European Theories in Former Yugoslavia: Trans-theory Relations between Global and Local Discourses 1443877204, 9781443877206

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Editors and Contributors
Index of Names

Citation preview

European Theories in Former Yugoslavia

European Theories in Former Yugoslavia: Trans-theory Relations between Global and Local Discourses Edited by

Miško Šuvaković, Žarko Cvejić and Andrija Filipović

European Theories in Former Yugoslavia: Trans-theory Relations between Global and Local Discourses Edited by Miško Šuvaković, Žarko Cvejić and Andrija Filipović This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Miško Šuvaković, Žarko Cvejić, Andrija Filipović and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7720-4 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7720-6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 European Theories in Former Yugoslavia Žarko Cvejiü, Andrija Filipoviü and Miško Šuvakoviü Chapter One ................................................................................................. 5 Andrew Bowie and Music in German Philosophy around 1800: The Case of Kant Žarko Cvejiü Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 12 Walter Benjamin and the Deterritorialisation of the Original Jovan ýekiü Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 20 Toward a Critique of Post-structuralist Anti-humanism: Cavell and Foucault Nikola Dediü Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 27 Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine and Rachael Blau DuPlessis’s Feminine Aesthetic Dubravka Ĉuriü Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 34 Artification and Jacques Rancière’s Aesthetic Regime of Art Aleš Erjavec Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 40 Deleuze and the Question of the Human in Contemporary Art Andrija Filipoviü

vi

Table of Contents

Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 46 Sara Ahmed and the Analysis of Critical Whiteness and Racism in Post-former-Yugoslavia Marina Gržiniü Chapter Eight ............................................................................................. 52 The Epistemological Aspect of André Nusselder’s Interface Theory Oleg Jekniü Chapter Nine.............................................................................................. 58 Gadamer’s Approach to the Paradox of the Open Horizon of Actuality Nataša Lah Chapter Ten ............................................................................................... 64 Transgressions of Utilitarian Speech in Bakhtin’s Speech Practice and the Trans-rational Experiment Amra Latifiü Chapter Eleven .......................................................................................... 73 Jacques Attali’s Concept of the Political Economy of Music in the Context of the Recording Industry in Former Yugoslavia Marija Maglov Chapter Twelve ......................................................................................... 79 Some Aspects of the Contemporary Methodological Position in Mazel’s Integral Analysis Method of Analysing Musical Works Sonja Marinkoviü Chapter Thirteen ........................................................................................ 86 Dissensus communis: Rancière and the Dehumanisation of Art Bojana Matejiü Chapter Fourteen ....................................................................................... 92 Stuart Hall’s “Double Articulation” in Theorising Yugoslav Popular Music Vesna Mikiü Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 101 Julia Kristeva’s Concept of Abjection applied to the Phenomenon of the Transgender Body Aleksa Milanoviü

European Theories in Former Yugoslavia

vii

Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 107 The A of Deconstruction: Derrida, la différance, and “and” Novica Miliü Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 116 The Theoretical and Philosophical Approach to the Concept of Authenticity in the Works of Cesare Brandi and his Contemporaries Marko Nikoliü Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 122 Philippe Sollers and the Idea of Textual and Ideological Revolution Sanela Nikoliü Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 128 Theory of Contemporary Art: Lines and Curves (Boris Groys, Dieter Mersch, W. J. T. Mitchell) Žarko Paiü Chapter Twenty ....................................................................................... 135 Louis Althusser’s Theory of Ideological Interpellation in the Post-socialist Space of the Balkans Rade Pantiü Chapter Twenty-one ................................................................................ 142 Vibrant Social Technologies: Bruno Latour’s Sociology of Non-humans and its Potential for Contemporary Social Theory Ana Petrov Chapter Twenty-two ................................................................................ 148 The Liquid Context: Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity Maja Stankoviü Chapter Twenty-three .............................................................................. 155 Olga Freidenberg’s Concept of the Parodic Lada Stevanoviü Chapter Twenty-four ............................................................................... 160 Ignasi de Solà-Morales and Minimalism Vladimir Stevanoviü

viii

Table of Contents

Chapter Twenty-five ................................................................................ 167 Woman as the Ineffable/Intangible Point of Textual Coordinates: Luce Irigaray and the Strategies of Working with the Limits of Phallogocentrism Dragana Stojanoviü Chapter Twenty-six ................................................................................. 173 A Discussion of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Paradigm of Postdramatic Theatre Aneta Stojniü Chapter Twenty-seven ............................................................................. 179 Jacques Lacan, Early Lacanianism, and Former Yugoslavia Miško Šuvakoviü Chapter Twenty-eight .............................................................................. 187 The Baroque has no Metropolis: Peter Davidson and the Universal Baroque Jelena Todoroviü Editors and Contributors.......................................................................... 192 Index of Names........................................................................................ 196

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors wish to thank all the contributors for the hard work they invested in this project. Also, the editors are especially grateful to the Faculty of Media and Communications, Belgrade, and its Dean, Professor Nada Popoviü Perišiü, for her generous assistance, without which this book could not happen.

INTRODUCTION EUROPEAN THEORIES IN FORMER YUGOSLAVIA: TRANS-THEORY RELATIONS BETWEEN GLOBAL AND LOCAL DISCOURSES ŽARKO CVEJIû, ANDRIJA FILIPOVIû AND MIŠKO ŠUVAKOVIû

European Theories in Former Yugoslavia is intended for students and scholars (ex-Yugoslav and international alike) of art and media theory, philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies in the context of their reception, interpretation, application, and elaboration in the region of former Yugoslavia. The book stems from a research project undertaken at the Faculty of Media and Communication in Belgrade in the spring and summer of 2014. The project was meant to produce an overview of the reception of contemporary European theories of art and culture in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav theory. In the conceptual framework of the project and this book, “reception” also signifies the translation and elaboration of these theories in the hybrid context of former Yugoslavia and the contemporary transitional cultures of its successor states. The book seeks to corroborate the main thesis of the project: that there is no such thing as direct transfer or influence of theories from the centre to the margins, but only the complex practices of borrowing, translating, and reinterpreting, conditioned by specific contexts and contextual identities, in this case, those of former Yugoslavia and its contemporary cultural sphere. In Yugoslav modernity, the theoretical objective was to catch up, as it were, with the rest of the world, the European and international theoretical discourses that were current at the time, by emancipating the local environment and by joining the mainstream in international theory and philosophy. In socialist Yugoslavia, the aim was to open Marxist

2

Introduction

philosophy to the debates and controversies of post-war European theory and philosophy. In the 1950s and 1960s in particular, Yugoslav theory strove to open the philosophy and theory of real- and self-managed socialism to various strands in European Marxism, including critical theory and the influential German philosophical traditions of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism (Heidegger and Gadamer). By contrast, in today’s post-Yugoslav cultural sphere, as shown in this book, the reception of contemporary European theory works only as an initial impulse for complex re-contextualisations of theories and philosophies, relating to various situations in contemporaneity and contemporary culture. Reception is no longer simply about receiving fresh knowledge from the centre, but also about communicating feedback from those international European theoretical insights into broader contexts, characterised by multicultural and global connections and exchange. Also, the book poses broader questions about contemporary theory today: what are theories today? How do specialised theories of culture, gender, media and art history relate to current philosophical turns in new materialism, neo-Marxism, and biopolitics? These basic questions concerning the relationship between theories and philosophy from the perspective of a European periphery, in this case the cultures of former Yugoslavia, gesture toward a dialectically tense relationship between the centre and the margins, that is, between original theories and their transformed perspectives. The selection of authors featured in this book is a cross-section of postYugoslav theory, including both young authors in the early stages of their academic careers, educated in the region and abroad, and more senior, established thinkers. Both groups of authors come from a variety of disciplines, including art theory, gender theory, cultural studies and theory, popular culture theory, sociology, anthropology, theatre studies, art history, musicology, media studies and theory, political theory, architecture, literary theory, and various trans-disciplinary combinations thereof. In terms of the topics and theoretical problems they address, their texts likewise offer a representative sample of current post-Yugoslav theory. Roughly, the texts may be divided into two groups: those that offer post-Yugoslav views and discussions of current European theories and philosophies and those that document the post-Yugoslav reception, application, translation, and transformation of those theories in practice. In terms of the thinkers and theoretical and philosophical strands they address, both groups of texts are dominated by post-structuralist French theory and philosophy, including, in the first group, Lacanian

European Theories in Former Yugoslavia

3

psychoanalysis (Miško Šuvakoviü); Jacques Rancière’s work in aesthetics (the notion of the dehumanisation of art and dissensus communis as that which lies between ethics and politics – Bojana Matejiü); Philippe Sollers’s work in critical theory (his idea of textual and ideological revolution – Sanela Nikoliü); and the feminist theory of Luce Irigaray (her critique of the phallogocentric model of oneness/sameness – Dragana Stojanoviü) and, in the second group, Hélène Cixous’s concept of écriture féminine juxtaposed with American poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s concept of writing as a feminist practice (Dubravka Ĉuriü); the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and the question of the human in contemporary art, and, in particular, the critique of a certain image of the human in bio-art practices and contemporary literature (Andrija Filipoviü); Jacques Attali’s political economy of music in the context of the music industry in former Yugoslavia (Marija Maglov); Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection applied to the critique of the hetero-patriarchal construction of the body in general and the transgender body in particular (Aleksa Milanoviü); the potential of Bruno Latour’s sociology of non-humans for contemporary social theory through his concept of “actor-network” (Ana Petrov); the reception and elaboration of Lacanian psychoanalysis in former Yugoslavia and especially in the context of Slovenian philosophy and theory; a critique of Foucault from the perspective of Stanley Cavell’s philosophy of everyday language and his concept of “moral perfectionism” (heterotopia versus utopia – Nikola Dediü); Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation in the post-socialist context of the Balkans today (Rade Pantiü); and Jacques Derrida and his concept of différance, introducing us to his treatment of philosophical and theoretical discourse (Novica Miliü). Many of the texts address German critical and postmodern theory and philosophy, including Walter Benjamin’s notion of the obscene as applied to Aleksey Balabanov’s film Of Freaks and Men (Jovan ýekiü); Gadamer’s hermeneutics and the problem of the open horizon of actuality (Nataša Lah); Boris Groys’s and Dieter Mersch’s works in contemporary art theory (Žarko Paiü); and Hans-Thies Lehmann’s work in theatre studies (his concept of postdramatic theatre – Aneta Stojniü). The remaining texts treat various topics and authors in contemporary European theory and philosophy, including Andrew Bowie’s reading of subjectivity in early 19th-century German philosophy and the role of music therein (Žarko Cvejiü); Sarah Ahmed’s work on race and racism in the context of former Yugoslavia (Marina Gržiniü); André Nusselder’s Lacanian analysis of digital technology and the difference between media and interface (Oleg Jekniü); Mikhail Bakhtin’s work in linguistics compared to the Russian trans-rational avant-garde art practices (Amra Latifiü); Boris Asafyev’s

4

Introduction

work in music analysis and his intonation theory in particular (Sonja Marinkoviü); Stuart Hall’s work in cultural studies applied to Yugoslav popular music (Vesna Mikiü); the concept of authenticity in the work of Cesare Brandi in relation to the practice of art restoration (Marko Nikoliü); Zigmunt Bauman’s critique of modernity (his concept of “liquid modernity” as opposed to the “solid modernity” of early capitalism – Maja Stankoviü); the notion of minimalism in architecture as advanced by Ignasi de Solà-Morales and his role in the commercialisation of the discourse of minimal architecture (Vladimir Stevanoviü); Peter Davidson’s work in baroque art history (Jelena Todoroviü); and Olga Freidenberg’s work in cultural studies (her concept of the parodic corresponding to a certain extent to the Bakhtinian carnivalesque – Lada Stevanoviü). Taken as a whole, this book illustrates the complex relationship between local, European, and American theories, the Yugoslav and postYugoslav spheres, and contemporary theorisations. Its complex mappings and webs of contemporary European theory show the growing complexity of the contemporary culture of theory and philosophy and their gradual transformation into a field of collaborative work between various original disciplines and their dynamic relations of the individual and the universal. Bringing these texts and authors together in a single volume, European Theories in Former Yugoslavia specifically identifies a transnational and trans-cultural relation of fluid knowledge, shifting from one context to the next, its structure thereby transforming from a “tree of knowledge” into a “web/network of knowledge”.

CHAPTER ONE ANDREW BOWIE AND MUSIC IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AROUND 1800: THE CASE OF KANT ŽARKO CVEJIû

There has hardly been a more dynamic period in the history of Western music aesthetics than the final decade of the 18th and the opening decades of the 19th century, which saw the emergence of such works as Kant’s Critique of Judgement in 1790, Schelling’s Philosophy of Art in 1802, and Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation in 1818. In just a few decades, music came a long way, from being merely an “agreeable” art, alongside cooking and telling jokes, in Kant’s hierarchy of the arts, to “the primal rhythm of nature” in Schelling (Schelling 1989, 17), and the only direct “copy of the will itself”, that is, the only real existence in Schopenhauer’s philosophy (Schopenhauer 1891, I, 331). It was a heady time in Western philosophy, too, that is, in its conception of human subjectivity. For Kant, arguably the greatest thinker of the German Enlightenment as well as the founding father of German Idealism, the human subject was still inherently, transcendentally, and essentially free. But already in Schelling (while Kant was still alive), the subject is inherently split, never coherent or self-identical, not free but constantly driven and torn by urges and desires beyond his1 control. Even more so in Schopenhauer, the subject is entirely enslaved to the Will, the impersonal and irrational force that drives the world in his atheist philosophy. In Robert Pippin’s summary, much of European 19th-century thought was dominated by this “profound suspicion about […] the free, rational, independent, reflective, self-determining subject”, which was probably, at least in part, provoked by the catastrophic demise of the French bourgeois revolutionary project, first in Napoleon’s dictatorship, then in his disastrous campaigns, and finally in the restoration of repressive

6

Chapter One

monarchical anciens régimes throughout Europe after 1815 (Pippin 2005, 5). In my mind, the most compelling interpretation of music’s ascendancy in European aesthetics around 1800, from a merely “agreeable” art to “the primal rhythm of nature”, has been given by Andrew Bowie, a major British scholar of German 19th-century philosophy. Bowie’s interpretation links those “admittedly hyperbolic, but instructive, assessments of the unique significance of music” (Bowie 2007, 140) with the “fundamental fragility of the subject” revealed by modernity (Bowie 2007, 34), to argue that thinkers like Schelling and Schopenhauer redefined art as radically autonomous in order to make it into a utopian model of freedom, if freedom were possible. Art “thus becomes a utopian symbol of the realisation of freedom”; “in it we can see or hear an image of what the world could be like if freedom were realized in it” (Bowie 2003, 57). Tonkunst, instrumental art music, was deemed especially worthy due to its “potential to sustain aesthetic autonomy via its non-representational character”, in other words, its self-referentiality, the fact that, strictly speaking, a sonata or symphony, unlike a painting or statue, typically represents only itself and not extraneous objects or people (Bowie 2003, 67). Probably because Kant rated music so poorly, Bowie understandably focused away from him, to the early German Romantics, Schelling, and Schopenhauer. But focusing on Kant, as I argue below, would only further corroborate his claims concerning those thinkers, if from the opposite direction: music does not play such a major role in Kant, as it does in the succeeding generation of thinkers, at least in part because Kant still believed in (transcendental) freedom and thus had no need for a radically autonomous notion of music as a utopian symbol of freedom. Other reasons may include Kant’s still Enlightened view of music as sound or at least as inseparable from sound and of edification through mimesis as the chief task of art. But more on that in the pages that follow. Presently, I must first briefly discuss Bowie’s interpretations of Schelling and Schopenhauer’s views of music and subjectivity, before returning to Kant. Schelling is probably the first major thinker of the post-Kantian generation who rejected the free human subject of the Enlightenment and, in turn, extolled the supposedly unique merits of music. In Schelling’s reasoning, the human subject, or “self”, is inherently split, because it emerges in the act of his own self-intuition; therefore, it is always-already split between its intuiting and intuited self:

Andrew Bowie and Music in German Philosophy around 1800

7

The concept of the self arises through the act of self-consciousness, and thus apart from this act the self is nothing; its whole reality depends solely on this act, and it is itself nothing other than this act. Thus the self can only be presented qua act as such, and is otherwise nothing. (Schelling 1978, 25)

As a result, the subject is never self-identical or free, always driven by longing for self-completion, which is attainable only in death, that is, in reuniting with God or “the absolute All” (Schelling 1989, 23–24), who constitutes the only free and self-identical being in Schelling’s philosophical system. God is also “the immediate cause of all art […] and the final possibility of all art; he himself is the source of all beauty”, just as art is “an emanation of the absolute” (Schelling 1989, 19–32). Since God is absolutely beyond human cognition, He chooses to manifest Himself through art, whose aesthetic autonomy is a sensuous representation of His self-unity and freedom, which the human subject loses in the act of selfintuition, but regains in reuniting with God: The work of art merely reflects to me what is otherwise not reflected by anything, namely the absolutely identical which has already divided itself even in the self (Schelling 1978, 230).

Instrumental art music is especially well-placed to perform this role due to its autonomy and self-referentiality: unlike a poem, painting, or statue, a sonata or symphony, autonomous in its rational musical structure, it appears to represent and refer to nothing but itself. In it, the human subject may catch a consoling glimpse of his own lost autonomy and self-unity, as well as that of God. Hence its capacity “to pacify our endless striving, and likewise to resolve the final and uttermost contradiction within us” (Schelling 1978, 222). That is why for Schelling, music is no less than “the primal rhythm of nature and of the universe itself”. By contrast, there is no place for God in the radically atheist philosophy of Schopenhauer. The only entity that truly exists and is therefore free is the Will, the impersonal and irrational spiritus movens of the world according to Schopenhauer. Everything else – humans, animals, and their various urges (e.g. the sexual drive, self-preservation instinct, etc.), plants, inanimate objects, various natural forces such as gravity, magnetism, electricity, and the like, the entire phenomenal world – are merely its sensuous manifestations, in other words, illusions, including freedom itself:

8

Chapter One During life the will of man is without freedom: his action takes place with necessity upon the basis of his unalterable character in the chain of motives. (Schopenhauer 1891, III, 351) [T]he individual, the person, is not will as a thing-in-itself, but is a phenomenon of the will, is already determined as such, and has come under the form of the phenomenal […]. (Schopenhauer 1891, I, 14647)

All beings, including humans, live only to satisfy their urges, which are not even theirs, but only imposed on them by the Will; if they fail to satisfy them, they suffer, but when they satisfy them, new urges appear, following a brief period of “ennui”. As a result, Schopenhauer paints a rather bleak picture of life in general: “essential to all life is suffering”, he writes: “the brevity of life, which is so constantly lamented, may be the best quality it possesses” (Schopenhauer 1891, I, 401, 419). The only consolation, however fleeting, comes in the form of art, that is, the disinterested contemplation of art, which is the sole preserve of the human subject. In Bowie’s words: Unable to tolerate the consequences of such a view, which just promises a life of endlessly renewed dissatisfaction, of the kind inherent in the very nature of the Will, Schopenhauer seeks a way of transcending the Will that is based on aesthetic contemplation. (Bowie 2003, 263)

In aesthetic contemplation (of a beautiful work of art), the subject temporarily forsakes his urges and desires and thus briefly transcends the Will and approaches true freedom, using art “as the only means of temporarily escaping the fundamentally futile nature of reality” (Bowie 2003, 262). The subject then briefly attains “pure knowledge, which is foreign to all willing” and becomes a genius, the pure subject of knowledge. However, it is important to note here that the subject thereby does not become free, but only transcends his own subjection (by the Will), temporarily loses his subjectivity and thus approaches death, the only true emancipation from the Will: [G]enius is the power of leaving one’s interests, wishes, and aims entirely out of sight, thus of entirely renouncing one’s own personality for a time, so as to remain pure knowing subject, clear vision of the world. (Schopenhauer 1891, I, 241)

In this regard, Bowie rightly notes that “only death gives real freedom, by delivering one from individuation altogether” (Bowie 2007, 199). Therefore, there is no personal freedom for the subject in aesthetic contemplation, for Schopenhauer is adamant that the subject cannot attain

Andrew Bowie and Music in German Philosophy around 1800

9

freedom and remain a subject. Rather, in aesthetic contemplation the subject may only partake of freedom, not his own, but that of the Will, the only notion of freedom that Schopenhauer allows, by communing with the Will, by losing itself or transcending his own subjection. Music is especially well-disposed to afford aesthetic contemplation, essentially due to its self-referential or non-representational character. In other words, whereas the other arts represent contents extraneous to them, music, at least instrumental art music, represents only itself. In fact, Schopenhauer credits it with representing the Will itself, because he views tonality, the underlying structure of all European 18th- and 19th-century art music, as another manifestation of the Will. By contrast, the other arts represent only “Platonic ideas”, which are themselves manifestations of the Will and are thus twice removed from the Will, whereas only music represents the Will directly. “Music is by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the will itself, whose objectivity the Ideas are”. Consequently, it is entirely independent of the phenomenal world, ignores it altogether, could to a certain extent exist if there was no world at all, which cannot be said of the other arts. (Schopenhauer 1891, I, 333)

In concrete terms, while Michelangelo’s David, for instance, represents not just the Biblical figure, but also the Platonic idea of male beauty, Beethoven’s symphonies represent the Will itself. That is why music occupies the very top of Schopenhauer’s hierarchy of the arts. By contrast, in Kant’s hierarchy of the arts, music occupies a much less flattering place: the top of the “agreeable” arts, such as cooking and telling jokes, or, perhaps (Kant is not entirely sure), the bottom position among the “fine” art, such as poetry, painting, and sculpture: music […], since it plays merely with sensations, has the lowest place among the fine arts – just as it has perhaps the highest among those values at the same time for their agreeableness. (Kant 1973, §53)

Now one might have expected music to fare much better in Kant’s aesthetics, given how well it conforms to his two main conditions of aesthetic judgement: disinterestedness – the idea that aesthetic judgement must be free of any interest on the judging subject’s part (“it must please apart from all interest”; Kant 1973, §29) and conceptlessness – the stipulation that “delight in the beautiful is such as does not presuppose any concept” (Kant 1973, §16). But this is not how Kant saw things. Part of

10

Chapter One

the reason for Kant’s poor treatment of music is contained already in that brief quotation above: music “plays merely with sensations”; elsewhere, Kant writes that music “speaks by means of mere sensations without concepts, and so does not, like poetry, leave behind it any food for reflection”, has no “intrinsic meaning”, represents “nothing – no Object under a definite concept”, and therefore “possesses less worth in the eyes of reason than any other of the fine arts” (Kant 1973, §53). In other words, for Kant, as for most other thinkers of the Enlightenment, music is still first and foremost pure sound with no other, hidden meanings and not an abstract art independent of the phenomenal world, including sound, as in the next generation of German thinkers. It cannot communicate any concrete meaning (the only kind of meaning valued by Kant) and thus edify its listeners, the way a poem, painting, or a statue can. But I suspect that there is at least one other reason for music’s lowly position in Kant’s hierarchy of the arts: his likewise Enlightened and Christian belief in free human subjectivity. “Freedom actually exists”, Kant writes at the beginning of his major work on ethics, the Critique of Practical Reason; it “is the only one of all the ideas of the speculative reason of which we know the possibility a priori” (Kant 1996, 14–15). In other words, the Kantian subject is still essentially free. Therefore, to turn, so to speak, Bowie’s thesis on its head, Kant, unlike Schopenhauer or Schelling, had no need for music conceived as a radically autonomous abstract art and a model or symbol, whether utopian or not, of freedom, if freedom could exist. In Kant’s still Enlightened and Christian philosophy, the subject is inherently free, having received freedom as a mixed blessing from God, as the capacity to choose right from wrong as well as responsibility for his choices. In other words, Kant still accepted freedom as a core Christian dogma, an axiom, “of which we know the possibility a priori”. However, this freedom is transcendental, or noumenal, which means that it is entirely unknowable to the human mind, as is the rest of the noumenal sphere, which is why we may only know “the possibility” of freedom, but not freedom itself. We know the possibility of freedom thanks to our moral consciousness, which we all have, according to Kant – freedom and morality presuppose each other; without freedom (to choose right from wrong), there could be no ethics. Now, since the human subject is not an entirely rational being, like God, but also sensuous, the main purpose of art and the aesthetic judgement is to teach humans about morality by lending it a sensuous representation. That is why Kant insists that aesthetic judgement must be both disinterested and conceptless: via beauty, it must teach us to appreciate other human beings as “ends in

Andrew Bowie and Music in German Philosophy around 1800

11

themselves”, without wishing to possess or violate them in any other way: “the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good” – it “prepares us to love something, even nature, apart from any interest” (Kant 1973, §§29, 59). Aesthetic judgement thus “makes, as it were, the transition from the charm of sense to habitual moral interest possible without too violent a leap” (Kant 1973, §59). Finally, in lieu of concluding, one may legitimately ask: to what extent is art at all autonomous in Kant’s aesthetics? For, if aesthetically autonomous art denotes art that has no function other than itself, then Kant’s notion of art hardly fits the bill, since its raison d’être is moral edification and not itself. But one may equally argue, as I have done in this paper by extending Bowie’s thesis, that there is no such a burning need for aesthetic autonomy in Kant’s philosophy as there is in Schopenhauer’s or Schelling’s, because the Kantian subject is itself free. Thus in Kant, one may perhaps speak of a relative aesthetic autonomy and, by contrast, a transcendental, that is, absolute autonomy of the human subject.

Notes 1

Here I must point out that in German 19th-century philosophy the subject is always gendered male, whether implicitly or explicitly.

Bibliography Bowie, Andrew. 2003. Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche. Manchester: Manchester University Press. —. 2007. Music, Philosophy, and Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1973. The Critique of Judgement. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —. 1996. Critique of Practical Reason. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Pippin, Robert. 2005. The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. 1978. System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. —. 1989. Philosophy of Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1891. The World as Will and Idea. 3 vols. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co., Ltd.

CHAPTER TWO WALTER BENJAMIN AND THE DETERRITORIALISATION OF THE ORIGINAL JOVAN ýEKIû

…of People For Walter Benjamin, the advent of technical reproduction undoubtedly belonged among the type of events whose effects not only restructured the entire social field, but also conditioned the emergence of a new historical formation. It was therefore an epochal event-cut-turn; mapping it may yield only indications or tendencies of the possible effects of such a change. Benjamin’s “prognostic demands” made no claims regarding proletarian art or art in a classless society, but referred to tendencies in art under contemporary conditions of production, that is, in 1936. The strategy of such a mapping was twofold: on the one hand, it was defined in relation to the growth of fascism as the most fantastic reterritorialisation of capitalism (Gilles Deleuze), whilst detecting, on the other hand, a series of symptoms that, starting with the advent of technical reproduction, led to the deterritorialisation of the original (Boris Groys), simultaneously suggesting a change in the entire social field. In the first case, Benjamin sought to get out of the framework of the established concepts in art, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery, because their uncontrolled use leads to a reprocessing of factual material in the fascist sense. Benjamin begins from the assumption that one may escape fascist reterritorialisation precisely by destabilising that conceptual web whose uncontrolled use transforms and establishes the dominant sign regime serving the aestheticisation of politics. This kind of strategy also assumes a different artistic production, which Benjamin defines as the politicisation of art. In both cases, we have a relative deterritorialisation, both in language, the utterable, and in (artistic) production,

Walter Benjamin and the Deterritorialisation of the Original

13

the visible. It seems that for Benjamin, every deterritorialisation assumes a degree of deterritorialisation, in fact, an unspoken question: just how much fascism? For Deleuze and Guattari, the “fascist State has been without doubt capitalism’s most fantastic attempt at economic and political reterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 258), whose possibility of resurgence within any given future kind of capitalist formation should not be easily dismissed. Citing Wilhelm Reich, they argue that the masses were not simply duped; rather, under certain conditions, they desired fascism, which is the perverse desire of the masses that one must take into account. Similarly, “fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 214). All sorts of different fascisms are possible: rural fascism, the fascism of a city/borough, youth fascism, the fascism of money, family, school, or office. Each one of these fascisms corresponds to an independent black micro-hole that communicates with other holes, before beginning to resonate in the big central black hole. In that sense, fascism makes use of technical reproduction, as Siegfried Kracauer showed in his book From Caligari to Hitler, as a new and powerful machine immanent to that process of fantastic reterritorialisation. Precisely for that reason, expressionist film unequivocally reflects the emergence of the Hitler automaton in the German soul. In his second book on cinema, Deleuze argues that Benjamin’s text shows how the art of automatic movement, ambiguously termed, Deleuze notes, “the art of reproduction”, coincides with the automation of the masses, whereby state direction  politics  becomes “art”. Not only does the art of the masses become a displaced subject yielding to the masses subjectivised as a psychological automaton, but also its leaders are repositioned as big spiritual automata. In such a constellation, Adolf Hitler appears as a (film) auteur, a singular abstract machine, and the fascist movement as a set overtaking the entire social field. It seems that Benjamin was able to anticipate the possible effects of the fascist reterritorialisation and “automation of the masses”, whereby the leader was established as the great spiritual automaton. His starting point is that the capitalist machine “obstructs the human being’s legitimate claim to being reproduced” (Benjamin 2008, 34). From the perspective of the 21st century’s emerging technologies, this statement by Benjamin might truly be ambiguous, because, as W. T. J. Mitchell notes, “biocybernetic reproduction has replaced Benjamin’s mechanical reproduction” (Mitchell 2005, 318). This assumes that reproduction and reproducibility today

14

Chapter Two

acquire a meaning rather different from a technology dominated by the “mass production” of commodities or “mass reproduction” of identical images. However, capitalism will answer this “legitimate claim” at being recorded with the “Kodak Idea”, cynically indulging the demands of today’s human beings: “You press the button, we do the rest”. But as Willem Flusser showed, the very core of that “Kodak Idea” consists of programmed cameras, which in most cases reduce the “We do the rest” to the production of clichés and stereotypes. For Benjamin, the effects of this event/cut, on the one hand, were visible in the growing significance of the masses, which imposed changes in the functioning of the social machine, and, on the other hand, in the dissolution of the aura, the deterritorialisation of the original, as the domination of those forces that may be classified under the concept of exhibition value over the forces of cult value. Technical reproduction opposes the transience and repeatability of the “reproductive” to the singularity and durability of the “auratic”. The deterritorialisation of the original not only isolates the reproduced from the domain of tradition, replacing the singularity of the work of art with multiplication, but also, for the first time in world history, emancipates the work of art from its parasitical existence in ritual, relocating it into the register of the political. The advent of the technical reproduction of the work of art not only brings forth the demise of its aura, but also equals its demise by freeing the object from its shell. But for Benjamin, this shell is not exclusive to sacral objects or works of art. Rather, it is a product of the historical formation that produces such effects, which reterritorialise the entire reality, spawning countless closed enclaves and fastening it hopelessly into a “prisonworld”. With technical reproduction, especially the emergence of film, this whole prison-world falls apart. “Then came film and exploded this prisonworld with the dynamite of the split-second, so that now we can set-off calmly on journeys of adventure among its far-flung debris” (Benjamin 2008, 37). What is this prison-world to which Benjamin refers? One might say that this is the world that emerged as a regime against the background of the Foucaultian panoptic diagram and that fell to countless pieces precisely with the advent of technical reproduction. Benjamin thus correctly detects that exact moment of transition into the post-Panopticon as a change in the world itself and the emergence of much more fluid sets. This bursting of the panoptic moulds/shells conditioned the establishment of a different relationship between the masses and art, while the framework of production itself likewise changed. This opening up to the masses entailed a tightest bond between the apparatus of technical reproduction and the movements of the masses. Besides, reproduction

Walter Benjamin and the Deterritorialisation of the Original

15

accommodates the viewer whatever her position and thus actualises the reproduced. Thus, if the “pleasure” of singularity and durability was a privilege of a small class, one might say “the bourgeoisie”, then transience and repeatability were the masses’ answer to that privilege. The masses’ relationship with art changes thanks to the technical reproduction of the work of art, from most backward, in the case of Picasso, to most advanced, in the case of Chaplin. For Benjamin, the differences in the perception of the masses grow especially conspicuous when one compares painting to film. Painting is simply unable to present objects for simultaneous collective perception, the way film or architecture can, or, in the past, the way epic poetry could. The masses become the matrix, because all established outlooks on works of art change in line with them, while the mode of participation is itself reversed due to the ever growing mass of participants. Benjamin is aware that this mode of participation initially occurs in a scandalous way, but that any criticism that the masses demand only entertainment becomes a commonplace that overlooks precisely the meaning of that radical change. In that regard, Benjamin considers all debates regarding whether photography is an art irrelevant, a waste of “much futile thought”, precisely because they mask a much more important question: is it not true that the discovery of photography has changed the character of art altogether? In Benjamin’s judgement, the method of film is much closer to the methods of Freud’s psychoanalysis, that is, to the deep perspective on speech of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The function of the Freudian slip would thus correspond to the movements of the camera, zooming on and thus emphasising the hidden details of the everyday in some banal environments. Right there it becomes clear just how differently nature addresses the camera than the human eye, above all because it complements a space permeated with human consciousness with a space permeated with the unconscious. Therefore, the camera, with all of its capabilities – moving, cutting, accelerating and decelerating, zooming in and out – uncovers the optical unconscious, just as psychoanalysis uncovers the instinctive unconscious. In fact, the camera’s presence changes our entire relation with the real and so for Benjamin, the most artificial aspect of reality becomes precisely one that is not disturbed by a machine. In a technological world, the appearance of unmediated reality becomes a mirage. But precisely this turn, with the inflation of technically reproduced images in capitalism, gives rise to a mighty cultural industry, whose only task, in Adorno’s words, is to “feed man with stereotypes”. Rather than a civilisation of images, this inflation of images makes capitalism above all a Deleuzean

16

Chapter Two

civilisation of clichés. In the same vein, cameras themselves are programmed to keep producing redundant image-clichés (Flusser). Like in fractal hierarchy, the matrix of their programmes takes form from the programme of the photo industry, which is in turn a sub-programme of the socio-economic apparatus, itself a sub-programme of the industrial park, and so on. For Benjamin, the reterritorialisation of the programme of an apparatus serves the functions of the fascist organisation of the emerging proletarianised masses, but without questioning existing property relations. The masses are thus allowed to acquire their own expression (the reproduction of the masses is especially conducive to mass reproduction), but never their right, the realisation of which would change precisely the property relations. Consistently striving to aestheticise political life, fascism seeks to conserve those relations. For Benjamin, reterritorialisation is a double articulation: on the one hand, the subjugation of the masses takes places via the cult of the leader, while, on the other hand, the subjugation of the apparatus serves the function of producing cult values. The politicisation of art is thus the deterritorialisation of the original qua dissolution of the very matrix of cult value and all its derivatives in all sorts of different registers of the social field.

…of Freaks From another perspective, in his film Of Freaks and People, Aleksey Balabanov maps the same epochal event, the advent of technical reproduction, but in this case on the margins of Modernity. The film presents not only the advent of the apparatus of technical reproduction in Russia, that is, St. Petersburg, first a photographic and then also a film camera, but also a radical restructuring of the entire social field. In contrast to Benjamin’s conclusion that in film, that new and mighty medium, “the masses take a look at their own faces”, Balabanov eliminates the masses altogether. He sets up Benjamin’s “legitimate claim to being reproduced” almost as a Deleuze-Guattarian desiring machine, which gets an entire “industry” going in the background, so as to render visible the blind spots in the social field. The subtlest reference to Benjamin is Balabanov’s presentation of St. Petersburg along the lines of Atget’s Paris, as an empty, almost deserted city, where the protagonists only sporadically fall into that void. There are no masses, there is no matrix, but only a fragmentary, above all “obscene”, “pornographic” humming of the “perverse desire of the masses”  to be reproduced. The entire film is shot in a melancholic sepia from the early days of technical

Walter Benjamin and the Deterritorialisation of the Original

17

reproduction, which irresistibly sucks the viewer in, producing the impression that things looked exactly like that. And an entire series of “passing” quotations from the very beginnings of cinema, such as the train that seemingly keeps arriving at the station over and over again, or the motive of clichéd pornographic images that redundantly appear one after another, almost generate a background noise of the universe of entire Modernity. With the emergence of technical reproduction, within that Foucaultian split between the visible and the utterable, Balabanov emphatically sharpens the division between those who see and those who do not see, those who utter and those who cannot. If Foucaultian surveillance society reaches its apogee in the advent of technical reproduction, then in such a society surveying is largely synonymous with seeing. It is as if Balabanov’s starting point were that colloquial usage: looking, but not seeing. Of course, there arises the following question: “Not seeing what?”, and then also: “What does it mean to see?”. Seeing always involves a surplus of meaning as opposed to looking, staring, feeding one’s eyes. Between that looking and seeing, there is something that one might call “looking-and-seeing” or, so to speak, “per-see-ving”, which is perhaps closest to that Deleuzean definition of Hitchcock’s “mental images”. When one begins to see, s/he first begins to perceive. Perceive what? The network of other gazes. More accurately, one also sees that which is not given as represented in the field of vision – the network of relations. Balabanov seeks precisely to show the structuring of that network of relations and gazes, whilst at the same time uncompromisingly pointing to a blind spot in the social machine, which is typically defined as “the bourgeoisie”. He seeks to outline the contours of that blind spot wherefrom members of that class simply cannot see. The advent of technical reproduction also brings a shift, producing a crack in the ideal model of the Panopticon, which challenges the very automatism of Bentham’s machine. On the one hand, this is the Benjaminian dictum that states that the masses become the matrix, that is, that the masses are no longer an object structured by the operation of the panoptic machine, that the masses are no longer that which is observed, but that begins, owing to film, to “see”, to capture that surplus of meaning. That is the revolutionary potential of technical reproduction. On the other hand, Balabanov completely perverts the story and turns technical reproduction toward the obscene: the advent of pornography. Why is this significant? Because pornography is that spot, that place where emerges that which is more visible than the visible itself. Therefore, the “producer” who appears in the film is a man who sees. Sees what? The blindness of

18

Chapter Two

the bourgeoisie itself. For that reason precisely, he “sees everything”: the horizon of their significance, the horizon of their desire, and at the same time the horizon of what they are looking (staring) at, without, in fact, seeing it – their own impotence and powerlessness. The bourgeoisie is blind and thus, in the spirit of Grosrichardian oriental despotism, no longer able to lead or govern. Its inability to see is a symptom of its impotence, which precisely opens the crack through which those from the outside, the “Barbarians”, burst in and destabilise the entire field, moving the horizon of meaning. Unlike Benjamin, who places the cinematic operator on a par with the surgeon, in other words, with a sort of precision and penetration into the essence of things, Balabanov’s positioning of the artist is radically different. One might say that Balabanov makes another claim that radicalises Benjamin’s idea of the politicisation of art. He shows that in such a network of gazes, bourgeois artists are nothing but a function of those who see, that is, a function of the producers, even when successful. Their fame has nothing to do with art; in a word, they remain within the horizon of bourgeois blindness. Then, the following question arises: what is the function of artists who seek not to be bourgeois artists, who do not acquiesce to the blindness of their own class? With his film, Balabanov already answers that question, showing that their task is to see even those who see. It is an almost Hitchcockian position of the artist, who, in order to evade the trap of blindness set up by the social machine, must simultaneously see those who see and those who do not see – must turn toward mental images. Artists need to see the web of all of those gazes, as well as the gaze of those who see and unscrupulously restructure the social field. Those who occupy the position of those who see may, as in oriental despotism or Balabanov’s film, be stupid, sick, or retarded. After all, at the very end of the film, the viewer realises that the producer has no power whatsoever, that it is a broken Oedipus-complex sufferer and afflicted man, an epileptic, which is actually irrelevant, because he occupies the place of “the one who sees”, precisely the obscene desire in the gaze of others, which for him is only a symptom of their blindness. He takes into account that blindness of others, which is Balabanov’s initial postulate, and that blindness of others, with whose obscene desire Balabanov plays, conditions the possibility of a different view. For Balabanov, it is a model: in a social force field, establishing a new medium always carries another, obscene, pornographic side. We have no reason to believe that something like that is not happening today as well, following the advent of digital media and screen culture.

Walter Benjamin and the Deterritorialisation of the Original

19

One might think that within the same linear historic flow, these two mappings of an epochal event-cut are mutually exclusive. If Balabanov is close to Hitchcockian “mental images”, which focus on weaving relations, or gazes, then Benjamin, with his demand to politicise art instead of aestheticising politics, is close to demanding absolute deterritorialisation. Finally, one might say that both Benjamin and Balabanov perceive the threat of blindness, which in Benjamin leads toward fascist reterritorialisation and in Balabanov to a servile assistance of the production machine (the masses’ perverse desire), regardless of its political orientation. In that sense, the politicisation of art and mental images are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they presuppose each other as a condition for resisting any kind of fantastic reterritorialisation, be it in terms of the utterable and the visible or those of the thinkable.

Bibliography Benjamin, Walter. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2005. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER THREE TOWARD A CRITIQUE OF POST-STRUCTURALIST ANTI-HUMANISM: CAVELL AND FOUCAULT NIKOLA DEDIû

Following the great epistemological turn of 1960s French poststructuralism, how might one rethink the idea of modernity and the modern project? In his more recent books dealing with Emerson and Thoreau (centred on his 1990 Carus Lectures, combined under the title of Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome), Stanley Cavell developed his postulates on “moral perfectionism”. With his theses there, Cavell initiated an anti-metaphysical and anti-idealistic reconstruction of the humanistic conception of the subject, that is, a correction of Foucault’s, Derrida’s, and Lacan’s antihumanism. Therefore, Cavell’s theses may be viewed as a sort of American “answer” to French theory of the 1960s. Cavell interprets perfectionism not as a strictly ethical theory, but rather as a set of texts produced in Western philosophical tradition ever since antiquity, discussing the practice of “the care of the self” and the parallel problem of transforming society, that is, transcending the current conditions of life. In that sense, the principle of moral perfectionism applies to a rather varied collection of texts – from Plato and Aristotle, via Kant, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, and Bernard Shaw, to Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Still, Cavell places two American Romanticists, Ralf Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, at the centre of this overlapping group of texts, taking Emerson’s essay “On Self-reliance” as central: in that context, moral perfectionism constitutes the practice of the subject’s self-constitution through the process of an open and never complete individuation. It is a process of continuous advancement, the moral perfection of the self by way of negating, in parallel, the current conditions of life. Still, one should note that while moral perfectionism is a practice of “the care of the self”, it is not

Toward a Critique of Post-structuralist Anti-humanism

21

conditioned by an external representation of the subject (that is, by an instance of God, Absolute Spirit, ruling authority, social institutions, tradition, and the like); in that sense, the doctrine of perfectionism is the first major critique of Western metaphysics. Cavell describes this Emersonian account of subject constitution “from the subject himself” in the following terms: Emerson’s problem of representativeness, or exemplification (“imitation”), or perfection, thus begins earlier than Plato’s, both in lacking a sun and in having no standing representative of the path to it. Emerson elects himself to be our representative man (anyone is entitled, and no one is, to stand for this election) and he warns that we have to – that we do – elect our (private) representative(s). In a sense his teaching is what we are to see beyond representativeness, or rather see it as a process of individuation. (Cavell 1990, 10)

The subject is thus formulated as an open structure, that is, a sort of “subject in process” (but not in Kristeva’s sense); Cavell describes this process as moving toward an “unattained but attainable” self. Emerson’s perfectionism is therefore a deconstruction site of the metaphysical postulates of the subject as a coherent, complete, and compact entity with an ontological grounding; that is why Cavell associates Emerson with the principal junctures in Western critique of idealism and metaphysics: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, and reaches conclusions similar to those of poststructuralist philosophy concerning the “not-whole” of the subject, knowledge, and society. Indeed, perfectionism does run in parallel with Heidegger’s misgivings regarding the privileging of rationalism in its modern understanding: words may never entirely encompass the world (or Heidegger’s Being); in that sense, knowledge is always split, not-whole – instead of ideas related to complementarity, totality, integrity, and consistency, Heidegger insists on concepts that Cavell labels as “inclination, capability, and possibility”. Similarly to Heidegger, “Emerson’s ‘partiality’ of thinking is, or accounts for, the inflections of partial as ‘not whole’, together with partial as ‘favoring or biassed toward’ something or someone” (Cavell 1990, 41). Thinking is a potentiality, rather than a finite entity; it is the production, the activity whereby the “I” constitutes itself, rather than a fixed representation of an objectively posited world. That is, “[t]hinking is – at its most complete, as it were – a partial act; if it lacks something, leaves something out, it is its own partiality, what Kant calls (and Freud more or less calls) its incentive and interest (Triebfeder)” (Cavell 1990, 42). Nietzsche’s philosophy (which insists on the subject’s self-transformation or on a sort of striving toward a

22

Chapter Three

“higher”, better self, but through a parallel self-representativity of that same self), as well as Wittgenstein’s analysis of ordinary language (knowledge as mediated not by any external guarantor, but only by its own internal rules, that is, the structure of everyday speech, whereby the subject constitutes itself by translating metaphysical illusions and abstract concepts into the “rational” concepts of everyday language) are likewise examples of “moral perfectionism”. In other words, teaching the moral advancement of the subject is a construct within the everyday, discursive practices of “the care of the self”. Cavell’s moral perfectionism is thus essentially close to what Foucault in Chapter 2 of his History of Sexuality, Volume 3, calls “the care of the self” (see Volbers 2012). By this phrase, Foucault means the practice materialised in texts from the first and second century AD that deal with ways in which an individual should constitute himself as a moral subject. These are texts by Soranus and Rufus of Ephesus, Seneca, Plutarch, Epictetus, and especially Marcus Aurelius on self-restraint and mastery over oneself, centring on the practice of knowing oneself: The task of testing oneself, examining oneself, monitoring oneself in a series of clearly defined exercises, makes the question of truth – the truth concerning what one is, what one does, and what one is capable of doing – central to the formation of the ethical subject. (Foucault 1986, 68)

Foucault thus insists on discursive practices that do not necessarily involve prohibition or punishment (which formed the focus of his earlier works, where he articulated his thesis on biopolitics as the practice of subjecting the body and applied it in his analyses of the history of madness, the prison, and the prison system in Western societies during the Enlightenment), but a sort of “calm enjoyment” in the self, exercising moderation, and practising the principle of the “good life” in the process of constituting subjectivity. Similarly to Cavell and again in line with his older theses regarding the genealogy and discursive nature of subjectivity, Foucault insists that the subject never features in external representation but inheres in the discursive order or structure. He therefore distinguishes between antiquity’s concepts of voluptas (“enjoyment”), on the one hand, and gaudium and laetitia (“joy” or “rejoicing”), on the other: whereas the former concept denotes the type of pleasure whose source is outside of us and in objects that are not guaranteed to us, in other words, in external representations of desire (which precisely make such pleasures inconstant, because eroded by the anxiety that the subject might lose them). The type of pleasure represented by gaudium and laetitia is “defined by the fact of not being caused by anything that is independent of ourselves and

Toward a Critique of Post-structuralist Anti-humanism

23

therefore escapes our control. It arises out of ourselves and within ourselves” (Foucault 1986, 66). This kind of pleasure is “characterized as well by the fact that it knows neither degree nor change, but is given as a ‘woven fabric’, and once given no external event can rend it” (Foucault 1986, 66). Therefore, Cavell’s concept of “moral perfectionism” and Foucault’s concept of “the care of the self” share two similarities in two regards: first, Cavell and Foucault both insist that neither concept is an ethical theory, but rather a set of texts, that is (in Foucault’s terminology), discursive formations that stage the constitution of the subject. It is interesting that both Cavell and Foucault situate Plato’s philosophy at the very beginning of the constitution of these discursive systems. This proximity stems from their relatively similar views of philosophy: right at the beginning of his central book, The Claim of Reason, Cavell asserts (focusing his critique on logical positivism, then dominant in the American context) that philosophy is not a set of problems but a set of texts (Cavell 1999, 3); similarly, knowledge as a set of texts forms the conceptual core of Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge. Second, these are ethical as well as political practices geared toward the other, which in fact means that the subject is (self-)constituted only by relating to the other. Although both authors write about practices of “knowing oneself”, in both cases this is not about negating society, that is, the polis, but precisely and literally about social practices as such. For Foucault, the care of the self appears as “intrinsically linked to a ‘soul service’, which includes the possibility of a round of exchanges with the other and a system of reciprocal obligations” (Foucault 1986, 54). On the other hand, Cavell associates moral perfectionism with discussions of justice and a just society: he adopts this idea from Plato, who interprets “the soul’s journey” as its transfiguration from “being one” toward what Cavell labels as the idea of each of us being representative for each of us. Emerson’s study of this (democratic, universal) representativeness – it comes up in my first lecture under the head of “standing for” (“I stand here for humanity”) – as a relation we bear at once to others and to ourselves: if we were not representative of what we might be (or what we were, in some Platonic or Wordsworthian past of our lives), we would not recognize ourselves presented in one another’s possibilities; we would have no “potential”. (Cavell 1990, 3)

Nevertheless, Cavell’s and Foucault’s interpretations of the subject essentially differ in one crucial matter, which basically separates Cavell from the Continental poststructuralist tradition: for Foucault, the subject is

24

Chapter Three

an effect of discourse, that is, following his anti-humanist key, Foucault argues that the structure precedes the subject; by contrast, in Cavell, it is the subject who produces discourse, i.e. Cavell argues that the subject is capable of a utopian transcendence of the current conditions of life. Following his own humanist key, Cavell thus privileges the subject to the structure. As Judith Butler asserts in her interpretation of biopolitics, in Foucault’s view, the subject is always and necessarily a product of the techniques of subjection and normalisation; in that sense, the concept of subjection harbours a sort of paradox: assujettissement signifies both becoming a subject but also the process of subjection, or submission, subjugation, becoming subjugated. This process of subjection takes place through the body; Butler takes Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish as an example and emphasises that the prisoner’s body appears not only “as a sign of guilt and transgression, as the embodiment of prohibition and the sanction for rituals of normalization, but is framed and formed through the discursive matrix of a juridical subject” (Butler 1997, 8384). Discourse not only forms the body, but the entire identity, i.e. the psychic life of an individual is also formed or formulated through her discursively constituted prisoner identity; subjection is literally the emergence of a subject ௅ it not only acts on the individual, but also forms her. The normative ideal is “inscribed in the prisoner” and thus is a kind of psychic identity, that which Foucault calls the “soul” (one should stress that both Foucault and Cavell use the concept of “soul”); thereby “the soul is figured as itself a kind of spatial captivity, indeed, as a kind of prison, which provides the exterior form or regulatory principle of the prisoner’s body” (Butler 1997, 85). In Foucault’s view, the discursive techniques of normalisation are all-encompassing and all-consuming; that is precisely why Foucault is hard-pressed to conceptualise models of resisting biopolitical systems of normalisation – Foucault manages to think of resistance only as a form of transgression against the discursive normative. Precisely in that sense should one read Foucault’s concept of heterotopia: heterotopias are places that represent otherness “in relation to all the configurations they reflect and speak about”, i.e. in relation to the disciplinary models of normativisation (Fuko 1990, 280). In other words, heterotopias are spaces of crisis (e.g. of the world or forbidden places in primitive societies) or spaces of aberration (from the average or norm in modern societies, e.g. mental asylums). Cavell’s path is different; his moral perfectionism refers not to the transgression model, but to the modern, Enlightened concept of projectivity, that is, utopia; Cavell’s subject emerges not through the

Toward a Critique of Post-structuralist Anti-humanism

25

procedures of submitting to the normative, but through a process of continuous movement, progress to ever new states of the self. Cavell treats this process of progressive moving forward through two major themes in his philosophy: one is the problem of scepticism and overcoming it; the other is the problem of artistic creativity and the utopian potentials of art. A detailed analysis of Cavell’s interpretation of the problem of scepticism would exceed the scope of this essay; suffice to reiterate his Wittgensteinian claim that the subject emerges by “translating” obscure metaphysical ideas, fallacies, and illusions into everyday language; this translating rests on reconstituting the criteria of language, through which the subject: 1) realises her relationship with the materially given world and 2) with other people in the process of inter-subjective communication. Therefore, the subject is not a product of discourse/structure, but emerges in the process of mastering language, which takes her into the space of symbolic exchange with the other, that is, she emerges by overcoming scepticism toward the world and other members of the polis. Or, as Mulhall asserts, taking Cavell’s interpretation of Thoreau as an example, Thoreau is portrayed as attempting to acknowledge the full specificity of the meanings of words, and thus as recounting both the criteria of every word he uses and the criteria of the words “world” and “language”; and the alignments that words establish both between speakers and between a speaker and her world ensure that acknowledging their specificity contributes to a revivification of the (speech) community and of its appreciation of the natural world within which its members live and to which they relate. (Mullhall 1998, 252)

Cavell describes this process of subject constitution as one of the subject’s coming out of a state of “metaphysical isolation” – “metaphysical” is here used in the Wittgensteinian sense, as a generic term for abstract and idealist conceptions of the subject’s existence in the world; “isolation” is also used in the Wittgensteinian way and refers to the subject’s coming out from the domain of “private language” and entry into the space of not transgression, but inter-subjective communication. With this procedure, in an analogy to French poststructuralist philosophy, Cavell mounts a materialist critique of traditional metaphysical systems of thought and philosophical idealism, but unlike his French colleagues, he insists on the idea of modernity, (inter-social) rationality, and utopian projectivity.

26

Chapter Three

Bibliography Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cavell, Stanley. 1990. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism – The Carus Lectures, 1988. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1993. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Scepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1986. The Care of the Self: Volume 3 of The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books. Fuko, Mišel [Foucault, Michel]. 1990. “Mesta” [Places]. Delo 57: 27786. Mullhall, Stephen. 1998. Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Volbers, Jörg. 2012. “Crossing the Bounds of Sense: Cavell and Foucault.” Contemporary Political Theory 11 (4): 397429.

CHAPTER FOUR HÉLÈNE CIXOUS’S ECRITURE FEMININE AND RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS’S FEMININE AESTHETIC DUBRAVKA ĈURIû

Hélène Cixous and Rachel Blau DuPlessis are both feminist scholars who write fiction (Cixous) and poetry (DuPlessis). They act in different political, cultural, artistic, and theoretical contexts. Cixous writes in France, she is famous and along with Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Monique Wittig, considered one of the most important French feminists, whose theoretical concepts have shaped American feminism since the mid-1970s. She is best known for her theoretical writings, while her fictional works are less well known. This is due to the reductive reception of her work in Anglophone academic communities, which have classified her as part of the feminist theoretical canon and have thus been unable to appreciate other types of writing in her work (Dobson 2002, 7). On the other hand, as a feminist poet and theorist, DuPlessis finds herself in between two communities: American feminist theory and experimental poetry. Drawing on avant-garde traditions in written and visual texts, she was for a long time opposed to American mainstream narrative feminist poetry, while for the experimental poetry community, she was much too interested in gender (Ĉuriü 2014, 284). They both write theory with literary intentions and their literary works are deeply rooted in theoretical concepts.

Hélène Cixous in between Theory and the Poetic One of the most important aspects of French feminist theorisations has been their insistence on sexual difference, which extends into the realm of language. They point out that Western culture has viewed masculine language as rational, logical, hierarchical and linear, while women’s is

28

Chapter Four

thought of as irrational/non-rational, illogical, and circular. Women are associated with the body, men with the mind. French feminists rejected this separation and insisted that women had to construct a new female discourse, as well as their own self-representations, in order to escape being caught up in a world structured by male-centred concepts. In order to do this, they had to start with the body, with sexual pleasures, which had been repressed in masculinist discourses. Écriture féminine became a powerful concept produced by French feminists, a “device” with which one could finally challenge phallogocentric masculinist discourses and transform not only the subject matter in terms of producing different selfpresentations, but also in terms of transforming “the way of producing meaning in poetry, fiction, film, and visual arts” (Jones 1997, 378). Cixous insists that in her work, as well as in Jacques Derrida’s, the most important aspect is textuality, i.e. working with the French language (Bojaniü Milutinoviü 2006b, 85). Écriture féminine is at its most expressive in the poetical, “in the possibility to segment and metaphorize life through the language” (Bojaniü Milutinoviü 2006a, 93). In Cixous’s work, écriture constitutes itself by intertwining the conceptual and the poetical. Her feminist manifesto of écriture féminine, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975), begins with the following lines: I shall speak about women’s writing what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven as violently as from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement. (Cixous 1997, 347)

Cixous argues that women should write, because writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures. (Cixous 1997, 350)

Engaging in an innovative use of language, Cixous textually challenges and/or rejects conventional linguistic and cultural norms, in order to provide different textual/symbolic articulations of female subjectivity (Dobson 2002, 16). She has done this in her theoretical works as well as in fiction and drama, always mingling different genres, styles, blurring the boundaries between theory and literature. She has also emphasised that there have been male poets as well who were at odds with the tradition and capable of imagining a

Cixous’s écriture féminine and DuPlessis’s Feminine Aesthetic

29

woman who would hold out against oppression and constitute herself as a superb equal, hence “impossible” subject, untenable in a real social framework. (Cixous 1997, 350)

Some poets have felt a desire for such a notion of woman and, in order to create it in their works, they have broken the codes that negate her. And only poets, not novelists, Cixous insists, are allies of representationalism. The reason for this is that poetry involves gaining strength through the unconscious and because the unconscious, that other limitless country, is the place where the repressed manage to survive: women, or as Hoffman would say, fairies. (Cixous 1997, 350)

The traditional construction of thinker/philosopher has been that of a universal human (i.e. male) rational genius. On the other hand, the field of literature and the arts have been constructed as a field in which male subjectivity is expressed in ways that may transgress masculinity as it is constructed in other social fields and a man could appear as an irrational subject who expresses his feelings, emotions, moods, etc. (Ĉuriü 2009, 132௅33). In its traditional sense, the poetic ௅ and for a long time, poets were exclusively male ௅ was associated with inspiration, creativity, imagination, and the power of the unconscious. Cixous associates the traditional poetical, i.e. symbolic and transformative power previously exclusively associated with masculinity, with femininity, so that women become the centre of imaginative symbolic and creative power, destabilising the male-female as well as all other binary oppositions. In Cixous’s writings, there are many voices that speak to the reader. In her conversation with Cixous, Mireille Calle-Gruber explains: the oxymoric writing surprises and calls: “suffering-enjoying” [...] Oppositions, pairs, a practice of the in-between between words that are contrary and that call to each other. On the one hand there is the practice of the writer who interrogates language. On the other, and together, what you called “dehierarchizing”, and which I would call, with another word that echoes this one: disarming. Your writing never stops disarming: disarming the head, disarming the heart, disarming the body: each one by means of the others and all disarming language. (Cixous and Calle-Gruber 1997, 15)

Cixous insists that she wants to write in the present, explaining that although it seems impossible, the dream of writing means to write the present, leading to transformations of writing, moving the place and time of enunciation, which implies writing at a limit. She asserts that she is at

30

Chapter Four

that limit, sometimes managing to cross it, at other times not (Cixous and Calle-Gruber 1997, 80). Many of the principles of writing and feminist engagement that I mentioned in relation to Cixous’s practices may also be found in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s work.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis in between Theory and Poetry Rachel Blau DuPlessis belongs to the American experimental poetry scene and has been associated with language poetry, which reinterpreted radical American and European modernism and avant-garde, working within neo-Marxist and post-structuralist theoretical contexts. Feminism has been important for female and male American experimental poets alike. The most characteristic of DuPlessis’s experimental feminist essays is “For the Etruscans” (1980), in which she speaks for and demonstrates “a” female aesthetics, which was at the centre of feminist discussions in 1979. In that essay, she collaged other people’s voices with her own, mingling bits of a “manifesto, analysis, interacts of material from [feminist] workshops, letters to friends, the fluid form of talking” (DuPlessis 2006, 27). This approach of using “collage” and “the fluid” modes or methods of organising thoughts enables her to reject hierarchy and claims of controlling authority over included materials. As she explains later on, she uses “modernist ‘devices’ for feminist purposes” (DuPlessis 2006, 27). She points to the fact that the woman artist does not have the privilege or mandate to find her self-in-world except by facing and mounting an enormous struggle with the cultural fictions – myths, narratives, iconographies, languages – which heretofore have delimited the representation of women (DuPlessis 1990, 5)

and are culturally and psychically saturating. Therefore a “female aesthetic” is needed, which will produce artworks that incorporate contradiction and nonlinear movement into the heart of the text. An art object may then be nonhierarchic, showing “an organization of material in fragments”, breaking climactic structures, making an even display of elements over the surface with no climatic place or movement since the materials are “organized into many centers”. (DuPlessis 1990, 8)

As an example, she points to Monique Wittig’s Les Guerilleres, a text containing no punctuation, pauses, subordination, nor ranking of the materials, connected in radical parataxis. As a woman’s self is defined as

Cixous’s écriture féminine and DuPlessis’s Feminine Aesthetic

31

“unspeaking” and “unspeakable”, a woman “is marked by cultural attributes of Woman, gender, sexuality, the feminine” (DuPlessis 1990, 161). She is obliged to silence, which is as social as speech is, and both are gendered and relate to hierarchies of power. So the question for woman as cultural producer is how to imagine herself, her gender, sexualities, men, her own interests, etc., when the basic structures of thought have been filled to overflowing with representations of her, and displacements of any “her” by the representations others make. (DuPlessis 1990, 161)

She describes her essay “For the Etruscans” as “antipatriarchal writing, as a method of investigation and an instrument for change” (DuPlessis 2006, 28). In it, aesthetic pleasure motivates political pleasure urging the need for transformation. By shifting among stances and genres, she constructs contradictory subjectivities, creating the plurality of “I”. Behind this practice is poststructuralist theory with its “multiple, even contradictory subject positions; interrogations of One, the Center, the Same; rejections of master narratives” (DuPlessis 2006, 28). And DuPlessis emphasises that “texts began as gestures of emancipation and interrogation; they were not contained or incited by theoretical postulates” (DuPlessis 2006, 28), so she insists that the texts published in The Pink Guitar are not just ones that could be understood in terms of a particular style, but provide a useful method. Later on, she explains that “feminine” writing tactics can be chosen by any subordinated group, which means that this term is interpreted as rhetorical and strategic and is situational and not essentialist (DuPlessis 2006, 28). Not only does DuPlessis share a feminist interest in women’s writing with Cixous and other female authors, but she also wrote about Cixous in her Blue Studio: Poetry and its Cultural Work. She describes “The Laugh of the Medusa” as a great manifesto of the 20th century, featuring an interplay of political and spiritual energies that often characterises feminist essays. In DuPlessis’s interpretation, exchanging pronouns (first, second, and third person) and making them mutually porous appears to form a new community. The term écriture féminine may be marshalled to undermine the central Freudian tenet of gender asymmetry, i.e. castration or lack. If logocentric writing may be understood as “writing the [male, universalised] body” (DuPlessis 2006, 44), a woman must likewise write her own body. Cixous insists that the snakes on the Medusa head offer a fecund plurality of generative elements. Hence that scary head, in some theories symbolizing

32

Chapter Four castration, is viewed by her as an affirmative copia of penile and orgasmic/clitoral abundance. With the knowledge of the multisexual female (the new bisexual in Cixous’s terms), the phallic period in world history is ended. (DuPlessis 2006, 44)

So for Cixous as well as for Luce Irigaray, the feminine points to heterogeneity, multiplicity, and polysexuality and their affirmation. Following the French feminists, all nonlinear structures, cross-generic experiments, collage, non-narrative play with subjectivity, temporality and syntax are labelled feminine (DuPlessis 2006, 45).

Conclusion At the end, I will briefly discuss the position of the poetical and poetry within the broader cultural field of practices. Hélène Cixous is important as a theorist who values the poetical as a crucial force in symbolic transformations. The field of literary production became the most important field, especially in the practice of male modernists like James Joyce. Blurring the boundaries between theory as a phallogocentric writing/thinking practice and literature as an irrational and intuitive creative practice enables the creation of a space/arena where the male/female binary opposition becomes possible to destabilise. In DuPlessis’s case, writing theory and poetry is imagined also as a space/arena for transformations and constructing multiple female subjectivities. Feminist experimental poetry practice has become powerful within the poetry community of American experimentalism. On the other hand, due to the marginalisation of poetry and the poetic as a creative value and because of the domination of theory, Cixous’s fictional work is almost unknown and DuPlessis as a theorist dealing with poetry occupies a marginal position in the global canon of contemporary theorists.

Bibliography Bojaniü Milutinoviü, Sanja. 2006a. “Analitika i poetika polne razlike.” Profemina 43௅44: 92௅98. —. 2006b. “Konaþno.... Razgovor voÿen u Théâtre du soleil, pozorištu Arijane Mnuškin, 22. marta 2006, za vreme pauze jedne od prvih proba novog komada za koji Elen Siksu piše tekst.” Profemina 43௅44: 83௅91. Cixous, Hélène and Mireille Calle-Gruber. 1997. Hélène Cixous Rootprints: Memories and Life Writing. New York: Routledge.

Cixous’s écriture féminine and DuPlessis’s Feminine Aesthetic

33

Cixous, Hélène. 1997. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” In Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, eds. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, 347௅69. Houndmills: Macmillan Press Ltd. Dobson, Julia. 2002. Hélène Cixous and the Theatre: The Scene of Writing. Bern: Peter Lang AG, European Academic Publishers. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. 1990. The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. New York: Routledge. —. 2006. Blue Studio: Poetry and its Cultural Work. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press. Ĉuriü, Dubravka. 2009. Poezija teorija rod: Moderne i postmoderne ameriþke pesnikinje. Belgrade: OrionArt. —. 2014. “Rachel Blau DuPlessis: From a Female Aesthetic to the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry.” In English Studies Today: Prospects and Perspectives, eds. Zorica Ĉergoviü Joksimoviü and Sabina Halupka Rešetar, 283௅91. Novi Sad: Filozofski fakultet. Jones, Ann Rosalind. 1997. “Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l’écriture feminine.” In Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, eds. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, 371௅83. Houndmills: Macmillan Press Ltd.

CHAPTER FIVE ARTIFICATION AND JACQUES RANCIÈRE’S AESTHETIC REGIME OF ART ALEŠ ERJAVEC

In this article, I will discuss “artification” and attempt to establish whether there are any common features between artification and Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics, especially his notion of the “aesthetic regime of art”. I want to argue that Rancière’s project of “art become life” can be employed as a common denominator for both theoretical frameworks, i.e. artification and the aesthetic regime of art, only that the notion of art to which Rancière’s notion primarily applies is different from the traditional notion of art on which the concept of artification is based. “Artification” is a concept developed mainly by contemporary Finnish aestheticians. It covers the broad terrain of artefacts, events, and processes that are initially not regarded as art but may acquire such a designation to a greater or smaller degree at a later time by appropriating certain art-like features: The neologism refers to situations and processes in which something that is not regarded as art in the traditional sense of the word is changed into something art-like or into something that takes influences from artistic ways of thinking and practicing. (Naukkarinen and Saito 2012)

The presupposition underlying this description of artification is that “artistic ways of thinking and practicing” are somehow different from nonartistic ones. Such a statement would be true if we did not proceed from a general notion of creativity (wherein artistic creativity is but a specific form of creativity) that also encompasses everyday activities and all those that can be with some measure of evidence called creative. The most commodified kind of creative practices are probably those that emerged in the 1980s in the United Kingdom under the banner of “creative industries”.

Artification and Jacques Rancière’s Aesthetic Regime of Art

35

There is also the reverse side of “artification”: “something that is not regarded as art in the traditional sense of the word [and] is changed into something art-like” can also appear under other kinds of conditions and circumstances. Consider the tradition of the British “Arts and Crafts” movement started by workshops initiated by William Morris in the mid19th century, which sought to revive medieval craftsmanship or the later Jugendstil (Art Nouveau, Liberty Style), which followed a similar utilitarian aesthetic tradition, or the German introduction, at the turn of the century, of workshops that followed in the steps of the British tradition. (British success was so astounding that in 1896 “the Prussian Government sent ‘cultural spy’ Hermann Muthesius to England on a six-year mission to study the secrets of English success”; Droste 2006, 12). Jacques Rancière is of interest as regards his notion of the aesthetic regime of art. The dominant schema, often explained in his works, is that with romanticism (with Friedrich Schiller, although sometimes he mentions in that regard authors as early as Vico and Winckelmann) a new “regime” of art emerged, namely the “aesthetic”. Rancière argues that this regime of art is in place, thereby supplanting both modernism and postmodernism, since both are purportedly theoretically insufficient. In his view, modernism is problematic first because it lumps together such disparate authors and movements as Adorno and Futurism, and second, because it “wants to hold on to art’s autonomy but refuses to accept the heteronomy that is its other name” (Rancière 2009, 68). He finds postmodernism problematic because it purportedly only reverses the logic of modernism, offering (by Lyotard as one of Rancière’s main adversaries) the sublime and the unrepresentable as the two main features of postmodernism. Instead of modernism and postmodernism, Rancière proposes his “aesthetic regime of art”. The purpose of this newly introduced notion is to replace both modernism and postmodernism, which are, Rancière believes, obsolete and erroneous. In his opinion, “[t]he aesthetic regime of the arts, it can be said, is the true name for what is designated by the incoherent label ‘modernity’” (Rancière 2009, 24). In the aesthetic regime, the criterion of art is no longer technical perfection (as in the representative regime), “but is ascribed to a specific form of sensory apprehension” (Rancière 2009, 29). Furthermore, the aesthetic regime of art resembles Fredric Jameson’s “cultural dominant”, for although it was purportedly the dominant regime of the last two centuries, it was admittedly not the only regime in this epoch, supplemented (and often in conflict) with the previous two regimes, the “ethical regime of images” and, especially, the “representative regime of art”. The latter precedes the aesthetic regime of art and is obviously also in close temporal

36

Chapter Five

proximity to the aesthetic regime. In brief, Rancière’s agenda is to offer his “regimes” as a novel taxonomy intended to supersede the presently dominant tandem of modernism and postmodernism – no doubt an ambitious project. Rancière’s open-endedness as regards his aesthetic regime implies primarily the obsolescence of “the end of art” theories and in this somewhat resembles Friedrich von Schlegel’s revolutionary attempt to bring into a competitive proximity two art formations of his own time, namely classicism and romanticism. Romantic art was to strive toward ever higher accomplishments – a view at odds with some dominant viewpoints on the decline or even end of art, such as Hegel’s, Heidegger’s, and Arthur Danto’s. Rancière’s non-Hegelian view allows neither for temporal closures of various regimes nor for any totalisations. What is also typical of the aesthetic regime of art is that it is “the regime that strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the art, subject matter and genres” (Rancière 2004, 23). If our vantage point is radical art, then in today’s public, art might as well be left to the birds and their multifarious activities on pieces of public art. From this perspective, public art today may very well be seen as a form of artification – as an integration of mostly site-specific works into natural or urban ambiances. This has always been a feature of public art, but today, it seems somewhat inauthentic. And this is also the essential problem with artification: people regard its materialisation as inauthentic, especially if it is interpreted as something “art-like”. In Western tradition, kitsch is something that pretends to be art-like: it achieves art-likeness but that is as far as it gets. It is fake art. As soon as it crosses the border into the realm of authentic art, leaving the fake and kitsch behind, art re/distributes the sensible. It offers something new; it “speaks”, rather than remaining silent and voiceless. By gaining a voice and starting to speak – to express herself artistically – an authentic artist effects a redistribution of the sensible and broadens the borders of what is perceived and sensed. Hers is a new “voice” to be heard or seen – experienced, in short – which is another way of designating the mechanism whereby a person becomes an artist and her work an artwork. Of course, no art or activity that happily submits to another purpose or agency may attain its proper purpose, which is one of the reasons why artification encounters difficulties when grappling with the assimilation of art. Only by “playing”, by having a purpose without a purpose, is Man “wholly Man”, Friedrich Schiller claimed. We may assume that such “play” and its creations are appreciated by the artist (s/he is in such a state

Artification and Jacques Rancière’s Aesthetic Regime of Art

37

of playing “wholly Man”) as well as by the public, although the relationship is by no means stable or predetermined. There are numerous cases when a work causes great satisfaction (in the sense of “play”) to the artist but hardly to the public; amateur works are frequently of such nature. There is also the opposite situation, such as, for example, that of an acclaimed artist making a simple sketch (Klee and Picasso were known for this), which for him is mere amusement while for the public at large such a work represents a little masterpiece. Which is it? On the other hand, in modern art, there were innumerable “normal” cases of art that was art for the artist as well as for the public. This was even more the case in representational art: there the “quality” and artistic value were, as Rancière frequently notes, relatively easily defined. As we see, art is subjected to various kinds of reception and especially today, our “imaginary museum” is filled with very disparate objects and phenomena. Nonetheless, a salient feature of modern art is not only its variety, but also its semantic openness and faith that it is the public that should accommodate to the work of art and not the other way around. Why is it necessary for art to require the public to accommodate to it? – Because (and in this we can follow Adorno) authentic art and culture require effort to overcome the resistance imposed by it. Culture, in the true sense, did not simply accommodate itself to human beings; but it always simultaneously raised protest against the petrified relations under which they lived, thereby honoring them. [...] Cultural entities typical of the culture industry are no longer also commodities, they are commodities through and through. (Adorno 2000, 232)

In instances where art is attempting to imitate creations done according to the demands of the public, such fake art remains authentic art – just the opposite of kitsch. Take for example the well-known project by Russian artists Komar & Melamid, Most Wanted, in which the two artists created a series of paintings based on a survey of the preferences of the public as regards the motives, formats, and colours of individual paintings (Wypijewski 1998). In spite of formally following the procedures of the market, the works in reality functioned as authentic works of art. This suggests that artification as the transformation of art into non-art or of nonart into “something art-like” may well work in an abstract situation but that in fact, it depends on a variety of other tasks. Still, it appears that there is an instance where non-art may turn into art and the other way around, and achieve this aim without endangering the artistic and aesthetic status of art, just the contrary – I am referring to

38

Chapter Five

instances of what Rancière calls the project of “art become life” (Rancière 2009, 38). The project is consubstantial with the aesthetic regime of art. It already inspired, in their dreams of artisanal and communitarian Middle Ages, the artists of the Arts and Crafts movement. It was taken up again by the artisans of the Art Deco movement, hailed in their time as producers of “social art”, as it was by the engineers and architects of the Werkbund and the Bauhaus, before again flowering into the utopian projects of situationist urbanists and Joseph Beuys’ “social plastic”. (Rancière 2009, 38)

Before the advent of the aesthetic regime of art (i.e. the period of artistic modernity and postmodernity) Mimesis separated out what was art from what was not. Conversely, all the new, aesthetic definitions of art that affirm its autonomy in one way or another say the same thing, affirm the same paradox: that art is henceforth recognizable by its lack of any distinguishing characteristics – by its indistinction. … In short, the specificity of art, finally nameable as such, is its identity with non-art. (Rancière 2009, 66)

This problematic statement will serve as the conclusion of this essay. The reason is that it reveals the limits of Rancière’s otherwise useful and important enterprise. For modernism and postmodernism point out certain essential characteristics of the art of the last two centuries, a task as yet not accomplished by the aesthetic regime of art. The latter lumps together the art of impressionism with abstract art, Duchamp’s projects, and products of artification. Put differently, the notion of art that it highlights and comprises is even more disparate than Adorno and Futurism. My reservations are also directed toward some tenets of Rancière’s theory, for the aesthetic regime of art is an interrelated notion in his philosophical framework. Nonetheless, I think that this criticism does not weaken the argument that the project of “art become life” remains valid – both in Rancière and elsewhere – when referring both to utilitarian creations of certain traditions and endeavours as well as to aesthetic avant-garde movements and their related radical projects.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. 2000. “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” In The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor, 230௅38. Oxford: Blackwell. Droste, Magdalena. 2006. Bauhaus 1919–1933. London: Taschen.

Artification and Jacques Rancière’s Aesthetic Regime of Art

39

Naukkarinen, Ossi and Yuriko Saito. 2012. “Introduction”. Contemporary Aesthetics. http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articl eID=634. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Continuum. —. 2009. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wypijewski, JoAnn, ed. 1998. Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid’s Scientific Guide to Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER SIX DELEUZE AND THE QUESTION OF THE HUMAN IN CONTEMPORARY ART ANDRIJA FILIPOVIû

In this text, I will try to provide some indication of the ways in which contemporary art deals with the question of the human. Accordingly, one may provisionally divide art by the categories of the body, identity, and the subject, although this does not mean there is no overlapping between them. There certainly is, but the purpose of this division is to point out the main problem of contemporary art, which is that it does not question its basis: the human as a substantialist category. Also, this does not mean that contemporary art is not politically engaged. It is, but when dealing with the problems of the body, identity, and the subject, contemporary art politically engages in an already established stratum (the human), as well as in substantial categories (species, gender, class etc.). Contemporary art, therefore, acts on the levels of already established forms of life, and in order for art to be art, it has to break away from established forms of life, that is, from the circling of lived perceptions. If we follow the division to the body, identity, and the subject, we can classify contemporary art in the following way: 1) the body – art that deals with biological givens (bio art, cyborg performance etc.); 2) identity – art as a cultural practice (queer art, contemporary postcolonial and immigrant literature, etc.); 3) the subject – art as a social practice (engaged art, participatory art, relational art etc.). Taking art that deals with the body, the human, and life in general as biological givens, Miško Šuvakoviü points out three characteristic concepts in contemporary art regarding the relations of the prehuman, human, and posthuman: The prehuman signifies those art practices that are based on working with “non-human” i.e. organic or living materials, organisms, creatures, or phenomena […], the human signifies those art practices that are based on working with “human” creatures in the biological, psychobiological,

Deleuze and the Question of the Human in Contemporary Art

41

cultural-biological, or socio-biological sense […], the posthuman signifies those art practices that are based on working with what comes after the human (death, life after death, eternal life, machine analogies or metaphors of life, robotics, digital simulacra, cybernetics, virtual art, cyber systems, artificial intelligence, biological computers, genetic engineering, cloning, etc.). (Šuvakoviü 2011, 81–82)

Art that deals with life as an inorganic given, such as that which most directly deals with the biological, can further be divided into four types, according to new media theorist Edwina Bartlem. Those are the representational mode, cyborg performance, experiments with artificial life (A-life) and art as biological practice (bio art; Bartlem 2009, 155). The representational mode is the most conventional approach and means creating performances of how artists imagine future bodies, corporeality, and the environment, shaped by changes generated by digital and other new technologies. Although this stimulates arguments about the different ways in which information and biotechnologies might shape us, they still maintain a safe position within the representational type of art. Bartlem’s second type of approach is cyborg performance. For example, Orlan connects his body to machines and transforms it through surgical techniques in order to present a cyborg subjectivity. Bartlem calls this practice “cyborg posthuman aesthetics”, an aesthetics that overcomes the biological human and stresses the connection between humans and new technologies. Orlan becomes a type of virtual body able to transform into the body of a digital picture, which actually comes down to a Cartesian division of the body and mind, in which the mind is the active and the creative part, while the body is just passive matter. The third and fourth types of practice involve artists using new and digital biotechnologies to create lifelike creatures or systems. In some cases, they create living or “semi-living” creatures as part of their artistic practices. Digital A-life is a synthetic and digital medium in which computer programmes, like digital systems or entities, recreate biological systems and behaviours. Other artists create artificial life (or bio A-life), creating new life forms by using biotechnologies. Bio-artists use scientific knowledge, methodologies, and technologies as part of their artistic practices and create new life forms or life systems for aesthetic and ideological purposes. As opposed to digital A-life artists, bio-artists use the materiality of tissues and cells to create new organisms. It is a new art form based on the use of genetic engineering techniques to transfer synthetic genes to an organism or to transfer natural genetic material from one species into another, to create unique living beings. Molecular genetics allows the artist to engineer the plant and animal genome and create new life forms. (Kac 1999)

42

Chapter Six

Using various digital and biotechnologies, like tissue engineering, stemcell research, xenotransplantation, and genomics, A-life artists and bioartists claim to examine the limits of the organic and inorganic, human and non-human, but are actually caught up in the process of the spectacularisation of biopolitically (and necropolitically) shaped life using new technologies, without questioning the basis of those politics, which are the concepts of life and the human. How is a human body, according to Deleuze, shaped into an anthropomorphic stratum of the mechanosphere? Or, in other words, how does one become a human being? First, a surface needs to be created, that is, some kind of body needs to substantialise from a multiplicity of intensities. Thus, created bodies need to be produced as subjects by investing in their body parts, organs, but primarily in the eyes and the face. In this way, the face as the centre of subjectivity expands to cover the entire body and the voice becomes the voice of a speaking subject. The eyes become “black holes” on a “the white wall”, thus signifying the depth of subjectivity, the power of judgement, or the mind in general. However, “before” the production of an organised body or organism, there are only lengths and widths, the swarming of various intensities of varying speeds on the body without organs. The organism as a substance is created by the processes of subjectification and stratification, but between substantial forms and determined subjects, between the two, there is not only a whole operation of demonic local transports but a natural play of haecceities, degrees, intensities, events, and accidents that compose individuations totally different from those of the well-formed subjects that receive them. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 280)

Therefore, a human being is a set of folded forces (or a set of a multiplicity of attributes) created on a certain stratum of the mechanosphere, as a result of the intersecting of specific historical fluxes. The human as a universal category emerges through the substantialisation of certain attributes, such as race, class, and gender. Better yet, by substantialising the category of the “human”, many attributes are wiped out, those that constitute it (as human) and those that, if left plural, would never produce the substance called human. In what way does contemporary art, with its three aspects, participate in shaping the form of life called human? Art that deals with the body as a biological given, with all its claims of re-evaluating the boundaries between the organic and inorganic, human and non-human, actually never reaches deep enough to seize the most problematic concept of all: life itself. Life is also a deeply historical concept that includes all the

Deleuze and the Question of the Human in Contemporary Art

43

differences between individual human beings. A change in understanding life, the creation of the concept of life itself, was also marked by the discovery of production as a source of value in political economy, and that discovery was also marked by the transfer of wealth into the creative forces of human biological life. The organic structure matches that of labour in the economic sphere. As the economy began to expand and develop in the 19th century, life began to be viewed as a process of evolution and progress, as something that produces and grows. This also counts as the start of biopolitics – biological reproduction and ways of life become aspects that one needs to analyse and organise along with labour and the conditions of production. Of course, this is not only about shaping human life, but also everything that is determined as alive or animate, as well as inanimate. On the other hand, art as a cultural practice and art as a social practice are complicit in the production of identities and subjects by means of stratification and subjectification. Art as a social practice includes various artistic practices such as socially engaged art, community-based art, experimental communities, dialogic art, littoral art, interventionist art, participatory art, contextual art, and collaborative art. As a social practice, what all these different forms of art have in common is the creation of a lasting interaction (durational approach), a reliance on conciliatory rather than custodial strategies, and the establishment of relationships not only between the participants in the artistic work, but also with the social and scientific-theoretical disciplines. Even though art is included in various spheres of collective actions that are in antagonistic relations with particular places of power, it “differentiates this antagonism from the modes of self-reflexive sociality necessary to create solidarity within a given organizational structure” (Kester 2011, 65). The immigrant and the postcolonial contemporary novels, however, shape the immigrant and postcolonial subjects so as to render them acceptable primarily to Western societies and countries, to which those subjects can emigrate or that used to be their countries’ colonial powers. The authors of such novels often speak with an “authentic” voice, but in such a way that this voice is already a part of the dominant Western culture. This form of subjectification was dubbed “ethno-lit” by Vladimir Tasiü (Tasiü 2009, 65–110). Faciality, as one of the processes of subjectification, constitutes the facial unit which establishes a binary relationship – A or B. However, although faciality establishes the binary, it also assumes a variation in the degree between A and B, so that no Other exists. If we take A as the norm, B will come second, but it will never be the Other. An abstract machine of faciality recognises and classifies B, because B moves in the same space

44

Chapter Six

as A, but in such a way that B is always subordinated in the hierarchy. In that sense, one may conclude that racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the face of the White-Man, which endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions, in a given ghetto, sometimes tearing them from the wall, which never abides by alterity. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 197)

The ground of A and B is the human, and for that reason there is no absolute outside, but only the interplay between interiority and exteriority: From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to be. The dividing line is not between inside and outside but rather is internal to simultaneous signifying chains and successive subjective choices. Racism never detects the particles of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped out. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 197)

The problem for contemporary art lies in the question of how to separate a given form of life if life is taken as the life of the virtual, the virtual as a never-ending process of the actualisation of the multiplicity of potentiality, and art as a force of deterritorialisation that creates blocks of sensations. That action characterises the death of God, the destruction of the world, the dissolution of the person, the disintegration of bodies, and the shifting function of language which now expresses only intensities (Deleuze 2004, 334)

and rests on an inorganic vitalism, according to which matter is the plane of consistency or Body without Organs, in other words, the unformed, unorganized, nonstratified, or destratified body and all its flows: subatomic and submolecular particles, pure intensities, prevital and prephysical free singularities. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 49)

The critical aspect of relocating the question of life to the plane of consistency or immanence, which is the individuality of the singular, lies in the fact that life is thus viewed in the framework of the conceptual pair of virtuality and actuality, because life consists only of the virtual. Namely, if life is presented as that of the virtual, or that of a chaotic virtuality that is constantly actualised, to be more precise, it follows that

Deleuze and the Question of the Human in Contemporary Art

45

one assumes an “uncontemporary” stance toward the actualised forms – what is actualised is just one small part of a wealth of virtual multiplicity that has yet to be actualised, or one that is impossible to actualise, but is possible to think about and in that way create the possibility of distancing from the everyday and the actualised.

Bibliography Bartlem, Edwina. 2009. “Emergence: New Flesh and Life in New Media Art.” In The Future of Flesh: A Cultural Survey of the Body, eds. Zoe Detsi-Diamanti, Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, and Effie Yiannopoulou, 155–178. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Deleuze, Gilles. 2004a. Logic of Sense. London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 2004b. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum. Kac, Eduardo. 1999. “Transgenic Art.” Ars Electronica 99: Life Science. http://90.146.8.18/en/archiv_files/19991/E1999_289.pdf. Kester, Grant H. 2011. The One and Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Šuvakoviü, Miško. 2011. Surplus Life: The Philosophy of Contemporary Transitional Art and Form of Life. Ljubljana: Horizonti. Tasiü, Vladimir. 2009. “Alegorija kolebljivog fundamentaliste.” In Udaranje televizora: Kolebanje postkulture, 65–110. Novi Sad: Adresa.

CHAPTER SEVEN SARA AHMED AND THE ANALYSIS OF CRITICAL WHITENESS AND RACISM IN POST-FORMER-YUGOSLAVIA MARINA GRŽINIû

Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmith’s College in the UK, who publishes widely on performativity, racism, and anti-racism in relation to queer and critical thought. In 2004, she published a seminal text titled “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism”. Ahmed claims that “race (and racism) has to be included in the critical whiteness work of the humanities” (Ahmed 2004). In contrast to the “big” names of Western academia, mostly male and white, of course, that have steadily (re)shaped the space of Europe (including the Cold War era!) – Ahmed’s theoretical work has no big presence (at least not yet!) in what goes under the name of post-former-Yugoslavia. In fact, she is almost absent from translations and writings produced by and in the post-former-Yugoslav space (though she does figure in my theoretical work and that of my doctoral students, as well as in some migrant and cultural anthropology studies). On the other hand, at the centre of post-former-Yugoslavia, in relation to the wars of the 1990s, we detect not only two lines of subjugation, exploitation, and discrimination – class and gender – which must be complemented with the constructed category of race and racism. Namely, the genocidal politics of the Balkan wars in the 1990s (around 8,000 Muslim men and boys slaughtered by Serb paramilitary formations in a single day in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina) and the constant production of “second-grade citizens” throughout the space of pre- and post-former-Yugoslavia (LGBTQI communities, Roma people, Kosovars, Muslims) and “non-citizens” (the “Erased People”)1 are outcomes of the direct racialisation of capital, which produces superfluous working bodies, underpaid workers who are, as such, easily excluded from the national

Sara Ahmed and the Analysis of Critical Whiteness and Racism

47

labour markets, and presented as incompetent through ethnically imposed racialisations). The racialisation of capital was also accompanied by institutional, structural, and social racisms. Although a non-existent space, post-former-Yugoslavia is constantly reconstructed and the events of the last three decades connected to its disappearance are more or less also connected with the transition from socialism to post-socialism to ultranationalism. This is why it is pertinent to bring Ahmed’s theoretical work on racism, anti-racism, and performativity to the centre of political, philosophical, and theoretical work in and on the space of post-formerYugoslavia. On the one hand, Ahmed exposes racism as a key logic of subjugation, exploitation, and discrimination in capitalism (she centres it at the heart of capitalism) and, on the other, discusses anti-racism. Ahmed is far from drawing a simple opposition between the two, because she rightly detects their close link with the regime of whiteness and performativity. In her view, [i]t might be assumed that the speech act of declaring oneself (to be white, or learned, or racist) “works” as it brings into existence the non- or antiracist subject or institution.

Though she does not maintain that they are simple claims, nevertheless “they define racism in a particular way”. So it is not that such speech acts say “we are anti-racists” (and saying makes us so); rather they say “we are this”, whilst racism is “that”, so in being “this” we are not “that”, where “that” would be racist. So in saying we are racists, then we are not racists, as racists don’t know they are racists; or in expressing shame about racism, then we are not racists, as racists are shameless, and so on. (Ahmed 2004)

According to Ahmed, these are all statements that seem to function as claims to performativity rather than as performatives, whereby the declaration of whiteness is assumed to put in place the conditions in which racism can be transcended, or at the very least reduced in its power. Any presumption that such statements are forms of political action would be an overestimation of the power of saying, and even a performance of the very privilege that such statements claim they undo. (Ahmed 2004)

Unconvinced by this performative “saying as doing”, in 2004 she introduced an almost blasphemous phrase: “the non-performative of antiracism”. This strongly complicates the processes of racialisation, showing

48

Chapter Seven

that although the good will of critical (white) anti-racism is undoubtable, it nonetheless reproduces racism under the “mask” of its performative transcendence. Ahmed explains this in the following way: The critique I am offering, as a Black feminist, is a critique of something in which I am implicated, insofar as racism structures the institutional space in which I make my critique, and even the very terms out of which I make it. In the face of how much we are “in it”, our question might become: is anti-racism impossible? Given that Black politics, in all its varied forms, has worked to challenge the ongoing “force” of racism, then to even question whether anti-racism is possible seems misguided and could even be seen as a denial of the historical fact of political agency. Surely the commitment to being against racism has “done things” and continues to “do things”. What we might remember is that to be against something is precisely not to be in a position of transcendence: to be against something is, after all, to be in an intimate relation with that which one is against. To be anti “this” or anti “that” only makes sense if “this” or “that” exists. (Ahmed 2004)

She derives her concept of the non-performative by modifying, or, better yet, by reversing Judith Butler’s definition of performativity. Butler published Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” in 1993 in order to propose a reformulation of the materiality of bodies, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the “matter” of bodies, sex, and gender. In Bodies that Matter, Butler offers a clarification of the notion of “performativity” that she introduced in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). In the former book, Butler explores the meaning of citational politics and states that performativity is “the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse does produce the effects that it names” (Butler 1993, 2). Sara Ahmed, in her book On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), where she re-elaborates on the non-performative, states that performativity is (in contrast to Butler) “the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse does not produce the effects that it names” (Ahmed 2012, 117, emphasis added). Departing from Gender Trouble, the most influential book in academic feminism and queer theory during the 1990s, and taking into account racialisation and necropolitics, on the one hand, and transfeminism and transmigration on the other, then in relation to Ahmed, I might propose another book, for the present decade. The title of this book would be Race Trouble: Transfeminism and Dehumanisation and the book would ask questions about the place of race, the nation state, and migrants in queer

Sara Ahmed and the Analysis of Critical Whiteness and Racism

49

theory and global necrocapitalism in post-former-Yugoslavia (more on this in Gržiniü and Tatliü 2014). Ahmed argues that It feels a bit smug to be critical of whiteness studies, and even critical of “critical whiteness studies”, given that I have already “admitted” that I do not identify with this field. So where am I in this critique? There I am, you might say, writing race equality policies that get used by my university as an indicator of its good performance. […] But for me we cannot do away with race, unless racism is “done away”. Racism works to produce race as if it was a property of bodies (biological essentialism) or cultures (cultural essentialism). Race exists as an effect of histories of racism as histories of the present. Categories such as black, white, Asian, mixed-race, and so on have lives, but they do not have lives “on their own”, as it were. They become fetish objects (black is, white is) only by being cut off from histories of labour, as well as histories of circulation and exchange. Such categories are effects and they have affects: if we are seen to inhabit this or that category, it shapes what we can do, even if it does not fully determine our course of action. Thinking beyond race in a world that is deeply racist is at best a form of utopianism, at worse a form of neo-liberalism: it imagines we could get beyond race, supporting the illusion that social hierarchies are undone once we have “seen through them”. (Ahmed 2004)

Her starting point, she continues would always be the work of Black feminists, especially Audre Lorde, whose book Sister Outsider (1984), reminds us of exactly why studying whiteness is necessary for anti-racism. Any critical genealogy of whiteness studies, for me, must begin with the direct political address of Black feminists such as Lorde, rather than later work by white academics on representations of whiteness or on how white people experience their whiteness. (Ahmed 2004).

In 2008, Ahmed took her main points developed in 2004 and engaged in an analysis-critique of the plenary talk Slavoj Žižek gave at the Law and Critique conference in 2007. In her critique, Ahmed showed that hegemony is not really reducible to facts, as it involves semblance, fantasy, and illusion, questioning the appearance of things and the gap between appearance and the real. In his plenary talk, Žižek dismissed liberal multiculturalism as hegemonic. In his view, it imposes on “us” the demand to support the other’s difference (seen as the hegemony of liberal multiculturalism). In Ahmed’s view, Žižek’s arguing for “destroying” the hegemony of multiculturalism is itself hegemonic. For Ahmed, what matters is to ask (and immediately answer, as she does) the following

50

Chapter Seven

rhetorical question: could this speech act, though creating the illusion that we do support the other’s difference, in fact work by not invoking that support? (cf. Ahmed 2008). In fact, she sees in Žižek’s demand a call for ɚ liberal (racist) monoculture, or even a certain “desire” for racism, as “the politically correct” multiculturalism in the view of Žižek and others forbids talking about racism. Ⱥs the non-performative of anti-racism does not do what it supposedly says (i.e. forbids racism), this “sudden desire” for racism is, according to Ahmed, a sign of a wider unnamed racism that accumulates force by not being named or by operating under the sign of civility. This imaginary prohibition is taken up as if it is real, which allows individuals to declare that being racist is prohibited (the probation happens, but that is not the point). Racism then becomes a minority position which has to be defended against the multicultural hegemony. (Ahmed 2008)

As was expressed in reactions to Ahmed’s text (Ahmed 2008), in the end it is not about choosing either side as valid ௅ the discursive hegemony of “multiculturalism” (following Žižek) and/or a profound disjuncture (as elaborated by Ahmed) between what the concept says and what it does; rather, it is about relinquishing the concept of multiculturalism, as a key conceptual tool of progressive struggle, to rightwing politics. Žižek’s response did not effectively dismiss Ahmed’s critique of Žižek’s failure to recognise the disastrous effects of the non-performative for any performative kind of emancipatory politics and agency. The consequences of Ahmed’s analysis, which she began in 2004, are pertinent not only for post-former-Yugoslavia, but also for global capitalism in general and its logic of an empty de-politicised performativity in relation to racism and racialisation. Ahmed rightly asks whether in this era of global capitalism a progressive anti-racist politics may reinvent a new conceptual politics. Or, to conclude with Ahmed: Our task is not to repeat anti-racist speech in the hope that it will acquire performativity. Nor should we be satisfied with the “terms” of racism, or hope they will acquire new meanings, or even look for new terms. Instead, anti-racism requires much harder work, as it requires working with racism as an ongoing reality in the present. Anti-racism requires interventions in the political economy of race, and how racism distributes resources and capacities unequally amongst others. (Ahmed 2004)

Sara Ahmed and the Analysis of Critical Whiteness and Racism

51

Notes 1

Slovenia’s 1991 declaration of independence from Yugoslavia was in part an act of necropolitical sovereignty, because 30,000 of its citizens lost their citizenship as a result, their names erased from Slovenia’s official citizenship lists. The “Erased” were mainly people from other former Yugoslav republics who had been living in Slovenia. 2 In his response to Ahmed’s critique, Žižek argues the following: “Where I disagree with Ahmed is in her supposition that the underlying injunction of liberal tolerance is monocultural – ‘Be like us, become British!’ I claim that, on the opposite, its injunction is cultural apartheid: others should not come too close to us, we should protect our ‘way of life’. The demand ‘Become like us!’ is a superego demand, a demand which counts on the other’s inability to really become like us, so that we can then gleefully ‘deplore’ their failure. [But] The truly unbearable fact for a multiculturalist liberal is an Other who effectively becomes like us, while retaining its specific features” (Žižek 2011).

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. 2004. “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-performativity of Anti-racism.” Borderlands 3(2). http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/ahmed_declarations.htm. —. 2008. “‘Liberal Multiculturalism is the Hegemony – It’s an Empirical Fact’ – A Response to Slavoj Žižek by Ahmed.” Darkmatter: In the Ruins of Imperial Culture. http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2008/02/19/%E2%80%98liberalmulticulturalism-is-the-hegemony-%E2%80%93-its-an-empiricalfact%E2%80%99-a-response-to-slavoj-zizek/. —. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Iidentity. New York: Routledge. —. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge. Gržiniü, Marina and Šefik Tatliü. 2014. Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism: The Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Žižek, Slavoj. 2011. “‘Appendix: Multiculturalism, the Reality of an Illusion’ – A Response to Sara Ahmed by Žižek”. http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=454.

CHAPTER EIGHT THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL ASPECT OF ANDRÉ NUSSELDER’S INTERFACE THEORY OLEG JEKNIû

In media theory, there are few book-length studies dealing with the problem of interface. When this important theoretical issue is discussed at all, it is usually discussed in aesthetic categories. Besides being one of the few books on this subject written by a European author, André Nusselder’s Interface Fantasy: A Lacanian Cyborg Ontology is also interesting because it deals with the ontology of the human-computer interface. Siegfried Zielinski’s archaeology of media showed us that the roots of the concept of interface may be found in Empedocles’ pores, whose function is explained in the latter’s pore theory of perception (Zielinski 2006, 3955). Following Zielinski, one may conclude that the interface, in addition to media and the subject, is the third necessary element of every system of communication. The interface is therefore defined as a source of information adapted to the human sensory apparatus, to which all of communication is oriented anyway, viewed as a form of acquiring knowledge. In theory today, the relationship between the theoretical concepts of interface and media has yet to be sufficiently explained. For most theorists, the interface is yet another new medium – specific to communication between computers and people. However, if viewed from an epistemological perspective and that of its transparency, one might posit the interface as a separate element of communication systems (in addition to the subject and media). In his Interface Fantasy, drawing an analogy between Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts and information and communication technologies, Nusselder formulates a theory of cyberspace in which the concept of interface plays a key role. In fact, Nusselder offers a psychoanalytic interpretation of the interface, starting from fantasy, which he posits as the central concept in Lacan’s psychoanalysis. Given that Nusselder himself

The Epistemological Aspect of André Nusselder’s Interface Theory

53

notes that “it is not very obvious how fantasy works in the theory of Lacan” (Nusselder 2009, 3), his approach may already be criticised for trying to explain one ambiguous concept (the interface) by reference to another (fantasy). Still, collecting its pieces scattered across Lacan’s entire oeuvre, Nusselder manages to provide a comprehensive and systematic presentation of Lacan’s theory of fantasy. Lacan, according to Nusselder, “considers fantasy also (at least in my analysis) to be an inevitable medium for ‘interfacing’ the inaccessible real” (Nusselder 2009, 5; emphasis added). As a Lacanian-oriented researcher in philosophy and anthropology, Nusselder views technique as the materialisation of the mental resources of humans. He defines his key concept – cyberspace – as follows: “the mental realm of the human-computer interface that turns us into cyborgs” (Nusselder 2009, 4). For Nusselder, new media, the emergence of which, as it were, put the concept of interface on the theorists’ radar, are all those media that are digital, multimedia, and interactive, unlike older media and information and communication technologies, which are not (e.g. the telegraph and the telephone). Such a view of new media and their relation to the interface resembles that of Lev Manovich in his The Language of New Media (Manovich 2002). On the other hand, in Slavoj Žižek’s views of dispositives as “frameworks” through which we see phantasmatic spaces, Nusselder finds inspiration for his main, Lacanian claim, expressed in the ambiguously Lacanian title of his book: Interface Fantasy. Thus on the one hand, Nusselder’s theory is determined by Manovich’s view of new media and, on the other, by Lacan’s psychoanalysis. For Nusselder, computers also qualify as new media, because they enable us to access digital data, which are not directly accessible to us. In the physical world, digital data are represented by the screen, the most typical visual interface. In cyberspace, which he defines as “the mental space of the conceptualization or representation of the codified objects (data objects) of the computer” (Nusselder 2009, 4), digital data are represented by fantasy, which in psychological terms corresponds to the screen, according to Nusselder’s reading of Lacan’s theory. Therefore, Nusselder’s central thesis is that the “computer screen functions in cyberspace as a psychological space – as the screen of fantasy” (Nusselder 2009, 5). Because in the mental domain of representation, subjective mechanisms, such as desire and fantasy, shape the representation of digital objects, Nusselder uses those forms of representation as his material for psychoanalysing our relationship with digital technology. In his

54

Chapter Eight

judgement, the way we represent data objects says more about us than it does about the world they purport to represent. A new media object “on the screen” does not have a one-to-one relationship to the codified object of zeros and ones in the computer databases. There is no intrinsic motive for the relationship between bits and their form, hence giving desire and fantasy an important role in this interfacing with bits. (Nusselder 2009, 5)

To draw a parallel with Lacan’s view of the world, which posits three (linguistic) orders – the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary – Nusselder likewise divides the world of cyborgs, shaped by digital technology, into three domains – the matrix, cyberspace, and interface: [...] the matrix, as the “noumenal” dimension of codified objects consisting of zeros and ones (the database); cyberspace, as the “phenomenal” mental space of the conceptualization or representation of code objects; and the interface, as their crucial medium. The interface is the gate leading humans into cyberspace, connecting us to the matrix while simultaneously, because of its particular formations, still separating us from it as a whole. (Nusselder 2009, 4)

Therefore, in Nusselder’s view, the interface both connects us with and separates us from the real. At the same time, it both is and is not a medium between the real and the symbolic. According to Nusselder, data objects do not exist in the real. The real of those objects is their computer code, comprising zeroes and ones, and as such, is not directly accessible to humans. Cyberspace in general is therefore conceivable in this dimension of a reality without “real” objects, by proceeding from Kantian philosophy in which it is the human subject that also constructs the object with his or her imagination and understanding. (Nusselder 2009, 18)

Therefore, the appearance of objects in cyberspace is not objective, because the digitalised world has no structure or form of its own by which it should appear. “For what is the true form of a data object? Is it the way it appears on your computer display, or on mine?” (Nusselder 2009, 16). In cyberspace, data objects, shaped by our desire and fantasy, take no shape of its own, but only for the user. Computers transform digital codes into physical sensations adapted to humans (ordered spatiotemporal structures of images or sounds), appropriating activities that according to Kant constitute the basic activity of the human mind. However, Nusselder notes, “There is a gap between

The Epistemological Aspect of André Nusselder’s Interface Theory

55

the object and its ‘exact’ representation, and in this gap the (unconscious) functioning of fantasy takes place, as imaginary and metaphorical (trans)formations of data into new forms of reality” (Nusselder 2009, 20). If data are transformed “into new forms of reality”, it seems right to pose the following epistemological question: is that gap, which functions as an interface, a transparent window into the world of digital data, i.e. the real, or does the gap itself, as a “new form of reality”, become a new object of cognition? I am convinced that the issue of transparency is crucial for distinguishing between a medium and an interface. Namely, if a medium cannot provide a transparent view of what lies “behind” it, then it is not a medium at all, because it does not connect, that is, mediate between, two domains – in that case, it becomes an object of cognition. In visual media theory, there are two approaches to the problem of media or interface transparency, formulated in two metaphors: one is “mirror”, the other “window”. For instance, Manovich argues that the code as a cultural interface is opaque (in his view, an interface is a “mirror”, i.e. implicitly, an object of cognition). In Nusselder’s view, film, as an interface, is one of those famous “windows”, wherein the very position of the camera already “creates a framed perception of the real”. However, to address the question of the transparency of the interface qua fantasy, one must remember that psychoanalysis, as a method of investigation, negates the distinction between the subjective and the objective, thereby obscuring the very concept of transparency. Nusselder himself writes that it is hard to separate in Lacan’s theory the subjective from the objective, because we always identify with the virtual position: “The subject of the interface can never get at ‘the real thing’ because the structure of the screen itself condemns it to representations” (Nusselder 2009, 141). The real is thus not absolutely accessible to the subject and therefore the subject sees her own reflection in the interface as a mirror and not a manifestation of the real, i.e. objects from the digital world as they really are in themselves. In psychoanalytic terms, Nusselder’s starting analogy with fantasy makes ample sense – the computer screen is a mirror filled with imaginary parts of the self and, as such, an ideal object for psychoanalysis. However, that suggests that the mediation of digital objects performed by fantasy qua interface is so “contaminated” by subjective contents that it becomes essentially impermeable to the real. In other words, fantasy does not function as a medium that connects the real and the symbolic, but itself becomes an object of cognition. The issue of interface transparency necessarily confronts us with the issue of the relationship between media and the interface. However, Nusselder does not address that relationship and therefore fails to provide

56

Chapter Eight

an explicit or clear answer as to what distinguishes a medium from an interface, i.e. whether an interface is an object of cognition or medium. Still, he implicitly attempts to provide a dialectical solution to this problem, by introducing a “third dimension” in his conception of the interface, arguing that an interface is simultaneously a mirror wherein we recognise parts of ourselves as well as a framework or window into cyberspace. Suggesting that an interface is a mental space and not the surface of an object of cognition, Nusselder deviates from the original understanding of the interface in technology, wherefrom he borrowed the term in the first place, which invariably conceives of interfaces as a sort of surfaces (surfaces where two systems overlap or border each other). In an interface, we see ourselves as if in a mirror, Nusselder argues, but these new spaces of representation “are not merely flat projections that we look at but are also spaces in which we (fantasmatically) live” (Nusselder 2009, 117). Not only do I look at my computer screen, Nusselder explains, but I also “live onscreen”, “by means of my identifications with the textual or visual appearances of myself” (Nusselder 2009, 117). Therefore, in Nusselder’s view, an interface is neither an object of cognition nor a medium of communication, but the surroundings or environment (the meaning of the concept of medium in chemistry, for instance) in which the process of cognition takes place. Not only Nusselder, but most theorists who have taken up this issue have failed to offer a strict definition of interface as a theoretical concept. In everyday usage, the concept typically denotes a “surface where two things or phenomena overlap”; therefore, there always remains the dilemma whether the interface is the same as the medium (tool of cognition) or a more-or-less impermeable surface-border, an object of cognition. Nusselder maintains that in technical terms, an interface is a medium that connects humans with computers, whereas computers themselves, in Nusselder’s view, similar to that of Lev Manovich, are considered new media. This leads one to conclude that the interface is a “new media medium”. Positing the interface as a “medium of media” reduces the communication process to one of remediation (Bolter and Grusin 2000). Therefore, unless one accepts that an interface is the object of cognition (an opaque surface that acts like a mirror to the subject and not a window into the real), the interface turns out to be a redundant concept, already covered by the concept of medium.

The Epistemological Aspect of André Nusselder’s Interface Theory

57

Bibliography Bolter, Jay and Richard Grusin. 2000. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Manovich, Lev. 2002. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Nusselder, André. 2009. Interface Fantasy: A Lacanian Cyborg Ontology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Zielinski, Siegfried. 2006. Deep Time of the Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

CHAPTER NINE GADAMER’S APPROACH TO THE PARADOX OF THE OPEN HORIZON OF ACTUALITY NATAŠA LAH

Hermeneutics between Memory and Oblivion Incited by his personal experience of coerced departure from his French homeland (lieux de mémoire) after the Revolution and by the postrevolutionary idea of damnation of memory (Damnatio memoriae), German naturalist and writer of French origin Adalbert von Chamisso wrote in 1813 “The Wondrous Story of Peter Schlemihl”. His hero Schlemihl, whose name – in Jewish and Talmud-based Yiddish tradition – denotes a man who has been forsaken by fortune, sells his own shadow to the devil. Since the shadow represents Schlemihl’s collective memory, the hero substitutes the social and private inconspicuousness of a shadowless man by working as a freelance scientist, a naturalist. Analysing this literary work, philologist Harald Weinrich concludes: Happy, peaceful science, in which a man can exist just as well with or without a shadow, recalling the past or forgetting it, and move through the world! (Weinrich 2004, 118)

Yet, is such an existence, scientistically defined and neutral in relation to history, capable of ensuring the “spiritual freedom” of artistic creation and understanding of art? Unlike science, art possesses the “character of past”, as claimed by hermeneutist Gadamer who invokes the old principle of Hegel’s speculative idealism. Gadamer’s work represents the idea of the comprehensiveness of the forcibly opposed sides of tradition and modernity. He explicitly claims that “[t]he essence of what is called ‘spirit’ lies in the ability to move within the horizon of the open future and the unrepeatable past”, and that

Gadamer’s Approach to the Paradox of the Open Horizon of Actuality

59

“Mnemosyne, the muse of memory and recollective appropriation, rules here as the muse of spiritual freedom” (Gadamer 1986, 10). He was aware that Hegel’s principle of the historicity of art originates from the self-understandable integration of community, society, Church, and the self-understanding of the artistic creator that took place in the 18th century, and that from the subsequent century onward, such selfintelligibility has been losing its theoretical integrity. Namely, ever since the 19th century, we have been witnessing how artists no longer live in community but rather create the community, thereby presenting themselves as “new saviours” (Immermann), while “the concept of the work points toward the sphere of common use and common understanding as the realm of intelligible communication” (Gadamer 1986, 13). Of course, this does not apply to the common use of mechanical skills, which – being production-wise knowledge – from Aristotle onward differed from art by referring to general values. Gadamer here confronts us with the paradox of the open horizon of actuality, wherefrom we observe the denoted theme and position of the post-historical art of “oblivion”. However, in his view, there is no more an isolated horizon of the present in itself than there are historical horizons, which have to be acquired. Rather, understanding is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing by themselves. (Gadamer 2006, 305)

The problem that opens up as a paradoxical encounter between open horizon and actuality in art theory from the 19th century onwards has been denoted already in mythologemic sources of narrative, concerning the interpretation of the meaning of those contents that link ontological with existential themes. Such contradiction is not rare when it comes to interpreting the ideas concerning the actions of mythic heroes and gods. The etymology of the word ȑȡȝȘȞİȣIJȚțȒ is closely linked to the role of the mythical messenger Hermes (Gr. ‫ݒ‬ȡȝȘȢ, Lat. Mercurius). Over a long period and a wide geographical area, Hermes acted as the personification of interpretation, with various iconographical patterns (image) and topics (meaning) of his own form. Hermes symbolised the skill of implementing ideas into action, in which matter he was sometimes pragmatic all the way to bribability. Wearing winged sandals, he skilfully mastered distances between gods and people, mediating in their communication. This mythical mediator could easily soar up to the holies and just as easily use deception and cunning in order to engage in commerce with them. Just as winged sandals sometimes symbolise his mobility and mediatorship, Hermes, who also carries a lamb on his back, represents a good shepherd (HermƝs kriophóros), as described in the Gospel of Luke in order to render

60

Chapter Nine

Jesus (Pastor bonus) a promoter of love amongst his own herd. More subtly still, Christianity introduces the mythologemic value of Hermes’s task through the notion of Gospel that comes from the Greek word ǼȣĮȖȖȑȜȚȠ, which is a compound of the notions eú (good) and ággelos (messenger or herald). Thereby it embodies the mediatorship and exchange of ideas between heaven and earth, God and man, and between idea and acting within the notion of “Annunciation”, hence implying its irrefutability. Let us add here that translations of Caesar’s account in Chapter 17 of Book 6 of the Gallic Wars (Commentarii de Bello Gallico; 58–50 BC) have earned Hermes, with his polytechnic talents, the status of “the inventor of all art”. Where does all of this layered multi-connotative and polysemantic abundance come from? In the words of Friedrich Georg Jünger, the problem is that a symbol does not think itself, but something else; a symbol is a sign that discovers its relations and meaning in something else and represents that other. The sign and symbol refer to something outside words, and in this manner deprive the word of its original power; the word is used indirectly [...]. The word can be manipulated. A word can serve anything. Meanings can be ascribed or withheld from it. It can become a sign for something else. It becomes an excuse, ambush, shelter. With words, and only with words, can one cheat and lie, because without language there is neither cheating nor lying. (Jünger 1972, 871)

The Problem of the Method: Interpretation (of Text) or Understanding (of Experience) The contradiction of interpretation in relation to a sign being interpreted, starting with the role of messenger in the myth of Hermes, has proved to be – in the philosophy of the early and late modern period – an insurmountable paradox of the open horizon of memory and reminiscence (of fixed denotation or text) and actuality (of the activity of ascribing new meanings). Amongst all the connotative forms, that is, accounts subject to interpretation, hermeneutics mostly dealt with speech and its fixed form – text. Its historical development included the alternation between the allegorical interpretation of the Pergamum school, the historicalgrammatical method of the Alexandrian school, medieval hermeneutics as a teaching concerning the rules of exegesis (all the way to the 18th century), while the Renaissance was mainly a period of mastering the hermeneutical problems of working on texts written in foreign languages. The great synthesis of classical German idealism and the accompanying

Gadamer’s Approach to the Paradox of the Open Horizon of Actuality

61

worldview primarily aspired to master the peculiarities of the historical in relation to the individual. In this period, Friedrich Schlegel’s hermeneutical critique and Hegel’s demand for the interpretation of “non-linguistic” arts especially influenced Gadamer. The humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) of Wilhelm Dilthey formulated the scientific demands of the hermeneutic method, while Martin Heidegger held the “phenomenology of existence” (Dasein) to be hermeneutics in its original meaning, hermeneutics denoting interpretation. In this context, the problem of method was especially actualised by pointing to various scientific and philosophical models of hermeneutics. Edmund Husserl regarded the natural sciences as interpretive, Dilthey strongly distinguished between scientific explanation and humanist interpretation, while the humanities varied their own interpretative methods in various ways. However, the method always stemmed from a certain philosophical position reducible to two basic points of origin, according to which hermeneutics is understood either as the theory of interpretation or as the skill of understanding. Gadamer’s considerations in Truth and Method were guided by the idea that language is a milieu where “I” and “World” appear in their original co-belonging. This implies that Gadamer’s hermeneutics cannot be a teaching concerning the method of the humanities, but an attempt to come to an agreement as to what the humanities are. Universal hermeneutics should start with the premise that anyone wishing to understand is connected to a thing that arrived at speech through the lore. This posits hermeneutics somewhere “between” the past and the present, as it seeks not to develop the process of understanding but rather to clarify the conditions that capacitate understanding. Hence, the true hermeneutical event is not language as language. It is neither language as grammar nor as lexis. Rather, it is arriving at a word pertaining to what was expressed in the lore. Besides, understanding moving toward action has to be active itself. Following Gadamer’s interpretation, hermeneutics does not use any of its methods to posit itself against its object of cognition, because hermeneutics itself is the method that pushes meaning to speak, rather than speaking for meaning. Hence, the experiential dialectic is preceded by openness to experience, while the dialectics of answering is preceded by the possibility of asking questions. Hermeneutics thereby becomes practical philosophy, and the encounter between tradition and actuality creates a “hermeneutical situation”, where one faces tradition in order to understand actuality. In other words, ahistoric actuality is “fused” with historical consciousness in a single “large horizon”, “that moves from within and that, beyond the frontiers of the present, embraces the historical

62

Chapter Nine

depths of our self-consciousness” (Gadamer 2006, 303). In this process, art plays an extraordinary role. Its typical characteristic is actually the “hermeneutical situation”, which is not characterised by consecutiveness, but by simultaneity and halting, speaking to us by persuading us to converse and participate. This is an alternating game of retreat and advance, pausing and passing, but also of rivalry, that follows the ideal of life’s very movement (as in “the play of waves”, “the play of lights”, etc.) (Gadamer 1997, 59). Invoking Plato’s maxim that the task of philosophical dialectic is to learn “perceiving and bringing together in one idea the scattered particulars” (Phaedrus 265d), Gadamer refers to the anthropological basics of human experience, primarily to the notions of play, symbols, and festivals. In this context, play is life’s elementary function, whereas its elements are found in religious-cult ritual and as “free impulse” in art. It is a movement without anticipating completeness, which stems from the character of “surplus” and aspires to presentation. The role of the mind in human play is opened up through the disciplining of play. However, play always demands co-play and therefore it is basically a communicational action wherein the border between “the one playing” and “the one who observes” the play is erased. In such situations, we have Something that is neither meaningful, nor notional, nor purposeful. It follows that this Something “regulates” its own motions. The artwork continues to exist, though it has not been completed in communication. Actually, the hermeneutical identity of the work will become based in the “apparently evasive” unity of the past and the present, which is achieved through understanding. However, if the (modern) artwork neither “means” nor “says” anything, what is there to identify, or understand? Through the activity of filling up the free space that is bequeathed to us by the artwork, says Gadamer, we divine the answer – and that is called “the experience of art”. Therefore, it is the achievement of reflection, with which modern art refers to us when it addresses us with the actual indefiniteness of referral. In this way, it fills us with an awareness of the importance, of the emphasised meaning of what is before our eyes, what we are incited to reflect upon. And this function is called symbolic. In Gadamer’s case, the procedure of artistic symbolisation is not the representation of something that is outside the artwork. It is not the iconographic symbolism of final vocabularies, but rather the symbolisation of meaning, because symbolic representation in art need not depend on “given things”. Indeed, according to Gadamer, the fact that what we have to say of an actual artwork exists only within the work presents art’s

Gadamer’s Approach to the Paradox of the Open Horizon of Actuality

63

general demand, rather than merely a necessary condition for modern art. This concerns the structural character of art that is comprehensive in regard to communion. Within symbolic representation posited thus, the demand for the hermeneutic search for the identity of an artwork directs us at “learning to spell” the alphabet and language of the one who is presenting something to us, with the aim of participating in a joint achievement. The joint achievement, which is also the third point of the anthropological grounding of the experience of “art’s hermeneutical situation”, is opposition to isolation and is presented as festival. Being a ceremonial act, or being thrown from profane into mythical time (in Mircea Eliade’s terms; Eliade 1968), the festival is staged in the form of a custom (unless it is a mere habitual order), by solemn speech and solemn silence. Such intention of union within the experience of art prevents fragmentation into separate conversations or isolation into particular experiences. Just as Gadamer’s view of the “fusion” between historical horizon and actuality surpasses the seeming absurdity occurring in the encounter between tradition and modernity, in the same way is modernity uncovered as the natural succession of history, interrupted by nothing but long-term and turbulent transitions of both methods and subject fields of research. From interpretation to understanding and/or from text to experience.

Bibliography Eliade, Mircea. 1968. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Boston: HMH. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1986. The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1997. Slika i rijeþ [Word and Image]. Zagreb: Institut za povijest umjetnosti. —. 2006. Truth and Method. London: Continuum. Jünger, Friedrich Georg. 1972. “Mit i jezik” [Myth and Language]. In Mit, tradicija, savremenost [Myth, Tradition, Contemporaneity], by Claude Lévi-Straus et al., 86978. Belgrade: Nolit. Weinrich, Harald. 2004. Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

CHAPTER TEN TRANSGRESSIONS OF UTILITARIAN SPEECH IN BAKHTIN’S SPEECH PRACTICE AND THE TRANS-RATIONAL EXPERIMENT AMRA LATIFIû

Transgression denotes stepping out of the pragmatic and socially instrumental into the sphere beyond: the sphere of the artistic. This process entails leaving the socio-pragmatic field and entering a qualitatively different state of boundlessness, transcendence, the ineffable, the metaphysical, indivisibility, and disinterestedness. The first part of this text offers an analysis of transgression in Bakhtin’s linguistic formulae. The second part comprises an analysis of avant-garde transgression in Russian trans-rational [zaum] literary-poetic speech, where, by means of transgression, the avant-garde became a tactic of turning away, stepping out, subverting, and experimenting vis-à-vis the dominant hierarchy of power in Russian art, culture, and society.

The Transgressive in Bakhtin’s Linguistic Formulae This text constitutes an analysis of Bakhtin’s theoretical communication, in which by means of transgression/violation/overstepping dialectic theory enters a qualitatively different state of the boundless and disinterested. The analysis below involves the detection of transgressive breaks in Bakhtin’s linguistic formulae. The transgressive process takes place in the tense relation between internal perception and the outside world. In Bakhtin’s view, an inter-relative condition entails understanding, that is, a semiotic process. In that sense, a sign is a place of translation, situated as a break between internal experience or perception and the experienced outside event. According to Bakhtin, language emerges in the dialectic tension between these two contexts.

Transgressions of Utilitarian Speech in Bakhtin’s Speech Practice

65

In his linguistic analysis, Bakhtin sets out from the real, practical “life of words”, the social practice of using utilitarian speech, which takes place primarily as spoken interaction (ɪɟɱɟɜɨɟ ɜɡɚɢɦɨɞɟɣɫɬɜɢɟ) between the I and You. Bakhtin’s concept of word is interpreted according to the same matrix as his concept of language. The term word figures in “concrete life” – living speech. Living speech is not the monologue speaking of an isolated subject, but conversation, dialogue between at least two interlocutors. In that regard, Bakhtin developed a philosophical theory of speech qua dialogue. Monologue and dialogue do not constitute two modes of speech; rather, monologue comes into being by reducing dialogue to a single speaking voice. In that sense, Bakhtin views monologue speech not as concrete, but as an abstraction that may live only within a dialogue. The boundaries of an utterance are mobile and determined only in relation to other utterances that precede or follow it. An utterance is a real unit, whose meaning emerges in the mobile sphere of spoken communication. The meaning of an utterance is generated in encounters with other utterances. As a speech product, an utterance acquires meaning only in the process of entering another sphere of spoken communication. As an entity, in Bakhtin’s view, utterance may not be defined by means of linguistic terms or methods. The discipline that comprises the study of utterance is meta-linguistics. The content of the concept of meta-linguistics corresponds to that of the concept of the Marxist philosophy of language. The process of exploring speech genres is meta-linguistic in nature. In that sense, Bakhtin’s meta-linguistics is analogous to his philosophy of language. In Bakhtin’s view, philosophy begins where exact science ends and “other-scholarliness” (ɢɧɨɧɚɭɱɧɨɫɬɶ) begins. Defining “other-scholarliness”, Bakhtin goes a step further, claiming that it may be defined as the meta-language of all disciplines and modes of cognition and consciousness. In Bakhtin’s view, linguistics entails a closed structure that cannot define the elements of language. Bakhtin critiques all understandings of spoken communication that view the sender and recipient as closed categories. Bakhtin’s philosophy of language is open and incomplete. The message is not a closed, premade category, but only emerges in the process of live speech itself. In that sense, according to Bakhtin, there is no common code as a cognitive element in the event of communication either. The code is only a technical means of information, with no cognitive creative significance. In Bakhtin’s words, the code is a “deliberately established, deadened context”. Bakhtin’s communication theory generates a playing field where language is refracted, reflected, and substitutes another reality that exists

66

Chapter Ten

outside of it. Language is ideology, because it constitutes the space of signification, that is, “where there are no signs – there is no ideology” (Bahtin 1980, 9). By perceiving and refracting reality, language crosses the boundaries of its individual givenness. The ideological possesses sign meaning and in that sense the sign character is the common denominator of all ideological phenomena. No ideological sign represents merely a reflection or shadow of reality, but is also a material part of the reality that it perceives/refracts. In Bakhtin’s view, ideological sign phenomena materialise through sound, physical mass, colour, bodily movements… In that sense, the reality of a sign is entirely objective and studied with the monistic method – “a sign is a phenomenon of the outside world” (Bahtin 1980, 11). The effects of a sign are unbroken, linking up with other signs in its social environment and inhabiting external experience. This chain of signification is one of ideological generating and understanding – ideology takes shape from one sign to another and another. Nowhere does such an ideological chain plunge into a mode of being that would be immaterial and not embodied in a sign, and thus “there is no break” (Bahtin 1980, 12). Bakhtin connects this chain with individual consciousnesses: “signs emerge in the process of interaction between individual consciousnesses” (Bahtin 1980, 12). A signification environment may form only on interindividual territory in a social organisation initiated by individual consciousnesses. The logic of ideological communication rests on the logic of consciousness. According to Bakhtin, words are made by individual means, with no external assistance. This determines the role of words as the signification material of internal life – consciousness (internal speech). Consciousness was able to develop only by having a flexible and bodily expressed material. “That material was words” (Bahtin 1980, 12). In that sense, according to Bakhtin, words may not be entirely exteriorised and thus the central object of study moves to inner words – “inner signs” – as one of the central problems in the philosophy of language. All ideological creativity is accompanied by words as a necessary ingredient. Words necessarily accompany every ideological process/act. The processes of understanding any ideological phenomenon (image, music, ritual, procedure) are not realised without the participation of internal speech. All manifestations of ideological creativity, all other, nonverbal signs, are inundated by the verbal flood; they are so inundated by it that they can never entirely be separated from it. (Bahtin 1980, 16)

Words are necessary in all processes of understanding and interpretation.

Transgressions of Utilitarian Speech in Bakhtin’s Speech Practice

67

Concentric circles, so to speak, of verbal echoes and resonances take shape around every ideological sign. Every instance of ideological refraction of being in becoming, in any kind of signification material, is accompanied by its ideological refraction into words, as an obligatory side effect. […] All the analysed specificities of words – their purity of signification, their ideological neutrality, their participation in live communication, their ability to become inner words, and, finally, their obligatory presence as a side effect in every conscious act. (Bahtin 1980, 1617)

Bakhtin further asserts that signs can emerge only on “inter-individual territory”, stressing that the “inter” may not be perceived, but only read. Bakhtin’s conception of the sign is paradoxically constructed around the polarity of inside/outside: psyche/ideology, subject/object. A sign constitutes ideology by representing it and by virtue of its function, but is also part of reality – it is material, objective, but also a phenomenon of the “outside world”. In other words, a sign is a link between the subjective consciousness that produces it and objective reality. Words emerge in the tension between those two relations, in the “interior”/consciousness, striving in its neutrality to acquire external independence. According to Bakhtin, words are “the signification material of inner life – consciousness (inner speech)”. In line with that, Bakhtin derives the process of meaning and understanding. Meaning is a process that may be understood as a “pure relation or function”, inconceivable without the sign (“meaning is a function of the sign”). Meaning entails a process of “inner” experience or perception, which does not figure in the semiotic matrix only on the level of communication, but is formed “for the one who is perceiving only in the material of the sign”. The relation between inner perception and the outside event perceived rests primarily on exceeding/reprocessing/ stepping over those two relations, defined as “crossing from one type of ideological material (e.g. mimic) to another (e.g. linguistic)”. This process of transition/reprocessing/stepping over is defined as understanding. Understanding entails a semiotic process, crossing from one sign system into another, which in turn entails the difference, transformation, and inclusion of a given sign into other signs. The line of orientation implies moving inwards from the reception of the sign. Bakhtin here posits the concept of internalisation. The process of internalisation shows that the sign as such can never be dead, reduced to a mechanistic materialism; in other words, it can never be mechanistically reduced to a signal. In the process of internalisation, the sign continually moves within the strict framework of the subject. This framework is subject to the process of the coming and going of signs. A sign is material, but fluid – moving, but never leaving itself.

68

Chapter Ten

The Transgressive in the Trans-rational Experiment This text also comprises an analysis of the Russian trans-rational experiment as an avant-garde literary-poetic type of speech. In the linguistic-verbal experiment of trans-sense [zaum], it detects zones of transgression. In the domain of the artistic, aesthetic, political, and existential, the trans-rational experiment became the horizon of projecting the New as a defining characteristic of a dominant modernity and in its optimal projection of the future, the transgressive penetrated into the utopian. Trans-sense becomes an avant-garde critique of the utilitarian, but also, at the same time, a new scene and vanguard of a dominant modernist culture. Trans-sense critiques, provokes, negates, and problematises the legitimacy of utilitarian sense. In its structure, transsense operates in its own right, constitutes the linguistic flow of events and thus acquires the status of a subject; it is independent from the speaker and thus simultaneously becomes a medium of expression and expression itself. Trans-rational words become a functional means of independent matter. The trans-rational tendency to objectify the text, the emphasis on the graphic dimension of the sign, as well as stressing the independent role of sound, valorise the text as a value in its own right. The remainder of this text offers an analysis of the trans-rational formulae of Russian avantgarde poet Aleksei Kruchenykh, a major representative of the Russian trans-rational experiment. Kruchenykh champions the idea that the work of art, in the referential sense, is an open, free construction. That implies that the work of art is a formal construction and not a possible image of the world. In that sense, the artist herself occupies a second-degree position in relation to production – the artist creates not only the contents and forms of art, but also art itself, art in itself. The basic ideas of Russian futurist poetry were represented by the experimental solutions of Aleksei Kruchenykh and Viktor Khlebnikov. Their ideas of a new, trans-rational language were closely linked to their interest in primeval, primitive speech and linguistic forms,1 as well as in the speech of children, folklore elements in the Russian language, Slavic mythology, and speech in religious cults. The futuristic striving to create a trans-rational language harboured the idea of a new verbal, semantic meaning of words. The ultimate goal of their explorations was to create words as pure articulative-semantic compositions, at the same time excluding the normative value of sound. Trans-rational poetry rests on intuition and trans-rational rhetoric. Kruchenykh wrote:

Transgressions of Utilitarian Speech in Bakhtin’s Speech Practice

69

What we experience we cannot say with words (words and concepts are ossified) – words are tiresome – they are gnoseologically empty. Hence the striving for a trans-rational, free language. One resorts to such a way of thinking at important moments in one’s life. (Ʉɪɭɱɺɧɵɯ 2001, 19)

Kruchenykh introduces the concept of the “self-sufficient” word, or “word as such”. For Kruchenykh, “self-sufficiency” signifies the emancipation of words from their subservient meanings. By emancipating words from their subservient meanings, poetic articulation achieves freedom and independence. Kruchenykh defined the extra-signification field by means of the visual-graphic and sonic-graphic qualities of words. Within the boundaries of those qualities Kruchenykh searched for new meanings. Example: a

e

u

e

e

u

iii

e

In his initial idea to create a trans-rational language, Kruchenykh pursued the view that the practice of language not only reproduced urlinguistic elements, but also produced linguistic practice outside of its surrounding speech. The language of trans-sense becomes a vital, active element of society at the moment of its utterance. Voices – speaking objects construct the atmosphere, not the story. The text becomes a media, spatial, and temporal happening. The trans-rational experiment becomes a pure “speech act” or “verbal situation”, in which meaning stems as much from the newly created semantic meaning of the poem, as it does from the intentions and ways of speaking it, that is, from a speech act. Such a reading does not create a final and thus closed meaning; rather, each reading and performance produces a new moment in the process of signification. Therefore, Kruchenykh’s trans-rational text constitutes an autonomous, that is, authentic writing, which in every voice, whilst mechanically performed, locates the ontological specificity of the transfiguration of linguistic codes. According to Boris Eichenbaum, a key procedure that links up with trans-sense is that of montage.

70

Chapter Ten The original nature of art is the need to exploit and organise those energies of the human organism that are excluded from the usual way of life or act in it only partially, unilaterally. That is its biological basis anyway, which demonstrates the power of a vital need that demands satisfaction. That basis, essentially playful and unrelated to any specifically expressed “sense”, is embodied in those “trans-rational”, “self-targeted” tendencies that one glimpses in all art and that appear as its organic ferments. (Ejhenbaum 1972, 14748)

Montage, as one of the syntactic plans of trans-rational poetic constructions, constitutes both the genesis and construction of the transrational text. As a constitutive genetic principle, montage allows the metapoetics of trans-sense to emerge by combining readymade or modified entities from other texts. Constructing trans-rational texts by means of the montage principle enables the building of a trans-rational heterogeneous composition comprising not a deductive thought process, which would compose a closed thought entity within a poetic construction, but an inductive thought process that begins with equal and independent fragments of linguistic sets, toward an open poetic entity. From the perspective of montage construction, a trans-rational text is a composition comprising a potentially endless series of sub-compositions that enable a simultaneous presentation of heterogeneous thematic-stylistic and genetic materials. Such a series of trans-rational autonomous fragments involves the alternation of linguistic genealogical materials, para-philological statements and axioms. The basic montage unit of trans-rational experimentation is the arch-unit of the thought process, which emerges in the process of deconstructing utilitarian language. The process initiates the reduction of narration down to the basic, ur-matter of language and the sign. Breaking and reducing the logic of speech regulated by the norms of utilitarian communication and the process of trans-rational montage reveal the potential infinity of text. The trans-rational procedure opens room for an endless development of linguistic generative powers. In its ultimate process, transgression in Bakhtin’s speech practice and transgression in the Russian trans-rational experiment are not technical transgressions of linguistic forms, but products of inner experience. They entail an individual act of crossing the boundaries of the rational, the everyday. Both phenomena clearly detect and exploit the power of prohibition. Transgression thereby enters into a decentred discourse. In that sense, an individual is obliged to engage in subversion, a break in her own or collective existence. This path excludes anarchy; both courses lead toward inner experience through ecstasy and the sublime. They both entail

Transgressions of Utilitarian Speech in Bakhtin’s Speech Practice

71

vertical movement and crossing over the bodily dimension. Both types of analysis entail interpreting the deep structure of a text, not just its surface structure, that is, linguistic composition. In addition to its surface structure, the system of a text also includes its deep structure, which, via inner experience, materialises the ideal, invisible plane of language. In this ideal zone of language, one does not study the “grammar” or “linguistics” of language, but realises the interrelation and inter-production of the external and internal planes. In that sense, when it comes to the deep structural zone of language and inner experience, with their clearly set up coordinates, neither type of transgression falls into the materialist trap of searching for a reflection of society in the ultimate instance of language. Nor does the deep structural zone of language rest on causality or sonic expressivity, but rather implies a reference that is performative in character. That means that a text produces its own reference within a concrete context and only then may its position and operation in society be determined. The key question regarding both types of transgression is not what the text is saying, but what it does, what it demonstrates by speaking (out) in society. Though similar in the initial stages of their respective processes, transgression/overstepping in Bakhtin’s speech practice and transgression/overstepping in the trans-rational experiment imply different processes. In Bakhtin’s speech practice, transgression/overstepping implies the process of semiotic immersion in relation to utilitarian speech. In the trans-rational experiment, it entails the process of transcendental expansion, again in relation to utilitarian speech. Pursuing their respective goals, both types of transgression undergo similar stages in their respective processes: 1) studying the content of social speech as that which is publicly revealed in speech; 2) detecting points of censorship constructed by the context in which the text emerges; 3) analysing the text’s surface materiality (sound, physical mass, colour…); 4) redirecting attention to the relationship between what is concealed in speech and the materiality of the text, that is, finding the interrelation and inter-production of the surface and deep structure of the text, more specifically: 4a) the interrelation oriented toward the process of semiotic immersion and 4b) the interrelation oriented toward the process of transcendental expansion; 5) semiotic and transcendental transgression/violation/overstepping; 6) conquering the zone of infinity, the ineffable, indivisibility, or disinterestedness, entering the Absolute Field of Art, of artistic acting and understanding art.

72

Chapter Ten

Notes 1

The return to the language of primitive societies in the analyses of Russian transrational poets was also influenced by the Primitivist movement in the visual arts. In December 1909, the first works in the Primitivist style were presented at an exhibition titled Ɂɨɥɨɬɨɟ ɪɭɧɨ (The Golden Fleece). In theory and historiography, the term futurism, as a generic term for the early period of the Russian avant-garde (1910௅1915) appears in various guises. In his History of Russian Futurism, Vladimir Nabokov uses the term “primitivist futurism”.

Bibliography Bahtin, Mihail [Bakhtin, Mikhail]. 1980. Marksizam i filozofija jezika [Marxism and the Philosophy of Language]. Belgrade: Nolit. Ejhenbaum, Boris [Eichenbaum, Boris]. 1972. Književnost [Literature]. Belgrade: Nolit. Ʉɪɭɱɺɧɵɯ, Ⱥɥɟɤɫɟɣ [Kruchenykh, Aleksei]. 2001. ɋɬɢɯɨɬɜɨɪɟɧɢɹ. ɉɨɷɦɵ. Ɋɨɦɚɧɵ. Ɉɩɟɪɚ. Saint Petersburg: Ⱥɤɚɞɟɦɢɱɟɫɤɢɣ ɩɪɨɟɤɬ.

CHAPTER ELEVEN JACQUES ATTALI’S CONCEPT OF THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MUSIC IN THE CONTEXT OF THE RECORDING INDUSTRY IN FORMER YUGOSLAVIA MARIJA MAGLOV

This text examines the concept of the political economy of music first discussed by French economist and theorist Jacques Attali in his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music.1 The concept is observed here in the context of the recording industry in former Yugoslavia, because in my opinion, Attali’s ideas, grouped around this problem, can provide new and interesting insights into the role of recorded music in Yugoslav society. Thus, I shall first present Attali’s thesis and one particular part of his narrative, focused on the problem of repetition and related to the condition of the recording industry in general. The main idea of Attali’s book is that music can, in a way, announce future developments in society and history. For him, music “heralds, for it is prophetic. It has always been in essence a herald of times to come” (Attali 1985, 4). The specific duality between music and noise is an important issue in Attali’s book, as he sees music, qua any organisation of sound, as a “tool for the creation or consolidation of a community” (Attali 1985, 6). In that sense, music shows that society is possible. Noise, then, is a dissonance in the social order, an act of violence that may and eventually will break that existing order. A specific “leitmotif” in Attali’s book, Pieter Brueghel’s painting The Fight between Carnival and Lent, is used to illustrate this constant battle between Harmony and Dissonance, Order and Disorder (Attali 1985, 21). But, as illustrative as this painting may be, Attali still gives precedence to music, to the audible over the visual, when it comes to understanding the world surrounding us (Attali 1985, 3). This is because

74

Chapter Eleven styles and economic organization [of music] are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible. (Attali 1985, 11)

What this quotation shows is that Attali thinks of music not only as a work of art. Instead, its economic organisation in different periods has a distinctive role in Attali’s narrative, although particular activities of artists, “classical” and “popular” alike, are certainly important in his discourse as well. Obviously, for him, music is not an autonomous activity, but nor is it “an automatic indicator of the economic infrastructure” (Attali 1985, 5). Rather, Attali emphasises the role of music as a herald, because, as he argues, it is in music that the possibilities of a given code of a social order can be first noticed, or, more precisely, heard. On the other hand, the future breakdown of that order is first recognised in the noise and dissonances that occur in the existing order. Fredric Jameson duly recognised the unconventionality of Attali’s conception, when he wrote in his foreword to the American edition of Attali’s book that Attali is the first “to have drawn the other possible logical consequences” of the Marxist model of the relationship between base and superstructure (Attali 1985, xi). Instead of following the traditional approach to this relation, which implies that the superstructure is always affected by the base, Attali argues that the superstructure may also announce future social, political, and economical developments. So, what are the exact orders through which Attali traces the changing modes of the political economy of music? It is important to note that Attali acknowledges the simultaneity of different codes and overlapping between periods, forms and styles, which certainly makes his narrative a sort of exciting noise in itself: it is neither clear nor systematic, but rather fragmented, rich in examples with overlapping observations, not exactly delineated in terms of a specific time period, although one may trace a certain line in time, as the orders in the end do replace one another. Thus, Attali distinguishes between three different orders, referring to “three strategic usages of music by power”: first, music as ritual sacrifice, serving to make people forget violence; second, music as representation, making people believe in order and harmony, finally, music as repetition, serving to silence and censor all human noises (Attali 1985, 1920). The fourth order, that of composing, of greater freedom and improvisation, in music and society alike, is yet to come, as Attali concludes and predicts by listening to the music and noise of his own time. Whether that final, utopian aspect of his narrative has proved right remains open for

Jacques Attali’s Concept of the Political Economy of Music

75

discussion. Here, I shall focus on the relationships between music, power, politics, economy, and society given in the order of repetition. As Attali explains, “repetition began as the by-product of representation” (Attali 1985, 85). Although it was meant as a way of preserving a specific network (representation), recording was to create another (repetition) and thus “heralded an immense mutation in knowledge and politics” (Attali 1985, 90). Speaking of the phonograph, the development of which marked the beginning of the new technology of recording, Attali comments that “the dominant system only desired to preserve a recording of its representation of power, to preserve itself” (Attali 1985, 92). Instead, this technology imposed a new social system, completed the process of the deritualisation of music and heralded a new economy and politics, in music as well as in other aspects of society (Attali 1985, 89). These were the economy of leisure and the economy of signs, and the music industry, with all of its derivatives, was their precursor (Attali 1985, 37). For Attali, music was “undoubtedly the first system of sign production”. By the mid 20th century, it was becoming obvious in more and more aspects of society that representation was not enough, as the new economy required accumulation. That is why “in order to accumulate profit, it becomes necessary to sell stockpileable sign production, not simply its spectacle” (Attali 1985, 37). The idea of the mere possibility of saving and stockpiling at home, where the pleasure resides in accumulating something that is not essential for living, marks the economy of post-WWII society (first in America, then globally). American musicologist Robert Fink explains that, after the Second World War, “rising productivity threatened to flood industrialized economies with a glut of goods”, which is why attention shifted to the creation of desire and hence to the rationalisation of a society dependent on advertising – repetitive marketing strategies (Fink 2005, 10).2 Of course, Attali finds the first traces of this in music (Attali 1985, 10609). Fink credits Attali for his unmatched insights in the ways in which “technological advances in production and reproduction engender pervasive repetition in consumer society”, although his own insights into this culture of repetition differ somewhat from Attali’s (Fink 2005, 8). Nevertheless, we may conclude that repetitive processes are strongly connected with the capitalist, consumer, mass-media society of the late 20th century. Attali notes that one of the effects of technology repetition is the reduction of music to a simulacrum of its original, ritualistic function, where reproduction presents the death of the original and the triumph of a copy, which conditions the forgetting of the foundation that was once represented (Attali 1985, 89). This “triumph of a copy” bore consequences

76

Chapter Eleven

for the reception of music. Recordings made music available to all, which meant that accessibility replaced the exclusivity of the festival and that listening to music became a more individualised activity, in contrast to its erstwhile collective reception (Attali 1985, 100). Due to this change, the value of music no longer depends on the ritual, but on its commerciality, on its ability to attract buyers. Of course, collective listening did not disappear, but the reception of music was deeply influenced by this new, individualised practice. Inseparable from that practice is the new, more abstract form of aesthetics, which the listener begins to require because of the production criteria imposed by technology (Attali 1985, 106). A clinically pure acoustics becomes one of the most important qualities of music. Quality, purity, and the elimination of all noise, the emptying of the body of its needs and reducing it to silence are all characteristics that, according to Attali, constitute the new musical ideal (Attali 1985, 122). Thus, the use of music as a tool of power for censoring human noises, mentioned above, is thereby confirmed. While the second half of the 20th century in the United States and other Western societies was, as was mentioned before, marked by capitalism (and still is), Yugoslavia was a socialist republic. In the dominant socialist rhetoric, the values of capitalist society were criticised, although Yugoslav socialism was more open to the West than were countries belonging to the Eastern Bloc. Bearing in mind that repetitive practices, including the recording industry, are more closely connected to the capitalist order, questions could be raised about the status and role of the music recording industry in the socialist context of former Yugoslavia. While, as is well known, Yugoslavia fell apart and its former constituent republics have been transitioning to capitalism, my position is that Attali’s model of “hearing” the future through music and its practices might be used retroactively and interpreted as heralding the capitalist order that was eventually to come. The examples I use stem from my research of the archives of the PGP-RTB recording label.3 Although not the only such institution in Yugoslavia, PGP-RTB was certainly one of the biggest and most important, so insight into its production yields relevant information about Yugoslavia’s recording industry at the time. I will focus on their classical music recordings as well as recordings of socialist mass songs and other forms of music featuring socialist content. Socialist rhetoric regarded classical music, among other products of high culture, as something belonging to the entire society (this, of course, does not apply to socialist societies alone, but must be noted here). High culture was supposed to be equally distributed to everyone (Zlatiü 1977,

Jacques Attali’s Concept of the Political Economy of Music

77

38), and the role of classical music in the formation of the “emotional and moral world of the new man” was emphasised (Popov 1980, 35). The role of the recording industry in this context was conceived as “the realisation of the cultural mission that is expected from this production” (Plavša 1977, 205). Licensed editions covered a wide range of canonical classical compositions, often grouped according to the stated aim of the popularisation of this music,4 while Yugoslavia’s own production was focused on local composers and performers. Despite emphasising the educational role of recording, the final result of Yugoslavia’s recording industry did not differ much from those of capitalist societies. Regardless of its stated rationale, Yugoslavia’s recording industry resulted in the formation of a market and a repetitive production of signs, which eventually led to a different economic order. But it is the production of mass song recordings and other music related to socialist themes that really draws our attention. This music was meant as a celebration and representation of socialist society and its symbols (Tito, the revolution, the Army, the workers, etc.).5 It certainly strove to emphasise collectiveness and equality as qualities of socialism. That said, what was actually achieved by recording this music and making it commercially available to the solitary listener? By attempting to preserve representation, with the recording as its by-product, and by making it available to all, the idea of accessibility truly replaces the festival. The recording produces a simulacrum of the original function of this music, silencing its possible noises and corporeality, in the aesthetic ideal of purity immanent to recordings. Finally, the representative role of this music is reduced to a sign as a product intended for the market, with the music’s original meaning muted. One recognises here Attali’s description of the effects caused by recordings. Thus, in the case of Yugoslavia, the technology of reproduction heralded the transition to a new order. The question of the relationship between socialism and capitalism in Yugoslavia is complex; the specific paradoxical situation of Yugoslavia was that its dominant socialist rhetoric, which gave the impression that the society was headed toward communism, collided with a political and economic reality that inclined toward capitalism, as Vesna Mikiü explains in her contribution to this volume. In music qua practice that explores the possibilities of a given code before other social practices, as we saw in Attali (Attali 1985, 11), and in its economic organisation, this paradox is even more evident. By following Attali’s example and accepting that the world is for hearing, not for beholding (Attali 1985, 3), we might learn, either retroactively or presently, more about the intricate relations of politics, economy, and society, with music as their inseparable part.

78

Chapter Eleven

Notes 1

The first French edition was published in 1977 as Bruits. Essai sur l’économie politique de la musique by Presses Universitaires de France and translated into English in 1985 as Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Manchester University Press in the UK and University of Minnesota Press in the US). The second, revised edition was published in 2001 by Fayard. 2 Fink’s study is concerned with the problem of various musical practices, among them minimalism, in what he calls the culture of repetition. 3 This acronym stands for “Produkcija gramofonskih ploþa Radio televizije Beograd” (Belgrade Radio Television Gramophone Records Production). It was founded in 1951. 4 E.g. vinyl editions with titles such as Music of the Millions and I Love Music (both by Philips). The mere fact that these were licensed editions, originally published by a major European label, confirms that there was no great difference between Yugoslavia’s music recording industry and those of Western European countries. 5 Some examples of these vinyl editions: Pesme o Partiji (Songs about the Party, 1979), Da nam živi, živi rad (Long, Long Live Labour, 1976, on the 30th anniversary of youth work actions), Himna pobede (The Victory Anthem, dedicated to the victory over fascism), Pesme o Titu (Songs about Tito), etc.

Bibliography Attali, Jacques. 1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Fink, Robert. 2005. Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press. Plavša, Dušan. 1977. “Dela jugoslovenskih kompozitora u medijima reprodukcije (radio, televizija, gramofonske ploþe i kasete)” [Works by Yugoslav Composers in Reproduction Media (Radio, Television, Gramophone Records, and Audio Tapes)]. In Kongres Saveza organizacija kompozitora Jugoslavije, eds. Nenad Turkalj et al., 199212. Zagreb: SOKOJ. Popov, I. 1980. “Muzika – nevolja ili sreüa” (Music – Trouble or Joy). Pro musica 102௅103: 3435. Zlatiü, Slavko. 1977. “Aktualna pitanja tkzv. masovne muziþke kulture (Širenje muziþke kulture kao zadatak omasovljavanja)” [Current Issues Related to So-called Mass Music Culture (The Dissemination of Musical Culture as the Task of Popularisation)]. In Kongres Saveza organizacija kompozitora Jugoslavije. eds. Nenad Turkalj et al., 3545. Zagreb: SOKOJ.

CHAPTER TWELVE SOME ASPECTS OF THE CONTEMPORARY METHODOLOGICAL POSITION IN MAZEL’S INTEGRAL ANALYSIS METHOD OF ANALYSING MUSICAL WORKS SONJA MARINKOVIû

The Serbian theoretical school was founded around 1900 by musicians educated at German,1 Bohemian,2 Austrian,3 and French4 conservatories, and their influence was dominant in the first half of the 20th century. But following the Second World War, the influence of the Soviet/Russian theoretical school gained strength, especially in certain theoretical subjects: harmony, music analysis, and, more recently, counterpoint.5 For a short time in 1947, the Belgrade high school of music changed its curriculum, implementing the Soviet system of education, but political circumstances quickly eliminated that influence in 1948. Although in the field of historical musicology the influence of Soviet scholars was very significant (especially works by Livanova, Gruber, Druskin, Keldysh, and Asafyev), in music theory the western influence remained dominant. In the main theoretical textbooks we find citations of only Soviet authors: Asafyev,6 Sposobin,7 Rimsky-Korsakov,8 Skrebkova and Skrebkov,9 and Berkov.10 Since the 1990s, Serbian music theory familiarised itself with some of the works of Rimsky-Korsakov, Taneyev, Yavorsky, Tsukkerman, Simakova, Rïzhkin, Mikhailov, and Mazel, including Mazel and Tsukkerman’s Ⱥɧɚɥɢɡ ɦɭɡɵɤɚɥɶɧɵɯ ɩɪɨɢɡɜɟɞɟɧɢɣ (1967), which was the most popular and influential one. Thanks to this work, Serbian music theorists familiarised themselves with some of the research methods of integral analysis, but the concept in general, its genesis, doubts, and evolution were never studied. The aim of my work is to emphasise certain crucial points of the integral analysis method covered by Mazel’s scholarly research.

80

Chapter Twelve

The Founding of Integral Analysis The foundation of the Soviet musical theory of integral analysis is associated with the works of Tsukkerman, Rïzhkin, and Mazel from the 1930s and its development has now been going on for over 80 years. The concept was proposed in Tsukkerman’s lecture courses presented at the Moscow Conservatory and developed in his and Mazel’s papers on works by Rimsky-Korsakov (ɐɭɤɤɟɪɦɚɧ 1933), Chopin (Ɇɚɡɟɥɶ 2008), and Tchaikovsky (Ɇɚɡɟɥɶ 1958). Tsukkerman’s theoretical position is hermeneutical, attempting to unite insights from different subjects (solfège, harmony, orchestration, music analysis, and aesthetics). He combined integral analysis with the analysis of intonation, musical language, and artistic image (ɨɛɪɚɡ), as well as with the analysing of style, genre, forms, concepts, and composers’ ideas. Also important for further development of the method was Tsukkerman’s analysis of musical form which is based on Asafyev’s theory (Musical Form as a Process, 1930– 1947) and defines three basic formal principles: impulse, process, and result.11 Asafyev’s intonation theory was likewise very important. In Russian, the term “intonation” has broader implications than in English, encompassing various expressive aspects of musical form. Intonation theory attempts to explain music as a language, stressing its communicational function and socio-cultural aspects (Ɉɬɚɲɟɜɢʄ 2011 and Marinkoviü 2007). Traditional analysis discusses music in terms of form: it began as a pedagogical discipline working to explain, as precisely as possible, what happens in a musical work and yet is still very pragmatic.

Mazel’s Concept of Integral Analysis Mazel’s contribution to defining and developing the integral analysis method is of utmost importance. He was one of the founders of the Soviet theoretical school and professor at the Moscow Conservatory for many years (1931–1967). He introduced the history of music theory in the Conservatory’s curriculum – with Rïzhkin, he co-wrote Ocherki po istorii teoreticheskogo muzïkoznaniya (An Outline of the History of Theoretical Musicology) – and developed his ideas about integral analysis in many of his writings, often discussing their potentials as well as shortcomings over a long period of about 50 years. Mazel’s aim was to integrate all aspects of analysis within a wide aesthetic context. He decoded aesthetic principles by which a musical work influences the listener and explored the complexity and concentration of that influence, interactions of functions,

Methodological Position in Mazel’s Integral Analysis Method

81

inertia, and its disturbing, paradoxical discrepancy (contradictions) as well as higher natural dispositions. For him, the crucial concepts were those of the heuristic potential of integral analysis and artistic innovation (Ɇɚɡɟɥɶ 1953). Like Tsukkerman, Mazel combined formal, generic, stylistic, thematic, harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral analysis with other disciplines: history, philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, psychology, linguistics, culturology, and the natural sciences. Mazel and Tsukkerman’s book on the analysis of smaller forms was crucial in formulating the key principles of integral analysis. It was formulated by using the dialectic method, consistent with the time and place of its writing. The authors thus point out that scientific knowledge starts from a direct, still undifferentiated understanding of the work, then moves to the study of its individual elements, then once more to the whole – a synthetic grasp of the form on a higher level (Ɇɚɡɟɥɶ and ɐɭɤɤɟɪɦɚɧ 1967).

The book is written as a textbook that sets the basics of the new approach to studying music forms. Before the October Revolution, the conservatories had a dual approach to teaching music analysis. For performers, it was theoretical and consisted of analysing musical works. For composers and theorists, it was mostly practical: they wrote compositions in varying forms. The interwar period saw the introduction of separate courses in composition and courses of music analysis gained a new purpose: teaching students to engage in complex, multi-layered, comprehensive/integral analyses of works of music to explain, using objective, scientific criteria, their contents along with their forms. Namely, by studying the form of a piece, a synonym for its compositional plan,12 including not just individual parts, but the whole, and different elements of the musical language (melody, harmony, etc.) not separately, but in terms of their combined structural contribution to the general compositional plan of the work. The authors argue that teaching musical forms must not be reduced to “studying empty schematics” disregarding their historical and stylistic contexts, but must take into account the circumstances of their emergence, the reasons behind their evolution, and the different ways they are treated in various styles and genres. The authors did not consider themselves the creators of integral analysis, but saw its origins in the work of A. Serov and S. Taneyev from the latter half of the 19th century. They also concluded that no work could be truly understood without comparing it to other works of art (sometimes not only of music), the composer’s style in general, the style of the compositional school and national culture to which the composer

82

Chapter Twelve

belonged, and the socio-historical circumstances of the work’s emergence. In their view, one had to be familiar with the relevant facts from the composer’s biography, testimonies about her artistic beliefs, tastes, the circumstances of her life that might have affected the work, the original idea, as well as the compositional process (reconstructed from the preserved drafts). Also relevant, in their view, were testimonies about the work’s reception by performers and audiences, music critics, supporters and detractors, as well as disputes and the further discussions triggered by the work. It would also be desirable to know about the work’s performance history and to analyse different interpretations of it. Mazel and Tsukkerman were fully aware of the complexity of their agenda and their course’s primary objective was to teach students how to choose relevant historical data in analysing concrete cases. In particular, students would be taught about the method’s defining characteristics, especially its unique elements, irrespective of the circumstances or immediate purpose of analysis. For Mazel and Tsukkerman, it was also important to master certain practical habits of integral analysis: interpretation must always be approached from the musical resources themselves. However, it must not end there. This is merely the method’s basis and specific approach. It includes understanding the key elements of music and its expressive and constructive roles. It also includes the study of musical syntax, sentence structure, musical themes, and the general principles of music’s development and structuring. Understandably, such a model of studying musical forms would also include learning about their history, origins and development, and changes in the context of different styles and genres. Integral analysis was thus set up not only as a systematic, but also as a diachronic discipline. The book begins with an aesthetic discussion of the nature of expression in music and characteristics of musical language, illuminating the nature and features of the notion of genre in music and demonstrating the importance of perceiving the mutual synergy of the elements of musical expression. The first part of the book sets the basic principles of the method, while subsequent chapters contain detailed and extensive discussions, supported by numerous examples and analyses of the following aspects of musical works: melody, metre and rhythm, the expressive and structural functions of harmony, the expressive and structural functions of dynamics, timbre and texture, parsing issues, the proportions between individual parts of overall structure, periodisation, and, finally, a summary of integral analysis as an analytical method.

Methodological Position in Mazel’s Integral Analysis Method

83

In musicology, Mazel’s concept of integral analysis appears as a universal multilevel scholarly and integrative system of musicalphilosophical comprehension of the world, considering the multiple layers of this analytical method (intonation, image, concept, style, era) in the context of a scientific methodology (of music, ethics, and aesthetic philosophy, as well as the psychological, literary and linguistic, cultural, and physical-mathematical methods of analysis).

A Contradiction in the Method Mazel also spoke about a contradiction inherent to the method: while integral analysis in theory means “encompassing a musical work as a whole”, in practice it could be also formulated as “analysing the whole, concerning its main principles and laws”. The most famous examples of Mazel’s method are his analyses of works by Beethoven, Chopin, Grieg, Tchaikovsky, and Shostakovich, in which he identified many innovative elements in those composers’ language. Finally, it is worth noting that Mazel himself, in his later works, questions regarding integral analysis as a theory, arguing for understanding it as a specific method of analysis with a primarily pedagogical significance. More recent discussions have sought to posit the concept of integral analysis as part of general as well as specific methods of scientific cognition: dialectics, induction, deduction, structural cognition, classification, historical cognition, Bergsonian intuitionism, associative cognition, comparative cognition, binary analysis, aesthetic analysis, morphology, etc. (Ʉɨɧɫɨɧ 2010). From the perspective of contemporary music theory, it is important to point out that the Soviet concept of integral analysis problematises the traditional view of the relations between the respective methods of music theory and historiography, thus striking a decidedly contemporary methodological position.

Notes 1

S. Mokranjac (1856–1914), C. Manojloviü (1869–1939), K. Manojloviü (1890– 1949), M. Paunoviü (1889–1924), M. Milojeviü (1884–1946). 2 M. Milojeviü, P. Konjoviü (1883–1970), M. Tajþeviü (1900–1984), M. Logar (1902–1998), D. ýoliü (1907–1987), M. Ristiü (1908–1982), Lj. Mariü (1909– 2003), S. Rajiþiü (1910–2000), V. Vuþkoviü (1910–1942). 3 M. Tajþeviü, V. Periþiü (1927–2000). 4 V. Ĉorÿeviü (1869–1938), P. Bingulac (1897–1990), M. Ristiü, M. Živkoviü (1935).

84

Chapter Twelve

5

Zoran Božaniü’s 1971 dissertation Teorija složenog kontrapunkta na primeru muziþke prakse strogog stila (Theory of Complex Counterpoint in the Strict Style) is based on Taneyev’s theory. 6 Ⱥɫɚɮɶɟɜ 1930, in Skovran and Periþiü 1991 and Popoviü 1998. 7 ɋɩɨɫɨɛɢɧ 1947 in Skovran and Periþiü 1991 and Popoviü 1998. 8 Ɋɢɦɫɤɢɣ-Ʉɨɪɫɚɤɨɜ 1946 and Zrjakovskij 1963 in Despiü 1986. 9 ɋɤɪɟɛɤɨɜɚ and ɋɤɪɟɛɤɨɜ 1948 in Despiü 1970. 10 Ȼɟɪɤɨɜ 1977 in Despiü 1989. 11 See Marinkoviü 2002. 12 That is, a realised plan, like that of an existing city, not a preliminary plan.

Bibliography Despiü, Dejan. 1970. Harmonska analiza. Belgrade: Umetniþka akademija. —. 1986. Muziþki instrumenti. Belgrade: Univerzitet umetnosti. —. 1989. Kontrast tonaliteta. Belgrade: Univerzitet umetnosti. Marinkoviü, Sonja. 2007. “Pojam dramaturgija forme u analitiþkoj praksi.” In Zbornik Katedre za muziþku teoriju: Muziþka teorija i analiza 4, eds. Mirjana Živkoviü et al., 3647. Belgrade: Fakultet muziþke umetnosti. —. 2002. “Qustions on the Symphonic Style.” In Music and Media, eds. Vesna Mikiü and Tatjana Markoviü, 7277. Belgrade: FoM. Popoviü, Berislav. 1998. Muziþka forma ili smisao u muzici. Belgrade: Clio and Kulturni centar Beograda. Skovran, Dušan and Vlastimir Periþiü. 1991. Nauka o muziþkim oblicima. Belgrade: Univerzitet umetnosti. Ɂɪɹɤɨɜɫɤɢɣ, ɇɢɤɨɥɚɣ ɇ. [Zryakovskiy, Nikolai N.]. 1963. Ɉɛɳɱɢɣ ɤɭɪɫ ɢɧɫɬɪɭɦɟɧɬɨɜɟɞɟɧɢɹ. Moscow: Ɇɭɡɝɢɡ. Ⱥɫɚɮɶɟɜ, Ȼɨɪɢɫ ȼ. 1963. Ɇɭɡɵɤɚɥɶɧɚɹ ɮɨɪɦɚ ɤɚɤ ɩɪɨɰɟɫɫ. Leningrad: Ƚɨɫɦɭɡ. Ȼɟɪɤɨɜ, ȼɢɤɬɨɪ Ɉ. 1977. Ɏɨɪɦɨɨɛɪɚɡɭɸɳɢɟ ɫɪɟɞɫɬɜɚ ɝɚɪɦɨɧɢɢ. Moscow: ɋɨɜɟɬɫɤɢɣ ɤɨɦɩɨɡɢɬɨɪ. Ʉɨɧɫɨɧ, Ƚ. Ɋ. [Konson, G. R.]. 2010. ɐɟɥɨɫɬɧɵɣ ɚɧɚɥɢɡ ɤɚɤ ɭɧɢɜɟɪɫɚɥɶɧɵɣ ɦɟɬɨɞ ɧɚɭɱɧɨɝɨ ɩɨɡɧɚɧɢɹɵ ɯɭɞɨɠɟɫɬɜɟɧɧɵɯ ɬɟɤɫɬɨɜ (ɧɚ ɦɚɬɟɪɢɚɥɟ ɦɭɡɵɤɚɥɶɧɨɝɨ ɢɫɤɭɫɫɬɜɚ). Moscow: Ʉɨɦɩɨɡɢɬɨɪ. Ɇɚɡɟɥɶ, Ʌɟɜ Ⱥ. and ɂɨɫɢɮ ə. Ɋɵɠɤɢɧ. 193439. Ɉɱɟɪɤɢ ɩɨ ɢɫɬɨɪɢɢ ɬɟɨɪɟɬɢɱɟɫɤɨɝɨ ɦɭɡɵɤɨɡɧɚɧɢɹ. Moscow: Ɇɭɡɝɢɡ. Ɇɚɡɟɥɶ, Ʌɟɜ Ⱥ. 1953. “Ɂɚɦɟɬɤɢ ɨ ɧɨɜɚɬɨɪɫɬɜɟ.” ɋɨɜɟɬɫɤɚɹ ɦɭɡɵɤɚ 7: 4357. —. 1958. “Ⱦɜɟ ɡɚɦɟɬɤɢ ɨ ɜɡɚɢɦɨɜɥɢɹɧɢɢ ɨɩɟɪɧɵɯ ɢ ɫɢɦɮɨɧɢɱɟɫɤɢɯ ɩɪɢɧɰɢɩɨɜ ɭ ɑɚɣɤɨɜɫɤɨɝɨ.” ɋɨɜɟɬɫɤɚɹ ɦɭɡɵɤɚ 9: 6773.

Methodological Position in Mazel’s Integral Analysis Method

85

Ɇɚɡɟɥɶ, Ʌɟɜ Ⱥ. and ȼɢɤɬɨɪ Ⱥ. ɐɭɤɤɟɪɦɚɧ. 1967. Ⱥɧɚɥɢɡ ɦɭɡɵɤɚɥɶɧɵɯ ɩɪɨɢɡɜɟɞɟɧɢɣ. ɗɥɟɦɟɧɬɵ ɦɭɡɵɤɢ ɢ ɦɟɬɨɞɢɤɚ ɚɧɚɥɢɡɚ ɦɚɥɵɯ ɮɨɪɦ. Moscow: Ɇɭɡɵɤɚ. Ɇɚɡɟɥɶ, Ʌɟɜ Ⱥ. 1937. ɂɫɫɥɟɞɨɜɚɧɢɟ ɨ ɒɨɩɟɧɟ. Moscow: Ʉɨɦɩɨɡɢɬɨɪ. —. 1987. “Ʉɨɧɰɟɩɰɢɹ Ⱥɫɚɮɶɟɜa ɢ ɰɟɥɨɫɬɧɵɣ ɚɧɚɥɢɡ.” ɋɨɜɟɬɫɤɚɹ ɦɭɡɵɤɚ 38: 7682. Ɉɬɚɲɟɜɢʄ, Ɉɥɝɚ [Otaševiü, Olga]. 2011. “‘ɂɧɬɨɧɚɰɢɨɧɢ ɫɜɟɬ’ Ȼɨɪɢɫɚ Ⱥɫɚɮʁɟɜɚ.” Ɇɨɤɪɚʃɚɰ 13: 22–30. Ɋɢɦɫɤɢɣ-Ʉɨɪɫɚɤɨɜ, ɇɢɤɨɥɚɣ Ⱥ. 1946. Ɉɫɧɨɜɵ ɨɪɤɟɫɬɪɨɜɤɢ. Moscow: Ɇɭɡɝɢɡ. ɋɤɪɟɛɤɨɜɚ Ɉɥɶɝɚ Ʌ. and ɋɟɪɝɟɣ ɋ. ɋɤɪɟɛɤɨɜ. 1948. ɏɪɟɫɬɨɦɚɬɢɹ ɩɨ ɝɚɪɦɨɧɢɢ. Moscow: Ɇɭɡɝɢɡ. ɋɩɨɫɨɛɢɧ, ɂɜɚɧ ȼ. 1947. Ɇɭɡɵɤɚɥɶɧɚɹ ɮɨɪɦɚ. Moscow: Ɇɭɡɝɢɡ. ɐɭɤɤɟɪɦɚɧ, ȼɢɤɬɨɪ Ⱥ. 1933. “Ɉ ɫɸɠɟɬɟ ɢ ɦɭɡɵɤɚɥɶɧɨɦ ɹɡɵɤɟ ɨɩɟɪɵɛɵɥɢɧɵ ɋɚɞɤɨ.” ɋɨɜɟɬɫɤɚɹ ɦɭɡɵɤɚ 3: 46–73.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN DISSENSUS COMMUNIS: RANCIÈRE AND THE DEHUMANISATION OF ART BOJANA MATEJIû

Ever since Kant’s third Critique, sensus communis has been a political term par excellence, although Kant never explicitly dealt with political philosophy. By sensus communis, Kant writes, must be understood the idea of a communal sense, i.e., a faculty for judging that in its reflection takes account (a priori) of everyone else’s way of representing in thought [...]. (Kant 2000, 173)

The other name for this “communal sense” in Kant’s terminology is the aesthetic faculty of judgement, wherein by “taste” Kant means that which makes our feelings in a given representation universally communicable without the mediation of a concept. This enables Kant to affirm that one can communicate her/his feelings to everyone else by means of “taste” as the faculty of judging (sensus communis aestheticus), as opposed to the general faculties of reason (sensus communis logicus). Kant tells us about the specific aesthetic modality of humans; of generic humanity, which manifests itself by this “sense”. By the same token, the concept of sensus communis implies the social, communal “foundation” of human beings as a fundamental prerequisite for their emancipation, which lies at the heart of the Enlightenment project. In her interpretation of Kant’s position, Hannah Arendt stresses the necessity of thinking the political dimension of common sense, reviving the ethico-political meaning of this idea, which it had from Aristotle to certain philosophers of the Renaissance. Arendt interprets sensus communis as the principle of equality in the public sphere: a judgement of taste, if it is universal, must be in the public sphere, that is to say, must have the ability to address all (people) (Arendt 1992, 123). Humans qua humans have always been individuals appearing in their “unique

Dissensus communis: Rancière and the Dehumanisation of Art

87

distinctness” and affirming themselves in speech and action, which shape and define the public domain – “the space within the world which men need in order to appear at all” (Arendt 1998, 208) – which ultimately is, as Arendt points out, “the work of man” and not (merely) the “product of her/his hands or the labor of his body”. Action and speech are terms that go hand in hand with common sense, given that they form, together with the world of appearance, a way of being together without which no real human being, or the reality of the surrounding world, could exist. The suppression of sensus communis intensifies (human) alienation (Entfremdung). The retreat of the public sphere or its apparent lack is a symptom of the growing privacy of individuals, as well as of depriving people of their ability to see and hear each other. The world, as another name for the public sphere, is both a human creation and that which creates people, if we agree with Marx that human life has the ability to create the conditions of life itself, since “by producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life” (Marx and Engels 1968). However, that applies to individuals and individual lives, how they represent and produce themselves, create each other and not themselves in isolation. And yet, in his early writings, Marx argued that human emancipation presupposes the “essence of community” as opposed to “the essence of difference” (Marx 1992, 221), inherent to political emancipation. That is to say, a “true” community is more than the order of formal agreements in the process of the human interchange of goods and services. Justice, as a virtue, is not merely the balancing of individual interests or “reparation” of “social damage” or “injustice” (Rancière 1999, 5). Accordingly, appearing in public in the world that is given to us all presupposes koinon – communion in public appearance  which brings people together and relates them to each other, as well as that which permanently exceeds the finite human life (Arendt 1998, 208). Rancière’s thesis on art becoming life is fundamental when it comes to thinking the possibilities of achieving the emancipation of humans in the realm of art. “The human revolution is the offspring of the aesthetic paradigm” (Rancière 2013, 120), Rancière asserts, and this explains why the Marxist vanguard and artistic avant-garde coincided in the 1920s. This site of human emancipation was the site of the construction of new forms of life, which witnessed the interference between the self-suppression of politics and that of art. The site of human emancipation refers to the place of attaining the “free appearance” (la libre apparence) of the people qua people in a common space and time, as an expression of the intensity of life, which confronts the public sphere of the labouring and consuming human being. That is to say, the thesis on art becoming life does not

88

Chapter Thirteen

presuppose “demiurgic projects of a ‘new life’” (Rancière 2013, 121), but a common, egalitarian temporality, in which everything and everyone can act and speak to break the boundaries between activity and passivity, power and resistance. Rancière ascribes this paradigm of thinking, the thesis on art becoming life, to the aesthetic regime of art, inasmuch as it has nothing to do with Plato’s didactic concept of the edification of human behaviour by means of artistic representation, but instead with the embodiment of dissensus communis. In Rancière’s view, the aesthetic effectiveness of this critical artistic practice stands between representational mediation and ethical immediacy and is ultimately characterised by a paradox, insofar as it stems from the break of the established bond between autonomy and heteronomy. One should note that Rancière uses the term aesthetics to designate a specific way of being of whatever manages to break away from everyday reality and become a “self-formation of life” (Rancière 2013b, 22). But, if dissensus communis implies a generic in-humanum, how may one “return” to this supposedly non-estranged place in the realm of art; a place beyond all “human” predicates and attributes? How may one conceive this generic in-humanum in art, to which the estranged human animal should “return”? How to “reach” the public sphere and who is entitled to “free appearance”? Rancière is aware of the problem of a gaping discrepancy between public and private sphere in Arendt’s formulation of sensus communis. In Rancière’s view, although Arendt tends to politicise the depoliticised public sphere, in other words, attempts to wrest the political (polis) away from the “contamination of the private, social, apolitical life” (Rancière 2013a, 66), her politicisation of the public sphere leads to a tautology between state power and individual “natural” life. Here, one should note “early” Marx’s critique of Bauer’s position regarding “the Jewish question” – Marx’s polemic on the problem of the supposed emancipation of the Jews in Germany from Judaism, whose significance, in fact, lies elsewhere: not in the emancipation of the Jews from their “Jewishness”, in other words, not in their political emancipation – that results from the reciprocity of the political state to civil society – but in their human emancipation (Marx 1992, 234). In Marx’s philosophical perspective, human emancipation implies the emancipation of the human from the human, whereby the new possible generic in-humanum would be found beyond the state and existing society – beyond all “human” predicates and historical forms of man (class, gender, race, nation-state, family, property, etc.). According to Marx, human emancipation correlates

Dissensus communis: Rancière and the Dehumanisation of Art

89

to the “real”, “concrete”, “generic” life, or, to use another term from the terminology of early Marx, with the community, in other words, with a place where anyone may realise their freedom by relating with others. The politicality of human emancipation in Rancière’s optics does not lie in the public sphere as such, but on the edge, in the relation of equality, which one must “practise”, in order to “establish” it: on the condition of the “birth” of one and the same “desire” on both sides  the emancipator and the emancipated, knowledge and ignorance, activity and passivity, etc. Only thus may a “true” community be thought – not as a consensus, but as a dissensus, due to the very “aberration” of the unity of a community “founded” on resisting any appropriation of the essence. The community happens à lieu sans avoir place, that is to say, in a place that is always, in its very foundation, exceptional; a place without a (predetermined) place. Dissensus, Rancière asserts, does not imply a conflict between individual interests, opinions, or values. Rather, it is a division inscribed by and in “common sense” as well as the process of thinking the very framework of human givens (Rancière 2013a, 69). Accordingly, “the rights of man” do not involve the rights of a supposed subject in terms of an autonomous bearer of political, abstract rights. It is in light of this conceptual threshold that Rancière indicates the problem of the “right” to the public sphere in Arendt’s theory. The nonfactual notion of community is doubly conditioned, as Rancière remarks: the first condition is that the community never be a goal that one should aspire to reach, although by all means that would be impossible, because it is an immanent, continuous process. The One of equality is neither an essentialist nor substantialist One, but One that divides in two or, more precisely, a place whose unity exists only in the operation of division. The community is always suspended in the very act of its acknowledgement. The community is never consistent, nor may it take the form of social institutions. Second, the community is not possible without its dialectical opponent of inequality – society (Rancière 2009, 57). This suggests that the community does not rest on some arkhe of politics. For, human emancipation strives toward the anarchic, an avantgarde component. The work of art in this constellation involves a sensory form that is heterogeneous in relation to everyday sensory experience and has the power to suspend the relations between appearance and reality, form and matter, activity and passivity, culture and nature. Such a notion of the work of art must be thought contrary to the dominant, contemporary, global dispositive of art that participates in the formal exercising of democratic human rights – art that, by means of

90

Chapter Thirteen

reconstructing and simulating images, objects, and texts, seeks to return to humanity its place in the world (Rancière 2011, 123). Instead, this “humanist restoration” of the place of humanity in the world must dispense with all human predicates and attributes, introducing a singular time-space of dissensus communis, a distance from existing for the peopleto-come. Any art that aspires to a “human content” in the modern, global pluralism of voices exerts the substantialisation of the human in the form of class, race, gender, nation, etc., thus introducing classification in the distribution of the sensible (le partage du sensible) and the division into those who “understand” and those who “do not understand”, into those who are and those who are not entitled to art (see Ortega y Gasset 1968). The figure of dissensus communis introduces a scene divided between two sensory regimes: 1) the sensorium, which aims at reaching a place that may become visible in space / a new set of vibrations of the human community in the present; 2) the material representative of what can / will come – the generic in-humanum. It is the work of art as the “dehumanised” interval between the universal and the particular, the individual and the community, the present and the future. Rancière's nonfactual notion of community does not imply a “lost origin”, “essence”, or “human nature”, to which one should “revert” through art. In Rancière’s view, “reverting” to the generic in-humanum through art would mean staging dissensus, that is to say, the place of the inversion of the very point of departure. For, according to Rancière, art does not become “true” by overcoming itself and intervening in everyday life, aspiring to the “reality” of real life. There is no such thing as “the real world”, or even concrete life outside of art (Rancière 2013a, 148). The Real must be the “real” of construction. Moreover, Rancière argues, the police order is based on a fiction that presents itself as “realistic”, simulating a rupture between what belongs to the Real and what belongs to the domain of phenomena, representations, opinions, in other words, the state of things. The politics of aesthetics presupposes new forms of individuality by sharing with “those who do not share” an anonymous voice, which predicates the process of reframing the world of shared impersonal experience (experience that does not exclusively belong to anyone and at the same time “belongs” to everyone). Accordingly, emancipatory art, as a dehumanised materialisation of dissensus communis, does not merely imply assigning an anonymous voice, but a radical reconfiguration of the distribution of the sensible.

Dissensus communis: Rancière and the Dehumanisation of Art

91

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1992. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_The_G erman_Ideology.pdf. Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1968. A Critique of The German Ideology. Marx, Karl. 1992. Early Writings. London: Penguin Books. Rancière, Jacques 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso. —. 1995. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 2011. Aesthetics and its Discontents. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. —. 2013a. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury. —. 2013b. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Bloomsbury.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN STUART HALL’S “DOUBLE ARTICULATION” IN THEORISING YUGOSLAV POPULAR MUSIC VESNA MIKIû

Ⱥsked once why he never moved to America, Stuart Hall responded: “I feel better taking a sighting of the world from the periphery (England) than the centre (America)” (Procter 2004, 5). Although Hall’s view of England as the periphery might be intriguing – since the centre is not only the United States, but also the so-called Continent ௅ here, Hall’s statement will be our point of departure. Namely, while in a certain poetical sense it legitimises our own peripheral discourse, to which, paradoxically, in light of the quotation above, Hall is the centre, this legitimacy at the same time becomes the platform for our own theorising. If we agree that Hall’s findings (considering his theoretical positions and the “openness” of his thought; see Fisk 1996, 212) may be appropriated for discourses on Yugoslav cultural practices, we may further see in what ways his theory/method of articulation (see Daryl Slack 1996, 112–31) might be fruitful for interpreting those practices, as well as the overall historical formation to which they belonged. Consequently, such an appropriation could produce not only insights concerning specific practices, but could improve the knowledge production of contemporary post-Yugoslav societies. One might argue that our peripheral position is doubly articulated with Hall’s, in a cultural-linguistic as well as socio-political sense, if we are to apply his discourse to practices belonging to the societal formation of a political system rather different from the one Hall studied and inhabited. Hall’s own “opening” of the articulation method as something based on “necessary non/correspondences” (see Grossberg 1996, 156) thus enables us to engage in articulation ourselves, linking Hall’s theoretical thought with the social reality of socialist Yugoslavia, and thereby articulating Hall’s critique of capitalist culture on the cultural practices of selfmanagement socialism. In that respect, our position will be that of Hall’s

Hall’s “Double Articulation” in Theorising Yugoslav Popular Music

93

beloved “middle ground”, additionally “enhanced” by a generationally peripheral position that could be understood as “transitional”, a “hallway”/passage position in relation to the object discussed (Yugoslav popular culture/music) and the theoretical discourse it appropriates (Stuart Hall’s articulation). This fluid/liquid mode of discussion, finally, could be articulated as “theorising”, Hall’s preferred “substitute” for theory, or something he calls “ongoing theorising”. Society is, for Hall, a complex unity, always having multiple and contradictory determinations, always historically specific. This “conjunctural” view sees the social formation as a concrete, historically produced organization – a “structure in dominance” – of the different forms of social relations, practices and experiences. (Grossberg 1996b, 156)

The concepts of “historical conjuncture” as well as his “conjunctural theory of social formation” are crucial for Hall’s theories of the ahistorical/transhistorical of the structuralist/poststructuralist (Grossberg 1996b, 155). If a particular cultural formation is (being) constituted by processes of constant, ongoing, and never complete negotiations and struggles, the effects of which are “social relations, practices and experiences”, then its historical conjuncture, as a kind of equally contested “superstructure”, must be taken into account, not (only) as a context in which the cultural formation can be neatly put away, but as an important terrain for understanding cultural transformations (see Grossberg 1996a, 142–43). The points of these transformations, as opposed to “periods of settlement” are fundamental for Hall’s theorising/articulation of “historical conjuncture” and consequently, of “social/cultural/political/etc.” formations. Since for Hall, from the very beginning, studying culture meant studying popular culture, that is, the “ongoing struggle”/articulation for dominance/meaning, the importance of the historical conjuncture becomes self-evident. We need to historically periodize popular culture, “try to identify the periods of relative ‘settlement’ ௅ when not only the inventories of popular culture, but the relations between dominant and popular cultures, remain relatively settled. Then [...] to identify the turning points, when relations are [...] restructured and transformed”. (Procter 2004, 30)

Informed by his leftist political agenda and Marxism, Hall’s theorising broached class-related questions, sometimes devising strategies for actual political action, taking him, via Voloshinov, Gramsci, and Laclau (see Procter 2004, 11–35) to his theory/method of articulation. Yet, before we

94

Chapter Fourteen

can appropriate/articulate Hall’s method in the discourse of/on studies of Yugoslav popular music, we must perform a series of “preliminary” articulations. For, if we bear in mind the importance of “historical conjuncture” in his thought, we must first interpret the nature of the articulations that established it as such, leading us not only to the necessity of articulating Hall’s “sense of classlessness” (Procter 2004, 16–20), but, more importantly, and via that articulation, to articulations of two “noncorrespondent” (political/social) formations/discourses: Hall’s, from the “periphery” of capitalism, and ours, from the “periphery” of (post)socialism. How does Hall’s “sense of classlessness” work in the conjuncture/context of the (allegedly) “classless” Yugoslav society? Paradoxically, one could argue that by opening the door to Hall’s “necessary non/correspondences”, the alleged classlessness of the Yugoslav societal formation could just as well be interpreted in terms of a “sense of classlessness”. If that conclusion is valid, then the particular historical conjuncture we are interpreting must have something to do with it. And, in order to discover/re-articulate these processes, we must introduce something we might call “double/two-way articulation”. The “fine tuning”/adjustments we are adding not only to Hall’s explanation here, but also to later interpretations and applications of his theory/method, should be understood as resulting from the specific historical conjuncture we are addressing and coming from. I always use the word “articulation”, though I don’t know whether the meaning I attribute to it is perfectly understood. In England, the term has a nice double meaning because “articulate” means to utter, to speak forth, to be articulate. It carries that sense of language-ing, of expressing, etc. But we also speak of an “articulated” lorry (truck): a lorry where the front (cab) and back (trailer) can, but need not necessarily, be connected to one another. The two parts are connected to each other, but through a specific linkage that can be broken. An articulation is thus the form of the connection that can make unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. [...] Thus, a theory of articulation is both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated at specific conjunctures to certain political subjects. (Grossberg 1996a, 141௅42)

If the word’s double meaning in English enables an ongoing theorising of the effects of specific societal formations and historical conjunctures based on linking their different expressions (re-articulations) as the articulations (effects) of various practices in predominantly capitalist conditions, some adjustments must be made before introducing it to theorising the different

Hall’s “Double Articulation” in Theorising Yugoslav Popular Music

95

conjunctural conditions of socialist Yugoslavia. That is why we speak not only of double, but also of two-way articulations, which constituted the historical conjuncture under the name of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945–1991). We can push Hall’s “pun” even further, by using, for instance, the “double” meaning of the French word sens (double sens) when speaking of the directions that articulations took in former Yugoslavia. Furthermore, the two directions were “not necessarily ‘contrary/opposed’” in the sens(e) of top-bottom and vice versa. In fact, they almost always ran in parallel, thus paving the way for (“linguistic”) double articulations to produce their effects. Finally, it is really the field of the popular culture of former Yugoslavia that enables this kind of theorising and that is yet another confirmation that Hall’s insights in general and his theory of articulation in particular can and should be appropriated/examined/articulated in discourses concerning Yugoslav popular culture. If, for Hall, “the effects of any concrete practice – its conjunctural identity – are always ‘overdetermined’ by the network of relations in which it is located” (Grossberg 1996b, 156), then the “network” that used to over-determine Yugoslav society was created by a “two-sens”/double/ “two-way” articulation, comprising two articulations that occurred in two parallel, yet interconnected/linked fields: the official and the everyday. In short, while the official discourse spoke of “the ongoing revolution” (toward communism; from socialism to communism), the direction in which the everyday life of Yugoslav society was articulated led toward a sort of consumerism not completely unlike that of capitalism (from socialism to capitalism?). In fact, the seemingly contrary motion of these processes resulted (via numerous/multidirectional/multi-accentual articulations) in a state of affairs I love to call “the (Yugo)slavic antithesis”, a state of neither/nor relations, whose articulations were an effect of its specific historical conjuncture. For, had it not been for the “turning point” of 1948, when Yugoslavia’s relations with the USSR were “restructured and transformed”, after the Yugoslav Communist Party rejected the Resolution of the Communist Information Bureau and for some time (until the early 1950s) severed all ties with the USSR, the “official/everyday” articulations would have been different. Henceforth, Yugoslavia became a socialist society gradually opening up to the capitalist West, whilst proclaiming its “ongoing revolution” but adopting Western values and ways of life (due to the economic growth of the socalled “techno-bureaucracies”) and resulting in a peculiar, but never publicly acknowledged class stratification. Perhaps, then, the dominant articulation of the (Yugo)slavic antithesis was neither a class, nor a

96

Chapter Fourteen

classless society, paradoxically articulating and resounding the fluid state of Hall’s “sense of classlessness”. If there was an overdetermining network articulated from the officially proclaimed classlessness that corresponded to and supported/constituted the everyday’s “sense of classlessness”, looking for articulations of (class) struggle in popular culture and music seems futile. Although for early Hall “popular culture is not necessarily a capitalist instrument; it might be reclaimed for socialist politics” (Procter 2004, 18), in Yugoslavia’s case, socialist politics did not “reclaim” it, but transfigured it into its own instrument, thus making the notion of class, though not the struggle as such, obsolete. For, as later Hall conceptualised re/articulation and, for that matter, the ongoing struggle over meaning (i.e. culture), via Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as something “never securely achieved, if even momentarily” (Grossberg 1996b, 163), one might argue that repositioning/rearticulating Yugoslav popular music practices constituted a “relatively autonomous conjunctural identity” (Grossberg 1996b, 163) in Yugoslav culture and the historical conjuncture of socialist Yugoslavia. Bearing in mind that we are dealing with socialist societal formation, in which the “masses” were allegedly in a dominant position, we have to apply a method of articulation that places its effects not in the relations of “non/correspondent” agencies such as dominant/high and popular/low or mass/collective and individual, but to search for them in that antithetical, overdetermining conjuncture in which society was engaged as a whole. For, if there was no concept of private property, private entrepreneurship, there was no economic base for capitalism, or for its inherent antagonisms. It goes without saying that Yugoslav popular culture/music operated under a completely different regime, as a predominantly state-funded practice. And if the concept of class struggle was transformed in the concept of “ongoing revolution”, then the accents of the struggle for dominance and resistance had to be transferred into popular music’s own historical conjuncture. Until the turning point of 1948, and a bit later – all in all, not for long – Western popular music practices, introduced during the interwar period into the everyday urban life of the main population centres of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana), were almost extinguished by the ruling cultural policies, heavily leaning on the Soviet model. Officially scorned, yet never legally banned, jazz and dance music genres went underground. Still, one should remember that in the aftermath of the Second World War, Yugoslavia, as the rest of Europe, had to face complex issues of infrastructural, economic, and, on top of that, political reconstruction, so everyday life was constituted in quite different terms

Hall’s “Double Articulation” in Theorising Yugoslav Popular Music

97

from those of the pre-war period. Resounding and, via its subject matter and musical features, constituting the everyday, organised by the dominant culture’s “reconstruction” narrative, the mass song emerged as the genre (borrowed from the USSR) that all Yugoslav composers were encouraged to pursue, thus articulating the “correspondences” between the official (dominant) cultural policy and the people. The fact that it “lived on” almost until Yugoslavia’s demise, constantly appropriating along the way features from contemporary popular music practices, enables us to think the mass song as a (historically) specific articulation of dominant and popular cultures. Entering its “period of stability”, which would last for about three decades, during the 1950s Yugoslavia laid the foundations for its antithetical conjuncture by opening to the West, by gradually reestablishing strong links with the East, and eventually occupying a (geopolitical) position of a neither eastern nor western state in the heart of the Balkans. Articulated as such, the Yugoslav state was strongly invested in the articulation of the so-called “Yugoslav” identity. Now almost completely open to Western popular music and actively participating, as the only communist state, in some of its practices (such as the Eurovision Song Contest), Yugoslavia embarked on devising its own brand of popular music, as an effect of articulating Western practices with the Yugoslav identity project. The practice was named zabavna muzika (entertainment music). Musically based predominantly on Italian canzone and American jazz and early rock ’n’ roll (and, interestingly, for a time during the 1950s, on Mexican music), “imported” at first through the film industry, “entertainment music” was to be sung in any of the Yugoslav languages (another intriguing fact is that Yugoslav identity was linguistically “supranational”, freely articulating the neither/nor entities of everyday life: for instance, one could identify as a Yugoslav speaking Serbo-Croatian, or vice versa, or Macedonian etc., for there was never any “Yugoslav language” as such). As its name indicates, entertainment music was meant for the entertainment of the working people, not class, and for filling their leisure time, which was now driven by forces different from those of the late 1940s, with the standard of living steadily rising, making room for an ever growing consumer culture. However “popular” nominally (presumably also in an attempt to avoid the notion of commercialism associated with Western popular music), “entertainment music” had a function – to entertain ௅ which means that the re-articulation/ transformation of the mass song happened as an effect of articulations in the political and socio-economic spheres. As a result of these processes, pop music’s “conjunctural identity” attained another “junction” during the

98

Chapter Fourteen

1960s – the Yugoslav rock scene was articulated in parallel to “entertainment music” and the so-called newly composed folk music. So, the struggle over meaning migrated, acquiring the features of a developed popular music field, unfolding inside it, forever “doomed” to “locality” and thus articulated by its historical conjuncture. Furthermore, internal popular music struggles were occasionally articulated as “linkages of correspondences” (generic mixes) resulting in a specific cultural/musical trans-formation. The “turning point” came in 1974, coinciding with the promulgation of socialist Yugoslavia’s last Constitution (symbolically the beginning of its end, as well as the end of the “golden era” – the period of stability). Yugoslavia’s fully developed media and music industries, keeping up with their Western role models, yet still state-funded, enabled the emergence of its first popular music superstars. Articulating the Yugoslav identity/entertainment music project, which was never immune (since the mass songs era) to antithetical articulations of traditional music elements with elements of Western pop, both in terms of music and overall image, the Bosnian band Bijelo dugme entered the scene, provoking a “moral panic” articulated by the (state) mass media, and starting the socalled “Dugmemania” (as a Yugoslav kind of Beatlemania) youth craze. The imported “rebellious” rock elements, as a double articulation of rejecting both the “parent” and the “dominant” culture, were introduced/legitimised by the very formations that articulated them. Therefore, it could be argued that another cultural transformation took place. At this particular point, Yugoslav popular music attained its dominant position (however temporary) by means of articulating (Yugoslav) “entertainment” and (Western) rock music, which transformed the former from a “functional” to an “autonomous” field of popular music, a kind of pop rock that would predominate among Yugoslavia’s urban youth, albeit immediately challenged by numerous opposing/underground forces inside the practice. A rather similar socio-economic and creative articulation occurred in the practice of newly composed folk music, which produced superstars of its own and became dominant in other generational and social strata of the population, although, at first, without a direct production “interference” from Western music in terms of music and lyrics, which suggests that any “moral panic” was restricted to the elite cultural actors. The popular music practices of Yugoslavia’s twilight years were marked by inner struggles for meaning, predominantly articulated as pop rock vs. folk, often driven by different articulations of nationalist, capitalist, and anticommunist ideologies1 ticking as a time-bomb deep in the cracks of something that was once articulated in the relatively stable,

Hall’s “Double Articulation” in Theorising Yugoslav Popular Music

99

settled historical conjuncture of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This relativity, as an effect of the inherent incompleteness of these articulations, is actually our “middle ground”, our space for ongoing struggle articulated as an ongoing theorizing.

Notes 1

This is articulated not only in the tension between pop rock and folk music, but also through the “ramifications” of the pop rock field in its punk and new wave “opposites”. For more, see Mikiü 2011.

Bibliography Daryl Slack, Jeniffer. 1996. “The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 113௅31. London: Routledge. Fisk, John. 1996. “Opening the Hallway: Some Remarks on the Fertility of Stuart Hall’s Contribution to Critical Theory.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 212௅22. London: Routledge. Grossberg, Lawrence. 1996a. “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 131௅51. London: Routledge. —. 1996b. “History, Politics and Postmodernism: Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 151௅74. London: Routledge. Mikiü, Vesna. 2007. “‘Tito Marches…’ Producing, Establishing, and Reflecting Personality in/through Music.” In The 20th Century and the Phenomenon of Personality in Music, eds. Laila Ozolina and Imants Mežaraups, 163௅69. Riga: Latvijas Komponistu savieniba. —. 2009. “Muzika kao sredstvo konstrukcije i rekonstrukcije revolucionarnog mita – Dan mladosti u SFRJ.” Zbornik Matice srpske za scenske umetnosti i muziku 40: 129௅36. —. 2011. “Romantic Notions in the Popular Music Discourses: Several Examples from Serbia.” In Approaches to Music Research: Between Practice and Epistemology, eds. Leon Štefanija and Nico Schuler, 191௅99. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. —. 2012. “Ex-YU Nostalgia, in Ex-YU Realities? Some Popular Music Strategies in Former Yugoslavia Spaces.” In Between Nostalgia,

100

Chapter Fourteen

Utopia, and Realities, eds. Vesna Mikiü, Ivana Perkoviü, Tijana Popoviü Mlaÿenoviü, and Mirjana Veselinoviü Hofman, 394௅600. Belgrade: Faculty of Music. Procter, James, ed. 2004. Stuart Hall. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN JULIA KRISTEVA’S CONCEPT OF ABJECTION APPLIED TO THE PHENOMENON OF THE TRANSGENDER BODY ALEKSA MILANOVIû

The contemporary medical classification of sex is based on a binary structure and presupposes a particular standardisation of sexual characteristics that excludes and/or marks all other or different forms of corporeality as abnormal or deviant. For example, upon the birth of a child, a medical institution determines its sex on the standardised basis of primary sexual characteristics, and consequently, whatever does not fit the standards will be marked as an anomaly, deformity, or malformation. In some cases, even surgical procedures are carried out to make the child’s genital organs conform to the norms (see Fausto-Sterling 2000). Any deviation from standard chromosome development and that of the hormones, sex glands, and genitals is considered anomalous, and those persons are classified as intersexual. Medical interventions with the purpose of adjusting their sexual characteristics to the binary normative are also involved in the phenomenon of trans-sexuality, which is classified in medical nomenclature as a mental and behavioural disorder. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD), maintained and published by the World Health Organisation, features a list of mental and behavioural disorders, including the subcategory of gender-identity disorders, which defines Transsexualism as follows: A desire to live and be accepted as a member of the opposite sex, usually accompanied by a sense of discomfort with, or inappropriateness of, one’s anatomic sex, and a wish to have surgery and hormonal treatment to make one’s body as congruent as possible with one’s preferred sex. (ICD-10, 2010)

102

Chapter Fifteen

In both cases, that is, regarding both trans- and intersex, Western medicine clearly defines any deviation from the normative binary sexual categories, constructed by that same medical discourse, as a disorder or deviance that needs to be removed or fixed in order to preserve the construct of sex and the binary structure of gender, and place the “afflicted” into one of the two normative sex categories. With this type of approach, the medical discourse puts pressure on both transsexual and intersexual people, forcing them to fit into strictly defined categories of corporeality. The institutionalisation of sexual dimorphism has contributed to the stigmatisation and consequently to the invisibility of persons with sexual characteristics different from those of people who fit the standards. Such bodies are usually seen only in photographs, medical textbooks and handbooks. Of course, the context in which they are presented makes a huge impact on the reader’s opinion. He or she, and, by extension, society as a whole, is then called to recognise these bodies as deviant or abnormal, and as examples of pathological physiology (see Singer 2006). Such a model of representation indicates an institutional intention to censor such bodies and mark them as a threat to the system that has rejected them and in whose definitions and categories they do not fit. Therefore, such bodies must be represented as something that has been put under control. This once again confirms the constructed binary or normative sex/gender as “normal” and as the reference point against which the idea of deviation is constructed as something that violates the norm. That is the reason why the eye of the observer projects them into the field of the ugly, abnormal, repulsive, abject. In her book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva introduces the concept of the abject by explaining it from the perspective of theoretical psychoanalysis. As Kristeva puts it, for the subject to establish itself as separate and whole and to draw clearly marked boundaries between itself and others/Other, it must confront the abject. The subject positions itself against the abject; the abject helps the subject to establish its boundaries and defend them from the constant threat of revealing its own constructed nature. The first object that the subject must abject in the process of its self-creation/self-recognition is the figure of the mother, with whom the child is in direct contact after birth and with whom it identifies during the early part of its development. Jacques Lacan explored a theoretical position that explains how the child becomes a subject; it forms its idea of subjectivity the moment it (mis)recognises itself in language, that is, the Symbolic. Thus right from the beginning, the child must occupy a position in language that has already been staged for him/her, and all he/she can do is somehow to fit in

Julia Kristeva’s Concept of Abjection

103

the given structure and recognise his/her place as that of the speaking subject. The first stage in this process is the subject’s self-(mis)recognition in the mirror – her/his entry into the Imaginary – when the child starts to feel itself as a totality. However, Kristeva thinks that even before the mirror phase, the child comes to be aware of its subjectivity (of its “I”) and to separate itself from others. First, the child must separate itself from the body of the mother; it must renounce it and abandon identification with it in order to establish its existence apart from the mother. At that point, the maternal body becomes the abject body, and whatever disturbs the subject becomes abject, whatever threatens its firm borders and corps propre (see Kristeva 1982). The subject is thus caught up in a game of continually reestablishing its borders and therefore must keep renouncing the abject, again and again, but the abject can never be extinguished; it becomes a faithful companion to the subject all the way to the end. Moreover, the subject establishes itself precisely by constantly renouncing the abject; thus the abject defines and guards the borders of selfhood. In a way, it is a constitutive part of the subject, which is why the abject must remain hidden to the subject, in the domain of constant fascination. For example, bodily excrements, cut hair and nails are abject because they are on the borderline – once they were part of the body and now they are not – therefore, the subject finds them confusing. They point to the material essence of the body and so to its finality; they challenge the subject’s borderlines. The abject must be repudiated so that the subject may step out, driven by the desire to overcome its finite destiny.1 Analysing the human body and taboos, Mary Douglas concludes that the surface of the body is not just its material border, but also a socially established borderline defined by the codes of a given culture. Whenever the borderlines of the body are threatened, when dirt threatens its cleanliness, we feel disgust, we have this repulsive feeling that keeps the taboo in its prescribed social place and enables it to persist. Thus the borderlines of the body can be perceived as social borders supplied by the dominant discourse so that social taboos may be established and naturalised under the sign of a Prohibition. The subject’s body is equivalent to the particular culture or established system that produces it, so the concept of the abject functions in the same manner for individual subjects as well as for culture as a whole. Judith Butler and Iris Marion Young are just two among many theorists who have developed and applied Kristeva’s concept of abjection in the field of social theories addressing the issues of marginalised groups. For Judith Butler, the abject designates here precisely those “unlivable” and “uninhabitable” zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not

104

Chapter Fifteen enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the “unlivable” is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject. (Butler 1993, 3)

The power to name the abject belongs to the dominant social groups, which then claim the power to stigmatise certain other social groups and praxes, at the same time constructing the illusion of the stability of the existing structures and power relations. The process of establishing subjectivity must include the abject Other so that the subject may define its position according to and against that of the abject; only then may it rest assured that the borders between them exist and are firm and stable. Referring to the concept of abjection, Judith Butler explains how heterosexuality posits homosexuality as the abject and Other, so as to constitute and establish it as the opposite of heterosexuality. Iris Marion Young analyses the “normative gaze”, which estimates the object gazed at, according to the hierarchical standards constructed and defined by the scientific, medical, juridical, and all other dominant discourses in a given culture. By establishing the borderlines that separate the beautiful, normal, and desirable from the ugly, abnormal, and degenerative, some social groups are marginalised and assigned the status of the Other – that which “I” must not be if I do not want to be cast off, if I want to establish myself as a subject. The fear of rejection, of being despised, of the loss of identity grows and transforms into a phobia that produces the aversion toward the abject Other (Young 1990). In that way the abject figures in racism, homophobia, trans-phobia, ageism, ableism, and other unconscious social fears of the Other and the loss of social power. The power position of the kind of subjectivity2 that models the ruling image of the world is strong and aggressive in creating and establishing its position, so that even members of socially marginalised groups internalise hatred toward their own cultural group, led by the desire to be identified with the dominant, privileged group.3 Equating un-normative bodies with terms such as degeneration, freakishness, and “mistakes of nature” is the path toward marginalisation, oppression, violence and other kinds of repression. Bodies that transgress the binary sex/gender normative are placed into the abject category because they deny or subvert the prescribed standards. Their appearance destabilises the established system and order, disturbs the identity of the subject, which is used to operating within the framework of just two standardised sex/gender categories. Whatever slips away, transgresses the established borders, and causes confusion, disgust, and abjection, often provokes fear that grows into a phobia, because it puts the subject into the position of being introduced to something new and unknown. The subject attempts to categorise what it sees but has little

Julia Kristeva’s Concept of Abjection

105

success because the category it is looking for seems impossible and unthinkable; what the subject sees is beyond categories and that is the exact moment when its borders are threatened. The situation becomes even more dramatic if the observer does not realise that the person gazed at is transsexual or intersexual and if the subject is informed about this afterwards, from another source. The problem then becomes more complex and the subject’s fear and destabilisation intensify, the moment the subject realises that his/her gaze is not able or penetrating enough to recognise the Otherness that “threatens” his/her identity. So what is most important for reception is the context by which Otherness is represented. The medical context of the representation of intersexual and transsexual bodies mentioned above enables the observer to prepare him/herself for the spectacle of such a body and allows him/her to analyse it from a safe distance, using existing categories. In that way the communication between the observer and the author of the medical text is established and the presented bodies function only as examples, as exhibited material that illustrates the text. These bodies are cut off from their personalities – they are not seen as subjects but as objects of analysis deprived of identity and thus denied the possibility of establishing any further communication. As the ruling culture establishes the norms, standards, and values of certain types of bodily and sexual characteristics, transgender bodies are seen as abnormal, degenerate, and abject, because they do not meet the criteria. The dominant hetero-patriarchal discourse stigmatises and pathologises them, seeking to “cure” and reconstruct them according to the dominant standards and values. By choosing the way and context of representing these bodies, the dominant discourse influences the general social attitude toward them, typically causing negative reactions, which is only a part of the repressing mechanism of safeguarding and protecting the construct of sex/gender norms and borders.

Notes 1

“It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us. It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva 1982, 4). 2 Typically white, male, and heterosexual. 3 For example, this is how homophobia and trans-phobia are internalised.

106

Chapter Fifteen

Bibliography Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 2000. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books. ICD-10. Version:2010. 2010. http://apps.who.int/classifications/icd10/browse/2010/en#/F60-F69. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Singer, T. Benjamin. 2006. “From the Medical Gaze to Sublime Mutations: The Ethics of (Re)Viewing Non-normative Body Images.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whyttle, 601௅20. New York: Routledge. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN THE A OF DECONSTRUCTION: DERRIDA, LA DIFFÉRANCE AND “AND” NOVICA MILIû

1 I thought that at the outset of this remembrance – ten years after Derrida’s departure – it might be pertinent to say something about Derrida and writing. Why? Because Derrida himself, at the beginning of his philosophical career, talked about writing or inscription, about l’écriture, which cannot be translated with only one of those two words; after all, l’écriture is also more than those two words combined. At the beginning, that is, in his early works, articles and books, which, as we know, were initially focused on Husserl’s phenomenology and theory of expression (Introduction to the Origin of Geometry, 1962; Speech and Phenomena, 1967), on a “science” of inscription/writing (Of Grammatology, 1967), and on difference and writing (Writing and Difference, also 1967). In those early years, Derrida discussed writing as that which is at the beginning of all thinking, including philosophical thinking; thinking had suppressed writing for the sake of Derrida’s “metaphysics of presence” and its “logocentrism” or “phonocentrism”. Writing qua inscription or archewriting, archi-écriture – Derrida still used the term “quasi-transcendental”  became the main topic in the deconstruction of metaphysics. Philosophy was suddenly revealed as an institution that writes, which does not mean that it did not write before. As an institution, philosophy has always been busy with writing, but it was then revealed as writing, not only as thinking. In Derrida’s view, then, and even now, philosophy regarded and still regards this revelation with considerable scepticism. Given all that philosophy does, it seemed that writing was only an incidental, unimportant factor, an agent or instrument of philosophical reflection. And

108

Chapter Sixteen

then, Derrida showed that writing should be a topic for philosophical speculation itself. But Derrida problematised writing not only as a matter concerning the inner structure of the institution of philosophy. Shortly after this initial beginning, there was another one, again concerned with writing. Starting with Margins of Philosophy and Dissemination (1972), and especially after Glas (1974), The Truth in Painting (1978), and Postcard (1980), Derrida began experimenting with writing as an instrument of philosophy, writing as an act of forming a philosophical text, style or styles, or the shape of a philosophical text. As it turned out, deconstruction was not enough as the main theme of philosophy, deconstruction as the undoing of metaphysics, but required the deconstruction of the institution of philosophy qua writing or text, that is, the deconstruction of philosophy. If writing was for thousands of years, which saw the construction of philosophy as an institution, at the margin of that same institution, it was not enough just to put it at the thematic centre of philosophy. Rather, this reversal was meant to displace and transfer the entire textual structure that calls itself philosophy, which always moves between the centre and the margins, particularly around the margins, on both sides, around the centre and on the “outside”. Also, reversal and displacement are cited at the end of Margins of Philosophy as two key initial operations of deconstruction: Deconstruction cannot limit itself or proceed immediately to a neutralization: it must, by means of a double gesture, a double science, a double writing, practice an overturning of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system. […] Deconstruction does not consist in passing from one concept to another, but in overturning and displacing a conceptual order, as well as the nonconceptual order with which the conceptual order is articulated. (Derrida 1982, 329)

Reversal (or overturning) and displacement appear twice in that brief passage, in (Derrida’s) italics; in the first sentence, and is also italicised, to which I will return later on.

2 But there is something else that is also important in the quoted passage: an unitalicised and in the second sentence, but emphasised in all of Derrida’s writings after the Margins, starting with those I mentioned above. Deconstruction applies to a conceptual as well as its affiliated nonconceptual order. Up to that point, the institution of philosophy dealt with the nonconceptual order only as much and insofar as it needed to be

The A of Deconstruction: Derrida, la différance, and “and”

109

translated, transcribed, or inscribed within the conceptual order of its own text. As I mentioned above, Derrida’s deconstruction does not only concern metaphysics. It also concerns philosophy qua writing and right there, at the edge of the institution of philosophy, it links the conceptual with the nonconceptual. This had a wide range of repercussions, both within philosophy (as a theory of being, ontology; as a theory of knowledge or truth, epistemology; as a theory of value, axiology; therefore, as the foundation of a number of theories and institutions it spawned) and beyond philosophy, in philosophy outside of itself, as it were, philosophy, to put it briefly, as the foundation of other institutions outside of philosophy, as well as its practices concerning other practices, from practical ethics to politics, from law to theology, and beyond. And even beyond that, because philosophy outside itself is no longer a philosophy that remains inside the institutions, inside the fortress of its schools, or as the home of Being; it is now a philosophy that intervenes, intersects, infects other modes of writing, as a meeting point or even a point of contact with all that philosophy, as an institution, had spurned over the millennia. And that concerns the form of its writing/inscription, the forms of its texts. Somehow it was believed, especially after Aristotle, that the “natural” form of philosophical writing is the exposition of one’s own thoughts and intentions, the result of which is a monologue of the mind that neutralises the subjectivity of the writing subject, reducing it to striving for universal thinking. For millennia, the institution called the philosophical type of discourse was based on this “naturalisation” of monologue. Occasional “dialogisations” served only to reinforce the monologised mind, for example, in those philosophical texts that are formulated as “dialogues” ostensibly with other minds, “critically” mastered by the writing subject. It turned out that Derrida’s second start, by touching on this naturalisation, touched the very limits of philosophy as a type of writing, and thus also the boundaries of the institution itself. If the institution of philosophy greeted Derrida’s initial thematisation of writing with some scepticism, despite Derrida’s theses and arguments  still formulated in line with the principle of monologue  when Derrida began to practise new styles, forms, and tones of writing in his philosophical texts, the institution reacted with impatience and resistance: Derrida was then declared, not only by detractors, but also by those who followed his theory, as a “literary” author. But as Derrida, for all we know – and over the past 30 years, I have read almost everything that Derrida wrote and published – did not write anything that could be considered “literature” in the usual sense, nothing except, perhaps, a single verse in the anthology

110

Chapter Sixteen

One Line Poems (1986), the indictment that he wrote “literature” must mean that he actually mixed “genres”, primarily those of philosophy and literature, which allegedly makes his “literary” writings jumbled, blurry, obscure, and as such unworthy of our attention. The laziness of the institutional mind thus found for itself an alibi. This alibi was reinforced by Derrida’s philosophy’s first major foray outside the institution of philosophy: its impact on literary theory. Derrida never wrote a single literary-theoretical text in the usual sense of the term; he did write several books about certain writers – Ponge, Blanchot, Celan  but those books are primarily philosophical readings of literature. Even when, in a still unpublished seminar at Yale, in 1981, he spoke of “the theoretical problems of comparative literature”, which is perhaps the closest he got to literary theory, even then Derrida raised the issue of the philosophical foundation of literary theory and the category of literature as a whole. That is, after all, the nature of Derrida’s influence on literary theory. Following Derrida, literary theory can no longer count on its problems as being beyond philosophy, outside some collaboration and sometimes confrontation with philosophy, because literary theory, upon the advent of deconstruction, at least in the case of Derrida, can no longer count on its own institutional concepts or categories. Of course, Derrida is not the only contemporary thinker who shook the basis of the standard concept of literature – there were contributions by other thinkers, too, such as Lacan, Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze, and even by some earlier figures, such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger – but Derrida, perhaps more than others, showed that the standard notion of literature as a category is actually a philosophical, that is, metaphysical concept. Literature is what philosophy, since Plato, or even since Parmenides, had spurned in speech and thinking, other to its institutions of the monologisation and homologisation of thinking, other to the way its texts were written. The rift opened by Derrida’s deconstruction in philosophy now referred precisely to that alterity, the “otherness” of literary types of writing: the urge to preserve the distinction between philosophical and literary genres, to the extent that every difference should be preserved, not because of the institutional division of labour or the market of the mind, but because of something much more important  the very constitution of thought in its relation to language  the basic division of logos into logos-thought and logosspeech, the division of thinking/writing as logos and lexis, constituent, even foundational of logos, as well as of lexis. With the collapse of these differences – and I think this is basically what Derrida called la différance, where that a stands for its irreducibility  both logos and lexis, both

The A of Deconstruction: Derrida, la différance, and “and”

111

philosophy and literature would disappear. The stakes are therefore higher than the division of labour or markets.

3 At the beginning, I considered writing about this a, the a of deconstruction, the a of difference or différance, the difference between difference and différance. The first letter of the alphabet, followed by b and c, as in ABC, which I used for the title of a booklet I wrote about deconstruction a few years ago, meaning not only an introduction, but also a series of letters followed by d, the prefix of deconstruction, whose exclusion would leave deconstruction somewhat exposed, as construction. One of the first constructions in Derrida’s writing of difference, not only as a subject, but also as a practice in different types of writing, was la différance. At the beginning of the Margins, right after the introduction, where Derrida tries his hand at a new sound of philosophical writing, “timpanising” the tone of philosophy, stands la différance. Here Derrida says, among other things: the difference or différance (so to speak, différance differing from difference), différance is neither a word nor a concept: I would say, first off, that différance, which is neither a word nor a concept, strategically seemed to me the most proper one to think, if not to master – thought, here, being that which is maintained in a certain necessary relationship with the structural limits of mastery – what is most irreducible about our “era”. (Derrida 1982, 7)

Unfortunately, there is not enough space here to deal with the “epoch” – or “epoche” in phenomenological terms and “epoch” in historicalphilosophical terms – of Derrida’s differance, not only the context in which it intervened, but also its genealogy; in Margins, Derrida relies on Parmenides, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure, Bataille, Levinas, Deleuze. I will only mention a couple of difficulties in thinking this notion of différance, that is, two problems, which give rise to many others. The first difficulty comes from philosophy, when Derrida says that différance is not a concept. How is it not a concept, the institution of philosophy would say, if it is le plus propre à penser, “the most proper one to think”? Well, le plus propre à penser need not necessarily be a concept: thinking, what we need to think, need not necessarily be thought of as a concept; there are also thoughts based on images, perceptual blocks, memories, figures, etc. But there are perhaps more important reasons why différance is not a concept: 1) it is not a concept because it

112

Chapter Sixteen

has no centre or boundaries (scope); 2) it is not subject to the rules of conceptual (not formal or transcendental) logic; and 3) unlike difference, différance is not opposed to identity: the same, it is not the same, it escapes binary opposition, metaphysical and all other kinds of hierarchy. It is not even a thought object, a logical being, nor is it quite transcendent or external to experience or the conditions of experience, above all space and time, as espacement, as spacing, or as le différant, that which defers in time, which might mean postponement. Nor is différance a word, says Derrida. How to understand this? First, différance is a word formed by deleting, removing one e from difference and substituting an a. As a word, it is one of erasure, a “silent inscription”, Derrida might say, more than a word of speech. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Derrida was always interested in voice and speech, especially when a silent or silenced voice cuts through the letter: literature, for example, is the first instance of such a voice. Here the silent, silenced voice, the a in différance, slashes through philosophical writing and takes it to the edge of its articulation, to the outer limits of its intelligibility, where that discourse shows traces of its essential instability, inversion, turning, where philosophy, as speech, can no longer count even on the reliability of words. Philosophy has rarely questioned its own limits in the way Derrida did with his différance. It also challenges the very limits of the identity of philosophy, the liminal economy of the philosophical mind and its understanding, the place or time where this understanding exposes itself to incomprehensibility and mindlessness. Or, to the intrusion of fiction: différance is perhaps primarily a fiction. Then, not everything that becomes a sign is by the same token translatable or reducible to a verbal element, verbum. For, a word is not only an articulated sound associated with a noema, a middle term between the intelligible and the sensual. Likewise, not all other languages are reducible to verbal language. Until the end of the 18th century, linguists or proto-linguists saw it as natural that word is the smallest linguistic unit that possesses reality in a speech chain, carrying a meaning; if we further analyse the linguistic substratum, in parsing lexemes and phonemes to morphemes, we get smaller units, but they are not carriers of meaning; and that position remained ruling for the next two centuries. It viewed language from the viewpoint of meaning, meaning from the viewpoint of thought, and, finally, thought from the assumption of the logos. Already in Of Grammatology, Derrida struggled with these assumptions about the unity of linguistic units, of language centred on logos. Différance is often “translated” into semantic or etymological analogies – lexicographic similarities, “roots” in the (Latin) verb differe or

The A of Deconstruction: Derrida, la différance, and “and”

113

(French) différer, meaning not only distinction or differentiation, but also spacing, deferral, and postponement. In Serbo-Croatian, différance was translated as razluka, as opposed to razlika (difference), in 1971, when the first Serbo-Croatian translation of a text by Derrida was published. But such translations are possible only under the assumption that différance is a word (in Derrida’s words, “a metaphysical name”): if not a word, in the standard sense, but only a concept, it remains a problem in terms of thinking a word – what is a word, not only as a concept, but as a figure, an image, an agent or general entity – starting with such “words” as différance, or a “chain” of similar “expressions” in Derrida, like supplement, trace, dissemination, destinerration, iteration, pharmakon, margins, and even deconstruction. Even more so, if the “origin” of language lies in différance, again, of course, “origin” in its changed, “deconstructed” meaning or sense. This is not easy, it requires a lot of effort, and we should always take into account the risk of coming to a false understanding or misunderstanding. The risk, however, can be alleviated if we read and think more carefully.

4 One of Derrida’s last essays is titled Et cetera. Its full title reads: Et cetera (and so on, und so weiter, and so forth, et ainsi de suite, und so überall, etc.). And so on, in more than one language. “More than one language”, plus d’une langue, which is, however, no longer a language, so it is no more than one language; it is also one of Derida’s “definitions” of deconstruction. It might also be a “definition” of différance. Or a “definition” of philosophy and literature. Exactly and no less, this stands between them, separates them and brings them close together. More than one language, not a language anymore, not more than one language: no more, no less, therefore and-and, neither-nor, which is everywhere in Derrida’s work, in deconstruction, as its “formula”, “style”, “tone”, or “figure”. As a mark or stamp, trace or marque, the and of philosophy and the and of literature, but not only of them, nor only between them. As a mark, but as a label: as a trademark, or a brand – despite, or, perhaps, thanks to all the confusion, deconstruction is still selling well. That alone raises the question of economy – both textual and extratextual, in writing or in an institution that believes that is sufficiently literate and that further improvement of its literacy is not necessary – deconstruction cannot be replaced with its labels, or even with its rhetoric, or its “definitions”, “concepts”, or “figures”, which Derrida performed on the stage of his writings over the course of so many decades. There will

114

Chapter Sixteen

always be a sign in this economy to show a trace of those “and-and and “(n)either-(n)or” situations, to generalise this economy towards itself, as another problem that remains between the logos and the logos, between the logos and lexis. For me, the question remains: what to do with deconstruction, i.e. what else to do with deconstruction? What is the ultimate horizon of Jacques Derrida’s philosophical enterprise? I am not convinced that we should think of Derrida only for philosophical reasons, as a new trademark of the institutions of philosophy. Nor should we think of him as another label of literary theory, a way of thinking about or within literature. Something else lies in deconstruction and among us. And with us, and this expression “with us”, never by “us”, does not seem to create unity. For those who do not know, there are authors who write or have written about Derrida, but cannot be viewed as a unified group or entity. “Derrideans”, alleged or actual supporters of Derrida, his fans and even epigones  even among them, there are sometimes heated debates, real struggles. There is even less unity among the diverse disciplines and fields with which deconstruction has established a kind of “and” relationship: deconstruction and criticism, and philosophy, and metaphysics, and science, and literature, and law, and architecture, and media, and the visual arts, and music, and techniques, and love, and the family, and friendship, and law, and the impossible, and hospitality, and mystery, and America, and Europe, and the Third World, and politics, and religion, and democracy, and university, and psychoanalysis, and feminism, and new historicism, and modernism, and postmodernism, and – concluding with this or that and, which, as in Etcetera, also exposes itself to deconstruction in progress, whereby the list I have just outlined is just the beginning. The deconstruction of all of this – all these “ands” and “us” – presents us in progress. En cours. To remind us: Derrida gave one of his “definitions” of deconstruction right here, in Belgrade, in an interview on TV Studio B, on 5 April 1992. La déconstruction – he said  c’est quelque chose en cours. Deconstruction, it’s a thing in progress. Ongoing, en cours, but also on the road, in circulation, in motion. Also, en cours, in discourse, only in discourse. Why is deconstruction something in progress? Because it is something that happens, not only in this or that theory, this or that text, but in practice, in the history of the world. It has its effects that are good, as well as those that are not so good, or that are not yet even perceived within the scheme of favourable and unfavourable. “Performing” deconstruction is not a Derridean caprice, coming out of the pure curiosity of his “followers”, his readers, nor a perversion of the mind,

The A of Deconstruction: Derrida, la différance, and “and”

115

but rather a kind of necessity, inevitability, or even the impossibility to do or think differently in a world where it is not all that rare to be deprived of all other options. Perhaps deconstruction is not “ongoing” in the same way that the world is “ongoing”, but in the sense that “we” are not in touch with the world or with an “ongoing” anymore. And there, with “us”, as with Derrida, with writing, with deconstruction, the outcomes are certainly closer to our reach.

Bibliography Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. —. 1978. Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Brighton, UK: The Harvester Press. —. 1986. Glas. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. —. 1987. The Truth in Painting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN THE THEORETICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH TO THE CONCEPT OF AUTHENTICITY IN THE WORKS OF CESARE BRANDI AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES MARKO NIKOLIû

Introduction The publication of Cesare Brandi’s Teoria del restauro in 1963 came on the eve of the Second International Congress of Architects and Technicians of Historic Monuments, held in Venice in 1964. In his Theory, Brandi asserts: A work of art, however old or classic, is actually and not just potentially a work of art if it lives in an individualised experience. As a piece of parchment, marble, canvas, it remains self-identical despite the passage of time. But as a work of art, it is recreated every time it is aesthetically experienced.

Brandi argues that if one accepts the position stated above, the following conclusion inevitably follows: “Any sort of activity in relation to a work of art, including restoration interventions, hinges on recognising the work of art as such”. This notion of recognition distinguishes the restoration of artworks from other types of products in which one does not recognise artistic or heritage qualities. In that sense, Brandi’s Theory defines restoration in the following way: “Restoration typically implies any kind of intervention meant to restore to a given product of human activity its original function” (Jokileto 2013, 13).

Authenticity in the Works of Cesare Brandi and his Contemporaries

117

Interpreting the Concept of Preserving Authenticity Individual countries embody rather different views on authenticity. For instance, ever since Boito, Giovannoni, and Pane-Gazzolo and all the way to the Restoration Charter of 1932, Italy kept re-examining its position on the restoration of monuments and historical edifices, confirming the misgivings regarding physical reconstruction and reproduction by means of a stylistic analogy between lost parts and new additions. The preservation and conservation of preserved elements is central. When necessary, new elements should allow the work to be preserved in good condition, but in line with the diachronic aspect and clearly marked as new and not as a reproduction of old, lost parts. The regal way and principle of “conserve, not restore”, proclaimed by Victor Hugo, John Ruskin, and Alois Riegl, rested primarily on the concept of authenticity; in Marco Bardeschi’s view, architecture and all other forms of human creativity are authorial art and therefore cannot be reproduced without losing their specificity (Bardeschi 2007, 196௅97). Authenticity was thus unequivocally identified with the life process of the material and its components over time. Twelve years ago, with the objective to continue the work of the 1994 Nara conference on authenticity, Roberto di Stefano promoted the conclusions of the Naples conference, which clarified the Italian position on authenticity and promotion of the concept of formal authenticity. The purest doctrine of stylistic restoration, which does not basically belong to any kind of theory of the preservation of historical monuments, but refers to their aesthetic presentation, was replaced with a scientific theory of conservation in terms of the total richness of authenticity. In practice, however, conservation adheres to this theory only to a degree. Having rejected the principle of stylistic homogeneity, it went to the opposite extreme, overemphasising the stylistic base and presenting the monument as an excised sample (Tomaszewski 2007, 227). There also appeared a new, modern vision of the social function of historical monuments. The old, elitist vision rested on the belief in the power of the human imagination, which enabled people to hark back to earlier historical periods. That is why members of the cultural elite travelled to Greece and Italy, to explore the ruins of the old greatness of ancient culture and read the works of Homer and Virgil in Greek and Latin. The modern vision does not delve into historical cultures; it is motivated primarily by modern ideologies and business and rests on modern technology, which is able to transport historical monuments to our own time or from one continent to another or to present them in new,

118

Chapter Seventeen

different, and surprising ways. The public perception has turned historical monuments from antiquities into curiosities. In Tomaszewski’s view, in discussions of valorisation and criteria in the domain of historical conservation, one should face the current state of affairs and call things as they really are (Tomaszewski 2007, 228). In addition to all of the above, one should also bear in mind that the concept of authenticity is closely tied to certain philosophical concepts and approaches. For centuries, philosophers have discussed the concepts of continuity, change, and truth. In Jokilehto’s text, one is immediately familiar with the debate concerning the ship of Theseus. As a monument, the ship was preserved by the Athenians for a long time. Due to the gradual replacement of rotting planks, the ship retained its original appearance, but all of its building material had been replaced. The following question then emerged: was it still the ship of Theseus? In modern times, this is viewed in one of two alternative ways. Regarding this example, one might argue that the gradual renovation over time still secured the ship’s spatiotemporal continuity, preserving a certain identity. Alternatively, one could argue that the new materials could have been built into any other ship whatsoever. In that case, what would be the significance of this other ship? From the perspective of historical structure, one might also ask about the difference between gradual reconstructions of old monuments (a common practice when it comes to restoring building) and general reconstructions of buildings or general restorations of buildings undertaken at a specific point in time (Jokilehto 2006, 8). According to Jokilehto, in ancient Greece, the concept of mimesis played a central role in Plato’s and Aristotle’s perceptions regarding poetry, drama, painting, sculpture, and music. Mimesis translates as imitation, as well as representation. Modern thinkers, from Nietzsche to Benjamin, Heidegger, and Brandi, invoked the idea that instead of mimesis (i.e. the imitation of nature), contemporary works of art are produced through creative processes, which gives them specificity. However, Plato had already proposed the concept of form or idea as eternal, fixed, and disembodied. The purpose of ancient artists was to imitate nature, in fact, to represent its forms in our reality. Vitruvius even spoke of architecture as representing forms that one finds in nature. Via Plotinus, the concept was adopted by renaissance artists, such as Rafael. Bellori likewise interpreted artistic ideas as striving to become ideals: stemming from nature, they transcend their beginnings and become the source of art. Nonetheless, in Jokilehto’s view, when discussing the essence of mimesis, although this concept is often interpreted as imitation, it should not be understood as mere copying, but rather as a process of

Authenticity in the Works of Cesare Brandi and his Contemporaries

119

learning by imitating the past. It is a form of presenting or re-presenting ideas and subjects, as a response that may guarantee continuity, as well as the elaboration and creation of new forms (Jokilehto 2007, 183௅184). Certain non-European authors consider the Venice Charter too grounded in European cultural values and thus not universal enough or unequivocally applicable to non-European societies or cultures that are not based on European culture. They stress that European values centre on visual beauty, whereas in the East Asian world, values are determined by spiritual and natural elements. While it may be true that Europeans have often attached much importance to aesthetics, this is by no means exclusive to them (Jokilehto 2007, 187௅88). On the other hand, due to today’s global flow of information, assessing cultural heritage by spiritual values and environment has become a widespread policy, supported by international doctrine, relevant for the Eastern world as much as for the Western. At the same time, every culture has its own ways of acquiring information and presenting values. This is part of cultural diversity, as stated in the UNESCO Declaration, which asserts that culture takes various forms in time and space and that diversity inheres in the uniqueness and multiplicity of groups and societies that constitute humanity (Jokilehto 2007, 188). One should accept that different cultures may have different understandings of concepts such as truth and authenticity. Most histories of philosophy begin with ancient Greece and conclude with reflections from European contemporary philosophy. Whatever happened beyond this region is generally neglected, save for an occasional reference to the ancient East. Nonetheless, when speaking of “Western philosophy”, it would be more accurate to understand it as our contemporary philosophy, given that today many ideas are shared across the globe. There are many publications that discuss the specificities of individual regions, for instance, contemporary African philosophy. While defining their own reflections (ideas), African philosophers faced the special problem of defining their cultural identity without forfeiting the rationality and truth characterising modern philosophy in general. At the same time, it was recognised that African thinking shared the same values with the rest of the world. Also, it was rightly noted that Africa is an immense continent with many traditions that are still part of contemporary local cultures. Therefore, it is only natural to explore what is shared and specific in different approaches. In Jokilehto’s view, to gain an insight into “modern” philosophy, one must begin with Heidegger, who discussed two fundamental components of works of art: the earth (material) and the world of meanings (ideas)

120

Chapter Seventeen

(Jokilehto 2007, 188). Heidegger cites the example of the Greek temple, where there is a statue of God, and concludes that by means of the temple, God is present there, which presence is itself expansion and delimitation as a sacred precinct. The temple’s physical existence and display of God still do not confirm the importance of that locus, but the presence of God and spiritual or immaterial dimensions lend it real meaning. The temple’s physical aspect Heidegger calls the earth and asserts that in things that are born, the earth is essential as the agent of protection (Jokilehto 2007, 185). The stony material constitutes the earthly aspect of the work, but not its idea. However, the temple posits the idea, which gives sense to the work. Heidegger asserts that the truth occurs in the act of its existence, which shines forth in beauty. In his 1994 study Restauro, Raymond Lemaire offered a roadmap for solving the conceptual framework of the Venice Charter. He distinguishes between formal authenticity and historical authenticity, whereby one is tied to the other, without neglecting the possibilities of a new doctrinal alibi for a rebirth of the assumed original identity of architectural expressions. Many theorists have based their philosophies of restoration on the impossibility of replacing an original work with a reproduction. Concerning the differences between aesthetic integrity and archaeological authenticity, Nelson Goodman’s definition, also cited by Umberto Eco, is perhaps the best description of the irrefutable truth that every imitation of a work of art unjustifiably and wrongly pretends to possess the production history of an original (Fabozzi 2007, 199). Documented data and the authenticity of information sources constitute the other aspect of the concept of authenticity. This is most relevant to the historical and archaeological verification of a given source of heritage. Testing authenticity should not be limited to only one aspect, ignoring all others. Rather, it should be based on a critical re-examining of all relevant aspects, striving for a balanced assessment as a synthesis. The social context and tradition of life constitute the third aspect of authenticity, to which multicultural communities, such as Canada, devote special attention. In traditional socio-cultural contexts, special attention is devoted to the immaterial dimensions of heritage, skills, and knowhow, as stated in UNESCO’s Convention on Immaterial Heritage and certain national laws regarding the matter. The term “authenticity” suggests different approaches, which may lead to incorrect conclusions. The problem is exacerbated when applied to the concept of artefact or to artworks and the interventions performed on them, especially if those works command historical, artistic, or religious significance. Aesthetic disproportions and 19th-century historiography,

Authenticity in the Works of Cesare Brandi and his Contemporaries

121

shaped by Hegel’s concepts of right and left, caused both a diversification and reduction of positions regarding the concept of authenticity. That in turn suggests that it is impossible hypothetically to accept a single solution whereby the concept of authenticity would respect different aspects and that every work of art occupies a unique conceptual situation of its own (Del Rio Carrasco 2007, 39).

Bibliography Bardeschi, Marco D. 2007. “The Discrimination Value of Authenticity in the Debate on Restoration: Before and after Nara.” In Values and Criteria in Heritage Conservation: Proceedings of the International Conference of ICOMOS, ICCROM and Fondazione Romualdo del Bianco, ed. Andrzej Tomaszewski, 19598. Florence: Edizioni Polistampa. Del Rio Carrasco, J. Manuel. 2007. “Values of Heritage in the Religious and Cultural Tradition of Christianity: The Concept of Authenticity.” In Values and Criteria in Heritage Conservation: Proceedings of the International Conference of ICOMOS, ICCROM and Fondazione Romualdo del Bianco, ed. Andrzej Tomaszewski, 4148. Florence: Edizioni Polistampa. Fabozzi, Giuseppe C. 2007. “The Need for Authenticity in the Tradition of the Florentine School of Restoration.” In Values and Criteria in Heritage Conservation: Proceedings of the International Conference of ICOMOS, ICCROM and Fondazione Romualdo del Bianco, ed. Andrzej Tomaszewski, 199208. Florence: Edizioni Polistampa. Jokilehto, Jukka. 2006. “Considerations on Authenticity and Integrity in World Heritage Context.” City & Time 2 (1). http://www.ct.ceci-br.org. —. 2007. “Aesthetics in the World Heritage Context.” In Values and Criteria in Heritage Conservation: Proceedings of the International Conference of ICOMOS, ICCROM and Fondazione Romualdo del Bianco, ed. Andrzej Tomaszewski, 18392. Florence: Edizioni Polistampa. Jokileto, Juka [Jokilehto, Jukka]. 2013. “Šta je moderna konzervacija?” [What is Modern Conservation?]. Moderna konzervacija 1: 1319. Tomaszewski, Andrzej. 2007. “Conservation between ‘Aesthetics’ and Authenticity.” In Values and Criteria in Heritage Conservation: Proceedings of the International Conference of ICOMOS, ICCROM and Fondazione Romualdo del Bianco, ed. Andrzej Tomaszewski, 22741. Florence: Edizioni Polistampa.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN PHILIPPE SOLLERS AND THE IDEA OF TEXTUAL AND IDEOLOGICAL REVOLUTION SANELA NIKOLIû

The key innovations of the group of theorists and artists gathered by Philippe Sollers, founder and editor of the Tel Quel magazine, in Paris in 1960 consisted of criticising and transforming the French nouveau roman and structuralism, exploring scientific knowledge, literature and other arts, the elaboration of the materialist theory of text, écriture, signifying practices (pratiques signifiantes), and intertextuality. Sollers’s post-avantgarde position directed Tel Quel’s activities toward understanding, exploring, and elaborating on literature as a social and politically determined material practice, as well as to an activist exploration of meaning, sense, and the role of language in society, that is, the context in which art appears. Sollers’s theoretical work was driven by the idea that one had to move away from the ideological and linguistic-semiotic analysis of culture, by means of theoretical work, text and “writing”, to a radical, revolutionary change of the current social condition. Accordingly, Sollers regarded himself and other members of his Tel Quel group as socially active workers. This essay will analyse, from the position of a meta-aesthetic problem, Sollers’s complex theoretical elaboration of the hypothesis that “writing” should become the literary work’s primary task, with ideological revolution as its ultimate aim. His elaboration included detecting the work of text and “writing” in the execution of ideology; the belief that by means of language and text one could deconstruct established ideological ideas; and, finally, participation in the execution of those changes through practical and theoretical activities. Unlike Louis Althusser, who argued that ideology was mediated by the activities of ideological state apparatuses and various social practices, Sollers maintained that ideology, regardless of the social domain, was always mediated by the field of language and text. Sollers accepted Althusser’s understanding of Marxism as a general theory of ideology, but,

Philippe Sollers and the Idea of Textual and Ideological Revolution

123

under the influence of linguistic theories, viewed ideology as representing a certain form of thinking about reality that produces its materialistic objectification through language and signifying practices. Confronting in an intertextual manner the methodologies of Marxism, structuralism, linguistics, and psychoanalysis, Sollers projected the importance of the struggle between the social classes and the economic base of Western capitalist society onto the problematisation of the work in language and the work of language. The ruling bourgeois ideology is trying to impose on us the idea that we are going through a “civilization crisis” and exactly in those cases where, in our opinion, the deep consequences of the world crisis caused by the capitalist mode of production should be analysed. [...] In our opinion, the theoretical bases of those analyses are the following: first of all, dialectic and historical materialism on the one hand, and on the other, the noncognitive, according to Freud. (Sollers 1971, 96)

Sollers’s criticism was aimed at the use of language as a means of exalting, propagating, and imposing capitalist society and representing bourgeois ideology and its prescribed relations between social powers and the formation of the subject in society. In that context, Sollers viewed literature as a field immanently determined by language and “writing” as a primary area of liberation from bourgeois ideology, owing to his understanding of the practice of “writing” as a “universal” juncture of practising social contradictions and differences. For him, literature was the primary field of interest, because linguistic practice could act in its truest sense by means of “writing”. “Writing” was interpreted as the production of meaning by language itself, not as a creation of a writing subject who “delivers” her subjectivity by creating a literary work. Literature summed up all characteristics of language and for Sollers, of all the discourses of the modern era in the West, it was the only place where logos-speech could be released from its subordination to logos-thought. We should insist that philosophy, poetry, and literature share as a common element their “repressed part”, bearing in mind that these are at the centre of the “negation of real activity”, “a negation by which philosophy keeps telling itself to make people believe what it is saying, as well as to believe that it is beyond politics, as it is beyond the social classes” (Althusser). Practising materialist and dialectic writing […] means breaking with spiritualism and idealism alike, and with their complicit opposite: formalism. Even Mayakovski said: “The fairytale of apolitical art must be broken into a thousand pieces”. This certainly does not mean  quite the

124

Chapter Eighteen opposite  that ideological struggle in literature should be directly political. In reality, this political task, marked by a continuous engagement in history and struggle between the social classes, will be achieved if writing is recognised for its function as a “universal juncture” in practising contradictions and in the battle of opposites […] (Sollers 1970, 76)

At the same time, the revolution in literature that would liberate the productive powers of writing from the phantasms that repress it was to mark a turn in the entire ideological field, concerning the dominant subordination of these areas to language. This is how the literary avantgarde could establish itself alongside the theoretical, literary, and political avant-gardes. “The theory of écriture is inevitably placed on the side of revolutionary activity” (Sollers 1968, 14). In Sollers’s view, the text, as a product of “writing”, is a materially determined space of linguistic realities in which every empirical context of the world is transformed; furthermore, its experience actually originates from the text itself. That was the point of Sollers’s rejection of traditional philosophical logocentrism, by constantly critiquing all kinds of representation and by asserting reality as a fiction determined by pure linguistic experience, which is nothing but a functioning paradigmatic field of language. This is how Sollers tried to demonstrate and execute textual autonomy as a separate and only form of social consciousness and social activity. He offered his theory of “the poetics of excess”, predicated on abolishing representation and all references to reality, as a supplement to a rational-empirical analysis of reality. The text relates to classic literature the same way that chemistry relates to alchemy. From this view, the text can be understood as the analysis of the exclusion of the subject from scientific discourse: this is why we said that it “knows” psychosis, not neurosis, as some have neurotically tried to prove. Therefore, we can claim that the text renews knowledge, which is nothing but a continuous questioning of every piece of knowledge. (Sollers 1970, 76)

In order to transform the experience of bourgeois ideology, the text should be based on a complete rejection of narrative form. The purpose of this would be to reflect the applied procedure, so that the object, referred to in the text, might disappear. This object would be empirical reality itself, of which only references and indications – traces – would remain. Sollers rightly notes that earlier “socially engaged” literary practice was fundamentally idealistic, resting on the hypothesis that meaning and truth could exist a priori and independently of language. In such an epistemological framework, verbal language, especially in writing, was

Philippe Sollers and the Idea of Textual and Ideological Revolution

125

always but an “external decoration, the potential of a dangerous untruth” (Sollers 1968a, 401). As an absent referent, by rejecting the material nature of language, representation was privileged over reality, which made representation possible in the first place, and that reality was language itself (Sollers 1968b, 245). Therefore, for Sollers, the point of the new, avant-garde literary work was in “language, in the practice of duplicating language, in the reconfiguration of that practice”, which, at the same time, “represented the subversion of bourgeois idealism” (Sollers 1968c, 387). By turning attention from the representation of reality outside language to the generation and production of meaning, the field of “reality” itself was brought into question: “reality is no longer a piece of predetermination shaped in one way or another, but a process of generation under transformation” (Sollers 1968c, 393). Sollers thus called for a continuous practice of avant-garde writing as an ideological struggle meant to engender a different model of knowing reality and the production of new social meanings. “We believe that what used to be called ‘literature’ now belongs to a period that is past, making room for the birth of the science of writing” (Sollers 1968e, 72). In his 1967 essay “The Roof”, Sollers explicitly linked the theory of text and the practice of “writing” with a radical Marxist critique of society and culture and then formulated, with other members of the Tel Quel group, the essay “Revolution Here and Now” (Tel Quel 1968, 34) as the manifesto of a radical platform meant to initiate a textual and ideological revolution through the practice of writing and the work of language. In these essays, Sollers argues that “writing” should be released from its usual functions pertaining to communication and aesthetics and treated as a means and space for constructing a new linguistic reality. In the discourse of Sollers and his colleagues, the phenomenon of “writing” was fully conceptualised as a separate social practice, the effects of which were meant to play a substantial role in starting the social revolution. Sollers imagined the practice of “writing” as a field for affirming all kinds of suppressed, marginalised, and excluded otherness. This affirmation of otherness was seen not as identifying with otherness in literary texts, but as a thought that thinks the origin of prohibition and transgression, their logic and genealogy as a force and dynamics in any area of social practice. This is how the fragmentation and heterogeneity of literary writing – recognised in analogy to the fragmentation and heterogeneity of the domain of unconscious and social practices – transgressed the traditional “compact” nature of representation and secured the “return” of all that was excluded from representation. The “standard” rhetorical literary discourse based on codes – where writing was seen as the subordination of the oral

126

Chapter Eighteen

act of speaking to its representation in writing – was replaced by “writing” as a trans-linguistic productive process, as opposed to the writing of linear language, “closed” in thought. The resistance to totalisation and the imposition of meaning from somewhere outside the text broke the stability of metaphysical logos and transformed “writing” into a stage where the totality of differences emerges simultaneously, with all the unpredictability of an act of ideological performance. Seeking to develop a transgressive practice of writing, Sollers devised his novels as an act of practising his theory of writing, whilst, at the same time, perceiving theoretical thought as an effect of the practice of writing. He based his concept of “writing” on the work of those authors whose importance, as he believed, was demonstrated by “their coefficient of theoretical-formal protest” (Sollers 1968b, 10) and whose works he considered manifestations of the literary and philosophical practice of transgressive writing in relation to the established order of literary representations of the modern era and the capitalist social order. In his collection of essays Logiques, Sollers’s focus was on texts by de Sade, Mallarmé, and Bataille, because those texts “burnt themselves on all levels” (Sollers 1968e, 75). They subverted the linear nature of the flow of history, the concept of truth, and the metaphysical, thought-based subject. Sollers shaped revolutionary “writing” as a literary, textual experiment on narrative fragments and with resistance to narration. Abandoning the notions of characters and narrative form as bourgeois components, in his novel Drame, instead of characters and a narrator to tell the story, he uses the pronouns “I” and “he”, while in Nombres, three pronouns are predominant: “I”, “we”, and “you”. In his essay “Das Augenlicht”, Sollers used his linguistic revolution in a double capacity – writing about the revolution and writing using revolution-inspired characteristics. Sollers’s entire elaboration of the concepts of “writing” and text was part of establishing the theoretical project of Tel Quel, which was meant to start a social revolution. Sollers and the Tel Quel group’s theories were also influenced by Althusser’s views on the role of epistemological models in the perception and construction of social reality and the role of theory in the production of epistemological breaks in scientific discourse. On this matter, Sollers pointed out that after 1968 the essence of the crumbling of capitalist production was expressed by questioning the very substance of the importance and role of the universities as centres of the production and transmission of knowledge. The “crisis” in literature, the endless discussions about that crisis, represents only one of the symptoms in this historical process, although a very important one. In France, this symptom developed continuously after

Philippe Sollers and the Idea of Textual and Ideological Revolution

127

the qualitative leap of the struggle between the social classes in May 1968, in the factories, but also, and for the first time as a final twist, at the University – the centre of the reproduction and transmission of knowledge. (Sollers 1970, 74)

Post-1968 events led Sollers to move on from the idea that the literary field could be the key ground for the practice of “writing” as social struggle. In Sollers’s post-1968 essays, from that point on, the dominant problems no longer comprise only the status and function of literary writing, but also that of writing in the social sciences and philosophy, as well as the idea of developing a theory from the platform of Marxism as “applied philosophy”, which would include a critical integration with the practices of linguistics, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and the history of science.

Bibliography Sollers, Philippe. 1968a. “L’Écriture fonction de transformation sociale.” In Théorie d’ensemble, eds. Michel Foucault et al., 399–405. Paris: Édition du Seuil. —. 1968b. Logiques. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. —. 1968c. “Réponses à La Nouvelle Critique.” In Théorie d’ensemble, eds. Michel Foucault et al., 386–93. Paris: Édition du Seuil —. 1968d. “Le Réflexe de réduction.” In Théorie d’ensemble, eds. Michel Foucault et al., 394–98. Paris: Édition du Seuil. —. 1968e. “Écriture et révolution.” In Théorie d’ensemble, eds. Michel Foucault et al., 67–79. Paris: Édition du Seuil. —. 1970. “La lutte idéologique dans l’écriture d’avant-garde.” La Nouvelle Critique 39: 74–78. —. 1971. “Thèses générales.” Tel Quel 44: 96–98. Tel Quel. 1968. “La révolution ici maintenant.”, Tel Quel 34: 3–4.

CHAPTER NINETEEN THEORY OF CONTEMPORARY ART: LINES AND CURVES (BORIS GROYS, DIETER MERSCH, W. J. T. MITCHELL) ŽARKO PAIû

Three paradigms Contemporary art theory since 1989 is determined by the endeavour to deconstruct the notion of a single ruling idea from which every possible real art project and its incarnation can be explained. The most important theories of contemporary art are at once paradigms for explaining the relations between the world, society, politics, culture, and art in the age of post-history (Rebentisch 2014). Three paradigms are the most creditworthy, since they correspond in terms of theory to the essence of our time. Under their aegis, and in contemporary Croatian art or the contemporary period in general, one may detect the ability to creatively appropriate the area of an alternative to the world of the neo-imperialist globalitarian order, which has turned art into a generating plant for the production of cultural spectacle. All three paradigms answer the question about the point of contemporary art in a world following the establishment of an integrated ideological, political, and economic model of globalisation. Their basic feature is determined by an insight into the necessity of re-evaluating the inheritance of modern and avant-garde art, traditional aesthetics and post-aesthetics, the history of art, the study of art, and the phenomenology of the image. The first paradigm is the repoliticisation of art, the second is the re-aestheticising of the world of life, and the third is the visual or iconic turn. The most important theorist of the first paradigm is Boris Groys, of the second Dieter Mersch, and of the third a group of various art historians, art philosophers, sociologists of

Theory of Contemporary Art: Lines and Curves

129

knowledge, and visual theorists, such as Gottfried Boehm, Hans Belting, Peter Sloterdijk, Bruno Latour, and W. J. T. Mitchell. An understanding of late-20th- and early-21st-century contemporary art seems inseparable from new radically critical attempts of theory (of philosophy, sociology, psychoanalysis) to explain the workings of the ideology of globalisation and globalism. A turn from the insight that with the end of communism history itself came to an end, encouraged by the re-emergence of various neo-Marxian and post-Marxian theories of history in a world dominated by liberal democracy and global capitalism German philosopher and art theorist Boris Groys has best articulated the essence of this paradigm (Groys 2008). By abandoning the categories of beauty and the sublime, contemporary aesthetics and art are becoming communicative practices. Beauty is subordinated to fashion, and fashions are in constant mutual conflict and contradiction. With the transformation of the aestheticised object into the world of life, a turn has occurred. The world of life has subordinated the world of art to its own purposes. The main marker of the art of our time is hyper-production (of photographs, video art, cyber art, film). In his analyses of the strategies of contemporary art, Groys follows the logic of the contemporary avant-gardes. If everything has become the world of a life ruled by politics, then art is left with the possibility of joining the critical resistance to the world of global capitalism by re-politicising its subject. Groys’s position is that of social criticism and ontological polities. Repoliticising art means working in conformity with the basic ideas of the avant-garde concerning the change of social and living conditions of the reproduction of life itself. In such an extension of the historical avantgardes through other means, art takes over the role of the activity of life itself. The re-politicisation paradigm for art has been derived from the paradigm of the re-politicisation of culture, which was carried out in sociology by Pierre Bourdieu (see Paiü 2006, 12639). It is obvious here that art has an autonomous status vis-à-vis culture, which is itself primarily an ideological tool in the system of global capitalism. Art has not lost its ability to create new worlds by having engaged with the world with social criticism. Where are the borders of such a commitment? If we ask where the need is at all for art to be re-politicised, we will find ourselves up against the challenge of criticising a paradigm that derives its programme from a superior social, political, and cultural criticism of the existing. Like the other two paradigms of contemporary art theory, Groys’s repoliticisation of art is nothing but a revival of the potentials of the avantgarde at a time when the avant-garde is coming to an end. The prevailing

130

Chapter Nineteen

form of artistic intervention in societies ruled by ideologies is the conceptual and performative deed of opening awareness to the problem of the perversion of human liberty. The deconstruction of the body in the space of the perversion of human liberty, the iconoclastic act of destroying the new visuality that is being put to use by the spectacle of capital, and the networking of collective initiatives (community art) comprise a triad of procedures of the social-criticism function of art in the age of post-history. The limits of this paradigm lie simply in its responding to the loss of art’s autonomy by reducing it to politics. As in the case of the first historical avant-gardes, here, too, we are concerned with a reduction of the original assemblage of art. When art is reduced to society and politics, the chance for any alternative to the current world vanishes. Art becomes mere social commentary, political activism, and a means for an end beyond itself. The re-aestheticisation of the world of life does not refer so much to the orientation of art practices in the age of post-history as much as to the problem of testing the possibility of art being thought of out of itself as a new aesthetic event (Ereignis). Thus since 1989, there has been a relatively large number of theoretical attempts at new aesthetics (appearance [in the sense of coming into view] or phenomenon, mise-enscène, performativeness). These have all been responses to the problem observed that contemporary art can no longer be understood from the standpoint of the massive ontology of the beautiful and the sublime. The most interesting representative of this paradigm must be the German philosopher and media theorist Dieter Mersch. He has articulated a new language and conceptual framework for the condition of the post-historical constellation of art as event and aura (HeideggerBenjamin) in the environment of the performative practice of contemporary art (Mersch 2002). For Mersch, three kinds of aesthetics have been drawn into the vortex of the modern age: the aesthetics of tradition, of the work of art, and of the avant-garde. Conceptual differences between modern and contemporary art correspond to some kind of epistemological cut. Thus for modern art, it is the aesthetics of the work that is relevant, for contemporary aesthetics, it is that of the event. The objectlessness of abstract painting and the iconoclasm of the avant-garde lead into the space-time of the re-aestheticisation of the world of life because in it, the event of the performative relation of humans and the world unfolds as an event of the gleam of the world. In the visual arts, event-art, happenings, post-1960s installations and performances, and the period of the second historical avant-garde no longer show anything.

Theory of Contemporary Art: Lines and Curves

131

This is the meta-art of the event. It takes place in the world of life, for the work, in the traditional meaning of the autonomous work of art, has been replaced by the production of life itself qua artistic event that has deprived the work of the right to authenticity. For Mersch then, performativity is the basic category for the artistic event. For contemporary art since the 1960s, only the act is important, the action, the moment of intervention in the space, the provocation of the state of society, the overturning of taboos, communication with the environment, interaction, and mise-en-scène. Performative projects go on in a time outside vulgar metaphysical temporality (pastpresentfuture). They are virtually incapable of being represented. They occur in the moment. The basic categories of the performative aesthetic are: 1) destruction, 2) self-referentiality, and 3) paradox. The artist destroys the previous work of the modern epoch with its self-referential body-in-motion and paradoxically once again “creates” it by breaking down its aura. Performativity is not the aesthetics of either the beautiful or the ugly. Rejecting reduction to politics, society, or any derivation of the modern creation of man as the autonomous subject of history, the paradigm of the re-aestheticising of the world of life considers the performative event the end point of the sublimation of contemporary art. The problem of all attempts to renew the aesthetic in a world ruled by no super-ordinate principle, cause, or purpose lies in their bringing back the possibility of some faith in the incomplete project of Modernism. Mersch’s aesthetics of the performative, unlike the re-politicisation of art, leaves open the likelihood of overcoming art as mere social criticism. If art cannot be reduced to the social, political, or cultural power of creating new worlds, still it remains at issue how safe the fragility of the event of performativity is from the pressures of life itself that takes from art its historical being. The visual or iconic turn is a collective name for various endeavours to revive the power of the visible and the iconic from the rule of logocentrism (Maar and Burda 2005). In other words, in the new media conditions of the reproduction of the world, an attempt is being made to give the image back its own right to autonomy. The visual construction of culture corresponds to the iconic turn in contemporary art. Of course, this does not mean that we should simply say that we are witnessing the revival of painting or some other traditional medium of the representation of art in an age of an overwhelming digitalisation of the visual. The projects created at the beginning of the 21st century in interdisciplinary collaboration between philosophers, art historians, sociologists, mediologists,

132

Chapter Nineteen

natural scientists, and artists characterise the work of ZKM Karlsruhe and the Iconic Turn project. From the many theorists of this paradigm, I would single out W. J. T. Mitchell primarily because for epistemological reasons, in his criticisms of the linguistic philosophy of Rorty and the neo-pragmatists, he has created the conditions for a far-reaching theoretical pictorial/visualistic turn. Following the long domination of text and speech, the image is henceforth to be considered an autonomous field of meaning. It belongs to the visual construction of the world in the age of media. It is its own precursor and super-ordinate. This kind of iconocentrism derives from Mitchell’s basic premise of the visual construction of reality as a revolution in cultural studies theory. Instead of a culture that organises reality according to its own codes, in the age of post-history it is visuality that is actually crucial. Images have their own history, surplus meanings, and their own visual logic. Our area of autonomous visuality is determined by the semantic and semiotic context. In it, images appear as vehicles of meaning and are themselves sign structures of the contemporary world (Mitchell 1994). Images are the iconocentric circle of the media culture of visuality. But their power is actually illusory. In his analysis of bio-cybernetics, Mitchell pulls together the story of artificially created life and computer technology. Bio-cybernetics is not just an information and communication event in which life and art possess completely different characteristics. Mitchell has indebted contemporary art theory by having founded visual studies. The interdisciplinary science of the collaboration of different disciplines in the consideration of the phenomenon of the image and visuality has contributed to a different understanding of media in the age of bio-cybernetic reproduction. In its breaking away from the natural world (of language, symbol, history), the entire world becomes mediaorganised. The network of relationships in the visual construction of reality will henceforth determine the world and art as a communication structure. The problem with the overall concept of the visual or iconic turn is in the iconocentrism of visual studies. Following the emancipation of the image from text and speech, actual images themselves are generated in a different manner than traditional texts. However, the image is not the other side of the text, but from the very beginning of the avant-garde, the text has been represented in terms of images. Hence the act of the deconstruction of text and the philosophy of language is justified only to the extent that it does not open the possibility of a new totality of relations, in which visuality precedes every other form of human relationship to the world. Contemporary art under the aegis of the paradigm of the

Theory of Contemporary Art: Lines and Curves

133

visual/iconic turn is just one section of the complex structure of reality that is articulated through media. Visual studies and the pictoriality/visuality of the media age are only a mirror image of the same discomfort in other areas. There is a covert deontology of culture that is liberated from all the sins of the avant-garde by placing not society but the culture of the image and bio-cybernetic life at the top of its cognitive pyramid. The iconoclasm of the avant-garde concludes, paradoxically, with a luxuriant visualisation of reality generated from idea machines (Paiü 2006a). The world of art in which we live is no longer a world, and art has long since disappeared from it, turning into a mass of figures and forms such as media, virtual, and digital art.

The outlook? If philosophy in this post-historical assemblage still intends to survive, then its basic question is no longer what the essence of contemporary art is, but rather what the point is of contemporary art if its “world” has become philosophically produced in the scientific production of objects from pure idea machines (Virilio 1991). Contemporary art and its theory face the challenge of a second beginning. Instead of going round and round in circles and the tautological stance that contemporary art responds to the world the way it is and the way that is necessarily possible here and now, perhaps the time has really ripened for asking about the point of one and the other (contemporary art and contemporary art theory) and their future, which neither utopias nor eschatologies will be projecting any longer, but which will be generated by the mere iconicity of the image without a world of its own. But is there at all such a future, one not comprehensible from this total currency of the new that consumes everything?

Bibliography Groys, Boris. 2008. Art Power. London: The MIT Press. Maar, Christa and Hubert Burda, eds. 2005. The ICONIC TURN: Die Neue Macht der Bilder. Cologne: DuMont. Mersch, Dieter. 2002. Ereignis und Aura: Untersuchungen zu einer Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt: Edition Suhrkamp. Mitchell, William John Thomas. 1994. Picture Theory, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.

134

Chapter Nineteen

Paiü, Žarko. 2006a. Slika bez svijeta: Ikonoklazam suvremene umjetnosti [The Image without the World: The Iconoclasm of Contemporary Art]. Zagreb: Litteris. —. 2006b. Moü nepokornosti: Intelektualac i biopolitika [The Power of Non-subjugation: The Intellectual and Biopolitics]. Zagreb: Antibarbarus Editions. Rebentisch, Juliane. 2014. Theorien der Gegenwartkunst (Zur Einführung). Hamburg: Junius. Virlio, Paul. 1991. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. New York: Semiotext(e).

CHAPTER TWENTY LOUIS ALTHUSSER’S THEORY OF IDEOLOGICAL INTERPELLATION IN THE POST-SOCIALIST SPACE OF THE BALKANS RADE PANTIû

In his famous essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (Althusser 2014), the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser performed an epistemological break in the field of ideology theory. Althusser wrested the concept of ideology from the discourse of social consciousness and thus also from the traditional Marxist concept of ideology qua false consciousness, and attempted to provide a theory of ideology’s material grounding. The essay presents two key points, on which Althusser sought to erect his theory of ideology: first, that “ideology interpellates individuals as subjects” (Althusser 2014, 261) and second, that “ideology has a material existence” (Althusser 2014, 258). With the former claim, Althusser defines ideology as a special discourse, with mechanisms of its own, with which it interpellates individuals and produces their subject positions. Ideology is thus a special discourse that has a materiality and structure of its own and produces specific material effects, and thus cannot be reduced to a mere illusion with no material grounding. With this conceptualisation of ideology, Althusser critiques Marx and Engels’s definition of ideology as illusory, false consciousness, that is, a fallacy as opposed to the reality of economic relations as its true “essence”. In Althusser’s view, ideology thus involves its own discursivity and produces specific ideological effects, and therefore cannot be reduced to anything outside of itself. The main function of ideology is the production of the subject-effect, and Althusser thus argues that “there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects” (Althusser 2014, 261). Ideological discourse and its mechanism of subjection rest on the structure

136

Chapter Twenty

of specular centring: the subject or subject-effect is produced by means of doubling the produced subject by the producing Subject, to whom the produced subject is subjected (empirical subjects are doubled by the transcendental subject, human subjects are doubled by God, etc.). In other words, ideology produces the subject-effect by using its specular structure to produce in the individual the imaginary effect of her self-misrecognition by and in the Other, which turns the individual into an ideological subject. Althusser explains the functioning of the structure of ideology in the process of ideological interpellation by referring to Christian religious ideology as an example. The main condition for religious ideological interpellation is the construction of a Singular, Absolute, Other Subject – God, who hails the human individual, thus lending her an identity in which she recognises herself and becomes a subject. In the very act of being addressed, the individual realises that he was the one who was addressed and accepts the identity that the Subject has assigned to him. In Althusser’s view, every human individual is always-already a subject constituted by ideology, which makes the human being “an ideological animal by nature”. Ideology thus exists only by the subject and for subjects and vice versa, the subject exists only by ideology and for ideology. The mechanism itself, whereby ideology interpellates individuals into subjects, is an unconscious one. The result of submitting to this scheme of ideological interpellation is that individuals qua interpellated ideological subjects “work by themselves”, that is, unaware of the interpellation mechanism, they misconstrue their subjection as their own free choice. This, according to Althusser, gives rise to the ambiguity of the term “subject”, which signifies both the freedom of subjectivity as the centre of initiative, initiating and answering for its actions, and a subjected, subjugated being, deprived of all freedom except the freedom to accept its own subjection. The individual is thus subjected as a free subject acting in line with her free convictions, participating, with her ostensibly free will, in the practices and rituals of religious ideological apparatuses. The concept of ideological apparatuses constitutes precisely the link between the ideological interpellation claim and that of ideology’s material existence. Althusser supports his thesis that ideology has a material existence by arguing that ideology is materialised through practices situated in ideological state apparatuses. According to this view, what drives the actions of every individual is not their conscious ideas, but material practices and rituals inscribed in ideological state apparatuses, where those actions reside. Ideology thus not only lends meaning and identity to individuals, by interpellating them into ideology and constituting them as subjects, but also directs their practical actions by

Louis Althusser’s Theory of Ideological Interpellation

137

means of the rituals and practices of ideological state apparatuses. Althusser combines these two claims in the following: “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (Althusser 2014, 256). Therefore, as the unconscious discourse of interpellation, ideology organises individuals into practical relations that are imaginary vis-à-vis their real relations, determined by their positioning in the economic relations of production. Ideology interpellates individuals by constituting them as subjects, as subject-effects of ideological discourse, providing them with imaginary reasons for taking their places in the relations of production. Therefore, the actual function of ideology and ideological subjects is to reproduce capitalist relations of production, which also reproduces the class hegemony of the bourgeoisie. The Slovenian theorist Rastko Moþnik has sought both to critique and build upon Althusser’s theory of ideological interpellation. In Moþnik’s view, Althusser’s concept of ideological interpellation was meant to bridge the gap in his theory of ideology that separated the materialist theory of the ways in which ideology functions in the social processes of the reproduction of the relations of production and the subject’s individual point of view, that is, the way the subject perceives her place in production as an agent of production. Moþnik maintains that Althusser’s concept of interpellation was meant to compensate for the absence of this “subjective” dimension of ideology theory. According to Moþnik, this missing dimension of Althusser’s theory of ideology may be retrieved by way of articulating Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory along with the Marxist theory of historical materialism.1 Moþnik views the process of ideological interpellation as one of subjectivation, comprising two interdependent mechanisms: the domain of subjectivation as a purely formal symbolic mechanism that always has the same structure and identification as an imaginary relation referring to ideological “content” (Moþnik 2013). Ideological interpellation functions by grounding the relationship of identification, but its success rests on its capacity to “trigger” the mechanism of subjectivation. These two domains of identification and subjectivation correspond to Lacan’s registers of the imaginary and the symbolic. In Moþnik’s judgement, since Althusser focuses only on the domain of the imaginary, his theory lacks an elaboration of the symbolic mechanism of subjectivation, which constitutes the grounding of every imaginary identification. Althusser’s definition of the imaginary does not fully conform to Lacan’s usage of the term, which denotes the Ego’s self-recognition by means of identifying with a certain point of view or subject position. In Lacan, the imaginary is an identification register that operates on the level of the “I”, the “Ego”

138

Chapter Twenty

and not on that of the subject, whose identification entails the symbolic register. Althusser’s interpellation thus boils down to an imaginary Egoidentification, whereby the subject identifies with the viewpoint of a subject supposed to believe, who is in turn analogous to Althusser’s imaginary Absolute Subject and thus cannot be the subject that performs symbolic subjectivation, without which no interpellation may succeed. Moþnik derives his concept of the subject who is supposed to believe by constructing a theory of ideology as one of interpretation (Moþnik 2003). According to this theory, utterances are grasped by means of possible background beliefs, which lend them meaning. Therefore, interpretation does not take place along a speech-reality axis, but in the dimension of utterance and its ideological background beliefs. Attempting to interpret a given statement, the interpreter thus strives to occupy a position wherefrom the statement may be understood. Moþnik calls this structural position, available in every discourse, “the subject supposed to believe”. The interpreter thus identifies with an instance of the subject supposed to believe and via that subject comes to believe in the possible meaningfulness of the statement. However, this is only a conditional identification, believing through an other, a mediator that constitutes a sort of “ideal interpellated subject” who unconditionally and necessarily believes whatever he is supposed to believe, so that the statement may make sense. Therefore, whereas imaginary identifications are conditional identifications with a subject who is supposed to believe, that is, with possible beliefs, symbolic identification entails a necessary and unconditional identification in which the subject “truly” believes. Moreover, this necessary identification, which constitutes interpellation, conditions the possibility of the subject’s transition from one background belief to another. The subject may thus “inhabit” a number of ideologies co-existing within a given society provided there be a single ideology in which she is interpellated. The subject may be interpellated in a given ideology if its background belief moves and captures an unconscious desire on the subject’s part. The subject is thus interpellated on an unconscious, phantasmatic level and so his identification with the background belief that interpellated him seems natural to him, necessary, and self-evident (Moþnik 1993). For interpellation to occur, then, the subject must not only identify with a subject who is supposed to believe, but also with an instance of the subject who is supposed to know. In modern bourgeois “individualist” societies, the role of the subject who is supposed to believe is played by nation as a zero-institution in every society (Moþnik 2003). In modern societies, characterised by a plurality of ideological conceptual schemes whereby different communities

Louis Althusser’s Theory of Ideological Interpellation

139

organise their social life, nation is tasked with supplying the neutral conceptual scheme, which constitutes their common speaking position. While other institutions in a given society perform certain particular functions, nation as a zero-institution is solely tasked with securing the prerequisites for the existence of society as a whole. The instance of nation as the subject who is supposed to know thus produces an empty assumption of knowledge that introduces the possibility of the existence of society as a whole and of various ways of its existence. This necessary identification with the subject who is supposed to know is thus preliminary for any conditional identification with the subject who is supposed to believe, who is attributed to various ideological schemes that assume different possibilities of societal organisation. This subject therefore also enables communication between members of a society who inhabit different ideological schemes. Nation is thus the supplementary institution that solves the communication problem of modern societies by interpellating subjects belonging to different ideological horizons and thus supplying them with a common point of identification, which enables mutual communication. However, the knowledge that the subject who is supposed to know supposedly has is only formal knowledge, void of all semantic content, which must be filled with a particular ideology to lend it “ideological” content. The ideology that manages to over-determine the institution of the nation becomes the hegemonic ruling ideology that, by way of the national subject who is supposed to know, interpellates subjects who identify with the given nation. The national zero-institution thus only indirectly produces the effect of a social whole, by way of various ideologies, one of which constitutes the hegemonic ideology. In nationally constituted communities, ideological struggle is waged precisely for the position of the ideology that will achieve mastery over the nation as the zero-institution. As a zero-institution, nation operates both internally, by giving an identity to its members, as well as externally, by giving its members an identity vis-à-vis other national institutions and their members. Thus it not only separates, but also links different nations and thus supports and reproduces certain relations of domination. Using the example of the Balkanist ideology, Moþnik shows how this hegemonic ideology, by overdetermining the national zero-institution, reproduces two kinds of domination: the “external”, economic, social, and political domination of Western Europe over the post-socialist countries of the Balkans and the “internal” domination of the domestic ruling socio-economic elites over the population of this region (Moþnik 2002). By way of this ideology, the post-socialist countries of the Balkans are identified as Europe’s other, that

140

Chapter Twenty

is, as the Balkans, a place of disorder, conflict, primitivism, poverty, etc., as opposed to Europe as a locus of civilisation, order, peace, prosperity, etc. The mechanism of Balkanism simultaneously forces each of these countries stigmatised as Balkan to prove that they are not Balkan, unlike their neighbours, who allegedly truly belong in the Balkans. The Balkanist ideology thus produces the effect of identifying the countries of the region as Balkan and simultaneously forces them to disavow this “negative” identity. Therefore, its function is to defer to Europe the right to decide whether a given country of the region belongs or not to the ideologically constructed space of the Balkans. For the people of the Balkans, Europe thus constitutes the subject who is supposed to know, who overdetermined their countries’ national zero-institutions and decides about their individual identities. Consequently, as the ideology that overdetermines the national zero-institutions of these countries, Balkanism has established two types of relating to the outside world: that of subjection through co-operation with European countries, which individual Balkan countries expect to recognise them as “non-Balkan” and that of antagonism to other countries of the region, which are perceived as “truly” Balkan. Therefore, to the citizens of these countries, submission to the hegemony of Europe does seem necessary, self-evident, and unproblematic, just like antagonism and conflict with other countries caught up in the Balkan matrix. The Balkanist matrix “captures” subjects by offering them the choice of either Europe or the Balkans, where the former is always-already chosen for them in advance. The Balkans is always-already marked as a senseless and irrational choice, which makes Europe seem like a freely chosen alternative. The Balkanist matrix thus reproduces the system of Western Europe’s geopolitical domination over the Balkan countries, as well as that of the local pro-European elites over their own populations.

Notes 1

In a posthumously published text (Althusser 2003), Althusser himself tried to provide a theoretical articulation of the discourses of psychoanalysis and historical materialism.

Louis Althusser’s Theory of Ideological Interpellation

141

Bibliography Althusser, Louis. 2003. “Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses.” In The Humanist Controversy and Other Essays (1966࣓1967), ed. François Matheron, 33௅84. London: Verso. —. 2014. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 232௅72. London: Verso. Moþnik, Rastko. 1993. “Ideology and Fantasy.” In The Althusserian Legacy, eds. E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker, 139௅56. London: Verso. —. 2002. “The Balkans as an Element in Ideological Mechanism.” In Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, eds. Dušan I. Bjeliü and Obrad Saviü, 79௅115. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. —. 2003a. “O ideologiji.” In: Tri teorije: ideologija, nacija, institucija, 3௅76. Belgrade: Centar za savremenu umetnost. —. 2003b. “O naciji.” In Tri teorije: ideologija, nacija, institucija, 79௅127. Belgrade: Centar za savremenu umetnost. —. 2013. “Ideological Interpellation: Identification and Subjectivation.” In Encountering Althusser: Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought, eds. Katja Diefenbach et al., 307௅22. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE VIBRANT SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES: BRUNO LATOUR’S SOCIOLOGY OF NON-HUMANS AND ITS POTENTIAL FOR CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL THEORY ANA PETROV

Non-humans under the Purview of a Sociological Investigation? As a discipline focused on the study of human beings, sociology has a long tradition of ignoring the non-human actors in the process of producing a society. Even though sociologists still tend to feel strange mixing humans and non-humans in their research, this has significantly changed since the influential work of Bruno Latour. The Latourian social turn to new perspectives has led to “reinventing the door” in contemporary social theory (Johnson 1988, 298). Latour points out that the focus on human beings was maintained through a process of purification, whereby an attempt is constantly made to isolate human beings from their nonhuman context. He argues that one of the characteristics of our age is the “modernist” denial of all the non-human actors that are deeply embedded in our lives, since it is impossible to find any situation that includes human actors only. Johnson stresses that humans only imagine that we see “pure” humans everywhere, thus neglecting the importance of non-humans as equal parts of societal networks. Rather, society consists of interconnected chains of humans and non-humans, entities called “hybrids” (Latour 1993). Latour’s discourse has been difficult to situate within a single discipline, thus it is usually labelled as part of the “anthropology of science”, “sociology of scientific knowledge”, and “science and technology studies”. Latour drew on the “actor-network theory (ANT)”, set up by the

Vibrant Social Technologies

143

Paris group of science and technology studies, even though the theory is now usually associated with him. This theory has opened a new perspective on the study of mediating processes between numerous heterogeneous societal actors, such as people, material (technical) objects, as well as ideals and symbolic entities. The fundamental questions here addressed are: how are practices rooted in the material circumstances of human existence and shaped by technologies?

Material Circumstances of Human Existence Dealing with the implications and misunderstandings of the actornetwork theory, Latour points out that there have been three resources developed over the ages to deal with agencies: nature, society, and meaning. The first one is the linking of agencies with nature and the tendency to ascribe to them a supposed “naturality”. The second one is seen in the attempt to grant them “sociality” and tie them with the social fabric. The third one appears to be the view that they are a semiotic construction and related to the construction of meaning. However, Latour points out that microbes, neutrinos of DNA, are at the same time natural, social, and discursive, which makes them “real, human and semiotic entities in the same breath” (Latour 1996, 369). Elaborating on the existing actor-network theory, Latour defines an actant as a source of action that may be either human or nonhuman and is usually both. Furthermore, the term “actant” does not refer to a thing or person itself, but, rather, to a capacity, i.e. an entity that has efficacy, that can do things, and that has coherence to make a difference, produce effects, and alter the course of events. Briefly, as Latour puts it, it is “any entity that modifies another entity”, thus neither a subject nor an object, but an “intervener” (Latour 2004, 75). In Aramis, Latour shows how the carriages, electricity, and magnets of an experimental Parisian mass transit system acted positively alongside the activities of human bodies, while in Pandora’s Hope, he shows how Amazonian worms played an important role in the history of the world. Following the Latourian logic of the construal of actants, contemporary social thinkers have embarked on the project of showing how numerous things and other living (but not necessarily human) creatures might be construed as being “like us”, since there is “a non- or not-quite-human body of evidence of the vitality of matter”, visible when worms, electricity, various sorts of gadgets, or entities such as fats, metals, and stem cells are seen as actants that, in confederation with other physical (human and/or non-human bodies), can make “big things to happen” (Bennett 2010, 94).

144

Chapter Twenty-one

The Nature/Culture Divide and a New (Technological) Morality Trying to develop an alternative to the notion of modernity and exploring the political roots of the concept of nature, Latour also worked on a terminology that would address multiple modes and degrees of effectivity, so that it might begin to describe a more distributive type of agency. In doing that, as Bennett rightly notes, Latour tries to use a kind of vocabulary so that he “strategically elides what is commonly taken as distinctive or even unique about humans” (Bennet 2010, ix). One of the most telling examples is his rejection of the terms “culture” and “nature” and use of the rather neutral term “collective” instead. He thus stresses that humans have not been alone, since extending their social relations to other actants with which and with whom (non-humans and humans alike) they have swapped many properties and formed collectives. The rejection of the category of “Nature”, which marks a supposedly pure realm separated from human culture, is crucial because the idea “renders invisible the political process by which the cosmos is collected in one livable whole” (Latour 1999, 304). The fundamental issue that Latour faced in his rethinking of the nature/culture binary is the redefinition of the technical. At the same time, he also addressed the issues of a new morality that was brought on with the “discovery” of non-human agencies in the “collective”. In short, Latour invites us to ask what to do in order to “give to technology the dignity equal to that of morality” so that a new relation between them may emerge. Answering that question, he tries to redefine the technical by considering it an adjective rather than a substantive, since, as he stresses, it is pointless to want to “define some entities and some situations as technical in opposition to others called scientific or moral, political or economic”, bearing in mind that technology is everywhere, since the term applies to “a regime of enunciation”, i.e. “a mode of existence”. Arguing that “the regime of technology” is different from a scientific, artistic, or moral standpoint just as prepositions differ amongst themselves and not in the way that “a region of reality would differ from another”, Latour defines technical action as an entity consisting of time, space, and the type of actants. From this perspective, he criticises the notion of “technical mediation” as inadequate to “encompass this triple folding of places, times and agents” and points out that the term mediation “always runs the risk that its message could be inverted and that one could turn whatever makes it impossible to transfer a meaning”, so that we might wrongly

Vibrant Social Technologies

145

reduce technologies to the role of instruments that “merely” give a more durable shape to schemes, forms, and relations which are already present in another form and in other materials. (Latour 2002, 250)

Morality, construed as a heterogeneous institution that consists of events, is a mode of existence, “a standpoint on being-as-another”, and “an original regime of mediation”. The relation between the standpoint of technology and the standpoint of morality is thus regarded through the relation between means and ends. What connects morality and technology is that they both mould “being-as-another” but not in the same way. Defined by their mediating capacities, nothing in the world stands for or by itself, but always “by other things and for other things”, which is the gist of Latour’s exploration of the mode of existence marked as “being-asanother”. From this perspective, morality (not being attached solely to humans and being “no more human” than technology) is concerned with the number of mediators that it leaves in its wake, always wanting to verify if it proliferates the greatest possible number of actants that claim to exist and intervene in their own name. (Latour 2002, 257)

Positioning us (humans, animals, all kinds of things, concepts, facts etc.) “in between” due to redefined modes of our existence and relation to each other and to multifarious concepts in which we live, Latour opened a perspective and the possibility of new ontologies of the natural, the social, the technical, and the political. The issues of performativity and ontology, as well as the term “turn to ontology” are sometimes mentioned in relation to the implications of his discourse (see Jensen 2013, 331௅36). In Latour’s account, our own existence, the many sorts of relations in the world, the making of facts if we are dealing with science, depends on gathering different allies in different places. This controversial turn to things in dealing with issues that had been considered “purely” social and human for such a long time, has certainly provoked reactions, sometimes dividing the scholarly community into pro- and contra-Latourian camps.

Conclusion: Latourian Rethinking of Social Theory Just as Latour has claimed that “to be social is no longer a safe and unproblematic property”, but rather “a movement that may fail to trace any new connection and may fail to redesign any well-formed assemblage” (Latour 2005, 8), the discourses on the social are no longer safe either. Concerning the recent interest in the Latourian construal of society in postsocialist sociological discourses, including in Serbia, it seems that

146

Chapter Twenty-one

there is a potential for Latour’s theory to deal with new readings of the social in different contexts. However, some articles dealing with Latourian rethinking of social issues appear to be no more than (more or less critical) reviews of Latour’s work.1 Others, by contrast, provide both a solid review and a critical reading of his theory, regarding certain issues in it and pointing to its further potentials.2 Finally, some authors present a constructive dialogue with Latour’s discourse, pointing both to the positive sides of his theory and to its potentially negative implications.3 One may conclude that the interest in Latour’s theory at the beginning of the 21st century in the sociological discourses mentioned above appears to be on the level of familiarising the scholarly community with the elementary concepts of his theory, as well as arguing for or against it.

Notes 1

For instance, see Petroviü 2007. For instance, see Birešev 2012. 3 For example, see Spasiü 2007. 2

Bibliography Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Birešev, Ana. 2012. “Politiþka ekologija Bruna Latura” [The Political Ecology of Bruno Latour]. Filozofija i društvo 23 (1): 112–25. Jensen, Casper Bruun. 2013. “What if we were Already in the InBetween? Further Ventures into the Ontologies of Science and Politics.” Foundations of Science 18 (2): 331–36. Johnson, Jim. 1988. “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer.” Social Problems 35 (3): 298–310. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 1996. “On Actor-network Theory: A Few Clarifications plus more than a Few Complications.” Soziale Welt 47: 369–81. —. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 2002. “Morality and Technology: The End of the Means.” Theory, Culture, Society 19 (5௅6): 247–60. —. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Vibrant Social Technologies

147

—. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Petroviü, Dalibor. 2007 “Od društvenih mreža do umreženog društva: jedan osvrt na makro mrežni pristup u sociologiji” [From Social Networks to a Networked Society: A Discussion of the Macro-network Approach in Sociology]. Sociologija 49 (2): 161–82. Spasiü, Ivana. 2007. “Bruno Latur, akteri-mreže i kritika kritiþke sociologije” [Bruno Latour, Actor-networks, and the Critique of Critial Sociology]. Filozofija i društvo 18 (2): 43–72.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO THE LIQUID CONTEXT: ZYGMUNT BAUMAN’S LIQUID MODERNITY MAJA STANKOVIû

In his text “What Art Is and Where It Belongs”, Paul Chan addresses contemporary art in the following terms: it is everywhere, one finds it everywhere, it is accessible to everyone, and everywhere it “feels at home” (Chan 2009). Art has become an object like any other; artworks are made in order to be presented at art exhibitions and biennials. Art is written about so that artworks may be appreciated, bought, and art exhibitions visited. Art has become an end in itself and in order to remain art, it should not “feel at home” anywhere. In Chan’s opinion, art has lost that quality. Yves Michaud, who likens contemporary art with the “gaseous state”, has a similar outlook on the ubiquity of art: It is as if the more there is beauty, the fewer there are artworks, or the less of art there is, the more does the artistic accumulate and colours everything, switching, so to speak, into a gaseous or vaporous state and covering all things with a sort of mist. Art has evaporated into aesthetic ether, if we remember that for physicists and philosophers after Newton ether was that almost unnoticeable substance permeating all bodies. (Michaud 2004, 9)

The disappearance of works and their transformation into “aesthetic ether” is a result of various processes, of which Michaud singles out two. The first is the replacement of the work qua object with experiences: artworks are no longer necessarily physical objects, which may be seen already in the neo-avant-gardes, which also staged the emergence of the problem of defining the work of art in terms of media and genre. Practically, an artwork may be anything. The other process is the hyperproduction of artworks. Michaud’s definition of contemporary art as “art

The Liquid Context: Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity

149

in the gaseous state” comes from Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity. According to Bauman, “liquid modernity” (Bauman 2000) is capitalist society in its present stage, dominated by the dimension of time and its defining qualities: transience, instantaneity, variability, perishability…1 Instantaneity is a new quality of contemporary society, which one recognises in all registers of human activity. This theoretical concept by Bauman is the starting point for introducing the concept of liquid context in contemporary art. In contemporary art, the context’s mode of operation has changed, whereby context has become an integral part of artistic reflection, without necessarily relating to a specific artistic procedure, medium, or mode of expression. Unlike its formalist definition, which dominated the 20th century – the context as the set of circumstances, objective, “given” conditions or external factors surrounding artistic creation – liquid modernity corresponds to a new type of context – the liquid – which takes into account the current situation, current set of elements, and corresponds to a series of changes in various social registers. If the starting point is the change in the mode of operation – from an external and fixed to an integral part of artistic work – the question arises as to how and why that change came about, what its effects are, and how the changed context functions. Why does context matter so much in contemporary art, whether we define contemporary art as art since 1945, or since the 1960s or the 1980s, or as current artistic production? In what way has this change in understanding context affected artistic practices? May it be related to changes in some other registers – philosophy, theory, technology? What is liquid context? According to Bauman, the period of liquid modernity was preceded by that of “solid modernity” or hardware, characterised by obsessing about size and space. Space was the “privileged”/primary dimension of reality, whereas time served the functions of appropriating and controlling space, which is best seen in Bentham’s Panopticon as a model of thinking and controlling space. Also serving the functions of space are objects, solid bodies that are typically used for mapping or “conquering” space. Clear and fixed spatial dimensions decrease the significance of time, “effectively resist its flow or render it insignificant” or take into account its homogeneity, uniformity, in a word, permanence. Solid modernity corresponds to the traditional view of context as a set of givens, circumstances surrounding the production and presentation of artistic work. Analytic philosophy’s attempts to define art may be related to solid modernism, the age of hardware. In itself, a definition as such is

150

Chapter Twenty-two

stable, fixed, solid, and corresponds to that territorial tendency: to define a given phenomenon, delimit and isolate it from other phenomena. One of the dominant methods in modernist aesthetics, formalism, greatly determined the understanding of context in the 20th century.2 The formalist method rests on analysing formal elements and rejecting whatever is not directly visible as a formal element in the work itself. This kind of approach, at the beginning of the 20th century, in so-called early formalism, was an expression of the radical tendency to separate the artwork from other disciplines (history, literature, mythology…) and nonartistic interests (ecclesiastic, national…). At that time, an especially topical issue was the drawing of boundaries between form and content and it was directly related to separating art from other areas of social activity. The role of form, as a specifically artistic element, freed from the topic, content, and artist’s biography, becomes crucial in foregrounding the autonomy of art. In this formalist key, the context comprises the givens, the circumstances – social, political, geographic, economic – which are not directly linked to the artwork, but constitute the environment in which it emerges. The formalist view is directly opposed to that of the artwork’s social determination, whereby the artwork, its specificity as opposed to other objects notwithstanding, is a result of the specific social context in which it was made.3 The middle of the 20th century was dominated by formalist aesthetics as the institutional mode of modernism, especially owing to the influential theorist Clement Greenberg. At the same time, the neo-avant-garde practices, which began to emerge around that time, directly opposed Greenbergian formalism, which also acquired a negative theoretical designation as the critique of those authors who insist on the artwork’s formal elements, its stylistic traits, neglecting all other elements, above all its socio-historical contingency and social function. By contrast, “liquid modernity” emphasises time and temporal aspects such as transience, instantaneity, variability, perishability… “Descriptions of fluids are all snapshots, and they need a date at the bottom of the picture” (Bauman 2000, 2). In Bauman’s judgement, instantaneity is an entirely new quality of contemporary society, with consequences in all registers of human activity. Whereas solid objects are associated with durability, permanence – envisaging an image of eternity – and thus render “natural” man’s striving for eternity, in the liquid condition of modernity “the image of eternity” has been supplanted by transience, or, as Virilio puts it: “We have gone from the aesthetics of appearance, stable forms, to the aesthetics of disappearance, unstable forms” (Virilio and Lotringer 2008, 97).

The Liquid Context: Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity

151

What are the key traits of liquid modernity? Bauman links them with the characteristics of fluids as a metaphor of capitalist society’s present stage. A key feature of fluids is their constant changing of shape: unlike solid bodies, whose “atom bonds” resist the pressure of forces and that, for the most part, retain their shapes, fluids do not share this kind of stability of solid bodies or block their atoms from coming apart, because variability is their mode of operation. Furthermore, fluids are motile, travel easily, and unlike solid bodies, they are hard to stop. Encounters with solid bodies leave them unscathed, whereas the latter, even if they retain their solidity, change. Due to their motility, fluids are associated with lightness, they are considered light, weightless, though they may be heavier than many solid bodies. According to Bauman, these are some of the physical qualities of fluids that mark contemporaneity, which he views as the latest stage in the history of modernity. “Liquid modernity” denotes societies where the conditions under which its inhabitants act change sooner than the particular ways of acting can coalesce into habits and routines. “Liquid life” is that which is mostly pursued in liquid modern society. The liquidity of life and that of society feed and support each other. Liquid life, just like liquid modern society, cannot retain the same form or direction for long. Liquid modernity corresponds to a new type of context: from the fixed, objective, external set of conditions, toward the end of the 20th century the context becomes a liquid and variable set of relations and, as such, an integral part of artistic work. Thereby, in addition to the existing formalist definition – the circumstances, assumptions, and conditions that as such exist independently from the artwork – it comes to include another level of operation as an open, heterogeneous system. Unlike social context, which provides the artwork with a determining character, reducing it to a product of the specific circumstances of its emergence, liquid context provides a surplus of meaning that may be detected as such only if artistic work is viewed contextually. Liquid context corresponds to the present stage in late capitalism, liquid modernity, and to a whole series of changes in various registers of social activity: the transformation of solid into liquid capital, of durability into instantaneity, to refocusing from the spatial to the temporal dimension, from categories of value to consumer culture, from ideological systems to post-ideological, neoliberal society, in which all values are consumer values – variable, perishable, and constantly subject to change. These changes are an effect of liquidity, which has spread to all registers of social activity, including art. To a large extent, this has changed the dominant view of the context as the set of external circumstances, in

152

Chapter Twenty-two

which the artwork comes into being. The change from “solid” to “liquid” has freed the traditional and formalist type of context from all of its static elements and conditioned the emergence of a different model that does not reject the existing view of context, but expands it in line with changes in other social registers: the transformation of closed into open, of fixed into variable, of substantialist into relationist – liquid context. The constitution of liquid context may be surveyed in several processes in 20th-century art: the introduction of the temporal dimension into the register of the visual, the introduction of the fragment into the discourse of art, the decentralisation of the institutional system of exhibiting, and the dispersion of media. Each of those processes challenged a specific segment of the traditional view of the artwork and introduced the aspect of liquidity, which would result in the emergence of liquid context. With the temporal dimension, the artwork becomes liquid – variable, unfinished, limited in durability – which makes room for drawing contextual links and changing its meanings in relation to context; by introducing fragmentary thinking, the work itself begins to function as a fragment that acquires meaning in relation to its context; with the decentralisation of the institutional system of exhibiting, the artistic object becomes contextual, because it develops the potential of producing meaning in different contexts; and the liquidity of media has shown that, in contrast to the insistence on the specificities of media characteristic of the modernist paradigm of art, with postmodernism, and especially with the emergence of digital media, media characteristics have become flexible and contingent on the contexts of presenting and performing. All of these processes have rendered context and working with context an indispensible part of artistic thinking and acting, which comes to the fore especially in contemporary artistic practices, where, even when the context is not directly problematised, as in, for instance, activist practices, it is still an integral part of artistic work and necessary for understanding it. Contemporary artistic practices are contextual because the context, in its liquid mode, is an integral part of the production, presentation, and perception of the artwork. With the emergence of liquid context, those elements that in the formalist outlook used to function as constants – art institutions, artistic work, the medium, the artist – acquire a liquid character: artistic work functions not necessarily as a specific object, but also as an experience, activity, process, performative, in institutional and extra-institutional environments alike; media do not define artworks, because one and the same work may be presented in different media; likewise the artist is not a constant, nor is her work stylistically unified,

The Liquid Context: Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity

153

rather it acquires a nomadic character, by moving across various media and registers. Artistic work is contextual because it links up with various contexts that are constitutive of its mode of functioning. Yves Michaud subjects the liquidity of the artwork to critique, arguing that today’s world has been left without works of art, “if that denotes those precious and rare objects to which, until recently, an aura or halo used to be ascribed, the magic quality of being the foci of creating unique, sublime, and refined aesthetic experiences”, but also that the world has simultaneously witnessed a flood of beauty, which has become an imperative.4 He links the disappearance of works as physical objects with, above all, their replacement by experiences. A paradigmatic example of that change is the video installation. In Michaud’s judgement, the process of abandoning concrete works in favour of experiences gained momentum with the neo-avant-garde movements and practices involving a temporal dimension and limited duration: with his readymade, Duchamp “opened Pandora’s box” and that, toward the end of the 20th century, led to the disappearance of the work as an object and centre of aesthetic experience. Art has lost its essence, uniqueness, and evaporated like ether. What Michaud misses is the following: with his readymade, Duchamp was precisely among the first who pointed to the effect of technical reproduction, which would, if not completely, then certainly to a great extent change the way art works. The transformation of the artwork into a specific experience, duration, event, variable set of elements that do not necessarily have their material equivalent is one of the main features of contemporary art. Taking the traditional view of art as the starting point, one comes to define contemporary art as insubstantial, vaporous, and groundless, which is also Michaud’s conclusion. However, if the starting point is not the traditional one, then such characterisations of contemporary art are not necessarily negative in connotation. On the contrary, they point to a different way artworks may function – a liquid way – and that is certainly an unavoidable feature of the present moment, not only in art, but also in many other registers.5 Following the onset of technical reproduction and the introduction of the temporal dimension in the register of the visual, artistic work assumes the logic of fluids: its material components, such as form, size, and format, have become variable and its semantic framework contextual. In a 1990 interview, John Cage spoke about the difference between the determinist and non-determinist position. The former corresponds to the traditional approach to music and assumes progress toward a non-existent, imaginary goal. The latter, which is much closer to the way we live at the

154

Chapter Twenty-two

beginning of the 21st century, refers to how we perceive things whilst experiencing them. If the starting point is the former position, then every performance means getting closer to the original. If the starting point is the latter position, then every performance is necessarily what it is and, as Cage put it, “you’d better listen while it’s going on, otherwise you’ll miss it” (Turner 1990).

Notes 1

Other existing definitions include postmodern society, the society of second modernity (Ulrich Beck). 2 E.g. Maurice Denis, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Heinrich Wölfflin, etc. 3 This is especially true of authors such as Henri Focillon (The Life of Forms in Art, 1935), who entirely rejects the significance of historical and social context. 4 “The beautiful are packaged products, expensive clothes with their stylised logos, well-exercised bodies reshaped or rejuvenated by plastic surgery, faces with makeup, well-tended or surgically tightened up, piercings and personalised tattoos, protected and preserved environments, living surroundings teeming with imaginative design…” (Michaud 2004, 7). 5 See Bauman 2005.

Bibliography Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. —. 2005. Liquid Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chan, Paul. 2009. “What Art Is and Where It Belongs.” e-flux 10. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/what-art-is-and-where-it-belongs/. Michaud, Yves. 2004. Umjetnost u plinovitom stanju. Zagreb: Naklada Ljevak. Turner, Steve Sweeney. 1990. “John Cage’s Practical Utopias – John Cage in Conversation with Steve Sweeney Turner.” The Musical Times 131 (1771): 46972. Virilio, Paul and Sylvère Lotringer. 2008. Pure War: Twenty-five Years Later. New York: Semiotext(e).

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE OLGA FREIDENBERG’S CONCEPT OF THE PARODIC LADA STEVANOVIû

Olga Mikhailovna Freidenberg (1890௅1955) was a Russian theorist whose work has been unfairly neglected for many years. A classical philologist, she was primarily interested in ancient Greek culture and folklore, approaching antiquity and the issues of myth and literature in what was then an avant-garde manner. She always situated her studies of culture in a precisely defined context, which enabled a comparative approach. Lately, her work has finally received some recognition, mainly in the field of Slavonic studies. Without any exaggeration at all, one may say that she was a pioneer of semiotics and the structural analysis of culture already in the 1930s. Although the first minor translations of her work into English appeared during the 1980s and had a marginal echo in academic circles,1 her book Image and Concept: Mythopoetic Roots of Literature appeared in 1997 in the series “Sign/Text/Culture: Studies in Slavic and Comparative Semiotics” edited by Vyacheslav V. Ivanov. On the other hand, her work on myth and ancient literature, of which Image and Concept is just the second part (the first consists of 28 lectures on the theory of ancient folklore), was translated and published in Yugoslavia in 1987, less than ten years after its first publication in the Soviet Union, when Nina Braginskaia, with the support of Yuri Lotman, succeeded in printing and editing it with much devotion. This is not a lone example of the openness of Tito’s Yugoslavia to both sides of the Iron Curtain, which created an exciting theoretical atmosphere at the time. The theorist who introduced me to the work of Olga Freidenberg was Svetlana Slapšak, also a classical philologist, literary theorist, and anthropologist, who moved from Belgrade to Ljubljana in the early 1990s. Slapšak was one of the founders of the Ljubljana Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis in 1992, which in 1995 became an accredited faculty for graduate studies in the humanities and

156

Chapter Twenty-three

social sciences, focusing on theory and marginalised strands of research in the humanities. The school engaged in very close cooperation with the Centre Louis Gernet at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS),2 which is mostly focused on researching antiquity from the perspective of anthropology. The main characteristic of this school is its distancing from conservative approaches to antiquity and effort to evade imposing contemporary perspectives and values on the phenomena under consideration. One method of achieving this has been comparing Greek with other ancient or contemporary cultures. This has enabled researchers to occupy better vantage points vis-à-vis particular historical or cultural contexts. Also, representatives of the French anthropological school of antiquity maintain that different theoretical approaches and methods do not exclude each other, while the ancient context is understood by reading texts alongside other ancient texts (Slapšak 2000, 12௅17). Introducing this theoretical school to Ljubljana, Svetlana Slapšak included in her teachings another theorist, who fit well into this methodological framework and school of thinking: Olga Freidenberg. What is even more striking here is that this neglected Russian theorist was working and writing several decades before the French Anthropological School. Freidenberg was the first to realise that the study of ancient folklore, myth, and literature required a specific contextual framework and more specific terminology for phenomena that should not be regarded in the same manner across different cultures and epochs. Approaching the specificities of ancient Greece, Freidenberg focused on studying cognitive development, in particular changes from concrete to abstract thinking. Her theories defined and influenced the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school and it was owing to this school that her work was rediscovered. Namely, due to her complicated but extant professional contacts with the linguist Nicholas Marr, which at some point stopped (she was often presented as his follower, which she had never actually been), her work shared with Marr’s group the same fate of neglect and oblivion (Stevanoviü 2009, 25௅26). Influenced by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Émile Durkheim, her theory anticipated the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The starting point in her approach to the interpretation of ancient folklore and literature that, in Freidenberg’s view, developed directly from rituals, is an archaeological approach. It rests on the stance that different epochs may be understood only by studying human cognition, which requires continuous generation of fresh conceptual and contextual frameworks. In concrete terms, analysing ancient literature and folklore, Freidenberg mapped and reconstructed the shifting of social constructs from the tribal period to the emergence of the polis, surveying the change

Olga Freidenberg’s Concept of the Parodic

157

from concrete to abstract thinking. The main argument regarding early Greek thought in the pre-tribal period is that human cognition operated by perceiving the subject and object as an undivided, single concept. In other words, people could not perceive themselves as separate from other people, or identify the difference between one and many, or have a perception of time, which was actually a spatial category. This should not be understood as a kind of shapelessness, but rather as a mental inability to differentiate diversities. So, types were not morphologically perceived as identical, but semantically. Gradually, however, this inherent mental uniformity flourished into more and more varieties by means of concretisation through metaphors, and metaphor, in Freidenberg’s view, is a term denoting the characteristics of early cognitional processes. So, as early thought (the other term that Freidenberg uses is “prelogic thought”, borrowing it from Lévy-Bruhl) developed, passing through different stages, metaphors kept appearing, changing, and attaining individual characteristics (Freidenberg 1997, 53; Stevanoviü 2009, 27). The domain in which metaphors were changed, shaped, and sharpened was primarily that of myth. However, the old meanings were neither completely lost nor replaced by new ones, but continued to exist side by side. So, mythology and folklore consist of multiple layers of different meanings and making a clear distinction between individual epochs is only a formal possibility. In order to explain the way early cognition functioned, Freidenberg focused on particular metaphors such as death, rebirth, marriage, eating, laughter, and so on, revealing the semantics of different actions and rituals in reality. A characteristic feature of the earliest cognitive categories was, according to Freidenberg, their visual nature. Visual images are not processed only through the eyes, but also through responses in the brain. As the process of observing is a mental process, it, like any other mental activity, lacks objectivity. This is exactly the context in which early cognition spontaneously created myths, not as an alternative reality, but as the only reality. So – visual images, metaphors, undivided spatiotemporal categories, an undivided relationship between humans and nature, and the absence of formal-logic causality – that is early myth and early thought (Freidenberg 1987, 38௅39). However, Freidenberg put an agnostic slant to her theory, pointing out that our attempt to understand these concepts is always conditional and terminable, since our processes of cognition are radically different from those of antiquity (Freidenberg 1997, 64). One of Freidenberg’s interesting concepts that I will presently discuss, in part to present her archaeological approach in more detail, is the concept of the parodic/hubristic. In order to theorise the parodic, Freidenberg argues that it is necessary to return to the stages of pre-

158

Chapter Twenty-three

abstract and pre-metaphoric thinking and deal with the domain of the comic as a cognitive category. This led us to the twofold worldview that always embodied, at the same time, two aspects of the same phenomena, one of which always represents a total parody of the other. Freidenberg claims that the hubristic aspect, as part of the binomial, turns the world upside down. As I already pointed out above, this dual principle was not based on a binary view of the world as we would understand it. On the contrary, it should be thought of as a totality comprising both “sides”, inseparable and mutually shifting, merging and constantly representing two facets of the same reality. Semantically, the parodic represented an aspect and potential for positive/negative perplexity, embodied in the mythic images of universe-construction and deconstruction. There are many mythical variations embodying and transmitting these two principles. Their essence, Freidenberg argues, is always the same – the peripeteia of the transition of pure into impure and vice versa, embodying death or rebirth, depending on the direction of transition. The ritual presentation of this is the ground of ancient drama, while cathartic images are always exclusively dual – the merging of pure and impure, the serious and the comic. The best translation of the term “hubristic” is, according to Freidenberg, parodic, but without its modern derisive overtones, at least in its earliest meaning. Thus, antique parody represents a hubristic aspect in which seriousness is distorted but not ridiculed. The sacredness consists of two sides – the proper and its reverse (Fredenberg 1987, 330௅31; Freidenberg 1997; Slapšak 2000; Stevanoviü 2002). It was in the fifth century BC that the parodic began to function independently, above all in the genre of comedy, but before that, it was an integral part of other genres. We may find the comic domain in Homer (that will later develop in separate genres of parodic epic poetry), in cosmogony, in lyrics, and, of course, in iamb. The comic domain has also continued to exist in myths and rituals – in fertility cults as well as in funereal rites. The meaning of laughter, especially in funereal rituals, was gradually forgotten, but as these ritual patterns changed rather slowly, due to the taboo that surrounds death, the custom of laughing at funerals in Greece continued almost to the present. The original meaning of such laughter disappeared (the inevitable shift from the serious to the parodic) and we can only understand it within Freidenberg’s theory. The concept of the parodic as introduced by Freidenberg corresponds to some extent to the much more familiar Bakhtinian concept of the carnivalesque. Also, in her Poetika siuzheta i zhanra, Freidenberg uses the term vulgar realism, which is close to Bakhtin’s culture of popular laughter. The main difference between Bakhtin’s and Freidenberg’s

Olga Freidenberg’s Concept of the Parodic

159

respective approaches is that Freidenberg focuses on early cognition and the workings of the mind that generated the appearance of the comic and laughter in situations that are often difficult to understand from a contemporary perspective, while Bakhtin mapped and analysed that worldview in the context of medieval culture, focusing mainly on its social function. A comparison of their respective theories would require a separate paper and certainly much more debate.

Notes 1

Her correspondence with her cousin Boris Pasternak was published in 1982, but in terms of theory, the book bears little relevance. 2 The Centre Louis Gernet was founded by Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre-Vidal Naquet, and Marcel Detienne in 1964.

Bibliography Freidenberg, Olga M. 1987. Mit i antiþka književnost [Myth and Antique Literature]. Belgrade: Nolit. —. 1997. Poetika suizheta i zharna. Moscow: Labirint. Slapšak, Svetlana. 2000. Za antropologijo antiþnih svetov. Ljubljana: ISH & ŠOU. Stevanoviü, Lada. 2002. Laughing at the Funeral: Gender and Anthropology in Greek Funerary Rites. Belgrade: SASA Institute of Ethnography.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR IGNASI DE SOLÀ-MORALES AND MINIMALISM VLADIMIR STEVANOVIû

When Richard Wollheim first introduced the term “minimal art” in the mid 1960s, he could hardly have anticipated that the term would persist up to the present as an important topic in art theory. Although initially conceptualised as signifying the minimum conditions that a work must fulfil to qualify as a work of art in the institutional sense, minimal art (or minimalism), in the hands of American art critics, soon became synonymous with a group of artists (Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Robert Smithson, and Sol LeWitt) whose work focused on positioning primary geometric volumes around gallery spaces. Subsequently, minimalism found its way into the contexts of various art disciplines (theatre, music, literature, film), entering the discourse of architecture during the late 1970s, almost unnoticed, as an attribute coined for describing certain new (at the time) works in architecture of a simple and extremely reductive – minimal – appearance. Only from the mid 1980s on did minimalism and minimal architecture become officially adopted and widespread terms for a new tendency in architecture. De Solà-Morales was the first to explicitly apply the term “minimal architecture” to the works of a specific group of architects in concrete chronological and geographical terms. In his 1986 book Architettura minimale a Barcelona: construire sulla cità construita, he presented several Catalan architects from the early 1980s (Lluís Mateo, Jordi Garcés, Arturo Soria, Torres and Lapeña, Viaplana and Piñon, Bach and Mora, and Llinás). Faced with the problem of generating, developing, and promoting a new tendency in architecture, de Solà-Morales was aware of the imperative to supply minimal architecture with a recognisable identity. Since by the mid 1980s postmodern theory had already deeply penetrated the discourse of architecture, a specific form or style could no longer by themselves guarantee a recognisable identity. It was necessary to implement certain theoretical themes and paradigms from philosophy and

Ignasi de Solà-Morales and Minimalism

161

sociology that had frequently been chiselled out already in literary criticism and art theory. In architectural discourse, these views have served as cover or support for various authorial poetics and proclamations of desirable models of reception, which then go on to ground general outlooks on disciplinary and socio-historical contexts. In order to discuss de Solà-Morales’s theory, one must survey his complex idea of minimal architecture in its entirety. In terms of form, it is an inclusive, equivocal, and eclectic architectural practice, in the spirit of the postmodern era, because it emerges by combining, juxtaposing, and collaging different kinds of fragments. However, in contrast to postmodern figurative-narrative eclecticism, de Solà-Morales talks about an eclectic taste for modernity. On the other hand, although inclined toward modernity, this is an architectural practice that hardly has a desire for modernism’s high technology. Thus, between postmodern representation and modern technology, minimal architecture opts for a hedonist outlook on form, which de Solà-Morales explicates by reference to the original meaning of the term decorum. Decoration is neither kitsch nor vulgar, but signifies willingness to emphasise secondary, minor gestures, ordinary elements and details that supply sensuous pleasure. He proposes a conception of the use and perception of the building that does not arise intellectually, as a rational gratification of our perception, but as a stirring of the senses that finds the principal source of its satisfaction in the development of perceptual experience. From there, de Solà-Morales derives for minimal architecture a corresponding model of reception, predicated on direct and subjective experience. The context in which minimal architecture emerges is Barcelona as a city that has already been built. De Solà-Morales underscores the minimal architects’ awareness of the need to adapt to the real, existing conditions, which in Barcelona’s case meant confronting specific locations, or, in de Solà-Morales’s terms, terrain vague. These are undetermined and undeveloped spaces generated by the de-industrialisation and growth of the suburbs – the city’s weakest spots, neglected locations with indeterminate functions and characters. The point of improving the suburbs is not about grandiose modernist projects or postmodern beautification, but the improvement and transformation of existing reality by means of minimal, discrete, and delicate interventions. Building upon an already built city means utilising the physical elements of its locations. From there, de Solà-Morales derives the authorial poetics of minimal architects – the method of appropriating ephemeral fragments of suburban cityscape and filtering them through abstract geometry. In Architettura minimale, de Solà-Morales outlined two major topics in his subsequent work: 1) weak architecture, architecture’s direct answer to the

162

Chapter Twenty-four

concept of weak thought, introduced by the hermeneutic-nihilist philosopher Gianni Vattimo and 2) terrain vague, which coincided with the emergence of dirty realism – a tendency in architecture, whose legitimacy is based on the concept introduced by the literary critic Bill Buford. Vattimo’s weak thought is one of the postmodern concepts that acknowledge the loss of a firm and rational reference point characteristic of monolithic and authoritative modernity (Vattimo and Rovatti 1983). The mission of weak thought is to establish a theoretical categorisation of the world without aspiring to offer an ultimate or normative grounding of thought as such. Following the philosophical paths of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer, Vattimo defined the end of modernity as the condition wherein: 1) the absolutisation of ontological and gnoseological categories (above all, being and truth) dissolves into viewing them as hermeneutic constructs in the domain of the socio-historical horizon and 2) the linear flow of history, dominated by the ideals of progress and critical overcoming of the current condition, is coming to an end, to be replaced by history’s next stage, which will rest on a new and as yet undefined monistic principle. The specificity of weak thought is its mode of relating to that which is modern in the newly emerged conditions of postmodernity. The postmodern cannot be defined as a new, truer alternative to the modern, because it would then remain stuck in the modern system of paradigm shifts. In terms of weak thought, post-modernity brings forth a rewriting, testing, rethinking, reversing, and redefining of the traces of modernity. For Vattimo, the central question of post-modernity is not whereto, but wherefrom. In his text “Arquitectura débil” from 1987, de Solà-Morales puts Vattimo’s concept of the end of modernity in the context of the 1960s crisis of modern architecture, which he views as a result of the collapse of a closed, rational system that aspired to absolute validity. However, de Solà-Morales did not regard the various postmodern tendencies that architecture pursued after modernism as adequate either. Having a priori refuted stylistic postmodernism, in neo-rationalism and the neo-avant-garde de Solà-Morales recognised remnants of the desire for monistic, fundamental, and correct directions leading to a return to the original roots of modernism, whereas in critical regionalism he saw a naïve wish to reclaim pre-modern authenticity. Whether turning to the roots of modernity or those of vernacular traditions, these were not paths leading to a meeting point with the heterogeneous and fragmentary postmodern age. Modernity may not be critically transcendent, but neither can its roots or true origins be revived. De Solà-Morales introduces the concept of weak architecture, the architecture of small gestures, which produces strong impressions precisely due to its weaknesses – its fragile,

Ignasi de Solà-Morales and Minimalism

163

ephemeral, non-aggressive, non-violent, and tangential character. According to Michael K. Hays, weak architecture advocates remembrance of the modern tradition and willingness to retrace it once more, but this time with no uncritical return to modernist authoritativeness (Hays 1998, 61415). Vattimo finds the meeting point between the two key features of weak thought (the acceptance of its own weakness and the proposal to relive modernity but without fundamentalist pretensions) in the aesthetic perception of art. He emphasises aisthesis in terms of the irreducibility of truth to reason, in line with an important feature of the postmodern age – the technologisation of reality by means of new media and channels of communication. The multitude of different models of living and technologies offered by contemporary media cannot be judged rationally, but only experienced aesthetically. In that sense, the truth of the postmodern perception of art is neither firm nor logical, but realised in a peripheral and marginal way – like in the media. These recognisable theses would take shape in de Solà-Morales’s Architettura minimale through the concept of decorum as a model of reception pleading for an architecture directly accessible to the senses. In “Arquitectura débil”, following the precepts of weak thought, de Solà-Morales continues to glorify decorum, on account of its peripheral position in contemporary society, as a subjective model of aesthetic experience that produces no standards and imposes no systems. As shown above, in “Arquitectura débil”, de SolàMorales provided an identical reiteration of the system of interpretative models he had previously used to define and explain the minimal architecture of Barcelona: an architecture consisting of arbitrary fragments of modernism and intended for sensuous and not rational perception. This time, de Solà-Morales does not address only the limited domain of Catalan architecture. Weakness comes to describe a panorama of international architecture (e.g. Tadao Ando, Álvaro Siza, Herzog and de Meuron). Having analysed the concept of weak thought, what remains to be done here is to survey the wider consequences of the contextual setting of minimal architecture, referring to the concept of terrain vague. Following the introduction of the concept of terrain vague in Architettura minimale, de Solà-Morales would reuse the term as the title of a well-known text from 1995, in which he reaffirmed his commitment to opportunistic and unimposing urban architecture in sync with a city’s energy and rhythmic flows and, as such, suitable for marginal urban locations. This is a contextually incorporated type of architecture that offers the possibility of haptic experience. Unlike weak thought, which had no further implications in architectural discourse, the concept of terrain vague prefaced the spread of dirty realism in Europe. Dirty realism

164

Chapter Twenty-four

is Buford’s term for the work of American 1970s literary authors (e.g. Raymond Carver, Frederick Barthelme, among others) who wrote about the prosaic aspects of everyday life, the reality of ordinary people and ordinary things (Buford 1983). Its themes, contents, and context are the dirty reality of the modern wasteland and dark side of working-class life in America’s provincial cities. Its style or mode of writing is characterised by using the minimum of narration tools, scantiness, sparseness, and ordinary words. Therefore, “minimalism” has been adopted as a variant term for dirty realism. Dirty realism was seen as a reaction to postmodern parody, pastiche, experimentalism, and meta-fiction. In contrast to representation and connotative games, realism offers the reader a direct experience of reality. Beyond literature, the neglected side of urban reality came to occupy not only de Solà-Morales’s focus of interest, but also that of certain circles in architecture (See Mateo 1988, Lefaivre 1988, and Galiano 1988). This was not only a mere identification of a literary concept with one from architecture. At a time of the de-industrialisation and growth of the suburbs, the changed urban image of many European cities conforms to this dirty reality. The scattered fragments of post-war modern architecture become the context from which architects and critics search for a way out of stylistic postmodernism. Therefore, the wider meaning of de Solà-Morales’s proposition was to point to the creative and critical potential of suburban reality at a time of turmoil in European architecture during the 1980s. What weak architecture and dirty realism shared was the affirmation of (1) the urban periphery as a marginal phenomenon and place to which one should return to relive modernism, but in a twisted way and (2) a direct experience of reality. Both aspects also shared an animosity toward postmodernism as a style. Despite de Solà-Morales’s theoretical postulates with which he defined minimal architecture, the fate of this architectural concept soon took a different path. The 1988 special issue of the Italian journal Rassegna titled “Minimal” canonised the interpretative model of viewing minimal architecture as an offshoot of minimal art (see Gregotti 1988). However, this interpretation of the genealogy of minimal architecture was performed not theoretically, but by stressing the formal similarities (simplicity, reduction) between minimalism in art and minimalism in architecture. The Rassegna labelled as minimalist most architects from Architettura minimale and “Arquitectura débil”. When he rejoined the discourse of minimal architecture, de SolàMorales had minimal art in mind, as well as the work of the famous Mies. In his 1994 text “Mies van der Rohe and Minimalism”, he rejected the ruling idealist, Platonist, and neoclassical interpretations of the German

Ignasi de Solà-Morales and Minimalism

165

architect. In de Solà-Morales’s view, Mies’s work in architecture is not an expression of a fixed ideal, but a tangible and self-referential object. The conditions of perception established by the materiality of the building are at the very origins of its spiritual signification. De Solà-Morales complemented this model of reception, known from his earlier texts as decorum, with Gilles Deleuze’s stance that art must be experienced directly, by way of sensations, percepts, and affects. However, de SolàMorales also compared this cocktail of theories that privilege direct experience with well-known ideas from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and bodily experience, which were developed by the protagonists and theorists of minimal art. Thereby, in addition to their shared forms and names, a crucial role in the theoretical coming together of minimal art and minimal architecture was also played by the phenomenological model. Following the impact of minimal art theory on the discourse of minimal architecture, there was a proliferation of publications in which weak thought and dirty realism lost currency. Although he was the initiator of these concepts that had lost credibility, de Solà-Morales did not seem to mind this. His participation in the organisation of the exhibition Less is more: minimalisme en arquitectura i d’altres arts held in Barcelona in 1996 as part of the 19th Congress of the International Union of Architects attests to this. Although not the official curator of the exhibition, as secretary-general of the Congress, de Solà-Morales was its initiator and originator. The exhibition promoted minimalism as a tendency common to all 20th-century art, with emphasis on minimal art and Mies’s famous poetic slogan “Less Is More”, as its key theoretical precept. In de Solà-Morales, minimal architecture emerges as a description of architecture’s unique way of acting in relation to context, i.e. minimal, discrete architectural interventions that interact with the existing, real context of the Catalan capital. Since then, the discourse of minimalism has gone through a number of different stages in theoretical terms. For most theorists, this elastic discourse, which, as it turned out, has no stable identity, was little more than an open field for a free inscription of one’s own interests and theoretical postulates. It is a hybrid discourse that persevered by appropriating and synthesising various theories serving as an agenda to bring together the works of a number of architects.

166

Chapter Twenty-four

Bibliography Buford, Bill. 1983. “Introduction.” In Dirty Realism – New Writing from America. Granta 8: 112. De Solà-Morales, Ignasi. 1986. Architettura minimale a Barcelona: construire sulla cità construita. Milan: Electa. —. 1987. “Arquitectura debil.” Quaderns d’Arquitectura i Urbanisme 177: 74௅85. —. 1994. “Mies van der Rohe and Minimalism.” In Presence of Mies, ed. Detlef Mertens, 149௅55. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. —. 1995. “Terrain Vague.” In Anyplace, ed. Cynthia C. Davidson, 118௅23. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Hays, Michael K. 1998. “Ignasi de Solà-Morales: ‘Weak Architecture’.” In Architecture Theory since 1968, ed. Michael K. Hays, 614௅23. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Galiano, Luis Fernandez. 1988. “Cruel como el futuro: Minimalismo sucio?” In Realismo sucio en la arquitectura. Arquitectura Viva 3: 56. Gregotti, Vittorio. “Editoriale.” In Minimal. Rassegna 36 (4): 47. Lefaivre, Liane. 1988. “L’architecture du réalisme hideux.” Le Carré bleu 88 (2): 3136. Mateo, Jose Lluís. 1988. “Realitat i projecte.” In Nova narració. Quaderns d’Arquitectura i Urbanisme 177: 1217. Vattimo, Ganni and Pier Aldo Rovatti, eds. 1983. Il pensiero debole. Milano: Feltrinelli. Savi, E. Vittorio and Montaner, M. Josep. 1996. Less is more: minimalisme en arquitectura i d’altres arts. Barcelona: Collegi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE WOMAN AS THE INEFFABLE/INTANGIBLE POINT OF TEXTUAL COORDINATES: LUCE IRIGARAY AND THE STRATEGIES OF WORKING WITH THE LIMITS OF PHALLOGOCENTRISM DRAGANA STOJANOVIû

Following the broadening of the theoretical, political, and activist platforms of gender and feminist studies in the Western and Eastern European context alike during the 19th, 20th, and now at the beginning of the 21st century, the feminine is still a specific paradigm of difference; it is still a burning as well as suppressed and silenced issue condemned to the implicit or even explicit field of unresponsibility in the economy of one/same – the economy of the phallically/phallogocentrically structured domain. In Luce Irigaray’s theory, sexual difference is perceived as one that may be neither grasped, nor deciphered; it does not speak (it does not express itself in the linguistic possibility of a dialogue) because it does not stem from a binary relation – two speakers, each of them autonomous, speaking to each other in a dialogue of differentially positioned, but equal languages. Irigaray views the feminine as a product of the economy of one/same, which rests on the logic of the phallic mode (Irigaray 1985b). Viewed in this light, woman is the fundamental negativity of the phallogocentric system, the non-being that predicates every (masculine!) possibility of being; woman is the para-existence of a para-subjectivity in a linguistic culture that neither comprehends nor provides the possibility of difference (except as fundamental Difference, which, qua negativity itself, guarantees the positivity complex of the structure of One!). Thus woman is always-already trapped in the realm of the linguistic system, but both inside (she does not speak; she is always only spoken for) and outside (she evades every linguistic representation of herself) of the phallogocentric

168

Chapter Twenty-five

system (of Language/Law); she is stuck in a kind of internal exile (Pollock 1996, xv). If one/same presents and represents itself as the Whole (complete with the phallic sign) and femininity/feminine/woman is in that relational structure found as that which is at the same time both inside and outside of it, then woman necessarily appears as non-whole meaning in terms of being not Whole (she does not occupy the place of the phallic/masculine/One – she is the Other), as well as in terms of being not wholly in it – in other words, in woman or in the place that woman occupies in the structure there is always something that evades or exceeds discourse (Irigaray 1985b, 89). Somewhat paradoxically, woman is thus both a discursive (since she is, as a term and designated category, already mapped in language and spoken/interpellated in it) and not-quitediscursive category, evoking the horror of the prediscursive, presubjective domain, from which the subject must constantly split itself off, trying to maintain the distance necessary to define itself as a subject. So woman is an abjection that must be conquered (which is done by positing her as the Other, so that she may guarantee the illusion of wholeness to the masculine subject and to the self-purposefulness of the Law); she has to be domesticated (in language) but never touched or deciphered. That unknown and unmarked territory – uncut by the coordinates of time and space, in which language attains its narration and semantic flow  occupies the place of the surplus of femininity. As not-whole, as I said above, woman is also not-wholly in the system of Language/Law – in it she is not whole, not quite, not completely – there exists a kind of surplus, an outflow, something else/more which is also her. There is (an)other possibility of being in her unutterability, which threatens to unmask the One as just one of a myriad of possibilities, because if woman is an entity that is both inside and outside Language, then her femininity conceived in/by the phallogocentric structure is not the only possible Femininity, but a hypothetical conception of femininity as a performative regarding the phallic Sign – Phallus. Woman thus stands as the impossibility of the mapping perspective or as the impossibility of the perspective of making a singular map – she eludes this singularity by being scattered, by being multiple – both inside and outside of the linguistic-phallic code. In Irigaray’s words: So woman has not yet taken (a) place. [...] She is never here and now because it is she who sets up that eternal elsewhere from which the “subject” continues to draw his reserves, his re-sources, though without being able to recognize them/her. She is not uprooted from matter, from the earth, but yet, but still, she is already scattered into x number of places

Woman as the Ineffable/Intangible Point of Textual Coordinates

169

that are never gathered together into anything she knows of herself, and these remain the basis of (re)production – particularly of discourse – in all its forms. (Irigaray 1985a, 227)

But that does not mean that she is beyond the reach of the Phallus – on the contrary – as Lacan put it: [...] we have known that the phallus, her man, as she says, is not indifferent to her. But, and this is the whole point, she has different ways of approaching that phallus and keeping it for herself. It’s not because she is not-wholly in the phallic function that she is not there at all. She is not not at all there. She is there in full (à plein). But there is something more (en plus). (Lacan 1999, 9394)

Therefore, to study the feminine position or the position of femininity does not imply studying only the logic of phallogocentric discursivity itself, but also examining what is outside; neither mapping nor reproducing the lack, but interpreting the surplus that brings us to the core issue – how to interpret/study the non-linguistic/extra-linguistic surplus by means of language, which is the speaking subject’s only tool for an intelligible production of meaning. May one at all speak about femininity or express it by familiar – phallogocentric  systems of representation? Is it at all possible to think about it if one can touch it (en passant) only inside signs or between them, only between the lines in the form of phallic negativity, of a specific surplus inscribed with the function of the lack? Woman is thus the ultimate riddle; the Sphinx on the fence of the Symbolic, in which the possibility of subjectivity continually tries to retain the illusion of its wholeness. There is no answer to the question: “What is woman?”, because woman is not: “Because ‘I’ am not ‘I’, I am not, I am not one” (Irigaray 1985b, 120). In fact, it is impossible to say what woman is if we are condemned to phallogocentrically structured language, which, by its constant production of One, abolishes every possibility of woman’s specificity and disables the expression of any model of femininity other than the models imagined, formed, written, and produced by phallogocentrism. Woman thus always remains at the limits of discourse, on the exact line separating the inside from the outside, which disables her but at the same time positions her as always potentially subversive (of all fixed boundaries, linguistic definitions, the speaking subject’s phallically defined safety in language), floating in the web of language as a specific intangibility, a riddle. Referring to this paradox, Irigaray asks a series of questions, which point to the (im)possibility of uttering the feminine in phallogocentric

170

Chapter Twenty-five

language and concern the domains of the representation of women/femininity, the language of women, women’s writing, and women’s interventions in the system of Language. Some of her questions call for mapping and solving these key points:  What else could be said about feminine sexuality besides what we have already learnt in phallogocentric discourse?  Can language be restructured, reformulated, and transformed and how, so as to include the feminine difference as a definable possibility and not as invisible negativity?  Can women, given that they always-already speak from and within phallogocentric code/language, intervene in the existing hierarchy of phallogocentrocally structured institutions? And should they?  What kind of questions should women put to the overall phallogocentric structure and their society, which is produced and reproduced by this structure?  Can women break free from being a product of the phallogocentric discourse of thinking and naming? If yes, how?  Does women’s speech exist and under what circumstances, and can it be inscribed in the existing or in an entirely new discursivity in the form of women’s writing (Irigaray 1985b, 119)? The riddle of femininity is actually the riddle of the masculine range of knowledge, the riddle of one/same, of the weakness of the Phallus itself – its impossibility to live up to be the Authority in whose name it speaks. But it is also the riddle of woman herself: as the feminine (para)subject is positioned so as to experience itself only in fragments, at the margins of the phallogocentric domain that maps and defines it, as a mere leftover or excess of incoherence, it is esentially invisible (as a whole; she is the one who does not have [the Phallus], on whose body there is nothing to see [she is the one who does not have the Phallus]), out of reach and out of thought, for masculine and feminine subjects alike. Woman is thus unthinkable – completely inside the dominant culture (being produced inside language), but also banished from the dominant culture (being forbidden from speaking from her own body/position). Essentially unnamed, un-presentable, left out of language, histories, and biographies, censored, renamed with an appropriate, domesticated name, intangible, woman is not unsaid, but unsayable. So how can we, in this light, come up with questions that might generate the possibility of revalorising and restructuring feminine identity in new or different terms? Elizabeth Grosz asserts that

Woman as the Ineffable/Intangible Point of Textual Coordinates

171

[n]o one yet knows what the conditions are for developing knowledges, representations, models, programs, which provide women with nonpatriarchal terms. (Grosz 1994, 188)

and which would produce knowledge from a feminine perspective or interest. So there is no way of finding those conditions other than to keep producing  continually, tirelessly  new discursivities, new representations, and new art forms imagined or done by women and/or by other linguistic/textual tools, hoping that some of them might offer the feminine subject a dwelling space that will be neither unsafe, nor unsure, nor temporary, and open the perspective of a dialogue (between two equal sides!) as a subversive-transgressive practice, a revolution without destruction, and a turn without annihilating the old order. In fact, destruction, annihilation, or even merely ignorance of the phallogocentric linguistic order would probably disable the feminine subject from expressing itself, which would indeed be a type of subversive practice in itself, but one that could scarcely furnish any connection points to the phallogocentric linguistic net and would thus simply cut off the feminine subject from all channels of intelligible communication, from speaking, from dialogue, and, finally, from the possibility of changing the existing order. With all this in mind, what else is left for her? Which strategy should she choose? How should she conceive of dialogue without submitting to the monological platform of phallogocentric discourse, or, to put it differently, how can she disable/alter the repressive mechanism of phallogocentric language, which produces her own place as mute? Beside the strategy of continually relocating the fixed points of the phallogocentric realm by speaking from the feminine position, the phallogocentric order can also be turned and twisted by means of the revolt strategy, where revolt stands for the irreconcilable conflict between the subject-in-process and the normative order, which can further be seen as a continual process of reconsidering and restructuring that order (Sjöholm 2013, 90). Unlike protest, which denotes resistance by means of existing resources in the field of the known, linguistic-paternal, dominant system of discursivity, revolt seems a rather different strategy. In that sense, revolt would be a continual tensional practice that softens and shakes up the borders and structural lines of the phallogocentric order, releasing that forgotten/rejected/abject soft and dissipating pre-discursive flux (afterwards labelled feminine), which brings it to the point of being écriture féminine par excellence, the practice that in its own tensioned position always-already questions the hard, dominant discourse. In this sense, écriture féminine is already effecting that change, speaking from the position of women, performing the possibility of change that anticipates its

172

Chapter Twenty-five

realisation. This intervention already moves the phallogocentric mode from its firm cradle and by the time it re-establishes its structural lines, the newly opened space is offered to reinterpretations, re-significations, and altered performative possibilities, which leave a permanent mark and thus inscribe an ever-pulsating change in the system, opening it to new discursivities, dialogues, and forms of expression, in which the feminine will have a place (or places) of its own.

Bibliography Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1985a. Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —. 1985b. This Sex which is not One. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jacques Lacan. 1999. Book XX: Encore, 19721973. London: W. W. Norton & Company. Pollock, Griselda. 1996. “Preface.” In Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts, xiiixxiii. London: Routledge. Sjöholm, Cecilia. 2013. Kristeva and the Political. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX A DISCUSSION OF HANS-THIES LEHMANN’S PARADIGM OF POSTDRAMATIC THEATRE ANETA STOJNIû

Dramatic and Postdramatic Theatre In conceptual and historical-theoretical terms, the concept of postdramatic theatre was introduced by Hans-Thies Lehmann in his eponymous study from 1999 (Lehmann 1999). For Lehmann, postdramatic is the kind of theatre that operates on the other side of drama, at a time when the paradigm of the drama text has lost validity in theatre. With the articulation of postdramatic theatre, the contemporary institution of theatre has redefined itself, restructured, and opened up to a systematic understanding of its emancipation from the seemingly inseparable element of drama. Dramatic theatre rested on the domination of the literary text, the connection between mimesis and the subject matter, and on representation, whose aim was affective communication with the aim of causing catharsis. In dramatic theatre, the text as a narrative and thought totality plays the dominant part, while human character is defined and “relayed” primarily by speech, that is, by the verbal text of the role. The advent of new media also changed the role of theatre in society, which caused changes in the art of theatre itself and the development of practices that are ontologically different from dramatic practices: the origin of dramatic theatre is literary text (dramatic theatre comes from text), while that of postdramatic theatre is performance (postdramatic theatre comes from performance). In epistemological terms, Lehmann formulated his concept of the postdramatic on the basis of descriptive and interpretative connections and mappings of certain phenomena that intervene in performance practice systems in various ways (Šuvakoviü 2005, 471). His theorisation is mostly concerned with detecting new ways of treating the drama text in theatre

174

Chapter Twenty-six

practices from the 1960s on. I will base my own critical elaboration of the concept of postdramatic theatre on the hypothesis that the implications of this theorisation may be applied to a range of practices wider than the period discussed by Lehmann. This means that the concept of the postdramatic might be understood as a discursive field comprising specific practices in the performing arts directly or indirectly stemming from broad changes in society that were provoked by the advent of new media.

The Paradigm of Postdramatic Theatre The paradigm of postdramatic theatre is Lehmann’s term for a collection of phenomena in theatre (and the performing arts) that problematise the traditional forms of drama and dramatic text. This paradigm refers to practices in the performing arts including physical theatre, movement theatre, theatre of images, opera, contemporary dance, performance art, as well as post-1960s and ’70s forms of theatre that do involve drama texts. Lehmann emphasises that in this case, he is using the notion of paradigm as a supplementary term to signify a collection of heterogeneous practices sharing a similar treatment of the element of drama. Postdramatic are those practices that consistently and coherently, in aesthetic terms, problematise the drama paradigm and seek to oppose it, entering the uncertain field on the other side of dramatic text. The play no longer centres on a dramatic text qua narrative that constitutes the “backbone” of the entire staging. Instead, the text becomes only one of the play’s dramatic elements and in no way plays a dominant part vis-à-vis other elements of staging. That means that it is crucial to define a categorical difference between the dramatic and the postdramatic, in conceptual and not formal terms. Drawing a conceptual distinction is necessary because elements such as fragmented narrative, stylistic heterogeneity, and grotesque hypernaturalist or neo-expressionist aspects may also be found in dramatic theatre. The mode and context of using various elements of staging decide whether one should read a given stylistic feature in the context of a dramatic or postdramatic aesthetic. In Lehmann’s view, the main “trigger” for the emergence of postdramatic theatre was the advent and impact of new media and the spread of information technology. The crisis of drama as a textual form,1 which may be traced to the beginning of the 20th century, stems from a general feeling that life and the image of the world were changing fast, which was generated by the ever growing speed of technological and industrial progress that took hold at that time. Until the 19th century, the performing (and not only the performing) arts played the socio-political

A Discussion of Lehmann’s Paradigm of Postdramatic Theatre

175

role of today’s mass media. Theatre was a source of information, a means of shaping public opinion and establishing the values of a given society, as much as it was a place of entertainment and social interaction. With the advent of mass media, theatre lost its dominant function and erstwhile position of power – it ceased to be a mass medium. In the context of the intensifying integration of Europe and North America, the global market, and transnational media industries, theatrical performance begins to seem rather anachronous. Theatre therefore begins to adapt to the modern industrial age, which over the course of the 20th century generated a series of formal and structural changes within the discipline itself.2 The emergence of new media enabled the establishment of the performing arts as an autonomous discipline comprising a series of subgenres, such as performance art and contemporary dance, as well as numerous hybrid genres, such as video ballet and video opera, all of which feature a radical separation of the body from the dramatic text. Theatre discovered development possibilities beyond the domination of dramatic text, entering the era that Lehmann would later label that of postdramatic theatre. Drama and the illusionist, mimetic approach moved to the domain of media, while in theatre the actuality of performance assumed the main role (Lehmann 1999, 64௅65).

The Problem of Historicising the “Postdramatic Paradigm” The link with the impact of new media and their functions in everyday life is decisive for understanding the development and functioning of contemporary performance theories and practices. However, what seems problematic in Lehmann is his insistence on dating the historical beginning of the postdramatic theatre paradigm to no earlier than the 1960s and ’70s. That means that in his theorisation, the historical avant-gardes, with their struggles against conventional, obsolete models of theatrical representation and communication, are literally viewed as the vanguard but not as the historical beginning of postdramatic theatre. Such a view is problematic in at least two regards: 1) It excludes from postdramatic discourse early theoretical concepts of deconstructing textual form – that is, it acknowledges them as postdramatic only upon their practical realisation; 2) It limits the postdramatic paradigm to the closed circle of theatrical performance, neglecting performance practices that stemmed from the visual arts and literature and also featured postdramatic elements.

176

Chapter Twenty-six

The historical avant-gardes brought new, deconstructed textual forms, in which narration and a referential relation to reality were almost completely lost (Lehmann 1999, 60). For instance, Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, Gertrude Stein’s landscape plays, and Witkiewicz’s theatre of pure form directly anticipated the development of postdramatic discourse in theatre, which would undergo a series of stages, from selfreflection and decomposition to the separation of elements of dramatic theatre. However, these authors were ahead of their time and so their theoretical conceptions were staged only much later, precisely in the neoand post-avant-garde practices that Lehmann acknowledges as postdramatic. For instance, Artaud, with his theoretical and dramatic texts, thus came to occupy an almost mythical position among 20th-century theatre-makers, while his texts found an adequate performance aesthetic only in the plays of Grotowski. Robert Wilson claims he arrived at his ideas concerning theatre via the writings of Gertrude Stein, whereas the theatre of the absurd, with Beckett’s zero-degree of signification, had been anticipated by Witkiewicz in his theories of pure form in the theatre, which one should understand as an absolute construction of formal elements. Given that Lehmann defines these practices as postdramatic, in my opinion, the equally concrete theoretical concepts on which those practices were based should then likewise be viewed as postdramatic, although historically older. Also, I would argue that the postulates of the postdramatic theatre paradigm could be applied to certain performance and theatre practices from the historical avant-gardes. In that regard, too, I would part company with Lehmann, who denies that the historical avant-gardes performed an essential break with dramatic theatre. He maintains that, although the abstract and distancing staging devices conceived and applied in historical avant-garde theatre drastically distanced the plays that were staged, they still staged them as coherent entities. Lehmann interprets the revolutionary formal innovations developed in post-1900 dramatic practices as striving to “save the real truth of the text” by means of new staging devices from its “mutilation at the hands of conventional theatrical practice”. He argues that despite their revolutionary strides, the historical avant-gardes may be discussed only in terms of anticipating but not initiating postdramatic theatre. Here I come to my second criticism of Lehmann’s conclusion that the postdramatic theatre paradigm does not apply to historically older performing arts practices. His insistence on an emphatic positing of postdramatic theatre as an exclusively contemporary phenomenon (the last 40 years or so) as opposed to reading “older” practices in light of the new

A Discussion of Lehmann’s Paradigm of Postdramatic Theatre

177

paradigm, practices that likewise featured non-dramatic elements, encloses the paradigm itself within the narrow circle of the theatrical. Namely, if we stick to the historical avant-gardes in theatre, such as Meyerhold’s biomechanics (see Meyerhold 2014), Lehmann’s position is valid, because in this particular case, the focus was not on breaking with dramatic text, but with traditional forms of staging, while the text, although utterly distanced, still retained its cohesive role. By contrast, the performing practices of the historical avant-gardes, stemming from the visual arts and literature, present an entirely different state of affairs. I am primarily referring to futurist and Dadaist paratheatrical experiments, artists’ behaviours and actions, which are considered a precursor of contemporary performance art (Goldberg 1979). An especially illustrative example would be the performances of sound poetry at Cabaret Voltaire. Sound poetry was a form of art situated in between literary and music composition, which privileged the phonetic aspects of human speech to conventional semantic values and syntactical meanings. Hugo Ball called this literary-performative form “verses without words” and it was by definition intended for performance (Ball 1916). Early examples of a direct precursor to performance art, or, rather, of its theoretical articulation, may also be found in Russian symbolism and Cubo-futurism – for instance, the actions of David Davidovich Burliuk from the 1910s and ’20s, in which he painted his own face. These and many other similar practices really occurred outside of the theatrical and reflected on themselves as an emancipation from the conventional paradigms of the visual arts and literature, rather than theatre, but at the same time, they evidently constituted performing practices that were emancipated from the domination of text. Finally, returning to the key issue of new media’s relationship with and influence on the emergence of postdramatic theatre, it is arguable that situating the epistemological break in the 1970s unfairly excludes the analysis of the decisive impact of the advent of film on the non-dramatic performing practices mentioned above. The fascination with film was a defining element in the historical avant-gardes. A number of authors affiliated with this movement sought to reformulate the visual arts, literature, and the performing arts in line with the new modes of perception and thought brought on by film and its specific characteristics. In the world of art during the opening decades of the 20th century, film was an axis that generated a remarkable number of highly varied artistic practices and forms (Bruce 2010). Although stemming from a nontheatrical context, they were precisely and for the most part the reference point for the practices that we classify as post-1960s postdramatic theatre.

178

Chapter Twenty-six

Articulating the postdramatic paradigm is one of the key moments for understanding not only contemporary theatre, but also the performing arts in general. That is why I consider it both possible and necessary to expand it so as to include early theoretical concepts of deconstructing textual form, as well as performance practices with postdramatic elements stemming from the visual arts and literature. As I argued above, that would mean relocating the onset of postdramatic practices to the beginning of the 20th century, that is, to the period of the historical avant-gardes.

Notes 1

The somewhat problematic concept of crisis (of drama, theatre, art) is used here in line with Lehmann’s humanist outlook. A critique/problematisation of this position itself would require a separate discussion. 2 This point does not necessarily apply to the performing arts alone, but could also apply to other artistic disciplines that transformed during the 20th century under the impact of the development of new technologies. However, a more thorough discussion of this issue would exceed the scope of this essay.

Bibliography Ball, Hugo. 1916. Cabaret Voltaire. Zurich: Meierei. Bruce, Edgar R. 2010. Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Goldberg, RoseLee. 1979. Performance: Live Art, 1909 to the Present. London: Thames and Hudson. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 1999. Postdramatisches Theater. Frankfurt: Author’s edition. Meyerhold, Vsevolod. 2014. On Theatre. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Šuvakoviü, Miško. 2005. Pojmovnik suvremene umjetnosti. Zagreb: Horetzki.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN JACQUES LACAN, EARLY LACANIANISM, AND FORMER YUGOSLAVIA MIŠKO ŠUVAKOVIû

The work of the French structuralist and founder of theoretical psychoanalysis Jacques Lacan marked a return to Freud and psychoanalysis. His approach to theorising psychoanalysis facilitated the derivation of a major eclectic theory on the constitution and de-constitution of the Western modern subject. Jacques Lacan founded the École de la cause freudienne on 21 June 1964. The society was disbanded (that is, transformed into a school) in early 1980, when he invited those among his pupils who still loved him: “It is a school of my pupils, those who still love me. I shall soon open the door for them. I say to many. This is worth pursuing. It is the only possible – and dignified – result. I shall convene the Forum (of the School), where everything will be discussed – without me. I will peruse its conclusions with much interest”. Thus Jacques Lacan convened the First Forum of the École de la cause freudienne, on 2829 March 1981 at the Palais des congrès in Paris. Jacques Lacan died in Paris on 9 September 1981 (Dolar 1983, 3975; Potrþ 1982, 130136). Thus Lacan posited a discourse of psychoanalysis as one of science, love, and death! The starting point of Lacanian psychoanalysis was set on the question of how Freudian therapy, i.e. the application of free association and analytical treatment might affect the real origin of subjectivisation, identification, and presentation in the private and public spheres. For Lacan, there is no theory of the unconscious as a special field of study, but only a theory of analytical practice that uncovers a structure claimed to be the structure of the unconscious, whereas the psychoanalyst is an integral part of the concept of the unconscious itself. Lacan’s theory rests on several structural-linguistic models of psychoanalytical concepts: (1) only with the help of linguistics may psychoanalysis become a science, and

180

Chapter Twenty-seven

therefore theoretical psychoanalysis often uses mathematical formalisations (mathemes, graphs, and topological presentations); (2) in the unconscious, psychoanalysis uncovers the complete structure of language, i.e. the unconscious is structured like language (the order of signifiers); (3) linguistic analysis rests on analysing and interpreting signs determined by an asymmetric relation between the signifier and the signified; (4) the dominant element of every sign is the signifier, which is also pure materiality open to various meanings, thus representing the subject to another signifier (this signifier will be that due to which all other signifiers represent the subject); (5) there is a distinction between the concepts of the symbolic, imaginary, and the Real, i.e. the symbolic is the action and effect of language, which generate sense and meaning; the imaginary is a visual representation of the conceivable; and the Real is that which cannot be symbolised (the void), i.e. that which differs from the everyday reality we can see, which is always in the domain of the symbolic; (6) the symptom is a defect in symbolisation, i.e. the core of opacity and that which is unverbalised in the subject, which disappears when put into words, and therefore psychoanalysis is a therapy treatment predicated on symbolisation; (7) there is always a gap between what is said and what was meant to be said, and therefore psychoanalysis looks for weak spots in those differences; (8) the sphere of nature and the sphere of culture are not equivalent, which means that there is no such thing as whole, but only unwhole (Pas-Tout), which shows the difference, uncomplementarity, and unhomologousness between male and female; (9) there is no metalanguage (a legitimate language of general laws of thinking, acting, and behaving); (10) transference is the relation between the analyst and the analysand, and a basic quality of transference is its ability to move the reality of the unconscious in the patient. At the same time, countertransference is the activity of the patient’s unconscious on the analyst. On the basis of these roughly described schemata and axioms, Lacan and Lacanian theoretical psychoanalysis erected its models of interpreting texts, symbols, inter-subjective relations, desire, etc. In the Socialist Yugoslavia, the reception of Lacanian theoretical psychoanalysis began toward 1970. This reception was tied with understanding the crisis of humanism as a matrix of integration that used to bind quite divergent philosophical and theoretical approaches, from self-management Marxism as the basis of Socialist Yugoslavia’s state political platform, via Praxis critical theory as a reformed Marxism in relation to state ideology, to revivals of metaphysical philosophic traditions, linked to the teaching of Martin Heidegger’s German modern philosophy. On the other hand, Lacanianism offered ostensibly practically

Jacques Lacan, Early Lacanianism, and Former Yugoslavia

181

oriented models of theoretical reflection on the crisis of the modern subject and its individual and collective integrity in the conditions of the multinational Yugoslav federation. The crisis of the subject and the crisis of meta-language were part of Yugoslavia’s reality, which was looking for a new interpretation, beyond humanism’s traditional philosophical rhetoric of “alienation”, or “modernity’s failure” to transcend the traditional local and global paradigms of humanism. The beginnings of Yugoslav or, more accurately, Croatian, Slovenian, and Serbian Lacanianism may be found in the individual transgressive work of the Croatian translator, poet, and philosopher Darko Kolibaš, who in his journey from Heidegger’s philosophy via Derrida’s deconstruction reached Lacanian critical discourse, as part of his analyses of the materiality of the working of text between philosophy and poetry. In the Croatian context, an early close approach to Althusser, Deleuze, Foucault, and Lacan was also provided by the philosopher Nenad Mišþeviü (Mišþeviü 1975). In Slovenia, Lacanianism emerged as an effect of counterculture, i.e. by separating theoretical and philosophical critical discussion from neo-avant-garde micro-social activism. Quite quickly, it took form as a “theoretical school” that combined sociology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis into a critical discussion of socialist society and the complex subjectivisations of totalitarian and para-totalitarian societies. In Serbia, Lacanianism was introduced by the pioneering work of the literary theorist and translator Radoman Kordiü, in his effort to take the analysis of literary and especially prose texts out of critical formalism and into the field of analytical work and, to be sure, signifier materialism (Kordiü 1980). In this text, I will focus on the theoretical works of Darko Kolibaš and the Slovenian Lacanians.

Darko Kolibaš: New Philosophy and the Limits of Philosophy In Croatian culture, Darko Kolibaš anticipated a number of major strategies and tactics of poststructuralism, for instance, the transcendence of hermeneutics, the deconstruction of metaphysics, the practice of Lacanian theoretical psychoanalysis in textual work, etc. (Kolibaš 1970a, 1970b, 1973). Kolibaš belonged to a circle of Zagreb-based experimental concrete poets and structuralist and poststructuralist theorists of text (Branko Bošnjak, Josip Brkiü, Zvonimir Mrkonjiü, Branko Vuletiü, Ante Armanini), clustered around the journal Pitanja in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Croatian and Yugoslav culture, Kolibaš was the first philosopher

182

Chapter Twenty-seven

and theorist who explored French poststructuralism, in other words the French late-structuralist reception of German philosophy from Nietzsche to Heidegger. His explorations and efforts in translating were above all focused on the works of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan. Writing in Croatian, he derived entirely new, as well as archaic and unusual words and phrases, in order to generate a new philosophical and theoretical terminology, needed for interpreting the modern media and textual age. Kolibaš showed that one could speak about the utterable only by means of metaphor and allegory, and by exposing the materiality of philosophical or literary speech. His artificially and diagrammatically posited metaphorical and allegorical speech comprises numerous theoretical connotations owed to Lacanian psychoanalysis, Derridean deconstruction, and French reception of Heidegger’s catastrophic philosophy. The discovery of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Kolibaš assumed, was not that of sexuality itself in man, but of the effects of pure loss (evil, the horror of truth, fear of castration) within the material order of language. The text is the locus of the loss of completeness of Western metaphysics. This is the loss of the legitimacy of linking thought, speech, and writing into a holistic system. Paraphrasing Kolibaš, one might say that truth is the cutting edge, because it never neglects to cut you/us down, whereas knowledge is the bone one throws to the dogs. The post-metaphysical gap may not be circumscribed – one cannot enjoy it. It is a place of horror. The text is a topology of horror, in the sense that Lacanianism promises a confrontation with the Real. Kolibaš’s survey of the transparency of narrative or speculative text was realised by experimental work in textology, in fact, by moving from text as text, via poetry, to philosophy and from philosophy to the writing of the différand, différence, and différAnce. A post-hermeneutic translation is an interpretative translation of an existing text or realisation of a text generated to look like a translation (performed as a simulation of translation) from one language into another, from one jargon into another, and from one idiolect into another. Furthermore: (1) in every text, there are multiple interpretative points of view and thus also semantic ontologies, concrete and fictional textual references; (2) translating is not only about establishing the criteria of correspondence between two languages, but also about transferring terms (words, constructions, concepts) from one possible language into another; and (3) the text is viewed not as a reflecting surface of reproducing referential meaning, but as a complex mechanism of producing, relocating, transforming, moving, and using semantic formations in pointing out the discontinuity of sense. In the material body of a text, the post-hermeneutic procedure creates hiatuses,

Jacques Lacan, Early Lacanianism, and Former Yugoslavia

183

cuts, and de-significations, and thereby indicates discontinuities in the humanist-based meaning of philosophical or literary creativity. Kolibaš’s critique of the humanist philosophical canon stems from a significant inversion: it is not the subject that creates language; rather, the subject is an effect of linguistic, above all signifying structures of language. Kolibaš’s textual work may be understood as a symptom (chasm, slippage) of the great humanist logocentric writing (écriture) that directs the identification of the human, thought, expression, and representation. It shows how every textual totality constructs its own, in Lacanian terms, Pas-Tout, and how the totalising voice of Western rationality produces something unexpected: something related to the material potentialities of text. For example, Kolibaš’s philosophical text “Loquere/ ut/ videam/ te” rests on three sets of differences, which are brought to a mutual confrontation: the difference of poststructuralist textual theory, the metaphysics of text in the Heideggerian sense, and potential mass media productionism. In Kolibaš, there is no dialectic: the unity of mutually divergent sets (a new whole); by contrast, what happens is an increase in the differences of language to a division and dissolution of language – from topology as a structure, to the ashes of language as an anticipation of the traces of the topology of the signifying fabric of text. Similar philosophical and theoretical experiments were realised in his collection of poems Rez (The Cut, 1969) and texts “bog in þlovek v procesu sveta” (god and man in the process of the world, 1969), “eshatološka akcija i pitanje transliterarnog govora” (eschatological action and the issue of transliterary speech, 1969), “hoc igitur, corpus” (1970), “identiþnost, struktura, razlika” (identity, structure, difference, 1970), and “tua res agitur”, 1970. Kolibaš’s work remained an isolated and individual rupture in neoavant-garde experimentality related to concrete poetry and textual explorations. Within the extremely strong tradition of the humanist philosophy of great Marxism and a revived metaphysical Heideggerianism, he seemed like a lone shooter speaking in an unintelligible language outside of the professional philosophic, that is, the literary theoretical jargons of interpreting the history and currency of thought and writing. His Lacanian-oriented discovery was that the sexualised human of contemporary writing was not the ideal complete totality at the foundations of modernity from the renaissance to socialist modernity and the belief in the integrative character of Praxis that generates the human world. On the contrary, this was man or the remainder that shows how the subject of desire and pleasure falls apart around the inscribed “I”.

184

Chapter Twenty-seven

Slovenian Lacanianism The phrases “Slovenian theoretical psychoanalysis” and “Slovenian Lacanian theoretical psychoanalysis” do not denote yet another national school in modern Slovene culture, but an extraordinary series of discontinual and confronted moments in the work of psychoanalytic theory that changed the perspectives of Slovenian national culture during the mature self-management socialism of the 1970s, late crisis socialism of the 1980s, and transitional post-socialist society of the 1990s and 2000s. Without much exaggeration, one might say that “Slovenian theoretical psychoanalysis” had that kind of orientation that phrases such as “French rationalism or structuralism”, English “analytic philosophy”, or “German phenomenology” had at certain moments in the history of European theories and philosophies. In other words, within its national framework of “Slovenedom”, the Slovenian theoretical psychoanalytic school gained international prominence and influence on the American theory market from the 1970s to the 2000s (Žižek 1983). In Slovenia, Lacanian theoretical psychoanalysis was historically anticipated at the end of the 1960s, by transforming Sartrean phenomenological Marxism and Heideggerian metaphysical discourses into poststructuralist materialist discourses that performed a critique of then-dominant idealist structuralism and humanist Marxism. Therefore, one may say that Slovenian Lacanianism emerged from erased traces of Heidegger, a clear distancing from the technocratic Puritanism of pseudoscientific semiotic structuralism, and an eclectic linking of ideas from the New American Left, critical post-Hegelian philosophy, and anti-psychiatry with materialist Althusserian and Lacanian teachings. Furthermore, the Slovenian school of theoretical psychoanalysis was characterised by constant confrontations with other, non-Lacanian authors, as well as by conflicts within the school itself, between various Lacanian-oriented authors. Among other early Slovenian Lacanians, one should certainly mention Rastko Moþnik, Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar, Matjaž Portþ, Rado Riha, and Braco Rotar. Chronologically, one may outline the following stages in the history of theoretical psychoanalysis in Slovenia: 1) The poststructuralist period (19681974), which saw the establishment of critical approaches to the textual idealism and formalism of modernist structuralism – the separation from the neoavant-garde movement OHO – Katalog;

Jacques Lacan, Early Lacanianism, and Former Yugoslavia

185

2) Coming to terms with critical theory of society as the critique of local and universal totalitarianisms (Stalinism, fascism, nationalsocialism); 3) References to British anti-psychiatry (R. D. Laing, D. Cooper) and transcending it; 4) Initial and short-lived relations to Italian psychoanalysis (Armando Verdiglione and others); 5) The separation of Lacanianism from Althusserian structuralist Marxism; 6) Links with French post-Lacanian theorists, especially JacquesAllain Miller; 7) The close reading and fundamentalist exegesis of Lacan’s writings in the context of theoretical psychoanalysis, but in a socialist milieu. The introduction of Lacanian theory as the central theory in the wake of structuralism generated an extraordinary and consistent platform of new critical theory, against the postmodern expansions of poststructuralism, from deconstruction to simulationism. The critique of totalitarian systems (fascism, national-socialism, Stalinism, real-communism, self-management Marxism) was performed from the perspective of psychoanalysis and its analytical apparatus, linked with signifier theory. The critique of totalitarian systems marked the first major specificity of Slovenian/Yugoslav Lacanianism in relation to the originary foci of French explorations in psychoanalysis (Dolar 1978; Žižek 1978; Moþnik 1978). Signifier materialism enabled the discussion of Lacanian models of interpretation predicated on the classic German philosophy of Hegel, Schelling, and Marx. Around 1980, the discourse of theoretical psychoanalysis was thereby established as the basis or background theory of Slovenian cultural and artistic alternative (the Punk scene, retro-avantgarde, and the realisation of various modalities of civil society). During the 1980s, theoretical psychoanalysis developed as a critical analysis and discussion of national and then also popular literature, film, theatre, and opera. With the entry of Slovenian theoretical psychoanalysis on the international scene, above all with the activity of Slavoj Žižek, theoretical psychoanalysis linked up with critical cultural theory, immediately following the collapse of the Cold War binary division of the world. Today, Slovenian theoretical psychoanalysis focuses on the critique of liberal postmodernist arbitrariness and relativism, that is, on a global critique of neo-liberalism and the domination of capitalism in the postCold War division of the world. In terms of scholarship, in Slovenia

186

Chapter Twenty-seven

theoretical psychoanalysis rests on a critical synthesis of Lacanianism and German Classic philosophy (Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Marx) with French late-modernist theory from Althusser to Lacan.

Bibliography Dolar, Mladen. 1978. “O nekaterih vprašanjih in protislovjih v marksistiþnih analiza fašizma.” Problemi  razprave 17780 (14): 49111. —. 1983. “Kratki kurz iz zgodovine lacanovstva.” Problemi  razprave 45: 3975. Kolibaš, Darko. 1970a. “Tua res agitur.” Pitanja 15: 138999. —. 1970b. “fainesthai fall_s \ (po)kazati falos.” Pitanja 19: 1692715. —. 1973. “ob-raþun: l’ob(litter)ation.” Problemi  razprave 12832: 91116. Kordiü, Radoman. 1980. “Uþenje Žaka Lakana.” Treüi program Radio Beograda 49: 37387. Mišþeviü, Nenad. 1975. Marksizam i poststrukturalistiþka kretanja: Althusser, Deleuze, Foucault. Rijeka, Croatia: Prometej. Moþnik, Rastko. 1978. “Problemi staljinizma.” Problemi  razprave 17780 (14): 17380. Potrþ, Matjaž. 1982. “Forum nove Lacanove škole.” Theoria 12: 13036. Žižek, Slavoj. 1978. “Uvod v stalinsko hermenevtiko.” Problemi  razprave 17780 (14): 18197. —. 1983. “Tri predavanja na simpoziju ob ustanovitevi Društva za teoretsko psihoanalizo.” Problemi  razprave 45: 138.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT THE BAROQUE HAS NO METROPOLIS: PETER DAVIDSON AND THE UNIVERSAL BAROQUE JELENA TODOROVIû

It is quite rare nowadays, especially in early modern scholarship, that a new theory appears which so thoroughly re-examines and re-evaluates a firmly established concept and understanding of a certain style or period in art. It is particularly poignant in the case of the Baroque, since the study of the Baroque began fairly late in the historiography of art. It took decades to be recognised as a period of intricate complexity, one that truly heralded the dawn of the first modern age. Therefore, the concept of the universal Baroque defined and elaborated by Peter Davidson had a profound influence on the understanding of this important period in the history of art and culture. Although Davidson applied the theory of universal Baroque in many of his studies of both the literature and arts of the Baroque, it was in his eponymous book that he developed this theory to its full extent (Davidson 2008). For many years, the understanding of Baroque culture was quite similar to the perception of other time periods in the history of art and culture, and owed much to the model established as early as the first great art histories of Burckhardt (Burckhardt 1997) and Wölfflin (Wölfflin 1994). In their view, the Baroque was a centralised culture, whose style was defined and developed only in several unquestionable capitals (notably the capitals of Catholic Europe). Other manifestations of Baroque culture were considered pale peripheral reflections, or even imitations of the original style, whose power waned in proportion to their remoteness from the nearest capital. This model, which functioned so seamlessly in the analysis of the Renaissance, presented great problems when applied to the Baroque’s diverging and often paradoxical manifestations. Apart from its highly pronounced interdisciplinarity, the Baroque period posed yet

188

Chapter Twenty-eight

another challenge to the scholarly world: defining its origins and duration. Depending on its origins and the politico-religious circumstances, the Baroque manifested itself differently in different places, with various durations somewhere in between the late 16th and the late 18th centuries. Recent theoretical approaches, particularly Davidson’s contribution, have managed to alter this standpoint profoundly. In recent years, there have been several important attempts to reexamine the Baroque, most notably the work of Robert Harbison (Harbison 2000) and Giovanni Careri (Careri 2003). Both scholars introduced novel and much needed changes in the perception of Baroque culture, making it more interdisciplinary in its appearance and more international in its reach. Nevertheless, no scholar has offered such a firmly founded and elaborately argued theory as Davidson’s, a theory that presented a comprehensive and far-reaching view of the Baroque as the first global culture, the first universal phenomenon, universal not only in scope, but also in application. Thanks to Davidson’s concept of the universal Baroque, the notion of the Baroque has expanded so as to encompass such profoundly different but conceptually very close manifestations as that of the English Baroque, the Baroque of the Orthodox Archbishopric of Karlovci, the Scottish Baroque, and the hybrid Baroque phenomena of Mexico and the Far East. Studying all of these diverse sources and using examples not only from the visual arts, but also from literature, theatre, and music, Davidson managed to offer a novel view of the Baroque – its style, culture, and legacy. Contrary to other theorists of the Baroque, Davidson is the first who thoroughly questioned the confines of the Baroque world. For him, the Baroque is fundamentally a “supra-national and supra-confessional style” (Davidson 2008, 13). From the late 16th to the 18th century, it developed into a truly international system with unparalleled powers of flexibility and adaptability. Precisely due to these qualities, one may appreciate the universality of the Baroque, since it managed to embrace not only different local cultural traditions, but also different cultures (as in the case of South America) and different confessions (as in the case of the Orthodox Baroque). It is to the great credit of the Jesuits, whose approach opposed the national and the local, that some of the most important elements of Baroque culture reached such diverse parts of the world. Through their powerful network of colleges and missions, the Jesuits transmitted the models of Baroque culture throughout the entire world known to the West at the time. Wherever there was school drama, state festivals, and occasional poetry, Baroque culture established itself.

The Baroque has no Metropolis

189

Like no culture before, the Baroque managed to embrace and appropriate, adapt and subject, and conquer by means of visual idioms which had far greater influence than any conquest attempted by other means in our early modern history. It was a conquest that blurred the borders between the conquerors and the conquered, allowing their respective cultural traditions to influence each other and create a new, more powerful cultural idiom. The Baroque kept re-inventing itself. In Davidson’s view, one of its greatest strengths was the very permeability of the Baroque system. It was a system that measured success by the seemingly endless variations of the established model applicable to all the arts of the period. For instance, the Baroque was the first culture that considered not just one established classical antiquity as its foundation, but strove to explore multiple antiquities, including the Egyptian and Sumerian models. The remote and the exotic were not viewed as otherworldly or strange, but their very strangeness was one of the underlying principles of the Baroque world (Davidson 2008, 14080). Moreover, it was a culture that existed most successfully in different cultural and artistic surroundings, drawing its strength precisely from the differences it brought itself. Thus, the Baroque was the first style whose nature was inherently hybrid. Adaptable and permeable, the Baroque created some of its most powerful art precisely in those territories where the bilingual and the hybrid were most pronounced. For those reasons, Davidson devotes an entire section of his book to the different forms of cultural hybridity in the Baroque universe. From Macao to New Mexico, Baroque culture left its most profound mark merging almost imperceptibly with local visual and cultural models. And in this process, it did not wane, but gained in strength and power of persuasion. What was previously wrongly considered the negative principle of the Baroque – its strangeness, oddness, and grotesque  was its most vital force. For Davidson, the Baroque should never be considered just a singular style of the Counter-reformation with one undisputed capital in Rome and many peripheries of greater or lesser importance. It ought to be seen as a movement of pluralities, as an age of manifold visions, a world with many peripheries and no centre. The Baroque has no Metropolis might easily have been the title of Davidson’s work, as it so precisely sums up the entire intricate theory of universality. If the hybridity of the Baroque style constitutes one of the founding notions behind his theory of the universal Baroque, the concept of “multiple peripheries with no centre” is clearly the other pillar in the construction of his theory. With a style of such powers

190

Chapter Twenty-eight

of hybridity, every cultural centre from Beijing to Karlovci created its own, rightful, and equally powerful form of the Baroque. For precisely those reasons, the theory of the universal Baroque found its particularly successful application in those territories where, according to Davidson, the cultural bilingualism of the Baroque was at its most powerful. The application of his theory of the universal Baroque proves to be of particular significance to the study of Serbian Baroque culture that developed in the shadow of the Habsburg Austrian Empire throughout the 18th century. Davidson’s theory has not only put the Archbishopric of Karlovci in its long-deserved place on the map of the Baroque world, but also demonstrated something far more important. It presented the diverse forms of Baroque culture that were created in Karlovci as legitimate forms of the Baroque cultural idiom valuable no less than their counterparts created in London, Rome, or Madrid. The peculiarity and visual bilingualism created by merging Baroque visual traditions with those of Orthodox Kievan and Serbian Baroque were highly valued characteristics and key features of its Baroque art. Thus, the flaming hearts in the lavishly illustrated panegyric (1757) of Zaharije Orfelin, the renowned Serbian Baroque poet, belong to the same visual language as those on Bernini’s tomb of Ludovica Albertoni and Baciccio’s frescoed ceiling in the church of Il Gesù in Rome. Similarly, the pattern poetry that adorns the same panegyric has a direct correspondence in many ornate publications issued in Rome, Vienna, Amsterdam, and Valladolid that were all meant to celebrate ascent to power. The patterns visible in the allegorical dramas of Jesuit scholars in Valladolid and Sopron reoccur with exceptional clarity in Kozachinskii’s work in Karlovci. The highly intricate visual and literary vocabulary of state festivals, those events that so deeply marked political presentations of all power structures throughout the Baroque political arena, were introduced with the same subtlety of form into the politics of presentations of the Karlovci Orthodox Archbishops in the Habsburg Empire. There is no longer any need to present the art and culture created in the Archbishopric as striving to emulate the Baroque model, since the Baroque model was already there, amalgamated into the very core of its cultural idiom. It should no longer represent the art of the Baroque periphery, as it was so wrongly perceived for decades. It stands as a Baroque centre in its own right, as it did at the time of its creation in the early 18th century. Unlike his predecessors, with his concept of the universal Baroque Davidson succeeds in presenting a thoroughly changed concept of the Baroque, encompassing all the arts of the period and covering not only the territories of Catholic Europe but, which is of utmost importance for

The Baroque has no Metropolis

191

further scholarship, all other domains that were subjected to visual and conceptual idioms of Baroque culture. He was the first to present the Baroque as a hybrid style whose very strength lies in its adaptability, rightly noting that some of its most important art was created in territories marked by cultural bilingualism. With his theory of the universal Baroque, Davidson not only remapped the old, but also charted a new map of the Baroque world, where Madrid and Cusco, Karlovci and Rome, Leiden and Kiev stand as its new capitals.

Bibliography Burckhardt, Jacob. 1997. The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy. London: Penguin. Careri, Giovanni. 2003. Baroques. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Davidson, Peter. 2008. The Universal Baroque. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Harbison, Robert. 2000. Reflections on Baroque. London: Reaktion. Wölfflin, Heinrich. 1994. Renaissance and Baroque. London: Penguin.

EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Dr Žarko Cvejiü is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Media and Communication, Singidunum University, Belgrade. His publications include a number of articles on music, gender, and subjectivity published in Serbia, Great Britain, and the United States. Dr Jovan ýekiü is a Professor at the Faculty of Media and Communication, Singidunum University, Belgrade. His publications include a number of books and articles in the fields of philosophy and art and media theory. Dr Nikola Dediü is Associate Professor of the History of Art, Theory of Art, and Media at the Faculty of Music, University of Arts in Belgrade. His publications include articles in English and Serbian published in various Serbian and Croatian scholarly periodicals. Dr Dubravka Ĉuriü is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade. Her publications include Impossible Histories (The MIT Press, 2006), a book of articles co-edited with Miško Šuvakoviü, an article published in The Face of the Other in Anglo-American Literature (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), and a number of articles published in English and Serbian in Serbian and Slovenian periodicals. Dr Aleš Erjavec is Research Adviser at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Ljubljana. His publications in English include Postmodernism, Postsocialism and Beyond (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), and articles published in Art and Aesthetics after Adorno (University of California, Berkeley, 2010) and Boundary 2 (2014). Dr Andrija Filipoviü is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Media and Communication, Singidunum University, Belgrade. His publications in English include a number of articles on Deleuze and other topics in contemporary philosophy, aesthetics and art theory.

European Theories in Former Yugoslavia

193

Dr Marina Gržiniü is Research Adviser at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Her publications in English include Re-politicizing Art, Theory, Representation and New Media Technology (Vienna: Schlebrügge, 2008) and On Europe: Education, Global Capitalism and Ideology (Duke University Press, 2010). Dr Oleg Jekniü is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Media and Communication, Singidunum University, Belgrade. His published work focuses on establishing interface theory as a new field in media theory. Dr Amra Latifiü is Associate Professor and Vice-dean at the Faculty of Media and Communication, Singidunum University, Belgrade. Her publications include two book-length studies on Russian avant-garde and postmodern art and on acting, as well as a number of articles in the arts and humanities. Dr Nataša Lah is Research Adviser in Theory of Art and Theory of Art History at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Rijeka, Croatia. Her publications include a number of articles and a book-length study, published in Croatia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. Marija Maglov is a doctoral student at the Musicology Department of the Faculty of Music, University of Arts in Belgrade and teaching assistant at the Faculty of Media and Communication, Singidunum University, Belgrade. Her publications in English include an article published in the New Sound, Serbia’s leading music periodical. Dr Sonja Marinkoviü is Professor of Musicology at the Faculty of Music, University of Arts, Belgrade. Her publications in English include a number of articles published in the New Sound journal of musicology. Bojana Matejiü is a doctoral student at the Theory of Art and Media programme of the University of Arts, Belgrade. Her publications include a number of articles published in Serbian and Croatian arts and humanities periodicals. Dr Vesna Mikiü is Professor of Musicology at the Faculty of Music, University of Arts, Belgrade. Her publications in English include articles published in various European and Serbian music periodicals and colletions of articles.

194

Editors and Contributors

Aleksa Milanoviü is a doctoral student at the Theory of Art and Media programme at the University of Arts, Belgrade and teaching assistant at the Faculty of Media and Communication, Singidunum University, Belgrade. His publications include articles on topics related to gender, queer, and cultural studies published in Serbian scholarly periodicals. Dr Novica Miliü is Professor of Communication Theory at the Faculty of Media and Communication, Singidunum University, Belgrade. His publications include a number of book-length studies and articles published by some of Serbia’s leading scholarly publishers. Dr Marko Nikoliü is teaching assistant at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade, Serbia. His publications in English include articles published in the Journal of Applied Engineering Science (2011) and Journal of Cultural Heritage (2013). Dr Sanela Nikoliü is Assistant Professor of Aesthetics at the Faculty of Music, University of Arts, Belgrade. Her publications in English include articles published by the New Sound and other leading Serbian scholarly periodicals. Dr Žarko Paiü is Professor at the Faculty of Textile Technology at University of Zagreb, Croatia. His publications include articles published in English and Croatian in leading Croatian and Slovenian scholarly periodicals. Dr Rade Pantiü is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Media and Communication, Singidunum University, Belgrade. His publications include a number of articles in some of Serbia’s leading periodicals in the domains of art, film, and media. Dr Ana Petrov is Assistant Professor at the Academy of Arts at the University of Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her publications in English include articles in volumes published by Umeå University, Sweden; Hollitzer Verlag, Vienna; and the Hellenic Music Centre, Athens. Dr Maja Stankoviü is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Media and Communication, Singidunum University, Belgrade. Her publications include a number of articles on topics related to contemporary art.

European Theories in Former Yugoslavia

195

Dr Vladimir Stevanoviü is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Media and Communication, Singidunum University, Belgrade. His publications in English include articles published in leading Serbian and Turkish architecture periodicals. Dr Dragana Stojanoviü is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Media and Communication, Singidunum University, Belgrade. Her publications include a number of articles published in some of Serbia’s leading gender studies periodicals. Dr Aneta Stojniü is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Media and Communication, Singidunum University, Belgrade. Her publications include an article published in Utopia of Aliances (Vienna: Locker, 2013) and a number of articles published in Serbian scholarly periodicals. Dr Lada Stevanoviü is Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnography of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Her publications in English include a book-length study published by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and articles published in Ancient Worlds in Film and Television (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2012) and Ethnologia slovaca et slavica (2012). Dr Miško Šuvakoviü is Professor of Aesthetics at the Faculty of Music, University of Arts, and Professor of the Theory of Arts at the Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade. His publications in English include a large number of books and articles on aesthetics, philosophy, contemporary art and art theory, and contemporary dance, most notably Impossible Histories: Historical Avantgardes, Neo-avant-gardes, and Post-avant-gardes, co-edited with Dubravka Ĉuriü (The MIT Press, 2003). Dr Jelena Todoroviü is Associate Professor of Art History at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Arts, Belgrade. Her publications in English include An Orthodox Festival Book in the Habsburg Empire (Ashgate, 2006) and articles published in Die Erschliessung des Raumes (Wolfenbüttel, Germany: Herzog August Bibliothek, 2014) and the Southeast European Studies journal.

INDEX OF NAMES

Adorno, Theodor W., 15, 35, 3738, 192 Ahmed, Sara, 3, 46௅51 Althusser, Louis, 3, 122௅23, 126, 135௅38, 140௅41, 181, 184௅86 Ando, Tadao, 163 Andre, Carl, 160 Armanini, Ante, 181 Bach, Jaime, 160 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 3௅4, 64௅67, 70௅72, 158௅59 Barthelme, Frederick, 164 Bartlem, Edwina, 41, 45 Belting, Hans, 129 Benjamin, Walter, 3, 12௅19, 106, 118, 130 Boehm, Gottfried, 129 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 5 Bošnjak, Branko, 181 Bourdieu, Pierre, 129 Bowie, Andrew, 3, 5௅6, 8, 10௅11 Brkiü, Josip, 181 Buford, Bill, 162, 164, 166 Butler, Judith, 24, 26, 48, 51, 103௅104, 106 Calle-Gruber, Mireille, 29௅30, 32 Carver, Raymond, 164 Cavell, Stanley, 3, 20௅26 Cixous, Hélène, 3, 27௅33 Cooper, David, 185 Danto, Arthur, 36 Deleuze, Gilles, 3, 12௅13, 15௅17, 19, 42, 44௅45, 110௅11, 165, 181, 186, 192 Derrida, Jacques, 3, 20, 28, 107௅15, 181௅82 Dolar, Mladen, 179, 184௅86 Duchamp, Michel, 38, 153

DuPlessis, Rachael Blau, 3, 27, 30௅33 Eichenbaum, Boris, 69, 72 Empedocles, 52 Flavin, Dan, 160 Foucault, Michel, 3, 20, 22௅24, 26, 110, 127, 181, 186 Freud, Sigmund, 15, 21 110௅11, 123, 179 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 2௅3, 58௅59, 61௅63, 162, 196 Garcés, Jordi, 160 Groys, Boris, 3, 21, 128௅29, 133, 196 Gržiniü, Marina, 3, 46, 49, 51, 193 Guattari, Félix, 13, 19, 42, 44௅45 Hall, Stuart, 4, 92௅96, 99௅100 Hays, Michael K., 163, 166 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 36, 58௅59, 61, 111, 121, 185௅86 Heidegger, Martin, 2, 20௅21, 36, 61, 110, 118௅20, 130, 162, 180௅82, 184 Herzog, Jacques, 163 Irigaray, Luce, 3, 27, 32, 167௅70, 172 Jameson, Frederic, 35, 74 Joyce, James, 32 Judd, Donald, 160 Kac, Eduardo, 41, 45 Kant, Immanuel, 5௅6, 9௅11, 20௅21, 54, 86, 91, 111, 186 Kester, Grant H., 43, 45 Khlebnikov, Viktor, 68 Klee, Paul, 37 Kolibaš, Darko, 181௅83, 186 Kristeva, Julia, 3, 21, 27, 101௅103, 105௅106, 172 Kruchenykh, Aleksei, 68௅69, 72

European Theories in Former Yugoslavia Komar, Vitaly, 37, 39 Kordiü, Radoman, 181, 186 Lacan, Jacques, 20, 52௅55, 102, 110, 137, 169, 172, 179௅82, 185௅86 Laing, R. D., 185 Lapeña, José Antonio Martínez, 160 Latour, Bruno, 3, 129, 142௅47 LeWitt, Sol, 160 Llinás, Josep-Antoni, 160 Lorde, Audre, 49 Lyotard, Jean-François, 35, 110 Manovich, Lev, 53, 55௅57 Marx, Karl, 20, 87௅89, 91, 135, 186௅86 Mateo, Lluís, 160, 164, 166 Melamid, Alexander, 37, 39 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 165 Mersch, Dieter, 3, 128, 130௅31, 133 Meuron, Pierre de, 163 Michelangelo, 9 Miller, Jacques-Allain, 185 Mišþeviü, Nenad, 181, 186 Mitchell, W. J. T., 13, 19, 128௅29, 132௅33 Moþnik, Rastko, 137௅39, 141, 184௅86 Mora, Gabriel, 160 Morris, Robert, 160 Morris, William, 35 Mrkonjiü, Zvonimir, 181 Muthesius, Hermann, 35 Nabokov, Vladimir, 72 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 11, 20௅21, 110௅111, 118, 162, 182 Nusselder, André, 3, 52௅57

197

Orlan, 41 Picasso, Pablo, 15, 37 Piñon, Helio, 160 Pippin, Robert, 5௅6, 11 Potrþ, Matjaž, 179, 186 Rancière, Jacques, 3, 34௅39, 87௅91 Riha, Rado, 184 Rohe, Mies van der, 164, 166 Rorty, Richard, 132 Rotar, Braco, 184 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 5௅7, 10௅11, 185௅86 Schiller, Friedrich, 35௅36 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 36, 61 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 5௅11 Siza, Álvaro, 163 Sloterdijk, Peter, 129 Smithson, Robert, 160 Solà-Morales, Ignasi de, 4, 160௅66 Soria, Arturo, 160 Šuvakoviü, Miško, 1, 3, 40௅41, 45, 173, 178௅79, 192, 195 Tasiü, Vladimir, 43, 45 Tatliü, Šefik, 49, 51 Torres, Elías, 160 Vattimo, Gianni, 162௅63, 166 Verdiglione, Armando, 185 Viaplana, Albert, 160 Vico, Giambattista, 35 Vuletiü, Branko, 181 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 35 Wittig, Monique, 27, 30 Wollheim, Richard, 160 Zielinski, Siegfried, 52, 57 Žižek, Slavoj, 49௅51, 53, 184௅86