Art and Emancipation [301, 1 ed.] 9789004686878, 9789004686861

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John Roberts - 978-90-04-68687-8

Art and Emancipation

John Roberts - 978-90-04-68687-8

Historical Materialism Book Series Editorial Board Loren Balhorn (Berlin) David Broder (Rome) Sebastian Budgen (Paris) Steve Edwards (London) Juan Grigera (London) Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam) Peter Thomas (London) Gavin Walker (Montréal)

volume 301

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm

John Roberts - 978-90-04-68687-8

Art and Emancipation By

John Roberts

leiden | boston

John Roberts - 978-90-04-68687-8

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2023039214

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill‑typeface. issn 1570-1522 isbn 978-90-04-68686-1 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-68687-8 (e-book) doi 10.1163/9789004686878 Copyright 2024 by John Roberts. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Brill Wageningen Academic, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

John Roberts - 978-90-04-68687-8

Contents Preface ix Acknowledgements

xv

Introduction: Emancipatory Technique, the Avant-Garde and ‘Alter-Realism’ 1 Kim Charnley

part 1 Value 1

Labour, Emancipation and the Critique of Craft-Skill

23

2

Art After Deskilling

3

The ‘Incomplete’ Commodity: Art, Value and Value-Form Theory 64

4

After the Crisis of Value: Some Further Reflections on Skill, Deskilling and Art 77

5

Notes on Craft: Marcel Duchamp, Bernard Leach and the Vessel Tradition 89

45

part 2 Technique 6

The Amateur’s Retort 103

7

The Practice of Failure 115

8

Trickster: Performativity and Critique in Rod Dickinson’s Crop-Circles 125

9

Roy Bhaskar, Critical Realism and Cultural Theory 143

10

The Antinomies of Iconoclasm 156

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contents

11

Writerly Artists: Conceptual Art, Bildung and the Intellectual Division of Labour 168

12

The ‘Black Debt’: Art & Language’s Writing 188

part 3 Praxis 13

Productivism and Its Contradictions 203

14

After Moscow Conceptualism: Reflections on the Centre and Periphery and Cultural Belatedness 215

15

Art After Art in the Expanded Field 225

16

Art, Neoliberalism and the Fate of the Commons 241

17

Art, ‘Enclave Theory’ and the Communist Imaginary 254

18

Postconceptualism and Anti-Pathos 274

19

Race, Black Modernism and the Critique of Identity 283

part 4 Image 20

The Political Economy of the Image 305

21

Realism, Alter-Realism and the Question of Legibility 315

22

Ideation and Photography: A Critique of François Laruelle’s Concept of Abstraction 333

23

Philosophy, Culture, Image: Jacques Rancière’s Constructivism 353

24

Some Reflections on the Image and the Early Avant-Garde: Victor Shklovsky, Error and The End of Saint Petersburg 366

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contents

25

After Lefebvre: The Everyday, the Image and Cultural Theory 377

26

Tár, Tarr and Tarr, and Other Sticky Things 384

part 5 History 27

Memories, History, Mnemotechnics 407

28

Dialectic and Post-Hegelian Dialectic (Again): Žižek, Bhaskar, Badiou 419

29

On Error: Hegel and Spinoza 445

30

Art and the Politics of Time-as-Substance 456

31

‘The Newest in What Is Oldest’: History, Historicism and the Temporality of the Avant-Garde 465 Bibliography Index 510

483

John Roberts - 978-90-04-68687-8

John Roberts - 978-90-04-68687-8

Preface This book brings together a wide range of work produced in the new millennium, incorporating published material in journals, book collections, and museum publications as well as unpublished conference and guest lecture papers; as such it gives a representative overview of my thinking on the relations between art and philosophy, and politics and culture, during this period. In this respect it develops and refines some of the themes of my other writings published since the late 1990s: the critical status of art after conceptualism, the question of skill and deskilling in art, the amateur and the ‘collective artist’, the avant-garde and anti-historicism, realism and the image, artistic agency and non-identity, art and negation. Accordingly, it covers – across various theoretical registers – a number of the problems that art after conceptual art has had to confront, faced with art’s longstanding relationship to market and institution, the commodity form and mass culture; problems, that, in a substantive sense, remain constitutive of art’s limits and possibilities under the antinomies of technological and social ‘progress’, modernity and the concept of the ‘new’. Some of my responses to these problems may appear unfamiliar or discordant or both, but the realities of the problems that I address are, nevertheless, long-standing. Indeed, they stretch back to Hegel and German idealism’s sense that what is worth defending in art in light of the emerging conflictual forces of modernity is precisely art’s capacity to escape, undermine or shift the constraints of its own inherited predicates in response to the heteronomous, delimiting conditions of this modernity. That is, art achieves its highest function, in Hegel’s sense, by being other than mere distraction, leisure, practical outcome, or academic doxa. On this basis it grounds its sense of possibility and its relationship to the future – and consequently its understanding of artistic value – from the same place as the realm of philosophy itself: namely the unconditioned force and identity of its predicates. In other words, art’s self-defining function is to face up to those instrumental and heteronomous forces that continually threatens its autonomy as poeisis (truth-in-making), through insisting on art’s unfinished character. Consequently, in order to defy what conventionally might be made of art or expected of it as a matter of self-definition under the pressures of market, institution and the commodity form, art has to act on its given conditions and externalities of production and reception in order to find out what it ‘might be’ as opposed to what it contingently ‘is’. I fully hold to this position, as an emancipatory horizon in art, despite all the current countervailing forces that would suggest otherwise.

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Yet we should be clear here this is not a version of classical modernism, in which the logic of the new supersedes, chronologically, the attachments of the old. Challenging the predicates of previous art today – when art is unable to depose the authority of previous art simply through its absolute negation – is to defend a very different notion of poiesis than ‘formal development’. Thus, if I continue to defend a notion of poeisis which is derived from the motile language of German idealism and the historic avant-garde, this is not an avantgarde that sees the new as an augur of the glorious oblivion of times past and, therefore, revels in the relentless futurist destruction and supersession of the old; this is because there is no radical order of the new in art, no Great Negation, that can provide a systematic set of formal predicates for a new art as the basis of a new world of values and meaning tout court. Art cannot remake the world through art’s difference from other art alone, as is increasingly clear from the hubristic attachments of art in the twentieth century to the modern as a transcendent value. For as soon as these predicates of the new are in place and are symbolically defined as the gateway to the Future, the future as a new symbolic order looks increasingly less secure as it recedes from us, insofar as the revaluation of all values through art cannot escape the contemporary’s own impending supersession and sublation, given that the future soon becomes the future past; indeed, poiesis in these terms easily becomes telos, in as much as the arrival of the present-becoming-future falls into a reification of this impending future as the self-fulfilling development of the recent past. Hence, under present conditions we may ask the new in art to be unlike the old – as a matter of art’s exit from those forces that would define present art in the image of past art – but this exit is not the creation of the new through the uniform destruction of the recent past, whose innovations guarantee the direction that all serious art should take in the present on the pain of artists’ falling into academicism and the old-new. In other words, the production of the new in art can no longer attach newness to the future as a unifiable call to break with the past without suffering from extreme bathos, certainly post the relativisation of all ‘isms’ since the 1980s, and, by extension, and more crucially, the underlying crisis of art itself in the twentieth century. This is where the antihistoricist futurity of the early Soviet avant-garde importantly comes into play, as a way of avoiding linear-historicist accounts of the futurist-new. When – as in Soviet Constructivism – art seeks an exit from art as a condition of art’s emancipation from the capitalist division of labour and by definition bourgeois culture’s restrictive understanding of creativity, the new, after late modernist, postmodernist and formal-futurist accounts of art, is compelled to establish – in the spirit of a renewed anti-historicism – a very different sense of technique and temporality in relation to the future and the modern. The

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new in art is carried by the promise of the exit from the capitalist division of labour into a realm in which real innovation in art lies not in its formal negation of past achievements, but in the general dispersal and availability of artistic technique for the many, irrespective of professional training; that is, newness is no longer swept along by the sole prospect of innovation in art – innovation, that is, confined principally to professional artistic tradition – but as the general transformation of art beyond its formal capture by the capitalist division of labour. The new, in other words, is defined by the exoteric horizon of art’s relationship to the repressed ‘radical needs’ of workers and others whose creativity is unmet by the social division of labour. But this radical transformation in the social value of art, is, of course, not specific to the utopic horizons of the avantgarde in the modern period; the Romantic anti-capitalisms of William Morris and John Ruskin both insist on how the production and reception of art under bourgeois hegemony fails to meet the creative and spiritual needs of workers (beyond, that is, the empty replication of bourgeois taste). But whereas this Romantic anti-capitalism is attached to expanding a given and exemplary repertoire of aesthetic skill and taste to all, the early revolutionary avant-garde proposed the deconstruction of art under bourgeois society as the constitutive reordering of art’s social ontology: that is, Constructivism, Productivism and Surrealism all judged ‘art’ to be a contribution to a new realm of liberatory technique, in which the reified identities of artist and worker, artistic labour and productive labour, aesthetic life and non-aesthetic life, were to be dissolved in the intersection of artistic technique and general social technique. As such, the undeveloped radical needs of workers were not to be met by the mimicking of the exemplary character of the best of past art – the renewed humanist option – but by the reconstitution of art itself under a model of generalised creativity. In short: in these terms the new is that which is secured by the dismantling of the division of labour, and the release of universal creative needs. But what does art actually do in the capitalist interregnum? If there is no working place outside of the capitalist division labour, then where might the intellectual claims of universal creative needs be situated here and now? Two positions suggest themselves. Firstly a ‘post-autonomist’ position and, secondly, an ‘autonomist’ one. The ‘post-autonomist’ position rejects the claims for the autonomy of art altogether by turning prefiguratively towards art’s assimilation into social technique, that is, by submitting itself to those social use-values that already shape the production of the visual as part of the cultural industries and the ‘capitalist project’: art-as-design, art-as-corporate digitalisation, art-as-architecture, art-as-environmental regeneration. The socialisation of art is, therefore, under

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these market conditions, able to find a pragmatic place for its outcomes. The ‘autonomist’ position, conversely, remains committed to the negative and disaffirmative possibilities of art’s languages of critique given art’s residual yet profound inefficiency as a form of labour power and subsumption under the value form. This involves, accordingly a very different sense of freedom and usevalue in art. Under the capitalist division of labour, for art to submit itself to the ‘capitalist project’, despite its would-be creation of social use-values, deepens its embeddedness in the division of labour and the wage-form. Which means that even if art attains, by way of its social functionality, an attentive ‘audience’, the outcomes and horizons of this process are always determined by the means-end rationale of the ‘capitalist project’ and by extension the accumulation process. Such a process, therefore, suppresses the disaffirmative autonomy of art: its residual negation of the value form as a condition of its autonomy. Consequently, my view is that art must defend its (relative) freedom from the value form, precisely because as a form of free labour, in the spirit of Hegel, the alternative means jeopardising art’s radical ‘uselessness’, or more precisely its useful ‘useless’ position within the division of labour. It, therefore, cannot attach itself prematurely to a post-art and post-autonomous account of art as social practice under the capitalist ‘project form’ without grievously submitting itself to a capitalist logic. The emancipatory struggle, accordingly, is to define post-art through the negation of productive labour, not in submission to it, or in alliance with it. However, this does not mean I am defending a late compensatory turn to modernist aesthetics, that is, advocating some notion of aestheticist withdrawal or indeterminancy. Rather, the continuing struggle for art’s non-compliance with productive labour will be conducted on the terrain of post-autonomist technique itself (socially engaged art, participatory practice, adisciplinary research, network culture, etc). For the struggle of the new as autonomy is a struggle for meaning from out of those heteronomous conditions that art now, necessarily, emerges. And these conditions are invariably those of post-art art. In this light my argument, across these chapters, is that art and art theory and the new are confronted with two sets of historical conditions. The new is no less compelled to think difference, in formal-material terms, but these terms are socially embedded in a critique of the division of labour and the reified categories of social experience. In this sense, the production of the new in art is not in advance of past art, so to speak, but, more precisely, in advance of the capitalist conditions under which the universal use-values of art as shared technique are suppressed. Hence, the call for the new as a break with the past has to be a process of constructive negation of the modern from within the social division of labour. This involves not just a dissociation

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of artistic technique from the pressures of art’s subsumption under productive labour and the ‘capitalist project’ – most obviously – but from the idea of new technology as the means by which the new is to be defined under art’s post-art condition. In other words, one of the critical functions of art today is to provide a set of temporal resources and strategies that breaks with the accelerationist dynamic of the social division of labour. And one of the most symbolically and practically efficacious ways of doing this is to re-enter the past itself as the site of the new, that is, a space that releases the hidden, oblique, repressed energies of the past into the present as a means of ‘working through’ what capitalist reason expels in the name of progress and the new-as-the-same. In this sense, there is no stable correlation between the new and progress understood as a release from the past. This means that the possibility and function of the new-as-working-through looks two ways simultaneously: firstly, to the past as a source of the new as the overlooked – that which lays underused and thought in futures past – and, secondly, to the notion of the present as exhibiting a transformative social dynamic and sense of the future that – under these terms – is very different from the simplistic notion of futurism as the harbinger of a new world. Thus, to return to post-capitalist claims of art: the art we know and are familiar with now or from the recent and distant past may, indeed, have little or no viability under another social and political system. It may indeed appear burdened with its past achievements and grandeur. But, in whatever ways this legacy is assimilated or adapted, the judgements and assessment of the past will be taken up as part of the general process of defining what kind of art will be viable, purposeful and pleasurable under the new system. For it will be the collective realities of the needs of the new system that will define what is required of a new art and the art of the past, and not the abstract evaluation of cultural inheritance. The new art, after having exited the old division of labour, may indeed look like bits of the old art – even reconfiguring its forms and concepts – but those who make it and judge it will take the measure of what they do from their own needs and desires, needs and desires accordingly very different from the needs and desires of what were once known as the interests of professional artists and the modern movement. But to free art from the social division of labour and the idea of the professional is not the generalisation of ‘free expression’. This is the mantra of anti-philosophy that tends to secrete itself in all emancipatory programmes where the critique of cultural power, hierarchy and division is called for; as if freedom and creativity was coextensive with the release of repressed feelings. For if art necessarily loses its professional designation as art here, this does not mean that the re-definition of the social function and reach of art is no more than a generalised expansion of

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self-expressive craft; this would not amount to ‘cultural emancipation’ but to a recidivist folk art made palatable for radical subjective sentiment. The continuing struggle for art’s autonomy under mature capitalism, then, is not a distraction or an unwarranted luxury in the light of art’s emancipatory horizon, but, rather, part of a wider political and cultural struggle. This is because the autonomy of art remains the terrain upon which the struggle for post-capitalist autonomy is to be carried out, if post-art is not to regress to the status of folk art and the cultural industries ‘project’. Negation, subtraction, non-compliance and withdrawal, therefore, continue to remain constitutive of the conceptual possibilities and new constructive horizons of art today and the foreseeable future. For what art continues to accomplish now as ‘experimental practice’ – as a negation of the means-end and instrumental rationality of capitalism – is fundamental to what the content of post-art as autonomous practice, unconstrained by instrumental rationality, might be. In this respect, I have divided the material in this book into what I consider to be the five key categories under which my work has engaged with the unforgiving tasks of modernity, critique and emancipation: Value, Technique, Praxis, Image and History. Obviously, in many instances, these categories overlap, and as such are functionally interdependent; nevertheless for the purposes of clarity I have kept them apart, in order to foreground, methodologically at least, what individuated forces continue to define the critical horizons of art and social practice.

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Acknowledgements A large number of people have played a role in the production of this book as editors, conference organisers, and intellectual interlocutors, indeed far too many to mention. I thank them all. I would, however, like to mention a few people who have made a discernible contribution to the development and refinement of my ideas over the last 20 years, inasmuch as they have been key to testing my thinking, particularly in public: Sezgin Boynik, Blake Stimson, Peter Osborne, Dmitry Vilensky, Ray Brassier, Barry Schwabsky, Keti Chukhrov, Marc James Léger, David Riff, Angela Dimitrakaki, Isabelle Graw, Christoph Menke, Octavian Esanu, Stewart Martin, Massimiliano Mollona, Glenn Adamson, Ulrich Steinberg, Jorge Ribalta, Stevphen Shukaitis, Karen van den Berg, Devin Fore, Helmut Draxler, Rasheed Araeen, and David Cunningham. I’m not sure being tested in public guarantees anything virtuous in and of itself, but, nevertheless, it at least blows away some of the dust that tends to accumulate around one’s most cherished ideas; and this is always a good thing. I would also like to thank Chris Gomersall for our continuing dialogue on the themes of this book, and in relation to many political and philosophical questions that lay far outside it; Kim Charnley for his astute and impassioned engagement with my work, Frank Berberich the editor of Lettre International for his commitment to publishing my writing in German, and to Danny Hayward at Brill for his editorial skills. I am also grateful for the support of my good and long-standing friends Alexei Penzin, Paul Hurford, Andrew Hemingway, Mark Harris, Euripides Altintzoglou, John Timberlake, Pete Cottridge, and Andrew McNiven. And, finally, a big thanks to Steve Edwards at Historical Materialism for his support of the publication and for the many, many conversations we have had on art, photography and politics over the last thirty-five years or more. Some of the pieces have been published in journals and magazines, some in book collections, and some as catalogue essays in museum and gallery publications. We would like to thank the publishers for their permission to republish the following material.

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acknowledgements

Value

‘Labour. Emancipation and the Critique of Craft-Skill’; a shorter version of this text, was published in The Journal of Modern Craft Volume, Issue 2 July 2012. Reproduced with the permission of Taylor & Francis. https://www.tandfonline.com ‘Art and Deskilling’, Historical Materialism, Vol 18, No 2, 2010 ‘The ‘Incomplete’ Commodity: Art, Value and Value-Form Theory’, published as ‘Art, Value, and Value-Form Theory’, in The Value of Critique: Exploring the Interrelations of Value, Critique, and Artistic Labour, eds., Isabelle Graw and Christoph Menke, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2019 ‘Notes on Craft: Marcel Duchamp, Bernard Leach and the Vessel Tradition’, published as ‘Temporality, Critique, and the Vessel Tradition: Bernard Leach and Marcel Duchamp’ in The Journal of Modern Craft, Vol 6, No 3, November 2013. Reproduced with the permission of Taylor & Francis. https://www.tandfonline.com

2

Technique

‘The Amateur’s Retort’, published in the catalogue for the exhibition, Amateurs curated by Ralph Rugoff, cca Wattis Institute San Francisco, 2008 ‘The Practice of Failure’, Cabinet, No 5, 2001 ‘Trickster: Peformativity and Critique in Rod Dickinson’s Crop-Circles’, published in a shorter version as ‘Trickster’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol 22, No 1, 1999 ‘Roy Bhaskar, Critical Realism and Cultural Theory’, published as ‘A Philosophical Memoir: Notes on Bhaskar, Realism and Cultural Theory’, Journal of Critical Realism, Vol 15, No 2, 2016. Reproduced with the permission of Taylor & Francis. https://www.tandfonline.com ‘Writerly Artists: Conceptual Art, Bildung and the Intellectual Division of Labour’, published in a shorter version, Rab-Rab: Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Art, No 1, 2014 ‘The ‘Black Debt’: Art & Language’s Writing’, Art & Language: Writings, Lisson Gallery/distritocu4tro, London and Madrid, 2005

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3

xvii

Praxis

‘Productivism and Its Contradictions’, Third Text, Vol 23, No 100, 2009. A shorter version was also published in ‘What is the Use of Art?’, Chto Delat, No 25, 2009. Reproduced with the permission of Taylor & Francis. https://www.tandfonline.com ‘After Moscow Conceptualism: Reflections on the Centre and Periphery and Cultural Belatedness’, published ARTMargins, Vol 9, No 2, 2020 ‘Art After Art in the Expanded Field’, published as ‘Kunst nach dem Ende der Kunst im erwiterten Feld/Art After Art in the Expanded Field’ in So Machen Wir Es: Techniken under Ästhetik der Aneignnung. Von Ei Arakawa bis Andy Warhol/That’s the Way We Do It: Techniques and Aesthetic of Appropriation. From Ei Arakawa to Andy Warhol, curated by Yilmaz Dziewior, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, 2011 ‘Art, Neoliberalism and the Fate of the Commons’, The Art of Direct Action: Social Sculpture and Beyond, eds., Karen van den Berg, Cara M. Jordan and Phillip Kleinmichel, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2019 ‘Art, ‘Enclave Theory’ and the Communist Imaginary’, Third Text, ‘Art, Praxis and the Community to Come’, Special Issue, ed., John Roberts, Vol 23, No 99, 2009. Reproduced with the permission of Taylor & Francis. https://www.tandfonline.com

4

Image

‘The Political Economy of the Image’, Philosophy of Photography, Vol 6, No 1–2, 2015 ‘Realism, Alter-Realism and the Question of Legibility’, published, in a shorter version, in Kunst und Politik: Jahrbuch Der Guernica-Gesellschaft, eds., Norbert Schneider and Alexandra Axtmann, Band16, V & R Press, Karlsruhe, 2014 ‘Ideation and Photography: A Critique of François Laruelle’s Concept of Abstraction’, The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory, eds., Mark Durden and Jane Tormey, Routledge, London and New York, 2019. Reproduced with the permission of Taylor & Francis. https://www.tandfonline.com ‘Philosophy, Culture, Image: Rancière’s Constructivism’, Philosophy of Photography, Vol 1. No 1, 2010

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acknowledgements

History

‘Memory, History, Mnemotechnics’, published in catalogue for exhibition, The Lining of Forgetting: Internal and External Memory in Art, curated by Xandra Eden, Weatherspoon Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2008 ‘Dialectic and Post-Hegelian Dialectic (Again): Žižek, Bhaskar, Badiou’, Journal of Critical Realism, Vol 12, No 1, 2013. Reproduced with the permission of Taylor & Francis. https://www.tandfonline.com ‘Art and the Politics of Time-as-Substance’, The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics, ed., Randy Martin, Routledge, London and New York, 2015. Reproduced with the permission of Taylor & Francis. https://www.tandfonline.com ‘ ‘The Newest in What is Oldest’: History, Historicism and the Temporality of the Avant-Garde’, published online, NeMe, Arts Centre, Limassol, Cyprus, 2018 In addition, many of the chapters took their first form as presentations at various international conferences, at museums and public art galleries, as well as at Art academies and University Fine Art, Art History, Philosophy and Cultural Studies Departments. Thanks to the organisers and participants of the following events.

6

Value

‘Labour, Emancipation and the Critique of Craft-Skill’ (Conference, ‘Labour of the Multitudes? Political Economy of Social Creativity’, Warsaw University, 20/10/2011) ‘Art After Deskilling’ (University of Wolverhampton, 12/11/2008; Middlesex University, London, 18/11/2008; Aarhus University, 27/11/2008; Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, 23/7/2009) ‘The “Incomplete” Commodity: Art, Value and Value-Form Theory’ (Conference, ‘The Value of Critique’, Institut für Kunstkritik, Frankfurt-am-Main, 19/1/2017) ‘After and Crisis of Value: Some Further Reflections on Skill and Deskilling’, (Städelschule, Frankfurt-am-Main, 18/1/2017; Symposium, ‘Fabrication and Disintegration in Contemporary Art,’ Schaulager, Newmünchenstein, 8/ 9/2017)

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‘Notes on Craft: Marcel Duchamp, Bernard Leach and the Vessel Tradition’ (Zeppelin Universität, Friedrichshafen, 27/3/2013)

7

Technique

‘Writerly Artists: Conceptual Art, Bildung and the Intellectual Division of Labour’ (‘History as a Class Act’, College Arts Association (caa), Boston, 25/ 2/2006; Workshop, ‘Index of the Subject’, Kunstpavillon, Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck, 13/6/2014)

8

Praxis

‘After Moscow Conceptualism’ (Conference, ‘Essays in the History of Modernity’, Victoria Foundation [V-A-C], Moscow, 23/9/ 2015) ‘Art After Art in the Expanded Field’ (Cochrane Theatre, Central St. Martin’s, London, 7/2/2011) ‘Art Neoliberalism and the Fate of the Commons’ (Conference, ‘What Do We Have in Common(s)?,’ Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1/12/2013; Conference, ‘“No Radical Art Actions Are Going to Help Here”: Political Violence and Militant Aesthetics After Socialism’, Yale University, New Haven, 18/ 4/2015; Conference, ‘Phantasm and Politics’, hau (Hebbel am Ufer), Berlin, 26/5/2015; Conference, ‘From Social Sculpture to Art-Related Action’, Zeppelin Universität, Friedrichshafen, 29/10, 2016; and Conference, ‘Community Regeneration & Public Art’, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongqing, 26/11, 2018) ‘Postconceptualism and anti-pathos’ (Conference, ‘La condition postconceptuelle (2). De l’art contemporain’, University of Paris 8, 12/8/2016) ‘Race, Black Modernism and the Critique of Identity’ (‘Rasheed Araeen: A Symposium’, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, 12/1/2019)

9

Image

‘Political Economy of the Image’ (Conference, ‘Critical Theory, Film and Media: Where is Frankfurt Now?’, Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt-am-Main, 22/8/ 2014; University of Edinburgh, 29/11/2014; Conference, ‘21st Century Photography’, Central St. Martin’s, London, 6/6/2015)

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acknowledgements

‘Realism, Alter-Realism and the Problem of Legibility’ (Conference, ‘Die Wirklichkeit Der Kunst. Das Realismus-Problem in Der Kunstgeschichte Der Nachkriegskeit’, Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe, 16/1/2013) ‘Ideation and Photography: a critique of François Laruelle’s concept of Abstraction’ (Conference, ‘Photography and Abstraction’, University of Westminster, London, 9/5/2014) ‘Some Reflections on Anti-Fetishism and the early avant-garde: Victor Shklovsky, Error and The End of Saint Petersburg’ (Conference, ‘Marx, Form, Isms: A Re-enactment of the 1920s Debates’, University of Westminster 4/6/ 2015; lecture series, ‘Anti-fetishism or the historical image: the contradictions of the visual production of worlds in biopolitical capitalism’, Merz Academie Höcheschule für Gestaltung, Kunst und Medien, Stuttgart, 12/12/ 2017) ‘After Lefebvre: The Everyday, the Image and Cultural Theory’ (Conference, ‘Ordinary/Everyday/Quotidian’, York University, 29/9/2013, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ica), London, 12/7/2014)

10

History

‘On Error: Hegel and Spinoza’, (Seminar ‘Error/L’Erreur’, discussion with JeanJacques Lecercle, Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, 15/12/2012; American University, Beirut, 24/5/2013) ‘Art and the Politics of Time-as-Substance’ (Galerie Thomas Flor, Berlin, 4/4/ 2014) ‘The Newest in What is Oldest’ (Symposium, Künstlerhaus, Stuttgart, 25/10 /2015; Conference, ‘Avant-Garde and Historicization’, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 23/1/2016; Conference, ‘The Idea of the AvantGarde’, NeMe Arts Centre, Limassol, Cyprus, 27/9/2018)

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introduction

Emancipatory Technique, the Avant-Garde and ‘Alter-Realism’ Kim Charnley

The naïve supposition of an unambiguous development toward increased production is itself a piece of that bourgeois outlook which permits development in only one direction because, integrated into a totality, dominated by quantification, it is hostile to qualitative difference. If we imagine emancipated society as emancipation from precisely such totality, then vanishing-lines come into view that have little in common with increased production and its human reflections. t.w. adorno1

∵ The history of the artistic avant-garde has been part of the history of Marxism since at least the 1920s, when the Constructivists and Surrealists developed their heterodox affiliations to the Third International. This legacy was reinvented in the 1960s and 1970s through the New Left, and alongside the neoavant-garde, with new configurations of art theory emerging from the rediscovery of Walter Benjamin, and the influence of Louis Althusser, in particular. Since the turn of the millennium the encounter between anglophone art theory and Marxism has enjoyed another period of renaissance. A clear sign of this renewed energy is that new intellectual materials have been brought into debates about contemporary art: first, through the popularity of postautonomist Marxism – the work of theorists including Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Maurizio Lazzarato and Paulo Virno – and more recently in attempts to interpret art through value theory and Neue Marx-Lektüre. These theoretical schools derive from the diverse returns to Marx in the militant

1 Adorno 2005, p. 156.

© Kim Charnley, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004686878_002

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1970s; for this reason, their re-appearance in anglophone art theory after the millennium is perhaps surprising. It is not an academic recovery, but an effect of new waves of activism: the militancy of the decade following 1968, especially in Germany and Italy, has provided a historical reference point for contemporary struggles, and thinkers linked to those histories have returned to prominence. From the alter-globalisation movement of the 2000s through to the resistance against the austerity measures imposed in the wake of the crash of 2008, art has been drawn into alignment with new social movements of protest against the transnational capitalist system. First, autonomist Marxism, and then communisation theory, have found a ready audience as the art world has moved leftward, under pressure to make good on art’s emancipatory claims. The essays collected in this volume show John Roberts working through the implications of this return to Marxism and a resurgence of interest in the avant-garde, both of which coincide with the deepening crisis of neoliberalism. Although Roberts’ work has been a significant presence in contemporary art criticism since the late 1980s, it is in the last two decades, the period covered by these essays, that his writings have achieved an international audience. Roberts explores throughout this book questions central to contemporary art’s politics: the nature of the relationship between art and capitalism and between art and labour; and the critical status of post-object art of collectives, actions and participatory works. This introduction will attempt an outline of Roberts’ ideas, identifying some ways into work that ranges across art history, art theory and philosophy. At the centre of this interdisciplinary project is what Roberts describes as ‘emancipatory technique’. Though each essay has a different focus, the collection returns continually to the legacy of modernism, realism and the avant-garde in which the compelling problems of art’s relationship to individual and social emancipation are to be found. One way of understanding Roberts is as a ‘post-Adornian’ philosopher. This label provides a useful starting point – Roberts draws on Adorno’s writings on art frequently – though it risks obscuring the diverse philosophical interlocutors found across these essays. In Adorno’s work, emancipation is addressed via negativa, as the epigraph to this introduction illustrates; he has no time for ‘the wishful image of an uninhibited, vital, creative man’.2 It is for this reason that most interpreters of Adorno take their cue from his tragic vision of modernity. Though emancipation is not intended to evoke a vision of affective fulness and redemption in Roberts’ work either; nonetheless, he strikes a

2 Ibid.

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different note by emphasising the avant-garde as a ‘general dispersal and availability of artistic technique for the many’.3 The political implications of the avant-garde were first subject to sustained philosophical scrutiny almost a century ago by figures including Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács.4 Though the debate about the relationship between realism and modernism is often treated as though it is merely of historical interest, its antinomies and contradictions are tenacious: as Roberts demonstrates here, they return in art theoretical debates of the last two decades. Simultaneously, the philosophical stakes of Roberts’ writings involve an even longer time frame, tracing the problem of the avant-garde back to the encounter between German Idealist philosophy and the French Revolution. In this respect, Roberts is in dialogue with the resurgence of aesthetics as a concern for contemporary art, which is exemplified in the work of Jacques Rancière and exposed to a searching critique by Peter Osborne.5 Although the politicisation of art forms a backdrop to Roberts’ attempts to understand the continued significance of the avant-garde, his philosophical investments provide some distance from the cut and thrust of art critical polemic; as a result, this book is not so much concerned with advocating for particular artists, or artistic developments, as it is with the kind of knowledge that the avant-garde might be said to produce from its enquiry into the experience of capitalist modernity. The avant-garde is understood as a research project into subjective and social experience under capitalism, rather than as a succession of contending movements. At a first encounter, the subjects addressed by this collection may seem heterogenous. The essays include a proposal for exploring the relationship between Duchamp and Bernard Leach, whose respective versions of modernism are not usually thought to have impinged on one another although they were contemporaries (Chapter 5); a detailed treatment of the work of artist Rod Dickinson, who is better known as the inventor of the ‘crop circle’ hoax (Chapter 8); a sustained discussion of conceptualism, and especially of the collective Art & Language (Chapters 11, 12, 14 and 18); culminating in philosophical examinations of the work of Roy Bhaskar, Henri Lefebvre, Alain Badiou, Rancière, Jean-Luc Nancy, Slavoj Žižek, François Laruelle, G.F.W. Hegel and Baruch Spinoza (Chapters 9, 17, 22, 23, 25, 28 and 29). Some of the essays find their centre of gravity in art historical problems, others in art theory,

3 Roberts, ‘Introduction’, this volume. Original emphasis. 4 Adorno et al. 1980. 5 Rancière 2011; Osborne 2013.

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still others in philosophy. None of them entirely submits to disciplinary conventions, but all of them might be said to explore aporias around which disciplines form. One may understand the general approach as ‘adisciplinary’, a term that Roberts has used to describe the extended research programme of the avant-garde itself.6 Each essay pursues a divergent trajectory through the fractious histories of twentieth-century art and theory, identifying sight-lines from the moment when the avant-garde rode a wave of revolutionary enthusiasm in the 1920s, through to its manifestations in and around contemporary art. These essays and talks contain preparatory work for, development of ideas from, or in parallel with, no less than five book-length works. Roberts’ publications of this period pursue, on the face of it, objectives that are only loosely related: resulting in two books on art theory, one dealing with skill and deskilling in art after Duchamp, and another with the avant-garde and ‘revolutionary time’; a work of philosophy dealing with the ‘the necessity of errors’; another philosophical work addressing the ‘reasoning of unreason’; and a book on ‘the productive power of violation’ possessed by photography.7 These various works have in common their scrutiny of characteristics of the avant-garde, especially its para-rational engagement with technology, realised through photographic depiction of the world, through collective praxis and engagement with chance, error and open-ended enquiry. This vision of the avant-garde is complex. It tends to privilege the example of Constructivism, Productivism and Surrealism, but not through historical reconstruction of these movements. Rather, the ‘historical avant garde’, as Peter Bürger termed it, is seen by Roberts as a moment when a dynamic interrogation of contemporary life – in representation and as praxis – coincided with a high-water-mark of working-class activity in the twentieth century. Although Roberts pursues the emancipatory content of art through adjacent disciplines, primarily philosophy and art theory, it is to the legacy of revolution, and the questions of representation that accompany the working class, that the book continually returns. This does not mean that Roberts reduces art to its manifestations in the activities of avant-gardes of the 1920s. Rather, that moment is a distinctive liaison between emancipatory politics and a longer history of art’s attempts to find a place for itself in the modern world. As Roberts notes in his preface, this problematic of the avant-garde, like the modern conception of art, can be traced to the inheritance of German idealism and Hegel where:

6 Roberts 2015, pp. 116–22. 7 Roberts 2007b; 2011b; 2015; 2018b; 2016b; 2020.

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What is worth defending in art in light of the emerging conflictual forces of modernity is precisely art’s capacity to escape, undermine or shift the constraints of its own inherited predicates in response to the heteronomous, delimiting conditions of … modernity.8 Thus, emancipatory technique is, in one sense, a product of the internal dynamism of art in its unstable historical trajectory through modernity. Yet, it is evident here that art is not emancipatory by default; rather, it is constitutively unstable in such a way that it reveals the shifting experiential contours of capitalism. It also provides a standpoint, as Adorno was at pains to stress, that makes problematic the claims of instrumental rationality. Art, the domain of aesthetic thinking, is shaped by a constitutive antagonism between rationalism and irrationalism, expressed in artists’ attention to intuition, to chance, tacit skills, and the productiveness of mistakes. Art is productive because it is the meeting place of contradictions. Understood through the activities of avant-gardes, art struggles against the conditions of its own alienation: this dynamism is usually glossed as an attempt to ‘blur the boundary between art and life’, though this well-known phrase is really only a gesture toward an ensemble of problems of representation and collective praxis that avant-gardes have explored. Roberts’ treats this problem of the avant-garde in essays that themselves employ a method of enquiry that works to shift conceptual constraints. For example, Roberts tends to address his subject by situating it in a debate that is presented genealogically, especially in relation to past encounters between art and politics. This is very clear in the section, entitled ‘Value’, where the question of the prevailing relationship between technology, artistic labour and the value form of capitalism is examined in relation to an extended debate within Marxism about the emancipation of labour. To call this a ‘debate’ is perhaps to stretch the meaning of this word; Roberts traces a thread of romantic resistance against the alienation of work across a century from the early Marx, through William Morris and on to the important labour theorist of the 1970s, Harry Braverman. This intellectual background is then used to examine the claims of Maurizio Lazzarato or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. In Chapter 1, the ‘crisis of work’ is traced through the influential writings of Endnotes, a collective of writers engaged with communisation theory, to a lineage that includes André Gorz, author of Adieux au proletariat: Au delà du socialisme (Farewell to the Working Class) and back still further to Constructivism (Chapter 4).

8

Author’s foreword in this volume.

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These connections sometimes appear counter-intuitive: does Endnotes’ communisation theory have anything in common with Gorz’s humanist socialism? Irrespective of the many political differences, Roberts shows that there is a very clear connection through discussion of the crisis of work and the changing capacity for political mobilisation that is an effect of automation and deskilling. To illustrate this point, it will be necessary to examine in detail some of the art theoretical stakes in this first section of the book.

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Artistic Labour

The first section of this collection, ‘Value’ builds upon questions that are treated in Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade, published in 2007.9 This text provided an early contribution to a fertile aesthetic debate of the last decade and a half, which has approached contemporary art through analysis of labour and the ‘value-form’ of capitalism.10 Constructivism and Productivism are interpreted by Roberts as antecedents of socially-engaged ‘postobject’ artworks, such as participatory, dialogic or activist art. This is not a question of stylistic inheritance; rather, digital and communication technologies have placed art in a relationship to ‘general social technique’ that recalls the aspiration of the Russian avant-garde, which was to dissolve the boundary between the artist and industry in the construction of a new society. Roberts argues that technological developments since the 1970s in the advanced capitalist economies have created an indeterminate space between art, design and service labour, which inadvertently resurrects this revolutionary precedent, although in entirely different historical and political circumstances. At issue, as a result, are assumptions about the relationship between art and economic categories that have long been integral to art theory, especially the identification of the artwork as a commodity. That this debate has been so productive – with a substantial recent contributions arriving in, for example, Sianne Ngai’s Theory of the Gimmick (2020) – suggests that the process of art’s restructuring under neoliberalism, a process that has gathered momentum over forty years, creates a new demand to examine art’s politics through economic categories.11 Roberts’ approach to this problem proposes the dynamic relations between labour, technology and capital9 10 11

Roberts 2007b. Beech 2016; Vishmidt 2019. Ngai 2020.

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ism that Marx described as a ‘moving contradiction’.12 This dynamic results in ‘deskilling’, the progressive erosion of workers’ autonomy in the labour process as fixed capital displaces variable capital, and the creation of surplus populations as machines and mechanisation replace the workforce, and industry secures its profitability by shedding workers. This dynamic of capitalist production is sketched out in part iv of Capital, ‘Production of Relative Surplus Capital’ (Chapters 12–15) but it is now often identified with the work of Harry Braverman in Labor and Monopoly Capital, which revisited Marx’s account to explain the dynamic of labour in the twentieth century under Taylorism.13 Even more influential, especially for those who work with communisation theory, is James Boggs, the communist militant who recorded the process of deskilling and automation at work in the early 1960s. At a point when African-American workers were pushed out of the industrial jobs they had only recently entered in mass migration from Southern states, Boggs analysed the causes of the immiseration that prepared the ground for the Watts riots and African-American labour militancy of the late sixties and early seventies.14 The renewed Marxist debate about deskilling that has followed the financial crash of 2008 has typically arrived at bleak analyses. This is because it treats the decline of industrialised semi-skilled labour which has been a key factor in the weakening of working-class militancy and, in the ‘advanced economies’ of the west at least, the plausibility of the working class as a revolutionary subject.15 The notable exception is the work of post-Operaist Marxists such as Antonio Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato or Paulo Virno, for whom deskilling has resulted in a newly generalised immaterial or affective labour, which provides the precondi-

12

13 14 15

‘Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary. On the one side, then, it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value’ (see Marx 1973, p. 706. See also: Endnotes 2010, pp. 106– 129). Braverman 1998. Boggs 2009 [1963]. This text is an important reference point for the communisation theory of the collective Endnotes: https://endnotes.org.uk/. See also Clover 2016. Certainly, this is true of the return to this theme since 2008, which has been linked to the influence of communisation theory. See the analyses of Endnotes in particular. Also: Noys 2011.

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tions for new forms of collective identification and political action.16 Roberts’ intervention tends to steer between the optimistic and pessimistic antipodes of this current, by situating it as a legacy of the artistic avant-garde. In Constructivism and Productivism, and the writings of Walter Benjamin, Roberts locates a discontinuous, heterodox Marxist tradition that perceives in technology a power that is not neutral, because it is formed by the demands of value-production, but that stands in need of being reclaimed from its alienated capitalist uses. Roberts seems to imply that what is needed in our relation to technology is still to be sought through art: i.e., a different approach to rationality. Though avant-gardes have tended to reject the artisanal basis of art, producing artworks that seem to require little or no skill in their execution, they also retained a latent relationship to artisanal processes, in the work of artists who were increasingly focused on intellectual skills. This is true both of Duchamp and his elusive and ironic research project and of the Constructivist and Productivist avant-gardes, which were formed through theoretical debates.17 Whereas deskilling in the labour process tends to strip labour of its intellectual content, reducing it to routine, repetitive tasks, the trajectory of art is quite different: tending toward closer identification with intellectual skills. Of central importance to the debate is the fact that art is not subsumed by the value form: artistic labour is not automated or rationalised in order to increase its productivity: ‘certain forms of creative labour are excluded from the law of value because their forms cannot be reproduced through socialized labour, and as such they remain resistant to, indeed excluded from, the necessary routinisations of the labour process’.18 This point is acknowledged in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, though Adorno emphasises that art registers through its historical development, and despite its illusory distance from social determinations, the penetration of experience by the demands of capitalist accumulation. In the neoliberal phase of capitalism, which broadly coincides with the passage to what is now termed contemporary art, this dynamic seems to be intensified. Art is now an ‘asset class’ that circulates within a globalised art world, in increased proximity to speculative investment, or parked in ‘freeports’, as the artist Hito Steyerl describes.19 As such, it seems to be emblematic of the bizarre itineraries of financialised

16 17 18 19

See, for example, the works of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, which were influential at the turn of the millennium. Roberts 2007b. Chapter 1 and Chapter 4 in this volume. Roberts, ‘Art after Deskilling’, Chapter 3. Steyerl 2017, pp. 75–100.

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capitalism. When viewed from the point of view of artistic labour, however, the relationship between art and capitalism poses a problem because it is not clear, strictly speaking, how the production of value in art may be understood in terms derived from classical Marxist economics. In his book Art and Value (2016) the artist and theorist Dave Beech emphasises that art is not subsumed by capitalism, it is ‘commodified without being commodified’.20 Beech’s argument emphasises the fact that it has become entirely conventional to speak of the commodification of art, but that this critical cliché offers no resistance against the incorporation of art into the instrumental schemes of neoliberal cultural economics.21 Roberts, for his part, views the artwork as an ‘incomplete commodity’ (Chapter 3).22 Artworks are created within a social world where nothing may be realised, ultimately, without recourse to capitalist commodities. At least some of the materials and labour that contribute to any artwork will depend on socialised production. Artworks are, in effect, dependent on the capitalist system as a result; however, they are ‘incomplete’ because the value that is produced or realised in art is not governed by the strictures of the value form. The conjuncture of use-value and exchange-value in the artwork is different than it is for objects or services produced in order to realise value. Developed through discussion of participatory art and socially-engaged art, this argument seems to suggest that these artistic strategies have the potential to resist the exigencies of capitalism: ‘Art’s immanent capacity to create use-values as a result of the art commodity’s exclusion from socially necessary labour time is determined by the artist’s control over the physical inputs and “time” of art’s production’.23 This limited control over time is contained by post-object, collective artworks, exposed to the exigencies of capitalism but nonetheless affirming a potential social collectivity. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri express a revolutionary optimism that was highly influential at the turn of the millennium, and Roberts’ response to this post-autonomist position is found in his earliest reflections on artistic labour. Roberts traces Hardt and Negri’s motifs to the various disposition toward labour that modernism inherited from the romantic Marxism of William Morris and the Productivists. This latter avant-garde sought the reorganisation of industry

20 21 22 23

Beech 2016, p. 12. Ibid., pp. 233–40 & 153–78, on Adorno and commodification and neoliberal cultural economics and its hegemonic influence. ‘The “Incomplete” Commodity: Art, Value and Value-Form Theory’. Chapter 3 in this volume. Ibid. p. 75

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through the intervention of artists, even as they dissolved the tradition of art by situating artists in the factory.24 Roberts is not ‘optimistic’ in his own conclusions, in the sense that Negri is when he sees the transformation of technology as a means for production of a new political subject, the ‘multitude’. Rather, he insists that the tendencies of deskilling within capitalism mean that it is a world of ‘post-work’, emancipation from labour, that constitutes the more radical political horizon of our engagement with technology: which implies, of course, a distinctive aesthetic politics. Even so, there is a certain affirmative quality that arrives simply through the genealogy of the debate itself, because it articulates the complexity of the fractured avant-garde tradition that resists the dehumanising effects of technology. This tradition is identified in Boris Arvatov and Walter Benjamin as well as the analyses of the Situationist International. Roberts’ conclusions seem in some respects aligned with communisation theory, though he has been critical of this tendency. Roberts accepts that there is no emancipation available now through labour alone, but necessarily through a horizon of the ‘refusal of work’.25 Yet, he does not seem to accept that this is a programme to be realised in the streets, as it tends to be for exponents of communisation theory; his writings tend to be agnostic on the subject of the political tasks required to achieve communism.26 For Roberts the genealogies of communisation theory reach back into the avant-garde’s inheritance of Marxism and it remains, as a result, a problem of art’s politics, albeit an art that has been thoroughly reconfigured by its contact with political movements that resist neoliberal capitalism. Roberts tends to use a mode of argumentation where his chosen subjects appear in something like the way that Adorno described philosophical questions as ‘self-righting toys’: aporias that periodically return to be invested with new historical content.27 When applied to artistic debates this approach seems to resist the compulsive temporality of intellectual fashion and the amnesia it imposes on ‘new’ developments. It disrupts the self-evidence of the terms of a given debate, by tracing the recurrence of fundamental aporias caused by the relationship between art and the changing forms of labour under capitalism.

24 25 26 27

Arvatov 2017. See in this volume: Roberts, ‘Labour, Emancipation and the Critique of Craft-Skill’ and ‘The “Incomplete” Commodity: Art, Value and Value-Form Theory’. Endnotes; Clover 2016. See also Roberts’ criticism of Communisation theory in Roberts 2013. Adorno 2001, p. 65.

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Conceptualism and the Amateur

Conceptual art has a privileged place in Roberts’ reflection on art because it marks a threshold through which central concerns of the historical avant-garde encountered social and technological realities that are recognisably those of the present. The moment of conceptualism in the late sixties and early seventies was also the moment when boundaries between art practice, theory and art criticism were dissolved, a point to which I will return, because it is crucial to Roberts’ account of the emancipatory potential of the avant-garde. The essays grouped under the heading ‘Technique’ in this volume provide an interpretation of the effects of conceptualism, of its relationship to genealogies of practice that run through modernism and a hint as to the influence that this avant-gardist moment may have had on Roberts’ work. The essay ‘The Amateur’s Retort’ addresses the inherent resistance to specialisation which became integral to the professional identity of the modern artist during the period of its formation in the nineteenth century. Citing the work of Gustav Courbet and Édouard Manet, Roberts sees the amateur as a kind of elective affinity of the modernist artist: ‘as a kind of “hunch” rather than a self-consciously declared position’.28 Here again we may note Roberts’ preoccupation with the autodidactic positions that are opened up by modernist art. He acknowledges that no artists actually want to be seen as amateurs: this was just as true of the Parisian avant-garde of the 1860s as it is of global contemporary art today. Yet, an insistence on what might be termed unlicensed expertise is a crucial part of the artist’s identity: It is through the gap between forced facility and an authentically realized proficiency that the labour of the painter, in this period, became a site for the unfolding identification between the amateur and the critique of art’s place in the social and intellectual division of labour.29 This interpretation of the origins of the tense kinship between artist and amateur derives directly from Roberts’ formative engagement with the legacies of conceptualism and, especially, with the work of the conceptual art collective Art & Language.30 First generation conceptual artists, the group Art & Language, which has had a shifting membership over thirty years of activ28 29 30

‘The Amateur’s Retort’, p. 104. Ibid. Art & Language was established in 1969 in Coventry by the artists Michael Baldwin, Terry Atkinson, Harold Hurrell and David Bainbridge. The group had a shifting membership

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ity, explored the boundary between conceptual art and philosophy with more stubborn resolve perhaps than any of their conceptualist peers. Characterised by a deliberately destabilising address – between philosophy, art theory and aggressive satire – the writings of this group form an integral part of their artistic practice. Though Art & Language is not reducible to a single artistic programme, its sustained assault on the division of labour between art, art criticism and philosophy has an ethical intensity that derives from ‘the gap between forced facility and an authentically realized facility’.31 A dialogue with Art & Language and amateurism is clear in ‘The Amateur’s Retort’. A 1997 essay by Art & Language dealing with the early practice of the group was entitled ‘We Aim to Be Amateurs’.32 Characteristically, this title is both sardonic and serious in its reflection on the concerns of conceptual art. Though Art & Language was always apt to flaunt its lack of credentials, its members were, and are, ruthlessly focused in their investigation of the validity of arguments about art. As Roberts notes in ‘Bhaskar, Realism and Cultural Theory’, it was after finding discussion of Bhaskar in Art-Language that he was prompted to read his work on realism and the philosophy of science, which is another enduring influence on his work (see, in particular, Chapter 9 of the present volume). Bhaskar’s ‘critical realism’ provided both a critique of empiricism and, at the same time, a bulwark against the ‘postmodern onslaught’, in which the post-Althusserian current of Marxism was overwhelmed in the 1980s.33 Art & Language clearly have an important role in Roberts’ thinking about art: his works of art theory consistently return to their example and to key passages of their history in the 1970s, in particular.34 This does not mean, of course, that Roberts is employing the same method as an artist in his own peregrination across the boundaries between philosophy, art theory and art history. What seems to be centrally important, a recurrent concern, is to explain why it is that a practice like Art & Language’s, where art and theory become thoroughly entangled, is integral to the emancipatory content of art that emerged from the crucible of the 1960s. Here, a key issue in Roberts’ investigation of emancipatory technique comes into focus. The research project of the avant-garde is one that is invested both in non-cognitive and in theoretical practices: it is this

31 32 33 34

throughout its first decade, but after 1977 was focused on the collaboration between Baldwin and Mel Ramsden. ‘The Amateur’s Retort’, p. 104. Art & Language 2005, pp. 191–210. ‘Roy Bhaskar, Realism, Critical Realism and Cultural Theory’, p. 317. Roberts 2007b, pp. 101–38; 2015, pp. 142–64; and in essays in this volume.

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space that Roberts identifies through discussion of artistic labour in Intangibilities of Form; of the heuristic processes of art in The Necessity of Errors; and in his more recent work Revolutionary Time and the Avant-garde. As Roberts also records in ‘Bhaskar, Critical Realism and Cultural Theory’, he has worked closely with artists, most productively with the artist and theorist Dave Beech, in a collaboration that produced a sequence of important essays on the ‘philistine’, two of which were published in New Left Review in the mid-1990s. The ‘philistine debate’ remains a high point in art theory of the 1990s, which created a multilevel philosophical contention about the reception of Adorno and the relationship between art theory and cultural studies in the intellectual inheritance of contemporary art.35 Though Roberts distances his current work from the idea that the philistine is a ‘determinate absence’ in art theory, there is a clear sense in which his writings on the amateur and on artistic labour, retain a certain spirit of this attack on the self-containment of aesthetic debates, confronting art with a critique ‘from below’.

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Art after Art in the Expanded Field

As we have seen, Roberts argues that the avant-garde is an ‘adisciplinary’ research project. It is helpful to situate this activity in the changing institutional configuration of the arts, and of academia, that emerged after the 1960s. Roberts’ interest in conceptualism is also an interest in the changing conditions under which knowledge is generated, as already noted. Anglophone conceptual art emerged in parallel with changes in arts education. In the United Kingdom, the ‘Coldstream’ reforms of art education explicitly required that higher education in Art and Design should be the equivalent of a university course of study, rather than identified with technical education. As a result, Art history and complementary studies became essential elements of Art and Design programmes. This development quickly became absorbed into wider efforts to increase participation in Higher Education in the United Kingdom where, in the early 1960s, only around 4.6% of school leavers studied for a degree, whereas in the United States around 20% of school leavers went to college.36 This was the beginning of the professionalisation of the role of the artist in the 1960s and perhaps a contributory factor to the intellectualised character of

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Beech and Roberts 2002. Tickner 2008, p. 20.

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minimalism and conceptualism.37 It is sometimes understood as having heralded a kind of institutional closure, in comparison to the more fluid educational pre-conditions of avant-gardes of the first part of the twentieth century. This is true, in a sense, but it is important to recognise that, in a parallel movement, the incorporation of avant-garde positions into the academy tended to loosen its disciplinary constraints. Although routes into artistic careers became more formalised, the class backgrounds of artists and art historians became at the same time more diverse. Whereas the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century had been, overwhelmingly, dissenters from the haute bourgeoisie, by the 1960s lower middle class and working-class students were engaged with avantgarde ideas in art schools. This was an asymmetrical development that, though it may have increased the scope of the art institution, bringing it closer to academia, also exposed it to new political pressures and forms of contestation. In the United Kingdom, the new proximity between art history and art practice tended to become embroiled in questions about the status of knowledge, including the differences in status between practice and theory. The creation of new hybrid disciplines, like art theory and cultural studies, was a response to this destabilised field of knowledge, and the demand for space within it to consider new cultural and political experiences. Art & Language played an important part in this history by establishing the art theory course at Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry, which was closed down in 1972 after the university authorities deemed it illegitimate for artists to submit final work for assessment in the form of written essays. The occupation of Hornsey Art College in 1968 is another famous marker of the political energies affecting art education at this time.38 Roberts’ intellectual formation can be situated in this period, when increasing numbers of students made a transition from art education into academia, engaging with theory or art history in order to clear a space for practice. Many of these people have since become prominent academics. Invariably, these academics interrogated the class, gender and sexual politics of the academy (Paul Wood, Fred Orton, Steve Edwards, Stewart Martin, Gail Day, Gavin Butt, Frances Stracey, among others). Indeed, it might be said that the radicalism associated with the arts in the UK has been distinctively shaped by scholars of this kind, who have in different ways engaged with philosophy, art theory and art history to create new space for practice.

37 38

Singerman 1999. Tickner 2008.

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The heterodox intellectual interests that Roberts explores are linked to this political and institutional context. Roberts’ essays, as I have already noted, are often structured around a genealogical reconstruction of aporetic problems of art. Here an aporia is not simply an unresolvable deadlock, though it may take on characteristics of a blockage, where a debate could develop no further at a given moment. Rather, an aporia for Roberts is the fusing of a discursive encounter and historical circumstances, configured at a given point in time. Aporias both register the collective dimension of intellectual enquiry and the places where this contact is unable to be continued. In these essays, the reflection upon aporias is an index of the theoretical and political struggles that affected the UK and international artworld since the 1980s. Although beset by political defeat and revanchism under Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government, and a coded anti-Marxism in the form of postmodernism, the relationship between the British art world and the Left was extremely fertile in the 1980s and the 1990s. Feminist theory, the emergence of the journal Third Text and post-colonial theory, a strong modernistTrotskyist current in art history and theory, a resurgent interest in Adorno, and Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism: all of these developments existed in the sheltering currents of art at this time, despite the crisis of Marxism as an organised political force. Roberts’ work is very open about, indeed reflective upon, its own intellectual debts, which are worked into what might be characterised as a kind of heterodox Hegelian Marxism. Though there is no space here to unpack the stakes of the philosophical essays in this volume, it is clear that they are in part developments of issues identified thus far. For example, The Necessity of Errors (2011) may be read as a philosophical investigation of the predicates of practice, especially the practice of the autodidact artist as exemplified by Art & Language. Similarly, The Reasoning of Unreason (2018) shares something in common with the philistinism enquiry, if only in its attempt to bring seemingly irrational currents within the bounds of rational enquiry. In Roberts’ work the heterodox Marxism that flourished in and around the UK art world is brought into an expansive relationship with parallel intellectual traditions. Roberts is in dialogue with the debates which established critical postmodernism in the United States, for example in his extended treatment of Rosalind Krauss’s essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ (Chapter 15). Reading Krauss’ project as an attempt to reconnect with the legacy of the historical avant-garde which had been obscured by high Modernism, Roberts creates a conjunctural reading of art, one which draws on the work of activist-theorist Gregory Sholette to evoke ‘art after art in the expanded field’ as a situation of avant-gardism which is exposed to the crisis of neoliberalism.39 At the same 39

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time, these essays see the avant-garde as a legacy of German Idealism. Theoretical contentions that derive from post-sixties art take on a very different aspect when they are translated into a Hegelian idiom in this way. Across this work, one has a sense that the philosophical inheritance of art theory is taken apart and reconstructed to form an urgent engagement with the present and a different perspective on the place of the avant-garde within it. Centrally important in this debt to Roberts’ inheritance from Adorno is an emphasis on art as an enquiry into the world that contains a critique of rationality. In closing this introduction, the implications of this point can be brought out through discussion of a short book, Thoughts on an Index not Freely Given, published in 2016. In this work, Roberts presents four art critical essays, each written about a different artist, at four moments in the 1980s. The artists and their artworks, which are described in great detail, are all inventions, though the theoretical resources of the essays are real, scrupulously linked to a plausible historical moment. It is implicit in Thoughts on an Index that it is both art theory and a fictional ‘implicative strategy’, potentially an artwork. Roberts states that ‘“art”, or the authentic “art effect”, can exist perfectly well not just in “conceptual” form – as art-idea produced by the artist – but as imaginary act as art idea [original emphasis]’.40 This claim, which is fundamental to the book, is one that explores the ‘post-conceptual’ character of contemporary art. If conceptual artists, through their processing of Duchamp’s legacy, made art from materials of art criticism and art theory, then should it not be possible to make art theory as art? Duchamp’s Fountain remains an artwork without an original object or an exhibition record. It is the precedent that, ultimately, legitimates the ‘post-morphological’ diversity of contemporary art. In principle, this diversity implies, in its outer reaches, the artwork as theoretical-historical ‘thought experiment’. As a ‘literary’ work Thoughts on an Index is intent on exploring the relationship between art, art theory and history, though these categories are mediated by fiction. This seems like risky territory, given that postmodernism was much given to the kind of vulgar poststructuralism that represents historyas a fictional construct. Roberts, careful to mark his distance fromthis species of relativism, makes clear that an implicative strategy is not intended to suggest that history is merely ‘the realm of competing and multiple fictions’.41 He affirms that ‘it is important not to “make things up” and call it history’.42 To do so

40 41 42

Roberts 2016b, p. 2. Ibid, p. 102. Ibid.

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would be to create the illusion that the past has no bearing on the present, when in fact it all too obviously creates real limits to action and conditions within which speculation operates. Working through those limits, and the speculative agency that theory might claim in its relationship to practice, is the central concern of Thoughts on an Index. As Roberts puts it, fictions may reveal ‘the traction of the past and its claims on the present’.43 This seems to be a lucid statement of the stakes of this collection of essays, its genealogical approach to articulating the emancipatory technique that Roberts identifies as a legacy of the avant-garde. The place of theory in this method is as a practice that is undecided as to its location between philosophy and art. Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (2015) emphasises that theory is integral to avant-garde practice, for example. For Roberts theory provides the tools that allow the avant-garde – he writes of a ‘suspensive’ avant-garde – to investigate the effects of capitalism on subjectivity. Theory is integral to this investigation because it is detemporalising: it informs political agency by disrupting expectations about the necessary causal relationship between historical events. By contrast, Art history misrepresents the avant-garde practice by incorporating it into a self-ratifying historicist narrative, a continuity of ‘developments’ that cannot help but distort the critical negativity of avant-garde work. History as a real process, then, is quite different to art history as an institutional mediation of art’s development in relationship to that real process. One senses again here a concern that was noted earlier in this essay: to extend genealogical continuity in order to disrupt the seemingly automatic but often illusory progress in debates about art and politics. What came to be known as postmodernism is an important point of origin for these problems, though it remains a difficult term. The frailty of postmodernism is not due to it having been insufficiently theorised; rather, it seethes with the theoretical production that was undertaken in the multiple and various debates that constituted it as a historical moment. It is over-determined by the uneven reception of post-structuralism in the English-speaking world, the militancy of feminist and post-colonial critique, and the reactionary politics of the neoliberalism that emerged through the Thatcher-Reagan consensus. The result was energetic, confused, often on the brink of collapsing into a parody of itself. In other words, art theory took on its now familiar lineaments as a risky, para-philosophical frontier under the auspices of postmodernism. Since at least the 1980s it has become common to identify this moment as a period of

43

Ibid, p. 104.

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the crisis or decline of criticism.44 For Roberts, however, the critical potential of art is present precisely in its working through of crisis. Art makes ‘the contradictions of capitalist experience legible and productive, by working through them’.45 ‘Contradiction’ is an important category here, because it anchors the openended research project of avant-gardism. Roberts takes the position that ‘realism’ as an approach to political aesthetics, though it has been classically seen as opposed to modernism and the avant-garde, is actually constituted by exactly the same processes of alienation and fragmentation. Realism, as a result, is a practice of working through contradiction. In Roberts’ analysis avant-gardes are realist: they are engaged in a working through of contradictions in representation or in praxis. Conversely, even in its ‘classical’ moment in the nineteenth century ‘realism is a claim for, and on the modern’.46 Realism is not the same as modernism, but its preoccupation with social legibility derives from the same crisis that modernism documents: ‘[Realism] is not a “style” or relatively stable mode of representation, but on the contrary, a processual and transitive site of negotiation across formal traditions’.47 In Chapter 21, ‘Realism, Alter-Realism and the Question of Legibility’, Roberts steers a route between the polarised and reified definitions that are often made of modernism, realism and the avant-garde. He identifies a cultural tendency that he terms ‘alter realism’ as being shaped by its attempt to represent aporias and contradictions. Unlike realist tendencies that emerged in moments of working-class self-confidence, alter-realism is shaped by the historical experience of the defeat of the working class, which has far-reaching effects on artistic and literary practice. Not the least of these is a profound uncertainty in the representation of work and the collective agency of workers which is caused by the post-Thermidorian stasis that has emerged from a long erosion of working conditions, working-class institutions and cultures of resistance. In this analysis, the spectrum of problems addressed so far around the role of the labour, value and amateurism converge. Emancipatory technique is not identified with voluntarist action, so much as it is with identification and working through of historically-imposed limits: the long counter-revolutionary sequence of defeat is not what alter-realism has to leave behind in order to renew its resources, forget the recent 44 45 46 47

Osborne 2013. ‘Realism, Alter-Realism and the Question of Legibility’, p. 332. Ibid. p. 317. Ibid.

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political past and open up a new horizon for practice; rather, it is the very ‘working historical space’ out which the defeats of the past and the contradictions of the present are connected and given form and made critically legible.48 The deepening crisis of culture and, indeed, of the liberal democratic state, offers no release from the logic of working-class defeat, which is seen in the fragmentation of resistance and the unrestrained exploitation of disorder to further capital accumulation. Arguably, the present political conjuncture and its alternative solutions – of innovative street protest and social democratic insurgent electoralism – are entirely determined by this defeat. It also permeates the forms that art has taken during the period since the 1980s, when diversity became integral to the progressive self-image of liberal democracy, under the auspices of what Nancy Fraser terms ‘progressive neoliberalism’49 (see Chapter 26). The progress was illusory because capitalism operates through social division, across lines including gender, race, sexuality and class, through recursive strategies of divide and rule, which Endnotes have termed the ‘history of separation’.50 Through Black Lives Matter and other recent social movements, these fractures return to visibility, not least because liberal democracy has exhausted its ability – at the level of the individual or the collective – to confect a horizon that might redeem the brutality of the here and now. Politically, this transition finds its expression across a spectrum of militancy, on the right and the left. The narcotic effect of the liberal democratic deferral, which was financed by dismantling of the welfare state and expansion of consumer credit, has receded. The actuality of social existence has once again revealed itself to be volatile. Under such circumstances ‘implicative strategies’ and emancipatory techniques are worth taking seriously. The near distance of the recent past, its missed turnings, provide critical traction now that speculation on the future has been exhausted. Though, of course, the 1980s are no longer near: we are as close to the onset of that decade as it was to the beginning of the Second World War. Emancipation, then, when read through Roberts’ approach to the avantgarde, realism and modernism, is not about release, it is about rigorous engagement with historical conditions. This engagement is conceived as taking place through a globalised contemporary art that is often said to have stalled in terms of its critical intelligibility and development. But the disorder within art is not 48 49 50

Ibid. Fraser and Sunkara 2022. Endnotes 2016, pp. 70–85.

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a condition that should be remedied by better or more philosophical art criticism: it is a conjunctural feature that has arrived because art is out of step with capitalist accumulation. As Roberts would probably argue, the idea that art ever developed, or progressed, is dubious in any case: the history of modernism is one of ruptures and discontinuities, a crisis that constitutes art and sustains critical practice. Even so, it is often the case that art theory treats contemporary art as an epistemological mess or as tragic evidence of the dominance of the capitalist order. In these essays, the emphasis consistently falls on another side of modernism: the space it opens for open-ended enquiry. This is the central legacy of the avant-garde, and it is sustained even as capitalism embarks upon a new and unprecedentedly destructive phase. There is no easy political lesson to be gleaned from this optimistic judgement: neither a promise that political emancipation is on the brink of being achieved, nor an injunction that the outcome can only be bleak. The avant-garde retains a critical potential but not a reservoir of revolutionary energies. Art is not subsumed under the value-form; hence, its emancipatory effects are disorganised and error strewn. Roberts’ method is one that places avant-gardes, and the potential for a collective subjectivity that they sometimes prefigure, at the centre of enquiry into the conditions of the present.

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part 1 Value

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Labour, Emancipation and the Critique of Craft-Skill The relationship between labour practices and craft-skill has once again become a topic of considerable importance in the light of recent reflections on the growth of immaterial labour within certain sectors of the global economy – immaterial labour here being defined as labour that produces the creative informational content of a commodity, or labour that involves the routine processing and distribution of information within primary production or the service economy.1 In this sense both kinds of immaterial labour, creative and routine, have, it is said, ‘intellectualised’ various aspects of manual and nonmanual labour processes. Indeed, for Maurizio Lazzarato,2 Toni Negri,3 and Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello4 – to name the most prominent contributors to the debate – under these new conditions there has been a demonstrable increase in the cognitive and affective content of various sectors of the labour process across the productive and non-productive labour divide. This is partly to do with the vast extension of computers into the workplace, but also the reorganisation of labour-management relations horizontally in response to the need for prompt, effective and creative solutions to problems at the point of production and distribution. Thus, in the ‘new creative’ sectors of the economy – which in many ways have been driving technological change at the point of production since the early 1990s – some aspects of the new workplace appear closer to the freedoms of artistic production than they do to customary forms of bureaucratic and top-down exchange between management and workers. Among these transformations, particularly significant, is the shared, processual involvement of workers in various semi-autonomous activities, in order to initiate a project, resolve a given problem or deliver a service. As Lazzarato argues, these new conditions require that workers combine:

1 A shorter version of this text, was published in The Journal of Modern Craft Volume, Issue 2 July 2012 pp. 137–48. 2 Lazzarato 1996. 3 Hardt and Negri 2001. 4 Boltanski and Chiapello 2005.

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the results of various different types of work skill: intellectual skills, as regards the cultural-informational content; manual skills for the ability to combine creativity, imagination, and technical and manual labor; and entrepreneurial skills in the management of social relations and the structuring of that social cooperation of which they are a part.5 Similarly, according to Negri, in retail and sales and the new public services the expansion of the affective aspects of non-productive labour – the qualitative increase in customer, client or patient care or attention – make the older bureaucratic forms of provision crude and inelastic. Negri makes two interrelated political points on the basis of these would-be changes. With the rise in processual skills and affective skills immaterial workers are able to share a skillbase across the sectional divisions of productive and non-productive labour; what office workers do to process data in the car industry, and how a worker monitors gas pressure in a gas plant, is technically not that different from what workers do in on-floor sales in a furniture store and the daily activities of a hospital administrator. Thus, irrespective of sectoral knowledge accumulated on the job, the ‘computer’ as a facilitator of social exchange and abstract interchangeable processing skills, comes to operate in an unprecedented way as a universal tool within the labour process, allowing workers to share their cognitive skills in far more flexible ways across sectional divisions than was hitherto possible. Negri, in fact, goes as far as saying that the digital incorporation of these cognitive skills into the new network economy possesses an immanent proto-communist content. ‘In the expression of its own creative energies, immaterial labor … seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism’.6 This debate on immaterial labour clearly revives, admittedly in a highly provocative fashion, the classical debate on skill and deskilling and the alienation of labour. In a tendentious rejection of the deskilling thesis in the Marxist tradition, Lazzarato, Negri and Boltanski and Chiapello all argue that these changes in the labour process weaken the usual picture of the worker as subject to the dissolution or fragmentation of his or her skills as a result of the routinisation of the technical division of labour. Workers in the new creative industries, retail industries and public services – as well as certain sectors of the old industrial base – provide, in fact, what is a very different picture of the industrial worker: the immaterially and affectively re-skilled worker. In this respect it is Negri who pushes the ‘transformatory’ potential of the new labour processes the furthest, 5 Lazzarato 1996, p. 137. 6 Hardt and Negri 2001, p. 294.

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claiming that, given that many of the immaterial skills operative in the workplace are extendable and adaptable outside of the workplace, new forms of worker autonomy and interaction are emerging as a result of this skill-set. A new creative work/life continuum has emerged: ‘production becomes indistinguishable from reproduction’;7 the informational skills the worker employs in the workplace form the basis for the digital skills required to communicate with others in and outside of the workplace, and, therefore, enables some of the tasks performed at work to be performed at home without difficulty (hence the growth in home-working in certain sectors), and, also, facilitates the integration of digital skills into daily household routines, particularly domestic labour (online shopping). Immaterial labour immediately involves social interaction and cooperation. In other words, the cooperative aspect of immaterial labour is not imposed or organised from outside, as it was in previous forms of labour, but rather, cooperation is completely immanent to the laboring activity itself.8 So, according, to Negri, these new generic skills, instigated across the service industries, the new cultural industries, and sections of the old industrial base, as well as across workplace and home, weaken the old craft-based and occupational hierarchies, top-down management, and the patriarchal distinction between workplace and the domestic, in the interests of new ‘cooperative … communicational, and affective networks’.9 Now, Negri’s sanguine account of immaterial work has rightly come in for a great deal of criticism.10 The number of workers that fall under this category is relatively low, meaning that his political optimism is highly skewed in relation to the overall dynamic of the world economy (particularly in the light of the two billion unemployed globally today). Moreover, the link between these new conditions of communication, technical interchangeability and skill-transfer across sectors, and the rise in at-work ‘creative autonomy’, is exaggerated. The idea that immaterial workers are not subject to the same forms of routinisation and surveillance as traditional industrial workers (or when working at home), is a fantasy born of a familiar ideological over-investment in emerging forms of technology. Admittedly, new forms of production that free up aspects of worker 7 8 9 10

Ibid, p. 385. Ibid, p. 294. Ibid, p. 294. Balakrishnan 2003.

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initiative do, indeed, put pressure on the measurement of value, but management soon adjusts to this, calibrating the extraction of surplus value in new and refined ways. The ideal image of the new horizontal forms of network production only stretches so far, therefore, principally in relation to highly specialised, ‘blue-skies’, ‘creative industries’ conditions. Yet in reply to his critics, Negri defends his views from an orthodox Marxist position: the rise of the immaterial worker is only a tendency, based on an analysis of the most advanced sectors of the economy globally, precisely the method adopted by Marx in the Grundrisse and Capital. As Marx asserts: ‘In all forms of society there is one specific form of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations assign rank and influence to the others’.11 When Marx was writing Capital there were more workers engaged in domestic service in Britain than there were in the emerging factory system, but this didn’t mean that Marx was therefore best advised to focus on service workers. The emerging tendency was the rapid growth of wage labour within the big factories: it was this that reflected the deeper dynamic of the system. Similarly, the transition from feudalism to capitalism is best understood by focusing on the rise of wage labour in the fledgling urban guild system (specifically Florence and Genoa), rather than on the labour of the majority of workers, landless serfs and tenants still working on the land. These new forms of guild wage-labour were, eventually, to have a profound effect on technological development and the relations of production in the fourteenth century (in particular the increasing movement of craft labourers from one workshop to another, and from one city to another).12 As Steven A. Epstein puts it, the guilds ‘incubated’13 technological development and new relations of production, insofar as they offered a basic institutional framework for generating and sustaining innovation. ‘Masters were able to enforce work rules and methods in their shops, and so they could make their employees adopt new techniques’.14 Thus wages paid in the city had a qualitatively different impact and set of expectations than wages paid in the countryside. Wages in the city encouraged the division of labour, and with it the development and transmission of new forms of technical and 11 12

13 14

Marx 1973, pp. 106–7. There was, of course, a comparable movement in the countryside in the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth century in England, as free tenants moved from their place of birth and took up available plots of land, made increasingly available after the plague, by lapsed tenancies, in response to the demand for labour for the market in rural areas close to towns or cities, such as East Anglia with its strong connections to London (see Hilton 1969). Epstein 1991, p. 230. Ibid, p. 247.

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artisanal knowledge.15 As Jarius Banaji argues: ‘The “forms” thrown up by the early capitalism of the Mediterranean were essentially those that continued to drive global history down to the expansion of large-scale industry’.16

1

Negri and Deskilling

So, Negri’s defence is admittedly not without certain orthodox credentials, and as such possesses a certain conviction. But at the same time, he drops from view what has remained crucial to labour process theory from Marx to Harry Braverman: the alienation debate, and its relationship to workers’ autonomy and the possible improvement or continuing degradation of workers’ conditions. Marx was never indifferent to the ways in which the conditions of workers could be improved; in fact, he saw such improvements (the shortening of the working day, most importantly) as absolutely central to workers’ capacity to organise and enter the institutions of civil society. But Marx never saw the improvement of workers’ conditions as a source of untapped autonomy. Workers, invariably, did not determine the terrain on which capital conducted its struggle against labour. However, this is precisely where Negri distinguishes himself from Marx, and where there is a parting of the ways around questions of ‘orthodoxy’. For Negri, working-class power lies precisely in ‘the antagonism and autonomy of workers themselves’.17 It doesn’t lie in institutions or in workers’ representatives. In this respect, the new capitalism foregrounds the immanent power of workers’ resistance in an unprecedented way, given how the ‘deterritorialisation of production’18 and the weakening of uni-directional discipline in the workplace gives workers access to new forms of cooperation that strengthen their powers of association (although, Negri admits, this does not obviate the re-centralising of production taking place at a global, macro-level). In fact, for Negri the defeats of the workers’ movement in the twentieth century, and the rise of new forms of centripetal power, are secondary to this new insurgent power from below. This optimism is challenging, to say the least. But most problematic for our argument here, is the way it bypasses the debate on de-skilling and alienation, as if immaterial labour and the increase in workers’ use of symbolic skills (the 15

16 17 18

One of the great examples of this transmission process handed down to us is Cennino d’Andrea Cennini’s (c1370–c1440) The Craftsman’s Handbook, written in Florence, most likely in the early fifteenth century (see Cennini 1960). Banaji 2010, pp. 43–4. Ibid, p. 269. Ibid, p. 295.

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processing of data, etc.) constituted a radically novel form of labour exploitation; a lessening of the coercive power of surplus-value extraction. Negri, is of course not a näif on this matter. But he does believe that the increased assimilation of workers and non-workers into this digital/immaterial regime of labour subjectivation has a qualitative upside that distinguishes this period from previous ones: namely, that the transformation of workers and non-workers into a new kind of cooperative producer/consumer enables workers to put in place a new ‘collective worker’ that is progressively linked to the universal expansion of the ‘general intellect’ (shared computerised intelligence). And this is irreversible, constituting a new ‘commons’ that is without parallel. Thus, Negri pushes the idea of the qualitative change in workers’ conditions to a sanguine extreme. But in doing so he foregrounds an old issue central to the debate on labour and emancipation: the question of whether the perceived improvement in the conditions of workers is evidence of workers’ strengthened position and confidence in their commitment to their exit from capitalist relations. (Is it possible to see changes in the way workers organize their interests as a class [trade unions], or how they labour in the workplace [the ‘collective labourer’], as a precursor to the way in which workers might organise their labour under post-capitalism?) Or, are such changes, firstly: mostly, an illusion, given capital’s inexorable recovery of its control over labour-power (through wage-cuts, unemployment, part-time employment, and the re-rountinisation and fragmentation of workplace tasks); and secondly, in the end irrelevant, given that there is no steady, unfolding, forward march of labour under capitalism. To think otherwise is to misunderstand the position of workers under capital: workers are not involved in a slow, if undulating, march to equality, but, rather, exist as a negative and fractured presence, as the extimate of capitalism – that is, something that is both inside and outside. So: the assumption that capitalism’s production of new forms of mass participation and non-passive communication is the point through which workers will slowly enter a new world of non-capitalist relations is contentious, precisely because it assumes a progressivist continuity between post-capitalist tendencies immanent to capitalism and the free producers of post-capitalism itself. Negri’s arguments are thus caught up in a larger historical argument: is the exit from capitalist relations a matter principally of the emancipation from labour power as the precondition of a new world, or are workers involved in the re-functioning of labour power as the reformist passage to a new world? Is the emancipation of labour concerned with separating creative self-directed activity from necessary labour, or is it about re-functioning labour as creative, self-directed activity as a precondition of the exit from capital? It is hard to say where Negri stands on this. But his priority, with Michael Hardt in Empire, is certainly to align the

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new immaterial conditions of production with the would-be immanent powers of workers’ resistance, with the ‘antagonism and autonomy of workers themselves’. Consequently, this highlights the issue that is central to value-form and labour-process theory: is the relentless deskilling of the labour process fundamental to capitalism’s control of living labour, and to workers’ extimate condition? Or is it contingent, dependent on workers’ struggles and technological transformation (the expansion of use-values, with the increased introduction or machines [now computers] into the production and distribution process)? Unsurprisingly, Negri defends the latter and therefore is highly antagonistic to the idea of deskilling as the ontological ground of the capitalist labour process (as it is in Braverman), because it dissociates workers’ immanent powers of resistance with struggles in the workplace. Deskilling occurs, but it is not defining. Accordingly, the question of craft for Negri cuts across the classical debate. He recognises that the old craft-integrity has long gone, but nevertheless this does not mean that workers are unable to reclaim old skills and generate new skills as the outcome of workplace struggles, indeed, generate new (cognitively-based) craft skills. Craft, then, is still a living issue for Negri in the period of immaterial labour, and as such provides a strikingly heterogeneous incursion into the classical debate on craft-integrity. In the late nineteenth century the debate on the emancipation of labour was based on the normative critique and evaluation of labour practices under the three major modes of production: classical slavery, feudal villeinage, and the capitalist free market. But the exploitation of labour across these modes of production for these late nineteenth-century critics of industrialisation were not equivalent. Slave labour and feudal villeinage may have been iniquitous and barbaric, but some slave-labour and feudal practices had a rich relationship to craft-practices and artisanal skill, revealing for these writers how immiserated most modern industrial labour had become. Indeed, factory labour diminished the status of the worker far below that of those Greek and Roman slaves and feudal artisans attached to long-standing craft traditions and the master’s workshop. Taking the ‘craft-integrity’ of various artisanal slave and feudal practices as their normative model, the critique of industrial capitalism for these writers took on a ‘counter-rationalising’ mode: how might the labourer best labour, under what ideal conditions, and with what tools and materials? The debate within the classical Marxist and Romantic anti-capitalist traditions has tended to focus, accordingly, on what has been devalued in the transition from the classical mode of production and feudalism to capitalism. In what ways does capitalism destroy – in its release of the labourer from its conditions of exoteric dependency – the craft-integrity of certain kinds of

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labour? What creative artisanal skills and capacities are lost or diminished in this process? What kind of subjectively satisfying investment in the direct transformation of raw or fabricated materials is expunged through mass mechanisation and the rationalisation of the labour process? Marx, and Romantic anti-capitalists such as John Ruskin and William Morris, are all overwhelmingly affected by what is destroyed from the passage from antiquity, through feudalism to capitalism. Yet, for Marx, if the gradual loss of craft-integrity in the transition from feudalism to capitalism exposes the contradiction between the claims of industrial progress and the bourgeois concept of ‘freely determined labour’, the ideal restitution of craft-skill cannot, in itself, answer the broader question attached to the emancipation of labour. That is: for Marx, the loss of artisanal skill is secondary to the non-alienated social form that the freely determined content of labour might take once the capitalist social division of labour is destroyed. For Marx, therefore, the question of what is lost by way of artisanal skill in productive labour in the transition from feudalism to capitalism is not the whole story, insofar as craft-integrity will only be one aspect of the non-alienated social content of labour under post-capitalism. In this sense, for Marx, the emancipation from labour is equally as important as the creative re-functioning of labour. Let us look in more detail then at the status of the figure of the medieval craftsman, so central to the thinking of Marx, Ruskin and Morris, because it will offer us greater clarification around the issue of alienation, deskilling and labour today.

2

The Medieval Craftsman

Reflections on the medieval craftsman in the Marxist and Romantic anticapitalist traditions largely begin from the same premise. Although the classical mode of production and feudal villeinage share a reliance on various forms of coerced labour, the craftworker and artisan under the Greek slave economy and feudalism are defined by their high level of artisanal accomplishment and integration of these skills into the symbolic life of these societies. In fact, feudal craftsmen, exhibit an extraordinary and admirable convergence between their long-honed skills and their social role. As Marx and Engels argue in The German Ideology [1846], in the medieval period: The limited intercourse and the weak ties between the individual towns, the lack of population and the narrow needs did not allow of a more advanced division of labour, and therefore every man who wished to

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become a master had to be proficient in the whole of his craft. Medieval craftsmen therefore had an interest in their special work and in proficiency in it, which was capable of rising to a limited artistic sense. For this very reason, however, every medieval craftsman was completely absorbed in his work, to which he had a complacent servile relationship, and in which he was involved to a far greater extent than the modern worker, whose work is a matter of indifference to him.19 In other words, because the medieval craftsman is assumed to identify his craft skills fully with his control over a given task, his labour is held to be fundamentally unalienated. In the same way, the Romantic anti-capitalism of John Ruskin and the Romantic Marxism of William Morris both offer a highly garlanded interpretation of this medieval worker as the fount of integrated creativity. As Ruskin declares in The Stones of Venice (1854), the Christian medieval craftsmen who built and ornamented the great Gothic cathedrals possessed a rough skill that was in harmony with their capacities. The Greek gave to the lower workman no subject which he could not perfectly execute. The Assyrian gave him subjects which he could only execute imperfectly, but fixed a legal standard for his imperfection. The workman was, in both systems, a slave. But in the medieval, or especially Christian, system of ornament, this slavery is done away with altogether; Christianity having recognized, in small things as well as great, the individual value of every soul […] And it is, perhaps, the principal admirableness of Gothic schools of architecture, that they thus receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of the fragments full of imperfection, and betraying that imperfection in every touch, indulgently raise up a stately and unaccusable whole.20 And as Morris explains in Signs of Change (1888): the medieval craftsman was free in his work, therefore he made it as amusing to himself as he could; and it was his pleasure and not his pain that made all things beautiful that were made, and lavished treasures of human hope and thought on everything that man made, from cathedral to a porridge-pot.21 19 20 21

Marx and Engels 1976, p. 66. Ruskin 1854, pp. 6–7. Morris 1888.

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Admittedly, Morris did not believe such freedom was undetermined by the violence of medieval society. The Church and State ‘repressed art in certain directions’ – that is, art and the craft skills of the artisan served the glory of God and both were tied to the symbolic authority and material interests of the aristocracy.22 Yet even so, for Morris, the medieval craftsman in his subaltern role took, he argued, direct and unalloyed pleasure from his work. The craftsman worked under the direction of a ‘master’ yet retained a modicum of control over the process of the work. It is no surprise, then, that even under these restricted conditions, the notion of the medieval craftsman as being able to determine the quality of his labour at the point of production becomes one of the key determinants of the debate on the emancipation of labour in the second half of the nineteenth century, as wage labour becomes massively concentrated in a narrow range of routinised, dangerous and oppressive occupations in the new factories and extractive industries. Marx, Ruskin, and Morris all deferred to a version of this vision of ‘integrated labour’ in order to open up an imaginative gap between would-be bourgeois industrial progress and previous modes of production. But if all three shared a view of the medieval craftsman as ‘unalienated’ and as such possessing a relative control over his artisanal skills, for Marx this ‘unalienated’ status is highly delimited in its freedoms, something that Morris and the Romantic anti-capitalists overlook or dismiss. Indeed, in an interesting Hegelian inversion of the problem of craft-integrity in The German Ideology Marx and Engels invert the would-be unfreedom and immiseration of the industrial wage-labourer into something quite different to its image in Romantic anti-capitalism. The medieval artisanal workshop may provide evidence of craft-integrity, and the medieval craftsman may take real pleasure from his control over his endeavours, but this is because he is unable to imagine alternatives to his present (narrowly defined) conditions of labour, or if he is able to do so – in a limited sense – he is unable to freely act on these conditions.23 The ‘admirable convergence’ between the craftsman’s skills and his social role in medieval artisanal culture is evidence, in fact, of a conspicuous lack: the ability of the worker to reflect and act on the outcomes of his labour as the result of his freedom as a free economic agent: his capacity to withdraw his labour from one enterprise or workshop and seek employment elsewhere, or withdraw from waged labour altogether, even if it meant likely starvation. Hence, paradoxically, Marx finds a hidden freedom in the formal freedom of the alienated, industrial worker: that is, pre-

22 23

Ibid. Marx and Engels 1976.

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cisely through his or her negative capacity to disidentify with his or her role as worker, the worker is able to establish their labour and creativity as distinct from the coercions of wage-labour. This is a kind of freedom in alienation, because, although the worker is separated from the integral skills that the medieval craftsman took for granted – thereby losing his secure place in the creative collectivity of labour – he is at the same time able to imagine, as a freely independent seller of his own labour power, a world of work beyond production for profit and production for a master. This is based for Marx on the greater powers of ‘egoism’ of the modern worker, his or her increased capacity for self-definition. Consequently, from the fourteenth-century guilds to the nineteenth-century factory system, the coercions of wage-labour provide the wider conditions for the meaning of workers’ emancipation: namely, the development and release of the worker’s intellectual and physical powers of self-realisation and creative singularity as a common horizon beyond the power of the master and the ‘employment relation’. If under capitalism individuation progresses through the conditions of self-alienation, under post-capitalism, individuation is secured through the subject’s fulfilled engagement in his or her (moderate) daily labours free from external authority. But this classical reading of the development of free labour, of course, raises more questions than it answers. Indeed, it raises a number of questions that Marx himself in his later writings was unable to answer, when he argued famously in The German Ideology that under communism, the freely determined producer would hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticise after dinner.24 Firstly, how do we square the massive and systematic tendency within capitalism to create forms of unsatisfying work with the creative possibilities of ‘freedom in alienation’? As Harry Braverman argued in Labor and Monopoly Capital [1974]: The capitalist mode of production systematically destroys all-round skills where they exist, and brings into being skills and occupations that correspond to its needs. Technical capacities are henceforth distributed on a strict ‘need to know’ basis.25 How, then, does the vast landscape of alienated, deskilled labour under capitalism prepare a transition to actual forms of self-directed, unalienated labour?

24 25

Marx and Engels 1976, p. 47. Braverman 1998, p. 57.

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What conditions, resources and relations are currently in place in the labour process that would make this transition a realistic possibility, or not? In other words, how might the transition to a new mode of production support unalienated labour for all, given the fact that under capitalism labour is alienated mostly for all?

3

Necessary Labour and Craft-Integrity

This is a question that is rarely addressed in the history of orthodox Marxism, given its commitment to the notion that the socialist release of the productive forces from their capitalist constraints will enable the expansion of industry to all corners of the globe, and provide jobs for all. Locked into this understanding, paradoxically, is the notion of the eradication of wasted expenditure; of greater efficiency. For a large part of the twentieth century socialism was associated with the increase in ‘free-time’ that the efficiency demanded by the drive for global industrialisation would provide, in a startling echo of capitalism’s fetishisation of technology as the bringer of freedom from want. What (Stalinised) socialism promised in these terms was real growth, plus leisure unconstrained by passive consumption; what occurred, however, was vast inefficiency and pollution and widespread cultural cynicism. This is because the productive forces under Stalinism served the same imperative as under capitalism: to define wealth through industrial growth and the identification of well-being with access to wages. In the Soviet Union, there was just less to buy. Marx’s critique of waged labour as the first step in the destruction of labour power as a measure of value was dispensed with. Little thought, therefore, was given to wages as a constraint on ‘free labour’; socialism was simply the freedom of all to labour for a wage without the fear of unemployment, as opposed to the freedom from labour and from the social division of labour; ‘self-directed activity’ was what was left after the completion of one’s patriotic duty to complete one’s quota was done.

4

Three Versions of Poiesis

Marx’s early writing on labour and craft, then, represents, a very different tradition to that of Stalinism, and its expulsion of the critique of labour from ‘workers’ emancipation’. This is a tradition in which the critique of the division of labour prevails over technist and growth-based accounts of development and well-being (Walter Benjamin, the Soviet Productivists Aleksei Gan and Boris

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Arvatov, Raniero Panzieri, Theodor Adorno, and André Gorz), and therefore, is a tradition that takes seriously the idea of human flourishing as operating at the intersection between the emancipation from labour and the creative re-functioning of labour (or what will remain of it). As such, this alternate (if fragmented) tradition defines post-capitalism not as a new mode of production, but a new mode of living, and as such defines its immediate task as the dissociation of work from labour-power as the basis for the qualitative transformation of the relations of production and new work-life relations. That is, in any transitional state in which necessary labour still prevails (over and above the conversion of human labour into machinic labour), decisions concerning in-puts, operational plans and targets, have to incorporate processes and outcomes that are creatively self-directed, individually and collectively. This is why at this stage the poiesis of artistic production remains key to this vision. In the absence of the discipline of the value form and production-for-profit, the vicissitudes of production are dissolved through non-instrumentally achieved ends, removing the tyranny of abstract labour from the decision-making process. This requires the creation of use-values determined by criteria other than those of cost-efficiency and simple utilitarian pleasure. As Gan and Arvatov argued in the 1920s: in the wake of the destruction of the capitalist division of labour the worker becomes an artist, and the artist becomes a worker; art and labour intersect; self-directed activity finds its place in the productive process.26 Hence in this model of unalienated labour artistic labour doesn’t just converge with productive labour, that is, bring aesthetic judgement into the production process – it redirects productive labour, opens it up to creative and shared decision-making.27 The actuality of this redirection, nevertheless, remains highly contested in this heterodox tradition. The Productivists in their artist-in-factory experiments in the 1920s soon realised that the collaborative initiatives of artists in factories and, as such, the possibility of workers ‘becoming’ artists – even under a fledgling revolutionary regime – were subject to the instrumental demands of the productive process itself and the artistically unassimilable nature of many branches of production. The call that the Productivists made to artists to train as engineers in order that they might integrate their skills into the production process, became precisely that, the transformation of artistic process into technical knowledge, dissolving the aleatory aspects of artistic production into the disciplinary requirements of the labour process

26 27

Arvatov 2017. Gan 1988.

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inside the factory. The artist became a technician in order to better facilitate the transition from artist to worker; the transition from worker to artist was considered less of a priority, for in truth the aim was to bring artists into the production process and not provide workers with the opportunity to become artists, even if this in some instances was the desired outcome. The point being, therefore, that in this revolutionary stage of transition the re-functioning of the productive process is not, in fact, some new kind of artistic ‘collaboration’ at all, but a means of assimilating all technical and intellectual decisions and inputs into the production process as freely given acts. From a radically opposite perspective, William Morris’ development in the late nineteenth century of a model of unalienated labour based on the craftintegrity of the medieval period, could only be truly operational – that is generalisable as a model of production – outside of the demands of mass production in a modern economy. Inside the economy, capitalist or not, it would be technically retarded and thus wholly impractical; no small-scale artisanal production can serve the needs of billions globally. Unalienated labour on this basis, then, is something the worker possesses and develops in his or her own (limited) leisure time, a kind of retreat or enclave outside of necessary labour. And, as we have seen, this kind of vision retains a split between productive labour and self-directed activity. Poiesis is confined to self-directed activity alone. Similarly, Adorno’s poietic model of liberated labour is confined in the abstract – as a kind of ideal horizon – to the ‘mimetic’ (empathic) labour of the artwork itself. There is no actual process of mediation between this autonomous labour immanent to the production of art and the exigencies of productive labour, simply a recognition that productive labour will need to act and look like the freely determined activity of artistic creativity.28 Adorno, then, doesn’t confine poiesis to self-directed activity, but nevertheless, it is unclear how poiesis might function in the production process. In André Gorz’s Adieux au proletariat: Au delà du socialism (1980), however, poiesis is neither confined to self-activity as leisure, nor invoked as an abstract ideal of production/self-directed activity integration. It is, rather, that which is affirmatively not productive labour. Poiesis offers a liberated model of labour independent from, and indeed, in opposition to, the instrumental realities of the labour process: under conditions of structural unemployment, underemployment, extended part-time work, and the increased routinisations of productive and non-productive labour, the liberation of creativity is best conceived outside of the production process itself. In a world in which machinic

28

Adorno 1984.

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‘labour’ will continue to displace human labour there can be no aesthetic/artistic reimagining of labour as the primary source of human fulfilment and flourishing, and therefore no integration of self-directed activity into the production process. In this Gorz has no hesitation in separating emancipation from labour from the creative re-functioning of labour.29 The poietic transformation of labour is a misnomer; the poiesis of self-directed activity is one thing, the development of creative inputs into the labour process quite another; they should not be confused. The de-alienation of labour under post-capitalism for Gorz does not lie, therefore, in the creative re-functioning of the labour process in any systemic sense, but in the emancipatory expansion of machinic ‘postwork’ conditions and the universal release of poiesis into self-directed activity. In this light, Negri is actually quite right to describe himself as a classical Marxist, insofar as he retains the possibility that the emancipation of labour will come about through the immanent transformation of the labour process itself, through its creative refunctioning. The creative re-functioning of the labour process will remain crucial to the emancipatory process. (This is because, for Negri, unlike Gorz, the integration of network culture into the labour process is a continuing indication of how capitalism produces and reproduces the conditions of ‘freedom in alienation’ and as such produces new forms of alienated singularity; from inside the routinisations of the new digital culture new and creative skills are born; the creation of new skills is functional to the exit from capitalism). But how ‘classical’, in fact, is Marx himself in this respect? That is, Marx may in The German Ideology talk about the ‘freedom in alienation’ of waged labour under capitalism, as a precursor to the emancipation of labour under communism, but in his later writing, in an echo of Gorz, he is less sanguine about ‘artistic labour’ or poiesis shifting or unburdening the strictures of necessary labour. In Volume iii of Capital, the ontology of necessary labour asserts itself. Freedom can only consist in socialised humans and associated producers ‘rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity’.30 Clearly, this is a far from sanguine view of the transformative or corrective powers of artistic process – or craft-integrity – on the labour process. Indeed, as

29 30

Gorz 1980 and 1985. Marx 1972, p. 820.

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the last line of the quote makes evident, because all economic systems are ultimately reliant on some kind of necessary labour, none can support unalienated labour for all, all the time, under all conditions, particularly in the light of having to meet the daily and multiple needs of billions of people. Rather, the relief from alienation, in the end, will find consistency in those forms of activity that are the result of the machinic release of labour from the production of value, that is through the exercise of independent self-activity. However, the transformation of labour power into independent self-activity does not mean that forms of necessary labour (routine labour) will not still play their part in a postcapitalist system; rather they will play their part external to the occupationbased constraints of the social division of labour in a radically reduced, and equitably distributed, way. The persistence of necessary labour, consequently, is not evidence of a political retreat secreted at the end of Marx’s labours on the capitalist system. There is nothing to suggest in Capital Volume iii that anything short of the ending of private property and the dissolution of the value-form will release humanity from the burdens of capitalism’s recurring and chronic crises, and capital’s instrumental capture of labour skills. But these late reflections of Marx do represent a shift away from his early Schillerian Romanticism that he shared in the 1840s with his Romantic anti-capitalist peers, insofar as he appears here to be stressing that not all forms of labour will be subject to creative redirection. In other words, collective control over nature and the productive process is quite separate from the control and reduction of necessary labour, which is irreducible. The irreducibility of necessary labour then blocks the full entry of unalienated self-activity into the labour process, in as much as certain kinds of labour are instrumentally determined by pre-given outcomes and relatively fixed processes, and as such are ‘non-aestheticisable’, or non-transformable into machinic/robotic ‘labour’. Marx doesn’t discuss the implications of this blockage. In fact, it appears that he does not consider such implications at all. Yet the consequences of this later passage are clear enough, and hence remain significant. In a system freed of the hierarchical and competitive demands of the valueform the universalisation of unalienated labour will, nonetheless, experience its own limitations and constraints. That is, there will remain forms of labour that will be impervious to the de-alienation of labour and machinic transformation, and remain so. Now, this is not to say that certain tasks and processes in certain sectors of the productive economy will not be opened up to ‘creative’ skills and decisions, or that previously unaestheticisable activities will become aestheticised, or that more tedious and demanding tasks will be taken up by technology, but many tasks inside and outside the productive base will not.

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This will set up a very different temporalisation of labour than under the valueform. Firstly, access to unalienated labour as primary labour will be displaced from traditional patterns of career structure, allowing those engaged in forms of necessary labour to share in this work after relevant training. Indeed, the switch-over from necessary labour to unalienated labour, and back again, will constitute the re-temporalisation of labour generally, breaking up the primary and fixed link between professions and social identity. That is, only part of the working week will be devoted to such labour, the rest of the week will be given over to the individual’s contribution to a small amount of necessary labour, when and where required. And secondly, this re-temporalisation means that by requiring that all workers and non-workers contribute at some level to the demands of necessary labour, necessary labour is removed from its inherited subordinate position within the system of unalienated labour as a whole. Under a system of use-values divorced from productivity for profit necessary labour may provide something like ‘alienation in freedom’. That is, workers may actually take pleasure from the disproportionate exertions of necessary labour, knowing that their labours are contributing to the primary reproduction of the new society, and the generation of new use values. This is not as utopian as it may at first seem. For, as Marx recognised, not all alienated labour can be dissociated from pleasure. If there was not pleasure to be had from different kinds of freely alienated labour under capitalism, capitalism would not be able to secure its reproduction and the continuing adherence that it does. A post-capitalist system will need to draw on such adherence to the ‘pleasures of alienation’ as an important source of transformative energy for those workers involved in maintaining the forward movement of the new system.

5

Time and the Division of Labour

On this basis, therefore, the emancipation of labour is only tangentially related to the reconstitution of craft processes within the labour process. Certainly, the exercise of traditional craft processes implies a very different kind of work rhythm and control over material, and of hand to machine, than is exemplified by the discipline of the factory and office; and as such represents the inseparability of craft-integrity from the ideal of a non-linear temporal order drawn from the early and late medieval period. Henri Lefebvre’s critique of capitalist time, for instance, certainly draws on this pre-modern connection,31 as does the pre– 31

Lefebvre 2000.

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modern artisanal vision of the potter Bernard Leach, who placed a high value on handwork in his reflections on the emancipation of labour.32 But it is not the distended labour of the crafts that is able to drive the wider dynamic of labour emancipation beyond the linearity of the value form. What is of greater importance is the control and disposal of time as such, and it is this, in the end, that has the greater efficacy in Marx’s writing. The emancipation of labour is not about winning back for the labour process the ‘unalienated’ labour of the medieval craftsman as part of the poietic transformation of labour, but, rather, about winning control over the labour process itself, in order to reorganise production in the interests of securing the labourer’s autonomy, and correspondingly expanding ‘freely determined time’ as self-directed creative time outside of production. As Marx says in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847): ‘In a future society … use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production; but the time of production devoted to an article will be determined by the degree of its social utility’.33 In these terms, the re-temporalisation of labour expands the quality, and reduces the length, of the working day. Moreover, this produces a further qualitative change in the relations between the labour process/necessary labour couplet and freely directed activities. The boundaries between work and life are fundamentally recalibrated – in an echo of Negri: skills developed freely outside of the labour process find a place of value in the labour process, just as skills developed in the labour process find a new home or value outside of the factory and office. Yet, if this generates a liberated continuum between labour and freely determined activities, freely determined activities are precisely that: they are not the liberated home of labour, but, rather, the space where intellectual and artisanal activities are advanced without preconceptions. Thus, the realm of freely determined activities may, in fact, be the space where all heightened images of creative productivity, intellectual, immaterial, or practical, are laid to rest. There is nothing to presuppose, accordingly, that the multiplicitous labours of the modern artist will be the only or ideal model of emancipated labour developed outside of the ‘unalienated labour’ and necessary labour of the labour process. Outside of the continuing necessities of the post-capitalist labour process, human activities, the pursuit of perfectionist goods and values, may have no charge and ambition other than the cultivation of laziness or one’s own garden or the development of life skills: of caring for others, of talking and listening, of noting and taking pleasure from nature. The dissolution

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Leach 1940. See also de Waal 1998. Marx 1976, p. 134.

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of the value form and of abstract labour and competitive productivity presupposes, therefore, a very different relationship between making, thinking and time; the connection between the self-valorisation of capital and time will be broken. So where exactly does the ideal of craft-integrity sit within an emancipatory post-capitalist model of labour? For a hundred and fifty years this ideal has taken the form of an alternative or counter-productivity to the one embedded in capitalist rationality. In the artisanal labour of the craftsman or craftswoman the elemental attributes of human creativity are supposedly laid bare. This is because, it is argued, the craftsperson exhibits a kind of perfected, or at least highly developed, expressive control over his or her work materials, as we have noted. As Richard Sennett puts it, the ideal of craft-integrity is best defined as a ‘capacity to stay with frustrating work, and [be patient] in the form of sustained concentration … The patience of a craftsman can thus be defined as: the temporary suspension of the desire for closure’.34 Accordingly, capitalism is held to be the very antithesis of this image of the cultivation of craft selfdiscipline; very few people engaged in wage labour under capitalism achieve – or, rather, are in position to achieve – the requisite levels of concentration, repetitive discipline, and patience to master a craft to a high level of accomplishment. Indeed, a double-deskilling has broadly taken place under mature capitalism: the increasing replacement of work-based skills in the work place with machinic facility, and the identification of ‘leisure time’ as consumertime, as ‘just reward’ for the exactions of labour-time. This is why capitalism is so time-poor for the majority, even under condition of labour-flexibility and increased leisure: the capacity for self-realisation outside of work is identified with a libidinal release from self-discipline, whether this is self-directed or not. That is: the majority are not in a position to find a balance between selfdirected activity and wage-labour, because leisure interposes pleasure between self-directed activity and the return to work as a ‘rational’ compensation for work and the travails of family. Under mature capitalism the logic of free-time is to expand the realm of compensation through consumption, and not the cultivation of self-directed activities that fall outside of the freedom to consume (as the capitalist core of ‘self-realised’ identity). Capital wants control over all aspects of the work/non-work continuum, insofar as it has to produce a subject that is not just willing to return to work, but that relies on wage-labour for its access to pleasure and its accompanying powers of selfdefinition.

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Sennett 2008, pp. 220–1.

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It is no surprise, therefore, that craft-integrity still has a powerful appeal in the tradition of Romantic anti-capitalism, because the ideal of the ‘time-rich’ craftsperson is crucial to the critique of this sense of closure. Yet, as I have stressed, seeing the reconstitution of craft-integrity in material or immaterial forms as the primary answer to temporal poverty is misconceived, because to focus on the loss of craft-skill under capitalism is to reduce the emancipatory re-temporalisation of the labour process simply to a matter of reconstituted craft-skill, as if the recovery of craft-skills (material or immaterial) will heal the vicissitudes of alienated labour and the division of labour. Whereas, in fact, the emancipation of labour needs to be seen as the outcome of a more fundamental shift: a control over time (of productive time). Sennett, then, in the manner of much Romantic anti-capitalism, places the pursuit of craft before that of the emancipation of time, elevating craft practice over and above the emancipation of labour from labour-power. This enforces a split between crafttime – what he calls, more precisely, ‘slow craft time’35 (a notion he clearly borrows from a quasi-medieval account of craft-integrity) – and the structural requirement of popular control over the production process; the role of craft-discipline and the dismantling of the capitalist division of labour do not connect in any integrated, transformative sense. The point is not that the development of ‘craft-time’ is unable to secure some freely determined space for self-realisation under the limited options for self-directed activity under capitalist conditions, and, therefore achieve some respite from the alienations of capitalist time (this happens consistently), but that there is no truly freely determined time for all without control over productive time as a whole. The Romantic anti-capitalist defenders of artisanal craft-skills have tended to lose sight of the politics of time, fetishising artisanal skills as the cornerstone of the emancipation of creative labour from labour power and of the critique of alienation. Similarly, Negri’s model of immaterial labour tends to fetishise ‘intellectual craft’ at the expense of the realities of workers’ alienation and the temporal discipline of the value process. This is why there are losses and gains from Negri’s adaptation of Marx’s model of ‘freedom in alienation’. By arguing that new skills emerge through the new forms of intellectual and immaterial labour he rejects the notion that capitalism destroys or leaves all forms of ‘craft-integrity’ behind; rather, what counts as ‘craft’ itself changes. (This is also in broad outline Sennett’s argument). The qualitative expansion of the immaterial content of labour redefines the notion of craft skill, in keeping with the

35

Sennett 2008, p. 265.

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changes in the relations of production since the 1960s – that is, the increased scientific and technical inputs into the labour process. In this he rejects the notion that emancipation from (necessary) labour is fundamentally opposed to the emancipation of labour. There is some truth in this; new skills, intellectual skills, cognitive skills, do get introduced into the labour process and as such can be identified with the conceptual expansion of the category of craft, and the amelioration of some of the most brutalising aspects of industrial labour. But presently Negri tends to over-valorise these new forms of labour at the expense of the technical division of labour, as if alienation might be lessened or dissolved simply by the expansion of intellectual and cooperative content, that is, as if the physically less demanding manipulation of ‘data’ enabled the worker to float free of the disciplinary mechanisms of the labour process and the accumulation process. On the contrary, given that immaterial labour is indivisible from the physical inputs of material labour throughout the system (and therefore from the wider constraints of the value-form), and that ‘intellectual labour’ is indivisible from the technical division of labour (and therefore subject to the breakdown of skills into perfunctory, repetitive or less complex procedures), immaterial labour is subject to the same pressures of routinisation as manual factory work and the low-skill service industries; and in some instances, accordingly, will be as physically arduous as manual labour. There is nothing implicitly non-instrumental in the greater role of intellectual content in the productive process. Consequently, once immaterial labour is accredited any kind of skillenhancing role, claims about the broader devaluation of workers’ skills across the system as a whole, and the alienation of both the new knowledge worker and manual worker, lose their critical leverage. And without these claims there is no sense of an emancipatory temporality beyond the reach of capital. Accordingly, the development of new creative (intellectual) inputs into labour is not the answer to systemic alienation, even if a privileged minority of knowledge workers – the ‘creative class’ – have benefited from this shift, and, at some level, do match Negri’s and others’ view of the post-Fordist labour process as an enhanced model of communication and association for workers at the point of production. But in reality only a minority of knowledge-workers benefit from these new processes of creative and intellectual self-valorisation, the majority do not. Finally, then, there are two interrelated issues at stake for the debate on labour and emancipation, skill and deskilling under present conditions: firstly, ontologically, there is no integral model of craft to be won back from the advanced technological labour process as the basis for the artisanal recovery of production and a balance of skills between hand and machine; machines will

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continue to strip out practice-centred skills in production, and, as such, lessen labour power’s attachment to manual processes; the emancipatory content of this process, therefore, lies in its ‘post-work’ trajectory, and not in the attachment of digital skills to a new craft-integrity and the birth of a new worker; and secondly, consequently, whether we take immaterial labour to be tendential or systemic under post-Fordism, its creative expansion – the increase of intellectual inputs into the labour process – cannot fundamentally alter the downward pressures of capitalist time and the value-form on labour, only the dissolution of the value-form, in the end, can do this.

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Art After Deskilling The idea that there is absence of discernible skill in contemporary art is something of a commonplace.1 Indeed, attacks on the skill of the modern artist have accompanied the emergence of art in the modern period from Jacques-Louis David onwards, and as such is indivisible from the origins of modernism. In this article I am less interested in why this should be so – that is, a matter of ideological critique and the sociology of audiences – than in the radical transformation of conceptions of artistic skill and craft in the modern period. This will necessitate a focus on the history of modernism and the avant-garde, as they come into alignment with, and retreat from, the modern forces of production and means of reproduction. Much, of course, has been written within the histories of modernism and the avant-garde on the intersection between art and technology, and, as a consequence, the conflict between art’s pursuit of formal (painterly and sculptural) autonomy and art’s resistance to ‘mechanical reproduction’ and its willing adaptation to the new mass cultural conditions. Little, however, has been written on the transformed conditions of labour in the artwork as a consequence of this.2 This is because so little art history and art criticism – certainly since the 1960s – has been framed explicitly within a labour theory of culture, on the assumption that how artists work has little to do with changes in the forces and relations of production. The way artists labour, and the way these forms of labour are connected to changes in the technical apparatuses of society (general social technique), are held to be secondary to a notion of sovereign creativity, that is invariably attached to a display of artisanal or expressive facility. Thus, the notion that these technical apparatuses (the mechanical production of information, images, texts), are not simply ‘aids’ to creativity, but, in fact, release the artist from skills that prevent new modes of production and reception, defines the great disconnection that occurs in the modern period between realisation and meaning; there is no necessary connection between the demonstration of trained facility and quality and value; an artist may produce a photograph in a split second and then have it processed by someone else, without the work’s loss of standing or the artist’s loss of standing; similarly an artist may produce something

1 First published in Historical Materialism, No 18, 2010, pp. 77–96. 2 The exception being Theodor Adorno. See Adorno 1984.

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‘incomplete’ or poorly executed on the grounds that the perfectionist pursuit of technique or beauty inflates academic skill, or the adherence to received conventions of proficiency, over the truth of the process of the making of the art. Thus, there are two models of truth here that show how the modern in art begins to position itself in relation to the new technical apparatuses and their accompanying sense of speed and efficiency: the first artist sees a greater truth in submitting his or her skills to automated processes, on the grounds that this process makes the ‘expressiveness’ of the artist’s mimetic skills unnecessary (the photograph carries far more meaning than a painting, given that the photograph’s evidential powers appear – certainly for this early generation of modernists – as unprecedented); while, conversely, the second artist sees truth lying in the correlation between the disordering of painterly form and the need on the part of the artist to find a way through the increasing uniformity of visual experience under the industrialisation of the image. In this sense, questions of skill and facility by the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century are embedded in the new technical and social conditions of industrial and urban experience, compelling the artist to either retreat from, reproduce, resist or subvert these conditions. This is because these new conditions for these latter artists encourage them to think of themselves as newly modern, outside of an academic tradition that continued to restrict their experience of the modern from entering the pictorial space of painting. This created a sense for these painters that the artist was being held back technically through an overattachment to skills and themes that were inadequate to the quotidian realities, affects and conflicts of the modern world. And this is why for those painters who took the dissonant painterly route in the late nineteenth century, the struggle was against those forms of academicism that de-subjectivised painting, and as such disconnected it from the heterogeneous appearances of the urban and the everyday. From this perspective, late nineteenth-century European capitalism does not just provide ‘new modern subjects’ for the artist, but crucially opens out an affective space in which artists produced their work – how artists materially create the formal means by which to represent this new world – thereby transforming the question of artistic value and the conditions of the new art’s reception in the process. As advanced modernist artists begin to define and resist what they see as their threatened cultural status, the priority – the modernist priority – becomes: how, and with what materials, and to what ends, does the artist labour? We see this affective and technical shift paradigmatically in the crisis around painterly craft in French modernism between 1848 and 1880. Both Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet open up painting to new forms of painterly affect

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that were at odds with the Academy and Salon. Both artists embraced, in different registers, a ‘semi-disorganised’ pictorialism, the representation of diverse social themes and non-bourgeois types, and an indifference to the coherent modelling of form and the production of convincing illusion. Indeed, Courbet and Manet were castigated for what was taken to be their formal inchoateness and lack of technique or facilité. In Manet’s case much was made of what appeared to be the incorrigible awkwardness or mis-positioning of his figures, and in the case, famously, of Olympia (1863), of allowing a proletarian figure – a naked female prostitute – to directly address the bourgeois (male) spectator.3 For the academic critics of Courbet and Manet there was good reason for these criticisms: Courbet and Manet’s major pictures were, when compared with official canons of taste and aesthetic propriety, undoubtedly ‘ugly’, technically deflationary and fragmented. But, of course, few writers and commentators in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s theorised why this was the case, because few were able to grasp the emerging connection between the development of new forms and technical effects in painting and the demand that art distinguish its interests from those of its patrons – state or private. This is the moment – as artists begin to define their interests in open opposition to the Academy and Salon – when a gap opens up between art as a bourgeois profession – like law or medicine – and its nascent, undefined, unofficial social role as a critic of bourgeois culture.4 Artists were faced with a crucial choice then: to continue to throw their lot in with the official culture and its traditional (although weakening) forms of patronage – and as a consequence see their art suffer – or work independently in alliance with the newly emergent private market for art, in order to defend and continue the achievements of the past. But in making this break in order to defend these achievements, modernist artists realised they couldn’t rely on the achievements of the past. Indeed, artists realised that the emergence of the modern in art required that artists distance themselves from, or revoke, the sureties of artistic tradition.

3 Clark 1984. 4 The critical function of art, of course, doesn’t begin with modernism – even during the Renaissance, the highpoint of state patronage, artists used art to challenge the authority of their clients. But these moments invariably were moments of individual honour – of hurt pride and revenge – and not attached to a critique of the state or its artistic institutions. Indeed, it would have been incomprehensible for any artist to criticise his patrons on these grounds; for the making of art and of its meanings was a direct extension of the power bequeathed to the artist by those who ruled. With the rise of capitalism, and the emergence of an independent market for art and as such the emergence of the independent professionalisation of the artist (a professionalism at odds with academy and state patronage), this direct transmission belt between ruler and artist is broken.

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For the first time, artists who sought to define themselves as modern were presented with an unprecedented challenge: in order to defend art and its future the artist had to first distinguish himself or herself from what the official culture does to art in the name of value, quality and tradition (that is, invariably, reduce it to a form of decoration, a social irrelevance, or a self-aggrandising adjunct of the artist and client’s social status). Crucial to this modernising move is a sense, therefore, that the inherited languages of Academic painting (broadly neo-classicising) are languages of authority and stability, and inadequate to the representation of new forms of artistic subjectivity demanded by a newly industrialising capitalist society; as Charles Baudelaire was to suggest in one of the first critical recognitions of this as an emerging problem for art, the need for a new kind of painting – a ‘painting of modern life’ as he called it5 – is profoundly at odds with the would-be harmonising spirit, equitable social bonds and idealising charm of classical culture. Accordingly, the great requirement of the modernising artist of this period is the exteriorisation of affect: how do I paint convincing images that express the truth of what it is like to live under these new conditions? How might technique and world cohere? As a result, painterly technique becomes a highly contentious matter in the bid for non-academic status and value; technique is not a neutral skill, it is asserted, something transmittable down the ages, but historically contingent and unstable, and therefore inseparable from the interrogative demands of artistic subjectivity and the artist’s mode of vision. Questioning inherited technique became a means of questioning the link between academic technique and form in official or Salon painting. One writer and philosopher during the latter part of the modernist revolution who recognised that art is on a new course is Friedrich Nietzsche. Writing in the 1870s, in his collection Untimely Meditations, he argues that the attacks on modern art produce a monumentalism of the past that blocks off the problems, divisions and hiatuses of the present. Because the ‘contemporary is not yet monumental, [modern art] seems to them [the official guardians of culture] unnecessary, unattractive and lacking in the authority conferred by history’.6 Indeed, the purported defence of tradition against ‘relativism’ is not so much a defence of quality as an attack on art tout court. ‘They are connoisseurs of art because they would like to do away with art altogether’, he declares.7 Now there are clear affinities here between Nietzsche and Baudelaire’s writing on the ‘painting of modern life’: both writers seek to define art in an active and 5 Baudelaire 1981. 6 Nietzsche 1997, p. 72. 7 Ibid.

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futural sense. But what Nietzsche introduces is something more profound: the recognition that under the dissociation of art and artist from the stability and assurances of tradition the artist has to struggle to assert himself or herself in defiance of tradition. Art is resistive, not restive. As such, the determining framework of art is of necessity that of negation – of past art, of artistic tradition itself. The modern artist doesn’t just inherit and transform tradition, but is compelled to shatter it, blast it apart, remake it, and as such remake it again. This introduces into the domain of art and art theory a new relationship between the production of artistic form and artistic judgement. If the transmission of artistic technique is not stable, and as such subject to adaptation and reinscription, then artistic form is not able to be assessed from any normative standpoint. Indeed, a reversal of judgement takes place: rather than the spectator adjudicating a work on the grounds of how well it matches or surpasses inherited technique, the assessment of value is based on how well the work, in its creation of new forms, withdraws from, and revokes, inherited technique as a condition of being modern. In this sense Courbet and Manet’s negation of inherited technique introduces into modernist painting what we might call a deflationary logic, one which stretches to Picasso and on to Jackson Pollock. The inherited techniques and forms of naturalism and realism are submitted to a radical process of denaturalisation, abstraction and formalisation. This is the familiar grand narrative of modernism from 1850 to 1950, in which the ‘making of the new’, in Nietzsche’s vision, testifies to the continuous unfolding of painterly achievement and technical reassessment. Moving through Courbet, Manet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Derain, Picasso, Braque, Miro, Pollock, Frankenthaler, Rothko, Newman, modernist painting demonstrates an extraordinary capacity for immanent self-definition and formal transformation. But, confined to painting, this model of negation is itself haunted by its own, and more fundamental, negation: namely, the contingency of painting itself, and therefore the rejection of art’s confinement to painterly form and painterly technique alone. Indeed, the confinement of the ‘making of the new’ to painting begins to break down by the time of Cubism and Picasso’s and Braque’s paper collages. For in the shift from the painterly proto-cubism of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907) to the cubist paper collages of the 1910s, we see the beginning of the deflation of painterly modernist deflation itself. Thus, when Picasso and Braque introduced collaged elements into the space of painting in, respectively, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper (1912) and Le Quotidian (1913), the content of modernist negation in art changes; by incorporating found mass printed materials, such as newspaper mastheads and advertisements into these paper collages, the deflationary logic of modernist anti-classicism, in an unprecedented way, is positioned against painting. The

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introduction of non-painterly elements into the space of painting places modernism’s strategies of negation in opposition to the aesthetic self-containment of painterly accomplishment. Artistic deflation becomes embodied in a radical reorientation and expansion of artistic skill: the introduction of the readymade into painting links negation for the first time to the development of non-artistic techniques, such as collage and assemblage. The measure of artistic competence shifts, in turn, from the distribution of painterly marks to the positioning, arranging and conjunction of pre-given elements and prefabricated forms. Now, this compositional shift is very familiar from the histories of modernism.8 But what is rarely commented on is the cultural character of this shift. With the move to a deflationary logic outside of painting, the competence of the artist also changes. By breaking and the interrupting the surface of the painting – by reaching into the space of painting – the artist signals that painting is now historically ‘in the way’ of art’s technical demands, so to speak. That is, what Picasso and Braque introduce in their paper collages is the notion that paintings – and therefore art – can be made and accomplished without carrying through painting as an aesthetically bounded totality. Paintings can be made of alien, heterodox, non-painterly, non-artistic things, and consequently can be made with very little labour. Or rather, painting can easily incorporate non-painterly things without failing as paintings, or as autonomous aesthetic objects. This objectification of art’s deflationary logic in the form of the introduction of the readymade into the artwork is what represents the great seismic shift of twentieth century art. Modernist art’s negations are now directed not just at destabilising the genres and conventions of painting, but demolishing the formal hierarchy in which painting is itself positioned and embedded.9 Art’s negations are now located in tension with, and in opposition to, the tradition of painting itself. It is Marcel Duchamp, of course, who is the first artist to systematise this shift through the readymade, providing the ground rules for the deflationary strategies of twentieth century art. In Bottlerack (1914), In Advance of a Broken Arm (1915) and Fountain (1917) – what he referred to as ‘unassisted’ readymades – he places the readymade outside of the supportive frame of the painting. In this respect he locates artistic meaning in the act of deliberation. By locating meaning in the aesthetically chosen found object (that is the object of artistic discrimination) the artist is no longer bound to the expressive demands 8 Krauss 1986 and Buchloh 2003. 9 For recent discussions of the relations between modernist painting and the readymade, see De Duve 1998.

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of covering a given surface or modelling a given material, but rather to the intellectual demands of re-contextualising extant objects in order to change their sign-value. Thus, what is important about Duchamp’s early readymades is that they reorder the way hand and eye have traditionally determined the form and content of art. The Duchampian readymade disperses the hand and eye to a world of signifiers and materials that require forms of mapping, superimposition and coordination. ‘It is a kind of rendezvous’, Duchamp said of this function of the readymade.10 The immediate outcome of this shift is that the deflationary content of art is subject to the thoroughgoing dismantling of the metaphysics of the hand, of handicraft, of the handmade. If the post-cubist painter is compelled to place something into the space of the painting in order to render that space more believable as a painting, the Duchampian artist is free to place any object in any art context (or non-art context) without relying on the organisational discipline of the ‘expressive’ hand. The production of meaning as the act of placing and arranging becomes fundamentally indeterminate in this sense, any readymade anywhere might have meaning. Thus, if in the post-cubist painting hand and eye are no longer contained by the dictates of bringing coherence to an orderly progression of mark making, in the work of the Duchampian artist this freedom is limitless. This means that the readymade’s deflationary logic invites more than a critique of painting’s circumscribed sense of artistic craft. Duchampian deflation stands not simply as a negation of the status of painting, but as an actual extension of the artist’s skills and competences. As Duchamp’s notion of the ‘rendezvous’ suggests, the superimposition and reorganisation of extant forms and materials opens up the category of art to non-artistic technical skills from other cultural, cognitive, practical and theoretical domains: film, photography, architecture, literature, philosophy and science. Indeed, if art is a site of many different disciplines, materials, and theoretical frameworks, art can be made quite literally from anything. Essentially, the Duchampian deflation of painting is the point where modernism’s ‘make it new’ is brought into conjunction with a wider set of historical pressures: the requirement of art to enter the modern division of labour, and align itself with the transformed technical base of twentieth-century mass production and reproduction. In this sense, in the passage from painting to the readymade the artist exchanges inherited artisanal skills for an executive role (the directing and organisation of forms and materials produced by others) or a technical role (the use or manipulation of a given technology, as in pho-

10

Duchamp 1975, p. 32.

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tography), or, of course, both. As a result, the artist is no longer required to actually physically produce his or her own work at all; indeed, in moving from the artisanal to the machino-technical, the artist is able to devolve the work to others, perhaps submitting plans or ideas to specialist technicians for them to execute, or working in collaboration with other artists and technicians as part of an extended division of labour outside of the studio (as in the printing of photographs). But in 1923 this is precisely what László Moholy-Nagy did when he ordered three enamel covered steel plates from a Berlin sign factory, which he then duly exhibited under his own name. Known as the ‘telephone pictures’, he dictated his instructions for their production over the phone to a foreman, using, as his wife Sibyl Moholy-Nagy writes, a ‘color chart and an order blank of graph paper to specify the location of form elements and their exact hue’.11 In these terms the artistic act here functions as an act of surrogacy: the artist adopts a conceptualising role, directing the labour and technical accomplishments of others, without actually directly manipulating any materials himself. There is of course nothing historically novel about art’s place in an extended division of labour. In the pre-Renaissance and Renaissance workshop system the workshop-master hired apprentices and wage-labourers to collectively produce works in the name of the workshop, and later in the name of the independent artist.12 But under modernism and the avant-garde, and the gen-

11 12

Moholy-Nagy 1969, p. 31. Cinnini 1954. This anonymous collective production was mitigated in the workshop by the encouragement of the all-round development of the apprentice and the trained craftsman. In the fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the workshop artisan had to be accomplished in a wide variety of painterly, carving, woodworking and metalworking skills, from casting medals and constructing caskets and chests to painting in tempera and painting frescoes. With the mercantile and ecclesiastical rise of Florence and Rome and the birth of the large private commission, in conjunction with the development of a new model of the artist based on the importance of the concept of drawing from life (to distinguish it from the artisan’s working-to-order), this wide skill base breaks down. That is, with the arrival of the independent artist and the model of disegno – the close working from the particulars of nature, by the artist – the workshop has to adapt to the demands of the individual artist rather than the workshop master’s multiple tasks. The result is that the old workshop skill-base is divested of its collective integrity (the apprentices finishing various tasks and completing different processes for the workshop-master as interdependent parts of a creative whole), to be given over in support of the ‘revealed creation’ of the independent artist who, increasingly, is commissioned by court and ecclesiastical authorities, in his own right as an artist, and as such where and when possible seeks to complete the majority of the work himself, and without the tutoring of apprentices in the process. The diversified skill base of the workshop, then, becomes subordinate to the commercial dictates of the independent artist of exemplary distinction, transforming the workshop apprentice, eventually, into a studio wage-labourer.

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eral subordination of craft to general social technique under capitalism, an ideological reversal takes place. Art’s place in the social division of labour is increasingly exercised as a critique of the social and cultural division that distances art from ‘mere’ technique and ‘mere’ craft. That is, art’s place within the social division of labour is no longer the thing that art desires to escape from in the name of the ‘revealed creation’ of the independent artist, but is, rather, the site of art’s democratic horizons and indebtedness to the collective labour of others. This is because, as I outlined above, the artist is increasingly forced to measure his or her own creativity and skills up against his or her diminished social status under the new market and social conditions of monopoly capitalism, thereby bringing the ideology of ‘revealed creativity’ under scrutiny. Indeed, by opening up a gap between the prevailing skills of the Academy and the Salon, and the need for new skills, this distinction becomes constitutive of how the artist negotiates this loss. Certain skills and effects in painting become identifiable with inherited cultural power (such as unnecessary ornateness and intricacy, and metaphysical atmospherics and vagaries) and others with an exemplary distance from this power (clarity and directness of form and the egalitarian representation of social relationships, and an ‘unfinished’ quality). It is not surprising, therefore, that these ‘democratic’ effects become associated with various anti-bourgeois and progressive functions. Subsequent to the rejection of received facilité in early French modernism there is an increasing identification between the artistic labour demanded of the representation of ‘modern life’ and the perceived straightforwardness and honesty of ordinary manual labour,13 which, after the Russian avant-garde, becomes a flood, as the artist adopts the democratic identity of the technician as a political and selfconsciously egalitarian act. Duchamp’s ‘unassisted’ readymades and Moholy-Nagy’s ‘telephone’ paintings’ appropriation of the labour of others, therefore, are a direct provocation to traditional notions of artistic creativity weakened by the artist’s loss of social position. By transparently presenting the labour of others as their ‘own’, Duchamp and Moholy-Nagy deliberately downgrade their own authorial status as artists. And this, precisely, is what is meant in the 1920s and 1930s by the designation artist-as-technician. As one part of an extensive intellectual and technical division of labour, the skills of the artist are held to be of no more significance or value than those possessed by the labourers and technicians who

13

For a discussion of this identification in relation to the photographs of Eugène Atget, who was working in Paris directly in the aftermath of this French modernist critique of facilité, see Nesbit 1993.

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produce the materials for the work’s completion.14 In fact, although the artistas-technician and actual technician enter the production process at different points, they share a similar range of skills; they simply bring a different set of accomplishments to the process. This erosion of the distinction here between intellectual labour and manual labour – the elision of the creativity of the artist with the routinised work of the labourer – represents more than a fantasy of egalitarianism on the part of artists, it proposes an actual shift in artistic practice. Moholy-Nagy and Duchamp are two of many artists in the first decades of the twentieth century, who, in rejecting the expressive-artisanal model of art, wanted a different account of what art might do, what the artist might become, and whom the work of art might be destined for. This shift from the artisanal to the executive, nominative, and immaterial in art, is the point where the post-Renaissance definition of artistic creativity as the autonomous and expressive rendition of craft-skill is finally destroyed; the deflation of painterly technique in modernist painting from 1850–1915 is, in this sense, an internal prefiguration of this crisis. In this respect it is possible to trace the emergence of the modern artist under capitalism as comparable to the loss of the artisan and ‘integral’ creativity of labour within the labour process. The rise of the post-artisanal labourer, through workshop, automated factory and office, parallels the decline of artisanal skill in artistic production; and this, of course, is what both Marx and William Morris generalise as being the overwhelming destiny of human capacities under capitalism: namely capitalism’s general diminishment of all-round human creative powers in the interest of narrowly defined categories of productive labour and free creativity. Concomitantly, this is why Morris was so interested in the pre-Renaissance medieval workshop as a model of socialised creativity, given the ways in which it brought the possibility of freely directed creative work into expansive alignment with production. But, if artistic and productive labour are subject to the extension and refinement of the social division of labour, and in turn the objectivity of general social technique, this does not mean that the demise of the artisanal in art is reducible to the process of deskilling in productive labour. Indeed, ‘deskilling’ in art is very different from deskilling in the factory and office. This is because, as Marx also insists, art is not subject to the law of value and therefore to the real subsumption of labour. Some artists may fall under the disciplinary regime of the law of value – working harder or faster; subject to re-routinisation and

14

In his early years in New York, Duchamp participated in a discussion group on art and labour, mostly influenced by the writings of Max Stirner. See Antliff 2001.

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the technical division of labour – that is, those that are engaged in the production of mass-produced artistic products. However the majority of artists are not, insofar as they are engaged in the production of non-reproducible forms, or forms that have limited reproducibility.15 This means that the artist confronted with the perceived deskilling prevalent in modern culture does not suffer the same creative denigration as the productive labourer. Whereas the productive labourer experiences an overall loss of autonomy as a consequence of his or her subordination to the capitalist’s control over the labour process, the artist as absent from the disciplinary regime of the value-form does not.16 Despite the artist’s would-be loss of all-around artisanal skills and the enforcement of his or her social alienation, there is no comparable loss of artistic autonomy; other skills directed towards self-motivated and creative ends fills the gap. The demise of traditional artistic skills is not the result of a coercive process of control and division, which like the value-form, strips autonomy out of the production process. Now this is not to say that the objects and events that artists produce are not commodities, but rather that the artwork’s status as a commodity is not strictly subject to the price calculation of the law of value. As I.I. Rubin notes, the economist L. Lyubimov is completely right when he subsumes the value of a product of a highly qualified laborer under the law of value. But he cannot deny the fact of the monopoly in relation to the individual price of unreproducible objects.17 This is why in the final analysis Marx makes a fundamental distinction between artistic production and productive labour: certain forms of creative labour are excluded from the law of value because their forms cannot be reproduced through socialised labour, and as such they remain resistant to, indeed excluded from, the necessary rountinisations of the labour process.18 Marx does not discuss the distinction between deskilling in productive labour and deskilling in art as a consequence of art’s relative absence from the law of value, because new forms of autonomy in art were not yet visible. Neither Marx nor Morris anticipated the massive technical transformation of art that was to occur after 1910; in this respect both Marx and Morris appear, 15 16 17 18

Marx 1969. For an extended discussion of this distinction, see Roberts 2007b. Rubin 1972, p. 166. Marx 1970a.

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from our twenty-first century vantage point, as oddly pre-modern in their cultural reflections – particularly Morris.19 Yet in Capital, in the early sections on the discussion of value and passing reflections on artistic labour, there is an implicit revolutionising sense that the future struggle for workers’ autonomy is through the adaptation of technique, not its abandonment, despite the subordination of general social technique to capital. Reading very much against the artisanal humanism and pastoralism of the classical Marxism of the time,20 this, essentially, is what Walter Benjamin sees in Marx, in his reconfiguration of the question of skill, artistic production and labour in the ‘Author as Producer’. Emboldened by the Russian revolution, and as such the sense that the repossession of traditional artisanal skills was utterly irrelevant to the emancipatory and class dynamic of the revolution, Benjamin’s insistence on the forging of a new identity for the artist out of the critical insertion of the artist into the new technical relations of the relations of production is a defence of the possible new sources of autonomy within the demands of general social technique. The new artist becomes a model for the new worker, and the new worker in his or her machino-technical proficiency becomes, potentially, a new kind of artist. In 19 20

Morris 1984. This is not to say that there are elements of Marx’s earlier artisanal humanism and pastoralism from the 1844 ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ in Capital, but this perspective is increasingly subjected to the progressive function of socialised labour, as socialised labour becomes a defining part of Marx’s conception of human emancipation and the development of human needs. This is why in reading Capital as a critique of political economy, we need to be careful to read the critique of abstraction (abstract labour) as double-coded with regard to skill and craft: abstract labour is the thing that both destroys all-roundedness as an exemplar of socialised, collective production, but also stands to liberate all-roundedness from its chronic technical and conceptual inflexibility (in the medieval workshop) through splitting the producer away from the need to subordinate all of his creative labours to the performance of a multitude of routine tasks, perfectly executed by machines. There is something monstrous about the need for the liberated labourer to recover a multitudinous dexterity as an ideal expression of creative autonomy, as if our emancipation as wage-labourers were bound up with the development of ourselves into multi-tasking handwerksmeister. That is, the meeting between a transformed labour process and a transformed conception of art in any post-capitalist future must also allow the disdain for labour, be it necessary labour or creative and intellectual labour. Looking, reading, sharing simple accomplishments, might be all we want or need, after the ‘specialist’ and intellectually invested activity and sensuous transformations of our necessary labour is done. The retaining or development of a new range (material and immaterial) of selfdirected craft practices in any emancipated model of labour, then, must allow space for ‘unproductive’ and distracted activity. Indeed, this is part of a more substantive debate about whether communism will be more ‘complex’ (or more complexly and richly varied) than capitalism, or at, an important level, release us in our daily affairs from the demands of complexity as such.

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this sense there is no nostalgia for lost skills, artisanal creative all-roundedness, or any other humanist shibboleth regarding the release of the ‘essential creativity of the masses’; indeed, for Benjamin such things actually get in the way of the pursuit of new forms of autonomy and knowledge.21 Consequently, there is a way of linking Benjamin’s cultural position with later debates on ‘deskilling’ in labour process theory, particularly Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monoply Capital (1974).22 Like Benjamin, Braverman is concerned to defend the advanced technical and intellectual role of the worker in the relations of production, in conditions where, historically, the level overall of material and intellectual skill within the working class is in decline. Certain skilled technical workers (and ‘knowledge’ workers today) may benefit from the general rise in scientific and technical knowledge under capitalism; the working class as a whole does not. The mass of workers gain nothing from the fact that the decline in their command over the labour process is more than compensated for by the increasing command on the part of managers and engineers. On the contrary, not only does their skill fall in an absolute sense (in that they lose craft and traditional abilities without gaining new abilities to compensate the loss), but it falls in a relative sense. The more science is incorporated into the labour process, the less the worker understands of the process.23 In this light Braverman’s work is crucial in setting workers’ struggle over the erosion of productive labour skills within a wider social and historical setting. Certain workers within certain sectors may win back some craft skills, just as new skills in certain sectors may be forged out of transformations in the technical division of labour, but overall the level of technical skill embodied in the labour of the productive and unproductive worker has been radically diminished. Today for instance the majority of newly created ‘knowledge’ jobs are largely routine and highly monitored. This sense of class dispossession accordingly goes far deeper than Braverman suggests, into the heart of the sexual division of labour. As Ursula Huws argues – in an extension of Braverman’s deskilling thesis – with the extensive socialisation of labour in the household from the seventeenth century onwards, women have suffered a ‘double deskilling’: from within the labour process, and in exclusion from the unsocialised productivity and creativity of the household. In the seventeenth century all participants in the running of the household:

21 22 23

Benjamin 1981. Braverman 1998. Ibid, p. 295.

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would have had an understanding of the total process and a high general knowledge of such things as cooking, curing meat, preserving methods, preparation of medical remedies, textiles, brewing, the manufacturing of candles and soap, the caring of animals and so on.24 Yet importantly for Braverman, this radical depossession is not an invitation to link the emancipation of the working class with the restoration of this world of unsocialised skills (certainly we should not forget the seventeenth century unsocialised household was not a haven of women’s freedom). On the contrary, the development of the forces of production, and the advances in general social technique, increases the revolutionary demand that working-class emancipation is inseparable from the ‘return of requisite technical skill to the mass of workers’, at a level and in a form in which such skills exert direct control over the labour process.25 How this actually impacts on the dissolution of the value-form and the release of the autonomy and creativity of the worker is less clear in Braverman.26 Indeed, in Braverman there is a workerist logic to this dynamic. But, without this massive sense of working-class dispossession, the

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Huws 2003, p. 69. Braverman 1998, p. 308. One of the misplaced assumptions of much recent writing on the law of value and the value process is that the critique of the value-form is somehow internal to non-cultural contexts alone. For instance, Axel Kicillof and Guido Starosta in their critique of I.I. Rubin (Kicillof and Starosta 2007) fail to acknowledge the cultural context in which Rubin wrote his Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value in 1927–8. Rubin’s tendency to confine the law of value to the exchange process alone is a conservative and economistic addendum to what had been an extensive and rich debate on value and labour within the avant-garde from 1920–8, a debate that had an impact well beyond the realm of artistic production itself. As Boris Arvatov, the leading Productivist theorist, asked at the time: in what ways might artistic labour presage and model emancipated labour, and, as such, in what ways might artistic praxis transform the labour process within and outside the factory? (see Arvatov 1972). Indeed, the Soviet factory was for a while (even under the extended factory discipline of the nep with its officious Red managers), not only a site of extended debate on the labour process, but also a place (potentially) of social-artistic experimentation. Thus, if the value-form debate has indeed become academicised, divorcing itself from ‘political action’ (Kicillof and Starosta), this is partially as a result of its separation from cultural and artistic questions. The recent debate on Chris Arthur’s theory of value (see Arthur 2002) in Historical Materialism (viz. the critique of Arthur’s Rubinesque separation of exchange and production) is a further indication of this. See, for example, Finelli 2007. Thus, if there is a pressing requirement to link the debate on value to political action, there is an equally pressing requirement to link the value debate and politics to the possible de-alienating contribution of artistic process to labour (see Roberts 2007b).

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revolutionary transformation and repossession of skills within the labour process at an advanced level is made anodyne. In this respect the deflation of the expressive-artisanal model is part of a larger political narrative of negation at the beginning of the twentieth century: the drive of the historic avant-gardes (1917–39) during and after the Russian revolution to finally depose artistic skill from its artisanal myths and fealties, and to release new forms of artistic production from out of the new relations of production. That the tradition of high-modernist painting continued to produce work of value during this period, then, does not alter the fact that, after cubist-collage, after Duchamp’s ‘unassisted’ readymades and Moholy-Nagy’s ‘telephone paintings’, after the concept of artistic surrogacy and authorshipat-distance, after the assimilation of photography into art, after Soviet Constructivism and Productivism, and the general transformation of the artist into a technician and monteur, the technical base of art is irredeemably changed. Artistic skill is no longer confined to the manipulation of a given medium within a tradition of discretely crafted works, but is the cross-disciplinary outcome of an ensemble of technical and intellectual skills, embedded in the general division of labour. And, as such, this technical repositioning of art engages and directs a wider process of deflation within this period: the general move towards defining art as form of cultural practice and, therefore, as something that has a direct and possibly transformative presence in the world (as opposed to a merely contemplative or decorative one). With the massive disinvestment of art from the confines of singular authorship, and from auratic forms of production and spectatorship associated with painting, mechanical production and interdisciplinarity become the motor of art’s passage into the everyday and collective experience. No longer confined solely to the gallery wall or to the painterly frame, avant-garde art moves to embed itself within a variety of social locations and the material and symbolic fabric of the world. Constructivism, of course, as a theory of the integration of art and social technique is central to this shift.27 The singular discrete artistic object is dissolved into the functional demands of material transformation of the built environment (architecture, public monuments, revolutionary propaganda, design). Art object, art event and social process coincide. Or, they did in theory. The heightened expectations of this social role for art were soon curtailed and destroyed by the rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and fascism in Europe. By the mid-1930s the great avant-garde experiment was in retreat, replaced by various forms of artisanal

27

For a discussion of Constructivism and Productivism and the re-definition of artistic labour, see Margolin 1997 and Gough 2005.

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nostalgia for the traditional studio artist. But what remained undefeated was the new cultural and technical dialectic that this period established, and that the new post-war institutions, under new political conditions, have been compelled to address: the long-range dissolution of art into general social technique (that is, the unification of technology, technique and artistic form). Since the 1960s we have seen the deflation of the expressive-artisanal model of artistic skill played out in a number of registers. Conceptual art, postconceptual photography and text, the appropriationist art of the 1980s, down to relational aesthetics, and the re-emergence of many forms of social functionalism today, all revive and repossess in various ways the notion of the artist as technician, as surrogate, as operator. Indeed, we say might say that the recrudescence of high-modernist painting between 1945 and 1985 – exemplified by the achievements of Gerhard Richter – represents a rupture within a broader historical pattern. Although the historic avant-garde as a social and cultural formation is at its end, avant-garde strategies and forms remain integral – in socially constrained ways – to how art defines its contemporaneity and critical function.28 (Richter’s would-be exultant auraticism is in fact self-consciously ersatz, given the artist’s reliance on repetitive and mechanical techniques.) Thus, the repeated attacks on postconceptualism, generally, in the 1980s and 1990s – for pursuing art to a point of inexorable technical and artisanal collapse – are a misrepresentation of the historical evidence. What we see is not a terminal decline of artistic skill, but the re-positioning of the notion of skill within a deeper dialectic: the necessary interrelationship between (received) skill, deskilling and re-skilling. Technical skill is not something that has been stripped out of art through surrogacy and technological reproduction, of action as opposed to making, but is redefined through the emergence of art since the 1920s, as a generic form of conceptualisation. Since the late 1960s this also has had a profound effect on the sexual division of intellectual labour in art. In the early 1970s, in the wake of the women’s movement, one of the direct beneficiaries of the crisis of the artisanal-expressive model were women artists who rejected painting on the grounds that its histories and expressive protocols inhibited women artists’ access to the representation and structuring of their own lives and experience. This conceptualisation offered a significant opportunity for women artists to reflect on sexual difference, gender and femininity, without expectation. Thus, following Duchamp and Moholy-Nagy, a new generation of women artists in the early seventies were able to create compelling, assiduous, exacting, anomalous post-painterly

28

Roberts 2007a.

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forms that embodied distinctive thought-experiments. This is best represented during this period by Mary Kelly’s influential Postpartum Document (1973–9), a sequence of panels consisting of hand-written and typed texts, images and objects, tracing and examining the relationship between Kelly and her newly born son and, as such, his emerging subjectivity.29 What is distinctive about Postpartum Document is twofold: its resolute anti-pictorialism in its depiction of motherhood and domestic labour – the fact that neither the mother nor the child’s body is figuratively represented – and its resolute, uncompromising, intellectualism, that is, its explicit identification of women’s authorship with demonstrable theoretical skills. The general implication of this move (and similar ones) is that skill is definable through the quality of this process of conceptualisation, and the intellectual acuity the artist brings to art’s material or immaterial forms, and not simply through evidence of the artist’s own mastery of a range of technical processes, shifting, in this case, women artists’ traditional identification as producers with certain inherited feminine craft processes. As such conceptualisation serves to split the judgement of a work’s skilfulness from the fetishistic evaluation of technical skills. The artist may choose to be a master of a given technical process – the manipulation of digital photographs for instance, or weaving – but this does not determine our judgement of the artist’s skill overall. Yet, in noting the emergent conceptualisation of art, we should not confuse the new art with the disciplines of intellectual and theoretical production itself, such as science or philosophy. The emergence of art from its historical artisanal base into the realm of materialised conceptualisation is not evidence of a unilinear, if uneven, process of art’s reskilling, as if art has revivified itself by talking on the languages of science. Art may have become a practice of conceptualisation, but this does not mean that it takes over the positivistic, deductive, and research-programme requirements of scientific investigation. This is because the dialectic of skill, deskilling and reskilling is first and foremost an expression of art’s alienated and reified place in the totality of capitalist social relations. Art may in the late twentieth century have freed itself from its tight artisanal bonds, and taken on a conceptual and interdisciplinary identity, but it is also required to defend its interests as art against its own systematic misuse, assimilation, containment, by the instrumental outcomes of the culture industry (entertainment, moral uplift, social utility) and the sciences. In other words, re-skilling is not a solution to art’s social marginalisation or the artist’s social standing, but way of allying art’s access to knowledge and prac-

29

Kelly 1999.

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tices that open up a space beyond capitalist subjectivation; and therefore these skills will themselves be adapted and transformed in this encounter. There is a broader commitment here: the dialectical intersection between received skills, deskilling and reskilling is the contingent means by which technique in art is linked to poiesis (truth through making) and therefore to the sustaining of art’s autonomy and non-compliance. In this sense we need to draw up again the question of autonomy and negation in relation to the notion of the ‘new’, or ‘making it new’. Theodor Adorno’s theory of autonomy still has exemplary use-value for understanding the situation we are in.30 Let us recall what Adorno has to say on the issue. For Adorno autonomy in art is defined as a social relation between art’s production and reception. In order to delineate itself as modern, it is imperative that art defines itself against those institutional arrangements, social circumstances and traditions in which it finds itself. Therefore, there can be no critical future for art without this experience of disjunction with the traditions and institutions that have brought art into being. That is, the dynamic content of art continues to be mediated by its own reflection on the very category of art itself. As such what drives this process is the very ‘asociality’ of art under capitalism, the fact that for art to remain art (rather than transform itself into architectural design, fashion or social theory tout court) it must experience itself as being ‘out of joint’ both with its official place in the world and its own traditions. Thus we should be clear here about what I mean by ‘asociality’. Asociality is not to be confused with its idealist designation in Kant. For Kant the ‘asocial sociability of men’ – the nature-determined tendency of humans to generate a state of constant mutual resistance – is that which threatens the dissolution of society, and, as such, is innate to humans and human relations.31 Here ‘asociality’ is, rather, the contingent and shifting space of art’s non-identity and resistance within the heteronomous field of its social and institutional operation. Accordingly it is identifiable with the notion of autonomy as the produced function of art’s heteronomous emergence under commodity relations. New forms of commodification are the heteromonous site of new forms of autonomy in art.32 In this respect ‘asociality’ is certainly worth saving for a theory of negation in art and culture, in the face of any (anti-Hegelian) social ontology that would overplay ‘positive real alternatives’ in the current period.33 Consequently without this drive to autonomy out of 30 31 32 33

Adorno 1984. Kant 1992. Martin 2007. Mészáros 2008.

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the conditions of heteronomy (that is, the emergence of art as something other to the conditions which call it into being) art would cease to exist as a tradition of aesthetic and intellectual achievement, and more importantly as a means of resistance to capitalist exchange value. This is why this tradition of negation attached to the dialectic of received skill, de-skilling and re-skilling continues to produce work of value and quality, despite the demise of the historic avant-garde and the dispersal and assimilation of modernism, and despite art’s constant submission to the demands of entertainment and commerce and institutional legitimation and approbation. Art is irreducible to its own histories and institutional arrangements because art is that which starts from a position of negation, of reflection on its own means and ends. In fact art’s development and its social constraints are precisely interdependent. So, art’s traditions of negation persist, because negation persists, and, if this is so then the dialectic of skill, deskilling and re-skilling becomes the very means whereby this dynamic expresses itself. Reflections on skill (as a withdrawal from received skills), as much as the development of new skills become part of the restless, ever vigilant positioning of art’s critical relationship to its own traditions of intellectual and cultural formation and administration.

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The ‘Incomplete’ Commodity: Art, Value and Value-Form Theory Over the last 40 years we have been witness to a fundamental transformation in how artists and their audiences orientate themselves cognitively to the forms and practices of art beyond the traditional mediums of painting and free-standing, hand-crafted sculpture.1 Conventionally this is now called ‘art in the expanded field’, and is identifiable with art’s non-medium specificity; art’s forms are transitive, mobile, morphologically indeterminate, and therefore no longer bounded by the technical concerns of the artistic tradition itself; artistic technique can readily encompass techniques, practices and forms of knowledge external to art itself. Crucial to this formal shift during these decades, then, there has been a cognate shift in the question of value in art: if art’s significance, meaningfulness, alacrity, critical legibility, is no longer connected to the artisanal skills of the medium-based artist, but to the expanded organisation and manipulation of non-artistic materials, then the question of the spectator’s judgement and assessment shifts accordingly. No longer connected to the judgement of a formally self-contained work, in which looking follows the ‘expressive arrangement’ of materials and signs, when confronted by a work that may be temporally and discursively extended, the spectator’s interest and attention moves in the opposite direction: to the non-linear passage through, and across, a multiplicity of non-totalisable sets of signs and clusters of information. We might say, accordingly, that the new conditions of spectatorship have finally destroyed what so much art production took for granted in the twentieth century, even within a great deal of historic avant-garde practice: ‘judgment at a glance’. ‘Judgement at a glance’, or the belief in the recognition of quality being spontaneous and ‘just so’ – which is fundamental, of course, to the ethics of modernism – has in fact become utterly inefficient and decorous today. Indeed, if pursued to the letter in front of temporally expanded and discursively complex artworks, it produces a weird inertia and bewildering politeness (or, of course, conversely, an impatient rudeness and scepticism: ‘what do I do with this?’). So it is no surprise, therefore, that there is currently a huge 1 First published in The Value of Critique: Exploring the Interrelations of Value, Critique, and Artistic Labour, eds., Isabelle Graw and Christoph Menke, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt-an-Main, 2019.

© John Roberts, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004686878_005

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struggle in place, implicitly and explicitly, inside and outside the institutions of art over the question of artistic value, given the vast growth in new forms of art in and beyond the expanded field. For what is at stake presently is the very ground of artwork-spectator relations in an artworld and cultural-field that continues to prioritise ‘judgement at a glance’ as the lubricant that frees up the wheels of market exchange. If artworks take a large amount of time to process, comprehend and adjudicate, and then are still unassimilable and deemed unpurchaseable (without a big headache in terms of their re-staging or storage), then ‘judgement at a glance’ – the stationary stare, with someone whispering in your ear, ‘this is good’ – is obviously the better option. As a collector, you’ll feel reassured that your money is still worth something and your taste is intact. Major galleries and museums have consequently found the new participatory, collaborative-based, discursive, pedagogic work highly stressful, and have wanted it to go away – and die, preferably. But the sheer extensiveness of this work, a result of the fundamental cultural crisis that art has been experiencing for a long time now, is something that the artworld – constituted in the present more and more as a neoliberal Gold Card Club, run by would-be experts who sound like hobbyists or boutique owners or both – has little control over. The art market shifts units, but no thinking of note happens within its portals. This makes all the old reservations of traditionalists, old school modernists and piqued postmodernists slightly risible, for what we are experiencing currently is a massive extension of art practice as a general social technique outside of the formal traditions and governing institutions of art itself. This does not mean that the new art has miraculously escaped the institutions of art or the commodity form (the immaterial exchange of ideas is itself a process subject to commodity exchange), or even the parameters of exhibition display. But it does exert a huge amount of pressure on how audiences might attend to works of art outside of the constraints and comforts of aesthetic approbation. That is: the rise of modes of attention and understanding that require something other than ‘judgement at a glance’ extends the space of reception of art into the realm of Bildung, in which the content of the work forms a relay of connections with other practices and their communities (artistic and non-artistic), and therefore with the possibility of the viewer expanding or reassessing their own cultural allegiances, critical attachments and research interests. The extended, expanded, discursive artwork, in other words, becomes something that generates a process of reception that is not just ‘never finished’ for the spectator (in the familiar ‘analytic conceptual art’ sense), but a possible creative jump-off point, or confirmation, for reflection on other ideas and practices.

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Obviously, there is something of contemporary ‘network’ thinking in my assessment here. But these shifts in attention are not simply a consequence of network culture and its affirmative and tedious mantra of participation at all costs. On the contrary, the crisis of ‘judgement at a glance’ is a crisis of how aesthetics has historically constructed the social, or the social relationship between the spectator and the artwork, as a way of excluding or extruding cognitive engagement in art from the collective intellect and the complexities of use-value in art. Under these new conditions, spectatorship is thus no longer led teleologically to a confirmation of the inestimable worth of the artwork – above all else, that is – but a way of reasserting and incorporating the spectator’s critical autonomy inside the demands of the artwork’s ‘unfinished sociality’. In other words: the ‘expanded artwork’ produces new forms of subjectivation in art as the outcome of looking, thinking and evaluation not being tied to judgement as an assertion of ‘taste’. Aesthetic experience is no longer subordinate to the proprietary assimilation of the object as an expression of a hierarchy of ‘likes’, but part of a collective discursive encounter with, and participation in, the temporal life and ‘after-life’ of the work. In this sense the ‘unfinished sociality’ of the artwork has something of the transindividual at its core in the creation of these new forms of subjectivation:2 the critical autonomy of the spectator, released and shaped by the encounter with the artwork, is the individuated ‘effect’ of a pre-constituted collectivity, or Bildung. Or, rather: the pregiven collectivity of individuation (collectivity as the constitutive form of multiple individuations) is the ground from which the spectator’s critical autonomy as a social and collective process is produced. Indeed, in these terms the expanded artwork brings to self-consciousness the notion of the artwork as the creative intersection between individuation-as-collectivity and collectivity-as-individuation.3 But if art’s ‘unfinished sociality’ has become crucial to contemporary practice and art theory, what economic-political transformations and pressures are driving these changes in production and reception and the crisis of artistic value? This is less straightforward, given art’s long-standing entanglement in, and resistance to, the commodity-form and value-form. Indeed, what is striking about the current period is how widely the theorisation and critique of art has become embedded in the debate on the critique of the value-form, as a result of the increasing impact of value theory in cultural and political discourse. As Axel Kicillof and Guido Starosta announced in 2007, noting this shift, one 2 For recent discussion of transindividuality in Spinoza, Hegel and Marx, see Read 2014. 3 For an overview of recent debates on art and collectivity, see Charnley 2011. For wide-ranging discussion of art and value and the new conditions of artistic production and reception, see Koslowski et al. 2014.

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of the pressing jobs of the critique of political economy is to bring ‘politics back into value theory’.4 This is because, if value is the fundamental ‘moving contradiction’ of capitalism (Marx)5 – namely, that workers’ labour produces value, but capital is compelled to utilise less and less living labour under the inexorable capitalist law of competition – then politics and cultural politics need a critique of the value-form in order to make sense of what capital posits as reason and human development, and what post-capitalism actually might mean as the organisation of free producers after waged labour. Accordingly, the fact that more commodities are being produced by a smaller number of workers is not just evidence of an increase in exploitation, but, more fundamentally, of the crisis of productivism and ‘growth’ itself (two billion workers globally remain unemployed, a surplus population that has little prospect of being re-integrated into the system). With fewer workers in full time employment, then, the demand for consumer goods diminishes, precipitating a further crisis in the realisation of value (profits) – a state of affairs, of course, which has been offset over the last 30 years by the expansion of credit and ‘cheap money’. Consequently, productivity efficiency (or the growth in organic composition of capital) doesn’t solve the problem of value; on the contrary, it heightens the ‘moving contradiction’ between capital and living labour. As Marx says famously in the Grundrisse: Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death for the necessary.6 In other words, machines and technology relentlessly drive forward the increase in the organic composition of capital, reducing, on an aggregate global scale, the value of labour power. The long-term decline of valorisation, then, is constitutive of capital, expressed today in capital’s relentless development of a vast new industrial robotics programme, in order to capture what will only be marginal gains in relative surplus value.7 Hence value is not the neutral-

4 5 6 7

Kicillof and Starosta 2007 p. 10. Marx 1973, p. 706. Ibid. Automation seeks out ‘transient increments of relative surplus value’, until even eventually living labour is ‘rendered superfluous and displace from the production process itself, while

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technical expression of ‘wealth creation’, but the objectively imposed form of the growth in the organic composition of capital, under which capitalism operates as a system of commodity production and exchange. In this respect, capitalism’s elimination of living labour does not represent the ‘cost’ of economic growth, but is the very agency of its realisation. As a result, given the inexorable expulsion of living labour from the system, the critique of political economy needs more than a conventional concept of ‘labour alienation’ or an expanded theory of global underdevelopment and modernisation. Such subject-centred developmentalism simply represses the moving contradiction between living labour and capital (machines). The critique of political economy cannot begin and end with the alienation of labour – that is, it cannot proceed from the affirmation of labour (the ‘return to full employment’; ‘better jobs’, etc). It must begin from the supersession of waged-labour itself. This is why we have seen since 2000 an extraordinary amount of theoretical work on deskilling, precarity, superfluous populations, real and formal subsumption, the critique of Keynesian underconsumptionist theories, the crisis of the ‘mass worker’, and proletarianisation, given that all this writing turns on one thing: the creation of a politics in which labour theory and value theory need to be indivisible in a world where labour power no longer carries the same collective agency. Indeed, this writing, in its turn to the widespread expulsion of living labour from the system, and the degradation of work-based skills, points to the growing erosion of worker self-identity as further indicator of the crisis of the labour-capital relation. What is increasingly manifest from the continuing demise in trade union membership, the dramatic drop in strike days internationally, the rise in precarious employment conditions globally, and the general political crisis of the mass workers’ movement, is the fact that workers feel less and less attached to being a worker as a primary economic-social marker of class autonomy. Whether one is in work or not, the crisis of value erodes work as a site of class subjectivation; proletarianisation without class-consciousness.8 As the group Endnotes have stressed, far from capitalism bringing about the increased combinatory power of the collective worker, as the early workers’ movement assumed, the long-term tendency of capitalism is the opposite: disaggregation and ‘unity in separation’: Everywhere, the working class is less homogeneous – it is stratified across high and low-income occupations; its work is more precarious; and it an immiserated humanity nonetheless remains ever dependent upon capital for its mere survival’ (Nesbitt 2017, p. 234). 8 For a discussion of proletarianisation as de-subjectivation, see Stiegler 2014.

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switches jobs more frequently. More and more workers feel like work has no purpose; for more and more employed in dead-end service jobs, or are unemployed or unemployable. Like the housewives of an earlier era, they produce little more than the everyday reproduction of the class relation itself. For these reasons, we cannot follow the autonomists in supposing that an ‘objective’ recomposition of the class will find its correlate in a new ‘subjective’ affirmation of class identity.9 The point here being that labourist nostalgia for a lost workers’ movement is no solution to the unending crisis of value: therefore, the hope for a newly constructed affirmative collective class identity predicated on growth and increased production can only prolong the crisis of labour power and capitalism. It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, given art theory’s historic relationship to the emancipation of labour since early German Romanticism, that contemporary art has played a distinctive role in response to this ontological crisis of labouras-value and class subjectivation. Indeed, art’s expanded or postconceptual condition has provided an advanced ‘working space’ for reflection on the valueform and the supersession of wage labour, and as such has played a key part in the construction of this broad value-theory centred cultural politics. In the call for a politics of value theory, the viability of such a politics is inconceivable without the historical reflections on free labour that artists, philosophers and art theorists bring in their wake. Today, though, the postconceptual landscape of art has radically deflated what the notion of artistic labour as free labour once promised aesthetically, insofar as the enculturation of aspects of the labour process in the new economy and the artisanal erosion of art itself as its falls under the demands of technologically-driven production and distribution has meant that the conventional attachments of aesthetic self-sufficiency and cognitive distance from means-end rationality – as an antipode to productive labour – is no longer secure and viable to the same ends and in the same ways. Thus: if artists and art theorists have become increasingly sensitive to how artists labour and under what conditions, this is not because they hope for an aesthetic life of recompense for the instrumentalities of capitalism, or want to see art take refuge from engagement in the world. On the contrary, the ‘turn to artistic labour’ in recent art theory marks a crucial separation of art from the aesthetic discourse as the compensatory resolution of the artist’s alienation from the world. The new writing, is concerned, therefore, less with how the art-commodity form of the artwork marks its differ-

9 Endnotes 2015, p. 159.

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ence from the commodity form as such, than with how artistic labour, after the crisis of object-based aesthetic traditions, increasingly exposes art to the heteronomous pressures of abstract labour and technological mediation (the extended assimilation of art into design or architectural practice; the participation of artists as hired labour on cultural regeneration schemes; the distribution of artistic labour as ideational content across the Internet) and therefore to the increasing intersection between artistic technique and general social technique. As such, given the increasing assimilation of artistic technique into general social technique, the individuated aesthetic object no longer carries the same reparative-aesthetic function, insofar as artistic technique operates as an extension of non-aesthetic practices and skills. Art is an ensemble of skills and relations, which is irreducible to any given craft process or ‘aesthetic’ effect. This thinking, in turn, has, since the new millennium produced a widespread embrace in cultural philosophy and art theory of a new ‘labour theory of culture’ across various political positions (Nicolas Bourriaud, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, for example) that analyses these changes as a consequence of the crucial convergence between artistic labour and post-Fordist, immaterial or cognitive labour – the rough equalisation of technique and capacity between artists and non-artists under the universal form of the computer and the democratic accessibility of social media.10 As Lazzarato says, this means that the creative functions of art and artists can no longer be assigned to a particular cultural fraction or class layer, but are operative as a set of capacities available to everyone. Moreover, artistic capacity is no longer ascribable to the production of things internal to a prescribed tradition of object-based artistic achievement, but to the production of situations and relations in which all may participate; a ‘differential distribution of “creativity” and the potential to act’.11 Creativity is no longer the monopoly of artists and intellectuals. In our society today, there is but one population that engages in activities all of which contain ‘coefficients’ of creativity, speech developed sensibilities, intellect and refined culture […]. Salaried workers, the unemployed, and welfare recipients represent a continuum that encompasses and mixes manual and intellectual labor, which were once separated between different classes, in the same way that cultivated and rough sensibilities are no longer distributed between ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘proletariat’,

10 11

Bourriaud 2009, Virno 2009, and Lazzarato 2017. Lazzarato 2017, p. 158.

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but are distributed in a differential fashion within a single population […] the problem is less the divide between activity and passivity than the requirement to become ‘autonomous’, and assume the responsibility and the risks that these behaviors carry.12 Consequently, the debate on labour and art today has moved decisively beyond the relationship between the art object and the commodity-form, as premised in Theodor Adorno and Peter Bürger13 on the conflict between autonomy (the achieved form of an individuated artwork) and heteronomy (the given conditions of instrumentalised reception and reified tradition, through which the struggle for autonomy is brought to consciousness and articulated), as the object-centred, subjectively-invested, transformation of a given medium. The new post-object, post-medium, discursive, and temporal conditions of production and reception have dissolved the negation of heteronomy (the same) through the anti-aesthetic resolution of form (difference). As a result, marking art’s difference from the repetition of productive labour (and mass ideology) is no longer grounded simply in an aesthetic-anti-aesthetic dialectic focused on the singular (individuated) object as the would-be protector of art’s formal integrity. In this sense, we might say that the individuated art object has migrated into the wider discursive framework of art’s post-conceptual non-object relations, decentring the focal logic or fetishism of the individuated singular object, so dominant within modernist aesthetics and to a lesser extent in postmodernism. But does this mean, thereby, that autonomy in art is no longer

12 13

Ibid, pp. 159–60. Adorno 1984, Bürger, 1984. See also Fritz Haug 1986. It would be wrong to say, however, that Adorno’s philosophy is no longer able to play a part in contemporary debates. What distinguishes Adorno’s aesthetic theory is its debt to a labour theory of culture premised on a post-Hegelian insistence on the production of art as the domain of advanced technique and concept, as opposed to aestheticised craft traditions, in many ways weakening his own reservations about the coercive forces of heteronomy in art. Adorno’s Hegelian attachment to art as the sensuous manifestation of art-as-idea is not an aestheticist position. On the contrary, for Adorno, art was necessarily in contest with aesthetics, laying the ground, implicitly in his writing for the postconceptual realignment of artistic skill and artistic value today, as such Adorno had no fixed attachment to specifically modernist forms of aesthetic autonomy. (Hence the ambiguous character of the title Aesthetic Theory; this is a book clearly not a book about art and aesthetics). Nevertheless, Adorno imagines this anti-aestheticism within a narrowly circumscribed social field, delimiting the use-values of art as a consequence. This leaves his theory in a weakened position in relation to the vast and heterodox use-values of contemporary art and its critical possibilities. See Roberts 2015 for a defence of a postconceptual reading of Adorno’s autonomy (what I call ‘autonomy-as-the-critique-of-autonomy’).

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meaningful, given that under the new regime of dissolved and dispersed artistic skills and forms and expanded sociality of art (social techniques), the artist necessarily operates transparently in a post-autonomous realm? Is the artist simply a technician or collaborator, content to hire out his or her skills as waged labour to commercial companies, to the managers of social projects funded by state institutions and ngos, in exchange for a range of would-be ‘transformative’ use-values? Is art now mostly subsumed as ‘social technique’ under value production? That the artist is subject to these post-autonomous forces there is no doubt; the digitalised post-conceptual condition of art has produced a general convergence between artistic technique and non-artistic technique, as Lazzarato and many others have emphasised. But this does not necessarily mean that artistic labour and the productive labour of the digital economy are now simply interchangeable, or that artistic labour today is now just wage labour, as Virno puts it.14 Rather, the issue of autonomy – of what art does differently to what productive labour does – has undergone a radical repositioning. Autonomy in art is not opposed to heteronomy (or, rather, no longer takes itself to be immanently freeing itself aesthetically from heteronomy) but operates within the sphere of post-autonomy itself as the basis of art’s postconceptual condition and post-aesthetic articulation. Heteronomy, therefore, is not that which threatens to destroy autonomous value for art and the distinction between artistic labour and productive/non-productive labour, but that which recalibrates the new heteronomous forces in art as a reconfigured claim on use-value. In other words, given that art’s range of functions, sites of production, and modes of reception, are greatly expanded beyond the gallery and the display of individuated objects, art’s transformation of its ideational materials lies precisely in these expanded conditions of production and reception; the making of art emerges from the transformation, mediation, negotiation with and negation of these exoteric, heteronomous materials and conditions. This brings into play, therefore, two sets of intersectoral pressure that now define the social content of autonomy under the new expanded postconceptual conditions of art: the artist can either set out to transform these conditions as the production of non-heteronomous use-values (that is, resist the subordination artistic labour to wage labour and the capitalized ‘social project’), or accede to these conditions as a new realm of (market-led) artistic utility, advancing art use-values into abstract labour and the subsumption of art under the ‘creative cultural industries’. Hence this is why the question of value and the

14

Virno 2009.

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value-form have taken on such prominence and significance recently, and why this discussion on autonomy and post-autonomy has such wide social ramifications in relation to labour after wage labour. And, in addition, this is why the new conditions of production and reception demand more of artists and theorists than simply the recognition of the ‘differential distribution of creativity’. The division between autonomy-in-post-autonomy and post-autonomy after autonomy defines a clear choice for artists and producers about how they line up politically with these new conditions. Does art still or can it even speak to values other than those attached to abstract labour and the capitalist cultural sensorium, or is art, as it moves away from conventional forms of aesthetic approbation, done with these forces of non-compliance and distanciation altogether? This is a stark choice, but nonetheless it is fundamental to insisting that ultimately what art does is not what value does. Thus, despite the convergence between artistic technique and general social technique, and despite the threat of art’s subsumption under abstract labour, a fundamental question remains: what is constitutive of artistic labour that is not attachable to the production of value? This is the determining question. Getting the ideological choice between autonomy and post-autonomy clear, in these terms, then, allows us to finally clarify the specific commodity status of the artwork. For in answering the questions above, we are required as a matter of necessity, as Isabelle Graw notes in ‘Working Hard for What?’, to recognise that the art commodity is a commodity ‘of a special kind’.15 But what precisely is art as a ‘special kind of commodity’, in lieu of art’s expanded field of production and reception and the crisis of aesthetic discourse? It seems to me fundamental and axiomatic that artworks are not subject to the value-form; that is, subject to socially necessary labour time (as a matter of life and death, as Marx puts it). Artists’ labour-inputs into the production of their work are not governed by the socially necessary labour time for the production of all artworks at a given point in time. Artworks are not produced on the basis of the reduction of costs over the long run. As Marx outlined in Theories of Surplus Value,16 forms of creativity that are not subject to socialized labour are thereby excluded from the realm of productive labour and the valorisation process. But what does it actually mean to say that artistic labour is not subject to the value-form in these terms? By what measure is this conceivable? For, clearly, artworks are commodities, that is, objects/events produced under a system in which all things are available for monetary exchange, and, as such,

15 16

Graw 2019, p. 155. Marx 1969, p. 401.

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indebted to the purchase of commodities including labour power (fabrication, technical execution or installation) for their successful realisation. Artworks are produced and received under a network of value-relations. Indeed, as we have stressed, in some instances the artist’s labour as abstract labour contributes to the realisation of intellectual commodities as part of the accumulation process (cultural regeneration; property development); art contributes, in these instances, indirectly to the valorisation process. There is, therefore, as we have emphasised, no absolute gap between artistic labour and productive labour (abstract labour), an alignment that Marx was unable to anticipate, in as much as he was writing at a time before the assimilation of art into the realm of technological mediation and general social technique. Yet, overall, operating outside of the constraints of socially necessary labour time, the measurement of artistic labour is not subject consistently to the pressures of the value-form. In this respect, under these conditions, artworks are in a crucial sense ‘incomplete’ commodities. Given their exclusion from the constraints of socially necessary labour time, they fail to fully realise their function as commodities-for-exchange. That is, as singular non-reproducible objects/events (even as short run editions or technological transmitted copies) and as such objects/events whose value is based on the indeterminate measurement of necessary labour time, artworks are unable to transform themselves consistently, on an aggregate scale, into capital. In other words, artworks may be commodities, insofar as they are available for exchange, but they don’t fully enter the monetary-commodity relations of commodity production (C-M-C). As individual sales, they do not metamorphise into the production of other commodities as part of the commodity-moneycommodity valorisation process; the sale of artworks are simply revenues that artists may utilise to fund the purchase of commodities for the production of other works, or even speculate with, not a form of capital to be invested in the labour power of others as part of the production process. So: given artworks’ exclusion from the constraints of socially necessary labour as a measurement of value, we might say artworks are, as ‘incomplete’ commodities, very inefficient commodities, even though, in some instances, at the blue-chip end of the art market, the revenues from the sale of some artworks may be extraordinarily high, which may in turn enter the valorisation process at some point further along the line. The failure of the artwork to transform itself efficiently into capital as part of the valorisation process, then, points to the underlying asymmetry between artistic labour and productive labour, even though, under certain conditions, the former can metamorphise into the latter. Unlike commodities as such, which confront each other as exchange-values, and therefore posit exchange value against use-value, artworks’ failure/inability to convert

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themselves fully into capital instates a heteroclite gap, a space of non-identity, a negative relation, between the use-value and exchange value of the commodity. Commodities for Marx embody a two-fold objectification of value (exchange value and use-value). Exchange value and use-value are in this sense interdependent: that is, commodities are not simply an expression of exchange value, indifferent to use-value, but are determined by use-values, otherwise, they would serve no function and remain unsold.17 But commodities cannot confront each other solely as use-values. This would mean, that the value of living labour would be determined directly by producers, something that is fundamentally excluded from production under the universal equivalent of the money form and the value-form. Yet, as ‘incomplete’ commodities this is precisely what happens to the artwork, as it fails to realise itself heteronomously as capital for the valorisation process. The asymmetrical relationship between exchange value and use value, as the expression of artistic labour’s exclusion from socially necessary labour time, enables the artist to, in a sense, determine the length and quality of the labour time expended in the production of the artwork. This gap, accordingly, is what is meant precisely by ‘free labour’ or ‘creativity’, and not evidence that artistic labour on these terms is labour free from commodity production and the social determinations of valorisation, as such. Thus the ‘unfinished sociality’ of art that I mentioned at the beginning as a characteristic of much contemporary art – the multiple use-values to which the artwork is put – is sustained precisely by this failure of artistic labour to complete the passage of artwork’s contradictory commodity-value into exchange value. This is why art’s autonomy is simply another name for this unstable gap between exchange value and use-value. Art’s immanent capacity to create use-values as a result of the art commodity’s exclusion from socially necessary labour time is determined by the artist’s control over the physical inputs and ‘time’ of art’s production. Thus, contemporary theorists who see only an isomorphism between the art commodity and the commodity, artistic labour and productive labour – as either evidence of the end of ‘art’ or evidence of the completed dissolution of art into social technique – fail to understand how the asymmetrical character of use-value and exchange value in the artwork is qualitatively different to that of the commodity as such. Artworks are commodities of a special kind, not because they escape value relations, but because as ‘incomplete’ commodities they fail to meet the heteronomous demands of capital accumulation. However,

17

See Arthur in Moseley et al 2014.

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this has not stopped capitalism, in its neoliberal phase, from trying to capture artistic labour for capital accumulation, in the wake of the demise of the traditional artist and object-based aesthetics, hoping to destroy art’s ‘usefuluselessness’18 (precisely: the inefficiency of the art commodity) under the dictates of social utility. Capital is perfectly happy to see the majority of artists offer their services to the cultural industries and the profit motive, in the belief that art is better served by being convergent with the client requirements of design, graphics and the games industry. Art, therefore, has a specific social and critical task in the period of the deepening dominance and crisis of value: the vigorous and ambitious maintenance of the unstable gap between exchange value and use value in the art commodity, as the fundamental and emancipatory expression of the art commodity’s failure to fully realise its place in the valorisation process.

18

See Menke in Graw et al 2019.

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After the Crisis of Value: Some Further Reflections on Skill, Deskilling and Art In Homer’s Iliad we encounter perhaps one of the greatest manifestations of pre-industrial craft and artisanal skill: Hephaistos’ manufacture of Achilles’ new shield and armour, which Achilles needs in order to defeat the Trojans after he has agreed to return to the fighting during the long running Trojan war. Visited by Achilles’ mother Thetis, the both human and divine wife of Peleus – a mortal not a God – the banished and lame God Hephaistos (condemned to a nether life of labour in his foundry) is asked by Thetis to create a magnificent shield and set of armour surpassing all others.1 ‘I have come to beg at your knees, hoping that you will give my doomed son a shield, a fine pair of greaves with ankle pieces, and a corselet’.2 Thetis does not have to beg, however, because she is much loved and admired by Hephaistos, given that she took him in as a young, disabled boy, and brought him up. He is very pleased, therefore, that he can at last repay what he calls the debt of life and make a set of armour ‘such that all the many men who see it will marvel at the sight’.3 And so he sets to work immediately while Thetis is there, getting all twenty of his bellows to blow at the same time. He then throws bronze, fire, tin, gold and silver on the fire, before gripping a mighty set of tongs in one hand and a hammer in the other. Let’s briefly follow Homer’s description of what happens next: First he began to make a huge and massive shield, decorating it all over. He put a triple rim round its edge, bright and gleaming, and hung a silver baldric [belt or shoulder sash] from it. The body of the shield was made of five layers: and on its face he elaborated many designs in the cunning of his craft.

1 Hephaistos is the patron god of artisans, craftworkers, and blacksmiths. His much admired and celebrated finely wrought skills at the forge were considered to be unsurpassed by the gods of Olympus, leading Prometheus – the subversive and creative transgressor of the gods’ privileges – to steal the fire from Hephaistos’s forge for the benefit of humanity. For a superlative dramatic treatment of the myth, see Aeschylus 2014. 2 Homer 1987, p. 306. 3 Ibid.

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On it he made the earth, and sky, and sea, the weariless sun and the moon waxing full, and all the constellations that crown the heavens, Pleiades and Hyades, the mighty Orion and the Bear, which men also call by the name of Wain: she wheels round in the same place and watches for Orion, and is the only not to bathe in the Ocean. And so on it he made two fine cities of mortal men. In one there were marriages and feasting, and they were escorting the brides from their houses through the streets under the light of burning torches, and the wedding-song rose loud …4 And on and on this tour de force of depiction and mimesis on the shield goes: in the first city two men are quarrelling over blood-money for a man who has been killed; and people are shouting their support for each man; and above the crowd elders are seated in judgement on the fate of the two men; two talents of gold lay on the floor, waiting to be claimed by the successful petitioner; in the other city two encamped armies stand outside the city, the defenders, women, children and old men on the walls, the young men setting out to meet the armies, clashing on the banks of the river with bronze-tipped spears; and all this in turn is set on a ploughed field, with teams of ploughmen wheeling this way and that, pressing onto the headland and back; and this, in addition, is set on land where reapers are at work; three sheaf-binders are ready to receive the cut corn from boys behind them, looked on by the king holding his sceptre, with his heralds nearby preparing a feast; and next to this scene is a vineyard, with grapes made of gold, the poles supporting the vines made of silver, and a fence made of tin, populated by girls and young men carrying the crop in woven baskets, and a boy playing a lyre with revellers behind him; and, in turn, next to this scene are cows, four herdsmen, and nine running dogs; and at the head of the cattle two lions who have killed a bull and are gulping its black blood; and further all this is accompanied by white sheep in a beautiful valley, next to it a floor for dancing on which are dancing young men and women, and a large crowd watching; and then finally, all these scenes are set within the mighty river of Ocean, running around the rim of the shield. The sheer, luxuriant skill and inventiveness demonstrated here – all this detail, remember, is contained within the relatively small space of a shield – is clearly, for Homer, a gift from the Gods. As Achilles says on receiving the shield from his mother, along with a corselet ‘brighter than the light of a burning fire’ and a ‘beautiful finely-worked’5 heavy helmet with an added golden 4 Ibid, p. 307. 5 Ibid, p. 310.

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crest on top: ‘no mortal man could have made it’.6 Yet if the shield is the work of the Gods, nevertheless, it is not an act of supernatural legerdemain or magic. Homer clearly shows Hephaistos in the act of making the shield, of utilising his skill and strength in the foundry to produce something that takes on the character of ordinary human creativity and endeavour. The Iliad was written in the Iron Age, in which the status of the metalworker was extraordinarily high;7 the smith was celebrated for producing things of great beauty and strength from mere, inert, undistinguished matter, and of course, for making the everyday tools and symbols of a martial culture and a permanent war economy. In this light the ancient smith in myths and stories in this period, from Tibet to Ireland, is seen as the great nurturer of things and people, particularly of the hero of the story. As Caroline Alexander says in The War That Killed Achilles (2010): it is the smith – the forger of things and lives – ‘who makes safe [the] young hero, fostering him and serving as his guardian’.8 Hephaistos is the great protector of lives. The notion of craft-skill and artisanal prowess nurturing the community, the polity, is of course, central to the nineteenth-century capitalist valorisation of the pre-modern craftsman, even if the focus of attention is less the blacksmith and martial crafts than the work of the church artisan – the carver of stone – and the woodworker. Looking back to the achievements of the medieval guilds, Ruskin, Marx and Morris all see the would-be integral skills of the medieval craftsman as offering a defence against the alienation of workers’ skills under capitalism’s transformation of labour into labour power. But this is precisely a defence, and not in Homer’s vision, the artisan as a productive forger of lives. Craft skill, for Ruskin, Morris and Marx, under the increasing pressure of the division of labour, is a way of protecting the individual worker from this state of alienation, as much as serving the community.9 This is the condition of the labourer under the modern division of labour and accumulation of capital: without recourse to the protection of some kind of integrated craft skill, the worker is invariably exposed to a process of labour which diminishes or erodes his or her self-esteem and, therefore, his or her sub6 Ibid, p. 311. 7 One should note that the historical time of the poem covers the aristocracy that precedes the Greek democratic polis, and Homer is looking back at this period’s heroic themes and myths in an act of imaginative reconstruction. 8 Alexander 2010, p. 153. 9 As Marx says famously in The German Ideology (1845–7): ‘every medieval craftsman was completely absorbed in his work, to which he had a complacent servile relationship, and in which he was involved to a far greater extent than the modern worker, whose work is a matter of indifference to him’, Marx and Engels 1976, p. 66.

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jectivity. In other words, craft skill in these terms – protected inside guilds or unions – is that which secures the individuation of the worker: namely, the interrelationship between, hand, intellect, self-development and social identity. This was a powerful vision, certainly up to the 1960s. But, of course, the protection of craft skill does not challenge the servile relationship between the labourer and master – there is no protection against masters as such – nor does it ameliorate the conditions of those labourers engaged in repetitive, backbreaking manual labour. Craft skill is, rather, the privileged apex of the productive process, and as such directly vulnerable to the development of manufacture in the cities in the nineteenth century. For it is the skills of these workers that will either be abstracted into the workings of machines, or assimilated into the abstractions of large-scale production processes. Thus, under the continuous refinement of the division of labour in the second half of the twentieth century, the dissolution of ‘complex labour’ into ‘simple labour’ (deskilling) effects a radical separation between the fast changing and residual skills of the worker (the machine operator and facilitator, the factory hand, the overseer) and the notion of labour as a source of craft individuation. There is therefore little sense that craft skills – even defended from within the space of the unions – have the capacity to protect the worker from this process of abstraction. Skills are eroded, destroyed, re-functioned and simplified, abstracted into machines (robots) in a continuous process of deskilling. I’m loath to say in a process of deskilling and reskilling here, for as Harry Braverman argues correctly in Labour and Monopoly Capitalism (1974), this process is inexorable for workers.10 New skills across industries may indeed be created, just as new industries come into being (the building and maintenance of robots today for example) and older industries pass out of existence, but across the working class as a whole, these new skills are largely residual, or rather, not skills at all, mere forms of facility. What new skills are created as a result of technological and technical innovation are those taken up by technicians and executives, who as a result have a greater knowledge of the productive process overall than the old collective worker. This is why the vast majority of jobs created today are invariably low-skilled or ‘no-skilled’. Marx saw the beginnings of this process already in the 1860s in his reflection on the increased inputs of science into the production process (‘Fragment on Machines’, Grundrisse).11 This is why although he can single out for praise in The German Ideology the work of the medieval craftsman as a source of craft integrity, he knew that the alien-

10 11

Braverman 1998. Marx 1970.

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ation of labour under the relentless violence of the division of labour, and the growth in the organic composition of capital, would not be solved or healed by a defence of the craft integrity of labour. This does not mean, for him, that a defence of what remains of craft skills should be ignored, but rather that the celebration of craft skills, as in the Romantic anti-capitalism of Ruskin and Morris (and even Hans Gadamer and Martin Heidegger after World War ii) is not the key to the de-alienation of workers and to human emancipation. Rather, the struggle of the worker for autonomy is a struggle over time: the dominance of free labour over necessary labour; the securing of labour free from the linearity and time-as-measure of the value-form; and, therefore, the freeing of labour from labour power as such. This shift – from the question of skill and deskilling within the cyclical framework of boom-and-bust to questions more precisely of time and value within the growing crisis of labour – defines our present period. This is why the ‘end of work’ has become crucial to recent radical political theory, for the exponential rise of deskilling, the robotic displacement of living labour, and consequently, the detachment of unemployment and underemployment from so-called business cycles has made the question of free labour a political and emancipatory priority (André Gorz, Endnotes, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams,12 Peter Fleming). Lack of available jobs is always good for capital, because it keeps down wages and disciplines labour, but now global structural unemployment and underemployment threatens the stability of the system as a whole. No more so than in relation to the uncontrollable character of the growth of the reserve army of labour itself – or the rise in surplus populations – with the incorporation of working populations in Africa and South East Asia into the global workforce. This massively increases the available pool of labour in a labour market where there are too few jobs. In turn the jobs that are conceivably available to such workers are themselves disappearing under the onslaught of robotics. It is predicted that something between 47 to 80 per cent of current jobs will be automatised in the next thirty years, and these jobs are not simply in the low-skilled service and manual sectors – they stretch into the administrative domains of law, medicine, engineering and insurance (a Japanese insurance company, for instance, has recently replaced its staff who determine payouts to policyholders with ai machines, who can calculate the figures far quicker). As Endnotes declare:

12

Srnicek and Williams 2016.

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here is the fundamental self-undermining tendency of the capitalist mode of production: social life continues to be founded on the exchange of labours; yet with the extension and development of the fixed capital base, labour is no longer key to production. Direct human labour plays an increasingly subsidiary role in production, even though the exchange of equivalents continues to be measured in terms of labour time.13 Two forces are meeting then in this current period: the secular tendency for capitalism to produce surplus populations that cannot be absorbed by the labour market, and capitalism’s immanent tendency to destroy living labour in pursuit of profits and cost effectivity. The result is that a larger and larger number of workers are superfluous to the needs of capital; in the advanced economies this has forced many workers into improvised and impoverished selfemployment, or into hour-by-hour punitive zero contracts living off poverty wages. In the so-called industrialising economies, this is reflected in the increased participation of workers in the growth of non-capitalist subsistence economies. The crisis of waged labour, then, is not the epiphenomenal effect of cyclical underemployment, it is the structural consequence of capital accumulation, and accordingly is not just identifiable with the rationalisations of neoliberalism; on the contrary, neoliberalism since the 1970s has been the bitter crisismanagement of this intractable reality and the fiction of full employment. Thus, in the long term, growth will continue to slow down and stagnate, nonjob recoveries will continue to be implemented as a placebo effect, job precarity and short-term contracts will increase, all in a context where for the majority of those in work ‘work’ is no longer seen as a source of pride, or emotional investment. Of course, workers’ dissociation from their identity as workers does not begin with neoliberal precarity. The crisis of the self-identity of the worker as a worker is increasingly visible in the 1940s and 1950s; and alienation obviously is indivisible from waged-labour from the beginning of the factory system. Yet, with this conjunction of forces in the current period, social atomisation, parttime work, precarity, stagnating wages, and increased surveillance at work has profoundly changed the relationship between waged labour and workers’ selfidentity; workers’ alienation is no longer mediated by collective use-values that workers have a modicum of control over in the factory, and identify with as a set of ‘common goods’ outside its gates. As Endnotes assert: increasingly ‘workers [can] no longer see themselves as building the world in the name of modernity

13

Endnotes 2015, p. 184.

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or a better, more rational world. On the contrary, that world [appears] already built, and [is] entirely out of their hands’.14 We should not confuse this knowledge, though, simply with a rise in cynicism or pessimism. The crisis of work in the wake of the global contraction of full-time waged labour has passed beyond this. Rather it reflects the real conditions under which workers labour and the value of labour itself, and as such, represents the actual internalisation of the self-undermining tendency of the capitalist mode of production; even in jobs that are reasonably well remunerated or with high social status, there is a feeling of how pointless and self-serving the work at hand is, when relentless drives for efficiency and costsaving prevent the job being done properly or even at all. As Peter Fleming puts it: ‘The prototypical neoliberal manager requires social goods to attack – something to bite – even if this results in major organisational dysfunction … It thus unleashes pre-emptive measures even before there is any evidence to justify such cynicism’.15 That is, the conflict between exchange value and usevalue appears to be inhibiting the reproduction of labour power itself; in a world of unattainable targets and efficiency, there is a growing surplus regulation of the working day that compensates for this crisis of targets and efficiency. The continuing crisis of work over the last thirty years has huge implications, therefore, for thinking through the content of labour faced with the crisis of labour power. In a world in which the deskilling of work is now accompanied by tireless surveillance and ‘targets’, and the power of the collective worker has collapsed – that is, as a living source of opposition – the idea of reskilling, or even the amelioration of the constraints on labour power in the present, no longer represents a credible way out of the impasse of capitalism’s immanent destruction of living labour. The dialectic between skill, deskilling and reskilling has broken down; for the cost of the development and refinement of knowledge in production is now the implementation of restrictive skills over extensive skills. Thus, for example, the introduction of driverless cars vans and trucks over the next twenty to thirty years will remove the driving skills of millions from production and distribution and everyday life. Many may welcome this, given that this change may – as is claimed – reduce car accidents exponentially. But again, it disconnects the labouring (and non-labouring) body from the development of learned skill and practice, as if all collective skills were an affront to the greater demands of computation and machine-efficiency.

14 15

Endnotes 2015, p. 146. Fleming 2015, p. 97.

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In the light of the above, then, it is no surprise that management ideology has wanted to import some notion of creativity from art into the workplace and work-relations, as an offsetting measure. In a world of relentless deskilling – of the transformation of skills into routine facility – the idea that you and your workmates might be involved in an autonomous, free exchange of ideas is obviously deeply appealing. Much has been written on this softmanagement model as the integrated obverse of the punitive neoliberal regime of targets and efficiency (Luc Boltanski and Yve Chiapello, Maurizio Lazzarato, Toni Negri, Bernard Stiegler). What is important about this shift is how the critique of instrumental labour – a critique obviously so central to modernism and the modern movement and twentieth-century Marxism and critical theory – has entered the domain of productive labour itself. Of course, it has merely entered it, and not transformed it, in the way the early Soviet Constructivists hoped. Yet, it reveals what the crisis of work imagines for itself in the period of capitalist non-reproduction: a phantasm of frictionless free creativity built upon on the image of art as a realm of self-transformation. But this creativity is as instrumental as the one that it seeks to replace: it abjures critical thinking, whenever creativity-as-critical thinking actually works to shift practice in a radically democratic and post-capitalist direction. As William Davies has argued: One way of interpreting the apparent senseless violence of punitive neoliberalism is as a strategy for the circumvention of crisis and, at the same time, an avoidance of critique. In place of critical forms of knowledge, which necessarily represent the deficiencies of the present, forms of empty affirmation are offered, to be repeated ritualistically. These lack any epistemological or semiotic aspiration to represent reality, but are instead ways of reinforcing it.16 Creativity in the workplace, then, has become a populist managerial mantra for the avoidance of critique at the workplace and elsewhere, a way of generating a consensual image of worker participation and free exchange. Even if most workers know the limits of such creativity, the notion of the workplace – particularly the new creative industries workplace – continues to have a certain allure in the new digital economy, particularly for artists themselves, who ironically see an opportunity to find a working space – and wage – outside the wretched conditions of practice for most artists today. Indeed, this is one of the

16

Davies 2016, p. 132.

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strange ideological anomalies of the current crisis of work: the willingness on the part of a growing sector of artists to either collaborate with the new cultural industries as part of a team or as an individual consultant, or align their artistic identity altogether with the instrumental objectives of a commercial enterprise as an employee. There are good reasons of course, why this is happening, that lay beyond the expediency of paid employment, or even opportunism. Contemporary artists are no different from productive and nonproductive labourers in being subject to a process of deskilling as a consequence in changes in the relations of production. But if art has lost some of its artisanal, productive allure over the last fifty years as a consequence, this does not mean that artists are objectively excluded from artistic production on the basis of these changes. Deskilling is never absolute, because, as free labour, it is detached from the discipline of labour power: artists do not make their work under the constraints of the value-form and socially necessary labour time and to a given template. As such they are not under threat of going out of business because they don’t meet the average costs of labour inputs per unit; artistic labour is not governed by the average time taken by all artists to produce a given commodity. Artists can take years to make one piece of work and will not be punished by the market for doing so. ‘You’ve taken too long, so we’ll find someone else!’ Yet, if artistic free labour is not subject to the value-form, it is subject to the generalisation of social technique across industrial production and non-industrial production. Thus, given the implementation of the computer as a universal tool across all sectors of production, the skills, techniques and resources artists use today are very similar to the skills, techniques and resources that workers in the cultural industries, service industries and administration use. This means that there is a general convergence of technique across the artistic and non-artistic sectors; artists, cultural industry workers, and administrators, image and text search, file share, edit, montage. For a number of theorists (Negri, Paulo Virno, Lazzarrato) this is a positive development, in a way echoing the communisation of technique debates in the early years of the Soviet avant-garde. And many artists, have followed them in this assessment, seeking to hire out their ‘conceptual’ and digital skills to companies, on the basis – heralded by the companies themselves of course – of a supposed new relationship between art and business. This naturally has some appeal to the artist, who believes that their commitment to art beyond the gallery might find a new home in the would-be ‘social agendas’ and ‘projects’ of corporations or start-ups. However, the immediate consequences of this move are self-evident: there is no room for artistic free labour in the enterprise (as the Productivists found in the factories they entered in the early 1920s, even though they were run by Red Managers); all use-values in the end are sub-

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ject to the competitive demands of the enterprise, and therefore are invariably captured by the instrumental ends of the value-form, even when labour-inputs are not measured strictly hour by hour in the workplace itself. The assumption that the convergence of technique across the art/non-art divide under the expansion of general social technique is unambiguously positive is therefore a myth. Indeed, if the artist is to retain his or her critical or autonomous relationship to technique they must resist the subsumption of their labour under abstract labour, because abstract labour is qualitatively different from artistic labour – in terms of means and ends – and therefore is antithetical to anything resembling creativity as critique. Technique – even if neoliberalism would assume otherwise – is not another name for social adaptation. On the contrary, it is also defined by indisciplinarity and non-compliance. This is where Homer and Hephaistos come back into view. Not because Hephaistos’ dexterity and abundant skills offer a comfortable image of creativity in times of cultural ruin and crisis. There is no going beyond general social technique and a return to the artisanal; there are no longer images of God-like creativity available to the artist, this side of bathos, hysteria and laughter that is. In a sense this is all obvious. Hephaistos is not a figure for our times: someone who, armed with tongs and a hammer, can drive away the violence of abstract labour. Yet, nevertheless, the excess of his creativity should give us pause for thought in the light of the threat of the increasing subsumption of artistic labour under abstract labour: for what is striking about Homer’s presentation of Hephaistos’s superhuman creativity – if we read it with a degree of philosophical thoughtfulness – is that the shield becomes a kind of compressed gesamtkunstwerk. However, this does not mean the shield is some ancient version of ‘art in the expanded field’ or some pre-modern Wagnerian spectacle, neither is it a metaphor for the hive-mind, in network jargon, or creativity as an open river, but rather, something close to Bildung: the enactment of a critical community, in which the free exchange of the labours of the many are represented by an infinite overlapping of ideas in a confined ‘conceptual space’. Indeed, setting aside the pre-modern artisanal form of Hephaistos’s creativity, the multiperspectival internal space of the shield represents a formal corollary of what makes the Iliad the heterogeneous ‘secular’ poem it is: that is, its extraordinarily vivid interweaving of events and particularisms, and, as Rachel Bespaloff argues in her study of the poem (1947) ‘humility before the real’.17 Indeed, if we follow Bespaloff’s reading of the Iliad, the shield in my interpretation here concretises the heterogeneous Homeric spirit of creative Becoming.

17

Bespaloff 2005, p. 94.

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In contrast to the ancient biblical belief in resurrection, Homer’s poem, as one of the highest dialectical achievements of ancient Greek thought, is committed to ‘intemporal immortality’,18 to the incomparable event that ‘emerges from Becoming for a single instant and forever’.19 In the biblical imagination, ‘Becoming is the image of redemption on the march toward a moving end’; in Homer, however, ‘Becoming presents itself as a tangled succession of growths, evolutions and deaths, athwart which the permanence of Being affirms itself’.20 Thus, Bespaloff reminds us what the Iliad announces as the wisdom of humility before the real, before it is actually given the name of ‘dialectics’ or ‘materialism’. ‘In the Bible, God is master of Becoming; in the Iliad, Becoming, or Fatum, if you wish, is master of the gods’.21 She locates the poem, therefore, between the magical thought that preceded it and the expressly dialectical thought that was to follow it on the basis that for Homer, action, making and doing are the ‘highest gift’22 humans can provide for themselves. As such, what is truly dialectical about Homer’s humility before the real is the way the poet attaches the greatest value to the persistence of creativity through misfortune. This is why the quasi-martial image of Hephaistos as the superlative creator of beauty and utility and love out of his own isolation and pain, is as important to the poem as Hector’s courage and self-mastery in the face of his own accepted death in combat at the hands of Achilles. In other words, what is exemplary about the shield, if we read it in this spirit, is not just the exercise of craftsmanship as such, but the way that Heiphastos’s creativity exceeds its own material circumstances to produce something that takes on a form beyond customary or familiar calculation. There is a refusal on Hephaistos’s part in meeting Thetis’ request to accept the limits of his own craft. The idea of craft here defies its own acceptable image of self-governance, even ritual submission to tradition. The point, consequently, is not that we are able to attach, anachronistically, this excess to a ‘modernist’ vision of craft in Homer, but rather, that makingas-Becoming here privileges problem-solving above fealty to the idea of superhuman creativity and the glorification of tradition. And this, essentially, is why Hephaistos’s efforts speak contrawise, beyond their artisanal form to the horizon of the artist’s modernity today. Through praxis truth escapes fatality and ‘ends’, there are no ‘ressurections’ or ‘redemptions’, only living force. Thus, to translate this into a contemporary context: the subsumption of art under tech-

18 19 20 21 22

Ibid, p. 95. Ibid, pp. 95–6. Ibid, p. 95. Ibid, p. 95. Ibid, p. 96.

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nology and the transformation of the artist into a machine technician does not thereby mean art is now overwhelmingly vulnerable to capture by abstract labour; nor does it mean that all that is left to art as aesthetic compensation is a to return to the völkisch pleasures of abstract labour’s crass opposite: the fleeing back of the artist into the arms of an artisanal and the anti-theoretical miniaturism of art-as-craft. On the contrary, we might say that art’s new technical relation is the site of a new forcing, a new relationship to technique and knowledge, that refuses the cultivation of shame in front of machines,23 and the passive acceptance of the artist as technician and miniaturist. In order to sustain his or her autonomy – that is, sustain the indisciplinarity of technique – the artist must subject themselves to the decentred critical labours of a living and open research community. A research community that defines its relationship to knowledge and praxis, external to what the artist might contribute to the knowledge industries; of multiple research projects that defy the market rationalisation of ‘outputs’ and ‘impact’. For it is the artist’s submission to the demands of infinite ideation, as a condition of the free exchange of art’s labours, that will determine what skills are worthy of the future name of art.

23

See Anders 2002, 2016.

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Notes on Craft: Marcel Duchamp, Bernard Leach and the Vessel Tradition The historical importance of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain is now well established.1 Indeed, its cultural, cognitive and political importance has shaped the very function and tenor of advanced art in the twentieth- and twenty-first century, making us all – whether or not we recognise the value of the readymade and the critique of the conventional artist it announced – essentially postDuchampians. Yet, in all the discussion of the Fountain, in all the arguments about its qualitative break with the past of art, and the valorisation of its tear in the fabric of traditional practice, one fact is rarely mentioned: the fact that the urinal is a factory ceramic. The urinal is more than a witty or salacious joke at the expense of certain kinds of aesthetic stability upheld by the New York Society of Independent Artists. On the contrary, as a factory-produced commodity it offers an explicit embodiment of the crisis of artisanal craft labour in an alienated form of postartisanal productive labour: the mass-produced ceramic. Duchamp chooses to present the crisis of artisanal labour in the alienated form of factory handcraft – and this is something that has largely gone unnoticed. In turn, the clichéd descriptions of the work as a womb or vagina and as such a sexualised affront to the propriety of the New York Society of Independent Artists, is actually not far off the mark. That is, if this work is a rupture in the continuity of artistic and productive labour, it is also an image of arrested origins, an ironic mimicry of Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866). If Duchamp’s urinal stands in for the work of art itself, and in turn for the productive labour that underwrites the vanguard modernity of American monopoly capitalism, it is also an image of premodern cultural continuity, in which craft, creativity, and being are united – it is believed – in the practice of a transhistor1 First published as ‘Temporality, Critique, and the Vessel Tradition: Bernard Leach and Marcel Duchamp’ in The Journal of Modern Craft, Vol 6, Issue No 3, November 2013, pp. 255–66. Thanks to my ex-PhD student, the artist and Raku potter David Jones, for the many conversations we have had on Duchamp, Leach, and craft. I am indebted to these conversations for awakening me from my post-Duchampian and ‘post-craft’ slumbers, and as such, this essay is a response to our exchanges. In this respect this essay is also a reflection on the reviews of Roberts 2007b within the craft community, and to the writings of those critics, such as Barry Schwabsky, who are much more sympathetic to the historic designation ‘craft’ than I have been, see Schwabsky 2008, pp. 84–6. See also Schwabsky 2010, pp. 34–6, and Schwabsky 2013.

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ically stable tradition of shared hand skills: the art of vessel making (pots, jugs, bowls). Indeed, in these terms, vessel making is both the ontological ground of all craft and art making and also the hidden line of continuity between the modern and the premodern. For all its marginalisation in the formation of the modern category of art, the vessel nonetheless establishes an emancipatory continuity with the primitive communist past and the origins of humanity. That Duchamp is referencing the vessel tradition in such a way is of course open to conjecture. To my knowledge there is no mention of this tradition, or the continuity of the crafts of firing, in his writing – and nor should we expect there to be. But the choice and presentation of the urinal, not simply as a transgressive artistic gesture but as an open, sensuous, organic form – which Alfred Stieglitz captured so well in his famous photograph of the object – suggested that Duchamp was also interested in the urinal as a primary or ur-classicising form, albeit a degraded one. Duchamp’s defence of American industrial modernity in this work also hides at the moment of birth of the post-artisanal avantgarde its very critique. This argument is given some credence by Duchamp’s increasing commitment to the craft of mechanical reproduction and automatism. By the early 1930s, he had turned his back on any identification of the readymade and the critique of authorship with nihilism and anti-art, to explore a post-artisanal notion of craft within the realm of mechanical reproduction. This doesn’t necessarily make his later work more sympathetic to a concept of craft per se, but it does complicate his defence of post-artisanal modernity in art. Accordingly – and this is the argument I want to explore in this essay – the fact that Fountain was a mass-produced ceramic is crucial to assessing the work’s more familiar reading as a cultural, cognitive, and political break with traditional forms of artistic labour. If the readymade is a traditional artwork détourné, the reference to vessel-making similarly turns away from any straightforward commitment to modernity as teleological necessity. As such it allows us to explore another line of questioning in relationship to Duchamp’s avantgardism: how much of his defence of modernity in art is defined by its critique? This in turn will allow us to explore the critique of craft in artistic practice today, from a more oblique angle. Now, this is not to say that the material form of the urinal has gone unnoticed in the large and still-growing literature on Duchamp. But this is invariably discussed in relation to Duchamp’s ironic appropriation of what was considered – as a recently arrived European artist to the USA – to be America’s greatest contribution to civilisation and capitalism: its vastly superior plumbing! (Along with, of course, the mass-produced – Ford – motor car.)2 Yet, for all the humour 2 Corn 1999. John Roberts - 978-90-04-68687-8

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of this, the irony has a wider resonance. Duchamp was not the source of this witticism. The originator – on the evidence of the curator and crafts writer Holger Cahill – was reputedly the great librarian, curator and supporter of the crafts in Newark, New Jersey, John Cotton Dana. In fact, Dana’s place in the link between modernism and the ceramic crafts is highly pertinent to the origins of Fountain. In 1915, in his exhibition ‘Clay Products of New Jersey’, at the Newark Museum, Dana displayed two porcelain toilets by Trenton Potteries, the state’s largest manufacturer of sanitary ware. These were exhibited next to other kinds of ceramic ware, provocatively, as items that one might admire in their own right. As Carol Duncan argues in her critical monograph on Dana: ‘Much like Duchamp, Dana deliberately flouted received ideas of “art” when he exhibited sanitary ware in a museum’.3 Indeed, this sentiment is strikingly evident in one of the letters Dana wrote to Trenton Potteries, to convince them to participate in the exhibition: The public thinks too much of museums as repositories of things past or dead or purely artistic, having little interest in the works of men today. Such exhibits [as ‘Clay Products’] will, we believe, add new life-blood to the museum undertaking them, and at the same time tend to dignify and to promote the industries and crafts so exhibited.4 There is something of this spirit in Duchamp’s own decision to exhibit an object of productive labour, and, as such, Holger Cahill believed that Dana’s public use of the ‘urinal’ was somewhere in the background in Duchamp’s thinking. This connection sounds plausible. For in staking out his own claim on the liminal state of the artwork, and the nature of art work, Duchamp was not willing to see the industrial cultures of American monopoly capitalism degraded by modernist aestheticism, particularly the modernist aestheticism he encountered around Stieglitz’s photographic circle in New York when he arrived from France – with its wistfulness, tendencies towards the miasmic dissolution of form, and general taste for pastoralist effusion. Duchamp’s break with painting and his development of the readymade is clearly a commitment to the avant-garde as an experimental space of advanced technique. In this sense the readymade is not a preparation for a future style, but an attempt on Duchamp’s part to align art with the advanced relations of production.

3 Duncan 2009, p. 115. 4 Ibid, p. 114.

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This much I would argue is uncontentious, and I have been a vigorous defender of this position.5 Yet the staged labour of the urinal haunts the reception of the work from another direction: the deposition of artisanal labour in the form of alienated labour is presented back to us in the image of premodern continuity. The urinal sits, therefore, not just as a shaming and partisan defiance of modernist aestheticism and academic tradition, but also as a moment of (non-ironic) classicising and irenic repose. In short, it sits there between the opposing forces of modernity and monopoly capitalism and premodernity and precapitalism. In this light, we need to adjust, or readjust more precisely, our sense of how the work operates in relation to circuits of labour. For, if this work embodies different modes of production (artistic and non-artistic; artisanal and mass-produced), it also embodies different concepts of temporality and cultural continuity.

1

The Vessel Tradition: The ‘Other Thing’

The drinking or pouring vessel, jug, pot or bowl, is often held to be the urform of all cultures, linking ancient and pre-modern cultures to the modern and contemporary crafts. Indeed, fragments of ceramics as evidence of habitation, craft, and production are the one form of evidence that can be found across the global archaeological record. From Ancient Greece through Byzantium, through ancient Britain, Gaul and post-Roman Egypt, it is pottery shards that lay the trace of community and civilisation, culture and production. For historians, the quality of vessel production evident in the archaeological record is a crucial measure of wealth, and the site and distribution of power, in historical communities.6 However, if the uses of pottery in these early contexts are now well documented, the origins of the vessel tradition remain subject to continuing reassessment based on new discoveries. It was commonly assumed that pottery production emerged in tandem with farming and the domestication of animals around 10,000 bce (more or less coterminous in Egypt, India, New Guinea, and southern China), when humanity established sedentary patterns of habitation. But new research continues to push our dating of the first pottery production back into the pre-historic epoch of hunter-gatherers, in the late Paleolithic period around 15–16,000bce. Evidence shows the dispersal of pottery across the globe to be uneven during this period, yet well established

5 Roberts 2007b. 6 Wickham 2006.

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as a technology and social practice.7 Indeed, there is evidence to suggest basic ceramic technology (used to make figurines) was in place as early as 26,000 years bce. This historical continuity is clearly why Martin Heidegger was so attracted to the vessel tradition’s panhistorical forms, as a measure of the crafted object’s ‘thingness,’ rather than mere ‘objecthood’. In his well-known essay ‘The Thing’ (‘Das Ding’) he argued that vessels provide a particular kind of ‘standing forth’, which for him has two components: the visible evidence of the act of making and, interdependently, how this evidence of making brings forward the ‘unconcealedness of what is already present’.8 By this he means that the hand-crafted vessel is something that does not stand ‘over us’ (as alienated labour) or ‘beside us’ (as an object of aesthetic judgement) and therefore ‘opposite us,’ but is with us, so to speak, that is, ‘to hand’.9 However, this standing forth is not directly related to the manifest labour of the potter. For Heidegger, the vessel does not prompt empathy because it is evidence of non-alienated labour, as we might expect. Rather it stands forth with us because of what is fashioned as a consequence of the making: From start to finish the potter takes hold of the impalpable void and brings it forth as the container in the shape of a containing vessel. The vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds.10 Thus: the jug, the bowl, and the pot are not made because they are efficient as vessels; they are made because they are things that hold, that is, vessels – a qualitative difference for Heidegger. Hence Heidegger’s distinction between object and thing as the basis of his non-objectivist metaphysic: the essence of the thing is not revealed directly in its making, but in what is indefatigably brought forth by the making: the to-handness or ready-to-handness [Zuhandenheit] of the user’s non-conscious, habituated use of the jug, its ‘nearness’.11 User and usefulness intersect. Heidegger’s metaphysics of nearness, of course, has played its part in the modern defence of the crafts. The notion that preoccupies and fascinates Heidegger – the holding vessel as self-sufficient and self-supporting –

7 8 9 10 11

For an extensive analysis of the extraordinary transregional dispersal of pre-historic pottery production, see Jordan and Zvelebil 2009. Heidegger 2018, p. 408. Ibid, p. 406. Ibid, p. 408. Ibid, p. 405.

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has underpinned much revanchist thinking on the crafts since the 1960s. The crafts, particularly the vessel tradition, grounded in thousands of years of technique, ritual, and intimacy with the earth, stand at an authentic distance from the mere objectness of the modern work of art and the modern experience of art as such. The fundamentalisation of this position within the potting and craft communities is, admittedly, rare these days. Few potters think of the vessel tradition as an inscrutable hold-out against the onslaught of modernity and industrialisation, as if outside of the vessel’s ‘standing forth’ all else drains away into relativism and inauthentic conceptualisation. Nevertheless, some sense of vessel-making as a standing forth against mass culture, the capitalist division of labour and the displacement of academic craft skills in art (certainly after 1848) attaches itself to this tradition. This is because making as a singular form of craft integrity is assumed to connect across the millennia with what makes ‘authentic’ creativity a hand-held, somatic, earth-centred practice. In other words, the manipulation and firing of clay provides a non-arbitrary, cognitively and socially integrated relationship between producer, user and tradition. Tradition secures the particularity of the potter’s art, making it unnecessary for the individual potter to stand, or try to stand, outside of this continuity. The longstanding embeddedness of the potter, via the meta-function of vesselmaking, removes (or at least challenges) the assumption that Art under the modern division of labour releases making from the burden of tradition. In fact, tradition is the place where individuation and the generic are both secured. This is why the attempt by various post-1950s potters to submit the vessel tradition to the heterogeneous demands of art, in order to achieved an expressive and conceptual autonomy, has experienced so many dead ends and hiatuses.12 Denaturalising the tradition, destabilising that inherited symmetry between producer, user and tradition, produces an adventitious transformation of the object in the name of the freely determined relations between producer, user, and cultural tradition. This is reflected in the large amounts of pottery that seem arbitrarily anti-functional or post-functional. So, there is a normative relationship between producer, user and tradition that is immanent to vessel-making, that sets such making apart from art – and even craft making in its broadest sense – on the grounds that what is at stake is not so much ‘free creativity’ but freedom from the perils and impositions of an unguarded subjectivity. This is why the vessel tradition has played such a large part in the metaphysical claims of non-Western religions: vessel-making acts as the space and support for individuation without ego, without the resistive

12

Adamson 2007, 2018.

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Subject animated by self-negation and division. Heidegger, then, has played his own part in this metaphysical conjunction of egoless subjectivity and the nonbeing of tradition. Consequently, the vessel tradition stakes its value, longevity, stability, and powers of assimilation on a temporal order that stands against, or at any rate outside of, capitalist and modernist teleology. In other words, the tripartite relationship between producer, user, and tradition is one that neither runs in advance of modernity nor lags behind. Past, present and future are manifested in the recurring bringing forth of the same as not the same. This compressed timely/untimely logic is particularly evident in Bernard Leach’s thinking on the potter’s craft. As is well known, Leach was one of the first modern Western theorists of the pre-modern vessel tradition. His relationship to the inherited relationship between producer, user and tradition was in turn an inheritance, but also a transformation in the reception of that tradition. For, prior to the penetration of Western capitalism into Japan and China, there was no ‘vessel tradition’ as a conceptually distinct entity; there was simply a tradition of pottery-making passed from generation to generation in a continuum that was coextensive with everyday production and experience. Within this longue durée of settled making in slow-changing communities, potters had no sense of themselves as being in conflict with other modes of making. This changed with the modernisation of Japan’s largely rural economy during the Meiji era (1868–1912). What had once appeared stable now seemed to be under threat, as local and small-scale sites of pottery production lost markets through the growth of mass production (by the end of the Meiji period Japan had been transformed from a feudal agricultural producer to a modern capitalist state, with a centralised bureaucracy, a standing army, and a modern transport and communication system). There was a concomitant rise of modernist sensibility amongst upper-middle-class artistic and craft circles in the major urban centres. This group saw itself as facing two ways: against tradition as selfvalidating and inert, but at the same time as working to recover and develop those aspects of pre-modern tradition that were deemed crucial to expressive and material continuity. This modernist reclamation of the past was not peculiar to the crafts and to the Japanese and Korean vessel tradition, of course. It also suffused the work of early modernists who sought to establish lines of precedent to classical achievement and stability (Friedrich Nietzsche, August Strindberg, George Santayana, and later Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot). But in Japan it was certainly heightened given the centrality of the crafts in artistic culture, and because the arrival of modernism in Japan was overwhelmingingly mediated and conditioned by the demands of national-patriotic observance and fidelity to ancient tradition. In other words, this was a modernism of refined judgement, as opposed to a modernism of mass culture and industrialisation.

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This sensibility or defence of cultural spirit (bunka seishin) gained further purchase in the 1930s with the backlash against Meiji culture (one of the ideological drivers of Japanese fascism).13 But this was not, and could not be, a recovery as such: in becoming the means for the self-conscious preservation of a vessel tradition, modernism in Japan amounted to a theoretical transmutation of that tradition. Artisanal tradition would henceforth become a ready means of defining what meaning and value might exist outside of the rapid development of mass production, mass culture, and the technical and intellectual division of labour. In other words, it was in the early decades of the twentieth century in Japan that the vessel tradition enters the social divisions of modernity, to become subject to the exigencies of theoretical abstraction and cultural theory. And this, of course, is where Leach entered the picture: he brought a modernist sensibility to the Japanese vessel tradition and the elite crafts community, and at the same time borrowed and extended its mediated traditionalism, as a means of attacking what he saw as the false crafts and attenuated modernisms of British and North American culture (their reliance on ‘thin’ historical precedents).14 In his key retrospective account of his Japanese experience and the continuities of ceramic achievement in Japan, ‘Japan’s Contribution to the World of Pottery’ (1961), Leach draws out these tensions around modernism, tradition, and the potter: I am sure that the good and true pot is neither the possession of tradition, nor of the individual, though I would agree that, for every occasional flash of enlightenment in an individual potter’s mind in more recent times, the gentle, slow and sure discovery of truth in pots has taken place a thousand times in communal, almost inarticulate, traditional group work throughout the ages, all over this earth. How often we individual potters flounder in the mud of error, compared with the unspoiled peasant potter! At the same time, I would not be true to type and to my own experience if I did not also say that the artist’s flash is of a further order of evolution than that of the artist’s humbly repeated chawan … [Yet] I would go further, and assert that in this issue between artisan and artist, country and town (gete and johin), we are liable to fall into dualistic opposition when at bottom, as with Buddhism, there is none.15

13 14 15

See Harootunian 2000, p. x. See Leach 1940. Leach 1961, pp. 337–8.

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This is why he gives so much credence to the unadorned beauty of Oido tea bowls from the fifteenth to sixteenth century (originally imported from Korea but much imitated in Japan) – for their simplicity and clarity produces a ‘modernism out of time’ that the twentieth-century potter can continue to rework without fear of academicism. Those ‘standards and qualities’, he wrote, ‘are not private to the East for all their peculiarity’.16 Consequently, the struggle for the modern potter – faced with the abstractions and divisions of modernity and the demise of the traditional crafts – is the struggle to transcend individualism as a modernist, that is, as an artist committed to renewing quality in continuity with the past. Or, as Eliot was to say of Pound: One of Pound’s most indubitable claims to genuine originality is, I believe, his revivification of Provençal and the early [fourteenth century] Italian poetry … [he sees] them as contemporary with himself, that is to say, he has grasped certain things in Provence and Italy which are permanent in human nature. He is much more modern, in my opinion, when he deals with Italy and Provence, than when he deals with modern life.17 It is perhaps no surprise that Duchamp enters this history from an opposing position. Whereas Leach offers a modernist reinvigoration of the vessel tradition, Duchamp places the vessel tradition in a state of critical abeyance. In Fountain, the vessel is parodied as the very antithesis of a living culture, of abstraction and theory, the dead thing that sits and parades its would-be Venerableness and Vitality, like a fat Buddha. That vessels and ceramics, portly porcelain and inert statuary posing as living art, were a preoccupation of Duchamp’s is reflected in the title of the article devoted to a defence of Fountain, written by Louise Norton and (probably) Duchamp in the second issue of the The Blind Man: ‘Buddha of the Bathroom’.18 Beatrice Wood (the future potter) wrote the short anonymous defence of Fountain, ‘The Richard Mutt Case’, that prefaces the article. Fascinatingly, then, the work of Leach and Duchamp (born in the same year, 1888), meets at the crossroads of tradition and anti-tradition. But, as I have stressed, this is not simply a conflict between modernism and the crafts, as it is often portrayed. Rather and more precisely, this was an allegorical and political confrontation with something far bigger than either Leach’s modernist conservatism or Duchamp’s deflationary avant-gardism. The vessel becomes 16 17 18

Ibid, p. 338. Eliot 1959, p. 11. Norton 1917, p. 5.

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a cipher for the unassimilable split in the very domain of art’s living temporality. This conflict was not strictly about the opposition between the crafts – or a particular virtuous craft tradition – and modernist art. Leach himself had no particular beef about the achievements of modernist art; indeed, he was a supporter of Vincent van Gogh, and introduced his work into Japan.19 The crucial issue, rather, is about the situatedness or lack of situatedness of creativity under the cultural divisions of capitalism. As Leach says in a letter to Lucie Rie in 1961: ‘Art as part of life, not extra’.20 In this respect, Leach and Duchamp share a similar deconstructive premise or mood. They both undermined or subverted the notion of creativity as unmediated expressive subjectivity. As such, in turn, they both rejected, in their respective ways, the authority of the sovereign author in both art and crafts. For Duchamp, the line of attack was based on the historical submission of creativity in art to the optical and mimetic facility (and fallacy); in Leach, it was based on a rejection of the potter as a conduit for expressive feelings, separate from the demands and discipline of traditional precedent. Both rejected the ideal of the emoting artist and his or her claims to authentic integrity. An important corollary is that both men placed a great deal of emphasis upon learned technique in their practices. In the case of Duchamp, this was premised on the requirement that in order for the artist to establish his or her judgements about ‘good practice’, he or she must work through or traverse some intellectual field, or set of problems, to which the artist then gives form. This form-giving, in turn, was best practised outside of the conceptually delimited domain of painting, where ‘expressiveness’ remained a constant pitfall. Leach held that the potter must train with the best as a way of continuing the technical accomplishments of the past in new and compelling forms. But these new forms must lay claim to, and as such participate in, the exemplary forms of tradition. So, in both instances, creativity is subordinate to some extra-artistic, extra-creative force: for Duchamp, the relationship between art and general intellect (as a condition of art’s post-artisanal status); for Leach, the need to bear witness to a certain kind of formal exemplariness, which carries in its train a whole number of social and interpersonal values (social conviviality, the pleasures of the domestic, honouring one’s ancestors, etc). For both Duchamp and Leach, the expressive ego of the creator was the least interesting and, in the end, the least determinate thing about creativity.

19 20

See de Waal 1998. Leach 2003, p. 302.

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But of course, the history of the reception of these two positions has been very different. Leach’s vessel tradition and the crafts generally have fallen into intellectual abjection, forever and forlornly wanting to escape their subordinate cultural position. In contrast, Duchamp’s post-artisanal anti-retinal model has become the conceptual template of the age, particularly today, where the post-conceptualisation of art now operates across the art/non-art dyad of immaterial and intellectual labour. From this perspective Heidegger’s ‘standing forth’ of the vessel is seen to be thin and unworldly. To build a critique of capitalist time and the value-form on the standing forth of this vessel tradition looks feeble and distended. ‘Pots against Modernity’, if we might risk some such slogan, just doesn’t have any resonance – certainly not in the way Heidegger imagined, at any rate. Yet the relationship between earth, hand, pot, tradition and, therefore, the situatedness of the potter, is not distended. That nexus still registers a fundamental resistance in many cultures and traditions to abstract labour and modern industrial culture, and this resistance is not to be dismissed so easily. The refusal of anxiety and discontinuity – or more precisely the assimilation of discontinuity into tradition – represents a profound denial of capitalist temporality, attached to both the derogation of the hand and the singular artwork. This is what one historian of pre-capitalist conceptions of temporality has called the ‘irreverence toward the progress of time’.21 In this respect what is at stake in the vessel tradition is not so much its authentication of hand and craft, but rather its allegorical reflection on the time of production as such. Clearly, the vessel tradition is extremely limited as an ontological critique of capitalist temporality. It may conserve and pass on various affective powers and skills that challenge the disciplinary and instrumental power of abstract labour and the destruction of cultural tradition, but the handmade and craft are not in themselves bearers of the emancipation of labour. To locate the critique of capitalist temporality solely within the self-authenticating terms of craft is to set the emancipation of labour adrift from the demands of intellectual skills and, as such, craft as intellection, and from machines as the formalisation of human intellectual power. So, if the liberation of craft is not coterminous with the liberation from abstract labour, neither is the liberation of the vessel tradition from its cultural subordination identifiable with cultural autonomy. Authentic emancipation is relational all the way down. That is, making and thinking are situated in ways that far outstrip any Romantic commitment to the crafts and the handmade overall. This is why Duchamp, in the end, is the more compelling

21

Kleinschmidt 2000, p. 19.

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figure as a thinker on craft. It is completely misguided to think of his commitment to the readymade and his critique of the artist as a fundamentalist attack on craft as such. On the contrary, his work, from the ‘assisted readymades’ onward, is a dialogue with, and a discourse on, the craft of conceptualisation, or conceptualisation as craft, and, in turn, of the enabling relationship between hand and machine. If we need to disengage Leach and the vessel tradition from a self-authenticating tradition of craft, we also need to place Duchamp’s critique of traditional forms of artistic skill within an expanded understanding of craft-thinking. In doing so, we can reject the presupposition that craft is attached to a particular range of objects and techniques identifiable with tradition, and that the craft tradition mysteriously, ineffably, is the key to the emancipation of alienated labour and creativity from the instrumentalities of capitalist teleology.

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part 2 Technique

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chapter 6

The Amateur’s Retort 1

The Challenge to Facilité

For the modern and contemporary artist, the amateur has come to have a vital and productive status.1 This is because the amateur is one of the defining figures in modern art’s construction of its own ideal self-image (and self-alienation).2 With the formation of the modern codes of art’s professionalisation after the 1840s (particularly in France) came the increased intellectual standing of the artist. It was, after all, the period of art’s fledgling identification with the new radical and revolutionary forces of that era. But with this professionalisation also emerged the recognition of the artist’s own precarious position in relation to the bourgeoisie (encapsulated in Gustave Courbet’s revolutionary politics and Charles Baudelaire’s radical ennui). The new market forces may have relieved the artist of some of the burdens of subordination to state and church, but they also left the independent modern artist exposed to the indifference, even antagonism, of a diminishing, bourgeois audience. The new intellectual professionalisation of the artist, therefore, was felt to be something of a sham once artists were faced with the real material outcomes of their distance from the Salon and the Academy. It seemed as if, at crucial points, the artist was closer to the old artisan in a workshop (the figure the modern artist-intellectual had hoped finally to leave behind) and, more poignantly, to the degradations of the new factory worker. As a consequence, artists felt increasingly distanced from traditional affirmations of ‘artistic skill’ and ‘professional protocol’ and their respective attachment to bourgeois social aspiration. The result was a widespread deflation of hidebound Salon skills, in which one of the regulating ideas of advanced 1 Published, in the catalogue for the exhibition, Amateurs, curated by Ralph Rugoff, cca Wattis Institute San Francisco, 2008. 2 The category of amateur, for all its pervasiveness in modern and contemporary art, has a spectral existence in the writings of artists and in art theory. That is, there is no critical discourse of the amateur in modernism and the avant-garde, distinct from its occasional and informal use in connection with its more theoretically familiar cognates (‘artist-as-producer’, ‘artisttechnician’, ‘self-taught artist’) and its endorsement, in various contexts and under various headings, as a sign of authorial authenticity. Recent exceptions to this rule include Art & Language 1999; and Wall 1995. The latter looks in part at the role of the photographer-as-amateur in the formation of Conceptual art.

© John Roberts, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004686878_008

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practice (painting) was that the artist should withdraw from, or make awkward, the facilité of the Salon professional.3 There were clear signs of this earlier in Courbet’s work, but in Édouard Manet’s it became a defining trope, with space (foreground/background relations) and the modulation of form subject to a threatening inchoateness. Yet if customary notions of professional practice are up for scrutiny here, it would be wrong to identify these moves with the amateur proper. The artist’s identification with the amateur existed, rather, as a kind of ‘hunch’ rather than a self-consciously declared position. Because – and this is something that characterises the production of much art today – no ambitious French artists in the 1860s and 1870s (in particular the socially ambitious Manet) wanted to be thought of as amateurs. That would have been too crippling a blow to their artistic self-esteem, given that the amateur was primarily still regarded at that time as a figure of artisanal failure and misplaced aspiration and therefore outside of the realm of modernity.4 Rather, amateurism, at that point, was a nascent and ambiguous identification with the limits of a professional academicism, and therefore, more properly, identifiable with an intra-professional deflation of the signs of academically or heteronomously imposed skills. Thus, there was an emergent sense that, by skirting the bounds of technical ‘incompetence’, or by withholding a professionally imposed facility, the artist would secure a greater vivacity and authenticity to the act of painting that would be in keeping with the artist’s displaced or marginalised standing. It is through the gap between forced facility and an authentically realised proficiency that the labour of the painter, in this period, became a site for the unfolding identification between the amateur and the critique of art’s place in the social and intellectual division of labour.5 3 Witness the reception of James Tissot, in France and England, in the 1870s. His technical virtuosity was considered to overly sweeten and betray his urban themes. 4 For a discussion of the amateur as autodidact, see Roberts 1999. 5 As Molly Nesbit notes, Eugène Atget’s photographic practice in the 1890s is where the professional/amateur conflict is rendered politically explicit for the first time. For what is profoundly arresting and deflationary about Atget’s pictures (street scenes of Paris produced for sale to public archives and private patrons, usually painters and architects) is that, although they assert their status as being more than mere documents, they make no professional claim to their status as art. Rather, as skillfully produced objects they ask of their ideal beholders to be taken as works of imaginative reconstruction. (The photographs may have been produced as primary ‘documents’ with the interests of their actual or imagined clients in mind, but they are composed ‘externally’ to their immediate use as autonomous sequences, which, in their syntagmatic complexity, tell an unfolding story of a ‘popular’ and disappearing Paris). Thus, what makes the work particularly striking is that in defiance of art photographers of the time, they refuse the comforts of the aspirational petit-bourgeois amateur. They do not

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Petit-bourgeois Aspirants and Gentleman-Amateurs

The blurring or derogation of the signs of facilité, then, produced a broad and significant cultural transformation. The deflationary became a placeholder for the ‘democratic’ or ‘popular’ insofar as the skills of the academic professional were seen as unprepossessing signs of domination and inherited authority.6 Yet this newly forged link between truth in painting and the rejection of facilité was not as transparently democratic as we first might assume. For what also needs to be acknowledged is how much the fear of, and identification with, the amateur as the aporia of a desiccated professionalism was positioned between petit-bourgeois aspiration and aristocratic entitlement. That is, fear of, and identification with, ‘failed’ professional ambition was a consequence of the modern artist’s class position, caught between the emergent petit-bourgeois desire to enter professional life and the aristocrat’s long-standing indifference to professional accreditation. Thus, the emergent modern artist might have looked to the honest ‘failure’ of the artisan as a means of distinguishing himself from academic facilité, but what he saw and experienced, beyond this ideal image, was an amateur subject to the contradictions of modernisation itself. On the one hand, overwhelmed by hubris and desire to participate in official culture, the petit-bourgeois amateur might have looked as if he was trying too hard;7 on the other hand, the aristocratic endorsement of amateurism as a name for a leisured and disinterested pursuit of knowledge might have made it look as if the amateur was not trying hard enough. Yet if many gentleman-amateurs were certainly despised by the new generation of professional modern artists, given these aristocrats’ louche pursuit of artistic or scientific practices outside the professional dictates of scientific and artistic communities, their perceived autonomy also provided a model

attempt, then, to ascribe to themselves the status of art on the basis of their ‘audacious’ intervention into the photographic process. Rather, Atget seeks recognition for their imaginative status from the opposite direction entirely. That is, it is precisely because of their status as works of lowly construction – as ‘mere’ documents – that they are offered up to critical judgement – hence the dissociation of the work of the amateur here from petit-bourgeois vision. The skills of the amateur here are identifiable with the ability to see imaginatively without false adornment. See Nesbit 1992. 6 For analysis of the ‘popular’ and ‘democratic’ inflexions of ‘flatness’ in nineteenth-century French modernist painting, see Clark 1984. 7 Indeed, because the petit-bourgeois amateur believed so ardently in the professional virtues of the high culture that he aspired to, in order to be taken seriously, artistic ambition for many amateur painters was taken to mean the successful mimicry of academic painting’s most ostentatious effects.

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of detached pastoralism that appeared increasingly attractive and agreeable to a generation of artists driven into the arms of the market. Thus, what is detectable in Courbet and Manet, for example, is how much the ‘democracy’ of the critique of mere facilité is grounded in an alliance between outré upperclass antiprofessionalism and artisanal rigour and clarity of method against the petit-bourgeois artist’s endorsement of official academic culture. Indeed, what modernism wanted to retain was the spirit of the free artisan, in defiance of the petit-bourgeoisie’s mimicry of its betters – the notion that value in art was essentially about the affirmation of the ‘most valued’ by the most highly regarded. What arose, therefore, in all manner of ways in the French modernism of this period was a conflict between an unstable and unusable sense of the professional and a general, pastoralised fantasy of the non-academic and honest artisan as a site of vigorous authenticity. And this, of course, as artistic modernism was invaded and transfigured by capitalist development, prepared the ground for the eventual split in the function of the amateur after the Russian Revolution: between its adaptation as a kind of avatar of modernist sensibility and as a functionary of avant-garde technique. Whereas modernist painting (from post-Impressionism to Vassily Kandinsky) underwrote the imaginary of the pastoral as a sign of art’s necessary expulsion from ‘instrumental reason’ and industrial labour – in the form of the primitive and the idiot savant as well as the art of the insane – the avant-garde turned in the opposite direction, expanding and universalising the democratic and deflationary impulses of French modernism on the terrain of new photographic and film technologies.8 Instead of endorsing the amateur as a sign of resistance to professional protocol, professional protocol was overturned in the name of the ‘new artist’, in whom the technical skills of the amateur and the intellectual skills of the professional converged and dissolved to form the artist-as-producer. The artist and the ‘non-artist artist’ were held to be mutual participants in a qualitatively new conception of artistic production and identity, which enabled a new (aesthetic) conception of productive labour. The submissive amateur as pastoral-artisan was exchanged for the affirmative amateur as proletariantechnician.

8 For a discussion of the relations between nineteenth-century French modernism and the new photographic technologies, see Rancière 2004.

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The Amateur-Producer (or the ‘Nonartist Artist’)

What the Russian Revolution and the avant-garde of the Weimar Republic brought into being during the 1920s was that those who were deemed to be without official cultural and artistic skills were able to play a part, as producers, audience members, or ‘social’ actors, in a culture produced in their own name. Thus, the proletarian-amateur – as artist-technician, artist-educator, artist-engineer – became a mediating figure through which this ‘culture from below’ was actualised and organized. This is why the proletarian-amateur in this period was valued, primarily, for two things: first, for possessing a technical proficiency readily available through mastery of new technologies, allowing, thereby, participation in shared or collective cultural projects (a proficiency hitherto denied through academic training in painting and sculpture); and second, because of this proficiency, for being well positioned as a dynamic figure in the destruction of the old intellectual division between labour and academic culture, which pitted professional artists and writers – the ‘experts on beauty’, as Boris Arvatov put it in the 1920s9 – against workers and artisans, who were competent ‘only’ with their hands. In these terms the worker-as-amateuras-cultural-producer released the amateur from his or her previous subordinate petit-bourgeois status as the ostentatious and jejune failure. With the Russian Revolution and the radical irruptions of the Weimar Republic, therefore, the petit-bourgeois pole of attraction of art was shattered, allowing the subjectivities of those ostensibly without culture – released and codified by the new technologies – to pour into the production and reception of art, reshaping art’s hierarchies and its very topology, and therefore, importantly, questioning the terms and means under which producers enter culture. Formerly a subordinate, aspiring figure, the amateur shifted its class position to become identified – albeit briefly – with the dehierarchisation of social appearances and the incorporation of working-class subjectivity into the production of art. The contemporary use and adaptation of the amateur, therefore, is derived from two related sources in this respect: the incorporation into art, from the 1920s, of the ‘underprofessionalised’ technologies of photography and film, and the transformation (after the Russian Revolution) of the amateur into the ‘nonartist artist’ – the amateur as nonprofessional co-participant with the professional. In this light, we might say that the amateur-as-producer or ‘nonartist artist’ – as ego ideal and fantasy figure – is one of the determining and recurring forces in art after the avant-garde irruptions of the 1920s and

9 Arvatov 1972.

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1930s. With the dispersal, retardation, and, later, reinscription of the original avant-gardes in European and American art, the amateur became sometimes an implicit and sometimes an explicit point of identification with the postrevolutionary moment of the amateur-as-producer’s democratic incorporation into culture.

4

The Amateur-Nihilist

In the post-war neo-avant-garde, down to the relational and post-relational debates of the present, it is the memory of this break within the class relations of culture that continues to generate the identification of the artist with the amateur. But the memory of the break, however, is highly mediated by the post-war administration of art and the rise of the modern museum; indeed, these conditions can be said to define the content of this historical memory. That is, the amateur of contemporary practice is not simply an echo or a transcription of the artist-technician, artist-educator, artist-engineer, etcetera. On the contrary, the break that the amateur-as-producer introduced into the topology of art in the 1920s has itself been broken politically and culturally over the last 70 years, bringing the amateur’s democratic cultural aspirations under the sway of other (non-revolutionary) political forces and conditions. Thus, what tends to define the function of the displaced amateur-producer today is the massive administrative enclosure of art into the culture industry (understood as the domination of exchange value over use value, the rise of abstraction, and the absolutisation of reified relations, or the society of the spectacle). The amateur-producer is now subject to the institutional force of an all-powerful ‘commodity aesthetics’.10 As such, the amateur-producer, divorced from its avant-garde identification with the producer, has itself been re-reconstructed, as the amateur has become the naysayer or deflator of art’s hypercommodification and hyperprofessionalisation. An indication of this is the extraordinary rise in artists’ use of do-it-yourself strategies, forms of pseudo-thinking or ‘folk ideologies’ (in Daniel Dennett’s sense), popular cultural detritus, childlike or adolescent evocations of innocence, and self-imposed acts of incompetence. In this sense what certain post-1960s artists, and many contemporary artists, enjoy about the legacy of the amateur in art are precisely those aspects of petit-bourgeois failure and mis-seeing that drove the ambitions of early mod-

10

See, for example, Haug 1986.

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ernism – the sense that in ‘not getting it right’ one ‘gets it right’, in ‘not making the right move’ one ‘makes the right move.’ But this internalisation of ‘failure’ as the moment of productivity inherent in the gap between facility and proficiency is no longer attached to the rhetoric of primitivism. By the 1960s the reactionary ethnographic inflation of the untrained ‘other’ was no less a target for modernist painters than it was for neo-avant-garde technicians and anti-aesthetes. Rather, what carried meaning was the way in which the internalisation of ‘failure’ threw into relief the cultural exclusions upon which such failures were said to be failures. In the 1960s, for example, Ed Ruscha’s early photo sequences and Andy Warhol’s Factory screenprints traded extensively on this. They both took ‘incompetence’ and inattention (repetition, technical error, refusal to hierarchise content through woeful or indifferent composition) as a means of incorporating the amateur-as-authentic failure into a new affective realm of art, in which contingency is privileged; truth is revealed through the unwillingness of the artist to harmonise, aestheticise, or select details or themes with due respect for significance according to the conventions of genre. But, significantly, the adaptation of the amateur was not a simple affirmation of his or her social exclusion. There was an implicit and pointed critique of the amateur-as-failure in these works, in the sense that they were also, in a way, chastising the amateur for being unable to see what was interesting about his or her aesthetic ‘heresies’. In this sense, the purgative, subtractive nature of their practices was directed at the petit-bourgeois amateur’s dream of high-cultural inclusion.11 By reflecting back to the aspiring petit-bourgeois amateur everything he or she dreaded or feared about his or her own wouldbe incompetence or mere ‘talent’ – boredom and emptiness – the amateur’s self-identity was stripped of all its high-cultural ambitions, its superego prohibitions. But, if high culture was derogated here, there was no celebration and defence of the amateur as a potentially transformative cultural figure. On the contrary, particularly with Warhol, there was an almost nihilistic stress on the indistinguishability between the amateur’s skills and the professional artist’s skills. Both were seen as equally delimited, so the question of the amateur’s cultural exclusion as a reflection of the work’s place in the intellectual division of labour didn’t come up. Both were subject to the same deflationary condition.

11

In this light it is worth looking at Ruscha and Warhol in conjunction with the fantasies of cultural inclusion exposed in Pierre Bourdieu’s examination of the 1950s amateur photo clubs of Paris; see Bourdieu 1990.

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The Amateur after Cultural Studies

In contemporary work, however, the excluded status of the amateur continues to come up for extended scrutiny in ways that allow us to reconnect the debate on the avant-garde with the social and intellectual division of labour. At one level, this has much to do with the rise of cultural studies from the 1970s onwards, in which the figures of the amateur, non-artist artist, cultural producer, and self-taught artist have framed the extension of what we take to have cultural meaning ‘from below’. On another level, this is a reflection of the overwhelming shift in contemporary culture to an amateur kind of ethos and its accompanying distributive model of creativity, namely: ‘Everyone can and should be creative’. The suitability of this model of cultural studies for a critique of cultural and social division, and therefore its value as a model of democracy, is less important here than the fact that the empirical interests and the desires of ‘amateurs’ and non-artist artists have been opened up to discussion, reflected in the increasing focus by artists on the actual work of amateurs and nonartist artists. Indeed, whereas the subjectivity of the amateur is very much offstage – an abstraction – for Ruscha and Warhol, in contemporary art the work of actual amateurs, as named or anonymous producers or collaborators, abounds. One artist who fits into this post-cultural studies framework is Jim Shaw. In the spirit of early modernism, what interests him about many of the dimestore amateur paintings that he has collected for years is the disparity between the sincerity and earnestness that motivates the work and its mistranslation of what counts culturally as meaningful and skilful. Indeed, he presents a paradox: The only way these works can be rendered as meaningful and skilful is through their appropriation as readymades by a professional artist and exhibition in a professionally accredited gallery. Nevertheless, Shaw’s recuperation of the paintings is not the work of a post-Duchampian cynic. He is not recovering the paintings so that they might be mocked for their low level of achievement, but rather, pace the legacy of 1970s cultural studies, to make them amenable for evaluation, to make their ‘truth content’ visible by presenting them in a sympathetic context. These paintings of clowns, flowers, Heavy Metal fantasies, etcetera may be banal, they may be driven by a mistranslation of what is purposeful in art, but nevertheless they provide a utopian moment of wanting to make the culture anew – that, despite the stultification of the paintings’ themes and execution, actually distances Shaw’s ambitions from those of Ruscha and Warhol. In openly embracing the symptomology of these paintings, Shaw returns the aspirations of these artists back to the anti-pastoral and revolutionary content of the amateur-as-producer.

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Another artist who fits into this post-cultural studies framework is Jeremy Deller. Here, though, the artist either incorporates amateur desires into a reflection on the unofficial or parallel economy of artistic production (invariably post-adolescent in origin, such as the artwork generated by fan-based enthusiasms), or works inside this unofficial economy as a choreographer of these desires. In his large-scale reconstruction of what has come to be known as the Battle of Orgreave, part of the British miners’ strike of 1984 (Battle of Orgreave [2001]), he collaborated with many members of the now-dispersed Yorkshire mining community, in particular former miners and police who fought on the picket line battle, in order to reposition the event and its aftermath within a radicalised tradition of working-class folk memory. In this he orchestrated the community’s self-dramatisation of its own recent past as part of a counterhegemonic re-enactment of the event (in this it bridges a particular British tradition of historical reconstructionism, such as the Sealed Knot organisation, specializing in military events and battles of historical importance, with a Bolshevik tradition of revolutionary reconstruction for educative and symbolic purposes, for example, the restaging of the storming of the Winter Palace by Nikolai Evreinov in 1920). If we need two avant-garde cognates here, Deller’s collaborationist model is quasi-Constructivist, and Shaw’s rendering up of the unconscious of the amateur is quasi-Surrealist. Historical precedents and their contemporary differences aside, however, they do point to two significant and related characteristics (and structural problems) with the use of the amateur in contemporary practice based on the post-cultural studies model. On the one hand, the amateur is made to stand side by side with the professional, allowing a would-be ‘democratic’ convergence to take place (‘I the artist detest this division between the “cultured” and the supposed “decultured” or “uncultured” and, therefore, my focus on, directly or at a distance, those ostensibly without culture is a rejection of this division’). On the other hand, the professional artist’s role with respect to the amateur must be much more than that of a mere advocate (‘As an artist I must work as much inside this unofficial culture as on its products’). In this sense, Shaw fits largely into the first category, and Deller into the latter. For Shaw, it is precisely the professional artist’s power to confer artistic nomination that renders this ‘democratic’ convergence possible. For Deller, it is the actual incorporation of the living desires of the amateur and the non-professional artist into the discursive space of the work that produces the convergence.

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The Performative-Amateur

Yet as anthropologists of cultural exclusion and division, the contemporary artist-as-amateur (Deller), or the artist who exchanges places with the amateur (Shaw), are caught up in a dilemma. As with Manet, no contemporary artist can risk being an amateur as such. Indeed, to court such a possibility is to immediately remove one’s work from artistic consideration and circulation, thereby making it invisible or subject to the very ridicule that the artist is challenging. Moreover, to iterate the supposed intellectual ‘failures’ of the amateur is also to skirt incoherence; that is, to deny the intellectual demands of art production (from a position of ‘common sense’ or political solidarity) is an act of false humility and sickly sentiment. This takes us to the key determinant in the use of the amateur in contemporary practice, its essentially performative status. The contemporary artist, be it either the artist who draws on the amateur-as-producer, or the artist who uses the amateur to deflate a professionally endorsed ideology of fine art, performs his or her identification with the amateur as an act of surrogacy. The artist, in other words, claims to be an amateur or identifies with the amateurish only insofar as he or she doesn’t want to be seen as a particular kind of professional. There are no contemporary modern-amateurs in the art world, then – no gleeful, contented, first-order amateurs – only artists performing as amateurs, as a performance of art’s exclusions and divisions. To do otherwise is not only to forgo one’s visibility as an artist, but also to evacuate those ‘autonomous’ skills that artists possess as critics and naysayers of the culture. The artist-as-amateur possesses, therefore, a particular kind of ventriloquised voice in contemporary culture. The identification with technical incompetence or awkwardness, the use of low forms, the staging of ‘failure’, or the placement of the production of work in the hands of non-artists signifies the artist as someone who speaks through that which is ‘other’. In this sense the identification of the artist with the amateur (as a particular kind of fantasy about what is authentically professional) is one aspect of art’s struggle for autonomy after the avant-garde and art’s assimilation into the culture industry. By deflating what passes for competence and artistic integrity, the performative-amateur’s invocation of incompetence-as-competence and ‘failure’ represent art’s continuing struggle over how and where art positions itself in relation to its inherited practices, forms of attention, and cultural identities – on the basis that the unquestioning perpetration of these inherited practices, forms of attention, and identities leads art into heteronomy and the academic. In other words, the amateur is a metonym for the non-heteronomous and the non-identitary. But if this link between ‘incompetence’ and the non-

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identitary has been a successful way of challenging professional protocol from Manet to Ruscha and Warhol, it is now, in contemporary practice, the countercultural move of our times. In fact, so advanced is the critique of professionalisation in these terms in contemporary art that art is now largely tutored within this framework. Staged incompetence and formal dissolution have become the modern academic language of the moment. Where, then, does this leave the figure of the amateur as artistic ego ideal, as fantasy of democratic inclusion? In a post-readymade art world, in which the advanced technical relations of art are available to everyone irrespective of their professional schooling, pretty much anyone can produce art that looks like advanced art. The use of formal incompetence has, therefore, become diminished as a means of signifying autonomy. This, essentially, is the framework Deller and Shaw are operating in. Iterating ‘failure’ or ‘incompetence’ is not in itself compelling in a world in which the strategies of incompetence-as-competence are taught. Thus, the performative character of the artist-as-amateur’s challenge has to engage with one of the massive consequences of the technical relations and distributive realities of the new culture: the fact that, in the digital world, professional skills and amateur or nonartist-artist skills have become operationally interchangeable. This is not to say, in the spirit of Walter Benjamin, that this equalisation of artistic technique weakens the channels of dominant artistic production and reception as such, or that it increases the producers’ powers of cultural reflection. The ‘democracy’ of market distribution is not equivalent to a democracy of ideas. But what has occurred is a palpable shift of the concept of the amateur into a new democratic register. With the equalisation of artistic technique, the amateur becomes directly embedded in shared, or general, social technique (the general conditions of technological and scientific reproducibility). As a result, the notion of the amateur as someone whose errors and mistranslations have defined the authentic speech of the professional-as-antiprofessional artist has become weaker.12 This is why Deller, for instance, sees himself despite evidence to the contrary as actually sharing a free space of production with his amateur and nonartist/artist collaborators. There seems to be genuine feeling on his part that all that separates the professional artist from the non-artist artist is simply the extensive power of nomination that he, as a professional, possesses. It is the job of the artist to redistribute these powers. Hence, at one level at least, the concept of the amateur today is – in a strange historical reversal – back in a 12

For instance, the mass-archival Lomography phenomenon, in which non-professional photographers work within a quasi-avant-garde framework (various predetermined strictures) in order to respond to a given theme or set of themes. See Roberts 2002.

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quasi-affirmative space. On technical grounds there is no difference between the skills of the professional and those of the amateur. Consequently, it would seem that the idea of the amateur as ‘other’ to the professional artist is now largely empty as a conceptual category, and, therefore, that one can risk being an amateur, for there is no longer any ignominy associated with its exclusions. We are now all amateurs, or professionals-as-amateurs, as the case may be. Indeed, from this perspective, this elision is precisely what is required of the artist politically – not his or her disappearance, exactly, but his or her convergence with the category of the non-artist artist. Yet, to return to my earlier remarks, under conditions of art’s hypercommodification the equalisation of technique and the artist’s convergence with the non-artist are meaningless when set against the current real limits to collective social praxis. The amateur, then, as the film producer Robert Evans once said of a young, aspiring actor, stays in the picture. Because what is valuable about the concept of the amateur-in-art as the name for a certain kind of conjunction between the ‘failure’ to meet cultural norms and the democratic demands of general social technique is that it is able to mediate between the requirements of artistic autonomy and the forces of genuine cultural emancipation. In other words, what remains worthwhile about the artist’s performance of the concept of the amateur as ‘failed aspirant’ is not the supposed equal exchange that takes place between professional and amateur, but rather the way in which the performance sustains a productive and critical gap between what passes for cultural inclusion (art’s formal adherence to democracy) and the democratisation of the culture, all the way down.

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The Practice of Failure ‘What a deep joy there is in making confession of objective errors’.1 gaston bachelard

∵ In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century ‘memory men’ or mnemonists (and they were usually men) were a familiar act on the music hall circuits of Europe and North America, and popular cabaret and circus shows in Russia.2 Though many of the acts were clearly scams relying on stooges in the audience to feed prepared questions to the performer, some featured performers who genuinely demonstrated what is commonly called ‘the power of photographic memory’, such as Solomon Sherashevsky (1886–1958), who could recall texts and complex groups of numbers almost instantaneously after he had ‘visualised’ them. Indeed, he could recall these details a year, ten years, twenty years after he had committed them to memory.3 However, whether elaborate illusions or prodigious feats, these memory acts were accorded a huge amount of respect. This is because the performers were appreciated as popular scholars, individuals who were capable of answering what the audience wanted answered – invariably questions on sports, scientific facts and the miracles of nature, and the biographies of kings and queens and the rich and famous. In this they fulfilled, superficially at least, a similar role to the successful tv quiz winners of today, those who return week after week, answering questions on the widest and most arcane subjects, or the person who can recite to order large chunks of the Guinness Book of Records. Both performers and quiz contestants are admired for their spontaneous encyclopaedic knowledge.

1 Bachelard 1964, p. 100. 2 First published in Cabinet, New York, Issue No 5, 2001. 3 Sherashevsky was brought to the attention of the Soviet psychologist Aleksandr Luria in the late 1920s, who then collaborated with him for many years on various cognitive tests that measured Sherashevsky’s remarkable abilities. During this time Sherashevsky became a successful traveling ‘memory man’. See Luria 1987.

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But unlike today, the Victorian and Edwardian ‘memory men’ also performed in a culture where formal knowledge was the province, largely, of the educated middle class. As such, for the Victorians and Edwardians the pleasure taken from the ‘memory men’s’ spontaneous demonstration of knowledge was the pleasure in being able to put questions to an expert without feeling shame for asking the question – even if, in principle, the purpose of the entertainment was for the audience to outwit the performer and see him fail. Thus, under earlier conditions of limited literacy, a significant part of the working class’s pleasure in watching ‘memory men’ perform their prodigious arts was based on being in the presence of knowledge and learning that felt attainable, amenable and inclusive. Today impressive acts of memory are certainly admired, but in the same way that juggling is ‘admired’ – as a skill that astonishes through its dexterity, but nevertheless is viewed, ultimately, as being a skill without purpose, and therefore of abstruse value only. This cynical response is not because the popular arts of memory have become any less popular.4 Working class autodidacticism, as it gets played out in sports knowledge – lists, tables, dates – remains formidably extensive. Rather, the response is because of the way acts of memory have been displaced by the ubiquitous and fast memory of machines. The exponential increase in computer memory have left human acts of memory trailing far behind. Indeed, new technology has exposed how feeble human memory actually is even at its most carefully cultivated and assiduous. The human brain is not designed to recover large amounts of information at will. Rather, the ways in which the human brain has proved to be efficient are in the creative and contextual application of knowledge, a set of skills at which computers are dismally poor. In this regard what computers have eliminated is the popular magical functions of the (limited) arts of memory that the early music hall celebrated: no human act of memory can come anywhere near in its speed and depth to the instantaneous recall of the search engine or the detail of the in-car navigational system. Now, obviously, the erosion of oral systems of knowledge transmission is not solely the result of computer efficiency. Since the invention of the book and various technological/analogic developments in the recording of data and indexing, humans have been able to separate the storage of knowledge from its oral dissemination, widening the conditions of who produces knowledge and who ‘owns’ knowledge and who has access to it. With the routinisation of knowledge distribution through the use of the written and published document, knowledge becomes a shared enti-

4 There are still many organised memory championships. The World Memory Championships have been running annually from 1991.

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tlement (for those who can read and write), rather than a cultic experience. But with the advance of computers and the expansion of the sciences, the separation between storage and common use has widened to unprecedented levels. One of the consequences of this is that what is treated, in philosophical terms, as the fallible relationship between memory and knowledge is now taken, on a social scale, to be irrevocable: Memory fails absolutely because humans are simply unable to digest the vast quantities of readily available information and data and compete with the computer’s forbidding powers of recall and organisation. The interrelationship between knowledge and memory has become, therefore, not just a problem of extensity and quantity – as it always has been under a complex division of labour – but of the stark visibility of memory’s impotence. This is why, in popular terms, the perceived impotence of human memory is seen as a crisis of storage capacity: the impotence of memory is gauged on the basis of the mind’s physiological and cognitive limitations – an updated version of John Locke’s theory of consciousness, in which human cognitive faculties are never quite up to the job of understanding or representing the world.5 The imputed failure of consciousness in the age of hyper-efficient memory machines veils a trauma: the impossibility of knowledge in a world where knowledge seems capable of being assimilated and evaluated. Cultural reflections on cognition, knowledge and memory, however, are rare these days – despite the ‘memory industry’ and the developments in Artificial Intelligence. Discussion of cognition and memory are usually confined to the philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology and the neurosciences, which is why the English artist Emma Kay’s work on cognition, memory and knowledge is particularly engaging, given its artistic context. Kay’s incorporation of various feats of memorisation into her art – drawing a map of the world from memory complete with place names, and the plots of Shakespeare’s plays from memory – clearly recalls the braggadocio of the music hall memory men; albeit mediated by the pedagogic discipline of the junior high school classroom. Indeed, the powers of recollection on display here are those nominally associated with the school exam and classroom recitation. But more pointedly, in her use of the Bible and Shakespeare, they enact a kind of lost or marginal cultural capital in the contemporary world of culture. Familiarity with the Bible in the West (discounting the beliefs and commitments of the religious) has long been an esoteric knowledge, just as the contemporary readership of Shakespeare is largely professional, mostly actors. Thus, despite the large amount of cultural capital still associated with a know-

5 Locke 1993.

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ledge of Shakespeare, and particularly with the Bible on the grounds of its vast pedagogic influence, popular attentive readers of these works are few. Kay’s acts of memorisation are attuned, therefore, to the social and ideological conditions under which cultural capital and tradition are produced. The Bible and Shakespeare may weigh in with a huge amount cultural and educational force – state force, in fact – but the popular conditions of reception (under which memory of the tradition within which such works live) have been diminished and fragmented. Hence there is an obvious gap between what the dominant official culture invites people to remember in order to accumulate cultural and social capital and what people choose to (or are in position to) remember. Kay’s point, though, is not that of a cheap cultural-studies jibe at high culture and religious belief and redundant pedagogies. Rather, what preoccupies her, and what interests me, are the conditions under which modernity produces, organises and derogates memorisation. In this, her performance from memory of culturally sanctioned texts is concerned more significantly with the occlusion of memory and knowledge generally. For as with our popular user of computers, her memory skills are produced out of a deflationary Lockean sense of human consciousness as inadequate to the production of knowledge. Thus, we might marvel, as with our imaginary juggler, at her rendering of the Bible and Shakespeare, but the act doesn’t compel; it has no social function. It seems to be merely fanciful, the work of frozen artificial culture – a dead pedagogy. In this sense the work involves an intriguing contradiction at the heart of the interrelationship between knowledge and memory: in straining after a purported truthfulness, the text inevitably demonstrates its own incompetence. The outcome, therefore, is substantively unlike the music hall and vaudeville ‘memory men’, because her appointed task is self-defeating and thereby an enactment of failure rather than its unconscious or incidental outcome. There is no illusion of expert exactitude here, even if the demonstration of memory skills remains impressive. It is wrong to assume, then, that this work is simply an anti-art act of violation against high cultural norms. Rather, the embrace of the failure of memory is wholly strategised within the bounds of art. That is, the demonstration of the limits of memory are here derived from a postconceptual act of ‘cognitive closure’. Forms of cognitive closure in art are strategies or acts of artistic self-disablement or self-constraint, which test or expose the inherited skills or cognitive boundaries of dominant or prevailing practices. The character of these forms of cognition can be elastic, but relevant examples might be Dieter Hacker’s and Art & Language’s ‘painting by mouth’ (in the 1970s and 1980s respectively), Vito Acconci’s blindfolded and earplugged documentation of his immediate gallery environment in 1971, and Ian McKeever’s ‘painting in the

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dark’ of the 1980s. The overriding aim of these strategies is to expose or derogate what are perceived to be culturally unproblematic notions of ‘expression,’ ‘representation’, and ‘authorship’. Such strategies of negation, therefore, should not be confused, for example, with the use of syntactic and alphabetic constraints in the fiction and poems of Oulipo and Georges Perec, where self-imposed textual ‘inhibitors’ function as obstacles to be overcome in a display of wit and ingenuity. Perec famously wrote a novel (La Disparation, 1969) without the use of the letter ‘e’.6 In contrast, the visual artist’s use of cognitive closure is closer to the aesthetics of amateurism (a ‘making awkward’; a self-conscious display of effort that ‘misses its mark’; a staging of failure), rather than the bravura display of puzzle solving and game playing. Amateurism is the model by which the deflationary function of the nonacademic and aesthetically and intellectually adventitious in modernism and the avant-garde is embodied. It is the amateur artist – the artist who in some sense fails the test of professionalism – that modernism and avant-gardists have looked to, in order to secure what is anti-bourgeois, anti-aesthetic and egalitarian. Of course, the cognitive demands, critical horizons and social conditions of amateurism have changed – the bourgeois audience for art is no longer troubled by the performed painterly ‘incompetences’ of Cézanne, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism – but nevertheless, the performance of incompetence remains something that haunts art’s resistance to the artworld’s call to professional order and the market’s valorisation of the artist’s ‘sovereign creativity’. Indeed, the performance of incompetence drives an enormous amount of contemporary art, in its widespread affection for poor materials and poor workmanship, juvenile symbols and child-like markings, misregistration of forms, ungainliness, bad spelling, camp obsessions, and the diy use of scientific hardware and knowledge. Much of this work, however, does not adopt strategies of incompetence as systematically as a cognitive constraint. This is because there is a darkness and deconstructive drive at the heart of the systematic use of cognitive inhibitors, which a lot of contemporary art is antipathetic to, given its confusion of amateurism with a love of loucheness. Kay’s use of the failure of memory as a cognitive constraint, then, occupies a different position, closer to the notion of cognitive constraint as a form of ideological exposure; that is, the failure of memory becomes a performative contradiction. The incompetence of the activity provides the conditions for critical reflection.

6 Perec 1969. In Perec’s case, this is not to say the use of the ‘inhibitor’ (lipogram: ‘to leave out’) is merely whimsical or frivolous. Perec’s writing is shaped by a clear sense of incarceration, and even trauma.

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One of Kay’s most ambitious works recently is Worldview (1999),7 a narrative written from memory of the history of the world. As a fifteen year old, Jane Austen wrote a short, unfinished and spoof history of England (The History of England)8 based on Oliver Goldsmith’s four-volume The History of England: From the Earliest Times to the Death of George 11 (1771), and remembered school lessons about Britain, world history and the Empire. Whether in sly homage to this or not, Kay’s text performs a similar manic ambition: the would-be narration of all significant events that fall under the description of ‘world history’ from the origins of civilisation circa 4,000 bce to the New Year’s Eve Millennium celebrations. It is claimed that Kay wrote the book without recourse to any study aids, relying solely on what she could remember from her school and University days, tv and general reading. What isn’t clear though is whether this primary process of memorisation was supplemented prior to the writing by vast amounts of cramming that she then regurgitated, as if she was a student of a particular megalomaniacal history master, sitting for an impossibly overarching exam – the mother of all history exams. The issue here, nevertheless, isn’t about the means by which she actually compiled the text – as if knowing she studied for its execution diminishes our admiration of the performance – but what finds its way into the text, on what terms, and under what assumptions. This is where the performative work of the text begins to unfold. Kay has produced a narrative that is compiled unashamedly from received ideas, clichés, obvious mistakes, uncertain empirical experience, and hearsay, but in a voice that is unswervingly confident about its claims. The writing has an authoritative relentlessness as it passes from one period, one set of events, and one set of facts to another. But, extensively, this relentlessness is always subject to a process of interruption and breakdown as Kay’s evident lack of knowledge of a given period or event is reduced to a few details and inconsequentialities, leaving the narrative hanging in the air. In this respect the text is actually desperately boring and unrewarding in regard to the claims for objectivity that it sets itself, as if in order to signify to the reader the authenticity of her process of memorisation the writing had to be untainted by theoretical argument, polemic or stylistic invention. Thus, what is remembered and noted down is written in such a way as to convince the reader that this is a work of laboured recovery, an exacting exercise, and not the underachieving commentary of an expert. Consequently, the dullness acts as trope; and functions throughout the text as a prerequisite of the reader accepting or appreciating the labour of the

7 Kay 1999. 8 Austen 1995.

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exercise. Literary invention would only foul up the image of honest amateurism by concealing the frustrating inaccuracy and lack of focus of the process of memorisation. The banality of the text, therefore, is key to the truth-effects of the memory exercise. By adopting the voice of an earnest compositor of facts, by incorporating non-sequitors and jumps in continuity, by excluding any reference to written authorities, by focusing on Britain for a large part of the book, the character of the narrative voice is self-evidently that of an England-domiciled autodidact. As such, the text’s ‘memory work’ is inseparable from its generic and provincial conditions of production. Worldview may have ambitions to be a world history, but its authorial voice is clearly overdetermined by what Kay remembers growing up in England during the 1970s and 1980s, and what she remembers directly from this period. The historical detail gets denser and more expressly national when the narrative coincides with her own biological lifespan. In this regard, the book advertises itself as a world historical narrative; but in actuality is written in the form of a memoir or diary. The idea that diaries or memoirs possess stronger claims to historical truth is commonplace. Indeed, on the basis that they are privileged sites of the truths of micro-history, the diary and memoir have become perhaps the most popular genres of historical writing today. But the discrepancy between the localised and partial knowledges of Worldview and the world historical ambitions of the writing means that the local and generic are here revealed as being theoretically insufficient to sustain the narrative. Hence by performing the failure of memory and the limits of her knowledge, Kay exposes the relational construction of subjectivity, and therefore the contingent conditions of her own ideological formation. For in demonstrating the failure of memory as a failure of knowledge, the relationship between ideology and knowledge is foregrounded. The failure of memory as a failure of knowledge becomes a means of exposing how historical knowledge is produced out of a shared cultural memory of historical representations over which we have little control. Kay exposes the impotence of memory not just as linked to cognitive limitations, but as the outcome of certain processes of socialisation. This leads to a very different reading of the text’s would-be factual content. What appears to be the neutral structure of Kay’s powers of memory and ‘information recovery’ becomes, in its gradual unfolding, the self-fulfilling Western, liberal democratic ideology of history as a process of self-correction and self-enlightenment. Kay’s voice becomes the voice of liberal reason. This is what makes Worldview particularly intriguing. We are never sure under what conditions the failure of memorisation is taking place. Is Kay’s indifference as a historian the actual outcome of the failures of memory and obvious lack of knowledge and theoretical reflection, or is her lack of know-

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ledge being simulated at certain points in order to emphasis the myth of neutrality? This question is particularly pertinent when we compare Kay’s surprising display of early medieval historical knowledge – ‘the best known shrines were at Santiago de Compostela on the route which led from England to Rome’9 – to her knowledge of modern and ubiquitous ‘media events’, such as President Kennedy’s assassination and the American moon landing. Strikingly she gets the dates of these two events wrong. This is not to say she shouldn’t get these dates wrong, but these errors look odd against the partial display of erudition elsewhere in the text. Accordingly, such slips allow the performativity of the writing to be interpreted in two ways: Either the book was written fast without much revision, or the finished text was then rewritten with added mistakes. To discover which path she took is not necessarily to make a value judgement, but to realise that the display of memory’s impotence is not just enacted here, but, indeed, actually performed. On this score there is an obvious point to be made about the intertextuality of the historical text, or any other social text for that matter: Kay’s historical narrative is a convocation of remembered lessons, reported speech, newspaper articles, film dialogue, tv narratives, and books, which are themselves, in turn, the composite remnants of remembered texts. But what is of principal interest about Worldview is not that it demonstrates the limits of historical objectivity as the limits of individual authorship – as if the whole project was an elaborate post-structuralist exercise in the fictiveness and contingency of signification – but, to return to my earlier remarks, that it invests an enormous amount of intellectual effort into the demonstration of intellectual failure. All intellectual work, in a sense, demonstrates this paradox in some capacity. But this is not something to which writers, intellectuals, and historians would willingly submit. It is hard to imagine a scholar, or anyone who takes their intellectual identity seriously, exposing himself or herself to memory’s impotence by publishing a text without recourse to any written aids and citations. In this way, Worldview uses the impotence of memory to field a number of questions about the function of intellectual expertise. One of the few critical functions that artists still possess is their access to modes of negation that deflate the conjunction between power and knowledge. This is because artists can lodge themselves into discourses without any social investment in those discourses. No one but an artist could have produced Worldview, because no one but an artist would have wanted to expose themselves to its intellectual embarrassments. Thus, Kay’s reworking of the notion of the amateur or autodidact is a reconfirmation of the deflationary powers of the

9 Kay 1999, p. 35.

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artist. Artists, that is, must of necessity make themselves masters of ‘failure’ in a culture where the truths of the dominant perform an ideological role of triumphant, positivistic elucidation (Aufklärung). In this sense, Kay’s employment of the impotence of memory can be seen as related, indirectly, to the politicisation of post-Freudian psychoanalysis. By recognising the failure of memory as an acceptance of insufficiency we are able to confront the problem of knowledge as a comedy of critical struggle, rather than as a tragedy of imperfect realisation. In this I detect a critical tension at play in Kay’s recourse to memorisation. As I outlined above, Kay’s engagement with memorisation seems inseparable from the trauma of knowledge. On one level, her employment of the impotence of knowledge is a direct response to the complexities of the contemporary division of labour and the power of intelligence machines. In her performance of failure – as in other contemporary art – there is a flight from formalised knowledge. This is her Lockean voice. But hidden in the performance of the failure of knowledge, in the deflation of knowledge’s triumphant elucidation, is a different understanding of pedagogy, one in which error is grounded in reason. If claims to knowledge could only be made where there was no possibility of error, communication between humans would be inconceivable. Yet the possibility of error is used, invariably, by those with intellectual power and authority to silence or subordinate those without such authority and power. Indeed, the fear of a making a mistake, of showing up one’s lack of knowledge, is one of the most powerful determinates of daily conversation, with its evasions, platitudes, and alienated civilities. This is because the sense of social exclusion who don’t pursue critical or theoretical knowledge is minimal compared to those who do try and fail.10 ‘I am not interested’, ‘I don’t want to know’, or, ‘that’s boring’, are invariably the self-protective responses of someone who knows the penalty and does not want to be humiliated. The shame attributed to the possibility of error is a powerful servant, therefore, of bourgeois ideologies of spontaneous knowledge and populist ‘folk-thinking’. As such, the fear of error is a means of socialising people out of certain critical intellectual skills into an acceptance of prevailing anti-intellectual and conformist ideologies. Recognising the intimacy between the pursuit of knowledge and the acknowledgement and acceptance of error can be liberating, therefore, insofar as it can expose the linguistic and ideological self-protection that dominates everyday discourse. This in turn means addressing ourselves to something that Jacques Rancière has pursued in his extensive writing on working-class autodidacticism: there is

10

See Pateman 1975.

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no hierarchy of intellectual capacity that says who, or who is not, capable of the pursuit of knowledge. ‘Emancipation is becoming conscious of this equality’ in nature.11 The pursuit of knowledge, in other words, is not simply an acquaintance with ideas, but is an attribute of social practice. On this basis we should all try writing a history of the world from memory.

11

Rancière 1991, p. 27.

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Trickster: Performativity and Critique in Rod Dickinson’s Crop-Circles Since 1991 Rod Dickinson has been involved in making crop-circles with other artists and with friends.1 Under the cover of darkness, armed with string, simple wooden planks and an outline of their design, the group enter the field along the seed lines, taking care to avoid any crop damage. Once in position – far away from potential surveillance from the edge of the field – they work fast by moonlight, working to a prearranged pattern, completing the design by sunrise.2 Over the years these designs have become more complex, putting enormous strain on the group to finish the circles under darkness. This is risky, for there is now a ‘price’ on the heads of crop-circle makers. Pressure is being exerted by the National Farmers Union on local farming communities to prevent what is seen as a major irritant during the summer, although farmers themselves are not too keen to get involved directly as there are large amounts of money to be made opening up their fields to paying tourists. Moreover, there is some support from the ufo and crop-circle research – or Cerealogy – community itself for the ‘hoaxers’ to be exposed. (As yet no one in Britain has been caught, no one arrested). For what divides the crop-circle watching community more than anything else is the division between the ‘hoaxes’ and the so-called authentic circles, those circles that are claimed by the Cerealogists to be made without human intervention. These designs, according to ‘expert’ opinion, are those which could not possibly have been completed in darkness within a few hours. In Britain these complex designs are invariably produced by Dickinson and his helpers: the ‘dna Double Helix’, the ‘Koch snowflake’ and the ‘Julia-set fractal’ amongst recent ones. In the Cerealogist literature any suggestion that these designs were made by humans is met with incredulity and passionate denunciation. In fact a great deal of ‘scientific’ evidence is marshalled to prove non-human intervention, for instance: changes in the cell structure of flattened stalks; consistent absence of entrance marks to the fields; alleged malfunctioning of electronic equipment

1 First published in a shorter version as ‘Trickster’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol 22, No 1, 1999. 2 The personnel of the crop-circle team changes on a regular basis; however, since 1994 Dickinson has worked in close collaboration with the artist and website designer John Lundberg.

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in or near the circles; migrating birds swerving away from the fields; observation and photographing of unexplained lights over the circles; positive or deleterious changes to people’s metabolism or state of being inside or near the circle.3 This list is not exhaustive, but it gives a clear sense of what is of central importance for the Cerealogists: crop-circles are evidence of inexplicable forces which signal the wider impact of extra-terrestrial communications or paranormal intrusion in life on earth. When Dickinson began making circles he was entering a tradition that was at least fifteen years old. In Britain the first circles were made by Dave Chorley (who died in 1997) and Doug Bower (who died in 2018) in the early 1970s. Begun initially as an enthusiastic response to the early convergence of New Age environmentalism and Ufology, their producers soon became locked into outwitting the ‘true believers’. In effect Chorley and Bower had initiated a new folk tradition of temporal ‘art events’. Drawing on country lore and mystical symbols, they created the raw materials for a new paranormal mythology. It was the obvious success of this process of mythologising which attracted Dickinson. With little physical effort and little financial outlay, Chorley and Bower were able to find an audience, and eventually a critical public, for their circles. But in a sense this is to make Dickinson’s debt to their work too formal. For Dickinson came to the crop-circles armed with post-Situationist theories of art and social intervention, modern media theory and a postconceptualist critique of the art institution, and not just a love of the English countryside and a passion for deception and a ‘good joke’. Yet, despite this, it is the very anonymous status of Chorley’s and Bower’s, and all the other crop-circle work in this period, that provided a basis for Dickinson’s art: to rethink crop-circle making as the basis for an enquiry into the conditions of modern mythology. The anonymity of crop-circle-making provides a perfect metonym for a critique of artistic authorship and artistic value, but in a social setting which remains outside of the intellectual context of the art institution. This is because as a crop-circle maker Dickinson is able to operate without any of the constraints of appearing not to be an artist. The circles are, first and foremost, made for a non-art public made of Ufologists, Cerealogists, New Agers, and tourists, etc. There is no question, therefore, of the circles being seen as a ‘second-order’ artistic activity before their primary validation as ‘unexplained phenomena’. That is, Dickinson produces crop-circles within a tradition of amateur art practice which makes no substantive claims for the artistic self-consciousness of his activities. In fact, amongst amateur practioners such as Chorley and Bower,

3 Talbot 1996/7.

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the most important thing worth attending to was whether the circles had been noted and categorised by the Cerealogists. In this Dickinson stepped into a rich tradition of amateur art, which has the power, as with earlier forms of folk art, to secure intellectual and aesthetic investment on the part of an enthusiastic non-specialist public. But if all Dickinson wanted to do was make a new folk art, if all he wanted to do was leave the art institution behind in the name of some spurious populism, then his activities would rightly be dismissed as opportunist and crass. What is significant about the crop-circles phenomenon is, paradoxically, their invisibility as amateur art, or otherwise, within the paranormal literature. For with the unwillingness or failure of the crop-circle writers to attend to the realities of human agency, the notion of the crop-circle or ‘Conceptual art’ becomes the absent cause of their arguments. This produces a cleavage which is highly suggestive in the discussion of ideology and modern cultural division. What is laid claim to as a modern folk art by its early practioners, is overlooked or dismissed by the Cerealogists because of their overwhelming desire as ‘true believers’ to affirm the extra-human origins of the circles. Hence what is important about the crop-circle phenomenon for Dickinson is not just its status as a modern folk practice, but its cultural reception and misperception. That Cerealogist writers are prepared to argue for either the extraterrestrial or paranormal creation of the circles is not simply perverse, but culturally significant, pointing to needs and desires which modern forms of rationalism cannot meet. Crop-circle writers can loosely be divided into two main camps: those who believe that the circles are produced by extraterrestrial forces, and those who believe they are produced by paranormal forces. The latter also include those who believe the circles are the result of ‘energy points’ on the earth’s surface. What both camps share, however, is a belief in the spiritual importance of these manifestations. This is reinforced by the fact that all the major cropcircles – on the whole those made by Dickinson, such as the ‘dna Double Helix’, ‘Julia-set fractal’ and ‘Koch snow flake’ – were made in Wiltshire, the home of English paganism and New Age mythology. Covered in barrows, standing stones, tumuli and other earthworks (such as Silbury Hill), and numerous pathways, the area is claimed to be connected by an ancient network of sight lines. It is home, moreover, to a number of famous chalk horses (geolyphs), such as the Alton Barnes White Horse (cut in 1812),4 which are etched into the county’s hillsides. Wiltshire, therefore, is a rich palimpest of ancient myth and 4 Most were cut at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century; the Uffington White horse in Oxfordshire, however, is reputedly to have been cut at the end of the Bronze age (circa 1200bce).

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historical record, a place pitted with arcane signs and significant premodern remains. Crop-circles and ancient standing stones and tumuli form a symbolic and metaphysical continuum. This melange of pagan history and reflection on the occult is a product largely of the 1970s, when Alfred Watkins’ analysis of ancient ley lines (Anglo-Saxon for cleared strips of land) in The Old Straight Track (1925)5 was rediscovered and formed part of the countercultural revival of Celtic fairy lore (fairy paths) and the developing interest in the new earth sciences. This in turn became the basis, after the publication of John Michell’s infamous and Watkins-inspired The View Over Atlantis (1969), for a New Age, Aquarian Earth Mysteries cult in England; Michell later co-founding and editing the crop-circle magazine The Cerealogist.6 Transmuting Watkins’ speculative ethnographic fieldwork into evidence of an ancient sacred geometry, Michell held the ley lines and other ancient markings to be ‘energy centres’ (places of magnetic force). And Wiltshire appeared to possess more of these lines and markings than other counties, making it the favoured place – for the followers of Michell and Watkins at least – to research the new ‘Earth Mysteries’; and, also one of the favoured homes of ufo ‘sightings’. As one theory of the 1960s ufo phenomenon put it: spacecraft were attracted to places such as Wiltshire because of the predominance of its magnetic pathways, which they used for navigation! It is no surprise that Dickinson and his colleagues chose to work here, for the location allows the crop-circles to enter a preexisting system of mythopoeic and occult lore. Thus when Dickinson produced the enormously complicated ‘fractal’ or ‘Julia-set’ design in a field adjacent to Stonehenge, the literature was quick to assume, given the occult importance of Stonehenge, that some extraterrestrial intelligence was trying to establish a significant connection between the two. This assumption is echoed in the way the cerealogist literature analyses the crop-circle designs, claiming that ancient site lines and standing stones and crop-circles not only share ‘unexplained’ energy levels, but, in the language of Michell, also display a sacred geometry.7 Moreover, in some instances where obvious icons of modern science are concerned, such as the ‘Julia-set’, this ‘sacred geometry’ is stretched to include the non-linear theories of nature of the New Physics, as if the earth was producing its own computer printout.

5 Watkins 1974. 6 Michell 1969. Michell was an old Etonian, anti-modernist, monarchist, right-wing ‘counterculturalist,’ redemptionist millenarian, ethno-segregationist, and (anti-Christian) creationist, and in 1976, the editor of The Hip Pocket Hitler, a collection of Hitler quotes. 7 Lyons 1996/7.

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What is absent in this literature is any awareness that the crop-circle makers are mirroring back to the ‘true believers’ their own mythologies, knowledges and histories. Dickinson is as well versed in the historical lore and occult beliefs of the Cerealogists and Ufologists as the writers themselves. This makes his interventions extremely context-sensitive, as the crop-circles are made with the desires, fantasies and occult ‘knowledges’ of the ‘true-believers’ in mind. They are not ironic. Thus if the complexity of the recent designs is partly a response to Dickinson’s own technical and aesthetic ambitions, it is also a way of upping the ante in response to the Cerealogists theories. This play-off between producer and consumer, mythologiser and believer, is at one level very similar to the practices and rhetorics of art and its theory. Hence in a strange mutation of classic avant-garde practice, Dickinson attempts to outmanoeuvre, or undermine, the claims and expectations of those theories that would seek to explain or predict the crop-circle designs. Concomitantly, there is also a sense in which the pronounced anti-materialism of the Cerealogist theories is ventriloquising the idealism and special pleading of much art criticism – a set of practices which are notoriously malleable ideologically in the face of economic pressure, institutional framing and personal flattery. But if this is something to be borne in mind when reading the crop-circle literature, this is not what is of primary interest about the play-off, or co-presence, of mythologiser and Cerealogist. For Dickinson’s crop-circles enact one of the most widespread psychological conditions to be found in late capitalist culture: iatrogenesis, or co-dependence. In the therapy-situation between doctor and patient it is common to witness a process of narrative suggestiveness on the part of the doctor come to shape and define the patient’s illness in concordance with the social expectations of the illness itself. Thus the symptoms of the hysteric or neurotic can easily be produced out of the therapy situation – as Freud balefully recognised towards the end of his life. There is a strong evidence for this in the current outbreak of hysterical epidemics and imaginary illnesses (chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple personality disorder, recovered memory of sexual abuse). Multiple personality disorder is highly significant in this respect. Between 1922 and 1972 there were less than 50 cases documented in the medical literature.8 Today, particularly in the US, there are thousands of such cases, due largely to the popularisation of an alternative therapy culture in conjunction with a professionally aggressive psychotherapy. What this largely affirmative therapy culture has created, on the basis of this growth of cases, is a widespread and

8 See Showalter 1997, p. 161.

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unprecedented permission for individuals to provide a narrative of their own unhappiness and disappointments. It is not that this unhappiness and disappointment is necessarily imaginary – far from it – but that the symptoms of these patients are either medicalised or projected onto an external agency, placing more and more individuals in positions of victim and accuser. As therapy culture widens, and as patients become more susceptible in psychotherapy to the narrative suggestions of the analyst, iatrogenesis conjoins symbiotically with other agendas (such as forms of radical feminism, conspiracy theories – particularly those related to the state and ‘mind control’ and the medical profession – and evangelical religious beliefs). In effect, the patient learns to tell his or her story from the ‘healing’ narratives that are publicly disseminated by the therapists, extending and reinforcing the story in the therapy session. This is, no more nor less, than the mediatisation of illnesses. What is produced, in other words, is an unprecedented closed loop of believers who learn from real sufferers and who then go on to produce, mimetically, more believers. This phenomenon might also be extended to include the huge increase in the number of alien abductees in the US, who shape their neuroses and fantasies in the form of narratives learnt from fictional abductions and the imaginary abduction stories of other believers.9 The overall result of this is an extraordinary diffusion and dissemination and mongrelisation of therapy stories, as patients live out the confusions, paranoias, or threats of the moment. In this way the exponential rise of these symptoms can be seen less as a dysfunctional epidemic, or evidence of widespread irrationality, but, in accordance with a post-Freudian definition of hysteria, as an oblique form of communication, and therefore, as Elaine Showalter has argued, as a ‘cultural symptom of anxiety and stress’.10 Hysterical syndromes are not marginal and prone to appear in the weak and feeble, but are part of everyday experience, suggesting that their current increase gives an indication of rising levels of internalised fear, anxiety and crisis. Hysteria, in this respect, is a mimetic disorder, in which the individual ventriloquises culturally acceptable expressions of distress. This is why patients increasingly present their symptoms in the way therapists shape and define them, as this allows the patient to give a legitimate or accultured voice to their feelings of anxiety. The process of iatrogenesis, however, is rarely seen as a crucible of fiction-making in the new therapy culture, because the treatment of hysteria as a cultural phenomenon is invariably subsumed under the rubric of ‘self help’ and personal growth and

9 10

See Bullard 1989, pp. 147–70. Showalter 1997, p. 9.

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redemption, placing as it does a high degree of emphasis upon authentic firstperson recollections and the authority of confessional speech. These symptoms of hysteria are thus detached from any examination of the wider social and cultural forces that shape and sustain the proliferation and diversification of these experiental narratives. Iatrogenesis, in other words, is a suggestive way of accounting for how the narrativisation of anxiety in our culture is produced. For it allows us to see the production and reception of Dickinson’s crop-circles as being closely modelled on the process of co-dependence. The function of the cure in psychoanalysis, in contrast, is to resist this co-dependence or transference, in order to dissociate the desire of the patient from the desire and approval of the analyst. In popular forms of psychotherapy, however, this process of resistance in the therapy session is not as strenuous, insofar as the analyst offers narrative pointers and stories that connect the patient to various plausible interpretations of the patient’s condition; it is not the job of the therapist to resist his or her status as the ‘love object’ and source of knowledge for the patient; this is far too ‘time consuming’. In this way the relationship between the analyst and patient in psychotherapy follows the ideological expectation that the therapist knows, and, consequently, psychotherapy provides far more of a consultatory dialogue than in psychoanalysis; as a result some forms of psychotherapy easily replicate the co-dependent conditions of the ‘master-subject’ relation: namely, the construction of belief out of the desire to believe, based, that is, on faith and the acceptance of authority. It is this that interests Dickinson: the link between co-dependency in therapy and in ideology; the condition (the phenomenon) is created out of the interaction between the analyst (artist) and the patient (believer). Dickinson the artist, as such, recruits the ‘true-believer’ by providing a plausible setting in which preexisting expectations and desires of the true-beliver can be confirmed and cathected. These expectations take the form, then, of speculations and hypotheses which produce the desire to give meaning and reality to the crop-circles on the part of those who believe in, or want to believe, in them. If this process is, as I have said, not ironic, neither is it cynical. Dickinson is not interested in how easily people are duped, but in how far the irrational is embedded in modernity, and, therefore, in how normative these processes of co-dependency are in a culture whose claims to reason and enlightenment are held to be self-evident. This places Dickinson’s work self-consciously within a particular postFreudian tradition of engagement with the irrational and ideological. Until Antonio Gramsci, and later Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Marxist debates on ideology – derived largely from a very partial reading of Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology – equated the irrational with ‘false conscious-

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ness’ with ideas that were insensible and chimerical and opposed to the longterm rational interests of the subject. But by the 1930s, with developments in psychoanalysis and a greater social understanding of consciousness as conflictual and divided, the idea of ideology as an opaque veil increasingly came under critical scrutiny. Men and women are not subject to a life of illusion through an inattentive submission to dominant ideological forces and the irrational, but, rather, continually contest, negotiate or adapt to these forces in the realm of ideas and representations. This is commonly referred to as the ‘lived relations’ or cultural model of ideology in which dominant ideology is equated with the conflictual production and reproduction of everyday practices, forms and ideas, and as such is attached to a sense of dominant ideology as itself fractured or unstable, that is, something that is internalised in a discontinuous and disharmonious fashion, given the gap between people’s perception of the real conditions of their lives and the ruling ideas of capitalism; it is through this gap that the negotiation with, or contest of, dominant ideological forces occurs. But this sense of ideology as the working through of the subject’s relationship to ‘capitalist common sense’, does not provide any kind of epistemological stability. To experience the inconsistencies or possible fragility of dominant ideology, does not mean, that people are willing to act on this knowledge, or even take any pleasure from its emancipatory possibilties. On the contrary, they may simply want a different vantage point – a vantage point congruent with their own interests – from which to enter into a relationship with this ruling ideology, and the jouissance it provides. Moreover, this may be construed as being wholly rational, even though it would appear to undermine or weaken their own rational self-interests and the claims of science. This is why the ‘lived relations’ model of ideology takes as axiomatic Freud’s hypothesis that consciousness is opaque to its unconscious workings and social effects, despite what people assume they are doing or saying in good confidence (that is, given their limited knowledge, class position, vested interests and unconscious desires). On this basis the ‘lived relations’ model of ideology assumes that struggles within ideology and against ideology are the outcome of a fundamental process of misrecognition, or rather, the result of the inevitable gap between intention and outcome. The relationship between the subject who ‘knows’ or assumes ‘to know’ is never congruent with truth and self-knowledge as such. It is this ‘open’ approach to ideology that is found both in Jacques Lacan’s and Louis Althusser’s Lacanian reworking of Freud in the 1960s and Adorno’s reworking of Freud in the 1940s and 1950s. The function of ideology should not be understood in terms of imposition, falsification, mystification – as that which renders the subject ‘mute’ and passive – but as the unstable domain of belief and identification, in which

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the effects of domination and power actually encode suppressed needs, wants and desires that are not easily assuaged through exposure to rational reflection. In this respect there is a significant shift in this writing in the understanding of the relationship between reason and rationality; although ideologies may contain or promote falsehoods, the acceptence of these ideologies is not necessarily an irrational process for those who invest in them. Indeed, such ideologies may express real needs and desires, and as such create and promote legitimate pleasures, and even, on occasions, open up spaces of resistance to critical and scientific theories that appear to weaken the subject’s pleasure. It is this model that has come to dominate current debates on ideology and the irrational, particularly in the work of Slavoj Žižek, who, following a postFreudian model of ideological interpellation, closes down the gap theoretically between ideology and reality.11 If ideology is not the realm of abject illusion, neither is it simply a place where ideas simply get fought out on an objective basis (as if with the right guidance, an ideology with a greater rational quotient might be assured greater support than another with a lower quotient). Rather ideology functions as a phantasmagoric support for reality itself. In other words: once we begin to talk about ideology and pleasure (and displeasure), ideology no longer becomes an external imposition, but is co-extensive and co-present with the operations of fantasy, and as such, forms a living (and conflictual) relationship to reason as a process of self-ascription (i.e. this is true and believable because it gives me pleasure, and therefore true and believable for me). Reason, consequently, is indivisible from desire. The rational and irrational are interlinked. This, in effect, is a version of Althusser’s interpellation driven into the arms of what Žižek calls, following Lacan, the surplus of enjoyment (or surplus-jouissance) – played out in the notion of ideas as ideological investments. Without doubt there are substantive problems with the ‘open’ model of ideology. By expelling the idea of false consciousness and the function of epistemology in the philosophy of the subject, we assume that the gap between the subject ‘who knows’ and self-knowledge leaves no trace of a knowledge that might be more than a symptom of misrecognition. The fact that the subject is not transparent to itself does not mean that it can only act inchoately; if so there would be no possibility of an emancipartory politics or science.12 Nevertheless, significantly, this ‘open’ model of ideology, importantly, allows us to

11 12

Žižek 1989. See for example, Latour 1987.

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think the irrational rationalistically. That is it allows us to move – as Showalter does in her analysis of modern hysteria, and as Adorno does in his discussion of astrology in the 1950s – to a position where the discussion of the irrational is immanent to the reproduction of lived relations and the everyday, rather than its aberrant and extraneous other. As Adorno says in his analysis of the Los Angeles Times astrology column ‘The Stars Down to Earth’ (1952–3), irrational beliefs may ‘result from the processes of rational self-preservation’.13 Thus, astrology for Adorno importantly contains a pseudo-rational advocacy of human agency, despite its overarching subsumption of human behaviour under the benign – and not so benign – influence of the planets. Indeed, this is the very success of astrology, for without this minimal ‘encouragement of people to take decisions’14 for themselves, readers would derive little narcissistic gratification from its entreaties, that is, from surplus-jouissance. Hence: under conditions of mass representative democracy, people may feel that they have little power, but they certainly do not want to be told so. Cannily, then, astrology invokes the Fates whilst stepping back from a crude fatalism. This core of the ‘rational’ is, of course, the result of the subtle work of the astrologist who carefully appeals to the problems and disappointments of their readers without demeaning them as victims or dupes. In this respect, Adorno argues, there is a deeper set of instincts at play which focus on how and why the reasoning of the irrational remains functional under modernity. The irrational is what Freud calls a residue of prehistorical animalistic practices, which, in a culture where such gratifications are held in check by the powerful social reinforcement of ego controls, releases a host of repressed affects and emotional needs. But this dependency is never strictly what it seems, because it can only enact its disavowals of reason, science and materialism via an acknowledgement of the benefits (of at least some) of science’s secular claims and achievements. The result, is what Adorno describes as a form of bi-phasic dissonance, in which the subject believes something in spite of overwhelming counter-evidence, because there is good reason to believe it – insofar as it is ‘good for me’, as defined above. In fact, it is possible to go one step further and note the development of what Peter Sloterdijk calls ‘enlightened false consciousness’, openly cynical defences of contradiction.15 ‘I may accept the advances of science, cel-

13

14 15

Adorno 1994, p. 34. In the 1950s Carl Jung also became interested in modern manifestations of the paranormal. See Jung 1977. Jung’s description of ufo sightings as ‘visionary rumours’ is built on a conservative view of the psyche as the repression of the mythic unconscious. The sightings become compensatory projections of ‘spiritual wholeness’. Adorno 1994, p. 44. Sloterdijk 1988.

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ebrate them even, but I defend astrology, because it’s harmless and a laugh’. Adorno himself barely considers this as a possibility in his analysis of the la Times readership. This certainly has something to do with the limitations of his method – he assumes a homogeneity of response to the la Times column – but it also reflects the limited self-conscious expression of this cynicism during the period he was writing. Today ‘enlightened false consciousness’ – after the defeats of the left and the libertarian commodification of 1960s counterculture – is the dominant ideology of the new middle class. Blairism incarnate. ‘I may believe in free education for all, but I will send my children to private school anyway’. Dickinson’s crop-circles are a product of and response to these ideological conditions, and, as such, it is through the operations of iatrogenesis that they stage their primary forms of dependency. His work goes to the heart, consequently, of a bi-phasic tension between the irrational and rational within mature capitalism. For what his work is also concerned to draw out is the huge intellectual and affective investment made on the part of the crop-circle writers in the lore and mythology of the crop-circles through the work of science itself. For all the implausibility of their hypotheses, the Cerealogists use the procedures of scientific field-work and analysis to ‘verify’ their findings. The result is a disarming paradox: the truth of the circles may, ultimately, be inexplicable to human reason, but nonetheless it is human reason that will eventually prove this. In this sense the full implication of Dickinson’s work in revealed only with the presentation of the literature and photo-documentation of the crop-circles in the gallery – articles are taken directly from the crop-circle and occult magazines and exhibited on notice boards along with photographs bought from professional crop-circle photographers. As a result the sheer profusion of this material provides an immediate visual fix on how extensive the network of ‘scientific’ analysts and helpers actually is. Would-be professional scientists and amateurs rub shoulders together. This activity may be pseudoscience, or ‘semi-erudition’ as Adorno might put it,16 but the extent to which it produces a culture of believers is, as with the social impact of astrology, evidence of that surplus enjoyment which the mechanisms of ideology enact. It would at the same time be foolish, then, to assume that Dickinson does not recognize the attractions of this enjoyment, for in producing the crop-circles he also recognises his own pleasure in the production of the enjoyment of others. With this Dickinson is not out to shame his interlocutors – even if this might seem the inevitable outcome – but to show how the pleasures of the irrational

16

Adorno 1994, p. 119.

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produce their ‘rational’ effects culturally, for in Dickinson’s complicity with the irrational he reveals the means by which the power of the irrational is made manifest. In these terms his work is distinguished by its extension and reworking of a much older tradition of artistic engagement with the irrational and the rational: the late nineteenth-century practice of using photography in order to fake paranormal manifestations. If Dickinson’s crop-circles openly identify with their hidden amateur legacy as heterodox artworks, his general subterfuge and game-playing identifies his art as part of a wider amateur tradition of artist-tricksters working on the edges of science. This is the artist as illusionist and mountebank, who – in applying new technologies and optics via popular forms of entertainment – is able to produce complex illusions in the interests of a ‘science’ of the paranormal. With the advent by the end of the nineteenth century of the telegraph, the telephone and photography – technologies characterised by their embodiment of the invisible – it was believed that the ‘spirit world’ existed in a parallel universe. Moreover, it was also believed that with the right equipment and through the hypersensitive senses of a gifted medium, communication channels could be opened up to this world. As the new technologies became the harbingers of the ‘spiritual life’ for believers, the technologies in turn were employed by illusionists to create a world that was said to exist just beyond the grasp of the senses.17 From the 1860s in Europe and the USA there emerged a professional photography of staged apparitions, in which the photographer, the scientist and the female medium – who acted as the embodiment of the spirits – colluded in the production of photographic documentation of things and persons from ‘beyond the grave’.18 Developing out of the Spiritualist movement of the 1840s, photographers employed the positivistic ‘truth claims’ of the new photography to announce the inexplicable power of photographic technique to render the invisible visible. Ghostly after-images, ectoplasmic clouds and spurts and other expulsive manifestations became the stock-in-trade of this staged photography. This generated not only a sizable following of ‘truebelievers’,19 but a learned Spiritualist literature in which the tricks employed

17 18 19

For a discussion of the telephone and Spiritualism see Ronell 1989. See Gunning 1995. For a discussion of Spiritualism and the early working-class movement, see Barrow 1986. The popularity of spiritualism, spiritualist photography and seances in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century has been described as a ‘war widow’ phenomenon in Britain. With the death of so many young men in so many imperial conflicts and wars during this period, spiritualism produced a

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by the photographers (double exposures mainly) were taken at face value. As with contemporary crop-circle literature, a similar picture emerges of the irrational ‘reasoned’. But if this history allows Dickinson to treat his own moves as belonging to a popular tradition of illusions, it also allows us to connect this image of the trickster to its artistic role in modernism.20 That is, the trickster-as-illusionist takes on a broader critical function once it is attached to the modernist critique of authorship and artistic identity. This is why this tradition is not as marginal as it first appears, for the illusionism of spiritualist manifestations and photography fed directly into early modernism’s obsession with the negation of aesthetic naturalism, and, in turn, the rejection of the confusion between the would-be sincerity and emotional attachment of the artist to the particulars of nature and truth in art. Both Marcel Duchamp and André Breton were fascinated by spiritualist activities and fake spiritual photography, and what this implied for the creation of the ‘critical illusion’ and the dissolution of the artist as expressive subject. For Breton the seance allowed for the production of the same kind of unconscious ‘intelligence’ as did automatic writing.21 The artist might perform the workings of the unconscious or stage an illusion, in order to faciliate a truth or experience that has nothing to do with the expressive transformation of materials. The artist is a detached concept-user; a fabricator of intellectual conundrums that confront the bourgeois art audience’s overinvestment in the myth of sovereign creativity. But if Dickinson is fascinated by the trickster because of its destablisation of artistic identity, he is not interested in using illusionism as a way of outwitting his audience. This is where his post-Freudian trickster meets the demands of postconceptual art practice. Dickinson’s faking of the paranormal identifies his trickster not just as an illusionist, as someone whose principal interest is in prestidigitation, but as a corrupting presence within preexisting value systems.

20 21

co-dependence between wives and lovers, seeking contact with their dead loved ones and the spiritualists, who, compelled by the effects of mass grief, were desperate to assuage these longings. Indeed, after wwi there was an outpouring of spiritualist literature and ‘scientific’ apologias for seances and the supernatural. One of the leading supernatural advocates was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who devoted most of his writing after 1920, until his death in 1930, to spiritualism. See in particular The Coming of the Fairies (1922) (a defence of spiritualist photography and the Cottingley faked fairy photographs, taken by two young girls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, in 1917) and The History of Spiritualism (1926). For a brief discussion of the trickster as artist, see Dickinson 1998. See Breton 1997. For an interesting anecdotal account of the connections between surrealism and the occult, see also Polizzotti 1995.

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The idea of the postconceptual trickster as a corrupting presence is not strictly the same as Duchamp’s ironist or Breton’s lover of dissemblance, although both artists use surrogate forms of production (the readymade) to corrupt the idea that the artist is subjectively self-identical with his or her art. The postconceptual trickster, however, is far closer to the surrogate artist Hank Herron, the imaginary American, Frank Stella-like artist immortalised in Gregory Battock’s Idea Art in 1973.22 For what emerges after Conceptual art’s dismantling and deflation of the artist’s self-image under the spectacle of both mass culture and the art market is a new dramaturgical relationship between what artists aspire to do in the name of artistic autonomy and in response to the alienation of artists’ labour and identity. Artists in a sense internalise the alienation of their products as a condition of being able to speak truthfully of the conditions under which they labour and signify. One of the possible critical functions opened up to the artist, in this respect, is the self-conscious dramatisation of his or her own commodified identity and social marginality. By turning the artist’s general modernist confrontation with the administrative power of the modern art institution and the culture industry into the staging of the processes and effects of the art institution and the culture industry, this simulation becomes the manifest content of the work. Herron’s ‘authorship’, then, provides, an interesting corollary for the ambitions of Dickinson’s trickster. Hank Herron was a fake, but through the article in Idea Art his work entered the public discourse of post-minimalism, and therefore took on an extended life, fuelling the rumour that Herron was actually based on a living artist. Thus, despite the uncertainty over Herron’s existence, Herron’s ‘virtual work’ and ‘virtual biography’ continue as historical events. As an extant text the ‘virtuality’ of Herron’s authorship is transformed into a first-order theoretical practice which is able to generate further theoretical reflection. In this sense, where does the identity of the author of the essay and Hank Herron’s ‘authorship’ begin and end? Herron’s work may have been invented by a pseudonymous writer (Cheryl Bernstein, the single pseudonym of the art historian Carol Duncan in collaboration with actor Andrew Duncan), but it continues to have meaning as the imaginary/critical practice produced by the two authors. This decentres the authorial authenticity of the embodiment of the artwork as a physical object: an imaginary set of artworks are no less able to produce discursive effects in the world than a set of actual, physical and displayable works. Dickinson’s cropcircles are therefore not faked in this sense, he is not trying to disguise his

22

Bernstein 1973.

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authorship behind a pseudonym or claim to have done something he hasn’t done. We know Dickinson to exist as the (co-)maker of the crop-circles. But like the producer of Herron’s imaginary paintings his clandestine authorship nevertheless establishes an ambiguous relationship between the art, the name and origins of its author and the work’s reception. For those who read the cropcircles as art, Dickinson’s authorship is a non-contentious possibility, given the available knowledge of the history of crop-circle making in Britain in the 1990s. The majority of his non-art world audience, however, who are not willing to read the work as art or anything like it, openly dispute his authorship. This leaves the reception of the work in a critically unstable position between two different publics. Dickinson’s postconceptual trickster is, consequently, corrupting, precisely because his ambiguous identity as an artist, stemming from the production of the crop-circles, allows him to penetrate the processes of modern mythology ‘under cover’. The clandestine authorship is transformed into an objective, disruptive force outside its initial conditions of production, which means ultimately outside his artistic control. In this way Dickinson’s crop-circles and fake ufo photographs function essentially as a kind of virus within the belief systems of the Cerealogists. By dint of their extraordinary success as icons for believers, the revealed ‘uncertainty’ of their origins remains a troublesome anomaly, reflected in the literature’s constant return to the threat of the ‘hoax’. No Cerealogist wants to be told the crop-circles are the work of artists. And, in turn, this is where Dickinson’s post-Freudian trickster meets up with situational aesthetics. What is of primary concern for Dickinson is how the production of the crop-circles, and their representation in the Cerealogist literature and media, provides us with a knowledge of the ‘irrational reasoned’ in everyday life through a participation in its processes. Situational aesthetics broadly can be defined as those installation-based practices which exclude the expressive authorial presence of the artist from the exhibition space, and as such, disconnects the artist’s skills and interests from the manipulation and transformation of medium-specific forms. Derived from both Situationism’s and Conceptual art’s defence of art as a site-specific intervention, it views the artwork as a disruption or resignification of a preexisting extra-artistic or artistic field of reference. For example, this might take the form of the artist producing a work in situ in a public gallery or museum in conflict or tension with the notion of the art institution as a place where quality is neutrally administered by curators and gallery directors; reflection on the determining role of the art institution to create and control meaning and thereby establish value becomes the content of the work. In this way, we might describe Michael Asher’s and Hans Haacke’s museum installations of the

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1970s and 1980s as situational: above all else they promote the idea of the artist as a genealogical investigator into the power of the art institution as an arbiter of judgement. The situational artwork derives its symbolic and semiotic material from the managerial functions, work practices, architectural structure and pedagogic identity of the institution, which through a process of critical and judicious juxtaposition and superimposition of materials, exposes the wouldbe liberal ‘neutrality’ of the museum’s modes of display to reflection and contestation inside the institution.23 One of the characteristics of situational aesthetics is an emphasis on reading interrelationally from one element to another, from one context to another (from the artistic to the extra-artistic, from the extra-artistic to the artistic, from the historical to the contemporary). The modes of attention employed are inevitably discursive and interrogative. As such, Dickinson’s non-linear presentation of his photo-documentation and crop-circle literature, along with video material of the crop-circles, drawings and websites, recognises the value of this critical legacy. By making montages of pre-determined, non-authored elements, ‘author’s meaning’ is subordinate to social meaning; the demands of reading (and listening) take precedence over matters of aesthetic judgement and the subjectivity of the artist. But what makes this process in Dickinson’s work very different from the museum-oriented version of this paradigm is the voice of the trickster itself. Dickinson’s ‘situational’ voice is that of someone who is self-consciously complicit, indeed active, in the production of the ideological processes in which the work is embedded. He provides, therefore, a set of motivations and cultural references for a discussion of cultural division, commodification, ideology and the public role of the art institution which are rarely encountered in the ‘critically transparent’ museum installations of postconceptual art in the 1980s.

23

In the case of Asher this takes the form of the serialised presentation of items taken from the museum itself, as for example in his 1991 Pompidou show where he removed all the page markers from books in the psychology section of the museum’s Bibliotheque Publique into the contemporary galleries. After the exhibition the elements were dispersed or destroyed, preventing the installation from yielding any exchange value. In Haacke’s work the serialised presentation of photographs and texts on subjects bear directly on the corporate interests of the institution in which the work is being shown. These function dissonantly as a reminder of the speciousness of the art institution’s claims to neutrality and as a challenge to the would-be restful pleasures of aesthetic contemplation, as in the extended sequential form of the Shapolsky real estate series, Shapolsky et al, Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May, 1971 (1971). In Haacke’s case, however, the sequence of photographs and texts exist as discrete works for further exhibition and sale. See Asher 1983, and Haacke et al. 1986. For a discussion of their work see Gintz 1993.

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As an artist who is interested in far more than the critique of the conventional ‘exhibition code’, Dickinson’s use of the trickster-illusionist presents a picture of someone trying to work through some of the problems of 1980s museum-based situational aesthetics. For the situational aesthetics of museum-artists, such as Asher and Haacke, have not escaped the idealist legacy of postconceptualism’s anti-institutional critique: the over-identification of social transformation through art with the transformation of modes of exhibition and spectatorship. In the 1980s such micropolitical strategies achieved a certain amount of critical purchase and prominence as the art institution came under attack for its racial, sexual and gendered exclusions and hierachies, this time from critical postmodern theory. The outcome, however, has been the incorporation of these anti-aesthetic modes of exhibition display into the postmodern transformation of the museum. Such efforts at ‘internal critique’ have been easily brought into line with the new managerial radicalism of the late 1980s and 1990s; situational aesthetics and site-specific practice have become the house style of the new postmodern museum. For a new generation of artists, therefore, who compare the corresponding critical claims of the work with its radical success, the critical value and aesthetic goals of museum-based situational strategies have appeared disappointing and problematic. Indeed, most critiques of the ‘exhibition code’ from within the museum itself have seemed limply virtuous, part of a cultural politics that has become as bureaucratically self-administering as the work of the institutions themselves. Dickinson’s adoption of the trickster-illusionist is not a solution to these problems. But by adopting the role of the trickster as critical illusionist Dickinson is able to perform the effects of cultural division and modern myth from within the spaces of popular culture and popular ‘science’ itself, rather than simply announce the consequences of their effects (as ‘artistic research’) for a museum or gallery-going audience. If this in turn produces an interesting set of problems for the true-believer visitor to the crop-circles and the reader of paranormal literature, it also sets up an interesting viewing relationship for the sceptic and true-believer alike in the gallery and museum; the gallery viewers are presented with a complex array of documentary and scientific materials which have already been mediated culturally as the ‘paranormal’. Before the crop-circles enter the gallery as art their value has already been established by the media as evidence of ‘inexplicable phenomena’. The result is that the acceptance or rejection of the mythological content of the materials is dependent on a primary process of cultural mediation before the materials mediation as art. The spectator’s relationship to the phenomenon is already sensitised to the power of the media in this mythological process, insofar as the mainstream press and tv conspires with ‘true-believer’ culture in the interests of ratings

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and popular appeal. By faking paranormal phenomena and owning up, Dickinson appropriates this power. He thereby produces the viewing conditions for a knowledge of the irrational in the everyday out of the work’s own necessary collusion with the media. To simulate the effects of the modern media in the work of art is, of course, nothing novel for art of the 1980s and 1990s. But in Dickinson’s work we are given a complex twist, insofar as his practice successfully insinuates itself into the populist agendas of the media as part of a preexisting non-artworld culture. This allows him to montage the voices of the irrational as the work of the irrational ‘reasoned’ within the wider ideological setting of mass culture. In the gallery the performative contradictions of modern forms of ideology are themselves performed.

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Roy Bhaskar, Critical Realism and Cultural Theory I first read Roy Bhaskar in Radical Philosophy in 1980, when ‘Scientific Explanation and Human Emancipation’ appeared.1,2 But when Bhaskar’s work cropped up in Art & Language’s writing in the early 1980s I resolved to read his A Realist Theory of Science (1975) and The Possibility of Naturalism (1979).3 I remember buying both from the excellent philosophy section of the old Compendium Books store in Camden Town. Art & Language were (probably) the first artists and art-theorists to recognise the critical importance of Bhaskar’s writing for a non-reductive account of realism in relation to art and cultural theory, given their general familiarity with debates in the philosophy of science and Anglo-American philosophy of language. W.V.O. Quine and Nelson Goodman, for instance, were part of the group’s daily conversational practices as artists during this period.4 Indeed, given their familiarity with the issues of intention, intension, the causal theory of representation (of-relations), the critique of empiricism and their general grounding in analytic philosophy and Boolean formal logic, the group were certainly well placed to develop Bhaskar’s own groundbreaking critique of empiricism in the philosophy of science, and push it in a productive cultural direction. Bhaskar became a crucial mediating figure between the ‘post-metaphysical’ interrogative mechanics of the analytic tradition and the genealogical-materialist commitments of Marxism, a link at the time that was then a growing influence in English Marxism, which eventually mutated a few years later, unfortunately, into the less than compelling analytical Marxism.5

1 Published, as ‘A Philosophical Memoir: Notes on Bhaskar, Realism and Cultural Theory’ Journal of Critical Realism, Vol 15, No 2, 2016, pp. 175–86. 2 Bhaskar 1980, pp. 16–28. 3 In fact, in Art & Language’s 1982 painting, Index: 3 Wesley Place, which depicts the interior of their studio with the group at work, and their various working artistic and intellectual resources hung on walls or laid out on tables (in the spirit of Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory [1855]), they include, on the table on the far right, a copy of A Realist Theory of Science. See, Art & Language (Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden). 1982. Index: The Studio at 3 Wesley Place: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/art‑language‑michael‑baldwin‑index the-studio-at-3-wesley-place-t03804 4 Of particular importance were Goodman 1968 and Quine 1951. 5 Roemer 1986 (although this does contain Jerry Cohen’s brilliant essay, ‘The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom’).

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As was widely acknowledged during this period, Bhaskar’s concept of realism as an emergent category (of powers, relations and tendencies), became an underlabourer for a growing reassessment of Marx as a realist thinker, certainly the Marx of Capital, where methodologically issues of stratification, negation and constellationality were crucial. This is why politically, as much as philosophically, Bhaskar was part of a loose group of philosophers and political theorists in the UK in the 1970s who were addressing questions on Marx, realism and methodology, such as David-Hillel Ruben, Derek Sayer, Sean Sayers, Tim Benton, Kate Soper, Andrew Collier, Christopher Norris, Chris Arthur, Simon Clarke, and Alex Callinicos. In what ways is Marx’s realism ‘productivist’ as opposed to ‘reflectionist’? In what ways is Marx’s dialectic specifically realist?6 This range of work was particularly incisive at the time, given the rapid retreat in the academy and public debates from a non-positivistic Marx under the growing shift of post-Althusserianism into post-Marxism and the postmodern onslaught. Most of this early reception of Bhaskar and Marx-as-realist, was done either consciously or indirectly in response to this newly muscular reactionary context. Certainly, in my own writing, Bhaskar created a pathway to think about realism in art, as opposed to realism as art;7 and as such, a way of cutting through the conflation of realism with resemblance and its association with the conventional painterly realism that still dominated both official art history and the emerging social history of art. For what Bhaskar’s stratified account of realism allowed in relation to cultural questions was a discussion of realism and truth separate from the empirical, dis-aligning the real in classical scientific terms, so to speak, from realism, and therefore divorcing politics in art from any simplistic adherence to the aesthetics of realism; indeed, realism, in these terms, might have little to do with what is commonly understood as ‘representation’ or picture-making at all. This move, of course, did not stand-alone culturally, insofar as in an important sense the notion of realism-as-method was backed up by excellent avant-garde credentials. Roman Jakobson, for example, had published an important assessment of the ‘relativism’ of realism as a category in art and literature in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, long before the state sanctification of ‘socialist realism’, but little of this debate and the legacy of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (opayaz) was available in the West until the mid-to-late 1970s.8 Similarly, in the mid-to-late 1970s, the key German debates from the 1930s (Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, 6 See in particular Sayer 1979. 7 See Roberts 1992, pp. 195–213 and Roberts 1993, pp. 1–36. 8 See Jakobson 1978, pp. 38–47.

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Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukács) were translated, allowing a renewed insight into Jakobson’s understanding of realism as a contested category.9 There was a fruitful period of exchange, therefore, between the newly emergent philosophical realism and this legacy of the avant-garde, following further English translations of the Russian Marxist-Formalist writers from the 1920s, and Brecht’s ‘counter-realist’ theory. In addition, in 1980 Terry Lovell published her influential Pictures of Reality: Aesthetics, Politics and Pleasure, which used Bhaskar to generate a model of realism in cultural theory and film aesthetics that relied on (some of) these avant-garde precedents. If realism was to be understood as an emergent category, then, in art and film it couldn’t be held to derive from fixed genres, stable naturalistic relations, and narrative continuity; on the contrary, social appearances – in the spirit of montage – needed to be denaturalised, re-narrativised and re-signified through a process of conceptual abstraction. But if Lovell uses Bhaskar and the recently translated avant-garde theory to depose conventional accounts of realism, she made an additional move against what might be construed as being the dominant philosophicalavant-garde paradigm of the time: Althusserian anti-humanism and theoretical conventionalism. In a direct sense Pictures of Reality was a ‘clearing out’ of the post-Althusserian post-realist consensus from seventies Screen-influenced film theory, in which a concept of constructedness in film and art is confined to the highly attenuated notion of the ‘open text’ – the film/artefact that reflects on its own means of production and signification.10 In contrast to this version of anti-naturalism, Lovell called for a ‘post-coventionalist’ constructed realism that was partly indebted to Brecht – although critical of what she saw as Brecht’s residual rationalist ‘cognitive realism’ – but also to Raymond Williams’s notion of a ‘subjunctive’ realism, a realism not in the ‘indicative sense of recording contemporary reality, but in the [prospective] sense of proposing a possible sequence of actions beyond it’.11 In these terms, Lovell’s and Williams’s respective identification of realism with the construction of the popular (later to become crucial to British Marxist cultural studies, albeit without the allegiance to realism) marks out the production of the spectator/political subject as an enabling agent of collective political transformation. Lovell’s intention, on this score, was clear: ‘It is impossible to produce a truly revolutionary text in a discourse in which only the dominant have any facility’.12 9 10 11 12

Adorno et al. 1980. The classic formulation is MaCabe 1974, pp. 7–27. Williams 1979, pp. 218–19. Lovell 1980.

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But in a substantive sense this popular and prospective realism was stillborn, as the political conditions for such a cultural politics in and outside film culture shifted with the rise of the new right, diminution of the political force of the industrial working class, and crisis of class identity and politics as a result of a massive shift in the composition of the social base of the industrial working class globally. Indeed, who was actually to participate in and sustain this realism as a popular counter-hegemonic project, when much of labour movement was moving in the opposite direction, and labour culture as a site of stable industrial-based identities (certainly after the 1984 British miners’ strike) was in decline? Also, Lovell’s (and Williams’s) too easy dismissal of the avant-garde as elitist compounded the problem in its re-routing of the question of realism back into anti-formalism in an unconscious re-run of the debates on film in the Soviet Union, after the populist attacks on Sergei Eisenstein’s October as ‘incoherent’ at the 1928 Party conference on film. Lovell’s notion of the popular text has clear echoes of Anatoly Lunarcharsky’s defence of Vsevolod Pudvokin’s ‘popular-narrational revolutionary cinema’ (The End of St. Petersburg) as a proto-Hollywood counter to the Russian-Futurist legacy.13 Nevertheless, the importation of a broadly anti-positivist realism into cultural theory and film theory during this period (indebted to both Bhaskar’s critical realism and the new counter-realist milieu) created a renewed expectation that a rearticulated realism might offer a new politics in art that avoided the pitfalls of conventional realist aesthetics – it is just that the defence of a postBrechtian and Williamsian ‘popular text’ wasn’t able carry this forward without both bathos and pathos. This is because realism, or realism-as-philosophical method rather than realism-as-aesthetics, needed to reconnect with modernism and the avant-garde in all their complexity if it was to secure an openness for itself in these severely reduced circumstances. Realism and the avant-garde needed to be conjoined; not pushed apart. Indeed, by 1983 the debate on realism had once more come to seem utterly provincial – certainly in the visual arts – in an unfortunate reprise of debates from the 1930s, in which ‘good faith’ and earnestness in the form of the revival of realist painting was pitched against what was left of a righteous post-Althusserian politics of deconstruction that overly identified art (photography) and film with ‘ideology critique’. As Terry Eagleton was to say in his review of Aesthetics and Politics in New Left Review in 1978, in some sense pre-empting the terminal crisis of the Anglo-Althusserian avant-garde:

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Leyda 1960 and Kepley Jr. 2003.

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It is temptingly easy to caricature the aesthetics to which a case leads – to fantasize that films which draw your attention to the camera thereby impel you out inexorably onto the picket lines. But if that is indeed a caricature, it can hardly be said that some aspects of this case’s conception of realism are anything less. For realism, in so far as it aims at the fixing of naturalized representation whose traces of production have been repressed, is by that token intrinsically reactionary … In a comical inversion of the aesthetics of Lukács, realism is now the ontological enemy.14 This is why the publication of Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory in English in 198415 was extraordinarily important for me and a number of other writers of my generation, who were committed avant-gardists, yet wanted nothing to do with post-Althusserianism and post-structuralism, and who, in turn, had no truck with conventional realism, yet remained philosophically committed to some conception of realism out of Marx that might be useful for an ‘openended’ and transformative understanding of cultural practice and artistic subjectivity. Admittedly, this was certainly a difficult juggling act, and there was nothing initially to suggest culturally that something like a conjunction of Adorno and Bhaskar’s realism might bear fruit. But what Aesthetic Theory foregrounded above all else, in contrast to what might have been picked up more generally from the collection Aesthetics and Politics, was the notion that the asymmetry between the real and realism, realism-as-method and realism-asaesthetics, might provide a politics of negation for art, in which the critique of artistic form – not just the ‘critique of representation’ – was productive and enabling. Moreover, Adorno’s own philosophical ‘realism’ – his attack on voluntarism and leftist cultural piety – provided a better critical armature for a politics of the Thatcherite and Reaganite conjuncture than did a renewed cultural studies attached to ‘identity politics’ and a sanguine populism, whether identifiable with postmodernism or not. That is, crucially, Adorno’s ‘aesthetic theory’ did not fall for the notion that all art had to do in order to produce a critically transformative spectator was to ‘politicise’ itself and enter ‘living social relations’. On the contrary, the politicisation of art could just as easily be compatible with humanist sentiment and with the whole self-deluding machinery of substitutionist and actionist fantasies. Hence what Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory opened up, for this writer at least, was a politics of culture that retained the singular force and presence of modernist

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Eagleton 1978, pp. 21–34. Adorno 1984.

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negation – of distanciation and disaffirmation – but within a cultural-political framework that took no comfort or solace from modernist forms of aestheticism and ‘anti-representation’. But this was an Adorno not instantly recognisable from Aesthetic Theory and from the received assumptions about Adorno as a critic of mass culture and jazz; one therefore had to perform a symptomatic reading to get the best out of Adorno’s text; or rather – more affectingly – in order to stay with the spirit of the book one had to steer it away from the clichéd notion that it was the theoretical summit of a gloomy modernist elitism – still the received view of Adorno on the left in the mid-1980s. On the contrary, Aesthetic Theory is riven with interesting caesuras, glitches, aporias, and hiatuses in its account of the modern in art, that derive from Adorno’s (necessarily) unresolved negative dialectical account of art’s autonomy and heteronomy under monopoly capitalism. Although there is little systematic attention given to the visual arts and visual culture in the book, nevertheless, at various points, Adorno is highly sensitive to the ease with which an aestheticized concept of autonomy in modern art (of formal abstraction, nonrepresentation, ‘non-communication’) is able to accommodate itself to the market and academic administration, irredeemably weakening any presumed link between aesthetic transcendentalism and resistance. This means that for Adorno there is no essence of modernism to defend as a redoubt against mass cultural heteronomy, and certainly not against conventional realism. Indeed, if Adorno defends modernism in Aesthetic Theory at all, it is a modernism shot through with a disaffected and self-negating drive to escape art itself, a position inherited from the avant-garde critique of the art institution. And, two of the most interesting moments of this self-negation (amongst many), are his brief use of the figure of the philistine as a counter-cultural spectre of bourgeois aestheticism and transcendentalism, and his equally significant notion that, after Hegel and Romanticism, after conceptual art, and the crisis of modernist aestheticism, art has a working non-identitary relationship to ideation in art, that necessarily puts its canonic visual and sensible forms under jeopardy. As he says, firstly, vis-à-vis ideation: “the widely accepted notion – a bowdlerized theorem of aesthetics … [is] that art per se ought to be visual. It ought not. Art belongs squarely in the conceptual realm”;16 and, secondly, vis-à-vis the philistine: Artlessness or philistinism is the antithesis par excellence of aesthetic behaviour. While it frequently shades into the vulgar it is different from

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Adorno 1984, p. 461.

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vulgarity, representing indifference to or hatred of art where vulgarity is more like an uncouth smacking noise. Politically the ban on artlessness is as culpable as the emphasis on nobility, for it rates mental labour higher than physical labour … Art needs this ideological aspect if it is able to correct itself perpetually.17 Although, these, two notions, are mere isolated moments in Aesthetic Theory, combined with Adorno’s general critique of aestheticism, they provide vivid instances of Adorno’s model of negation in relation to the exigencies of artistic form and the division of intellectual labour and artistic subjectivity. Indeed, they go to the very heart of art’s intimate and conflicted place in the relations between autonomy and heteronomy, insofar as they stage autonomy in art as a social relation. In other words, autonomy is produced out of art’s heteronomous conditions of possibility; it is not an inherited (modernist) style or set of specific aesthetic moves. As such, the suggestiveness of this was a spur for Dave Beech and myself in the mid-1990s to attempt to do justice to Adorno’s insights and to a workable theory of negation in art in our systematic encounter with and theorisation of the philistine as the would-be via negativa of the aesthetic. That is, despite its spectral presence in Aesthetic Theory, the philistine promised all kinds of critical opportunities for a theory of negation that could move the philosophical debate on realism and politics in art forward, in a political and cultural context where the revival of ‘aesthetics’ had again frozen the complexities of the autonomy/heteronomy relation, and realism itself. In this sense the debate on the philistine was, in short, a new version of an old cultural debate – the debate on class, art and emancipation that goes all the way back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s critique of art as bourgeois amour propre,18 and to Kant and Hegel’s dialectical negation of this critique in the interests of art’s universal emancipatory spirit – that Marx (and Adorno) inherited. This is why Bhaskar’s own shift to an explicit model of dialectical negation – following his own ‘Marxian/Leninist/Adornian’ encounter with Hegel, so to speak – was so crucial to our thinking at the time, for it allowed us to think the philistine relationally across the autonomy/heteronomy divide. For, contrary to some of our critics, at no point did we ever see the cultural figure of

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Ibid, p. 3 42. Rousseau 1992.

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the philistine as a solution to cultural division, or as an emancipatory herald of proletarian revolution; rather, what made the philistine an interesting figure in relation to both the production and reception of art, was precisely its immanent, negating character. The philistine is not a non-specific other, but holds a non-transferable position in cultural relations. And, in this way, it is related hierarchically to other nontransferable positions such as the aesthete and connoisseur. This is because the philistine is the outcome of the complex positions produced by the internal relations of cultural division.19 Consequently, in our reading of Bhaskar’s Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (1993), we saw an opportunity to draw out the immanent negative character of the philistine on a systematic basis, through an adaptation of Bhaskar’s account of negation as real determinate absence. That is, following Bhaskar’s argument, the character of the philistine as the ‘uncultured’ or ‘culturally excluded’ is not a positive identity, amenable to ‘politicisation’ but, on the contrary, a shifting identity that consistently haunts the relations of bourgeois culture as the repressed or barely acknowledged determinate absence immanent to cultural division. It cannot, therefore, fulfil a transparently emancipatory role at all, because the emancipatory content it possesses is marked by its structural exclusions; that is, the ‘uncultured’ cannot magically become the ‘otherlycultured’. In our two essays for New Left Review (1996–8), then, the philistine as real determinate absence becomes a way of reintroducing a realist asymmetry into the debate on art and politics and emancipation – and not, as was occasionally assumed by our critics, an anti-aesthetic stand-in for the Bakhtinian carnivalesque or anti-Kantian voluptuous body. That is, the philistine functions as the self-negating haunting of the aesthetic, rather than its antipode. Thus, we might say, in Bhaskar’s terms, that although the philistine has no positive identity as a negation of trained aesthetic judgement and critical cultural competence, given its shifting position internal to the relations of cultural division, its absenting of bourgeois cultural power is a condition of bourgeois culture’s intelligibility as a class formation; that is, the philistine’s nondeferential absenting of such competences exposes such competences to class scrutiny. This is why Bhaskar was keen to talk in Dialectic about absence as real absence.20

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Beech and Roberts 1998, p. 50. Bhaskar 1993, pp. 238–41.

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Something of this ambiguity about the function of the philistine and what our notion of the philistine was actually doing – was it an anti-aesthetic or ‘hedonistic’ inversion of the bourgeois aesthete or a figural ‘haunting’ of bourgeois culture? – was reflected in Gary MacLennan’s response to our writing in the Journal of Critical Realism in 1998.21 If MacLennan is supportive of what the philistine promises as real determinate absence in relation to exposing the class function of culture, he is less persuaded by what this actually means in terms of ‘philistine modes of attention’ and philistine forms of agency on the ground. And he would be right. There is little critical leverage or selftransformative agency to be won from the supine pleasures of mass culture, or from rejecting ‘high culture’ per se. But the philistine was never designed to elevate such fallen pleasures, despite our initial indulgence in a kind of rebarbative proletarianisation of the pleasures of the popular, which might be described as the Proletkult phase of our theory of the philistine. Rather, more broadly and more convincingly, the philistine was a way of thinking class subjection in culture without opting for the two usual ‘improving’ solutions to its usual rebarbativeness: firstly, the outright rejection of the philistine as a manifestation of false consciousness, and as such, the advocacy of the transformative power of ‘good works’ (as in the edifying edicts of humanism, left or right); or, secondly – the cultural studies option – the assimilation of the philistine into an affirmative account of popular pleasures and pastimes as forming micro-communities of resistance, in which hairstyles have equal billing with avant-garde films. Neither option is successful in resolving the problem of the philistine, precisely because each positivises what it assumes to be its failings or strengths, missing the way in which, as a real determinate absence, the philistine can never be equal to any negative or positive identity attributed to it. As such what our non-identitary definition was designed to accomplish, then, was something altogether more affecting and purposeful: the return of ‘political reason’ to those ostensibly outside of culture who resist the overtures of bourgeois culture. Humanist and aestheticist correctives and cultural studies subaltern advocacy fail to do this given their respective diminishment of the philistine as a self-reasoning and autonomous concept-user, albeit one whose range of options and transformative possibilities are severely constrained by this assumed autonomy. But this is precisely the point: to defend the philistine is to defend the reason of non-compliance, not an acceptance of the ‘reason’ of the idiot savant or ignorant. In other words, in recognising the fractured and torn subjectivity of the philistine as that which ontologically cannot be assim-

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MacLennan 1998, pp. 19–22.

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ilated to the humanism of aesthetic discourse, aesthetic discourse’s claims to universal inclusion are rendered frangible. Why embark on such a critical trajectory though? What is to be gained in defending this negative space within aesthetic discourse, this relation of non-relation? Well, in the 1980s and 1990s, quite a lot, when the debate on culture and art was overrun by postmodernism and post-Marxism and claims to realism-as-method – certainly in art – were considered, as such, outré and almost redundant. To offer up the philistine, therefore, as an anti-positivistic disclaimer of the current aesthetic and pluralist settlement was deliberately provocative, particularly given its earlier twilight life in Adorno, who was then, in the US and Europe, undergoing an extraordinary ‘aestheticist’ reinvention as part of the new neo-Weberian critical theory and post-structuralist reception of Adorno-as-troubled-aesthete. The New Aestheticists who entered the debate found this invitation to the philistine the most uncomfortable of all: ‘this was not the Adorno we signed up to in our fight against postmodernism’ was a familiar refrain.22 To use the philistine, against postmodernism, against post-Marxism, against conventional realism, and against (and with) Adorno was undoubtedly touched by a kind of Marxist hubris. But this is why Bhaskar was so crucial to this move: for the realism at stake in the debate on art and culture was negatively ‘expressive’ (in the Hegelian sense) rather than ‘reflectionist’ (in the Kantian sense); that is, whatever self-conscious philistine modes of attention might be employed by artists and writers, the discussion was subject overall to the ontological condition of the philistine as a real determinate absence and, therefore, to the wider need for the absenting of this absence as a primary condition of universal emancipation. The discussion on the philistine was determined in the last instance, consequently, not by its contribution to the postmodern/modernist debate on low culture and high culture, or even the modern and the everyday, but by fundamental questions of autonomy, subjectivity and freedom. Indeed, the core philosophical concerns of the discussion were essentially those of power and self-determination: who, and what speaks, when the philistine speaks, or fails to speak? What interests does the aesthete speak to, when the philistine speaks? And, consequently, what happens to the interests of both philistine and aesthete as a result? What is properly realist about this intervention, then, certainly for myself, was that it was a first move in a return to the debate on art and culture, to the relations between negation, the subject and the capitalist totality: something

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This position was suasively defended by, J.M. Bernstein, see Bernstein 2002 and Bowie 2002, pp. 73–102.

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that Bhaskar and Adorno share. And this is why the absenting figure of the philistine was a way of exposing the increasingly harmonious and assimilationist criteria of both postmodernism and the ‘return to aesthetics’, in either its modernist or conventionalist realist guises. For it provided a rent, or disaffirmative gap, through which the fictiveness of the totality of cultural relations might be exposed. This was borne out in practical terms by the double crisis of the return to aesthetics and postmodernism in the mid-to-late 1990s in the widespread ‘turn to the social’ in art globally, as finance capital begins to destroy its own liberal cultural base, through the marketisation of all values, realising a huge amount of dissensual and critical energy that could not be contained by the old formal allegiances of the art market and art institution. Thus postmodernism may have won the hegemonic battle in the 1980s and 1990s when popular culture looked the more progressive bet for art against a deracinated high culture; but, as financial capital began to weaken the social interests of ‘capital in general’ and destroy the living conditions of most artists and state support, at the same time rendering art even more subordinate to commerce and the spectacle, it was unable to secure the assent of a sizeable new generation of artists and intellectuals. Emerging from this period of increasing constraint, indifferent to both market and institution, these artists began to relink the socially transformative capacities of art to a totalising critique of capitalism. Relational and post-relational aesthetics, tactical media, participatory art, and the new forms of communal practice constitutive of the new network culture, were all central to this, as was the move, more generally, to an intellectual gift economy. The point was not that this work represented an extensive left turn in art, or had radicalized a new generation, but that technically and subjectively it opened up art to modes of doing and being not subject to the dolours of object production for exchange, and in this it made loose alliance with various ‘uncultured’ friends of the philistine: the amateur, the non-professional artist, the ‘non-artist artist’, the technician and activist. And Bhaskar, at least, for myself, in the mid1990s, was important philosophically in grasping the avant-garde dynamic of this, insofar as Dialectic provided a language of negation without ‘endism’ and closed totalities. In the spirit of this anti-historicism, in 1998 Dave Beech interviewed the artist Keith Tyson, the future Turner Prize Winner (2002): db: Roy Bhaskar, the British philosopher, has argued that our thinking about reality has to begin with ‘non-identity’ and end with ‘open unfinished totality’. Most philosophical mistakes, he says, ‘derive from taking an insufficiently non-anthropocentric, differentiated, stratified, dynamic, holistic or practical view of things’. Don’t a lot of ideas about art make these mistakes? I mean, the idea that art is expressive, or art is visual, or

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art is whatever an artist says it is, or art is a commodity – aren’t these daft simplifications of art? And if they are, don’t we have to think about making art in ways that take account of this complexity? kt: I haven’t read him yet. But that sounds like a pretty accurate description of what I was trying to do with the Artmachine. Which was to deanthropocentrise the notion of how art is. And also to make something that embraced complexity instead of trying to simplify it. I just cannot believe that any one descriptive or philosophical or political model is complete.23 Yet, if this clearly instances what dialectical critical realism might provide for an anti-historicist, socially stratified and intra-relational account of contemporary art and cultural production, Bhaskar himself, unfortunately showed little interest in exploring these connections. Disappointingly, the cultural ramifications of dialectical critical realism, by the late 1990s, were swallowed up by Bhaskar’s move to a spiritualized non-dualist ‘creativity’, which as a model of emancipation lost all traction with the vicissitudes of class subjectivity and the symbolic, the conjuncturally specific and praxiological agency. The overriding feeling was a kind of retreat to a Rousseauvian account of art as amour propre; creativity was not reducible to the professional discourse of art and cultural production, and therefore lay more broadly outside of the cognitive and discursive altogether. Of course, there is no reason why Bhaskar should use dialectical critical realism to reflect on the artistic legacy of realism, modernism and the avant-garde; there was never any indication that he saw this as part of his philosophical project. Yet the valorisation of a non-discursive creativity seemed like an anti-modernist attack on the modern philosopher as an advocate for the emancipatory (non-identitary) role of art, and on the Hegelian view of the development of art as an increase in reflexive consciousness and, as such, perilously close to pushing the cultural debate into creativity-as-self-enchantment and autopoietic intuitivism. ‘Thinking can never get us to action. At some point we just have to stop thinking (about), and just do; and that is spontaneous, intuitive’.24 I say perilously close, because Bhaskar does admittedly say elsewhere that creativity is not ‘ontologically non-immanent’.25 Nevertheless, this vacilla-

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Beech 1998, p. 18. Bhaskar 2012, p. 145. I’m sure Bhaskar had no cultural memory of this, but the quote sounds like a conservative homily from a 1960s modernist painting tutor, intent on releasing the ‘inner creativity’ of his students. Ibid, p. 134.

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tion inflates human sentience (consciousness) at the expense of human sapience (concept formation).26 And, crucially, as regards the political outcomes of (underused) human sapience, this is not what I see was at stake in the notion of real determinate absence in cultural theory: namely bringing creativity into productive and egalitarian alignment with concept-use as part of the ‘general intellect’, in Marx’s sense. Under the strictures of Bhaskar’s metaReality, creativity becomes merely the underdetermined realm of sentient ‘all inclusiveness.’ In other words, to what extent is Bhaskar’s critique of discursiveness liberatory? These criticisms are certainly worth exploring another time, as part of a larger debate about creativity and emancipation, art and concept-use. But here it suffices to ask: where is dialectical critical realism best used and situated in cultural theory today?27 What useful dialectical philosophical materials might continue to be employed from Dialectic, as a means of sustaining the transformative and emancipatory link between negation in cultural theory and art and sapience? As such: in what ways is realism-as-method and the legacy of realism as representation (of the avant-garde and realism) mutually engaged?28 Indeed, Dialectic has barely been broached as a theoretical resource on cultural questions; and yet its vividness and productive complexity was what made it such an extraordinary intervention into the ‘complacencies of the age’ in the early 1990s. In its range and ambition, it singularly demolished the detotalizing, de-stratifying and anthropocentric tendencies of the postmodern and retro-positivistic ascendancy. In this sense I owe it a great deal.

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For a defence of the Hegelian legacy of human sapience, see Brandom 2000. See Verstegen 2013. See John Roberts 2014, pp. 86–91.

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The Antinomies of Iconoclasm On the 13 June 2013, a 41 year old man was arrested after spraying turquoise paint over a full-length portrait of Queen Elizabeth ii, in the Chapter House at Westminster Abbey.1 The painting, by the Australian artist Ralph Heimans, depicts the Queen alone in the Abbey in state dress (her 1953 Coronation robes), walking away from the altar and choir stalls. The turquoise paint obliterated most of the portrait. Acts of defacement against works of art and the destruction of works of art are of course part of a long tradition of iconoclasm, stretching back to the Middle Ages, and earlier, to Byzantium.2 In this respect defacement carries with it a radical, dissenting and political impulse. But if attacking artworks is a way of drawing attention to an injustice or an expression of defiance against a given state of affairs by defiling what is highly thought of (what is most highly thought of), it is also a manifestation of nihilism and act of ressentiment. Indeed many of the most notorious attacks on artworks in the twentieth century (the spray-painting of Picasso’s Guernica [1974]; the slashing of, and spraying of chemical paint on, Rembrandt’s Nightwatch [1975 and 1990]; and the scrawling over Rothko’s Black on Maroon with graffiti ink in the Tate in 2012) were hubristic acts carried out by artists or would-be artists against the achievement of the artists in question, or by members of the public expressing their grievances in defiance of a famous artist’s historical standing and indefatigability. In some instances this ressentiment is fuelled by a critical or paranoiac hatred of art – or specifically modern art – as in the knife attacks on Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue 111 in 1986 and Cathedra in 1997 at the Stedelijk, by the same assailant (I don’t ‘hate all art, just abstract art and realism’),3 and the attempted burning of David Mach’s huge tyre sculpture Polaris outside the Hayward Gallery, London in 1983; but on the whole many of these attacks are distressed acts of impotence, that seek to piggy back on the status of the work in order for the attacker to gain atten-

1 Published in German, as ‘Ikonoklasmus: Die Autorität Des Kunstwerks Die Motive Zu Seiner Zerstörung’, Lettre International, No 111, 2015, pp. 76–9, and in Romanian, ‘Iconoclasm, Creativitate Si Politica’, in Lettre Internationale, Editia Romana, No 97, 2016. 2 For an excellent account of iconoclasm’s history, see Gamboni 1997. For iconoclasm and Byzantium, see Herrin 2008. 3 Vogel 1997.

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tion for himself or herself.4 As Wlodzimierz Umaniec said after his attack on the Rothko: ‘This was not an act of destruction. It was an act of creativity. “Now yellowism is a global phenomenon”’. Or, in other instances, this piggy-backing takes the exultant form of a deluded self-aggrandisement or violent narcissism, as in the hammer attack by László Toth on Michaelangelo’s Pietà in 1972. (‘I am Jesus Christ – risen from the dead’).5 But whatever the motivation behind iconoclastic attacks on well-known or significant works of art, none of the attacked works can be said to be improved or productively ‘re-signified’ by defilement, or more politely, physical ‘intervention’, despite what Umaniec might believe. These kind of attacks are invariably frustrated attacks on the power of a reputation or public acclaim and not an extreme or perverse commentary on the art itself; and this is because very few attacks on works of art are committed against works that are by unknown artists, or on works that are poorly thought of, or considered marginal. This makes the attack on Heimans’ portrait all the more interesting, precisely because it actually improves a mediocre work of art. That is, in this instance, the negative engagement with the art is a genuine creative act, or rather a genuinely oblique creative act. This is because in this instance even if the act of vandalism is parasitic on the social status of the artwork – its Royal imprimatur – it is not parasitic on the work’s artistic value, as is usually the case. In fact, the act of iconoclasm here is largely indifferent to (or unaware of) this value. One might say, therefore, Heimans’ portrait is attacked precisely because of its marginal artistic status, as if the mediocrity of the work allowed the attacker a certain emotional freedom. This results in an interesting cognitive shift. The violence directed against the work’s social status – as opposed to an attack on its artistic standing – enables the work to be reclaimed from its reactionary framework (photographic painterly realism; heritage culture; the honour and prestige of royal patronage of the arts) to find a place in a long tradition of what the Situationists famously called détournement, the disruption and re-functioning of an extant image, as a counter to its manifest meaning or ideology; ‘salutary alterations’ as they called them.6 4 The attackers, respectively, were Tony Shafrazi (1974), William de Rijk (1975), Klaas Wilting (1990), Gerard Jan van Bladeren (1986, 1997) and James Gore-Graham (1983), who died as a result of the burns he received. 5 Toth was a Hungarian born geologist who committed the act on his 33rd birthday, the age at which Jesus was crucified, after unsuccessfully waiting to see the pope. He wasn’t charged with the offence and was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital in Italy for two years. For a range of personal reminiscences and recollections of the mythic and social resonances of his iconoclasm, see ‘Whatever happened to Laszlo Toth, the man who smashed Michelangelo’s Pieta’, at https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,‑2565,00.html 6 Debord and Wolman 1956.

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Indeed, the spoiling of Heimans’ painting is remarkably close to the classic form of Situationist détournement: an explicitly ideological image is degraded or ironised through an act of adulteration. But in this case, the intention is not to show up the formulaic, self-corrupted, empty or oppressive character of the image itself, but simply to obliterate the generic cultural status of the painting and its symbolic attachment to the image of power; the fact that this is a painting of royalty presented in a royal setting, with all the state authority that attends such an image and setting. Yet even so one should be circumspect here. Even if it can be shown that the attacker, Tim Haries, had Republican sympathies (although reputedly he did say to a steward directly after the attack: ‘Sorry, mate, I’ve nothing against the Queen’), the attack is not directly on the Royal Family or the Monarchy or even the State, but on an object of public prominence that is attached to state power and tradition, and that will, therefore, draw maximum publicity for the attacker’s cause. (The attacker was a supporter of Fathers4Justice).7 Hence, because the defilement of the Heimans painting is not premised on an embittered or malicious attack on the status of a venerated work of art, as in the attacks on the Rembrandt and Rothko, but on a work that, above all else, signifies a privileged intimacy between cultural tradition and authority, it provides a sharp and direct corrective to this authority and power. Now, it is perfectly possible that at some point the attacker recognised the retardataire character of the painting, and therefore was careful about choosing the painting as his target: this is a generic image, after all, of the Queen, in all her state pomp and regalia, an image clearly designed to ‘prop up’ an image of power above all else. And, consequently, to attack such an image in Westminster Abbey is to attack the very apex of state power. Something of this clearly drives the act of defilement; this is an attack on a painting of the monarch in an important public setting, not on a painting of a vase of flowers in a sleepy private gallery in the provinces. Thus, it is precisely through the attack on the inflated cultural status of a mediocre and reactionary work that the attack is able to do its counter-ideological work and achieve its desired outcome: public attention for a cause. Consequently, it would seem as if the attacker has no interest in what the painting signifies artistically, outside of its anointed role as a public prop for Royalist sentiment and state tradition. It is simply an attack on congealed power, not on artistic value. But nevertheless, this is an attack on an artwork. The spell of congealed state power is singled out for opprobrium in the form of 7 Fathers4Justice is an organisation devoted to supporting the rights of fathers to secure access to their children after divorce or separation. See https://newf4j.wordpress.com/2014/03/24/​ tim‑haries‑has‑been‑released‑brixton‑prison‑on‑tag/

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an attack on traditional painterly skill, on the grounds that artworks, particularly artworks commissioned by Royalty and depicting Royalty, are considered to be a heightened and value-rich manifestation of this power. A demonstration outside of Westminster Abbey, or a symbolic attack on a site of comparable public prominence, or even the making of an artwork itself, would not have achieved the same level of ideological disruption. This is because breaking the sanctity of the artistic object – irrespective of its particular artistic merits – provides a material and symbolic transgression of status and authority that is held to be irredeemably repugnant. But to return to my earlier point: the unintentional outcome is much more creative, attritionally interesting, critically disturbing, conceptually defiling, than Haries may have imagined. In breaking the spell of congealed power in the attack on such a mediocre and reactionary work of art, a better work of art is created (revealed). Indeed, the defiled painting appears as if it has been released from art historical purgatory. The defacement brings an enlightened cancellation to an image of authority and empty tradition. But if the legacy of Situationist détournment is at work here, nevertheless we should remind ourselves that the Situationists took no comfort from, and indeed were largely antagonistic to, the iconoclastic defilement of actual artworks. Or rather, to be more precise, in some instances they were prepared to support iconoclastic attacks on works of art,8 if they were part of a wider revolutionary cause, but on the whole they were opposed to artists or activists iconoclastically refunctioning works of art in order to produce new art works, irrespective of whether they served revolutionary ends or not. To prioritise détournement as an art strategy would have felt too much like an act of artistic appropriation, and, as such, an intra-artistic act internal to the ‘art world’. Consequently, the Situationists (certainly Guy Debord) had no interest in defiling works of art to create ‘better’ works of art, or create an artistic scandal. This is why Asger Jorn came in for so much criticism, eventually forcing Jorn and other artists out of the si. His ‘refunctioning’ of a number of found kitsch paintings was felt to diminish the mass and demotic character of détournement. Détournement largely worked at the level of cheap, mass cultural images, which stood to be ideologically ‘improved’ by their despoliation or defacement. So, we might say, then, that artistically driven iconoclasm is the most compromised form of détournement for the si, in keeping with the si’s general anti-art stance. In this respect the Chapman brothers’ well-known Situationist-type détournement of an original

8 See http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/newforms.htm; http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/Pariscomm une.htm#3.

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set of Francisco Goya’s The Disasters of War in 2003 (Insult to Injury) would fall outside of Debord’s general proscription. Indeed, for all the work’s vivid ‘rectification’ of the Goya prints with clown and puppy heads, it’s hard to say the changes improve the work, or are involved in a dis-emburdening of the image’s ideological character.9 But in the case of the Heimans painting, though, we have precisely this: in cancelling and violating a reactionary image of state power the work is vaulted from its conservative lair to become (briefly) a compelling conceptual token, as if the work, in a strange parallel postconceptual universe, had since its production been waiting for this process of dissensual ‘re-signification’. In one quick act, the authority of depicted power and the world of everyday semblance are ruined. There is something extraordinarily liberating, then, about seeing the suture between power and semblance defiled in this way, particularly when the act of adulteration is an authentic act of disruption and cancellation. We are released from the forced continuity between power and appearances. But the character and force of this defilement is not indiscriminate. Rather, it is precisely the painterly cancellation of the image that has much to do with impact of the attack in this case. If the assailant had written across the canvas in Magic Marker, or stabbed it feebly with a penknife, the violation would, firstly, appear slightly peevish, even adolescent, and secondly, the visible authority of the image would remain intact. Painterly iconoclasm, therefore, carries with it an increased capacity for veiling or even obliteration that relieves the host work of its visual authority. The material presence of the defiled work is extinguished, yet the physical integrity of the work remains largely visible. This is also evident in the postconceptual strategies of contemporary post-painting, as in Gerhard Richter’s work, in which the authority of two dominant painterly traditions of modernity (realism and modernism) are relieved of their inherited authority, through the blurring or fudging of their respective formal characteristics. Yet if the act of violation in this instance restores integrity to an artwork ‘lost’ to authority and power, can iconoclasm be a consistent artistic and political strategy? This is the fundamental issue that traverses all acts of low level or high-concept iconoclasm, for once iconoclasm is subject to programmatic and systematic extension it becomes ugly and authoritarian, indeed, it becomes a form of completed nihilism in which negation falls into the clutches of dogmatic metaphysics. We see evidence of this in the recent attacks by Isis on 9 An even more extreme ‘rectification’ of Goya is John Ruskin and Frederick S. Ellis’s extraordinary burning of a set of Goya’s Caprichos in 1872. Ellis was Ruskin’s bookdealer, and they both agreed that the prints were ‘only fit to burn’. See, Ruskin, ‘Letter, September 19th, 1872’ in Ruskin 1909.

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pre-Islamic art and architecture in Syria, and the Taliban’s infamous destruction, in the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan in 2001, of the ancient Bamiyan Buddhist statuary (although Isis are certainly not consistent in their iconoclasm, stealing the most venerable and rare items for sale in the West).10 The Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, who issued the order for the statue’s destruction, argued because there were ‘no’ Buddhists in Afghanistan, and therefore the statues had no religious significance: ‘why get so upset’? ‘It’s just like breaking stones’.11 The point, however, is that systematic destruction on ideological grounds can only inflate iconoclasm as a purification of the act, pointing the way to a kind of mutually assured cultural destruction: I destroy all your realist kitsch paintings, you destroy all my conceptual art works; I blow up all your modernist heavy metal sculptures, you blow up all my super-realist figurative fibre-glass sculptures, and so on. This is why the historic avant-garde, despite its symbolic denigration of traditional practices, never embarked on a systematic ‘pogrom’ of pre-modern artworks, even if it fantasised about blowing up museums and destroying tranches of religio-sentimental painting so as no one would ever have to see them again. Thus, if Haries’s intervention improves the Heimans painting, and as such enters the contemporary and virtuous domain of postconceptual re-signification, this cannot have any further life as a strategy. For to be consistent in this way – to embark on a systematic re-signification of would-be ‘reactionary’ works of art in order to relieve them of their ideological ‘burden’ and release them into the postconceptual light – is to turn ‘re-signification’ into a zero-sum, apocalyptic, indeed criminal game of artistic self-election, insofar as there will never be enough would-be reactionary works to defile or deface in the name of ‘liberation’, particularly if the corrupted character of the art object is extended to the very exchange value of art itself. We might call this the Anabaptist-Khymer Rouge approach to ‘cultural critique’. This is why the artist Alexander Brener’s adolescent, Jacobintype spraying in 1997 of a huge dollar sign on Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism 1920–1927 is dispiriting, banal and reactionary, and perhaps most crucially in this context, tautological, insofar as a dollar sign might legitimately be sprayed on most things. Iconoclasm is deadening and oppressive, then, when it does its work through a violent and systematic exclusion of all that the iconoclasts deem unworthy, for above all else it renders history and the historical subject opaque. Indeed, Isis’s iconoclasm seeks to break history in two in this respect: everything pro-

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For a discussion of Islamic iconoclasm, see Noyes 2013. See, Harding 2001.

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duced before the advent of the Prophet, is worthless, corrupt and degraded, and, therefore, should be cast into oblivion. This is why the ‘emancipatory’ effect of iconoclasm is necessarily interruptive rather than systemic, ‘discursive’ rather than ‘elective’ (beholden to a direct message from God or leader). For it is precisely when the iconoclastic act operates as intermittent and punctual re-functioning of the host work – as a break in its ideological continuum – when it is localised and unexpected, that it is able to carry meaning and value worthy of its re-signifying function. Similarly, in a revolutionary situation or period, where destruction is demanded of the revolutionary process in order to clear an unambiguous symbolic path through the old order, the intense and initial destruction of the artefactual and environmental legacy of the dying regime is overwhelmingly liberating, and as such acts as a precursor to a wider and lasting cultural transformation (as in the French Revolution and Russian Revolution, and Saddam Hussain’s Iraq, as national anti-Hussain forces used the Western imperialist intervention to destroy the significant physical evidence and monuments of Hussain’s Baʿathist regime). But when iconoclasm takes on metaphysical and antinomian proportions (as under the Anabaptists in sixteenth century Germany or under the Khymer Rouge in 1975, or latterly under Isis) all things, at all times, begin to look ideologically suspect and corrupt. This is why the Russian revolutionary left’s investment in the avant-garde between 1917–27 was always a productive and transformative encounter with the negation of the academic and conservative tradition. The authority of what blocked change had to be destroyed in practice, through the collective displacement and construction, not simply through violent destruction; the Bolsheviks certainly destroyed Churches and religious artefacts, but on the whole it protected Russia’s pre-revolutionary cultural legacy, particularly in the light of Lenin’s critique of Proletkult short-termism and the revolution’s sense of itself as the inheritor of world culture.12 In other words the new as the symbolic destruction of the old had to provide a new set of values and relations that could open up the future, while at the same time incorporating the achievements of the bourgeois past. On the far right, however, iconoclasm consistently borrows from the apocalyptic antinomian tradition in order to obliterate or stake out its break with the past or with the corrupt present. In these terms artworks are seen as legitimate targets for destruction or defilement given their irredeemable ‘venality’, ‘godlessness’, ‘concupiscence’, and therefore, things that 12

Something of this also characterises Debord’s writing, as the si is confronted by the limitations of their early Anabaptist and antinomian strategies. Indeed, Debord’s anti-art stance is always militated against by his preservationist tendencies: his nostalgia for old Paris, and his admiration for classical French culture.

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are straightforwardly heretical, blasphemous, or even evil in character. Isis and Taliban iconoclasm commonly falls into this category, as do the recent attacks in Russia on contemporary art by ultra-Orthodox and fascist groups, such as the attacks made in 2001 and 2004 in St. Petersburg against the anti-clerical works of Oleg Yanushevski.13 This violence was widely supported in the orthodox and far-right press, suggesting a high level of tolerance in Russia for antinominian fantasies about the corrupting power of modern culture. Indeed, the rise of systematic religious iconoclasm globally is part of a renewed conflation of iconoclasm with an attack on blasphemy in the wake of the multi-cultural make-over of religious belief, fuelled, as it is, certainly in Russia, by a high-octane nationalism and xenophobia. Any artwork or image that is judged to offend a given local or national community or constituency is assumed to be a legitimate target for retributive attack. What links such thinking, then, with antinomianism more generally, is the fetishisation of the targeted object as a form of ‘primitive magic’. The image or work is assumed to cast a destructive spell over of the spectator and thus constitutes a destabilising threat to the integrity, values and equanimity of an imagined national community or a local community or constituency. Hence for iconoclasm to work as a self-conscious act, it has to break with the ‘antinomian fantasy’ and primitive magic of the iconoclast’s ‘exclusive election’.14 For once exclusive election channels iconoclasm into systemic negation it degrades the political, transforming ideological commitment into the desire to shame and humiliate. Yet, if iconoclasm easily invites purist exclusionary fantasies and fantasies of revenge, nevertheless it is not to be seen as an extreme pathogen of negation, its pathological remnant. On the contrary, as the intense and bitter recoil from tradition, power and authority, it is the invaluable and inevitable violation of, indeed cut into, the overwhelming and hidden violence of a culture built on division, hierarchy and exclusion. Even those reactionary (non-antinomian) attacks on art disclose on occasion a subfusc emancipatory spirit in this sense, as in the Toth attack on Michaelangelo’s Pietà. This is reflected in the massive response to the Toth attack in the world press at the time, as if the undoubted shock of the destruction – ‘How could he do this?’ – produced an unconscious release of dissident energy against the all too visible links between high culture, bourgeois art’s ‘mission civilisatrice’ and class deference. Or let us put it this way: in some instances, in a brief moment of destruction, the pathological releases an emancipatory energy.

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For a discussion of far-right iconoclasm, see Jonson 2015. Cohn 2004, p. 254. See also, Von Kerssenbrock 2007.

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This is why iconoclasm needs to be thoroughly politicised and thoroughly stratified as a ‘strategy’. That is, there is no iconoclasm as such, and certainly no iconoclasm attached solely to the artwork itself, despite the repeated singling out of artworks for destruction or defilement as representative of prevailing state-power relations, secular or religious authority, or bourgeois culture. Rather, we should divide iconoclasm into the following: there is the iconoclasm internal to revolutionary change; the iconoclasm internal to regime change (conservative or radical); iconoclasm internal to rapid capitalist modernisation; iconoclasm internal to communist-modernisation (as in Mao’s ‘modernist’ iconoclastic programme to destroy the ‘four olds’: old culture, old ideas, old customs, old habits); iconoclasm internal to post-revolutionary modernisation (neoliberalism for example); iconoclasm internal to theistic and anti-Western counterrevolutions; and iconoclasm internal to theistic and pro-Western counterrevolution. In all these structural transformations, the destruction of public images and symbols, and the built environment, predominate, and therefore constitute destructive processes which are not necessarily cognate with the destruction of art per se; indeed, the destruction of art may play a small part, a major part, or even be ignored (relatively), across these various trajectories. Accordingly, the greater or lesser dynamism of modern artistic iconoclasm under such regime changes is shaped by the relative influence of enlightenment and counter-enlightenment thinking, the countervailing forces of theism and anti-theism, and the level of penetration of the modern and modernism into cultural values at play within any given national-cultural context. Consequently, just as we need to distinguish between anti-capitalist iconoclasm, anti-image iconoclasm, and anti-modern art iconoclasm, physical attacks on art may play a subsidiary role in a revolutionary period or a period of intense modernisation; total iconoclastic destruction may in fact exclude art. Thus, if the Bolsheviks broke with academic tradition in order to incorporate the best of bourgeois art into a revolutionary concept of world culture, strangely the Nazis never attempted a totalising antinomian move against modern art; modernist works and other works that were denigrated were removed from public display or mocked in public (as in the ‘Entartete Kunst’ show in 1937), but rarely were they physically attacked, as opposed to books (indeed, as is now well known, a number of leading Nazis either collected modernist [expressionist] works themselves, or sought to protect collections from neglect or confiscation in the hope of financial gain).15 This is a peculiar anomaly, therefore, given the bodily, material and symbolic annihilation of Jewish culture, the destruction of the 15

For a discussion of book-burning iconoclasm, including the notorious, Archbishop Juan de Zumárraga, who as head of the Mexican Inquisition (1536–43), destroyed vast amounts

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institutions of modernism, and those of the communist tradition, and the symbolic destruction of all other manifestations of cultural and political opposition. Yet, this has much to do with the Nazis’ self-perception of themselves as national modernisers, and therefore, whatever pathological deviations ‘international’ modernism presented for German nationalism, in terms of German destiny such works still played an illustrative part in the greater achievement of German national advancement and national culture overall, even as counterexamples of a failed Bolshevik internationalisation. This is why in the destruction of an image-regime aesthetic disqualification16 does not necessarily turn into the destruction of the artistic image; aesthetic disqualification can be contained within a broader process of the destruction of things that occur outside of the domain of art. What is different about Isis, however, is that anticultural (anti-infidel) iconoclasm, anti-image iconoclasm, and anti-art iconoclasm cohere; that is, whereas the Nazis’ counter-enlightenment revolution was prepared, paradoxically, to defend in most instances the physical integrity of the art object, Isis’s counter-enlightenment revolution is not. In the end, then, this may reveal how political Islam’s counterrevolution is closer to medieval Christian apocalyptic antinomianism than it thinks. But if revolutionary iconoclasm against prevailing cultural forms and traditions is not reducible to iconoclasm against art, violence against works of art nonetheless are part of a continuum of violent and violating and negating forces that intersect with these wider forces and therefore shape the production, reception and institutionalisation of culture, the image and art. Iconoclasm against artworks or artefacts, then, are the result of two sets of intersecting yet asymmetrical forces: iconoclasm is potentially part of the macropolitical forces of regime change or the revolutionary process, as described above; but it is also the outcome of the daily institutional class relations of bourgeois society that define art’s living form and encounter with history. Hence, if the emergence of the artwork into culture – into validation, tradition and memory – is a process subject to various contending and contested forces of approbation and negation, the artwork’s life is consequently far from stable. There is always the threat of aesthetic or historical disqualification (as a result of localised or major historical and political shifts) just as institutional inclusion and approbation, in the short term, is always fighting an interim battle against curatorial and critical exclusions, and, in the long term, against decay and damage. Indeed, the symbolic and formal instability of the artwork

16

of Aztec pictographic literature, see Manguel 2006; and Nixey 2017, for an account of early Christian iconoclastic attacks on classical pagan culture and literature. The phrase is Gamboni’s; see Gamboni 1997 p. 323.

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is invariably threatened over the long run by the twin-forces of historical resignification and physical wear and tear. Consequently, art’s entry into the institution and canon is not just a way of protecting artworks against oblivion and amnesia and everyday neglect, but actually against physical attack itself. For one of the rarely recognised achievements of modernity and the bourgeois institutionalisation of art from the eighteenth century is the actual protection of the artwork against indiscriminate physical attack on the grounds of belief, ideology or personal vengeance or grievance. In a pre-modern realm devoid of stable and universal approbation of works of art as autonomous objects, one of the functions of the Catholic Church and private collectors was in fact to protect the work against the wrath of iconoclastic destruction or damage, whether by orthodox or heterodox iconoclasts or later by the Protestant righteous.17 The gradual emergence of the concept of art’s autonomy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then, was a way of separating the value of the devotional work from the violence of ‘elective’ judgement. Accordingly, the questioning or aesthetic disqualification of works of art was divorced from the threat of dogmatism, and therefore, in turn, from their possible righteous destruction. In this respect, Kant’s theory of beauty was a way of freeing the universalising attributes of aesthetic judgement from the residual antinomianism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s secularised attack on art as a source of bourgeois oppression and amour-propre.18 Kant and later Hegel never denied this class function of art, but rejected the idea this weakened or prejudiced art as source of universal emancipatory feeling and spirit, as did later Marx, who took the transcendental Kantian-Hegelian line, as opposed to accepting Rousseau’s radical particularism. To say, therefore, that iconoclasm against art – ontologically – is always the violating recoil to what is perceived as a greater violation, is true. But once the work of negation inside culture assumes a systemic expulsive form, violation becomes monstrously disproportionate to its discursive and interruptive aims, and to art’s possible wider emancipatory horizons. In other words, destruction becomes pure destruction, in which eradication becomes attached to the antinomian and Gnostic phantasm of ‘cleansing’, even at the point where such iconoclasm assumes a liberatory role in the clearing away of the ‘muck of ages’.19 Iconoclasm’s immanent ‘creativity’, therefore, is always divided against

17 18 19

For iconoclasm and the Protestant righteous, in particular the (pre-reformation) Hussite heresy of the fifteenth century, see Bredekamp 1975. Rousseau 1992. Marx and Engels 1976, p. 47. For an ambitious modernist work of fiction devoted to a systemic anti-capitalist iconoclasm in these terms, see Le Clézio 1973. On each page, at the

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itself in the light of the limits to destruction, insofar as, whatever level iconoclasm is practised at, whether iconoclasm is the outcome of regime change, a form of modernisation or an elective act of individual artistic re-signification, it is determined in the last instance by the need to arrest destruction before its furies become exclusionary and incantatory.

bottom right of the section of graphics and designed advertising texts, inserted occasionally into the novel, is written: ‘Hyperpolis doit être brûlé’.

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Writerly Artists: Conceptual Art, Bildung and the Intellectual Division of Labour Conceptual art continues to fascinate, reflected in the extensive writing it continues to receive over forty years after its demise.1 This is due less to the usual fealties paid to the art of the recent past after a period of neglect or indifference, than to the massive import of Conceptual art’s claims and achievements. Indeed, soon after its demise in the early 1970s it was immediately the source of much critical repositioning, its implications and effects continuing to have significant impact on a new generation of artists and critics. These early responses to Conceptual art have now become part of the history of Conceptual art practice itself – indeed part of the very language of its afterlife – contributing to the general passage of Conceptual art as a discrete moment or movement (lasting for around six years) into the more capacious categories of ‘conceptualism’, and latterly, postconceptualism. Some historians, recently, however, have taken this as a sign of Conceptual art’s dilution as a qualitatively definable sequence of works, or evidence of its inevitable assimilation into an expanded and weakened late modernism, and as such have wanted to distinguish what characterises Conceptual art as a historical moment and movement, and what it facilitated more generally. I’m more interested in what it enabled and continues to enable, in as much as Conceptual art is the point where art ‘re-learns’ the key revolutionary and deflationary ideals and strategies of the historic avantgarde, allowing art, in a period of morbid aestheticism in the 1960s, to make a bold connection with non-artistic disciplines and extra-artistic forces. These connections and ambitions are, of course, still being played out under various kinds of critical headings today. In this respect, I am concerned, in what follows, to locate what I see are those forms of philosophical, cultural and political engagement that have long-range historical implications for art. These are: 1) The critique of the intellectual division of labour as an instance of revolutionary Bildung (communities of critical self-learning)

1 A shorter version of this article was published in Rab-Rab: Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Art, No 1, Helsinki, 2014.

© John Roberts, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004686878_013

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The importance of the contribution of the writerly artist to the critique of spontaneous ideologies of art, artistic identity and artisticness; artists as language users and concept-users The destruction of painterly visualisation as corollary of value and meaning in art (‘imageless truth’) And the recourse to new skill/knowledge relations based on technologies of reproducibility Conceptual Art and the Belated Avant-Garde

All four points were constitutive in various ways of the early avant-garde (Constructivism, Productivism, Surrealism) and represent, more generally, the social and political ambitions of the 1920s: to transform artists into workers and workers into artists, technicians into artists and artists into technicians, and, therefore, to dissolve artistic technique into general social technique as the basis for the transformation of general social technique into (non-instrumentalised) praxis. Conceptual art is clearly indebted to this wider emancipatory legacy of the avant-garde, in which the labour of artisticness and the identity of the artist are, in broad terms, deaestheticised, de-sacralised and denaturalised. But this indebtedness is largely a fragmented and belated experience for artists in the USA and Britain in the 1960s; the reworking, relearning and transmission of the historic avant-garde was a terribly uneven and attenuated process. Few artists had any real historical understanding of the historic avant-garde,2 insofar as artists’ relationship to the avant-garde was mostly generic, or based on rumour and hearsay. And, in a way, this was to be wholly expected: in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was little historical critical writing available on Constructivism and Productivism that could frame this generation’s possible refunctioning of the avant-garde, the exceptions being the architectural work of Kenneth Frampton, the film writings of Jay Leyda, and Camilla Gray’s history of the Soviet avant-garde – her well-known and widely read The Russian Experiment (1971).3 The reception of Dada and Surrealism was admittedly somewhat different, given their extensive ‘assimilation’ in 1950s and 1960s modernism,

2 Just how much knowledge, remains open to contestation. See Foster 1994. 3 Leyda 1960, and Gray 1962. In 1970 Thames & Hudson also published, Anatole Kopp’s Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning, 1917–1935, and in 1971, the Hayward Gallery, London, staged a major show on the Soviet avant-garde, Art in Revolution: Soviet Art and Design After 1917. In the mid-70s other contributions appeared such as Stephen Bann’s (problematic) The Tradition of Constructivism, Thames & Hudson, 1974, and John Bowlt’s excellent anthology Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, Viking, London, 1976.

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after the emigration of many of their leading members to the USA, and the amenability of many Dadaist and Surrealist image-strategies to incorporation into a revived modernist painting.4 The major issue, however, is that there was no coherent corpus of writing on the historic avant-garde until Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) was translated from the German in the 1980s.5 And this is why the critical reception of the avant-garde began largely after Conceptual art (although in 1975–6 a number of English artists and art critics began to theorize and question the presuppositions of the category).6 Consequently, there was no systematic unpacking of what linked Constructivism and Productivism to Surrealism; and little understanding of what distinguished Constructivism and Productivism from modernism generally, and, therefore, what distinguished Constructivism and Productivism’s critique of the image and the object from Dada and Surrealism’s critique of resemblance in art and the formal integrity of the art object (through the use of the readymade, collage and assemblage). On this basis Conceptual Art can be seen as the last of the historic avantgardes, but, paradoxically, without Conceptual art proclaiming itself self-consciously as an avant-garde. As the first manifestation of the avant-garde’s reemergence after the post-war efflorescence of painterly modernism, its primary task was, in a way, more circumspect: namely, the theoretical and practical displacement of an institutionalised (American) modernism, and not, as one might assume, the historicisation and re-articulation of the category of the avant-garde. The use of the concept of the avant-garde was very much a consequence of the initial and localised critique of modernism and, therefore, was largely retrospective in effect. Accordingly, the theoretical labour on the avant-garde began after Conceptual art, when it became clearer what kind of sequence or movement Conceptual art actually was: precisely, a deflected appropriation of some of the key avant-garde strategies within a philosophical framework of ontological reflection on the limits and boundaries of art: the deconstruction of the identity of the artist through collective practice; the expanded use of the readymade as part of extended post-artisanal repertoire of artistic skills; and the adaptation of techniques of technological anonymity and repetition as a means of freeing the artist from a self-postulating creativity. So, in many ways Conceptual art is a product of the post-war rupture between theory and practice, enshrined in (American) modernism. Whereas the historic avant-garde (1917– 4 See Motherwell 1951. 5 Bürger 1984. 6 See Newcastle Exhibition Writings, Robert Self in association with Northern Arts, NewcastleUpon-Tyne, 1977.

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29) took the unity of theory and practice for granted in its claims for art’s place in revolutionary cultural transformation, the post-war neo-avant-gardes, such as Conceptual art, had to remake the avant-garde as part of its own localised and delimited claims to theoretical self-definition (art-beyond-modernism). So, overly obsessed – even inhibited – by its critique of the achievements of modernist painting, Conceptual art indirectly rehearsed debates that had in fact in key respects taken place 50 years before. This, however, is not to say that this rehearsal was at all platitudinous or repetitious. On the contrary, the lack of direct knowledge of the early avantgarde, and the focus on the negation of modernist painterly form, produced an array of strange, unprecedented neo-avant-garde strategies, interventions and forms that ‘hollowed’ out and reshaped modern art in unusual and productive ways – blank sheets of paper with a few printed lines or marks, sequences of propositions in book-form, grainy photos and oblique texts, grids, maps and charts, empty galleries as installations and other ‘invisible’ entities – producing an unprecedentedly vivid draining of art’s sensuous apprehension (even Malevich’s zero-sum abstraction looked positively affirmative by comparison). In this sense, paradoxically, despite the heightened intellectual demands and commitments of Conceptual art, in contrast to the fading aestheticist reflexes of high modernist painting, Conceptual art was the last moment of historical ‘innocence’ in late modernist practice. After Conceptual art and the rise of institutional-based cultural theory and art theory, there develops an increasing convergence between artist’s critical self-consciousness and the production of historical knowledge; Conceptual artists were the last generation of artists who had in a sense to become historians themselves – albeit limited ones – in order to figure out a way forward. We should not, however, romanticise this intense autodidactic moment; the critical reclamation of the past is a constitutive force of art’s relations of production in the modern period. Historically ‘ignorant’ artists – the blessed idiot savant of Romantic fantasists – are not usually engaged in any conversation of note; artists of ambition have always, therefore, sought out the most important conversations and theories. But nevertheless, in a period of intellectual retreat for art in the 1950s and 1960s, Conceptual art, nevertheless, produced a striking revival of the intellectual identity of the artist, of the artist who thinks, and as such thinks as much outside of, as inside, of art. The idea of bringing ‘art’ and ‘language’ together, therefore, was to foreground what had been occluded in the post-war, post-avant-garde settlement: the fact that artists are not just sentient beings (possessed of consciousness or expressive feelings) but sapient beings (concept-users).7 And the best way to act on this fact was not simply 7 For an important Hegelian defence of this distinction, see Brandom 2001. John Roberts - 978-90-04-68687-8

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to expand the cognitive repertoire of artists, but to push and test what kind of concept-user artists might actually be, or could be. This would necessarily involve questioning what artists learn, how they learn, and how ‘how and what’ they learn might be incorporated into art, and, in turn, how this process of learning might produce a re-functioning of the representation of the artistic self as a condition of ‘artistic expression’ itself. Where do individual self-definition and collective practice and authorship begin and end? When loosened from the motor skills and artisanal craft practices of painting and freestanding ‘expressive’ sculpture, what does artistic skill actually consist in? In this respect, Conceptual art was at its most ‘avant-gardist’ when it embarked on this fundamental revaluation of art’s place in the intellectual division of labour, as a consequence of questioning what artists learn and how they learn; hence the significance of the four points above. Transforming art’s place in the intellectual division of labour meant changing the artist and art’s relations of production all the way down. And, crucial, therefore, to my aim here is to analyse how the legacy of the recovery of this concept of learning in Conceptual art – or more precisely the links between technik and Bildung – played out for this generation, and, consequently, how conceptual art’s long-range influence on practice plays out today, particularly in an art world in which postconceptualism and the notion of the artist-as-interdisciplinarian have become thoroughly naturalised. In other words, to pursue the most convincing historical and critical work on Conceptual art today, we need to press home the demands that Conceptual art itself expected of its audience and interlocuters in the late sixties and seventies: that art must participate in a discussion of its own conditions of possibility as a condition of transforming art as part of a transformation of the world. But in doing so, one should not assume that the various national contributions to Conceptual art under this demand do not produce very different ends and expectations. This is something that rarely gets addressed in the drive to celebrate Conceptual art as a post-national cultural formation; and when it is addressed, the local and particular tend to be fetishised in the interests of national self-definition, or recently, a global politics of difference.8 What is required, and, as such, what is rather more purposeful for our aims, is to examine how national variations of Conceptual art asked different questions of Conceptual art as a model of learning, and, as a result, presented different demands to the expansion of art as an international proto-avant-garde. Thus, the emergence of Conceptual art in South America in the late sixties, for

8 Camnitzer et al. 1999.

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example, is conditioned and mediated explicitly by an anti-imperialist politics, which immediately put its practitioners in a subordinate relationship to American culture and politics, and to post-war American art in particular. The emergence of Conceptual art in Argentina in the late 1960s, for instance, is very much governed by this perspective; the recently inherited and mandated forms of American minimalism and Conceptual art, are subtly – and not so subtly – deflated and ironised, and, as such, exposed to the violent political realities of Argentina and the comprador capitalisms of South America.9 In contrast Conceptual art in the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s allied the dissolution of the traditional forms of art with extraordinarily novel kinds of apophatic artistic theory, to produce a ‘silent’ withdrawal of art from the Stalinist public domain, as in the group Collective Actions.10 Similarly Conceptual art in Britain and West Germany in the late sixties cannot be separated from these two countries’ respective sense of subordination to dominant American cultural interests, and, in turn, the way these feelings of subordination became mediated historically by an attachment to the labour movement and the radical left inside their respective national cultures.11 Certainly in Britain, the reframing of knowledge inside Conceptual art was expressly connected to a heterodox class politics, in which the theoretical in art acts politically as an autonomous space of recoil from bourgeois humanist assertions of aesthetic competence and critical entitlement. The point, then, is, if Conceptual art reframes the avant-garde and opens out art generally to a multitude of critical and non-compliant cultural forms and attitudes, it is not surprising that this is a space in which the possible meanings of Conceptual art are mediated in different national locations by different political traditions and cultural lineages. Learning in art, as a claim on art’s conditions of possibility, is necessarily context sensitive. This is why it is possible to talk about South American Conceptual art as largely overdetermined by anti-imperialist struggle; and why Conceptual art in Britain, on the level of group learning, possesses such a strong subaltern class perspective, and, on another level, presents a certain sympathy for Anglo-American analytical philosophy and ordinary-language philosophy, given their dissident modes of rationalism. One tends to forget that, despite analytic philosophy’s underwhelming liberalism in the academy, in the 1960s its incisive demolition

9 10 11

See, Katzenstein 2004. See, Monastyrsky 2010; Groys 2012, and Esanu 2013. Dieter Hacker’s ‘Socio-Political Art Concept’ interventions in West Germany in the early 1970s are of particular interest here. For a discussion of the left and ‘concept art’ in post1960s West Germany see Langston 2008. For a discussion of the British left, post-war transformation and the debate on class, culture and humanism, see Steele 1997.

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of false conflations, category mistakes, and conceptual indeterminancies was the scourge of a certain kind of lazy Oxbridge English culturalist-humanist religiosity. To radicalise this intra-bourgeois critique of ‘feeling’ and ‘intuition’ – to place philosophical reason in philosophically ‘untrained’ and plebeian hands – produces a cognitive jolt, at odds with the liberal judiciousness and equanimity of analytic philosophy’s sunny liberal uplands. The job of any broader historical account of Conceptual art and its aftermaths is to indent these historical, political and cultural conditions, therefore, from within the dialectical flow of the art of the period. Here, in this essay, though, my intentions are somewhat narrower, given my knowledge and competences and limited space: namely, to focus on some of the key areas that Conceptual art in Britain brings to the critique of American modernism (and British Conceptual art’s interdependent emergence with American Conceptual art) within this space of shared learning or Bildung. On the one hand, this is the result of my formation as a writer, but on the other, more importantly, it is the result of my judgement about the significance and value of the four areas of Conceptual critique I have highlighted as central to Conceptual art. Because of the regressive position of late modernism within a broadly patrician modernist conservative culture in Britain in the 1960s, Conceptual art’s transformation of an anti-bourgeois function of learning in art takes on an expressly pedagogic and radical cultural role. That is, there is a definable democratising reflex in the theoretical displacement of the ‘aestheticised’ spectator and ‘intuitivist’ modernist producer, as British culture and art education in the 1960s undergoes an extraordinary transformation from below. For, when we talk about Conceptual art and the counterculture, as many recent histories of Conceptual art obviously do,12 we should also remember that Conceptual art, certainly in Britain, attached itself to, and was a product of, a certain shift in class power and class relations inside the institutions of culture; new modes learning were not the neutral supplement to an increasingly attenuated modernism, but a radical transformation of art’s relations of production and conditions of reception. And, consequently, this derived from real material changes in educational provision. Both Pop art and Conceptual art were produced largely by a generation of working-class and lower-middle-class art students who, after the 1944 Butler Education Act, were able to enter art school with few or no academic qualifications, and, when there they were given the time and space, to find an autonomous identity for themselves. As such, there was a huge influx of

12

See Corris 2004.

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working-class and lower-middle class energy into the British art school system between 1960 and 1975 that transformed both the cultural and artistic expectations of working-class and lower-middle-class students themselves, but also transformed the very identity of what it was to be an artist in these institutions. In this sense, what I have to say here is an acknowledgement of this rich history. Accordingly, one of my purposes is to reveal what the local manifestations of Conceptual art (in Britain) share, or do not share, with the category ‘Conceptual art’ narrated and imagined in recent globalised art histories. And one of the best ways to do this is to remind ourselves that, at a significant level, many artists in Britain and elsewhere became Conceptual artists first and foremost because they wanted to leave a cordial middle-class account of what it is to be an artist well behind, and therefore were desperate to open up art and its affects to those radical, deflationary and agonistic forces rushing into the culture from both inside and outside of art. To emphasise my earlier point, there was, consequently, ‘no time’ to pose the role and identity of the avant-garde again in any explicit theoretical and art historical sense, for there was far too much to do in the moment of this countercultural release of these subaltern energies; that is, before any proper re-accounting of the avant-garde could be made there was too much mediating of the flux of the countercultural times to be lived and absorbed, too much self-organised theoretical clarification of the new artistic opportunities to be accomplished, and, therefore, too much sloughing off of an aestheticising modernist legacy to be pushed through, that had betrayed its own great – and world transforming – legacy. In this sense we need to begin our account of new modes of learning in art by looking at what has shifted in the culture since, in order for us to understand why and how artists in these years began (again) to think of themselves as thinkers, or more precisely, writerly artists.

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Art History and Artistic Writerliness

In the 1960s in Europe and North America, the intellectual division of labour in art history underwent a rapid and far-reaching transformation. Where once art historians were trained as art historians and artists were trained as artists – certainly up to the 1950s – from the late 1960s this begins to break down. Artists were now acting as their own historians and critics. This admittedly is a very uneven process across national boundaries and from academic sector to sector, but, nevertheless, by the early 1970s, the production of artists-as-writers in the art schools under the aegis of the new art and its expectations, destabilised the traditional division between art historical representation and artistic

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agency; artists had no need of what historians and critics might say, precisely because what had to be said had to be said by artists as a condition of production; artists wrote to find out what might be made of the situation they found themselves in, and therefore did not require what might or might not be made of the situation by others, no matter how ‘informed’.13 This refusal of representation as a condition of producing the artist as ‘thinker’ (as historian and critic), was accompanied by an internal crisis of representation in art history itself, as traditional humanist methodologies and value judgements experience a crisis in response to a number of external and internal factors: the weakening of the narrow class-base of art historical scholarship under the impact of the increased access to higher education by working-class and lower-middleclass students14 (although university numbers for art history are relatively small compared to the numbers of art students in the art schools, certainly in most European countries), encouraging a minority of younger historians to engage directly with contemporary art; the emerging crisis of connoisseurship as a route to art historical understanding in response to the increasing opening up of art history to extra-art historical methodologies and social demands; and crucially, the increasing inability of the discipline as a whole to respond to the critical requirements of actual living artists, especially women artists. These various pressure points came to a head during Conceptual art, defining the intellectual space into which the self-organising and autodidactic demands of Conceptual artists emerged. That is, Conceptual art’s primary identification of artistic labour with intellectual labour was a way of creating a space free from conventional art history and art criticism’s methods; artists did not want to have what they did ‘explained’ as a result of professional judgements divorced from or exterior to the art’s discursive conditions of production. This did not mean that artists’ recourse to the writing of theory and history was primarily a way of artists protecting their reputation against arbitary judgement, given the exacting nature of the new work. But rather, if criticism was to fulfill its role it had to be adequate to the theoretical requirements of the art’s conditions of production. In other words, it had enter the demands of the dialogue with the art in ways that would make the dialogue a worthwhile learning experience itself. Thoroughly disenchanted, then, with American modernism’s strict division between criticism, art history and studio practice, and its tendency towards mandarin modes of attention and judgement, a younger generation 13 14

See for example, Burn 1991. For an extensive reflection on the connoisseurial and enfeoffed nature of art history in Britain between 1930 and the 1960s, see Miranda Carter’s biography of Anthony Blunt, Carter 2001.

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of artists reopened the debate on art’s position in the intellectual division of labour, by dismissing the requirement of the artist to defer to the words of the critic, as if the critic, operating in domains he or she had no competence in, could, through ‘feeling’ and a ‘good eye’, explain back to artists what they were doing. Of course, Conceptual artists made no extra-artistic claims about their own critical perspicacity; in some sense they were the first to admit that they didn’t know transparently ‘what they were doing’, even if they knew clearly what they didn’t want to do. But this uncertanity is not the substantive point. Rather, what was at stake was the destruction of this subordinate relationship between external professional judgement and the heuristic and open-ended intellectual demands of the production and reception of art itself, a division enshrined in Clement Greenberg’s and Michael Fried’s thoroughly anti-writerly reading of modernism, and the whole humanist and quasi-literary legacy of ‘intuitivistic’ and ‘sensitivistic’ accounts of aesthetic judgement. The old art history and the new modernist criticism were equally obstructive to artists, insofar as what both had to say were ‘off stage’ and therefore external to the unfolding and specific intellectual demands of the new art’s abandonment or foreclosure of aesthetics. In defiance of Greenberg’s and Fried’s de-intellectualisation of artists’ skills, Conceptual artists increasingly defined themselves as artistwriters, and, as such, partisan historians and critics of their own and others’ practice; writing, accordingly, became not just interior to the demands of production, but took on an externalising role in which ‘artistic thinking’ lay claim to ‘thinking in general’. From this perspective, the writerly identity of Conceptual art forms part of a wider transformation of the intellectual division labour inside the critique of Western bourgeois culture in the 1960s: that is, the post-humanist critique of disciplinary boundaries. The emergence of the philosopher-artist and philosopher-writer for example – as embodied in the writerliness of postwar French philosophy (Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Gilles Deleuze) – was a way of bringing philosophy out of its technical abode, in order to bring philosophical concepts to bear on the claims and horizons other disciplines, shifting the philosopher’s voice into a public, expressive and interrogatory mode, away from a professional and ‘passive’ one. In Conceptual art the construction of writerly artist-historian, artist-critic and artist-philosopher, offered a similar expansion of identity and critique of inherited or assumed passivity. But, in the case of Conceptual art, the post-disciplinary movement was very much in the other direction: artists were not looking to find a post-disciplinary intellectual identity that might be adequate to an expanded theoretical economy, but, rather, simply, recover a working intellectual identity as such, one that, indeed, would

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allow them to write in a first-order way as artists without assuming this was a diminishment of creativity (this is why, in what seems like a contradictory move, Conceptual artists could draw on the perceived dissident rationalism of analytic philosophy).

3

Writerly Legacy

Of course artists have written, from the Rennaisance onwards, in many ways obsessively so. But invariably this was in response to the practical demands of studio practice; and most of this writing was for private consumption only, in the form of correspondence (Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse) or journals (Eugène Delacroix and Thomas Jones). Artists rarely wrote to be published – unless they were obligated to do so as state officials, or as institutional figure-heads in the case of Sir Joshua Reynolds.15 This changes under the cultural ‘externalisation’ of art practice, once artists are defined primarily by their relations to the market and to the emergent institution of art history itself (in contrastinction to artists’ non-specific place in the general conflict between ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns’). This transformation occurs, then, at the point where modernist painting loses its vestigal connection to the classical art of the past (as in Édouard Manet) to become an advocate of its own modernity, and as such, an intellectual defender of its own autonomous interests. In this respect, the place from where the artist speaks changes. He or she no longer seeks to defend tradition from inside the academy, but, rather, in discursive negotiation and contest with tradition and the vested, even coercive, power of tradition’s reliance on the academy for its authority. Consequently, the enunciative force of the artist’s commitment to his or her new found autonomy also changes. He or she now defines his or her identity in alliance with the expansion of the modern conditions of knowledge production (Georges Seurat, Camille Pissarro, Berthe Morisot). Art may seek to wrest its autonomy from the instrumental forces of commodity-production and the narrow interests of the market, but its claim to modernity does not harbour a pre-modern antithesis to the sciences; on the contrary, science and art share a commitment to reflection on the conflicts and antagonisms of capitalist modernity. Thus from the 1870s artists increasingly incorporate the polemic, the manifesto, the political thesis, the extra-artistic alliance and scientific hypothesis and proposition into their relations of production, as a way of establishing 15

Reynolds was president of the Royal Academy from 1768–92. See Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, Collier, New York, 1969. Male artists nevertheless wrote, as if for public

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a public and appelative identity for the art. Admittedly much of this writing remained unpublished; and, although artists were conscious of their intellectually oppositional role, they did not see themselves in any sense as artistwriters or artist-philosophers. Writing, rather, is that which the nineteenth century modernist painter does in order to preserve his or her professional integrity against the rise of a bullishly instrumental bourgeois culture, particularly when the words of the professional critic are so uniformly ignorant, historically retarded or rebarbative. However, this writerly reticence changes once modernism experiences the full force of the impact of general social technique (or technological reproducibility and the modern intellectual division of labour) on artistic practice, and the full force of the dissolution of the academic art institution itself during and after the Russian revolution. From 1910 to 1930 – that is from Marcel Duchamp to El Lissitzky and André Breton – the writerly function of the artist undergoes a massive and epochal change. What was until recently a critical addendum to the work of the studio, now defines the character of studio practice itself and the social identity of the artist. This is because the avant-garde requires the artist to re-position himself or herself within the intellectual division of labour as someone who makes no distinction between so-called artistic interests and artistic technique and extra-artistic interests. In many ways Duchamp is the first artist of this kind, insofar as he makes no formal separation between artistic knowledge and non-artistic knowledge, thus requiring the artist to shift his attention from non-writerly practice (or what Duchamp famously called the retinal) to the writerly. But it is El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy who establish the writerly transformation of the artist in a qualitatively decisive break with the art of the recent past. The avant-garde art of the Russian revolution and its transmogrification in 1920s Berlin does not simply represent an expansion of the extra-artistic interests of the writerly modernist (as if artists now demonstrated a theoretical interest in technology and art), but, more fundamentally, the transformation of the writerly modernist into an artist-intellectual and artist-theorist. In the wake of the avant-garde’s abandonment or displacement of painting, and the rise of the interdisciplinary artist, writing becomes a constitutive part of studio practice and the social and revolutionary identity of the artist. Writing becomes the basis of a research-based, theoretically self-conscious, and interdisciplinary practice. Hence the writing

consumption. Mary Cassatt, for instance (1844–1926), based in Paris and a close friend of Edgar Degas, left only 64 letters mostly concerned with family and domestic matters. See Havice 1981–2, pp. 1–7.

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defines and shapes the art inside and outside the studio dissolving the distinction between writerly practice and non-writerly practice. This in turn breaches the boundaries between, history, criticism and studio activity. In being committed to transforming the conditions of production under which the artist works, the artist is also committed to the work of rehistoricisation in theorizing and defending the conditions of this transformation. Conceptual art in the 1960s borrowed much from this writerly model of the avant-garde, even if – as I have stressed – its historical understanding of the original avant-garde was partial and fragmented. In this, it saw that American modernism’s sensuous detour through pre-modernism and aestheticism suppressed something more fundamental than the pictorial: it suppressed the very writerly conditions of modern art itself. One of the preoccupations of Conceptual artists and postconceptual artists, therefore, has not been simply to reinvent the identity of the artist as intellectual and concept-user, but more substantively, to bring writerliness into realignment with the general condition of art’s modernity as an expansion of the conditions of artistic learning. Since Conceptual art the number of artists-writers and artist-philosophers has grown exponentially (for example Art & Language, Joseph Kosuth, Adrian Piper, Victor Burgin, Hans Haacke, Mary Kelly, Terry Atkinson, Lygia Clark, Allan Sekula, Martha Rosler, Jeff Wall, Barbara Kruger, Andrea Fraser, Renée Green). One might say then that there are two periods to Conceptual art’s writerliness. The early years, in which writerliness is conceived as a direct exit from modernist painterly discourse, and as such the historical reconstrution of the modern is confined to the vicissitudes of late modernism itself – writerliness as the valorisation of writerly art work. And the period after 1975, when a recently acquired reflexive history of Conceptual art is now constitutive of the development of Conceptualism as the ongoing historical form of art’s writerly modernity. And this is one of the reasons why the expansion of artist-writers and artist-philosophers has occured in the depth and diversity it has since then – whatever the shifts in art history and criticism itself after 1975. Artists’ own belated experience of the avant-garde could no longer wait on the avant-garde’s external and ‘authoritative’ historicisation and theorisation by others. Rather, the historical and theoretical work had to be done by the artists themselves in order for artists to position themselves in relation to a living past (including the recent past of Conceptual art itself) in which they could invest and refunction. One consequence of this – reflected in the broad emancipation of the identity of the artist from narrow technical and formal considerations – is the notion of the writerly artist as an intellectual partisan for other practices. That is, part of the artist’s writerly work as an intellectual advocate for their own production is the making and refining of a set a plausible historical arguments for

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like-minded practices. This does not exclude accommodating or supporting the interpretative schemas of the professional art historian and critic, but, rather, that the voice of the artist is at no point secondary to these schemas, meaning that, in any ensuing dialogue on matters of judgement, the artist’s own voice is substantive rather than merely exotic or exoteric. This is somewhat different, then, from the art historian’s recovery of the written or reported speech of the artist, so central to the kind of art history and criticism Conceptual art rejected. For, in this respect, the speech of the artist functions precisely as a direct competitor to the theoretical speech of the interpreter. Or more properly, they share the same interpretative space.

4

The Art School and Artistic Writerliness

What, then, has been the effect of this on art history and art criticism since the 1960s and the rise of the writerly artist? In, particular, what ways have art criticism and art history responded to this challenge to these changes in the intellectual division of labour? In the light of the above, the response since art history’s crisis of representation has largely been twofold: on the one hand art history has moved to contemporise itself and art criticism historicise itself (that is narrow the gap between the modern and the contemporary and open up the contemporary to genealogical analysis respectively); and, on the other hand, in the wake of the destabilisation of the professional identity of artist and art historian alike, there has been an opening up production/theory to the increasing fluidity between the roles of artists-as-art historians and art historians. For one of the general consequences of postconceptual writerly practice since the late 1970s is not only the increasing move on the part of trained artists into the area of art theory and art history, but the move of art historians and art theorists into the area of production or quasi-production. The volume of traffic, admittedly, is not the same in both directions. It is the former that tends to predominate, given the residual identity of would-be primary artistic authorship in our culture with ‘creativity’. Yet there is growing evidence that it is the commitment to working with or collaborating with artists that is determining in the long run the social base of contemporary art history and art criticism, reflected in the professional decline of the ‘independent’ critic and his or her ‘stand-alone’ judgements. For, just as there has been an exponential increase in artist-intellectuals and artist-writers who claim historian and theorist-status, and artists who also practice as art-historians or art critics, there is also a growing number of art historians and critics who seek some kind of participatory role in a given project or event (just as there is a convergence of the

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critic with the curator-as-producer). These moves, however, are not identifiable with the pejorative category of the ‘failed artist’, as if this writerly activity constituted a generalised compensation on the part of both artist-critics and writer-critics for a lack of credible artistic ability. On the contrary, under these generalised writerly conditions of practice the artist moves into this writerly space as a writer, and the historian and critic move into the artist’s writerly space as (possible) writerly participants, both equally engaged with the problems of production. These changes have perhaps been more pronounced, for longer at least, in Britain, where the conditions under which artists and historians and critics have been produced since the 1960s are quite different from the USA and Europe. It is worth looking at this in more detail as it bears upon my broader arguments about the social conditions of writerliness and the countercultural and subaltern character of Conceptual art in Britain in the 1960s. As we have noted: one of the distinctive features of art education post-World War ii in Britain is that working-class and lower-middle-class students were able to gain an art education through the impact of the 1944 Butler Education Act. All students had to do in order to gain entry to art school was display some modicum of artistic proficiency, and have passed five O-levels, a general education subject-based examination, taken at the age of sixteen. Introduced in 1951, O-levels were discontinued in 1988. This released an enormous amount of heterodox creativity into the art education system, completely transforming the cultural landscape of art in the 1950s and 1960s. Pop art’s dissident pictorialism and Conceptual art’s radical autodidacticism owe their collective force to these changes from below. Indeed, the changes in cultural expectations that arose from this new situation were both profound and exacting, certainly in and through Conceptual art. For Conceptual art – specifically in the work of Art & Language and Victor Burgin – this involved, no more nor less, an unprecented identification on the part of working-class and lowermiddle-class artists with the demands of independent intellectual achievement within the culture (rather than identification with the monuments of workingclass sentiment, usually inscribed in the adherence to some historical notion of painterly Realism). Students were exposed to a wide variety of emerging critical perspectives that enabled them to receive a varied if informal theoretical education beyond the refinement of traditional artisanal skills. But this refunctioning was not the result of any systematic refashioning of priorities and curricula in the art schools themselves in the 1960s and early 70s. Art school education, certainly in the UK, and certainly outside of leading studio programmes in New York, and at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, was in a parlous critical state, as Kerry Freedman and Patricia Stuhr have noted.

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Co-extensive with a hegemonic painterly modernism in US art departments in the 1960s and early 70s was the growing resurgence in the popularity of traditional crafts.16 But paradoxically, because this modernist/craft hegemony was so weak intellectually – or, rather, because its claims were framed within a liberal modernist education that encouraged ‘free expression’ – its governing assumptions were tacitly accepted, rather than intellectually imposed. Indeed to impose such assumptions would be in conflict with the very spirit of liberal ‘self-expression’. (A residual complaint, of course, during this period made by many students later, was that this kind of liberal modernist education didn’t actually teach you anything, but rather, left you to your own devices in the studio for three years; abstract painterly ‘emoting’ was the order of the day.) It is into the gap between this naturalisation of modernist painterliness and the art school’s immanent resistance to the academic implementation of this painterliness as a theoretical programme, that conceptual writerliness emerges. As such one of the progressive functions of the art school in Britain in the early 1970s was the fact that this theoretical void – or naturalisation of modernism as ‘self-expression’ – allowed the space for a small number of lecturers and visiting artists armed with the new post-artisanal agenda to establish new theoretical frameworks and new spaces of contestation in the studio itself. These initiatives were not welcomed of course, despite the improved space for dialogue and improvisation. In fact, in many instances they were openly resisted and in some instances eventually quashed, as in Art & Language’s notorious dismissal from Coventry Art School in 1970. Yet in the work of a small ambitious layer of lecturers and artists throughout the sector, new pedagogic links between the seminar room and studio were faciliated, allowing a young generation of artists to rewaken their identity as thinkers, or thinking practitioners. This dispersed pedagogy – or loose network of shared theoretical concerns – was able, therefore, to develop and shape the emerging writerly ethos of Conceptual art, certainly in Britain, from within a still confident sense of the art school as a place of independent creativity. Let us not forget that the vast majority of art schools in the UK in the sixties and early seventies were independent institutions (that is, not academic institutions attached to Universities), and therefore, did not suffer what were to become the future bureaucratic depredations of art’s incorporation into the expansion of the University system. Conceptual art, then, is the point where the suppressed writerliness of the early avant-garde returns to refunction the artist and the critic in response to

16

Freedman and Stuhr 2004.

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the modernist de-socialisation and de-intellectualisation of art, precipitating a fundamental reorientation in the intellectual division of labour between artists and critics. The result was that, at an important level, despite the general antiintellectual torpor of many fine art departments in the late 1960s and 1970s in the UK, non-academic working-class and lower-middle class students, were able to receive a theoretical, cultural and political training of sorts. Or rather, more specifically, they were in a position to open themselves up to this outcome through their own autodidactic efforts. One of the consequences of this is that the ‘postconceptual’ art school in the 1980s and 1990s in the UK becomes an intellectual training ground and space for theoretical speculation (and the building and support of creative and theoretical cadres) completely unavailable to other working-class and lowermiddle-class students elsewhere within the education system. The outcome is that a large number of working-class and lower-middle-class students pass out of the art-school system in order to take higher degrees in art history, philosophy and cultural studies. The art school, then, becomes a redoubtable conveyer belt for, and cradle of, political dissent and theoretical ambition in spite of the residual anti-intellectualism, in turn, producing the material base for the development and teaching of the new art histories (Marxist and feminist and later deconstructionist, post-colonialist and post-structuralist) in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, it is the movement of many working-class and lower-middleartists into art history and art theory from the late 1970s on, that contributes to the radical transformation of art history in Britain, in the wake of its methodological crisis during this period. It also demonstrates the emergence of a closer working relationship between the writer and artist, which confirms some of the more general things I have been saying about modernism and writerliness: the avant-garde recovery of writerliness, and the opening up of new autodidactic conditions and spaces for intellectual work from below, begin to dissolve the fixed boundaries between artist, art historian and critic. As a result, this writerly shift is part of a deeper dynamic as the post-artisanal conditions of art become the determining framework of ‘value’ and ‘research’ in art; Conceptual art recovers art from the self-policing discourses of aesthetics. Hence, writerliness is at the centre of the modern artist’s bid for critical autonomy precisely because of its exercise and defence of art’s link to the Enlightenment tradition of Bildung (the necessary connectedness between art and intellectual labour in any worthwhile account of art’s liberatory potential and human emancipation). By this I mean that the release of writerliness in the avant-garde, and the release of writerliness across the roles of artist and artist historian and critic in the 1960s and 1970s, produces something more, in the final analysis, than what we now know as interdisciplinarity. That is, in chal-

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lenging the intellectual division of labour, writerliness challenges the Kantian division between theoretical and practical reason, and, by extension, the subordination of ‘aesthetics’ to concept. In so doing, art as a space of self-realisation comes not through the skilful replication of inherited models of ‘good’ practice (classicism) or through the release of the spontaneous feelings of the artist and spectator (aestheticised modernism), but through self-developing communities of intellect. Self-realisation, lies, therefore, in the development of cognitive and creative spaces for reflection and self-reflection. And, of necessity, these spaces will be governed by practices of collaborative and (self-critical) learning. Consequently within the tradition of Bildung art and intellectual labour, (and labour on the self) are not opposed. Cultural development is derived precisely from the forms of objectification provided by intellectual labour. This means that the development of authentic cultural self-realisation lies in the expansion of the scope of aesthetic reason and not in the encouragement of aesthetic desublimation. The writerly avant-garde and the writerly critique of American modernism in Conceptual art embraced and extended this. For just as art is placed in the realm of the concept and extra-artistic knowledge, the concept, in turn is defended as a living and productive thing, and as such indivisible from practice. In other words, the concept and writerliness are themselves forms of praxis.17 But if writerliness and Bildung are at the centre of twentieth-century art practice, the social force of this writerliness of course remains uneven. Large amounts of traditional art history and criticism by art historians and critics still gets produced, given the continuing links between the objects of art history and the validations of the market; in the USA, for example, which produces more art historians, critics and artists than any other nation state, art history and criticism is more professionalised than ever as a consequence of the continuing power of the market over the academy. Furthermore artists’ scramble for a place in the market is invariably conditioned by the liberal ethos of ideological neutrality, which retains its influence in the market if not in the academy: it is not the job of the artist to act as a partisan interpreter of his or her own work; and it is certainly not the job of the art historian and critic to participate in production. And this of course feeds art history’s and art criticism’s traditional approbation of its canonically chosen objects. So, if Greenberg’s and Fried’s partisan conjunction of non-writerliness with quality may have long gone as a model of practice, non-writerliness as a means of facilitating market inclusion (it’s up to the spectator to give the work its meaning, helped along by the

17

See Badiou 2005[a], for an exploration of this connection.

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critic), prevails as the commensensical line of least resistance. Artists’ writerliness – their critical sapience – only gets ‘in the way’, limiting sales options and slowing down the circulation and assimilation of artworks. Thus the market and the major institutions function largely to suppress both the presence of writerliness within art’s relations of production, and the motile identity of the artist as artist-writer, artist-thinker, artist-historian. This has produced in the current period a fundamental disconnect betweeen what advanced art does and what is declared legible as art by the institution and the market. Indeed, this disconnect now defines the art market increasingly as a place of empty exchange. That is, the huge rise in forms of ‘writerly’ group, collective and participatory practice and pedagogic and interdisciplinary work over the last twenty years, defines a system of production and reception that has no interest in the approbation of institution and market alike – even if some of this work is taken note of and obviously circulates back through the official channels of the artworld. Moreover, this exponential expansion of interdisciplinary, pedagogic and participatory work, of temporal and network practice, identifies Bildung with something larger than artistic group learning itself: namely, art’s participation in and rehaping of the ‘collective intellect’ across the intellectual division of labour. Participatory practice, team work, and collaborative activity, become the fluid and active sites of exchange between artists, technicians and their audience, in turn, transforming artistic process into a multitude of points of social and political dissensus and articulation. This is not to exaggerate the transformative effects of these extra-institutional practices politically and socially. These practices are invariably ad hoc and subject outside the art institutions to all the familiar practical constraints and exclusions and divisions enforced by the free market’s proprietal control over the built environment and the implementation of privatized zoning laws, in lieu of art’s claims for direct intervention into the world. The important point, however, is we need to take the long view on writerliness and Bildung, against the imposed history of the official institution, that sees such writerliness as the occasional exotic and exoteric manifestation of art’s avant-gardism. On the contrary, as the continuities within avant-garde and neo-avant-garde have revealed in the twentieth century, writerliness is where the real transformative work of art’s self-definition is done, and, therefore, the continuing site of art’s collective and distributive promise: the disidentification of art as a category from the production of discrete entities, and the alignment of artistic and cognitive skill with general social technique. Art history, therefore, is not just living in the wake of a major nervous breakdown since the methodological revolutions of the 1960s (the post-colonial dismantling of the Western canon; the rise of alter-histories of the modern; the desubjectivisation of ‘self

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expression’). It is operating in a space where its categories of judgement are increasingly subordinate to the writerliness and collective ethos of a large range of artistic practices as such, in which what is required from the art historian – artist, ex-artist or professional art historian alike – is a critical participation with artists and other specialists. Not simply as advocates, of course, but in the political spirit of Bildung as part of a shared research programme/s. Conceptual art, therefore, produced a cleavage in the intellectual division of labour, making it impossible to return to the (pre-avant-garde) notion that artistic expression is fundamentally external to, or incidental to, conceptualisation. In this it didn’t just make a substantive post-Kantian claim on the interrelationality of authorship, expression and concept-use, but provided a thoroughgoing critique of the idea that artists are at their best when they escape the confines of intellectual community and group practice in the broadest sense.

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The ‘Black Debt’: Art & Language’s Writing Most writing by artists is studio-writing, that is, writing that is the product of studio practice and thinking, or in response to conversations in the studio.1 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this work usually remained unpublished and was either epistolatory or in the form of a journal or notebook. Paul Cézanne and Vincent Van Gogh were inveterate letter writers, Van Gogh sometimes writing three times a day to his brother Theo outlining the travails of his studio and his ambitions for his painting. Eugène Delacroix and Thomas Jones kept elaborate journals. In the twenty-first century studiowriting has become a branch of the publishing industry. Artists usually write to be published. Moreover, they write to be understood, first and foremost in relation to the prevailing discourses of art. The writing does not get done as an informal monitoring and sharing of studio practice with various interested parties, but rather as a public declaration or position-taking, or more commonly self-endorsement. Its logic is the logic of publicity. Declarations, position-taking and self-endorsements bring the thinking of a practice into open and competitive engagement with the judgements and hierarchies of the institution. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art is of course no stranger to such public declarations and self-endorsements. Modernism – and the avantgarde’s break with the academy – is based exactly on this principle of selfdeclaration, and as such, reflects the emergence of the readerly/writerly condition of the modern artist: the incorporation of artists’ writing into the relations of production of art itself, in the form of manifestoes and essays, and the creation of an expanded domain of attention for the spectator. Artists’ writings were no longer ‘hidden’, so to speak, or considered an ancillary mark of authority and status from within the academy, but viewed as the means by which the artist’s ‘programme’, ‘vision’ or ‘ideals’ were made socially comprehensible and communicable. In this regard, the history of the avant-garde is the history of artists’ writing as public manifestations or artistic intentions. This provides the template for the modern artist-intellectual or artist-theorist. Duchamp, Rod1 First published as ‘The ‘Black Debt’: Art & Language’s Writing’, ‘Introduction’ to Art & Language: Writings, Lisson Gallery/distritocu4tro, London and Madrid, 2005, translated as ‘Introducción: ‘Dueda Negra’: La Escritura De Art & Language’, Art & Language: Escritos, revsada por Carles Guerra, Lisson Gallery/distritocu4tro, London and Madrid, 2007.

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chenko and Moholy-Nagy, in their very different ways, exemplify this early ‘readerly/writerly’ moment. They all acknowledge writing as something from which their practice emerges, and, where the spectator is concerned, as a critical point of convergence with their practice. The readerly/writerly tendency freed artists from the belle-lettrist limitations of early epistolatory and journal writing, reconnecting them to the studiolo of the late Renaissance (the studio as humanist reading room and research laboratory), but on the terrain of the modern division of labour. The artist may still produce notebooks or journals, but these are now the sites of critical transmission between the studio or its surrogates, extra-artistic discourse and the art institution. Writing sustains the notion of the artist as a post-artisanal and interdisciplinary maker of things. Writing is the framework by which the thinking of the studio or its surrogates is made socially objective, from Constructivism to Surrealism the avant-garde artist writes himself or herself into art, and ‘over’ art, so to speak, in order to render art and writing companionable. The readerly/writerly model of the artist emerges, then, at the point where the skills needed by the artist are transformed by the expectations of revolutionary political, social and technological change that accompanied the terminal crisis of academic naturalism. However, the revolutionary social forces that propelled this model into collective life after 1917 were in tatters by the late 1930s. The counter-revolutionary forces that dissolved the social claims of the early avant-garde also dissolved its textual imperatives, its restless discursivity and imaginative verbosity. After World War ii, in New York and Paris another model of artists’ writing came to dominate: the artist’s statement as poetic fragment or anthropological citation (or conversely the matter-of-fact rejection of all scholarly citation) which summons both artist and spectator into the promethean realms of silence, and encourages a sensuous attentiveness to the painterly object. In New York in the 1950s this was not exactly the revenge of belle-lettrism. A number of leading modernist painters were among the first artists to receive university educations, and they placed a high value on their intellectual standing. Nevertheless, the distrust of art’s overwriting as theoretical talkativeness was bound up with a renewed emphasis on the space delimited by the framing edge of painting as one in which certain kinds of talk and writerly tendencies were neither permitted nor warranted. One of the consequences of this tradition of silence was the rejection of, or indifference to, artists writing as the place of authorial assertiveness or control. The exigencies of interpretation were thus left open to others – in short, to professional critics. In fact, the influence of this tradition of silence in American painterly modernism coincides with the emergence of a new post-war academy in art history and art criticism. The result was that the new art criticism rushed into

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to fill the absence of writerly studio talk – its remit strengthened by the shedding of the belle-lettrism of earlier forms. It both responded to and shaped late modernism’s rejection of the idea that the avant-garde is in some essential way interdisciplinary. Greenberg’s reading of modernism as distinctly unwriterly was central to this shift. In the 1960s the insidious unwriterliness of American modernism was the principal target of a generation of Conceptual artists frustrated with the loss of the artist’s interdisciplinary voice. Indeed, as the modernist artist became increasingly mute, Conceptual artists became, of necessity, more prolix, in a hystericized reversal of this tradition of silence. Conceptual art reinserted the readerly/writerly artist into the relations of art’s production as a means of overcoming what it took to be modernism’s mystified ‘de-language-ing’ of art. But this was an overwriting of art quite different from that of the early avantgarde. Art and artists’ writing are treated not merely as companionable, but as engaged in a process of exchange and identification. In a broadly speculative move, art takes on, or imagines itself to be, a writerly form. This form of writerliness is perhaps at its most explicit and polemical in the practice of Art & Language. In the late 1960s, tendentiously, Art & Language placed writing where art should be. This was not because Art & Language believed that texts alone could be art, but that at some boundary-limit they believed that there might be interesting things to be discovered there, or more precisely, that in substituting text for art, the distinctions between text and art – writerly practice and non-writerly modernism – could be clarified. As they have inquired: ‘What sense can be made of the idea that text is made of our art as well as our art made of text?’2 In this respect Art & Language have persistently argued that their writerliness as artists is more than a formal acknowledgement of the conversational, reflective conditions of the studio; it is constitutive of what the art is made out of figurally and literally. Texts produces pictures, which produce further texts, which produce other texts, which might in some (fragmented form) be physically incorporated into other pictures. In short, texts produce pictures, just as pictures produce texts. Writerliness, therefore, is woven into the practice: there is ‘no obvious order between picture, painting and text’.3 ‘Practice has been project-like and essay-like’.4 Yet if Art & Language’s practice is a writerly studio practice, their writing is not confined solely to reflection on the workings of the studio. This is what makes their writerliness as artists complex and disjunctive. Unlike most other 2 Art & Language 1999, p. 191. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid, p. 280.

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artists of the period – with the exception perhaps of Donald Judd – Art & Language have also consistently produced criticism of other practices (reviews, articles, polemics). Much of this writing is taken up with the deflation and absurdist exaggeration of the pretensions, manners and knowledge-bases of the day-to-day art world spectacle. In this mood Art & Language are pugilistic, sardonic, willing to offend and to embarrass. Historically, this kind of aggression has been the great writerly taboo for artists. Artists’ judgements of other practices should be left to the gossip of the studio and private view and not transmitted into public discourse; this last was the job of critics. In the 1950s Judd tested this taboo, by using the review to punch an acerbic pathway through to his own practice and interests. Art & Language certainly learnt from this aggressiveness; and perhaps, even more than they did from the writerly artists of the early avant-garde. But at the same time Art & Language had little interest in the episodic and impressionistic writerliness of Judd. He may have reconnected the modern artist to a public and intellectual tradition, but his critical framework was too obviously reactive, too bounded by the common language of high modernism. If the pacifications of American modernism were to be tested with a bit more vigour, then, writerliness had to be given a bit more weight; the writerliness had at some point to infect the actual relations of art production and the self-identity of the artist. In this sense Art & Language’s writerliness in the late 1960s and early 70s is in direct confrontation with the prevailing intellectual division of labour that placed artists in opposition to thinkers, and that singled out an authentically ‘artistic thinking’ from thinking ‘in general’. In face of the illicit distinction between intellectual and artist, Art & Language went further than to reassert the writerliness of studio practice; they also demonstrated that artists might make a stronger claim for what they do learn in the studio by transforming themselves – non-professionally at least – into art critics, art historians, and cultural theorists. The outcome of this was twofold: it served to destabilise the image of the artist as the passive or manipulative interlocuter of professional criticism; and it generated a requirement that studio-talk be turned outwards towards non-artistic disciplines, in order that the conditions of this talk could be rendered subject to reflection. Crucially, it is this latter outcome that separates Art & Language’s writerliness in the 1960s from Judd’s: the attack on the silent artist becomes programmatic and research-based. Studio conversation is brought into alignment with theoretical study. The model of the studious writerly artist is not unprecedented in Western art, but it is one that the legacy of Romanticism rendered alien to modern conceptions of the authentic, the purposeful and the ambitious in artistic practice. To study was to be brought low by academicism. But Conceptual art and

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Art & Language invert the logic of Romanticism: not to study is to be brought low by academicism; it is to be brought low by repetition, assertion and mere intuition. In this regard Art & Language’s engagement with and use of philosophy and the social sciences is a defence of interdisciplinary writerliness as the place where reflection on the condition of art’s possibility is a condition of art remaining open as category. This interdisciplinary reflection is noteworthy in two ways. Firstly, there is no sense that for Art & Language art-writing has any special privileges, such as might free artists from the need to investigate nonartistic discourses. Secondly, given that Art & Language is an artists’ group (and now a threesome),5 their writerliness is first and foremost a collective activity and its outcome therefore a social text. If writerliness dissolves the boundaries between picture and text, it also dissolves the notion of the writerly authorial ‘I’. There is no ‘I’ in Art & Language’s writing, and therefore, there is no sense that writing in art, about art, is anything but intellectually indebted work.6 Hence these two points might be united under a general claim: the outcome of Art & Language’s writerliness is a collective text in which the artist’s voice is dissolved into a shared labour across disciplines.7 But if Art & Language’s writerly practice is intellectually indebted, and insistent on the dissolution of the distinction between artist and thinker, artist and critic, ‘I’ and ‘we’, their writing at the same time is not to be taken as philosophy, social science or cultural theory. Artists’ writing may not have any special privileges, nevertheless Art & Language’s writerliness is not mimetic of philosophy and the social sciences. At an important phenomenological and material level Art & Language’s writing is attached to their practice in the studio, and as such remains the work of artists in the studio. This is an important qualification. Intellectual indebtedness is not a feature of ‘intellectual ambition’ in the abstract, so to speak – as if they were intervening in philosophy or the social sciences – but the material outcome of their labour across disciplines as artists. Intellectual indebtedness is, at the same time, an expression of their artistic autonomy. This does not mean they abjure matters of intellectual coherence, but that they feel no obligation to paraphrase, digest and synthesise – as though, external to the material, they were compelled to make the con5 Now a twosome, Charles Harrison died in 2009. 6 This is not to say, of course, that this indebtedness is shared across the contributions of Michael Baldwin, Mel Ramsden and Charles Harrison in equal ways. Nor is the collectively authored text necessarily conceived as one which excludes internal discussion and conflict. 7 See Art & Language, ‘Moti Memoria’, in Art & Language 1999: ‘The possibility here is that the author or artist is no longer alone; that a socialized base of art just might be developed not from a sentimental notion of communality but as a necessary internal development of “the work” itself’ (p. 211).

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tent of their art communicable as a set of propositions. Consequently, their writerliness has not been noted for the theoretical stability or transparency of its products, particularly during the period of Conceptual art. In this sense their writing and practice displays what might be called a Hegelian insistence on the notion that truth is a passage through moments and not a repeatable value.8 For Hegel truth cannot be expressed as unifiable principle but lies in the dynamic passage of all (contradictory) propositions.9 This implies a distance from positivistic and rationalistic notions of clarity in philosophical and theoretical writing. Language is not solely a means of communication, but a speculative and unstable engagement with the object. Clarity, therefore, is not the same as intelligibility, for once it is acknowledged that clarity is not an unproblematic value, knowledge can longer be evaluated in terms of how clearly it presents itself. ‘Unclarity’ therefore, is the force that drives the correctability of claims to transparency. As Adorno argues in his Three Studies on Hegel: Clarity can be demanded of knowledge only when it has been determined that the objects under investigation are free of all dynamic qualities that would cause them to elude the gaze that tries to capture and hold them unambiguously.10 In this Adorno describes Hegel’s writing as anti-texts, just as Hegel himself described writing as a black debt, the thing that swallows itself.11 There is something of this Adornian/Hegelian ‘blackness’ in Art & Language’s own ‘dynamic transitivity’12 and in their distrust of the idea of transparency (the notion of a fully articulated language). As such the critical status of Art & Language’s writerliness needs to be more properly assessed in relation to the link between Adorno’s critique of positivism and aesthetic theory. Art & Language’s writerliness is a version of Adorno’s (Hegelian) resistance to the distinction between concept formation, empirical analysis and critical synthesis. That is, critical discourse is not second-level discourse predicated on an established and given foundation of empirical understanding, but is

8 9 10 11 12

For a discussion of Hegel and Conceptual Art in relation to Art & Language, see John Roberts, ‘Conceptual Art and Imageless Truth’, in Corris 2004. Hegel 1977(a). Adorno 1993, p. 98. The title of this essay is a debt (of blackness) to another indebted Hegelian ‘black text’, Steven McCaffrey’s ideographic poem The Black Debt, see McCaffrey 1989. Art & Language 1974, p. 52.

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immanent to the project of empirical understanding itself. Adorno calls this the ‘reflection of [the] reflection’,13 Art & Language talk of their writing as a form of second-order discourse. The requirement upon a second-order discourse is that it should be capable of ‘including’ the first (i.e. describing what it describes and explaining what it explains) but that it should also furnish an explanation of how (and perhaps why) that describing and explaining is done.14 In other words, in matters of judgement and explanation, Art & Language insist on building into their reflection on the theories and categories of art, and on the art-world, an inquiry into the genetic character of the claims of truth and explanatory power that these theories and categories embody. In an art world where ‘clarity’ and ‘transparency’ (in both theoretical and antitheoretical terms) invariably perform arbitrary closures on open enquiry, such robust causal analysis becomes a critical requirement. Art & Language’s writerliness, then, takes place within a permanent disjunction between the ideal claims for open enquiry and what are taken to be the self-evident and normative conditions of understanding. But this reflection on reflection is no opening onto an Archimedean critical objectivity. To expose misunderstanding and falsehood is not thereby to produce truth, for the claims to truth derived from the exposure of falsehood are no less blind to their own contingency. In this sense, building genetic understanding into a theory of meaning also means, of necessity, building into the theory a reflection on the conditions of possibility of theory and practice itself. The two are inseparable if the theory is not to falsify its own internal limits in the critique of the limits of other positions and theories. Indeed, this precisely what Art & Language mean by their secondorder discourse: the ‘requirement of self-reference can only be met under conditions of quotation, repetition and travesty’.15 Adorno believed, famously, that in art and its reception lie the best conditions for a defence of a non-instrumental conception of truth. This is because art and its reception are conducted according to what he calls ‘the law of non-identity’.16 Unlike scientific understanding, aesthetic understanding is a process of reflection that cannot be arrived at through deductive synthesis, as if interpretation weighs up the evidence to reveal a pre-established meaning. Meaning is not something that interpretation releases from the artwork as a rationally achieved goal, but is the unfinished work of interrogative self13 14 15 16

Adorno 1993, p. 134. Art & Language 1999, p. 96. Ibid, p. 294. Adorno 1984.

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negation, derived from the unresolved character of the work’s production and its indebted relationship to those works that precede it. In this way aesthetic experience resists the arrival of truth as revelation, as a condition of interpreting the work.17 As Adorno says: it is not the job of interpretation to ‘show what is contained in what, but what follows what, and why … ‘historical’ analyses are needed’.18 This does not mean, however, that under aesthetic experience the artwork escapes each and every interpretation, and is therefore polysemic – many things equally. Adorno argues against polysemy on the grounds that the unfolding claims for truth in art are nevertheless part of a process aimed at truth-telling, insofar as interpretation’s admission of the possible failure of understanding is a future claim on truth. Because aesthetic experience is not subsumptive, deductively, the very enactment of the failure to produce understanding, produces the demand for truth. Adorno’s negative aesthetic theory is indebted to Hegel’s concept of ‘determinate negation’. Negation is not the external rejection of the object in the name of transcendental meaning, but a mimetic appropriation and an immanent critique of the object in the name of truth as the dynamic passage of understanding through all (contradictory) propositions. Aesthetic experience then is a process of self-subversion in which the failure or uncertainty of understanding secures the continuing production of meaning. The positivistic alternative – ‘automatic meaning’ – reduces truth to the comforts of ‘transparency’, and thus reduces what is potentially liberating about the artwork’s capacity to resist deductive reasoning, to a thinking of the knowable and given ‘whole’. Art & Language’s own ‘reflection on reflection’ brings this process of determinate negation into explicit theoretical consciousness. In being made unsublatable according to their own criteria and the criteria of others, their work is driven self-consciously as a self-reflective process. Writerliness, in other words, becomes a name for the theory of aesthetic negativity. But if the link between Adornian aesthetic negativity and Art & Language’s writerliness gives philosophical shape to their practice, it does not identify the specific materials out of which it is made and conducted.19 Art & Language’s self-negating writerli17 18 19

For a discussion of the process of self-subversion and the non-automatic in Adorno’s aesthetic theory, see Menke 1998. Adorno 2002, p. 5. Art & Language’s practice as process and Adorno’s aesthetic negativity have a kindred content, but this is not to say that Art & Language’s writerliness follows that of Adorno. For all its shared philosophical content with Adornian aesthetic negativity, Art & Language’s second-order discourse is not an inherited philosophical position. On the contrary it has its own trajectory and independent origins. Indeed Art & Language’s concept of secondorder discourse emerged at around the same time that Adorno was writing Aesthetic

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ness is not just a process indebted to philosophical method. It also has its roots in a post-Romantic rhetorics or poetics. Yet this latter connection is something which has never been commented on – and might be thought a bit implausible – by members of Art & Language themselves, despite its relevance to a wide range of Conceptual art writing and writerliness in the 1960s and early 1970s, and despite the terrain it shares with Adornian negativity. In the post-expressionist, post-imagist poetry that emerges in the 1950s and 1960s, phonemic, graphemic and ideographic components of language emerge as the materials of poetic ambition. Grammatical or extragrammatical play and self-imposed linguistic constraints force poetry out of its routine lyrical and expressive functions, allowing referentiality to be organised around features of language other than syntax, narrative, and focal image. In the poetics of writers as diverse as the group Oulipo, Eugen Gomringer and John Cage, and more recently Steven McCaffery, Lyn Hejinian and Charles Bernstein, the poetic image in the form of the luminous detail – so central to Ezra Pound’s modernism – is rendered opaque; decontextualized in graphic as well as alphabetical dissolution. This dissolution results in an extended chain of possibilities as graphic and alphabetical signifiers share the task of meaning production. Moreover, the literary connectivity so crucial to modernist poetry’s sense of historical embeddedness (achieved through various forms and degrees of ‘quotation’) is divorced from speech-based poetics; that is, from clear intonation and from the living, breathing voice. In such writing, the question is not how literary connectivity is borne forth in speech, but how such connectivity can itself constitute a poem’s potentially voiceless effects, or how referentiality or aboutness can be a condition of a literary connection not explicitly made. In the following non-syntactical rules and procedures this writing obviates the captivity of the poetic in the familiarly ordered identity of syntax, the self of the poem and authentic speech, locating the poem’s meaning not just in its sentential structure but in ‘micro’ phrasal and ideographic forms. There is a constitutive ‘noise’ in procedural, paragrammatical poetry. With the break-up of words into phonemes and sentences into ideograms and with the introduction of random elements, many of the necessary elements of a message are suppressed or omitted. As Marjorie Perloff argues in Radical Artifice (1991), this poetry emerged in the 1960s against a background of debased lyricism, of self-expressive free verse and of a general mediafication of ‘poetic’ language. In such circumstances, she Theory – in the mid-to-late sixties. By the early seventies Art & Language had addressed some of the problems that Adorno himself had been addressing regarding artistic form under the centrifugal and centripetal forces of capitalist heteronomy, albeit with very different theoretical materials.

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suggests, ‘clarity of writing may no longer be an uncontested virtue’.20 If ever it was, one might add. Nevertheless, ‘noise’ is also what Art & Language have built into their writerliness and procedural negativity as artists since the late 1960s. As in the tradition of ideographic procedural poetry, noise is for Art & Language a means of delaying or stalling the imaginary coherence of the work of art (its would-be ‘wholeness’). If Art & Language are not (often) writing poetry, neither is their writing an attempt to dissolve the boundary between ‘prose’ and ‘verse’. So, where is the ‘noise’ of post-imagist, procedural poets to be found in their art? Art & Language do not produce paragrammatical texts or ideograms as such. Equally, they are not involved in producing complex phrasal dislocations of their texts or as their artistic work. Their writerliness is usually non-poetic in this sense. Their writing as artists may be destructive of the distinction between artist and writer, but it has no interest in – nor does it normally concern itself with – the poetic status of the text itself. However, Art & Language’s sensibility as writerly artists is paragrammatic and ideogrammatic insofar as they have occasion to de-dignify or to adulterate their theoretical texts graphically within their artworks. Since the mid-1970s, fragments or sections of their theoretical texts have found their way into their paintings or pictures as pictorial material. For example, the fragment ‘Surf’ from the word ‘surface’ (perhaps), finds its way repeatedly into their pictorial work of this period. The modes of appropriation employed in the early work tend towards this standard, fragmentary usage. It is only in the 1980s (with the Museum series and later with the Hostages) that larger textual extracts find their way into – and onto – the paintings. Here text becomes surface (Index: Incident in a Museum xii [1986]) compelling the viewer to switch back and forth from reading to looking. Although the linearity of these extracts is broken up, there is little or no phrasal fragmentation of these texts; they are treated, rather, as large quotations. In the 1990s, however, the pictorially presented text is subject to an unprecedented autonomy: sections from various pornographic S & M texts are malapropistically altered, in order to be presented graphically on the surface of free-standing structures that are compiled out of paintings. Mrs Malaprop’s visitation heightens the disruptive ‘noise’ that the incorporated text produces on the painted surfaces. The text is unwilling to render up its marginally discernible ‘normal’ meaning. What is at stake for Art & Language’s writerliness as it passes from text to picture and from picture to text, is how visual and readerly ‘noise’ or opacity might function as a way of producing another kind of spectator or reader. This will not be the customarily sensitively attuned spectator or reader, who sees

20

Perloff 1991, p. 195.

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through the opacity in accordance with their learned expectations, but one who is compelled to look and to reflect and think in the realm of displacement and adulteration. In the same way as paragrammatical poetics talks about the refusal of syntactic disclosure as heightening of the artifice of absorption, Art & Language talk about the restitution of ‘non-trivial pictoriality’.21 That is, their painting functions as a snare for viewers who are also readers, detaining them with their own feelings of ‘incompetence’. Art & Language refer to this as the underprivileging of the viewer and reader. But this is slightly misleading. It does not entail the radical stripping of all the viewer’s competences and expectations, but rather the re-sensitisation of the spectator’s skills ‘above’ and ‘below’ normal thresholds of competence. In this sense the underprivileging of the customary, sensitively attuned spectator is a moment in which self-negation has the potential to produce what can be called ‘new knowledge.’ Art & Language’s writerly move from text to picture, picture to painting, painting to text, text to painting, then, is itself a voluminous and noisy task. Text cite texts within paintings that cite texts in an unfolding dialogical process. This produces a disruptive play, in which the work is to be understood not only as extensive (determined by or demanding a knowledge of works in sequence) but as intensive (determined by or demanding scrutiny of each of the work’s internal relations, which in turn, are genetically or thematically connected to other works in a given sequence of sequences). This effect is not the result of willed incoherence, or a gratuitous wedging of one thing against another. Art & Language’s writerliness across image and text and within the image itself is not a sleek form of montage. The processes that constitute their work are genuinely disruptive and not at all like some of the feeble sense-scrambling strategies associated with the weaker forms of paragrammatic poetics. The strategies of adulteration employed by Art & Language produce a conflicted convergence between visuality and textuality, opacity and transparency, depth and surface.

21

Art & Language 1999, p. 181. One of the precursors of this refusal of syntactic disclosure for paragrammatical poetics is George Oppen, in particular Discrete Series (see Oppen, 1934). As Michael Davidson argues in his introduction to Oppen’s collected poems: ‘For Pound and Eliot, the problem of value in a world of fact was solved by containing reality in repetition, amassing cultural fragments toward an eternal dynastic edifice. Oppen chose to solve the problem not by adding more fragments to an already debased architecture but by refusing the building altogether – or at least by paying more attention to its building materials’. Oppen 2003. Art & Language’s ‘non-trivial pictoriality’ is built from this same sense of working with the dismantled elements of a debased architecture. The intention then is not to represent such debasement, but to find the materials and resources to inhabit a critique of it. Art & Language’s practice is made out of the ruins and remnants of modernism and pre-modernism, erected on the ruins of the contemporary modern.

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Thus, for example, the moment where reason (text) is apparently derationalised in, or as, painting (aesthetic judgement) is not the moment where reason is abandoned. The aesthetic assimilation of reason is here also its possible recovery as meaning-as-reason. That is, we should not confuse this aesthetic moment of non-identity in the production of ‘noise’ with the glib attempt at a deconstructive aestheticisation of all orders of writing. To incorporate theoretical texts into pictures may be to denaturalise them, but is not thereby to derationalise them. Do we see, therefore, two separate orders of writerliness in Art & Language’s practice: a writerliness applicable to their theoretical texts, and a writerliness applicable to the way these texts are often incorporated into paintings or painting-like things, as well as to those fictional voices that are present in some of their studio-dialogues, librettos and song lyrics? Well, yes and no. Yes, insofar as the theoretical writerliness does not dissolve itself into the literary, but No, insofar as it resists easy historicisation and paraphrase. Yes, insofar as these fictional voices present or stage theoretical positions, but No insofar as these fictional voices are translatable into real propositional content. (The fictive writing is, so to speak, deflected theoretical work.) So, the theoretical writerliness and the fictive writerliness may exist within a shared process of interminable self-negation, and the theoretical writerliness may pass through this process into the aestheticised space of the paintings and other art works. But theoretical and fictive writerliness are not identical. If they were identical they would operate in terms of an undifferentiated form of exchange, in which case the content of the theoretical writing would be assimilated to the art, and vice versa. Art & Language’s writerliness does not function in this way. On the contrary the process of negation works to generate an uncomfortable accommodation between the theory and the art. Theoretical text and text, text and image, text as image and image as text, exist in a constant dialogue of inflation and deflation. In this, ‘noise’ is not an arbitrary outcome of the process of negation but its constitutive content – the means, that is, whereby the truthconditions of art and theory are brought into constant critical conjunction or alignment. For Art & Language, writerliness is the medium in which reflectionon-reflection moves, but it is not what gives content, in and of itself, to the process of reflection.

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part 3 Praxis

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Productivism and Its Contradictions 1

A Short History of Productivism

Lenin’s decision to reintroduce certain aspects of the free market into the Soviet Union after the ravages of War Communism was a form of what might be called ‘revolutionary pragmatism’.1 The industrial base of the country was devastated, the working class atomised and peasant discontent widespread, and therefore a modicum of capitalist modernity had to be restored immediately. Without this, Lenin surmised, the fledgling revolution could be split apart and lost by the failure of the new state to meet simple, everyday needs. One of the immediate effects of the New Economic Policy (nep) was, of course, the rise of a new bourgeoisie, with its speculation, parasitism, conspicuous consumption and petit-bourgeois tastes; another was the return to various forms of speeding up and coercion within the factory, resulting in widespread workers’ resentment. For many Bolsheviks on the left then (and subsequently) this is where the revolution was actually ‘lost’ as the technical transformations put in place by the Party (within a largely antiquated factory system) were immediately subsumed under a new disciplinary productivist regime. For Lenin there was no way of getting around this if the infrastructure of the state was not to collapse; for Lenin’s critics (including many workers themselves) it was one thing to protect the revolution, another to be worse off and suffer increased levels of control. The nep then was profoundly transformative of the direction of the revolution, because it forced the Party to address the limits of workers’ emancipation in conditions of general need. It is no surprise therefore that the factory itself becomes a source of massive political and cultural struggle and self-definition for the revolution during this period, because it is the factory that bears the full weight of the New Economic Policy. Indeed, the operations, relations and dynamic of the factory become a key focus of the revolution’s ideal horizons, as right and left seek to adjust their positions to the new Policy. Thus at one end of the ideological spectrum Alexei Gastev proposed various time-and-motion programmes in order to create increased worker efficiency, punctuality and hygiene (all this backed initially by the Central Committee

1 Published in Third Text Vol 23, No 100, 2009, pp. 527–536. A shorter version of the article was also published in ‘What is the Use of Art?’, Chto Delat?, No 25, March 2009.

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and its fascination with American-style Taylorism),2 while at the other end were situated the various cultural initiatives developed by the newly emergent avant-garde (Constructivism and Productivism) which demanded new work practices, new forms of production and, essentially, a return to the early Bolshevik debate on worker self-management and the relations of production.3 That it is the cultural left that largely addresses the condition and form of the factory is indicative of how desperate the situation had become for the Central Committee. Under the continuing threat of Allied intervention, industrial production and efficiency levels had to improve without delay. In this respect the outcome of this struggle within the factory was pretty much preordained: debate on the relations of production and the ‘free worker’ would have to be postponed. Yet, despite these constraints, for a few years the cultural left not only debated at length the notion of the ‘emancipated factory’ and the possible place of art within its disciplinary regime but were able to establish an actual presence in the factories themselves. This presence was very small but larger than hitherto imagined. The notion – much emphasised in most histories of the Soviet avant-garde – that Productivist theory never left the drawing board has recently been undermined by the extensive archival research of Maria Gough. Gough’s writing on the programme of ‘consultative’ work undertaken by the Constructivist/Productivist Karl Ioganson in the Prokatchik rolling mill in Moscow between 1923 and 1926 goes some way to correcting this impression.4 Ioganson’s work on various aspects of the labour process in Prokatchik reveals an artist engaged in collaboration with workers in order to improve various technical processes of metal finishing – and with some success. However, we should be wary here. Such involvement is not the tip of an iceberg; direct involvement by artists in the factory system was indeed rare in this period. But what Gough does reveal is the extent to which initiatives like Ioganson’s represent one striking material manifestation of widespread debate about the labour process and the nep in the factory itself. Factories in this period were places of open and clandestine discussion about the immediate impact of the nep, conducted mainly under the auspices of factory discussion groups that, initially at least, were not controlled by officious ‘red’ managers. In this sense the place for Ioganson and others had already been prepared. On this basis, Productivism can be seen, contrary to most accounts, as a direct response to the rise of the nep, and, as such, an opportunity for Productivism to develop its thinking and intervene in the 2 For a discussion of Gastev, see Taylor 1991. 3 See Margolin 1997. 4 Gough 2005. In 1924 the factory rolled alloys and nonferrous metal and employed 196 workers.

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labour process, rather than the point where Productivism goes into immediate decline. As Christina Kiaer has also argued, the rise of the nep, far from jeopardising the emergence of Constructivism and Productivism – preparing both for their eventual Stalinist demise – for a few years galvanised Productivism to develop and act on the theoretical work it had done in INKhUK between 1920 and 1923.5 So, following Gough and Kiaer, we might say, for our critical purposes here, that there are two interrelated dynamics in mid-twenties Productivism: the emancipatory Productivism of INKhUK best represented by Boris Arvatov – the great theorist of Productivism6 – and the applied Productivism of the shopfloor exemplified by Ioganson and by many of the debates that took place in factories during this period. Now, even if the single and singular example of Ioganson does not quite test emancipatory Productivism in action, it nonetheless provides an interesting and valuable insight into how the artist operates in the factory under the auspices of Productivist ideology, and the inherent contradictions of Productivism itself as it comes into conflict with the labour process.

2

Three Productivisms

By 1922 INKhUK had established a Productivist platform in contradistinction to Constructivism’s post-easel social interventionism, identifiable in the main with Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky. Leading members of this platform, Osip Brik, Boris Kushner and Boris Arvatov, argued that the skills and aims of the artist needed to be repositioned with the technical purview and discipline of industrial production itself; and that Constructivism, for all its emphasis on the technical reskilling of the artist, made a fetish of the artist as engineer. Indeed, the status of the engineer in Constructivist-Productivist debate in INKhUK was exactly what needed to be challenged in the move from Constructivism to Productivism. The re-functioning of the artist was not just a matter of raising the technical and scientific level of the artist, but of situating art within the relations of production as a transformative technical and scientific force. In this respect there is a concerted shift of attention, particularly in Brik and Arvatov, to the notion that the site of art’s research value lies in the factory, and not in the studio or artistic research centre. As Arvatov argued in 1923, it is the job of Productivism to instigate experimental laboratories in factories.7 5 Kiaer 2005. 6 Arvatov 1972. 7 See Gough 2005, p. 177.

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In fact, the broader aim eventually was to transform the factory into a research centre and source of general creativity, and as such facilitate the factory as the form-giving site of future collective practice. This is because at the point of production within the factory, art is able to offer an actual foundational transformation of the relations of production and the social relations of art. Allied to, and transformative of, the labour process, art reconfigures what artists and workers do and what constitutes the meaning of production and the character and quality of industrially produced goods. But if Productivism asserts that the factory is the ideal horizon of art’s labour and its socially transformative potential, nonetheless it is unclear precisely what is expected of the artist once he or she is on the shop floor. Much of the remaining discussion between Constructivist and Productivist platforms in INKhUK is taken up with this problem. From what place and under what terms does the Productivist artist actually begin his or her work? What form should the collaboration between artist, designer, technician and worker take? What role should there be for experimentation? And is experimentation actually generalisable? Are Arvatov’s ‘experimental laboratories’ viable in cheese factories, shoe factories and lampshade factories, as much as car factories? These questions boil down to three categories of Productivist praxis, and as such involve the dissolution or subsumption of the artist under three different headings that cross both applied Productivism and emancipatory Productivism. Firstly, the notion of the artist as a facilitator of improved techniques and machine processes in the factory (the artist as engineer who dissolves his or her identity into that of technician); secondly, the artist who contributes to the improved design of products (the artist as designer who collaborates on raising the quality of goods); and thirdly, the artist who seeks to transform the consciousness of production itself in the technical and cognitive use of experiments within production in order to contribute to labour’s emancipation (the artist as inventor who as such retains an independent identity as thinker and intellectual). These categories, at various points, overlap in the thinking of Arvatov, Kushner and Brik; insofar as Productivists do not actually want to give up their status as artist-intellectuals completely (for to do so would transfer ‘cultural thinking’ as a whole to the engineer and technician), just as at no point do they want to return to the notion of the artist as independent producer or critic (for to do so would be to lose what had been achieved by pushing art decisively into production). This is why few of these problems are sorted out in practice in Productivist theory, because the respective problems and demands of these positions were never tested in depth across different kinds of workplaces. And, consequently, this is why Gough’s analysis of Ioganson’s tenure at the Prokatchik factory is

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highly instructive, because Ioganson’s work is one of the few instances where some of the ideals and internal conflicts of Productivism are demonstrated in practice. Ioganson began his career in INKhUK as a primary-structure Constructivist building freestanding forms from geometric units. When he entered Prokatchik this position had changed to one close to that of the Productivist inventor, in which the artist contributes to the labour process in order to raise the creative level of production overall. In other words, he enters Prokatchik at some level armed with the ideals of emancipatory Productivism: namely, that the artist’s technical skill in contributing to the transformation of patterns of production contributes to the general re-functioning of the worker into artist. It is not too clear from Gough’s account, though, what Ioganson expected from his tenure at Prokatchik; suffice it to say, given the ferment of the times, he was certainly not there simply to make up the numbers. The strictures of the nep soon undid any notion that his work was contributing either to the production of a ‘new worker’ or a new factory. Indeed, it is clear from the start what the managers of Prokatchik wanted: someone who could contribute to raising production and improving or finessing the means of production. They certainly did not want someone to set up an ‘experimental laboratory’ inside the factory or lead discussions on workers’ alienation amongst workers themselves. Thus, a short time into his tenure at the factory, he was encouraged to contribute his technical skills in removing the ‘backward-looking’ craft processes and attitudes still prevalent in certain parts of the factory. In the finishing shop, for instance, he introduced an automatic dipping process that removed the slow application of finishes by hand – an actual, concrete technical advance. In other words, he was fully encouraged to take on the nep’s quasi-Taylorist ideology of rationalisation and increased productivity. Thus – as if blind to the nep pressures he was working under – in a work-in-progress paper that Ioganson wrote for INKhUK in January 1924,8 he extolled the virtues and success of the rationalisation process in which he was involved, as if emancipatory Productivism’s critique of the labour process was a luxury that inventor-Productivists, and any other applied-Productivists, could not afford. He lists a number of outcomes he has achieved at Prokatchik, the first of which reads: ‘The first concrete work of a konstruktor, and his first concrete achievements – the raising of the productivity of labour by 150%’.9 No doubt some such automated dipping process needed to be introduced – at least to militate against injury and persistent poisoning of metal workers,

8 Ibid, p. 168. 9 Ibid.

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as much as to increase efficiency. However, this is not what Arvatov and other Productivists – who in 1921–2 were stressing how much better it was for artists to study at technical college than art school – would have wanted to hear: a Productivist artist contributing to Party-led rationalisation shutting down factory debate on the labour process and workers’ alienation! The response to the paper is unrecorded, but there is good evidence to assume that it would have chastened many Productivists, and perhaps would have confirmed some of Arvatov’s reservations about the possibility of an emancipatory Productivism operating under prevailing conditions in the factory system. For, despite being identifiable with the artist’s shift to the factory, Arvatov’s writing on Productivism and Constructivism in the 1920s (collected in Iskusstvo i proizvodstvo [Art and Production], in Moscow in 1926) is somewhat ambiguous about the factory as the foundational site of transformative practice. Like Alekseĭ Gan, Kushner and Brik, in the early 1920s he exhorted artists to move either into the factory or think the factory as a potential locus for real transformative work on the relations between art and labour. But correspondingly he also saw the emancipatory effects of Productivism broadly as lying in artists and specialists taking collective control over technological and technical processes outside the factory (as in new forms of architecture, urban development, transportation), as part of an expansion of artistic technique into environmental technique and design. Moreover, in the essay ‘Art in the System of Proletarian Culture’, he widened the notion of the Productivist as an organiser of material structures and intersubjective flow of social processes to cover all social and cultural activities. The new Productivism will ‘invest artistic activity in everything’.10 Indeed the proletarian artist must experience all material and want to organise it artistically, whether that be using noise in music, street jargon in poetry, iron and aluminium in arts and crafts, and circus tricks in the theatre.11 This is clearly closer to a conventional (Constructivist) avant-gardism than it is to Ioganson’s Productivism; and perhaps Ioganson would not have recognised this position as Productivism at all, and maybe said as much to Arvatov, Brik and others. Consequently, it is revealing how fraught and intense the struggle over the relations of production had become for revolutionary artists who thought that the factory was the natural home, the only home, of art. Clearly as the nep unfolded, and the nep transformed into Stalinist collectivism, the factory was a more intractable material problem than early Pro-

10 11

Arvatov 1972, p. 13. Ibid, p. 14.

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ductivism had imagined. It is possible then that Ioganson’s intervention at Prokatchik – the guinea pig of Productivism, we might call it on current evidence – actually confirmed this for many Productivists, particularly as the forces of reaction were consolidating their hold after the death of Lenin, making it highly dangerous for artists to assume any role in production beyond the most perfunctory and affirmative contribution. The factory, as the imaginary link between art, labour and Communism after 1927, is increasingly off the cultural agenda for artists. What once was the possible crucible of ‘free labour’ becomes the redoubt of hierarchy and instrumental thinking. Indeed, with the demise or withdrawal of Productivism, the factory loses its identity as a kind of cultural unit or place of cultural relations – and its key transformative role in the Communist imaginary – to be replaced by various forms of revolutionary symbolism developed at a distance from the idea of factory as being central to the progressive functions of the revolutionary state.12 This, essentially, is what constituted the majority turn in lef thinking to representational practices after 1925.

3

Factory-Free Productivism

Perhaps, then, factory Productivism is not at all the terminus of ‘failed’ revolutionary avant-gardism. It is instead the site where art’s vulnerability as praxis within the labour process is exposed to the inexorable demands of production, and so exposes, philosophically and politically, art’s relationship to productive labour to an important limit condition. Maybe Arvatov realised there could be no emancipatory Productivism centred on the labour process distinct from art’s place in the destruction of the alienation of the labour process itself. The actual revolutionary destruction of the labour process, though, was not on the Productivist agenda. Firstly, because of the chronic under-industrialisation of the Soviet economy and falling levels of productivity, but secondly, because for artists and theorists to focus on the labour process under the nep was to expose Soviet labour to the realisation that it is no less subject to the law of value (increased speed of production, technical division and inter-enterprise competition) than labour in the capitalist West. Debates on the value-form are thus

12

As Kevin Murphy argues in his study of the Moscow ‘Hammer and Sickle’ factory during the nep years (Murphy 2007): “the Soviet factory was much more than just a place of employment – it lay at the very heart of workers’ civic life … the Soviet factory acted as the community-organizing center for food and housing distribution, as well as workers’ leisure activities.” (p. 5)

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largely glossed over in Productivism, certainly until the late 1920s after Trotsky’s exile, when a state capitalist analysis of the Soviet Union gains a foothold within the Left Opposition, particularly in the labour camps.13 As such, it is the absence of a discussion on the value-form that prevents Productivism from asking the most obvious question of its revolutionary efforts: why intervene in the factory in the first place, given that what distinguishes the critical force of art is precisely its relative absence from the strictures of the value process. That is, art unlike productive labour is not subject overall to a process of socialised reproduction, even if it employs advanced technical means of reproducibility, such as photography.14 This means that art’s free labour – all the way down – is in a position to critique the determinate labour of the factory, as a reflection on the conditions of free labour itself, by demonstrating to determinate labour the autonomy of free labour. Why then subjugate the free labour of art to the discipline of the value-form? This is a crucial question and is perhaps one of the reasons why emancipatory Productivism, after the demise of historic avant-garde and the rise of the neo-avant-garde in the West, has tended to avoid work on and with the labour process: firstly, it is too difficult (limited access; factory hierarchy; market constraints) and secondly the rewards are minimal, particularly in non-revolutionary situations. It is hard to think of any successful factory-based projects by artists indebted to emancipatory Productivism after the 1920s. The nearest we get is the Tucumán Arde (Tucumán is Burning) collective in Argentina in the 1960s. However, their work was conducted largely in alliance with workers or ex-workers outside the factory.15 Similarly, in the early 1970s, the British Artist Placement Group managed to get inside a number of factories, but only to establish the most innocuous or ameliorative discussions between art and labour. Indeed, what comes to shape and direct the memory of Productivism under the auspices of the neo-avant-garde after World War ii is a version of Arvatov’s secondary Productivism – the expansion of artistic technique into environmental technique and socially interventionist practice. This expansion of Productivism has largely been mediated through the debate on the ‘everyday’, via Henri Lefebvre, a debate to which Arvatov, of course, made important contributions in the 1920s.16

13 14 15 16

See Ciliga 1979. For a brief discussion of art’s relative absence from the law of value, see Marx 1970. For an extension of this analysis, see Rubin 1972. See Cramuglio and Rosa ‘Tucumán is Burning’, in Katzenstein 2004. For a defence of a quasi-secondary Productivist position (the first after Arvatov), see Lefebvre 2002. And for a discussion of Arvatov and the earlier debate on the ‘everyday’ see Roberts 2006.

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Secondary Productivism and Labour in the ‘Immaterial Economy’

The rise of secondary Productivism in all its multiple forms since the 1960s (art in the ‘expanded field’; social functionalism; community practices; tactical media; relational and post-relational aesthetics, etc.) defines an epochal break, therefore, in the use of the concept of production in art. In secondary Productivist discourse, the concept of production in art is detached from the realm of productive labour to cover all forms material and symbolic transformation. That is, the use values of art are productive precisely because they are not fixed by one kind of political strategy, one kind of artistic form, one primary site of struggle. In turn, this expanded productivity of art’s use values is accompanied by the notion that the interactive, interdisciplinary, applied, supplemental functions of art are in themselves forms of production. The use-values of art, their productiveness, lie in the multiple ways in which they might intervene in and across a multitude of social and political sites; the free labour of art is allied to a transformative vision for art across all social and political realms. In this sense, secondary Productivism – in its neo-avant-garde extension from the 1960s – absorbs the contradictions of emancipatory Productivism by expanding and multiplying the use-values of art in the service of an expanded conception of culture as production. The avant-garde ‘failure’ to transform alienated labour at the point of production becomes an opportunity for the neo-avantgarde to strategize and allow artists to work in the interstices of the state and capital (as with Robert Smithson). It is no surprise, therefore, that this secondary Productivist discourse – more broadly, the enculturalisation of politics from 1965 to 1985 – has overlapped neatly with the general attack on the factory as the primary site of political struggle in post-Marxist, revisionist Marxist and autonomist theory since the 1970s. Thus, if the factory has largely disappeared from the critical horizons of the avant-garde over the last eighty years, over the last forty years this has been underwritten at an important level by the rise of a post-productivist model in political and cultural theory. The factory worker has, it is contested, disappeared from the forefront of political struggle to be supplemented by the ideological struggles of the ‘new subjects’, but also by forms of exploitative labour not governed by the hierarchies of the factory system (the vast expansion of clerical work; service work; home-based work). In the 1980s this was a straightforwardly anti-productivist programme, as the factory in actuality and imagination was demoted politically to be replaced by the expanded realm of non-productive labour and struggles irreducible to the struggles of labour as such.17 This position is elaborated in different ways by early Antonio Negri, Félix 17

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Guattari and André Gorz, drawing on a tradition of semi-Bakuninist thinking on the revolutionary subject as lying in potentia outside of the industrial working class that has, they assert, too vested an interest in the reproduction of the system. Today, the anti-productivist rhetoric has somewhat subsided. This, at one level, has of course much to do with the political and cultural decline of the ‘new subjects’ as sources of opposition and potential counterhegemonic alliance with/within the working class (a position best exemplified in the 1980s by the writings of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe),18 but also with the fact that under globalisation there has been a vast expansion of the factory system globally in its most hierarchical and oppressive forms. Indeed, the number of productive workers in China, Brazil, India, Mexico and South Korea has grown exponentially during this period. Moreover, a ‘new factory’ has emerged in the West: the ‘clean’ factory integrated and networked across its technical divisions through the immaterial labourer at his or her computer. The rise of this kind of labourer in the new service, technical and creative industries and in modernised sectors of the old economy remains a contentious issue (in terms of the scope and the putative immeasurability of immaterial labour within the framework of a classic theory of value).19 Nevertheless, in these sectors the release from older forms of material and routinised constraint at the point of production has opened up the need for new conceptual distinctions in order to describe the new modalities, interactions, exchanges and social conditions of the new labour processes. This is signalled through what is claimed – in various ways – as a cognitive and affective revolution in which the worker’s command over various immaterial skills, irreducible to old technical divisions, enables him or her to expand his range of skills beyond the completion of immediate (routinised) tasks. As Franco Berardi puts it: ‘The production process is becoming semiotic’.20 Furthermore, these skills and their outcomes interface with cognitive skills and affective relations that cultural workers take for granted (processual involvement in autonomous activity; affective engagement and dialogue with others in order to resolve a given problem), enabling immaterial workers to share a skill base however limited across the alienated divide between productive/nonproductive labour and creative labour. This putative development has also been at the heart of another influential account of immaterial labour: Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s idea that in these new sectors the production, organisation

18 19 20

Mouffe and Laclau 1984. See for example, the Aufheben Collective’s 2008 review of De Angelis 2007. Berardi 2007.

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and management of immaterial labour borrows from a collaborative model of avant-garde artistic practice itself.21 The result of this generally, therefore, has been a renewed commitment in political theory and cultural theory to a new language of production, but a language in which production and productiveness converge with the indeterminate flows of artistic production and the general nomadism and interrelationality of digital exchange. As a consequence, a strange mirroring has occurred: political theory borrows from an artistic language of flow, affect, interaction and co-operation, just as artistic and cultural theory and practice borrow from the mediation of this artistic language in the new political theory. Indeed, this exchange has become something of a hegemonic position in recent cultural theory, perhaps best represented in the 1990s by Geert Lovink and David Garcia’s The abc of Tactical Media (1997),22 in which activist modes of art are rerouted through the network strategies of digital technology. This version of the broad enculturalisation of politics, however, is now symptomatic of a secondary Productivism without internal constraints. In a world dominated by notions of ‘swarming’, ‘nomadism’, cultural ‘anti-essentialism’, extreme ‘tacticality’ and ‘deterritorialisation’, secondary Productivism has reached a kind of tertiary micro-vitalist stage; a productivism of singularities that is perfectly in keeping with the interests, to quote Lovink himself, of ‘techno-libertarian entrepreneurship’.23 That this kind of vitalism has largely overtaken the new language of production does not mean that we need to revert to Productivism’s older labourist identifications in order to get production out of art again and back into the factory proper. As David Riff has argued: We are all productivists, factographers, muralists, biographers of things and worker-correspondents. We are living in an age of total internalisation of the production line, its domestication in the home office, where we work day and night without stopping.24 Yet we do need to recognise that the unobtainable, (presently) unrecoverable horizon of the factory for interventionist cultural practice represents remains a profound limit condition for the emancipatory rhetoric of the new vitalist productivism, be it Negri’s new immaterial worker or Lovink’s digitalised act21 22 23 24

Boltanski and Chiapello 2006. Lovink and Garcia 1997. Sholette and Ray 2008, p. 552. Riff 2009, unpaginated.

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ivist. That is, the factory and its hierarchies stand globally as a determinate absence within the social totality. It functions as the part that is no longer the whole (the whole of politics), yet no other part or parts of the social totality can function freely (in their own self-image) until this part-to-whole relationship is transformed and in turn transforms the social totality. In other words, the factory’s fundamental resistance to cultural intervention (the factory is the only site where the dominant culturalism cannot truly do its job) is precisely its political strength. Because the law of value blocks cultural initiatives in the factory from being anything other than subordinate to capital (even when the artist is invited in on good terms, as with Ioganson’s tenure at Prokatchik), it renders clear the real political limits to enculturalisation within the system, and, conversely, reveals the potential transformative power of workers outside art’s would-be humanisation of labour. Yet the factory, as hierarchical site of labour, is where ‘aesthetic thinking’ as the critique of the value-form must enter eventually. The factory therefore is, contra the emancipatory Productivists of the 1920s, not the prime site of art’s use-values (the place where art will fully emancipate itself through productive labour), but rather the destinal site of art’s artistic critique of the value-form, the place where it has to arrive some time in order to confront and challenge the alienations and routinisations of labour itself – material and immaterial. How this will happen and under what terms is unknown, but whatever forms it will take, the working class will have a direct say in their outcomes. In these terms too much vitalist productivism of the moment does not confront the general condition of productive labour under mature capitalism. This is because, following Negri, Guattari, Maurizio Lazzarato and Beradi, the valorisation of the equalisation of cognitive skills in certain privileged sectors of the immaterial labour force hides the general decline of skill historically within the working class as a whole.25 And, therefore, it comes to act as an impossible, idealistic, vanguard condition for the working class. Ioganson’s tenure at Prokatchik demonstrates a significant historical lesson: what might, and might not, be taken into the factory and taken from the factory, and so how artistic labour might or might not be able to contribute to the critique of the value-form from inside the labour process. In this its ‘failure’ is invaluable.

25

Braverman 1998.

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After Moscow Conceptualism: Reflections on the Centre and Periphery and Cultural Belatedness Moscow Conceptualism has since the early 1990s gained an enormous amount of critical attention in Russia, Europe and North America.1 Indeed, its status has risen enormously with the historical recovery and critical repositioning of the group Collective Actions (1976–),2 and the intellectuals, writers and philosophers who worked in collaboration with the group, or in its orbit. This is because Moscow conceptualism achieved something remarkable during the period of conceptual art’s decline in Europe and America: a coherent programme of cognitive strategies, formal subtractions, and an expanded collective model of production and reception that extended the range and attributes of what we might mean by ‘conceptual art’ as a post-medium specific sequence of artistic manifestations.3 This points to two key issues regarding the development of conceptual art and the refunctioning and continuity of the avant-garde more generally in the 1970s: Firstly: conceptual art was not simply a globalized phenomenon in which the message of art’s ‘dematerialisation’ (to use the familiar and clichéd term) was disseminated around the world from its intellectual ‘homeland’ in the US and the UK, on a kind of loose and equitable basis. On the contrary, in the wake of conceptual art’s initial break with painterly modernism, ‘conceptual art’ came to serve very different functions and uses, as a result of the cultural, social and political circumstances in which it found itself, shifting and transforming the character and form of conceptual art itself.4 Thus in South America – particularly Argentina and Chile – conceptual art’s strategies of formal negation were overdetermined by anti-imperialist struggle, which included a critique of US American cultural imperialism and the US American neo-avant-garde itself.5 In Poland, conceptual art drew on an already vigorous dramaturgic avant-garde tradition (Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘poor theatre’)6 to produce a predominantly event-

1 2 3 4 5 6

First published, ARTMargins, mit Press, Vol 9, Issue 2, 2020. For a recent update of their activities, see Gulenkin 2016. Esanu 2013. Camnitzer et al. 1999. See, Katzenstein 2004. Grotowski 1969.

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based conceptual art centred mostly in the countryside and the suburbs, and thereby as far as away from the industrial imaginary of Soviet socialist realism as possible, as well as the prying eyes of the state.7 In Iceland, in the early 1970s the recourse to text and photography was, as it was in many other peripheral national European contexts, a means of breaking from a narrow national, painterly landscape tradition. Furthermore, the concerns of UK and US conceptual art were by no means compatible themselves. Many of the interests of ‘analytic conceptual art’ in the UK, are very different from those in the US, given US conceptual art’s reliance on an undisclosed formalist hangover from modernism (such as in the work of Joseph Kosuth), thereby weakening any assumed shared history between US and British conceptual artists. Indeed, as in other centres of national conceptual production there is an implicit assumption that much American conceptual art is turned inwards to the interests of the art market, and ‘business as usual’. Thus, in the group work of Art & Language, for instance, there was a primary concern with the intellectual division of labour and questions of cultural pedagogy, in the wake of the huge influx of workingclass and lower middle-class students into the art school system in the Britain in the 1960s. How might class experience relate to learning and value in art? How might a non-bourgeois subjectivity be created from the discursive opportunities of conceptual art? And how might women artists be an active part of this?8 As such, there were clear connections between these forms of group learning and the revolutionary debates on teamwork in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. In addition, we see another set of national-cultural conditions at play in the case of Moscow Conceptualism itself, producing a ‘conceptual art’ quite different in its theoretic-material concerns than other centres of production. In a period of post-Thaw, and late Soviet ‘stagnation’, conceptual art takes the form of a generalised entropic and apophatic withdrawal from the ‘public sphere’ and direct political engagement, in which the absences, phlegmatic silences, and textual ambiguities of conceptual art, assume a kind of moral and poetic antipode to the (failed) rhetoric of Stalinist productivism. Indeed, in Collective Actions these zero-sum manifestations, and their almost winsome indeterminancies, produce a radicalisation of both late Descartes’ libertine motto: ‘a happy life is an unseen life’, and Spinoza’s rejection of ‘affect’ as a kind of bondage; art finds an active ‘silence’. In this sense Moscow conceptualism does share certain ‘allegorical’ affinities with other conceptual art in Eastern Europe; primarily 7 For a discussion of early Conceptual art in Poland and the flourishing of local networks and independent spaces, see Patrick 2001. 8 See Corris 2004.

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the opportunity that conceptual art provides for small-scale temporary interventions, subtle acts of resistance, and ‘invisible’ events that provide a space for art’s ‘withdrawal of consent’. But in the Soviet Union, this withdrawal from consent is also attached to a strong commitment to collective avant-garde values, and therefore has little time for the ‘self-possessive’ individualism of much other conceptual art in Eastern Europe. Thus: we might say, that whereas Polish conceptual art has no stake in – or rather refuses a stake in – the memory of the (Soviet) historic avant-garde, Moscow conceptualism saw one of its jobs as being to reclaim and defend what remained progressive about the avant-garde legacy of the 1920s.9 All of these conceptual art manifestation – East and West, North and South – can be defined, then, as part of that great sequence of events, manifestations and intellectual horizons identifiable with ‘conceptual art’, yet they all put the strategies of ‘conceptual’ negation and denaturalisation of the art object and artist to work in very different ways and with very different outcomes. This not only produces a striking unevenness to conceptual art in this period of its emergence and transformation, but also confirms the general conditions of belatedness of conceptual art’s relationship to an understanding of its own avant-garde past. Each national cultural formation was working with, and through, very different cultural and historical materials on the basis of very different kinds of awareness of the avant-garde past and the recent conceptual present. This takes me to my second point: Moscow Conceptualism is defined by a range of shared cultural memories of the avant-garde (given the avant-garde’s constitutive legacy, if marginal presence in post-1950s official Soviet artistic history) that are grounded in a set of political and cultural conditions that are quite unlike any other national-based conceptual art, East or West, throwing into relief the complex belatedness affecting the formation and dissemination of conceptual art during this period of globalisation. Conceptual art in Europe, particularly the UK and in the US, was not an unmediated transmission belt for the historic avant-garde, given that both sets of conceptual artists were far from conversant with the critical and artistic legacy of conceptual art’s own antimodernist claims: that is, very few artists at this time in the US and UK had a working knowledge of the Soviet and Berlin avant-gardes (principally because little work was published in English on the early avant-garde period, and little work was shown). Falteringly, hesitantly, then, US-UK conceptual art – through its primary critique of painterly modernism and dismissal of art as a wouldbe ‘natural kind’ – generated a loose pathway back to the post-medium and

9 For a critical engagement with the avant-garde legacy, see Monastyrsky 2010.

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interdisciplinary claims of the early avant-garde without in fact re-historicising conceptual art’s possible links to this past (this came much later). In the Soviet Union, in contrast, despite the fact that few works from the 1920s were on permanent display, the avant-garde legacy was not only available through the rich critical literatures of the period, and shared (if oblique) memory of the revolutionary past, but significantly, was present critically in its remnant aspects and traces, in actual everyday Soviet life in the 1970s: namely, the critique of art’s commodity form (given the absence of a private market for art), a residual anti-productivism (born of a post-Brezhnevite broken economy) and a commitment to a (residual) collectivism. In fact, we might stretch this sense of revolutionary remnancy even further back, to the days of High Stalinism in the mid-1930s. Despite the increasing state oppression and curtailment of avant-garde ideology, Soviet society underwent an extraordinary period of political and ethical reconstruction, in which the building of socialist subjectivity and a new self, drew on the memory of the 1920s for its bearings. Crucial to this appeal to the ‘new self’ was the importance of the citizen diary, as a place where the Soviet citizen could explore his or her position in Soviet society and as such raise its interests – as Jochen Hellbeck has outlined – ‘above [the] paltry parochial concerns [of daily life] into the higher plane of historical and action’.10 These ‘public’ diaries in the 1930s were a remarkably popular component of this mass mobilisation of the ‘collective self’. Indeed, on the left, the proletarian diary was defended as a key part of the factographic and documentarist turn. lef, for example, in the late 1920s encouraged every proletarian to keep a diary in order to document their place in and contribution to the revolutionary transformation of everyday life. Even if this call to self-representation was uneven (many workers feared its consequences and many felt inadequate to the task; some diaries submitted to public scrutiny were barely literate), nevertheless many workers took the opportunity to write themselves into collective life and history. They sought to realise themselves as historical subjects defined by their active adherence to a revolutionary cause … They put pen to paper because they had pressing questions about themselves and they sought answers in diaristic self-interrogation. Their diaries were active tools, deployed to intervene into their selves and align them on the axis of revolutionary time.11 10 11

Hellbeck 2006. Ibid, p. 5.

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Thus, even after the Party had taken its distance from the interventionist and socially experimental character of the diary-programme (in a drive against bourgeois ‘self-representation’), there remained in place, a strong ethos of the socialised self, in which the link between writerly self-representation and life, the self and the collective, promised an authentic participation in a historical process larger than oneself. In this respect, despite the cynical narrowing of this ideal after the war, the Party sought to maintain the notion of each citizen as ‘consciously’ integrated into Soviet society. Moscow conceptualism, therefore, did not have to imagine the social character of the avant-garde through the creation of a micro or enclave ‘communalism’, in the manner of the post1960s Western avant-garde, it could draw on its still living, if attenuated, forms and deflected agency, in the collective present. But, of course, if these conditions might enable the production of a conceptual art free from the need for the machinery of social critique and critical theory, this conceptual art was not free of its own local constraints and avant-garde belatedness. If the group Collective Actions represents the first manifestation – loosely speaking – of the avant-garde in the Soviet Union for almost 50 years, it nevertheless, had no working relationship to the socially transformative character of the historic Soviet avant-garde; officially, it was claimed, this kind of work had already been done. Indeed, in many respects Moscow Conceptualism represents the opposite: a ghostly or revenant avant-garde divorced from the avant-garde’s socially constructive dynamic – precisely the condition of the avant-garde and conceptual art, or neo-avant-garde, in the West after the Second World War – hence, the strange, withdrawn, oblique, indeterminate character of Moscow Conceptualism. As with Western conceptual art, conceptual art in the Soviet Union did not assume a primary field of engagement with the social and material world, but, rather, operated within the ‘secondary’ realm of the symbolic. In other words, Moscow conceptual art was no less distant from the fundamental structural promise of the original Soviet avantgarde – the radical dissolution of art into productive labour and productive labour into art; the transformation of the built environment; the subsumption of art into life – than was Western conceptual art at the time, despite Moscow Conceptualism’s extraordinary, post-market, conditions of artistic production. This gives the work of Collective Actions, and Moscow Conceptualism generally, a haunted quality and pathos that is quite unlike any other conceptual art of the period (with the exception perhaps of work being done in Poland [Wlodzimierz Borowski, Zbigniew Warpechowski] and Czechoslovakia [Eugen Brikcius, Jan Steklik], although for quite different reasons). Its mode of production was free of the determinations of capitalist exchange (the singular commodity-form, institutional approbation, the pressure of individual careers

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defined by market identity and branding), yet this mode of production – art as a nexus of post-object, temporal conditions and de-reifying collective techniques – operates in a ‘suspended’ state. Yet, this isn’t the ‘suspensive’ state of the Western avant-garde, divorced from a revolutionary tradition and forced to find strategies of engagement/disengagement in a culture in which bourgeois cultural pluralism diverts, ameliorates or blocks the ‘world transforming’ and post-market functions of avant-garde practice. In the post-Thaw years in the Soviet Union this is a notion of ‘suspension’ as an actual state of withdrawal and radical non-compliance, as if participation in the official channels of cultural support was to endorse Stalinism and betray the legacy of cultural resistance since the late 1930s. As Keti Chukhrov argues: The ’70s in Soviet society are known for economic and technological stagnation. At the same time the texture of social life in the ’70s is characterized by a strange spiritual pleroma [a sense of fullness] or plentitude … anti-utilitarian collective consent becomes widespread, and a society grows accustomed to abstaining from pleasures and libidinal joys, consensus seems to be reached more often, and high standards of living, for construction, technical efficiency, and consumer prosperity become less necessary.12 This places Moscow Conceptualism in an unprecedented position within the greater and uneven orbit of conceptual art during this period, for all this work’s varieties of engagement: it draws on the historic Soviet avant-garde, indeed, benefits from the living interconnection between conceptual art and the remnant collective ideologies of the 1920s under the post-market conditions of 1970s cultural production, yet, like many strategies of conventional modernism – that it also echoes – it withdraws backwards into the world. This invites us, to turn, therefore, to the question of cultural unevenness and the contemporary avant-garde. If the 1970s, in Europe, North America and the Soviet Union is a period of the belated possession and re-staging of conceptual art across national-cultural formations – under the impossible and half-forgotten name of the avant-garde itself – today the re-functioning of the avant-garde in the West and in Russia is, of course, no less subject to other kinds of unevenness, but, at the same time, crucially, it is also subject to unprecedented kinds of historical consanguinity, given the global and post-Cold War character of art and the increasing global interconnection of the cultural mar-

12

Chukhrov 2010.

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gins. That is, if UK-US conceptual art was in some sense blind to its own avantgarde legacy, given its lack of theoretical access to the historic avant-garde, and, therefore, had to work falteringly to reconstruct this legacy and its possibilities, and Moscow conceptualism was an ‘avant-garde’ ‘at home’, so to speak, but without real transformative agency, today the avant-garde is, at least, freely available intellectually as an ongoing research programme in which the effects of the belated production and reception of the historic avant-garde are now self-consciously incorporated into a reflexive and historical understanding of the limits and possibilities of the avant-garde, that is, into a model of combined and uneven artistic development. In other words, the structural belatedness and unevenness of cultural production and reception is built-into the theoretical claims of contemporary avant-garde research programmes. And this necessarily shifts the operational and temporal terms of the avant-garde, in the light of the massive changes historically and culturally since the 1920s. The avantgarde is not a thing or ‘movement’ to be now recovered in the light of this new intellectual and critical reflexiveness globally – as if we can now get on with the job of properly being ‘avant-garde’ – but rather, a set of resources and possibilities to be re-thought and re-functioned as an outcome of its defeats, struggles, hiatuses and caesurae over the last 90 years, and, therefore, something that is to be reconstructed constitutively from these hiatuses, gaps and caesurae. Thus the avant-garde maybe be no less a ‘suspensive’ project today, than it has been from the late 1930s, that is, no less subject to the division between art and the social world, and between aisthesis and collective experience, but under present political and social conditions, in the wake of the global crisis of capital, the intellectual demise of postmodernism, and the compression and claustrophobia of neoliberal network culture, one of its core ideals has nevertheless returned to central stage in order to redirect a huge amount of artistic activity: the totalising critique of capitalist relations as a condition of art’s emancipatory force and legibility. For the first time, for a very long time, the relationship between art and praxis, and art and politics, art and collective experience, art and productive labour, art and free labour, the conditions of art’s living situatedness, art and capital accumulation, art and universal emancipation, are becoming the working terms and grammar of a large number of artists working collectively or individually on socially engaged projects that owe little or nothing to official or market criteria. This is an enormous social and intellectual shift within the political economy of art, and therefore, is irreducible to the notion these new forms of collective, participatory, and temporal ‘post-object’ practice, simply represent a stylistic shift in concerns, and, therefore, will dissolve with changed social and political circumstances. On the contrary, these changes represent a massive reorientation of ‘business as usual’ in art, trans-

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forming the artist in classic avant-garde terms from the producer of discrete objects for exchange on the market to the producer or facilitator of relations between things, and of conceptual templates. Two things ensue from these new conditions of the ‘suspensive’ avant– garde.13 Firstly, we can see clearly how much of this new practice and its recent forbears, back to Conceptual Art and beyond, owes to the world-historical rupture of Soviet Constructivism as the metaform of all avant-garde research programmes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. All present and recent practices, consciously or not, derive from this constructivist programme: that is, they derive from the destruction of the authority of discrete object, of authorial sovereignty and monadic consciousness, of disciplinary and craft unity, and from the critique of the non-discursive or aesthetic-contemplative reception of art. And, secondly, under globalisation we can see how changes in the relations and order of avant-garde belatedness have transformed the perception of cultural indebtedness across national borders, and, as such, have released cultural peripheries, in some instances, from their subaltern relationship to the centre. So, in globalised conditions of transnational exchange and collaboration the Soviet avant-garde is no longer the ‘Soviet avant-garde’ in conventional art historical terms (namely, that sequence of events, works, that rises in prominence, falls away and then disappear to be recovered as ‘influences’), but, the enduring transformative core of art’s emergence from its bourgeois prehistory; in other words, its universalising dimension is released into the problems of contemporary practice. Yet if Western national cultural traditions can no longer secure cultural patrimony for themselves by simply asserting the greater authority and prestige of the (the white normative) centre, this is not to say that the Anglo-American imperialist relationship between the centre and the periphery has changed how imperial capital operates; imperial capital still structures and shapes global circuits of influence and power, just as it structures finance capital’s investment in the global art market to the advantage of the large Western-sales markets. But, nevertheless, in the absence of the constraints of the Cold War, and in the wake of de-colonialisation, and the new forces of transcultural exchange, the alignment between imperial capital and imperial cultural power in the interests of shaping and influencing the cultural direction of national states has diminished; the one-way traffic of modernisation from centre to periphery has broken down. Peripheries remain peripheries, certainly, but their peripheralness is no longer subordinate to an exoteric process of modernisation. Rather,

13

See Roberts 2015.

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the experience of modernisation on the periphery is now part of a challenge on the part of the peripheries to ruling definitions of modernisation itself. That is, if the centre can no longer hold in place a Western-centric and unilinear understanding of modernisation, progressive blocs in the peripheries have an unprecedented role to play in questioning and challenging the very character of modernisation as part of an anti-imperialist politics. This is why cultural mimicry of the centre (Anglo-American imperialism) by the peripheries, in order that the peripheries may enter the vaunted global circuits of cultural modernity, no longer applies or no longer works, because the very terms of modernity as a globalised experience are now being shaped by the non-synchronic demands and horizons of the peripheries. Now this contribution to the critique of imperialist modernisation and modernity by various progressive blocs within various peripheral national cultures is itself dependent upon what kind of periphery the country in question is and what kinds of relationship the national culture in question has to the dynamics of global modernity. Not all peripheries have rich and extensive connections to the cultural legacies of a dynamic modernity, and, therefore, clearly not all peripheral cultures are equal contributors to the anti-imperialist dialogue. So, this is why, although the new conditions of globalisation have released a groundswell of other claims to modernity from periphery to centre, this process is itself uneven, given each nation state’s determinate place within the network of imperialist relations. In other words, Kinshasha is not Bombay, despite both having a subordinate place in the imperialist chain. This is why Russia is what we might call a privileged periphery, given its prominent place in the imperial world order (as a weakened imperial power itself) and its own historical and culture connection to epochal changes in modernisation and emancipatory politics. For, however, marginal at the moment the country remains culturally in relation to Anglo-American imperialism, progressive forces are able to draw on an unprecedented set of revolutionary cultural and political resources as a part of the ongoing debate on globalisation and modernisation. And this is why Boris Kargarlitsky is wrong when he says, speaking of contemporary art in Russia, in an interview with Ekaterina Dergot, that ‘we are still living off the remainders of the Russian avant-garde legacy, relying on it as parasites … our cultural assets are exhausted’.14 Indeed, this tone and accompanying judgement seems to me to be exactly what is not required under these transcultural conditions. For what the new avant-garde globally reveals is how Russia’s position as a privileged periphery lies precisely

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Kagarlitsky in Dziewanska et al. 2013, pp. 144–5.

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in its capacity to act as a critical placeholder for the collective legacy of this avant-garde. This is not nostalgia, or a national propping up of an exhausted tradition, but on the contrary, a recognition that the huge transformations occurring globally in art, and, in the face of the still prevailing, if shifting, cultural unevenness of the imperial relation, the avant-garde has a ‘home’ in Russia, so to speak, which is demeaned at its peril. Therefore, wherever and whatever the kind of work being done on the research programmes of a new avant-garde internationally, Russia will remain a privileged space of reception for this avantgarde’s claims, despite all the reactionary forces currently lined up against it.

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Art After Art in the Expanded Field Here I want to explore what I will call the social force field of art’s current condition.1 In one respect this involves re-narrativising the problems and issues that have shaped art in the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, but also stepping outside of this narrative to cast a critical eye on the political economy of art itself. In this sense the first half of the essay will be taken up with the world-transforming impact of the early avant-garde in the wake of the Russian Revolution and art’s assimilation into the new machino-technical culture of the time, and the second half with the hidden implications of this revolution, not simply in terms of the denaturalisation of art as a category, but, rather, in relation to the radical dispersal of art outside of art’s official institutions and aesthetic attachments. By this I mean that what has dominated the global production of art since the new millennium is the development of what we might call a ‘second economy’ of art, that is, the vast production of art works, events, actions, and so forth, that have no direct relationship, or a highly attenuated relationship, to the official art world. This economy has two key aspects: firstly, the extraordinary rise in participatory, social-pedagogic, and interventionist forms of socially engaged practice that have some basis in group activity or the work of an artist’s collective; and secondly, the massive growth, enabled in part by the internet and digital practice, of work by amateur, non-professional and occasional artists, what Greg Sholette has called the ‘dark matter’ of the artworld. ‘It is an antagonistic simultaneously inside and outside, like a void within an archive that itself a kind of void’.2 A bottling up of creativity ‘within the holding company known as high art’.3 As I will discuss below, these changes are a result of the intersection of two things: the rise of unemployment and underemployment globally, releasing large numbers of people into self-determined activities; and secondly, the widespread availability of new forms of technology that enables the production and dissemination

1 This was first published as ‘Kunst nach dem Ende der Kunst im erweiterten Feld/Art After Art in the Expanded Field’, in So Machen Wir Es: Techniken und Ästhetik der Aneignnung. Von Ei Arakawa bis Andy Warhol/That’s the Way We Do It: Techniques and Aesthetic of Appropriation. From Ei Arakawa to Andy Warhol, curated by Yilmaz Dziewior, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, 2011. 2 Sholette 2010, p. 3. 3 Ibid.

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of this work. It’s worth mentioning a staggering statistic in relation to this: according to the census conducted in the US in 2005, two million people wrote down on their form that their primary job was an artist, and 300,000 declared that it was their secondary or part-time job.4 This makes being an artist in the US one of the most popular occupations in the country, and as such, in terms of the goods and services these artists purchase, a major industry. But, of course, very few artists – about one to two percent – actually make a living from this activity. And so, it is this vast, active, but essentially unemployed and underemployed reserve army of professional artists, in addition to amateur artists and occasional artists, that has provided the base for the ‘secondary economy’. Furthermore, it is precisely sections of this vast reserve army of artists that has supplied the context and audience for the rise in the new forms of participatory art and art as social praxis. This means that the secondary economy – that economy that has no place or an attenuated place within the official art market – can be seen as the primary site of art’s production and reception today. The political, critical and social implications for art from this are, therefore enormous, particularly when linked to the current crisis of capitalism and the attacks on education and culture generally. But before I discuss this, let’s briefly do some historical work, in order to clarify what has happened to art over the last 100 years. Some of this discussion, out of necessity, will be highly compressed, and some of it will be familiar.

1

A Very Short History of the Modern in Art

I want to begin by returning to 1903. On the one hand, this would appear to be an innocuous and almost arbitrary date in the history of Western art, but on the other hand, it’s full of import from our historical perspective in 2011. Artworks and art world events of note in this year include: The Blue Rider, by Wassily Kandinsky; the founding of the Salon d’Automne, the counter-salon to the official Paris Salon (which was supported by Jacques Villon, and the venerable Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Auguste Rodin); Echo and Narcissus by John William Waterhouse, Picasso’s The Old Guitarist, and The Wounded Angel by the Finnish artist, Hugo Simberg, which depicts two boys, one turning to the viewer, carrying a young angel, head bowed and covered with a bandage, on a stretcher. In addition, in this year Paul Gauguin, Camille Pissarro and James McNeill Whistler all died, three of the key artists, of course, of the preceding twenty-five

4 Ibid.

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years. From the professional perspective of this second generation of modernist artists, then, things in 1903 ‘looked good’, or least ‘on the up’. The achievements of the first generation of modernists had transformed the demands and expectations of the Academy; the emerging private gallery system, driven from the 1870 onwards by the increasing separation of the production of painting from the protocols and hierarchies of the Salon, had finally released the modernist artist in Europe from the last dusty remnants of official patronage, antiquarianism and genre-sentimentality that continued to haunt the Salon and the state chambers of art. As such it seemed as if second generation modernism had assimilated its forebears and superseded, or least marginalised, the residual neo-classicism and Symbolism-gone-soft represented by Waterhouse and Simberg, and was in the front seat. Yet 15 years later this sense of stately continuity (that is, second-generation modernism as the great, authentic inheritor of canonic painterly achievement from 1860 to 1900) was in crisis, as transformations in the relations of art’s production as a consequence of the changes in its technical base became generalised. Three significant changes come to mind. Firstly: the immanent crisis of painting, as represented by Braque and Picasso’s ground-breaking destablisation of the integrity of painterly space through their introduction of found elements into their work (mastheads, tickets, leaflets, etc); secondly, and more radically, the adaptation of this move in Duchamp’s unassisted readymades (Bottle Rack and Fountain) as an externalised move against painting; and of course, thirdly, the world-transforming effects of the Russian revolution, in its assimilation of the new reproductive image technologies into forms of interdisciplinary, collective and post-artisanal practice. By 1920, the technical apparatus of art had expanded to cover photography, film, text, architectural installation, and street performance. Moreover, this expanded regime of artistic technique transformed the very identity of the artist himself or herself: no longer confined to the labour of the painterly mark or sculpted form, the artist identified his or her skills precisely with that of the technician, director or machine-operator. Now this is not to say that the majority of working artists during this period, and after, recognised these changes specifically in these terms, or even if they did, saw them as progressive; the history of art is a history of combined and uneven development, in which structural changes in the production and reception of art are mediated by the struggle or competition between various artistic positions and cultural and social forces. In other words, cultural and social changes enforce artists to make ideological choices – consent or dissent – based on forces that lie outside of the purview of actual artistic practice itself. And this is no more so in the wake of the Russian revolution, in which the new avant-garde’s machino-technical culture split early twentieth-century modern-

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ism into two camps: on the one hand, the camp that was content with the immanent transformations of painting as a critique of the conservative pictorialism of pre-modern art; and, on the other hand – and in opposition to this – the camp that looked outside of art’s inherited forms and relations, and therefore, towards an understanding of art that promised something far larger than anything encompassed by the aesthetic choices of painterly modernism. Thus by 1920, as Weimar and Moscow remodelled the technical and cultural identity of the artist, this split in modernism had become a debate about where the boundaries of art and the artist were to be best located: immanent to the legacy of painterly post-Impressionism, or in alliance with the new technical and technological relations and social imperatives of art. Consequently, many modernist painters were not happy with what this transformation of the technical relations of art required them to forgo: namely, that growing band of rich collectors in Europe and the US, who were actively and successfully shaping modernist taste. A number of modernist artists, including Picasso himself and other post-Cubists, backed away, therefore, from the radical implications of their own technical break with the past and retreated into a quasi-classical painterly mode in order to re-stabilize their place in the legacy of canonic, post-Impressionist painterly achievement. For this grouping the new technical resources were at best a fad, or at worst, the harbinger of the death of art itself. In this respect, as Robert Jensen notes in Marketing Modernism in Fin-deSiècle Europe (1994),5 the emerging European market for modernist painting in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth encouraged two things: firstly, that artists should think of their alienated bohemianism and non-conformity as continuous with those defining moments of would-be (male) genius within the pre-modern painterly canon; and secondly, the notion that what artists do, as a consequence of this continuity, evolves from within the demands and rewards of the market. Picasso got a whiff, then, in the paper collages of what art and the artist’s identity might be outside of this market logic, and he didn’t like it one little bit. Yet, whatever Picasso and other painters who followed his retreat may have thought about this cultural shift – however much they thought that this shift betrayed art – the shift in art’s technical base was historically irreducible. Which obviously makes the use of 1903 as a date of note deliciously provocative in any discussion of art and artistic continuity, art and historicism: one moment Simberg and Gauguin, and all the fading rhetoric of Symbolism, and hope for modernism’s final approbation by the Academy, and then, in the next

5 Jensen 1994.

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moment, Duchamp, Tatlin and Rodchenko, and art’s place in the revolutionary transformation of everyday life. In 1917 the future past of 1903 seemed like a world utterly empty of a future. This is why the destruction of the RussoGerman avant-garde culture between 1927–37 under the counterrevolutionary forces of Stalinism and Fascism (in gleeful collaboration with the European bourgeois art institution, it has to be said) could ultimately only delay the generalised impact of this technical and cultural shift in the expanded cultural identity of art and the artist. The historic avant-garde may have been intellectually dismantled by the late 1930s, but its de-subjectifying strategies and heterodox forms and anti-aesthetic redaction of art remained in place. Hence when the debates and conflict over this legacy arose again in the US in the 1950s and 1960s, that is, when the remnants of the newly arrived cohort of European avant-gardists intersected with the newly emergent and confident US art market, the attempt to re-stabilise painterly modernism, as defined by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried’s writing, was short lived – shattered as it was by the return of the repressed in the form of Conceptual art in the late 1960s and postconceptual photographic-based practice directly afterwards. By 1968, Hugo Simberg, even Gauguin and Picasso, seemed a long way away; or rather by 1968 one could see a bit more clearly why Braque and Picasso’s paper collages and Duchamp’s Fountain had destroyed this painterly continuity, and allowed a mass of other skills, strategies, affects, subjectivities and (non-artistic) forms of knowledge to rush into the space of art. Indeed, by 1975 and the demise of painterly aestheticism, postconceptualism had recovered many of the extra-artistic, extra-institutional, and interdisciplinary aspects of the historic avant-garde. But crucially, there was a re-functioning of these resources as an entry point into a whole new world of cultural production: a world beyond white, male European artistic painterly precedent; a world beyond bohème, the modernist canon, and the ‘aesthete’.

2

The Expanded Field

Which takes me, somewhat speedily, to 1979, and to Rosalind Krauss’s wellknown essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ – the topic of the title of this essay. By 1979, the formal and cultural struggles around the modern in art outlined above, were finally detached from a heroic painterly modernism, that had rallied in mid-twentieth century US under the auspices of an increasingly powerful American art market. But its recrudescene of painterly sensuousness was culturally thin. Its suppression of the technical, social and interdisciplinary achievements of the early avant-garde created a rearguard aestheticism. This is

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why the early Russian and European avant-garde for Krauss is the hinge to the late modern period: it was the thing that was lost by the late 1930s, clearly, but also the thing that had brought the experience of the twentieth century into focus; art in the twentieth century was the avant-garde; the movement of the contradictions of the modern through the realisation of new forms, new subjectivities, and social relations. Thus in 1979 what preoccupied Krauss and her generation of theorists was what was still useable from this legacy of modern art’s traumatic entry into the twentieth century – and what was not. And, in turn, therefore, how it might be possible to continue to make further claims on the modern when the present appeared to be detached from futures past. In this sense Krauss’s essay is as much concerned with producing a workable topology of the modern as with the contingent problems of postconceptual art practice. As such, the essay functions as a diachronic/synchronic intervention into twentieth-century art historiography: the teeming history of the modern in art in the twentieth-century projects a false unilinearity, hence the significance of the Soviet avant-garde in breaking the calendrical temporality of bourgeois art; what the Soviet avant-garde established, across forms and disciplines, is the production of the ‘new’ as an integrated multiplicitousness; a claim on the synchronic that was not conservative. This is what the twentieth century produces as both its defining sense of the modern, but also that which is suppressed or diffused in the expansion of the post-wwii art market, and its relentless desire to constrain art’s socialisation beyond the production of discrete objects. Admittedly, in ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ Krauss is not writing on the revolutionary ideals of the avant-garde directly, but this sense of art’s socialisation through the interrogation of its formal and cognitive limits and possibilities is echoed in her notion of the ‘expanded field’. In other words, in the wake of the high theory and critical claims on art’s social function in the late 1960s and 1970s, Krauss provides a general statement of synchronic intent that both marks a break with the painterly modernism of the recent past, and establishes a re-attachment of the conceptual and postconceptual art sequence with the legacy of the avant-garde. As she argues: ‘the bounded conditions of modernism have suffered a logically determined rupture’.6 This rupture obviously was the working knowledge of this generation of artists, and therefore Krauss is not exactly the bearer of new tidings here. But, Krauss’s essay does more than ride the zeitgeist, so to speak; she defines a new generic space for art to enter, inhabit and test its material and cognitive boundaries, one that, indeed, re-sets its claims to experimentation within the avant-

6 Krauss 1979, p. 42.

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garde’s expressly spatial and social co-ordinates. Even in 1979, the avant-garde was either theorised as a formal logic of the aesthetic supplement (the transgressively new), or the bringing of ‘art’ into ‘life’. It was not seen as a systematic claim on art’s spatial integration and immersion into the extra-artistic. Thus, we can see why Krauss’s principal target in the essay is the modernist medium specificity that was shattered by the early Picasso and Braque and Duchamp. For medium-specificity is the very antithesis of art’s spatial and social extension. Art in the ‘expanded field’, then, is the generic term that Krauss gives to past art and recent art that bypasses or dissolves the medium specificity that had defined modernism’s immanent painterly logic and sculptural ‘integrity’ from Kandinsky and Giacometti to Jackson Pollock and David Smith. And therefore, post-medium specificity stakes out what she sees as a new technical regime for advanced art, providing one of the first theoretical definitions or defences of postmodernism in art. (That a re-functioned avant-garde becomes postmodernism, is a strange story for another time). Within the situation of postmodernism, practice is not defined in relation to a given medium – sculpture – but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms, for which any medium – photography, books, lines on walls, mirrors, or sculpture itself – might be used.7 Now, Krauss is able to look forward in a programmatic way here in 1979, because her notion of expanded ‘sculpture’, or art in the expanded field, is held to be the beneficiary of what was perceived to have lain dormant and undertheorised since the late 1920s to the late 1960s: the notion of the artist as interlocuter of, or investigator into, a given space, an environment, a conceptual framework, a system, as the non-expressive means for the manipulation of signs and materials. This kind of labour – that the late 1960s had made its own – is, she argues, ‘organized … through the universe of terms that are felt to be in opposition within a given cultural situation’.8 Consequently, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ not only extends the radical implications of the art of the recent past (conceptual art and postconceptual photo-text practice), but defines this against the background of a wider de-theorisation of practice after wwii, as the absent means by which art might define a possible future for itself that is more than a calendrical exercise in the ‘new’. Hence Krauss’s recovery of art’s technical and intellectual history under twentieth-century industrial modernity offers a tentative re-alignment of art with the cultural and technical conditions of late capitalism. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid, p. 43.

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This is why her essay unleashed a huge amount of theoretical writing and practice that set out to define its terrain of operation from within the cultural and technological conditions of advanced capitalism. And as such this is why Krauss’s tentative definition of postmodernism in a way is so paradigmatic for this moment:9 for it represents the point where the destruction of formal painterly continuity in art, that was swept away initially in 1912 by Braque, Picasso and later Duchamp, becomes theorised as the standard or normative system of production and reception for art.

3

The New Hegemon

Thus, in ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ we see the tentative beginnings of what has become a theoretical hegemon since the mid-1980s (critical postmodernism, the neo-avant-garde or postconceptualism): an art that is postmedium/multimedia, post-institutional, interdisciplinary, technologically embedded, temporal, contextually mobile, and socially interventionist. In these terms the artist divests himself or herself of the monadic identity attached to medium-specificity and its corollary, ‘individual expression’, in order to refunction and redistribute his or her skills across a range of disciplines, extra-artistic knowledges, social sites and micro-political strategies. Indeed, this is where the radical opening out between new practices and the legacy of male, European modernist painting and its virtuous circle of practice/studio/gallery is at its most emphatic; the expanded field of art is not simply tied to a new set of interdisciplinary skills that conceptual art might call its own (philosophy, cultural theory, political theory), but is now thoroughly intersectoral. Artists are not just ‘technicians’ or ‘thinkers’ but ‘planners’ and ‘organisers’ of materials and their disciplinary and institutional supports. But, on one level, if this represents the reclamation of various avant-garde strategies, on another level, it represents a grasp of history that is fundamentally different to those artists and critics in 1903 or after wwii, for example, who were hoping for the continuing assimilation of painterly modernism into the Academy. The concept of the ‘expanded field’ defines therefore – although Krauss doesn’t talk expressly in these terms – what we might call the fundamentally anti-historicist condition of advanced art at the end of the twentieth century and in the new millennium. Krauss’s topology may serve to re-frame the avant-garde as the radical caesura that shapes the wider social dynamic of

9 See Foster 1985.

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art in the twentieth century, but there is no sense of continuity through reclamation here, as if the avant-garde was an unfinished project, and the ‘expanded field’ of art was its erstwhile inheritor. Hence there is no recovery of the technical advances of the avant-garde as such, as if art had long been depleted of these riches and was thus in need of interdisciplinary ‘revitalisation’; the avant-garde returns, certainly, but it returns as a collation of fragments and ruins, mediated by the political realities of its destruction and dispersal; and this is why Krauss’s essay functions subtly as an anti-positivistic historiographical intervention: art in the ‘expanded field’ is not about the making of the avant-garde anew, but the re-insertion of its rupture into the present, as an opening of the present to futures past. The alignment of contemporary art with the technical and intersectoral ideals of twentieth-century avant-garde art, in other words, is inseparable from the social and political defeat of this programme, and therefore inseparable from what this defeat means for an art that continues in the avant-garde’s name. The avant-garde is itself the accumulated history that it carries behind it. As Fredric Jameson was to argue a few years after Krauss’s essay, in a similar spirit: ‘The productive use of earlier radicalisms […] lies not in their triumphant reassemblage as a radical precursor tradition but in their tragic failure to constitute a tradition in the first place’.10 The challenges of the recent past for Krauss, consequently, do not so much provide the conditions for the reconnection of past achievements with the present, but a critical re-alliance of the unresolved problems of the past with the present. The challenge of the avant-garde is also the challenge of its counterrevolutionary loses. Hence, this approach is not a (modern) classicising nostalgia for the past, in the way both Simberg and Gauguin and later artists can be accused of looking over their shoulders for comfort towards the certainties of pre-modern art. On the contrary, the recovery for Krauss of the de-subjectifying impulses of the original avant-garde under the mantle of ‘art in the expanded field’ is precisely about the avant-garde repositioning of the substantive problems and issues that still confront and determine the experience of the modern (What is art? What is the artist? How might art contribute to emancipatory forms of socialisation?) In fact, this making of the new in the name of futures past becomes a key theoretical motif for this generation of theorists in the 1980s and 1990s in their attempt to realign contemporary art with art’s twentieth-century tech-

10

Jameson 1991, p. 209.

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nical revolution. For instance, Hal Foster continues this anti-historicist line of thought in his 1994 essay ‘What is Neo About the Neo-Avant-Garde?’ Far from the historic Soviet avant-garde being destroyed without remainder by the fascist and Stalinist counterrevolution, the significance of the questions it asked of art continue in their after-effects as a set of resources to be repositioned and reworked. As he says: On this analogy the avant-garde work is never historically effective or fully significant in its initial moments, it cannot be because it is traumatic: a hole in the symbolic order of its time that is not prepared for it … [the avant-garde always returns] from the future.11 Thus, what I’m suggesting here is that Krauss’s topological move in 1979 rearticulates the major cultural and social outcome of the historic avant-garde’s rupture with tradition in the 1920s, that art is irreducible to art history as a history of objects: post-medium specificity in art is another name for art as an unbounded ensemble of disparate techniques and practices and sites of production; and, therefore, a process in which the production and cognition of objects are incorporated into a relational and temporary field. Thus, the artist’s creativity lies at the interface of these techniques, practices, sites, and is not, consequently, embedded in the aesthetic presentation and manipulation of a given medium as a display of discrete authorship. In this sense Krauss and Foster necessarily expose art to the fundamental negation that lies at the very heart of the historic avant-garde: the critique of the artist as the sovereign bearer of aesthetic expression. As the ‘technician/interlocutor/coordinator’ inside art as an ensemble of techniques, practices and sites, the artist/artists creativity lies precisely in the organisational manipulation and transformation of disparate semiotic, linguistic, material (non-organic and organic) and objects (made and found). As a result, Krauss’s sense of the future in art, after the restitution of the artist as thinker in conceptual art and cultural theorist in postconceptual art, represents a recovery of those aspects and strategies of the avant-garde that are precisely discontinuous with the notion of art as aesthetic recompense, expressive consolation or spiritual exaltation: thus, whatever modernist painting had thought it was defending, or continuing, in the name of value and quality in 1919 in Europe looking back to 1903 and beyond, and whatever modernism painting thought that it had sloughed off in 1950 in the US, was simply an interregnum, a blip.

11

Foster 1994, pp. 30–1.

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But if in 1979 Krauss is reasonably sanguine about these new conditions for art, she and her generation of co-theorists were unable to predict how successful the formal characteristics of this new technical paradigm would actually become. Her call for art in the expanded field is initially largely directed towards a small coterie of New York and US-based artists working after Conceptual art, active in the area of post-sculptural related activities. Yet, within ten years, however, the call for a post-medium interdisciplinarity and the rise of the artist as multitasking technician had become the dominant mode, not just of advanced art in the major museums, but of all the new technologybased practices that had adopted the installation as its technical Grundform. With the advent of the new digital image technologies, the installation and temporal-based condition of art in the expanded field stretched the expanded field itself, to cover all kinds of interactive and installation-based work involving light, sound, image and text. In addition, in the new millennium the rise of new forms of art-social praxis outside of the gallery system or working at its margins (new participatory forms of community art [Suzanne Lacy’s New Genre Public Art], eco-practices, street interventions, Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, art-as-pedagogic practice) pushed Krauss’s largely objectbased and quasi-Constructivist re-functioning of the historic avant-garde to breaking point. There is now a vast amount of production that is temporal, discursive and non-object-centred, in which the notion of the artist as technician is identified explicitly with a whole range of intersectoral nonartistic skills and activities (scientist, ethnographer, ecologist, anthropologist, educator, engineer, ngo activist). A short selection of these groups and collectives give us a sense of how deep this post-art shift now runs: 16 Beaver Street (US) Chto Delat (Russia), Chainworkers (Italy), Critical Art Ensemble (one of the oldest and most respected of these groups), (US), Future Farmers (US), La Llecha (Mexico), Bureau d’Études (France), Park Fiction (Germany), Platform (UK), Yes Men (US), Groupe Amos (Congo), Superflex (Denmark) and WochenKlauser (Austria), Temporary Services (US). All draw on this identification between the artist and the non-artist/activist, indeed some make no pretence of working as artists at all, given that the very designation art delimits what the artist might do as a practitioner. Thus, what distinguishes this re-expansion of the paradigm of art in the expanded field is something that Krauss’s and Foster’s neo-avant-garde could only see obliquely: the increasing participation of art in the expanded field beyond a coterie of critically and institutionally supported professional artists, tied to the privileges of market protocol. Many of these groups and collectives continue to have some kind of working relationship with museums and not-for-profit spaces, and as such form part of the general dialogue and debate on questions of art and social engagement within the official

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artworld. But overall, the critical horizons and expectations of the work lie beyond the purview and discipline of the art institution in establishing a nongallery-going audience of users. Indeed, if the work ends up in a museum, this is primarily as a means of ‘reporting back’ to the artworld what has being going on beyond its remit. Moreover, given the collective and participatory character of this art, there is no authorial centre or focus to this practice, limiting the ways in which the art institution is able to represent the work to collectors. Now, painting and some forms of free-standing sculpture still dominate the private galleries and the sales rooms; the art market is still overwhelmingly committed to the validation and sale of a small range of luxury dry goods. In this respect neoliberalism has seen a great flourishing of financial speculation on the art market since the early 1980s, producing extraordinary levels of return on such sanctified objects, and introducing new power blocs into the global sales market (Russia, China). The sale of commodities, however, has little relationship to the actual working activities and conditions of the vast number of contemporary artists, in fact, even less than it has ever had. This is why it is possible to talk about an unprecedented split in the consciousness and practice of artists today, with echoes of the 1920s: some artists – the few who sell – have a fruitful and working relationship to the salesroom; some would like to sell or sell more than they do already and therefore would like to have a more fruitful working relationship to the salesroom, but many see no relationship between what they do and the sale of work, as a matter of course; as such their identity as an artist is formed completely externally to the expectation of sales and market approbation. This is what the ‘second economy’ captures: the fact that a wide range of artists working today define themselves antagonistically to the production and distribution of discrete objects for sale on the market, not as a ‘withdrawal’ from the market expressly, but as means of reorganising the relationship of the artist to his or her materials and audience. In other words, not selling is constitutive of what defines art’s relationship to its audience and the world for these artists. Hence the rise of the new forms of participatory, pedagogic and discursive practices that are driving this shift establishes a vital injunction for artists still locked into the conventional cycle of ‘practice/studio/gallery’: don’t look to the primary sales economy of art for validation, look to your own self-activity in collaboration with the self-activity of others as the determining condition of validation. The rise of the ‘project’ in the new millennium, then, is evidence of the rise of a new technical, cognitive and cultural space for the artist, in which the artist is able to discard their secondary, solitary and marginal identity as a producer for the market, in order to work in conjunction with other artists and committed parties, on shared, socially engaged initiatives. In this sense, we are in an interesting his-

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torical moment: art in the expanded field has ‘re-expanded’ the field beyond its familiar professional museum enclaves, to encompass a vast base of artistic activity external to the market and museum.

4

Neoliberalism and the Second Economy

Since the late 1970s, with the rise of neoliberalism or deregulated capitalism a basic requirement of management ideology has been the need for workers to be flexible and multitasking. Indeed, this precariousness has been theorized by neoliberal ideologues as essentially beneficial, insofar as it encourages workers to ‘think creatively’ as consequence of being adaptable to changing workplace circumstances. This pursuit of adaptability is, of course, a highly subjectivised view of what is an objective contradiction: the constant reproduction of the scarcity of jobs under capitalism in the midst of an abundance of goods. Invoking adaptability, in other words, is simply a way of covering up the reality of a system in which more and more workers have become superfluous to production over the last 30 years. Immanent to capital accumulation is a paradox: capital inevitably reduces or destroys the thing that produces value for the system: labour-power. ‘The working population produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing’.12 We can now see the catastrophic results of this increase in the advanced economies: the growth in casual labour, the rise of poorly paid services jobs (that fail to produce a new round of expanded capitalist reproduction), extended part-time work as essentially underemployment, and the rise of permanent unemployment overall; and, in the ‘non-advanced’ economic zones, such as Africa, South America, India and the former Communist economies: the mass immiseration of the unemployed and casual labour, reflected in the social and geographical disconnect between working class areas and centres of urban renewal; and the growth in the global South of vast shanty towns and slums outside major urban centres. This underlies, in turn, what Marx designated as the crucial difference between the industrial working class and the proletariat as such – that is, those who are forced to sell their labour-power as workers, but cannot actually be workers in any consistent sense, who are ever only occasional workers.13 The vast rise of self-determined artistic activities since the 1990s, then, becomes a little clearer in the light of the deepening crisis of the labour-capital 12 13

Marx 1996 p. 625. For a discussion of these issues, see Endnotes 2010.

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relation. The exponential increase in underemployed and unemployed artistic activity exists in this gap between the decline in industrial labour and the rise of a new proletariat that incorporates all those who are excluded or partially excluded from wage-labour. In this sense many professional artists, occasional and most ‘non-artist’ artists, are now part of a globalised casual economy. But the semi-proletarianisation of the artist is, naturally, not the same as this new immiserated proletariat of the global unemployed and underemployed. Unlike the unemployed or underemployed in the favelas of Rio de Janerio and slums of Lahore, those who ‘labour’ in art’s second economy are (largely) educated and live lives that are time-rich, or certainly possess greater autonomy than those who are forced to make a living on the edge of the exchange economy. Yet the creativity of the favelas and the European and North American art collectives do share a certain perspective, even if their access to resources is very uneven: as unemployed, underemployed and socially precarious artists and those working outside of the exchange economy are part of a sizeable critical mass of underused creativity, globally, that, in working and surviving in non-compliant relationship to the exchange economy, produce a living space inside neoliberalism that is attached to the critique of waged-labour. Thus, being a poorly paid artist today is not the solitary and bohemian life it is usually assumed to be, in which ‘waiting’ is a corollary of finally being recognised. Rather, if one takes the opportunity, it is to find oneself involved in a process of socialisation in which creativity becomes a shared effort with others without the imprimatur of an external authority. What arises out of this shift, therefore, is a new kind of training, in which art is defined by its intersection with the skills and interests of other artists, activists and non-artists as part of a ‘creative commons’. Thus, this isn’t simply further evidence of the dissociation of practice from the sovereign object and the sovereign artist; the ‘doing’ of art emerges from its collaborative and participatory potential as the practice of the ‘many’, and not from the idea of the ‘artist’, as someone invited to exercise his or her communicative and collaborative skills or ‘vision’ as a practitioner of art in the ‘expanded field’. Art as an ensemble of techniques, practices and sites takes its authority directly from those involved collaboratively in the work’s production; artists and non-artists, community members and invited participants, pursue a shared – if not necessarily harmonious – aim. In many instances the question of artistic common pursuit is not always defined by the development of an accord between participants – that is, a set of pregiven parameters – but by the collaborative working through of problems, and the exposure of divisions. One of the results of this is that the artist is not there solely as co-ordinator of the contributions of others. He or she or they may provide the questions, or terms of the encounter between participants, but nevertheless they refuse to take a leadership role as artistic

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director/s in the work’s production. Hence, the artist drops ‘out of view’ even if the artistic character of the project doesn’t, insofar as the job of the artist/s, non-artists and the community is to find a common framework in which to turn the ideas and actions of all the participants into a collaboratively produced and convincing realtime artwork. This is what the second economy of art supports: a wide range of artists and cultural producers who function principally as cultural technicians or artistic ‘service providers’; and therefore, artists find themselves in a position to be supported financially by a range of public institutions, ngos, charities, and not-for profit agencies who all feel that participatory works fulfil their own social and cultural agenda and funding profile. However, the problem with the idea of the artist as a ‘service provider’ in these terms (and worse ‘conflict resolver’), is particularly indicative of one of the problems that arise when art defines art’s collaborative integration into the social realm solely in terms of funders’ criteria of success: the pursuit of ‘effectivity’ and palpable outcomes. This makes art after art in the expanded field particularly vulnerable to new forms of instrumentalisation and capture by abstract labour (the transformation of artists into wage-labourers at the beck and call of public institutions), and as such susceptible to crass notions of community building, regeneration and festivity. Funding for ‘socially engaged art’ has become ‘outcome’ obsessed. Yet, the growth in the extra-artistic relocation of art – art after art in the expanded field – is now the terrain on which art is compelled to work through the contradictions of its expanded form; indeed, this is where what remains of the avant-garde is being shaped, re-defined and tested. Thus: without evoking teleology, we can see how the modern market’s formal and social constraint of art under the bourgeois authority of the sovereignty of the individual artist, and the art object as a unique object of exchange, has expelled art, not just into a newly defined expanded field – governed by the exigencies of interdisciplinary and the intersectoral – but into a post-professional realm of the artist commons itself, an expulsion which is particularly difficult for the art market and museum to control – so on the whole it just ignores it, and where forced to acknowledge it, identifies it with public and leftist bureaucracy and the ‘death of art’. Nevertheless, the post-art terrain of art is one of the unanticipated emancipatory effects of deregulated capitalism since the late 1970s and its push through of a new generation of labour-saving technologies: i.e. the emergence of electronic networks and the computerised production of images and text as the basis for forms of association and communication not governed by restrictive conditions or codes of access. Thus, the ‘secondary economy’ is that part of the digital economy in which the intersection between new forms of technology and non-professional relations of cultural production fundamentally weaken art’s professional criteria of exclusion, which are invariably set by

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the artist’s financial success on the market. In turn, this rearms one of the key emancipatory platforms of the historic avant-garde, what Walter Benjamin in the 1930s called, in response to the democratising effects of the new machinotechnical culture of the time, the author or artist as producer: namely, the possibility of those without the requisite academic or officially sanctioned skills being in a position to make works of art (in particular photographs), and, as such, contribute to a new democratic culture. With the advent of the internet and the availability of new and accessible forms of image reproduction and storage, the resources for art making are now widely available beyond professional sanction. The crucial issue, however, is not that the internet constitutes a new democracy of art (universal access to a new technology is not universal democracy) or that access to new forms of technology guarantees an exit from received forms of ‘folk-thinking’; or that digitalisation in art represents art’s exit from the market. The market is not something one ‘escapes’ from through immateriality or electronic networks. But, rather, the issue is that artists and their supporters, are now in a situation where the new technical resources of art and image production and communication have outgrown the aesthetic constraints of the cycle of practice/studio/gallery as a privileged site of commodity production, further challenging the identity of the artist a sovereign producer of dry goods. This is because, the critical leverage of such forms of creativity become the present and future basis of any free associations of producers and users all the way down, presenting a profound challenge to notions of creativity and artistic value enshrined in both the official artworld and even within the new generation of art in the expanded field. However, the sociality of the internet cannot do the work of critique and deconstruction, of transformative cultural work, itself; indeed, the internet, on the whole, is a vast clearing house for the routine, reified and pathologised forms of expression under mass culture, and as such a source of dismal compulsion. Yet in its unedited, rancorous, disputatious and multitudinous flow, it continues to offer a space of participation without hierarchical sanction, and as such, for those who take this opportunity, it offers a precious commons for new forms of self-directed activity within the wider social dynamic of art’s second economy. Thus, participation without hierarchical sanction is one of the facilitators of the expanded social base of art, and not its guarantee; the social relations of the new art have to be built out of the contingencies and resistances of a given material context. But nevertheless, this is what makes ‘art after art in the expanded’ qualitatively different from ‘art in the expanded field’: art, technology, self-directed activity and the commons establish a space of integrated production that is not subordinate to the professional circuit and etiquette of studio, gallery and market.

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Art, Neoliberalism and the Fate of the Commons This essay looks at one of the key issues of the recent turn to socially engaged art: the political claims of participatory and collaborative forms of practice as the basis for a new cultural-political agenda.1 In support of this work, it is argued that, in the wake of the legacy of the early avant-garde, Conceptual art, and post-object community practices, art requires a different framework for its production and reception: an art that breaks systematically with the production of discrete objects for the market, museum, and with the aestheticised judgements of the ‘immobile’ spectator. In so doing, this form of art is thereby freed of the constrictive ties between spectatorship and artistic use value. Consequently, the plethora of socially engaged art produced since the 1990s is premised on a simple countercultural shift: when art is located beyond the fixed object, art is then able to reorder its materials and concepts in the interests of its critical relationship to praxis, and as such, to the exchange of knowledge and skills between artists and their publics as part of a programmatic examination or speculative reflection on specific social issues and problems. This move is close in spirit to the concept of Bildung, in which the skills of artists and the experience and non-artistic skills of participants become part of a shared learning process. This has meant, in turn, that there is now an explicit identification of art praxis with political praxis, producing, in effect, a new, generic conjunction of the cultural and political: art-political praxis. That is, many of the new forms of collaborative and participatory art make no distinction between art as political praxis and political praxis itself; art, it is claimed, is a form of political praxis. As a result, socially engaged art has broadly assumed – irrespective of social and geographical context – a new contestatory role for itself in the democratic process and public sphere. In establishing itself as a shared learning process through engagement with and reflection on modes of direct democracy, the experimental status of the art-political project provides a highly articulated disjunction between the repressive realities of the neoliberal democratic process and the modes of direct democracy adhered to by the new forms of socially engaged art. Accordingly, we can make a wider claim about socially engaged art as an art-political practice: socially engaged art is

1 First published in The Art of Direct Action: Social Sculpture and Beyond, eds., Karen van den Berg, Cara M. Jordan and Phillip Kleinmichel, Sternberg Press, Berlin 2019.

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structured politically and cognitively as a practice of ‘the commons’, in direct opposition to the vast neoliberal attack on public ownership and collective social provision and the general privatisation of public resources and experience. Indeed, the erosion of democracy under neoliberalism runs in parallel with its counter-practice and counter-theorisation in contemporary art, insofar as the neoliberal destruction of the commons is the metapolitical framework through which socially engaged art organises its noncompliant and resistive ‘experiments in democracy’. Hence, before we look at the art-political claims of socially engaged art in detail, we first need to understand the economic conditions under which this retreat from the commons has occurred. The concept of the commons can be divided into five distinct categories: (1) free natural resources, such as air and water; (2) nationalised property or services; (3) free collective spaces such as parks and public gardens; (4) free access to the use of electronic communication networks; and (5) and free access to educational provision. A general definition of the commons would then be something like this: democratic access to a socialised and open resource that is freely available to everyone at a reduced or zero cost. The very fact that these categories of the commons have become increasingly visible over the past twenty years is an indication, therefore, of how increasingly vulnerable these resources have actually become. Indeed, the commons arrived as a political category precisely at the point when the benefits of a common life are beginning to erode or disappear. This, of course, is a consequence of the massive neoliberal onslaught on the social state and nationalised property during this period, which has effectively broken up various forms of state provision that acted as a social wage. More and more workers now have to pay an increasing portion of the costs of public services out of their own wages as these various forms of public provision are incorporated into the market.2 These attacks may have been conducted ostensibly in the name of efficiency and consumer choice, but the real aim was to remove the links between various sectors of the social state and organised labour at the local level. Such links were historically a line of defence against the opening up of public provisions to capital accumulation and, as such, provided spaces of communal association and support that were free from direct market intervention. This, in turn, allowed users to think of these resources and facilities as part of a shared community, or, indeed, a commons. The privatisation and contraction of public services across North America and the eurozone, therefore, has been as much an ideological intervention as it has been part of a macroeconomic strategy. That is, for the

2 See Lapavitsas 2013.

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marketisation of social provisions to work properly people have to be disinvited from the idea that they collectively ‘own’ or possess the services they use. The best way to do this is not only to introduce artificial scarcity into the provision of public services (libraries, children’s facilities, swimming pools, and playing fields are too costly to maintain; we will have to get used to living with less of them), but also to demonise the social character of these services in order to better weaken them for privatisation.3 (Privatisation, as such, acts as a form of primitive accumulation in which public resources are deliberately undervalued financially as a means of undervaluing them culturally or intellectually, allowing them to be expropriated at under cost.) The ‘enclosure’ of the commons, then, is not just the physical taking over of space or a set of resources by capital but the creation of a self-alienating regime in which low-cost social provisions are assumed to be poor and second rate. In other words, ‘enclosure’ is as much cognitive and cultural as it is economic. This plundering of social property in the interest of so-called market efficiency is not simply an anomaly of neoliberalism, as if privatisation is the work of a venal neoliberal cabal intent on snatching playgrounds from children. As many have written over the last thirty years, it is a consequence of the longterm decline in the profitability of capitalism after the end of the post-war boom of the early 1970s. Since this period, capitalism has found it extremely difficult to restore the profit levels it once achieved between 1945 and 1973; indeed, the fall in profits globally has been gradual and consistent since that time (with the exception of intermittent profit hikes in certain economies, such as the United States in the mid-1990s). This decline, as Robert Brenner has argued, is a consequence of the overaccumulation of capital as a result of a lack of productive capacity in a system that increasingly uses less labour power to create more goods.4 A vicious feedback loop is thereby produced: in order to be more competitive, capital drives down labour costs and raises productivity by introducing new forms of technology and cutting back on labour power, but as a result less surplus value is extracted, creating a downward pressure on profit levels. Profit levels, in turn, are further eaten away by ambitious capitalists reinvesting in new forms of technology in order to seek new competitive advantages by cutting down on the socially necessary labour time needed for the production of goods (indeed, this drive to competitive advantage has

3 See Harvey 2015. 4 Robert Brenner, ‘What is Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America: The Origins of the Current Crisis’, Prologue to the Spanish translation of Brenner’s Economics of Global Turbulence (Special Issue of the New Left Review No 229, May–June, 1998), published by Akal, 2009, p. 2. See also ‘Crisis in the Class Relation’ in Endnotes, No 2, 2010.

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become particularly acute in the present period of rapid computer-based transformation; companies are failing to use up the full life of their constant capital through natural wear and tear). But for successful capitalists, these competitive advantages don’t last long. For when other capitalists catch up, living labour is squeezed even more, and the new average amount of necessary labour time reduces the values of goods produced. Hence, profit levels flatten out and then drop again globally. So, in these terms, capitalist competition generates a process of internal compression in which only the biggest and strongest companies have the long-term capacity (that is, continuous access to reserves of capital) to sustain competitiveness globally. This is why the rise of the monopoly in the twentieth century is the result of this winnowing process, for it is precisely the company that has ridden out the losses involved in this process of falling behind and catching up again – in order to capture more of a depleted market – that survives to grow and take over other businesses and markets. But the paradox of this process is that monopolisation is a further crisis of profitability waiting to happen: with the rise of market dominance and, along with it, with the reduction in the average necessary labour time and the drop in value of goods produced, there is less profit to reinvest in production.5 So, either in a small scale or large scale, in reducing costs to sustain competitiveness, companies’ profit levels are always under threat. For capitalists to radically alter this situation and get the system ‘running under its own steam’ again – that is, by increasing the employment of living labour and thereby increasing levels of surplus value extraction – means opening up the system’s productive capacity by destroying large amounts of capital value throughout the whole of the industrial system (the material inputs of production, plant and machinery, etc.). This is why the many recessions since the 1970s have not been able to revitalise the system as a whole, for only a fundamental shake out, such as the Great Depression of the early 1930s or the Second World War, which underwrote the conditions for the postwar boom, is capable of achieving this. During World War ii, vast amounts of capital value were destroyed in Europe and South East Asia, allowing the United States to become a mass exporter of goods on the world market, followed by Germany’s and Japan’s economic recovery and rise to global prominence.6 But, if world war is a last resort, the social costs of such a shake out today through a full-blown depression would also be too great for capital, given the possible radicalisation of the working class – as in the 1930s. Policymakers, planners, and technocrats, there-

5 Harman C. 2010. 6 Hudson 2003.

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fore, have pursued fiscal and monetary policies that have avoided a full-scale destruction of capital value, which they know they may not be able to control politically. There are, as a result, the three political-economic pillars of capitalist reason that define our age: the expansion of financial capital, the global restoration of primitive accumulation (that is, privatisation), and, most crucially for workers, the expansion of credit across the system – the creation of the ‘indebted man’, as Maurizio Lazzarato has put it – as a way of offsetting the reduction in the real level of wages and the growth in unemployment and part-time work.7 This is why the downturns after the 1970s have not been as severe as the Great Depression, but this also explains why the system is unable to freely re-expand.8 In the major recession of the early 1980s, for example, the destruction of capital was only a fraction of what it was in the 1930s. Thus, the bourgeoisie is always balancing the costs of capital accumulation against the destruction of the social and metabolic conditions of reproduction that will enable such accumulation. Consequently, in this period of capitalism’s long-term post-1970s decline it is easy to understand how the concept of the commons has become crucial not only to thinking politically through these forces of compression, indebtedness, and monopolisation, but also as a critical site of cultural and artistic thinking. Indeed, the rise of the commons as a political and cultural category since the mid-1990s has produced an unprecedented space of mutual exchange between art praxis and political praxis, which returns the debate surrounding social engagement in art to the debates on popular participation and collaboration in the social sculpture and community art of the 1970s. In this sense, we might say that the majority of post-object or participatory art practices today are engaged in various forms of collaboration, community interaction, and pedagogic exchange, and are less concerned, in a classical sense, with political representation than with performing and developing forms of common exchange outside of, or in contradistinction to, the depredations of the market and these forces of compression. This has produced a range of practices along two fundamental axes: first, the idea of artistic collaboration between an artist or artists and a group of participants as the model of an ideal intellectual community; and second, the notion of the artist or artists acting in collaboration with a non-artistic community or group in order to ameliorate or change a given state of affairs as a counter to external forces of neglect, coercion, or oppression.

7 Lazzarato 2012, p. 11. 8 For a discussion of this reality, see Kliman 2012.

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The former invariably takes on the identity of a shared process of intellectual dialogue as the basis for historical or political research focused on a particular community (as in the work of Thomas Hirschhorn, for example), and the latter operates, as a functional transformation of a particular problem in a given locale or community, through dialogue and collaborative practice (as in the Danish group Superflex drilling a well in an African village; the US-based art activist group Haha growing vegetables for aids sufferers; the Indian group Dialogue’s long-term involvement in enabling the artistic creativity of women in a Adivasi village in Chhattisgarh in Central India; and the Austrian group Wochenklausur’s practical interventions into conflictual social situations, such as their work with drug addicts in Zurich in the mid-1990s).9 In this sense, the latter model derives its politics from an explicit centre-periphery, metropoliscountryside, skilled-unskilled process of exchange. Yet, in broad outline both positions share a similar horizon: each sets out to enact and make visible a process of free exchange and participation irreducible to the enclosures of the commodity form, the boundaries of medium-based practice, the institutional spaces of the official art world, and the historical distinctions between art praxis and social or political praxis. In these terms, the conventional demands of political representation (and its iconography) are secondary to the notion of art praxis as occupying a given place during a particular period with various participants in order to facilitate a self-transformative and collective outcome (that is, intellectual dialogue; shared artistic production across disciplinary and professional boundaries; the articulation, amelioration, or even resolution of a particular social issue). Now, there are two ways of reading art’s move into the artwork-as-commons. Firstly, the notion that the reduction of art to a range of functional and consciousness-raising stratagems in these ways is fundamentally paternalistic and delusional, given that this kind of work can never live up to the political expectations of its horizons. And, secondly, the more productive notion that I want to explore here: that these models of intellectual exchange and intervention are, in fact, forms of autonomous artistic production and should be valued as such. This involves, accordingly, a recalibration of the art-political axis back toward art – or art-as-politics – rather than a view of politics in art as an actual or potential exit from art, as political practice. In this, the new generic claim for art as political praxis needs to be opened up to scrutiny. Politically, artworks can certainly initiate a horizontal chain of emancipatory possibilities from one communal experiment to other communal experiments, but whatever participatory forms these might take they cannot mobilise 9 Kester 2011.

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the general will to prevent the destruction of the commons itself. Because politics in art is not connected to the general will (outside of moments of revolutionary transformation in which art directly enters the political process or when artists subsume their interests under the demands of campaign work), art cannot, certainly in everyday capitalist conditions, assume a political leadership role for itself, this side of bathos anyway. To assume such leadership not only leads to an inflation of art praxis as political praxis but also opens up art praxis to the assumption that the interrelationship between art praxis and political praxis is at its best when it works in direct conjunction with political groups, ngos, or even official agencies of the state. At the heart of art-as-the-commons lies a fundamental tension, therefore, between the real and emancipatory conjunction of art praxis with political praxis (which defines the present moment and its emancipatory horizons) and, from the opposite direction, the threat of the political process actually closing down the possibilities of art praxis. In other words, such projects misrepresent themselves to themselves when they assume a direct symmetry between what they claim as art praxis and the actual realities of the political process. For this position assumes that cultural politics can substitute for politics itself, when in fact art’s contribution to any generalised resistance to the enclosure of the commons is either after the fact or may actually get in the way of political struggle. Accepting the demands inherent to the means-end logic of the political process in order to establish where art does its transformative work is one thing, but allowing this process to diminish the non-identitary functions and non-compliant rationale of art-as-the-commons is another; it can only diminish what art possesses that other practices don’t, a commitment to speculative reason. As such, the critique of the artwork as a form of ethnographic paternalism (in the spirit of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault’s famous exchange on representation and politics in 1972)10 is perfectly correct in this context: such practices of collaboration and intervention actually achieve very little as forms of resistance, and, in some instances, they clearly profit from the circuits of the official art world at the expense of those who they collaborate with – irrespective of the would-be open and democratic character of the dialogue and proclamations of social use value. In these terms, collaboration and art-as-thecommons cannot freely exit the intellectual division of labour, nor can they escape the colonial relationship between active artist and recipient/collaborator, for precisely the same reason Jerry Cohen argues that proletarians collectively cannot exit the proletariat and enter the petty bourgeoisie at will: the

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See Foucault and Deleuze in Foucault 1977.

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individual and social costs are too great and the economic penalties too heavy, given that the worker’s individual freedom to exit the proletariat is conditioned by the proletariat’s collective unfreedom.11 Consequently, the empowering of non-artists to become artists as part of the expanded reach of artistic skills, as in the work of the Dialogue group, is no less subject to the constraints of the intellectual division of labour as are the egalitarian collaborations between artists and non-artists or occasional artists favored by other contemporary activist groups; in the end, value and power still accrues for those who are in a position to successfully represent themselves as professional artists on the global art circuit, and therefore the construction of artistic identity is never simply about the transfer of artistic skills from the skilled to the unskilled. But, if art-as-the-commons is shot through, in these instances, with glaring contradictions, as collaborations and collective interventions they nevertheless open up a space of action and reflection for art that uncouples the making and reception of art from the compression and claustrophobia of commodity relations. This is easily misinterpreted. This does not mean that discursive, pedagogic, and dialogue-based works escape the commodity form; even temporal interventions have to purchase commodities on the market in order to pursue their ‘non-commodified’ outcomes. Moreover, in order to enter into dialogue with an audience or collaborators artists have to transform the content of what they do into intellectual goods; there are no spontaneous exchanges of ideas – ideas have to be mediated by forms of systematic (abstract) presentation that are subject to commodity relations. The point is that in the production of works that are not conceived for monetary exchange (temporally executed or devised as ‘gifts’), such works negotiate a non-compliant, dissensual, and nonidentitary set of relations with commodity relations, in which the exchange of skills and affects and the production of knowledge overflow the fixed form of the art object and its exchange value. And this is crucial for any sense of artas-praxis as an open-ended research programme built on the use values of art. For these forms of free exchange establish an important centrifugal dynamic for art in the present period: namely, the development of an art after ‘art in the expanded field’, in which the collective forms of participatory production and reception become constitutive of these open-ended research interests. We might call this reflective process, then, a split within the time-as-measure of the commodity form, in which the drive to instrumentalise and entrepreneurialise as an expression of the individual creativity associated with the production of artistic dry goods for the primary market – and the valorisation of

11

Cohen 1983.

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‘judgment at a glance’ – are suspended. Hence, by acting collaboratively or collectively in order to establish a ‘thinking community,’ or alternatively in order to produce a transformation of a given state of affairs based on work with a group of individuals in a given locale, such models – at least when they are successful – are ‘out of joint’ with the heteronomous conditions of commodity production from which they emerge. And this, precisely, is what I mean by the value of such artworks lying in their autonomy as actions or interventions, irrespective of their actual political efficacy or transformative outcomes. For in the end their value lies in their capacity to engage in non-instrumentalised forms of learning and exchange, which in turn may lead to other non-instrumentalised forms of engagement and exchange. Now, to acknowledge this split within the time-as-measure of the commodity form is not to abandon an examination of the power relations that shape and determine the new alliances being created between capital and research, as if treating art as an autonomous activist or research endeavor allows art to circumvent all the market pressures and constraints bearing down on art from outside of the art world. For, as is evident from the recent history of such research practices, the union between research and art-as-the-commons under the auspices of ‘art after art in the expanded field’ is easily compatible with the operations of the new cultural service industries. Indeed, in some instances they are interchangeable. Increasingly, the conceptual, participatory, and research skills employed in this kind of work are being captured by the disciplinary mechanisms of abstract labour as artists become (part-time or even full-time) wage labourers on social regeneration schemes, community art and architecture projects, digital corporate or charity projects, etc. As Chto Delat have argued recently: ‘Society is outsourcing its politics to art, and that has become extremely profitable’.12 Crucially, then, art-as-thecommons as free exchange and art-as-open-ended-research do not enable art to escape these countervailing forces of abstraction. Artists as researchers are easily drawn back into the accumulation process and the constraints of time-as-measure. Autonomy, therefore, is not to be confused simply with the postconceptual horizons and research conditions of contemporary art; autonomy always has to be won anew from the conditions in which art finds itself, irrespective of its material or immaterial forms. But, nevertheless, there is something wider at stake critically than pointing out the pressure points where real autonomy is threatened and where claims to political efficacy are dissolved.

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Chto Delat 2009, p. 469.

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Despite the various constraints affecting the rise of collaborative art and collective practice, then, this work generally signifies a fundamental shift in the relations inherent to art’s production, a state of affairs that the compressive logic of the official art world finds genuinely difficult to accommodate. In this respect, the official art world seems less and less a place where artists might think and work; a place, indeed, that seems more and more tied to the social rituals of finance capital than to anything resembling the legacy of the avant-garde. And this is why, if it is critically important to avoid treating the social and activist turn as a solution to art’s social function, it is also important to see beyond what appears to be the limited heteronomous character of these collaborative actions and processes to their totalising form as moments of autonomy. That is, if the manifest political outcomes of these practices are secondary to the transformative engagement that they establish with people and things, then there is something here that is far more demanding than simply art’s escape from the art institution or from object relations – the usual justification for moving outside of the art institution and into the realm of ‘art after art in the expanded field.’ And this is the fact that the generalised shift to participatory and collaborative practice represents a quite extraordinary collective negation of capitalist culture in this epoch of capitalist stagnation, or non-reproduction.13 This is why the cognitive and cultural enclosures of neoliberalism have generated such a huge generational counter-reaction to these conditions across such a wide variety of postconceptual, temporal practices. Artists, for the first time for a very long time, have become preoccupied with how and under what conditions they labour as artists (and ‘non-artist’ artists) in order to redefine an autonomous place for themselves. In part, this has not only to do with the increasing underemployment and social precarity of artists, but also with the crisis of political representation itself under neoliberalism: the fact that the enclosures of contemporary culture have followed closely on the enclosures of the political process (mass voter abstention, withering of democratic processes, exclusion of workers’ organisations from public life).14 Thus, irrespective of the political limits of the new social practices, this art is doing some of the work of cultural transformation that the political process is unable or unwilling to do itself: that is, carry a critique of the value-form and waged

13 14

See, Magdoff and Bellamy Foster 2014. As Hito Steyerl has argued these conditions have produced a vast exclusion of independent film and video, even documentary photography – what she calls the ‘poor image’ – from the public sphere, pushing this work into the niche markets of the Internet. For, these forms of image production continually threaten the circuits of exchange between, popular film, tv, infotainment and advertising. See Steyerl 2012.

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labour into everyday life as an enactment of a life beyond capitalist compression and claustrophobia. This is why we should to step back a little from the category of art-as-the-commons itself and adopt a more explicit Hegelian position on the question of autonomy, in order to recognise what is ontologically significant about the social turn in contemporary art. Too often the debate on the political successes or failures of particular projects fails to recognise what has been released as a broad set of social and critical opportunities by these projects. What unites much of this socially engaged work, or is at least implicit in its participatory forms, is its adaptation of practices of group learning. This means we need to address what is presupposed by art-as-the-commons as a form of free exchange by repositioning art-as-the-commons under the auspices of Bildung – of free communities of learning – in which self-transformative action is constitutive of a given collective process. Whatever political weaknesses the various forms of art-as-the-commons exhibit, it is the interdependence of self-learning with collective transformation that is crucial to the form of art-as-the-commons and its survival, reflected in the huge rise in artists’ groups, interdisciplinary and transcultural projects, and team work generally. And this is precisely why a politics of time, immanent to the artwork and its reception, is central to the political effects of art-as-the-commons. The value of such practices lies, first and foremost, in the non-identitary break they presuppose with the time-as-measure as a condition of sustaining art as an openended research programme and emancipatory horizon. Art-as-the-commons and the self-transformative function of Bildung operate interdependently. This means that the autonomous character of this work derives from this centrifugal dynamic. Autonomy, consequently, is today no less an issue of distanciation, withdrawal, ‘walking away’, disappearance even, as it was for the early generation of modernists. But today, this is a politics of negation detached from the merits or demerits of non-communication and formal abstraction; autonomy, rather, is the name we might give to the intellectual correspondence between research, social critique, group practice, and formal open-endedness. The issue, therefore, of how the practices of art-as-the-commons facilitate the uncoupling of art from capital’s value practices has become as crucial to this extended sequence of art into politics as it has for the political debate on the commons and theory of the microtopian ‘enclave’ itself. Indeed, a strange isomorphism has occurred between art-as-the-commons and political theories of the commons. This is a result of the fact that much of the political debate on the commons has itself taken on artistic or cultural character in response to the instrumental outcomes and closures of the political process. So, to flesh out my

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arguments on the distinctions and possible continuities between art-political praxis and political praxis, I want to conclude by looking at this isomorphism between the political theory of the commons and the artistic theory of the commons. In so doing, I will be able to provide some final reflections on the question of autonomy and art and democracy and politics now. In The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital (2007), Massimo De Angelis argues that the work of emancipation begins from the dayto-day de-linking of practice from capitalist relations. ‘We need to extend the realm of commons in more and more spheres of our social doing, at any scale of action, to reduce the level of dependence on the markets’.15 This is based on two interconnected premises: that the conditions of emancipation are not lying in wait for us and as such need to be produced here and now and, consequently, the need for us to accept and act more directly on the ‘non-capitalism of our lives’.16 By ‘non-capitalism’ he does not actually mean that our relationships or communities are able to disconnect themselves from capitalist relations as such, but rather that various forms of non-capitalist solidarity and social cooperation enter into conflict with the complex web of capitalist relations. ‘The whole therefore is not capitalism’.17 Indeed, on this basis he insists that we don’t live under capitalism at all, for when we call our world capitalist, we forget how much of our lives – value practices, relations, affects, forms of mutual aid – lie outside of capitalist relations. This has strong echoes of John Holloway’s ‘crack-theory’ of the commons: as political subjects we necessarily operate in the interstices between things, that is, in the supplementary gaps that capital is unable to occupy. ‘Our power to do has a dynamic, it is a constant moving against and beyond that which is’.18 It also recalls Roy Bhaskar’s eudaimonistic concept of the political subject, according to which politics must advance a primary commitment to self-emancipation (‘we have to engage in conscious practices of self-change’) as a precondition of collective politics.19 As with these thinkers, De Angelis places a central importance on what escapes capital and, therefore, on building on value practices that generate a ‘counter-enclosure force’.20 The production and defence of the commons is, he claims, a horizontal process of attrition as an ‘ongoing laboratory of co-production’.21

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

De Angelis 2007, p. 12. See also De Angelis 2013. De Angelis 2007 p. 34. Ibid, p. 37. Holloway 2010, p. 209. Bhaskar 2010[a], p. 165. De Angelis 2007, p. 143. Ibid, p. 244.

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This emphasis on acting before being acted upon offers a compelling defence of political voluntarism: we can remake the world in our own image. Picturing capitalism as capitalism is part of the false consciousness of thinking that we cannot change the world. But in reality, this ‘counter-enclosure force’ represents an old political problem and story, indeed a pre-dialectical one, in which communal withdrawal or free exchange offers the hope of an exit into a new politics without confronting the exoteric realities of power. Thus, if the struggle for another politics is always about the struggle for other values now – as De Angelis and the new activist turn in art correctly argues – this struggle can never be content with the cognitive frame of micropolitics, as if the overcoming of capital will come about by a slow accretion and dissemination of these alternative values. In other words, by channelling an emancipatory politics solely through the concept of the commons, De Angelis (and Holloway) never confront the bigger picture of capital and the state; capital will not dissolve itself. This is why the micropolitical model of the commons has produced a strange convergence between art praxis and political praxis in the current period. De Angelis’s ‘laboratories of co-production’ take on the character of research-based art experiments, just as the new collaborative and participatory forms of art praxis, from the other direction, insist on the real-world efficacy of their artistic interventions. Indeed, a change of thresholds has occurred between art and politics. In the post-party space of the new global politics, the creation of other values has become expressly part of a cultural process, and the postconceptual, post-object space of the new art – artistic processes – has become an expressly functional one. This convergence, of course, is not a quirk of the times. Both positions, rather, are a symptom of a larger structural problem: the continuing absence of a mass democratic politics from the capitalist political process. Hence, if it is important to critique the inflationary rhetoric of these models of the commons, it would not be productive to denounce them for their false elision between art and politics, as such, or even for their utopian horizons. On the contrary, they represent valuable prefigurative emancipatory resources that keep open a space for other ways of doing and being. Thus, artas-the-commons and political theories of the commons will inevitably share a terrain on these questions. Quite simply, the political struggle for autonomy in art should not be taken as an extension of a new collective politics itself. For such a politics is still to be determined at a collective level of struggle, far removed from the mutual flatteries of art-as-politics and politics-as-art.

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Art, ‘Enclave Theory’ and the Communist Imaginary What is rarely discussed with the recent rise of relational and post-relational aesthetics is its reflection on communist form and the communist imaginary.1,2 Indeed Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (1998) is not just indebted to the aesthetic informalities of postconceptual postmodernism (aesthetic drift, intertextuality, anti-form), or to the whole gamut of post-60s sociability in art,3 but, more precisely, to the general reflections on communist practice and communist form on the French left in the 1980s and early 1990s. This is a heterodox tradition (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou) in which communist form and practice is both de-Stalinised politically and reaestheticised culturally. In this regard the early Marx’s emphasis on the radical and revolutionary function of Bildung (communities of collective self-learning) comes to define non-statist and autonomous forms of productive, intellectual and creative community. Accordingly, this political writing, at one level, dovetails with the revival of various autonomist kinds of thinking in Europe during the late 1980s and 90s which also brings together the critique of Stalinism and neoliberalism and reflections on cultural form, particulary Toni Negri’s political philosophy (although these traditions are by no means convergent). Thus, what Bourriaud borrows from this milieu is a kind of anti-doctrinal communist praxis in which notions of artistic community stand in for a critique of debased public notions of bourgeois community and democracy and the antidemocratic vicissitudes of neoliberalism as a whole. Suffice it to say, there has been no shortage of this kind of utopian ‘enclave’ practice and dialogic practice in advanced art from the mid-sixties: the Artist Placement Group (apg), Pete Dunn and Lorraine Leeson, Group Material, Helen and Newton Harrison, and the Critical Art Ensemble all come to mind. But what Bourriaud’s writing in the late 1990s codified – certainly within the confines of the international art world – was the generalised demand and interest in new forms of sociability in art, in a culture that was suffering from neoliberalism’s relentless frontal attack 1 First published in Third Text, ‘Art, Praxis and the Community to Come’, Special Issue, ed., John Roberts, No 99, Vol, 23, July 2009. 2 Watson et al. 2006. 3 Bourriaud 1998.

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on the remnants of social democracy, and the narrowing of the political. The cultural critique of this new political settlement was forged, however, as was the libertarian communist writing in the 1980s in France, in conditions of massive political retreat for the working class internationally, particular after 1989–90 and the final collapse of Stalinism – despite all the rhetoric of new political times. In this respect Bourriaud’s relational theory tends to draw mainly on the utopian-aesthetic motifs of the 1980s libertarian communist turn, at the expense of the tradition’s re-politicisation of labour. His model of sociability has little place for artists’ collaboration with workers, and art’s critique of the value-form – a concern of the historic avant-garde (Benjamin and Constructivism) and earlier socially interactive practice – but is grounded in the possibilities of democratic exchange between artist-professionals and non-artistic collaborators and spectators. And this theme, generally, could be said to dominate much contemporary relational and post-relational art practice: ‘communist form’ – or what Bourriaud calls in the plural a ‘communism of forms’4 – is primarily identified with the free exchange of ideas within self-enclosed creative communities. Consequently, in contrast to the classical Marxist tradition with its generalised attack on utopianism5 there is a deliberate braiding here of the communist imaginary with the traditions of a utopian communalism. In conditions of political retreat or ‘closure’ the function of the communist imaginary is to keep open the ideal horizon of egalitarianism, equality and free exchange; and art, it is judged, is one of the primary spaces where this ‘holding operation’ is best able to take place. Indeed, this ‘holding operation’ might be said to be the invariant communist-structure-in-dominance of so much contemporary art, which takes its point of departure from relational thinking and participatory practice. As such, there is a bigger picture at stake here. Any critique of the convergence of the communist imaginary with images of utopian communalism, derives, clearly, from the fact that such a convergence is prone to produce all manner of familiar political idealisms, substitutionalisms and mystifications. This is precisely, and for good reason, the basis of Marx and Engels’ critique of speculative-utopianism-posing-as-communism within the First International.6 But what is interesting about the status of this critique currently is this that the link between the utopian and the communist imaginary is presently far more capacious than any standard or classical ideology-critique of utopianism can neutralise. For, to reverse the usual order of things, utopianism in this current moment actually provides a pathway through to communist 4 Bourriaud 2000 p. 29. 5 Marx and Engels 1988, p. 84. 6 Marx and Engels 1987 and Marx and Engels 1988, p. 84.

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form and praxis.7 This is why we might talk about the burgeoning of a postStalinist communist-utopianism across a whole number of cultural practices and theoretical disciplines, in which the redemption of ‘communist thinking’ and ‘communist form’ becomes the vehicles for a utopian cultural politics or ‘messianic’ politics now. Indeed, the utopian imaginary and the communist imaginary converge.8 Slavoj Žižek’s In Defence of Lost Causes (2008) is perhaps the ur-text of this reversal: a messianic defence of communist praxis as a utopian disaffirmation of the present. [T]he eternal Idea of [communist revolution] survives its defeat in sociohistorical reality. It continues to lead an underground spectral life of the ghosts of failed utopias which haunt the future generations, patiently awaiting their next resurrections.9 In fact, Žižek raises the stakes even further by invoking the eternal idea of the revolutionary Idea at the very heart of Stalinism. ‘Against the utopia of “mechanized collectivism”, high Stalinism of the 1930s stood for the return of ethics at its most violent, as an extreme measure to counteract the threat that traditional moral categories would be rendered meaningless, where unacceptable behaviour would not be perceived as involving the subject’s guilt’.10 This is why there is a huge outpouring of revolutionary subjectivity during this period despite the purges and oppression; or rather, more accurately, there is a huge outpouring of revolutionary subjectivity because of the purges and oppression, insofar as it was beholden on everyone to define their commitments in relation to the regime. This is confirmed in Jochen Hellbeck’s extraordinary account of the

7

8

9 10

For a recent defence of the utopian imaginary within the Marxist (Morrisonian) tradition, see Edwards 2004. Morris’s achievement ‘was to accept the Marxist critique of Utopian Socialism while refusing the injunction in thinking on thinking about the future: in the process he cast utopianism in an activist mode’ (Edwards 2004, p. 17). See for example, Gough 2005 and Kiaer 2005. Both books, in a sense, rehistoricise the critical resources and productive aporias of Productivism and Constructivism, as models with ramifications for socialized practices now. That is – certainly in Gough – the factory-based experiments of Productivism in the Soviet Union in the 1920s are shown to be not a finished narrative of material failure (as in standard art historical and philosophical accounts of the historic avant-garde), but a model of relations between artistic labour and nonartistic labour that remain essentially undertheorised. See also the St. Petersburg based, ‘new-communist’ newspaper/journal, Chto Delat? [What is To be Done?], which has consistently produced the most invigorating writing on the new relational and post-relational milieu and ‘communist’ form. Žižek 2008, p. 207. Ibid, p. 212.

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widespread activity of diary writing under high Stalinism, Revolution on My Mind (2006). In the spirit of Žižek, Hellbeck sees the generalised practice of confessional and reflective diary writing, in the tradition of Bildung, as ‘unending process of work and self-transcendence’,11 carrying with it, in its universal ideal of intense reciprocity between politics and everyday practice, a ‘relevance to this day’.12 Similarly, in Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005), the concept of the ‘utopian enclave’ in science fiction literature and counter-cultural practices becomes a covert (discreet) dialogue with the communist tradition. Such enclaves are something like a foreign body within the social: in them, the differentiation process has momentarily been arrested, so that they remain as it were momentarily beyond the reach of the social and testify to its political powerlessness, at the same time that they offer a space in which new wish images of the social can be elaborated and experimented on.13 ‘Enclave thinking’ in art, then, has begun to take on a renewed political significance, insofar as it operates at this conjuncture between utopianism and the communist imaginary, invoking what Lucio Magri has called in a wonderful turn of phrase, ‘the stimulus of finding ourselves once again in a crisis of civilization’.14 In this there is a critical revival of the politics of cultural form that touches on deeper and wider changes within the political economy of art that cannot be dismissed simply as yet another outbreak of speculative artworld silliness and idealism, given the fact that we are witnessing the large-scale production of forms of socialized art work outside of the official orbit of the artworld and its mediating institutions.15 Current ‘enclave’ thinking is the result, not just of a pronounced ‘left-shift’ in theory and practice, but of the increasing democratic dissolution of the professional boundaries of art production itself, releasing, from below, various microtopian energies and perspectives. In this sense relational aesthetics – a term, it needs to be emphasised, that is far larger than Bourriaud’s limited perspective – should be seen as part of a wider and long-term transformation. As Greg Sholette argues, in a fine article on

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Hellbeck 2006, p. 335. Ibid p. 362. Jameson 2005, p. 16. See also Cunningham in Beaumont et al 2007. Magri 2008, p. 56. See in particular, Kester 2004.

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this emergent artistic economy, this shift represents a revitalised convergence between the hidden informal economy of market relations and new forms of extra-artworld sociability: Unlike the formal economy, this missing mass or dark matter consists of informal systems of exchange, cooperative networks; communal leisure practices; conduits for sharing gossip, fantasy anger, and resentments; and even the occasional self-organized collective that may or not be politically motivated. Within this dark universe, services, goods, information, and in some cases outright contraband are duplicated and distributed, sometimes in the form of battered exchange and occasionally as gifts that circulate freely, this always moving and benefiting a particular network or informally defined community. All of this is disconnected, or only partially connected, from the mainstream market. For capitalism to acknowledge this missing mass would require a radical re-definition of the concept of productivity.16 In other words, the informal economy of professional non-market artists and non-professional artists and the like, present a growing mass of socialised art activity that, albeit hidden to the art market, now defines the terrain on which art is practised. Relational aesthetics is simply one – disproportionately prominent – response to these new conditions. But, nevertheless, there remains a key question to be answered in response to this new milieu and its extensive range of critical activities: how is art to be actually practised in, and as, a form of dialogic or ‘enclave’ thinking? That is, what is the precise meaning of aesthetic thinking in relation to the socialised claims of relational and post-relational practice? Can the act – the sociability of the artistic exchange itself – carry the aesthetic meaning and value – as Bourriaud and other relational or dialogic theorists such as Grant Kester and Stephen Wright tend to believe – or is aesthetic thinking effective and worthwhile precisely through its de-temporalising effects, that is, through its actual distance from the world of everyday social relations? For, how are we to imagine a world free from the constraints and reifications of these everyday relations, when art is beholden to its instrumental forms and effects and, particularly in the case of Bourriaud, content to identify ‘enclave thinking’ with the most minimalist accounts of democracy and communist form? Consequently, what are the realistic possibilities, and conversely, the limits to sociability in the new art, and how does this then affect the future condition and possibilities of practice, and the critical relationship between 16

Sholette 2008, p. 38.

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these practices and the (utopian) communist tradition? The post-autonomous status of the artwork is therefore, still very much unsettled.17 In this light, the debate on art’s autonomy or post-autonomy – as it is played out in current relational and post-relational practice – brings into view a key theme of the communist tradition developed by the ‘new-communist’ thinking in the 1980s, and as such relates importantly to the whole legacy of the debate on ‘aesthetic thinking’ in Marx and Marxism, and centrally to the debate on art now: the relationship between ‘communist form’ and a ‘communism of the senses’. That is, if we identify Stalinism with the degradation or conservative foreclosure of the senses, State-Communism produced the very opposite of what Marx imagined as the re-aestheticisation of experience under communist social relations. Through the destruction of bourgeois culture, the senses would be released from the tyranny of reified social forms. As he says, famously, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844): the positive supersession of private property, i.e. the sensuous appropriation of the human essence and human life, of objective man and of human works, by and for men, should not be understood only in the sense of direct, one-sided consumption, of possession, of having. Man appropriates his comprehensive essence n a comprehensive manner, that is to say, as a whole man. Each of his human relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving – in short all the organs of his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form are in their objective orientation, or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of the object, the appropriation of human reality … The abolition of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object – an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians.18 In this sense the release of new social forms from within, and in opposition, to bourgeois culture, should be understood as a radical transformation of the relational content of the five senses. In the early writings of Marx, this was certainly framed by a picaresque naturalism and artisanal humanism, limiting the content of ‘aesthetic thinking’ to a kind of wan pastoralism, but in the 17 18

See Roberts 2004[b] and Martin 2007. Marx 1975[b], pp. 299–300.

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mature writings there is a greater understanding and sympathy for what capitalist development and socialised labour demands of the senses under postcapitalism: their actual critical embeddedness in the transformative, socialised work of ‘sensuous being’. This is what I take Marx to mean by the retheorisation of the senses. Thus, if the precise content of ‘aesthetic thinking’ in Marx is open to debate (in short, what sense is Marx’s ‘humanisation’ of the senses compatible with new forms of technological relationality?), nevertheless, as Alberto Toscano stresses, the link between communism and aesthetic thinking ‘have been clinched tight from day one’:19 the ‘communist organisation of society’ is … to be understood, aesthetically, as a domain of generalised (or generic) singularity, in which there is no contradiction (indeed no difference) between the human and the unique.20 Communism for Marx is precisely the production and collective exchange of singularities, and as such represents a collective aesthetic transformation of social form and the senses. But before I discuss these arguments and their recent cultural manifestations and their viability, I want to first look at the political context of the ‘new communist’ or utopian thinking from the 1980s – in Badiou, Guattari and Negri, Nancy – and its debt to the legacy of invariant communism.

1

Invariant Communism and Communist Form

In the wake of the collapse of Soviet Communism, Alain Badiou has set out to rethink and repossess the ideal horizon of the communist project. In this, in contrast to the prevailing reformist and reactive mentalité, he repositions the communist project in relation to a Platonic imperative: the notion that it is the universal Idea that endures (and renews itself) against all odds; in Hegel’s terms, the excess of the Idea survives its historical defeat. Crucial to this retheorisation is the reassertion of an old Leninist dispositif : that objective knowledge is necessarily partisan, and therefore, that the production and defence of universal truth, is always a matter of taking sides with the universal against that which destroys or weakens it, namely atomism and perspectivalism.21 Yet, 19 20 21

Toscano 2005, p. 119. Ibid, p. 120. See in particular Badiou 2005 and Žižek 2008.

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for Badiou this ‘taking of sides’ is not, conventionally, Marxist in its identification of partisanship with the partisanship of the working class. Certainly, in Badiou’s recent writing the orthodox notion of the proletariat’s ‘objective perspectivalism’ guaranteeing a universal perspectivalism is missing.22 In many ways this is why he presently designates his philosophy as post-Marxist, and takes his distance from the actual political legacies of Marxism as such. Similarly, Žižek offers a renewed ‘Leninist’ commitment to proletarian partisan thought – to a defence of the excluded part as embodying the universality of the all – but without any direct reference to the building of a new Party, and to the actual machinery of class struggle from below.23 In this sense, in both instances this is partisanship of defeat, or less pejoratively, a partisanship of messianic deferral.24 Yet, if the international proletariat is stripped out of this retheorisation of materialism, or rather given a deflected or subsidiary position, what distinguishes their writing, and indeed emboldens it, is a renewed commitment to the communist project, and more generally the communist imaginary. This marks their writing out, certainly in Badiou, as a splitting off of a communism that names ‘our’ defeat from the possibility of a communism which names ‘our’ future. In this sense there are two critical components to Badiou’s post-Marxist communism: the rehistoricisation and assessment of communism as ‘the real movement that abolishes the present state of society’ as a programme of emergence and decline, and communism as the ‘invariant’ content of a universal emancipatory programme. Only, then, by bringing defeat into alignment with the universal Idea, can the recent (defeated) historical forms of communism be separated from the invariant ideal or hypothesis of communism. Indeed, in an essay on this hypothesis,25 Badiou offers something like a quasi-transitional programme for the reconstitution of communism as a political horizon: The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organisation is practible, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coer-

22 23 24 25

For a discussion of the figure of the partisan in contemporary materialist philosophy, see Toscano 2009. Žižek 2008. See Roberts 2008. In this article I claim that Badiou’s philosophy is a ‘non-relational cut from within Marxism’ (p. 24). Badiou 2008.

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cive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganisation based on a free association of producers will see it withering away.26 But, if this represents some invariant core of a communist programme, its practical and serviceable meanings now exist in a new historical sequence, largely divorced from the past. Indeed, Badiou distinguishes two earlier sequences of the communist hypothesis: 1791–1871 (from the French Revolution and the end of Absolutism to the Paris Commune) and 1917 (from the Russian Revolution to Mao’s Cultural Revolution). These sequences, he contests, are over, opening out a new – and as yet unimagined – third sequence. In this sense it is clear, he insists, that this third sequence, will not be – cannot be – the continuation of the second one. Marxism, the workers’ movement, mass democracy, Leninism, the party of the proletariat, the socialist state – all the inventions of the 20th century – are not really useful to us any more.27 This is a bald, even reckless, assessment, yet for Badiou it is premised on the fact that the collapse of State-Communism as the ‘real movement that abolishes the present state of things’, hides the collapse of the fundamental ground of communist politics in the second sequence: the Party. The Party may have been appropriate and successful in overthrowing weak reactionary regimes, but it was inadequate in organising the transition from a temporary revolutionary state to Marx’s non-state. Thus, whatever forms the communist hypothesis, or imaginary, might take in the third sequence, they won’t be organized by, or mediated by, the traditional Party-form, because it now cannot generate ‘effective’ organisation in the wake of its revolutionary foreclosure. ‘This is why our work is so complicated, so experimental’ he states.28 The tension between a proletariat-less and Party-less materialism, and a commitment to a renewed communism, has been noted not least by those who are sympathetic to Badiou (and Žižek), as a reformulation of various ‘anarchist’ themes in recent French political philosophy.29 But Badiou has insisted he is not an anarchist, nor is he, he asserts, a speculative leftist, one of those idealist communist mounte-

26 27 28 29

Ibid, p. 35. Ibid, p. 37. Ibid, p. 37. See Hallward 2006.

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banks that Marx and Engels attacked so vigorously in the 1860s.30 Rather he bets the future of his communist third sequence on what we might call a universalism of revolutionary post-Party partisanship, in which small groups and their allies produce a kind of cellular model of resistance, in which the primary job of revolutionaries is to consolidate the reality of a ‘single world’ and the universality inherent in all singular identities. This is because, in an epoch where the ‘real movement that abolishes the present state of things’ is stalled, what is at stake, for Badiou, is the very defence of the communist hypothesis – its universalist axioms. If all this sounds vague, ultraleftist and ill-equipped to put a theory of partisanship into action, this is because Badiou’s theory of the communist ‘invariant’ is now situated in a permanent state of uncertainty, historically, somewhere between the end of the first sequence (the bloodshed of the Commune) and the beginning of the second sequence (the ideological battle in pre-revolutionary Europe for revolutionary ideas amongst louche utopians and communist idealists). In the current period, then, communism – the communist hypothesis – is no more than an indeterminate utopian-horizon premised on historical defeat. But this is perhaps why, in this period of the communist interregnum, there has been such a wide revival and expansion of utopian thinking, particularly in cultural and artistic theory, contrary to all premonitions and doom-saying about the end of politics, and certainly the end of Stalinist State-Communism. Thus, perhaps what will come to define this moment of capitalist crisis31 is less the familiar picture of the continuing crisis and demise of the left, than the widespread revival and flourishing of revolutionary ‘enclave’ and microutopian thinking. Indeed, Badiou’s writing on the communist hypothesis represents currently just one philosophical response to the legacy of communist culture within French political philosophy and political theory and cultural theory globally. In fact what distinguishes Badiou’s work on the communist hypothesis is that it is part of a specific French tradition of engagement with communist form and the communist imaginary before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the final crisis of Stalinism (a philosophical engagement with the vicissitudes of communist form which is largely absent from AngloAmerican Trotskyism, too indebted to its inherited 1930s humanist pieties and anti-Stalinist fetishism – whether committed to a state-capitalist theory of the Soviet Union or not).

30 31

See Bosteels 2005 (a), pp. 751–67. I write this during the ‘credit crunch’, the biggest financial crash of the capitalist system since 1929. But what distinguishes this period is the political voiding of the crisis, the fact

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In his Maoist reflections in the mid-80s on the implosion and destructive aftermath of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the restitution of capitalism in China, and the political consolidation of neoliberalism, Badiou argued that the Century of Revolution had already ended, and therefore, the need for the work of communist ‘reconstruction’ in theory had already begun. Thus, in many ways Badiou’s ‘The Communist Hypothesis’ (2008) and The Century (2005) are direct heirs to similar ‘communism in reconstruction’ thinking of Felix Guattari’s and Toni Negri’s Communists Like Us, published in 1985 and written in 1983–4 and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community (1986). They all presuppose, in the wake of the growing neoliberal closure of the political process East and West in the mid-1980s, the need for a philosophical and cultural engagement with communist form, the communist imaginary, and a (liberatory) communism of the senses. They all present, therefore, work on revolutionary politics, against the grain of its pragmatist and neo-Stalinist interlocuters as the European left moves en bloc into identify living communism with the very failure of the political imagination and the death of politics.

2

Singularisation and Communist Form

Guattari’s and Negri’s book is an extended examination of what they determine as ‘real communism’,32 or the creation of authentic conditions for human emancipation: ‘activities in which people can develop themselves as they produce, organisations in which the individual is valuable rather than functional’.33 And central to the accomplishment of this is the collective movement to transform the nature of work itself. Communism implies the redefining of the ‘concept of work as the transformations and arrangements of production within the frame of immediate liberation efforts’,34 and, as such, revolutionary transformation occurs when new forms of subjectivity are born of transformations in collective work experience. Crucial to the production of these new forms of subjectivity, then, is not, as is commonly understood, the de-alienation of the labour process, but the repossession of the liberated meaning of work through the release of new practices and new modes of consciousness. New practices and new modes of consciousness transform not just the relations

32 33 34

that for the international ruling class not even the mildest Keynesianism is debated or taken seriously; the market will correct the excesses of the market. Guattari and Negri 1990, p. 13. Ibid, p. 13. Ibid, p. 40.

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of labour, but its social form and meaning. In contrast to the false image of communism in Stalinism, as the state-ossification of the collective – and this will very much define ‘communism in reconstruction’ thinking in the 1980s – communism here, in an echo of the early Marx above, comes to stand for the collective liberation of singularities. Thus, the labour process is reconnected, not just to politics, but to ‘aesthetic thinking’, allowing large-scale collective experimentation at the point of production to ‘unglue’ the dominant corporate and bureaucratic forms. But this bringing forth of singularisation out of a transformed labour process, its repossession ‘in desire’ so to speak, is not the outcome solely of any singular break with capitalism identifiable with a future and interruptive revolutionary Event. This is because this politics of the Event fails to take account of the growing consciousness of ‘the irreversible character of the crisis of the capitalist mode of production’ now.35 That is, the release of new subjectivities – ‘a plurality focused on collective functions and objectives that escape bureaucratic control and overcoding’36 – is emergent and operative in a range of domains of production and social locations. Indeed, Guattari and Negri assert that this is a ‘real movement’ and not in any way utopian. This is, essentially, in nascent form, Negri’s much vaunted immanent model of labour-under-capital: in relying on the resistance to capital built into labour-power under capitalism, labour already provides the requisite resources and new lines of alliance for communism-in-praxis.37 The severe problems with this position as a theory of labour and of a model of generalised resistance (Negri and Guattari have little sympathy with the notion of historical defeat, as having a determinate effect on praxis) will not detain me here, as I have drawn up my criticisms of this position already.38 However, what is significant about this position and for ‘new communism’ thinking overall in the 1980s, and the present period, is that in reasserting the immanent and continuous subjective resistance to capital within the proletariat, Negri and Guattari draw a political line between socialism and its state forms and communism as such. Here is the theme of ‘invariant communism’ incarnate: communism is the directly emergent and spontaneous form of struggle from within the proletariat (and the oppressed). As Negri argues in his 1990 postscript to Communists Like Us: ‘As Marx teaches us, communism is born directly from class antagonism, from the refusal of both work and the organization of

35 36 37 38

Ibid, p. 99. Ibid, p. 107. See in particular Hardt and Negri 2000. See Roberts 2007[b].

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work’39 (rather, that is, from inherited and formalized political tradition and Party instruction). In this sense there is an explicit rejection of Stalinist and neo-Stalinist doxa that the proletariat has to pass through state socialism in order to dissolve itself as a class into communism. There are no intermediate stages of development – as the collapse of Stalinism has proved – there is only the ‘re-taking of freedom into one’s own hands and the construction of collective means for controlling cooperation in production’.40 Indeed, socialism, as its history in the twentieth-century East and West evinces, is no more than a form of capitalist state-craft, and as such as collectivist post-capitalist ideology utterly moribund. This ultraleftism easily dissolves into a rallying cry for the oppressiveness of all transitional state-forms, absenting politics from institutional mediation, and as such leaving it to the crippling sanctions of a spontaneous purity. But nevertheless, what this kind of thinking bears out in relation to the current flux of ‘enclave and microtopian theory’ after Stalinism is how widespread is this jump of communism’s liberation of singularities over the traditions of socialism directly into ‘communist form’ and the ‘communist imaginary’. That is, the convergence between the communist imaginary and a utopian communalism in enclave and microtopian thinking in current cultural theory is directed precisely, in the spirit of Guattari and Negri, to ‘communism’ as an emergent, living praxis. This reflection on community as a reflection on communist form is also the subject of Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community. As in Guattari and Negri, community under the name of communism is theorised is an emergent category, and as such stands in opposition to an ossified and repressive notion of community in Stalinism and capitalism. Nancy declares that the communist ideal of community has been betrayed in ‘real communism’41 and therefore needs to be put back into play. But this notion of community is ‘most often unknown to communism itself’42 (unknown to Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky that is) – Marx’s notion, derived from the tradition of Bildung, of communist community as the collective production and exchange of singularities. In this sense Nancy is one of the few French theorists of the ‘new communism’ to make explicit the link between aesthetic experience and thinking and communist form in Marx’s writing. This connection remains Marx’s ‘distant’

39 40 41 42

Negri, ‘Postscript, 1990’ in Guattari and Negri 1990, p. 166. Ibid, p. 168. Nancy 1991. Ibid p. 7.

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‘secret’.43 But in keeping with the general inversion of the socialism/communism dyad in Negri and Guattari, this aesthetic ‘communion to come’44 is not to arrive in any deferred, teleological sense. There is no ‘community’ in any full or fused sense, ‘to come’. On the contrary the production and exchange of singularities continually tests and revokes the meaning of community as such; ‘community’ is not something the proletariat possesses or works towards in its liberated completion, but rather is a continuous, unfolding space of possibility.45 If community as the realisation of intersubjective transparency never arrives, this is because ‘sharing … cannot be completed’.46 In this Nancy moves beyond the meaning of Marx’s release of the re-theorised senses under communism, to insist that it is the very production of singularity that secures the possibility of communist community. Yet, for Nancy this does not mean that in dissolving community the production, release and exchange of singularity is ultimately opposed to the idea of community (as if community inhibits singularity). In this he takes his distance from two opposed solutions to the ‘aesthetic’ critique of fixed community in Georges Bataille’s libertarian communism of the 1930s and 1940s: the dichotomous (the opposing of singularity to community) and its opposite, the fusional (the conjunction of singularities as an ecstatic community).47 The first position repeats the Romantic mythos of non-identity alone as truth, and the second simply aestheticizes the fusional drives of capitalist and Stalinist community. Both positions in this sense overlook the philosophical specificity of Marx’s debt to Bildung: singularity under communism is a socialised singularity. That is, singularity is itself the result of a transformative, social, collective process. But for Nancy, in addition or with greater emphasis – it is precisely singularity that disrupts and extends the boundaries of community. Thus, we might say, if Nancy moves beyond Marx in insisting that the release of singularity is not to be deferred to a ‘community to come’ (although Marx does say that communism is not the goal of human development),48 he remains with Marx’s non-dualistic account of communist singularity: singularity is socialised reflection on, and the exchange of, singularity. 43 44 45

46 47 48

Ibid. Ibid, p. 13. For a similar (and Nancy-indebted) discussion of the ‘community to come’ and non-state communism, see Agamben 1993. ‘What the State cannot tolerate in anyway … is that singularities form a community without an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging …’ (Agamben 1993 p. 85). Ibid, p. 35. See, Bataille 1988. Marx 1975(b), pp. 299–300.

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Inaugural Communism

In this light Nancy adopts this model of ‘unworked’49 community to propose a particular kind of cultural communist practice that is compatible with, and extends, this socialised singularity, what he calls literary communism. Literary communism – and art, as much as literature would fall within this model – is the name for irrevocable powers of artistic practice and writing to inaugurate community. This is because writing/artistic practice for Nancy inscribes beingin-common as a form of unworked community in the very core of its praxis and reception. In moving outward to ‘touch’ the other – the singular – writing/the artwork constantly resists and interrupts the notion of a community known or hoped for in advance. In this sense the interpellated community of readers and spectators is a community of articulated singularity, rather a group of singularities in search of the confirmation of a shared experience, and as a result engenders an infinite reserve of meaning and communication, continually exposing the limits of community as an imagined or hoped-for settled conjunction. Accordingly, writing and the artwork set in play the conditions of socialised singularity as such: a community that comes together in a process of shared articulation, to produce an incompleted whole of articulated singularities. ‘Community means here the socially exposed particularity, in opposition to the socially imploded generality characteristic of capitalist community’.50 Nancy says bluntly at the end of the section of literary communism, however, that his model does not determine any particular mode of social practice, artistic practice, politics or writing. Rather it refers to that which ‘resists any definition or program’.51 In one way, this is to be expected and in keeping with writerly ‘deconstructive’ custom. Yet as a figure of communist community Nancy’s model of literary communism sets down an ideal marker for the reversal of the socialist/communism dyad in ‘new communist’ thinking, and the aestheticisation of communist form. It would be strange therefore not to conclude in saying that Nancy’s hypothesis makes a broader claim on post-Stalinist communist form. Indeed, in identifying Marx as a theorist of socialised singularity, Nancy declares that ‘it is not an exaggeration to say that Marx’s community is, in this sense, a community of literature – or at least opens out onto such a community of articulation, and not of organization’.52

49 50 51 52

Nancy 1991, p. 31. Ibid, p. 74. Ibid, p. 81. Ibid, p. 77.

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Cultural Communism of the Third Sequence

It is not surprising then that Nancy’s inaugural communism has played a part in the debate on the new forms of sociability in the new art. His model of mutual articulation has proven to be a useful theoretical ally in the emergence of a new form of ‘enclave thinking’ in the current conjunction of a utopian communalism and cultural communism. His ‘literary communism’ has provided a language of community-in-development that resists the (sorry) history of community art’s statist assimilation and socialist reification as virtuous intervention.53 The articulation of part to whole presses all the right buttons at the moment about non-identity and self-representation. However, what is of primary concern here is the viability of the prioritisation of singularity as the core of a new communist imaginary. Because testing this proposition means evaluating more broadly the claims of ‘new communist’ thinking – invariant and inaugural – and its relations with the new forms of artistic sociability on the historical terrain of the avant-garde and the revolutionary tradition. In other words what is at least striking about Nancy’s model is the way in which it focuses many of the political problems and hiatuses that now confront art and cultural practice under the communist Third Sequence, and as such should be seen as paradigmatic of the post-Stalinist durée. Socialised singularity or communist singularity is that which ties communist form to the aestheticisation of politics. The production, release and exchange of singularities in community, as community, as a communism of the senses, traverse the notion of community as the end-state of State-communist praxis. The ‘new communist’ theory borrows deeply from early avant-garde practice itself: the production release and exchange of singularities is the outcome of creative community in motion, in struggle. An interesting cultural conflation is currently in operation therefore: ‘new communist’ thinking borrows from the defensive operation of the historic avant-garde (under Stalinism and StateCommunism) in order to release communist thinking and practice from Party inertia and historicist closure. In turn, the new forms of relational sociability in art borrow extensively from this aestheticisation of politics in order to repoliticize aesthetics (in fidelity to the historic avant-garde). Thus, for instance, Badiou’s current model of cellular politics (L’Organisation Politique)54 has an avant-garde character similar to any number of activist and relational art

53 54

See for example, Kwon 2002. ‘Politics, as we conceive it in the op, promises nothing. It is without party and without program’. Alain Badiou, quoted in Hallward 2003, p. 227.

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groups one cares to name; and he takes a certain pride in this, just as much as relational and post-relational art activity crosses the border into politics proper. This conjunction of an aestheticised politics with a politicised aesthetics is, of course, a consequence of the Third Sequence as an emergent utopianhorizon premised on historical defeat. The conditions of emergence of a new ‘communist hypothesis’ and the avant-garde are essentially suspensive. This means that recourse to the production, release and exchange of singularity within community as an oppositional stance tends to get caught up in its own aestheticist presumptions and compensations. That is, if the future production, release and exchange of singularities reveal the true nature of community, in as much as it discounts or destroys measure under the force of capitalist abstraction, it also runs the risk of blurring its claims about the destruction of measure with capitalism’s own destruction of measure. As Jameson puts it: ‘postmodern and decentred thinking and art reinforce the new social and economic forms of late capitalism more than they undermine it’.55 This is reflected at the political level, for instance, in Badiou’s withdrawal from the advocacy and theorisation of a Party of a new type – a primary concern of his in the 1970s to the mid-1980s – to post-Party politics generally; and, at the cultural level, in the widespread tendency in relational aesthetics to defer politically and culturally to the ‘other’ and to the politics of ‘difference’. With this abdication comes the privileging of the temporal ‘enclave’ community as an idealised version of Nancy’s articulated community in the making: in comparison all other communities appear fixed and bounded. Hence, this is where ‘indeterminate meaning’, ‘infinite community’ ‘unbounded exchange’ become liabilities, because in their self-declared advanced or vanguard state, they ontologise the gap between articulated community and actual, messy, slow-changing communities, the communities we all actually live in most of the time. The historical idea of the revolutionary Party as ideal community embedded in the bounded community of the proletariat is lost. Interestingly this political dilemma gets played out in a relational register in a critique of Nancy’s influence on the new sociability in art, in Grant Kester’s Conversation Pieces. Kester attacks Nancy for his community-in-production as being Manichean. Nancy’s work, Kester argues, invokes a series of ‘oppositions that accord an intrinsic ethical value to rupture over stasis, incoherence over fixity, ambiguity over predictability’.56 In this Nancy fails to make a methodological distinction between bureaucratised and fixed communities that rely on

55 56

Jameson 2005, p. 165. Kester 2004, p. 158.

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an authoritarian coherence, and stable communities that rely on their coherence through custom and tradition. It is the latter formation of community – as in the working-class – that continues to have a progressive and defensive identity. Accordingly, it is not the job of the relational artist to work produce a productive uncertainty without distinction. On the contrary the greater challenge, for Kester, is to produce ‘unanticipated forms of knowledge … through a dialogical encounter with politically coherent communities’.57 What Kester blocks here is the subsidence of the new forms of sociability in art into fetishisation of the ‘unformed community’. Such a model, he contests, produces an enclave mentality that prefers the idealised production of aestheticised singularity, over and above work that enriches already existing lines of communal dialogue (specifically through class and race). In a way this is an old debate about how and where artists position themselves in relation to a given community. Do they work alongside the community, athwart it at some distance, or submerge themselves into it? Indeed, there is an assumption anthropological in origin and tacitly assumed by Kester – that the best results occur when artists actually go and live in, and become, part of a given community. But, despite these criticisms of Kester makes of Nancy, both relational/dialogic and ‘new communist’ thinking actually share a similar vision: the necessary dissolution of representation. Both ‘new communist’ thinking and relational or dialogic art practice prioritise the fluidity of reciprocal exchange, beyond, and in opposition to notions of the artistic subject or collective artistic subject speaking to, and speaking on behalf, of the ‘other’. That is, both models take it as axiomatic that representational forms of petitioning, explication, appellation, narrow or even destroy art as a space of resistance and democratic co-articulation and cooperation. In ‘new communism’ thinking this finds its cultural expression, paradoxically, in a high-modernist commitment to non-representation or anti-representation (as a space free of the exchange of alienated appearances),58 and in relational or dialogic practice in the commitment to the multiple, temporal, unstable, interactive space of the extra-gallery or gallery installation or event. Singularity and the dialogic function as a counter-space and counter-cognitive ‘theatre’ to the fixed, hierarchical representational logic of the capitalist sensorium. The critique of representation, then, is very much a rejection of the idea that political practice lies in the production of a counter-symbolic archive that stands in contest with the capitalist sensorium. For relational practice and ‘new com-

57 58

Ibid, p. 163. See Badiou 2006b, pp. 133–48.

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munist’ thinking alike, these counter-symbolic possibilities are now historically otiose: (1) because, presently, there is no working-class movement to underwrite this counter-symbolic process and connect its disparate motivations; and (2) because the political subjects of such a representational economy, refuse to be named as the empathetic victims of this counter-symbolic process (the ongoing crisis of the documentary ideal). There is much to agree with here: too many representational practices claim a political identity for themselves that in reality does not exist; any politics of representation worthy of the name has to acknowledge ‘who speaks’ and to ‘whom’. Yet, the attack on representational objectification brings with it a loss of knowledge derived from, what we might call corrective distance. That is, corrective distance results from those forms of knowledge that are produced from a theoretical encounter with the subject’s objective place in the social totality. This, however, is not to oppose correct distance to the free flow of the exchange of subjectivities in ‘new communist’ thinking and relational practice, but to put a break on the notion that dialogue and the exchange of singularities in themselves are socially transformative. Interestingly both Bourriaud and Kester admit as much. As Kester says, the dialogic/relational model is easily reducible to a kind of ‘dialogical determinism’: the naïve belief that all social relations can be resolved through the utopian power of free and open exchange … [this model] overlooks the manifest differentials in power relations that precondition participation in discourse long before we get to the gallery.59 Similarly, in Postproduction Bourriaud moves away from the largely dialogic model of Relational Aesthetics, to a counter-representational model of practice. It is important, he says, that art sustains a level of counter-representational activity in the face of mass culture. No public image should benefit from impunity, for whatever reason: a logo belongs to public space, since it exists in the streets and appears on the objects we use. A legal battle is underway that places artists at the forefront: no sign must remain inert, no image must remain untouchable. Art represents a counter-power. Not that the task of artists consists in denouncing, mobilizing or protesting: all art is engaged, whatever its nature and goals. Today there is a quarrel over representation that sets art and the official image of reality against each other.60 59 60

Kester 2004, p. 182. Bourriaud 2000, p. 87.

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The broader argument here is that the aestheticisation of politics in ‘new communist’ thinking and the repoliticisation of aesthetics in relation to practice reach a similar internal impasse around the dilemma of representation. The production, release and exchange of singularities dissolve the need to resymbolize and re-historicise. In a way this is one of the reasons why Badiou is so insistent on separating a Communist Third Sequence from a Second Sequence and a First Sequence. By tying cultural commitments to the revolutionary legacy of the past, revolutionary practice and cultural practice ties art praxis and political praxis to the obligations of the past – to the archival work of a dusty mnemotechnics – and, in turn, to the wretched, tedious, ineffective work of sustaining a corpus of anti-capitalist imagery. Yet, despite this separation, and despite Badiou’s continuing debt to Maoist politics of the break, his periodisation has the virtue of clearing a space for historicisation or rehistoricisation. For in its sequentiality it makes clear that we are still, so to speak, inside the horizons of communist history and practice. This means – as Guattari and Negri, and Nancy demonstrated in the 1980s and 1990s – what is at stake is what kind of communism is appropriate to its defeated legacy, not the fetishisation of the name ‘communism’ itself. And crucial to this, certainly for advanced cultural practice, is the meeting between the aestheticisation of politics and the politicisation of aesthetics on the terrain of an inaugural communism or enclave thinking as a fluid (avant-garde) space of experimentation. Because in the current period this is where ‘thinking the future’ will be done at the meeting between a utopian communalism and an inaugural communism (indeed the only place). This is why the new forms of sociability in art are significant. They may aestheticise their own conditions of production; they may fetishise the dialogic as transformative activity; they may devalue and misconstrue the emancipatory potential of artistic autonomy (and, as a consequence, as Žižek puts it in his discussion of Hardt and Negri, mimic the frictionless ‘communism’ of Bill Gates’s virtual capitalism),61 but at a material level they strive to unblock the reified and dismal social relations of contemporary artistic production. And, in this sense, they underwrite and expose something productive and unmarked within the Third Sequence: the examination of community, reflection on community, extension of community across various artistic forms and practices, as an engagement with notions of collectivity and democracy outside of their inherited (capitalist and socialist) state forms.

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Postconceptualism and Anti-Pathos Postconceptualism in art enacts two losses: bourgeois humanism and pathos, or perhaps one thing if you consider bourgeois humanism and pathos to be the same. But if anti-pathos is not particular to postconceptualism as such, it defines most late modernist and neo-avant-garde art since the 1960s. We might talk, then, about four traditions of anti-pathos in the modern period: Bertolt Brecht’s theatre of verfremdungseffeckts; Clement Greenberg’s painterly modernist aestheticism; J.H. Pyrnne’s poetic abstractions; and Art & Language’s discursive ‘beholder resistance’. If anti-pathos in art has now become broadly posthumanist, in the 1960s, however, it divides largely between critical humanism and posthumanism: Brecht and Greenberg are, in their respective ways, critical humanists, Prynne and Art & Language are more conventionally posthumanist. However, all positions could be said to define their poetics, aesthetics or anti-aesthetics in relation to Marxism after Stalinism; indeed, what they all share is a rejection of any kind of descriptive realism that stages art or poetry or theatre as place of empathic identification (of pathos) at the expense of knowledge or learning or strenuous attentiveness to semantic or cognitive particulars. To say we live in an epoch of cultural anti-pathos today, though, is to misconstrue the very different accounts of anti-pathos that are derivable from the ‘anti-pathos condition’ above, and therefore, makes us vulnerable to blurring the political consequences of different philosophical positions. This is important, because, if postconceptualism is our dominant condition in the visual arts,1 what postconceptualism defines and defends as anti-pathos is less secure than we might imagine. Thus, we need to be clear about how each of these positions produces their beholder or reader over and above the ‘merely’ human, for it is on this basis that we can clarify what is stake in anti-pathos now, and therefore its possibilities and limits. For Brecht, a theatre of ideas must incorporate and enhance the reflective and decision-making capacities of the spectator, as part of a political process external to both playwright and audience. In the 1920s and the 1930s the anti-subjectivist character of this obviously has strong links to revolutionary discipline: namely, there is a refusal to accept or indulge the pathos of the

1 Osborne 2018.

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individual predicament of both oneself and others. But this is not a conventional attachment of art to scientific Wissenschaft (knowledge). For Brecht a dramaturgy of Wissenschaft is never simply about providing knowledge or ‘winning arguments’.2 On the contrary, it is closer to the aporetic demands of classical Socratic philosophy in which the master (here the playwright) stages the inconclusiveness of his or her own thought, as a heuristic encounter with the vicissitudes of praxis and historical understanding. Brecht, therefore, makes no claims to being a channel through which an external or objective knowledge is transmitted in fictional form: the knowledge of those who – in the psychoanalytic sense – believe they know. Rather, claims to knowledge lie in the actual conflictual staging of agency and praxis itself, in the limited – even violently limited – scope for action. It is a mistake, consequently, to oppose Brecht’s theatre to Hegel, on the basis that his use of alienation effects – stepping out of character and historical time – constitute what is radical and supposedly anti-historicist and anti-expressivist about his theatre, as Augusto Boal does in The Theatre of the Oppressed (1974),3 and those influenced by him. Brecht’s theatre is certainly anti-historicist, as all political theatre must be, but this does not constitute what is truly radical about his dramaturgy. Brecht, like Hegel, is a playwright of the failure of knowledge. Not failure as such, or the failure of knowledge as such, but the failure of pure knowledge or pure reason to adjudicate historical events in any self-transparent or self-possessive fashion. This is why his understanding of the place of theatre in the legacy of Enlightenment philosophy, of historical experience and learning generally, is always mitigated by ‘plumpes Denken’ – crude thought – or the demands of full stomachs and wily manoeuvres, in the spirit of Galileo and classical Chinese philosophy.4 This does not mean his theatre flatters the actions of renegades, dupes, counterrevolutionaries, fools and moral cowards, but rather, that ideas, even the best of ideas, are worth little without collective force and the mitigation of immediate misery; in this, like Hegel, he demotes hubristic heroism and Romantic posturing, in favour of calculable collective strategy and the assessment of the critical potential of a given situation. One might say, therefore, that both audience and characters are caught up in or subsumed by circumstances not of their own making, and consequently are confronted with the reality of making decisions that are – what I would call – the ‘worst-best’ or ‘best-worst’. This, in turn, stretches what we might mean by Brecht’s anti-pathos (anti-pathos, here, being attached to the enactment or demonstration of a procedure in the interests 2 Brecht 2014. 3 Boal 2008. 4 See, Brecht 2016.

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of a ‘greater outcome’ or truth process). Namely: there is a necessary pathos attached to the anti-pathos of what is required from a revolutionary theatre (or indeed any critical art practice), given that the transmission of knowledge is not enough to secure any process of social transformation. In other words, the intractabilities of history and praxis call us back to pathos, or, rather, to the pathos of anti-pathos. In Clement Greenberg, writing around the same time as Brecht was writing, modernism, becomes, a defence of the aesthetic beholder and ‘sensuous’ reason against mere representation or empirical particulars in art. Modernist (abstract) painting, accordingly, secures the greater freedom of aesthetic judgement from the pathos of art’s attachment to moral uplift or political education, usually identified with the realist tradition, on the grounds that such judgements respect that artworks are constructed things, before they are windows on the world or pointers towards social transformation.5 This means, for Greenberg, that the modernist revolution in painting, from Manet onwards, calls art to its true modern and Enlightenment path: the release of the artist and beholder from the notion that art is no more than a confirmation of meaning and values external to itself. As is well known this derives from Greenberg’s assessment of art’s autonomy at the midnight of the twentieth century in the late 1930s, with the catastrophic rise to power of fascism, Stalinism and American mass culture. All represent, for Greenberg, a tearing up and suppression of the production and reception of art as involving a judgement about the formal materials of art, as opposed to art’s connection to its imputed externalities. Resisting pathos in art for Greenberg, therefore, is about resisting the lure of art’s attachment to false or pious images of the collective, which for him either leaves art in the realm of sentiment (kitsch) or infected by populist hyperbole. This leads Greenberg to briefly identify with Leon Trotsky’s anti-Stalinist ‘Manifesto Towards a Free Revolutionary Art’ (1938),6 in the belief that Trotsky, Diego Riviera and André Breton were defenders of a revolutionary art opposed to the instrumentalities of social engagement and representation; they were not. Greenberg’s late career, then, tends to see pathos everywhere except in the work of the small group of American abstractionists he supported. As a result, his understanding of anti-pathos is increasingly circumscribed by a rejection of all social claims for art as being a betrayal of the freedoms of sensuous reason. This leads him, despite his early political alliance with the left into alliance with conservative nationalist positions, in which modernism

5 Greenberg 1978. 6 Trotsky et al 1938.

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stands in for a ‘spiritual reaction’ (the singularity of the artwork) against the collective, the mass spectator, and by extension the would-be unrealizable claims of the revolutionary left. If anti-pathos is the sign of being ‘unillusioned’ – in the spirit of Brecht – then Greenberg’s ‘unillusionedness’ is of course very much that of the liberal; and it is liberal anti-pathos, largely directed at the left after 1945, that has dominated post-war European and North American culture, with the legacy of realism being the main casualty. The modernist English poet and Marxist, J.H. Prynne, similarly, sees value in poetry and the commitments of the poet as tied to the demands of antipathos. However, his anti-pathos is fundamentally shaped not just by the postThermidorian political conditions of the post-war world, but by the instrumental-modernising conditions of language and poiesis. In these terms pathos and anti-pathos attach themselves expressly to a post-Debordian account of meaning-formation under conditions of the absolute or near absolute destruction of poetry. Poetry must necessarily resist the pathos of the idea of language redeeming the world through the ‘poetic’ – that is offering up the noninstrumental affects of language as kind of ‘spiritual therapy’. Thus, a revived lyricism is no answer to the semantic constraints of functional and reified ordinary language. Prynne’s late modernist response is a return to the ‘camp of responsibility’ (Andrew Duncan),7 insofar as the form of the poem is reconstituted as a hard, granite like thing, in which language resists the pathos of the ‘poetic’ loss of relation to the world through a process of semantic excess or overflow, in which the poetic self is dissolved or made opaque through this process. However, he achieves this overflow and density not by abstracting from the lyrical or calling up the ineffable, but by utilising technical and scientific languages to create a new, lexical reorientation of language to the world and power and abstraction. In this tightening and ‘hardening’ of the surface of the poem the gaps between the poet’s voice and the would-be fallen world is closed down, producing a constricted, costive encounter between each word, each word cluster, each line, as if the reader needs to be perpetually reminded that there is work to be done (see White Stones, 1969, Brass, 1971).8 As David Trotter has said of Prynne’s poetry, it turns ‘a Medusa-head on anyone who accosts [the work] with a demand for ready meaning’.9 If this defies the pathos of lyricism, nevertheless it also rejects the pathos of modernist liberal unillusionedness, in which the poet rejects the signs of instrumental thinking and the loss of relation, in the name of a historically ‘unfulfilled specificity’ of experience (Trotter), 7 Duncan 2003. 8 Prynne, White Stones (1968) and Brass (1971) in Prynne 2015. 9 Trotter 1984, p. 219.

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attached invariably to an imagined loss of origins and community (as in the poetry, for example, of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams who both draw on a notion of lost community, Heideggerian and preindustrial in the case of Stevens, Caribbean and demotic in the case of Williams). Prynne’s semantic complexity and difficulty, therefore, is a deliberate removal of the poet’s voice from this pathos of origins, aligning reading and understanding directly with the (hard) work of anti-pathos. The group Art & Language is equally committed to the fundamental antipathos of the spectator’s late modernist encounter with the artwork. And like Prynne this is based on the introjection of scientific and theoretical language directly into the space of the artwork, in order to withdraw reading and understanding from any hint of companionableness. But, of course, this does not involve the introduction of words into the space of art (as in Dada or Surrealism) but the repositioning of words where art, or images, should be. Text as art becomes first-order. The result is a shift in spectator responsibilities, in which reading and looking, reading as looking, looking as reading, converge. In these terms in the early 1970s Art & Language talked of the suppression of the beholder, as the basis for a new concept of (theoretical) companionableness: one in which spectator and artist produce a heuristic space of shared learning.10 Thus, in an echo of Brecht, spectators become producers, relieving the spectator (or pejoratively the ‘art lover’) of the burden of interpretation as a guide to empathy. In other words, the spectator’s function is to participate in the transitive, indeed unending, discursive life of the artwork, in which reading/looking are constitutive of a process of meaning production ultimately lying beyond the finitude of both artist and spectator. Anti-pathos, accordingly, as in Brecht and Prynne, is language put to work against art’s reconciliation with appearances. Liberal modernism and revolutionary modernism, critical humanism and posthumanism, all dislike, therefore, the idea of pathos as a source of unearned emotion and affect: the idea that pathos encourages certain non-cognitive beholder privileges. This is why there is tendency to inflate cognitive attentiveness, reflexiveness, distanciation in all the positions above: they, all assert the moral economy of presentness – of attachment to the labour of engagement with the object to hand – in order to resist the empathic drift of loss and longing, and unearned feeling. The labour of engagement with the object to hand must be a labour of engagement on the present. Of course, the demands of presentness do not stop loss and longing entering the critical frame; but they do

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See Harrison, ‘Conceptual Art and the Suppression of the Beholder’, in Harrison 1991.

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create a space for the idea that the work that the work of art and the beholder do together is a shared engagement with the contemporary and the future. Futurebuilding; praxis; new worlds, no less. In liberal modernism, this production of the new is directed towards a very narrow and technical end: the upholding of the quality of a beholder’s formal encounter with the artwork as a moment of sensuous freedom (as a way of putting the would-be freedoms of politics and politics in art in their place); in revolutionary modernism it is shaped by a concrete political demand: to learn, learn, learn, as a way of inviting artwork and beholder into a transformative encounter with the meanings of the non-aesthetic: i.e. the contradictions of social experience. Both notions, accordingly, albeit from very different formal-political positions, have a horror of realism. Realism for liberal modernism produces the pathos of the utopian in art, leading to hubris; realism for revolutionary modernism produces the pathos of the revolutionary’s sentimental attachment to past struggles, leading to academic doxa. As such anti-pathos in this instance defines itself through a particular methodological prohibition: a fear of history and representation overwhelming art’s powers of self-renewal, either aesthetically/semantically or theoretically. In short, antipathos is the anti-historical and anti-representational move modernism makes once the politics of the avant-garde are detached or weakened by the postrevolutionary conditions of culture after World War ii. The triad RealismHistory-Representation, consequently, for this generation, is identifiable with the bourgeois/Stalinist/scientistic, suppression of art’s singularities. We see this move most obviously in Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’s infamous dialogue in 1972 ‘Intellectuals and Power’11 in which representation on behalf of the subaltern other is associated with death and inertia, non-representation with intensity of desire (particularly in art), and self-representation as the realm of truth and virtue. There is much to be said for the way in which Foucault and Deleuze denaturalise representation and power here, in common with other work at the time, but little to be said for post-representationalism as a project. Indeed, in resisting representation, Foucault and Deleuze merely shift the contradictions of representation into a quasi-Orientalist mode: that is, their post-representationalism concedes embarrassing ground to the notion that the language of those without the power of representation possesses a privileged interiority; and therefore, that those without, or with limited powers of representation, speak a truth denied those with the powers of representation. But at least we can see how much anti-pathos here relies on a highly restricted under-

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Foucault and Deleuze 1977.

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standing of representation in order to do its work: representation is reduced to a calculable form, merely ‘speaking for’; mere replication. Representation as Vertretung (identity) overrides representation as Darstellung (making, productiveness, staging; non-identity). In the drive to exit pathos as the would-be unearned realm of affect, liberal and revolutionary late modernism are confronted, therefore, by an ineluctable contradiction: the production of the new, the political identification of the reception of the artwork with aesthetic freedom or learning, suppresses the very thing that makes this relation engaged and worldly: historical consciousness, and the particularities of social experience. This is why of all the models of anti-pathos we have looked at, it is Brecht’s perhaps that has the most influence during this period, particularly in film (Godard), for Brecht never sacrifices pathos (social heterogeneity; ‘working through history’; affect) for anti-pathos (abstraction). His notion of ‘crude thinking’ is, essentially, an expression of this relationship. Consequently, it is no surprise that in the early 1970s, when analytic conceptual art begins to break down – and conceptual art moves into postconceptualism proper – that photography plays a crucial part in conceptual art’s reengagement with pathos. The photodocument for modernist painterly abstraction, mimimalism, and analytic conceptual art, of course, is the gateway to all that is disruptive of the formal and cognitive rigour of anti-pathos. Greenberg and Michael Fried try to tie it up in formalist rhetoric, Roland Barthes – in his distaste for photojournalism – accuses photography of emotional bullying, and Carl André dismisses photography’s social and artistic status altogether as a mere ‘rumor’.12 Photography, nevertheless, is the entry point of anti-pathos back into representation, and as such, reestablishes a Brechtian revision of cognition and history. Robert Smithson, Hans Haacke, Allan Sekula, Victor Burgin, and Mary Kelly all reopen links with the pathos of the photodocument and historical genealogy: for instance, Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), Haacke’s Shapolsky et al, Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May, 1971 (1971), Sekula’s Aerospace Folktales (1973), Burgin’s ‘Life Demands a Little Give and Take’ (1974) and Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1975–8). Images and signs of, or the aftermath of, industrial labour, images of slum properties, domestic settings, working-class street scenes, the unwaged immaterial labour of motherhood, take their place next to supportive explanatory or narrative texts. Thus: for the first time for a long time, bodies and their histories, bodies and social forces, labouring bodies, maternal bodies, enter the mise en scène of modernist practice, producing a wealth of social ‘affects’ that hitherto had been taken to

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Andre 1970.

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be illicit or lie outside of proper aesthetic attention or the demands of theoretical exactitude (non-representation). Hence if in analytic conceptual art, texts take the place of images, here images and texts find a place of mutual interrogation. However, this is not a return to representation and pathos as such, as if this first generation of postconceptualists had rediscovered documentary photography, or wanted photography to do the work of a revived ‘history painting’ or social realism. Rather, photographic representation here undergoes a disciplinary displacement. Photography is divorced from its disciplinary location and genres (fine art photography, documentary practice, photojournalism) to become a ‘truth-bearing’ (not truthful) sign and source of social critique. In this sense: representation returns ‘ruined’, or in a default-state, so to speak, rather than the renewed and affirmative voice of social engagement. Therefore, we might say that postconceptualism from 1973–4 reconnects the pathos of representation to critique, or rather, establishes critique as form of pathos; of loss as the renewal of thinking. Like Brecht, Haacke in his Schapolsky piece wants us to reflect, as opposed to empathise, but like Brecht, he also wants us to feel pity as a precursor to reflection. Just as Mary Kelly, in order to reveal something of how subjects enter symbolic and social relations through the possession of language, wants us also to share in the small and poignant exchanges between her and her son during her son’s early years. Why does postconceptualism from 1973 want a different relationship to antipathos in these terms? What isn’t modernism doing that it should be doing? From modernist painterly abstraction to conceptual art, bodies and their relations are excised or revenant presences in art. They disappear or are merely alluded to, as if the very visible presence of the human body were a manifestation of bourgeois power. And it is not hard to fathom why. After the immediate post-war years of burnt and brutalised bodies, such bodies were overwhelmed by pathos – pathos appeared to be ingrained and scarred into their very surfaces – and, as such, such bodies became abstractions; ‘non-thinking’ bodies, universal placeholders for humanist generalities. It was a short and necessary step, therefore, from the removal or delimitation of the visible body, to something like a renewal of reason in art; a release of anti-pathos as a clearing out of a hysterised humanism. But if the traumatised body – as a monstrous humanist body – is placed out of view in order to relieve art of a heightened burden of unearned emotion, post-Thermidorian trauma is not. And this is why the bodies return. But they do not return as figures of lost origins, or tokens of feeling, but as organised social signs, imbricated and invaded by the specificities of power. And this is why postconceptualism, from 1973–4 onwards, is the moment when the repression of pathos and representation returns as a systematic meeting between history, social structure and subjectivity. Indeed, early

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postconceptualism represents a moment when pathos is detached from liberal modernism, in order to reconnect the social sign with ‘affective’, as opposed to instrumental, content. Pathos is not what prevents action or learning but what gives action and learning historical meaning and value. Postconceptualism, then, is far from simply being an art movement that follows or supplements conceptual art: it does something more. It produces a radical transformation in the relations between representation, subjectivity and social system, in which art’s transformative encounter with its materials encompasses site, institution, information networks, bodies, and their material and affective relations. That is, postconconceptualism excises the primacy of the painterly sign, formalist or aestheticist accounts of value, anti-representational orientalisms, and intellectualist ontologies (art as a reflection on art), in order to produce a non-dualist, non-medium specific, socially stratified and cognitively extended space for the interrogation and theorisation of representation, agency and form. In these terms – through its technical attachment to and development of the installation-form as the space where this interrogation takes place – postconceptualism approaches the condition of the gesmantkunstwerk; a move within, for and against, totality. As such pathos (historical consciousness; the realm of affect) and anti-pathos (system; the in-human; collective agency) become relational and dialectical categories, determined in the final analysis by political contingencies. Indeed, pathos and anti-pathos are irregular and unstable, determined in the end by their mutual imbrication. This is why pathos doesn’t relieve us of the ‘difficulties’ of modernism; rather, it means that in the desire of art to find new modes of distanciation (of complexion) in a world overrun by the pathos of mass culture, the hard, impenetrable surfaces of modernism will not be enough. But the temptations of a hubristic political anti-pathos remain. Thus, in the present period, where collective political practice is weak or narrowly conceived, postconceptualism today is far more attached to Foucault and Deleuze’s anti-representationalism than it is to Brecht’s. The rise of post-relational aesthetics, participatory practice, places agency over representation, community over collective strategy, spontaneity over history, in a resurgence of participatory vitalism, in the belief that art can do some of the work that politics can’t or won’t do. This move of course, tied as it is to a new social companionableness in art, suffers from its own pathos: the post-Thermidorian cultural left’s residual attachment to the orientalism of the ‘other’. But at least postconceptualism is capacious enough to point this out, without looking to liberal unillusionedness for comfort or solace. And, therefore, we can at least clarify to what ends pathos and anti-pathos are doing their ‘affective’ and ‘non-affective’ work.

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Race, Black Modernism and the Critique of Identity It is a pleasure to be here to celebrate Rasheed Araeen’s achievement.1 Rasheed’s work as an artist, anti-racist activist and editor of Third Text has made a fundamental contribution to the debate on art, race and identity, and art and anti-racist struggle in the UK and internationally from the mid-1970s, when the discussion of race, certainly in Britain, was considered to be discourteous and irrelevant to questions of ‘quality’ in art. Araeen and his comrades relentlessly attacked this myth. Today, though, I am not going to focus on Rasheed’s art and writing, which I’ve addressed extensively elsewhere, but on the cultural and political context that shaped Araeen’s understanding of race, ethnicity and anti-racism. In this regard, I want to switch my frame of reference from race and identity politics in art, to race and identity politics in literature, looking at the achievements of early black modernism in the US, as my guide, and two black modernist philosophers of note, Frantz Fanon and Achille Mmembe. This, in turn, might provide an insight into the problems of identity in art itself. In 1931 George S. Schuyler published his brilliant novel Black No More, or to give it its full and glorious title: Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, a.d. 1933–1940. Drawing on H.G. Wells, the popular illustrated magazine science fiction of the time, the dyspeptic satire of H.L. Menken’s American Mercury and the American Communist Party’s critique of Marcus Garvey’s ‘return to Africa’ movement (the Universal Negro Improvement Society), Schuyler produces one of the great achievements of 1930s black modernism: a novel that sets the absurdity of race in a contemporary context free of the ‘antebellum’ and minstrel clichés of ‘white’ liberal mediation of the authentic black voice (for instance, Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus [1880])2 and the separatist (capitalist) race empowerment of black nationalism and Africanism. Black modernism in the United States in the early 1930s had two major achievements in literature to its name already: Cane by Jean Toomer (1923), a post-Joycean mix of prose, poetry and

1 A shorter version of this chapter was presented at, ‘Rasheed Araeen: A symposium’, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle Upon-Tyne, January 12, 2019. 2 Chandler Harris 1986.

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dramatic dialogue, centred on the lives of a number of small-town AfricanAmerican women, and Passing (1929), by Nella Larsen, a story of female ‘racial integration’ in white middle-class New York.3 Schulyer, Toomer and Larsen were all, in the broadest sense, products of the Harlem Renaissance (Toomer’s Cane was republished in 1927), and as such their commitment to a black modernism was defined by one thing above all else: as black writers they did not want to be ‘racialised’ and known as black writers if it meant that their engagement with race could be exoticised or limited to the sociological margins of contemporary literature. This is why Black No More is perhaps the most striking and impressive of all three novels, insofar as it pushes racial identities and their would-be inclusions and exclusions to a screaming and grotesque breaking point. The novel focuses on the widespread success of a machine invented by the black scientist Dr. Junius Crookman, which enables black people to bleach their skin and ‘pass’ as white. Known as the Black-Off machine, it offers the perfect ‘chemical’ solution to racial oppression, by ‘making the downtrodden Aframerican resemble as closely as possible his white fellow citizen’.4 ‘can change black to white in three days’, says Crookman’s publicity. Max Disher, the novel’s hero, a ‘crack’ Fire Insurance agent, obsessed with ‘yellah gals’ and meeting white women, agrees to be the first black man through the machine. With his skin, twitching and dry and feverish, and his insides ‘hot and sore’, he sees himself for the first time, post-transition, in the mirror: he was startled, overjoyed. White at last! Gone was the smooth brown complexion. Gone were the slightly full lips and Ethiopian nose, Gone was the nappy hair that he had straightened so meticulously ever since the kink-no-more lotions first wrenched Aframericans from the tyranny and torture of the comb. There would be no more expenditures for skin whiteners; no more discrimination; no more obstacles in his path. He was free! The world was his oyster and he had the open sesame of a porkcolored skin.5 Six hours later, clean shaven and blond and with a new name – Matthew Fisher – Disher declares he is ‘through with coons’. ‘Ah! It was good not to be a Negro any longer!’6 The would-be joy is soon short-lived, however, as Fisher’s 3 4 5 6

Toomer 1988, and Larsen 1997. Schuyler 2018. Ibid, p. 17. Ibid, p. 18.

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experience of ‘white life’ is disappointing. His new white acquaintances are no different from Negroes, ‘except that they were uniformly less courteous and less interesting’,7 and as such he begins to feel wistful about his old life, particularly when old friends don’t recognise him and treat him differently. Moreover, the supposed economic advantages of being white don’t materialise either: he is unable to find a new job in insurance and moves South to Atlanta in pursuit of employment and the affections of a white woman who once rejected him racially in a New York nightclub. In Atlanta seeing an opportunity for advancement and quick money he cynically wheedles his way – under the guise of being an anthropological race expert – into the circle of the Rev. Henry Givens, who has recently set up an off shoot of the Ku Klux Klan, The Knights of Nordica, to combat Black No More’s ‘chromatic democracy’. ‘Unlike Givens, he had no belief in the racial integrity nonsense … He had the average Negro’s justifiable fear of the poor whites and only planned to use them as a stepladder to the real money’.8 Furthermore, the woman he is pursuing turns out to be the daughter of Rev. Givens himself. At the same time Black No More grows exponentially to become a national organisation with over 50 sanitoriums, with a vast income. As a result, there is a run on the banks as hundreds of thousands of black people withdraw their savings to pay for the transition, and the desertion of black people from black organisations in the rush to be ‘white’. Black politicians lecture ‘in vain about black solidarity, race pride and political emancipation’.9 ‘Gone was the almost European atmosphere of every Negro ghetto: the music, the laughter, gaiety, jesting and abandon … [instead] was a nervous money-grabbing black, stuffing away coin in socks’10 to pay Dr. Crookman’s fee. With this crisis of ‘race’ there is an immediate demand on the part of the old organisations of black emancipation, big business and The Knights of Nordica to restore order and secure ‘racial integrity’ and the honour of America. Old Race Men talk lachrymosely about the loss of race pride, the decline in money given to black charity organisations and defence funds, and the bankruptcy of skin whitening companies; big businesses bemoan the loss of readily exploitable black labour; and the Knights of Nordica, invoke, in a swell of patriotism, the traumatic loss of racial boundaries as a mark of Southern tradition and civility: ‘one couldn’t tell who was who!’11

7 8 9 10 11

Ibid, p. 41. Ibid, pp. 47–8. Ibid, p. 62. Ibid, p. 63. Ibid, p. 82.

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Schuyler, however, doesn’t leave his devastating critique of race here, resting, as it does, on the exposure of ‘race interests’ and ‘race integrity’ to the divisions of class. He pushes his critique of race even further, with greater force and grotesquerie: the Knights of Nordica recruit over a million members; Fisher moves into the ‘race business’ full-time by marrying Ms Helen Givens and becomes very rich as a result of promoting the Knights as a fighting organisation for the working white man, against, the ‘yellow peril’, ‘aliens’, Bolsheviks, papists, and of course Black-No-Morists. Indeed, Fisher strengthens the Knight’s case for ‘race integrity’ by recruiting Santop Licorice (a thinly veiled portrait of Marcus Garvey) and other black leaders, who see the organisation as the only way to stop the erosion of their influence and funding for ‘black uplift’. But, if the organisation rises in national prominence, drawing on the old guard of Race Men, little of their propaganda activity slows down Black-No-More. A further 50 sanatoriums open coast to coast, as the Afro-American population drops to below one million. The growth even continues when the first black child is born to a white woman and a moral panic sets in across the country. ‘Every [white] stranger was viewed with suspicion’12 by every white person and transitioned black person alike, for fear that sex harboured the threat of ‘racial regression’. The panic, though, is soon allayed, with the introduction of Black-Off machines in hospitals, where mothers are able to chemically bleach their babies within 24 hours. Black-No-More, however, begins to face difficulties when the Knights regroup, allying themselves with the professional genealogical ‘experts’, Dr Samuel Buggerie, and Arthur Snobbcraft the President of the Anglo-Saxon Association. Both men insist that if the race line and ‘racial integrity’ are to be retained, the only way to tell the difference between ‘pure whites’ and ‘imitation whites’13 is to subject everyone to the genealogical examination of their family trees. This would clearly and finally ‘disclose the various non-Nordic strains in the population’.14 White people need to feel confident on this matter, the two men insist, particularly in the wake of the simmering atmosphere created by the ‘black baby’ scandal. Politicians, consequently, need to appeal to people’s better race interests. Dr Buggerie’s extensive research, however, proves the opposite: not only are 20 million US workers of Negro ancestry, but, our social leaders, especially of Anglo-Saxon lineage are, descendants of colonial stock that came here in bondage. They associated with slaves, in 12 13 14

Ibid, p. 89. Ibid, p. 122. Ibid, p. 122.

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many cases worked and slept with them. They intermixed with the blacks and the women were sexually exploited by their masters.15 ‘I guess we’re all niggers now’,16 says the Rev. Givens despondently. If Schuyler’s Black-Off machine dramatises the utter fictiveness of skin colour as marker of race, his exposure of biology to genealogical impurity provides a further dissociation in the novel between race, identity and reason. Indeed, Schuyler presents race throughout as a purely racist category, given that ‘race’ has no biological or genetic reality; skin colour-as-race is a pathological white phantasm, not a scientific concept. In fact, Buggerie’s confirmation of genealogical ‘impurity’ strikingly prefigures the Human Genome Project seventy years later, which decisively confirmed the irremediable diversity of nature and the biological spuriousness of race.17 As the scientist J. Craig Venter writes, who worked on the Human Genome Project, ‘there is no way to tell one ethnicity from another in the five Celera genomes’.18 The Celera process employed vast computing power – 7,000 processors – to sequence the genome. Dramatically, though, Schuyler at the end of the novel submits the fictiveness of race to a further grotesque twist, drawing out the explicit class and cultural dimension of ‘racial thinking’ as a social construct. In the wake of the crisis of the Knights’ white suprematist genealogical move – and the exponential expansion of ‘chromatic democracy’ in the country – Dr. Crookman reveals, in a published monograph, that the Black-No-More process has resulted in the generation of lighter skin pigmentation than ‘normal’ Caucasian skin. in practically every instance the new Caucasians were from two to three shades lighter than the old Caucasians, and that approximately one-sixth of the population were in the first group. The old Caucasians had never been really white but rather were a pale pink shading down to a sand color and a red.19 The impact of this immediate and hysterical: ‘What was the world coming to, if the blacks were whiter than the whites?’ As such upper-class pure whites begin to look negatively at their own pale complexions, and begin to think it was

15 16 17 18 19

Ibid, p. 143. ibid, p. 155. Fields and Fields 2012, p. 6. Venter 2001, p. 317. Schuyler 2018, p. 177.

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not such a good idea to be so white after all, when transitioned black people were even whiter. This thinking catches on across all classes, with some workers willing to attack other workers for being so pale. Some of the old former Race Men, such as Dr. Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard (a portrait of W.E.B. Du Bois), step in to denounce the new skin prejudice, founding the Down-WithWhite-Prejudice League. However, other Race Experts step in to claim that it was now obvious that all achievements in society derived from people whose skin was not exceedingly pale; less pale is the most virtuous they announce. Consequently, more and more people are persuaded to look for ways to get darker, encouraging the growth of skin darkening treatments. Mrs. Blandine’s Egyptienne Stain was considered to be one of the best. ‘Everybody that was anybody had a stained skin.’20 Soon, as Schuyler concludes, a ‘white face became startlingly rare’.21 Schuyler’s explicit identification of the category ‘race’ with racism is rich in its complex inversions, displacements and ironies; indeed, in no early work of black modernism is this done with such forensic detail. In this respect he reveals, indirectly, how much of the construction of ‘race’ is the evasive work of what Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields have called expressly ‘racecraft’: namely, the ongoing resort to false science, folk-thinking, welfarism, political opportunism, religious and secular victimhood, and notions of righteous redemption, in order to maintain the scientific and social scientific reality of race, even after its explicit dismantling as a biological and genetic category. Consequently, de-biologicalisation of race and anti-racist legislation is no barrier to the expansion of racecraft itself. The more ‘race’ becomes a project of enlightened and institutional rationalisation and management, the more it becomes entangled in the fictiveness of its own would-be scientific claims. So, the innocuous call for ‘racial equality’ is far from being the common sense of a post-racial democracy, as Schuyler alludes to in his relentless attack on those emancipators who speak up progressively for the good name of the essentialism of ‘racial identity’. We see the problems derived from race ‘positivism’ in the US after the abolition of slavery. The social and political emancipation of black people became horribly embroiled in US constitutional fetishism and Southern federal law making, as the old Confederate states slowly (and violently) undid all the advances of the early years of Reconstruction – with the implicit support of the Supreme Court, far more concerned with protecting federal state rights than defending black emancipation.22 This reactionary ‘racecraft’ 20 21 22

Ibid, p. 180. Ibid. Foner 2019.

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in the end exposed the implicit ‘white suprematicist’ assumptions of many of the best Republican Party fighters in Congress for the ending of slavery, because they were unwilling to push black emancipation beyond black (male) enfranchisement into full legal equality and what black liberators at the time called ‘public equality’. Indeed, the push back against black male enfranchisement during and after Reconstruction by Republicans was an attempt to head off the growing alliance between white and black women in the struggle for votes for women. Many of the leading abolitionists in the US from the 1830s were women (mostly middle class and white, but some were ex-slaves, such as the influential Soujorner Truth), who identified the anti-slavery struggle with female suffrage, and hoped that the former would enable the latter. As the Grimké sisters argued (Sarah and Angelina), black liberation and women’s liberation were inseparable. As Angelina was to say in 1863, in a speech during the Civil War: ‘In this war, the black man was the first victim; the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, of free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government, securing to all life’.23 But if Northern capitalists were happy to see black male enfranchisement as the democratic outcome of the defeat of the South, their struggle, as Angela Davis puts it, against the Southern slaveocracy, ‘did not therefore mean that they supported the liberation of Black men or women as human beings’.24 This in turn sowed division between the middle-class white women abolitionists and black activists, weakening the alliance between white women and the struggle for black male enfranchisement, further preventing the dismantling of ‘race’ as a notion based on the comparison between black experience and a ‘white ideal’. The consequences of this ‘racecraft’ were enormous for the US and humanity for the next hundred years. The dismantling of the early egalitarian years of Reconstruction in the late 1860s, in which hundreds of thousands of newly liberated slaves (and freemen and freewomen) participated in a new democratic upsurge, resulted in the gradual constitutional narrowing and finally dismantling of all the legal and social gains of the mid-1860s. (By the 1930s the right of African-Americans to vote, enshrined in the 1870 Constitution, had been rescinded across the whole of the old Confederacy). Because no clear conception of black emancipation was established and supported at national level in the late 1860s, based as US electoral politics was on the tendentiousness of black-white comparisons, racist and ‘racialist’ assumptions could remain as the basis for a concessionary notion of ‘black progress’, enabling reactionaries and liberals to tie this progress to a beneficent white amelioration of the would-be immutable 23 24

Grimké 1863. Davis 2019 [1981] p. 65.

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differences (in quality and capacity) between races. Indeed, the second defeat of Afro-Americans after Reconstruction fundamentally retarded black-white working class unity in the US, radically severing race from class in American politics.25 ‘Racial equality’, accordingly, is premised on the acceptance of black equality with a normative whiteness, confirming the invidious acceptance of ‘race’ as a false classification of human qualities, powers and characteristics. This is why the concept of ‘racial equality’ is the benign and liberal version of race as a racist category (in the same way that ‘class equality’ is the benign and liberal acceptance of political economy). As the Fields sisters say: persons of African descent must accept race, the badge that racism assigns them, to earn remission of the attendant penalties. Not justice or equality but racial justice or racial equality must be their portion … Just as a half-truth is not a type of truth but a type of lie, so equality and justice, once modified by racial, become euphemisms for their opposites.26 This was the express reality of the first generation of black modernists in the US, tentatively uncovering and creating an unmarked space of artistic autonomy: the demonstrable exclusion of black artists’ experience and understanding from the generic and universal. In other words, the work of racecraft: not black peoples’ contribution to literature or art, but black art and black literature, a concessionary inclusion into the democratic family. And, in turn, this is the ‘racecraft’ that Rasheed Araeen himself experiences when he arrives in London from Pakistan in the early 1960s, as a young artist hoping to participate freely in the fraternity of international modernists and minimalists: not the possible inclusion of a new minimalist voice in the minimalist dialogue, but, rather, an exclusion on the obtuse grounds of ethnic ‘over-coding’ and sumptuary ‘exotic’ excess; Araeen’s minimalism was the ‘wrong’ kind of minimalism;27 similarly, Chester Himes, who, exiled from the US because of racism and lack of opportunity for his writing, finds a home in France in 1953 where his French readership is entranced by his Harlem ‘true crime’ novels; 25

26 27

See Boggs 2009. ‘Before the Civil War, Negro struggles were called rebellion and revolts. But after the Civil War and the formal emancipation of the Negroes, and violent action by Negroes was just called a ‘race riot’ even when these actions were based on economic grounds, such as jobs, housing, or prices’ (pp. 76–7). Fields and Fields 2012, p. 159. See Rasheed Araeen: A Retrospective, ed., Nick Aikens, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, mamco, Musée d’art modern contemporain, Geneva, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, jrp/Ringier, Zurich, 2017.

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yet, what really excites his Parisian literary defenders is his ‘racial savagery’; Himes becomes the right kind of modernist, but, is elevated to prominence by the wrong, if familiar, kind of racecraft – the primitive – and as such no less depressing for the author.28 Araeen, though, unlike Himes and other earlier black modernists, fought the insidiousness of racecraft at the time when it had become the very kind of capitalist enlightened reason so presciently predicted by Schuyler: namely, the shift from post-race anti-racism into ‘race relations’, ethnic arts and identity politics. Indeed, in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s the fundamental identification early black modernism makes between the category of ‘race’ and racism undergoes a powerful disconnection. Firstly, through the revival of radical black nationalism in the US and through the anti-colonial struggles in Africa – both in their respective ways preoccupied with collective racial uplift – and secondly the mass exodus of anti-racism and black studies, into an affirmative identity politics, in which the primary target is white monoculturalism, as opposed to the universal emancipation from the category of ‘race’ itself. Early black modernism’s insistence on the failure of race as an emancipatory category goes into abeyance, producing the nascent machinery for what is now a familiar, majoritarian multiculturalism, in which an inclusive ‘race pride’ as opposed to the destruction of race is the priority. This period which stretches from the mid1970s to the new millennium is perhaps best represented, certainly in a US context, by the writer Ismael Reed’s anthology from 1997, MultiAmerica: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace, a sprawling recitative on culture and racial ‘diversity’.29 Reed had once been a follower of Himes, and Himes’ rebarbative and nihilistic attack on race, but, like many of his generation, post the Black Panthers, he could by the 1980s see no future in the progressive ‘race-blindness’ of the pre-war generation. Progressive race-blindness, it was claimed, simply produced more – if more sophisticated – Uncle Toms and Uncle Remuses. But there is always a cost when politics and cultural politics jettisons universalism and reifies identity as a progressive unity. The turn to identity politics as an escape from what was perceived as the racist complicity of emancipatory race-blindness was a devil’s pact with an identitary ‘black reason’ as capitalism made every effort to incorporate multiracial identity into a new democratic polity. This is why today, an egregious Afro-pessimism abounds in the US, as the crisis of identity politics has exhausted itself in increased self-assertion, and as such, has led politically – on the left at least – to the further abandon-

28 29

Himes 1995. Reed 1997.

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ment of the critique of race as a racist category as a political strategy. Indeed, in recent American literature, we can see how intense this retreat and confusion has become in a writer like Paul Beatty. Clearly indebted to the grotesquerie of George S. Schuyler, and the bitter nihilism of late Himes, Beatty’s excellent novel The Sell-Out (2016)30 enjoins a disgust with race as a racist category to a masochistic acceptance of race’s seemingly endless mutability for capitalism. But, of course, the choice for cultural theory and artistic practice is not simply between a renewed identity politics and progressive race-blindness, no matter how desperate the situation may seem to be today. Indeed, progressive race-blindness is, in fact, a misnomer. There is no progressive race-blindness free from the category of race, because there is no practice of anti-racism free of ‘race’ as an imposed category; the rejection of race as a category, therefore, has to be mediated by the determinate negation of racism as a set of persistent material, institutional and symbolic practices, and consequently can only function in response to the everyday effects and affects of race as a category. So ‘race’ in this sense is the working if fictive material that the exit from race has of necessity to engage with, and act on, negatively. Or to put it in more expressly Hegelian terms: the fictiveness of race has real and determining outcomes – racism – that therefore have to be combated through anti-racist struggle in the face of the reality of race as a racist category. But this anti-racist struggle has to be fought on non-identitary terms, and not on the basis of race identity itself. The struggle against racism becomes the universal struggle for the recognition of race as the other of itself: the aracial. The dialectics of race, identity and araciality are of course explored in one of their most philosophical astute forms in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Fanon, working at the intersection of the anti-colonial struggle in Africa in the 1950s and the emerging participation of black writers in European and North American modernist culture, remains singularly important in exploring questions of ‘race-blindness’, identity and non-identity, and the social construction of race. In this, the Fields sisters’ critique of ‘racecraft’ finds a direct correlation in Fanon’s black modernism and radical universalism: it is the job of philosophy and an emancipatory politics to extricate men and women from their ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’. As Fanon asserts: ‘The white man is locked in his whiteness. The blackman in his blackness’.31 ‘It is the racist who creates the inferiorized’.32 ‘We believe that an individual must endeavor to assume 30 31 32

Beatty 2017 – a title with direct echoes of Randall Kennedy’s critique of the persistent and oppressive post-Reconstruction holding of the ‘colour line’; see Kennedy 2008. Fanon 2008, pp. xiii–xiv. Ibid, p. 73.

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the universalism inherent in the human condition’.33 This, however, is not an example of what we have called above progressive ‘race blindness’, as if Fanon was advocating an abstract universalism, or a benign racial inclusiveness. On the contrary, for Fanon, the critique of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ means thinking beyond ‘whiteness’ as the primary term. Hence he rejects the notion of ‘blackness’ as a problem or state of ‘otherness’ that racial inclusion dissolves and ameliorates, as if black people were responsible for their would-be blackness, and therefore happy to be relieved of this burden and invited back into humanity. The assumption is, of course, that historically black people in Africa have had no relationship to the universal before they were enslaved, and therefore, that black people’s relationship to the universal has to be presented as a kind of gift from a beneficent white culture. Fanon rejects this. As such his notion of universalism is one in which black people fully reinstate their relationship to the universal that was torn from them. But if black people refuse their designation as ‘black’ as opposed to ‘white’, and therefore, refuse the invitation to be reintegrated into the universal as ‘black’ in the name of the recovery of black people’s humanity that existed before a white-constructed ‘blackness’ produced its historical rupture – in other words, after slavery, after biological racism and institutional racism – then there can be no simple taking of one’s old place on these terms, as if blackness can flow, as creative becoming, into whiteness, as if ‘black culture’ can now effortlessly become ‘white’ culture. Indeed, in a world still dominated by racism, the escape from blackness cannot be an escape from race, even if race is an illusion. This essentially is Fanon’s position. Under racism, there is no possibility of an equitable integration, in which black people can miraculously go ‘unnoticed’.34 ‘Without a black past, without a black future, it [is] impossible for me to live my blackness’.35 Thus, universalism for Fanon means the still living relationship to the ‘particular’, because it is through the ‘particular’ that black people reconnect to their own history and struggles, which in turn has a bearing on present struggles. In this he says: ‘I am not a potentiality of something. I am fully what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. There is no room for probability inside me. My black consciousness does not claim to be a loss. It is. It merges with me’.36 But this is the point also where his modernism steps in: to accept the impossibility of integration and the convergence of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ does not mean that black culture can achieve autonomy or exit from the critical hori33 34 35 36

Ibid, p. xiv. Ibid, p. 47. Ibid, p. 117. Ibid, p. 114.

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zons of white, Western and modern European culture. This is why Black Skin, White Masks is an explicit rejection of the ideas that were particularly popular in the 1950s and 1960s in black art and culture: Afrocentrism, Africanism, and other ‘black essentialisms’ invariably based on a rejection of European modernity and belief in a shared subaltern, ethno-primitivist reality and vision. The concept of negritude, however, was different, certainly the original negritude of Aimé Césaire, which in the mid-1940s in Martinque drew on Marxism, modernism, Surrealism and pre-colonial African thought and which influenced Fanon;37 Léopold Sédar Senghor’s negritude in the 1960s was expressly Africanist, prehistorical and pan-Negrist. For Fanon Africanism and black essentialisms were purely mythic constructs and as such veiled the divisions internal to ‘blackness’. Indeed, even under conditions of a brutal colonialism, the stability of a shared and subaltern ‘blackness’ was always being threatened by conflicting class, national and ethnic interests; for Fanon there was no shared ‘blackness’. Thus, Fanon’s move from ‘black consciousness’ to the critique of identity and back echoes Hélène Cixous’s later critique of identity, drawn from her own colonial experience in Algeria in the 1950s: self-representation for women is never simply about the recovery or assertion of identity as such: women’s voice is necessarily ‘multiple’ and therefore irreducible to the binary logic of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’. ‘Hélène Cixous isn’t me but those who are sung in my text. Because their lives, their pains, their force, demand that it resound’. ‘I am overflowing, now the outpouring. I flow out of myself in rivers without banks’.38 Similarly for Fanon, black identity and experience as a condition of colonial modernity is fundamentally ambiguous, for there are, as Fanon says, ‘many black men’.39 That is many black men and women of different classes, ethnicities and sexualities, with different and conflicting interests. Black culture as it resists and emerges out of, and negotiates and converges with ‘whiteness’ and the realities of ethnicity, nationalism and class, is multiple. But it is a multiplicity Fanon recognises that in the end is always split between disaffirmation and affirmation. Once I realize, he says, that blackness is the negative term, ‘I start hating the black man. But I realize that I am a black man. [And therefore] I have two ways of escaping the problem. Either I ask people not to pay attention to the color of my skin; or else, on the contrary, I want people to notice it’.40 Under the gaze of a white normativity, then, Fanon argues the struggle for emancipation will not just be derived 37 38 39 40

Césaire, 2000 Cixous 1991, p. 54 and p. 56. Fanon 2008, p. 115. Ibid, p. 174.

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from a rational critique of identity, and as such from the recognition of assimilation or exit as a false choice, but from an existential leap beyond identity, that truly destabilises blackness and whiteness. As such, at the end of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon re-assesses his previous understanding of the dialectical relationship between the critique of identity and an affirmative black consciousness. First, he quotes Hegel – ‘It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained’41 – and then lists, in response to this demand – as a kind of concluding philosophical manifesto – a series of final reflections on identity and race: My black skin is not a repository for specific values. There is no black mission; there is no white burden. No, I have not the right to be black. It is not my duty to be this or that. My life must not be devoted to making an assessment of black values. There is no white world; there is no white ethic – any more than there is a white intelligence. The misfortune of the man of color is having been enslaved. The misfortune and inhumanity of the white man are having killed man somewhere. The black man is not. No more than the white man.42 We can see clearly how this pulverises the Enlightenment’s racially restricted concept of personhood and universalism – a concept that has underscored the history of philosophy and art and the ‘aesthetic life’. Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is perhaps the first frontal attack on how European culture in the nineteenth century and twentieth century constructed its colonial claim on the world through the complete obliteration of black subjectivity and black culture. There is no sense in Kant, Schiller and Hegel that cultural value could be attached to any non-white culture beyond the borders of Europe. But for Fanon the struggle against racism is not about the destruction of the Enlightenment or declaring it over, or conversely, insisting on the need to incorporate and repar-

41 42

Ibid, p. 192. Ibid, pp. 202–6.

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ate ancient or traditional black cultures within the Western tradition. On the contrary, the struggle is about the construction of new freedoms and a new culture, in which the deformations of racial identity play no part. This is what he means when he writes that ‘The black man is not. No more than the white man’. In this sense, his reflections on universalism and the possibility of an unconditioned universalism is attempt to decondition and refunction the legacy of the Enlightenment – open up its limitations – rather than transcend it. On this basis, Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason (2017)43 owes a great deal to Fanon’s black modernism, given the fact that Mbembe’s writing follows Fanon down the same path in resisting the temptation of a ‘folk’ essentialism in the struggle against racism, and as such, he affirms the need for black art and culture to stay in contact creatively with a modernist multiplicity. However, unlike Fanon, Mbembe’s experience of this is not mediated by anti-colonial struggle, but by the increasing rise in affirmative racial identities – or racial identity politics – as the post-1980s ‘democratic’ face of capitalism; the universalism and the critique of race as a social construct that Fanon took for granted as the horizon of black emancipation and anti-racist struggle is diminished, even lost. Thus, Mbembe begins Critique of Black Reason with an Fanonian appeal to the critique of identity. Underlining both Fanon and the Fields’ position, he moves beyond the current identitary, multicultural and post-colonial settlement, to present a devastating critique of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ as a hallucinatory and identitary madness, remarkably similar in scope, in fact, to George S. Schuyler’s own evocation in the 1930s of race as a form of intoxication. If colonialism, imperialism and the capitalist exploitation of indentured labour invented modern ‘blackness’, ‘to signify exclusion, brutalization and degradation’,44 under the afflatus of racial uplift and identity politics – in short, black reason as Mbembe describes it – it has experienced a spectacular reversal and has become ‘the symbol of a conscious desire for life, a force springing forth, buoyant and plastic, fully engaged in the act of creation and capable of living in the midst of several times and several histories at once’.45 As such Mbembe asks: in what way is this inversion part of the same story of ‘race’ and, therefore, another form of subjection, even if it comes before us dazzlingly bright with enlightenment vistas? Doesn’t blackness as a life-force return the category of race, albeit ‘re-charmed’ with new affirmative colours, to the old primitivist rhetoric? In this respect, Mbembe is just as attuned to the

43 44 45

Mbembe 2017. Ibid, p. 6. Ibid, pp. 6–7.

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reality of the separation of race as a category from racism as the early black modernists; race as identity can quite easily develop a vital and colourful future in all kinds of ways, particularly under the transactional cultural logic of contemporary capitalism and the democratic fiction of ‘racial equality’. Hence, for Mbembe the adoption of ‘blackness’ as a life force is no less a construction of the subject as a racial subject, as are the ugly and oppressive narratives of ‘whiteness’ that accompany colonial and imperialist domination. In this respect Mmembe echoes Fanon’s famous injunction against essentialism – ‘In our view, an individual who loves Blacks is as “sick” as someone who abhors them’ –46 by asking: when does the pursuit of racial autonomy and difference ‘turn into a simple mimetic inversion of what was previously showered with malediction?’47 Consequently, following Fanon’s dialectical critique of identity and Cixous’s deconstruction of binarism, Mbembe talks of race as ‘at once real and fictive’.48 Indeed, once we remove the legacy of imperialism, colonialism, and slavery and the construction of white normativity, blackness in a sense does not exist. But of course, we cannot just remove the legacy of imperialism, colonialism and slavery and white normativity, insofar as blackness continues to be produced as a category as a consequence of this legacy: hence the fictive/real character of race. Race may have no biological or genetic reality, but as a social construction predicated on the realities of social exclusion, it therefore continues to have real world effects and outcomes. Thus, on this score, we might talk of two anti-racist responses to race and the real/fictive couplet: the affirmation of race as race – politically and culturally – and, conversely, the disaffirmation of race. It is the latter position, accordingly, that Mbembe follows. There can be no affirmation of what is imposed as a false category. But, nevertheless, like Fanon, Mbembe argues that it is not enough to say that race has no essence, and therefore, we can be blind – progressively, that is – to its fictiveness, for the continuing reality of race rests on its extraordinary ‘specular’ power.49 It doesn’t matter, therefore, that race doesn’t exist as such, for the specular life of race as appearance continues to work its power through its imaginary reach. As he says: For it to operate as affect, impulse, and speculum, race must become image, form, surface, figure, and – especially – a structure of the imagination … Racism consists [then], most of all, in substituting what is with 46 47 48 49

Fanon 2008, p. xii. Mbembe 2017, p. 7. Ibid, p. 10. Ibid, p. 32.

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something else, with another reality. It has power to distort the real and to fix affect, but it is also a form of psychic derangement.50 Yet, in a further reversal, any ‘call to race’ in the resistance to this deranged specular power inevitably falls back into ‘blackness’ or ‘brownness’, etc. and cultural essentialism. This is why, like Fanon, he refuses the overtures of negritude and Africanism in the twentieth century, historically the two most successful ways of resisting white normativity and cultural exclusion for Africans and African Americans. For, in its anti-colonial rejection of whiteness, far from rejecting the myths and stereotypes of a primitivist, intuitive and experiential blackness, it exploited and reified them in the interests of black autonomy, opening-up anti-racism to the racial metaphysics of ethnophilosophy, what Paulin J. Hountondji has called the ‘myth of primitive unaminity’.51 One of the consequences of this, culturally in the 1950s, as Fanon notes – as we have seen above – is that the construction of another modernity and aesthetic paradigm on the part of black artists and writers during this period, is forced to establish ‘blackness’ in opposition to global modernity. The outcome is that ‘black’ becomes a sign of ‘minoritization and confinement’.52 Indeed, in this confinement, ‘blackness’, Mbembe says, becomes attached to ‘all the waste of the world’.53 This is why black modernists in the US in the 1920s and 1930s were so concerned to refuse their imposed designation as black writers, insofar as they didn’t want to be pushed into the sociological margins of literature as ‘exotic’ exceptions.54 So, how does Mbembe move philosophically, then, from the critique of minoritisation and primitivism, into a critique of ‘black reason’? How can the critique of the fictiveness of race live with the specular realities of race and racism? How can radical ‘black consciousness’ defy the essentialisms of ‘blackness’? Mbembe, following Fanon, says that the only way is through the reattachment of the art and culture of black people to the universal, and therefore the re-attachment of black and brown experience to global modernity. Without this move ‘race’ always functions as a form of division, and perhaps more crucially, links to a sense of incompletion for those who are placed outside of white normativity. For what is destructive about this sense of incompletion and apart-

50 51 52 53 54

Ibid. Hountondji 2002, p. 107. For a queer and trans extension of this understanding see Gordon 2022. Ibid, p. 48. Ibid, p. 53. Claude McKay’s writing is exemplary in this respect. See Home to Harlem (1928) and Romance in Marseille (published posthumously) (2020).

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ness, is that it denies the right of some people – because of the imposed category of race – to contribute to the work of the universal as a shared reason. In other words: ‘Race contradicts the idea of a single humanity’.55 And, of course, it also contradicts the idea of a universal reason as an ontological given – the reason that the Enlightenment embraced, but then betrayed through its construction of a racially constricted concept of personhood.56 Thus, for Mbembe, when defenders of a nativist negritude, Africanist, and essentialist versions of identity politics say that ‘We rebel not against the idea that Blacks constitute a distinct race but against the prejudice of inferiority attached to the race’,57 they diminish black people’s possession of universal reason as a reason ‘without race’, that is weaken their ability to possess reason in the same way that white people who live without the pejorative attachment of race possesses reason – without qualification. This is why for Mbembe anti-racist struggle is not simply about inclusion, or the refinement and embrace of racial difference. This is no more than the ‘throwing away of power’, he says.58 Rather, anti-racist struggle and the affirmation of black consciousness has to be both continuous with, and constitutive of, the powers of universal reason, and therefore cannot be based, ontologically, on an attachment to difference as ‘othernesss’. For instance, Marcus Garvey’s unia ‘return to Africa’ movement, popular in the US in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, believed that absolute difference promised the reversal of history: slaves would one day become masters again. The unia was to act as the guardian of the interests of blacks in Africa and those of the African diaspora, as the basis of the foundation of a black (capitalist) nation governed by an elite recruited from black communities around the world.59 As Mbembe says: ‘Afrocentrism is a hypostatic variant of the desire of those of African origin to need only to justify themselves to themselves’.60 But does this mean that we have come full circle philosophically? Is this Fanonist understanding of the universal in Mbembe no different from Alain Badiou’s universalist conceptions of ‘purification’, ‘abstraction’ and the critique of the ‘ego’ in art and culture?61 Is it indeed, no different from Badiou’s assertion in the final chapter of his short book Black: The Brilliance of a Non55 56 57 58 59 60

61

Ibid, p. 54. See Roberts 2018b. Ibid, p. 90. Ibid, p. 94. For a relatively sympathetic assessment of unia, if not Garvey himself, see Robinson 1983. Ibid, p. 178. For further reflections on the conflicts between Afrocentrism and decoloniality and the struggles around the impact of capitalist global modernity in Africa, see Sarr 2019. See Badiou 2006b.

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Color (2017) that humanity is simply ‘colourless’?62 Undoubtedly, there is some shared ground here. Badiou, Fanon and Mbembe all resist the idea that multiplicity dissolves the need for the universal, and as such reject the notion that the universal constrains freedom and difference. However, for Mbembe in particular, the struggles of the oppressed are always for the ‘particular’ as the living expression of exclusion and loss, and therefore art and culture as a subaltern reality for those without autonomy and power must pass through the ‘particular’ as a claim on the present limited conditions of universalism. The passage through the particular does not stand outside of the universal or waits for its inclusion, but, rather, works to remove or destroy the received and conditioned dimensions of the universal itself. Consequently, for Mbembe (and Fanon) the idea of a common human condition and reality, is not a pious wish. For it defines the ontological ground and ambition of all emancipatory political and cultural struggle: ‘how to belong fully in this world that is common to all of us’.63 Hence, difference cannot take the place of this common world, even when division and oppression excludes people from this reality. Thus, for Mbembe the adoption of ‘blackness’ as a life force is no less a construction of the subject as a racial subject, as are the ugly and oppressive narratives of ‘whiteness’ that accompany colonial and imperialist domination. And therefore, his work compels us to ask again, and necessarily even more forcefully than the early black modernists: if I don’t feel freely more than my designation as a racial subject, then why should I give myself affirmatively to race, however it is mediated? The call to race, in the end, can never be other than a mutilation, insofar as racialisation always fixes the subject and exploited populations – expressly working class and peasant populations – in a range of predetermined places, roles and sites, even when such subjects and populations feel they are doing justice to their ‘own identity’ and history. As Mbembe argues: the racist no less than the progressive racialised subject is happy to see ‘the humanity in himself not by accounting for what makes him similar to others but by accounting for what makes him different’.64 The release from identity politics is not, therefore, about the subjugation of difference under the (monocultural) same, but, rather, about breaking with a politics in which, origins, ethnicity and skin colour justify themselves. Difference is not that which is subsumed under the one, but through a process of individuation, speaks for the one, or the in-common. Or, rather, speaks from within individuation against the exclusion of individuation from the same, destroying the inclusion 62 63 64

Badiou, 2017, p. 104. Mbembe 2017, p. 176. Ibid, p. 36 and p. 182.

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of non-whiteness into a normative whiteness. Or as Mbembe emphasises, in the revolutionary and dialectical spirit of Fanon: ‘each person is a repository of a portion of intrinsic humanity. The irreducible share belongs to each of us. It makes each of us objectively both different from each one another and similar to one another’.65

65

Ibid, p. 182.

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part 4 Image

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The Political Economy of the Image I want to begin this essay by recalling the reception of the image from another world, a world before capitalism – or certainly on the edge of capitalism and modernity.1 This is not to fuel us with a comforting bathos, so that we can lose ourselves in what appears to be free of conflict and division, but in order to draw out a point of contrast in a world where images no longer appear to frame the same kinds of needs and desires. In this sense, before we analyse the political economy of the image today, I want to present a moment of partial withdrawal from exposure to our familiar para-technological-image regime. At the beginning of his great, unfinished and posthumous novel, Henry von Ofterdingen (1802), Novalis produces an extraordinary incantation on the power of the image. Seated around the breakfast table, the eponymous hero of the novel (the medieval poet Henry von Ofterdingen) discusses with his parents the content of the dream he has recently awoken from. As the narrator recounts: new images never seen before arose and interfused and became visible beings around him … intoxicated with rapture and yet conscious of every impression, he swam easily with the luminous stream as it flowed out of the basin into the cliff.2 This flowing with and through the landscape brings him eventually to the discovery of ‘tall, pale blue flower’, attracting him ‘with great force’.3 This moment of empathy in the dream becomes the signature encounter in the novel, in which the poet experiences at various points in the narrative moments of intense exposure to the natural world, human beauty, and visual art – in one instance, illustrations in a book owned by cave-dwelling hermit. Thus, if Henry von Ofterdingen is an Erziehungsroman, a novel dealing with the education of a person, it is one directed predominantly though the educative power of the image. In this sense the poet’s exposure to ‘blue 1 First published in Philosophy of Photography, as ‘The Political Economy of the Image’, Vol 6 No 1–2, 2015, pp. 25–35. 2 Novalis 1964, p. 17. 3 Ibid, p. 17.

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flower’ in the dream represents a moment of openness to sensuous form. As such, Henry says to his father over the breakfast table, captivated by his recollection, that he has dreamed a dream ‘that seems to me to have been more than a dream’.4 Yet his father scoffs, dismissing Henry’s dream and all dreams as ‘spindrift’.5 However, his father rejects the dream, not because he believes dreams to be worthless fantasies, but rather because dreams are not what they once were. They have lost their connection to the truths of prophecy. The times are past when divine apparitions appeared in dreams and we cannot and will not fathom the state of mind of those chosen men the Bible speaks of. The nature of dreams as well as of the world of men must have been different in those days.6 The prophetic, startling or projective content of dreams have lost their realworld connection to the visions of prophets themselves: ‘our present-day miracle-working images have never edified me especially’.7 Henry, though, rejects his father’s admonishments for their crude spirituality. Far from dreams being the repository of a dead or dying prophetic tradition, they are the living manifestation of our sensuous place in the world. Is not every dream, even the most confused one, a remarkable phenomenon, which apart from any notion of it being sent from God is a significant rent in the mysterious curtain that hangs a thousand fold about our inner life.8 In other words, Henry defends the autonomy of the dream, and as such reminds his father how astonishing dreams actually are, despite their commonality. If you had a dream for the first time in your life, how astonished you would be, and you certainly would not let anyone talk to you out of the miraculous nature of this happening which has merely become commonplace to us.9

4 5 6 7 8 9

Ibid, p. 18. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid, p. 19. Ibid.

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This rejection of his father’s cynicism encourages his father into recalling an intoxicating dream that he himself had when he was a youth in Rome and was courting Henry’s mother. Henry’s father enters a farm in the Roman countryside to be greeted by a farmer who is pleased that his guest is a foreigner and a German to boot. The farmer, surrounded by books and antiquities, excitedly shows Henry’s father a number of artworks, and ‘then with fiery imagination he reads some glorious poems’.10 Accepting an invitation to stay the night, his father falls asleep and dreams he is back in his hometown of Eisenach. He takes a walk into the countryside, and up through the local mountains, where he discovers an opening in the side of one of the mountains which leads to a stairway. Down the stairway he finds an old man in a ‘flowing cloak sat at an iron table’,11 who stares continually at a beautiful girl carved from marble seated in front of him. The old man’s beard had grown through the table and covered his feet. The old man then rises and leads Henry’s father through various passageways to a green field, which is covered in fountains and flowers. But it is one flower in particular that holds Henry’s father’s attention – a blue flower. He then sees a vision of Henry’s future mother with a child. Now this complex, recursive set of reflections on the dream-image and dreaming is a historical fiction. It’s hard to imagine such families in the fourteenth century, seated at the breakfast table, presenting such a sharp distinction between the dream as religious idios, and the dream as a secular realm of autonomous freeplay. The latter would constitute a kind of blasphemy in this period in Christian Europe, certainly in its confessional form presented in the novel.12 Indeed, Novalis’s anachronistic dialogue between father and son is expressed precisely through the extraordinary modernity of Henry’s secular defence of the dream, as if he was paraphrasing Freud’s critical reflections on dreams and prophecy. So, in these terms Novalis is projecting his own newly found Romantic attachment to the dream as a new source of knowledge into the speech of his imaginary fourteenth-century poet. Like a time-traveller,

10 11 12

Ibid p. 21. Ibid. The Catholic Church, in opposition to the everyday Roman-Greco scrutiny of dreams (of their would-be portents and signs), demanded that ordinary Christians reject their dreams, as these were held to be suspect and impenitent expulsions from the body. Dreams were one of the main channels through which the Devil entered the soul. As such only those who had learned and pious knowledge of how dreams work on human temptation, such as kings, religious leaders and above all monks, could draw conclusions from dreams, by finding morally pertinent messages from God in them. These were ‘privileged dreamers’, so to speak. Dreams, then, in the early Middle Ages had to be largely repressed or discussed only in the most clandestine of terms (see Le Goff 1997, p. 33).

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Henry speaks from the future to his father, encouraging him to participate in the new knowledge. Moreover, the opposition between the prophetic dream and the dream of sensuous play – which finds its correlation in the poet’s empathy with natural form – disrupts any sense that Novalis is encouraging us to take nostalgic solace in the pre-modern image. Through the introduction of anachronistic knowledge, the dream-image is given a history, and, as such, becomes a site of conflict; this scene is not, therefore, an invocation of the premodern image as undifferentiated, iconic and whole; a sealed off idios. Rather, the complex recursiveness of the passage signifies something quite different: to bring the life of the image into living dialogue. Father and son here, in their passion, disagreement and powers of recall, invoke the image as living thing. So, the truth of the pre-modern image here lies not in its fetishised religiosity – this is portrayed by Novalis as a dead thing even in the fourteenth century – but in its capacity for Bildung: the education of the senses and emotions. One can see, therefore, how early Romanticism in this form becomes a powerful philosophical tributary into the critique of the instrumental and monovalent reception of the image under the rise of capitalism. Novalis’ Bildung of the image is one in which the spectator lives with the image as a condition of its truth-value; and as such, Novalis’s writing has become pre-figurative for so much of the critical image-work in the twentieth century, in which livingwith as a means of finding out and making meaning, stands against the art of mere interpretation and passing judgement. This moment of slow mimeticism is there in Freud’s dream-analytics, in Maurice Blanchot’s irresolution and ‘withdrawal’ in front of the image, in Theodor Adorno’s critique of hermeneutics, in Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man’s deconstructive delay, and recently in Jacques Rancière’s ‘pensive image’. All these models of anti-interpretation are indebted to a Novalian labour of empathy, as a slow education of the senses and intellect. But of course we don’t live in an image-world in which the slow education of the senses and intellect is able to make room for such empathy with any degree of conviction.13 People don’t want slowness, and certainly don’t associate it with the education of the senses. In fact, living with images as an opening up to the world seems strangely jejune, a liability, a direct and provocative affront to the turnover of the technological image and of passing desire and interest. This is reflected in the double crisis of the (painterly) modernist image and the veridical documentary ideal in the second half of the twentieth century. 13

For recent discussions of this condition see Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Crary 2013); and Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Noys 2014).

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What was axiomatic to the success of both traditions was the linking of production of the image to strong communities of reception. Even though these two traditions were in some sense opposed ideologically, they nevertheless were united by their shared insistence that the life of the image was a critical and public concern; image and critical public were interdependent. This is because for these publics (professional and non-professional alike) such practices represented a hard-won cultural and political achievement that secured and defined a set of public goods opposed to the prevailing mass cultural and academic settlement. In short, these practices, at their height, educated spectators into a different set of temporal expectations from looking and thinking (for modernism: the Hegelian truth of process; for documentary photography: the truth of being there, of placing oneself in the way of the world; and the spectator’s recognition of this). These temporal expectations, therefore, socialised the artist/photographer and spectator in a profoundly non-aesthetic way: as partisans for the image’s transformative place in the world, and as such for the idea that certain image-practices might make a difference, might hold the spectator to a point of contrast between what the artist and photographer does and what the expanding image-regime of capitalism does or fails to do. This link between the image and a partisan public of reception begins to break down in the 1960s, as the social base of these publics is subject to political dissolution, with the increasing penetration of the market as the key mediator of cultural value and meaning, and co-extensively the increasing divergence between the left and advanced culture. Now this is not to say that these practices and publics were usurped, so to speak, as if these traditions were not subject to their own internal problems of renewal, given the change in political and cultural context. But nevertheless, in the light of these new conditions, their influence and efficacy shifted, bringing to an end what Blake Stimson has called that long ‘Enlightenment hurrah’ in art and photography from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1960s.14 Indeed, this increasing crisis of legitimacy of the ‘image apart’, the image of non-relation and dissensus, is precisely the cultural and political context out of which Adorno writes Aesthetic Theory in the late 1960s.15 As the revolutionary avant-garde retreats even further into historical memory, and the partisan claims of painterly modernism and the legacy of documentary photography appear increasingly attenuated – and as such out of sync with the rise of commercial popular culture – Adorno defends the continuing power of the image to resist the onslaught of mass cultural social-

14 15

Stimson 2006. Adorno 1984.

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isation. And he does this through a particular Hegelian and Novalian move: living with the image has to be the outcome of a special and intimate relationship between the refunctioned artwork and the affective, processual empathy of the spectator. That is, in circumstances where the relationship between the image and partisanship has broken down, the image, if it is to create any kind of critical community at all amongst producers and spectators, is compelled to work on two fronts simultaneously: against premature aestheticisation and against popularisation as a self-confirming instance of representational transparency, and the production of what we might call a community of the dead or the inattentive (which of course can be both lovers of art as much as distracted consumers). In these terms the image works to create a new critical public by opening a gap between itself and these received expectations. As such, the ruin or disaffirmation of what has become familiar and tolerable produces a tension between the sensuous particulars of the work and the received tradition in which it is grounded and from which it is emergent, and, as such, a source of a new encounter between the labour of reception and the notion of living with the image. Hence the importance of Adorno’s own version of mimeticism on this score: the requirement of the spectator to match in animating spirit and cognitive attentiveness, the discontinuous and unfamiliar complexities of the work at hand, as a condition of sustaining the life of the image as sensuous concept. This, of course, is a big demand for the spectator, in which Hegel in some sense out-distances Novalis: living with the image becomes an endless aporetic encounter, as part of an endless refusal to let the image fall – through mere interpretation and aesthetic approbation – into the realm of commonplace cultural identity and ideological platitudes. This is why the formal implications of art and its links to a critical public here are not just contained with the boundaries of picture making per se. The gap between the image and the received traditions of aestheticised modernism and of populism becomes subject to a dissolution of the image-tradition itself, as the organic boundaries of the art object and image-form (to borrow Peter Bürger’s language)16 are put under greater strain externally and internally. Thus, although Adorno is writing during the emergence of minimalism and conceptual art (and therefore largely before the huge non-aesthetic impact of post-minimalist and postconceptual modes [Rosalind Krauss’s ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, for example]) the implications of his thinking are clear: the dissolution of the formal boundaries of image production are a condition of the modern’s survival as a living tradi-

16

Bürger 1984.

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tion. Distance and disaffirmation, then, are built into the new as the necessary non-aestheticising and non-populist encounter with the legacy of the modern and modernism as a space of reflection. Accordingly, this heightened responsibility on the part of the artist and the photographer to the instability of form as a condition of art’s autonomy, becomes the basis for the construction of a new critical public. Indeed, it is only through this process of dissolution and disaffirmation (determinate negation) that, in fact, any kind of critical community can be created at all. The outcome of this, however, is a strange inversion of the earlier collective partisan communities as these formal negations of the tradition of the modern are further incorporated into the tyrannical calendar of the art market and the turn-over of the art-idea as commodity: the emergence of a multiplicity of enclave communities, some sharing positions and ideas – but others not – in a competition over the advanced conditions of artistic difference and novelty. In some sense, this remains the fundamental condition of advanced art today. It is not surprising, then, how easily these enclave publics have become identifiable with the collapse of the notion of a classical public or counter-public sphere under the rise of post-Fordism. Adorno’s active principle of negation is clearly not something he would have wanted to identify with a multitude of competing art-world opportunities. Yet, nevertheless, this model of multiplicity has become the basis for art’s marketised socialisation today. This is quite different, then, from the exchange of the art object and image-form on the market, in which the artist’s originality or novelty secures a strong exchangeadvantage for himself or herself – which of course, tended to dominate the production of art under Fordism (from say, 1910–70). Rather, we are in a position now where art contributes its meanings (even its critiques and negations) to a process of socialisation by mediated consumption. That is art, and more broadly counter-image production, takes its place within a political economy of culture in which diversified modes of consumption, entails, as Wolfgang Streeck has put it, ‘hitherto unknown opportunities for individualized expression of social identities’.17 Thus we should be clear, therefore, that this critique of this new stage of exchange and consumption is not to be confused with a classical critique of art under mass culture, so central to Adorno’s and Peter Bürger’s critical theory. The assimilation of art’s diversification into new modes of consumption is not synonymous with the mass cultural marginalisation of authentic art practice. On the contrary, art now provides a leading role in socialisationby-consumption, by providing key transformative points of identification with

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Streeck 2012.

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‘personal development’ and ‘individualised taste’. This is why the proliferation of a multitude of art markets over the last twenty-five years, is part of this wide process of post-Fordist market socialisation, drawing more and more spectators of art into non-public constituencies of reception for the consumption of art. Postmodernism as a cultural category has been the vanishing mediator of these new conditions. One of the consequences of this is a familiar overlapping between the rise of these non-public constituencies, and the antagonism to, or distance from, on the part of consumers (in politics and public policy) to collective goods or social goods, that advance social and class solidarity over and above individualised consumer satisfaction. As Streeck says: As the new market mode leaches laterally into the public sphere through the generalisation of expectations of cultivated in the consumption of post-Fordist affluence, the capacity of states to impose public order on what is an increasingly de-politicized market society must evaporate.18 Now this does not mean that the formation of these new marketised constituencies for art cannot provide a space for the interpellation of the radical and dissensual agendas of various forms of art. There is no ontological disconnect between the market socialisation of consumption and the process of radicalisation. But, these new forms of radical identification will tend to be based on individualist consumer decisions that, in the same way, reflect how contemporary participation in politics – for radicals and conservatives alike – has become predominantly issued-based, and as such, is invariably predicated on a kind of particularist get-out clause: namely, the future exit on the part of the political agent from any collective pressures brought by the general will, on the grounds that their own individual issue-based commitments do not necessarily have to comply with the general will. Consequently, it is possible to see this is as part of a general post-Fordist de-coupling of cultural production and meaning from the collective and partisan functions of the symbolic: the structural tendency within our para-technological cultural regime towards the fluid de-contexualisation of the image as a condition of its particularist legibility – what we might call, under post-Fordism, the state and market’s interdependent strengthening of the non-symbolic. Hence by, non-symbolic, I mean something more concrete than simply reification: namely, the expulsion of the image from any conflicting claims of ‘truth’ and ‘representation’ as

18

Ibid, p. 43.

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a condition of the image’s free circulation. The image is naturalized as a mere template for subjective projection or a factual datum, thereby, crowding out the discursive functions of the symbolic.19 In many ways the internet functions precisely along these lines – or, rather, these lines of flight from context. This is why so many artists today working in the wake of the dissolution of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century image-form of art – and, therefore, whose work operates broadly in the space of ‘art beyond art in the expanded field’ – have sought to establish, even engineer, an ideal or universal discursive community for their practice. In relational aesthetics, post-relational aesthetics, and across the whole gamut of contemporary participatory and pedagogic practices itself, the notion of living with has become attached to a microtopian model of Bildung in art: that is, the centrality of participation and collective exchange becomes the determining condition of the authentic temporal life of the artwork. In this sense the spirit of Hegelian/Novalian delay has become a discursive construct outside of the contemplation of aesthetic particulars, or even the internal relations of the image itself. Reception is participation. Indeed, this decoupling of critical public from the vestiges of an Adornian mimeticism moves the notion of the ideal public into the realm of a Hegelian ‘imageless truth’: truth is first and foremost that which resists iconicity as the ontological condition of defending the life of art, that is its living reception. In this respect post-Fordist modes of socialisation in art continue to produce their own internal fissures and moments of resistance and breakdown. Thus, we need to remind ourselves that art, like politics, cannot fully become a particularist object of consumption without destroying its identity. That is, art can never be completely subsumable under the forces of market socialisation, insofar as art is not something that can easily detach itself from the universal goods of collective solidarity. These universal goods will continually reclaim art’s autonomy as a condition of its social and non-aesthetic legibility. And it is these fissures and internal resistances that, in a sense, are what interests me here. Under the conditions of the increasing market socialisation of art and the non-symbolic dominance of the para-technological image regime, we are witness to an irresolvable aporia: the new technological image regime continually destroys the condition for creating a living Bildung in art, but simultaneously produces the conditions for its survival. This means art is compelled to function catachrestically under these aporetic conditions: market socialisation is the channel through which art’s public values are destroyed, but at the same time,

19

For a discussion of the non-symbolic, see Flusser 2009, pp. 281–8.

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the place where they are forged anew as a condition of making art anew. There is no sense then that the production of an ideal community for art is a mere option or luxury, for the very lack of art’s social legibility continually produces the very desire and need for it. Indeed, without this immanent countermove – that is, of the stopping of the flow of the work/image back into the capitalist image-continuum as a condition of art’s renewal and struggle for social legibility – art and photography lose their autonomous identity altogether, dissolving the emancipatory connection they might continue to have with Novalis’s and early Romanticism’s Bildung: the life of the image as an expression of a life worth living.

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Realism, Alter-Realism and the Question of Legibility As Fredric Jameson rightly notes in his book Antinomies of Realism (2013), contemporary discussions about realism have a peculiarly chimerical character: ‘it is, either denounced or elevated to the status of an ideal (aesthetic or otherwise)’.1,2 This notion of realism as somehow lamentedly failing as art, or conversely, acting as an ideal horizon for art, is, of course, hardly surprising, for historically realism has been both the source of the conservative foreclosure of art, literature and film’s formal and cognitive possibilities and an impossible object of political and critical combativeness and disclosure. This is also why the debate on realism on the left today rarely gets beyond its classical antinomies: Georg Lukács versus Bertolt Brecht; socialist realism versus social realism; narrative versus anti-narrativity; naturalistic perspectivalism versus montage. For these competing claims on realism have themselves become fetishised as an ideal ‘research programme’, steeled as this debate was in the 1930s in the furnace of twentieth-century politics. However, the social and aesthetic problems realism faces today are very different from the 1930s, let alone the 1870s; firstly, there is no functional link between the mass workers’ movement and realism; and secondly, there is no civic culture to speak of that would give collective value to works that open up contemporary realities to critique. Thus, although it would be foolish to say that all aspects of these formal disputes are now completely dead and buried, as we will see, there is nevertheless much that needs to be rethought in relation to the debate, enabling us to take what might still be claimed for realism beyond its received categories, certainly in a world where the ‘great realist novel’ and the renewal of realism through modernism lie behind us. Yet, the following is not an engagement with the vast expansion of world literatures, global art and cinema and

1 This article was originally published in English in a shorter version in Kunst und Politik: Jahrbuch Der Guernica-Gesellschaft, eds, Norbert Schneider and Alexandra Axtmann, Band16, V & R Press, Karlsruhe, 2014 (pp. 93–103), in German in a shorter version, as ‘Aporetischer Realismus: Alter-Realismus Als Philosophisces Konzept Künstlerischer Horizont’, Lettre International, No 109, 2015, pp. 86–91, and in Russian, in full, as ‘Realism, Alterrealism I Problema Raspoznavaemosti’, in Moscow Art Magazine, No 114, July, 2020. 2 Jameson 2013, p. 2.

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realism in the twentieth century; the focus here is narrowly European, given European capitalism’s primary connection to the legacy of realism and the representation of class and class conflict and the post-Thermidorian and postEnlightenment realities of the political process in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries through the modern revolutionary tradition. My concern here, then, is to find a way through these classical and radical modern languages of realism, in order to find a viable point of address for the concept of realism in relation to class, collective representation, and the ‘crisis of the political’ today. Thus, I will not be dwelling in any great detail here on the late bourgeois novel of (waning) heroic protagonicity, realist painting and socialist realism, the class allegories of Italian neo-realist cinema, or photomontage. For despite the breakthroughs and achievements of these practices, their assumptions and formal resolutions now clog up the sight lines of any worthwhile continuation of the debate. This is because, collectively and individually, they demonstrate a recurring political problem of realism given its pressurised and antipodal status under capitalism as a ‘truth-telling’ category – its reification of various technical and formal moves as would be exemplary kinds of practices. Exemplariness in realism in strict formal terms is no longer what it once was. This is why the standard opposition between classical realism and modernist realism is today inoperable as a means of defining the problems that face realism, given the fact that the narratological remnants of the high bourgeois novel, the articulation of social relationships in perspectival painted form, the spatial interruptions of photomontage, and the class allegories of neo-realist cinematic diegesis are no longer identifiable with particular critical positions and particular critical constituencies – that is, there is nothing at stake politically and cognitively in defending these positions and their aesthetic affects and proscriptions. There is nothing progressive about montage in and of itself. But this is not because narrative, diegesis and montage are exhausted as resources for an account of realism, but, rather, as a result of the fact that the institutions of literature, cinema and art are no longer attached, respectively, to the destinal and world-historical forms of the high bourgeois novel and post-war realist cinema, realist painting (history painting, social realist painting or otherwise), and the cut and paste operations of photomontage. The general deflation of the male heroic figure in fiction (already waning in Leo Tolstoy) in response to the demotic rise of the secondary character in the naturalist novel; the removal of painting as a site of primary artistic value by post-object and conceptual modes of visual production; the digitalisation and virtual/temporal extensity of the artwork against the exhibition of discrete objects; and the loss of the political connection between film and

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the collective symbolic space of workers’ culture, has disconnected realism from the specific partisan character of these older formal oppositions and resources. There are two ways, then, of reading the ending of the period of classical and modernist realism. Realism is exhausted and therefore indistinguishable from its inherited aesthetic forms; or, alternately, it is part of the unfinished work of the modern and critique of the modern under capitalism; and, therefore, the willingness of critics to accept the crisis of realism without qualification reflects the failure of these critics to follow realism’s own reflective demands as a critical tradition formed within the modern. In this essay I adhere to the latter. Realism is a claim for, and on, the modern. This doesn’t mean that realism is modernism; for making realism and modernism co-extensive doesn’t lessen realism’s particular attachment to the problem of art’s social legibility and what Lukács called ‘human conflicts in all their complexity’;3 but, rather, realism is based – no less than modernism – on the formal articulation of the aesthetic and non-aesthetic across a range of practices and modes of address – which are, in their heterogeneity, it has to be said, very un-Lukácsian. Thus, in order to avoid the reification of realism and modernism as separate traditions of the modern, an important place to start our discussion, therefore, is to dismantle the idea that realism is a socially transparent programme of ‘truth-telling’ in which the disclosure of capitalism’s inequities and contradictions are returned to capitalism in as compelling and as direct a form as possible, something that Lukács himself was highly critical of in his own (oblique) fight with socialist realism in the late 1930s and 1940s. This is why Jameson is right when he says that realism is fundamentally ‘a historical and even evolutionary process in which the negative and the positive are inextricably combined, and whose emergence and development at the same time constitute its own inevitable undoing, its own decay and dissolution’.4 Hence if realism proceeds by this ‘undoing’, we might say that realism is aporetic to its core: that is, it is not a ‘style’ or relatively stable mode of representation, but on the contrary, a processual and transitive site of negotiation across formal traditions. The technical and cognitive categories of realism are thereby produced precisely out of this unstable condition. If realism shares its aporetic condition with modernism and the avant-garde, therefore, modernism and the avant-garde are no less driven by this formal instability. All share a post-Enlightenment intimacy with art’s failure to realise itself in the world,

3 Lukács 1972b. 4 Jameson 2013, p. 6.

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that is, all are defined by the gap between the particular ‘truth claims’ of the artwork (whether these are attached to pleasure, knowledge or reason) and art’s delimited place in everyday social relations; all inherit the post-Romantic Hegelian condition of art’s alienation. Hence art derives its drive for immanent self-articulation (the re-positioning, re-constellation and expansion of its inherited technical, aesthetic, and cognitive resources) from this desire to overcome this alienation and sense of separateness. The idea, therefore, that realism in the novel, for example, fails the larger test of this process of immanent self-articulation and innovation in the face of the intractabilities of the real and the limits of representation, is a myth, as if literary realism settles on some workable model of ‘transparent’ signification as a guarantee of realism’s greater literary legibility in the nineteenth century and then sticks to it with minor modifications. On the contrary, as soon as the realist novel is up and running in the middle of the nineteenth century, it begins to break down and reorder its priorities and internal assumptions. Thus, for instance, at the point where it brings into view the new relations of the bourgeois domestic and public spheres – the interconnections of family, class, social power and the market – by drawing on a classicising destinal narrative structure and the remnants of eighteenth-century melodrama and biblical redemption, the internal contradictions of this world break apart, given that the ‘human conflicts in all their complexity’ of the bourgeois and emerging industrial world cannot be contained by the conventions of this inherited proto-classicising structure. All the great realist/naturalist novelists of this period (Gustave Flaubert, Ivan Turgenev, Henry James, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy) present the crushing bourgeois sphere of the domestic as a place of cruel feminine disappointment and, crucially, adultery; and, as such, seek new internal relations, new fictive modes of address, within realism’s chronological narratability of events. Indeed, the centrality of adultery in this corpus of writing as a realm of experiential possibility external to bourgeois propriety and familial destiny (particularly in Flaubert and Tolstoy) diminishes any kind of stabilising reliance on male, heroic narrative protagonicity that the reworking of classical structure and eighteenth-century genres provided. From out of this reordering of female desire and narrative fracturing, arises the observational re-structuring of the ‘real’ and the ‘everyday’ (the increasing attention to social particulars; reflection on the sexual division of labour) and, in turn, the valorisation of the singularities of ‘present time’ (the exploration of individual states of consciousness, as in Emile Zola), and, finally, the development of a radical modernist-realist ‘presentism’ itself in the new modernist novel (James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922; Jean Toomer, Cane, 1923; John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, 1925; and Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz,

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1929), in which narration is stretched and complexified across far shorter fictive time spans than the historical chronologies of the nineteenth-century realist novel. On a broader scale, then, this points to a fundamental truth about the development of literary realism as a claim on the modern: realism is thoroughly heterodox in its borrowings (insofar as ‘newness’ or novel content, as Peter Bürger puts it, is as much a condition of pre-modernist literature as it is of modernism proper);5 just as full blown naturalism as realism, on pain of narrative incoherence, cannot produce a novel solely out of observational data, and therefore is forced to return to some version of realist chronology, generational, diurnal or otherwise. By the end of the nineteenth century, accordingly, realism is in dialogue with naturalism’s radical ‘presentism’, setting in place the spatial and temporal discontinuities identifiable with modernism, which in turn will bring about further internal changes to realism’s aporetic condition, as in the ambitious novels of Bento Pérez Galdós (1843–1920), with their foregrounding of a vast cast of secondary characters caught up in the minutiae of urban conversational exchange.6 In these novels the socially discontinuous and heterodox crowds into and disrupts realist generational chronology. Similarly, if realism by the first decade of the twentieth-century opens out onto modernist heterogeneity and the ‘many’,7 modernism’s exit from classical realism – despite its adherence to anti-narrativity and ‘presentist’ form and rhetoric – continues to employ the narrative structures of realism, as if realism for modernism was still where the novel goes to learn its trade as story-telling. In Ulysses, Joyce links up the destinal structure of classical literature, the narrative machinery of melodrama, and the Flaubertian-type adultery novel, all within a hyper-naturalistic ‘presentism’ – the novel of a day-in-the-life, dominated by an intoxicating range of psychological and social detail. These interdependencies of modernism and realism and realism and modernism are also evident in the rise of photography in the first three decades of the twentieth century, where realism’s absorption of the indexical powers of the photograph opens out a whole new register of engagement with ‘presentism’ and the ‘everyday’. The photograph comes to stand in – in its would-be immediacy – for the real itself, given the unprecedented indexicality of the photograph, the fact that the photograph shows things in their finely gradated facticity. But, if this allies photography to a positivism of ‘social facts’ – and, in turn, to the widespread acceptance of mimetic representation as a window on 5 Bürger 1984, p. 60. 6 Galdós 1987 and Galdós 1952. 7 Woloch 2003.

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the world, in a throwback to the realist myth of transparency – it also generates a radical aporetic realist discourse that questions the facticity of photographic truth. At the same time as photography in the 1920s provides an unprecedented realism of social particulars, it also moves to question the terms of this new social contract under photography, by recognising the ease with which the photograph is manipulated and serves the interests of bourgeois power; and, therefore, despite, the unprecedented facticity of the photograph and its claims to transparency, photography is seen to be constitutively ambiguous and, as such, open to multiple readings. The questioning of photographic positivism and the acknowledgement of the limits of representation accordingly finds its critical resources in a kind of modernist deflation of representational transparency in this period; and, therefore, in a way similar to the transformation of the nineteenth-century realist novel into realist-modernist modes in the twentieth century, the realist claims on photography find themselves in dialogue with its modernist antipodes (ambiguity, delay, indeterminancy).8 This is why it is possible to talk, expressly after the modernist mediation of photography, about alter-realism; a realism that in a sense has internalised a critique of conservative or official realism, as a way of continuing realism as a project. But crucially, what distinguishes this photographically-derived alter-realism from previous forms of artistic and literary realism is its disdain for any passive association between realism and modernist presentism. This is because 1920s photography provide an unprecedented actionist dimension to the realist debate. Photography’s modernist critique of positivism and representational transparency radically re-channels realism in photography into a constructionist and active mode. That is: what distinguishes photography’s realism from all previous claims to realism is that the photograph – particularly the photograph with text – is able to ally itself directly with political action; photography enters the very texture of the political process. And, of course, key to this is the fundamental impact of the Russian revolution, which in its programmatic assimilation of photography and film into an actionist conception of art, establishes a decisive political break in the debate on realism. Photography and realism are as result irrevocably changed. In the early years of the revolution, the direct alliance between this constructivist mode of photographic production and the idea of realism as means of transformative praxis (Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky) de-links realism from its inherited classical and bourgeois legacy as model of cross-class

8 For an extensive overview of this dialogue, see Phillips 1989. See also Fore 2012.

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stability and social inclusion. This fundamentally transforms realism’s relationship to the representation of class and classes. Realism no longer seeks to represent workers – as a querulous problem to be expunged, patronised or empathized with – but, rather, acts as a dynamic space of shared interests between worker, artist, and writer, in which the artwork or literary work becomes a contribution to the revolutionary process and the rebuilding of the world, embodying the actions and responses of workers in the work’s realisation. Two key works of this period of alter-realism, influenced by the new Russian photography, are Ernst Friedrich’s Krieg dem Kriege (1924) and Ernst Tucholsky and John Heartfield’s Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles (1929).9 Although they set out to do very different things (for Friedrich, to expose German imperialism and nationalism and commemorate the proletarian war dead; and for Heartfield and Tucholsky, to expose the reactionary impostures of German national culture and the increasing rightist and social democratic attacks on the working class), they both subvert public and state photographic iconography in the interests of a partisan re-symbolisation of bourgeois culture. The juxtaposition of photograph and text, text against photograph, photograph against photograph, not only satirises and defames the positivistic and ‘cleaned-up’ democratic realism of the new post-war German public sphere of illustrated magazines and patriotic propaganda – as in Friedrich’s use of the extraordinary images of First World War front line survivors, with their faces blown away, at the end of Krieg dem Kriege – but produces a complex constellational mode of ‘seeing’ in which the sequential uses of images and countersyntactical thinking invites an interrogative and worker-aligned and ‘totalising’ mode of interpretation. Walter Benjamin and Brecht’s own constructionist accounts of photography, realism and representation are clearly indebted to these text-image displacements and understanding of photography-as-praxis. Photography and text invite the spectator to question and de-naturalise the images he or she lives amongst. This photographic/literary development of alter-realism as a post-classical research programme after the 1930s becomes the standard bearer for a progressive encounter between modernism and realism after wwii, transforming the novel and cinema in its wake. Indeed, some version of alter-realism is the defining framework within which realism is legitimately defended or acknowledged at all after the 1950s. This is clear across a whole range of literary, filmic and photographic work itself from this period, to the 1990s: Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962), Georg Perec’s Les Choses (Things, 1965), Jean-Luc

9 Friedrich 1980, Heartfield and Tucholsky 1973.

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Godard’s Dziga-Vertov group work Tout Va Bien (Everything’s All Right, 1972), Chris Marker’s photo-film essays La Jetée (The Pier, 1962) and Le fond de l’air est rouge (The Grin Without a Cat, 1977), Arno Schmidt’s novels Aus dem Leben eines Fauns (Scenes From the Life of a Faun, 1953) and Die Gelehrtenrepublik (Egghead Republic, 1957), Alexander Kluge’s early stories Lebenslaüfe (Case Histories, 1962), early films, In Gefahr und größter Not bringt der Mittelweg den Tod (In Danger and Dire Distress the Middle of the Road Leads to Death, 1974) and early novels, such as, Schlachtbeschreibung (The Battle, 1964), Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s Nouveau Realismus, Die Umarmung (The Embrace, 1965), Jorge Semprun’s novel La Segunda muerte de Ramón Mercader (The Second Death of Ramón Mercader, 1969), J.M.G. Le Clézio’s Les Géants (The Giants), 1973, and Heiner Müller and Sarah Kane’s realist trauma-dramaturgy, respectively, Hamletmaschine, 1977 and Blasted, 1995. But if all these films and works of fiction are indebted to the alter-realist break within 1920s modernism-realism, significantly, this sequence of works is structured around a post-Thermidorian mediation of class and history that barely relates to the formation of alterrealism in the 1920s and early 1930s. In this sequence of works, late alter-realism represents an aporetic realism that is overwhelmingly defined by the pathos of a defeated revolutionary political past, in a way bourgeois literary realism and Brecht and photographic modernist realism at the height of theirs powers were not. (Although, we need to be clear the defeated presence of the French Revolution and the Revolution of 1848 in the classic realist novel hardly existed as a living political horizon for a later generation of writers; indeed, these revolutionary events – or their after-shocks – appear only to the extent they are able to point up the presumptions and failures of partisan political speech itself; the political activist or political ‘speechifier’ in this later tradition is always mocked or undermined; there are few high bourgeois novels that speak to the emancipatory legacy of the early bourgeois revolutions).10 Yet the late bourgeois novel

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Realism, of course, is the space in which the de-hierarchisation of class relations and the everyday exchanges of popular experience are given public meaning. Even the realism of Honoré de Balzac gives creative voice to this. But if in their novels demotic voices speak, the words they speak politically are always compromised, even pathologised; the great bourgeois novel of ‘enlightenment’ is also the great de-rationaliser of plebeian speech. Plebeian speech is invited into the novel’s diegesis, certainly, but once there it is muted or made grotesque, comic or mad. Nevertheless, if these limits to inter-class dialogue are to be expected in the bourgeois realist novel confronted with the emerging workers’ movement, the opening up of the realist novel to radical and post-bourgeois energies after the Stalinist Second-Thermidor is confronted with another set of de-rationalising constraints: the uncertainty and limited efficacy of radical working-class speech itself as the expression of collective class interests. That is, at the same time as realism opens its diegetic

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in the second half of the nineteenth century does, at least, produce a uniquely contested democratic and public space internal to the novel through which some artisans and workers speak, as in George Eliot’s masterpiece Middlemarch, published in the same year as the Commune, in 1871. This notion of the artwork as a publicly conceived space of contestation is continued in the 1920s and 1930s through photographic realism (as in the ‘crisis realism’ of the photomontagist John Heartfield) and the wpa-fap muralists in the USA during the period of the Popular Front.11 But this is the last throw of the dice for the (short-lived) notion of the artwork as a public and contestatory space attached to and framed by a political process in which realism and workers’ interests are linked. After wwii, the Stalinisation and isolation of what remained of the Russian revolution, and the social democratic demise of the workers movement in the West and the vast consolidation of mass culture globally, the aporetic character of alter-realism in Europe takes on an explicitly inverted form, in which the modernist negation of capitalist realities takes priority over the representation of the conflict of ‘class interests’ and ‘social relations’. The internalisation of defeated revolutionary legacy, and as such the counter-revolutionary (second-Thermidorian) destruction of the political and historical conditions of realism as a research programme, leads to a thorough historical saturation of realist form, insofar as all practices of realism are now over-determined by a metahistorical sense of political defeat. This is why post1950s alter-realism is defined by nothing so simple as a renewal of the postBolshevik move to realism-as-praxis, but, rather, by the very suspension, or questioning, of the ‘political effects’ of realism-as-praxis itself; realism is now haunted by a deflationary critique of ‘presentism’ and chronology alike (the present is without significant detail and the future is without contour). One of

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space to the heterodox realities of popular experience, it soon meets the sociological constraints of this move, no matter how imaginative or politically engaged this move is. For in a post-Thermidorian world of Stalinist and post-Stalinist working-class defeat, and, latterly of the neoliberal decomposition of collectivist identities, working-class speech is invariably domesticated and stabilised in the interests of a ‘democratic naturalism’. In a sense, this domestication and pacification of working-class speech is at the very heart of Lukács’s notion of the ‘exception’ in the realist novel, in his admonitions against naturalistic truth. What kind of authentic non-naturalistic speech should be placed in the mouths of workers? And how might this affect the possible destinal outcomes of their represented struggles? Today, therefore, for workers to speak as if the post-Thermidorian condition or counter-revolutionary condition did not exist as a subjective reality, is ahistorical; yet for workers to speak as post-Thermidorians is to in-authenticate their speech, to re-naturalise it in a conservative fashion. See Hemingway 2002.

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the outcomes of this shift is a generalised erosion of affect in the artwork (the introduction of blank or deadening surfaces into the art object or performance or literary work, through the evocation of foreclosed spaces or inert or denuded human relationships), or conversely, a heightening of affect, in the form of the symbolic ruination of bodies subject to the scorching intensities and hypersimulations of mass culture (a realism of the Spectacle). In Perec, Schmidt, Kluge, mid-period Godard, Brinkmann, and Müller, alter-realism maps a world of diminished agency, the draining of desire, reified everyday relations, and depleted historical consciousness. Indeed in Perec, Le Clézio, Kluge and Brinkmann, in particular, this produces an austere landscape of disconnection: a capitalist realism – although these libidinal affects have little to do with the sex-pol intensities of Wolf Vostell’s and other West German ‘capitalist realist’ artists working around the same time, such as Peter Sorge, with his mix of the machinery of imperialist war (Vietnam) and the female pornographic body.12 The result is that the aporetic conditions of alter-realism in the post-1950s undergo a qualitative transformation; realism becomes a language of mediation between a desperate ‘presentism’ and a delimited future.13 The prominent exception to this in this period, worth noting in passing, is the image-text photographic alter-realism of Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula, who from the mid-1970s return the use of montage to the sequential cognitive mapping of early avant-garde photography (Rodchenko) and to the notion of the artwork as a historical intervention into the contemporary. Turning to the representation of labour (if not to the labourer’s body as such) and the everyday as a site of contradiction between labour power and commodity fetishism, ‘presentism’ becomes an entry point into the relations of capital.14 But if Rosler and Sekula reconnect alter-realism to the ‘learning-work’ of 1920s photo-text production, this return to a praxis of the text and image remains connected to tradition that is confined to academic critique alone. This is the period where realist practice is mainly attached to the ‘critique of representation’ debates in the Universities of North America and Europe. Overall, then, the post-Thermidorianisation of alter-realism changes the very terms of narration, diegesis and realism-as-praxis. Realism becomes a language of agential foreclosure and a semiosis of negation. And this no more so than in relation to the question of class and class agency.

12 13 14

See, Brehmer et al. 1971, and Sorge 1979. For an expressly post-Communist extension of a ‘loss of illusion’ as a radical ‘realism’ – an aesthetics of “material dilapidation” (p. 24) – see Rancière 2013. Rosler 2004, Sekula 1999.

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Under post-Thermidorian political conditions – that is, the combined Stalinist, social democratic and neoliberal defeat of the working class as a collective agent – working class self-emancipation and the ‘open present of freedom’ (in Jean-Paul Sartre’s sense)15 are uncoupled. The result is that realism is not the medium through which the separation of history and politics are made intelligible again (as in Lukács), but, rather, the place where the dead are forced speak to the living (as in the theatre of Samuel Beckett and the philosophy of Theodor Adorno).16 And this is why Lukács in one important sense is correct: realism can never simply be a topical or activist response to prevailing political conditions; no ‘interventionist’ model of realism alone can carry through the necessary cognitive and cultural complexity required of realism’s demand for legibility. But, nevertheless it is Adorno that we need most in order to make sense of this gap between history and politics, insofar as this ‘gap’ cannot be diminished by lessening the negation of capitalist realities by a return to kind of pre-Thermidorian affirmative realism, a realism of ‘relations’ and ‘demographics’, or even worse, ‘hope’. Thus, the long counter-revolutionary sequence of defeat is not what alter-realism has to leave behind in order to renew its resources, forget the recent political past and open up a new horizon for practice; rather, it is the very ‘working historical space’ out of which the defeats of the past and the contradictions of the present are connected and given form and made critically legible. Late alter-realism is attached above all else, then, formally and cognitively to the demands of abstraction: that is to the heightening of contradiction and the aporetic as truth-telling mechanisms. Or, to put in a slightly different register, to quote from Heiner Müller from the mid-1980s, writers and artists need ‘To live without hope or despair’.17 Realists are not sentinels, tribunes or seers, but foragers of the past and gleaners of the present; and as such operate fitfully, uncertainly, in the gaps and interstices of the historical process, in the hope of linking emancipatory futures past with the present in ways that re-open the past to the present without closing the present off to the future; alter-realism, is less a new form of ‘cognitive mapping’ as a representation of ‘totality’, than an active ghosting of the past within the dead zones of the present. This fundamentally changes the very dynamic of realism’s relationship to class and representation. In a situation where alter-realism is a realism defined by the waning of an independent workers’ culture, the coercive legacy of the Stalinist states, and 15 16 17

Sartre 2003. Adorno 1984. Müller 1989, p. 163.

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the rise of social democratic corporatism, the representation of class takes on an increased spectral character. Thus, post-1950s alter-realism is not a retreat from class representation as such, but, rather, an intensification of early alterrealism’s internalisation of the limits of representation in response to these conditions. In other words, alter-realism’s struggle for legibility always begins from the real existing conditions under which both realism and the workers’ movement finds itself, and not from any imagined working class identity or ethnographic essence or realist ‘aesthetics’. We see this in Chris Marker’s films from the 1960s onwards. In the mid-period films this is expressed through a kind of ‘historical-memory work’ in which the history of workers’ struggle and forms of association create a ghost-like sequence of absent-presences that figure and negatively animate the present, as in Sans Soleil (Sunless) (1983). But the spectral character of the dead speaking to the living also touches on another key aspect of the aporetic condition of class and representation in alter-realism: the very spectral character of class identity itself. This leads to a deep structural problem about class and representation and the form and content of workers’ speech: namely, the living connection between the ‘presentism’ of everyday workers’ interests and preoccupations, and the representation of collective class interests in a post-Thermidorian period where history, politics and representation are disconnected. Indeed, this separation takes us to the heart of realism and of alter-realism in the current period and, as such, returns us necessarily to the aporetic suspension of the ‘politic effects’ of earlier realism-as-praxis. In addressing this issue, I want to look at three approaches to ‘class identity’, class speech and collective representation, in three films across the later alter-realism period: Godard’s Tout Va Bien (1972), Svetlana Baskova’s Za Marksa (For Marx) (2012), and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) (2006). We can consider Tout Va Bien, for good reasons, to be one of Godard’s best and most distinctive alter-realist works. This is because the representation of workers’ identity is fundamentally separated from the traditional ethnographic-symbolic machinery of realism: we rarely see any representation of living labour. It is clear that this is not social or socialist realism. The film, then, proposes a crucial split between workers’ identity and the representation of labour as such, insofar as ‘workers’ speech’ is decisively shown to achieve autonomy once workers are not seen to be working – indeed when they are on strike.18 Set in a meat factory where the workers have downed tools for better conditions and pay, the film deals with the negotiations between the

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For an extended discussion of Godard’s Tout Va Bien, see Roberts 2012b.

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striking workers and the management (with Jane Fonda’s visiting and supportive American journalist providing a – left-liberal – counterpoint to the struggle). Significantly, in the light of the split in the film between workers’ autonomy and the representation of labour after the release of the film and at the height of his work with the Dziga-Vertov group, Godard talked about the importance of another productive disconnection that the radical filmmaker should adhere to: the necessary gap between the formal interests of the filmmaker as a revolutionary and the actual representation of the routines, habits and labour of workers’ lives themselves. In a revealing quote some years later, he declared: ‘The worker would be bored to tears if he had to watch himself. People don’t want to see their lives, only a bit of their lives’.19 This would seem to be highly conservative, even defeatist, given the absence of the representation of labour within the symbolic order of mature capitalism. But, on the contrary, the quote points to a structural impasse that is crucial to the relationship between representation under capital and the aporetic realism of alter-realism. Labour certainly has a representational and narrative place in the symbolic order of capitalism – films, news, novels offer us glimpses into labour-capital relations all the time20 – but, at no point can the representation of labour ever be coextensive with this order. For this to be the case the capitalist symbolic order would thereby have to speak in the interests of labour – to be its representative – and plainly this is impossible given the fundamental incompatibility of labour and capital. In other words, these glimpses into labour-capital relations – the conditions in factories and offices, workers lives, even the violence of labour-capital relations – cannot become definitional for the symbolic order, for to become representative of the symbolic order, labour would actually have to dissolve itself into capital, disavowing itself as a determinate absence. Labour power would become symbolically congruent with capitalism, producing a symbolic short-circuiting of labour’s negation of capital, and of realism as the cultural form of this negation. A crucial question, therefore, presents itself here: What possible value might the representation of labour serve when its interests are compatible with capitalist ‘common sense’? How many films, novels and photo-sequences can be produced on factory and office life and workers’ struggles, when these struggles

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‘Interview with Jean-Luc Godard by Emmanuel Burdeau and Charles Tesson’, in Godard 2002, p. 23. A recent example would be Neill Blomkamp’s science fiction film Elysium (2013) (set in la in the near future) in which the hero Max Da Costa (Matt Damon) is shown working on the production line, in a vast and self-evidently Fordist-type factory producing ‘security robots’.

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have become identifiable with the interests of the system itself? In fact, this symbolic closure returns realism to the ethnographic and affirmative workerism of post-wwii socialist realism, in which the reification of the ‘worker’ overrides the destruction of the social division of labour and the struggle of workers’ to exit from class identity as such. The alternative to this reification under capitalist conditions, as Godard insists, is the break with or suspension of the representation of living labour, for this opens up an emancipatory gap for the filmmaker and audience between workers’ speech and workers’ identity as workers. Thus, it is precisely through establishing this gap – a gap in which nonidentitary ‘thought’ might intercede – that the critical function of alter-realism operates. By disconnecting the representation of workers’ interests from the act of living labour, workers are thereby freed from identifying with – and taking pleasure from – the representation of their own alienation. This issue also circulates through one of Godard’s post-Dziga Vertov-group films, Passion (1982), which interconnects ‘uncertainty’ in sexual relations with ‘uncertainty’ in the representation of labour and the ‘uncertainty’ of filmmaking. A young female factory worker (Isabelle Huppert) confronts an assistant film director who has come to her factory to recruit extras for a film that is being shot close to the factory, and that is suffering from a number of production problems. (The vicissitudes involved in the making of the film, on and off the set, take up the central focus of Godard’s film). ‘I have to ask you a question’. Huppert says. ‘Sometimes I go to the movies or watch television and they never show people at work. Do you know why?’ ‘It’s forbidden to shoot in factories’, the assistant director replies matter-of-factly. This announces a key axiom of late alter-realism: the realist seeks out the determining contradiction in experience and not the identitary content of appearances. Thus, when Jameson says: ‘the vocation of any realism [is] to explore the hitherto unsaid and unexpressed, and to bring figuration to what has always been excluded from public representation’,21 a major qualification needs to be put in place in relation to the representation of labour: realism’s truth conditions – its aporetic truth conditions – have to be coextensive with a critique of the representation of living labour in order to free up workers’ speech from its received and instrumental contexts. One can see this critique at play also in another alter-realist filmmaker, Harun Farocki. In his writing on labour and the cinema in connection with his archival film Workers Leaving the Factory (1995) (consisting of a wide range of footage taken from documentaries and feature films of workers leaving factories at the end of their shift), he talks

21

Jameson 2013, p. 270.

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about cinema’s fundamental resistance (through the desire of the spectator) to the representation of productive labour and the realities of factory life. Echoing Godard, he says: ‘Most narrative films take place in that part of life where work has been left behind’.22 Something of this structural impasse and the necessary ‘walking away’ from the representation of living labour is also visible in Baskova’s Za Marksa. Here, though, the autonomy of workers’ speech is represented by the production of a kind of fictive-filmic ‘autonomous-speech’, or truth-in-fiction. There is a brilliant – and long – scene in Za Marksa (which deals with the struggle for an independent union during the post-Soviet transition), where a group of workers, who are part of a workers’ film club, begin a passionate discussion about film theory and Godard. What is significant about this scene is that there is no build-up of embarrassment or sense of illegitimacy: this is simply what workers do: they discuss anti-narrativity, montage and filmic alienation effects, when they have a chance. There is something of Lukács’ concept of the productive exception here, in his diatribe against naturalism in the 1930s.23 The majority of contemporary Russian workers may have no interest in or capacity for discussing film theory and Godard, but this does not obviate the truth of the exception, for it represents those moments in a worker’s day when workers do represent themselves freely to themselves. This kind of autonomy, though, rarely finds a voice in post-Thermidorian realist narratives: for the intellectual-worker is deemed to be not just an exception, but, rather, a deracinated fantasy figure. The last – and only – period where such a figure had a productive role in the realist novel, for example, was in Victor Serge’s pre-wwii revolutionary fictions, such as Conquered City (1932), where the speech of workers is never less then engaged in the problems of production and politics.24 But of course, these are post-Thermidorian novels that narrate pre-Thermidorian realities, and as such are utterly anomalous within the realist tradition today, even in those political novels that recreate a historical moment and its significant actors, as in Hilary Mantel’s writing – as Jameson notes.25 Thus there is a clear distinction between the fictive autonomy of Baskova’s workers and Serge’s worker-intellectuals. In Serge, convergence between the ideal and the actual is constitutive of the revolutionary process – the ideal does not betray the actual and the actual does not betray the ideal, they are locked together – and therefore this process of interaction is unexcep22 23 24 25

Farocki 2002. Lukács 1972a. See for example Serge 1969, 1975 and 1982. Jameson 2013, p. 276.

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tional, whereas in Baskova, despite her Hegelian insistence on the indivisibility of the ideal and the actual, it stands as a post-Thermidorian anomaly. In response to the structural impasse of the representation of labour another kind of critical immanence is demonstrated in von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen – the allegorical figure. Here, though, the problem of the representation of class functions in a world in which the interests of labour are, in fact, held to be congruent with the symbolic order, yet still cannot speak – namely, the Stalinist gdr. In this respect the film creates a disjunctive play between the visible presence of collective representation of workers in the gdr, and the absence of collective class consciousness from the political process. This is a film made in a united Germany about the Stasi, in which an officer in the Stasi, Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), stands, narratively, in his subjective resistance to the Stasi leadership for the problem of the ‘missing masses’ in the former East. As such, von Donnersmark uses the disaffected Stasi officer to generate a cognitive and political dissonance internal to the representation of the history of the gdr in order to address the aporetic condition of collective representation today. The officer in question is asked to eavesdrop on a famous gdr playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) (a Heiner Müller-type figure, who travels widely, publishes in the West, and has good journalistic and literary connections in West Berlin) but eventually recoils at what he is required to do, given that he judges the playwright to be a good man, and accordingly goes out of his way to protect him and his girlfriend, an actress. The social and political isolation of the officer and his distance from the Stasi executive and the cosmopolitan ‘freedoms’ of the playwright’s leftist circle alike, makes the protection of the playwright all the more poignant, aligning his action not just with some fantastical Stalinised image of workers state security, but with a recognition of a Sartrean ‘open present of freedom.’ Thus, his actions do not simply represent the conscience or honour of the system – the system saved so to speak – or a corrupted selflessness made liveable, but a real opening out to collective representation, even if this is utterly utopian.26 But the real efficacy of his decision comes at the end after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The writer sails through the transition to bourgeois literary success, the security officer drops into the newly unified German proletariat as a postman. He thus helps to secure the playwright’s powers of representation, only to experience the forfeiting of his own. But, paradoxically, in his release from these state powers and therefore in losing everything, in his abjection, the future opens up again, whereas the playwright’s

26

Jameson 2013, p. 282.

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newly honed literary powers appear dead on arrival in the publication of a fictionalised account of his surveillance, with the dreadful title Die Sonate vom Guten Menschen – the pathos-laden memoirs of a ‘survivor’, it would seem. Yet, in a final reversal, it is the dedication in the book that provides the decisive image of the transformation of powerlessness into futurity and anonymity into freedom. The book is dedicated to ‘hgw xx/7: In Gratitude’, the actual codename of the security officer whose identity he eventually discovered in his own files in the Stasi archive. In an unconscious convergence with the utopian language of science fiction, the playwright allows the anonymous actions of his own ‘prosecutor’ to live on generically as an unnamed identity or pure name detached from the historical past. The reason for these examples is not that they point to a solution of the structural impasse of class and collective representation in realist film, literature and photography in the twenty-first century, but, rather, that they show how alterrealism, in all its heterodox, conflicted and symptomal manifestations, can only function as an engagement with contradiction and aporiae, and not through the application of realism as canon, ‘aesthetic ideal’ or activist political virtue. The question of legibility for realism, therefore, is always tied to what cannot be freely made visible or said as a condition of the aporetic limits to representation. For to ignore these limits is to produce an identitarian realism of the Ideal, as has been disastrously the case in the twentieth century. Thus, under conditions where the representation of labour is unable to be isomorphic with the symbolic order – for to do so is thereby to destroy realism as a critical project – realism has to operate in the non-identitary gap between the ideal and actual, the very opposite of Victor Serge, under present conditions. And this, precisely, is what Jean-Luc Godard and the post-1960s German aporetic alterrealist tradition has taught us. Finally, then, realism as an aporetic interrogation of the problems of representation and artistic agency, exists in the same cultural space as modernism and the avant-garde, contrary to what many defenders of realism have believed; indeed, it is produced from the very same set of historical conditions, faultlines and pressures as modernism and the avant-garde (the struggle for artistic autonomy and for transdisciplinary forms of artistic praxis; the attachment to negation as passage through identity). Thus, it defines itself in relation to modernism and the avant-garde as being part of a far larger process: that is, the defence of art’s immanent (Hegelian) self-articulation as an open-ended research programme, as the means by which art is able to define and redefine its possible place in the world. And this is why realism is a philosophical problem and critical horizon, not an aesthetic ideal or cognitive system attached to ‘everyday appearances’. Nevertheless, in contributing to this hybrid space it

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brings a number of distinct problems and techniques to this larger research programme that are particular to its own critical history: namely, the possibility and efficacy of collective representation and its relationship to issues of identity (the identity/collective antinomy); the problem of social prefiguration and class narrativity; and, in the realm of photography and film, the strategies of social archiving and the documentary survey – which have been crucial to the post-1960s alter-realist critique of aesthetics, and the detachment of realism in art from painting. This is why alter-realism’s fundamental relationship to the mimetic is necessarily and productively unstable. Alter-realism draws on the veridical image/document only to displace it, re-function it, constellate it and re-constellate it as part of a post-disciplinary and post-generic research programme. And this is why when realism seeks to reify its mimetic capacities in the name of ‘accessibility’, or reassert a historicist and heroic protagonicity (admittedly very rare in realist film and literature these days), as a source of mass appeal, it either inflates the popular in defiance of the realities of the ‘living contradiction’, or produces a superheated image of engagement in which the world is turned either into an expression of the hero’s actionist desire, or into an endlessly denuded landscape of pain and destruction upon which the hero can write his or her pathos. Thus, if realism’s historical distinctiveness lies in what it brings to the problems of class narration, collective representation, protagonicity, the ‘totality’, ‘truth’ and semiotic indeterminancy, it cannot resolve these problems as matters of exemplary practice. Rather, what realism as a philosophical and non-identitarian endeavour can do, is make the contradictions of capitalist experience legible and productive, by working through them; and this, in a sense, is where its exemplariness lies.

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Ideation and Photography: a Critique of François Laruelle’s Concept of Abstraction 1

Abstraction, Mimesis and Photography

In The Concept of Non-Photography (2011), François Laruelle outlines an ambitious bid for a theory of photography that jettisons what he calls the ‘ontological distinctions and aesthetic notions’1,2 of the Humanities; in other words, a theory of photography that demotes the interpretative and technical categories that hitherto have laid claim to photography’s singular realism, or worlddisclosing capacities. This expulsion of photography’s normative ‘appeal to the World, to the perceived object’3 is to be pursued, not unsurprisingly, through an intellectual withdrawal from the organisational character of the social particulars, genres, styles and historicity of the photograph. This is why Laruelle is so insistent on the need for a theory of photography that rejects what he terms – familiar from his non-philosophy more generally – a decisionist interpretation of the photograph’s manifest content, a form of interpretation that he sees as simply ‘moving meaning around’, as a ‘complement, a rectification, a deconstruction, [or] a supplement’.4 This ‘post-interpretative’ approach he calls an abstract theory of photography. Standard photographic theory accumulates stories and multiple historical truths and as such registers the quality and range of photographic affects, an abstract theory of photography, on the other hand, dispenses with them. Abstraction, then, in classically scientific terms is a subtractive move – an axiomatic and reductive operation – rather than a hermeneutic exercise. Or, as Ray Brassier explains in an early, relatively sympathetic account of Laruelle’s non-philosophy, decisionism constrains what philosophy might do: ‘the possibilities of philosophical invention, whether formal or substantive, are already delimited in advance by [a philosophical] decisional syntax’.5

1 First published, in eds., Mark Durden and Jane Tormey, 2019, The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory, London and New York: Routledge. 2 Laruelle 2011, p. viii. 3 Ibid, p. 3. 4 Laruelle 2010, p. xxii. 5 Brassier 2003, p. 33.

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But this move is not built out of a new language of photographic form. By abstraction Laruelle does not mean the creation of a photographic theory that interrogates the immanent spatial relations of the photograph, as opposed to the semiotic analysis of a scene or setting as a focus for the presence or absence of human activity, or that draws out the insignificant or overlooked detail (as in Salvador Dali and Roland Barthes) as a means of defamiliarising photography’s manifest content. There is no recourse to the ‘abstractedness’ of the internal relations of photography, or nothing of this sort that would turn his concept of abstraction into a new version of formalism. Furthermore, his understanding of abstraction has nothing in common with the production and reception of photography under the law of real abstraction (photography’s commodity form), and therefore with the notion of real abstraction as source of photographic truth (as in photography’s reliance since the 1960s, as in Ed Ruscha’s work, on repetition and the sequence as a metonym of ‘reified vision’). Nor has his theory anything to do with photography’s relationship to social abstraction as the correlative of real abstraction or the value-form (the socially heteronomous impact of capitalist competition on the material world, or what Henri Lefebvre called ‘representations of space’:6 the production and reproduction of the built environment), in photography’s capacity for the panoramic bird’s eye view. Rather, for Laruelle, abstraction is what happens to photography when thinking about photography discards the mechanics of photographic interpretation as such – its ‘realist illusion’,7 its ‘already made “interpretative frameworks”’8- to concentrate on photography as a specific order of the scientific, what he calls its infinite field of materialities: a ‘manifold of determinations without synthesis’.9 That is, photography is not a support for something else, something to be explained or narrativised on the basis of its manifest content, but an ‘unlimited theoretical space’; an ‘emergent novelty’.10 In this respect Laruelle follows, in a standard way, what other philosophers and theorists of photographic representation from Charles Sanders Peirce onwards have necessarily foregrounded – What is photography’s relationship to the real? Why does photography continually recall us to the problem of the real? But for Laruelle, dramatically, this is pursued without any attachment to what has usually defined all schools – realist and anti-realist alike – within

6 7 8 9 10

Lefebvre 1991. Laruelle 2011, p. 8. Ibid, p. 70. Ibid, p. 53. Ibid, p. 72, 70

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this tradition: namely photography’s particular and vivid worldliness or social embeddedness. Thus, if realists and anti-realists differ on the conventionality or non-conventionality of the interrelationship between index and icon in photography, they at least both necessarily recognise that photographs establish a definite social-relational encounter with the world – even Umberto Eco in his defence of the photograph as an autonomous symbol recognises this.11 Laruelle, however, pursues a conventionalist anti-realism and anti-Peircian position on the index/icon interface to the point where the photograph becomes absolute and pure idea. Indeed, abstraction is another word for the photograph’s ideational distance from its depicted objects. ‘A photo manifests a distance of an infinite order or inequality to the World’,12 rendering things as ‘inert and sterile’ before they appear.13 ‘Photography allows one to see what a thing that is photographed resembles: the photo is only ever the photo of that which it appears to be the photo’.14 In other words, Laruelle, wants an abstract theory of photography that brackets the idea of photography as a possible mimetic Doubling of the World. Photographs for Laruelle are definable not through what they represent – their perceivable objects – but what they represent as a photographic act or force itself – ‘a vision force’ – and as such are absolutely distinguishable from their extra-representational objects. He talks of photographs as being apparitional in this sense. Thus, for all photo-theory’s commonplace talk of photo-realism, photographs in fact do not share a common space of objectification with perception at all; represented objects in photographs are one thing, their objective referents another. This is why he insists it is more appropriate to talk of photographs resembling other photographs than it is of photographs resembling their depicted objects. Indeed, contrary, to the research-scientific, legal and social uses of photography, photography has never been or can ever be an objective aid to perception. That is, every claim on photographic naturalism and realism suppresses the ‘infinite uni-verse that every time, every single photo deploys …’15 Unsurprisingly, then, abstraction is a transcendentalising process that runs in parallel with the world, as opposed to being in intimate dialogue with it (in the Hegelian and dialectical sense), and as such, is a mode of appearing that is wholly exterior to appearances as a source of knowledge. In the photograph:

11 12 13 14 15

Eco 1976. Laruelle 2011, p. 100. Ibid. Ibid, p. 102. Laruelle 2011, p. 58.

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‘There are only pure “phenomena”, with no in-itself hidden behind them’;16 the photograph is a ‘pure irreflective manifestation of the phenomenon-withoutlogos’.17 A strange disjunction emerges. On the one hand photography invites an ‘unlimited theoretical’ production, but on the other hand, it resists as a condition of its essence – what Laruelle calls the photograph’s ‘literalness’ or reproduction of the real-as-Identity – any social and discursive encounter with its depicted objects. This is perhaps why abstraction takes on a heightened figural character for Laruelle, as opposed to it possessing any kind of socially productive and discursive identity: in creating this flattened and parallel universe all photographs (not just staged or digitally composite ones), are an ‘absolute fiction’.18 Indeed, The Concept of Non-Photography would appear to read, in part, like a hypertrophic extension of Martha Rosler’s 1981 critique of the photodocument; a clean sweeping away of all documentary practice’s social horizons and presumptions. But whereas Rosler presents an ideological critique of humanist approaches to documentary practice, and talks disparagingly about the ‘liberal sensibility’, ‘victim’ ideology, ‘trophy hunting’, ‘weep[ing]’ vision, ‘sentimental mythification’, and ‘aesthetic eternality’ of traditional documentary practice, Laruelle ignores the humanist atrophy of documentary practice and photo-writing altogether, and talks simply of the photo-document’s ideological blankness.19 What concerns him is not that documentary photography and thinking is a haven for aestheticist and humanist idealisations of everyday life, but that it is quite simply a blank art, an inert registration of things. Thus, whether photo-documents appear to aestheticise, idealise or humanise appearances (in the interests of bourgeois ideology) are neither here nor there, because photography is nothing other than a flat fictionalisation of the world. Blankness is what Laruelle sees, therefore, as the distance between what always appears in the image and the world of things it references; there is no correlation. And because there is no correlation, worrying about ‘aestheticisation’ and ‘idealisation’ is irrelevant, given that there is no stable photographic truth that such ‘aestheticisation’ and ‘idealisation’ can be measured against. Talking about photographs as things that might be found wanting in matters of realism is, then, a category mistake. This allows Laruelle to treat the photograph’s ‘inertness’ as the essential expression of the photograph’s fictiveness – that is, 16 17 18 19

Ibid, p. 95. Ibid, p. 96. Ibid, p. 20. Rosler 2006, p. 176, 178, 178, 179, 182, 186.

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blankness, as the space for absolute fiction, becomes the name precisely for the photograph’s capacity for both formal experiment and theoretical speculation. So, if the loss of realism is an irrelevance, then the gap between what appears in the image and the world of things it references can form the basis for speculative modes of contextualisation and reframing, of allegorical conceptual play and chiasmus. The basis for a socially discursive account of the production and reception of photography is obviously threatened here. Photographs lose their socially determined, causal-historic-genealogical identity – their identity as concrete abstractions derived from appearances – to become things operating transcendentally at the limits of thought, that is, irreducible to representation and causation. This dissociation of the photograph from its depicted objects and conditions of production, however, is hardly novel within conventionalist photo-theory, even within montage theory. Post-Kantian realists and idealists and avant-gardists and modernists have of course long attacked the false conflation between resemblance and truth. And, therefore, there is nothing progressive in photo-theory about defending the powers of resemblance of the singular photo-documentary image and its pure or formal integrity, separate from multiple strategies of image-text production. But why, here: the irreal inversion of photography under the heading of abstraction? Why the absolute dismantling of indexicality and mimesis, and the reification of the photograph-as-symbol, in the name of a fictive abstraction? Why do photography and photo-theory need to become this parallel vision-force?

2

Photography, Totality and Anti-Decisionism

Laruelle’s critique of decisionism more broadly is predicated upon on what we might call a fear of philosophical propinquity or subjective intimacy. If Peter Sloterdijk has denigrated Western philosophy as a tragic history of epoché and ascetic contemplation, of maddening distance,20 Laruelle sees it from the opposite perspective as a febrile and maddening entanglement of the philosophical subject with its objects.21 Western Philosophy, or Greco-Occidental thought, is always damagingly caught up with the arbitrary judgements and circularity of ‘doublet-thinking’: the endless passage back and forth from one contrary to another. Even deconstructionism cannot escape this: as soon as the

20 21

Sloterdijk 2012. Laruelle 2010.

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bifucatory logic is dismantled through the introduction of a suspensive third term, the circularity of meaning is restored at a higher level, an accommodating ‘softening’22 of the would-be perils of decisionism; ‘either/or’ is changed for ‘neither one nor the other’, a mere supplemental alterity. Laruelle’s postmetaphysical, post-dialectical, non-differencing-as-decisionism solution, then, is bracingly simple, if technically convoluted: a kind of non-subjectivist halting to the work of philosophical scission and aporetic scrupulousness, in order to situate thinking at the ‘objective’ border between the universalising ambitions of philosophical conceptualisation (the normative) and the axiomatic demands of science; a thinking that rejects the idea of ‘more or less’ alterant turning; a thinking, indeed, that incorporates difference without decisionism into a philosophy that knows itself like a science to be a practice of the real. But this is not an invitation to let science take over the reins of philosophy. On the contrary, if philosophy for Laruelle needs to renew its vows with science – in order to clear out all the epistemological machinery of interpretation and Western philosophy’s decisionist intimacy with its objects – these vows do not in turn produce a new unified scientized philosophy. If philosophy needs science to rid itself of decisionism, this new science (of philosophy-as-science) refuses to forfeit philosophy’s special claims on the speculative. This is why Laruelle’s abstract theory of photography does not actually set out to explain photography scientifically – give it an ontology, or provide a topology of its effects or a taxonomy of its attributes through a discussion of its uses – but rather, render it generically available for ‘unlimited theoretical’ production. This is because photography’s would-be non-resemblance to its objects provides not just a new formal set of possibilities for photographic production, but a new speculative philosophical-scientific context for its non-decisionist reception. In the abandonment of external interpretative frameworks, photography is able to open itself up to a new process of photographic ideational immanence. That is, in detaching photography from the binarisms and ‘stable’ totalities of perception and representation the ‘photographic state of things’ can be rethought in a ‘more “internal”’ way.23 And, therefore, it is precisely here, around the trope of a new ‘internality’, that Laruelle’s post-mimetic theory of photography meets up with his critique of decisionism and his non-philosophy.

22 23

Laruelle 2011 p. 133. ibid, p. 78.

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Nature, Contingency and the Object

In an article on Laruelle’s speculative methodology, Andrew McGettigan has called Laruelle pejoratively a philosopher as strong poet (in Richard Rorty’s sense), in which frustratingly the philosopher’s critical ‘intuition’ does the philosophical work, separate from any adequate historical and theoretically account of his objects of critique.24 There is some truth in this, as we have outlined, but Laruelle’s commitment to theoretical speculation at the expense of the messy ideological, historical and social entanglements of objects and concepts is less a failure of methodological judiciousness and explanatory clarity than a familiar collapse of the critique of dialectics into an abstract rationalism – one that it shares with some aspects of speculative realism. So, the idea that we can subjectivise Laruelle or Laruelle’s anti-decisionist nonphilosopher as a ‘strong poet’ figure conflicts with the scientific reassertion of the object here. There is, in fact, no subject at stake in Laruelle’s nonphilosophy.25 Indeed, both Laruelle and speculative realism represent forms of rationalism that depose post-Kantian philosophy, in the name of a new thinking of the object (a thinking of the object irreducible to the subject).26 In this light, mathematicised science and theoretical speculation in their immanent analysis of the object ‘in-itself’ become the privileged means by which the thinker exposes the false or weak abstractions (ideological think24 25 26

McGettigan 2012, p. 41. Laruelle 2015. There is much discussion about the heterogeneity of the term ‘speculative realism’. Ray Brassier’s short and barbed conspectus on its recent history (see Brassier in Wolfendale 2014) emphasises this. However, despite the very different philosophical approaches to realism internal to its recent life on the ‘philosophical market’, as a broad church ‘speculative realism’, nevertheless, does share across its varied participants a certain kind of post-dialectical dissociation of truth from appearances (illusion), hence the ‘scientism’ of its move against correlationism. Yet as Brassier, points outs, Graham Harman’s object-theoretics owes a greater debt to Heidegger’s anti-scientism than it does to the anti-correlationism of a Rudolf Carnap. Indeed, the aestheticist content of this move has become increasingly apparent (see Harman 2018a, 2018b, 2019). So, if, for convenience sake, ‘speculative realism’ at the moment stands for a certain kind of post-metaphysical rationalist move within philosophy, its philosophical fortunes, will in the long run, certainly not be determined by the term ‘speculative realism’ itself; at some point the crucial differences between participant positions will overspill the term, shattering whatever remains of the term’s (fragile) self-identity. In other words, the inflationary or deflationary scientisms currently built into the term’s ‘popular’ reception (certainly in the philosophically gullible and ahistorical constituencies of the artworld) will have to find their feet in the wider world as part of a dialectical account of realism and representation that has long preceded it.

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ing), and their forms of intellectual support in the consensual intersubjectivity of the philosophical cogito. In a crucial sense, then, the enemy is not exactly appearances here, but the metaphysical projection of thought into appearances, in an echo of the classic post-Kantian and post-Hegelian post-subject ‘scientism’ of Rudolf Carnap.27 If Laruelle calls the outcome of the philosophical cogito decisionism, Quentin Meillassoux calls it correlationism and the ‘becoming-religious of thought’, or the ‘religionizing of reason’.28 Indeed, this link between the idea of correlationism/decisionism and religious thought is fundamental to this scientistic return to the object. Thought of the object initself offers a resistance to the object as a metaphysical, or even dogmatic metaphysical, prop for spiritual values, ‘language games’, or various forms of historical probabilism. Crucially for Meillassoux, this requires a radical retemporalisation of the object. As he argues in Against Finitude (2008): philosophy’s task against this current becoming-truth of belief (fideism, or faith independent of reason) is in the re-ontologisation of the scope of mathematics as an absolutisation of contingency; that is the truth of mathematics lies in the fact that it subjects all things to the conditions of impermanence. And, therefore, the only convincing and non-circular way of exposing idealism and dogmatic metaphysics – and as such avoiding a clash of incommensurable secular and non-secular faiths – is absolutising the contingency of all appearances, natural and social: Critical potency is not necessarily on the side of those who would undermine the validity of absolute truths, but rather on the side of those who would succeed in criticizing both ideological dogmatism and sceptical fanaticism. Against dogmatism, it is important that we uphold the refusal of every metaphysical absolute, but against the reasoned violence of various fanaticisms, it is important that we re-discover in thought a modicum of absoluteness [in defending the contingency of all things] …29 In nature, therefore, things may have primary qualities and essences, but these primary qualities and essences can be at some future point other than they are. Our moon one day may millions and millions of years hence may well not be the moon we know now; its movement and chemical and physical form may change, thereby changing scientific laws; indeed, it is claimed, there is some isotopic evidence that the speed of light may have increased slightly over 27 28 29

Carnap 1997. Meillassoux 2008, p. 46, p. 47. Ibid, p. 49.

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the last two billion years, due to changes in the strength of the electromagnetic force.30 Thus, by exposing nature as well as human production to the rigours of non-human timescales, the basic scientific principle that necessity cannot be derived from appearances (of science inductively arriving at lawfulness through appearances) provides an anti-metaphysical shock to ‘interpretative’, ‘religionist’ and ‘creationist’ thought. Nature is massively indifferent to our human-centred meanings and explanations, no matter how sophisticated. Thus, on this cosmological scale of things, the absolutisation of contingency frees up human thought and praxis from the anthropological limits of thought, thereby allowing us to accept the non-necessity of necessity as the ontological ground of all non-metaphysical, scientific and emancipatory theory. For Laruelle, similarly, the ‘authentically scientific’31 critique of metaphysics is the problem of philosophy’s reduction of thinking to anthropological meaning, hence his attack on post-Kantian philosophy. Here, though, the focus is primarily on the hermeneutic privileging of difference in post-Kantian thought. In post-Kantian philosophy, ontologisation of difference (contingency, heterogeneity), far from freeing philosophy from closed totalities, produces a new metaphysical move: the ‘coupling’ and mutual constitution of differences. That is, philosophies of difference are merely localised redistributions of essences; a rearrangement and displacement of them, creating new idealist unities and totalities. The fundamental problem of decisionist post-Kantian philosophy, therefore, lies in its inability or unwillingness to ‘acquire a scientific, non-aporetic knowledge’ of itself,32 beyond this distribution and rearrangement of differences.33 Laruelle argues, then, that the failure to achieve these ends is due to the abandonment of the real as a non-reflexive reality, or what he calls the One. The One is a kind of cognate of an extra-discursive real (although this is not to be confused with matter as such, in a kind of positivistic or empirical sense), insofar as the One is immediately given in a transcendental sense, that is, constitutes an ‘all-preceding’34 reality. The One or Indivision is: Absolutely immediate: … given (to) itself without passing through the mediation of a universal horizon, a nothingness, extasis or scission, a ‘dis-

30 31 32 33 34

See Kurzweil 2018, pp. 139–40. Laruelle 2010 p. xviii. Ibid, p. 11. Ibid, p. xxii. Ibid, p. 153.

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tance’. It is strictly non-reflexive, that is to say absolutely singular and autonomous as such before any universal (form, meaning, relation, syntax, difference, etc.).35 As such, the One is distinguished from the empirical and ideality: by a pure transcendental distinction that is immediately a ‘real’ distinction … the real no longer designating the ontic but rather [a] sphere of non-reflexive immanence. Transcendental distinction is here grounded ‘in the nature of the thing’ …36 The One, therefore, is the object of an indivisible transcendental experience that is given to itself ‘as what it is’.37 Hence, for Laruelle, the One is not other to Difference, but is coextensive with Difference. Difference is not what thought ‘exits’ from and ‘returns to’ but is the very ground of the ‘real absolute’.38 This means that ‘we do not exit from philosophy into the One; we describe the vision-in-One of philosophy’.39 The indivision of the One therefore guarantees the non-decisionist ‘immanent Unity’40 of philosophy and of science. In this respect, Meillassoux and Laruelle share a certain objectivist, desubjectivising spirit: the adaptation of science as a would-be enlargement of philosophical judgement outside of the vicissitudes of a ‘critical-critical’ and aporetic thought of the object – a leap beyond finitude and hermeneutics, we might say. But if these moves rightly question the valorisation of humancentred meaning based on non-cosmological time scales, the cost of the rejection of the limits of being-thought is the demotion and disconnection of the links between praxis, meaning and abstraction. In freeing praxis from thought, as consequence of freeing thought causally from its objects, praxis and thought are reunited under the auspices of a new speculative rationalism; thought leaps over mere appearances to announce a thought indifferent to the ‘givens’ and ‘necessities’ of the world. In this respect, the emphasis upon contingency all the way down returns philosophy to the spirit of a pre-Kantian Gnosticism. Because all things are contingent, then, thought should at all points be equal to this.

35 36 37 38 39 40

Ibid, pp. 18–19. Ibid, p. 185. Ibid, p. 53. Ibid, p. 20. Ibid, p. 155. Ibid, p. 152.

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This turns crucially on Laruelle’s and speculative realism’s understanding of the critique of Sufficient Reason.

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Contingency and Sufficient Reason

To claim the necessity of non-necessity, and as such reject that things have good reason to be as they are rather than otherwise, is by definition to reject the claims of Sufficient Reason. There are no immutable reasons why things should be as they are, even the movement of the planets. As Frank Ruda says: ‘the only sufficient reason for things to be how they are is that there is no sufficient reason for them to be how they are at all’.41 But if this releases objects in the long run from the logic of necessity and dogmatic positivism, nevertheless in the short run it makes it impossible to infer that one set of objects, state of affairs or events are more probable or feasible than others, and therefore that a given set of objects, state of affairs or events are necessarily preferable; that is, that there is good reason for one thing to exist and take one particular form rather than another. The critique of Sufficient Reason, therefore, casts a chronic ontological instability or insecurity over such claims, insofar as such claims can always be held to be arbitrary. Now of course, this is precisely what drives this rationalist materialism’s non-circular claims to post-metaphysical liberation: yes, the absolutisation of contingency is destabilising, but this is precisely its strength, because it allows extensive scope for ‘unlimited theoretical’ speculation – as we have noted in Laruelle – as a result of the unlocking of thought from the givenness of objects. Because things can always be other than they are means that philosophy loses its fear of the object, insofar as thinking is no longer forced to subject itself to the causal trajectories, pregiven histories and ontic intricacies and phenomenal stabilities of its objects – hence Laruelle’s rejection of photography’s representational, social-relational intimacy with World, City and History. Undoubtedly, the critique of Sufficient Reason is fundamental to the critique of any naïve realism or historicism; objects in and for themselves are not foundational for the natural sciences or social sciences, and concomitantly, in relation to our historical understanding the present is not the pregiven outcome of the past. This is something that all post-Spinozan materialist philosophies (including Hegel) share with speculative realism. But the absolutising of contingency here as a de-subjectivising of the philosophical cogito is unable to over-

41

Ruda 2012, p. 61.

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come a debilitating paradox: if everything is contingent, theories, social objects, natural kinds, then something might not be contingent; if everything is possible in the long term, then, something might not be possible, that is, the possibility of ‘everything is possible’ might include the possibility that ‘everything is not possible’. There is always a possibility of non-possibility, always a possibility of non-contingency. Thus in presupposing, therefore, that the non-necessity of necessity is the answer to idealism and dogmatic metaphysics on the grounds that it blocks off metaphysical language games and arbitrary interpretations, rationalist materialism of this stripe is guilty, as Ruda says, of a ‘non-dialectical generalisation of un-totalizability’.42 That is, once contingency becomes the only name for necessity and therefore precedes existence and its struggles, the absolutisation of contingency becomes a metaphysical and abstract notion itself, destructive of the continuity necessary for thought and practice and scientific enquiry in mortal, non-cosmological time.43 As Ruda explains: Contingency can only be logically anterior to any existence if there already is existence. Contingency is the retroactive anteriority to any existence because there is existence (thus it is not contingency that generates existence, but existence that generates insight into the very anteriority of contingency and hence already determines contingency).44 The necessity of contingency is itself contingent.45 Or rather, the only necessity is not necessarily that of contingency. Hence the major outcome of the absolute release of contingency, of the liberation of the object from necessity, is that in the short term, in historical time, paradoxically, it leaves everything as it is, because if there is no reason why things are the way they (within a given mortal time frame), then objects and their relations lose all traction as things that may change or necessarily resist change, or conversely may necessarily require change because they resist change. On this account, inferring change, on the basis of a probabilistic account of a given set of tendencies is ruled out of court from the beginning. This is because such probabilistic tendencies are themselves held to be contingent or arbitrary under all conditions. The political, and philosophical and scientific, consequences which emerge from the absolute necessity of contingency, then, are deeply unappealing for 42 43 44 45

Ibid, p. 68. See Macintyre 1990, pp. 196–215. Ruda 2012, p. 68. Hegel 1977a.

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practice: as in Gnosticism, thought is uncoupled from the mediations between contingency, conceptualisation and the real; and as such unmoored from its embodiment in (self-constrained) practices and living subjects. This presents certain challenges, consequently, to this would-be new unity of science and philosophy. That is, it is unclear what the relationship between this new speculative unity of science and philosophy and practice actually is, and thus what it might enable faced with the intractabilities of the world.

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Philosophy as Science?

When science speaks about the mind-independent world, this does not mean that science believes that it is matter alone which guarantees materialism or the real for science, as if the truth of things is secured by the physicalist appropriation of a mind-independent nature. The real, rather, is produced at a conceptual level out of this encounter with matter and the object, insofar as science works to produce the real through this process of conceptualisation. The conceptualisations of science, therefore, do not mediate the real of a mindindependent world; they actively produce the real. However, they do not produce the real simply as Idea, but as a space for further enquiry into, and transformation of, the real. This is why the discursive-real/real antipode of decisionism, correlationalism and speculative realism, appears to misunderstand how science actually works in the world, given their reliance on a commonplace or naïve realist view of scientific practice perpetrated by many scientists themselves: that science posits the truth of an external nature separate from the subjective interests of scientists. In other words, the non-correlationist model of science or philosophy as science is a phantasm: a science that denies the subjectivity of the scientists who produce it. Thus, contrary to the positing of truth as externality to the untruth of internality, science opens up a space in which scientific discourse has ‘real[existential] consequences’, as Alexenka Zupančič puts it. As she argues: The fact that the discourse of science creates, opens up a space in which [scientific] discourse has (real) consequences also means that it can produce something that not only becomes a part of reality, but that can also change it.46

46

Zupančič 2014, p. 27.

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Modern science literally creates a new real(ity); it is not that the object of science is mediated by its formulas, it is indistinguishable from them; it does not exist outside of them, yet it is real.47 Science returns to the real; and, therefore, effectively the conventionalist argument about the real being an effect of discourse – which drives the critique of correlationism in the new rational materialism – is functionally misconceived. In other words, the conceptual production of scientific knowledge does not subjectivise the world – and as such produce it as discourse and philosophical speculation – it is the answering call to the real produced by scientists that the conceptualisation of the real necessarily demands.

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The Temptations of Scientism

One can see, then, why, these forms of rational materialism have a certain scientistic and secular appeal at the moment, under the pressure of what we might call the Žižekian-type pincer movement of contemporary liberal fideism and fundamentalist dogmatisms. The neo-liberal rationalisation and tolerance of stupidity and ignorance as ‘personal belief’, and the justification of ‘revealed truth’ as ‘spiritual flourishing’ in various religious fundamentalisms, spreads the dogmatic subjectivisation of thought into every nook and cranny of capitalist life, producing, as a counter to this, a tempting scientistic reaction or point of objectivist intolerance, inside contemporary philosophy, in its critique of both subjectivism and positivism – particularly in the light of the perceived radical impotence of post-Kantian philosophy. Against Finitude and Laruelle’s speculative scientism thus have a certain family resemblance to the post-ideological invective of Richard Dawkins:48 a plague on all your ideological plagues. Indeed, this is a new version of an old debate within the legacy of the Enlightenment. The new philosophical scientism eschews the historicity of reason (as in the immanent spirit of Hegel), in order to re-scientise reason in philosophy as the antithesis of ideology.49 True emancipation, on its watch, lies in protecting science from the discursive cage of theory and embracing truth in philosophy as a knowledge of the ‘great Outside’, as a big, bold clear-out of the ‘religionising’ of thought – or, in a slightly different register, philosophy doing to death the death of the death of God. But back on earth, in the day-to-day workings of ideology and practice, objects are not simply contingent essences that need 47 48 49

Ibid, p. 25. Dawkins 2006. For a Dawkinsesque defence of the legacy of the Enlightenment, see Israel 2012.

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liberating from the subjectivist grip of correlationism or decisionism (in order to resist the lures of fideism), but contradictory sites of subject-object mediation. This means that the ‘object-liberation movement’ of the new rationalist materialism fails (or more precisely rejects) a principal test of the dialectical tradition: the unity of appearance and reality. In this tradition there are no mere appearances or mere illusions; appearances and illusions are a product of the movement of the real itself. And, therefore, all appearances and illusions contain some measure of truth; that is, appearances and illusions reveal as much as they conceal the reality that is manifest in them.50 If the conceptualisation of science answers the real, then, it answers it on these terms: thought and praxis are immanent to illusion. This requires a subject,51 therefore, who is transcendentally constituted not through a scientifically neutral access to the object-in-itself, or the indivisibility of the One, but through the vicissitudes of struggle and failure. This means in turn a fundamental re-correlation of subject and object. As Slavoj Žižek argues: we cannot gain full neutral access to reality because we are part of it. The epistemological distortion of our access to reality is the result of our inclusion in it, not of our distance from it … the very epistemological failure (to reach reality) is an indication and effect of our being part of reality, of our inclusion within it.52 The absolutisation of contingency breaks this dialectical link, in its non-dialectical totalisation of things, by treating all appearances as subjective illusions. As a result, what Marx calls the ‘relative necessity’ of appearances (the explanatory link between appearances and objective/subjective ‘real possibilities’ in the world) is made incomprehensible.53 Indeed, in Laruelle’s concept of photography it is made utterly trivial. This is why conceptualisation as the theorisation of appearances in the dialectical tradition is an answer to the immanent transformation of the real, and not simply, the means by which appearances ‘lack of reason’ are exposed.

50 51 52 53

Sayers 1985. Roberts 2011b. Žižek, ‘Interlude 5: Correlationalism and Its Discontents’, in Žižek 2012, p. 646. This is principally an attack on Epicurus’s speculative critique of necessity; see Marx 1975a, p. 44. ‘It is a misfortune to live in necessity, but to live in necessity is not a necessity’ (Epicurus, quoted by Marx 1975a, p. 43).

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Flattening of the Real

Laruelle’s concept of non-photography (and non-philosophy) is particularly guilty therefore of this anti-dialectical flattening of appearance and the real – if one can actually assign culpability to a system that doesn’t see the real as a philosophical problem at all in these terms, and therefore has no sense of the relationship between appearances and knowledge, indeed, refuses it out of hand: the object of philosophy is not the conceptualisation of the real as a delimited manifestation of the real, of an intervention into the real, but the ‘specularisation of real objects’.54 In other words, given that for Laruelle the photographic image is an image-thing, rather than an image of the thing, appearances have no constitutive relationship to truths that possibly stand ‘behind them’ inferentially. Photographs harbour ‘nothing invisible’.55 In other words, appearances have no immanent relationship to the real. This is why his abstract photo-theory wants nothing to do with photography’s would-be relational, conceptual claims on its real objects (the World, History, the City): ‘Far from giving back perception, history or actuality, etc, in a weakened form’,56 photography reveals an ‘immanent chaos’57 that is derived directly from the gap between the image-thing and the image of the thing. Because, as Laruelle declares, a photograph is a semblance that resembles nothing – a flat identity in the last instance – there is no requirement on the part of an abstract theory of photography for thought in fact to be ‘accountable’ to appearances; indeed, for theory to be accountable to appearances is to undermine the very possibility of speculative thought itself. ‘A photo is more than a window or an opening, it is an infinite open, an unlimited universe from vision to the pure state’.58 Photographs are, on the contrary, algorithms – transitional states – not schemas, he says, and as such, opposed to every philosophical synthesis that would hierarchise their contents based on a notion of inferential truth. Consequently, photographic appearances do not disclose abstractions (social division, spatial relations, the unconscious), they are themselves abstractions, that is, manifestations of photography as a field of infinite materialities. And Laruelle calls this algorithmic potential, photography’s essential fractality (that is, its immanent resistance to philosophical synthesis as a condition of the gap between image-thing and image-as-thing, and not empirical evidence

54 55 56 57 58

Brassier 2003, p. 32. Laruelle 2011, p. 105. Ibid, p. 53. Ibid, p. 95. Ibid, p. 108.

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of the photograph’s hidden geometric relations, in the manner of chaos theory). Fractality, then, is the intensive excess derived from photography’s irreducibility to representation. As such, in his later refinement of this theory in Photo-Fiction, a Non– Standard Aesthetics (2012), fractality as a critique of representation becomes more precisely the ‘onto-vectorial’ and ‘quantic’ aspect of the photograph59 ‘liberating possibilities of new virtualities’.60 He calls this process, more broadly, photo-fiction or thought-art, in which the ‘photo is now the end of realism via an excess of the real and the absence of reality’.61 Indeed, the photographer ‘loses’ his or her causal and historico-conceptual relation to the world, in exchange for an art of ‘interweaving disciplines’.62 The quantic and the onto-vectorial, consequently, are forged by, and folded into, the ‘impossibilities of representation’.63 This in turn provides the jumping off point for a philosophy (non-philosophy) that builds off the absolute fiction of the photograph, without the conventional props of description or metaphor. Such descriptive and metaphoric moves are simply photo-centric (that is decisionist), and accordingly tied to appearances and the legacy of realism. As a result, the meaning of the photograph cannot be produced historically or dialectically, only quantically through the immanent operations of the photo-fictive operations of the photograph itself. In such photo-fictions and their theoretical production the conceptual image takes on an ‘objective appearance’64 and, therefore, denies the world-determining mimesis and realist social-relation of standard photography and critical-theoretic or genealogical-historical criticism. In [photo] fiction the objective appearances are materially the same as in the photograph … but they do not auto-conform themselves according to sufficiency, and it is in this that they form a probable chaos via the absence of the world and its sufficiency …65 In these terms, abstraction as a non-consistent multiplicity, here, is a version of the absolutisation of contingency at the level of perception, and returns us to all the problems of the post-dialectical tradition that besets this rationalist materialism and speculative realism. 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

Laruelle 2012, p. 58. Ibid, p. 9. Ibid, p. 21. Ibid, p. 26. Ibid, p. 30. Ibid, p. 80. Ibid, p. 81.

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The Giving and Asking for Reasons

Photographs clearly are not simply windows on the world or fictive symbols, they are indeed abstractions as Laruelle correctly insists, but they are abstractions not simply because they constitute in their theoretical reception a ‘transcendental creative force’66 or refuse the ‘complacencies of recognition’,67 and ‘perceptual normality’,68 but because they are the outcome of, and instate, a specific set of social determinations. In this sense, photographs are properly concrete abstractions (socially embedded signs) that are also real abstractions (that is, subject to and the product of conflicting processes of social and technological reproduction and commodity exchange that operate transindividually behind the backs of producers and spectators alike).69 And this is why the appearances of photography, therefore, are not ‘pure phenomena’ or blank surfaces waiting for unlimited quantic speculation, but the objective concretisation of these processes of abstraction and as such recoverable in theory and interpretation. Photography, then, is both a process of (real) abstraction and a system of appearance-generating mechanisms by which social abstractions are produced as signs as the outcome of this objective process. And as a result, the appearances of photography are caught up in the conflicts and contradictions of these processes as the source of photography’s (abstract) truthclaims. Thus, at one level, Laruelle, in the spirit of the critique of Sufficient Reason, is right; traditional photo-criticism is happy to take most photography on trust (indeed he calls his theoretical move a critique of the Principle of Sufficient Photography). Accordingly, we need a theory of abstraction in photography and not as a formal afterthought or critical addendum; photographs are always more than their given or assumed appearances. This is in order to tell us that photographs are not mere things, not mere appearances, not mere illusory symbols, but conflictual ideological entities, that, in their very fallen and fractured ideological condition, open out onto the world. Consequently, we also need a theory of abstraction that resists the received categories and generic assumptions of naïve realism; a theory of abstraction, that is, as Laruelle puts it, resistant to false or pregiven syntheses and historicist closures, of the dull machinery of generic interpretation. Laruelle is correct to insist, therefore, that as abstractions, photographs demand an active theoretical engagement. 66 67 68 69

Ibid, p. 141. Ibid, p. 109. Ibid, p. 79. For a discussion of the transindividual function of real abstraction, see Sohn-Rethel 1978.

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What we don’t require, however, is a theory of abstraction in which a version of the absolutisation of contingency dismantles the link between appearances and truth-telling as the necessary precondition of abstraction as speculation (‘photography is a representation that neither reasons nor reflects’).70 This is a wholly underdetermined account of photography, in which the inferential powers of photography – of photographic appearance as conceptually contentful in a determinate fashion – are weakened, diminishing the place of the photograph in a socially discursive account of representation as a ‘giving and asking for reasons’.71 In reifying singularity – in Laruelle’s language, the quantic and fractal – therefore, the truth-producing aporias of the photograph’s production disappear into the indeterminate and non-dialectical abstractedness of photography as a non-consistent multiplicity; a theory of abstraction without abstraction, so to speak, without social-relation and the real.

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Abstraction and World-Building

What kind of relationship between science and representation, then, best serves photography as a form of abstraction? How does photo-theory avoid the pitfalls of both naïve realism and the Gnostic theoreticism of photography as a parallel ‘vision force’? This turns, I believe, on how we think about photographic practice and theory as actively possessing appearances. In this way the active possession of appearances in photography is closer to Darstellungsmethode in Marx’s sense (the capacity to produce truth from the active displacement or inversion of appearances; representation as the non-mimetic organisation of particulars), than it is to simply Vertretung (replication, copying).72 Hence, it is closer in theory and practice to representation as a form of staged production, as ‘acting on’, than it is to the conventional notion of representation as ‘acting for’, or the naturalistic reproduction of appearances. Darstellungsmethode’s active possession of appearances as a process of abstraction in the production and reception of the photograph, consequently, is not a matter of epistemology (of reflection), but, rather, an act of world building. That is, the work of possession (judgement) already begins from the process of abstraction (conceptualisation) that is involved in taking the photograph and in its reception and judgement; abstraction works on abstraction.73 70 71 72 73

Laruelle 2012, p. 37. For a defence of the inferential role of representation, see Brandom 2009, p. 184. See Fulda 1978, pp. 180–216. For a discussion of abstraction and concrete abstraction, see Toscano 2008, pp. 273–87.

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Nevertheless, it is Vertretung that is invariably identified with abstraction in photography, given the idea that copying presupposes an instrumental and selfdistancing relation to the world. The idea of the possession of appearances as a reflexive and active process (as an answering response to the demands of the real as ‘not-all’), so crucial to the practice of abstraction in Darstellungsmethode, is forgotten. Yet, it is precisely abstraction in these terms that is able to think the relationship between appearances and the demands of the real, discursiveness and the extra-discursive, as a condition of transformative practice. For it is precisely abstraction as Darstellungsmethode – as the dialectical possession of appearances – as a claim on the inferential content of appearances, and therefore of the production of the real as the conceptualisation of the ‘notall’, that creates a ‘new space of the real’74 in our theories and interpretations. The real is not an essence or substance to be ‘found’ either discursively or extradiscursively, it is a limit-condition to be defined by theory and interpretation. Laruelle and speculative realism, however, in their respective versions of ‘world building’ as abstraction, offer a version of Darstellungsmethode without this necessary torsion. Indeed, they want abstraction without the real of the ‘not-all’ of appearances – without the inferential ‘truth’ of appearances – and therefore without a subject who, as an active part of this process, is part of this transformative and consequentialist struggle inside, and for, the real. Finally, then, photographs may be opaque, but their opacity is grounded in the irreducible sociality of appearances; things appear and have meanings, because other things have happened before the photograph was taken, and therefore knowing why these other things happened will provide an entry point for the ‘giving and asking of reasons’ in front of the photograph. But this move is not an updated version of the social history of photography. Laruelle’s resistance to this covert positivism of photographic theory is correct. Photographs cannot be made transparent by better theorising, or better modes of interpretative (decisionist) understanding. But this does not mean that the causality of photographs cannot be reclaimed, for good reasons, and made to work in the interests of theory (abstract truth) and interpretation. As an abstraction in these terms – as something that produces modes of abstraction from out of its sociality – the photograph is, therefore, above all else, a ‘contentful’ intentional act.

74

Zupančič 2014 p. 26 and p. 28.

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Philosophy, Culture, Image: Jacques Rancière’s Constructivism Modern continental philosophers – or more precisely modern French philosophers – have, historically, not been the best or most welcome judges of art.1 When they have not been hitching a ride on the back of some blue-chip reputation in order to stoke the fires of high-end conceptualisation, they have been scuttling around in artistic marginalia pursuing some unfathomable fancy, like a love-struck teenager indifferent to the absurdity of their love-object. Top prize in the former category goes to Gilles Deleuze’s hystericised Francis Bacon as grand master; symptomatic of the latter is the kitsch-loving bathos of Jacques Derrida’s reading of Valerio Adami and Louis Althusser’s strange paean to Leonardo Cremoni, in which Cremoni’s forlorn domestic interiors populated by fragmented human forms are identified with the ‘real abstractions’ of an anti-humanist project. This is why although there is a great deal of philosophy of art and of philosophical writing on art, there is not much compelling art criticism by philosophers. It is as if the desire to affirm philosophy as the site of art’s coming-to-being drives philosophy into the very thing modern art and philosophy rightly mistrust: the art enthusiast or aficionado. Most philosophical writing on art is either after-the-fact in its judgements, or, through the speculative elision of concept and work, engaged in producing judgements that are wildly capricious or irrelevant. This is largely a result of the fact that the movement of philosophical thought from concept to artwork, and from artwork to concept, is rarely internal to the conflicted labour immanent to the work of art and its relations to the conflicted labour of other artworks. Artworks are invariably fitted up for scrutiny on the basis of their susceptibility to philosophical abstraction, and not on the basis of the historicity of their technicity and form. (Ironically this is precisely Derrida’s point in his critique of Heidegger’s reading of Van Gogh’s ‘peasant shoes’).2 Philosophy arrives at the doorstep of the artwork offering sustenance to what it sees as art’s conceptually bedraggled and parched identity, whereas, on the contrary, it should be attending to the thing that provides modern art with its identity – the internal violence of the art-

1 Published in Philosophy of Photography, Vol 1, Number 1, 2010, pp. 69–79. 2 Derrida 1987.

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work’s historicity. This is why modernist criticism has always been sniffy and derogatory about philosophers on art: philosophers lose sight of the contingency of the object’s making and therefore lose sight of the significance of the artwork’s claims on the particular as against its exemplary status. But, more pertinently, in the drive of philosophy to defend the extension or expansion of the artwork through philosophical reflection, the artwork’s self-disablement or self-violation is rendered amenable, and even opaque, to conceptualisation. This drive in philosophy to make the artwork amenable (as philosophical exemplum, as the ground and bearer of abstraction) was one of Adorno’s preoccupations in Aesthetic Theory (1984).3 And, of course, it is Adorno above all other modern philosophers who could be said to have avoided the stooge-like applications of philosophy to art. His focus on the emergence of the artwork from the mediations of social and cultural division asked that the philosopher fashion his/her judgements from a primary reflection on the ‘disfigured’ materials of these divisions. The virtue of this model is that it rested on a conception of judgement and interpretation as immanent praxis: ‘any statements about content remains mere verbiage unless it is wrung from technical findings’.4 Or, more precisely, the work of judgement and interpretation must, in a process of a mimetic attentiveness, embody the work of the artwork. Judgement and interpretation are wrested from the realms of reflection theory (criticism of the representational or epistemological adequacy between artwork and the world) and repositioned in the realm of the vicissitudes of artistic labour. In this respect, Adorno seeks to clarify why the intersection between the ‘labour’ of the artwork and the ‘labour’ of judgement and interpretation secure a model of ‘best’ interpretative practice. The mimetic labour of judgement, as the interpretation of sensuous particulars, enables the conceptualisation of the artwork all the way down. This is a cursory description of Adorno’s theory of praxis, but it points to what the conceptual labour of philosophy, might do, or has to do, if it is to do the work of art criticism against the heteronomous effects of philosophical abstraction. It must provide an account of the artwork’s particularity and internal relationality as the basis for a discussion of the problem of art’s social form and visibility. In this regard Jacques Rancière is one of the few post-war French philosophers to take up this labour on the social visibility of art, or something like it, to any real and substantive effect. This is largely to do with

3 Adorno 1984. 4 Adorno 2002, p. 5.

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the fact that, on the one hand, he has always seen himself as a historian of social and cultural form (of counter-hegemonic cultural practices; of the popular reception of the image; of the early French labour movement and workers’ self-creativity) and that, on the other hand – a rare thing for contemporary French philosophy – he is actually conversant with post-war Anglo-American cultural and artistic theory, which, in its mediation of post-war French theory, has presented back to the theory of the image in French philosophy a series of highly critical reflections on its various abstractions, and, as such, has provided one of the most productive frameworks for a critique of the dominant form of this abstraction in post-1960s French philosophy: the subsumption of the image under the concept of ‘regime-thinking’. Early Barthes, Althusser, Debord, Foucault, Baudrillard and Virilio – to name the most obvious – have all ascribed, in their critique of the state-sponsored and market-organised technologically produced image, a certain logic of conformity, instrumentality and systematic coercion. Indeed, a high premium has been placed in this canon on the ‘dead’ life of technologically produced and distributed images: namely, such images make one culturally stupid or amorally culpable, or both. Clearly these writers enter this terrain from different political positions and exit it armed with different philosophical and artistic outcomes, but broadly, they all follow the Situationist notion of capital-become-image, in treating art and the technologically produced image under post-war capitalism as the effects of an exultant system of control and reification. Consequently, in this tradition the popular image only ever asserts its specular and mythic identity; it rarely speaks back – and in turn spectators rarely speak back – in defiance of its assumed supine, subordinate or monological function within this system. Rancière’s familiarity with the critique of this kind of regime-thinking in Anglo-American cultural studies is important therefore, because it is precisely the engagement with the indeterminacies of spectatorship and the fissures of ideological interpellation in such cultural and artistic theory since the late 1970s that has allowed Rancière’s critique of post-1960s regime thinking – in short, the society of the spectacle – to develop and find an audience outside of France. In fact, an interesting entwinement between Rancière’s work and the legacy of Anglo-American cultural studies has emerged. Rancière’s early critique of Althusser and structuralism paralleled the rise of Anglo-American cultural studies’ critique of Althusser and the emergence of the notion of the ‘creative’ or ‘resistant’ consumer, and, as a consequence, as more of his books have appeared, we can see how much of his theory of counter-interpellation through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s has chimed with the counter-hegemonic theories and ‘non-passive’ cultural subject of Anglo-American cultural studies

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in the same period (for instance, compare Rancière’s work to John Fekete’s writing from the early 1990s.)5 This is why Rancière is the nearest French philosophy after 1968 gets to Anglo-American cultural theory, and why he has now become so well received in the Anglo-American academy. Because, on the one hand, his work allows continued space for the notion of the ‘resistant’ spectator/reader, and, on the other hand, he advances a strong methodological commitment to the presence of philosophy in cultural theory and art theory and the presence of cultural theory and art theory in philosophy.6 This means that, with respect to the above, there is an abiding commitment to working through the symbolic materials of cultural production as a working through of the demands of conceptualisation. Yet, this is not to say his writing is, in the customary language of contemporary cultural theory, interdisciplinary, or that in advocating the interpenetration of philosophy, historical studies and cultural theory, he is engaged in the development of a theory of art, culture, and the image. As he has claimed recently, far from his work being interdisciplinary, it is in-disciplinary in scope. My problem has always been to escape the division between disciplines, because what interests me is the position of the distribution of territories, which is always a way of deciding who is qualified to speak about what.7 The outcome of this is a practice of cultural theorisation that stresses, above all else, that the production of meaning is not the ‘deepening’ or nuancing of explanation (providing a theory of a given artefact or form as the basis for making an authoritative or exemplary judgement), but about making things ‘resonate differently’: leap, so to speak, from the host discipline or practice in which the work or form is embedded, to other practices, to the production and consideration of other works of art and knowledge-bases.8 Hence, the exercise of the critical powers of the philosopher/theorist is closer to that of creative montage and dissensus. The job of the philosopher/theorist is not to provide 5 Fekete 1991. 6 Although this is not to say there have been major disputes over his legacy, certainly pre- the 1990s. For an engaging discussion of these conflicts within Anglo-American cultural studies, see Rifkin 2008. In Britain, Rifkin has been, since the late 1970s, one of the key mediating figures between Rancière’s work and cultural studies in Britain. The provocation and irony of in-disciplinarity is not to be underestimated, when the ruling dispositif of regime-thinking, certainly in Debord and Foucault, has been, precisely the disciplinary function of the image. 7 Rancière 2010. The provocation and irony of in-disciplinarity is not to be underestimated, when the ruling dispositif of regime-thinking, certainly in Debord and Foucault, has been, precisely the disciplinary function of the image. 8 Ibid.

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a historicist account of the work’s formation, or even a theoretical exegesis of its conceptual ramifications, but an articulation of its emancipatory or critical content for those – the non-professional majority – who might appropriate it in their own interests. In this respect, despite his or her ‘expertise’, the work of the philosopher/theorist is to honour or enable the freely exercised powers of the ‘common’ spectator or reader. What counts is how the philosopher/theorist opens up a space for the political subjectivisation of the spectator/reader as someone who is able to construct, ‘their own poem, their own film, with what is front of them; and then they “prolong it in words”’.9 On this basis Rancière’s position is clearly indebted to a modern tradition of ‘reader-response’ theory: the value of interpretation lies in how it enters the life-histories, life-struggles and life-narratives of the spectator/reader; and in this sense the common spectator/reader owes little or nothing to the approved skills of the professional interpreter, who, in his or her customary eagerness to explain, blocks or deflects this democratic process of reception. In a broad sense, then, there is no hegemony of capitalist spectacle, because there are no spectators of the spectacle; no mute carriers of its powers of reification. Consequently, Rancière’s thinking is heir to a long line of dialogic-reception thinking, from Valentin Volshinov, to Arnold Hauser, Jürgen Habermas, the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, and even the liberal literary critic John Carey.10 Essentially, popular cultural works and works of art are transitive points in an endless and fluctuating conversation that has no prior expectations or destiny. Yet, if Rancière is indebted to a notion of the common spectator and reader, this is accompanied by a particular ideological reticence in his understanding of the modernist counter-hegemonic role of art. This derives from a general unwillingness on his part – in many ways antithetical to this legacy of reader-response theory – to countenance any partisan ideological role for the artwork that the ‘common’ spectator and reader defers to, on the grounds that the spectator and reader are, according to this logic, placed in the position of the passive recipient of the work’s would-be critical beneficence. In other words, partisan critique in art – as another invidious example of interpretative mastery for Rancière – further prevents the extended conversation of cultural democracy taking place. Here Rancière inherits Adorno’s strictures on the direct politicisation of art and the limits of social critique, on the basis that the emancipatory effects derived from such works are either vague and nonverifiable or utterly presumptuous and after the fact. There is much to agree

9 10

Ibid. Carey 1992.

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with Rancière (after Adorno) on this question: the belief in the transparency or direct potency of social critique in art is a recurring leftist phantasm that has historically overburdened the politics of art. Rancière’s solution to this problem, however, is very different to Adorno’s – the linking of the re-functioning of art’s autonomy to an ethics of fidelity on the part of the spectator to the work’s absolute singularity – namely, that the production of conversation in response to the artwork – as a process of political subjectivisation – is valuable, less as a result of a collective process of critical position-taking, than as a free exchange of interpretation as an instance of democracy in action. Producing one’s ‘own’ poem, film and artwork in the act of reception, then, is where the real and abiding political (emancipatory) effects of art lie. In other words, mimetic attentiveness for Rancière carries a primary fidelity to the quality of conversation the work generates, rather than to a defence of the singularity of the work itself. But such strictures on ‘mastery’, politics and knowledge in art stores up all kind of problems, which a commitment to the free-ranging common spectator and reader cannot solve or obviate. This is acutely demonstrated in Rancière’s extended discussion of the image, photography and politics in The Future of the Image (2007) and The Emancipated Spectator (2009).11

1

The De-Placed Image

In The Future of the Image and The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière attempts to fashion a different set of places – a different spatial logic – for cultural production and reception beyond the politics of negation of Romantic anti-capitalism and the incipient nihilism of modernism and postmodernism, which he sees as having dominated post-1960s regime-thinking on representation. This is an ambitious agenda, and accordingly his account of the image comes to mediate, more broadly, his political commitment to his ‘out-of-place’ – or what I call his ‘de-placed’ – democratic subject. Thus, what is under scrutiny is precisely where the relations between author, artwork, image, mass culture, spectator and politics might be properly and practically located. In this respect, at one level, Rancière follows Anglo-American cultural studies to the letter: the nonplace or no-place attributed to the work of art and to the critical spectator, and the uncultured status attributed to the mass cultural consumer in situationist and post-situationist thinking is a myth. There are no no-places, no hierarchical positions determining absolute cultural competence, and, there-

11

Rancière 2007, 2009.

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fore, at the same time no in-different places occupied by interpretants.12 As a result he attacks the three most familiar cultural/political solutions presented by artistic theory as a critique of the prevailing regime-thinking, namely: modernist historicism, or the belief that abstraction or non-representation presents an advance over the representational logic of the system as a whole (indeed it is an imperative in a world where all images circulate in the interests of capital, pace Jean-François Lyotard); the dissolution of the distance between artwork and spectator in a celebration of unmediated festivity over spectacle (the critique of capitalism is essentially the critique of distance); and the notion that art is at its most political and persuasive when it adopts an avant-garde role (art’s singularity lies in its continuous powers of negation). For Rancière all these critiques position art and the image in the wrong place, so to speak, in so far as they all base their engagements and solutions on a false equation between, either, emancipation and the overcoming of apartness through the immediate or future rejection or suspension of mediation, or, emancipation as the insertion of direct mediation into the social process as an overcoming of apartness; the notion of the artistic autonomy of the avant-garde as a pre-figuration of the eventual dissolution of apartness itself. None of these positions address, in any fundamental way, the aesthetic labour required in the reordering and redistribution of the sensible, or common forms of appearance as part of an emancipatory politics worthy of its name – preferring, in some sense to withdraw art from the challenges of cultural praxis. Accordingly, 12

There is a certain parallel on this question of the ‘emancipated spectator’ from below and my work with Dave Beech on the notion of the ‘cultured philistine’ in the mid-tolate 1990s. Indeed, it might be argued that our anti-aesthetic ‘philistine’ is far more robust as a democratic category of indisciplinary spectatorship than Rancière’s aestheticized indisciplined spectator, insofar as, despite the fact that the philistine cannot be reduced to that of the proletariat in name and number, nevertheless its sense of its own defiant cultural exclusion is defined by how the injuries of class division and cultural exclusion shape its heterogeneous existence. Rancière’s de-placed spectator, in contrast, is, in the manner of classic post-structuralism, always trying to wriggle out of the determinations of collective class identity – largely because there is little or no sense of shared class injury or loss to his position. Workers and the culturally dominated always appear infinitely creative and adaptable in his schema, and therefore free of the need to organise their creativity or sense of exclusion around the real and symbolic violations and anti-cultural antagonisms of their shared class identity (which, in turn, is very different from insisting, correctly as Rancière does, that there are no inherent class hierarchies in the measuring of intelligence) (see Rancière 1991). To put it another way, workers might not necessarily imagine themselves as ‘poets’ rather than ‘workers’, but as ‘poets’ and ‘workers’ (Dave Beech and John Roberts, The Philistine Controversy, Verso, London and New York: 2002). On a different note, we might want to trace Rancière’s de-placing to Lacan’s insistence that things we repeatedly find in the same place ‘don’t speak’: see Lacan 1988b, p. 238.

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Rancière plots out his anti-specular cultural critique from an explicitly pragmatist position. In rejecting the idea that emancipation in art, or through art, is about the future bridging of the gap between artwork and audience (which the spectacle is held to reproduce), or the eventual closing of the gap between a politicised art and a depoliticized public sphere, he dismisses the notion that art somehow needs to be in another place, a better place, in order for it to do its emancipatory work. If there are no no-places, then the available (representational) places should determine the conflicted relations between author, artwork, and mass culture. So, for Rancière any theory of the image is always poorly served by the dualistic logic of the spectacle: reification and representational heteronomy on one side, the need for non-representation and an anti-representational sublime on the other; or, in a corresponding fashion, capitalist propaganda on one side, and the need for combative and partisan counter-transparency on the other. Such divisions simply hold the image in thrall to the limitations of the spatial ‘solutions’ of the three critiques of the spectacle above: the enhancement of ‘distance’ as resistance, the overcoming of ‘apartness’ as resistance, and representational ‘transparency’ as resistance. In contrast, therefore, Rancière’s pragmatism subordinates the life of the image to something that Romantic anti-capitalism invariably rejects as superfluous and ideologically wasteful: mediatory work on representation as a form of cultural praxis. ‘If the avant-garde has meaning at all … it is on this side of things’.13 But, following the constructivism of Rodchenko and El Lissitsky, representation here is not just the symbolic life of pictures, but the very materiality of things and their relations. Accordingly, the reconstruction of the sensible appearances of the world – of the built environment, of the ‘décor’ of the sensible, as Rancière describes it – is more than the negation of bourgeois appearances in the name of either a radical aesthetics or a radical politics; it is, rather, the common invention of ‘sensible forms and material structures for a life to come’.14 However, if this schema clearly pays homage to the programme of the constructivists, Rancière is also at pains to distance himself from the collective organisation of this common programme. That is, this is not a revolutionary programme fashioned into a version of the avant-garde’s total revolutionary praxis. For Rancière there is no prospect or possibility of a ‘take over’ of the sensible; the avant-garde’s insistence on radical apartness as a precursor to the dissolution of apartness through art as social praxis similarly leads, in his

13 14

Rancière 2004, p. 29. Ibid, p. 29.

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view, to the subordination of the sensible to an imposed emancipatory aesthetic/political programme. On the contrary, the job of emancipatory culture – of in-disciplinary strategies and energies – is to provide a network of aesthetic production (in collaboration with political subjects) that intervenes in, challenges and inverts the hierarchies and exclusions of the sensible, in shifting, motile and heterogeneous ways. For Rancière this reorganisation of the sensible across aesthetics and politics is a continuous process of mediation on the exclusions and hierarchies of the sensible – hence the structural importance of de-placement to his schema of in-disciplinarity and the democratic spectator. Equality lies neither in the imposition of a revolutionary schema of art as praxis, nor in ‘having to use the terms of a message as vehicle’,15 but in the spaces for participation and exchange produced through the ‘improper’ collaboration between a common aesthetic programme and political subjects. Cultural praxis and collective activity always proceeds through disunity and dis-identification. But if this has striking echoes of Anglo-American 1990s debates on the neoavant-garde – with constructivism defended as a kind of detoothed vanguard – Rancière has little interest in working within the given periodisations of modern art: realism, modernism and postmodernism. Rather, in The Future of the Image and The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière’s de-placed image enters a long-standing debate on his part on the importance of ‘theatre’ to this process of political subjectivisation and to the formation of a (heterogeneous) common programme of aesthetics and politics. Indeed, subsumption of the reorganisation of the sensible under the rubric ‘theatre’ has been crucial to all his writing, and, accordingly, is central to the split he made with Althusser and structuralism in the 1970s, and that he has made latterly with post-Situationist regime-thinking. By theatre Rancière means that process of making visible which determines any sequence of political assembly or action (revolutionary or non-revolutionary) or artistic sequence in the public domain, and as such, which provides the basic conditions for the reconfiguration of the material world. Thus ‘theatre’ is that space of many-spaces where the in-disciplinary is able to secure the creative passage of forms and the image between the different arts, but, more importantly, frame and secure the relationship between politics and aesthetics ‘on the same surface’.16 Theatre, then, has none of the pejorative and rebarbative connotations it has within post-war French philosophy. On the contrary, 15 16

Ibid, p. 63. Rancière 2009b, p. 107.

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for Rancière, there is no politics without theatre, insofar as there is no struggle without the staging of struggle (or rather struggle as a staging), and as such theatre becomes shorthand for what survives in art and culture as a living principle of making speech visible. What need would life in its pure similarity, life “not looked at”, not made into a spectacle have of speaking? … Theatre is first and foremost the space of visibility of speech, the space of the problematic translations of what is said into what is seen.17 In this respect Rancière’s turn to the pragmatism of the neo-avant-garde is but a short step away from a reflection on the determinates of classical culture and neoclassical aesthetics. Rancière’s in-disciplinary spectator retraces and repositions the debate between text and image, poetry and painting, distance and propinquity in spectatorship, which shape the classical reception of the arts from Horace to Walter Pater. That is, Rancière’s notion of theatre is an attempt to re-periodise the modern from inside a longer sequence of reflections on aesthetics and the spectator, the visible and invisible, the sayable and unsayable. Essentially, Rancière’s neo-avant-garde pragmatism is a kind of neo-Paterite defence of the necessary passage of each art into the conditions of another art (what Rancière calls conversion), and, in turn, the capacity of the spectator of art to construct a subjective view of the world. This is not as perverse as it seems because, like Walter Pater, Rancière is interested not in any universal schema for art, or any theory of its medium specific attributes, but in pursuing and defending ‘aesthetic perception’ as an imaginative and active principle.18

17

18

Ibid, p. 88. Underwriting Rancière’s conception of theatre is his distinction between what he calls the three different regimes of representation in the West, from classical Greece to postmodernism. In the ethical regime of image, identifiable with ancient Greece through to fourteenth-century Europe, ‘art’ is not identified as such, and consequently the image is subject to an ethical regime in which no distinction is made between the work of ‘art’, the individual participant and community. In the representative regime of the arts, from the fifteenth century to the early nineteenth century, the image is subject to various hierarchical and proper accounts of making, showing, and doing; this enforces strict modes of apprehension between the individual and aesthetic community. In the aesthetic regime, from the middle of the nineteenth through to modernism and postmodernism, the artwork is freed from these arrangements, allowing artist and spectator to freely determine the boundaries of aesthetic community. Theatre, then, is the mode proper to the ‘aesthetic regime’ of the arts, insofar as there are no generalized rule-following modes or suitably trained spectators; on the contrary, there are only freely determined spectators and freely determined works. Pater 1935.

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Indeed, Rancière and Pater thoroughly dislike all attempts (enshrined in Gotthold Lessing) to lay claim to what is properly or improperly sayable in words, and properly or improperly made visible in images. To call Rancière a neo-Paterite, then, is to tax his understanding of the image with a highly aestheticized account of the neo-avant-garde. For although, Rancière is conscious of the implausibility of aesthetics as an ideal horizon for modern practice, nevertheless it stands very much as a placeholder – as in Pater – for an unnuanced attack on the Enlightenment. This leaves Rancière’s Adornoite critique of political efficacy in art at the mercy of an undialectical understanding of the representation of politics and the politics of representation. Rancière’s horror of political ‘transparency’ or immediacy in an overcompensator fashion produces a highly narrow account of what constitutes politicised artistic practice (and heteronomous content in art), and as such what constitutes critical effectivity or efficacy in photography. So when he talks about the distance ‘between the pretensions of critical art and its real forms of efficiency’19 he misses something important. Critical art is never, or rarely claims to be, transparent or immediate in these terms. Thus it is one thing to follow Adorno in rejecting the notion that artworks might substitute for political action or intervention (as I believe we must), and another to assume that the majority of producers and defenders of ‘political art’ or critical practice think of themselves as inspiring the direct mobilisation of political energies. On the contrary, critical practices function as a standing reserve within a standing continuum of other like-minded works, and thus, far from imaging themselves as in direct alliance or commune with political agents, see the efficacy of the work as lying in a future place of exchange and dialogue in which spectators can freely participate. Thus the efficacy of critical practice functions, not under the rubric of immediacy (something that disappears as soon as it is countenanced), but under the nominative and the archival: that is, ‘as the producer of this work this is something I, or we, have named, and now it is up to you, the future spectator, to do with it as you will’. Hence, it is this process of naming as a declaration and projection of knowledge into the future that is missing from Rancière’s account of the common spectator and reader, leaving his link between aestheticisation (interpretation) and democracy in a constricted political zone. Aestheticisation never stretches on Rancière’s part to the process of critical interpellation itself.20 That is, the partisan political 19 20

Rancière 2007, p. 80. Despite Rancière, that is, committing himself to the following: ‘And for me political action itself is an aesthetic activity to the extent it makes us see as political, things not recognised as such, as when we are made to hear subjects left out of account, etc.’ (see Rancière in Noys and Newman 2008, p. 179).

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content that Rancière is so fearful of, that is so would-be threatening to the democratic spectator, is no different in its capacity to take on an aestheticizing function as any so-called non-political work. Indeed it cannot but do this. This is because if there is no one-to-one correlation between a given work of art and a political community, the ‘political’ effect of art is always and necessarily one of delay and distanciation. And this applies even to the most gruesome of atrocity photographs. Indeed, to look at such atrocity pictures is not be overwhelmed by the photographer’s desire to expose the violence of the system, and, therefore, to be subject to the photographer’s intellectual domination, but to be given the opportunity to learn to aestheticize (assimilate) what is ‘unaestheticizable’ as an act of empathy. Rancière’s caricatural reduction of political practice to the direct representational embrace between art and community, forces him, therefore, to produce an account of the image, ironically, which is de-politicized, or at least one-dimensional, insofar as no image or sequence of images is allowed to settle and accumulate into the aesthetic bonds of critical thought and collective (revolutionary) memory. Thus, if certain photographs produce knowledge in this way, this is not because they ‘mobilize us against injustice’,21 but because they provide an opportunity for us to register and inhabit a continuity of struggle and its symbols. A palpable tension exists, then, within Rancière’s neo-avant-garde framework. On the one hand, his constructivist dissolution of art into cultural practice – into reshaping the materiality of things ‘from below’ – places his thinking in line with the great emancipatory thrust of aesthetics and politics from 1917 onwards, and should be applauded. Similarly his attempt to clear out all the accumulated idealist (actionist), nihilist (iconophobic) and positivistic (reflectionist) tendencies of this artistic legacy should also be defended, and recognised accordingly as the baseline for advanced thinking on art and politics today. Yet, at the same time, his disconnection between knowledge, mastery and art, is too invested in the rights of the (culturally excluded) spectator to make these things tell as a shared class identity. Thus politics and art only seem to function in the flight from collective power; as a consequence ‘everyone’ is encouraged to speak and experience their own interpretative powers, but no one actually seems to be listening to each other. One can see why Rancière holds to this principle of flight so firmly, as a philosophical principle: given that there is presently no organic relationship between the workers movement and avant-garde culture – and indeed precisely because there has not been for a very long time – nothing is to be expected from official or organized chan-

21

Rancière 2007, p. 61.

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nels of opposition. The struggle, therefore, is to liberate ourselves from these false expectations and their ugly histories. But the crucial issue is, how and in what ways you hold on to the gap between critical cultural practice and its ‘real forms of efficiency’, and not to the validity of this principle itself. Rancière’s flight from externally ‘imposed’ notions of ‘collectivity’, ‘unity’, ‘identity’ and ‘political action’ may take the fight to those self-deluding forces on the left (and right) that assume such notions as unproblematically good things. But they also inculcate artistic and political practices of least resistance. Indeed, for all its (moderate) virtues, his democratic spectator simply vacates the more difficult terrain of mediation between a collective emancipatory politics and the avantgarde, or neo-avant-garde. This is why it is easy to hide ‘inside’ Rancière’s writing at the moment: his post-Marxist, post-Debordian, ‘post-mastering’, neo-avantgarde pragmatism, fits the bill quite nicely. As Peter Hallward has put it, Rancière’s ‘trenchant egalitarianism seems all too compatible with a certain degree of social resignation’.22 This is perhaps too harsh, certainly for a thinker who has done much to re-repoliticise key cultural and political categories, and whose work on the formation of the early French workers movement is exemplary in its attention to revolutionary affect and desire. Rancière is no postmodernist avant-la-lettre. Yet his writing points to one of the great problems facing the theorisation of the politics of culture, and of aesthetics, today: the practices and metaphors of deterritorialisation, disunification, disidentification and dissociation slide all too easily into capitalist rationality. Consequently, this makes the emancipation of the spectator a far more conflictual (and perilous) matter than the fine-tuning or displacement of the received positions of cultural producers and consumers that Rancière places so much faith in.

22

Hallward 2006, p. 16.

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Some Reflections on the Image and the Early Avant-Garde: Victor Shklovsky, Error and The End of Saint Petersburg One of the strangest cultural anomalies during the early years of the Russian revolution, disturbing all received views of the revolutionary culture of the period, was the domination of the Hollywood movie in the Soviet Union.1 After the Civil war, V.I. Lenin and Anatoly Lunacharsky, desperate to re-capitalise the fledgling Soviet film industry, in order to strengthen the cultural revolution, agreed a distribution deal with Hollywood in which a quota of American films would be shown in Russian cinemas. However, so successful was the initiative during the nep years that the majority of films shown – and the most popular – were the Hollywood films, pushing Soviet films down the bill. By the mid-1920s over 85 per cent of feature films shown were largely American imports.2 As such, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Vsevolod Pudhovkin and Esther Shub, would, in many instances, barely get a showing. The Hollywood films also got the longest first-runs, one of the longest and most popular firstruns in Moscow being Douglas Fairbanks’ Robin Hood (1922). Yet, if the quota system curtailed the popular impact of the avant-garde in the nep and lef years, it enabled the Bolsheviks to set up and support a new production studio (the privatised studio Mezhrabpom), in addition to increasing their support for the state-owned studio, Sovkino. The capital raised had an immediate effect on film production; in 1923 just thirteen films were released, by 1928 the number had risen to 109. But the impact of the quota system was not just financial. The systematic introduction of the Hollywood film into Russian cinemas also exposed Russian audiences to the temporal conventions (precisely linear causality and continuity editing) and psychological-based character development of the new narrative cinema. The popular success of this on audiences did not go unnoticed (even if the majority of imports were edited for domestic consumption), reflected in the large audience numbers for these films. Lunarcharsky, as a result, was quite keen on filmmakers to combine the partisan

1 First presented at, the conference, ‘Marx, Form, Isms: A Re-enactment of the 1920s Debates’, University of Westminster, 4/6/2015. 2 Kepley, Jr 2003.

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effects of the new left-avant-garde cinema with the narrative drive and popular appeal of the Hollywood film. As such, this combination of avant-garde exhortation with Hollywood style narration began to shape the production values of the new private film studio, Mezhrabpom, setting in place a loose kind of ideological division between the privatised studio (which employed Pudovkin, Boris Barnet, and Yakov Protazanov) and Sovkino, for which Eisenstein, Vertov, and Shub worked. In addition, the Hollywood film found a sympathetic setting and context in Lev Kuleshov’s workshop at the State Film Institute, which Pudovkin, Vertov and Eisenstein attended, which celebrated ‘amerikarschina’ fast editing as way of holding the interest of the spectator. In contrast to European feature films of the period American feature films involved a greater number of cuts per minute. By the mid-1920s, then, there was a tacit assumption on cultural matters within the Party leadership that Mezhrabpom’s assimilation of the Hollywood movie offered the best option for the development of party education and historical and political consciousness amongst a largely illiterate population, certainly outside of the big cities. These issues came to a head in 1928 in Moscow at the first-ever Party conference on cinema. Of primary concern at the conference was the growing ‘ideological retreat and ambiguity’ in cultural work that had occurred under the nep and the rise of the popular, Hollywood influenced film (indeed Boris Barnet and others had produced a number of humorous, ideologically indeterminate films, that matched and even challenged the appeal of Hollywood film in their theatrical range and popularity for Russian audiences).3 Consequently, the Soviet film industry, particularly now it was in a financial position to lessen its reliance on foreign revenues, needed to reconnect to the ideological specificities of the Soviet experience in the struggle to build socialism. Yet, if this announced an opportunity for Sovkino and left avant-garde to reassert its vanguard role, this couldn’t be further from the truth. In what seems like a counter-intuitive move, Eisenstein’s October – made in 1927 and released in 1928 as a much-trumpeted commission to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Revolution – was roundly criticised for its post-Futurist formalism. Indeed, perversely, in 1928 October became the corrupt standard by which the avant-garde’s reliance on montage and temporal discontinuity was to be measured and attacked inside the Party in the name of a new popular-revolutionary cinema. Reports of workers’ incomprehension at ‘leftist cinema’ were routinely advanced at the conference. Accordingly, what the arrival of Lenin and Lunarcharsky’s Hollywood film in the Soviet Union created, unbeknownst to them – as a kind of cinematic Trojan

3 See, for example, The Girl with the Hat-Box (1927). For a discussion of Barnet, see Leyda 1960.

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horse – was a popular space to consolidate the marginalisation and eventual eradication of the left-avant-garde and its heterodox cultural politics, as Stalin began to consolidate his power. It is legitimate therefore, I believe, to talk about the profound influence the Hollywood film had in the nascent construction of the revolutionary-popular during this period. Indeed, its giddy advocacy of a popular spectator flows directly into the development of the protocols of Socialist Realism in the early 1930s, as national-populism and State-building cohere symbolically around the production of the heroic Party militant. In the same way American Taylorism was widely admired on the Central Committee (even by Trotsky) as a means improving factory production and efficiency, the ideological ‘efficiency’ of the Hollywood movie was widely seen as a way of building ideological coherence in period of political flux.4 Eisenstein was certainly chastened by this new (and unexpected) conjunction and curtailed his earlier Futurist tendencies in the later historical films. Pudovkin, however, flourished, given his willingness in The End of St. Petersburg – also made in 1927 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Revolution – to combine the classical Hollywood system of continuity-editing and psychological development, with montage and temporal discontinuity.5 Pudovkin didn’t escape Party criticism later – he was much criticised for the residual avant-gardism of the early films – but nevertheless, his technical debt to Kuleshov at the Film Institute, and Lunarcharsky’s advocacy, green-lighted his development of classical narration, allowing him space to work through film as a narrational-popular form. 1928, then, was a crucial year for film in the Soviet Union and for the legacy of Futurist avant-garde.6 What remained of the avant-garde and the debates in lef and Novyi Lef, were soon to be curtailed or removed altogether. However, when Viktor Shklovsky reviews The End of St. Petersburg in Novyi Lef in November 1927, little of this is discernible, allowing him to speculate on the limits and achievements of Pudvokin’s film without any hint that the influence of the avant-garde is about to end.7 Thus he’s willing to criticise the film for what appears to be its unresolved tension between its reliance on classical narration and adaptation of an avant-garde syntax, what he calls the use of ‘cleansed 4 For a general perspective on this, see Buck-Morss 2002. 5 Esther Shub also releases her first major ‘compilation’ feature, The Fall of the Romanovs in 1927 (Sovkino), which includes extensive found footage of workers and peasants on the streets of Moscow after the February Revolution. 6 Indeed, it is crucial for the Soviet Union; in December 1927 the Left Opposition is overwhelmingly crushed at the 15th Party Conference (none of its members are elected to the Central Committee) and Stalin accedes to power. In January 1928 Trotsky is expelled from the Communist Party. 7 Shklovsky in Taylor and Christie 1988 [1927], pp. 180–3.

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shots’ or ‘hieroglyphs’. For Pudovkin these are ‘word-signs’ in which objects, in particular, carry the significant meaning of a scene, linking the scene to the unfolding of the film’s narrative. What Shklovsky seems to be objecting to overall is that these ‘word signs’ are not given their due, in an echo of Eisenstein’s criticism that Pudovkin only accommodates the simplest of ‘shock’ images. ‘Because of the absence of plot structure in Pudovkin’s film we can distinguish the montage problems, the problems of poetic cinema and the problems of the contraction of the shot’.8 Indeed, the film is praised for being well made, ‘but it might have been better if something different had been invented’.9 This is perhaps a coded reference to Pudovkin’s well-known conservative reliance on a tight script and professional actors, which become increasingly pronounced after the mid-1930s, in the director’s defence of ‘continuity’ against montage.10 (The film’s writer Nathan Zarkhi, who also scripted Pudovkin’s conventional adaptation of Gorky’s Mother, was killed in a car crash in 1935). Nevertheless, the heterodox and mixed character of The End of St. Petersburg encourages Shklovsky to talk about ‘mistakes’ in relation to the artistic process, as if in recognition of what is interestingly unresolved about the film. ‘Art very often moves forward because mistakes are made and unresolved questions posed. A mistake that is properly remarked and carried through to its conclusion turns out to be an invention’.11 Shklovsky’s focus on mistakes and errors here in order to give the unresolved character of the film a degree of processual value and clarity is revealing. In the lef and Novyi Lef years there is no discourse of the ‘productive error’, to speak of, in literary and artistic theory and film theory. Shklovsky is the only theorist of this generation to broach the Hegelian intimacy between the ‘mistake’ and ‘truth’ in artistic production: as Hegel says, what reveals itself as the fear of error, is no other than the fear of truth.12 In contrast, what operated, more generally in the early Soviet avantgarde debates – post-Cubism – was a theory and politics of cognition in which the break up, or ‘making strange’ of appearances, in Shklovsky’s classic formulation, is held to restore the dialectical flow and contiguity of the real. As Boris Eichenbaum was to argue in 1927, the Futurist or Formalist method involves ‘seeing’, rather than simply ‘recognising’,13 requiring that ‘seeing’ the artwork and film and the production of ‘seeing’ in the artwork and film were necessarily

8 9 10 11 12 13

Ibid, p. 180. Ibid, p. 182. See Taylor 2006. Shklovsky 1988, p. 180. Hegel 1977b, p. 74. Eichenbaum in Matejka and Pomorska 1978, p. 14.

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co-extensive – hence the avant-garde imperatives of montage, superimposition and narrative discontinuity. For it is precisely via the concepts of ‘inversion’, ‘disruption’, ‘contingency’, that these formal strategies, in the fight against what Shklovsky calls ‘the familiar’, intorduce the non-identity of appearances into the real and into cultural transformation.14 ‘The task of Futurism is to resurrect objects, to restore to man his ability to sense the world’.15 The ‘mistake’, then, becomes the working supplement of this process of defamiliarisation; the outcome of the artistic or film-making process that strives to make the flow and interconnection and immanent contradictions of appearances legible as practice. ‘Mistakes’ are that which reveal the artist in struggle and negotiation with his or her ideological materials. This is why Pudvokin’s film is seen by Shklovsky as a relatively intriguing object; its admix of formal discontinuities and classical continuity editing reveals a filmmaker working through the ‘audience’ requirements of the moment and the fledgling achievements of the avant-garde and Eisenstein’s ‘intellectual’ cinema. Yet, if Shklovsky ‘sees’ the significance of this awkward encounter, he fails to see what is remarkably heterodox, indeed, scandalous about the film’s narrative itself, condemning Futurism-Formalism, in this instance, to its own identitary blindness. This is the fact, that, although this is a film that is commissioned to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Revolution, unlike Eisenstein’s film there is no reference to the Party, its leadership, its membership, its achievements. Remarkably there isn’t a single mention of Lenin in the subtitles, until the very final shot, which announces: ‘long live the city of lenin’. On the contrary, this is a film about revolutionary transformation ‘from below’ in which the demands of narrative continuity are given over to the psychological, cultural and political transformation of the unpoliticised, indifferent, and even counterrevolutionary, into revolutionary workers. As Vance Kepley Jr. puts it, the film is concerned above all else with proletarian self-transformation and ‘proletarian entitlement’,16 and, as such, how the proletariat through its collective actions is gradually able to gain physical and cognitive control over the space it inhabits. ‘Not only do proletarians exercise direct, physical control over new locale by the film’s end; they also experience expanded authority through commanding glances’.17 The peasant Lad, who initially betrays the Communist worker to the Tsarist police, eventually joins the attack on the Winter Palace, and the Wife of the Communist worker, who ignores the Lad and refuses him 14 15 16 17

Shklovsky 1972, p. 68. Ibid. Kepley Jr 2003, p. 99. ibid, p. 100.

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bread when he visits their house, in a churlish rejection of the politics of her husband and spiteful defence of family over stranger, feeds him potatoes as he lays severely wounded outside the Winter Palace; she now ‘sees’ him, just as he ‘sees’ through struggle, suggesting a new definition of family. And in a final and wonderful scene her husband the Communist Worker surveys the interior of the Palace at the top of the magnificent Jordan staircase, not as a conquered possession, but as the triumph of proletarian ‘seeing’ over bourgeois ‘looking’, as she walks up the stairs to greet him. Shklovsky makes no reference to this ‘proletarian entitlement’ as a reflection on ‘seeing’ over ‘recognising’, or, in a parallel register, as a reflection on worker’s self-activity over Party leadership. This is unusual given his concluding remarks: ‘we must not now produce works to gain applause, to please immediately and to please everyone. We must give the audience time to mature to perception’.18 Clearly this is a reference to the emergent popular-revolutionary agenda promoted by Lunarcharsky and taken up Pudovkin, as if to suggest that Pudvokin’s and others’ assimilation of Futurist syntax into the techniques of classical narration still carries with it the cognitive and formal responsibilities of the avant-garde. But he avoids the next step: to link this transformative defence of ‘seeing’ with the political heterodoxy of the movie. Perhaps in 1927, as an ‘entitled’ member of opoyaz (Society for the Study of Poetic Language) and contributor to Novyi Lef, he felt he didn’t need to direct his attention to class-party relations, and that a generalised defence of defamilarisation was enough; indeed, paying bureaucratic fealty or homage to the Party in order to win cultural favour was not on opoyaz’s and Novyi Lef’s agenda, so ignoring class-party relations was maybe, for him, a decision of little consequence. Or, perhaps, more to the point, he didn’t want to call up the spectres of his own recent political past. As a Left Socialist Revolutionary (who was renowned for blowing up bridges), and who ‘came over’ to the Bolsheviks during the Civil War, he was reputedly saved from execution by Larissa Reisner, the great and very well-connected German worker-correspondent,19 who hid Shklovsky in her apartment in Moscow and reputedly got Trotsky to sign off the relevant papers to allow Shklovsky to travel freely.20 Although, it has been said it was Gorky’s patronage that really helped in the end. So, there was certainly some unresolved prehistory around the question of party, workers’ self-activity, even anarchism, that was better left buried, and that no amount of cognitive defa-

18 19 20

Shklovsky 1988, pp. 182–3. See Reisner 1925. This is recounted in Jakobson 1997.

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miliarisation might repair. If I was to hazard a guess, then, there is something in the latter speculation; aligning ‘seeing’ with workers’ self-activity was an act of defamiliarisation too far. So, we might say then at this particular conjuncture, 1927–8, a strange, even phantasmorgoric range of ‘mis-seeings’ circulate within Lunarchsky’s emergent and Hollywood-driven narrational-popular, popular-revolutionary cultural agenda. Eisenstein’s celebration of Party and Revolution in October is castigated for its Formalist deviations; Pudvokin’s The End of St. Petersburg, which draws on Futurist syntax, and omits to celebrate, or even mention, the Party and Lenin, is lauded as a breakthrough; and Shklovsky the great Futurist theorist of ‘seeing’ as opposed to ‘looking’ – along with Eichenbaum and Roman Jakobson – fails to register the greater and obvious defamiliarisation in The End of St. Petersburg (workers self-activity), which the Party also chooses not to see, or at least ignore for the time being. But, if these instances of mis-seeing reflect an unstable political and cultural situation, by 1929–30, as we know so well, this instability is resolved by the Party’s systematic cultural shift to the Hollywood model, shorn, of course, of any explicit affiliation with the non-functional pleasures of bourgeois narrative and character development; the use of psychological development in film is now framed solely by the worker’s relationship to the Party. Thus, if this transformation green-lights Pudhovkin (against the odds), refocuses Eisenstein, and eventually destroys Vertov and sidelines Shub, it forces Shklovsky, Eichenbaum and Jakobson to disconnect what remains of opoyaz’s defamiliarisation project from an avant-garde cultural politics. The cost of this for Shklovsky, at least, is a demonstration of public contrition on method, and the extrusion of the concept of the productive ‘mistake’ from his mature Futurist theory. In his article ‘Monument to Scientific Error’, published in the Literary Gazette in January 1930, as the Stalinist cultural shake-out begins, Shklovsky provides an autocritique of Futurist method on the grounds that what was problematic about Formalism was not the initial act of formal separation of the work from the world, but that this became ‘fixed’, as he puts it.21 But what is revealing here is the language of shame and culpability that frames his auto-critique. Shklovsky adopts what will become the standard Stalinist mode of error-confession: ‘Our error was that …’22 ‘This was my error’.23 ‘I had no desire to stand as a monument to my own error’.24 So, if we compare this to his review ‘Mistakes and Inven21 22 23 24

Shklovsky 2014 [1930]. ibid. ibid. ibid.

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tions’ of two years before, the possibility methodologically of a link between the ‘mistake’ or ‘error’ and defamiliarisation is reversed; indeed, the very construction of a science of error as a constitutive aspect of Formalist-Marxist practice, which Shklovsky adumbrates in 1927, is stillborn.25 The immediate outcome of the reification of the error into a confessional mode, consequently, is not simply the end of avant-garde art as commonly understood, but more precisely, a decisive epistemological shift in how ‘experimentalism’ and ‘contingency’ are judged and evaluated in the analysis of artistic process; there is no longer scope for establishing a productive link between formal attentiveness and political transformation, a connection that is not solely reducible to ‘avantgardism’. Whereas in 1927 for Shklovsky the mistake and error are attached to a process of reflection on ‘irresolution’ in filmic practice, as a way of marking the ideological/formal fissures of film in an openly productive way, in 1930 discussion of formal irresolution appears now tantamount to ideological indeterminancy, and, as such, dangerously close to the catastrophic plunge of the film and spectator alike into social anomie – Formalism as a counterrevolution of the ‘sign’. We might talk, therefore, once Stalinism’s reconfiguration of pictorial representationalism, continuity editing and the subsumption of psychological development under the guidance of the Party as state practice is underway, about the post-Thermidorian closure of the conceptual fluidity of the error. As such, there is a clear correlation between this closing down and the closure of the debate in philosophy on Marx’s relationship to Hegel and Spinoza; both closures act to drive ‘contingency’ out of practice and thinking.26 The labyrinthine rise of the culpable ‘error’ as one of the key disciplinary modes of Stalinist power, is, consequently, one of the great defining political and cultural forces of the period; in the name of the Party it mounts a successful process of self-editing and self-censorship. Indeed, Marx’s later (Hegelian) debt after the Commune to ‘inventive error’ (in an echo of Shklovsky) as opposed to the degraded and repressive function of the Jacobin-style culpable error, is the great critical and literary theme of Victor Serge’s postThermidorian fiction and political writing after 1935, in particular his novel The Case of Comrade Tulayev.27 As he was to say in ‘Marxism in Our Time’ published in the Partisan Review in 1938: “Can science be anything except a

25

26 27

In contrast to this, David Bordwell notes irony and subterfuge in his confession. This may be so, but what is clear is how Shklovsky’s admittance of culpability fits within the emerging rhetorical mode of self-denunciation. See Bordwell 2014. For a discussion of the debates, particularly the work of Abram Deborin and Liubov Akselrod, see Kline 1952. Serge 2003.

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process of continual self-revision, an unceasing quest for a closer approach to truth? Can it get along without hypothesis and error – the ‘error’ of tomorrow which is the ‘truth’ (that is the closest approximation of the truth) of yesterday?”28 Shklovsky would no doubt have had some sympathy with this, for what marks his writing in 1927–8, particularly in the review of The End of St. Petersburg, as with Eichenbaum’s writing from the same period, is how the ‘specificity’ and ‘concreteness’ of Futurist-Formalism was always the outcome of ‘working hypothes[e]s’ and not ‘ready-made system and doctrine’.29 The culpable error, in contrast, therefore, was the deadening corrective of received doctrine. But Shklovsky was, if nothing else, resilient in his commitment to the project of the 1920s, as were Eichenbaum and Jacobson (who remarkably all survived the purges: Shklovsky died in 1982, Eichenbaum in 1959, and Jakobson in 1984 [in the US]), and in 1940 Shklovsky returns obliquely to the question of method, contingency and the mistake in his critical memoir of Mayakovsky, Mayakovsky and His Circle. One is immediately surprised that it ever got published given its candidness and sub-Futurist discontinuities. But in 1935, five years after Mayakovsky had committed suicide, Stalin notoriously canonised the poet, by saying: ‘He was, and is, the greatest poet in our Socialist Epoch’.30 This didn’t necessarily make Futurism’s legacy any more amenable, but it certainly lessened the critical pressure on those who had defended Mayakovsky and knew him well in the 1920s, such as Shklovsky, Jacobson and Eichenbaum; and obviously it eased the book into publication. In the chapter on opoyaz Shklovsky re-engages with the issue of method and the liberation ‘of perception from automatism’,31 by looking over the shoulder of Stalin, so to speak, and past his own ‘confession’ in 1930, back to Lenin. Of course, the use of Lenin in the 1930s to settle political or philosophical issues – or try to settle issues – was commonplace; a well-placed quote, or theoretical deference on contentious issues, could do wonders, or at least deflect accusations of revisionism or heterodoxy. But, whatever the debate or discussion, the aim was to make arguments fall in line with orthodoxy, and, where possible shore up a preternatural affinity in thinking between Stalin and Lenin. In Mayakovsky and his Circle, Shklovsky, however, does something quite different. Not only does he single out Lenin as a would be creative and quasi-

28 29 30 31

Serge 1938, p. 177. Eichenbaum 1978, p. 3. Joseph Stalin, quoted in Hyde 1970, p. 8. Shklovsky 1972, p. 115.

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modernist interlocutor of popular culture – pretty much unprecedented – but links this, indirectly, to the revolutionary ‘seeing’ of Futurist-Formalist practice. This all turns on one of Lenin’s reminiscences of visiting the Music Hall in London, at the beginning of the century. As Lenin recalls: ‘There is a certain satyrical and skeptical attitude to the conventional, an urge to turn it inside out, to distort it slightly, in order to show the illogic of the usual. Intricate but interesting’.32 This leads Lenin to elaborate and defend what he calls ‘eccentrism’ as a special mode of theatrical art, and as a possible critical viewpoint. Shklovsky goes on to enumerate what is at stake: 1. Lenin is interested in eccentrics. 2. Lenin is watching the demonstration of real work. 3. He evaluates first class work as senseless and wasteful; he talks about the anarchy of production and the necessity to write about it. 4. Lenin talks about the eccentrism in art, a skeptical attitude toward the conventional …33 Points 2) and 3) are a little opaque, but, the general point Shklovsky wants to make, admittedly with a degree of legitimacy, is that, following Lenin’s reflections, ‘“eccentric” art can be realistic art’34 – an alignment of course that in 1940, 10 years after Mayakovsky’s death and the demise of Novyi Lef, was particularly loaded. Indeed, Shklovsky is emphatic on this score. ‘The old art tells lies with its melodrama …’35 ‘New art searches for the new word, the new expression’,36 and further on in the book, in his discussion of Mayakovsky and Alexander Rodchenko’s collaboration About That (1923): ‘Eccentrism [means] defamilarization’.37 Aligning Lenin here, then, with Futurist ‘seeing’ and with aesthetic and dramatic contingency, Shklovsky is not out to make a complete bonfire of the vanities of Socialist Realism. He doesn’t mention Socialist Realism by name, nor does he refer to the Lunarcharsky years, or indeed to Stalin himself. Rather, he is keen to restate a simple homily that his generation took for granted: revolutions necessarily change perception. In this respect the critique is implicit: what is required is not a revolutionary art as such, but a revolution in art as a revolutionary art. ‘Innovation enters art by revolution’.38 That he recruits Lenin to this position in 1940, therefore, is an indication of how

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

V.I. Lenin, quoted in Shklovsky 1972, p. 117. Ibid, p. 117. Ibid, p. 118. Ibid, p. 119. Ibid, p. 118. Ibid, p. 170. Ibid, p. 118.

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much the production of a revolutionary politics in perception was still a living issue for him. His ‘mistake’, however, was to assume, as he puts it in the book in his discussion of Soviet avant-garde painting, that using Lenin would now allow him to remake ‘mistakes differently’.39 By 1946, with the return to orthodox Socialist Realism, the prospect of such creative mistakes was long gone.

39

Ibid, p. 28.

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After Lefebvre: The Everyday, the Image and Cultural Theory When Henri Lefebvre wrote his magnificent sequence of books on the ‘everyday’ from the 1930s to the 1960s, there was a clear sense of what the concept stood for and what its transformation might prefigure: a space of heterodox working-class resistance in which culture, politics and praxis might contribute – in their interdependent ways – to the deconstruction of the exclusions and occlusions of capitalism’s construction of popular experience and cultural tradition.1 In this respect his revolutionary construction of the ‘everyday’ initially had four interconnected targets: 1) bourgeois high culture and its institutional and statist antipathy to popular culture; 2) the separation, in traditional realist painting and modernist painting, of art from praxis; 3) the cultural monstrosities of Stalinist historicism and reflectionism (namely, the reliance on reified class representations, as in generic socialist realism), and 4) the indeterminacies and generalities of bourgeois humanism, in which the celebration of ‘human values’ and ‘Man’ precedes the analysis of real social particulars and their cultural mediation. As such Lefebvre’s cultural critique is derived from the most advanced theoretical and cultural materials of the period. In the early writings from the 1930s and 1940s: Soviet Constructivism of the 1920s; the new radical ethnography, indebted in part to Surrealism (although Lefebvre was largely critical of Surrealist art practice); the recovery of Hegel as the great precursor of the critique of the everyday (that is, the use of Hegel’s dialectical penetration of first negation – the Absolute – into second negation [the determinate negation of the actual] as a theoretical antipode to Stalinism and bourgeois culture’s antagonism to the revolutionary immanence of the ‘here and now’); Marx’s critique of underdetermined theoretical abstractions in the Introduction to the Grundrisse; and Marx’s critique of alienation in the ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ (1844) as an extension of this critique to ‘actually existing socialism’. And, in the later writings in the 1950s and 1960s: Antonio Gramsci, the Situationist International and the fledgling women’s movement. By the late sixties, then, Lefebvre’s theory of the ‘everyday’ had established the co-ordinates for what was to become the new cultural theory and political 1 First presented at the conference, ‘Ordinary/Everyday/Quotidian’, York University, 29/9/2013.

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aesthetics: counter-representation, counter-historicisation, the archival and symbolic redemption of the culturally overlooked and remaindered – what Lefebvre called ‘the significance of the insignificant’2 – and the spatial/environmental expansion of art practice into cultural practice as a whole. This is why May 1968 in Paris was very much the high point of Lefebvre’s post-Soviet avantgarde theory of the everyday: it seemed as if the conjunction of revolutionary politics with cultural politics was in a position to produce a new grammar of cultural and political praxis and thereby open up what Guy Debord in the late 1950s called the ‘colonisation’ of everyday life. Accordingly, the everyday at this point is both a heteroclite space to be defended against this process of colonisation, but also the name by which the process of de-colonisation is to be put into operation. In this sense the ‘everyday’ for Lefebvre in these years is both a place of contrast with the reifications of mass culture and a conservative realism, and a space of solidarity with working-class life and the production of a new culture from below. However, by the late 1970s and early 1980s this point of contrast and space of production has collapsed under the weight of the growing attacks on labour and the rise of an advanced media culture, largely draining the concept of the ‘everyday’ of its revolutionary and avant-garde content. Perhaps Debord was always more of the realist than Lefebvre on this score and had fewer illusions about the fortunes of a new cultural political praxis, but neither Debord nor Lefebvre could quite predict how quickly and how deep this process of evacuation was to be. By the late 1970s, the critical languages of the ‘everyday’ – of counter-narrativisation and counter-historicisation – had shifted from the critique of the everyday as a totalising critique of capitalism, to a theory of representation and symbolic form. The transformation of the everyday is now confined largely either to a process of semiotic recoding (after Michel de Certeau’s Practices of Everyday Life),3 or to a theory of the cultural subaltern, in which popular and sub-cultural practices are identified with counter-hegemonic resistance (as in Anglo-American cultural studies). The larger, utopic and avant-garde critique of the everyday, in which politics, representation and praxis are held to be coextensive, and as such part of a wider political process, becomes diminished. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the concept of the ‘everyday’ in the wake of this extended political and cultural rupture develops into a site of negotiation with the meanings and affects of popular culture itself, turning the complex dynamics of the ‘everyday’ into a mere cognate of the demotic, ‘ordinary’ or vernacular. For it is at this junc-

2 Lefebvre 2002, p. 4. 3 de Certeau 1984.

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ture in the mid-1980s – where cultural studies meets an emergent postmodernism – that the ‘everyday’ as a semiotic encounter with image production is subsumed under the new advanced forms of technological mediation and as such the would-be erosion between high-culture and popular culture. To define the ‘everyday’ now is to inhabit the technological horizons of this new image regime, in order to align it more closely with the production of the popular – the great mantra of cultural studies between 1975 and the late 1990s. This is why in the 1980s and 1990s we see a slew of books and exhibitions devoted to the ‘everyday’ and the image, the everyday and popular culture, and the everyday and the vernacular, as photography and critical theories of representation are structurally incorporated into the circuits of postcolonial global art production and into a globalising cultural theory. This very condensed, indeed breathless, history obviously does not do justice to the complexities of the production, critique and foreclosure of the concept of the ‘everyday’ during this period and after. However, it does point to how much of the work done on, and in defence of, the ‘everyday’ from the late 1930s to the present, is the product of a long counterrevolutionary sequence, that shapes the very fate of the concept, irrespective of Lefebvre’s hopes and critical expectations. The links between the transformation of the everyday and the political legacy of the avant-garde that the Situationists fought to rebuild between the late 1950s and early 1970s, are in a permanent state of crisis throughout the whole of Lefebvre’s period of work on the critique of ‘everyday’ life. Indeed, Lefebvre’s reopening up the debate on the everyday to the rich legacy of the avant-garde, is, in the end, less a new theory of cultural production, than a crisis-theory of culture in the spirit of Adorno, in which the possibility of the decolonisation of the everyday and the critique of everyday life are forever being pushed back. In this sense, if Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life is principally a critique of the separation of cultural praxis from political praxis, it is increasingly clear, certainly after May 68, that cultural politics and a politics of representation is integral to the new stage of capital accumulation, as a vastly expanded popular culture assimilates and channels the radical remnants of the counterculture into new niche markets. This is intensified with the neoliberal dismantling of the old media and state cultural conglomerates in the wake of digitalisation and the re-composition of the international division of labour. In a world of digital ‘start-ups’ and micro-cultural production, the new cultural industries facilitate an expanded alignment between ‘critical content’ and the ‘boutique production’ of cultural goods. Similarly, design, art, architecture, and social activism open up their disciplinary boundaries to find points of connection and exchange under the aegis of the transdisciplinary ‘project’.

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Over the long run, therefore, the expansion of politics into the realm of cultural practice itself (or a new micro-politics, in the language of Félix Guattari)4 – as the re-politicisation of the everyday at all levels of social and economic life – becomes perfectly compatible with a new order of cultural expansion under post-Fordism: micro-cultural production and micro-politics coalesce. Indeed, these new forms cultural production and consumption do not just produce a reinvestment in the affirmative transformation of the everyday on the part of cultural producers and technicians – the regeneration scheme; the art/architecture project – but, more importantly, affirm cultural consumption as a moment of political choice itself. The purchase or consumption of diverse cultural artefacts allows, as Wolfgang Streeck puts it, ‘hitherto unknown opportunities for individualized expression of social identities’.5 And this, essentially, is the crucial transformative link between the new forms of cultural production and the new forms of boutique consumption or individuation as they come to be mediated by digitalisation and network culture post the 1990s: the notion of the everyday as a realm of resistance defined by an awareness of the gap between the processes of colonisation and an experience of class division and alienated social relations – and therefore still reliant on a popular resistance to its effects – is dissolved, replaced by an everyday in which the spectacle is absorbed into multitude of individualised acts of consumption, which feel increasingly like moments of active participation in a shared culture, rather than anything so stark and ideological as ‘manipulation’. And this is why Lefebvre, later in his career, long before the advent of network culture, contemplates giving up work on the ‘everyday’ altogether, because the conditions under which the concept might be mobilised as a collective space, or even as a signifier of resistance and working-class creativity, were beginning to feel increasingly attenuated, given this vast expansion of socialisation through consumption. In this respect, capitalist culture in the period of the expanded mediafication of popular taste, the demise of a normative classical bourgeois culture and its classical realist antipode (admittedly pretty much over by the late 1970s), the rise of the interdisciplinary project as a sign of the end of the distinction between high-culture and popular culture, and a post-critical art industry and film industry, loves the ‘everyday’, indeed fetishes it. For the everyday now stands in for the shared place of cultural exchange between high and low, amateur and professional, as the universalising substance of an inclusive and non-elitist culture. However, this is not simply the old culture industry’s elision

4 Guattari 1983. 5 Streeck 2012, p. 33.

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between the popular and the moral valorisation of the ‘ordinary’, but the production of a culture after network culture that is based on the vast demotic process of exchange of images and information into daily life. The reach and penetration of this network culture produces a superadded flux of images and information without internal distinction; the ‘everyday’ becoming the very medium of multiplicitousness and inclusive exchange itself. Hence, in a world in which the ‘everyday’ is identifiable with the flux of images, the cognitive distinction between ‘truth’ and ‘spectacle’ provided by the codes of the avantgarde, realism and documentary practice, no longer has any distinctive transformative function as a way of marking out certain image-practices from other image-practices. This is why the everyday now largely takes its epistemological compass from the subjective machinery of the new network culture – from the narcissism of the personal blog and reality tv, from the confessional drive of social networking sites, the posts of ‘influencers’, and from image-sharing as self-display, and self-validation – as a result blocking out the ‘everyday’ as a space of social reflection. Indeed, such subjectivisation now stands in for the photographic ‘real’ as such, harnessing insecurity and anxiety as the primary forms of authentic speech. This is why this stage of neoliberalism is perfectly happy to see the increasing corporate monopolisation of image-production – alongside the vast and pullulating self-archiving of the Internet – squeeze out the ‘everyday’ as space of reflection and critical disclosure. For the generalisation of such modes of reflection can only hold up or derail the circulation of commodities and the generation of what Christian Fuchs has called ‘produsage’:6 the indirect outsourcing of cognitive labour to users of sites who help unknowlingly (knowlingly) to algorithmically generate commercial information. The advent of the Internet as part of the digital economy, then, may facilitate unprecedented forms of information exchange, it may also still provide an extraordinary space of non-hierarchical dialogue, but it also subjects this process at key points to the intrusions and coercians of the value-form. To participate is to invite the exploitation of your ‘cognitive labour’ and the erosion of the distinction between wage-labour, consumption and leisure time. At this juncture, therefore, we can risk a general assessment of the postdigital ‘everyday’ and new conditions of production and exchange: the production and reproduction of a technologised ‘everyday’ is now overwhelmingly mediated by the entropic ideological conditions of mature capitalism: namely, the non-symbolic: the reproduction of the system through the erosion and dissolution of determinate social distinctions and divisions, or what we might

6 Fuchs 2011, p. 109.

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call a process of non-reproduction. The non-symbolic, consequently, takes two interrelated forms: the increased reliance of mediated experience under advanced technologised modernity being drawn from an extraordinarily narrow range of fantasy, entertainment and infotainment, in which advertising, tv, popular film and news forms an enclosed circle, and the direct expulsion of heterodox visual materials and image-traditions from the public sphere into the dead zones of the Internet follows from their definition as a specialist interest; that is, as something that one gets ‘pointed to’, rather than acting as part of shared public culture of the image. This covers all the image-traditions that we might associate with the ‘everyday’ from the 1920s onwards: documentary film and photography, avant-garde film, video art, even the canonic tradition of post-war war realist and post-1960s independent film. When did you last see a Fassbinder and Godard film at 8p.m. on terrestrial tv? The artist Hito Steyerl in her excellent book The Wretched of the Screen (2012) – one of the best dissections of our present neoliberal image condition yet published – calls this process of exclusion and devaluation the rise of the ‘poor image’. A poor image is an image that remains unresolved, puzzling or inconclusive because of neglect or political denial, because of lack of technology or funding, or because of hasty and incomplete recordings captured under risky circumstances. It cannot give a comprehensive account of the situation it is supposed to represent.7 In this respect, with the disappearance of resistant, heteroclite, and non-compliant visual materials from public visibility, into a network of alternative archives – ‘kept alive only by … committed organisations and individuals’8 – such poor images are ‘not assigned any value within the class society of images’;9 they are superfluous, eccentric, their exhibition value a hindrance to the smooth exchange between popular cinema, tv, advertising and the Internet. The poor image consequently is the proletarian condition of all imageproduction that circulates outside of this charmed and self-enclosed circle. Indeed, this category of the poor image is continually expanding, as more work drops into its abyss. This is why in the contemporary film business there is so much financial pressure from producers and financiers on directors and writers to avoid this exit into would-be visual impoverishment at all costs. Producers want ‘visibility’ rather than critical alacrity. 7 Steyerl 2012, p. 156. 8 ibid, p. 36. 9 Ibid, p. 38.

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An everyday without internal distinction, under the logic of capitalist nonreproduction and the non-symbolic, would suggest, therefore, little scope for a politics of the everyday and the image today. Indeed, as Steyerl suggests, there appears little egress from these conditions given the reality of neoliberal cultural policy: to render all visual practices and forms amenable to capital accumulation (to the algorhythmic shaping of consumer choice and attachment). But, then, again this exit into ‘poverty’ is also a place to see clearly, to step back, and produce new forms of autonomy and new audiences. This is why Steyerl rightly sees the advantages in the poor image under the online conditions of localised exhibition and reception. In this space of irresolution and depletion, images and image-traditions become a ‘new battle ground’ for alternate common interests.10 Moreover disconnected from fetishised forms of public display, the re-presentation and re-functioning of the poor image, allows a productive participation in the image, and as such, the means for the recovery of new discursive communities. However, one would not want Steyerl to lead us – following the affirmative post-operaist language of Toni Negri or Paulo Virno – into denying the symbolic violence perpetrated by this stage of neoliberalism as anything but presently a defeat for the left culturally. Neoliberalism’s financialisation of all values pluralises only within strict parameters; it has to lock down where possible all alternative use-values that might actually link cultural practice to political praxis. For the last 40 years, the long-term global secular fall in profits has made this an imperative under post-Fordist cultural conditions. There can be no autonomous space given to a left-image and heterodox culture competing for public space and attention. Yet, even, under these conditions, Steyerl is correct: the ‘everyday’ and its subordinate image-traditions exist, not just as a point of attachment to the past or an imagined future, but as a common resource of production here and now. And this, of course – if nothing else – is Hegelian and Lefebvrian to the letter.

10

Ibid, pp. 177–90.

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Tár, Tarr, and Tarr, and Other Sticky Things. Todd Field’s film Tár (2022), which dramatises the fall from grace of the fictional first female lead conductor of the Berlin Philharmoniker, has received widespread plaudits, even the rare accolade of being awarded Best Film of the Year simultaneously by the National Society of Film Critics, New York Film Critics and Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and in addition has received six Oscar nominations and has been awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. At this point one might legitimately step back, and say, why so good?, given the penchant for American critics – in particular – to favour films that dramatise the sorrows and vicissitudes of fame, power and the performing arts, from All About Eve (1950) to La La Land (2016), as a reminder of the ‘tragic’ stakes of creativity. In fact, one can almost hear an audible sound of relief from American critic circles that an American director today has produced something of stature for adults, indeed, that possesses the best of European gravitas and affective, spatial, and intersubjective complexity. (The film, in fact, does have something of a European melancholic indefatigability to it, which we will come to later via László Nemes and Béla Tarr.) Indeed, the only voice of dissonance (apparently) in these elevated American circles has been Richard Broady at The New Yorker, who called the film ‘regressive’ given its apparent submission to the values of high art, and its seeming elevation of the bourgeois canon, and devaluation of cancel culture and #MeToo activism.1 Broady has a point, but it’s misplaced; the film is certainly 1 Brody 2022. ‘The movie takes the point of view of Lydia throughout. She has lived for so long in the world of private jets and private foundations that anything else seems like a dreadful comedown. It identifies so closely with her perspective that it even depicts several of her dreams – yet, despite getting inside her head, Field can’t be bothered to show what she knows of her relationships with two of the key characters in the film; he doesn’t convey what Lydia knows of her ostensible misdeeds, whether with flashbacks, internal monologues, or the details of investigations. The film seems to want it both ways: it sustains Lydia’s perspective regarding music, her professional relationships, and her daily aesthetic, while carefully cultivating ambiguity regarding what Lydia is charged with, in order to wag a finger at characters who rush to judgment on the basis of what’s shown (or, what isn’t). By eliminating the accusations, Field shows which narrative he finds significant enough to put onscreen. By filtering Lydia’s cinematic subjectivity to include disturbing dreams but not disturbing memories, he shows what aspect of her character truly interests him. By allowing her past to be defined by her résumé, he shows that he, too, is wowed by it and has little interest in seeing past it’.

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in consort with the elite demands of the modern classical musical world and its particular ideological blindness, but it is far from being in harmony with it. Tár tells the story in an episodic fashion, of the meteoric rise of Lydia Tár (Linda Taar) (Cate Blanchett) from an American working-class provincial background (which we don’t learn about until the end of the film) to being a student of Leonard Bernstein, postgraduate ethnomusicology study, conducting posts at Cleveland, Boston, Chicago and New York, to the very pinnacle of modern classical conducting achievement at the Berliner Philharmoniker. In this, in addition to her openness as a lesbian, and her active support of young female conductors and musicians, her career trajectory reflects an extraordinary overcoming of the traditional sexual and artistic hurdles that women conductors and composers have had to face in the modern classical world, notorious for its cult of the male, white European maestro. But if this history is evident and hangs over her life and achievements in the film, her trajectory and comfortable ‘fit’ at the Berliner Philharmoniker is nonetheless the very centre of ‘progressive neoliberal’ culture, to use Nancy Fraser’s term,2 and is representative of the overall direction of modern classical music. This is why Tár is not so much about personal hubris, in the old-fashioned sense, as a reflection on sexual politics and culture under late neoliberalism. Indeed, for the film to produce its authoritative effects we are perfectly accepting of the fact that Tár’s conductorship in Berlin, her open lesbian sexuality, and her central position in public culture, are without anomaly. She is the exemplary figurehead of a massive cultural shift under late neoliberalism: the (gay) female cultural producer who is in control of extensive resources and personnel and has real productive and progressive influence over lives. So, although we see Lydia Tár as a figure of authority, she is not a ‘stand-in’ for authority, her identity, her achievements, are identifiable with, and articulative of, the neoliberal assimilation of lesbian, gay, trans, feminist, and decolonial cultural critique, and those areas of the culture where lgbtqia+ rights, feminism and decoloniality are also at the forefront of this critique’s culture industry assimilation. This is why the ‘shock’ of Tár’s fall from grace is constructed as a betrayal by those who have wished her well creatively and intellectually; and even some of her ex-lovers, who, despite falling out of favour with her, such as her personal assistant Francesca Lentini (Noémie Merlant), are still deeply, intensely, attached to her as an ego ideal. For Lydia Tár represents for her female supporters and those who love her, such as her wife Sharon Goodnow (Nina Hoss), the concertmaster for the orchestra, the

2 Fraser and Sunkara 2022.

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very concretisation of their own aspirations as musicians. In fact, until the end of the film, when Tár is in ‘exile’, so to speak, in South East Asia, and isolated, the film is driven by the intensity of Tár and the key female figures that surround her at the Berliner Philharmoniker, in a close circle of leadership and creative exchange. But as the film unfolds, we begin to see this leadership isn’t exactly that of a horizontal (non-patriarchal) family (even if the musicians in the orchestra uphold something like this), but of a slightly bitter congregation divided by an increasing awareness of Tár’s professional peccadillos and subtle sexual manoeuvrings. This is foregrounded with the successful audition performed by a newly hired female Russian cellist to the orchestra, Olga Metkina (Sophie Kauer), for the possible role of soloist for the orchestra’s performance of Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor Op 85 (made famous by Jacqueline du Pré, who Metkina namechecks) to accompany Tár’s upcoming and much anticipated interpretation of Mahler’s Symphony No 5. In rehearsal, Tár firstly suggests that the Elgar concerto might be a good option to accompany the Mahler (which the orchestra hesitantly agrees to) and then encourages Metkina to audition, at the expense of the orchestra’s lead cellist who she feels will have enough on her hands with the Mahler (the cellist reluctantly giving way), Tár already knowing that Metkina has mastered the part. Metkina duly wins the anonymous audition, without Tár compromising herself (although she knows that it is Metkina playing when she auditions, having recognised her shoes under the audition screen), given that Metkina’s superlative tone wins hands down. She then engineers ‘rehearsals’ with Metkina and invites her as her ‘assistant’ on a trip to New York (overlooking her full-time assistant Lentini), to launch her critical autobiography Tár on Tár. Metkina accepts, but she is no flattered ingenué, and avoids and cleverly bypasses Tár’s advances, distractedly and haughtily refusing to meet with the conductor for an evening meal in their hotel in New York; and, later, back in Berlin, having been invited to Tár’s ‘composing’ apartment for a rehearsal, she even precociously corrects, at the piano, a composition Tár is working on. What is clear from this imbroglio and the subtle evidence of other relationships she has had since being with her wife, is that Tár likes messiness, difficulty, uncertainty, as much as she likes the comfort, support, and conformity of others, particularly when it comes to her work as a composer. Indeed, she likes this messiness precisely insofar as it remains confined inside the boundaries of the comfort and support she can rely on from her ex-female lovers and friends, and the deference that comes with her elevated position. This is at the heart of the film’s sexual and cultural politics. Field’s Tár is an artist who haunts and invades the hyper-masculinity of the traditional indomitable and

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unquenchable male artist (here maestro), last seen on Hollywood screens to decrepit and risible effect in the musical drama Nine (2009), with Daniel DayLewis as a womanising Fellini-like Italian filmmaker, all passionate asscresciuta and ‘intense’ vision; but it is also visible in a multiple of ways in the remnant Nietzscheanism of much modern Hollywood and European representations of the artistic life as uncompromising, male transgression, from Carol Reed’s The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) – on Michaelangelo – to Ed Harris’s Pollock (2000) and Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate (2018), on the last years of Vincent van Gogh’s life. Interestingly one of the most inflationary Nietzschean versions of this model of the self-authenticating male artist – providing much of the scaffolding for this tradition of artistic representation in the modern tradition – is Wyndam Lewis’s novel Tarr (published in 1918, although written between 1909 and 1915 and re-written and republished in 1928), an account of the life of artist Frederick Tarr, set in bohème Paris, amongst émigré aspirant artists.3 The connection between Tarr and Tár is too great to ignore, although I haven’t seen Todd Field make mention of it, which perhaps isn’t surprising given its obvious affective and overdetermining richness, and the fact that Field appears in his interviews loath to say anything that grounds the film and his filmmaking process generally in extant critical contexts and traditions. Talking of his film, he says that he ‘was really trying to stay out of the way so that there was room for the audience to come in and find things for themselves’.4 Admirable no doubt (and necessary, which we will come to) but nevertheless it is clear that there is some ‘tarring’ (and tarrying) going on here. Tár changes her name from Linda Tarr to Lydia Tár, and as result gives her family name a European, feminised, slightly queered, intonation, pushing the name semantically back into the path of yet another Tarr, both equally European and culturally queering: the contemporary Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, renowned for his oblique and infrathin exercises in glowering moodiness, bleak male and female endurance and defeat (relieved by momentary elation) and the dark cinematic arts of shadow play that seem to well-up and suffuse his East European landscapes; and finally the passage of queered, Europeanised, masculinized Linda Tarr, falling in admiration not far from the lap of the brutishly heteronormative ‘queer’ Frederick Tarr himself, a garrulous, self-advertising defender of male creative and sexual importuning and psychic indifference to others, especially women. Tarr-Tár-Tarr/Tarr-Tarr: a nice Derridean loop. Indeed, I’m happy to play this Derridean game, because the ‘stickiness’ of this elision and the almost com-

3 Lewis 1968. 4 Ford 2022.

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plete homophony of the chain above, invokes the stickiness of the film itself as it invites us to move through various displacements, replacements, (mock) semblables, deceits, covers. Yes, the film is a sticky, clogging business, which has got even stickier, with the American lesbian conductor Marin Alsop, whose career bears a passing resemblance to that of Tár’s (although conspicuously without the working-class origins), and who is cited in a public interview Tár gives to Adam Gopnik from The New Yorker at the beginning of the film, wading in with an embarrassingly gauche critique of the movie: ‘So many superficial aspects of Tár seemed to align with my own personal life, but once I saw it I was no longer concerned, I was offended; I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian’.5 (This slightly comical quote could have been scripted by central casting: the perfect expression of contemporary American identitarian pieties; the Ivy League head-girl version of Tár’s/Blanchett’s ‘progressive neoliberalist’). But before we work our way through this tarring, let us start with/return to Wyndham Lewis’s Mr. Frederick Tarr, and Field/Tár’s female tarring of, and tarrying with, this Mr. Tarr, because Mr. Tarr knows no artistic order other than that of the sex-war and ‘obscene heroism’6 of the newly masculinised twentieth-century modern male artist; the artist without illusions, without the false notes of human communality between friends and between men and women. For the artist: ‘There are no “friends” in this life any more than there are authentic “fiancées”: so it’s of no importance what we choose to call each other: one drifts along side by side with this live stock – friends, fiancées, “colleagues” and what not in our unreal gimcrack artist-society’.7 This kind of Tarrian modernism is of course a long way from our cultural moment and from Lydia Tár’s artistic and social horizons. Frederick Tarr may invoke exasperation with art and artisticness as much as valorising the singular, exalted, authentic artistic life, but he is nonetheless completely invested in 5 Marin Alsop, quoted in ‘This real-life conductor mentioned in “Tár”. And she’s not a fan of the film’, Christa Carras, Los Angeles Times, January 11, 2023. Intriguingly, Alsop, is herself tarred to a filmic, imaginary public imago, her appearance in her own recent bio-documentary, The Conductor (2021), which in turn is, tarred historically, musically, to another film entitled The Conductor (2018) a semi-fictional account of the Dutch-born American conductor Antonia Brico (1902–89) (the first American to graduate from the Berlin State Academy of Music), the precursor to Alsop and Tár, who returns to the US to found her own women’s symphony orchestra and ends up as principal conductor for the Boulder Philharmonic (1958–63). So, whether Field intended it or not, Tár is the spoiler, the break in this emergent generative chain; and thus Alsop, now tarred seemingly to this apparent broken chain, is (in her view) the Tár-like semblable of a ‘lesbian cynicism and predatoriness’. 6 Lewis 1968, p. 14. 7 Lewis 1968, pp. 21–2.

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that late Victorian/Edwardian default setting about women’s essential ‘uncreativity’ and would-be vampiric hold on male creativity.8 Yet, libidinally, like a persistent self-correcting toy, Tár’s inclinations, her constant self-positioning as artist and feminised maestro, are Nietzschean through and through, attached and re-attached as they are to a Tarrian vision, as if Tár’s queerness and the queering of her provincial working-class identity lies most convincingly in the direction of a lesbian queering of an over-man figure such as Frederick Tarr.9 It would be wrong to map Tár neatly onto Tarr for convenience’s sake, Derridean or otherwise (this is what I mean by Field’s keenness to absent himself from any clear semantic trails – let all Tarrs flourish or none!). Nevertheless, Tár’s feminine appropriation of the image of the importuning Tarrian male artist as part of this chain of semantic Tarr-substitutions, is real enough. I say this because there is a key confrontation in the film between Tár and her wife Sharon in their Berlin apartment, after it has become evident that Tár has been chasing/grooming Metkina. Sharon says, resignedly, as if they had been in this position many times before: all your relationships are instrumentally ‘transactional’, implying, most devastatingly at this point, that she married Sharon to get inside the Berliner Philarmoniker, or at least facilitate her further climb up the slippery pole of the Berlin classical music world; indeed, our being party to this Tarrian revelation makes clear to us there are neither ‘friends’ nor ‘lovers’ for Tár when there is tarring and tarrying to be done. But to be frank the Nietzschean link here is in fact less Nietzsche, and more Tarras-Nietzsche. The Tár that Field/Blanchett constructs is not so much an inverse of the complete male artist as containing the essential woman famously outlined by Nietzsche10 – Tár as the queerly female assimilated male artist – but a re-articulation of what Tarr calls the necessary intersection of male creativity across the identity of the under-man and over-man. The male artist needs to be unassuming, discrete, pliant, in order to carry through the seductive work of the over-man in his artistic and sexual life; the overman is in a way nothing, a mere front, unless he can carry off the subterfuges of the under-man. This indeed is the problem with his artistic and emotional male polarity in the novel, the bombastic German painter Otto Krieisler, who rushes at art and 8 9

10

For a discussion of Tarr’s modernism and his ‘non-phallocentric misogyny’, see Jameson 1979. One thing we might speculate on is that the missing of interiority of Tár in the film (of intention and justification, as Broady notes above) as opposed to her creative oblation, can easily be imagined as part of a fictive chain of ‘Társ/Tarrs’, that she herself self-consciously constructs lexically through the sticky tarring of Tarr with Tár and Tár with Tarr; the hidden self-tarring and tarrying of Tár is the oblique mis-en-scène of the film. See Nietzsche 1968, pp. 424–5, and Nietzsche 1994.

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lovers with equal unnuanced fervour. ‘To “mark” time was his cue, until the opportunity arrived to strike … he was the perfect snob, with revenge for a motif’.11 Field/Blanchett’s Tár is the over-woman as over-man queered by the seductive solidarities of the reassuring lgbtqia+ ‘under-woman’. No wonder this intersection of ‘under-woman’ and ‘over-women’ is a combustible mix in Tár’s professional and personal life, as is the role of the under-man in Tarr’s own professional life and ‘bourgeois-bohemian’ social milieu. In Tarr’s life this tension finds its conflicted and aggressive expression in his repeated effort to persuade his interlocuters that he is, in fact, a humble person, even though he is renowned for his Tourette’s-like outbursts of vitriol for certain kinds of women, effete male artists, and men who do not meet his demanding overman criteria. This conflict between humility and overbearingness provides the unstable ground for the indifferently reasoned denunciatory logic of his speech; he repeatedly reasons calmly, almost ascetically – as an artist indifferent to mere life – towards an expulsive condemnation of people and things. Tár’s ‘under-woman’, however, is stronger and more self-controlled than that, and she avoids gratuitous denunciations or ‘pile-ins’ and ad hominem attacks, or ascetic posturing, for she has a family to manage and keep happy (the orchestra, a young, adopted child and her wife, and various ex-lovers who are still around). She doesn’t have the luxury of idle, excessive speech and selfadvertisement. Yet under pressure, after the revelation that one of her protégés and recent lovers (who we meet briefly at the beginning of the film) has committed suicide because of Tár’s own malicious indifference to her, and the fact that the suicide has become a public scandal leading to demonstrations and her eventual dismissial from the orchestra, her cover breaks, and we see her lash out at those who now threaten her. What enrages her is that they haven’t played the game; the maestro’s dance; and as such she dismisses their aspirations and past support as nothing; the enthusiasm of hangers-on and failed musicians. This is reinforced when she finally opens the gift sent to her by her protégé in the toilet of the plane on the way to New York and discovers a copy of Vita Sackville-West’s Challenge (1923), a story of West’s elopement with her lover and socialite Violet Trefussis, in which Sackville-West is represented by the character of Julian and Trefussis by Eve.12 Tár doesn’t need that kind of challenge – running away – that’s for kids and the rich, with shitty, repressive families; she needs to be in the game with those who subordinate their needs to hers. This is

11 12

Lewis 1968, pp. 128–9. Sackville-West [1923] 2012.

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why she violently rips out the frontispiece with her lover’s words and stuffs the book through the slot in the garbage bin in the toilet – the book for her is a gratuitous and ignorant provocation. Like Tarr Romantic love is for ‘little people’, for little, middle-class girls who imagine eloping with their female teachers. These two moment of sharply defined anger follows her own Tourette’s-like moment at the beginning of the film before she goes out on stage, when she flicks and cuts the air with her hand, and reveals a range of anxious facial tics, as if she can barely keep her Tarrian over-woman within the bounds of the game. This early emotive interruption provides the pathological prelude for one of the key scenes in the film, the scene (already much discussed in print) of her conducting seminar with a group of students at The Juilliard School on her visit to New York. This is an important moment because it reminds us that Tár is there at the Berlin Philarmoniker for good musical reasons, that is, not solely as a compromise ‘progressive neoliberalist’ candidate, or efficient manager of musicians, but as a musician and composer of note in her own right, who is capable of throwing a few ‘over-woman’ punches. As a result, Field provides a set-piece conflict between generations (feminist and xenofeminist, Marxist/critical theoretical and post-Marxist and post-human/decolonial, canonic/musicological and anti-historicist/deflationary, universalist and identitarian). I say set-piece, but the conversation is far from a debate; the divisions are only inferred; and Tár does not by any means represent the first antipode across these divisions, indeed, in keeping with her institutional locale and commitment to diversity, her position is liminally open here; nor are the second positions I list given any of broad range of voices amongst the students; their voices are largely circumspect, absent; so in the seminar she is far from defending her views from the opinions of the student body. Nevertheless, Tár, is on the front foot, attacking – or dialectically outwitting, more profitably – one student in particular, Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist), who identifies as pangender and bipoc (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour), and who takes increasing, if quiet, umbrage at Tár’s defence of what the European canon can teach young musicians. His voice and demeanour are gentle, yet his body appears to be fighting off a suppressed rage, through the uncontrollable shaking of his leg. Seated at the piano on stage, with Tár discussing J.S. Bach, he says he has no interest in Bach’s music because the composer was a misogynist and oppressor, for having had so many children. She leans over and stills his leg with her hand, and then steps down to deliver the key part of her talk: the weakness of in-group pieties and the shrillness of a defence of principle as the valorisation of unearned moral condemnation. Max looks aghast and calmly walks out of the class. Max is something of a caricature and straw (pangender) man here; yet as a kind of ultimatist representative of the 1492 critique of Western imperialism and the

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early Enlightenment (the post-1492 destruction of non-European cultures), he stands starkly for the seeming nihilism of contemporary cancel culture, despite this culture’s vital and ongoing unlearning of the deep racism of the colonial and imperialist legacy. In fact, Max’s immature, imbecilic position seems like the wan echo of some rote generic denunciation. But this is precisely what we are supposed to draw from his/her passive aggression: that contemporary cancel culture is an ideological short cut to emancipatory thought and practice, and little different from the more successful cancel cultures that both precede late ‘progressive neoliberalism’ and that still shape its ideological forms of bodily and intellectual control: Catholic and Protestant evangelicalisms, conservative Islamist and Jewish (Zionist) essentialisms, neo-Stalinist populisms, and perhaps most pervasive of all, network culture and mass culture’s computational reason’s libidinal expulsion of the creative challenges of otium and noesis (reflection and creative autonomous action) from the lives of the majority – the cancelation of critical thinking itself as inefficient and weakly libidinal. Indeed, the seminar stages the wider theme that loosely organises the film’s diegesis: the diminished generosity of a public culture that provides an ideal of open and emancipatory universalising inclusion, that can move and interconnect multiple desires; a public culture that can challenge and arrest the ‘murderous disarticulation of the I and the we’.13 This image of an unconditioned universalism is, presently, of course, culturally, a fantasy and an object of wrath for posthumanist critique. But nevertheless, the re-articulation of I and we are what is at stake, above all, for Tár. This is why what is detectable in her sharp exchange with the Juilliard students is a defence of her own experience as a working-class music student, who not only wanted to escape the confines of her provincial class background, but, more adventurously, to enter a world of transformative, englobalising values that she had glimpsed as young musician; a world beyond mere pleasure, or rather, a world of different pleasures, different attachments. In this she reveals a residual class consciousness that is framed explicitly at the end of the film, when she returns to her family home. Standing at the top of the stairs having just looked around her old bedroom and through her collection of old classical music performance videos – the passionate archive of her adolescent self-transformation – she tries at the bottom of the stairs to engage her brother, who has just entered the house, in conversation. He’s utterly indifferent to her sudden presence after so many years, signifying in a familiar way what appears to be the costs of working-class exodus and exile. In this sense, she is reminded of what has been lost in her escape to reach

13

Stiegler 2019, p. 5.

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the imagined transformative shores of a world in which the injuries of class were perhaps once her motivation to make a new music part of a new world. And Blanchett is brilliant at communicating this in this scene and the seminar scene, given her extraordinary intermix of sensuousness, openness, and intellectuality as an actor. Thus, in the family house, this is the point where she takes notional control over the meaning of what her transformative journey has become: an uncertain holding of the centre between contending powers and ideals – although this is not expressed as such in speech but inferred through her physical and affective revisitation of her old attachments. Hence, the important question, the unasked question that grounds the diegesis overall: why is a lesbian composer and conductor, with a background in ethnomusicological critique (indigenous Peruvian music), new classical music, and support of new female composers and conductors, shown to be putting so much effort into rehearsing two works of note from the high European male classical tradition? It obviously doesn’t square with what we know of Tár’s musical ambitions for a new musical regime at the Philarmoniker, nor with her own compositional interests. So, Field’s choice in putting Tár in rehearsal at the heart of the popular European canon is perplexing, given the way it confuses the musical stakes of her tenure. But then, again, absurdly Field also has her as the recipient of an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony (an ergot winner) for her tv, theatre, and film work, as if he couldn’t resist upping the popular stakes of her fall. As a working-class student, who, willing or not, on entering the musical academy would have had to work through the consolations of the culture she has just left and knows best, a popular culture of ‘least resistance’ – a process definitional of her transformative journey – it is strange we are shown little of the musical outcomes of this process, with the exception of the Juilliard class; where we see her directly at the helm of the orchestra, conducting or talking about Mahler, she is portrayed first and foremost as the interpreter of official taste. Of course, in a state institution like the Berlin Philharmoniker, the representation of the official repertoire would be part of her job, as would her desire to match the interpretative achievements of her predecessors, such as Herbert von Karajan. (Just as moonlighting on the side with tv and film projects, is hardly infra dig for classical musicians these days.) But what of the building of a new repertoire and her commitment to new music; the creation of new musical attachments, new sonic relationships? Nothing musically in the film is shown in the making, as if her role as conductor is quite separate from her musical judgement and powers of critical patronage. Hence, why don’t we see her rehearsing the work of young or mid-generation women composers, such as, for example – in no particular order – Anna Clyne, Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Sarah Nemtsov, or Unsuk Chin, which would obviously deepen our libidinal

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attachment to the gathering force of musical change at the institution that she publicly represents, and therefore musically enrich her clash with the Julliard students? There are three reasons: two are understandable, one bad. Field needs to show Tár affected by some sense of self-constraint as a way of making her visible anxiety at various moments comprehensible (because throughout the film we learn very little about her state of being from what she actually says; thus it is never clear whether the rehearsal of the Mahler is merely part of her job or, indeed, evidence of her giving up on her former commitments; a lowering of critical standards?); and secondly, for more pragmatic and filmic reasons, there is an obvious difficulty involved in covering the musical actions of non-musician actors, when the actor is required to show extensive musical skills and technical competence (unless most of the scenes are performed by a double). Having Blanchett involved in the production of new (and perhaps heterodoxically complex) music, could easily appear inert and underinvested. But thirdly – the bad reason – the fear of overinvesting in musical controversies or difficulties and losing your audience, and in turn, losing the opportunity for Tár to make some stock conducting moves and crescendi flourishes that would make clear, narratively, that she has taken over, and assimilated, the power, of the male conductor’s standing. I think all these decisions are working here, overall weakening the film’s musical relevance, even as it tries to trade on it. But, in a substantive sense, diegetically, it is also clear that Field is only interested in musical questions insofar as they unambiguously support the undisclosed anxiety that affects Tár throughout the film. And this is why the feeling of being both uplifted yet held in place by the centralising requirements of the institution, by tradition, by the canon, is shown to be more dramatically affecting than dealing with the struggles Tár may encounter in building a new repertoire. In other words, Field wanted a more conventional relationship between conductorship and the orchestra in order to make Tár’s investment in classical canonic achievement for contemporary practice more telling and legible. Having her ‘under-perform’ as the conductor-as-over-woman, would therefore diminish this visibly, particularly if her work as a conductor is less called for in rehearsing the work of younger composers had Field chosen the new music option. And this is why Field’s strong reliance on the gestalt image of the conductor, actually slides the film into the Hollywood melodramatic sub-genre of the ‘conductor movie’, best represented for our needs here by one of Preston Sturges’ last films, Unfaithfully Yours (1948), starring Rex Harrison as an English conductor working in the US (Sir Alfred de Carter) and Linda Darnell (Daphne de Carter), his younger wife, who he believes to be having an affair with his secretary, Anthony Windborn (Kurt Kreuger). In the final concert sequence (which remarkably lasts for over 30 minutes), de Carter, angry and intensely jealous, fantasises as

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he conducts Rossini, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky three possible resolutions of his marriage, which we see on screen: the perfect murder of his wife, the generous acceptance of Windborn as his wife’s lover, and a stand-off game of Russian roulette with Windborn, which ends in his own death. His conducting, serving as the perfect channel for his violence and frustration, stretches the melodramatic dénouements into abject comedy. ‘The audiences laughed from the beginning to the end of the picture. And they went home with nothing. Because nothing had happened. He had hadn’t killed her; he hadn’t killed himself. It just looked that way’.14 There is no unfortunate collapse of melodrama into abject comedy in Tár, but there is a similar kind of musical indifference to conducting itself, a comparable reliance on the expressive melodramatic effects of conducting as a spectacle to convey feeling and a sense of authority and elevation, which means Field is happy to let filmic values outweigh musical veracity. But even this is not stable. The film does not go through its various tarrings and tarryings (queerings) to arrive at some settled acceptance of value and tradition; that would be comical, a waste of emotional expenditure, and as such, would, indeed, be reactionary and ‘regressive’. Rather, the stabilisation of the film’s musical values in the classical space of the orchestra and canonic repertoire – whatever reasons we might bring to this move – in the end serves a quite different cultural and non-musical agenda. It enables clear light to emerge between, what we might call the mobilisation of two cultural states of anxiety that define the film’s intersubjective and intersectional mood and dynamic, which Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick analysed in her late-1990s work on ‘queer reading’ and anxiety as the queer-reparative and queer-paranoiac positions. As she argued in ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’ (1997)15 the dominant queer reading mode, or cultural setting of queerness, has been invariably paranoiac, that is grounded in an alertness to danger, defamation, and humiliation. Moreover, this has been a kind of secret knowledge, a queer knowledge that practices preemptive withdrawal and the detection of the signs of bad surprises (‘exposure’, derision, loss of respect). For the reparative position – which for Sedgwick is not opposed to the paranoiac position as a humiliation-fear theory, but détourns it, so to speak – the ‘secret’ is out in the open, indeed there is no secret and therefore the anticipation of the negative loses its valency. This does not mean that trust has magically begun to replace fear and misreading, but that humiliation and the bad surprise are not inevitable, and therefore are not that which lie in wait as a matter of course. This enables a different temporality and mode of

14 15

Sturges 1991, p. 307. Sedgwick 1997.

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attentiveness to emerge with regard to practice, one that doesn’t default to the inevitable and to withdrawal, but that allows queerness to assemble and reassemble its materials and attachments in a space that allows – albeit falteringly – the creation of a queer ‘plenitude’.16 This plenitude is the outcome of lgbtqia+ struggles in the new millennium and Lydia Tár is the direct beneficiary of these struggles and history. And this is why when I borrow from Lewis’s Tarr and talk about Tarr’s Nietzschean ‘over-woman’, I’m talking directly about the queer confidence that comes with the institutionalisation of the reparative position. Indeed, what is engaging and vivid about the film is that its lesbian queer libidinal dynamic, is neither visibly sexualised for heterosexual consumption, nor plotted as an externality to heteronormative action; the central action is the queerness of Tár’s personal and professional relations. In this queerness in the film is co-extensive with action and speech; queerness is neither hidden nor explained. Yet nevertheless, it is a ‘paranoid’ film, or rather a film about contemporary paranoia, intersubjectively posed from a queer position. That is, Tár’s reparative-paranoid position, and pangender Max’s pure paranoid antipode, are the two intersecting ideological poles through which Tár’s crisis and destruction are played out as part of a larger struggle around history, subjectivity and meaning. In this regard, although Max appears only briefly, his presence and words nonetheless fill out the film and Tár’s anxiety, because they fill out a post-colonial world that Tár is trying to negotiate and live in as much as Max. In this way these two interconnecting modes of anxiety constitute the present uneven psychic plenum of late capitalist culture: the recovery and maintenance of a kind of psychic stability through tying struggle to history, and the creation of a place of the subaltern in the future emancipatory life of that history, and the production of new subjectivities, that are radically indifferent and done with that history, that, in fact, revel in the multiplicitous fragments of its collapse; a separation of queerness from (white) Humanist Man that knows no limits, in which the cultural peaks and monuments of that past are reduced to mere contingencies. So Tár’s anxiety and Max’s anxiety share a paranoiac queer substrate, but they reveal very different exit points from its suppositions. Max’s position is deontological, without a historically redemptive perspective – pure negation in Alain Badiou’s sense17 – while Tár’s position is deontological from a redemptive perspective, driven, in contrast, by the memory of the historical and present working-class and racial costs that have subtended the emergence of the Idea of European culture and its highest achievements, therefore costs

16 17

Sedgwick 1997, p. 28. Badiou 2008b.

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that should not be betrayed, but held in trust through the efforts of those future non-white Europeans who stand to inherit it and transform it into another kind of plenitude. This is why first and foremost the film is set in Berlin, the elevated seat of an old Europe, that in an act of modern suicide destroyed itself through imperialist blowback and the revanchism of ethnic mystification, and, why, in turn, the cultural discussion takes place in New York, the ‘new world’ (now equally old world) where claims to American exceptionalism and an escape from European hubris covers a history of white supremacy and violent antiworking class politics that interwar European fascism gratefully learned from.18 Thus, the Europeanized de-Americanized American and parochial nativised radical American face each other on a terrain where pure paranoiac forms of queerness reveal, invite, and deepen the exhaustion of democracy and the separation of cultural politics from politics, and the destruction of any obligations to world history. But this is not an ethical victory for the reparativeparanoiac position; Tár cannot herself build these historical bridges; it appears that whatever idea she might have had concerning an old Europe made new, indeed, made new through a queer revolution, has become increasingly compromised. Tár may shut down the purely paranoiac through the reparative, but the paranoiac leaks out (evidenced through her tics), the anxiety that in the end comes through investing too much in this new Europe. (This is what I mean by Field’s choice of Tár’s repertoire signifying something bigger than her professional obligations; all her efforts on her – closely guarded – Mahler interpretation, which we never hear, encourages us to think of this interpretation as revelatory). What is inferred by Max’s anger, however, is: why does this tradition needs to be creatively redeemed in the name of a new Europe at all?; let the European and the Anglo-American white world die; let the paranoiac freely leak out, indeed let us celebrate it (hence Max’s neurodiverse ‘ticcingflapping’ resistance to ‘neurotypical white male reasoning’);19 any new plenitude that can be made is being made anew now by those who see no place for themselves in this redeemed history. But if Tár’s reparative-paranoiac position is presently a fantasy of re-integration and plenitude, it invites us to resist this rationality, resist what Sedgwick sees presciently in the late 1990s as the intimacy between pure paranoiac queerness and collusion with conspiracy theories and apophenic thinking, or what she calls ‘weak theory’20 (in which the edging of a hermeneutics of suspicion into nihilism prevails). And this is where the film 18 19 20

See for example, Whitman 2017 and Pichot 2009. For a discussion of the radical cultural ramifications of neurodiverse ‘ticcingflapping’ and stimming, see Manning 2020. Sedgwick 1997, p. 21.

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‘centres’ itself culturally, somewhere close to accepting the risks (and present costs) of reparation: ‘No less acute than a paranoid position, no less realistic, no less attached to a project of survival, and neither less nor more delusional or fantasmatic, the reparative reading position undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks. What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways in which selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture – even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them’.21 This leads to my final tarring, the attachment of the film not just to a contemporary politics of culture, but to film aesthetics itself. To say Tár tarries within the infrathin aesthetics of yet another Tarr, Béla Tarr, is to say that the film doesn’t simply invite consideration of ‘Europe’ and ‘America’ as historical entities and concepts at the level of the text, but tarries with a ‘Europeanized’ spirit of devastation and loss, in which the filming of Europe (of Berlin) from the subjective space of a de-Americanised, queered, American position, leaves the film sharing its queerness with a Béla Tarr-like queerness, his refusal to have his characters explain or reflect on their suffering and pain as part of the film’s diegesis. Rather Tarr’s audience is asked to move with and inhabit the time of the characters, as if making sense of lives and things is about trying to make out what moves in and out of the shadows that suffuses all his mature films, evidenced most mostly famously in the opening of The Turin Horse (2011). In this opening sequence father (János Derzi) and daughter (Erika Bók), impoverished potato farmers, do not speak for an entire hour; we share their impoverishment by being with them and observing what they observe. Tár doesn’t abjure speaking, as is clear, she is a public official after all, but nevertheless in the film she does live in, and emerge intermittently from, her ‘shadows’. Tár is maybe the subjective focus of the film but the film rarely discloses her feelings in her words or the words of others; we mostly infer her feelings and attitudes towards her wife, her ex-lovers, her professional colleagues, from brief exchanges and passing encounters; scenes involving her are not intercut with scenes that speak of her; she is not the subject of discussion or gossip, she is never Tár to others, an object of judgement or victim. In this respect, as in Tarr’s, tarrying with non-diegetic time Field is not interested in telling the story of Tár’s rise and fall as a figure within the melodramatic conventions of a ‘woman destroyed’, because the subject of the film is not in fact her moral failings, her indiscretions as ‘woman and a lesbian’ (as Alsop primly puts it), but the emotional cost of the anxiety she lives and fails to live with as the cost of her role as

21

Sedgwick 1997, p. 35.

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a lesbian artist, which, therefore, is connected more precisely to her diminished sexual and professional judgement in her Lewis-Tarrian over-identification with her queering of the heteronormative male artist. (Revealingly she never resists being addressed as maestro throughout the film; the affirmative obverse of her stimming.) This is not a queer melodrama, then, in the sense that Basil Dearden’s Victim (1961) with Dirk Bogarde is a queer melodrama and point of public debate; Field provides no reason to identify her as victim or a monster, because to do so is to betray her individuation and therefore subject her to an excess of heteronormative scrutiny. Thus, the striking intersubjective costiveness that Field creates – firstly the diminished reflective and non-relational portrait of Tár at work and at home, and secondly, his decision not to stage a meeting between Tár and her accusers and ex-lovers – enables the viewer to work through the cultural and aesthetic stakes of her reparative-paranoia as the context of her misjudgement, rather than taking her ‘over-women’ queering simply as a moral failure and the subject of trial. Doing so means that the film beneficially, overall, is libidinally as much about Tár’s conflicted relationship to her beloved orchestra, as it is to her wife and ex-lovers; and, therefore, as such, a move that is designed principally to act as a barrier to turning the second half of the film simply into a detective story or court room drama in which shaming, or redemption leads to relief and platitudes. But to return to Béla Tarr. This lack of explicit intersubjective relationality in the creation of Tár – the creation of her as an object of obscure desire – puts the audience to work in the ‘shadows’, where interesting kinds of tarring and tarrying gets done, and where ultimately the ‘film experience’ can be defended beyond plots and dénouements. What László Nemes, the director of Son of Saul (2015) and Sunset (2018), and assistant on Tarr’s The Man From London (2007), has insisted on as being a displacement of the diegetic compulsion to know: ‘Cinema today – by jumping from angles, from points of view, always giving the right amount of information and the right vision when it’s needed for dramatic purposes – gives the audience the impression that they control, they can judge, and they can understand. I think, on the contrary, I have a responsibility to my audience to take them on a journey that is also by themselves, and show that you cannot always open all the curtains’.22 This is not something contemporary Hollywood film has much sympathy for, even if it fleetingly attaches itself to what the memory of what that once meant (ironically in its support of Tár). Thus, compare the recently overly hyped Black Panther (2018), with its ‘blueprint’ script which took 200 million dollars to make, and took over 1.3 billion

22

Interview with Lázsló Nemes, Kaufman 2019.

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dollars at the box office, to Djibril Diop Mambéty’s La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil (The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun) (1999), which cost hardly anything to make with young non-actors and made nothing at the box office and is one of the great films of the last 30 years.23 A familiar story of course and it proves again that the film industry is largely about providing jobs, and not making films. But Nemes is right, as much as Béla Tarr is right, on the question of what film can produce through the duration of a scene and through visual inference, how slow-moving bodies and looks – even inertia and silence – can bring stories and their contingent pathways to fruition. As Jacques Rancière says in his short book, Béla Tarr, The Time After (2013), on Tarr’s metaphysics of time, Tarr’s the ‘time after’ is ‘neither that of reason recovered, nor that of the expected disaster [insofar as the disaster is already with us]. It is the time after all stories, the time when one takes direct interest in the sensible stuff in which these stories cleaved their shortcuts between projected and accomplished ends. It is not the time in which we craft beautiful phrases or shots to make up the emptiness of all waiting. It is the time in which take an interest in the wait’.24 A waiting in and out of corners and shadows, a waiting that requires an adjustment to the demands of living through the extended time of the present disaster, a working through of its ‘afterness’. This could easily describe Tár’s own ‘time after’ as she enters and adapts her paranoiac queering to the neoliberal continuum. But, after her fall the time allowed to her to work through the ‘time after’ has radically foreshortened, and as such her exposure to ‘raw neoliberalism’, as opposed to the comforts of ‘progressive neoliberalism’, has intensified. Her investment in a reparative queering of the temporal luxury of the classical tradition – of middle class otium and the noetic – is now tarred to the time/timing she hoped she had left behind, the time of commerce and market immediacy – revealed strikingly in the final shot of the film. Living in an unidentified South East Asian country we see Tár on stage at a public concert about to conduct a scratch orchestra in a live performance of the soundtrack of the popular Japanese video game Monster Hunter (in which players hunt down various monsters), which since its release in 2004 has sold over 80 million copies. The camera pans slowly along the side of the audience, who are all dressed in inventive and colourful cosplay outfits derived from the game. When the camera reaches the end of the rows of seats the film blacks out, and the film ends. The shock of this stunning final scene is the shock of Tár being back in the space that she believed 23

24

A more convincing pathway through to an Afrofuturist aesthetic, is the exhilarating Neptune Frost (2021), co-directed by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman, partly indebted to the queer realism of Mambéty’s early masterpiece Touki Bouki (1973). Rancière 2013, pp. 63–4.

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she had left as a classical musician, or more accurately believed she was in a position to control. But if we see her as a diminished, even anonymous presence here, to underline my point above, the film does not present her fall from grace in this form as a moral lesson. Rather, we are in late Kafka dialectical territory. Indeed Tár’s ‘time after’ is also tarred to, and tarries with, the ‘time after’ of Franz Kafka’s short story, ‘Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse-People’ (1924), his tale of a mouse, who decides that her singing/squeaking – no different in quality and range than the squeakings of the mouse community she lives in – is worthy of individual attention and appreciation. Josefine believes she has a special talent and, therefore, deserves special privileges, specifically time off work, so she can dedicate all her energies to singing/squeaking. The community find this incomprehensible. ‘Among ourselves we admit quite openly that as singing goes, Josefine’s singing does not represent anything extraordinary’.25 Furthermore, the community finds Josefine’s insistence on her squeaking or ‘piping’ as an art in itself, as arbitrary and mystifying. ‘We all of us pipe, but truly, nobody thinks of claiming it as an art, we pipe without paying attention to it, indeed without noticing’.26 But Josefine repudiates the habitual character of everyone’s piping, insisting emphatically that there is a world of difference about what she does with her squeaking and what everyone else does. Josefine, then, with the reluctant acceptance of the community, establishes a public career for herself, even though it is difficult for the community to notice any real difference between her squeaking on stage and the squeaking of the audience. But with increasing exposure to her focussed piping, the community, begins to reassess their indifference to their own shared skill for piping. What they thought of as habitual and in fact didn’t recognise as piping at all but part of everyday work routines, becomes of interest, and as a result they are occasionally moved by Josefine’s piping, even though it is no different in quality from their own. The small attention she receives encourages her to assume a rightful claim to the exceptional power of her talent, pushing herself to the verge of exhaustion to consolidate her position as part of what she believes to be an ‘elect’. With her rapid ageing and the weakening of voice and tiny body (this is after all the ‘time after’ in mouse-years), she heroically, persists, to little avail, and ‘retires’. ‘She is a small episode in the eternal story our people … she will soon, redeemed and transfigured, be forgotten, like all her brethren’.27

25 26 27

Kafka 2012, p. 66. Ibid p. 66. Ibid, p. 80.

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Kafka’s tale is written in the same period as Tarr and represents its negative shadow. As Lewis’s Tarr says in assertive Josefine-mode: ‘I prefer the artist to be free, and the crowd not to be “artists”’.28 Kafka, however, reverses this: the crowd is, or will become, artists, and the artist in his or her transindividuated individuation will be part of this artistic community. Thus, in this dialectical transformation of diurnal, unself-conscious ordinary time, made self-conscious by Josefine’s egoistic interruption into the community’s enclosed, unreflective time, a new time, a time that integrates productive time with artistic time (nonbourgeois time), emerges. Kafka’s imaginary ‘time after’ therefore is a ‘time after’ art, so to speak. In these terms, interestingly, Maurizio Lazzarato in his Experimental Politics (2017) gives Kafka’s story an anti-neoliberal uplift. The outlines of Kafka’s ‘time after’ is already with us. In the world of contemporary cultural practice, ‘nonvirtuosity [or shared squeaking] and the weakness of materials are “democratic” techniques to neutralize the authority of tradition, the author, and the work over the public’.29 The shock of the final scene in Tár, then, is precisely this neutralisation of tradition and the author and the elevation of the public, the very driving force of the cultural debate that hangs over the discussion between Tár and the students at Julliard. But if Field shows us the real ‘hidden’ terms of the cultural conflict that is played out under neoliberal participatory mass culture, as a way of disclosing how fragile ‘progressive neoliberalism’ is for those who have benefitted from its privileges in their critique of neoliberalism, there are no reassurances here about the artist ‘returning’ or being ‘claimed’ by popular values, as if Tár has returned (perhaps as Linda Tarr) to the fold. The idea of the visible loss of artistic distinction or the regaining of a popular and participatory audience for the artist in the final scene are both equally crass. This is why I think we shouldn’t assume that the ending is tragedy or a popular corrective to libidinal excess (the imagined privileges of the female artist as ‘over-woman’). Rather, and this underwrites my general reading of the film, the ‘time after’ of her new situation, enables a repositioning of her reparative paranoid method, which her misguided queering of the over-man had lost contact with. This, in its abjectness, playing along to Monster Hunting, may be not so bad, for it may produce the possibility of new practice, a new queering, a new set of relations, a new plenitude. Indeed, at the moment of Tár’s exclusion and isolation, Field reconnects Tár to what Donna Haraway once called the ‘promise of monsters’,30 opening up another queer semantic loop, in which reparative paranoia is reclaimed explicitly for the energy of the 28 29 30

Lewis 1968, p. 214. Lazzarato 2017 p. 214. Haraway 2003.

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hybrid, of sympoiesis, of the creative impurity of the monstruous, as opposed to a return to the security of tradition, the autarkic self, nature, Europe, whiteness. And this is where there is a refusal on Field’s part to moralise: Tár’s would be ‘monstrousness’, her over-identification with the over-woman as over-man, moves into another register. Monstrousness serves other ends than domination: an attachment to the transformative beauty and alacrity of the contingent, the presumed misaligned, the unexpected conjugation.

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Memories, History, Mnemotechnics On a visit in 2004 to St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad, and before that St. Petersburg/Petrograd), one of the first things I asked of a Russian friend was that we visit the Piskariovskoye Memorial Cemetery.1 Piskariovskoye is where more than five hundred thousand people who died in the Leningrad Siege between September 1941 and January 1944 are buried in mass graves. As I wanted to pay my respects, we hailed a nonofficial taxi – ordinary drivers who stop if the fancy takes them – and rattled our way at ferocious speed to the outskirts of the city. At the time, I knew relatively little about the siege, but on arriving in the city I was overwhelmed by a powerful desire to visit the graves. Indeed, I felt I would shame myself if I didn’t visit. Arriving at Piskariovskoye and walking through the gates, I told myself that whatever else I might do on my visit to St. Petersburg, this is what made it worthwhile. It was a beautiful day; wildflowers were in bloom in the wooded periphery, where plastic-covered photographs of long-dead sons and daughters were pinned to trees; and the statue of the Motherland that dominates the far end of the cemetery shone forcefully in the sun. My friend and I sat down on a bench by the river, and I said that although this was my first visit to Russia, its history, its politics, its culture, had shaped my life. In fact, I had lived out a ‘virtual’ Russia, or Soviet Union, since my late teens; the revolution, the Stalinist counterrevolution, the fight against fascism, were things I thought about, dwelt on, talked about to myself, almost on a daily basis. This is why I needed to visit the cemetery, I suggested: I needed to give a physical presence to the pathos of these memories, as if I was visiting my own grave, my own deepest loss. But, perhaps, more important, I realised I needed to renew my spirit by subordinating my own affections and sentiments to the flow and intensity of a collective experience that preceded me, and that, at the profoundest level, had shaped the world I was born into. I also needed, in a sense, to make tangible the necessary integration of ‘living memory’ with ‘historical memory’. I needed to feel that I was offering, no matter how enfeebled, a fidelity to something that stood long gone but still present over me.

1 First published, 2008, in The Lining of Forgetting: Internal and External Memory in Art, curated by Xandra Eden, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro: Weatherspoon Art Museum.

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In the sunshine of Piskariovskoye, and in the company of a friend, it is easy to feel one is endorsing this integration and making a difference, but, of course, I was perfectly aware that the existence of such a place as Piskariovskoye may not be wanted by some, or not be wanted in quite the same way that those who built it wanted it. Its embedded images of resistance, heroism, self-sacrifice, glare back in a Russia and a wider world in which such things rememorialise – in embarrassing and unfathomable ways – the commitments that produced them; that is, resistance to the siege was not just part of the monumental struggle against fascism on Russian soil but a struggle against fascism for the soul of the party. St. Petersburg, the seat of the October Revolution, was also the city of dissent, the one last major source of old Bolshevik intellectual independence. Although Stalin did not exactly let the city ‘go hang’, he dragged his feet over breaking the blockade, hoping that the remaining and long-standing source of opposition would be severely weakened. This gives an added poignancy to one of the abiding and extraordinary moments from the siege: the premiere, in 1943, of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, written in the city during the early part of the blockade. Most of the city orchestra’s musicians were dead or had left, and so a general call to anyone who could fill their places was made, right down to the frontline defenders. In a short time, a ramshackle group of musicians assembled, some so cold, tired, and hungry that they could hardly lift their instruments (most people were living on a small, heavily adulterated portion of bread a day). But, with the barest of rehearsal times, they produced a tumultuous performance, broadcast to the German lines and beyond, which culminated in a massive surge of after-performance emotion, musician embracing musician, audience member embracing audience member. Few of the musicians survived the blockade. This passing and exultant act of solidarity is one of the great moments of creative resistance in the twentieth century, an incendiary spark from the killing floors and mausoleum of fascism and Stalinism. Yet, if I choose to speak of the performance in this way, it is not because this meaning is available to me as a collective memory in English; on the contrary, it is because I choose to bear witness to it, and, as such, give it a symbolic form, as part of a shared political commitment to its significance. I consciously bring it into historical memory, indeed, into a theory of history and collective struggle, allowing it to rest along with other events – expanding in number and meaning all the time – within my historical consciousness. It becomes a symbolic event once I interpolate it into this historical consciousness. This socially individualised process of memorialisation is not about securing the place of a given event in collective history (my recall and symbolisation of the Shostakovich premiere cannot in and of itself do this; for others, particularly for many Russians, it already exists within collective memory), but is,

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rather, a demonstration of the significance of this event as part of its reinscription within my historical consciousness of its (suppressed) political meaning. More precisely, therefore, I do not just recall the event, tell myself again, and others, that this is what happened, as if it carries no meaning beyond its date and location but, rather, reposition it within a counter-historical reading of the event itself. In other words, we might say that my recall of this event stands at the intersection of two dominant discourses and one marginal or subordinate discourse: a national and patriotic discourse that sees the siege and the concert as something that should be forgotten, remaindered along with Stalinism itself; a national and patriotic discourse that celebrates (as does the current Russian tourist industry) the fortitude and grandeur of the Russian people in times of national trauma; and a critical and revolutionary discourse, in which the event is read against the grain, dislodged from its immediate context to live as a utopian and prefigurative glimpse from another world, a glimpse of the future in the past. This is why the critical redemption and rewriting of such events – as Walter Benjamin understood so powerfully – is so central to the possible interconnection of living memory and historical memory. The subject in its fidelity to what has passed must break open the continuum of the past in order to let past subjectivities flow into the present and live again. But, of course, as Benjamin also recognised in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, such a process is extremely fragile in the face of the amnesia and commemorative effusions of national-patriotic and state-sponsored memory.2 The living traditions of history’s victims are cast under the brutally censorious or palely incurious rewritings of the victorious. Piskariovskoye and other such places of public record in the former Communist countries, then, face their own amnesiac rewriting under the imperatives of state-sponsored memory as the ties to older, Soviet collective memories break down. This is expressed, perhaps most concretely, in the increasing devaluation visited by revisionist historians East and West on the Red Army’s role in the defeat of fascism, and in the renewed anti-Semitic denigration in Russia and the former Stalinist states, particularly Estonia and Hungary, of the legacy of Communist antifascist resistance. In an important sense, therefore, living memory and historical memory don’t just coincide but are the outcome of prior choices and ideological struggles, in which the will to remembering as position-taking, absence of memory freely chosen or imposed, and the willingness to forget fight for space, indeed could be said to inhabit the same subjective space. This is why, in the Bergsonian tra-

2 Benjamin 1973.

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dition of memory-research, we are not subjects with memories but are memories – that is, our consciousness and agency are the conflicted outcome of the interdependence of past and present. There is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience. In most cases these memories supplant our natural perceptions of which we then retain only a few hints, thus using them merely as ‘signs’ that recall to us former images.3 In other words, immediate perception is ‘bound up in memory’.4 To perceive, to have consciousness, is actively to enact, invoke, or be possessed by memory. ‘[T]here is nothing that is instantaneous. In all that goes by that name there is already some work of memory’.5 Every concrete perception is already a ‘synthesis made by memory’.6 Being bound up in memory, establishing memory as a form of labour, shifts the epistemological focus of recollection and remembering away from the Cartesian and Lockean emphasis on the primary weakness of the connection between memory and knowledge. In René Descartes and John Locke, the fragility of memory always puts knowledge in jeopardy. In Locke, in particular, human faculties invariably fail the best of human intentions.7 This is not to say that Bergson does not think of memory as equally precarious, but, in contrast to the Cartesian tradition, memory is an active and productive category. For all its fissiparousness, memory is what enables and produces subjectivity and truth. This is why Bergson shares a certain affinity with Freud: Embedded in memory, we are compelled to work with and through memory in order to possess ourselves (and repossess ourselves) as historical and knowledgeproducing beings. But for Freud, of course, famously this process is not easily won. Our embeddedness in the workings of memory is also our embeddedness in the work of the unconscious; hence, for Freud, the absence of memory and our willingness or eagerness to forget, impede and shape our will and capacity for remembering. Indeed, remembering is never simply recollection in Freud’s psychoanalysis, for remembering is precisely what is opposed to, and breaks through, the compulsion to repeat that is inherent in our day-to-day recollections. Remembering is a process of patient sifting through the compulsion to

3 4 5 6 7

Bergson 1991, p. 33. Ibid, p. 66. Ibid, p. 69. Ibid, p. 182. Locke 1993.

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repeat. The labour of remembering, then, is intensive, intrusive, and interruptive; it presupposes that our recourse to our stock of memories blocks the work of remembering at the very point it supposedly recalls us to the past. The emphasis on memory, as recollective work against memory’s labour of forgetting, places the function of memory at the forefront of historical analysis, and, as such, places personal memory at the interface between the theory of history and psychoanalysis. In this sense, memory-research here functions broadly as an underlabourer for a critique of the subject in the social and historical sciences. This is in sharp contrast to memory-research in the area of cognitive psychology and neuroscience, where the emphasis upon memorytasks focuses, in a quasi-Lockean way, on the dysfunctions and derelictions of memory as an empirical confirmation of ‘human fallibility’.8 In this literature, the fragility of remembering is locked into a range of evidential categories of forgetting in both short-term memory and long-term memory: trace decay (stm); displacement (stm); interference (stm); retrieval failure (ltm); and failure to consolidate (ltm). Trace decay presupposes that short-term memory is only able to hold information for around fifteen to thirty seconds unless it is consciously and deliberately retained. Forgetting occurs, therefore, as a result of the automatic decay of remembering in short-term memory (although this rapid decay is highly difficult to test). Displacement theory emphasises the chronically limited storage capacity of short-term memory. Because shortterm memory can hold only a small number of units of information, new information soon pushes the old information out. Interference theory asserts that forgetting occurs because new memories interfere with and disrupt other, older memories. This occurs, for instance, during the process of formalised learning: What we know already prevents new memories forming, and what is newly learned weakens or dissolves what is already learned. Retrieval failure occurs when information stored in long-term memory cannot be accessed because the social, environmental, and affective cues required for the successful recovery of the information are weak, or no longer available (through physiological damage). Last, the ‘failure to consolidate’ is what happens during the passage of information from temporary storage in short-term memory to its laying down permanently in long-term memory. Neurological damage, particularly in the area of the hippocampus (the limbic system of the forebrain), can prevent this process occurring. The result is an inability to form new memories necessary for successful social development and interaction.9 8 See Baddeley 1976. 9 For an introductory overview and critique of the relative merits of these positions, see Henderson 1999.

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This is not to say that an antipathy to the historical sciences can be directly read off from memory-research in the cognitive sciences or the neurosciences, or that studying the failures of memory leads memory researchers into cultural nihilism. But, by locking into the weaknesses and fallibility of memory, accompanied as this research is by a general distaste for Freud and psychoanalysis,10 the cognitive sciences and neurosciences generally fail to connect the derelictions and limitations of human memory to a theory of the subjectas-memory in any meaningful social sense. Bound-up-in-memory means little more than being bound up in a kind of Cartesian binarism, in which the self is engaged endlessly in a losing battle to retain its rational self-identity against the dissipative and erosive functions of memory. These feelings of dissipation are exacerbated by the dominant model of the brain-as-computer in the cognitive sciences. Its functionalist emphasis on the superior computational capacity of artificial-intelligence machines exposes the failings of human memory to an idealised and impossible model of rapid and exact memorisation and calculation. Consequently, memory becomes overly identifiable with techniques of memorisation, and, as such, the key question in memory-research – ‘Why do we forget?’ – loses any kind of epistemological valency and social content. By focusing on this question, we suppress or discard the other significant and interrelated question of memory-research: ‘Why and how is it possible that we do remember?’ Why and how is it possible that through the work of repetition we are able to lay down information permanently in our long-term memory, and, moreover, significantly lay claim to its truthfulness? This is the primary concern of the social model of memory-research, in which the failures of memorisation (individual memory), collective memory, and historical memory are brought into cognitive and psychological alignment. In this way, the failures of memorisation and the productive notion of memory-work as active and reconstructive (in the Aristotelian/Freudian sense of memory as anamnesis, the labour of recollection)11 operate coterminously. This is the dominant theme of Paul Ricoeur’s monumental work on memory, Memory, History, Forgetting (2004),12 which seeks to bring the discussion of memory’s fallibility in the area of the cognitive sciences under the discipline of this anamnesic, effortful search for truth. ‘The truthful ambition of memory has its own merits, which deserve to be recognized before any consideration is given to the pathological deficiencies and the nonpathological weaknesses of

10 11 12

See, for instance, Henderson’s seven-line dismissal of Freud, ibid., p. 76. Aristotle 1930. Ricoeur 2004.

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[short-term] memory’.13 In other words, whatever derelictions are constitutive of memory, essential to memory-work is the ethical imperative not to forget. This is why, for Ricoeur, historicisation (and rehistoricisation) above all else involves a duty to memory, thereby encouraging ‘the duty to do justice, through memories, to an other than the self’.14 Accordingly, memory-work as historical labour is the struggle against forgetting in the name of those who have the most to lose from forgetting: the oppressed and exploited. But, for Ricoeur, the memorial work undertaken against forgetting and in the name of justice is not able to do its reconstructive work without affirming the steadfastness of memory as the facilitator of truth. Hence, underlying ‘the truthful ambition’ of the reconstructive work of memory is not simply a fidelity to the archive, textual, photographic, or filmic – as the would-be basis of collective memory – but a fidelity to the veracity of what founds the truth-claims of the archive itself: the testimony of the witness. [W]e must not forget that everything starts not from the archives, but from testimony, and that, whatever may be our lack of confidence in principle in such testimony, we have nothing better than testimony, in the final analysis, to assure ourselves that something did happen in the past.15 This ‘veridical-epistemological’ content is the core of Ricoeur’s social conception of memory: It is possible to claim with some certainty, on the basis of the intersubjective testimony of witnesses, that some events did happen in a particular way, at a given time and place, and with certain outcomes. This is not to say that the testimonial witness settles the interpretative work undertaken on the event or events, or that testimonies are not open to questioning from other witnesses, but without the testimony of the witness, history differs little from fiction. Testimonies, by definition, therefore, ‘open a space of controversy’,16 but it is against this background of controversy and scepticism that memory-work is able to produce its truth-claims. [I]t is the force of testimony that presents itself at the very heart of the documentary proof. And I do not see that we can go beyond the witness’s triple declaration: (1) I was there; (2) believe me; (3) if you don’t believe me, ask someone else. Ought we to make fun of the naïve realism of 13 14 15 16

Ibid, p. 21. Ibid, p. 89. Ibid, p. 147. Ibid, p. 164.

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testimony? It can be done. But this would be to forget that the seed of criticism is implanted in actual testimony.17 The point is not that different memories-as-testimonies find agreement on a given historical event – and thereby explain the meaning of, and give value to, that historical event – but that understanding cannot begin without verification, without the assertion that ‘this happened’. ‘This happened’ is the prepredicative belief upon which the agreement between and clash of (critically embedded) testimonies proceeds. What is more broadly at stake, therefore, in Ricoeur’s account of memorywork is that, ultimately, memory, despite its derelictions and failures, represents the guardian of historical knowledge, insofar as it is precisely testimony that engages and directs the ‘effort not to forget to forget’.18 The methodological outcome of this is that a memory-work that moves beyond the split between the cognitive sciences and the historical and social sciences needs effectively to integrate ‘living memory’ (and collective memory) into historical memory, and vice versa. Or, as Ricoeur puts it, the pursuit of an integral memory that holds together living memory and historical memory enables the articulation of ‘historical knowledge onto the work of memory in the present of history’.19 This very Benjaminian formulation has been the horizon of much artistic work and cultural practice since the 1980s. Indeed, it has been precisely the integration of living memory and collective memory into historical memory that has characterised much of the new critical work on memory during this period. The recourse to testimony as part of a reflection on history and representation and art’s engagement with the world-historical event – the Holocaust, apartheid, the collapse of Soviet Communism – has been widespread. Similarly, a Benjaminian-inspired mnemotechnics has had some influence theoretically in cultural practice and theory on the critique of the post-historicity of post-modernism and the fantasies of neoliberal ‘progress.’ As Tom Cohen has argued, in one of the more sophisticated versions of this position, mnemotechnics as a critical summons to, and denaturalisation of, the ruling representations and symbols of the present and the past, ‘holds open the possibility of actively deforming and negating the signifying order out of which [history’s] own present had been generated’.20 In this, it codifies the textual work of 17 18 19 20

Ibid, p. 278. Ibid, p. 454. Ibid, p. 385. Cohen 1998, p. 105.

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anamnesis – inscription and reinscription – as a politics of the event, trace and testimony. Out of a mnemotechnic cultural politics, ‘alternate models of reference, causality, the historical, and the “event” become possible’.21 Chris Marker’s important photofilm works and ‘fictive’ documentaries are singularly mnemotechnical in this sense. Memory-images are juxtaposed and choreographed, not just as a bulwark against the erosion and fading of (revolutionary) memory but also as an interrogation of the process of memory as representation, as the labour of reinscription.22 But if a politicized mnemotechnics has shifted postconceptual practice into a new and fruitful engagement with the document and archive in art – into new sequential and relational unities, so to speak23 – memory-work has also seen an accompanying fetishisation of memory as the default position of a dominant post-political culture. The invocation of personal memory as an attachment to the lost object of desire has become a commonplace conceit in a lot of work that mourns the possibility of praxis in a world seemingly devoid of it. The use of memory as a surrogate of closure, ‘endism’ and ‘postism’, or as an identification simply with the commemorative, has become commonplace. Significantly, in integrating living memory and historical memory into a politicised mnemotechnics, we also require a critique of memory-work itself. Not only do we need a systematic critique of the bourgeois memory-industry (in Pierre Nora’s sense),24 as part of the critique of the foreclosure of the present and erasure of the past, but also a critique of memory-work as not forgetting. For, as Ricoeur himself points out, the struggle over memory, the struggle for memory, our struggle as memories, brings with them their own sense of inertia and closure. Where forgetting is challenged and opened up by the work of recovery and reinscription, obligation can also step in, transforming understanding into passive fidelity and melancholia. At the moment of the liberation of the event from the condescension and oblivion of the victors and ruling interests, the anamnesic work of memory produces a cult of the victim and of loss. Thus, if forgetting is the thing that threatens the integrity of memory as

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Ibid, p. 104. For a discussion of Marker’s major films, La Jetée, La Joli mai, Sans Soleil, and The Last Bolshevik, see Lupton 2005. We might speak here of a rise in new forms of ‘historical montage’, derived from the widespread assimilation of new technologically based techniques of combination and superimposition. In this way, the gallery installation as a site for the disruption and refunctioning of image-sequences and word-sequences becomes a space for mnemotechnical invention. Nora 1996–98.

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anamnesis, anamnesis threatens what is enabling about forgetting: its clearing away of the past on the basis of a break with the past. With forgetting comes the ‘clear horizon’. But if forgetting is itself productive, the clear horizon of the break can only operate within the wider constraints of meaning and justice; there is no forgetting-as-praxis in any abstract sense, no forgetting as such, no duty to forget. This, simply, leads to abstentionism, unearned amnesty, and the injustices of forgiveness. To forgive the perpetrators of the Holocaust is to destroy the historical ground of memory-as-testimony. Consequently, forgetting can only operate relationally with not-forgetting, insofar as we need to know who is doing the forgetting, on what basis, and to what ends. In contrast to distractive and purposeful forgetting – the notion that the past is not knowable or too distant from our lives to be reclaimable – the productive place of forgetting in the dialectic of living memory and historical memory is better understood and practised as a strategy of interruption and suspense. Nietzsche, in one of his early Untimely Meditations, puts it well: Justice turns on ‘being just as able to forget at the right time as to remember at the right time’.25 Indeed, although Nietzsche declares that ‘forgetting is essential to any kind of action’26 and the past ‘has to be forgotten if it is not to become a gravedigger of the present’,27 ‘the unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure for the health of an individual, of a people, of a culture’.28 If memory-work needs a theory of history, it also needs the jolt and rupture of anti-historicism. Nietzsche’s version of antihistoricism – the eternal return – doesn’t take us very far, however; ultimately, it commits historical memory to the reactionary antiquarianism he attacks in his Untimely Meditations. Yet, it is clear that the link he establishes between forgetting and daring to begin is necessary in order for the subject not to be drawn down into memory’s obligations. This is why a productive theory of memory and a productive theory of forgetting shade into a materialist theory of the subject, in which agency is the necessary outcome essentially of the subject’s not-knowing, or failing to know. It is precisely because we do not know, or seek to know because we do not know, that we are able to act and dare to begin. As Daniel Dennett argues: Every finite information-user has an epistemic horizon; it knows less than everything about the world it inhabits and this unavoidable ignorance 25 26 27 28

Nietzsche 1997, p. 63. Ibid, p. 62. Ibid. Ibid.

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guarantees that it has a subjectively open future. Suspense is a necessary condition of life for any such agent.29 Where does this leave an anamnesic account of memory? And where does it leave memory-work as a political mnemotechnics in cultural practice? Is daring to begin, and a subjectively open future, compatible with a political mnemotechnics? Certain forms of memory-work in art and literature are clearly complicit with a deadening use of the past, in which the uses of personal memory outweigh historical understanding. The current vogue for the antihistorical memoir or diary and the use of family photo archives as a basis for a search for origins and identity are two familiar examples of this: The past is redeemed through the minutiae and contingencies of everyday life, invariably invoking the securities of the past as against the insecurities of the present and future. Similarly, once a politics of memory becomes a mnemotechnics in a formal sense, the unlocking and reinscription of an erased past locks us into a never-ending process of struggle against the force of historical amnesia. In this respect, whether as the search for personal identity or as political mnemotechnics, whether commemorative or radically interruptive, assimilationist or antihistoricist, all memory-work shares a certain traumatic self-dramatisation; that is, it cannot escape the fact that what distinguishes memory-work in the modern period – the redemption of the past – is overdetermined by the emancipatory horizons of historical reason. In other words, whether as a nihilistic rejection or a critical reinscription of the historical event and trace, memory-work is a consequence of the perceived gap between the historical process and the telos of human emancipation and progress (one doesn’t have to believe in Hegel’s absolute, or adhere to a crude teleology of historical stages, to acknowledge that some notion of progress [and, importantly, its blockage or deflection] is a requirement of any adequate theory of history). Memory-work, in all its forms, is the work done precisely in the gap between history and reason – in response to the fact that we cannot freely assimilate the futures-past to practice in the present. The critical issue, therefore, is how practice situates itself in relation to the emancipatory content of futures-past. To redeem and recover what the present has rendered mute involves seeing a projective or anticipatory speech embedded in these futures-past. But the reclamation of the past as a critique of the present is not simply a matter of reinstalling the received symbols of resistance and histories of past emancipatory struggles (the embedded signs in common

29

Dennett 2003, p. 92.

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memory of previous struggles of class, race and gender, and sexuality). This would suggest that the challenge to amnesia and incuriousness involved nothing more than the recovery and insertion of what has been repressed or lost into a shared present. On the contrary, the mnemotechnic recovery of such symbols challenges the histories in which these materials are embedded by lifting them free of their previous context or contexts in order to denaturalise and dehistoricise past and present; in turn, this confronts the historicist assumption that the self-enlightened reclamation of such materials is the outcome of the continuing progress of a liberal reason embodied and fulfilled (through constant self-criticism) in the present. Such a challenge involves a two-way renarrativisation and repositioning of such symbols and representations, which cut across the purported continuity between the past and the present. By bringing the veridical ‘outside’ of past symbols and materials into the ‘inside’ of contemporary problems and struggles, and, from the opposite direction, by opening up the problems and struggles of the present to the struggles and symbols of the past, new networks and chains of meaning between past and present are established. Mnemotechnics is an incursive and interruptive recovery of the past in the present, and the present in the past.30 In our epoch of memory, where futures-past exist as traces of once-imagined futures, these futures-past will, of necessity, be subject to continuous reinscription. This, in turn, means that in an epoch seemingly dominated by a frozen, horizonless future, it is the futures-past that become the anchor and motor for emancipatory and transformative work now. Indeed, Marker’s own films relish and celebrate this by stressing that in our epoch of memory (of would-be destroyed praxis and of destroyed historical memory), it is the construction of a representational continuum from the integration of individual memory, collective memory, and historical memory that becomes the operative and ideal horizon of a political mnemotechnics.31 A mnemotechnic politics, in this sense, is born from this representational continuum. The reinscription of futures-past cannot reclaim the future without dragging this representational continuum – its histories, its memories – behind it. This is the labour of memory.

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In this way, we might say that a political mnemotechnics functions as a general form of counter-memory, under which various generic categories of memory-work operate, either singularly or in overlapping ways (class-memory, gender-memory, race-memory, sex-memory, citizen-memory, place-memory, class-memory-as-gender-memory-as-placememory, race-memory-as-class-memory-as-citizen-memory, etc.) as starting points, relays, for the denaturalisation, reconstruction, repossession, and rewriting of historical memory and collective memory. See, in particular, Marker’s cd-rom Immemory.

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Dialectic and Post-Hegelian Dialectic (Again): Žižek, Bhaskar, Badiou In the last few years, two ‘fronts’ have been formed in connection with the treatment of Hegelian dialectics and Spinoza’s worldconception: the Hegelian front and the Spinozistic front. The disagreements and disputes which are going on in our own midst focus on two basic points: the disputes about Hegel touch the foundations of our method, the differences of opinion with regard to Spinoza concern our world-view and involve the conception of materialism itself. But, since method and world-view are not separate from one another, the disputes and disagreements in the first area – those concerning method – are indissolubly connected with the disputes in the second area – those concerning world-view. abram deborin 1927

… Frequently an event appears to end when it is only really beginning … novalis 1802

∵ One of the perplexing things about the reception and interpretation of G.W.F. Hegel is how poorly he is read, almost wilfully so.1 Of course, all philosophers, all writers, are subject to misreading, prejudicially or creatively; and, as such, it is hard to imagine anything more boring than the mimetically exact rendering of the truth of a text. Even if this was possible (as an exercise in paraphrase) it would not be productive; strong partisan readings are always preferable to the supine or sympathetic ‘transcription’ of an author’s argu-

1 First published in the Journal of Critical Realism, Vo 12, Issue 1, 2013.

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ments. Indeed, the vigorous misreading or denunciation of a text allows the text to find its way in the world. But Hegel stands out all on his own in the annals of partisan or ignorant misreading and philosophical blindness. Even his most assiduous critic and advocate, Karl Marx, produces a Hegel that is cramped and implausible. One needs to ask, therefore, what repeated symptomal function has Hegel served since the 1840s? Why has Hegel’s philosophy, more often than not, been seen as utterly aberrant, tyrannical, inflationary, irreal, and so on, as if Hegel’s raison d’etre had been to construct a monstrous self-ratifying system, without egress. In fact, one of the curious things about the large corpus of both partisan and purblind misreadings of Hegel is how many of these writers, irrespective of the would-be post-Hegelian sophistication of their arguments, rely on cliché and hearsay, as if every critic was party to the same stupefying innuendo and pre-given template. So, wherever we meet Hegel in these writers, he is historicist, pan-logicist, teleological, identitarian, as if they were all working from the same philosophical pro forma. For some anti-dialectical philosophers and bare-knuckled positivists, of course, he will always be historicist, pan-logicist and teleological, and identitarian – ‘there it is in the texts, look’ – but for others, working their way through the dialectical tradition, such incuriousness appears – certainly to this writer – perplexing, as if anti-dialectical and post-dialectical philosophers know precisely ‘what he’s like’, and therefore must be on their way without delay. Indeed, the equally speedy exit from Hegel in the post-dialectical writers is largely reached without political mediation, without recognition of the fact that there are a number of Hegels out there that might at least slow down the post-Hegelian exit and mix things up a bit. Hegel is simply, well, Hegel, and never the contested and conflicted name immanent to a range of philosophical and political encounters; indeed, in knowing Hegel they assume that they do not need to know Hegel as ‘unknown’ or known less assuredly. So, Hegel appears and reappears as adamantine in his systematic awfulness, and yet thin and ghostly in word and concept. Now, if much of the confidence of the explicit anti-Hegelian position derives from the analytic tradition’s general horror of metaphysics and ontology, the post-dialectical tradition – in its most modern form at least – has its origins in Louis Althusser’s turn in the 1960s to Baruch Spinoza’s rejection of subjectcentred thinking. In Spinoza no subject’s consciousness pre-exists the consciousness of other subjects, hence intellect is not a property of self-relating thought, but of collective, social relations, what Spinoza calls substance: ‘one single mind and one single body’. Consequently, adequate knowledge and truth are always shaped by the struggle to resist the subject-centred illusions of the ‘imagination’ (thinking by revelation or first appearances): ‘the intellect, by its

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native strength, makes for itself intellectual instruments, whereby it acquires strength for performing other intellectual operations, and from these operations gets again fresh instruments, or the power of pushing its investigations further, and thus gradually proceeds till it reaches the summit of wisdom’.2 In other words, the singular products of the intellect are always the outcome of a pre-given and open-ended process of intellection, in which given advances or refinements in knowledge become objectified in common technique and practice. Spinoza’s distributive, non-subjectivist subject, then, is crucial to the fortunes of the post-dialectical reception of Hegel, precisely because he appears to offer an immanent philosophy that abjures the need for object/subject mediation. The order of ideas is determined by the immediate conditions of their production, and not the execution of a method that prepares the ground for a ‘thinking’ that will evolve or arrive in the future (for fear of thought making a mistake in the present, or lacking the requisite insight, as in René Descartes’ method). Thinking and the solution of problems in their distributed collectivity are, so to speak, contingent and immediate; spontaneously processual. Thus, the active character of ideas is not the determinate result of the individual subject, but of the general process of ideation itself, insofar as the production of knowledge is an unfolding substance without end or telos. Althusser’s post-Hegelian interest in Spinoza lies, therefore, as is well known, in the notion of objective immanence as a structure without the mediation of transcendental subject. For Althusser, as for Spinoza, what the process without ends presupposes is that history is process without a subject, that is, its own cause (causa sui). This allows Althusser to invoke Spinoza’s immanentism as the missing philosophical link in Marxism as the science of capital.3 That is, there is a hidden post-subjectivist ‘structural’ influence of Spinoza on Marx in The Grundrisse and Capital, which offers the possibility of a non-Hegelian Marxism of force and relation that finally buries Marxism’s orthodox association with historicism and teleology. In The Grundrisse and Capital Marx’s ‘epistemological break’ with this subject-centred humanism is a version, precisely, of Spinozan immanent objectivism (of thinking as non-sublation and multiple and infinite causality). As a consequence, under the aegis of this would-be influence of Spinoza’s anti-teleological philosophy on Marx, Spinoza is taken by Althusser to be evidence of a path not taken by Marxism from the 1890s to the 1960s: namely, the critique of transcendental subjectivism – whose political influence has been wide and deep (the various schools of Marxist human-

2 Spinoza 1955, pp. 9–10. 3 Althusser and Balibar 1998.

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ism, Gramscian praxis-theory and existential Marxism).4 (One also sees this move in Gilles Deleuze’s short book on Spinoza (1970),5 which draws from the same anti-dialectical well.) But if Althusser reinvents Spinoza for the critique of transcendental subjectivism, Althusser at the same time continues an old controversy, played out in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, before Joseph Stalin put an end to creative debate on philosophy and dialectic with his formulation of Diamat: the relative position of Spinoza and Hegel as precursors to Marx. In the mid-1920s, the Hegelian Abram Deborin, and the ‘mechanists’ Nikolai Bukharin and Liubov Akselrod, all invoked Spinoza’s anti-teleology as both the fundamental basis of dialectic and the ground of Marx’s thought. Indeed, in 1927 Deborin was to argue emphatically that ‘the materialism of Marx and Engels was a variety of Spinozism’.6 Similarly, in 1925 Bukharin uses Spinoza against the prevailing conflation of Marxism with Aristotelian teleology, in order to reject final causality for efficient causality.7 But it takes the least Hegelian of the three thinkers, Akselrod, to make it clear that not only is it problematic to conflate Spinoza with Hegel (as Deborin does), but it is also erroneous to assume Spinoza to be the materialist precursor of Marx, thereby diminishing the significance of Hegel’s break with Spinoza.8 In Spinoza, significantly, there is no dialectic between finite and infinite substances, generating a non-sublatory model of knowledge that affirms the purity of thinking against (fractured) becoming. As such, adequate knowledge becomes the knowledge of necessity, leading to an essentially passive relationship to the universe: from the point of view of the universe as a whole, each event and each series of events is conditioned by the universal, unalterable, and necessary connection of the world’s conformity to law. What men call an ‘end’ is the idea of a desired value (whether in the material or the intellectual realm) toward the attainment of which an individual, or a group of individuals united by common interests, strives. In social and historical as well as in individual life, ends and teleologies exist, operate, and retain their full significance. Yet on a closer, objectively scientific inspection all ends, 4 As Althusser says: ‘Thus I established a rather strict parallel between Spinoza against Descartes and Hegel against Kant, showing that in the two cases what was in play and in struggle was a transcendental subjectivist conception of “truth” and knowledge. The parallel went quite far; no more cogito in Spinoza (but only the factual proposition homo cogitate “man thinks”), no more transcendental subject in Hegel, but a subject in process’. (Althusser 1997, p. 5). 5 Deleuze 2001. 6 Deborin 1952. 7 Bukharin 1925. 8 Akselrod 1952.

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whatever their nature or content, are seen to be evoked and conditioned in the most rigorous manner according to the law of mechanical causality; hence it follows that teleology itself is only a variety of mechanical causality. Thus it is evident that the law of absolute necessity, that is, the rigorous conformity to law which characterizes all events, is in Spinoza’s system the supreme sovereign law which governs the entire universe. And this absolute, sovereign law is Spinoza’s substance, or what amounts to the same thing, Spinoza’s God.9 Thus, it is precisely because there is no conception of historical ‘ends’ in Spinoza (of gaps, halts, retreats) that there is a hypostatisation of substance over the subject, leaving the subject in its spontaneous production of ideas, paradoxically, as an abstract cipher of freedom. Spinoza’s error consists principally in this conceiving human freedom in the sense of the Stoic doctrine of ‘inner freedom’. The whole struggle for the attainment of freedom and happiness is carried on exclusively within the subject. Activity, as opposed to the principle of passivity, is declared to be a manifestation of infinite intellect, revealing itself in the adequate knowledge of necessity and finding tranquility in this knowledge. This inner mental activity leads in the final analysis to a passive contemplation of the universe.10 In this sense Akselrod aligns herself with Hegel: Spinoza’s system of infinite intellection is essentially static, dissolving the subject into substance; nontransformative of the subject and the world. These debates may have resolved the anti-teleological status of Marxism, making it clear that Marx did not imagine communism to be historically inevitable, or to be incubated in primitive communist societies, yet these writers were unable to produce a workable judgement on either the relationship between Spinoza and Hegel, or assess the proper standing and relationship of Spinoza and Hegel to Marx, and Spinoza to Hegel. That Marx assimilated Spinozan anti-teleology does not make him a post-dialectical thinker or a postHegelian, just as a theory of ‘ends’ is not cognate with teleological thinking, and formal teleology with historical teleology. In this sense Althusser actually takes the debate backwards, pushing at a humanist and historicist Hegelian Marxist strawman, unaware that the critique of teleology was central to philosophy under the (pre-Stalinist) Bolsheviks and that there was a rich seam of debate on Spinoza and Hegel and dialectic in the Soviet Union.

9 10

Ibid, p. 7. Ibid., p. 15.

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Thus, in some sense, Pierre’s Macherey’s important book Hegel or Spinoza (1979) seeks to rectify this omission, by reconnecting the post-Althusserian debate on Spinoza to the earlier intimacy between Spinoza and Hegel in the Marxist tradition (if not the actual Bolshevik debates). As he stresses, ‘the truth of philosophy is as much in Spinoza as it must also be in Hegel, that is, it is not entirely in one or the other’.11 Each speaks to each other ‘one against the other and one with the other’.12 Consequently, if these two philosophers ‘do not take partake of a single truth, whose process belongs neither to one nor to the other, [it is] because [the truth] is produced at the intersection of their respective journeys’.13 Nevertheless, for all Macherey’s dialectical ‘poise’ here, he is being slightly disingenuous, indeed mystifying: the primary focus of the book is to show how Hegel subjects Spinoza to an ‘extraordinary misunderstanding’,14 making the text crucially anti-Hegelian in key respects. As such, Macherey’s sensitivity to Spinoza is not matched by any sustained rapport with Hegel himself, who emerges yet again as the closed, historicist, teleologized thinker of lore: ‘the evolutionary logic that constitutes the heart of the Hegelian system, according to which that which comes after necessarily engulfs and includes that which is coming before it can only act in anticipation or as preparation’.15 Thus Macherey sets up his own misunderstanding in order to critique Hegel’s ‘misunderstanding’. Not surprisingly, this partisan reading has had a profound political influence. Macherey’s explicit post-Althusserian agenda has contributed (along with Deleuze’s Spinoza) to the extensive French/Italian Spinozist wave of postHegelian Marxist thinking and ‘post-Marxist’ philosophy in the 1980s and 1990s, clearing a path through the historicism of the dead or dying European Communist Parties. Hegel or Spinoza becomes a key text for Antonio Negri and for post-operaism generally (Negri writing his own book on Spinoza in 1981).16 Indeed, Deleuze’s Spinoza and Macherey’s putative Spinozan-Marxism – driven both by anti-teleology and overdetermination – produces the conditions for the vitalist-driven concepts of the multitude and ‘general intellect’, whose political outcomes have not been overly auspicious. But this is directly a consequence of overdetermination overriding negation and sublation, re-producing within the new Spinozism the ‘weak nihilism’ of an early gen-

11 12 13 14 15 16

Macherey 2011, p. 3. Ibid, p. 4. Ibid, p. 6. Ibid, p. 10. Ibid p. 5. Negri 1991.

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eration of post-Althusserians keen to out-Althusser Althusser (in particular Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst).17 A good example of this ‘weak nihilism’ disguised as a post-dialectical affirmationism is Eugene Holland’s summary of the Spinoza/Hegel debate after Macherey and Negri, ‘Spinoza and Marx’ (1998): For Spinozan Marxists the only certifiable historical tendency is for capital to expand and capitalism to intensify (will the contradictions that entails). And it is up to us, the multitude – without the confidant crutch of the ‘inevitable’, much less the complacent, tragic sense of ‘dialectical’, historical progress – to see that it doesn’t go unchallenged.18 This seems to be profoundly de-totalizing and de-subjectifying. Thus, despite, Macherey’s, Deleuze’s and Negri’s hopes for a productive exit from Hegel and from a Hegelianised Marxism, the post-post-Althusserian and post-operaist conflation of anti-teleology with post-Hegelianism has not been good. But I am less interested in the foundational character of Hegel or Spinoza for a new Spinozan Marx than the dialectical schema of Macherey’s encounter between Hegel and Spinoza as such; that is, how they are put to work against each other and for each other in the text. For what is important about the book is how it re-orders the logic of precedent within the debate on dialectic, breaking with a conventional evolutionary trajectory within the philosophical literature, in which Hegel sublates Spinoza, then Marx sublates Hegel. ‘The real relation between philosophers is no longer measurable solely in terms of their degree of hierarchical integration: it is no longer reducible to a chronological line that arranges them in relation to one another in order of irreversible succession’.19 So we get to see what Spinoza might teach us about Hegel after Hegel’s critique of Spinoza. This is an important methodological (retroactive) move, insofar as it registers the reflexive or post-dialectical character of dialectic itself, particularly in the period of Marxism’s own dialectical crisis. Alain Badiou argues for something similar during the same period (1975), rooted as it is in his own theoretical assessment of Stalinism and Maoism. ‘The dialectic itself is so to speak dialectical, insofar as its conceptual operators, which reflect reality, are all equally split’.20 But, if what preoccupies Macherey and Deleuze and the Spinozan Marxists is the creation of a post-Hegelian dialectic through the insertion of Spinoza between Hegel and Marx in order to challenge the relations of 17 18 19 20

Hindess and Hirst 1975. Holland 1998. Macherey 2011. Badiou 1975, p. 81.

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the latter two, I’m more concerned with how Hegel now figures as a thinker after the critiques of Spinoza and Marx. This does not mean that the sequential order should now read Spinoza, Marx, Hegel (which is to reunify Hegel at the expense of Spinoza and Marx), but rather, that Hegel, after Marx and Spinozan Marxism, might be in a better position to explain dialectic for a Marxism after Marx after Hegel after Marx. In these terms the struggle is not to produce anything so simple as a post-Hegelian dialectic but, rather, to produce a post-dialectical dialectic that invokes the dialectic as itself dialectical (as retroactively productive of itself in the spirit of Hegel). And this is why, despite the rise of a Spinozan Deleuzism and a Spinozan Marxism (post-operaism), Hegel remains the ‘stake of an interminable conflict’.21 For the struggle is not simply about undoing the gross ‘misrepresentations’ of Hegel as a thinker (indeed, as we will see the misrepresentations necessarily contribute to Hegel as this interminable site of conflict), but inserting Hegel back into the logic of a universal emancipation as a figure who is best able to explain the premature resolutions or dissolutions of ‘dialectical reason’ itself. This is why it is difficult to escape the retroactive pull of Hegel, because the repetitive-compulsive misrepresentation of Hegel is a symptom of a political aporia we are yet to escape. And this is why Hegel is less a figure to be revived by each generation, as Fredric Jameson has suggested recently,22 than a figure to be continuously put to work dialectically and post-dialectically against these misrepresentations. Yet it would be wrong to insist that the historical stakes of Hegel as a site of ‘interminable conflict’ has not shifted since the collapse of the Communist states and the increasing dissemination of the notion of post-history, as if the Hegel we need now does not have a retroactive force that is unprecedented. This is reflected currently in the extraordinary political and philosophical reinvestment in Hegel as a way of thinking through the present ‘weak nihilisms’ of left and right. Jameson, Badiou, Roy Bhaskar and Slavoj Žižek have all registered their debt to Hegel at a high level of engagement. ‘Hegelian immanence can be said to energize a revolutionary frame of mind, rather than discourage it and strengthen a kind of disempowered apathy’ (Jameson).23 ‘I remain more profoundly Hegelian. That is, I am convinced that the new can only be thought of as process. There surely is novelty in the event’s upsurge, but this novelty is always evanescent’ (Badiou).24 ‘When you say that my position ends up looking somewhat like Hegel’s because of a similar model 21 22 23 24

Badiou 2005d, p. 24. Jameson 2009: ‘The Hegel revival, which seems as vigorous today as it will ever be’ (p. 3). Jameson 2010, p. 71. Badiou 2005(c), p. 253.

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of geo-historical directionality, you have to bear in mind that some such model is going to be there if you talk about alienation, because there is something essential to yourself that is not now part of yourself’ (Bhaskar).25 ‘[T]o be a Hegelian today does not mean to assume the superfluous burden of some metaphysical past, but to regain the ability to begin from the beginning’ (Žižek).26 But there are divisions here that remain difficult to reconcile if the debt to Hegel is to be made productive. In particular Bhaskar and the critical realist tradition have come late to Hegel – and only with a modicum of postdialectical dialectical assimilation. Indeed, this has to do with critical realism’s overwhelming Spinozan-Althusserian commitment to the structuralist sublation of Hegel as a theorist of closed totalities. As Bhaskar says in Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom (1991), ‘the essence of Marx’s critique … of the culmination of classical German idealism in the philosophy of Hegel is that it destratifies science and then dehistoricizes reality … [as such the] Althusserian legacy demands nothing less than the most thorough-going critical appropriation today’.27 Admittedly this was written before Bhaskar’s major reassimilation of Hegel in Dialectic28 – as a way of out of the constellational immobility of early critical realism – but, nevertheless, the post-Althusserian framework still holds. That is, in the earlier work, Dialectic’s dialectic is attached to an agent/structure dyad in which the subject (individual and collective) is socialised transcendentally in a non-aporetic fashion. Subjects are simply the transformative effects of and ground of structures, never the disintegrative forces of disunity, dismemberment, self-negation and loss, which prevent or enable the transformation of structures. In other words, disunity and loss are for Bhaskar things to be negated as the affirmative shedding of ills and constraints, rather than the ground of negation and transformation itself. As a result, in dialectical critical realism subject and structure live together in ‘mutually transformative’ interaction, which places Bhaskar’s notion of the social totality as an overdetermined decentred complex whole far closer to Jürgen Habermas and Anthony Giddens’ communicative action theory than it does to a psychoanalytically grounded dialectical materialism. Subjects may be irreducible to structures and structures irreducible to subjects, but this doesn’t explain how and when subjects become and fail to become subjects and how this shapes political agency. Politically this omission is expressed in Bhaskar’s eudaimonistic emphasis on self-transformation, with all its petit-bourgeois language of 25 26 27 28

Bhaskar 2010b. Žižek 2012, p. 303. Bhaskar 1991, p. 168, p. 183. Bhaskar 1993.

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individual creativity, rather than through a commitment to the subject and political subjectivity as an emergent force of class relations (Badiou, Žižek). In this way political strategy for Bhaskar becomes overdetermined in precisely the same fashion as Spinozan post-operaism: we all can contribute to the transformation of master-slave relations, at all levels. But if political subjectivity is expandable in these terms (as a eudaimonistic force), ‘change’ (an obsessional and vague philosophic reflex in Bhaskar) is largely empty and therefore no more than a form of changeless change without the structural transformation of a proletarian rupture with class relations. Bhaskar’s eudaimonistic model of transformation inevitably leads class agency into de-classed collective change and then into the vagaries of self-enlightenment. Thus, Hegel’s necessary connection between the negative self-relation of the subject and the openness of the social totality as the outcome of this self-relation is missed or avoided in Bhaskar as a source of diremptive political strength (that is, the emancipatory politics have to be made out of the conjunctural limits of politics and divisions of subjectivity). This leads Bhaskar to a Hegelian insistence in Dialectic on the primacy of the negation of negation, yet without any attention to the actual dynamics and real-world implications of this process in Hegel. For Hegel, subjectivity – and as such political agency – is produced out of the subject’s repeated failure and struggle to produce itself as a subject. Thus, we have the same pro-forma Hegel in Dialectic as we do in Hegel’s radical, liberal and conservative critics. Hegel’s dialectic realises the ‘primordial Parmenidean postulate of the identity of being and thought in thought, underpinned by a progressivist view of history’.29 His ‘master concept … drives his dialectics on (for the most part teleologically)’.30 Furthermore, in those who have been developing a Bhaskarian dialectical critical realism in the aftermath of the new post-Hegelian dialectics, this generic Hegel is borrowed wholesale from this reductivism without critique or comment. Hence in Alan Norrie’s thorough-going defence of Bhaskar in Dialectic and Difference (2010),31 Bhaskar’s post-Althusserian pragmatism is assumed from the beginning, as if such a position was the necessary political outcome of transcendental realism, rather than a long-standing Spinozan political option. This enables Norrie to push Hegel into the philosophical background as the sublated other, on the basis that Bhaskar’s critique of Hegel’s would-be teleological thinking and historicism are given facts. Norrie’s litany of familiar misconstruals of Hegel is worth listing in detail, then, because it allows us 29 30 31

Bhaskar 1993, p. 18. Ibid, p. 27. Norrie 2011, p. 12.

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to clarify that this is not the Hegel of the texts and therefore not the Hegel that is productive, and, as such, why Bhaskar’s Hegel is the weaker Hegel on offer within the new Hegelianism. Hegel ‘starts with identity. Submits it to a negative critique’, and then follows this ‘by the positive restoration of identity through reason (rational totality)’.32 ‘[I]n Hegel totality is rational and in principle complete and closed’.33 Hegel’s dialectic ‘is programmed, rationally “linear”, unifying’.34 ‘It was the sense of a world confronted with seemingly unavoidable conflict that Hegel sought to rationalize and resolve in his philosophy, bringing a Platonic reliance on ideal reason to bear on modern splits and contradictions’.35 Hegel’s ‘philosophical idealism means that he always resolves the problems he identifies in theory, so that the practices and objects in the world that he critiques always remain in place’.36 ‘Hegel does not maintain a genuine sense of dialectical contradiction, but at best a sense of dialectical connection, which is buttressed by dialectical logic, in the context of a progressivist view of history’.37 ‘Hegel focuses on moments of negative dialectical critique which provide a determinate negation and then lead to a resolution at a higher level in the rational totality’.38 ‘Hegel follows the ideal misrepresentation and produces an ideological image of the present as the inevitable and eternal representation of the ideal’.39 ‘Hegel acknowledges the oppositional ways of the world, but only in order to re-appropriate them through thought and for Reason’.40 ‘A Hegelian totality is a bad totality if it is open’.41 ‘With Hegel … reason is aligned a prioristically with a progressivist view of history as the dynamo of world development’.42 ‘For Hegel, the constellation is a figure of closure, for constellationality is ultimately a matter of the rational containment of phenomena and of a resulting identity of the universal and the particular’.43 Hegel submits the ‘world to the rule of reason’.44 So, in short, Hegel’s thought begins in identity, which is negated, and then positivistically restored as part of

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Ibid, p. 16. Ibid, p. 50. Ibid, p. 54. Ibid, p. 60. Ibid, p. 59. Ibid, p. 62. Ibid, p. 66. Ibid, p. 68. Ibid, p. 68. Ibid, p. 83. Ibid, p. 84. Ibid, p. 100. Ibid, p. 114.

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a progressivist and idealist rationalisation of contradiction and conflict. As a consequence, Hegel is a Platonic idealist committed to a unilinear conception of historical development and therefore to a unifying and rationalising hypostatisation of the present (actual) in the name of the future. This may sound absurdly crude, a compilation of the standard misunderstandings, but nevertheless it is hard to say how this précis differs in content from the broad thrust of Norrie’s compendium of criticisms. This leaves Norrie with an enormous amount of work to do in defence of Bhaskar’s post-Hegelian diffracted dialectic: a dialectic that is open to complexity and differentiation, in which difference is ‘not acclaimed at the cost of losing sight of the structured whole’.45 For whatever dialectic this is on Bhaskar and Norrie’s part, it can hardly be said to be post-Hegelian (or -Marxist), for the Hegel challenged or sublated here does not exist. Indeed, this represents a fundamental epistemological problem in the reception of Hegel after Marx that all critics of Hegel have had to confront, and invariably have failed to live up to. The real absence of structural differentiation in Hegel (overdetermination, autonomy of levels, etc.) is made to stand so overwhelmingly and so inflexibly for the failure of Hegel’s idealism that his idealism is closed off from its immanent productiveness and its materialist implications. As Jameson says, the Spinozan-Althusserian tradition is surely right about such absences in Hegel, but this is the wrong way to read Hegel if we are to stay with him. The right way, rather, is to address, ‘precisely those things he was capable of exploring because he was an idealist, namely the categories themselves, the modes and forms of thought in which we inescapably have to think things through, but which have a logic of their own to which we ourselves fall victim if we are unaware of their existence and their informing influence on us’.46 In other words, once we trace his account of the subject as the work of the selfdividing labour of consciousness and praxis, Hegel’s so-called system of ideal reason becomes a chimera, radically transforming our sense of the temporality and dynamic of his thinking. Far from Hegel positing an identitarian loop, in which negation follows positivisation, which in turn, then reconciles itself with the movement of Spirit, true reconciliation, Hegel asserts, is a reconciliation in which ‘the free subject is not submerged in the objective existence of the spirit, but is accorded its independent rights’.47 This implies that the free autonomous individual is the continuous outcome of the process of self-relating negativity, and therefore, there is no submission of ‘freedom’ to ‘system’ through 45 46 47

Ibid, p. 77. Jameson 2009, p. 454. Hegel 1975b, p. 198.

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positivisation. Freedom ultimately is a matter of ‘being with oneself’ (Bei-sichselbst-Sein).48 This has significant epistemological implications for praxis. Our knowledge is subjective, not because we do not have access to external reality, but because our pursuit of knowledge and claims to truth are part of reality; our pursuit of knowledge and our claims to truth are subject to the resistances of the world, and these resistances, in turn, will shape our further struggles and understanding of these struggles. We cannot therefore step outside of our subjective investment in this process in order to establish an objective account of our struggles. This means that there is no absolute closure to this process because at no point are we able to reflexivise totality as an objectifiable ‘outside’. Hence the usual condemnation of self-relating negativity on the grounds that it generates a premature synthesis of opposites does not do justice to the sense of breakdown and contradiction that drives Spirit’s immanent movement. This is a long way, therefore, from the crass objectivism of Norrie’s charge (as with many others) that Hegel ‘resolves the problems he identifies in theory’.49 This would seem to suggest (a) that one can somehow freely resolve problems in actuality separate from our subjective investment in these problems, and (b) that, therefore, one can resolve problems in actuality without theory, and finally (c) that resolving problems in theory is not a form of practice in itself. Consequently, what distinguishes Hegel’s writing, and makes his dialectic a dialectic of emergence rather than that of closure, is that he is not a philosopher of anticipated arrival, but exactly the opposite, of disintegration and dissolution, and as such it is precisely his theory of self-relating negativity that defines this. The upshot of this is that the movement of Spirit observes a profoundly political, not metaphysical, course. As Žižek stresses, negative self-relation is not a ‘swallowing up’, a costive synthesis, but, rather, a process of repeated expulsion: ‘the matrix of the dialectical process is not that of defecation – externalisation followed by swallowing up (re-appropriation) of the externalized content; on the contrary, it is one of appropriation followed by the excremental movement of dropping, releasing, letting go’.50 This, then, conjures up a very different historical temporality than the one associated with Bhaskar, Norrie and others’ identification of Hegel with a rationalistic and unilinear progressivism. As Jameson declares, in Hegelian dialectic, ‘history progresses not by way of victory but by way of defeat: and that if our eyes are trained to see it, we can find

48 49 50

Hegel 1991, p. 58. Norrie 2011, p. 60. Žižek 2012, p. 405.

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the dialectic at work everywhere in the record of our collective existence’.51 As such, if there is irony to be found in the defeats of emancipatory struggle, there is also irony to be found in victory, which necessarily also becomes a kind of defeat, insofar as victory is only a victory on the way to another defeat. Accordingly, the truth of the struggle emerges only in and through defeat (Žižek).52 The immanent movement of Hegel’s Spirit, therefore, is fractured and as such repeatedly stalled. As Joseph McCarney also puts it – a far more classical Hegelian than either Žižek or Jameson – in his close reading of the ‘Introduction’ to the Philosophy of History: There is no suggestion … that the point which consciousness has attained is the terminus of its historical development. If that had been Hegel’s view it would have been natural for him to have revealed it on such an occasion and downright misleading not to have done so. The suggestion is rather that the present is but a temporary anchorage of spirit within historical time. It is true that there is no hint either of an ultimate end such as our framework postulates.53 In these terms, there is a shared vision in Jameson, Žižek and Badiou (to a lesser extent) that Hegel is the theorist of a reason that is subject to failure, breakdown and dissolution, as a way of articulating a materialist inversion of Hegel-the-teleologist. It is this fundamental break, then, with the Hegel of the post-Hegelians and Spinozans that I want to examine now in more depth in relation to the Marxist tradition and to Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism. The notion that Hegel is an anti-teleological thinker, and a thinker sensitive to contingency, the excremental, breakdown and loss, is not new. But certainly those aspects of his thinking that are derived from these characteristics have become crucial to the new Hegelianism. This suggests either that we are getting an ideological Hegel, for these new ‘bad times’, or that, finally, the gross misrepresentations of Hegel – which have become standard even in critical realism – are being effectively dismantled. I’m not saying that aspects of the new ideological Hegel can be put to anti-Hegelian ends – as if the passage into a new Hegel makes him unrecognisable as an early nineteenth-century idealist – but that the new Hegel is much more worthwhile than that. Indeed, it gives back to Hegel, as Jameson mentions above, a revolutionary trajectory, in a time when even defenders of Marx’s Hegelianism seem ensnared in the old evolutionary 51 52 53

Jameson 2009, p. 41. Žižek 2012, p. 201. McCarney 2000, p. 176.

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schemas. In fact, crucially, it restores the immanent irony of early Romanticism (particularly Novalis and Ludwig Tieck), which marks the formation of Hegel’s thinking, as a possible source of post-dialectical reflection. Both Novalis and Tieck produce a ‘mannerist’ dialectic that frees action from evolutionary and organic metaphors. For, example, the playwright Tieck breaks the closed form of naturalistic theatre by having his actors actually disappear from the play altogether. Things ‘fall out of view’ as a destruction of an assumed continuity.54 If Hegel despairs at the relativism such destruction of illusion hides (as in Schlegel), nonetheless, his rejection of evolutionary and organic metaphors shares a certain spirit with early Romanticism’s excremental irony. Žižek’s massive re-assessment of Hegel in Less Than Nothing, then, is the benchmark here, insofar as it moves Hegel, in Macherey’s non-chronology, back into a position of (non-dominative) prominence. For Žižek, Hegel is the great theorist of what fails to emerge and what cannot emerge, indeed fails once it has emerged, in order that it might emerge and fail again. However, this is not to reconstruct Hegel as a wise counsel of post-historical reason, in which, in the image of his critics, he now becomes a master of finitude or advocate of the equipoise of negative dialectics. Rather, Žižek’s Hegel operates as a kind of para-realist, in which the dialectic dramatically and self-consciously proceeds by its bad side. Which is obviously different from the conventional view of Hegel as a historicist harmoniser of opposites, but also from the ‘leftist’ version of this: Hegel as the rational assimilator of history’s ‘shadow side’ as the necessary passage through which humanity must pass. For Žižek, in contrast, Hegel’s thinking adopts and prepares us for a ‘third’ position in relation to the latter: the dialectic is precisely that which opts for the bad side; the negative as the mediation of failure and loss is persisted with. And this persistence is functional precisely because of negative self-relation. Thus, according to this logic, Hegel, when confronted with two elements (good/bad), does not opt for a third element that unifies these two elements, but opts for the bad side of the initial choice, thereby allowing the process of negative self-relation to continue. In this sense the dialectic does not pass from 1 to 2 to 1, but from 2 to 1 to 2. As Hegel asserts: ‘[O]ne should not begin with oneness and then pass to duality’.55 This is because, as Žižek declares, the One is only constituted through the passage to duality, through its division. The unexpected consequence of this fact is that, contrary to

54 55

Tieck 1974. Hegel 1979, p. 450.

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the common notion that the number of Hegelian dialectics is 3, in other words that Hegel’s goal is to overcome all dualism in a higher ‘synthesis’, to reconcile the opposites in an encompassing third medium, the proper number of dialectics is 2: not 2 as the duality of polar opposites, but 2 as the inherent self-distancing of the One itself: the One only becomes One by redoubling itself, by acquiring a minimal distance towards itself.56 So, in these terms 2-1-2 is the divisional logic of a ‘third option’ that resists the evolutionary stability or maturity of the passage of elements into system. Thus, in Hegel reconciliation is not to be confused with the synthesizing language of 3 (thesis-antithesis-synthesis). Reconciliation is, not the assimilation of I into 2 into 1, but rather, the acceptance of 2 into 1 as the necessary movement of negative self-relation. Reconciliation, then, is reconciliation with the negation of the negation, and 2 into 1. The post-dialectical dialectical (non-sequential) outcome of this is precisely a convergence of Hegel with Spinoza on the question of causa sui and history. The move of 2 into 1 into 2 is the logic by which the historical process establishes the conditions of its own possibility, and therefore, the obverse of the received notion of negative self-relation as ‘knowing itself’ as a condition of its unfolding. Yet, if Macherey is right in recognising how much Hegel learned from Spinoza on this score, he is wrong to assume that, in borrowing from Spinoza, Hegel then abjures the concept of causa sui altogether as weakly non-developmental, a void (for according to Macherey Hegel willfully rejects what he knows to be true). Rather, in Hegel the concept is put to a very different use than in Spinoza and, consequently, Hegel was right to reject its function in Spinoza. In Spinoza causa sui is the name for those attributes of substance through which substance constitutes itself. Thus, substance is realised through the internal causality of its attributes, in contradistinction to the notion that substance alone gives form to these attributes. In other words, substance for Spinoza exists only through its attributes, what Macherey calls a process of ‘reciprocal irreducibility’.57 This means that ‘having cause in itself’, substance is self-affirming. The upshot of this is that history for Spinoza is a process without beginning or end, without external meaning or justification. Processes are determined by repetition and disappearance alone and as such exclude the possibility of negation and sublation as the condition of reason’s progress. Now Hegel (in McCarney’s terms), is, in agreement here, that history

56 57

Žižek 2012, p. 474. Macherey 2011, p. 104.

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is not the expression of a pre-given substance; for Hegel there is no progress towards an End (cessation) as the culmination of a primordial beginning. Progress is without preconditions or guarantees, and therefore history is the labour of its own realisation. However, Hegel outrightly rejects that this labour is positive, and therefore that progress is purely self-affirming. This is because causa sui cannot be free of the obstacles, caesuras, hiatuses, and absences of its own becoming. As such Hegel places a singular importance on the thwarted ‘ends’ of particular historical processes as definitional of this notion of occluded progress: progress is a condition of limitation and the struggle towards overcoming this limitation, and ‘not an indeterminate advance ad infinitum’ (as in Spinoza).58 Consequently the Notion (freedom) generates its own conditions of actualisation from these limitations: ‘the Spirit as the spiritual substance is a substance, an In-itself, which sustains itself only through the incessant activity of the subjects engaged in it’ (Žižek).59 Which is another way of saying, with Marx, that men and women make history but not in circumstances of their own choosing. But Žižek’s defence of self-relation here takes on a particular psychoanalytic (Lacanian) identity that seeks to draw out the radical implications of Hegel’s reconciliation with negation (and, therefore, is implicitly critical of Marx for not being materialist enough here on the question of self-limitation) – and, this, precisely, is what separates Hegel as a ‘postmetaphysical’ thinker from his misrepresenters, and from the post-dialectical vitalism of post-operaism and from de-subjectivised Marxisms. Subjects are not self-divided and inconsistent because they are thwarted by obstacles, as Žižek puts it following Lacan, they are thwarted by obstacles because they are themselves self-divided and inconsistent and thwart themselves. Progress is necessarily by way of the inconsistencies of self-relation. Thus, contra Spinoza, causa sui cannot be that which causes itself to emerge out of itself as a selfaffirming process, precisely because self-actualisation is continuously subject to the return of the failure of self-actualisation as the basis of its future possibility, breaking and twisting any infinite advance. Causa sui is the space of this folding back on itself, and the outcome, consequently, of the interdependence between the ground state of the subject as inconsistent and self-divided, and the obstacles, hiatuses and absences of the historical process. Causa sui is produced out of the divisional logic of the negation of the negation. Or as Jameson states the case, in an echo of Žižek: self-division is not teleology, but precisely retroactive self-formation. It is a process in which the ‘emergence of a specific

58 59

Hegel 1975b, p. 149. Žižek 2012, p. 187.

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historical form retroactively calls into existence the hitherto formless matter from which it is has been fashioned’.60 Hence, ontologically, causa sui is indivisible from retroactive movement, and therefore lays to rest the notion that for Hegel Spirit is essentially external to that which the actual confirms or fails to confirm. Indeed, retroactive self-formation is key to understanding Hegel’s commitment to history as an open process, to open totalities, and to the new Hegelianism’s defence of this generally. By emphasising self-relation as retroactive production, past and present are no long points within a closed succession but are the interlinked continuum of immanent potentialities and possibilities. In this sense, the development of self-relation is not about the discovery of its own hidden essence, but of finding or restoring the potentiality of what is returned to as part of this process as a continuous modification of the premises of this process. ‘As Hegel himself puts it in his Logic, in the process of reflection, the very “return” to the lost or hidden Ground produces what it returns to’.61 This means that defining progress as causa sui is inseparable from identifying and articulating the restorative transformation of the possibilities of the past in the present.62 In these terms Badiou is very much part of the new Hegelianism. He defends Hegel as the great and unassailable theorist of the immanent excess of actuality: in Hegel we are swept up by the ‘indestructible capacity to overstep boundaries, which is the infinite as quality of the finite’.63 As such, in keeping with Jameson and Žižek, for Badiou to defend Hegel is precisely to resist the contemporary logics of finitude, with all its post-metaphysical reticence, and post-Kantian hymning to human limits, and declare for a dialectic of infinity (in other words, communisation). But like Bhaskar this dialectic of infinity is played out within (the remnants) of an Althusserian framework, in which Hegel appears only to disappear, to be invoked and deferred to, rather than actually re-functioned post-dialectically. Consequently, contrary to Žižek and Jameson, the Hegel we get is one heavily mediated by the Althusserian breach, thus leaving Hegel adrift again from his possible (psychoanalytic) materialist rearticulation, despite Badiou’s Lacano-Hegelian critique of a foundational subject. In Being and Event (2005), for example, negative selfrelation is shaped – and, as such, fundamentally delimited – by the fact that the passage of every moment is detained by the mark of its own identity. ‘The 60 61 62 63

Jameson 2010, p. 87. Žižek 2012, p. 467. Ibid., p. 464. Badiou 2007, p. 158.

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result is that every point of being is “between” itself and its mark’.64 In this ‘the “still-more” is immanent to the “already”: everything that is, is already “still more”’.65 This is an ‘affirmative infinity’66 (in much the same sense Hegel criticises Spinoza), insofar as Hegel’s generative ontology constitutes a dialectic of ‘proliferation, in which the same proceeds from the one’.67 Infinity, then, becomes thinkable solely through the mediation of the one; the repetition of the finite operating here under the sublatory law of the one. Badiou’s Hegel, therefore, produces a familiar split between the ‘spirit’ of Hegel’s dialectic (the indestructible movement of negation) and the would-be closed and circular reality of his system. But as we have stressed, this is neither plausible in our assessment of what Hegel said, nor productive in defending Hegel against his critics; it simply continues the misreading of negative self-relation as identitary. So, although Badiou claims to produce the conditions for a new dialectical Hegel (after Marx), the Hegel we get is little different from the Hegel of his liberal and conservative critics. This makes Badiou’s dialectical post-dialectical alternative far easier to establish. Badiou’s critique of Hegelian self-relation as identitary is predicated on the post-dialectical rejection of Hegelian dialectic as ‘pre-mathematical’, on the grounds that the multiples of multiples of mathematics are able to support an open dialectical totality – certainly in the light of the advances of modern mathematical science. That is, modern mathematics tells us that imagined or imputed Wholes are a fiction; would-be totalities are nestled in multiples in multiples in multiples, etc.: ‘there is no more a concept of a whole, thus of a part, than there is a concept of the one. There is solely the relation of belonging’.68 Hence, Hegel’s (and dialectic’s) fundamental assumption that mathematical knowledge is formal and therefore self-reflectively empty and pre-dialectical severs mathematics from being. On the contrary the truths of mathematics are ‘fully transmissible’ to being through the advances of postCantorian set theory.69 In this respect what Hegel counts as not-One is based on a false mathematical assumption: that the multiple is a predicate of a given continuum and structure (what Badiou calls an ‘affirmative infinity’). Any totality or set will include in its count – its constellation of differences – a not-One that is present but not presented, not actualized, but nonetheless overdetermines

64 65 66 67 68 69

Badiou 2005[b], p. 162. Ibid, p. 162. Ibid, p. 165. Ibid, p. 168. Ibid, p. 83. Ibid, p. 9.

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the constellational content of the set; the impasse of the constellational situation. This is what Badiou, following Lacan, calls the Real. The sublatory process, therefore, in its predication of the not-One on the One cannot think the possibility of not-One outside the given situation and, therefore, the possibility of that which is other to the given count. ‘Insofar as the one is a result, by necessity “something” of the multiple does not absolutely coincide with the result’.70 Badiou’s set-theory critique of Hegel’s thinking then remains attached to a fundamentally conservative view of self-relation: that Hegelian dialectic cannot produce novel content or instances, preventing what Badiou calls the possibility of ‘pure disjunction’.71 What emerges dialectically is what is, or potentially, already there. In response to this putative enclosure of the not-One in the (selffulfilling) One, and the reduction of the new to what is extant, Badiou argues for a subtractive ontology, in which dialectic operates asymmetrically and atemporally across time and space, in order to release the power of predication from pregiven structuration – a ‘discontinuity within the dialectic’.72 This takes two related forms, constituting what we might call a revolutionary ahistorical temporality. Truth arises as a condition of dialectic’s subtraction from the situation as a reflection on what fails to be counted as part of the situation (and not from what is given or presented by the situation), and the historical (revolutionary) event (or world-historical event in Hegel’s language) remains meaningful as an event, or evental-site in the present, only when those who submit to its truth, labour to reinscribe its universal content. In other words, events don’t authorise their truths themselves. On the contrary, such truths are produced from the continual splitting of the evental-site from the event’s normalisation (both reactionary and radical) as a consequence of the re-tracing and re-examination of the event as a process of political judgement: ‘the entire effort lies in following the event’s consequences, not in glorifying its occurrence’.73 Thus, fidelity to the event, therefore, is not a dogmatic commitment to anything so grand as its essence, but to its unfinished potentiality and implications. In these terms, fidelity is that ‘which is capable of discerning the marks of the events at the furthest point from the event itself’.74 Badiou’s emphasis on the event as an evental-site discontinuous from its historical framing clearly shares a strong affinity with Hegel (the world-historical event lives on in its defeat, though its defeat). But there is mortal judgement

70 71 72 73 74

Ibid, p. 53. Ibid, p. 168. Ibid, p. 169. Ibid, p. 211. Ibid, p. 237.

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on Badiou’s part on Hegelian dialectic that places it a distance from a Hegelian dialectical post-dialectics, confounding his commitment to Hegel’s ‘indestructible capacity to overstep boundaries’. That is, his subtractive ontology wants rid of Hegel’s retroactive self-movement of the actual, precisely because it represents an inertial drag on politics, and underwrites the false promise of ‘historical’ development. In short, Badiou has no sympathy for ‘progress towards’, and as such no interest in causa sui as a non-teleological engine of deflected progress. In this respect, Badiou remains as much Althusser’s (and Spinoza’s?) pupil on the inexistence of history for politics, as he does the old Jacobin, who sees action as the necessary risk that exceeds mere circumstances. For Badiou, then, Hegel’s dialectics simply prepare the future on the basis of the past. This is why he insists that Hegelian dialectic must itself be split into two: ‘we must seize the Two of the Two’ in order to see how this brings us back to the One.75 But, as we have seen, we don’t, in fact, need to bring this divisional logic of 2 into 1 as an external move to Hegel at all, for it is in place – at play – in the immanent logic of retroactive self-formation itself. As such, Badiou’s counterposing of subtractive novelty to immanent circularity misses where the genuinely new is produced in Hegel’s thinking. Under the logic of retroactive self-formation, the dialectical processes continually reintroduce the possibility of ontological openness into what appears to be the closed sublation of the past in the present. That is the new arrives as the unexpected outcome of the contingent conditions of the dialectical ‘return’. In this sense, as Žižek puts it, Hegel’s dialectic is precisely an effort to avoid the narrative illusion of a continuous process of organic growth of the New out of the Old; the historical forms which follow one another are not successive figures with the same teleological frame, but successive re-totalizations, each of them creating (‘positing’) its own past (as well as projecting its own future). In other words, Hegel’s dialectic is the science of the gap between the Old and the New, of accounting for this gap.76 To reiterate: it is mistaken, then, to assume that the new in Hegel derives from a fixed condition of a previous identity. It is not clear, consequently, that the post-dialectical event is what a new Hegelian dialectics needs in order to resolve all the old Spinozan, Althusserian, Cantorian problems around closed totalities. Indeed, in this light Badiou’s sub-

75 76

Badiou 1975, p. 81. Žižek 2012, pp. 272–3.

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tractive ontology appears to be profoundly post-Hegelian on the grounds that, in attempting to solve all the familiar problems of dialectical reason (premature synthesis; interiority; immanent circularity), its radical atemporality actually weakens the historicity of dialectical thinking as such. For what is dialectics if not the thinking of modes of production, and of the development of capitalism, and therefore of totalities? Indeed, it is dialectic’s modern re-emergence in Hegel and Marx as a response to these conditions and forces that provides a new (non-historicist) historical consciousness, in which the idea of bourgeois progress is critiqued: ‘it is class struggle that restores a dialectical reading of history insofar as it necessarily proceeds by breaks and discontinuities, and not the uninterrupted (or ‘bourgeois’) temporality of progress or inevitability’.77 But, in addition, of course, this post-dialectical critique of progress is also subject in Hegel and Marx to dialectics of development-as-progress. Hegel and Marx may not confuse progress with capitalism – and certainly not European capitalism – but they are also clear that there is no progress without capitalism, without its massive increase in the means of production and powers of socialisation. So, internal to Hegel and Marx’s post-dialectical resistance to the narrative of organic growth, is an insistence that there are no returns to pre-modern levels of general social technique; and this is something that the new Hegelianism defiantly adheres to against the legacy of Adornian negative dialectics, which places catastrophe at the centre of the twentieth century capital-progress relation. As Jameson argues: ‘things cannot go backwards (at least according to their inner logic; they can certainly decay or fall apart, cease to be what they were) – there is an inevitable increase in complexity and productivity at work which cannot be reversed’.78 The new Hegelianism, as such, defends the achievements of twentieth-century modernity as a pre-condition of dialectic proceeding by its bad side. But, nevertheless, how far is it possible to be a Hegelian when history is ‘suspended’ from the event, and the event from historical continuity? This would make you a very curious Hegelian indeed, perhaps a very Spinozan Hegelian, for it fails to bring the past along with us as a necessary condition of the limits of praxis and intellection in the present. This is why Badiou’s event may resist the amnesia of historicism (itself a catastrophe of capitalist rationality), only for the event’s virtuality to be pull dialectics into its dehistoricizing orbit. And this is where the new Hegelianism bifurcates: Badiou, like Jameson and Žižek, may firmly reject negative dialectics as a dialectics of the capitalist-technocratic Fall (as opposed to the productive-

77 78

Jameson 2009, p. 29. Ibid, p. 49.

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ness of defeat), but his radical anti-historicism places him on the outer-edge of dialectics as an historical practice. This has much to do with his increasingly post-Marxist rejection of revolutionary politics as a dormant legacy within the system. For Badiou there is no legacy in a system that now destroys the conditions of visibility of its own negation. Consequently, politics must subtract itself from the specious assumption that the emancipatory resources of the future are being prepared for us. Thus, perhaps surprisingly, and ironically, given how close Bhaskar’s diffracted dialectic is to Adornian negative dialectics, Bhaskar appears to be the most classically Hegelian of all the new Hegelians on the question of the capitalprogress relation. Resistant to the notion of splitting politics from dialectics on the grounds that capitalism is no longer able produce the conditions of its own negation, his eudaimonistic commitment to self-emancipation (‘we have to engage in conscious practices of self-change’)79 seeks to take the intellectual high ground on the question of rational directionality in history. Indeed, for Bhaskar these practices of self-change are presupposed by three transcendental ground-states: ethical commitment to the ‘good’ life, empathy and solidarity, and reflexivity. As such, without a commitment to transcendental agency on this basis there is no real efficacy to agency at all. Thus ‘it doesn’t matter how fractured or split you are, you still have a sense of yourself being fractured or split’.80 But if these ground-states provide the eudaimonistic forces of rational directionality, rational directionality is only ever evitable. That is, noneudaimonistic forces, rooted as they are in heteronomous and oppressive conditions, ‘are at any time opposed to this telos; so that rational directionality does not necessarily mean that it will always win out in any particular set of circumstances or that it must win out in the end’.81 This is all respectably Hegelian and Marxist in its non-teleological insistence on historical contingency, and as such common sense. However, Bhaskar’s very un-Hegelian subject produces a tension between historical diffraction (differentiation; multiplicity; the swerves and deflections of history), and his idealist positivisation of self-emancipation, in which the imaginary or utopian horizon of the eudaimonistic stands in for change as such. This seems to be a weak, even limply asocial figure for the violent and heteronomous forces of diffraction. Indeed, its ideal ethical character reintroduces a dualism into non-dual agency, insofar as the non-dualistic subject transcendentally sustains the eudaimonistic ideal as a kind of placeholder

79 80 81

Bhaskar 2010b, p. 165. Ibid p. 177. Ibid p. 104.

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for emancipation, reinforcing a familiar pre-Marxian split between the possibility of rational directionality and subjective experience. So what appears to be classically Hegelian initially, clearly is not when assessed in the light of Hegel’s far more rigorous understanding of the failure of the subject to produce itself as a subject as the necessary self-thwarted and self-pathologising condition of political and social emancipation: ‘the subject endeavours to adequately represent itself, this representation fails, and the subject is the result of this failure’.82 We should defend Bhaskar’s defence of rational directionality, certainly, and in the spirit of Hegel, but in doing so we should make it the bear the full weight of historical loss and dissolution. This leaves us, finally, to clarify an important problem: what kind of shape or topological form is dialectic – or dialectical post-dialectics – best represented by? This is crucial because it gives visible identification to the logic of retroactive self-formation and the Hegelian division of 2-into-1-into 2. Moreover, it stresses, as Jameson, has noted, how the new Hegelianism, in its divisional logic of 2-into-1-into-2, is essentially an opening up to a new spatiality of dialectical thinking, as is, of course, the case in Badiou’s mathematical intervention into dialectical temporality. Both pull dialectic into multi-temporal and nonsymmetrical relations. This does not mean temporality as process is demoted, but rather, that dialectic as a historical practice becomes a truly global practice of capitalist analysis and critique at the multiple levels of what Marxists once called combined and uneven development. This is something that Jameson has been a powerful advocate for since the 1980s,83 and which he has passed on to others, such as Nick Hostettler. Hostettler’s recent dismantling of ‘europic’ modernity has significant implications on this score for a dialectical post-dialectics, even though his Bhaskarian-Althusserian model replicates some of the same methodological problems we have already discussed in relation to Hegel.84 Returning to the critique of Eurocentrism, he attacks the structural indebtedness of the debate on modernity and globalisation to the core-peripheral model, in which the world is invariably ‘represented at any given moment, as zones of synchronic development, of peace and stability, surrounded by zones of dysfunction, chaos and instability’.85 Thus by explicitly detaching modernity from the notion of core-to-periphery dissemination, he gives political weight to a non-teleological account of capitalist development, allowing Marx’s critique of capital as an ‘anti-europic social ontology of capit82 83 84 85

Žižek 2012, p. 174. Jameson 2009, p. 68. Hostettler 2012. Ibid, p. 114.

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alist modernity’ to breathe again. In these terms, capitalism may originate in Europe, but European capitalism is not the essence of global modernisation, and, therefore, is not the teleological destiny of non-European nations. The terms ‘Europe’ and ‘world history’ are far from equivalent – as Hegel himself insisted.86 But finally: the question of dialectic and topology. The classic Hegelian, Stalinist, orthodox Marxist, and conservative and radical detractors of ‘stagist’ accounts of historical development, imagine the dialectic as an inclining curve (which may or not have breaks in it). This is familiar from a thousand textbooks in the former Communist countries and Cold-War tracts. Primitive communism passes into feudalism, which passes into capitalism, which passes into socialism, which passes into communism. The classical Marxist tradition imagines this trajectory still as a curve, but certainly with more explicit breaks and jumps in its continuum, the break representing, on the one hand, historical retreat and retardation, and the jump, on the other hand, representing transformation of quantity into quality. In this respect the image clearly adopts a conservative historicist Hegelianism, even if it is a historicism that bends back on itself. The Bolshevik and post-Bolshevik revolutionary traditions, however, break with the inclining curve altogether, establishing the spiral as the radical non-teleological form of dialectic. The curves of the spiral loop back, as part of an upward movement, which suggests, retreat and progress as being interdependent. This is a topology that the new Hegelianism inherits. As Bruno Bosteels says of Badiou’s dialectic, it operates as a spiral ‘combining the circle and the leap from quantity to quality in an ongoing series of symptomatic torsions’.87 Similarly, for Jameson the progression that emerges from Hegelian retroactive self-formation is an ‘enlargement of a spiral rather than a circular or cyclical process’.88 And, in the same spirit, when Žižek talks of Hegelian negative self-relation as a process in which ‘the Self to which the process is returning is produced by the process of returning’89 he clearly emplots the spiral as the necessary movement of this self-relation; there is movement forward, then backwards, whose future trajectory forward is then changed by the previous move backwards. Yet the topology of the spiral is not made tacit in 86

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Not surprisingly, Hostettler fails to draw Hegel into the issue of Marx and anti-teleology. For, if Marx is exceptional in his commitment to a non-essentialized Europeanism in the second half of the nineteenth century, he certainly borrowed much from Hegel on this score. As Joseph McCarney puts it: Hegel was ‘no “good European”, no champion of a panEuropean ideal of Europe itself’ (McCarney 2000, p. 146). Bosteels 2005b, p. xxxv. Jameson 2010, p. 115. Žižek 2012, p. 235.

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this writing, and as such there is no formalisation of the mutation of the spiral form as consequence of the process of retroactive self-formation. Indeed, what is implicit in the dialectical post-dialectical moves of writers such as Jameson and Žižek is how much the shape of the spiral of the new Hegelianism is very different from the classical spiral that we know so well from Vladimir Tatlin’s ‘Monument to the Third International’. That is, in this instance the loop does not pass through a stable set of movements – onwards and upwards – but pulls the spiral out of shape in its passage forward. In this respect we might propose here a twisted and corrupted spiral: that is, the loop within the movement of the spiral pulls the spiral back, also pulling the upward movement of the spiral down. When movement returns, this pull-back consequently determines the trajectory of the next move, which in turn suffers another pull-back or deviation. The loops, then, produce a passage of return and deviation in which the spiral is pulled wildly out of shape downwards or sideways to left or right as it moves forward. This essentially is causa sui as deflected progress, in which the movement forward is constituted though the loops and deviations themselves. The resulting shape, then, owes nothing to a classical spiral or curve, and more to the non-linear maps of mathematical topology. But this wandering trajectory can itself by broken by a return that generates a loop that is far greater in size and without deviation, and this, of course, is the moment of revolution.

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On Error: Hegel and Spinoza At the beginning and at the end of my book The Necessity of Errors (2011) I asked the reader to imagine two very different thought experiments: firstly, a world in which errors did not exist and we possessed the powers of pure percipience; and secondly, a world in which we experienced nothing but errors and failure.1 In a world without errors, of course, all our claims to knowledge would be pre-given, since, everything would be known by everyone, without fear of contradiction. This creates the horrendous prospect of a complete breakdown in communication and praxis, given that all our assertions and propositions would be self-confirming. Discourse would be utterly transparent to those who participated in it, creating a universe that is wholly knowable and instantly predictable. In other words, every statement of fact would be accessible to everyone, without query or qualification. However, if it is relatively easy to imagine this world armed with what we know of science fiction – of distant planets full of super-brains – or of para-fiction, in which some characters are allowed to possess extraordinary psychic abilities – as in the case of Claude Sylvanshine in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011)2 who is able to recover a multitude of obscure facts about an infinite range of events and objects – it is almost impossible to imagine a world completely subject to errors, for in a world dominated by the error, human consciousness and praxis would obviously not exist at all. Indeed, this is a world in which we would not be here, for the origins of life – that fragile combination of chemicals and combustive sub-atomic processes – would never happen; the conditions for life would never be quite right, so preventing the necessary trigger points and transformative thresholds for life to occur. So, in these terms a world that is consistently error-filled produces infinite regress and the void: in such a world nothing can emerge, not even matter itself. These two fanciful thought experiments are important in getting us to think about the significance and challenge of the error, for errors, are precisely those things that we need and don’t need simultaneously. They are, therefore, what destroy material and biological continuity and the possibility of progress, and, at the same time, that which are necessary for the growth of knowledge, 1 A version of this chapter was published in German as ‘Über den Irrtum’, in Lettre International, No 115, Winter, 2016. 2 Foster Wallace 2011.

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human communication and praxis – for without error we quite simply cannot practice, and therefore, are unable reflect retroactively on our thought and actions. In this sense the error is a form of metastasis: two things that exist as one but are not one. This dilemma has produced a fundamental bifurcation in the history of Western Philosophy and the philosophy of science. On the one hand, the error is that which is to be hunted down and expunged from thought and praxis, and on the other hand, that which is productive and as such indivisible from the truth-claims of philosophy and science. In the first category we can place Descartes, Kant, Rudolf Carnap and Karl Popper. In the second category: Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Heidegger, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. For Descartes and Kant making an error or accepting an error is inadmissible, because it weakens the subject’s adherence to the power of reason. In this sense overlooking error is a grave act of privation. It deprives the subject of an image of perfection or ideal he or she should always strive for, whatever the circumstances (given that consciousness, for Descartes at least, is made in the image of God). This is why perception is such a source of concern and anxiety for Descartes. Mistaking things for other things, or trusting in what is imprecise, leads to false or indecisive practice, or what Descartes calls the will.3 The subject of truth, therefore, needs to avoid perceptual uncertainty at all costs, rejecting all claims to truth when the grounds for accepting or not accepting a proposition are not completely certain. This is why falling foul of the ambiguities of perception is a constant worry to Descartes, because it puts at risk his ethical status as a subject of reason. Now, Kant rejects Descartes’ virtuous agent of reason, for the very reasons Descartes defends it: perception cannot produce errors of substance because perception is not in and of itself a source of true knowledge. What Descartes takes for confusion Kant defines, essentially, as pre-conceptual, and, therefore, no guarantor of truth at all, even if we had the most astounding and unclouded powers of perception. This is the basis of Kant’s critique of Descartes’ empiricism: that basing true ideas and the uncorrupted will on perceptions that appear to be clear and distinct is insufficient. Yet, in many ways Kant remains a classical Cartesian, insofar as it is through the subject’s internal adherence to the powers of self-rationalisation that the privations of errancy will be prevented from occurring – it is just that the threat of these privations have become greater, not less, not simply through the passions and the imagination, but through both the would-be truths of per-

3 Descartes 1986.

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ception and the operations of self-reflection themselves.4 As such, despite their fundamental differences, Descartes and Kant share a significant philosophical premise: that the subject of reason is responsible for the errors and mistakes he or she makes, and thus, in an important sense, is directly culpable for the loss of reason as an ideal. In The Necessity of Errors, I call this the possessive subject of truth, insofar as it is based on the subject taking possession of the truth process as the exercise of his or her agency: it is my responsibility that truth prevails, and therefore that error is resisted, here and now. In early twentiethcentury philosophy of science this subject is crucial to the non-metaphysical claims of logical positivism: it is only on the basis of scientific workers taking possession of the experimental process as a shared commitment to a truth process that exceeds or stands outside their own subjectivity, that science is able to adjudicate between scientific knowledge and falsehood, and continue in good faith. To produce scientific knowledge then is to discount and question all sources of uncertainty at all points in the experimental process – as Carnap insisted.5 So, for the legacy of Cartesianism, an ideal state of perception or a scrupulous logical method is a way of expelling error and defending reason. Now, in the second tradition that I tentatively map out, the epistemological focus of the error that is so central to Descartes and Kant loses its efficacy. This is not because this tradition is full of philosophical relativists, or those who think errors are unambiguously a good thing, but, rather, that the error does not play the same kind of culpable or existential role. This is because this tradition is sceptical about, and disinvested from, the very notion of the selfrationalising subject, weakening the assumption that it is through the action and perceptions of the individual subject alone where errors are brought to account, and, therefore, where the power of reason is to be shored up. In this tradition the subject of reason is the outcome of exoteric processes which displace any claims to reason’s autonomy, thereby removing the consequences of errancy from the failure or limitations of the subject’s given faculties and powers of reason. Errancy is no longer what the subject alone avoids or resists, but the shared substance of thinking and practice itself. Simply put then: this tradition rejects the notion that the subject only reasons when he or she holds out against the error and drives it out of practice and thought. This is why I call this post-Kantian tradition a tradition of the de-possessive subject. For de-possession carries with it not only a sense of knowledge as the outcome

4 Kant 1990. 5 Carnap 1997.

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of a collective subject (as in Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx) but also the critique of the autonomous subject as a critique of pure reason as such (Heidegger, Lacan, Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault). But crucially, it is Hegel that best defines this de-possessive tradition, and, accordingly, establishes what I will call the post-subjectivist account of the error as shared substance. Hegel like Descartes and Kant begins from the ‘I’ as the necessary starting point of knowledge: there is no first step in the production of knowledge, without the subject’s perceptual exposure to appearances. But this ‘primacy’, unlike in Kant, is an illusion, insofar as it never precedes the historical inter and intra subjectivity of the subject. The individual subject is always a ‘we’ and this ‘we’ is always historically produced and constrained. Hence, thought is never simply the work of the formal and autonomous application of concepts to objects – as if, in Kant’s sense, subjects bring their reasoning abstractly to external appearances, but a process in which the subject’s concept-producing capacity is the outcome of the subject’s socially determined position and struggles in the world. Truth, then, is an emergent, immanent and aporetic process, in which the failures and inadequacies of making sense of things are a part of the truth-making process. This is why the key Hegelian concepts of sublation (supersession; passing over), and of retroactive formation (truth as that which is produced out of the process of its own formation) are crucial to Hegel’s temporal conception of thought: consciousness and praxis proceed by way of the preservation and transformation of what is subsumed and assimilated. Truth unfolds. But, this is not a teleological unfolding – as is mistakenly assumed to be the case in all conventional and mystifying interpretations of Hegel – but a process very similar to Spinoza’s notion of causa sui, in which truth is its own cause: truth is retroactively productive of itself – produced out what is returned to – and not the hidden expression or essence of a pre-given process. This has a singularly important implication, then, for the place of error in knowledge production. The error is not that which must be removed or destroyed at all costs, but that which is constitutive of the unfolding and retroactive formation of the knowledge process. If truth needs to distinguish itself from error, the error nevertheless is the substance of truth-as-process; the means by which truth is able to renew itself and reflect on its own conditions of possibility. As Hegel says in the Logic, ‘Error or other-being, when superseded, is still a necessary dynamic element of truth: for truth can only be where it makes itself its own result’.6 This is why error and truth in Hegel are essentially indivisible, as opposed to their forced co-habitation and splitting in Descartes and Kant. Now, this indivisib-

6 Hegel 1975a, p. 274.

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ility is also central to Spinoza’s thought, who can be said to represent the first point in the Western philosophical tradition where the error achieves a theoretical autonomy (indeed, as Pierre Macherey has demonstrated in Hegel or Spinoza [1979],7 the Spinozan debt in Hegel is greater than we care to imagine). But in Hegel this indivisibility takes on a quite different emphasis. In the Ethics, Spinoza argues that a belief is an idea that is always in agreement with its object.8 By this he means that there are no definite or absolute false beliefs; mistakes or incorrect beliefs are simply forms of ignorance (forms of inadvertence – that is lack of knowledge – rather than forms of commission, that is, malicious confusion). So contrary to Descartes, for Spinoza, false belief is not a threat to an ideal of reason at all. But this seems an extraordinary position to argue, particularly in the period of the rise of the natural sciences, which Spinoza, obviously, defended with great bravery and fortitude. Why does Spinoza refuse to accept the notion of false belief when such a position would seem to imply the equivalence between the truth claims of religion and those of science? He refuses to accept the notion of false belief precisely because of the claims of religion and science. That is, what religion and science of his time fail to make clear is that something can be real that is not true (which of course will be the founding principle of the great anti-positivistic scientists of the nineteenth century: Marx and Freud). Religious believers can easily accept that what is scientifically unprovable can be true (such as their own religious faith), but find it harder to accept that their beliefs have a truth-content quite separate from the truth-claims of their beliefs. Similarly, scientists attack the beliefs of the religious without assuming that such beliefs have real-world effects despite their would-be untruth. This distinction between the real and the true on Spinoza’s part is profound and enabling because it introduces into philosophy the relationship between truth and the paradox of ideology: ideology is false, but true and efficacious in its falseness. But there is something bigger ontologically at stake here for Spinoza in both his attack on religion and the natural sciences: there is nothing positive to be gained at all for philosophy from designating something false tout court. For to do so is to assume that ‘things might have been otherwise’. That is, correcting false ideas on the basis of ‘true ideas’ in thought does not thereby remove or transform the practices that create such false ideas in the first place. False beliefs have a material reality resistant to ideas themselves. Consequently, to make an absolute distinction between correct and false beliefs – in the name of an ideal Cartesian reason – is oppressive. For it holds those who adhere to so-called false belief to be outside of 7 Macherey 2011. 8 Spinoza 1996.

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reason, and that philosophy alone can rid the world of false thinking. Spinoza’s notorious determinism, then, is not a version of Protestant predestination – in which everything is for the best on the basis of given expectations – but, precisely, the opposite, an anti-teleology, in which the meanings attributable to occurrences in nature and the social world are the result of the occurrences themselves. Thinking is released from mere supposition and fear, enabling a space for tolerant enquiry. Indeed, this becomes a profoundly atheistic and egalitarian premise in his thinking, insofar as the error no longer carries with it the stigma of malfunction and religious providence, but is ‘naturalised’ as the outcome of contingent processes. Errors happen, and we should accept them naturalistically, before we confront them and seek to challenge them. On this basis, therefore, the superstitious association between error and pathology is rejected; afflictions and illnesses, or unexplained accidents or events and catastrophes, are no longer God’s will.9 But this ‘egalitarianism’ has its problems, as Hegel insisted. This is a world without counterfactuals and negation, a world in which the rejection of ‘things being otherwise’ produces a strange evacuation of desire from human thought and agency. Spinoza’s refusal to identify thinking with desire and negation, produces in Hegel’s well-known image, a system without internal change; a void; indeed, what happens in history for Spinoza happens ‘just so’. Thus, it is one thing to argue correctly that something can be real that is not true – in order to free the subject from the temptations of providence and the projections of the imagination and establish thinking as internal to ideology – but another to assume that the liberation of thinking from the tyranny of final causes, of the present as being explained by the past, is in and of itself emancipatory. For this leaves consciousness and action in a ‘pure’ form without breaks, retreats or ends, reducing freedom from predestination as a critique of religious thinking, to a spontaneous ‘inner freedom’ – as Liubov Akselrod, the Soviet Spinozan, put in the 1920s.10 In other words, Spinoza’s antiteleology is one-dimensional; or as Hegel himself declares: in Spinoza’s system, history is imagined as no more than an ‘indeterminate advance ad infinitum’. Far from freedom, then, for Hegel being that which escapes the necessities of history, freedom is that which plunges humanity into historical time, its 9

10

See Bennett 1986, ‘Because he thinks that Nature (or God) has no purposes and is subject to no external standards, he firmly rejects the idea that there is any pathology of Nature: he pours scorn on certain common attitudes by saying that they imply that “Nature has gone wrong”. We tend to think there is something intrinsically wrong or bad or substandard about a child with leukaemia; but Spinoza would say that a child that has leukaemia is a perfect specimen of one kind of natural object, and is not evidence that Nature has made a mistake’ (p. 65). Akselrod 1952.

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hiatuses, lacunae, retreats and dead-ends.11 Thus, although, Hegel lines up with Spinoza in critiquing teleology – progress is without preconditions or guarantees, and therefore history is the labour of its own realisation – Hegel outrightly rejects that this labour is simply positive and that therefore that progress is selfaffirming. This is because causa sui cannot be free of the obstacles, hiatuses, caesuras, retreats of its own becoming. Indeed, these deformations shape and define the meaning of progress. This is why Hegel places an importance on the thwarted ‘ends’ of particular historical processes (as in the French revolution): progress is a condition of limitation and the struggle towards overcoming this limitation, and therefore, freedom (Notion), generates its own conditions of actualisation from these (subjective) limitations.12 And this is why causa sui cannot be that which causes itself to emerge out of itself as a self-affirming process, because it is precisely the failures of self-actualisation that produce the conditions for its future possibility – shattering any notion of ‘indeterminate advance ad infinitum’.13 Causa sui therefore is the space of this folding back of history and truth on itself – what we have called a process of retroactive self-formation. Hegel, consequently, establishes a crucial difference between himself and Spinoza on the question of teleology. The past is not the cause of the present, but it is past actions that are the very substance of our present actions.14 One can see, therefore, how the error might take on a new philosophical lrole and function within this process. Spinoza may have generated a new philosophical autonomy for the error in his defence of false beliefs as real, but this understanding is never put to work historically. Indeed, his defence of false belief as real was in principle a defence of religious dissent against state oppression, rather than opening up philosophy to the historical dimensions of understanding. In Hegel, however, the error achieves a new positional and historical logic altogether: the error becomes the very motor of causa sui and the active selfformation of ideas. As I argue in The Necessity of Errors: The error in Hegel generates a different positional or spatial sense for a theory of truth. If truth ‘is the movement of itself within itself’ this means that the critique, dissolution of the error, is never just a matter of the cut that leaves no remainder on its way to the future. On the contrary, under

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Hegel 1975b. Hegel 1977a. See, ‘Dialectic and Post-Dialectic (Again): Žižek, Bhaskar, Badiou’, Journal of Critical Realism, in this volume. See Bennett 1986.

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the logic of Hegel’s Aufhebung, no error is ever forgotten or lost to the historical process; for in its failure to realize reason, or in its dereliction of truth, it not only provides the sustenance for the continued realisation of reason and truth, but it offers the means to reimagine and reconceptualize what truth was in the pursuit of further enquiries into truth.15 The epistemological implication of this new positional logic, then, is that the error is not something that merely defines where reason is absent, but is crucial to the making and passage of reason itself. In this sense the error becomes something inhabitable, the substance through which truth and history are made. ‘What calls itself the fear of error reveals itself as a fear of the truth’, as Hegel puts it in The Phenomenology of Spirit.16 This is a fundamental shift, which works its way as ‘dialectics’ or dialectical thinking throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, as the possessive subject gives way to the de-possessive subject under the pressure of thinking’s historicisation in Hegel, we can see how this shift produces a new dialectical spatiality and topology of the error. In divesting the error of its Cartesian and Kantian subject-centredness and culpability, the erroras-substance becomes identifiable with transformation, mutation, renewal, indeed, with the flow of historicisation itself. And this is why Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is one of the great founding texts of modernity: historical subjects make their reason from their material and intellectual engagement with, and transformation of, and crucially, failure to understand and transform, the world.17 In defending the French Revolution, therefore, significantly Hegel defends the emancipatory logic of the error against the counter-revolutionary identification of the revolution’s errors with unreason. Whereas Edmund Burke (1790), Joseph de Maistre (1796) and the Abbé Barruel (1798)18 talk about the monstrous and barbarous errors of the Enlightenment and the Jacobins, and as such block off the productiveness of the error in Enlightenment thought,19 Hegel assimilates the failures and errors of the revolution as the promise of emancipation that lives on in defeat. Indeed, Hegel is practically alone of his generation in defending the emancipatory promise of errancy in his defence of the French revolution. But if Hegel is fundamental to the re-spatialising of error as substance, he misses how the modern revolutionary process massively rein-

15 16 17 18 19

Roberts 2011b, pp. 45–6. Hegel 1977b, p. 74. Hegel 1977b. Burke 2009, de Maistre 1980, Barruel 1798. See Bates 2002.

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states the error as a possessive subjective category. For revolutions and revolutionary commitments are defined precisely by the culpability of the political subject: for to err and fall into errancy is to betray, deceive, deny, or obscure the revolutionary process, as Robespierre makes beautifully clear in his speeches and pamphlets between 1792–4, which obsessively draw up the boundaries of what is errant and what is not.20 This is why, in some sense, The Phenomenology of Spirit’s defence of the error’s place within Enlightenment progress is haunted by the necessary re-possession of the possessive subject as the agent of revolutionary transformation and responsibility.21 Errancy, therefore, takes on both a heightened political and existential character as capitalism begins to define the limits to Enlightenment thinking and the historicisation of being. This is why by the end of the nineteenth-century, the role of the error is neither simply Cartesian nor classically Hegelian: it is, rather, the space of the necessary dialectical interface between possessive culpability and de-possessive substance. This is reflected most obviously in the achievements of Marx and Freud: that is, the error becomes productive, precisely because it defines the renewal of practice and thinking, or discloses a truth not disclosed by manifest truth itself – in this, Freud is the direct descendant of Spinoza and his distinction between the real and the true. But Marx and Freud do not inherit this post-Hegelian topology spontaneously, as if Hegel’s concept of the error was freely available as a model or method. Marx has little time for the error under the progressive advances of the workers’ movement in the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s, until the Commune in 1871, where the violent destruction of workers self-organisation becomes a traumatic point of reflection on the longue durée of workers’ emancipation and failure, and as such revitalises his engagement with Hegelian dialectic.22 Similarly it takes a huge amount of practical and theoretical work within the transference process for

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Robespierre 1973. The problem of the possessive subject is necessarily that of the representing and knowing subject. If error is ever to be possible (and productive) it must presume a subject who is wrong about how things actually are – the productiveness of error, therefore, being a condition of the truth of things. But this epistemological definition of error is meaningful in these terms only to the extent that the function of judgement is subject to the exercise of the subject’s conceptual or representational understanding. In other words, error is constrained by the representational order of explanation that the subject accepts as a condition of practice. For example, reflection on errors in artistic practice have a truthvalue quite separate from any normative judgement on truth itself. The truth-value of the error in question will depend on the error’s assimilation as truth into the particular practice at hand. Consequently, the subject takes responsibility for the error as productive. Marx 1988.

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Freud to see the truth-value of the error in the analytic session – which Lacan inherits and develops, particularly in the early seminars.23 But the crucial point is that the assimilation and critique of the error under the tutelage of Hegel, so to speak, means that the error-as-substance is subject to the divisions and conflicts of praxis itself. In this sense the thing that Descartes and Kant found most abhorrent – living with errors – becomes the thing that defines the indivisibility of truth and the error here. This is why it is possible to talk about a clear post-Kantian shift in the epistemological status of the error, certainly in the first half of the twentieth century. The error is that which we inhabit, not that which we simply exclude. We can also see this move in Heidegger and Georges Canguilhem. In ‘On the Essence of Truth’ (1943) Heidegger declares that man does not fall into errancy – as if into a ditch – but, is as he says, ‘always astray in errancy’.24 Similarly in the crucial chapter in The Normal and the Pathological (1943) ‘A New Concept in Pathology: Error’, Canguilhem argues that acknowledging the naturally occurring function of error in biology offers a liberatory post-metaphysical discourse. ‘Disease is not a fall that one has, an attack to which one succumbs, but an original flaw in macromolecular form’.25 ‘Disease is no longer related to individual responsibility’.26 Again the debt to Spinoza is obvious. Now, Canguilhem was no follower of Heidegger, but we can see how ‘living with errors’ in these terms is easily ontologised as a defence of human finitude. And this is what Foucault picks up on in his very Nietzschian and Heideggerian ‘Introduction’ to The Normal and the Pathological in the English translation of the book in 1978: ‘In the extreme, life is what is capable of error’.27 ‘Error … is the permanent chance around which the history of life and that of man develops’.28 Error is ‘the dimension proper to the life of men and to the time of the species’.29 In these terms Foucault’s introduction reveals what is at stake for a post-Kantian philosophy labouring under the mantle of ‘living with errors’: on the one hand, an errancy of human finitude, in the spirit of Heidegger and Nietzsche, in which intellectual humility needs to be constitutive of thinking and praxis, and on the other hand, an errancy of struggle in which error-as-substance defines the working through and overcoming of division and aporias, and the horizon of universal emancipation, as

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Lacan, ‘Truth Emerges From the Mistake’, in Lacan 1988a. Heidegger 1996, p. 133. Canguilhem 1991, p. 278. Ibid. Foucault 1991, p. 22. Ibid, pp. 22–3. Ibid, p. 22.

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in Hegel and Marx. That Foucault comes down on the side of Nietzsche and Heidegger is perhaps no surprise. His growing anti-Enlightenment prejudices in the early 1960s are matched by his growing antipathy to dialectics. This is why with hindsight his introduction offers a prescient insight into the fate of a post-Kantian philosophy of the error after the 1960s. It is hard not to see his introduction as one of the first indications of a postmodern ontologisation of error: the error as the necessary figure of finitude in an anti-Enlightenment valorisation of difference and the critique of totalities. Postmodernism may have receded as a philosophical category today, but the identification with the error and a philosophy (and politics) of finitude certainly remains. As Nicholas Rescher argues in Error: (On Our Predicament When Things Go Wrong) (2007), in many ways a pragmatist version of Foucault’s position: ‘the most salient feature of error lies in its role as a characterizing hallmark of human finitude’.30 ‘Homo sapiens is a fallible creature of limited capacity’.31 This is, as is perhaps evident, not why I set out to think errancy as a post-Hegelian (Hegelian) dialectical category, or why we should take living with errors seriously as an historical problem. On the contrary, the identification of the error with finitude cedes the error too willingly to scepticism, thereby suspending the intimacy between error, truth, and emancipation. In this sense Rescher, following Foucault, following Heidegger, following Canguilhem, draws the error down into what we might call the religious imaginary: the sanctification of weakness and incapacity as a virtue. In this both Spinoza and Hegel would have been appalled, for, in a sense, their respective versions of the de-possessive subject defied such limits in the name of an errancy that was collective, futural, and open, and as such, intransigent in the face of finitude. So, living with errors should not be construed as the endless substance of humans’ ‘delimited’ powers, but on the contrary, the very substance of struggle and dialectic itself.

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Rescher 2007, p. 97. Ibid, p. 96.

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Art and the Politics of Time-as-Substance What unities both classical realism and modernism is a resistance to, and downgrading of, political topicality in art.1 Both abjure the idea of art chasing the political vicissitudes of the moment in order to secure popularity, clarity of effect, or didactic purpose. Indeed, both positions certainly concur on one thing: political topicality invariably leads to the sins of propaganda, moral righteousness and a paucity of affect. In Georg Lukács, for, instance, the primary test of the good or successful realist novel is the complex distance it takes from a coarse naturalism and ‘the petty commonplace superficial truth of everyday life’;2 this is based, as is well known, on a rejection of literary characterisation as the ‘mouthpiece of the Zeitgeist’ (following Marx’s literary reflections). The intellectual physiognomy of character should ‘go beyond the correct observation of everyday life. Profound knowledge of life is never confined to the observation of the commonplace. It consists rather in the invention of such characters and situations as are wholly impossible in everyday life’.3 In other words, the compelling realist work instantiates the vivid and distinctive exception to the naturalistic everyday and taken-for-granted. Similarly, in modernist artistic theory it is the transmutation of the naturalistic sign (August Strindberg’s theory of the modernist image and Clement Greenberg’s theory of painterly modernism) that defines modernist painting’s exclusion from the world of everyday appearance and daily cognitive verities.4 The modernist painting must produce a dis-habitation from ‘mere’ descriptive or appellative content. Of course, we know in actuality what all these positions end up producing: an inert classicism, on the one hand, and a modernist teleology of painterly form, on the other, that, in their respective ways, both fundamentally misunderstand and bypass the great technical and cognitive revolution of art and the avantgarde in the first two decades of the twentieth century, reflected in Lukács’ and Greenberg’s adventitious judgements on the avant-garde itself; Lukács preferring Maxim Gorky to James Joyce, and painterly figuration to photographic montage (John Heartfield), and Greenberg demoting Constructivism, Dada

1 First published in 2015, in Randy Martin (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics, London and New York: Routledge. 2 Lukács 1972a, p. 132. 3 Ibid, p. 100. 4 Strindberg 1939, pp. 34–49.

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and Surrealism to the level of ‘anti-art’, without any thought to questions of art and praxis, and the problem of art as ‘intellection’ (or ‘abstraction’ in Hegel’s philosophical sense), rather than ‘sensuousness’ per se.5 Yet, this shared antipathy on the part of a classicising modernism and realism to the question of topicality and the everyday does point to a fundamental and recurring problem: what is the time of the artwork? In what ways and to what ends is the artwork impactful, when it is released into the world and the circuits of reception? What classical realism and modernism share is a sense that topicality – or everyday political relevance – is always temporally self-defeating, insofar as the would-be effectivity or empathic qualities of such works are always ‘after-thefact’, given that a work’s political content never coincides with its projected or ideal audience, and, therefore, is simply an empty signifier of political commitment, rather than an actual and transformative intervention within a political process. Indeed, because the gap between ‘political effect’ and ‘political process’ is so great, claims to ‘political relevance’ are just hubris – particularly when such belatedness soon turns into the ‘political past’ and to the evocations of history. Moreover, as Greenberg and Lukács intimate, this constant dissipation of art’s political effect produces an internal pressure on the part of realist artists confronted with the iniquities and concerns of the moment, to trade in the clichés of struggle and resistance in order to secure a life for the image beyond fast-fading topicality, leading to all kinds of crude cognitive short-cuts.6 Today this presumed ontological gap between ‘political content’ and ‘political effect’ is most famously pursued by Michael Fried and Jacques Rancière, in their respective adaptation of Roland Barthes’ late modernist notion of the ‘pensive’ spectator,7 who speaks for the ‘freedom’ of the spectator through his or her resistance to the entreaties of the artwork’s political disclosures and therefore to the would-be instrumentalising production of the viewer as a subject of political truth. (This model is very much based on Barthes’ dislike of the declarative documentary image holding the spectator to ‘cognitive ransom’ – particularly the atrocity picture; Camera Lucida (1982) is his theoretical destruction of this ‘ransom’.)8 For Rancière the freedom of the spectator (his or her emancipation) is premised on the intuitivistic assumption that people know all about the realities of global capitalism and therefore don’t need to be reminded of them;

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Hegel, 1988. On the question of Hegel and ‘conceptualisation’, see also Pippin 2008. Lukács 1972a and Greenberg 1978. Fried 2008. Barthes 1982.

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political art or a partisan politics of art, for Rancière, is a kind of pleonasm.9 But if Fried and Rancière recognise the limitations of art’s ‘political effect’, this limitation is turned, as in Greenberg, into a structural misapprehension of the purposefulness and critical horizons of art’s political function, by allowing the ontological gap between political content and political effect to stand in for art’s political value as such. As a result, this position may legitimately define the limitations of the political effects and effectivity of art, but it does so without examining what this gap allows art to do politically. The key issue, therefore, is how much the activist position and its ‘pensive’ critics both produce a reduction of the political. Once the political effects of art are predicated on a model of immediacy, instantaneity or transparency, naturally it is no surprise that art is unable to live up to these criteria in any consistent sense, for each and every artwork ‘arrives late’ in some sense, that is, arrives athwart the demands and requirements of direct action, given these requirements and demands necessarily shift and move on. Of course, under certain circumstances this belatedness does in fact break down, narrowing the gap between the cognitive disruptions of the artwork and its possible connection to the political process. We see this most obviously in the revolutionary or pre-revolutionary moment, or during a period of state crisis (as during May 1968 in Paris or recently in the events preceding, and after, the demonstrations in Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2012), in which the quickly devised and distributed artwork responds to the demands and contingencies of direct action, by taking an ideological lead – the poster, street theatre, or documentary film. But overall, this is rare, driven as it is by the requirement of art under these conditions to embed itself without ambiguity in the political process in order to meet the political ‘situation’ head on. Hence, this state of exception is not the situation for most art, most of the time. To assume otherwise – as a number of activist artists willingly do – is to produce and reproduce the cognitive short cuts, instrumentalities and hubristic ambitions that the critics of art’s ‘political effectivity’ repeatedly decry. Indeed, on this basis, to derive art’s political function wholly from this state of exception – that is, from a sense of the continuous and chronic crisis of capitalism – is to permanently assert that the time of the artwork is always grounded in the heat of revolutionary time or activist time and any other time – pensive-time or contemplative-time, the time of the long-view – diminishes the active relation between artwork and political process. This is why the activist time of the artwork is driven by the need of the artist to meet the daily demands of the political process, in fact to find a secure

9 Rancière 2004 and 2009.

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point of identity with it, for not to do so is to fail the demands of the political process itself. Consequently, the outcome of this is that art’s relationship to politics has no interest in being ‘out of time’, for this abandons art to what no politics of art can possibly contemplate without courting ‘ineffectualness’: temporal delay or invisibility. Precisely because art is able to produce extra-artistic use-values, it must act on these possibilities at all times, in time, and assume a directly transformative role for itself in everyday experience. If this has an air of desperation and hysteria, this is because the relationship between art and politics in these terms produces a positivistic inflation of art as praxis. In other words, in assuming there can be no special dispensation for art praxis as opposed to political praxis, art must always drive to align itself directly with the political process, be cognate with it, on the basis that the political slogan shouted on the street or printed on a leaflet and the image and text produced for a publication or for use on a march share a symbolic language. As such, the drive on art’s part for an immediate relevance and functionality suffers from a fundamental temporal impatience, that fails to relativise both the temporality of art and political praxis, as a necessary condition of the emancipatory capacities of art and the production of an emancipatory politics of time. This is why this kind of openness to temporal compression derives from an activist indifference to the atemporal labours of art itself, to the fact that the job of art under capitalism is not just to return a picture of capitalism to capitalism, but to make the free labour of art a space of resistance to the temporal pressures of the value-form (a pressure which politics itself is unable to escape). There is another kind of temporal functionality at stake for art, therefore, under these conditions. The true functionality of art’s emancipatory force lies not in its daily symbolic and political contestation with capitalist reality – as part of a counter-hegemonic struggle it can’t possibly win – but in its nonidentitary value, those long-range strategies of negation and counter-imaginary dis-affirmation that refuse or step outside of the historical reifications and temporal compressions of the capitalist value-form and capitalist work-time itself10 and point to a time beyond the production of value. Competing politically on value’s terms, therefore, by constantly traversing the intensity of the moment and capitalism’s production of the everyday weakens the very thing that art and revolutionary politics are able to share: a withdrawal from the centripetal pressures of the moment and ‘relevance’ in order to produce use-values that

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are not at the behest of instrumental or capitalised reason, of transparency and immediacy. Thus, stepping aside, stepping back from, withdrawing, disappearing, finding the renewal of speech in silence, is not the temporality of artistic quietism or political muteness, but a space where the work of nonidentitary production can be done. For it is in this space that the extensity and expanded research conditions of art as the negation of capitalist temporality (compression, repetition, foreclosure; the dead time of commodity-time) can be produced and secured. Winning the ‘open-time’ of research-time for art, then, is crucial in enabling art to produce a range of critical and noncompliant use-values that generate a complex normativity for praxis. And this has been the fundamental epistemological and ontological drive of the avantgarde in the twentieth century down to today, through the conjunction of general social technique (post-medium specificity) and art’s participation in the collective intellect. The avant-garde is not a succession of non-painterly styles, but rather a struggle over art’s emancipatory place in the division of labour. Thus, the appropriation of time – of research time – as a centrifugual and extended time, is where art makes its emancipatory and cognitive stand in a culture where the instant judgement-at-glance, the instant political intervention, and means-end accounting and effectivity prevail. Hence art praxis and political praxis cohere not under the exigencies of the political process as such, but under the critical space of the research programme as the laboratory and political crucible of art’s negation of the value-form. The temporal compression of art praxis into the moment and intensity of the activist confrontation, then, is not actually the problem here: art praxis, at some points and under certain conditions, needs to open itself up to these forms of spontaneity in order to drive art and politics together – for maximum clarity of effect. Activist praxis is certainly correct on this. But, under the day-to-day operations of capitalist culture, this compression is a manifestation of how the political use-values of art are easily confined to a weak and enfeebled concept of art praxis as representation. By ‘beginning and ending’ in direct political action the actionist model fails to see how complex normativity in art actually derives from the productive gap between the temporality of art praxis and the temporality of political praxis. Art praxis functions as political praxis not on the basis of its emancipatory identity with direct action, but on the basis of its emancipatory withdrawal from the logic of the commodity’s temporal compression and acceleration. In other words, if art’s time is a time that is ‘out of joint’ with the calendrical time of value-form, it also out of time with the assumption that the best way to confront the compression and acceleration of this calendrical time is by operating in its (linear and centripetal) space.

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Hence art praxis-as-research practice is the name I give here to the antipodal form of this calendrical logic: that is, it seeks to produce a temporal space of production and reception for the artwork that require the kind of affective and cognitive skills on the part of the artist and spectator, that negates both the compressive space of the capitalist sensorium and its compressive activist counter-force: a centrifugal space in which the artist, artwork and spectator (and other future spectators) are part of an unfolding and dispersed process, whose counter-hegemonic content is built and shaped by those who participate in the production and reception of the work and its extension into other research contexts. This is not counter-hegemony as a model of activist disclosure, but as a form of Bildung; of art as a space of re-functioned subjectivisation; of political self-transformation as a condition of a collective process of learning. ‘We don’t need life as a work of art, or the work of art as life. We need a total reassessment of what art can give us and how it becomes part of our everyday life’, as Chto Delat put it.11 As such this centrifugal space for art is by definition a post-medium one; a space in which the concept of the ‘art in the expanded field’ loses its morphological and sculptural characteristics as ‘installation art’, to become the technical transformation of the conditions of art’s temporal and spatial possibilities as such, as was the readymade before it. The time of the research programme and the centrifugal conditions of art’s post-medium condition – its dispersed production and reception – is the time of art’s reception, then, pulled out of its familiar compressed ‘judgement at a glance’. Post-1960s neo-avant-garde art and film, of course, drew on this as the defining principle of its anti-spectacularity (as in Andy Warhol and Bruce Nauman). But today such formal extensity cannot in and of itself secure the living time of an anti-calendrical temporality. Six-hour marathon films or videos of repetitive gestures or movements, or mundane events – the spectacle ‘slowed down’ so to speak – have become a pathologised and aestheticised (and as such an interminable) antipode to temporal impatience, cognitive compression and judgement at a glance. This is why my understanding of centrifugality in the contemporary post-medium artwork, with its disparate constellations of meaning, cognitive discursiveness, has little in common with the mere extension of the artwork’s duration; centrifugality is not simply the negation of instantaneousness. Rather, as the space of Bildung, it is where art-praxis as-research is both enacted and made legible as time-as-substance, that is, the space where the cognitive particularities of art are given palpable form and therefore made amenable to those who are willing to give over their time to the ‘distracted’ and

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‘incomplete’ character of the process. ‘Giving over time’, accordingly, is an active force here and not a masochistic act of perseverance in the face of the extremedurational forms of early neo-avant-garde work. It is a ‘learning space’ in which the production of a counter-subjectification is the outcome of the beholder’s affective investment in the centrifugal and distracted conditions of the work’s reception. The intersection of praxis-as-research in production and centrifugality-asbeholder research in reception, therefore, defines a kind of readerly ideal horizon of art’s temporality in a cultural context where compression and speed are fused to the instantaneousness of aesthetic judgement, and where the fast cut and the cognitive switch within network culture weaken thinking and judgement at a distance. The issue, therefore, of art’s living temporality, is crucially a question of the artist’s or group of artists enacting, in a discursive and ‘unfinished’ form, the extended temporal conditions of praxis-as-research. For it is precisely through this unfinished exchange between the research immanent to the work, and the (undecided) research interests of the beholder/participant that the temporality of the artwork can secure a working space of resistance and noncompliance with the prevailing commodity-time and as such, in turn, contribute to the production of a politics of time-as-substance. Non-compliance or temporal obstinacy12 becomes, therefore, not a matter of masochistic perseverance, or contemplative embeddedness, but of cognitive extensity, in which the time of the artwork is the time of its extension by the beholder/participant into living social relations. This is a temporal situatedness, then, that avoids the epistemological trap of defining the time of the artwork simply through its singular confrontation with the time of compression. Art’s relationship to Bildung, consequently, is closer to primitive cadre building in which artists, beholder/participants, and future beholder/participants (as artists or non-artists), participate in an extended community of producers and users in which the time of art’s production, and the time of its reception, establish an emancipatory connection. Situatedness, in these terms, provides the extended material conditions the temporal life of art praxis-as-research. Where and how art praxis situates itself in relation to political praxis and the political process is therefore crucial. In pursuing the temporal conditions of the research programme under the routine conditions of capitalist reproduction, art is necessarily both behind and in advance of the political process. This is because there has to be a gap or fissure between the time of art’s production and reception and the actualities of the production of art as a mode

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of political engagement, in order for art to do its non-identitary and negative work. For otherwise: the praxis of art is indistinguishable from the compressive means-end rationale of non-aesthetic reason and therefore from the language of determinate ‘results’: the neoliberal language of accountability and activist impatience alike. Consequently, reason in art is the cognitive, representational and praxiological work art does on those conditions and structures of foreclosure and compression, as the constitutive means by which art is sustained as an open-ended and speculative research programme. The asymmetry between the ‘time’ of art praxis and the ‘time’ of political praxis is a emancipatory one, then, insofar as it registers art’s fundamental place within the critique and displacement of time of the value-form as the time of measure. Capitalism must always restore time-as-measure (value) at the same as it destroys time-as-substance (the interrelationship of past-present-future; time as cooperation).13 Indeed, capitalism kills time as a condition of reifying time-as-measure. But the very fact that time-as-measure has to restore itself reveals how uncertain and contested time-as-measure actually is. It can never permanently enforce its conditions of reproduction, given that the real subsumption of living labour is never permanently secure. This is because the time of production is the time of cooperation – and not machinic linearity – the time-of-measure is always under threat. In fact, one of the fundamental contradictions of the present period is that capital’s attack on the mass, factorybased labour militancy of the 1970s, through the neoliberal reorganisation and disaggregation of the labour force, is that it released new forms of collectivity and exchange at the point of production, which workers in the new service and cognitive sectors have willingly taken advantage of. Now, this does mean that time-as-measure is being destroyed ‘from within’, as some post-operaist thinking presupposes.14 Capital’s analytic instruments are constantly being renewed and refined across the new service sector in order to deal with living labour’s (relative) erosion of time-as-measure released under the new conditions of production.15 But nevertheless, time-as-cooperation as time-as-substance is the obstinate and immanent force that makes a politics of time indivisible from any revolutionary post-capitalist perspective. Art praxis-as-research, therefore, is the self-conscious manifestation of this time-as-substance. But this is not because today’s avant-garde has a coherent ‘politics of time’ or claims to operate in solidarity with the organised working class. Rather, the expansion of art praxis-as-research is the consequence of art’s transformed place within the 13 14 15

See Negri, ‘The Constitution of Time’ in Negri 2003 and Postone 1993. See Hardt and Negri, Antonio 2005, and Vercellone 2007. Caffentzis 2013.

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intellectual division of labour. Under neoliberalism’s pressure to transform the free labour of art into abstract labour, on the one hand, and the dissolution of art into actionism or aestheticist compliance, on the other, reflection on timeas-substance has become crucial to the survival of art’s (socialised) autonomy. The ‘politics of time’ immanent to living labour’s resistance to time-as-measure necessarily converges with art’s resistance to the cultural and political forces of temporal compression. This is why the fundamental struggle for any politics of art today, is not the struggle for representation or praxis alone, but for the radical untimeliness or atemporality of art’s conditions of production and reception as such.

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‘The Newest in What Is Oldest’: History, Historicism and the Temporality of the Avant-Garde The avant-garde today is more than a space for the continuing extension of art into the ‘expanded field’ and postconceptual modes of practice; it is, rather, the renewed site of the debate on capitalist temporality and reproduction, history and time.1 Indeed, it is the double articulated character of the avant-garde – on the one hand its revolutionary function as that which presses beyond or in advance of the present, and, on the other, its role as the revolutionary critic of the modernising present and modernity – that makes it crucial to the debate on art, emancipation and temporality today. In the following, therefore, I want to look at how a defence of the avant-garde in art, enables another kind of thinking on modernity, one not beholden to the abstract universality and temporal compression of the value-form, and, therefore, one not subordinate to the unilinearity of capitalist developmentalism. In this sense, to understand the continuing revolutionary value and valence of the avant-garde we need to look again at its defining relationship with anti-historicism and the critique of the philosophy of history. For it is here that the problems and dilemmas of contemporary culture will be foregrounded, in as much as it is the ways in which artists and theorists are able to think the relationship between past, present and future as an anti-historicist ‘relation of non-relation’ that will determine a workable politics in art.

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Begriffsgeschichte and Anti-historicism

Historicism, derived from positivistic historiography and the evolutionary and development models and schemas of the bourgeois social sciences and what remains of social democratic progressivism, has two key components: an assumption that history unfolds on the basis of the incremental development of the achievements of the past; and the notion that the past is freed from the present, in order to render the present transformable into the future. This is

1 First published by the NeMe, Arts Centre, Limassol, Cyprus, 2018, at http://www.neme.org/​ texts/the‑newest‑in‑what‑is‑oldest

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underwritten, in positivism proper, by three autonomising definitions of the social subject, that, in a sense, provide the agential machinery for a working ideology of change and developmentalism: namely, 1) a subject, whose selfpossessive identity is divorced from the divisions of subjectivity; 2) a subject whose relationship to the world is based on the simple instrumental reorganisation of an external world; and 3) a subject whose agency ‘transcends’ the causal efficacy of social relations. Now, of course, the critique of this intellectual apparatus – or Capitalist Discourse as Jacques Lacan once called it2 – continues to define the long emancipatory struggle in thought derived from Freud and Marx in the modern period, in which the autonomous subject has been destroyed again and again in theory over the last 150 years. But theory-as-practice has its limits. Indeed, what is assumed to be destroyed in theory, finds itself, in turn, destroyed as practice. In other words, under the abstract universality of the commodity form the logical relations that support capitalist social reality continue to reproduce themselves, irrespective of the intellectual or ideological critique of these relations. This is the ontological irrealism of Capitalist Discourse.3 The fact that the abstract universality of the commodity form is not imposed on everyday relations and appearances, so to speak, but structures the real as the result of commodity exchange. One of the reasons, therefore, that Lacan talks about historicism and positivism as the socio-subjective props of Capitalist Discourse, is that their function is precisely to act in the interests of this social continuum. The attack on historicism, then, over the last 50 years, has operated on two fronts simultaneously: the historicisation of the subject as a condition of the critique of the autonomy of the subject, of the ‘strong ego’, and – in a comparable temporal move – the ‘returning’ of the contemporaneous to the noncontemporaneous and the non-contemporaneous to the contemporaneous, as a condition of breaking free of the present as the unfolding gateway to the future. Thus, in psychoanalytic terms, if the autonomous subject refuses the reality of castration, in the theory of history, the progressivist release of the past from the present in order to render the present transformable into the future, separates past and present from the multiplicities and unevenness of historical time. This is why, certainly since the reception of Walter Benjamin in Europe and North America since the 1970s, the overwhelming role of antihistoricism in historical materialism has been to link the experience of the noncontemporaneous in the contemporaneous to a multi-causal account of his-

2 Lacan 1978. 3 For a discussion of irrealism, see Bhaskar 1993. See also Hostettler 2013.

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torical change and the asynchronic conditions of development, and, therefore, to the transformative pull or explosive charge of the multi-temporal valency of the past in the present.4 In these terms anti-historicism is expressly a critique of Sufficient Reason. The past does not explain the nature of the present and, therefore, presupposes that the future is the evolutionary or rational consequence of the present, but, on the contrary, inhabits and negates the present as the transformative condition of the present’s non-identitary relationship to itself and to the past. History, therefore, is not the domain of achieved facts subject to interpretation, but of retroactively achieved concepts. This is why the notion of Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual-history) has been one of key critical building blocks of an anti-historicist temporality and historical practice, since Benjamin. For, under its interventionist logic, the re-construction and rereception of the historical event is wrenched from its settled historicist place within chronological time, displacing the self-sufficiency of both facts and interpretations. Accordingly, this has had enormous implications for understanding the avant-garde, whose repeated historicist foreclosure since the 1970s has been based on the commonplace assumption that its meanings and agency have been superseded by the realities of the present and therefore claims for the avant-garde’s extension are merely a formalist or stylistic repetition of its origins. This is a crucial point. For historicists don’t deny that past events might speak to the present, but they do reject the notion that they have any causal efficacy; whatever we might reclaim from the past is confined to the past; interpretations do not generate agency. Begriffsgeschichte, in contrast, treats interpretative intervention into the past as an actively prospective move, insofar as the truth of the event establishes itself through the process of intervention, changing past and present as a consequence. Indeed, until the intervention is made, we are not able to see the event at all or see its continuing significance in the same way. Thus, Begriffsgeschichte is not just the work of recovery or redemption (of reclaiming the past from the dead hand of condescension, of recovering the overlooked), but of the conceptual production of the event in the present as an intervention into the present. In other words, Begriffs4 This revitalised anti-historicism covers a wide range of thinkers: Tony Negri (1973), Jacques Camatte (1973), Giorgio Agamben (1978), Reinhardt Koselleck (1979), Theodor Shanin (1983), Alain Badiou (1988), Roy Bhaskar (1992), Moishe Postone (1993), Daniel Bensaïd (1995), Catherine Malabou (1996), Paulo Virno (1999), Fredric Jameson (2002), Michael Löwy (2006), Kevin Anderson (2010), Jarius Banaji (2010), Slavoj Žižek (2012, 2014), Massimiliano Tomba (2013, 2019), Nick Hostettler (2013), Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014), Peter Osborne (2015). Some of this repositioning derives from Benjamin, some from Spinoza (as against Hegel), some from Hegel and late Marx, and some from Ernst Bloch.

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geschichte is precisely form-giving, insofar as the ‘event’ in the process of its historicisation is conceptually reconfigured, and, therefore, epistemologically indivisible from the process of intervention itself. But this is not a speculative process: for the event to have efficacy in the present the truth-claims of the event must possess a non-contemporaneous-contemporaneous capacity to shape the present and open up a space for future praxis; the event can only be reconstructed from that which has determinate historical efficacy, it cannot be rebuilt on supposition alone. But, in turn – crucially – the process of intervention is itself conceptually mediated. There are no pure or non-historically determined returns or interventions from the position of the present, insofar as the point from which the return is made also exercises a privileged perspective on the past. So, for example: the re-functioning of the avant-garde today is only possible through the political reception of the post-revolutionary and postThermidorian history of its original destruction and reception; there is, therefore, no non-traumatic recovery of its critical horizons, no neutral recovery of the avant-garde as such. Hence, what we make from the revolutionary truthclaims of the avant-garde is made from the truth of this post-Thermidorian history; the avant-garde and post-Thermidorian history are inseparable. Consequently, if the avant-garde is irreducible to its origins (that is, if the conceptually produced ‘avant-garde’ is supplementary to the originary event), this irreducibility is mediated by its historical conditions of possibility. Or, rather, to put it another way: the avant-garde’s conditions of emergence are determined by its suspensive and contingent conditions of possibility. There is a fundamental dialectical understanding of the afterlife of the original avant-garde at play here, therefore, derived from the asynchronic and non-contemporaneous conditions of Begriffsgeschichte-as-method. Under changed social, economic and political circumstances the would-be core programme of the avant-garde undergoes a process of transformation and qualification subject to these changed circumstances. Thus, after the Second World War, the entry of the ideals and horizons of the avant-garde into post-revolutionary or post-Thermidorian historical space, radically alters what might or might not be advanced in the name of these ideals and horizons. Accordingly, what is produced and named by the avant-garde in this period as key avantgarde aims and strategies – the dissolution of art into life, the deconstruction of the monadic artist, the distribution of artistic skills into production and across social classes, the extension of artistic form beyond painting and sculpture – are subject to multiple extensions, re-functioning, and re-positionings that dissolve any sense of this work as an extension of an ‘unchanged core’. This is why the avant-garde is not ‘reclaimed’ or rediscovered in this period, it is re-functioned in response to (and in resistance to) the prevailing post-

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revolutionary and late Cold War conditions. Fundamentally, then: the political claims of the research programmes of the original avant-garde change as a result of the gap between what the avant-garde originally named as a revolutionary sequence – or hoped to name – and the radically constrained conditions of this process of nomination in the post-war world. As such, the avant-garde’s re-functioning of its programme is itself the outcome of the new social ontology of art in this period: namely, the assimilation of art into the new cultural industries and the growing calendrical pressures of the art market in the pursuit of renewable ‘novelty’. The post-war avant-garde, of course, draws off this dynamic – one should not forget this – but nevertheless, the determining logic of the avant-garde’s critique of modernity – its revolutionary production of places and spaces and forms agency of art beyond the modernist canon – is subject to a striking compression. Artists in this period still operate in response to these ambitions (think of Wolf Vostell, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica and Robert Smithson’s extraordinary extra-gallery projects in the late 1960s), but there is no direct relationship between art, cultural form and the transformation of the sensible; no direct alignment between art, the collective subject, general social technique and the environment; and, in turn, no re-functioning of the technical and social division of labour under the noninstrumental demands of art. Rather, there is a fragmented interpolation of the ‘avant-garde horizon’ within the mediating realm of a newly expanding art-world and the newly conquering art institutions, particularly in the USA. Thus, the avant-garde’s sphere of intervention and influence retains a twofold identity in this period: firstly, it foregrounds the socially delimited character of the new institutions, and secondly, provides a critique of the quasi-amnesiacal identity of the prevailing ‘return’ to modernist painting, the canon, and the monadic artist in post-1950s art. Admittedly, both of these strategies are little more than small-scale countermoves, in lieu of the weight of their historic avant-garde precedents, yet nevertheless they remain profoundly enabling in terms of how art in the present continues to retains its link with the past. The avant-garde, or rather more precisely the neo-avant-garde in this period (1950–), then, operates, accordingly, in response to a temporality not derived from the evolutionary or linear continuity of the modernist painterly canon. That is, irrespective of the neo-avant-garde’s assimilation into the new institutions of art and the international circuits of production and reception, and the pluralising historical framework of the new modernism (and later postmodernism), its claims to extend the claims of the historic avant-garde acts as an asymmetrical rupture and disaffirmative presence within this new regime. By this I mean that, even though much neo-avant-garde practice is historicised as radically extending the ‘great tradition’ of modernist accomplishment, its

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motive force remains attached to the unassimilable rupture of the historic avant-garde with bourgeois culture, irrespective of this motive force’s weak or attenuated presence in actual works and internal to the social relations of artists. This is why Peter Bürger’s Theorie der Avant-garde (1974) (Theory of the Avant-Garde [1984]),5 muddies the water historically and historiographically by adopting a version of revolutionary historicism, rather than revolutionary Begriffsgeschichte, in his assessment of the post-war avant-garde. He fails to think the avant-garde beyond its – unfinished – conditions of production, reducing the neo-avant-garde to a failed echo of its heroic early years. The consequences of this are twofold: the essentialisation of the revolutionary content or core programme of the avant-garde separate from its unfolding historical production, repositioning and re-functioning; and the blurring of the fundamental temporal difference between the avant-garde and modernism. Bürger is clear that the Soviet avant-garde radically dismantles the bourgeois art institution and its valorisation of artisanal craft-processes, and this is what separates it from modernism, but fails to fully understand that the avant-garde’s adaptation of the advanced relations of cultural production is a critique of the meaning of the modern under industrial development. And this is what we might mean by the contemporary/non-contemporary dialectic of the avant-garde in its struggles to circumvent bourgeois culture. That is, the avant-garde – as it is defined and theorised in the early Soviet Union, Berlin and in Paris under Surrealism – is not the heightened and incantatory subordination of art’s active place in the social world to a process of modernisation, but precisely its opposite: the freeing of social creativity, artistic form, and artistic identity from the calendrical turn-over of the commodity, and the valorisation of the monadic self or artistic ‘strong ego’. In this sense between 1917–27 the avant-garde breaks through the process of capitalist modernisation to identify an alternate kind of modernity, in which the production of the ‘new’ shifts horizontally; that is, through the critique of traditional artistic labour, artistic form and the art institution there is a move externally towards a new collective culture. Now, of course, art’s relationship to technological modernisation plays a crucial part in this – Constructivism and Productivism derive their momentum and idealism from what art and the artist might make of the advanced relations of production as a supersession of archaic and artisanal forms of production. In this sense there are no avant-garde research programmes without the interface between technique, technology and the advanced relations of cultural production. Yet, even in the writing of the most partisan and technologicist adherents

5 Bürger 1984.

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of the machino-technical transformation of art in the 1920s, the fundamental struggle is always to produce a new subjectivity in art, in labour, in labour-asart, in art-as-labour, not beholden to the calendrical order of the commodity form. In this sense, then, the avant-garde passes through the fires of modernity as its critic and not its celebrant, whereas the anti-technological defenders of modernist aestheticism, concerned with the imagined freedoms of contemplation and sensuous form (principally painting) free from industrial culture, are the willing, indeed, ardent, accomplices of art’s commodified exchange under industrial modernity. Thus even, if at the heart of the new commodified conditions of artistic production in the post-war world, the neo-avant-garde as a revenant or residual avant-garde retains this temporal link to the historic avant-garde’s critique of modernity. There may have been no stable and progressive links between art and transformative forces ‘from below’, but nevertheless, as placeholder, for other ways of doing and being, or other ways of organising creativity outside of the market, the attenuated conditions of avant-garde production and reception played the role in Ernst Bloch’s sense of the non-contemporaneous contemporary, as a confluence of the ‘nonsametimeliness’ and ‘sametimeliness’ (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen).6 This means, ontologically, therefore, that the avant-garde is not to be confused with those forms of historicism, like Bürger’s and others since, that would identify the avant-garde either with a failed event or with a past set of stylistic resources that are now freely available for semiotic or symbolic recovery. On the contrary, in the prevailing post-Themidorian space that we still live and work in, the atemporality of the avant-garde as a research programme represents an important stake in that range of social/political experiments that harness the ‘nonsametimeless’ in the ‘sametimeliness’ as part of a wider process of the re-temporalisation of capitalist culture, that Alain Badiou has identified with ‘another order of time’;7 ‘a different durée to that imposed by the law of the world’.8 This means that the avant-garde has a special part to play in a new politics of time, particularly in the light of the growing crisis of capitalist reproduction, and the overwhelmingly comprehensive and claustrophobic character of the ‘permanent now’ of the new network culture and its variously thinned-out virtual solidarities.9 Thus, in liberating the avant-garde, from its historicist death, it is possible to see how an emancipatory politics of time in the current period breaks with 6 7 8 9

See Bloch 1969. Badiou 2008, p. 41. Ibid. For a critical discussion of network culture and the avant-garde, see Léger, 2018, 2019.

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the enforced linearity of the ‘new’ as ‘other’. As such, before we return to our discussion of the ‘contemporary/non-contemporary’ character of the avantgarde, and its extension and re-functioning today, it is, therefore worth looking at how an anti-historicist understanding of Begriffsgeschichte, links to various other post-historicist, retroactive, post-linear models of capitalist modernity and world history. For, despite, the overwhelming dominance of lived time by what Badiou calls the unending fetishisms of commodity exchange, we are actually living through an extraordinary period of philosophical counterhistoricising that, obviously, includes the work of Badiou himself. Some of this writing focuses directly on the critique of philosophy of history, other work on the critique of evolutionary models of progress borrowed from the bourgeois social sciences.

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The Becoming of Necessity

The notion of Begriffsgeschichte, of course, comes from Reinhardt Koselleck’s Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time), first published in 1979 and translated into English in 1985.10 What is transformative about Koselleck’s book is that Begriffsgeschichte, operates as a de-temporalising and denaturalising force against the tendency in both radical and conventional historicisms to conflate historical chronology with actuality (or the ontic), and historical truth. But this isn’t simply a post-chronological understanding of how the past can speak to the present, as in the classical historiography of the Greeks in which the lessons of the past are reinstated in the present. Rather, this is a thoroughly post-Thermidorian temporality in which the present and the future are forged anew from the re-articulation of what links the present to futures past – hence Koselleck’s title. Thus, if both bourgeois and radical historicism submit the past and the ‘event’ to a flat iterability in the present (recovery of that which has been superseded, lost to the historical process and ‘progress’), Koselleck’s de-temporalising Begriffsgeschichte understands the present as a space of productive iterability (of futures past as ‘unfinished’ historical labour, that sets up questions, and provides a prospective theoretical encounter with the problems of the present). Productive iterability clearly bears close historiographical relationship to Benjamin’s temporal recovery of the histories of the vanquished as aborted futures past. And, of course, Benjamin’s own anti-historicism under-

10

Koselleck 1985.

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girds most of the post-Thermidorian anti-historicist work of the last 50 years on the philosophy of history and the critique of evolutionary models of capitalist progress. But Koselleck is no utopian theorist, no matter how much he might borrow indirectly from Benjamin and from Bloch’s ‘contemporaneous/noncontemporary’ model. On the contrary, his commitment to the productive notion of futures past is a way of introducing a pluralising account of the past and the past in the present in order to break the notion of the present as the necessary gateway to progress and modernity. In other words, the present offers no guarantee of the future and, therefore, those who presume to know the future on the basis of the present and past, what he calls revealingly ‘the voluntaristic self-assurance of utopian planners of the future’,11 substitute historical thinking for prophecy and eschatology. Indeed, he identifies this mode of historiography, if not directly with the works of Hegel and Marx themselves (his historical methodology owes a passing debt to the Marx of the Grundrisse), then certainly, with a politics and history that have claimed their provenance and legacy from the historicist reading of Marx and Hegel. This is deeply ironic of course, for since the publication of Futures Past, the received and reactionary notion of Hegel and Marx as unreconstructed historicist thinkers (with implicit or explicit eschatological tendencies) has been subject to the most thoroughgoing critique.12 Indeed, the retroactive transformation of the past (as the ‘unfinished’ past) that is evident in Hegel’s philosophy and the ‘antiprogressivist’ and anti-evolutionary character of Hegel’s dialectic and in Marx’s Grundrisse and that is fully reinstated in the later Marx, is defended in a range of works since the 1980s, for instance, Theodor Shanin’s Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism, (1983, 2018), Daniel Bensaïd’s Marx l’intempestif (1995) (Marx for Our Time, 2002), Jarius Banaji’s Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation (2010), Massimiliano Tomba’s Marx’s Temporalities (2013) and Slavoj Žižek, writing generally, but particularly his massive book on Hegel Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (2012).13 As Žižek elaborates in Less Than Nothing, the retroactive understanding of the past in the present as a transformation of past and present represents the very core relationship between 11 12

13

Ibid p. 114. As such, one the striking characteristics of this counter-historicising work is its own counter-historicising account of anti-historicism. Hegel and Marx are themselves subject to the re-conceptualising move of Begriffsgeschichte, in order to finally release both thinkers from the clutches of a post-Deleuzian and poststructuralist anti-dialectical posthistoricism, and from the use of Benjamin’s Marxist anti-historicism against both Marx and Hegel. Shanin 2018, Bensaïd 2002, Banaji 2010, Tomba 2013, and Žižek 2012.

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Hegel and Marx as thinkers. And this centres first and foremost, given both writers’ respective critiques of Sufficient Reason, in their rejection of necessity as predetermination. Far from historical development being an inevitable consequence of the past, historical becoming is the becoming of necessity itself, that is, the claims of necessity are themselves indivisible from the claims made in its name. Necessity, therefore, is radically contingent, and consequently, ‘becoming’ retroactively engenders its own conditions of possibility: ‘the process of becoming is not in itself necessary, but is the becoming (the gradual contingent emergence) of necessity itself’.14 Crucially, then, the past is not simply assimilated into the present as a given or lost prehistory, but through its retroactive re-determination it begins a new causal chain in the present. Philosophically this is fundamental to Marx’s reconfiguration of his earlier anti-historicism (1859), in his late writing in the 1870s and early 1880s on the Russian peasant commune as a collective social form that can enable Russia to ‘leap over’ the ‘social costs’ of bourgeois forms of capitalist development. The traditional Russian commune was for Marx, as Shanin argues, to be ‘restored on a new and higher level of material wealth and global interaction’.15 In this sense in the later writing Marx employs a version of Begriffsgeschichte as a radical Hegelian re-temporalisation of past and present. As Žižek says of Hegel’s method in these terms: ‘the Self to which Spirit returns is produced in the very movement of this return, or, that to which the process of returning is produced by the very process of returning’.16 And, as Žižek, says of Marx’s early anti-historicist reflections on anthropology and historical development: it is precisely because of the passage from ape to man is radically contingent and unpredictable because there is no inherent ‘progress’ involved, that one can retroactively determine or discern the conditions (not “sufficient reasons”) for man in the ape.17 So, for both Marx and Hegel the critique of Sufficient Reason releases the historical present from a mechanical sequence of effects and causes: ‘the present retroactively alters the past, which in turn, determines the present’.18

14 15 16 17 18

Žižek 2012, p. 231. Shanin 2018, p. 15. Žižek 2012, p. 235. Ibid, pp. 230–2. Tomšič 2015, p. 26.

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Stratification and Struggle

But if Hegel and Marx are conjoined philosophically in Žižek as anti-historicists, it is the radical historiography of Shanin, Bensaïd, Banaji and Tomba that provides Hegel and Marx’s critique of Sufficient Reason with a political and global raison d’etre, aligning the retroactive production of the past and Begriffsgeschichte with a historical materialist theory of asynchronic development and multiple temporality.19 ‘Present and future history is not the goal of past history’, says Bensaïd.20 Indeed, in this corpus of writing there is an explicit link between the spatialisation of time and anti-historicism which puts us in mind not only of Bloch, but also of Badiou’s own spatialised understanding of time in the Logics of Worlds (2012), in which the past becomes the ‘amplitude of [the] present’, in a radical telescoping of past and present.21 The only real relation to the present is that of incorporation: the incorporation into this immanent cohesion of the world which springs from the becoming-existent of the eventual trace, as a new birth beyond all the facts and markers of time.22 In this sense, spatialisation produces a radically asymmetrical version of what cosmologists call a ‘tensed’ view of the metaphysics of time: past, present and future are fundamentally interdependent.23 But in Shanin, Bensaïd, Banaji and Tomba, the spatialisation of time is not so much attached to a notion of the present as the non-identitary opening up of the past in the past in a formal or conceptual sense. Rather, it represents 19

20 21 22 23

Bensaïd and Tomba derive their anti-historicist models from the introduction to the Grundrisse, and Marx’s late writing on Russia, in which Marx stresses the notion of uneven development and the need for a ‘composite representation’ of historical time. In the introduction there is rejection of the convergence between the flow of time (supersessive, diurnal time) and meaning, which Marx clearly derives from Hegel. In this respect this is the point where Marx begins to develop a critique of modernity from within modernity. Two issues derive from this: different forms of production internal to the capitalist mode of production do not proceed at the same pace and rhythm of development; and the past always haunts the present. As such, a constellational and multi-temporal account of capitalism emerges as Marx begins to distance himself from his earlier unilinear model of development. ‘The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future’ (Marx, 1970b, pp. 8–9). Koselleck’s notion of Begriffsgeschichte is close, at one level, to Marx’s ‘composite’ model of representation and his concept of what is ‘newest in the oldest’. Bensaïd 2002, p. 15. Badiou 2006a, p. 510. Ibid, p. 508. See Lowe 2010. John Roberts - 978-90-04-68687-8

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the material outcome of the non-synchronous ‘modernizing’ temporalities internal to the capitalist mode of production itself, what was once called ‘combined and uneven development’. In this sense the ‘non-contemporaneity/contemporaneity’ of the present is the outcome of uneven and stratified levels of development, of residual and dominant temporalities, albeit operating interdependently within an open, unfinished ‘totality’. The openness of the present, therefore, is not just a consequence of the retroactive force of Begriffsgeschichte on the present, but of the struggles of the oppressed that are immanent to and the shape the outcome the conflict of these temporalities. Indeed, it is these struggles over temporality that will decide the becoming of necessity as an emancipatory opening in the present, shifting futures past to an active mode. As Tomba argues: ‘What needs to be grasped are the historical stratifications of modernity, produced by the struggles of the oppressed class, not the false image of modernity, an undifferentiated, smooth surface’.24 Or as Banaji insists in a similar vein, inflexibly uniformitarian or monist theories of the capitalist mode of production have to be ‘stripped of [their] evolutionism and refurbished to allow more complex trajectories’.25 In this sense Begriffsgeschichte, the retroactive production of the past in the present, and a model of stratified and uneven capitalist development, can be variously combined as the basis for a politics of time in which the unilinear time-as-measure of the value-form and of an ‘undifferentiated’ modernity are denaturalised in practice and thought. A new politics of time consequently requires a twofold understanding of capitalist modernity under the demands of anti-historicism: a revolutionary recognition of what is ‘newest in what is oldest’, as Marx put it in a letter to Engels at the end of his life in which he reflected on the legacy of the pre-modern commune in Russia;26 and as such, the notion that the encounter between conflictual and interdependent temporalities on a global basis can produce new temporal conjunctions and beginnings and, therefore, ‘new openings’ for collective subjectivity and agency. In his last writings, what Marx provides in these terms in his notion of what is ‘newest in what is oldest’ is the explicit political re-ordering of his anti-historicist reflections on the collective achievements of archaic and classical culture in the introduction to the Grundrisse: the ‘nonsametimely’ opens up the ‘sametimely’. The culture of humanity’s ‘childhood’

24 25 26

Tomba 2013, p. 19. Banaji 2010, p. 6. Marx 1987, p. 557. See also Marx 1989. ‘Everyone would see the commune as the element in the regeneration of Russian society, and an element of superiority over countries still enslaved by the capitalist regime’, Marx, ‘Drafts of a reply (February/March 1881)’, ‘The ‘First’ Draft’, in Shanin 2018, p. 106.

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in ancient Greek society speaks ‘out of time’ as a denaturalisation and detemporalisation of bourgeois progress.27 But in his rethinking of the political form of the Russian commune, twenty years later, Marx is not simply offering a timely/untimely recovery of the lessons and achievements of the past, as if the Russian peasant commune can be reinstated in its historic form in the present. On the contrary, its ‘nonsametimeliness’ lies in its capacity and potential for a new form of collective existence, and as such a new and ‘timely’ modernity. ‘Precisely because [the traditional Russian commune] is contemporaneous with capitalist production, the rural community may appropriate all is positive achievements without undergoing its [terrible] frightful vicissitudes’.28 This sense of the production of a divergent temporality, out of the struggles from below internal to the asymmetrical vectors of capitalist temporalities globally, produces, I would argue, a subjunctive moment of futurity29 from the dialectic of past, present and future, one that avoids the current fetishism of the present simply as recovered futures past. Thus, for example, in Paulo Virno’s post-Benjaminian anti-historicist political remodelling of the past as the future, in Il Ricordo Del Presente (1999) (Déjá Vu and the End of History (2015)), the lacunae of the present, in Virno’s words, (or what I’ve been calling the non-identitary form of the present), can only ever be ‘filled in’ by the potentiality of the past or futures past. Hence although we should remain faithful, as he says, to ‘Benjamin’s impulse and conceptual lexicon’ this should be qualified. The past enters into constellation with the present ‘precisely because the present moment itself entails the past-in-general-potential – as one of its intrinsic components’.30 This is true, of course, as Marx makes clear, yet futurity is sacrificed here to the assumption that the future can only pass through the potentiality of the past; is only conditioned by the past, in a quasi-Heideggerian sense. ‘It is only in order to realize the (potential) past that we construct the future’.31 As such, recognising the temporal foreclosure of this move is more than a technical philosophical nicety specific to post-orthodox Marxist historicising; it is absolutely central to the political struggle against the current global counter-revolutionary and counter-Enlightenment reaction.32 We need to remember that non-linearity and anti-developmentalism are not defining

27 28 29 30 31 32

Marx 1973. Marx, ‘Drafts of a reply (February/March 1881): The ‘First’ Draft’, in Shanin 2018, p. 106. I borrow, the term ‘subjunctive’ here, from Williams 1979. Virno 2015, p. 144. Ibid p. 145. For a discussion of Virno’s ‘emptying’ out of the future, see Osborne 2015. See Roberts 2018b.

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tropes solely of the new left. As the Islamist and Foucauldean political theorist Amr G.E. Sabet argues: ‘The non-linear, symbiotic, and centripetal dynamics of Islam contrast sharply with the linear and centrifugal dynamics of the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment’.33 Non-linear patterns of growth under Shariʿah ‘must be circular, so as to allow the future to be largely a reflection of the past’.34 ‘Henceforth it becomes possible to define Islamic modernity as the epoch in which … Islam’s pristine past and the present merge to reestablish the universality of revelation and reason – the future’.35 The dialectic of what is ‘newest in the oldest’, therefore, becomes that which Marx also warned against in his critique of modernity and developmentalism in his late Russian writings: the future may be in constellation with the past-as-potential but it cannot take its measure solely from the past; there is no secure path back to the past, whether its dressed up in the imagined finery of the future and the past or not. In the absolutising of the retroactive move, therefore, the link of futures past to the present fails to provide an image of the future that is also anticipatory, ‘unbidden’, ‘unnamed’. Yet, to call on the figure of anticipation here is not to call on a bland utopianism, a position Virno and other anti-historicists rightly reject as providing a premature and abstract resolution of an imagined emancipated future; anticipation is not an ideal projection of futures past into the future; neither is it an indeterminate image of hope. This is just futurism in a new form. Rather, anticipation in its subjunctive mode, is that living, if uneven and fractured expectation of ‘another order of time’ – the progressive atemporal freeing of the ‘new’ from the modern and modernisation – as guide to action in the here and now. As Fredric Jameson says, in the spirit of the late Marx, in A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2002), if the future is to be emancipated from the compulsions and compressions of the value-form, then, a politics of time – or ontology of time as he calls it – has to operate outside the ‘conceptual field governed by the word “modern”’.36 Or, rather it has to operate outside of the ‘modern’ as a non-circular move, contra, to reactionary and nostalgic forms of non-linearity. The ‘return’ to the pre-capitalist ‘archaic’ (Marx) has to be made in the name of the modern – has to supersede the Modern as the modern.

33 34 35 36

Sabet 2008, p. 83. For a survey of the extensive influence of a Heideggerian counterEnlightenment temporality on (Iranian) Shiʿite Islamism, see Mirsepassi 2011. Sabet 2008, p. 75. Ibid, p. 91. Jameson 2002, p. 215.

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The Atemporal Freeing of the ‘New’; or the Avant-Garde and Trauma

In these terms, we might talk about the avant-garde today as the ‘new-old’, retroactively repositioned as the ‘old-new’. Obviously the historic, avant-garde no longer exists, or is able exist in its specific, Soviet, German and Parisian forms; there are no futurist returns here as a pure redemption of the past. Consequently, if the present is in constellational tension with the past-as-mediatedpotential, and, as such, the present’s openness to the future is retroactively formed out of the determining conditions of the past in the present, then the revolutionary potential of the avant-garde is ontologically grounded in two ways: it is irreducible to its original conditions of production – the ‘avantgarde’ is supplementary to the avant-garde, as we have asserted – but also, in a converse move, its potentiality is irreducible to the notion the present is freely available as an act of pure creativity. Divergent or conflicting temporalities, cannot alone structurally transform capitalist synchronisation.37 In other words, if the original avant-garde in a sense did not exist in a given finite form – that is, was not ever self-present to itself; was produced as a category in the process of its conflictual emergence – nevertheless, the labour of Begriffsgeschichte as the Hegelian labour of the avant-garde’s future historicisation, cannot substitute the re-functioning of its past potentiality for that inherited historical absence. To do so, of course, is to enact precisely that abstract exercise of the historical will that Badiou warns us about in Being and Event, and that tends always to haunt the edges of anti-historicism. Indeed, we see this in Koselleck when he fails to address how, paradoxically, the denaturalisation of synchronizing historical temporalities opens up a space for the possibility of History as Story Telling, as much as it does for revolutionary Begriffsgeschichte. That is ‘speaking contrawise’ in the name of the past-as-potential, can just as easily destroy the causal connection between Begriffsgeschichte and the material determinations of event-as-multiple-site, as it can release counterhistories and counter-meanings from a predetermined causal chain. In fact, if the present assumes a ‘stagnant immobility’, a ‘sterile agitation’ and a ‘violently imposed atonicity’, to quote Badiou from Logics of Worlds,38 then, the speculative imposition of Begriffsgeschichte is always a radical temptation under these conditions; a remaking of an idealized present and future on the basis of an idealised past.

37 38

Osborne 2015. Badiou 2006a, p. 510.

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This is why the gap between the historic avant-garde and its post-war postThermidorian conditions of possibility in the present, then, remains a traumatised encounter with its past, and not a semiotic or historiographically redemptive one. That is, if the avant-garde cannot remake itself freely in the world via its inherited revolutionary image in the present, this is because the causal determinations of the past in the present hold its potentiality in the present in torsion with its unrealized potentiality in the past. But this traumatic encounter with its own past though is precisely that which determines the avant-garde’s revolutionary relationship to its truth in the present. That is, in its atemporal recovery of the past, and horizontalised distribution of its techniques, virtual and participatory forms, collective strategies and non-aestheticised modes of judgement as the anti-historicist reconceptualisation of the past, it operates as the via negativa of modernist linearity and the sanctification of the art object. And this is what we see significantly today in the emergence of an extensive body of new avant-garde activity. The re-functioning of the avant-garde today represents an extraordinary disordering of the intellectual and cultural and economic machinery that holds conventional forms of commodity exchange on the art market in place. That is, with the exponential rise of temporal, participatory and adisciplinary, researchbased activities, produced largely outside of the primary market of private galleries and major museums, the re-functioned avant-garde provides a very different set of social relations, spatial conditions, and subjective identifications, usually associated with the production of artistic dry goods for this primary market. This is not to say that this kind of work does not inhabit commodity culture or operate within the market for intellectual goods, or requires approbation at some level from governing institutions, or is not engaged in sales. Art under capitalism is art under capitalism, irrespective of the dissident and selfnegating forms it adopts; there are no pure exit points from commodity relations, and consequently much of this work continues to operate inside what we know as the ‘art world’. Yet, the forms of labour, the modes of non-aesthetic engagement, and research-intensive strategies, developed in this art, produces various modes of disinvestment from the primary market, that stand athwart or in non-compliance with the primary market and its rigid conflation of consumable artistic form and individualised artistic identity. The rise of the artist group or collective globally, the reliance on networked forms of exchange, the incorporation of non-instrumental extra-artistic research into artistic practice, and the temporal character of much of the work, produces a determinate swerve or even break in the means and ends of artistic subjectivity and therefore how artists define their labour and artistic identity. Consequently, the production of the ‘new’ is lodged in a transformative, even revolutionary encounter, with

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the situation and condition of art-as-idea, rather than with the market’s veneration of generic difference centred invariably on medium specificity. Indeed, research, artistic praxis, artistic form, and artistic subjectivity form a shifting constellational framework within a larger extra-artistic research framework that mediates this encounter with the means and ends of art: namely art’s place within the totalising critique of capitalism. The politics of this work, therefore – and there is a lot of work to choose from globally: (Raqs Media Collective (India), to Future Farmers (USA), to Chto Delat (Russia)) – rests not simply on manifest critiques of political iniquities or inequalities, but on the space and time of artistic provision as points of negation within the temporal compression of production and experience under the commodity form. That is, the opening out of practice to a temporally extended and centrifugal noninstrumentalised research model, creates a non-calendrical encounter with the ‘new’ that is at odds with the narrative of the modern and modernisation, pushing what artists do into direct confrontation with the market’s limited account of artistic change and creativity. In other words, such work establishes a non-compliant and non-identitary set of relations with commodity relations, in which the collective exchange of skills and affects and the production of knowledge overflow the fixed form of the art object and its exchange value. And this is crucial for any sense of the avant-garde as a research programme. For these forms of free exchange establish an important centrifugal dynamic for art in the present period: namely, the development of an ‘art after art in the expanded field’ in which the collective forms of participatory production and reception become constitutive of art’s open-ended research interests. We might call this reflective process, then, a split within the time-as-measure of the commodity form, in which the drive to instrumentalize and entrepreneurialise as an expression of the individual creativity associated with the production of artistic dry goods for the primary market are suspended. Thus by acting collaboratively or collectively in order to establish a ‘thinking community’ or alternatively, in order to produce a transformation of a given state of affairs based on work with a group of individuals in a given locale, such models – at least when they are successful – are ‘out of joint’ with the heteronomous conditions of commodity production from which they emerge; and thus the value of such artworks lies in their autonomy as actions or interventions, irrespective of their actual political efficacy or transformative outcomes. For in the end, their value lies in their capacity to engage in non-instrumentalised forms of learning and exchange, which in turn, may lead to other non-instrumentalised forms of engagement and exchange. Thus, the claims for the ‘new’ in art here stand to be made realisable in advance of capitalism, not simply in advance of art. And, consequently, there

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is an atemporal-temporal order at play here, that traverses both the logic of the value-form and artistic futurism, and that connects the re-functioned avantgarde of today with the historic avant-garde, even though this re-functioned avant-garde is limited in its transformative reach; exists in a ‘suspensive state’, as I have put it elsewhere.39 That is, the generalised shift to participatory and collaborative and adisciplinary research-intensive practice today represents a quite extraordinary collective negation of capitalist culture in this epoch of capitalist stagnation40 or neoliberal non-reproduction, and therefore invites for consideration, in its various and inventive rejections of time-as-measure and the introduction of a gift-culture, the central part art might play in the transformation of the relationship between free labour and productive labour in a post-capitalist world. And this is why the anti-historicist avant-garde is so significant in defining the question of temporality and futurity. In its manifestation as the ‘old-new’ in the ‘new-old’, the re-functioned avant-garde provides a working space of experimentation and exchange, one that is both ‘in time’ and ‘out of time’, both contemporary and non-contemporary. Consequently, the ‘newest in the oldest’ is not the reinsertion of the old into the new, but the first move in the post-historicist opening up of the potential-in-the-non-capitalist-past to the future.

39 40

Roberts 2015. For a recent discussion of stagnation theory, see Magdoff and Bellamy Foster 2014. As Magdoff and Bellamy Foster outline, even bourgeois economists now admit that stagnation is the ‘new normal’.

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Index abstraction 49, 108, 110, 299, 457 abstract labour 36, 56n20, 70, 72–4, 80, 86, 88, 99, 239, 249, 464 and alter-realism 325 and anti-pathos 276–7, 280, 281 and photography 333–52 and Rancière’s constructivism 359 and temporality 465–6, 478 and the vessel tradition 96, 97, 99 Acconci, V. 118 Adami, V. 353 Adorno, T.W. 5, 10, 13, 15, 16, 132, 152, 193–5, 308–11, 325, 357–8, 363, 379 about astrology and irrationality 134–5 about autonomy 62 about emancipation 1–2 about poiesis 36 Aesthetic Theory 8, 62, 71n13, 147–9, 354 Hegel: Three Studies 193 Akselrod, L. 422, 423, 450 Alexander, C. The War That Killed Achilles 79 alienation 5, 8, 18 labour 24, 27, 30–43, 68, 79, 81–2, 89, 92–3, 100, 207, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214, 264, 328 and realism 318 self-, of the amateur 103 Althusser, L. 1, 132, 133, 145, 353, 355, 361 and Spinoza’s subject-centred thinking 420–423 amateurism 126–7, 135, 136, 153, 225, 226 and cultural studies 110–111 and cognitive closure 119 and conceptualism 11–3 gentleman 105–6 nihilist 108–9 performative status 112–4 petit-bourgeois 104 as producer (nonartist artist) 107–8 professionalisation challenges 103–4 André, C. 280 Araeen, R. 283, 290–291 Art & Language 14, 143, 182, 183, 216 and anti-pathos 274, 278 and cognitive closure 118

conceptualism and amateurism 11–2 writerliness 188–99 Arvatov, B. 35, 107, 205–6, 208, 209, 210 audience see spectatorship autonomy 166, 178, 259, 466, 481 Adorno on 62, 148–9 and art-as-the-commons 249–53 of dreams 306 racial 190, 193, 297–8 and value 71–3, 75 workers’ 7, 23, 25, 27, 29, 36, 40, 55–8, 81, 212, 329 and writerliness 184, 192, 197 Bachelard, G. 115 Bacon, F. 353 Badiou, A. 269, 270, 396, 471 Being and Event 436–7, 479 Black: The Brilliance of a Non-Color 299–300 The Century 264 and Hegel’s dialectic 425, 426, 428, 432, 436–41, 443 Logic of Worlds 475, 479 and temporality 471, 475 ‘The Communist Hypothesis’ 260–264, 273 Banaji, J. 27, 475, 476 Barthes, R. 280, 334, 457 Baskova, S. Za Marska (For Marx) 329–30 Battock, G. Idea Art 138 Baudelaire, C. 48, 103 Beatty, P. The Sell-Out 292 Beckett, S. 325 Beech, D. 13, 149, 153 Art and Value 9 belle-lettrism 189–90 Benjamin, W. 1, 8, 10, 34, 113, 255, 321, 414 anti-historicism 472–3, 477 ‘The Author as Producer’ 56–7, 240 ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ 409 Bensaïd, D. 475

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index Berardi, F. 212 Bergson, H. 409–10 Bespaloff, R. 86–7 Bhaskar, R. 12, 252 Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom 150, 153, 155 and Hegel’s dialectic 427–30, 441–2 Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom 427 The Possibility of Naturalism 143 realism and cultural theory 12, 13, 15, 143–55 A Realist Theory of Science 143 Bildung 65, 66, 86, 168, 172, 174, 184–7, 241, 251, 254, 257, 266, 267, 308, 313, 314, 461, 462 black modernism 283 from primitivism to global modernity 296–9 race blindness 291–3 racecraft 288–90, 292 race equality 290–291 Schuyler’s critique of race 283–8 universalism 293–6, 299–301 Blanchot, M. 308 Bloch, E. 471, 473, 475 Boal, A. The Theatre of the Oppressed 275 bodies 280–281 Boggs, J. 7 Boltanski, L. 212 Bosteels, B. 443 Bourriaud, N. Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World 272 Relational Aesthetics 235, 254–5, 258 Bower, D. 126 Braque, G. 49–50, 227, 229, 232 Brassier, R. 333, 339n26 Braverman, H. 5, 29 Labor and Monopoly Capitalism 7, 33, 57–8, 80 Brecht, B. 145, 274–5, 276, 277, 278, 315, 321, 322 Brener, A. 161 Brenner, R. 243 Breton, A. 137, 138, 276 Broady, R. 384–5 Bukharin, N. 422

511 Bürger, P. 4, 71, 310 Theory of the Avant-Garde 170, 319, 470 Burgin, V. 182, 280 Cahill, H. 91 Canguilhem, G. The Normal and the Pathological 454 Carnap, R. 340, 447 ceramics 89, 90, 91 see also vessel tradition Certeau, M. de Practices of Everyday Life 378 Cézanne, P. 119, 178, 188 Chiapello, E. 23, 212 Chorley, D. 126 Chto Delat 249, 461, 481 Chukhrov, K. 220 Cixous, H. 294, 297 cognitive closure 118–9 Cohen, G.A. 247 Cohen, T. 414 collage 49–50, 170, 228, 229 Collective Actions 173, 215, 216, 219 commodity, art as 55, 64–76, 89, 154, 218, 311 commons, art as the 238, 241–53 communisation theory 2, 5–6, 7, 10 communist form inaugural (literary) 268–9 invariant communism 260–264, 265 ‘new communist’ thinking 269–74 and relational aesthetics 254–60 and singularisation 264–7, 269 Conceptual art 16, 65, 168–9, 241, 249, 310, 316 and amateurism 11–2, 127 American 173, 190 and art education 13 and artistic writerliness 169–87, 190 Art & Language 11–2, 182, 216 and avant-garde 169–75, 179–80, 184–7 British 173–5, 182–4, 216 craft-thinking 99–100 and deskilling 60–61 and the expanded field 229–35 and iconoclasm 161 photography and pathos 280 in South America 173, 215 in the Soviet Union 173, 215–24

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512 Constructivism 1, 6, 8, 59, 84, 170, 456 and the avant-garde 169, 170, 189, 255 and mechanical production 59 and Productivism 204–8, 470 Rancière’s de-placed image 358–65 Soviet 222, 377 Courbet, G. 11, 46–7, 49, 103, 104, 106, 143n3 The Origin of The World 89 craft-skill, craft-integrity artisanal process 8 and efficiency 34 in Homer’s Iliad 77–9, 86–8 and immaterial labour 23–43 medieval 30–34, 79 poiesis of labour 34–9 and technology 80–81, 85 and temporality 39–44, 85 worker’s identity 79–80 see also deskilling Cremoni, L. 353 crop circles 125 and amateur art 126–7 and artist trickers 136–8 Cerealogists 125–6, 127, 139 culture of co-dependence 129–35 historical tradition 126 knowledge of the irrational 130–137, 139, 142 and situational aesthetics 139–41 spiritual beliefs 127–8 Cubism, post-Cubism 49, 51, 228, 369 cultural studies, cultural theory 13, 96, 118, 171, 184, 191, 232, 234 and amateurism 110–111 and communalism imaginary 263, 266 and critical realism 143–55 and Lefebvre’s ‘everyday’ 377–83 and productivism 211, 213 and race-blindness 292 and Rancière’s constructivism 355–8 Dadaism 169–70, 278 Dali, S. 334 Dana, J.C. ‘Clay Products of New Jersey’ 91 Dawkins, R. 346 De Angelis, M. The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital 252–3

index Dearden, B. Victim 399 Debord, G. 159, 160, 162n12, 378 Deborin, A. 419, 422 Delacroix, E. 178, 188 Deleuze, G. 247, 282, 353, 425, 426 ‘Intellectuals and Power’ 279 Spinoza 422, 424 Deller, J. 111–2, 113 de Man, P. 308 Dennett, D. 108, 416–7 Dergot, E. 223 Derrida, J. 308, 353 Descartes, R. 216, 410, 421 about errancy 446–7, 454 deskilling 68 debates on 6–8, 10, 24, 29, 33, 41 deflationary logic 49–63 reskilling, and technology 80–85 Dialogue group 246, 248 Dickinson, R. ‘Crop Circles’ 125–42 digital technology 6, 28, 37, 44, 249, 316 and communism 24 conceptualisation 61 and domestic labour 25 and the ‘everyday’ 379–83 and Productivism 213–4 and the ‘second economy’ of art 225, 235, 239–40 Duchamp, M. 8, 50–51, 53, 54, 97–100, 137, 138, 179, 232 Fountain 16, 50, 89–91, 97, 227, 229 Duncan, A. 138, 277 Duncan, C. 91, 138 Eagleton, T. 146–7 Eco, U. 335 Eichenbaum, B. 369, 372, 374 Eisenstein, S. 368, 372 October 146, 367 Eliot, G. Middlemarch 323 Eliot, T.S. 97, 198n21 Elizabeth ii, Queen 156–8 emancipatory technique 1 and avant-garde 5, 9–10, 12–3, 17 and historical engagement 18–20 Endnotes 5–6, 19, 68–9, 81–3

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index Epstein, S.A. 26 errancy 13, 15, 115, 445–6 amateur’s 109, 113 and the failure of knowledge 123 and finitude 455 Hegel and Spinoza on 423, 448– 55 inadmissibility of 446–7 non-culpability, de-possessive tradition 447–8, 452, 453, 455 productive, Shklovsky’s criticism 369– 76 Evans, R. 113 expanded field, art in 13, 15, 86, 211, 227, 461, 465, 481 art-as-in-the-commons 248–50 Krauss ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ 229–35, 310 secondary productivism 211 and the second economy 237–40 and value 64–9, 72–3 failure and amateurism 104, 105, 109, 112–4 Hegel and Spinoza on 448–55 of knowledge, and memory 116–24, 411– 4 and truth-telling 195 and value 74–6 see also errancy Fairbanks, D. Robin Hood 366 Fanon, F. Black Skin, White Masks 292–6, 298, 301 Farocki, H. Workers Leaving the Factory 328–9 fiction 16–7, 373, 445 and black modernism 283–301 and cognitive closure 119 dream-images 305–8 realism, alter-realism 316, 318–23, 329 and the ‘utopian enclave’ 257 see also Field, T. (Tár) Field, T. (Tár) 384–403 awards and criticism 384–5 class consciousness 392–3 disregard for musical outcomes 393–4 metaphysics of time 400–401

513 queer paranoid reading 395–8 sexual politics and culture under neoliberalism 385–92 Fields, K.E. and Fields B.J. 288, 290, 292 films 51, 106, 280, 315, 458 devaluation of the ‘poor image’ 382–3 Hollywood, influence on Soviet culture 366–70 and mnemotechnics 415 realism 145–7, 315–6, 320, 321–2, 326–32 and temporality 461 see also Field, T. (Tár) Fleming, P. 83 Foster, H. ‘What is Neo About the Neo-Avant-Garde’ 234, 235 Foster Wallace, D. The Pale King 445 Foucault, M. 282 on errancy 454–5 ‘Intellectuals and Power’ 279 Frampton, K. 169 Fraser, N. 385 Freedman, K. 182 Freud, S. 129, 132, 134, 307, 308, 410, 449, 466 on errancy 453, 454 on memory 410, 412 Fried, M. 177, 185, 229, 280, 457, 458 Friedrich, E. Krieg dem Kriege 321 Fuchs, C. 381 Futurism 146, 368–75 Gan, A. 35 Garcia, D. The abc of Tactical Media 213 Garvey, M. 283, 286, 299 Gastev, A. 203 Gauguin, P. 228, 229, 233 German Idealism 4, 16, 427 Godard, J.-L. 280, 329, 331, 382 Passion 328 Tout Va Bien 326–8 Goodman, N. 143 Gopnik, A. 388 Gorz, A. 6, 212 Adieux au proletariat: Au delà du socialism 5, 36–7

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514 Gough, M. 204–7, 256n8 Goya, F. The Disaster of War 160 Graw, I. ‘Working Hard for What?’ 73 Gray, C. The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863–1922 169 Greenberg, C. 177, 185, 190, 229, 274, 275–6, 280, 456, 457, 458 Grimké, S. and Grimké A. 289 Grotowski, J. 215 Guattari, F. 212, 214, 254, 260, 273, 380 Communists Like Us 264–6 Haacke, H. 280, 281 Hacker, D. 118 Haha group 246 Hallward, P. 365 Haraway, D. 402 Hardt, M. 9, 273 Empire 28 Haries, T. 158, 159, 161 Heartfield, J. 323, 456 Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles 321 Hegel, G.W.F. 4, 148, 154, 166, 251, 260, 275, 295, 310, 346, 417, 426, 457, 475 on race 292 on truth 193, 369 anti-Hegelian positions 420 causa sui 434–6, 439, 444, 451 critical realism 427–8 Dialectic 427, 428 and errancy 369, 448–55 historicism 420, 433, 438–41, 452 negation 149, 195, 377, 428–38 The Phenomenology of Spirit 452 vs. Spinoza 419, 422–5, 434–5 and topology 442–4 Heidegger, M. 81, 353, 455 ‘On the Essence of Truth’ 454 and the vessel tradition 93, 95, 99 Heimans, R. portrait of Queen Elizabeth ii 156–8, 160, 161 Hellbeck, J. Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin 218, 257

index Herron, H. 138–9 Himes, C. 290–291, 292 Hirschhorn, T. 246 historicism, anti-historicism 181 and art in the expanded field 232–4 the becoming of necessity 472–4 Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual-history) 467–72 Brecht’s 275 and Capitalist Discourse 466 contemporaneous and non-contemporaneous 466–7 and dialectical critical realism 153–4 Hegel’s 420, 433, 438–41, 452 and memory 407–9, 413, 414, 416– 8 stratification and struggle 475–8 the subject’s autonomy 466 and Sufficient Reason 343 and the theory of the everyday 378 Holland, E. ‘Spinoza and Marx’ 425 Holloway, J. 252, 253 Homer Iliad 77–9, 86–7 Hostettler, N. 442 Hountondji, P.J. 298 Huws, U. 57–8 iconoclasm 156 as an act of creativity 157, 159, 166– 7 and the Isis 160–162 political / religious ideologies 160–166 portrait of Queen Elizabeth ii 156, 158, 160–161 Russian 162–3 and Situationist détournement 157–9 image, political economy of de-placed 358–65 dreams 305–8 and market socialisation 311–4 and the partisanship 309–11 INKhUK 205–7 internet 70 and art in the expanded field 225, 240 and the ‘everyday’ 381–2 Ioganson, K. 204–9, 214

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515

index Jakobson, R. 144–5, 372, 374 Jameson, F. 233 Antinomies of Realism 315, 317, 328, 329 Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions 257, 270 and Hegelian dialectic 426, 430, 431–2, 435, 436, 440, 442, 443 A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present 478 Jensen, R. Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe 228 Jones, T. 178, 188 Jorn, A. 159 Journal of Critical Realism 151 Joyce, J. Ulysses 319 Kafka, F. ‘Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse-People’ 401–2 Kandinsky, W. 106 The Blue Rider 226 Kant, I. 149, 295 on aesthetics 166 on ‘asociality’ 62 on errancy 446–7, 454 Kargarlitsky, B. 223 Kay, E. 117–9 Worldview 120–123 Kelly, M. Postpartum Document 61, 280, 281 Kepley Jr., V. 370 Kester, G.H. Conversation Pieces 270–271, 272 Kiaer, C. 205 Kicillof, A. 58n26, 66 Koselleck, R. Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time) 472–3, 479 Kosuth, J. 216 Krauss, R. ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ 229– 35, 310 Kuleshov, L. 367, 368

labour 2, 5, 6–10 alienation 24, 27, 30–43, 68, 79, 82, 89, 92–3, 100, 138, 207–8, 209, 211–2, 214, 264 division of 11–2, 24, 26, 30, 34, 35, 38–9, 42–3, 51–60, 73, 79–81, 94–8, 104, 107, 109–11, 117, 123, 149–50, 168, 172–7, 179, 181, 184–91, 212, 216, 221, 247–8, 261, 318, 328, 379, 460, 464, 469 immaterial 7, 23–44, 54, 70, 99, 212–4 realism and class identity 326–32 and the ‘second economy’ of art 237–9 Lacan, J. 132, 133, 359n12, 435, 438, 454, 466 Laclau, E. 212 Lacy, S. (New Genre Public Art) 235 Larsen, N. Passing 284 Laruelle, F. The Concept of Non-Photography 333– 43, 346–52 Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard, Aesthetics 349 Lazzarato, M. 23–4, 72, 245 Experimental Politics 70–71, 402 Leach, B. 40, 95–100 Lefebvre, H. 39, 210, 334, 377, 378, 380 Lenin, V. 162, 203, 366, 367, 370, 374–6 Lewis, W. Tarr 387–91, 396, 399, 402 Leyda, J. 169 Locke, J. 117, 410 Lovell, T. Pictures of Reality: Aesthetics, Politics and Pleasure 145–6 Lovink, G. The abc of Tactical Media 213 Lukács, G. 147, 315, 317, 325, 329, 456–7 Lunarcharsky, A. 146, 366–8, 371, 375 Lyubimov, L. 55 Mach, D. Polaris 156 Macherey, P. Hegel or Spinoza 424, 425, 434, 449 MacLennan, G. 151 Magri, L. 257 Malevich, K. 171 Suprematism 1920–1927 161

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516 Manet, É. 11, 46–7, 49, 104, 106, 112, 178, 206 Mantel, H. 329 Marker, C. 322, 415, 418 Sans Soleil (Sunless) 326 Marx, K. 1–2, 42, 143, 149, 155, 166, 237, 255, 347, 351, 478 and Bildung 265–8 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy 7, 26, 37–9, 56, 144, 421 and deskilling 27, 30, 54–5 ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ 259, 377 and errancy 453 The German Ideology 30–33, 37, 80, 131 Grundrisse 26, 67, 80, 377, 421, 473, 476– 7 The Poverty of Philosophy 40 and Spinoza 422–6 Theories of Surplus Value 73–5 theorisation of the senses 259–60 Mbembe, A. Critique of Black Reason 296–301 McCarney, J. 432, 434, 443n86 McGettigan, A. 339 McKeever, I. 118–9 Meillassoux, Q. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency 340, 342, 346 memory failure of knowledge 116–24, 410–413 integration of living with historical 407–9, 413, 414, 417–8 ‘memory men’ 115–8 mnemotechnics 414–8 and perception 410 truth-claims and testimony 413–4 Mezhrabpom 366, 367 Michelangelo Buonarroti Pietà 157, 163 Michell, J. The View Over Atlantis 128 mistakes see errancy Moholy-Nagy, L. 52–4, 59, 60, 179, 189 Morris, W. 5, 9, 30, 36, 54–6, 79, 81, 256n7 Signs of Change 31–2 Moscow Conceptualism 173, 215–24 Mouffe, C. 212 Müller, H. 322, 324, 325

index Nancy, J.-L. The Inoperative Community 264, 266– 9 Kester’s criticism of 270–271 naturalism 49, 143, 145, 259, 456 photographic 335, 351 and realism 315, 316, 318–9, 323n10 negation 119, 215, 217, 250, 377, 396 Adorno’s aesthetic theory 62–3, 147–9, 195, 311, 440 Bhaskar’s dialectical 149–50, 153, 155, 441 and iconoclasm 163, 166 modernist painting 49–50 and realism 324, 327 self-relating, Hegelian 428–37, 443 and temporality 459–61, 481 and writerliness 195–6, 199 Negri, A. 1, 9–10, 23–6, 37, 42–3, 85, 211, 213, 214, 254, 273, 383, 424–5 Communists Like Us 264–6 and deskilling 27–9 Nemes, L. 399–400 neoliberalism 6, 8–9, 164 and art-as-the-commons 241–53 and the crisis of work 82–4 the ‘everyday’ and image production 379, 381–3 progressive 19, 385, 388, 391–2, 400, 402 and the ‘second economy’ of art 237– 40 New Economic Policy (nep) 58n26, 203–9, 366, 367 New Left Review 13, 146, 150 Newman, B. 156 The New Yorker 384, 388 New York Society of Independent Artists 89 Ngai, S. Theory of the Gimmick 6 Nietzsche, F. 95, 387, 389, 454–5 Untimely Meditations 48–9, 416 Norrie, A. Dialectic and Difference 428–31 Norton, L. ‘Buddha of the Bathroom’ 97 Novalis 310, 314, 419, 433 Henry von Ofterdingen 305–8 Novyi Lef 368, 369, 371, 375

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517

index opoyaz (Society for the Study of Poetic Language) 371, 372, 374 painting 362, 376, 377, 456, 469, 471 and amateurism 11, 104–6, 110, 119 and cognitive closure 118–9 deflationary process 45–54, 59–60, 103– 4 and the ‘expanded field’ 227–36 and iconoclasm 156–61 and pathos/anti-pathos 274, 276, 280– 282 and realism 144, 146, 316, 332 and writerliness 169–72, 178–83, 188–90, 197–9 participatory art 2, 91, 153, 313, 363, 402, 480, 482 and anti-pathos 278, 282 and capitalism 9 and the ‘expanded field’ 235–6, 240 and the question of value 65–6, 70 and the ‘second economy’ 225–6 and social engagement 241, 245–55 and writerly artists 181, 185–7 Partisan Review 373–4 Pater, W. 362–3 pathos, anti-pathos 274–82 Perec, G. 321, 324 La Disparation 119 Perloff, M. Radical Artifice 196 philistinism 13, 15, 148–53, 359n12 photography 4, 146, 157, 171, 210, 216, 240, 358, 364, 379, 382 and abstraction 333–52 and amateurism 104n5, 107, 109, 113n12 and antipathos 280–281 and blankness 336–7 contingency and Sufficient Reason 343– 5 and deskilling 45–6, 52, 61 documentary 250n14, 309 and memory 115, 415, 417 nature, contingency, object 339–43 and realism 319–24, 334–7, 348–9 scientism 345–8 totality and anti-decisionism 337–8 and tricksters 135–7, 139, 140

Picasso, P. 49–50, 232 and deflationary logic 49–50, 227, 228, 229 Guernica 156 The Old Guitarist 226 poetry post-conceptual, and anti-pathos 274, 277–8 post-expressionist 196–8 Pop art 174, 182 Pound, E. 97, 196, 198n21 Productivism 6, 8, 9, 35, 59, 67, 85, 169–70, 256n8, 470 the factory as a research centre 205–9 factory-free 209–10 secondary 211–4 short history of 203–5 Pudovkin, V. 146, 367 The End of St. Petersburg 368–70, 372 Pyrnne, J.H. 274 Quine, W.V.O 143 race, racism see black modernism Rancière, J. 3, 123, 308 and art’s political effect 457–8 Béla Tarr, The Time After 400 critique of regime-thinking 354–5 de-placed image 358–65 The Emancipated Spectator 358 The Future of the Image 358 politics and art 363–5 reconstruction of the sensible 360–361 and spectatorship 356–8 readymades 6, 90, 138, 170 and conceptualisation 100 Duchamp’s, and artistic deflation 50–51, 53, 59, 91, 227 realism, alter-realism 3, 18 and abstraction 325 capitalist 324 and cinema 326–32 and class narrativity 321–32 critical, Bhaskar’s and cultural theory 143–55 critical, Hegel’s dialectic 427–8, 432 debates 315–6 erosion of affect 324 the male hero 316–7

John Roberts - 978-90-04-68687-8

518 and modernism 317–9 and photography 319–24, 334–7, 348–9 and presentism 318–20, 323–4, 326 representation and agency 331–2 Reed, I. MultiAmerica: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace 291 relational aesthetics 60, 153, 211, 235, 282 and communist form 254, 257–9, 270– 272 and participatory art 313 Rembrandt Nightwatch 156, 158 Rescher, N. Error: (On Our Predicament When Things Go Wrong) 455 Reynolds, J. 178 Richter, G. 60, 160 Ricoeur, P. Memory, History, Forgetting 412–5 Riff, D. 213 Riviera, D. 276 Roberts, J. 2–6 Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade 6, 8, 13 The Necessity of Errors 13, 15, 445, 447, 451–2 The Reasoning of Unreason 15 Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde 13, 17 Thoughts on an Index not Freely Given 16–7 Robespierre, M. 453 Romanticism 69, 433 and Bildung 308, 314 craft-skill critique 29–32, 42, 81 and the writerly artist 191–2 Rosler, M. 324, 336 Rothko, M. Black on Maroon 156, 157, 158 Rousseau, J.J. 149, 166 Rubin, I.I. 55, 58n26 Ruda, F. 343–4 Ruscha, E. 109, 110, 113, 334 Ruskin, J. 32, 79, 81, 160n9 The Stones of Venice 31 Russian Revolution 56, 59, 162, 179, 225, 227, 262 and amateurism 107

index impact on photography’s realism 230 influence of Hollywood movies 366–70 Sabet, Amr G.E. 478 Salon 47, 48, 53, 103–4, 226–7 Schuyler, G.S. 291, 292 Black No More 283–8, 296 ‘second economy’ of art 225–6 and neoliberalism 236–40 Sedgwick, E.K. ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’ 395–8 Sekula, A. 280, 324 Sennett, R. 41–2 Serge, V. The Case of Comrade Tulayev 373 Conquered City 329 ‘Marxism in Our Time’ 373–4 sexuality and conceptualisation of art 60–61 and deskilling 57–8 queerness, in Field’s Tár 385–90, 395– 403 and realism in film-making 328 Shanin, T. 473, 474, 475 Shaw, J. 110–113 Sherashevsky, S. 115 Shklovsky, V. 368 Mayakovsky and His Circle 374–5 ‘Monument to Scientific Error’ 372– 3 on productive mistakes 369–75 Sholette, G. 15, 225, 257–8 Showalter, E. 130, 134 Simberg, H. 227, 228, 229, 233 The Wounded Angel 226 situational aesthetics 139–41 Situationism 10, 139, 355, 358, 379 détournement and iconoclasm 157–9 Sloterdijk, P. 134, 337 socially engaged art 6, 9 and communal form 254–73 the image, and mediated consumption 311–4 and neoliberalism 241–53 the ‘second economy’ of art 221, 236, 239 Sorge, P. 324 Sovkino 366, 367

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519

index spectatorship and the art-as-the-commons 241, 248 and artistic judgement 49, 64–6 bourgeois, and amateurism 103, 107, 119 and iconoclasm 163 and memory acts 115–6 participatory 278, 399–400, 402, 408 and the political economy of the image 309–10, 312 Rancière’s thinking 355–65, 457 and realism 321, 328, 329 and the ‘second economy’ 226, 236 Soviet film industry 366–7, 370, 371 and temporal spaces 461 and the theatre of ideas 274 and tricksters 137, 139, 141 and the writerly artist 185–6, 188–9, 197–8 Spinoza, B. 216 dialectic, vs. Hegel 419–21, 424, 425, 434–5 and errancy 446, 448–55 Marx’s relation to 373, 421–3, 425, 426 subject-centred thinking 420–423 Starosta, G. 58n26, 66 Steyerl, H. 8 The Wretched of the Screen 250n14, 382– 3 Stieglitz, A. 90 Stimson, B. 309 Streeck, W. 311–2, 380 studio and writerliness 178, 179–80, 188–92, 199 Stuhr, P. 182 Sturges, P. Unfaithfully Yours 394–5 Superflex 235, 246 Surrealism 169–70, 377, 470 surrogacy 52, 59–60, 112, 138 Tarr, B. 387 The Turin Horse 398–400 Tatlin, V. ‘Monument to the Third International’ 444 technology 4, 6, 8, 10, 23, 34, 170, 232, 243, 313, 355, 470–471 and amateurism 107, 113

labour and skill critique 23, 25–9, 43, 51, 67, 69, 80–81, 87–8 and memory 116, 415n23 and Productivism 207, 213 and tricksters 136 and the writerly artist 169, 179, 189 see also digital technology ‘telephone pictures’ 52, 53, 59 temporality 87, 220, 221, 230, 448 and art in the expanded field 235 of the avant-garde, and historicism 17, 465–82 and the communist imaginary 258, 270 and contingency 340 craft-skill, and labour 39–44 and crop circles 126 metaphysics of time in Tár 400–402 in post-Hegelian dialectic 430, 431, 438, 440, 442 and realism 316, 319 in Soviet films 366, 367, 368 time as-substance, art and politics 456– 64 and the vessel tradition 93–9 theatre and conceptual art 215 and the de-placed image 361–2 and pathos/anti-pathos 274–6 and realism 325 Tieck, L. 433 Tomba, M. 473, 475, 476 Toomer, J. Cane 283–4, 318 Toscano, A. 260 Toth, L. 157, 163 Trotsky, L. 368, 371 ‘Manifesto Towards a Free Revolutionary Art’ 276 Trotter, D. 277 Tucholsky, E. Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles 321 Tucumán Arde (Tucuman is Burning) 210 Tyson, K. 153–4 Umaniec, W. 157 utopian communalism 255–7, 260, 263, 266, 269, 270, 272–3

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520 value, value theory 1, 5, 6, 8–9, 20, 44, 99, 106, 216, 383 and amateurism 108 art as a commodity 73–6 art-as-the-commons 246–53 and autonomy 62, 71–3, 75 dissolution of 45, 46, 48, 49, 53, 54–9, 63 ‘judgement at a glance’ 64–6 politics of 66–70 and Productivism 209–10, 211, 214 skills and labour 26, 28, 29, 34, 35, 38– 44, 81, 83, 85–6 and temporality 459–60, 463, 465, 476, 481–2 truth-value 308, 453n21, 454 Van Gogh, V. 188, 353 vessel tradition 90, 100 archaeological records 92 and the object’s ‘thingness’ 93–9 timely logic of 93–9 Virno, P. 72, 383, 478 Il Ricordo Del Presente (Déjá Vu and the End of History) 477 von Donnersmarck, F.H. Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) 326, 330–331

index Warhol, A. 109, 110, 113, 461 Waterhouse, J.W. 227 Echo and Narcissus 226 Watkins, A. The Old Straight Track 128 Williams, R. 145, 146 Williams, W.C. 278 Wochenklausur 246 Wood, B. 97 wpa-fap muralists 323 writerliness, writerly artists 169 and art education 181–7 and art history 175–8 Art & Language 188–99 and conceptual art 169–87 legacy 178–81 studio-writing 188–92 Žižek, S. 133, 475 on correlationalism 347 In Defence of Lost Causes 256, 261, 273 and the Hegelian dialectic 426, 427, 428, 431–5, 439, 443–4 Less Than Nothing 433, 473–4 Zupančič, A. 345

John Roberts - 978-90-04-68687-8

John Roberts - 978-90-04-68687-8