Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy: An Essay in Political Aesthetics 9780231547369

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1. DEMOCRACY’S FRAGILITY AND THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF PUBLIC ART
2. VOICES AND PLACES: THE SPACE OF PUBLIC ART AND WODICZKO’S THE HOMELESS PROJECTION
3. DEMOCRACY’S “EMPTY PLACE”: RAWLS’S POLITICAL LIBERALISM AND DERRIDA’S DEMOCRACY TO COME
4. PUBLIC ART’S “PLAIN TABLET”: THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF CONTEMPORARY ART
5. DEMOCRACY AND PUBLIC ART: BADIOU AND RANCIÈRE
6. THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF CHICAGO’S MILLENNIUM PARK
7. THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF NEW YORK’S NATIONAL 9/11 MEMORIAL
8. PUBLIC ART AS AN ACT OF CITIZENSHIP
Appendix: Badiou on “Being and the Void”
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

PUBLIC ART AND THE F R AG I L I T Y O F   D E M O C R AC Y

COLUMBIA THEMES IN PHILOSOPHY, SOCIAL CRITICISM, A N D T HE A RTS

CO LUMBIA THEMES IN PHILOSOPHY, SOCIAL CRITICISM, AND THE ARTS

Lydia Goehr and Gregg M. Horowitz, Editors Advisory Board Carolyn Abbate J. M. Bernstein Eve Blau T. J. Clark Arthur C. Danto John Hyman Michael Kelly Paul Kottman

Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts presents monographs, essay collections, and short books on philosophy and aesthetic theory. It aims to publish books that show the ability of the arts to stimulate critical reflection on modern and contemporary social, political, and cultural life. Art is not now, if it ever was, a realm of human activity independent of the complex realities of social organization and change, political authority and antagonism, cultural domination and resistance. The possibilities of critical thought embedded in the arts are most fruitfully expressed when addressed to readers across the various fields of social and humanistic inquiry. The idea of philosophy in the series title ought to be understood, therefore, to embrace forms of discussion that begin where mere academic expertise exhausts itself; where the rules of social, political, and cultural practice are both affirmed and challenged; and where new thinking takes place. The series does not privilege any particular art, nor does it ask for the arts to be mutually isolated. The series encourages writing from the many fields of thoughtful and critical inquiry. For the list of titles in this series, see pages 343–44.

PUBLIC ART AND THE FRAGILITY OF DEMOCRACY

A N E S S AY I N P O L I T I C A L AESTHETICS

F R E D E VA N S

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2019 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Evans, Fred J., 1944– author. Title: Public art and the fragility of democracy : an essay in political aesthetics / Fred Evans. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2018. | Series: Columbia themes in philosophy, social criticism, and the arts | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018008523 | ISBN 9780231187589 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231547369 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Aesthetics—Political aspects. | Democracy. Classification: LCC BH301.P64 E93 2018 | DDC 701/.03—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008523

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover image: Evan Semones © Getty Images

T O E D WA R D   S . C A S E Y P H I LO S O P H E R , M E N TO R , F R I E N D

•

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

1. DEMOCRACY’S FRAGILITY AND THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF PUBLIC ART1 2. VOICES AND PLACES: THE SPACE OF PUBLIC ART AND WODICZKO’S THE HOMELESS PROJECTION23 3. DEMOCRACY’S “EMPTY PLACE”: RAWLS’S POLITICAL LIBERALISM AND DERRIDA’S DEMOCRACY TO COME48 4. PUBLIC ART’S “PLAIN TABLET”: THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF CONTEMPORARY ART81 5. DEMOCRACY AND PUBLIC ART: BADIOU AND RANCIÈRE109 6. THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF CHICAGO’S MILLENNIUM PARK153

VIIICO NTENTS

7. THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF NEW YORK’S NATIONAL 9/11 MEMORIAL181 8. PUBLIC ART AS AN ACT OF CITIZENSHIP231

Appendix: Badiou on “Being and the Void” 249 Notes 255 Bibliography 311 Index 327

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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book that I wrote years ago developed a genealogical critique of cognitive psychology’s computational model of mind. A later volume concerned society, communication, and democracy in “the age of diversity”; it clarified and built upon some of the ideas in the book previous to it. In particular, it proposed viewing society as a “multivoiced body,” a creative interplay among voices that also resists “oracles,” that is, nihilistic tendencies in societies. I appeal to political ontology once more in the current book, Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy. Its role here, however, is to help us address the problems public art faces in a democratic society. These problems derive in part from democracy’s insistent and intrinsic questioning of what it is or should be. This openness is a strength that invites us to explore creatively democracy’s possibilities as a way of life and form of governance. But it also renders democracy fragile, allowing it surreptitiously or inadvertently to incorporate racist, plutocratic, or other tendencies that corrupt it. In response to this paradoxical nature of democracy, I develop a criterion for assessing when public artworks either reinforce or resist the nihilistic forces that plague this form of polity—that is, when such works do or do not qualify as “acts of citizenship” in a democracy. The criterion proposes both political and aesthetic guidelines, the latter concerning the creative tension between the aesthetic and political dimensions of given works. To ensure that the criterion doesn’t betray the democracy it supports, I show how it shares the openness of democracy, acting as a

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lure for always further articulations of itself and thus adopting the form that contemporary philosophers call an “event. The construction of this criterion involves extended critical discussion of key theorists of democracy (both “continental” and “analytic” thinkers), art critics and art historians, as well as artists. I have selected them on the basis of their importance in their fields but also for their relevance to the specific task of fashioning the public art criterion. Although I discuss an ample number of public artworks for carrying out this undertaking, including topical Confederate and diversity-oriented monuments, I devote a chapter to Millennium Park, whose conviviality celebrates life, and another to New York’s 9/11 memorial, whose commemorative task addresses death and mourning. The critical discussion of these two multifaceted memorials allows me to refine the public art criterion and test its mettle for the burden I am assigning it. Much is at stake in this endeavor. Many governments that profess democracy today nonetheless adopt rhetoric and policies promoting bigotry, authoritarianism, and thuggery. They thereby revive social–political tendencies that have historically threatened democracy from within as well as from without. Moreover, the vast amount of wealth that is passing into the hands of a decreasingly smaller group—the “one percent”— progressively turns freedom and equality, the two bulwarks of democracy, into a mirage. All the more reason to explore how public art can enlist its aesthetic and political power to resist these destructive tendencies as well as to reveal new possibilities for a democratic way of life. I present the themes, figures, and pathways of this book more fully in chapter 1 of this book. Instead of repeating what I say there, I will shift to a lesson I’ve learned from writing this book and the other two before it: that a single-authored book is nonetheless a collaboration. This lesson makes me all the more eager to acknowledge the many people who have helped me produce Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy. To begin, the staff of Columbia University Press have been unfailingly generous as well as expert in bringing this book to print. My editor, Wendy Lochner, went beyond guidance and patience. She provided sagacious advice that led to some substantial changes in the text. Of the many other members of the Press who helped, I particularly want to thank associate editor Lowell Frye and production editor Kathryn Jorge for the helpful and friendly attention they gave to me and my work; thanks also to copywriter and

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catalog manager Zack Friedman and senior designer Chang Jae Lee. My appreciation also goes to others in this chain of creative support whose names I do not know or will learn only after these acknowledgments are part of the finished book. Within my academic circle, encouragement and good advice came abundantly from friends and colleagues. First place, as always, goes to my life partner, Barbara McCloskey. She read multiple drafts of the text, advised me wisely on my ideas and prose, and, as an art historian, saved me from a number of embarrassing errors. Her own work on the political culture of twentieth-century Germany impressed upon me the intricate manner in which the aesthetic and political dimensions of a successful artistic work complement one another. Most importantly, the pleasure of reading and commenting on each other’s work continues to be part of the joy of all our years together. Edward Casey and Leonard Lawlor commented extensively on the text and continue to educate me, the first about phenomenology, the second about Derrida and Deleuze, and both about how to extend such paradigms into visionary philosophies of one’s own. Tony Smith’s rigorous and insightful work on economic democracy, as well as on Marx and Hegel, inspired me to write more critically on capitalism in this book and to study further his own ideas about what could replace it. Greg Nielsen continues to lend nuance to my understanding of his notion of “imaginary audiences” in the area of journalism and to our mutual appreciation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “heteroglossic voices.” Andreea Ritivoi, like these four others, gave me helpful advice about revising some sections of my book and, from within her field of expertise, tutored me about the power of rhetoric in determining political destinies. I also benefited from the work and comments of three other art historians besides Barbara— Erika Doss, Kirk Savage, and Terry Smith—and from the friendship and creativity of the artists/scholars Andrew Johnson and Susanne Slavick. Two anonymous referees for Columbia University Press enlightened me on how to improve my text on a number of important points. Besides these individuals, I wish to thank a former graduate student, Boram Jeong, for preparing the list of references for my book; another, James Bahoh, for helping me with related bibliographic research; and two others, Melanie Walton and Brittany Leckey, for inviting me to give keynote presentations at their respective universities on topics related to

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chapters in this book. More generally, two groups of graduate students frequently commented on some of the ideas that were central to the book. The first group are the graduate students whose dissertations I was directing during the time I was writing Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy: Brock Bahler, Nathan Eckstrand, Boram Jeong, Ariana Ragusa, Tristana Martin Rubio, Tom Sparrow, and George Yancy. Besides introducing me to their challenging dissertation topics, they greatly aided me with their critical questions about the ideas in this book. Similarly, I also must express my gratitude to the faculty, staff, and graduate students of Duquesne University’s philosophy department; they provided me with a rich philosophical setting for my work in addition to the administrative support it required. With respect to the latter, the department’s administrator, Joan Thompson, has been particularly helpful and kind over the years. Duquesne University itself—especially Jim Swindal, the dean of the College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts—helped by granting me financial aid for the images used in the book and the indexing for the latter, as well as by allowing me to take a leave of absence for a semester in order to complete a rough draft of the manuscript. The other group of students I want to thank are those on whose dissertation committees I served on as an external reader at the University of Pittsburgh’s Hispanic Language and Literature Department: César Zamorano Díaz, Carolina Gainza, Juan Carlos Grijalva, Lizardo M. Herrera, and Fabio López de La Roche. Besides what I learned from their impressive work, our frequent conversations enriched the concepts I was developing for my book. More particularly, each helped translate some of my articles into Spanish and to publish some of those in Latin American journals and/or present them at conferences south of the U.S. border. One of these scholars, Fabio López, invited me to team-teach a course with him at the Universidad Nacional de Bogotá, Colombia, and to give a keynote address on public art at an international conference there. A friend separate from this group, Luis Herrera, invited me to give a keynote talk at the Universidad de Cuenca in Ecuador on a topic directly related to this book. Also separate from this group, curator and art historian Luiz Guilherme Vergara has discussed with me some of the material in this book during the last few years and introduced my work to some of his colleagues in Brazil. I very much appreciate the attention they have all given my work. More generally, I have been able to improve my ideas for Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy through the critical commentary I received at

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numerous conferences and other speaker situations, as well as though publication opportunities. These are too many to list here in full. I will limit myself to already published work related to some of the chapters in this book. In each case, the work in question has here been significantly revised as well as reframed by the rest of the book: Related to chapter 2: “Citizenship, Art, and the Voices of the City: Wodiczko’s The Homeless Projection,” in Acts of Citizenship, eds. Engin F. Isin and Greg M. Nielsen (London: Zed Books, 2008), 227–46. Related to chapter 3: “The Dilemma of Diversity: Rawls and Derrida on Political Justice,” in Justice through Diversity? A Philosophical and Theological Debate, ed. Michael Sweeny (New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2016), 123–55; “Derrida and the ‘Autoimmunity’ of Democracy,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 30, no. 3 (2016): 303–15; “Cosmopolitanism ‘To Come’: Derrida’s Response to Globalization,” in A Companion to Derrida, ed. Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 550–565; and “El cosmopolitismo que viene: Derrida y el pensamiento ‘fronterizo Latinoamericano,’ ” trans. César Zamorano Díaz, in Revista de humanidades de Valparaíso 1 , no. 9 (2017): 49–72. Related to chapters 6 and 7: “Citizenship and Public Art: Chicago’s Millennium Park,” in Outrage! Art, Controversy, and Society, ed. Richard Howells, Andreea Ritivoi, and Judith Schachter (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 144–71;“Citizenship and Public Art: The Political Aesthetics of New York’s 9/11/01 Memorial,” Belmont University Symposium Journal 3 (2013): 79–105; and “The Dilemma of Public Art’s Permanence,” in “Permanence in Public Art,” ed. Erika Doss, special issue, Public Art Dialogue 6, no. 1 (Spring, 2016): 58–81. These thanks, to so many, are meant wholeheartedly. They are also extended to many friends who I could not name here but have contributed to this book over the years. All this helps confirm what I said earlier: a single-authored book is indeed a collaborative affair.

PUBLIC ART AND THE F R AG I L I T Y O F   D E M O C R AC Y

1 DEMOCRACY’S FRAGILITY AND THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF PUBLIC ART

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n May 17, 2017, the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee was officially removed from its prominent location in the city of New Orleans (figure 1.1). The event was attended by a large crowd of animated protesters. They were divided into those opposing and those supporting the original 6–1 decision by the City Council to take down the statue and three other Civil War memorials.1 Those cheering the removals abhorred these stone and bronze reminders of the era of slavery and the belief in white supremacy they still embodied. In contrast, those shouting against the removal were of two minds. One group included members of the Ku Klux Klan and others who vociferously glorified the monuments as symbols of the white supremacy they championed. Its adherents were also more likely than the others to protest violently. The other group against the removal chose more conventional reasons for their position. They argued that the monuments expressed only nonracist sentiments such as military valor, the identity and culture of the city, or the “lost cause” of the Southern Confederate States of America. Some members of this group proposed keeping the monuments in their present locations but accompanying them with plaques or other devices that would acknowledge their more ignominious significance.2 However, the intensity of the protests at, before, and after the removal indicated that something more contentious than a reverence for past history was represented by the monuments.3

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Monument to Robert E. Lee in New Orleans, Louisiana, 2015. Copyright © AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

FIGURE 1.1

We could say more about this event in New Orleans. We could add that the disastrous end of Reconstruction (1863–1877) was followed by installing statues of Confederate soldiers on tall columns in courthouse squares throughout the South, and that these new memorials were accompanied by the explicitly racist acts of terrorizing blacks, eroding their civil rights, and excluding them from the centers of political power.4 We could even note that when African Americans did return to these courthouse squares it was frequently as victims of the lynchings that took place there.5 We could say these things, elaborating on them. But the purpose of this brief consideration of the removal of monuments in New Orleans is threefold: to impress upon us the fragility of democracy and what it too often tolerates; to dramatize the importance of public art in shaping our views of democracy; and to heighten the urgency in using public art along with

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other means to strengthen democracy. Another example will help reinforce these concerns and specify how they will be addressed in this book on the political aesthetics of public art. The example of the New Orleans monuments involved removing public artworks. This next example is about creating them. It also takes us from a conservative South to a more liberal California. The monument I have in mind is Judith Baca’s Danzas Indigenas (Indigenous Dances), sponsored by the City of Baldwin Park and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (figure 1.2). Baca’s public artwork conducts us through an outdoor plaza and under a twenty-foot-high arch that opens onto the platform of the city’s commuter rail station. The installation also includes the benches and shelters of the station and, at the entrance to the plaza, two planters with an oak and a cactus representing the mixture of the

FIGURE  1.2 Judith Baca’s Danzas Indigenas in Baldwin Park, California, 1993. Copyright © Judith F. Baca. Photo courtesy of SPARC Archives (SPARCinLA.org)

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indigenous and Spanish cultures pertinent to the site. An explanatory plaque states that “the elliptical shapes of two lines of dancers of the Gabrielino and Chumash tribes” are “woven over and through” the patterns on the plaza floor of the arch and the platform on its other side. Texts in English, Spanish, and several local indigenous languages (including pictographs) are inscribed on these lines and patterns. Other detailing on this ingenious monument depicts the different peoples who historically have populated this area and those who live there now. They also pay tribute to the missions as well as to the captive Indians who were used for labor. In addition, the monument emphasizes the role of women in the history of the area and honors statements by citizens, poets, and others now inscribed on the arch or plaques. One of these inscriptions captures the spirit of the installation and the city’s ethnic groups: “the kind of community that people dream of, rich and poor, brown, yellow, red, white, all living together.”6 In short, Danzas Indigenas heralds a recent tendency in the United States to construct public art works celebrating racial, gender, and other forms of diversity. But Baca’s monument and many others like it have also met with protests demanding their removal. In the case of Danzas Indigenas, demonstrations occurred three times, twice in 2005 and again in 2007, and were conducted by “Save Our State” (SOS), a white-supremacist group in California. People from Baldwin Park and their allies greeted the first SOS incursion with a clamorous and even violent reaction. Riot police and a helicopter were needed for crowd control. But the Baldwin Park contingent changed its tactics in the second SOS-initiated protest during 2005 and then again in the 2007 encounter. These two times they met SOS with a mobile public art work, You Are My Other Me. The work consisted of a chain of marchers carrying placards with images and quotes, such as “Good art confuses racists” and “America turns its back on hate groups.” In other words, this counterprotest was a celebratory festival, disarming the hate-motivated approach of SOS with “love, humor, dignity, compassion, understanding, indigenous spirituality, inclusivity, and resistance.” The mayor of Baldwin Park proclaimed that You Are My Other Me “represents our city, our people and all America.” Insightfully, Erika Doss remarks that the controversies over Danzas Indigenas and similar monuments are “grounded in the dynamics of American citizenship and

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national memory: of who ‘counts’ as an American today and what America itself means and represents.”7 Danzas Indigenas, like New Orleans’s removal of the Civil War monuments, dramatizes the fragility of democracy: even if the tendency toward bigotry, authoritarianism, and thuggery is resisted in New Orleans and Baldwin Park (one by the removal of monuments, the other by their creation), this resistance is repeatedly countered and sometimes overwhelmed by these same negative forces. We must note with alarm the fascistic movements and governments that are reemerging around the globe in our current era.8 These troubling forces offer to their constituents, whether in the United States or elsewhere, an ethnic, religious, or other homogenizing identity to idolize and couple with hatred of a despised or feared “other.”9 They also have their monuments to shape public opinion, ones akin to the white supremacist beliefs embodied by the Confederate soldier on a pillar.10 These menacing forces also raise the issue of the power of and urgency for public art to address them. We will respond to this issue by establishing a criterion for assessing the value of monuments and other public artworks in a democracy, that is, the degree to which they qualify as “acts of citizenship.”11 Accomplishing this task will require that we clarify the elusive meanings of public art, citizenship, and democracy. We will have to confront examples of public art whose standing will not be as clear-cut for us as that of a soldier–statue for the wrong cause or the depiction of an indigenous dance for the right one. We will also have to deal with challenges to democracy more subtle than white supremacy and with promises more easily questioned than diversity. All the while, we will have to keep in mind the urgency of these issues in the face of the authoritarian threats now rumbling through the United States and the rest of the world.

A P L A I N TA B L E T A N D P U B L I C A RT

The issue concerning public art and democracy was broached in the United States long before the Civil War and the turbulent events just addressed. Its appearance at this earlier time will convey to us further

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aspects of democracy’s fragility and public art’s possible responses to it. We will begin by reemphasizing the importance of our proposed criterion of public art and clarifying the major terms involved in establishing the criterion. After completing this preliminary task, we will preview the subsequent chapters of the book and the path we will follow. During the inaugural years of the United States, Congressman John Nicholas (1764–1819) of Virginia and his fellow members of Congress were involved in a tumultuous debate over public art, a debate that even rivaled the issue of slavery. The Federalists thought a hero monument to George Washington would inspire the people to revere the Father of the Republic and to love the country he helped found. The image of authority embodied in the monument’s permanent and imperious stone would also suggest that the executive branch of the government should have as much or more authority than the legislature. In contrast, John Nicholas, Thomas Jefferson, and their fellow Democratic-Republicans believed that enlightened citizens did not need monuments or other quasi-religious symbols as the basis for their trust in the democratic charter of the nation. Nicholas therefore proposed a monument that he thought would be truly novel and befitting of the new democracy: “A plain tablet, on which every man could write what his heart dictated.” He declared that these scribblings would keep George Washington alive in “the national feeling” far more effectively and more appropriately than would “a heap of large, inanimate objects.”12 In his book on “monument wars” in the United States, Kirk Savage shows how this early debate opened a path of history that is still with us today. He points out that during the period in which the Washington Monument was heatedly discussed and later built, the opinion of Nicholas was joined by the democratically inspired iconoclasm of North Carolina congressman Nathanial Macon, the poets John Greenleaf Whittier and Walt Whitman, and the voices of many other U.S. citizens, revered and common alike.13 Savage adds that Maya Lin’s minimalist Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial and the debates surrounding it are a repetition of this issue in political aesthetics. The sunken, black granite wall of her “antimonument” is filled exclusively with the names of U.S. service personnel killed or missing in the Vietnam conflict and the mirrored reflections of the viewers reading them. Like Nicholas’s blank slate, the memorial was intended to convey no message other than those created by its visitors.14

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Savage concludes with a discussion of a monument on the National Mall that contrasts with Lin’s minimalism and returns us to the more imperial sentiments of the Federalists: the World War II Memorial, completed in 2004. Besides splitting the public space of the Mall in two, it contributes to the “militarization of the memorial landscape” and therefore should move us to recommend a temporary moratorium on further Mall monuments. Savage thinks this pause would allow us to take into account that the Mall is an ongoing project rather than the “completed work of civic art” proclaimed by the public officials in charge of it: Projects could give much greater weight to the antimonumental impulse that has been such a deep and enduring theme in American culture. Nicholas’s tablet— on which people write what their hearts dictated— would be perfectly in place here. . . . More voices would find room for expression, creating a far more open, democratic sphere of memory.15

Savage’s conclusion indicates that the original debate over public art in the United States is still with us: which one, a plain tablet or a monument of stone, reflects the values of democracy? Which, that is, constitutes an act of citizenship? As indicated earlier, we will approach these questions in political aesthetics by attempting a more general and philosophical task: the development of a flexible criterion for assessing public art as an act of citizenship in a democracy.16 Other scholars have discussed the relation of public art to democracy. But no one to my knowledge has made a systematic or explicit statement of this criterion.17 The importance of developing this type of criterion is undeniable. We can support this claim by repeating some of the remarks that were made at the beginning of the chapter and adding to them. The first of these addresses the prevalence of public art today and its power to shape perceptions and thoughts. Savage’s concern about the Mall and our discussion of Baca’s Danzas Indigenas and the removal of Confederate monuments are examples of this prevalence and power. The significance of these and similar cases is also captured in Erika Doss’s book on “memorial mania” and by her claim that “the pace of commemoration has quickened, and the number of memorials has escalated, because growing numbers of Americans view public art as a particularly powerful vehicle of visibility and authority.”18

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The second reason for the importance of our criterion lies in the uncertainties that democracy always has about itself—the issue of its fragility. Along with issues of racial justice and diversity, we need a criterion in order to judge if public art is also attentive to how money in politics can blur the line between plutocracy and democracy; to how fear of migrants can undermine our commitment to inclusion and diversity; and to how our conservatism can accept artwork that repeats patriotic bromides in place of critical and imaginative expansions of our ideas of democracy. Thus the prevalence and power of public art to influence our perception of democracy—to enhance or eviscerate this political ideal—are justifications of the need to develop a criterion that helps us determine the status of public artworks as acts of citizenship. The task of establishing this criterion is made difficult because of another theme that I hinted at in the beginning section of this chapter: the three major terms involved in our criterion—democracy, citizenship, and public art—thrive on evading the final characterizations we might want to impose upon them. But establishing at least workable meanings for these terms is a necessary part of constructing the criterion we seek. Like the proverbial ship at sea, we will have to continually reconstruct their significations while putting them to use and viewing them in relation to one another. We should not be surprised that the ideas put forward by the end of this book will act more as lures for further thought than serve as completed concepts. This also will be true for our criterion of public art. If democracy, citizenship, and public art intrinsically resist final definitions of themselves, then shouldn’t our criterion, our touchstone, be helpful for assessing public art as an act of citizenship but also always remain an invitation for further revisions of itself? Shouldn’t that be part of its meaning? Notions of democracy, citizenship, and public art are linked by the idea of voice and its derivatives. I have comprehensively developed the notion of voice and of society as a dialogic body in an earlier work.19 A particular advantage of voice is that it helps us understand a key sense in which public art can be an act of citizenship. Specifically, we will call public works of art “quasi-voices” as a mark of their agency in public spaces. Spelling out the meaning of this hyphenated term will be part of the task ahead of us. The notion of voice also applies to the participants and institutions that we will encounter in this book. I will present this

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term and its nuances more fully in the next chapter with the help of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s example of “counter-architecture,” The Homeless Projection, and Rosalyn Deutsche’s commentary on the socio-political meaning of his work.20 The relation of public art to democracy is only one major part of the criterion we are seeking. Savage’s elaboration of the debate between the Republicans and the Federalists—a plain tablet versus a stone monument— also makes clear that public art involves an aesthetic dimension as well as a political one. Our essay on political aesthetics will therefore be complicated, and made more interesting, by having to probe how these two dimensions of a public artwork—the aesthetic and the political—can effectively fuse together in it: how the different emphasis of the one can avoid cancelling out that of the other. We must also reinforce a caveat already entered: the criterion of public art arrived at must be one capable of continually interrupting itself in light of innovative public artworks, art history, philosophy, and other sources. A criterion in stone is no better than our most uninspiring monuments of the same material.

P U B L I C A RT A N D AC TS O F C I TIZE N S H I P

These opening remarks have emphasized the importance of our proposed criterion of public art. We can now briefly examine the definitions of “public art” and “acts of citizenship” and then proceed in the next two sections to do the same for the relation of public art to politics and aesthetics. State sponsorship or support is usually a key marker for what might pass as public art. But this is helpful only in a limited manner. Almost all aspects of society, including its art, are intentionally or inadvertently supported to a greater or lesser degree by government organs. Furthermore, contemporary social media provide a public dimension for many artworks that are in private hands. For these reasons, Lambert Zuidervaart prefers the term “art in public” over “public art.” He defines the former as “any art whose production or use presupposes government support of some sort and whose meaning is available to a broader public—broader than the original audience for which it was intended or to which it speaks.”21

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We will retain the term “public art,” proposing a broader definition than Zuidervaart’s but then paring it down to make it more manageable. For us, public art will encompass any artistic creation that has the intent or effect of addressing democratic values and occurs in public spaces. This qualification, like Zuidervaart’s definition, also allows that some private spaces can be transformed functionally into public ones when they make a point—here an artistic one—that engages a society’s public policies. Most importantly, our characterization of public art explicitly includes Zuidervaart’s emphasis on government-sponsored art but also adds art that can dissent from the former under certain conditions. With respect to the “government sponsored” side of our definition, we can at least initially restrict ourselves to art that is directly state-sponsored. We can assume that the government is obligated to express or at least not undermine the values that it shares with the people whom it presumably represents. In a polity such as the United States, these values are democratic ones. Governments can also sponsor artworks that qualify as acts of generosity, charity, or entertainment. In that these acts tend to reflect the interests of religious, ethnic, or other specific groups, they are not directly related to and can even conflict with the more inclusive meaning of democracy. For our purpose, they therefore do not formally qualify as acts of citizenship no matter how valuable and socially acceptable they might be otherwise. In short, the relation of public art to democracy is paramount in the formal context of an “act of citizenship.” An act of citizenship is not the same as legal citizenship. We can initially clarify the force of “act” by considering some of the Engin Isin’s remarks on the topic. He distinguishes an “act of citizenship” from citizenship taken as “status” and “habitus.” Citizenship as status includes the “rights and responsibilities of citizens in a given state”; citizenship as habitus refers to “how citizens and perhaps non-citizens practice the rights that they do have.”22 Isin holds that acts of citizenship transcend these two other forms because they involve creativity, inventiveness, and autonomy. More importantly, they have the capacity to “rupture” established laws and practices. These ruptures make possible acts with the other three qualities—creativity, inventiveness, and autonomy—but also have the ability to traverse established borders and limits.23 Isin develops these terms with great care and many examples. Our own characterization of acts of citizenship will share his emphasis on rupture, creativity, and

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kindred terms; but they will also receive the elucidation needed for our aims as we confront the meanings of democracy and public art in the rest of this book. If we accept direct state sponsorship as one limit on the continuum of examples that make up public art, then dissident public art constitutes the other. Dissident public art counts as an act of citizenship when it reflects a democratic ethos and corrects the government’s support of art that implicitly or explicitly promotes autocratic values. In this essay, we will sometimes use examples of dissident art to help us obliquely ascertain the status of officially government sponsored art as acts of citizenship. We will use Wodiczko’s The Homeless Projection for that purpose in the next chapter. There is, of course, art that dissents from democracy itself, but it would be an act of citizenship only for the polity that it imagines to replace democracy in the future. The soldier–statues of the Confederacy offer such an example: the constitution of that short-lived government included an explicit provision that today we consider anti-democratic, the affirmation of slavery in perpetuity.24

P U B L I C A RT A N D P O L I T I C S

We saw earlier that our criterion for assessing public art involves two related parts: a political one and an aesthetic one. This section will introduce the political part by exploring further public art’s relation to the fragility of democracy. The next will take up the aesthetic part of the criterion. The most general way of characterizing democracy’s fragility is through its relation to what I call the “dilemma of diversity.” The dilemma arises historically with the advent of “the age of diversity.” In this age, the traditional search for a homogeneous identity or univocal notion of the good is now rivaled by the growing recognition that cultural, ethnic, and other forms of diversity constitute values as well as facts. The tension between these two political virtues, unity and heterogeneity, constitute the dilemma: the desire for solidarity threatens to diminish the importance of differences; but the allegiance to diversity can easily divide us into disparate islands held together by nothing other than the exigencies of mutual fear or commercial trade.25 The two contrasting terms of this

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dilemma threaten to cancel out each other. If we are not able to couple the very ideas of unity and plurality (solidarity and heterogeneity, identity and difference) and do so in a way that is just and compelling to most people, it will be even harder in practice to counter ethnic cleansing, draconian antiimmigration policies, and the other agendas of social and political exclusion that have plagued our recent history. Besides exploring the vicissitudes of this dilemma and hence the fragility of democracy, we will want to discover if it is intrinsic to democracy—a sort of autoimmunity, or a product of the foibles of the citizens who otherwise subscribe to it. To confront this dilemma, to try achieving at least a conceptual affinity between unity and diversity, we will have to envision a unity composed of—rather than imposed on—difference.26 The notion of “voices” mentioned earlier will help us express this abstract formula in a manner that captures its concrete as well as logical sense. Public artworks will also play a major role in contributing to this goal. Indeed, the dilemma and its solution will be the key aspect of the political part of our criterion for assessing public artworks as acts of citizenship. Some problems closely related to the dilemma of diversity suggest both advantages and disadvantages of democracy’s fragility. To see how fragility can paradoxically be both a promise of and a hindrance to democracy, we can take the difficulty of defining democracy as a chief example. This difficulty is partially due to democracy’s status as both a dream and an abstract idea, a way of life as well as a set of constitutional rules. Indeed, scholars often cite approvingly Claude Lefort’s comment that democracy gains its legitimacy from “the image of an empty place, impossible to occupy, such that those who exercise public authority can never claim to appropriate it.”27 These scholars echo Lefort by valorizing democracy for being intrinsically protean, continually reinventing itself and requiring art and other media to help it fulfill this tendency. Thus Daniel Bensäid equates democracy with its permanent revision into new and more radical forms: “To survive, [democracy] must keep pushing further, permanently transgress its instituted forms, unsettle the horizon of the universal, test equality against liberty. . . . It must ultimately attempt to extend, permanently and in every domain, access to equality and citizenship. So democracy is not itself unless it is scandalous right to the end.”28 But the disadvantages associated with the ambiguity of democracy offset its auspicious “scandalousness.” One of these is the tendency for

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acts in the name of democracy to inadvertently or surreptitiously support autocratic interests. We have already noted how the Confederate States thought that democracy was compatible with legalized enslavement and racism. Another disadvantage is the tendency in many democracies to permit the increasing privatization of public space by capital—its “naturalization”—as well as the domination of government by business interests, as seen particularly in the United States. Thus Kristin Ross argues that “democracy [has become] the right to buy,” both in the sense of purchasing a wide variety of consumer goods and in the sense of corrupting government. She contrasts this with the more laudable sense of democracy practiced by the Paris Commune.29 More generally, the rising inequality in the United States and other capitalist countries undermines the solidarity required for a democracy. In later chapters we will see how this problem of privatization extends to the artistic realm when corporations play a major role in financing public artworks that are officially sponsored by the government. A further disadvantage of lacking a clear definition for democracy is the tendency to leave its meaning unexamined in popular, political, and artistic discourse. For this reason, John Keane makes the pithy comment that “democracy itself had become democratized [after its proliferation in modern times]—to the point where anthropologists rather than political scientists [are] better equipped to grasp its ways.”30 Similarly, JeanLuc Nancy proclaims that “democracy has become an exemplary case of the loss of power to signify. . . . It means everything—politics, ethics, law, civilization—and nothing.”31 These statements by Keane and Nancy reiterate a much earlier one by the eighteenth-century French revolutionary Auguste Blanqui: You say to me: “I am neither bourgeois, nor proletarian. I am a democrat.” Beware of words without definition, they are the preferred instruments of schemers. . . . It is they who invented the beautiful aphorism: neither proletarian nor bourgeois, but democrat! . . . What opinion couldn’t manage to find a home under that roof? Everyone claims to be a democrat, even aristocrats.32

The problem of the ambiguity of democracy extends to the art world as well as to the political. For example, Rosalyn Deutsche regrets that there

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has been “little interrogation of the definition” of this political concept in the debates concerning public art. Yet “no topic is more urgent today than democracy. . . . [Its] emergence . . . in the art world . . . corresponds to an extensive eruption and diffusion of struggles over the meaning of democracy, in political theories, social movements, and cultural practices.”33 The ambiguity and abstractness of the term therefore call for public artworks and other concrete images to render democracy palpable, to increase its force in society and to explore or extend its meanings. These images can include everything from protestors’ urgent artistic interventions in the streets to governments’ often staid monuments that attract only birds. Public art, in short, has the potential to help convert the abstract idea of democracy into a “popular ethic,” thus motivating citizens to participate in civic activities—or to reduce it to clichés that inspire no one.34 Before continuing to the aesthetic part of our criterion of public art, we can use this discussion of democracy as an empty place to illustrate how the concept of an act of citizenship in public art varies from one national ethos to another. Sabine Hake mines Lefort’s idea of empty place in her book on democracy and film during and after Germany’s Third Reich. She points out that in contrast to Nazism, “the inherent abstractness of democracy, both as a form of government and a way of life, has posed a considerable challenge to filmmakers because of its lack of compelling myths and symbols and the resultant difficulty of forming and sustaining democratic commitments through fictional scenarios and imagined identities.”35 This statement suggests that what counts as an act of citizenship in art is going to differ considerably according to whether the art is sponsored by and reflects a democratic or a fascist government. The difference in the meaning of an act of citizenship is further brought out by considering what public sculpture signified for German National Socialism. George Mosse highlights “beauty without sensuality”— “worshiped but neither desired nor loved”—as the standard for statues or paintings of nudes during the Third Reich and its rise to power in the 1930s. The “muscular and harmonious bodies” of male and female nudes in German public art promoted national cohesion around the moral standards of that time and emphasized the Nazis’ belief in the Aryans as a pure race. This vision of the purity of the German Volk was intensified by contrasting it with what the Nazis considered to be the genetic and cultural “degeneracy” of Jews and other ethnic groups. Indeed, this self-aggrandizement through such images of the nude included a cult of

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“active” masculinity to which even the public artistic depiction of women conformed. Only in the context of the private realm were women’s bodies encouraged to be portrayed in a more “passive” and sensual manner. Moreover, Hitler and the Nazis considered the masculinist aesthetic of its public art as a remedy to the “chaos” and “degenerate art” (Entartete Kunst) of modernism, especially the latter’s accent upon the individual and the new.36 The images and values embodied by Nazi art also supported more general motifs of hierarchical order and militarism in German fascism. Even in light of our preliminary characterization of democracy, these examples help us see, once again, that acts of citizenship in the realm of public art tend to differ markedly in democratic and totalitarian societies. The importance of this difference is further highlighted in contemporary democratic Spain. Many Spanish citizens are outraged about the use of public funds to maintain a monument from the era of Franco’s fascist regime, the Valle de los Caídos, as part of the country’s “patrimonio nacional.”37 This is clearly similar to the feelings of the citizens of New Orleans who proposed the removal of the Confederate monuments from civic locations in their city. The problems just introduced suggest that government public art in democracies should support the values that are or could be associated with its polity. It should, that is, help characterize and support the idea of democracy as a unity composed of difference; resist the colonization of democratic values by autocratic interests; concretize the abstractness of this political idea as well as motivate civic practices expressive of it; and, perhaps most important, stay true to its transformative capacity, revealing new possibilities for democracy and acts of citizenship.

P U B L I C A RT A N D A E S T H E T I C S

In this section, we can examine more closely—though still preliminarily— the aesthetic part of the criterion we are seeking for evaluating public art works. There are two problems with respect to this part of the criterion. We can expose each by appeal to Congressman Nicholas’s idea of a plain tablet as public art. The plainness of the tablet is close to the emptiness of Lefort’s empty place of democracy. The first of these problems reflects a claim by the many contemporary theorists and practitioners of art who

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uphold the notions of contemporaneity, heterochronicity, and anachronicity. This claim and the three notions related to it assert that contemporary art eschews the idea that artistic work has an essence or universal telos. This presents the problem then of being able to state the nature of what can count as a public artwork. How can we evaluate an artwork if we have no basis for distinguishing art from non-art? We will address this claim and the meaning of contemporaneity, heterochronicity, and anachronicity in chapter 4. For now, and from our contemporary standpoint, we can take Nicholas’s plain tablet to represent a radical pluralism and the relativism that term implies: a tablet that is open to any and every opinion being inscribed on its surface, and so plain that it might be mistaken for a registry rather than recognized as an art object.38 We can generalize from this affinity between Nicholas’s plain tablet and Lefort’s empty place to say that both are forms of the dilemma of diversity and its possible solution via the idea of a unity composed of difference. Indeed, the words “plain” and “empty” convey the image of an intrinsic incompleteness or, better, the paradox of two vacancies that must be filled while leaving them open: say what they are and we annihilate them; don’t, and they remain an empty and troublesome mystery. Resolving this paradox is therefore another way of articulating the dilemma of diversity as the central meaning of democracy’s fragility; of elucidating the ideal of a unity composed of difference; and of constructing a criterion for acts of citizenship in the domain of public art. We have already encountered the second problem of the aesthetic part of the criterion of public art. We could say that it, like the first problem, revolves around a dilemma. It is directly related to the aesthetic status of public artworks: it concerns the relation between the aesthetic and political dimensions of public artworks. (It should not be confused with the relation between the political and aesthetic parts of the criterion of public art.) The dilemma is that of either of these contrary dimensions cancelling out the other: too political, and the artwork is non-art; too much of an aesthetic aura, too arty, and it is not political. To present this aesthetic dilemma more fully and to reiterate some of the political complications we have discussed, I will briefly introduce the two public art projects that will be the respective focuses of chapters 6 and 7: Chicago’s Millennium Park and New York’s National September 11 Memorial. Some of the critics of Millennium Park contend that the park both “naturalizes” the interests of capital and reduces art either to the status of

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“spectacle”—“wow aesthetics”—or, alternatively, to amusement, instruction, or some other strictly instrumental value. The first problem— naturalizing capital—is part of the larger issue of privatizing public space. The second problem—reducing art to either a mesmerizing spectacle or a mere tool—consists in distracting the viewer from recognizing whatever critical significance or catalytic force an artwork might have. Taken to its extreme, the mesmerizing character of spectacle is close to the “aestheticization of politics” that Walter Benjamin attributed to Nazi and other totalitarian regimes. In contrast, art as a mere instrument is more like an exaggeration of the “politicization of aesthetics” that Benjamin favored and felt characterized communism.39 We have already encountered the abhorrence of mesmerization or “detached opticality” in Congressman Nicholas’s rejection of the Federalists’ penchant for stone monuments.40 On the other hand, Nicholas’s plain tablet suggests the opposite problem: if the tablet is only the receptacle of stated opinions, it risks forfeiting the affective power of art and amounts to no more than a didactic, merely pedagogical enterprise.41 In his discussion of the Federalist–Republican debate over the monument for George Washington, Savage does not address explicitly this possible problem with Nicholas’s tablet, but he indirectly suggests it when he states why Nicholas’s opponents might have valued a monument for other than purely political reasons: The public monument speaks to a deep need for attachment that can be met only in a real place, where the imagined community actually materializes and the existence of the nation is confirmed in a simple but powerful way. The experience is not exactly in the realm of imagination or reason, but grounded in the felt connection of individual to collective body.42

In other words, art does more than merely provide a lesson or entertainment. It often sends a condensed shock of recognition through us that provokes us to repeat in thought, language, or action what its more immediate presence is suggesting. Art can also affect us in more subtle ways, as when it establishes a mood that permeates its audience after a period of time. These sorts of political and aesthetic issues also surround New York’s National September 11 Memorial. Construction of the memorial and the related museum finished in 2011 and 2014 respectively at the site

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of the destroyed World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. The catastrophe motivating the project is considered by many to be the key event in the first part of the new millennium.43 Thus the memorial has received both considerable critical as well as favorable comment. Although our later discussion of these two projects will reveal autocratic tendencies plaguing both of them, I will show how Millennium Park suggests a notion of democracy that is more radical or profound than those often touted in relation to the park and other public art. We will see then if what the park introduces can address successfully the dilemmas of democracy and aesthetics. If it can, it ironically will provide us with a flexible and effective criterion that we can then turn back upon the source of its origin, Millennium Park itself. That is, we can use it to evaluate Millennium Park as an act of citizenship. The same criterion can then be applied to the National September 11 Memorial and other public art so as to judge whether or not they qualify as acts of citizenship and indicate whatever other values they might also embody. Indeed, New York’s 9/11 memorial will serve as a test case for helping us to determine how discerning our criterion can be in this sort of assessment. We will be aided in this effort by also considering an alternative 9/11 memorial proposed by another of the artworks of Wodiczko—albeit one never actually constructed.44 This will further clarify and render concrete the idea of a unity composed of difference, its application to democracy, and the tension between the aesthetic and political dimensions of an artwork. In addition to establishing a criterion for judging public art as an act of citizenship, I will also maintain that a positive evaluation on the basis of this criterion can hold even if the artwork continues to serve the autocratic forces it simultaneously resists: the artwork can be at war with itself and still favor an alternative to the nondemocratic forces afflicting it and society. The question is the degree to which it can still successfully counter those forces. Because purity is an illusion and perhaps even detrimental to society, or so I have argued,45 the ongoing conflict among disparate forces is always the setting in which art must be evaluated—especially when it is under the auspices of the government or other powerful institutions. Besides the more substantial notion of democracy that Millennium Park suggests, I will argue that the park also combines spectacle with a form of relational aesthetics or aesthetic agency that allows it to escape

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the Scylla of wow aesthetics and the Charybdis of mere instrumentality.46 This combination is paradoxical because relational aesthetics is the opposite of spectacle: it prioritizes the effects of the art object on the relations among its viewers and of the viewers on the art object. Once again, the National September  11 Memorial and Wodiczko’s dissenting artistic response to it will help us determine the discriminating power of this standard for aesthetic effectiveness. An interrogation of Millennium Park and the New York 9/11 memorial will therefore culminate in innovative ideas concerning the aesthetic as well as the political dimension of public art. In other words, this endeavor will be an exercise in political aesthetics: we will try to determine if and under what conditions the aesthetics of a public artwork can impress upon us an innovative sense of democracy and aid it in resisting the autocratic tendencies that are often embodied in public art and its social setting. Besides the public importance and the critical comment Millennium Park and the 9/11 memorial have stimulated, I chose these two public artworks for a number of other reasons as well. One is simply that the two works brought forth these issues of democracy and aesthetics for me more forcibly, yet also more subtly, than most of the other projects I had encountered. Part of their power in this regard is that Millennium Park functions ostensibly as a site of celebration and entertainment—that is, life—and the New York memorial presents itself as a setting for mourning and death as well as for reflections on peace and war. The two projects therefore span some of the most significant aspects of human existence—life and death, peace and war. For this reason, they should allow us to consider democracy, citizenship, and public art in some of the most revealing and challenging contexts possible. Indeed, the commemoration of the dead, the finality that it suggests, would seem at least superficially to mark the limit of what is relevant for the political concept of democracy. The New York memorial will therefore serve as a challenging test case for the criterion of citizenship at which we arrive initially through the aegis of Millennium Park and the other sources we will critically explore. Three other reasons for selecting these two public art works are more minor than the others but worth mentioning at this point. First, both of them are government sponsored and have been undertaken in the same time period—the beginning of the new millennium—and in the same country. These similarities help diminish the differences in

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social-political and aesthetic sensibilities that often confound attempts to evaluate public artworks comparatively across time, space, and type. Moreover, their status as government projects in the United States means that they are committed, if only officially or traditionally, to express democratic values or at least not to undermine them. I must caution, however, that the tradition of joint private and governmental funding for these and other artworks in the United States will lead us later to examine more closely the sense in which we can still consider them as public art. The third reason for choosing the two projects concerns their aesthetic dimension: they have benefited from the work of Michael Arad, Frank Gehry, Kathryn Gustafson, Anish Kapoor, Daniel Libeskind, Maya Lin, Jaume Plensa, and other internationally acclaimed artists. If aesthetics makes a difference, and assuming for now that artistic excellence is the reason for the prominence of these artists, then their work should readily demonstrate the importance of aesthetics in the political aesthetics of Millennium Park and the 9/11 memorial.

T H E PAT H A H E A D

All these factors, then, are the reasons for why Millennium Park and the National September 11 Memorial constitute a central focus of this book. But to approach these two public art projects adequately and construct our criterion from them, we will have to follow a preparatory path. Making our way along it will involve clarifying the major issues and ideas concerning democracy, citizenship, and public art. I have already introduced this task historically in the present chapter by illustrating how the political and aesthetic issues concerning public art were considered calamitous by politicians and the populace alike at the very beginning of the United States—and then thereafter. In chapter 2, I will introduce the salient aspects of the “public sphere” and the space in which public art is located. I will use that topic also to present some concepts that will shape this and our other inquiries in this book. As I indicated earlier, I will argue that we should think of public art and its space—indeed, of society itself—in terms of the notion of voice and also as a dialogic or multivoiced body that is constituted by the

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interplay among the government officials, entrepreneurs, donors, artists, audiences, and the other participants belonging to this body, including the “quasi-voices” of the art objects themselves. This chapter will show us the advantages of using these terms when we examine New York’s Union Square. Its exploration will include how the city’s real estate industry transformed the square to fulfill their pecuniary predilection, as well as how Krzysztof Wodiczko transforms it again with “counter-architecture” in the name of the homeless who were displaced by the previous, traumatic metamorphosis. This and commentary by Deutsche, Nancy Fraser, Jürgen Habermas, and others will give us a preliminary idea of the contours for a criterion of public art as an act of citizenship. In chapters 3 and 4 we move from the microcosm of Union Square and Wodiczko to the broader context that includes and informs it: the theory and practice of democracy and its public art. To provide the proper background for these two themes, we will treat democracy and art separately in a pair of chapters and then thereafter treat them together. More specifically, in chapter 3 we will see to what degree John Rawls’s “political liberalism” and Jacques Derrida’s radically different “democracy to come” escape the horns of the dilemma of diversity and fill without eliding Lefort’s empty place of democracy. Their attempts at approximating our touchstone of a unity composed of difference and an agonistic polity will help us clarify how our public art criterion must treat diversity, solidarity, and a third political virtue, fecundity, that is, the creation of new ideas of democratic values. The efforts of these two thinkers will also help us address the nature of democracy’s fragility, especially whether it is a contingent or, instead, an intrinsic or “autoimmune” aspect of the people’s sovereignty. In other words, it will allow us to define and evaluate the idea of democracy’s fragility in terms of the dilemma of diversity and Lefort’s idea of democracy as the image of an empty place. Chapter 4 will complement this endeavor by discussing the aesthetic dimension of Congressman Nicholas’s plain tablet and kindred public art projects. More exactly, we will move from Wodiczko’s earlier example, The Homeless Projection, to the characterization of public and other art as a contemporary genre (or anti-genre), that is, as contemporaneity, heterochronicity, anachronicity, and participatory art. Chapter 3 will tell us more about how our criterion of public art must reflect democratic values, and chapter 4 will explore how it should do so without sacrificing its

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important aesthetic dimension—how it can avoid reducing itself to a meaningless spectacle, on the one hand, or to a pure political statement, to non-art, on the other; how it can fill the plain tablet of Nicholas’s monument without marring its aesthetic surface. Chapter 5 will continue the efforts of the previous two chapters by considering the views of two other leading contemporary thinkers on both democracy and art: Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière. Examination of their conflicting thoughts adds new dimensions to the visions of democracy and art that we will have already reviewed. This will help provide the breadth necessary to ensure that our criterion of public art as an act of citizenship will reflect the most important characteristics of democracy and art. Because of the open meanings of democracy, citizenship, and public art, we will profit from understanding them through a judicious use of examples and figures rather than abstract definitions alone. Chapters 6 and 7 will deal respectively with the two examples of public art I just introduced: Millennium Park and the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum. These two spaces will allow us to present a comprehensive statement of our criterion of public art as an act of citizenship and to test how compelling it is at the same time. Chapter 6 will also critically address some of the work of the important Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben that is related to democracy, art, and, by extrapolation, to the 9/11 memorial and museum. These achievements will still leave us with the task of the last chapter: to provide a succinct statement of our criterion of public art, assign important qualifications to it, and clarify its status as an “event.” Its status as an event will show that the criterion we are constructing is different than the traditional sort of standard and its partiality for absolute finality. Most importantly, this chapter will express once more the hope that our efforts concerning public art in this book will contribute to safeguarding and creatively exploring democracy. This hope is especially appropriate when that political form of “we the people” is called into question during times of crisis such as the one we are undergoing today with the emergence of proto-fascist movements and governments.

2 VOICES AND PLACES The Space of Public Art and Wodiczko’s The Homeless Projection

I

n chapter  1, I introduced this essay in political aesthetics by discussing two events related to public art: New Orleans’s removal of a monument to Confederate general Robert E. Lee and Baldwin Park’s installation of Danzas Indigenas, a monument that celebrated ethnic and cultural diversity. These illustrated the fragility of democracy and public art’s prospects with regard to it. We went on to see that the core meaning of the democracy’s fragility consisted in the dilemma of diversity: how to combine unity and diversity without the one cancelling out the other. We noted too that public art’s relation to democracy was already the topic of a dispute during the inaugural years of the United States government. It concerned which of two proposals should determine the memorial for George Washington: the “plain tablet” championed by DemocraticRepublican congressman John Nicholas or the stone monument sponsored by the Federalists. Our deliberations on this contentious debate indicated that for public art to qualify as an act of citizenship it must both maintain its status as an aesthetic object and relate to democracy in a supportive, critical, or innovative manner. But the meanings of the three major ideas involved in this endeavor—public art, democracy, and act of citizenship—were left only partly defined: Nicholas thought a plain tablet would be the epitome of a democratic form of public art despite its suggestion of either political chaos or aesthetic poverty; and Claude Lefort felt that democracy was the equivalent of an “empty place” that must and must not be occupied by any public authority. These two images of

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intrinsic openness—a plain tablet and an empty place—render public art and democracy paradoxical: two vacancies to be filled but left still open. This paradox, itself a variant of the dilemma of diversity, will be further clarified and heightened when we cover democratic theory and contemporary art in chapters 3 and 4. To do justice to this paradox and our political aesthetics, we will organize our task around the ideas of voices and place. I already introduced the notion of voice in chapter 1. I stated that it was appropriate in the current context because voice, more so than any other comprehensive notion, captures the interrelationship of democracy, citizenship, and public art. More specifically, voice includes all the major participants that constitute public art and its setting. These participating voices are, on the one hand, the artists, sponsors, viewers, politicians, and others who engage the art work, and, on the other, the “quasi-voices” or “expressive gestures” of the public art works themselves.1 The strange ontological status of a voice, seemingly neither purely mental nor purely material—a force always in excess of its words but never separable from them—is also the sort of paradoxical entity that might help us say what public art and democracy are without annihilating their intrinsic openness in the process. Besides the comprehensiveness of voice in the context of public art, it has a number of other advantages. We can note three of them now. The first capitalizes on the political nature of our enterprise, political aesthetics, and its three major terms, democracy, citizenship, and public art. Voice is pertinent to politics—perhaps more than any other political concept— because “audibility” is the central concern of politics: which voices get heard and which not.2 This concern is especially important for a polity in which the people rather than autocrats are supposed to be sovereign. A second advantage is specificity: a voice is always specifiable because we can make the discourse it expresses at least partially clear. I will support this claim by elaborating on the idea of discourse and presenting examples of it later in this chapter. A third advantage of voice is flexibility. In effect, we have already noted it: voice can refer to everything from communicating individuals to paintings, architecture, traffic lights, and the other artifices that we construct to speak for us. We can also refer to the voice of such grand formations as the nation, nature, or the supernatural. This range of referents is as inclusive as that of the more passive and arguably less informative notion of

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“identity.” Indeed, the notion of identity often amounts to a particular stereotype imposed upon us from the outside rather than the discourses that are enunciated by us and constitute who we are at any given moment. Besides its comprehensive reach, then, the three further advantages of voice are its political pertinence, specificity, and flexibility. Voices are inseparable from the places in which they occur. Although we have not yet specified the meaning of the “quasi-voice” of art objects, we can note that the stone monument for Washington, the one opposed by Congressman Nicholas at the beginning of the Republic, was erected in a public space. These spaces are crucial for a democracy; indeed they are microcosms of democracy. We can initiate our more global discussion of the political aesthetics of public art by considering the theoretical meaning of public space and then following it with a detailed investigation of a specific public space: New York’s Union Square. This space includes the statues in the square and the metamorphosis of them brought about by Krzysztof Wodiczko’s “counter-architecture,” The Homeless Projection.3 Examining Union Square and Wodiczko’s dissenting and internationally recognized artwork will allow us also to elaborate on the notion of voice and ascertain its efficacy for carrying out our task in political aesthetics.

THE PUBLIC SPHERE

To see how radical the meaning of the public space can be, we will start with a debate over the traditional liberal idea of the public sphere. This dispute will also contribute to our earlier discussion of the fragility of democracy and its dilemma of diversity. Nancy Fraser has set out the assumptions of the idea of public space in an article that has served as a touchstone for many thinkers concerned about the meaning and role of this idea in contemporary society. According to Fraser, the liberal model of the public sphere has taken for granted the following four major tenets concerning public space: (1) actual social equality is not necessary for open discussion (it is enough to act “as if ” the participants are equals); (2) a “comprehensive public square” is better than a “multiplicity of competing publics”; (3) public deliberation should be limited to issues of the

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“common good” and exclude private concerns; and (4) a clear separation should be required “between civil society and the state.”4 Fraser argues that that none of these assumptions are credible. First, bracketing inequality means that the actual power asymmetry between social groups will not be addressed as an issue. Furthermore, it is impossible to act even “as if” this inequality were not in play during public discussion. For example, the privileging of certain styles of deliberation (masculinist and classist forms of “rationality”), the influence of media (the tendency of private and government news outlets to favor capitalism over socialism), and similar tendencies in the background of any public forum, even in one presumed to be egalitarian, will continue to benefit the socially and economically dominant voices of society.5 Thus a thriving democracy requires that we attain greater social and economic equality. That advancement will help counter the usually unquestioned advantages that some groups have over others in the public sphere. Second, Fraser argues that the acknowledgment and activation of multiple competing publics, rather than the pretense of a single public or comprehensive public square, will ensure greater audibility and development of the many different voices that make up a society. This exposure will also augment the ability of the enunciators of these voices to communicate with one another.6 Presumably, the participants in these multiple spheres would also use their empowered voices to challenge exclusionary opinions in the public square.7 Third, limiting discussion to the common good precludes discovering what is likely to be the case—that there is a plurality of such goods, including conflicting ones.8 We therefore should not start public dialogue with the presupposition of a common good. These three counters to the standard liberal model are clearly important. But the fourth, the separation of civil society and the state, allows us to see even better the role of public spaces in society. Fraser initially follows Jürgen Habermas’s idea that the public square designates “a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk—the space in which citizens deliberate about their common affairs, hence, an institutionalized arena of discursive interaction.”9 Fraser adds that Habermas wants to keep the idea of public space “conceptually distinct” from the state and the official economy. In this way it can be an arena for critically questioning these two other spheres.

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However, she worries that such a separation might go too far and serve to defend classical liberalism, as it unwittingly reinforces the idea that “a system of limited government and laissez-faire capitalism is a necessary precondition for a well-functioning public sphere.”10 In response to this form of classical liberalism, Fraser distinguishes between “strong” and “weak” publics. The deliberative practice of weak publics concerns only “opinion formation” and excludes “decision making”; in contrast, the discourse of strong publics includes both of these.11 On the liberal model, a public incorporating a decision-making role would in effect become the state and thereby no longer be able to provide a “critical discursive check” on it. However, if the state should become a “parliamentary sovereignty,” that is, one answering to the people it represents and not to economic and other forms of autocratic power, then it could translate public opinion into legislative outcomes and be accountable to the public—the line between a civil society of associations and the state would thereby become blurred in a way more beneficial to democracy. This stronger public sphere could include democratic workplaces, child-care centers, residential communities, and other institutions of self-management.12 Thus Fraser concludes that “any conception of the public sphere [requiring] a sharp separation between (associational) civil society and the state will be unable to imagine the forms of selfmanagement, interpublic coordination, and political accountability that are essential to a democratic and egalitarian society.”13 This insight will be important when we try to evaluate whether government-sponsored art can support a more radical and fruitful idea of democracy and thus be politically accountable. Within the United States, the public sphere is clearly the weak form that Fraser describes: it is subservient to the discourse of the neoliberal voice currently hegemonic in the governments of North America.14 Fraser herself hopes to turn Habermas’s idea of public space—one where citizens deliberate about common affairs—into the more comprehensive one by Geoff Eley that she cites approvingly: “the structured setting where cultural and ideological contests or negotiation” take place “among a variety of publics.”15 This preference presumably holds whether we are speaking of the weak or the strong model of the public sphere, although it would be much more ample in the second of these two. In this context, Rosalyn Deutsche may voice a position that is even more radical or postmodern

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than that of Fraser and many other scholars. She ardently supports the view that the public sphere is about continual adversarial relations rather than consensus. For her, consensus should be only a punctuation point or necessary pause in the service of ongoing contestation among the many public voices in which society consists: “Conflict, division, and instability, then, do not ruin the public sphere; they are the conditions of its existence. The threat arises with efforts to supersede conflict, for the public sphere remains democratic only insofar as its exclusions are taken into account and open to contestation.”16 Indeed, the characterizations of public space that appeal to a past period of tranquil unity, to literature “mourning the lost beginnings of the democratic public” are “panicked reactions to the openness and indeterminacy of the democratic public as a phantom—a kind of agoraphobic behavior adopted in the face of the public space that has a loss [of political plenitude] at its beginning.”17 This depiction of public space, of society itself, as an “agon,” as an adversarial rather than consensual type of democracy, a dialogic body of contesting voices that includes the anxiety or agoraphobia that it can evoke, implies that public art supporting democracy and resisting autocracy “either helps produce a public space or questions a dominated space that has been officially ordained as public.”18 The view of public space as an agon also indicates a problem, part of the dilemma of diversity and the fragility of democracy, which we will have to confront: how to make dissensus and agonism a value supported by the members of the polity. We get some help in that direction when Chantal Mouffe clarifies the view of agonistic democracy by stating that the aim of democratic politics is to construct the “them” in such a way that it is no longer perceived as an enemy to be destroyed, but as an “adversary,” that is, somebody whose ideas we combat but whose right to defend these ideas we do not put into question. . . . Antagonism is struggle between enemies, while agonism is struggle between adversaries.19

To fully understand this view of public space and the role of art in it, we can capture it in action through the concrete example of Manhattan’s Union Square and the critical treatments of the latter by Deutsche and by Wodiczko’s The Homeless Projection.

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U N I O N S Q UA R E : A M U LT I VO I C E D B O DY

Despite the ample size of New York’s Union Square, visitors can feel hemmed in by the midtown Manhattan traffic passing on either side of it. Stores and restaurants line these streets as well. The busy urban setting therefore tends to make people forget that the park itself was first opened to the public in 1839. One of its purposes was to commemorate the idea of liberty gained by the War of Independence.20 In subsequent years, a number of modifications were added to the park’s original six pathways. These included statues of Lafayette (1873); Abraham Lincoln (1986); George Washington (1856); “Charity,” a bronze mother and children ensemble; and an immense flagpole base with patriotic inscriptions, including the full text of the Declaration of Independence (1926). Besides its sequence of statues, Union Square has always served as a place for civic gatherings during times of crisis. These assemblies include citizens supporting the Northern cause during the U.S. Civil War, workers protesting economic injustice throughout the Industrial Revolution, and, in the days and nights immediately after the 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, mourners filling the square with lighted candles, commiserating with each other about the deaths in that calamitous event and seeking solidarity and hope.21 But Union Square has also been the vehicle for enterprises more closely aligned with private interests. These interests usually have been associated with the fortunes of capital and often threaten to advance autocratic concerns over democratic activities. The most pertinent of such interests in the current context is the urban “revitalization” scheme sponsored by the real estate industry and backed by the New York City government during the 1980s.22 Deutsche’s detailed description of the agents and effects of the revitalization scheme allows us to elaborate further on the notion of voices and a unique but nihilistic status of some them that I have called “oracles.” 23 Deutsche shows that by the 1980s the allusion to Union Square’s original meaning of “liberty” was in effect reduced to the exploitive rights of private property. Technological and financial enterprises replaced New York City’s manufacturing base. Corresponding to this momentous change, members of the managerial and professional class increasingly displaced blue-collar workers and pushed service workers and others into marginalized housing or onto the streets.

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In order to meet the housing and office space requirements of the newcomers, and to exploit novel venues for the investment of capital, city officials and real estate developers sponsored the gentrification of large tracts of New York’s buildings. Many of these edifices had already been abandoned or fallen into disrepair, but a large number of others had provided low-cost housing for New York City’s poor.24 Deutsche attributes this deterioration and subsequent gentrification to a more general “cycle of devalorization” that was financially exploited by the city government, banks, landlords, and others in the real estate market.25 Appealing to David Harvey and other theorists of capitalistic urbanization, Deutsche adds that the financial sector’s use of this cycle is itself part of a larger phenomenon: the over-accumulation of capital and the falling rate of profit that forces entrepreneurs to invest in other sectors of the economy such as the built environment.26 These developments increased the dissolution of the working-class members who still remained in these urban areas and who had provided labor for the manufacturing units previously located there.27 Thus two of the most encompassing voices in the city and the square are capital and workers.28 But we shall see that race and homelessness are also audible in these locales. The economic and social changes taking place in New York directly affected the immediate area surrounding Union Square. Besides the construction of the luxury Zeckendorf Towers adjacent to it, the park itself was “revitalized.” This process included much more than preserving and refurbishing its four bronze monuments. Real estate advertisements rewrote Union Square’s history in order to emphasize the patriotic celebrations that took place there. They omitted the labor and other protests that were equally part of the Square’s past.29 Moreover, the officials in charge of the park agreed to change its entire spatial layout in order to ensure the type of Haussmannian or Panoptical surveillance that would discourage “derelicts,” “thugs,” and other “undesirables” from loitering there.30 Many trees were cut down and the original six radial paths were replaced by two sidewalks crossing the park. The corporate managers and residents of Zeckendorf Towers and the other beneficiaries of redevelopment would now have complete control over the park’s newly organized space.31 They need not be troubled by homeless or poor people, let alone the occasional pimp, drug dealer, or mugger that also haunted the park’s premises.

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The real estate industry’s plan was as dismissive of ethnicity concerns as it was of class divisions. Deutsche points out that at the time the Fourteenth Street area was the largest shopping place south of Spanish Harlem for Manhattan’s Latino population. “La Calle Catorse” was also the major connection between the large Latino community on the Lower East Side or “Loisaida” and other Latinos living in Chelsea. These neighborhoods were already experiencing population displacements through other redevelopment processes in the vicinity.32 Thus “the word revitalization conceal[ed] the very existence of those inhabitants already living in the frequently vital neighborhoods targeted for renovation.”33 I will use these remarks on Union Square to elaborate further on our vocabulary of voices. This enlargement will then help us address Wodiczko’s artistic intervention in terms consistent with our vocabulary as well as clarify the latter in light of his Homeless Projection. To avoid confusion I will indicate each new term with an italicized indicator at the beginning of the first paragraph in which the term appears. A dialogic body. Deutsche’s description introduces the voices of the city/ real estate industry alliance and those of the dispossessed poor and Latinos. We will see that there are other vocal forces as well. But for now, and in accordance with our political perspective, Deutsche’s description suggests that we can think of Union Square, and indeed the world, as a place populated by voices that contest each other for greater or at least continued audibility.34 We can also refer to this agonistic interplay among voices as a dialogue, but in the sense of the word elucidated by the twentiethcentury Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin: dialogue is “a struggle among socio-linguistic points of view” rather than an exchange guided by a transcendent truth.35 In their dialogic interplay, these voices are always already converting the place they occupy into the subject matter of their discursive exchanges and political prerogatives. The interplay among these voices simultaneously holds them together and keeps them separate from each other, forming the dialogic or multivoiced body we call society. These voices are, then, far from being a mere collection of individual vocalists, and we are dialogic rather than monologic creatures. First constituent of voices: enunciating subjects. Each of these voices is embodied and enunciated by one or more subjects, expresses a specific discourse, and is always explicitly or implicitly responding to or

3 2VO ICES AND P LACES

addressing the others. Even the voice of the Zeckendorf operation is a dismissive response to the displaced not explicitly acknowledged in the enterprise’s brochures. More specifically, the enunciating subjects provide the bodily apparatuses responsible for producing the voice’s expressive signs. These bodies are also partly responsible for individuality: they are what make voices yours, mine, or those of artworks and the other artifices we have created to stand in for us. Second constituent of voices: discourses. In contrast to this bodily and individual aspect of voice, the second constituent element is discursive and intersubjective: each voice is the expression of a social discourse. Some examples of social discourses that we encountered in chapter 1 are the celebration of diversity by the Danzas Indigenas memorial and the support of white supremacy by the soldier–statues of the post-Reconstruction South. Another two are Congressman Nicholas’s pluralistic “plain tablets,” on the one hand, and the Federalists’ use of stone monuments to glorify centralized authority, on the other. The assembled words and gestures of these different parties have been articulated in a variety of ways while remaining true to the singular voice, to the “sense,” each expresses. Moreover, the enunciation of any of these discourses is simultaneously the subjectification of its enunciators and the things to which they refer. In other words, the discourses of these voices establish the identities of their enunciators (for example, Nicholas’s position as a congressman) and give legal standing to certain documents and social meaning to the names of objects and persons. These discourses also shape our values and the directions of our thoughts and actions by specifying which things count as relevant or irrelevant for us. The same is true for the interpellative discourses of the real estate industry, the city government, and other groups we are encountering in the initial part of our discussion of Union Square. The concept of discourse to which I am alluding here is very close to Michel Foucault’s notions of “statements” (énoncés), “discursive formations,” and the “positive unconscious of knowledge.” Starting with the last of these terms, Foucault says this “unconscious” is “a level that eludes the consciousness of the scientist and yet is part of scientific discourse.”36 In tune with Foucault’s more general intentions, this positive unconscious is broader than simply the one informing science and scientists: it holds for all fields, including those of the entrepreneurs, politicians, artists, and the other voices involved in Union Square. More specifically, this type of

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unconscious consists in the “discursive formations” and the “rules of formation” underlying these fields. The rules of formation establish the objects, types of statements, concepts, and thematic choices of those articulating a given discourse.37 For Foucault, statements are different than “sentences” and “propositions”: a sentence belongs to a text and is defined by the laws of language; a proposition pertains to an argument and is governed by the rules of logic; but a statement belongs to and is defined by a discursive formation. It therefore “cuts across” structures such as grammar and logic and across unities such as subjects and objects.38 The subject enunciating a statement is determined by rules governing who can make such a statement. For example, only elected representatives such as Nicholas and the originators of Union Square can officially designate sites for a national monument or delegate authority for someone else to do so. The statements they make to that effect can exist and be repeated only within the official type of discursive formation where they occur, and not in separation from them; if they are made by someone outside the official institutions, they are not legally binding and are therefore different than the authoritative ones despite the similarity of their appearance.39 This “repeatable materiality” is therefore part of the constitution of a statement: the group of words in a statement in an official document is different than when the same words appear in a novel or in ordinary conversation, but are repeatable, as different from one another, in each of these three types of formation.40 The words determining the legal fate of Union Square can be stated with effect only by the city officials and their real estate industry allies, but not by the homeless people and ethnic minorities who live there or in its vicinity. As we will see, this does not mean that less powerful groups can’t enunciate dissident discourses that affect events differently than the official statements of the city/real estate alliance. Although a voice is inseparable from the discourse it expresses, its enunciators can indefinitely vary the ways in which it articulates its discourse. For example, a voice can nuance ad infinitum the discourse concerning the sort of democratic memorial that Nicholas favored—but only within a range of divergence that does not turn it into an advocate for the type of monument desired by the Federalists. If it was to do the latter consistently, it would become a different voice, one closer to the aesthetic taste of the nineteenth-century political opponents of the Democratic-Republicans.

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The same holds true for the real estate industry’s discourse and the oppressed voices opposed to it. Rather than being a set of rigid determinants, then, the rules of formation for a discourse are like the relatively more amorphous or malleable sense the voice has for its enunciators. We could borrow from Edmund Husserl and say that a voice is “anexact” rather than exact or inexact—more like the roundness of a plate than either a geometrical circle or the material plate itself.41 Third constituent of voices: mutual responsiveness. The third constitutive component of voices, their mutual responsiveness, provides discourse with a much more dynamic meaning. A voice is always already in a relation of responsiveness to other voices. It does not first exist and then act; from the very beginning it addresses or responds to other voices in an effort to maintain or augment its audibility in the social arena. Even its address to another voice is part of a dialogic exchange that has preceded it and carved out a place for its enunciation. More generally, we wake up in the morning already thinking, that is, talking to ourselves or to actual or imaginary others; and this continues until we sleep, often pressing on with new variations in our dreams. We may think that we initiate and direct these dialogues; but it is equally true that they make us their accomplices and carry us along in the exchanges among their constituent voices. If we end one dialogue, we are immediately part of another. We are therefore dialogic creatures and the society we inhabit is the dialogic interplay among the voices we enunciate. Elliptical identity. The mutual responsiveness of voices opens up the question of the exact relation between us and the voices whose discourses we enunciate. Just as this mutual responsiveness ensures that voices can never be reduced to a static version of the discourses they express, so it also guarantees that voices are not just persons talking with each other. We, like Nicholas and the other politicians quarreling over tablets versus monuments, and like the different groups laying claim to the socialpolitical meaning of Union Square, are only “elliptically” rather than completely identical with the voices we enunciate. We are the voices whose discourses we utter, and these voices are us; but they are also always more than us, throwing us headlong into the trajectory set by their momentum toward audibility and interaction with each other. We therefore always have more to say, see, and feel than we immediately know. For the same

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reason, these dialogic exchanges are both personal and anonymous, both our efforts and those of the vocal forces constituting us. If we have the feeling that this relation between ourselves and voices is paradoxical, it is perhaps due to a prominent structure of many languages, the binary relation between the active and passive grammatical voice: we can say either that we are doing something or that something is done to us, but have no similar grammatical device for capturing the in-between way we actually exist. We need a new vocabulary to escape this binary logic of the passive and the active and to express the way we continually “become” rather than “are” our voices, as well as the way we find ourselves departing from our previous voices and becoming the enunciators of new ones. Whatever the details of this new vocabulary, democracy and citizenship make little sense unless we have some degree of agency in forming our destiny. We can summarize this elliptical relation between us and voices by saying that in speaking we transform the abstract patterns of language into voices and their dialogic relations. These voices, however, simultaneously establish the parameters of our existence—our identities—as well as our status as participants in the dialogic movement that characterizes the social body. Language becomes dialogue, and subjects become voices. In other words (and to repeat it once more), voices are never merely persons talking to one another; rather, they are the vocal forces that provide us with our clamorous lives.42 Reciprocal presupposition. These remarks thus far have stressed the peculiarities of voices and have mentioned little about their relation to the places in which they find themselves. Borrowing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, we can refer to these two dimensions of our dialogic existence as “expression” and “content.” Expression consists in sign systems— our discourses—and content refers to our bodily perceptions of our location and our technological, economic, and social-structural interactions with it. For Deleuze and Guattari, the interaction of these two dimensions is “guided” by what they call an “abstract machine” and its “diagram.” Departing from the letter of Deleuze and Guattari, we can think of the abstract machine and diagram as a voice. Although the abstract machine and diagram (together, now “voice”) guide the interplay between expression (discourse) and content (perceptual world and the social

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structures in it), the latter two have a good deal of independence in the way they interact with each other. Rather than one determining the form of the other—language giving form to content or content giving meaning to otherwise empty signs—the two dimensions of voice are “reciprocally related” in the sense that they continually interrupt and introduce changes in each other.43 Interestingly, Deleuze argues that reciprocal presupposition is also the relation that Foucault establishes between “saying” and “seeing,” that is, “discursive practices” and “forms of self-evidence.”44 In either case, Deleuze’s or Foucault’s, the economic realities surrounding Union Square stand in a reciprocal tension with the two different ways of articulating them: the real estate’s “revitalization” discourse and that of Deutsche, Wodiczko, and others who speak on behalf of the unjustly displaced. We exist, then, as dialogic creatures, as enunciators or vocalists within the creative interplay among the voices that make up the social body. But there is a more threatening dimension of this multivoiced body. I’ll introduce it here through a discussion of the aesthetic side of public artworks.

U N I O N S Q UA R E A N D T H E A E S T H E T I C O R AC L E O F S P EC TAC L E

The preceding remarks about society as a dialogic or multivoiced body can be elaborated further by focusing on the aesthetic part of the real estate industry’s revitalization discourse. Deutsche points out that the “beautification” of Union Square and other aesthetic practices often play an important role in distracting people from the secondary importance assigned to minorities and the poor. She calls this process “aesthetic contextualism” and thinks it was a key phase of the revitalization program for Union Square.45 More specifically, the aesthetic contextualization of the revitalization program consisted in the Planning Commission designating an area as having a “unique character or quality” and then, on that basis, putting aside or modifying the standard zoning regulations. Thus the Zeckendorf Towers’ project was granted a number of concessions with the argument that these would allow its building to be compatible with

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“the historic architectural uniqueness of Union Square,” that is, with “[aesthetic] contextualist principles.” This meant that all the new buildings involved in the project would blend in with the neighborhood and restore its earlier elegance.46 The “context” for these aesthetic stipulations, however, did not include any reference to the displacement of the current residents that would result. The Environmental Impact Statements for the project therefore avoided acknowledging the negative economic and social effects of the redevelopment plan on the more vulnerable inhabitants of the area.47 Urban problems were taken as aesthetic problems: an “aesthetic disguise” covered over “the brutal realities of ‘revitalization.’”48 As disguised, the voice of the expelled is still tacitly contained within the revitalization discourse, in tension with it, even if only as a logical implication, an antonym, of the promised elegant neighborhood. The style of the sculptures in Union Square also supported autocratic rather than democratic voices. As we saw in the previous chapter, monuments often tend to reflect and reinforce two values associated with order: permanence and moral rectitude. The Union Square statues are imitations of the Greek and Roman sculpture popularized in nineteenth-century Paris. Like other neoclassical monuments of that era, they were intended to “produce a sense of order and communal feeling through spatial organization and decorative beauty.”49 The anachronistic idiom of neoclassism therefore fed into the aesthetic contextualism and architecture of the New York’s city planners: The architects of redevelopment (together with the copywriters of real estate advertisements) attempt to bolster the illusions of cultural stability, universal values, and gentility connoted by such architectural forms. By so doing, they fail to realize that their own acts of preservation are ideologically motivated, determined by particular interests and investments, and present them instead as neutral deeds of cultural rescue.50

Deutsche refers to the combined operational documents and artistic style promoted by the Planning Commission as an “aesthetic discourse.” This discourse “distorts” the architectural and design history of the region and creates “the illusion of a comforting continuity and a reassuring stability of a tradition symbolized by transcendent aesthetic forms.”51 It therefore contributes to the Planning Commission’s ability to expropriate

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Union Square for its pecuniary reasons. In the vocabulary of voice, we can refer to this discourse and ultimately capitalism as an “oracle.” According to ancient Greek myth, an oracle, such as that of Apollo at Delphi, always foretells an infallible truth.52 Indeed, both Laius and Oedipus found to their great misfortune that the Delphi oracle’s pronouncements concerning them were impervious to their best efforts to revise the conclusions of that pitiless voice. Plato even suggested that the ideal city should invent a purposely mendacious oracle, stating that the “city will be ruined if it ever has an iron or bronze guardian.”53 Inept guardians of this sort would consist of those determined by an examination to not have the capacity to rule and proclaimed by a foundation myth to have been given a weak constitution by the gods. We will use the term “oracle” as a characterization of those voices that, like the Greek oracles, present themselves as absolute truths and thus not in need of significant revision. In the context of our essay in political aesthetics, they are voices raised to the level of the “one true god,” the “pure race,” the superior gender (“patriarchalism”), the acceptable sexual-orientation (“heterosexism”), the natural economy (“capitalism”), or any other dogma that has or seeks social hegemony to the detriment of the creative interplay among the other voices of the social body. One of the tasks for radical artists, historians, and philosophers is to expose these oracles and the mystery of their “riddles” as the myths they are. In this way, truth hopefully emerges, but always as revisable, always processual, and thus forever in need of a public square, its art, and the other voices that ceaselessly contest the meanings proffered there—with the wish, of course, that we may fare better than the fate of Laius and Oedipus.

WO D I C ZKO ’ S T H E H O M E L E S S P R O J EC T I O N A S A N T I - O R AC L E

The dissident art of Krzysztof Wodiczko qualifies him as one of the radical artists just described. Indeed, exposing and confronting oracles is his profile as an artist and has earned him international recognition.54 Wodiczko was born in the capital of Poland in 1943, the year of the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. We can take the heroic resistance to

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Nazism that happened there as a harbinger for Wodiczko’s own activism and art. In his career, he has produced visual projections and other artwork in a number of different countries. He emigrated from Poland to Canada and then immigrated to the United States. Currently, he is professor in residence of art, design, and the public domain in the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Wodiczko often melds his art with technical devices that he learned from his engineering background in Poland. Most importantly, he has used his artwork to help champion the issues and causes of the homeless, immigrants, war veterans (both civilians and soldiers), women, and other struggling groups. He often constructs his public art so that members of these groups can express their own stories. Here we will concentrate on one of his projects concerning the homeless; in a later chapter we will discuss a work of his that takes up a different theme. The “counter-architecture” of his Homeless Projection is intended to resist oracles, particularly New York’s revitalization project, by critically citing it in a way that reveals the meaning it conceals.55 Wodiczko specifically states that his transfiguration of this project reveals the revitalization project’s definition of architecture to be “really . . . a merciless real estate system, embodied in a continuous and frightening massscale EVENT, the most disturbingly public and central operations of which are economic terror, physical eviction, and the exodus of the poorest groups of city inhabitants from the buildings’ interiors to the outdoors.”56 Wodiczko accomplishes his counter-architecture by projecting slideimages seamlessly onto the statues of Union Square and thereby transforming them into homeless people. A head bandage and a leg cast convert Lafayette’s slim form into an unfortunate person asking for a handout (figure 2.1); a crutch and beggar’s cup change Lincoln into a vacant-eyed panhandler soliciting at a street corner (figure 2.2); Washington’s horse becomes a wheel-chair, his right hand now grasping a bottle of Windex and a cloth, his imperial left arm left motioning drivers to stop and get their windshields cleaned (figure 2.3); similarly, an extended hand and a grocery cart transform the sculpture of the woman and her two children into a vagrant family (figure 2.4). By transfiguring these sculpted figures, Wodiczko “juxtaposes the fake architectural real estate theater with the real survival theater of the homeless!”57 This aim involves making the  actual homeless into a new type of city monument or symbolic

FIGURE  2.1 Krzysztof Wodiczko, Proposed Projection for Union Square—Lafayette, 1986. Photo copyright © Krzysztof Wodiczko. Photo courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York

FIGURE  2.2 Krzysztof Wodiczko, Proposed Projection for Union Square—Lincoln, 1986. Photo copyright © Krzysztof Wodiczko. Photo courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York

FIGURE  2.3 Krzysztof Wodiczko, Proposed Projection for Union Square—Washington, 1986. Photo copyright © Krzysztof Wodiczko. Photo courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York

FIGURE  2.4 Krzysztof Wodiczko, Proposed Projection for Union Square—Charity, 1986. Photo copyright © Krzysztof Wodiczko. Photo courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York

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architectural form, “THE HOMELESS.” The “slightest sign of life” in this monument is for the observer “a living sign of the possibility of the death of the homeless from homelessness.”58 We can summarize the virtue of this new type of city monument by noting that it has at least four major effects. We have just seen the first: the counter-architecture parodies the real estate industry’s own use of Union Square and its statues—it shows that the concealed meaning of their citation of the square is the social injustice of dispersing the homeless. But The Homeless Projection is also an example of what Wodiczko calls “slide warfare.” It uses slides “to infiltrate the cultural programs taking place on [the site of the memorial],” thereby “reveal[ing] and expos[ing] to the public the contemporary daily life of the memorial.”59 Deutsche points out that this type of warfare attains the second and broader effect of restoring Union Square “as a site of public debate and criticism,” revealing the “agonistic” dimension of a public space proper for a democratic society.60 In other words, Wodiczko’s architecture includes the diverse voices of those who make up its active audience as well as the quasi-voices of the reconstituted statues themselves. The third effect of Wodiczko’s dissenting Homeless Projection is the  successful integration of its aesthetic and didactic dimensions. Deutsche comments that the seamless manner in which the slide images transform the several statues “renders the presence of the images more astonishing and the statues more uncanny in their mixture of strangeness and familiarity.” She adds that this startling appearance “[disengages] spectators from their usual disregard of the monuments as well as from their seduction by the restoration program’s presentation.”61 In other words, the aesthetic form of Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection is a necessary element of the content and impact of its political message. The two working together constitute a political aesthetics. The political aesthetics of Wodiczko’s counter-architecture achieves a fourth effect. Like Congressman Nicholas’s plain tablet, this one is related to the processual aspect of public art and democracy. The very form of The Homeless Projection—the relative ephemerality of the images it casts upon the statues, even its proposed duration in the square for only a single day—militates against and undermines the permanent monumental edifices that suggest universal significations. Indeed, it speaks instead of the changing meaning and uses of the “languages” of these structures as

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they cede ground to new historical circumstances, local and global.62 Like Michel Foucault’s well-known genealogies, the aim of Wodiczko’s counterarchitecture is “not the erecting of foundations” but to disturb “what was previously considered immobile,” to fragment “what was thought unified,” to show “the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself.”63 In tandem with this idea of mutability and novelty, Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection also champions heterogeneity. By inserting a “sign of life” into the monuments on Union Square, by converting these statues into the figures of homeless people, Wodiczko converts the establishment notion of the homeless as “bringers of conflict” into the image of “products of conflict.”64 Indeed, he affirms a particular type of existence: the culture of the street poor, captured by the activities and postures of the homeless people depicted in the projection. The transformation of Washington, Lincoln, and the other revered figures of the park into marginalized city dwellers conspires to prevent the viewers from reducing the homeless to examples of mere impoverishment; the actual homeless gain just enough visibility from their association with these honored personages to help viewers see them as embodying a way of life that, like any other, can develop in many directions if not oppressed by such forces as the actual real estate industry.65 They gain just enough stature to remind us that they too are citizens of the city, documented or otherwise, and thus worthy of our attention and allegiance.66 In the brochure accompanying the projections, and hence part of the artwork itself, Wodiczko caps this discussion by declaring five theses of The Homeless Projection: To magnify the scale of the homeless to the scale of the building! To astonish the street public with the familiarity of the image and to make the homeless laugh! To employ the slide psychodrama method to teach the BUILDING to play the role of THE HOMELESS! To liberate the problem of the homeless from the unconscious of the “architecture”! To juxtapose the fake architectural real estate theater with the real survival theater of the homeless!67

There are at least four effects, then, of Wodiczko’s counter-architecture in relation to the real estate industry’s revitalization project: (1) parody of

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that project by transforming the statues in Union Square into images of homeless people; (2) revealing the agonistic character of democratic public squares; (3) achieving an effective integration of the aesthetic and political dimensions of The Homeless Projection memorial; and (4) demonstrating the processual nature of all monuments and its compatibility with the political virtues of heterogeneity and fecundity. We will now see how these effects help clarify the idea of public art as an act of citizenship.

T H E H O M E L E S S P R O J EC T I O N A S A N AC T   O F   C I T IZE N S H I P

In chapter  1, we preliminarily characterized two major parts of the criterion for public art as an act of citizenship. The first of these parts, the political, is the relation of public art to democracy. The second, the aesthetic, concerns the relation between the aesthetic and political dimensions of a public artwork. Three of the four effects of Wodiczko’s counter-architecture that we discussed—parodic criticism, agonism, and the processual view of memorials—pertain to the relation between public art and democracy. The three effects emphasize how public art can resist oracles like the one advanced by the revitalization discourse of New York’s Planning Commission and the real estate industry. This resistance includes the way in which Wodiczko’s counter-architecture, or slide warfare, parodically insists that the voices of the poor and ethnic minorities have as much right to audibility, to life, as those attempting to push them out or otherwise benefiting from their absence. His project is anti-oracular in a second sense as well: rather than a life-and-death struggle among opposing forces, a once and for all silencing of them, Wodiczko (like Deutsche) suggests that determining public policy is an ongoing contestation among voices and that one role of public art is to increase the audibility of those voices that have been muted by dominating forces.68 He therefore says of his slide warfare that “it is essential to take advantage of any administrative desire for art in public places, to ‘collaborate’ in such events and infiltrate them with an unexpected critical element.”69 This emphasis on democracy as an agonistic process is reinforced by his insight that the political and aesthetic meanings of monuments are

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always processual rather than permanent, always open to change via the fecund interplay among the heterogeneous voices that constitute the public forum. In this sense, Lefort’s “empty place” is left intact, as is the general idea of Nicholas’s plain tablet. But still remaining for us is the task of articulating more clearly how these two vacancies can be filled without closing them—of how they, democracy and art, can each be compatible with a unity composed of, rather than imposed on, difference. We have said that the second part of our criterion, the aesthetic, is a clear idea of the relation between public art’s aesthetic and political dimensions. This relation was the issue of the last of the four effects of Wodiczko’s counter-architecture, though numbered as the third in the order we originally discussed them. As we discussed, the political message of the Homeless Projection does not minimize the force of its aesthetic manner of engaging us, and its aesthetic dimension is not a sheer “spectacle” that mutes or trivializes the work’s capacity to incite new thought, action, or collective formation.70 The voice of art and the voice of politics support each other in this case. But here too we must articulate more fully and carefully how we can keep the aesthetic and didactic content of public art together without sacrificing one for the other—how something as plain as Nicholas’s tablet can be aesthetically forceful (if it can) while still maintaining its political message or effect. This summary, then, provides us with a preliminary view of the two parts of our criterion of public art as an act of citizenship in a democracy: the relation of public art to democracy and the relation of the aesthetic dimension to the political dimension of an artwork. It thereby also provides us with an initial idea of a political aesthetics of public art. But it is only a beginning: we need to deepen our understanding of the criterion further, test its applicability and range on more examples, and see philosophically if it has the event-like structure—the self-interrupting function—we briefly introduced in chapter 1. In addition to this progress, our discussion of Union Square and The Homeless Projection also allowed us to introduce the idea of voice and to show the advantages of considering public space as an arena of contesting voices. The emphasis in such an arena is not so much on arriving at a consensus as it is on ensuring that the contest can continue—that the public space will never stop being an agon and the production of new voices. When autocratic forces or other oracles attempt to take over such

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space, to convert it into their univocal discourse and make it appear that the square has thereby achieved its natural state of consensus, then the role of dissident art is to resist these forces. When the revitalization campaign advertises the Zeckendorf Towers as “The Latest Chapter in the History of Union Square,” artists like Wodiczko are called upon to reveal the actual “brutal history” of the square and, in this case, to champion homeless people.71 It is also part of their task to show that there is, and always will be, other chapters of this public space—that the character of this space in a democratic society is to be written over again and again in aesthetically effective ways by our diverse and often conflicting scribblings. The intuitions we have gained from considering the public sphere and its art as an agonistic form of encounter among voices are only partial and presuppose a fuller sense of democracy and public art. For example, Deutsche and Wodiczko have provided us with their valuable defenses of heterogeneity, metamorphosis, and resistance. But a fuller idea of democracy and its relation to public art also has to include solidarity and how it relates—is or is not an antidote for—the former’s fragility. This solidarity, however, must involve a special relationship among voices still to be determined—a kind of solidarity that elevates rather than subordinates or deprecates heterogeneity and the production of new voices. We therefore still need to say much more about the voices of democracy and public artwork before we can formulate a viable criterion for assessing public artworks as acts of citizenship. Perhaps surprisingly, given what has just been stated about his emphasis on resistance and the processual nature of monuments, Wodiczko’s later art project, City of Refuge, will be of assistance in garnering the fuller sense of democracy and its solidarity we are seeking. Indeed, another commentator, Lisa Saltzman, has remarked that in his more recent work Wodiczko has moved from the critical “interruption” of oppressive modes of power to an affirmation and artistic evocation of a broader idea of community.72 Because we need more background on democracy and public art as separate realms, the next chapter will move us from the microcosm of the public square to the macrocosm—the democratic society—in which the former exists. To get a fuller idea of that polity for our political aesthetics, we will critically examine John Rawls’s and Jacques Derrida’s radically different theories of democracy. The chapter following it will help us move

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from Wodiczko’s particular example of public art to the characterization of public art as a contemporary genre (or anti-genre), that is, as contemporaneity, heterochronicity, anachronicity, and participatory art. This will aid us in going further than the merely partial portrayal we have thus far given of public art. The two chapters together constitute the basis we will need to discuss democracy and public art mixed together in a more powerful and informed way than we have thus far. We will begin with the democracy chapter.

3 DEMOCRACY’S “EMPTY PLACE” Rawls’s Political Liberalism and Derrida’s Democracy to Come

I

n introducing the idea of a criterion—a touchstone—for evaluating public art as an act of citizenship, we passed from one abyss to another. We discussed and provisionally accepted Claude Lefort’s portrayal of democracy as the “image of an empty place.” We also noted the early and still ongoing debate in the United States between those who hold that public art should follow the model of a “plain tablet,” open to the imprints of the many, and those who favor the authoritarian pronouncement of words inscribed in stone. We ended with a view of the public square as a space for agonistic rivalry rather than for homogenizing consensus as a preset goal for politics or art. But we also saw that the laudatory emphasis on heterogeneity and fecundity in Krzysztof Wodiczko’s The Homeless Projection needed to be supplemented by a concept of unity or solidarity. Anything less would fail to pass between the horns of the dilemma of diversity, canceling out either unity or plurality in the name of the other. Anything less would leave democracy more fragile. Wodiczko’s dissident “counter-architecture” also helped us to concretize the notions of voices, oracles, the dialogic body of society, and kindred terms as the most appropriate framework within which to develop our public art criterion. But Wodiczko’s work and public spaces such as Union Square are only the microcosm of the larger democracy and contemporary art scene in which they appear. To clarify the usefulness of the gains of chapter 2 for our project, we must now explore the macrocosm. We will want to learn how these two vacancies—Lefort’s empty place and

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Congressman Nicholas’s plain tablet—can be filled while paradoxically still keeping them open. In other words, we will want to know how exploration of these two areas—democracy and art—can help us escape being gored by the horns of a dilemma, satisfy the idea of a unity composed of (rather than imposed on) diversity, and confront the fragility of democracy. In this chapter we will focus on democratic theory, saving contemporary art for chapter 4. Our focus on democratic theory will be particularly important for stating the political part of our public art criterion more precisely and judiciously; the next chapter’s concentration on contemporary art will do the same for the criterion’s aesthetic part. These separate chapters on democracy and public art will provide us with the background needed for melding the two realms together again in subsequent chapters. Here, we can begin by consulting John Keane’s work in order to gain a historical perspective on democracy. We will then address the writings of two leading political philosophers, John Rawls and Jacques Derrida, to see if their disparate theories can fill Lefort’s empty place while still posting the vacancy sign.

D E M O C R AC Y: P O S S I B L E A N D I M P O S S I B L E

In his comprehensive history of democracy, Keane echoes Lefort’s idea of democracy as an empty place: Democracy is never more alive than when it senses its incompleteness. . . . [It] is always on the move. It is not a finished performance, only a set of actions that are always in rehearsal. It is never something that is done and dusted, never a mechanism that comes to rest, as if it has reached a steady state. Democracy must always become democracy again. It is a thing of action—not something accomplished and piled up and stored, like gold in a vault, or goods in a warehouse.1

Keane also elaborates on the different ways in which people have responded to this incomplete performance in the past and today. His history includes the “assembly” democracies of the ancient Greeks and, prior to them, those of the Syrian–Mesopotamian societies. This type of polity

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required all citizens (usually only males and non-slaves) to participate directly and equally in making and applying the laws that governed them. Keane’s history also treats the “representative” form of democracy in an equally ample manner. In this later version of democracy, people choose who in the governing body would represent their interests and values.2 Keane thinks that in recent years a qualitatively new historical form of democracy has been added to the dominant representational kind. He coins this innovation “monitory democracy” and characterizes it as “a variety of ‘post-parliamentary’ politics defined by the rapid growth of many different kinds of extra-parliamentary, power-scrutinising mechanisms.”3 These mechanisms do not eliminate political parties and legislatures, but they do diminish their importance and put them on notice that they must carry out their functions in a competent, trustworthy, and representative manner or suffer punitive exposure by monitory agencies. This sort of public monitoring can include the unelected representatives of human rights and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the elected or appointed advisory boards and regulative bodies associated with governmental institutions, and any other group dedicated to improving democratic processes. It leaves a grand space for the role of political art as well. Indeed, monitory democracy is a new “political geometry”: A complex web of differently sized and more or less interdependent monitory bodies that have the effect, thanks to communicative abundance, of continuously stirring up questions about who gets what, when and how, as well as holding publicly responsible those who exercise power, wherever they are situated. . . . [It is] the most energetic, most dynamic form of democracy ever.4

But Keane also sounds alarms concerning monitory democracy. One is what we might expect: office holders, elected or otherwise, often try to block the effects of this monitoring activity through big-money politics, legal immunity, vilification of NGOs, academics, and similar sources of dissent, and other “pathological” tactics.5 Another alarm is not as specific but perhaps more important. Thus Keane declares: Democracy requires colossal transformations of people’s character. Their habits of the heart have to change. People need to become democracies

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within themselves. They must recognize that there are different possible selves within themselves; they must become convinced that they can grow stronger by sorting and mustering these different selves, for selfdefined ends.6

Many thinkers would agree with Keane that democracy requires a new way of thinking about ourselves and democratic values. Indeed, that is what effective philosophy and art do in their particular ways. But Keane’s reference to different possible selves is ambiguous. We can substitute our term “voices” for “selves” and recall the types of discourse we discussed in relation to New York’s Union Square: the revitalization campaign of the real estate industry, the aesthetic contextualism of the City Planning Commission, and the counter-architecture of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s The Homeless Projection. But substituting voices like these for selves will not become fully compelling until we clarify further the role of voices in the unity composed of difference we are seeking. In the meantime, it is enough to note that the still commonplace reactions against diversity indicate a need for something more pervasive, inspiring, and transformative than simply adding monitory and other devices to our ways of governing. Those seeking this something more can be divided into two camps. One camp attempts to think democracy as a means of molding the voices of society into a consensus making polity. The other camp’s members hold views similar to those of Nancy Fraser, Rosalyn Deutsche, and Wodiczko in chapter 2 and Keane in the present one. They aim to prevent any permanent form of convergence and instead valorize democracy as an ongoing agonistic process, always proliferating new voices and ideas of how to relate to one another. In other words, the two camps favor different ways of confronting the dilemma of diversity and Lefort’s empty place of democracy. To represent these two camps in this chapter, we will appeal to the “political liberalism” of John Rawls and the “democracy to come” of Jacques Derrida. Rawls is the most important exponent of the consensus driven tendency. His work dominates the traditional or analytic stream of political theory in the United States. Even one of his key adversaries, Michael Sandel, states that Rawls’s theory of “justice as fairness” presents “the most compelling case for a more equal society that American political philosophy has yet produced.”7 Rawls also accepts that diversity

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represents the political dilemma of our day, asking: “How is it possible for there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens, who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?”8 Derrida and his notion of democracy to come capture the inclination of the agonistic camp. The French thinker and his followers in the United States and elsewhere represent the post-structuralist or postmodernist stream of political theory.9 Derrida raises the dilemma of diversity in the context of European unity: on the one hand, “European cultural unity cannot be dispersed” into a plethora of “self-enclosed idioms or petty little nationalities”; and, on the other hand, “it cannot and must not accept the capital of a centralizing authority that, by means of its trans-European mechanisms . . . would control and standardize.”10 Rawls, as we shall see, thinks a reasonable conception of political democracy is possible and can resolve the dilemma of diversity. In contrast, Derrida argues that democracy is “only possible as impossible.” This paradoxical proclamation precludes any democracy from legitimately adopting an imperious view of itself and becoming dangerous to itself or other countries. Stating these two positions more dramatically, Rawls proclaims that life is worth living because justice and democracy are possible; Derrida says it is worthwhile only because the two are impossible (in his special sense of the word).11 We have, then, a view of democracy as a realistic utopia versus a view of it as always and only to come. The political philosophies of Rawls and Derrida are complex enough that it is convenient to deal with each thinker one at a time, citing their strengths and weaknesses, and then drawing from the results what we will need to continue with our task of clarifying the meaning of public art as an act of citizenship.

D E M O C R AC Y A S P O S S I B L E : R AW L S ’ S POLITICAL LIBER ALISM

To understand Rawls’s political liberalism requires paying close attention to the sometimes tedious but rigorous definitions he gives of his basic terms. We can start with those terms and then critically draw their

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implications for how he would propose to occupy Lefort’s empty place of democracy.

R AW L S ’ S T E R MI NO LO GY

The original position. Rawls refers to his political conception of justice and democracy as political liberalism.12 He places it and his hallmark idea of justice as fairness in the tradition of Western social contract theory. More specifically, he believes that translating the proverbial “state of nature” into his idea of an “original position” produces a new social contract that is nonetheless implicit in traditional contract theory. He adds that this contract “best approximates our considered judgments of justice” and “constitutes the most appropriate moral basis for a democratic society” (TJ, xviii, 10; PL, 5, 14, 22–28, 292). In his hypothetical original position, we are to ask what principles of justice “free and equal” members of society would choose if they were operating behind a “veil of ignorance,” that is, without prior knowledge of the social position, idea of the good, generational status, or any other circumstance that might end up being theirs under the contract. The resulting principles therefore would presumably be fair, hence just, and could be used for evaluating the rules that currently guide our societies (TJ, 9 11–12, 16–17, 118–19). Equal and free citizens. Rawls considers the citizens occupying the original position and society to be equal when each has the two “moral powers” he feels are necessary for justice as fairness—a capacity for a sense of justice and another for a conception of the good—as well as the additional abilities required for cooperating with the other members of society (PL, 81). The citizens must also be free. Rawls assigns three related meanings to the freedom of these citizens. The first is that they conceive of themselves and each other as “having the moral power to have a conception of the good.” The second is their capability to revise this conception “on reasonable and rational grounds” when they wish. The third is more complex but still clear: they can think of themselves as “self-authenticating sources of valid claims” and thus as entitled “to make claims on their institutions so as to advance [and take responsibility for] their [reasonable] conceptions of the good” (PL, 30, 32, 33). Rawls’s assertion of the value of

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the necessity of these two moral powers for justice seems acceptable, but this may be due the culture we share with him. We must therefore be alert to what foundation he provides for this claim. Reflective equilibrium, time, and the possibility of democracy. Although Rawls does not use the term “hermeneutics,” he approximates its meaning when he says that the principles of justice chosen and revealed in the original position are already implicit in the tradition of democracy. But he adds that determining these principles would also provide us with the moral basis that is most fitting for a democratic society. This addition indicates that he thinks he is also elaborating and improving upon that democratic tradition. More specifically, he says that choosing the principles of justice involves achieving “reflective equilibrium” between our “considered judgments of justice” (the meaning of justice implicit in the tradition, for example, religious tolerance and racial equality) and the formal versions of them that we derive from our deliberations in the original position. If the two are not in complete equilibrium, if the principles do not sufficiently reflect the considered judgments, then we must achieve congruence either by clarifying further the considered judgments or by revising the neutralizing conditions of the original position and the principles at which we arrive on their basis.13 Rawls emphasizes that this adjudicating process is a method of practical reason. This method constructs principles explicitly related to reasonable political aims rather than to theoretical concepts of truth or intuitions about an order of values thought to exist independently of the original position and the process of reflective equilibrium.14 Rawls’s idea of reflective equilibrium also embodies his claim that the democracy of political liberalism is possible. More specifically, Rawls thinks that reflective equilibrium—and hence democracy—is possible as a regulative idea that can be approximated in practice: “reflective equilibrium is a point at infinity we can never reach, though we may get closer to it in the sense that through discussion, our ideals, principles, and judgment seem more reasonable to us and we regard them as better founded than they were before” (PL, 385). This teleological or regulative sense of reflective equilibrium reflects Rawls’s view of time. This view is traditional and perhaps for that reason Rawls rarely states it explicitly. Indeed, no entry designates “time” in the index to his Political Liberalism. But a few indexed comments on time do

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exist in the earlier A Theory of Justice. Those comments limit time to the traditional idea of a “temporal sequence” of moments in which past, present, or future have equal standing. More specifically, Rawls holds that each of the temporal sequences he has in mind is occupied by an activity that is part of a plan and “carried on for a certain length of time” (TJ, 360). He adds that the principles of justice he will propose constitute the ultimate and regulative aim of these plans in liberal society. Indeed, the principles will be morally right—fair or just—in so far as they are derived from the degree of reflective equilibrium achieved within the original position; and they will be rationally good in so far as compliance with them allows human beings individually and collectively “to express their nature as free and equal moral persons.”15 On this view, democracy and justice as fairness are possible as regulative ideas that can be approximated in the present.16 I have already indicated that Derrida will challenge this traditional idea of time and claim that even a regulative idea of democracy is possible only as impossible. Before entertaining the meaning of this paradoxical claim, we must examine the rest of Rawls’s political liberalism and ascertain how compelling it is as an idea of democracy and thus as an element in our criterion for public art as an act of citizenship. The two principles of justice. Rawls believes that strict adherence to practical reason in the context of the original position and its veil of ignorance will lead to political liberalism and justice as fairness as opposed to utilitarianism and “perfectionist” views of democracy and justice. More specifically, this adherence will allow the construction of his two guiding principles of justice. The first, the principle of liberty, states that all citizens have an equal claim on freedom or liberty of thought, conscience, association, and the rest of a scheme of basic rights adequate to ensure the social conditions necessary for citizens to exercise the two moral powers (a sense of justice and a conception of the good) previously defined. The second, the social-economic principle, makes two major stipulations: that all citizens have equal opportunity to gain offices and positions in government and that they must abide by the “difference principle.” This principle states that any social and economic inequalities are acceptable only if they are “to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.”17 The principle of liberty has priority over the socioeconomical one in that the liberties specified by the former cannot be overridden by the

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economic concerns of the second; they can “be limited or denied solely for the sake of one or more other basic liberties” (PL, 294–95). Reasonableness and the basic structure of society. The primary focus of these two principles of justice is “the basic structure of society.” This structure (the constitution plus the executive, legislative, judicial, and other important government institutions) concerns the distribution of “the chief primary goods at the disposition of society,” that is, fundamental rights and duties as well as the determination of the “division of advantages from social cooperation” (TJ, 6, 54–55). The two principles also dictate two other regulative ideas at the heart of Rawls’s notion of social cooperation. Rawls calls these ideas “reasonableness” and the “criterion of reciprocity.” He defines citizens as reasonable “when, viewing one another as free and equal in a system of social cooperation, over generations, they are prepared to offer one another fair terms of cooperation according to what they consider the most reasonable conception of political justice.” These fair terms of cooperation are ones that would comply with the two principles of justice. He adds that citizens also have to agree to act on those terms “even at the cost of their own interests in particular situations, provided that other citizens also accept those terms” (LP, 136). But in another text he stipulates that the ones offering these terms also have to view them “as reasonable for everyone to accept and therefore as justifiable to them.” They are further obligated to be “ready to discuss the fair terms that others propose.”18 This emphasis on taking others’ views into account is exactly the way he defines the criterion of reciprocity in both texts.19 The criterion also implies that all those following these terms “are to benefit in an appropriate way as assessed by a suitable benchmark of comparison” (PL, 16). Reasonableness, then, always includes implicitly the criterion of reciprocity and, though Rawls doesn’t say this, appears to be the more comprehensive and basic of the two. We probably would not be amiss to think of the two terms as equivalent for all practical purposes. This emphasis on the fairness (or justice) of the terms of cooperation implies a moral commitment. Rawls therefore privileges the reasonable over the idea of the “rational” and its exclusive connection to citizens calculating how to achieve their individual ends (PL, 50–51). This distinction between the reasonable and the rational should not surprise us: Rawls takes justice, its two principles, and political liberalism to be intrinsically moral—“fair terms” rather than purely self-interested goals.20 The

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moral status of these principles and regulative ideas also allows him to claim that political liberalism escapes the status of a modus vivendi arrangement, a mere expedient strategy, to achieve social stability for the wrong reasons (PL, xli, 147, 168, 392; see also xliii, 11, 147–48). In other words, a citizen’s ultimate good in the political sphere should be these political principles, these moral maxims of “right,” themselves (TJ, 503; see also 116, 222). Autonomy and morality in a realistic utopia. Rawls feels that the moral bond among members of liberal society helps justify that his political liberalism is a “realistic utopia.” The realistic side of this formula for utopia requires that political liberalism be an accomplishable goal and can achieve consensus on the fair terms of cooperation.21 By the time Rawls refers to political liberalism as a realistic utopia, he has already made one radical change in his theory of justice. He sees that his earlier theory could not adequately ensure a place for diversity and stability unless he was willing to make further room for the plurality of ideas of the good that are at play in every society and the world as a whole. The cost of securing such a guarantee is his relinquishment of the traditional notion of autonomy (human freedom) as the ruling idea of the good of society. Yet autonomy must still continue playing its role in relation to the free and just participants in the original position and in the general political life of liberal society. Because of this necessity, Rawls calls his new and more restrictive version of freedom, “full autonomy,” and claims that it is “realized by citizens when they act from [the moral] principles of justice” in the political realm (as opposed to civil society) and enjoy protection by these same principles.22 This notion also permits him to say that justice as fairness is now equivalent to “the political conception itself,” that is, to political liberalism and its two principles of justice along with reasonableness and the criterion of reciprocity. Moreover, this conception of justice now serves as the “regulative” principle for a “well-ordered” society (PL, 14–15). Overlapping consensus. To accommodate the innovations we have just discussed, Rawls distinguishes between “comprehensive doctrines of the good” and a “reasonable political conception of justice.” The former consist of moral, political, or religious ideas of the good that extend to the aspects of life that go beyond the strictly political realm. In contrast, political conceptions (and “full autonomy”) concern only what Rawls designates as the political realm (PL, 38). In this realm, “public reason” is

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restricted to debates, issues, the legislation of laws, and other matters typical of governmental venues. The actors involved in these venues are government officials, candidates for public office, and the other citizens of the polity. Those citizens who are neither officials nor candidates are nonetheless to think of themselves “as if they were legislators” and to exercise their civic duty by voting and ensuring that public officials are acting in accordance with reasonableness and the criterion of reciprocity that guarantees “political legitimacy.”23 Presumably, this civic activity would include the monitory democracy we discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Because public reason involves the intrinsically moral notions of reasonableness and reciprocity, this activity, like the “freestanding” political conception of justice itself, is intrinsically moral as well as a civic duty.24 Indeed, Rawls says that reasonableness and reciprocity are the basis of a “civic friendship” and public reason.25 More concretely, Rawls holds that public reason and the reasonableness associated with it are necessary for excluding unreasonable comprehensive doctrines and, most importantly, for achieving an “overlapping consensus” among reasonable comprehensive doctrines, that is, doctrines that can initially affirm the political conception of justice from within their own views of the good (PL, 147). Despite the compatibility of reasonable doctrines with the political conception of justice, we can (and must) put aside the ideas of the good dictated by our different comprehensive doctrines. Only then can we interpret the principles and liberties that constitute the basis for a constitutional democracy.26 Rawls proclaims further that we must “contain” unreasonable comprehensive doctrines, some of which he thinks of as even “mad,” so that “they do not undermine the unity and justice of society” (PL, xvi–xvii). These doctrines are neither “well-ordered” nor, with respect to the criterion of reciprocity, “politically moral” (PL, 35). Indeed, Rawls says unreasonable comprehensive doctrines embody two different types of political relations, each of which rejects the criterion of reciprocity and are “incompatible with an idea of public reason that belongs with democratic citizenship.” The first type consists of those who divide society into “friends and foes”—into persons belonging to a “particular religious or secular society” and those who do not so belong. The second type of political relation involves those with “the zeal to embody the whole truth in politics,” to “[relentlessly] struggle to win the world for

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the whole truth” (PL, 441–42). One can imagine that Rawls had in mind Nazism for the first type and Soviet communism for the second. In contrast to unreasonable comprehensive doctrines, reasonable ones subordinate their ideas of the good to political liberalism when they conflict with the latter in the political domain (PL, 138, 145–46, 155–58, 243–44, 392–94, 460–62). For example, political liberalism supports the separation of church (religious comprehensive doctrines) and state. Political parties would therefore have to refrain from imposing their religious values on society if they were elected to power and still wished to comply with the tenets of political liberalism, that is, if they were reasonable in Rawls’s sense (PL, 477–78). Moreover, religious or other groups could not prohibit apostasy, heresy, proselytization, or gender equality even in the private sphere.27 When reasonable comprehensive doctrines are taken to be the basis of legislation compatible with political liberalism, it is only because a reasonable political conception can provide them with independent support. Thus Martin Luther King Jr.’s religious justifications for civil rights are admissible because in principle one could reinterpret them in terms of political liberalism’s principles of liberty and difference and the criterion of reciprocity (PL, xlviii–l). Moreover, adherence to the criterion of reciprocity prohibits citizens from invoking their comprehensive views even when there is a stand-off between different positions within the framework of political liberalism. In the case of such an irresolvable disagreement, Rawls thinks that citizens should not attempt to win each other over to their doctrines, but must simply vote their best estimate of the situation in accordance with the idea of public reason and the criterion of reciprocity (PL, li–liv). In general, Rawls distinguishes the public forum from “background culture” or “civil society” and its many comprehensive doctrines, where “the idea of public reason does not apply” (PL, 443). In his Law of Peoples, Rawls extends his notion of overlapping consensus to global politics and what he calls “the Society of Peoples” (9–10, 18, 23 55, 128). The representatives of “peoples” are to regard one another as free and equal participants in a hypothetical “society of peoples” and seek consensus on how to apply principles of justice in their interactions with one another. Furthermore, peoples that are liberal domestically must treat all their members as free and equal and respect the basic human rights of all individuals. A second type, those that Rawls calls “decent

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hierarchical peoples,” have to respect freedom from slavery and other “urgent” human rights but they do not nor are they required to treat all their own individual members or groups as socially or politically equal to one another.28 Because both liberal and decent peoples respect basic human rights, they are not expected to tolerate and can even intervene militarily in states that violate the basic human rights of their own individual citizens. Rawls claims that this two-tiered ontology of individuals and peoples extends a “political (moral) force” to all societies, including outlaw states, and thereby provides his law of peoples (and hence the political liberalism on which it is based) with a “universality of reach.”29 This discussion of overlapping consensus makes clear that it is the basis of Rawls’s attempt to combine unity and diversity in a judicious manner. Indeed, one of the items in the Political Liberalism index entry for “social unity” states this coupling of diversity and unity most emphatically: “[a] reasonable overlapping consensus [is] the most reasonable basis of social unity available to us” (PL, 516). His emphasis on unity here suggests that his main concern with diversity is the need and desire for social stability.30 This leaves us with the question as to whether his notion of overlapping consensus can occupy Lefort’s empty place of democracy and spell out a possible democracy only by sacrificing a more resilient idea of diversity.

P RO B L E MS W I T H P O L I T I C A L LIB E RALIS M

Political liberalism as a comprehensive doctrine of the good. Despite its thoughtfulness and rigor, Rawls’s political liberalism cannot resolve the dilemma of diversity. The first support for this claim concerns the political conception of justice and the freestanding or purely ethico-political status it is supposed to have in order to allow for an overlapping consensus among the plurality of comprehensive doctrines of the good in a liberal society and among the international groups that constitute the society of peoples. Rawls’s idea of a freestanding status for his political conception of justice seems unsustainable. In the doctrines that he calls unreasonable, the meaning of justice is dictated by an idea of the good—be it religious or secular—that is more authoritarian than any alternative a free and equal people might generate through public reason in the name

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of fair terms of cooperation. The adherents of these more authoritarian doctrines would therefore conclude that the very division between the political and comprehensive notions of the good, between the reasonable and the unreasonable, is itself a comprehensive doctrine, perhaps an inheritance from the European Enlightenment and therefore part of the legacy of Western liberalism. These dissenting positions would include not only those doctrines Rawls declares mad but also those that he might think to be good candidates for his designation of reasonableness if only they would base their political decisions on the criterion of reciprocity rather than directly on their more comprehensive notions of the good. Indeed, the proponents of these more acceptable notions of good, these “voices” in the sense introduced in chapter 2, could upon deliberation see society as an agon, that is, the arena in which people periodically or constantly contest over the comprehensive notions of the good that they feel should guide or shape democratic societies. The enunciators of these voices, then, would not accept political liberalism as the neutral or freestanding arbitrator of the competing visions of the good. They would see it as merely one of the contenders for greater audibility or a leadership role. They might even say that what holds a country like the United States together is an implicit discourse about how citizens should regard one another, for example, as free and equal, in both the political and social arenas. Religious or secular groups that do not share this regard but nonetheless prefer to remain in countries where it holds sway would presumably do so for pragmatic (modus vivendi) reasons and because they are not strongly coerced to abridge their indigenous practices within the boundaries of their particular communities. The view that political liberalism is no more than a particular comprehensive idea of the good is reinforced by other considerations. For example, Will Kymlicka points out that Rawls’s notion of political or “full autonomy” includes the right to form and revise one’s conception of the good both in political and civil society and is therefore tantamount to being its opposite, a comprehensive idea of autonomy: the revisability of one’s viewpoint that political liberalism takes as a political right for all members of society means that a reasonable communitarian group has to surrender, in effect if not by proclamation, what it takes to be the inviolability of its doctrine. The right of revisions—full autonomy—ends up

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trumping these tradition-bound communitarian conceptions of the self and their notions of the ultimate good.31 Kymlicka points out that Rawls’s idea of full autonomy is therefore very close to what Rawls considers to be Mill’s comprehensive doctrine of autonomy. This proximity implies that Rawls’s political liberalism is itself nothing but “another sectarian doctrine” and hence no different than other comprehensive doctrines of the good.32 Kymlicka adds that in this case the communitarian group would be better off in a millet-system (within which a group can maintain internal restrictions on rights and still be an accepted part of the nation) than under political liberalism.33 Political liberalism as “cynical.” Johan van der Walt goes much further than Kymlicka in his criticism of Rawls. He thinks that Rawls’s claims of neutrality leads to “the worst political cynicism possible, namely, the cynicism of justifying political expedience in the name of a sincere respect for everyone as free and equal.”34 More specifically, van der Walt argues that Rawls’s conception of public reason fails when two opposing parties each “have claims that can be reasonably defended before the other as fully considerate of everyone as free and equal.”35 When this happens, one of the two reasonable parties must in effect be coerced to accept the other contender’s version of public reason. This coercion, however, can be justified only by appealing “to considerations external to public reason,” that is, “ for the sake of Rawls’s principles of justice but not in terms of them.”36 Van der Walt points out that Rawls recognizes this situation and also the necessity of urging the losing party to continue with public reason even though it doesn’t help that party in this particular case.37 But this motivational move is not the same as justification—not the same as appealing to decisions derived from public reason and reasonableness—and thus, on Rawls’s own terms, does not ultimately treat the losing party as “free and equal.”38 In these crucial situations, therefore, political liberalism must tacitly act on the basis of utilitarianism (urging in the name of the happiness for the greatest number), rational intuitionism, or some other comprehensive doctrine of the good rather than relying on Rawls’s idea of a freestanding political conception of justice. Rawls’s realistic utopia, that is, would be acting in the name of political expediency rather than out of a sincere respect for everyone as free and equal. The following example will help illustrate van der Walt’s point. Imagine a group of workers who try to litigate in favor of collective ownership of the means of production. But they lose the case to the opposing

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private owners. Yet both positions are consistent with public reason, assuming that Rawls’s principle of difference can include collective ownership and still remain consistent with reasonableness and the criterion of reciprocity. Presumably the jury and the voters have opted for private property rights and the market value or commodification of labor over the workers’ appeal to labor as the expression of human nature (labor power as one’s essence) and thus collective ownership as necessary for their and everyone else’s freedom. But insofar as both outcomes— collective or private ownership of the means of production, democratic communism or capitalism—are consistent with Rawls’s principles of justice and public reason, the workers are nonetheless urged to accept the verdict for reasons external to political liberalism. That is, they are not being treated as “free and equal” participants in a purely political conception of justice. Instead, a comprehensive doctrine such as utilitarianism, libertarianism, or market fundamentalism—one that is not the workers’ own—is being used implicitly or explicitly to justify their remaining in and complying with a polity misleadingly characterized as guided solely by a pure political conception of justice.39 Political liberalism as circular. Arguments by Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift and by Amartya Sen add to the suggestion that Rawls’s political realism is itself a comprehensive doctrine of the good rather than a freestanding political conception of justice. Indeed, Mulhall and Swift go further and claim that Rawls’s notion of reasonableness is “circular”: [Rawls’s charge of] being unreasonable . . . to all those whose comprehensive doctrines that do not affirm his view of political society as a system of fair cooperation between free and equal citizens, or affirm it in a way leaving open the possibility that non-political elements of the comprehensive doctrine may, in cases of conflict, sometimes take priority . . . is entirely circular. By defining “the reasonable” as including a commitment to a politically liberal vision of society, Rawls defines anyone who queries or rejects that vision as “unreasonable,” but he offers no independent reason for accepting that morally driven and question-begging definition.40

Mulhall and Swift’s argument is convincing—Rawls does not offer independent reasons for his definition of reasonable. Indeed he himself says that there is “no way of proving that this specification [of ‘reasonable’]

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is itself reasonable.” He adds that “none is needed” because “it is simply politically reasonable to offer fair terms of cooperation to other free and equal citizens, and it is simply politically unreasonable to refuse to do so” (LP, 87–88). In the face of this circularity and what we said earlier about Rawls’s reliance on the context of United States democracy (the hermeneutics embedded in his political constructivism and notion of reflective equilibrium), we must suspect that his realistic utopia is tradition-bound and amounts to one comprehensive idea of the good (one including a notion of political liberalism as morally right) among the others that make up the agon of contesting positions. In other words, his idea of unity ends up being homogenous and thus placing constraints on who can participate in his original position and politically liberal society. His overlapping consensus becomes a modus vivendi arrangement rather than the common ethico-political bond that would move the other comprehensive doctrines of the good to continue to participate in Rawls’s realistic utopia. Sen and Rawls’s “original position.” Some remarks by Amartya Sen reinforce this conclusion about the homogeneity of the unity proposed by Rawls. Sen first points out that the participants or “noumenal subjects” in Rawls’s original position are too ensconced in the local values of the democratic tradition they share. These values, as we have seen, are the source of the considered judgments that are supposed to be in reflective equilibrium with the principles of justice resulting from the noumenal subjects’ deliberations. But this arrangement implies a lack “of some procedural insistence on forceful examination of local values that may, on further scrutiny, turn out to be preconceptions and biases that are common.”41 Sen therefore proposes that public reasoning on justice should include voices that “go beyond the boundaries of a state or region.” The relevance of the interests of other persons would help participants avoid bias and treat others fairly; other people’s viewpoints would encourage them to broaden their scrutiny of pertinent principles, thus “avoiding under-scrutinized parochialism of values and presumptions in the local community.”42 Sen therefore concludes that that we should not assess democracy only in light of formal institutions “but by the extent to which different voices from divers sections of the people can actually be heard.”43 In other words, the call to articulate the implicit idea of democracy embedded in Western civilization is better answered by an open and ongoing political conversation among advocates of heterogeneous ideas of the

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good than by a group sharing the same historical tradition and deliberating behind the veil of ignorance in the original position. Sen’s appeal to a plurality of different voices allows us to register two more points. The first is terminological: we can treat ideas of the good as equivalent to voices. The meaning of “diversity” will therefore be the “heterogeneous voices” that make up society. This adjustment is congruent with our discussion of voices in chapter 2. The second point is substantive. Sen comes close to our idea of an agon, an arena of contesting voices, but does it allow us to construct a regulative idea of democracy—one that can guide us at least to approximate it—or is such an ideal impossible? In other words, can agonistic or any other ideal of democracy successfully fill Lefort’s paradoxical empty place of democracy? Before discussing these questions in light of Derrida’s notion of an “event” and his claim that all ideas of democracy are possible only as impossible, we should consider briefly how Rawls treats public art.

R AW L S AND P U B L I C ART

Rawls says that his principles of justice must state “the freedoms of artistic expression of free and equal citizens.”44 Yet he says little more about art except to emphasize that the government should advance subsidies only for cultural goods that “promote directly or indirectly the social conditions that secure the equal liberties [of political liberalism]” and “advance in an appropriate way the long-term interests of the least advantaged.”45 Zuidervaart refers to this as Rawls’s “minimal instrumentalism” justification for government aid to the arts. He adds that Rawls thought such support of the arts was at best only “weakly justified.”46 For our part, we can speculate on what Rawls’s would and would not emphasize for a criterion of public art as an act of citizenship in a democracy. We can imagine that he would want public art to support a form of solidarity around his two principles of justice, liberty and socioeconomic fairness for individuals. In contrast, we saw that his emphasis on diversity is due more to his concern for social stability than its intrinsic value; we can assume that he would hold the same for fecundity or the production of new voices.47 His opinion of these two political virtues—heterogeneity and fecundity—would therefore place them as a secondary rather than

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primary concern for public art: solidarity would trump heterogeneity and fecundity; consensus and his ideal of “reasonableness” would win out over agonistic democracy. Democracy would remain fragile in that heterogeneity and the new would be muted relative to solidarity. These conjectures carry implications for Rawls’s possible view of some of the public art we considered in chapters 1 and 2. He certainly would pronounce the placing of statues of Confederate soldiers in public squares and their racist overtones to be anathema to democracy and political liberalism in particular; and he would likely praise Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection for reminding us that capitalist pecuniary interests should not be allowed to violate the rights or well-being of vulnerable individuals. But he might well go in a different direction with regard to Judy Baca’s Danzas Indigenas; he might, that is, assess its celebration of diversity for its own sake as the reflection of a particular comprehensive doctrine of the good rather than as directly related to his political conception of justice. Again, I am basing these inferences on conjecture rather than any explicit statements Rawls made about public art. The meaning of these conjectures will be clarified further when we compare them with Derrida’s views on public art. But first we will start with Derrida’s idea of “democracy to come.”

D E M O C R AC Y A S I M P O S S I B LY P O S S I B L E : D E R R I DA’ S “ D E M O C R AC Y TO CO M E ” D ERRI DA’S H E R ME N E U T I C S AND T H E S PACING O F T IME

Derrida agrees with Rawls that the ideas of democracy and justice are implicit in the Western tradition and contract theory. But Derrida locates these tacit ideas much farther back in the past, even to a primordial origin, and says we experience them as a solicitation or “call” to reveal and consent to them. More specifically, he refers to a “hermeneutic circle” and says that if “we did not already have some idea of democracy . . . we would never seek to elucidate its meaning or, indeed, call for its advent.”48 This idea calls to us, and we respond by calling for its coming to be. Moreover, this voice from the past, from our “European legacy,” is not conservative, not a mere

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repetition of what has already been said or instituted. Instead, it “gestures toward the past of an inheritance only by remaining to come.”49 Derrida appeals to this version of a hermeneutic call throughout his work. It is especially pronounced when, following and revising Plato, he speaks of khora, the event of all events. Khora is all-encompassing because it “comes before everything” and designates the “place” of the legacy of Europe as well as what is intrinsically linked to the latter, “the call for a thinking of the event to come, of the democracy to come.” Though first to arrive, the khora makes only a place for its progeny. It does not determine their content; it thereby ensures the unfinalizable character, the always “to come” status, of democracy, justice, and our existence.50 But Derrida goes even further with his idea of khora and time. He italicizes that we can “invoke a certain reason to come” as “democracy to come” and thus combines reason and democracy in what he calls “democratic reason.”51 He even claims that democracy to come is politics itself and the “khora of the political.”52 He will ultimately identify this form of reason with his version of “reasonableness.” To see how this is possible we can begin by examining his notion of temporality more fully. Derrida says that khora and democracy to come have the universal structure that he calls “spacing.” This notion is equivalent to his wellknown idea of différance and constitutes both the spatiality and temporality of democracy to come. According to Derrida, our experience of the present moment must paradoxically include an absence—the past and the future—without which it would lose its thickness, its duration, and disappear into nothing. Differing from itself in this way, as both a presence and an absence, the spacing of the present is simultaneously the “becoming-space of time” and the “becoming-time of space.” It is the becoming-space of time because the temporal interior of the present necessarily opens onto an “outside,” its past and future. But this spacing is also the becoming-time of space because it defers the future of the present moment. That is, the present moment always remains still to come, and this holds too for our experience of the presumptive identity of whatever takes place within that deferred moment.53 Because this moment is always deferred, it is inherently unfinalizable—without “prospect or horizon”—and also singular, that is, incommensurable with any other event, exemplary in its own way, as well as incalculable in its meaning or implications.54 Furthermore, the present moment or event accomplishes

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this deferral and thus its own possibility of existence by carrying with it a “trace” of itself as it disappears into the past and opens onto its future. The event sacrifices whatever univocal meaning it might have had in order to be what it primarily is, a “to come” that intrinsically defers its arrival and thus is always differing from itself.55 Because the legacy of democracy can be recalled by us only within the spacing of the present moment, it, and thus the closing of the hermeneutic circle we spoke of earlier, are always only to come. More precisely, the temporality of to come means that the essence of democracy is inherently “indecidable.” As indecidable, the concept of democracy is “equal and proper to itself only insofar as it is inadequate and improper [to itself]”; it is “interminable in its incompletion beyond all determinate forms of incompletion.”56 Democracy is our legacy, but paradoxically only as always to come.

D E M O C RACY AS AN U N CO NDI T I ONAL INJ U NCT IO N AND P R O MI S E

Derrida refers to the call of democracy, its voice, as an “unconditional injunction” and a “promise.” As an unconditional injunction, it is a demand for its fulfillment: we can ignore its call but it still asserts itself as an obligation for those sharing its legacy.57 As a promise, it has the “memory of that which carries the future, the to come, here and now.”58 This memory opens onto or carries the future here and now, but like no other promise; for what it promises, pure democracy, is in principle “unpresentable.” Therefore “to come” means neither “a future democracy that one day will be ‘present’,” nor the memory of a past democracy that was once here. Rather, it is the pure “exposure” that opens us to time and whoever or whatever may come upon us.59 Democracy to come, in other words, is always beyond any conditions that could ever render it “foreseeable” or definable; its “to come” character always interrupts any possible appearance or determination of its meaning; its outcome, though thought of as something that must be good can later on just as easily be thought of as bad.60 More specifically, this paradoxical idea of democracy necessarily remains outside the realm of “the theoretical, the descriptive, the constative, and the performative,”61 always “indifferent to any content,” always

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transcending or heterogeneous to any possible democracy.62 Because of this heterogeneity, Derrida can also say that democracy to come is “possible only as im-possible.”63 It is im-possible in two senses. Its status of always and only to come means that this form of temporality is the necessary condition for the very possibility of democracy. For this reason, Derrida places the hyphen between “im” and “possible.”64 But the temporality of to come also implies the future anterior and thus a second sense of im-possible: that which occurs as possible is “haunted by,” rendered impossible by, “the fact that it will have been impossible in its structure,” that it is and will be only ever to come, that it will have been impossible by the time it occurs.65 In other words, the temporality that makes democracy possible simultaneously renders it impossible. This notion of unconditionality carries several important implications. The first distinguishes Derrida’s democracy to come from all claims that democracy is a regulative idea or ideal. It is not ideal, not idealized, because it is “real” and “sensible” as an “urgent” demand that “swoops down upon [us]” and never lets us “put it off until later,” seizing us “here and now.”66 And it is not regulatory, not a possible achievement, because its indecidability implies that it could never be self-consistently thought of as reachable even at infinity; it could not be within the theoretical power of someone, of some ipseity or “I can,” to realize it, to even consistently think it as accomplishable.67 Indeed, indecidability implies that the idea of democracy might diverge from rather than converge upon what is taken or could be taken as its meaning at any time.68 Its promise is not one of possible fulfillment even in thought.69 The second implication of Derrida’s idea of unconditionality concerns rules. Derrida points out that it is not possible for an unconditional injunction, all form and no specific content, to obey preset rules. Such a condition would mean that decision making is akin to a computer piloted by software and therefore could not constitute a true choice or responsibility.70 This sense of the priority of the unconditional is heightened when we consider the third implication of Derrida’s insistence on it. It concerns the exact character of the transcendental priority that Derrida presumes democracy to come to have over possible democracies and their conditional status. Derrida says that these two realms—unconditional and conditional democracies—are “absolutely heterogeneous” and yet “indissociably” related to one another. On the one hand, possible democracies

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require the unconditional idea of democracy to come for their “guidance” and “inspiration.”71 Indeed, Derrida agrees with his paraphrase of Rousseau: even if democracy “in the strict sense” can never exist because of its “amorphousness” or “polymorphousness,” one “must, one ought, one cannot not strive toward it with all one’s force.”72 On the other hand, this unconditional injunction must nonetheless engage in “conditions of all kinds” in order to “arrive” and be more than a utopian thought or “nothing at all.” This relation to such conditions means that democracy to come is best referred to as a “quasi-transcendental” condition for possible democracies.73 Only between the benign oracle of unconditional democracy to come and the earthly voices of possible democracies can “decisions and responsibilities” be taken.74 But if unconditional democracy is going to guide possible democracies, it must at least have enough content that it can be linked to them in thought or practice.75 Perhaps realizing this necessity, Derrida proclaims that “it is on the basis of freedom that we will have conceived of the concept of democracy” and then proceeds to qualify this freedom in several ways.76 He identifies it as “a freedom of play, an opening of indetermination and indecidability in the very concept of democracy,” and holds that this distinguishes the constitutional paradigm of democracy from all other political rationalities. Most importantly, he further specifies this freedom as an “interminable self-criticizability” or the “right [in principle] to criticize everything publically, including the idea of democracy.”77 Indeed, he even equates democracy with a particular mode of such criticism: “there is no deconstruction without democracy, no democracy without deconstruction.”78 Derrida adds three more qualifications to the freedom he has in mind. The first concerns its transcendental status: unconditional freedom is what makes possible the conditional sort of freedom that involves the “I can” or individual initiative of “liberty and license.”79 Derrida’s idea of unconditional freedom also absolutely renounces sovereignty and its inherent “abuse of power”80 as well as its subordination of free “decision” and “responsibility” to the “determinative knowledge” of a norm or law.81 For the third qualification, Derrida posits an “incalculable” form of equality—the equality of the unconditionally free—as “an integral” and “unconditional” part of “[pure] freedom.”82 This equality is also linked to unconditional hospitality: Derrida thinks we have an absolute

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obligation to expose ourselves to “the coming of the others, beyond rights and law,” especially those who are absolutely unlike us.83

DE MO C R ACY AS AU TO I MMU NE

Autoimmunity. These pure ideas of freedom and equality, then, permit Derrida to link the unconditional injunction of democracy to come with conditional democracies: the in principle commitment to critique, especially self-critique, is the identifiable aspect of the two forms of democracy. Because of this linkage, Derrida says that the indecidability of the idea of democracy is not due directly to the interminable deferral of the becoming-time of spacing but to something much stronger— “autoimmunity”—which itself now becomes the basis for the deferral pertinent to democracy to come.84 More specifically, unconditional freedom and equality imply that the invitation to participate in a democracy must be extended to even those who would argue against democracy and would vote it out of existence. Immunizing democracy against this selfdestruction would require restricting it only to those who absolutely uphold this form of polity. But Derrida thinks such a restriction would contradict democracy’s demand for universal inclusivity and equality. It would therefore immunize democracy against itself, that is, make it undergo a fatal and always latent autoimmunity. Autoimmunity, then, is part and parcel to the very structure of democracy for Derrida.85 Derrida cites the Islamists in Algeria and the fascist and Nazi regimes in Europe as illustrations of his claim that the “general form” of autoimmunity has to do “with . . . the freedom at play in the concept of democracy.” This freedom permits “the worst enemies” of democracy to “put an end to democratic freedom in the name of democracy” by achieving a “numerical majority” in a popular election. The intrinsic autoimmunity of democracy, derived from its joint demand for unconditional freedom and equality, therefore ensures that democracy can never make itself present and will always be lacking a “proper meaning,” will always be possible only as impossible.86 Despite its pessimistic appearance, Derrida thinks that autoimmunity carries the positive implication for democracy indicated earlier: the indecidability implied by autoimmunity means that no country can view its

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democracy as the true one and then use that as a reason for imposing its model on others or for curtailing needed changes at home.87 To help democratic countries profit from this positive implication of autoimmunity, Derrida proposes that they adopt “reasonableness” instead of calculable rationality as their form of political reason. This type of reason would take into account unconditionality and the special temporality of pure democracy and its injunction. It therefore would help limit autoimmune democracies to the sort of “maxims of transaction” that might provide them with sufficient humility to ward off the arrogance and imperious temptations that have plagued them historically.88 Summary of Derrida and Rawls on the possibility of democracy. Before we turn to criticism of Derrida’s idea of autoimmunity, we can now precisely distinguish his democracy to come from Rawls’s political liberalism by summarizing how they treat the possibility of democracy and how each occupies Lefort’s “empty place.” Both appeal to the legacy of democracy. Rawls, via his notion of reflective equilibrium, transforms this legacy into his two principles of justice and the political idea of reasonableness. These two principles and the concepts of political liberalism associated with them act as regulative ideas that constitute the possibility of democracy and indeed the idea of a realistic utopia. In contrast, Derrida converts the legacy into democracy to come. This future anterior sense of time replaces the sequential temporality of regulative ideas and thus renders political liberalism or any other form of democracy possible only as impossible. Democracy is ultimately characterized as having an autoimmune structure requiring a nonregulative version of reasonableness to construct maxims of transaction between the unconditional injunction of democracy to come and the (impossibly) possible or conditional democracies that it inspires and that it guides. Because democracy to come implies absolute hospitality to all voices and provides the unifying factor of its injunction, one can say that it accomplishes a more inclusive relation between unity and diversity than that permitted by the overlapping consensus of Rawls’s political conception of justice. Therefore it, and not Rawls’s political liberalism, would seem to pass successfully through the horns of the dilemma of diversity and to occupy Lefort’s empty place of democracy without eliminating its inviting vacancy. It would, that is, fulfill the ideal of democracy as a unity composed of difference. Before we see if democracy to come can actually

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sustain these claims in its favor, we must see what Derrida might say about public art. Derrida’s democracy to come would also carry implications for public art that differ from Rawls’s presumed view of the latter. In particular, democracy to come would counsel public art to valorize the virtue of this absolute hospitality for all ideas of the good despite the impossibility of this form of welcoming others. In other words, Derrida would value an agonistic form of democracy rather than Rawls’s emphasis on consensus. Additionally, but now more in conformity to Rawls’s view of political liberalism, Derrida’s democracy to come would charge public art with resisting the imperious tendencies of the United States and other conditional democracies. For Derrida, then, public art that reflected the virtues he favors would constitute acts of citizenship. We will look at this claim more critically in the next chapter when we treat Derrida’s view of architecture and other forms of art. Despite the encouraging words above on Derrida’s fulfillment of the ideal of democracy as a unity composed of difference, his argument collapses if the unconditional injunction of democracy to come actually includes a tacit condition that makes it immune to autoimmunity.

D EM O C R ACY ’ S I MMU N I T Y TO AU TO IMMU NIT Y

Derrida’s idea of reasonableness and its basis in autoimmunity encounter two problems. The first is that the idea of democracy’s autoimmunity might lead to a reaction different than the positive caution and humility that Derrida endorses. Because autoimmunity means that democracy must always fall short of being democracy—that it can be “saved” only by placing itself on the sacrificial block of accepting those who will overthrow it or, contrarily, by refusing them admission—it may very well have the unfortunate consequence of encouraging people to adopt another direction of the European legacy: the installation of nondemocratic caretaker or totalitarian governments. If democracy can never be itself, if it can only be “negotiations” about the least offensive way of not being itself, then why institute it in the first place? The second problem for Derrida’s depiction of democracy is a more crucial and immanent criticism: democracy is immune to autoimmunity.

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We can agree with Derrida that freedom as unlimited critique is a primary meaning of democracy. But contrary to what he may think, this claim implies that for any electoral process to qualify as democratic it must be done in the name of such endless critique—in other words, unconditional freedom and equality. It must therefore preserve an “open space” for always further critical and public commentary.89 This implies that if a “numerical majority” (a merely “calculable” form of equality) votes out democracy and eliminates dialogic practice, we cannot say that it is acting as part of a democracy. The majority would merely be using a formal voting procedure and not one that meets the Derridian requirement of operating, as we saw, “in the name of democracy,” that is, in the name of the freedom and equality that implies “interminable criticizability.” The triumph of the majority would then be due to an external factor: susceptibility of its members to demagogy, fear, or some other foible, but not because of a factor intrinsic to democracy itself. Even if the idea of an open space is itself subject to Derrida’s notion of spacing and hence ultimate indecidability, questioning its meaning would require that it always remain open for a rejoinder to any of the proposed interpretations of it: the open space mandate would automatically reassert itself. Its reassertion could not be disrupted by the claim (deconstructive or otherwise) that we cannot distinguish absolutely between an open and a closed space; for if this claim is made in the name of democracy, it simply invites the open space stipulation to continue as the basis for public forums considering the validity of the claim against it. The debate may be interminable and thus call for temporary and always revisable decisions on the meaning of democracy and its dialogic space in the present moment, but this would not be due to an autoimmunity of the polity in question. For Derrida to say otherwise would be inconsistent with his claim that critical questioning is at the heart of democracy. Democracy, then, is susceptible (is not immune) to overthrow from fascist or other nondemocratic forces through a procedural vote; but it is not autoimmune, not self-destructible in its own name.90 This argument against autoimmunity affects Derrida’s idea of the unconditionality of democracy to come in several ways. To begin with, it places a condition on democracy to come and thus revokes Derrida’s stipulation that his unconditional injunction is “indifferent to content.” The conditional content is that only those committed to the open space of

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unlimited dialogue and critique—what Derrida referred to as unconditional “freedom” and “equality”—can count as legitimate policy-making voices in a democratic polity. Those who would overturn democracy intentionally, for example, white supremacists, must, like all other voices, be heard but cannot consistently be allowed to establish anti-democratic policy in society, at least not in the name of democracy. Hospitality is necessarily extended to all voices, to hearing them, but not to accepting the policies they would promote as ones done in the name of democracy. Even if this argument against autoimmunity is correct, what is the status of this new condition, this agon of contesting voices? Can it safeguard the “to come” aspect of Derrida’s idea of unconditional democracy and thus protect itself from falling into the messianic arrogance that Derrida so rightly condemns? In effect, the unconditional injunction of Derrida’s democracy to come provided a form of unity or solidarity that permitted absolute heterogeneity (one therefore broader than Rawls’s overlapping consensus) and thus would have escaped the two horns of the dilemma of diversity if not democracy’s immunity to autoimmunity. Can the new agon be a unity composed of difference and embody the simultaneous affirmation of the three political virtues that have emerged more fully in our discussion: solidarity, heterogeneity, and fecundity (the production of new voices and ideas)? Ironically, we can reply to these questions affirmatively by examining some of the ways that Derrida himself refers to voices throughout his work. These references are congruent with his appeal to “calls” as the means by which the legacy of democracy addresses us. We will see that they also supplement the view of voices and society as a dialogic body that we introduced in chapter  2 through the vehicle of Union Square and Wodiczko’s The Homeless Projection—the view that we have been using as an apparatus for connecting democracy, citizenship, and public art in this essay on political aesthetics.

VO I C E S O F A LT E R I T Y

Derrida’s more direct and innovative uses of “voice” are contained in his response to a question about writing from the French feminist Hélène Cixous. Derrida says that for him “a monologism, univocity, a single voice . . .

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is impossible, and plurivocity is a non-fictional necessity.” He adds that in writing a text he often has “to change voices . . . to make several persons speak . . . and that the essential thing comes from another voice in some manner, from another voice in [him] . . . which is the same and not the same.”91 In another text, he says that what inspired him to start writing was “the adolescent dream of keeping a trace of all the voices which were traversing [him],” and that “deep down this is still [his] most naïve desire.”92 Part of this “tracing” takes place when he alludes to his roots in French Algeria and refers to himself as an “over-colonized European hybrid.”93 Derrida reinforces his allegiance to hybrid voices in his remarks on Husserl and European memory. His work on Husserl provides compelling arguments for the impossibility of a univocal voice, of one that is not immediately open to its other.94 In his claim against Husserl that a pure voice is open to its other, the other can be interpreted as other voices.95 Similarly, Derrida says we have a “duty to respond to the call of European memory,” to recall “what has been promised under the name Europe.” He is, however, very careful to claim that this Europe is shot through with “other headings” or non-European voices.96 More specifically, Derrida says that we must “make ourselves the guardians of an idea of Europe, of a difference of Europe, but of a Europe that consists precisely in not closing itself off in its identity and . . . assign[s itself] identity from alterity, from the other heading and the other of the heading, from a completely other shore.”97 In other words, the voice of Europe, its heritage, is so shot through with other voices that we cannot assign it a teleological or other form of strict identity, cannot legitimately make of Europe any of the oracles that have historically claimed or would claim to speak for it. The heritage of Europe, therefore, has built into it a principle of self-critique and recognition of the alterity that helps to constitute it. Derrida’s portrayal of hybrid voices in these passages suggests that we can invert his initial idea of democracy to come. Rather than seeing democracy as guided by an unconditional injunction that comes from “on high”98 and that is indifferent to content, we can take it as coming from below, from the dialogic interplay among the voices of which Derrida speaks. We also saw this notion of voices valorized by Sen in the section of this chapter on Rawls’s political liberalism. From this interplay among

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voices emerges the democracy that, as we have already revealed, is not indifferent to who constitutes its membership. More specifically, and repeating some remarks from chapter 2, the creative interplay among voices holds them together and simultaneously keeps them separate, forming the agonistic body we call society and shaping its space and time. Derrida captures the space of this body when he remarks that each of the European “headings” or voices “assign[s] itself identity from alterity.” This phrase indicates that each voice is part of the identity and, at the same time, the other of the rest, that each is what it is through its difference from the rest. In other words, the voices are related to each other in the “diacritical” manner that the Swiss linguist Ferdinand Saussure stipulates for the interconnection of signs: each is established by its difference from the rest in the same way that the English phoneme “a” counts as what it is through its difference from all the other phonemes in English. Difference is therefore the driver of identity and is also a social preconscious or garb of interrelated voices that we inhabit and draw upon in our efforts to speak of the world surrounding us. This reference to our role as the ones who draw upon or enunciate these voices takes us from the diacritical space of the social body back to its form of time and dynamism—from the spatial axis of the social body to its temporal axis. The diacritical space is always already converted into the temporality of the social body. This temporality is inseparable from the ongoing dialogue among these voices, that is, from their contest with one another for greater audibility concerning the different meanings they want to assign to the open space or freedom and equality of democracy. We can say that this dialogic interplay is the form of the time of the political, of political time. The dialogue among these voices always throws their enunciators ahead of themselves, as each responds to the remarks of the enunciators of the other voices about the best way to characterize their democracy. The full meaning of democracy and its agonistic space remains open because of the momentum of this primordial dialogue and its implicit injunction to respond to the other voices and their opinions about democracy. In other words, the idea of this democratic body, of its diacritical (spatial) and agonistic or dialogical (temporal) character—that is, its spatial and temporal axes—acts as a constant lure for always further debate about it and its meaning as well as its governmental policies.

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These exchanges and the temporality immanent to them imply that any final idea of democracy and its conditions is always and only to come.99 More dramatically, Derrida’s indication that each voice is part of the identity and the other of the rest, diacritically and dialogically, spatially and temporally, related to one another, means that the creation of a new voice through the dialogic interplay of the others will produce an immediate change in all of them. The social body’s temporality, indeed that body’s very being, is therefore its continuous metamorphosis, a body that remains the same but only as always different. In this sense, any final opinion about democracy is, as Derrida declares, intrinsically indecidable. But this condition is now due to the nature of the ongoing interplay among the voices of the social body and not to autoimmunity. We have gone from the idea of an unconditional injunction to one conditional upon the open space requirement of democracy; from an abstract or formal notion of time to one (a political form) that is the agonistic interplay among the voices of the social body, always throwing us, their enunciators, ahead of ourselves. We have kept the immanency of Rawls’s political liberalism but replaced his notion of the social body with one that retains the temporality of “to come” introduced by Derrida.100 This view of society as a multivoiced or dialogic body carries three other implications that will help us complete its outline. The first concerns the fragility of democracy that we discussed previously. The refutation of autoimmunity as the structure of democracy means that the dilemma of diversity is not intrinsic to democracy. The dilemma still exists—we can go too far in the direction of a unity that homogenizes society or too far in that of a diversity that fragments into unrelated social groups or even ones antagonistic to each other. But this will be due to our foibles rather than to the otherwise agonistic and open space of democracy. Part of the task of public art will be to alert us to those foibles and help us resist them: creations like Baca’s Danzas Indigenas and Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection rather than the statues of Confederate soldiers in public squares or  the real estate industry’s pecuniary use of Union Square and its sculptures. The second implication of society as a multivoiced body is its transcendental role. Its voices constitute the multiple identities of the bodies enunciating them and thus our status as dialogical beings. More generally, the diacritical relations and interplay among these voices, the transcendental

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network they form, make possible the particular exchanges that take place among the enunciators of the constituent voices. But “transcendental” does not mean “transcendent”: the voices require these bodies for their own existence and for the temporalization of their diacritically spatial relations. We enunciators, to say it again, initiate a vocal system that simultaneously makes us the dialogical creatures that we are. The transcendental condition (the multivoiced body) is inseparable from what it conditions or makes possible (you and me as its participants).101 The third implication is that this multivoiced body incarnates a political ethics and aesthetics. This view of the social body suggests that we can have a unity (each voice is part of the identity of the rest) that does not cancel out heterogeneity (each voice is also the other of the rest). This unity would provide something between the limits Rawls’s places on which voices can have policymaking power in his idea of democracy, on the one hand, and Derrida’s notion of openness or absolute hospitality to all such voices, on the other. We will see in later chapters that this “something” must involve a crucial distinction between openly hearing voices (Michel Foucault’s treatment of the ancient Greek notion of parrhesia, or “courageous speaking and hearing”102) and accepting them as policymaking powers. In short, we must preserve the open dialogic space of democracy we spoke of earlier by passing between the shoal waters of Rawls’s limited and Derrida’s absolute tolerance for listening to the other. If we can accomplish this feat, we will escape the horns of the dilemma of diversity and fill Lefort’s empty place without having to take down its vacancy sign. But we will still need to show more conclusively that our view is not itself an oracle and can affirm all other voices without at the same time allowing white supremacists and other oracular voices to sustain political policies for society in the name of democracy—that our view can paradoxically exclude the excluders without itself becoming an oracle. If our dialogic view of society can manage these wonders, then it will have fulfilled the idea of a unity composed of (rather than imposed on) difference, satisfied the simultaneous affirmation of the three political virtues, and provided an idea of the sort of democracy that would help give content to the political part of our criterion of public art as an act of citizenship—it might, for example, help us assess the relative merits of the Federalists’ stone monument and the Democratic-Republicans’ plain tablet in their contest over the appropriate representative for such an act.

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In the next chapter, we will explore the intricacies of thought about contemporary art. This will include some further words on Derrida’s view of art and implicitly those of Rawls. But the overall task will now be to see how contemporary art can help us address the political and the aesthetic dimensions of Nicholas’s plain tablet and other public artworks. In chapter 5 we will examine Alain Badiou’s and Jacques Rancière’s philosophies on both democracy and art. That will allow us to refine our understanding of both these areas, make our criterion of public art as an act of citizenship more specific, and put it to work in the still later chapters that will critically explore our primary test cases, Chicago’s Millennium Park and New York’s National September 11 Memorial.

4 PUBLIC ART’S “PLAIN TABLET” The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary Art

I

n the previous chapters, we spoke of two vacancies that we had to fill while paradoxically leaving them open: democracy’s “empty place” and public art’s “plain tablet.” We used chapter 3 to see how two important but radically different political philosophies, John Rawls’s political liberalism and Jacques Derrida’s democracy to come, might accommodate democracy’s empty place. However, their promising theories ran into difficulties. Rawls’s “realistic utopia” seemed circular and to favor stability over heterogeneity. In contrast, Derrida’s view of democracy required conditions that belied the unconditional status he claimed for it: solidarity was sacrificed for his homage to unfettered hospitality. Nonetheless, both positions provided important clues for an agonistic version of a democracy that could pass between the horns of the dilemma of diversity and constitute a unity that would be composed of rather than imposed on difference. This still-incomplete idea of a multivoiced, dialogic society suggested some of the parameters—solidarity, heterogeneity, and fecundity (the production of new voices)—that our criterion for assessing public artworks as acts of citizenship should accommodate. Besides these accomplishments, two others accompanied them. The first was realizing that fragility was not an intrinsic or “autoimmune” structure of democracy itself. Rather, it is the product of the foibles of the citizens involved; of the players and not the game itself; of our too frequent tendency to bend democracy’s openness in the direction of autocracy or other

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oracles instead of affirming its value and revealing new aspects of it. The hope is that public art can help us resist the former alternative and advance the latter. The second of the two other achievements concerned the multivoiced body view of society. Rather than just a framework for this essay in political aesthetics, I argued that it—the priority of voices, the creative interplay among them, and their resistance to oracles—is the transcendental or ontological basis for our dialogic mode of existence and the ethicopolitical norms that might support solidarity without sacrificing heterogeneity and fecundity. The idea of society as a multivoiced body will therefore provide a fundamental basis for justifying the criterion for public art at which we finally arrive. In this chapter, we will pass from the empty place of democracy to problems of contemporary art that are reminiscent of those surrounding Congressman Nicholas’s plain tablet and his opposition to a stone monument for commemorating George Washington. These problems are twofold. The first concerns a political question: what aspects of democracy are favored by the four tendencies in contemporary art that we will examine—contemporaneity, heterochronicity, anachronicity, and participatory art? Do they mainly emphasize the pluralism suggested by Nicholas’s plain tablet and its call for the inscription of diverse opinions on its surface, or do they also appeal to a form of social solidarity? The second problem of contemporary art poses an aesthetic question hinted at by Nicholas’s tablet: does its plainness preclude aesthetic value and reduce it to the plurality of political opinions it permits to be scribbled on its surface? Or, if left untouched—a shimmering expanse—would it amount to an aesthetic spectacle that obscures any political gravity it might have had? It suggests, in short, the more general issue of the relation between the aesthetic and the political dimensions of public art. The tension between the two is made all the more troublesome by traditions that think only one or the other of them carries the overwhelming weight for what passes as worthy art. We will examine these issues in the political aesthetics of contemporary art by first introducing the “contemporaneity to come” proposed during a meeting in Paris between philosopher Jacques Derrida and art historian Terry Smith. We will then elaborate on their idea of contemporaneity in art by seeing what other thinkers and artists have said about two other tendencies related to it, “heterochronicity” and “anachronicity.”

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This elaboration will also include the more overtly political aims of “participatory art.” The current chapter, then, will help clarify the role of aesthetics in constructing our criterion of public art as an act of citizenship.

D E R R I DA A N D A RT ’ S CO N T E M P O R A N EIT Y AN AU S P I C I O U S ME ET ING

In the last chapter, we critically examined Jacques Derrida’s notion of “indecidability” in the context of democracy. We begin this chapter by seeing how that idea works in the setting of art—how it shows the impossibility of proclaiming an essence for art, and how it thereby also ensures the open-endedness, heterogeneity, and fecundity of today’s art. This will also help us understand better those historians and artists who view art in a manner similar to Derrida’s and often refer to it as “contemporaneity.” Shortly before the 9/11 attacks in the United States, art historian Terry Smith met for a recorded conversation with Jacques Derrida at a restaurant of the latter’s choice—Le Train Bleu, located in the Gare du Nord train station. The restaurant has neo-Baroque figures that frame murals depicting the railway’s major stations. Indeed, Le Train Bleu is itself a work of art in the style of the Belle Époque. It therefore provided the appropriate setting for the meeting between the French philosopher and the Australian-U.S. art historian, with the exception that the focus of the more scholarly part of their discussion was contemporary rather than nineteenth-century art. More specifically, they briefly addressed the question “What is contemporary art?” At the very beginning of their exchange, Smith referred to Derrida’s idea of “democracy ‘to come’ ” in Specters of Marx. Derrida responded with the exclamation: “Contemporary art is art to come!”1 As we might suspect from our previous discussion of his democracy to come and his other ideas championing difference over sameness, Derrida chides the “blindness” of “conventional art historians” and their allegiance to “schools” of art and “their claims that their perspective is the correct one.”2 More specifically, he says that the experience of contemporaneity is an encounter with the “other”: like “the core experience

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of love, of thought, of writing, perhaps—of art, certainly . . . it is the ‘to come’ in the purest sense, pure difference . . . a kind of grace.”3 He adds elsewhere that painting, architecture, sculpture, and the other spatial arts are characterized by spatiality and hence a textualization whether or not they are directly related to some form of discourse.4 As we have seen, this means that the artwork is intrinsically open to what is outside it and that its meaning is always deferred, always and only to come. In particular, Derrida links the notion of voices to this spatiality: I would say that what [my texts] have . . . that is most analogous to spatial, architectural, and theatrical works is their acoustics and their voices. I have written many texts with several voices, and in them the spacing is visible. There are several people speaking, and this necessarily implies a dispersion of voices, of tones that space themselves, that automatically spatialize themselves.5

Derrida adds that texts—books or spatial art—which “don’t end or begin, or [which] disperse their voices” undermine frames, univocal meanings, and other such totalizing devices that would try to give these works “the impression of a kind of gathering” or closed totality.6 In his major work on this topic, Derrida shows how the consequent indecidability of this spacing undermines a number of mimetic functions or representational aspirations of art.7 But we can illustrate this indecidability by drawing on Derrida’s comments on architecture, the art most akin to the focus of our later chapters, Chicago’s Millennium Park and New York’s 9/11 memorial. He uses the Tower of Babel to capture his idea of postmodern architecture. He reminds us that the goal of the Semites was to gain absolute dominion over everything that would be visible from the supreme heights of their proposed tower. God, however, foiled this plan by replacing the univocal language of the tower builders with a plethora of heterogeneous idioms, a “diversity of languages.” In the same way, Derrida believes postmodern architecture “deconstructs modernism and its universal language” by spatializing “khora,” the event of all events. This spatialization means that “an inventive faculty of the architectural difference . . . would bring out a new type of diversity with different limitations, other heterogeneities than the existing ones, and . . . would not be reduced to the technique of planning.” It would not, that is, aspire to

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uniformity and the development of a model for the whole world. These anarchic accomplishments would also involve a new relationship between the individual and the community: Babel would include rather than block interaction between different cultures and the architectural event. An implicit “promise” would therefore be kept. Even if it “is not kept in its visible form,” this promise would provide a “place where desire can recognize itself, where it can live.”8 Here we have a view that clearly recognizes the political dimension of art and the creative interplay among the voices of the dialogic body of society. In an exchange with Peter Eisenman, the architect of the Berlin “Holocaust Memorial” (“Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe”), Derrida further clarifies his idea of postmodern architecture. He sees deconstruction as destroying the foundations of the philosophy and history of architecture so that new constructions, “true invention,” can take place on this “nonfoundation” and the indecidability associated with it. Although Eisenman places himself in the camp of deconstructionism, Derrida feels that the latter thinker’s concurrent allegiance to the “architecture of absence” (to the idea of a “presentness” that is the “presence of absence”9) has “theological overtones,” specifically “Judeo–theological overtones.” It therefore amounts to “a negative theology on the subject of architecture.”10 Despite this criticism of the architect, Derrida appears ambiguous about the concrete practices Eisenman proposes for their joint, unfulfilled architectural project at the Parc de la Villette in Paris. Those practices involve what Eisenman calls “scaling,” that is, “a design process entirely constructed around anachronism, analogy, and coincidence.” In the park project, this scaling involves the anachronizing technique of layering together material “traces” of disparate time periods and places. Specifically, the architect creates a “formal analogy” between one of his unrealized domicile projects and the overall design for the Parc de la Villette by Bernard Tschumi. Eleanor Morgan succinctly describes this idea of layering: The problem becomes how to represent the unrepresentable. They begin on a process of layering in which one site will be allegorically read through another. There will be three stages to their work: Derrida’s interrupted essay on Plato, Eisenman’s reaction to Derrida’s essay, and a previous

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building design that Eisenman created in Venice which echoes the grid pattern of the Parc de la Villette. It is hoped that this layering will rid the garden of any notion of origin or single authorship.11

These layered traces are in addition to the mixed influences of Derrida’s notion of khora and Eisenman’s idea of presentness on the project’s design and theoretical elaboration.12 In light of this rich mixture, Tschumi decides to make a symbolic change. His park originally had been generated by a “point grid,” one “staged to provide a common denominator between a text (Joyce’s Finnegans Wake) and a garden (London’s Covent Garden).” But he now says he wants to add Joyce “into the PlatoDerrida-Le Corbusier-Eisenman-Tschumi ‘equation.’ ” The park’s grid would therefore “provide the common point among [these six] uncommon commonalities.”13 We might add that the mere presence of the grid probably would not dominate the interplay among the six singularities or “voices.” This interplay and the park would therefore approximate our idea of a unity composed of difference. For his part, Derrida seems to have favored this layering and, at least in abstract terms, found it compatible with his ideas of khora and deconstruction.14 More generally, these ideas in the area of art are also congruent with Congressman Nicholas’s idea of a plain tablet when it comes to memorials in a democracy. Indeed, Derrida and his La Villette interlocutors speak at one point of letting the visitors to the park “write something new” as the only way to “open the circle of totality,” even of using sand and water (“sand for writing, water for erasing”) as a means of filling the plain tablet of art in a way that would simultaneously keep it open.15 Derrida sees his notions of spacing and indecidability as holding for works of art from whatever period. But his exchange with Smith and his comments on architecture suggest that both thinkers feel Derrida’s notions are most transparently illustrated by contemporary art. Indeed, many historians and philosophers of art characterize contemporary art in terms that are very close to Derrida’s as well as to Nicholas’s idea of the blank slate. Critically examining what some of these thinkers have said about contemporary art will help clarify those ideas further and also ensure that our own discussion of citizenship and public art will not be limited to traditional examples of public art. In particular, we will want to see how

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these considerations of contemporary art help us understand art of whatever period from two standpoints: on the one hand, art’s intrinsic heterogeneity and its consequent resistance to entrapment within a universal or oracular narrative of its meaning, and, on the other, the degree of autonomy or aesthetic agency art objects have in the production of their meaning or significance. We can begin by engaging the art history of Terry Smith and seeing how he treats the notion of “contemporaneity”— the idea that he and Derrida were discussing at the restaurant in the Gare du Nord train station in Paris.

CO NT E MP O R A N E I T Y

Terry Smith begins his What Is Contemporary Art? by claiming that “being contemporary” is the “only option” for art today. He adds that this situation is accompanied by “a sense that currency and contingency is all that there is in the world, all that there may ever be.” Indeed, he claims that ours is the only contemporary period in history in which its concerns are addressed “as an interrogation into the ontology of the present, one that asks: What it is to exist in the conditions of contemporaneity?”16 In answering this question, Smith distinguishes three conditions of contemporary art and adds to them three “world currents” and three “core ideas” of the ontological characterization of contemporary art as contemporaneity. The three conditions of contemporary art place contemporaneity in the flow of history. These conditions begin to emerge clearly in the 1950s–1980 and are familiar: globalization, inequity, and spectacle. He characterizes globalization as the accelerated desire to exploit the diminishing resources of the world and to ensure its “hegemony” over the increasing differentiation of cultures into a multitude of “asynchronous temporalities” (for example, the aboriginal cultures and arts coeval with those of modernity and postmodernity). In its turn, inequity refers to the peoples, classes, and individuals whose dreams of liberation threaten the states, ideologies, and religions dominating them. The last of the three conditions is the now pervasive infoscape or “spectacle.” It determines our diet of images and “mediated information” and provokes the resistance of “closed-knowledge communities” and the more open actions of “volatile subjects” and “rampant popular fundamentalisms.”17

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These three conditions of contemporary art—globalization, inequity, and spectacle—also spawn Smith’s three “world currents” or “antinomies”: the aesthetic of globalization, postcolonial multiplicity, and relational survivalism. The aesthetic of globalization is the most offensive to Smith: it consists of “retrosensationalism” (a money-making version of avantgardism without the latter’s “political utopianism” and “theoretic radicalism”) and “remodernism” (the attempts of modern art institutions to portray contemporaneity in art as only more recent modes of modernism). Much more palatable is the second world current, postcolonial multiplicity: the “plethora of art shaped by local, national, anticolonial, and independent values [such as] diversity, identity, and critique brought about by decolonization and the postcolonial turn.” Lastly, and the most promising for Smith, is “relational survivalism.” This world current consists of younger artists who have concern primarily for “the interactive potentialities” of the variety of material media and new communication technologies; these artists “seek to arrest the immediate, to grasp the changing nature of time, place, media and mood today,” including the sense in which these commonalities are becoming steadily “stranger” for us.18 After describing these world currents, Smith argues that each of the three is an “actual [kind] of art.” He cautions that they do not form a Hegelian synthesis: the remodernism and retrosensationalism of the aesthetic of globalization as the thesis, postcolonial multiplicity as the antithesis, and relational survivalism as the synthesis. He instead cites Derrida and claims that each of the currents is “irreconcilable and yet indissociable” with respect to the others, forming a “friction in relation to each other” from which ever more art projects are generated.19 Each, then, is its own voice, accompanied by its art-specific discourse, the interaction or “friction” among the three creating evermore new voices. These currents/kinds of art thus cohere with two of the political virtues we described in the previous chapter, heterogeneity and fecundity, but still leave mute or implicit the virtue of solidarity and the more explicit characterization we desire for the full idea of a unity composed of difference. In his discussion of these three world currents, Smith provides a very detailed analysis of a large number of artists and art objects and projects. This lends credibility to his codification of the conditions and currents we have just reviewed. But he also casts contemporaneity as an “ontology of the present” and encapsulates its meaning in the following quotation:

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Contemporaneity consists precisely in the acceleration, ubiquity, and constancy of radical disjunctures of perception, of mismatching ways of seeing and valuing the same world, in the actual coincidence of asynchronous temporalities, in the jostling contingency of various cultural and social multiplicities, all thrown together in ways that highlight the fast-growing inequalities within and between them.20

Smith indicates that this quote includes the three features that are at the “volatile core” of contemporaneity: multeity, adventitiousness, and inequity. These correspond roughly to at least the last two of the three currents we just discussed, postcolonial multiplicities and relational survivalism. More specifically, Smith means by “multeity” the coeval presence of asynchronous temporalities and the interaction among incommensurable cultural and social multiplicities. For example, contemporary art today encompasses a plethora of different temporalities: the historically pervasive and diverse attempts to use art as a vehicle for transcending time and encapsulating eternity; retro-sensationalist art and its obsession with instantaneity; the emphasis of modern art on the future; the predilection of contemporary art for multiple but incommensurable times; and a large number of other forms of art and temporality that Smith analyses.21 Although these temporalities are asynchronous, Smith emphasizes that a work of the contemporaneity variety cannot, like modern art, attempt to “resolve art” in favor of one alternative meaning or another but must “leave itself open . . . for whatever to come.”22 Even more startling, Smith approves of Jean-Michael Bruyère’s idea that the challenge for today’s art is to imagine the othernesses within us, our otherness within others, and the “possible exchanges between these othernesses as a world-wide economy, one that is occurring incessantly, everywhere, at once and in many distant places, always concrete and always connected.”23 In the same vein, Smith elsewhere quotes approvingly a statement by the anthropologist Marc Augé: “The world’s inhabitants have at last become truly contemporaneous, and yet the world’s diversity is recomposed every moment; this is the paradox of our day.”24 These aspects of contemporaneity echo the statements by Derrida on voice that we cited in chapter 3 and share a kinship with the view of society as a multivoiced body, of voices that intersect one another.

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Smith’s second core idea of contemporaneity, “adventitiousness,” attributes to art works the appreciation of chance and coincidence; and the third, “inequity,” makes sure that contemporary art does not forget to keep prominent the issues of poverty, racism, and, more generally, the oppressive role played by globalized capital and the distraction produced by spectacle in the arts and infoscape. If the first two core ideas (multeity and adventitiousness) capture the form of contemporaneity, the third (inequity) announces the oracles (globalized capital, spectacle, and infoscape) all three resist. Along with the accentuation of heterogeneity and fecundity, this resistance constitutes contemporaneity’s political dimension. Allied to these three core ideas is contemporaneity’s rejection of periodization and other attempts to set up “the overriding temporal framework.”25 Perhaps to ensure the constancy of this resistance, Smith states elsewhere that “the present may become, ‘perversely,’ ‘eternal’ . . . as a kind of incessant incipience, of the kind theorized by Jacques Derrida as à venir—perpetual advent, that which is, while impossible to foresee or predict, always to come.” Indeed, he feels that contemporaneity precludes any “deeper stability” or “overarching explanatory totality” and that “in the aftermath of modernity, and the passing of the postmodern, multeity, adventitiousness, and inequity may be all there is.”26 This emphasis upon an eternal albeit heterogeneous and interactive present clearly distinguishes contemporaneity from modernism’s penchant for the future. These core ideas of contemporaneity apply to architecture as well as to the other forms of art. Specifically, Smith brings up a topic that we will address in a later chapter, the 9/11 memorial and its surrounding buildings: The rebuilt site at Ground Zero—all architecture to come—should be shaped by heterogeneity, and designed in such a way that it never becomes a single, supreme symbol of any one ideology, way of life, or faith (and thus a target). It should never become an iconotype. . . . To counter fundamentalism wherever it occurs, the contemporaneity to come requires an architecture that is no longer subject to spectacle, to none of its many imperatives, to the specters of its forms. Nor should it retreat into compromise: the languages of architecture and design after the spectacle are emergent. We are witnessing their difficult birth. . . . The conditions of contemporaneity cannot be wished away.27

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Smith adds that in the aftermath of 9/11 those who desire “open communities” will have to confront the pervasive control afforded to governments by modern technologies and the increasing need for security. This includes the necessity of “interrogative architecture” to acknowledge the three conditions of contemporaneity.28 In other words, this form of architecture will, like Nicholas’s plain tablet, Lefort’s empty place, and Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection, have to resist the oracles that would muffle its voices and prevent the open communities in whose name they speak. The nature of this open community, its form of solidarity, one valorizing its heterogeneity and fecundity, is still not stated with specificity by Smith. Paul Wood approximates a version of this worry about solidarity. He criticizes Smith’s “mix” of antinomies (universalizing critique and singularizing particularity) for keeping the antinomies in play rather than going between them, for proposing a “pluralist relativism.” He finds it “difficult to conceive this as anything more than the elevation of eclecticism to a point of principle, licensed by the twin theses of the total absence of any underlying stability and the definition of the present as a state of permanent transition requiring continually provisional response.”29 But Wood may be guilty of reintroducing a totalizing paradigm that does not give heterogeneity and fecundity their due. In fairness to Smith, a more complete and critical treatment of Wood’s work would be required if there was room for it here.30 But in the current context, I wish only to suggest that my direction is to go between Smith and Wood in searching for a unity composed of difference, with a particular concern for being just to Smith’s emphasis on heterogeneity and fecundity. Because the criterion for public art as an act of citizenship is dependent upon the idea of solidarity as well as that of heterogeneity and fecundity, it too still remains in the dark—the darkness of an empty place whose vacancy must be filled without closing it up. Smith has indeed given us a panoramic view of contemporary art in a globalized world: three conditions of that art, three world currents, and three core ideas. In order to add to his and Derrida’s idea of contemporaneity, and to see if we can catch a fuller glimpse of the solidarity only fleetingly referred to by these two thinkers, we can examine what a growing number of historians and philosophers of art see as the two main axes of contemporary art. The first of these, heterochronicity, will add further specifications to Smith’s idea of contemporaneity’s asynchronic

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temporalities; the second, anachronicity, also will contribute to it, but, even more important for this particular chapter, it will additionally clarify and extend what we have said earlier about the aesthetic dimension of art and the agency or quasi-voice status of art objects.

H E T E R O C H R O N I C A N D A N AC H R O N I C T I M E H E T E R O C H R O NI C IT Y

In his book on visual time, Keith Moxey describes contemporary thinking about art and its history as involving two problems. The first concerns the struggle of this thinking to “translate” the “significance of alternative temporalities that intersect with the universalizing aspiration of its [own] narratives.”31 The urgency of the problem originates particularly with the “postcolonial awareness” of the asynchronicity of time.32 The second problem asks how such thought can theoretically grasp “its awareness of the life of images beyond the [historical and cultural] moment of their creation,” that is, account for the agency or autonomy of the aesthetic dimension of artworks.33 Moxey refers to these two problems as revolving around two “axes,” heterochronicity and anachronicity. His main task is to demonstrate the important ways in which the two axes are linked. But before we try to absorb the connection he draws between them, we should be clearer on what they are. Smith’s treatment of contemporaneity has already presented a good deal of what we need to know about heterochronicity; but the elaboration of it by Moxey and some other thinkers will add further clarification and present other important aspects of the asynchronicity of time in contemporary art. In particular, these thinkers will indicate how the two axes operated throughout history and not just in the contemporary period. Moxey captures the idea of heterochronicity by appealing to a striking example that concerns the work of a South African artist, Gerard Sekoto, painting in the 1940s. The style of his paintings is like that of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and other European “Post-impressionists.” But in the 1940s, the teleological arc of Western modernity and modernist painting had already moved beyond Sekoto’s favored genre to cubism,

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surrealism, and abstract expressionism. The work of the black Johannesburg painter is therefore excluded from the dominant teleological time of the Western narrative. Indeed, Moxey claims that “modernism’s narrative can operate only by excluding [Sekoto].”34 The political and economic forces of several centuries of world history have determined that Sekoto belongs to a different temporality, one that is not and never will be “synchronous with that of metropolitan modernism.” Although the exact meaning of the time of Sekoto’s work may still be hard to determine, Moxey concludes that at least we will be able to “see” it and to tell Sekoto’s story once we recognize fully that “modernism’s time is multiple,” that it “flows at different speeds in different situations.” In other words, we will achieve this openness once “art history has one paradigm by which to understand developments in one context and another to cope with those taking place in others and such paradigms are not hierarchically organized.”35 Moxey makes several comments about these heterogeneous temporalities that go beyond what we noted in our discussion of Smith’s idea of contemporaneity. Although clearly in accord with Smith’s emphasis on heterogeneity, Moxey argues that Smith’s idea of “a historical moment identified by irreconcilable antinomies,” one that is not “our time” or “a time,” still refers to a “particular temporal characteristic,” a “non-time” or “eternity” and thus to a “period,” the very designation that Smith thinks contemporaneity has rejected. Moreover, Moxey fears that if we do eliminate “universal time” and hence any narrative of time (with past, present, and future stages), we then will be unable to clearly specify differences in time—presumably there would be a chaos of temporalities—or to introduce new temporalities. We are necessarily attached to “an enduring compulsion to understand the contemporary as a period.”36 We therefore differentiate the contemporary from the past and the future even though it is not “dictated by any inherent characteristic” of the contemporary; we do it simply because of the need “to create distinctions in the texture of time” and “for a structure with which to deal with the trajectory from a shadowy past through the bright intensity of the present and on into a dim and unrecognizable future.”37 He concludes that we can legitimately “fabricate” such a heuristic structure and the distinction between past and present that goes along with it so long as we realize that these punctuations are “never permanent” and “depend on the interests of the now.”38

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The philosopher of art Peter Osborne agrees with Smith that contemporaneity is more than just a temporal period. He also agrees with Moxey that periodization is invented in response to the problems raised by radical heterogeneity. But Osborne differs from Moxey in that he thinks the heterochronicity of art is mistakenly rather than heuristically blanketed by the periodizing terms of historicists. More specifically and positively, he thinks contemporary art is really “a coming together” of “different but equally ‘present’ temporalities or ‘times,’ a temporal unity in disjunction, or a disjunctive unity of present times.”39 But he adds some further observations on heterochronicity that help flesh out the concept and seem to come closer than Smith to the missing unity that avoids chaos without sacrificing difference. He says that contemporaneity or the concept of the contemporary and the single historical time of the present it projects consist in four problematic but inescapably constituent propositions: the Kantian regulative “idea” of a disjunctive unity of times (as opposed to what would be an impossible sensory experience of all the possible times involved in this unity); a “structural anticipation” of the future (similar to Derrida’s idea of an indecidable “to come,” one that allows for the totally unexpected to appear and that deviates from the teleological version of the Kantian notion of an “idea,” as discussed in our chapter 3); a “fictional construction,” in that the concept “projects a non-existent unity onto the disjunctive relations between coeval times”; and thus a fiction that is “geopolitical,” the political unity of the disparate “spaces” of the world body.40 Osborne declares that this fourfold characterization of the concept of the contemporary is a “speculative proposition.”41 We can avoid the rigorous and detailed exposition he provides for the Hegelian roots of this notion by noting that he says structural anticipation is the part that makes the concept of the contemporary inherently speculative.42 This statement suggests that the most salient part of the meaning of the concept of the contemporary is its forceful and Derridian indecidability. But structural anticipation and the other three constituents of the concept of the contemporary are only part of the speculative proposition Osborne has in mind. He adds a historical but still critical dimension to this proposition and its indecidability: “contemporary art is postconceptual art.”43 Besides conceptualism’s historical proximity to the contemporary epoch, Osborne has both positive and negative critical reasons for identifying his speculative proposition with the latter. His positive reasons are

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conceptual art’s rejection of Kantian aestheticism and its emphasis on the role that concepts play in the construction of art works. By “Kantian aestheticism” he means accenting the pleasure that comes from the harmony established between an indeterminate concept and the form of a sensory object—between the faculties of understanding and imagination—in judging nature or an art work and deeming it universally beautiful.44 Osborne rightfully objects that such aestheticism neglects “the things of sensibility” by following a principled “indifference to the character of the objects that occasion judgement.” This by-passed character includes “the cognitive, relational, historical and world-disclosing dimensions of works of art.”45 Osborne (and many others before and after Kant) proposes instead an aesthetics that is based on the particular characteristics of the sensible objects themselves. He thinks this will mitigate the tendency of Kantian aestheticism or “art as aesthetic” to overlook that the artistic significance of the aesthetic dimension is relative to the historically variable cognitive, semantic, social, political, and ideological aspects of artworks internal to their critical structure.46 Because he recognizes the aesthetic qualities of sensible objects, Osborne does not accept conceptualism’s inclination to consider these qualities eliminable in the form of art that its adherents were advocating: “all art requires some form of materializations; that is to say, aesthetic— felt, spatio-temporal—presentations.” He therefore rejects the idea of a purely conceptual art but agrees with Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, and other avatars of conceptualism that art is necessarily “constituted by concepts, their relations and their instantiation in practices of discrimination.” This dual emphasis on aesthetics and conceptuality consolidates respectively the “post” and the “conceptualism” in Osborne’s speculative proposition that contemporary art is postconceptualism. But he adds the following three elements to postconceptualism in order to make it congruent with Smith’s, Moxey’s, and his own use of “contemporaneity”: (1) “the expansion to infinity of the possible material forms of art”; (2) “a radically distributive—that is, irreducibly relational—unity of the individual artwork across the totality of its multiple material instantiations, at any particular time”; and (3) “a historical malleability of the borders of this unity.”47 We can make these conditions of postconceptual art concrete and illustrate Osborne’s claim that contemporary art is postconceptual art by

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examining his treatment of Robert Smithson’s work. Osborne thinks Smithson’s art is emblematic of the ontological structure of postconceptual art because of “the relationship between its conceptual dimension (infinite in its possible actualizations) and its multiple actual materializations.”48 More specifically, he believes that Smithson’s guiding concept, the “site/ non-site” relation, is the spatial aspect of the more general relation between the aesthetic and the conceptual. In short, it is “the ontological structure of the postconceptual.”49 Although Smithson’s site/non-site concept goes through alterations and distinct materializations, the two elements of this formula are always “dialogically” or “dialectically” related: a site inspires the non-site that represents or “extracts” a concept from the galvanizing material of the site and at the same time transforms the latter into its site.50 As Smithson states this relation in a footnote to one of his articles, “is the Site a reflection of the Nonsite (mirror), or is it the other way around?”51 His answer is that both are mirrors and reflections of each other. In the example of Smithson’s most celebrated work, the Spiral Jetty, the artist’s site is a peninsula at the Great Salt Lake, Utah, composed of irregular beds of limestone “dipping gently eastward,” covered by massive deposits of broken black basalt, giving it and the region a “shattered appearance.” More succinctly, Smithson describes his site as a dormant movement: it is “a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness,” an “immobile cyclone,” a “dormant volcano spread into a fluttering stillness.” He declares that the possibility of the non-site, the Spiral Jetty, emerged from this “gyrating space.” He materialized this possibility and simultaneously made a site of the rotary by laboriously constructing a 1,500-foot long and 15-foot wide spiraling earthwork composed of mud, precipitated salt crystals, black basalt rocks, and water.52 In the very same rich paragraph, Smithson makes another visionary statement, one reminiscent of Nietzsche’s description of the Dionysian dimension of reality. He says that the “dialectics of site and non-site whirled into an indeterminate state.” In it, “solid and liquid lost themselves in each other,” as if “the mainland oscillated with waves and pulsations, and the lake remained rock still.” In it, “no ideas, no concepts, no systems, no structures, no abstractions could hold themselves together.” Therefore, it made “no sense wondering about classifications and categories, there were none.”53 Osborne picks up on this last fragment to further characterize his own notion of postconceptualism. He sees Smithson’s disavowal of categories,

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or rather the “transcategorial character” of his work, as veering toward a “meltdown of categorization,” that is, toward what Smithson calls “pure perception.” The Spiral Jetty is both a sculpture and not a sculpture; it is its own thing, and is only placed in one box or another (sculpture, earthwork, architecture, video, etc.) because, echoing Moxey, of our need for categories. Osborne indicates that this transcategorization is what allows him to construe contemporary art as postconceptual art and to mark the advent of a “postconceptual ontology of contemporary art in general.”54 We saw above that one of Osborne’s four constituents of the concept of the contemporary or contemporaneity is a geopolitical fiction, the unity of disparate spaces, of all the interrelated countries and other spaces on the globe. Although this fiction is necessary for us to conceptualize our global surroundings, this “will to contemporaneity” or projection leads to a key question that Osborne shares with Smith and Moxey, a question that frames our issue of citizenship and public art if we were to consider it at the global level: “How can art critically reflect and transfigure” such a world-wide arena?55 How can it be, in effect if not intent, an intellectual “Marxist internationalism by new transnational artistic means”?56 Osborne’s own answer to this question is first to note that the unity involved in the fictive projection of the will to contemporaneity can be thought of as a “we” that is “a conjunction of a plurality of temporally copresent ‘I’s.” He adds importantly that this “subject” of the contemporary form of unity is “distributed” and “speculative” rather than the homogenizing subject of modernity’s “collective dialectical” unity.57 The distributed aspect of this form of unity means that the contemporary takes modern art’s transitoriness or “contract with the future” and enfolds the latter within its “duration of a conjuncture” of the distributed “I”s or, “at its most extreme, [within] the stasis of its present moment.”58 This transformation of future-oriented art into a conjunctive duration of difference is complemented by the speculative aspect of the contemporary form of unity: the “freedom to make art from any of a potential infinity of material and ‘immaterial’ means.”59 Focusing on this freedom, Osborne appears to make it the negative or “critical” side of his speculative proposition that contemporary art is postconceptual art. This interpretation seems warranted because he ends his book with the statement that “at its best, contemporary art models experimental practices of negation that puncture horizons of expectation.”60 These punctured horizons include the modernist teleological narrative of

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art, capitalism’s reduction of life to exchange value, and any other projection into the future that would be more than an “anticipation”—that would be in fact the “expectation” of some specific end. In this sense, Osborne’s speculative proposition is compatible with the indecidability of Derrida’s (and Smith’s) temporality of “to come.” Indeed, the proposition, stripped of its historical reference to conceptualism, resembles Derrida’s indecidability wrapped in but not enclosed by the terminology of Hegel’s dialectic. Osborne’s treatment of the contemporary unity of art and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty suggest our own speculative notion of a unity composed of difference. It also brings to mind the materialization of that notion in the realm of art and politics: the creative interplay of society’s voices and their hoped-for resistance to the oracles that threaten their heterogeneity and fecundity. We will return to these implications after we have introduced the work of Georges Didi-Huberman and Moxey’s second axis of contemporary thinking about art, “anachronism.” Before turning to it, however, we should note that Osborne, like Smith and Moxey, shies away from any developed idea of the solidarity involved in this form of unity—the form that we are seeking to elucidate in a manner that avoids what these thinkers and most postmodernists and postconceptualists fear, the homogeneity usually associated with the notion of solidarity. Thus Osborne speaks of a “speculative collectivity of the historical present” but emphasizes only its negative critical meaning of “puncturing expectations.”61 His minimalist treatment of solidarity therefore highlights one of the tasks we still have ahead of us: to capture a notion of solidarity that does not minimize heterogeneity or fecundity and therefore can serve as a touchstone for the relationship between citizenship and public art.

A N AC H R O N I C I T Y

The views of heterochronicity presented by Smith, Moxey, and Osborne emphasize the heterogeneity of temporalities or, in our idiom, voices and their social discourses. This heterogeneity challenges the teleological narrative of art history traditionally sponsored by Western intellectuals. The challenge includes criticism of the Western narrative’s univocity and the cultural dominance it propagates. In its turn, anachronicity supports

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the idea that at least some art objects are aesthetically autonomous, capable of affecting those who encounter them in the present apart from any cultural or political meaning that they had in the past.62 This axis of contemporary thinking about art represents a turn toward images or icons and away from the linguistic turn that preceded it and which still dominates much of analytic and continental philosophy as well as many other disciplines in the contemporary period.63 The French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman is one of the most original proponents of this turn to the importance of the anachronicity of art objects, contemporary or otherwise. His version of the anachronic status of art objects reinforces the view of heterochronicity we have discussed. However he accomplishes this by paradoxically assigning an atemporality to the aesthetic dimension of art objects. In an article that summarizes his view, he illustrates the intricacies of anachronism through Fra Beato Angelico’s Madonna of the Shadows. The fresco was produced during the middle of the Italian Renaissance, in the fifteenth century. It is located in the east corridor of the dormitory of Florence’s San Marco monastery, situated between two of the corridor’s dormitory cells.64 The wall surrounding it is whitewashed. The fresco consists of two halves: a “Sacred Conversation” figure and, beneath it, a horizontal row of four painted panels of trompe l’oeil marble. At the center of the Sacred Conversation, the Madonna and Child are surrounded by a semi-circle of eight saints who are depicted as if they are conversing with one another. The perspective arrangement of the saints leads the eye up to the two central figures. Furthermore, the Madonna and Child appear against a background “wall” that is proportioned by a number of trompe l’oeil columns. As already noted, the bottom half is trompe l’oeil as well: the faux marble panels appear at eye-level and give the impression of extending outward as if they were the supporting ledge for the top half of the fresco. The marble panels are covered with red, green, yellow, and brown diagonal swaths of pigment. Fra Angelico also purposely flecked these swaths with erratic spots of white paint. As we will see, Didi-Huberman has much to say about these scattered flecks.65 We can view Didi-Huberman’s illustration as involving three different levels of anachronism. Each of these three is aimed at undermining what he calls “euchronistic consonance,” the art historian’s ideal of interpreting artworks of the past through reference to the visual categories of the

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period in which they originally were produced. More specifically, this euchronistic ideal involves knowing the period-based sources that will give us access to the “mental tool kit”—the technical, aesthetic, religious, and other sources—that made possible the artist’s pictorial choice at that time.66 The first level for undermining the euchronistic or received view of art history concerns the status of the sources for unearthing the artist’s tool kit. Didi-Huberman argues that two of the main commentators on Fra Angelico, Cristoforo Landino and Leon Battista Alberti, are only anachronistically rather than euchronisitically related to the Dominican artist. For example, the Latin in which Landino and Fra Angelico were versed reflect different time periods (Classical and Medieval, respectively) and thus disparate influences on their thinking. This difference can have a great impact even though Landino wrote of Fra Angelico only thirty years after the artist’s death and lived in the same city. In contrast, Fra Angelico and Alberti lived at the same time and in the same neighborhood. Yet Didi-Huberman shows that it is easy to imagine anachronistic factors separating them as well. He therefore concludes that these examples leave the “impression that contemporaries often fail to understand one another any better than individuals who are separated in time: all of the contemporaneities are marked by anachronisms.” There is, then, “no temporal concordance” of the sort that the euchronistic ideal would suggest.67 The second level on which Didi-Huberman attacks the art historian ideal involves the more positive idea that the necessity of anachronism is internal to the objects or images themselves. More specifically, he finds “at least three temporalities . . . anachronistic to one another” that express the “exuberance, complexity, and overdetermination” of images such as Fra Angelico’s Madonna. First, the trompe l’oeil marble frame of Madonna comes from a modern mimetism and a notion of perspectiva that is Albertian. It is therefore euchronistic in the period of Fra Angelico’s fresco. But Didi-Huberman adds that the mnemonic function of the color of the fresco is inspired by the idea of the figura in thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury Dominican manuscripts. The choice of color is therefore “oldfashioned,” that is, anachronistic relative to the time in which the fresco was created. Similarly, the dissimilitudo (dissemblance) of the painted surface of the fresco is an interpretation of a textual tradition that Fra Angelico had access to in San Marco’s library. This tradition included

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Albertus Magnus’s and Saint Thomas Aquinas’s commentaries on Dionysius the Areopagite. The library’s collection also included figural traditions from ancient times (semiprecious multicolored stones used in liturgy). These traditions came from Byzantium and entered Italy by way of Gothic art and the imitation marble statues of Giotto di Bondone at the Scrovegni Chapel. They too are anachronistic to Fra Angelico’s time but serve in producing a key theme of the fresco that expresses yet another temporal designation, “the mystical moment of the incarnation.”68 Besides this “montage of heterogeneous times forming anachronisms,” Didi-Huberman is quick to point out that the implements in the artist’s mental tool kit are also plastic in the sense of being constantly transformed by the hands and minds that use them. He gives the example of Fra Angelico’s “subversion” of four types of religious styles of speech: subtilis, facilis, curiosus, and devotus. In particular, we can view the linguistic facilis mode as expressed iconographically in the decorative register of the simple ornamental frame of the fresco, that is, the panel of trompe l’oeil marble that serves as the base for the Sacred Conversation (Mary, the Christ- Child, and the eight saints). Similarly, we can view the linguistic subtilis mode as expressing biblical exegesis and incarnational theology (liturgical, devotional, allegorical, performative, and mystical references) all now embodied in the physical and technical aspects of the Madonna fresco.69 Didi-Huberman concludes that the considerations on this second level indicate the image’s extreme overdetermination, playing “on several levels at the same time.” He declares that this “montage of difference” or “range of symbolic possibilities” can be understood and verified only via another set of possibilities: the more general “open range of meaning” whose “practical and theoretical conditions of possibilities had been forged by medieval exegesis.” He thinks of this as “a certain dynamic memory”— the images had “produced memory” even prior to the later Giorgio Varsari (1511–1574) and the origin of the formal history of art that he inaugurated: It is to memory and to its medieval “art” that is owed the montage of heterogeneous times by which, on our painted surface, a mystical notion of the fifth century—that of pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite with regard to mottled marble—can be found there, ten centuries later, surviving and

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transformed, inserted into the context of a thoroughly “modern” and Albertian perspective.70

The “mottled marble” in the quoted sentence refers to the third level that Didi-Huberman thinks undermines the euchronistic view of art history and establishes in its place “the sovereignty of anachronism.”71 The anachronism involved here is probably the most astonishing from DidiHuberman’s point of view: the white paint that Fra Angelico sprinkled on the faux marble surfaces. This part of the fresco has been overlooked by commentators and has been even left out of most of its reproductions in books. But Didi-Huberman reacted to it completely differently: in “a present” that saw itself “stopped in its tracks and simultaneously born in the experience of the gaze,”72 in a Proustian “involuntary moment” brought about by his encounter with this painterly conceit, he was mesmerized by an “irruption or appearance of time”—the “more-than-present” of the artist of the “more-than-past.”73 Didi-Huberman speculates that this encounter occurred because of a “displaced resemblance” between Fra Angelico’s spots and the centuries later “drippings” on canvas by the Jackson Pollock Didi-Huberman so admires. This connection, he assures us, has nothing to do with any possible historical connection between the Dominican Fra and the abstract expressionist. The white splatters are an “incongruity,” the emergence of a “new object to see” outside the explanations of the standard historical approach, “an almost aberrant moment, like a symptom in historical knowledge.”74 It also makes clear that Fra Angelico’s veritable constellation or “made image” of “heterogeneous times” can occur again and again in all the present moments of the future, its past either momentarily left behind or never known, an anachronic aesthetic event.75 We  can add that its peculiar transhistoricity, an event outside of any particular period, makes it yet another distinct member of the heterochronicities that we now see to inhabit all of history and not just the contemporary or postconceptual periods. Didi-Huberman concludes his reflections on his auspicious encounter by suggesting the implications this event has for historians and other thinkers on art. His main suggestion is that we not confine ourselves to the euchronistic ideal; that instead we recognize the power and pervasiveness of the anachronistic. To accomplish this recognition, we should

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neither get so close to the art object that we can hang any “phantasm” on it nor so far from it that we consign it to a euchronistic death. He counsels us instead to work within the “differential tempo” of the unexpected moments, on the one hand, and those of careful “critique and verification,” on the other. In short, he proposes an “overinterpretive science” for the history of the “overdetermined,” the “polychronistic, heterochronistic, or anachronistic” objects of art: indeed, is not “the history of art itself an anachronistic discipline?”76

T HE I N T E R S E C T I O N O F H E T E R O CH RO NICIT Y A N D  ANAC H R O NI CIT Y

We have seen that Moxey shares with Derrida, Smith, Osborne, Smithson, and Didi-Huberman a heterochronicity view of time: “time [is] multiple and asynchronic” and “its nature depends on the location in which it takes place.”77 The second clause reminds us that these times are always the times of particular cultures and their art: they are temporal forces, and each artwork expresses some substantive content even if it is just the negation of narrative or other figurative meaning. Each is incommensurable with the rest in that any common term that would unify them can only be a “historical myth” no matter how necessary it is for our own peace of mind or professional task of periodization.78 In our terms, each is a singular voice. Nonetheless, Moxey also agrees with Didi-Huberman and many others that there is an anachronic time or “aesthetic time” that accompanies heterochronic or “historical time.” Moxey discusses a number of different proponents of the idea that images and icons have a power that is independent of their original historical setting and the meaning they had there. He notes the many different but related ways they have of expressing this power of the art-object’s aesthetic dimension—how it endows the art object with a “life of [its] own,” with “agency,” gives it the status of being a “presence” or “presentation” rather than a “representation,” or provides it with an “aura.”79 Like Didi-Huberman, he holds that we should be sensitive to the aura of art objects and “take note of what [these objects] ‘say’ before we try to force them into patterns of meaning.”80 In more hyperbolic terms, he declares that the aesthetic aura “escapes time” or

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“creates” a time outside the historical period in which the object originally occurred.81 Having affirmed both heterochronicity and anachronicity, how does Moxey think these two temporal axes intersect? He suggests two ways. The first is that both in their separate manners undermine the idea that there is a “natural hierarchy of times.”82 They suggest that any hierarchical arrangement would be due to an artificial imposition. Heterochrony’s historical time does this by manifesting difference everywhere; and anachrony’s aesthetic time accomplishes it by disturbing a temporal framework with its unexpected appearance and force. In our terms, the faux natural hierarchy of times challenged by heterochrony and anachrony would not be a unity composed of contesting differences but a unity that dominates and silences them. In other words, it would be what we have been calling an oracle. It would be acceptable at most only if the imposition is done for the heuristic, transparent, and reversible reasons that Moxey favors. The two axes also intersect in a second way: even though the aesthetic or auratic dimension of an artwork may allow it to break free of its station in the past and thus create a new time, the responses to it in the present will always vary with the cultural and personal backgrounds of the respondents, that is, with the specific heterochronic times in play at that moment. We saw this in the case of the drip paintings by Pollock that sensitized Didi-Huberman to the trompe de l’oeil portion of Fra Angelico’s fresco. Thus Moxey states that “the ways in which objects call to us, their animation, their apparent autonomy, stem only from their association with us” and the heterochronic times within which we exist. We therefore must recognize the “independence [of these objects] but also their dependence on human culture.”83 The eternal reappearance of anachronistic objects help break up the conventional periodicity of historical time, and heterochronicity adds to this heterogeneity of time by ensuring that the aesthetic presence of these objects will always be affected (received as alluring, distressing, or in some other mode or understanding) by the disparate temporal frameworks in which we receive them. This relationship between heterochronic voices and anachronic art objects is a special instance of the more encompassing relation between linguistic discourse and images, words and things, expression and content.

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We discussed this relation earlier, appealing to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of reciprocal presupposition. We also observed the way expression and objects interacted in the relation between Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection and its focus, Manhattan’s Union Square. Moxey refers to this as the problem of “ekphrasis”: Translating the potential of the image into meaning is what ekphrasis does; it is both its enduring contribution and its fatal curse. As description attempts to bring the image to life before our eyes, it also blinds us to it, substituting a text for the image and an author for the artist. Ekphrasis, or description, is what remains when the meaning of what we see eludes us.84

Moxey illustrates the issue of ekphrasis illuminatingly through an analysis of some paintings by Pieter Bruegel and how his images are always in excess of the words that would repeat them. Moreover, Moxey feels that the issue of ekphrasis and the relation between heterochronicity and anachronicity are parallel to one another: “the apparent failure of ekphrases to encounter the objects they address, the way that words slide past the images they seek to capture, parallels the evident incompatibility of different time systems.”85 We shall reengage the issue of the relation between discourse and art objects later on. Indeed, we will revisit a point made in our chapter 2 discussion of Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection— that art objects have the status of “quasi-voices” and thus are a “vocal” part of the interplay among the voices constituting the setting of public artworks. For now, it will suffice to note Moxey’s feeling that even if “the visual struggles to escape the ever-encroaching embrace of language,” and “local forms of time fight, often in vain, to free themselves from universal time,” we still need language and temporal narratives to grasp images from cultures other than our own.86 We just need to remember that these linguistic and temporal structures and the translations they permit are at most heuristic and malleable fictions. Indeed, we will have to see if or how this claim might affect our particular task of establishing a criterion for assessing public art as acts of citizenship in a democracy. We will address this issue head on in our final chapters.

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T H E S O C I A L T U R N TO PA R T I C I PATO RY A RT A N D T H E D EG R A DAT I O N O F T H E A E S T H E T I C

The art that we have discussed thus far has been visual. But more recently a number of artists have moved—made a “social turn”—toward “participatory art.” In her supportive but critical book on the topic, Claire Bishop characterizes this artistic form of participation as one “in which people constitute its central artistic medium and material, in the manner of theater and performance.”87 In other words, a painting, photo, film, or other visual and often passively received product is not the main emphasis of this art; rather, its artists tend toward a non-hierarchical, interactive process among participants—including the artist and the audience—that places value on “what is invisible: a group dynamic, a social situation, a change of energy, a raised consciousness.”88 More specifically, the socialpolitical aim of participatory art is to emancipate us from “the dominant ideological order” by “forg[ing] a collective, co-authoring, participatory social body” in either of two ways: directly, by constructing a “utopian realization” of such a body, or indirectly, by parody or other means that reveal and condemn the dominant order.89 Although Bishop is a strong supporter of participatory art, she notes both its negative as well as positive aspects.90 The negative aspect she feels most strongly about concerns the aesthetic dimension of art. She laments that this dimension has been overlooked—even eschewed as an unnecessary or debilitating distraction—by many of the adherents of this more recent art form. She therefore aims to correct its prioritizing of the “ethical” over the “aesthetic.”91 For example, the very successful Turkish artists’ collective, Oda Projesi, invited a well-known artist to participate in a children’s workshop, a sculptor to partake in a community picnic, and a theater group to organize a children’s parade. These and other projects were suggested by the collective’s neighbors rather than urged upon the latter by the group. Bishop’s interviewees from the collective felt that these projects contributed to “a more creative and participatory social fabric” and in that manner challenged the “over-organized and bureaucratic society” in which they and the larger community lived. The members of the collective were particularly insistent that they

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preferred to judge their work by this collaborative criterion rather than aesthetic concerns. Indeed, they considered “the aesthetic to be ‘a dangerous word’ that should not be brought into the discussion.”92 In response to the opinion of the collective, Bishop points out that its members overlook that the social dialogue and the affective intensity of social exchange experienced by their neighbors as well as other aspects of their work are aesthetic in character and complementary to their social or “ethical” criterion.93 These two aspects—the aesthetic and the ethical or political—together give their projects the status of art and make them more than just instruments for social change. Through analyses of many participatory artworks, Bishop repeatedly demonstrates the often unacknowledged presence of this aesthetic dimension. She concludes her comprehensive effort by stating that participatory art’s use of people has always given it a “double ontological status: it is both an event in the world, and at one remove from it.” More specifically, this form of art “communicates” to participants and spectators at two levels: it reveals “paradoxes that are repressed in everyday life,” on the one hand, and “elicits perverse, disturbing and pleasurable experiences that enlarge our capacity to imagine the world and our relations anew,” on the other. But Bishop adds tellingly that participatory art requires a “mediating third term” (an object, image, story, film, or a spectacle) in order to attain the second of these two levels. Without this third term, without the aesthetic dimension of participatory art, our experience of it would not be able “to have a purchase on the public imaginary.”94 In the lines concluding Artificial Hells, Bishop emphasizes a related point she has argued for throughout her book. She does not think participatory art is a “privileged political medium” or a “ready-made solution to a society of the spectacle.” It has its role to play on both these counts; but it is like Nicholas’s plain tablet with respect to art and kin to Lefort’s empty place in relation to democracy, that is, to our “two vacancies to fill.” Thus Bishop says that participatory art is “as uncertain and precarious as democracy itself; neither are legitimate in advance but need continually to be performed and tested in every specific context.”95 These quoted words brings us back to our broader project of the relation  between politics, particularly democracy, and public art. In this regard, Bishop states flatly that the philosophers Alain Badiou and Jacques

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Rancière are “at the center” of opposition to the reduction of art and politics to the “ethical turn.”96 Her mention of them is propitious for two reasons. The first is that examining the political and aesthetic thought of these two thinkers will allow us to fill in the groundwork we still need before we directly engage the relation between these two themes in our treatment of Millennium Park and New York’s 9/11 memorial. In particular, these two philosophers will help us address further the meaning of democracy (first theme) and whether the aesthetic dimension of public art detracts from or adds to its political dimension (second theme). These two dimensions—the aesthetic and the political—and what can be a creative tension between them are salient for the criterion we are seeking concerning public art as an act of citizenship. The second reason for the noteworthiness of Bishop’s comment about Badiou and Rancière is its relation to Rancière’s treatment of art: we will use Bishop’s view of participatory art to reveal that Rancière’s “aesthetic regime of art” is not inclusive enough about the kind of art that can harbor a favorable relation between the aesthetic and political dimensions of public artworks. The voices of Badiou and Rancière, then, will contribute to our agonistic choir.

5 DEMOCRACY AND PUBLIC ART Badiou and Rancière

T

here are several reasons why I am reserving a chapter-long treatment of two more thinkers on democracy and public art. In relation to democracy, Badiou and Rancière develop political ontologies that are significantly different than those that were offered to us by Rawls and Derrida in chapter 3. Examining them will give us a more complete imaginative variation of democracy’s possible meanings. This will help develop further the view of agonistic democracy as a creative interplay of voices that resists autocracy and other oracles. In turn, this advance will help ensure that the political part of the criterion we are constructing will be able to assess public artworks in light of how they support, reimagine, or denigrate democracy. Furthermore, Badiou and Rancière, in their different ways, suggest further variations of the philosophical notion of “event,” that is, of an occurrence that exceeds its conditions, is singular (nothing else like it), and interrupts the status quo. This will aid us in honing the version of event that we will ultimately use to characterize democracy and the criterion for public art. Finally, Badiou’s and Rancière’s provocative ideas of citizenship will contribute to our critical development of that political concept. In relation to public art, we saw that Claire Bishop said Badiou and Rancière are at the center of those who oppose the “ethical turn” away from the aesthetic dimension of art. Our critical attention to them will therefore take us a step further in developing the aesthetic part of the

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criterion of public art. That part, as we have seen, concerns the internal relation between the aesthetic and political dimensions of an artwork. It is also pertinent to the status of the artwork as a “quasi-voice.” Indeed, we will appropriate one of Rancière’s notions, the “aesthetic regime of art,” in order to construct a version of the internal relation between the aesthetic and political dimensions of public artworks. In short, we are treating Badiou’s and Rancière’s views at length in order to determine further the characteristics of democracy and art that we must take into account to formulate our criterion of public art as an act of citizenship. Because this chapter is necessarily more lengthy than most of the others, I will divide it into two parts, one on democracy and citizenship (the political ontologies of the two thinkers) and the other on public art and democracy (their political aesthetics). We will start with the former part because the political ontologies of Badiou and Rancière are necessary for understanding the two thinkers’ views on art.

PA RT I : D E M O C R AC Y A N D C I TIZE N S H I P B ADI O U ’ S P O L I T I C A L O NTO LO GY

Badiou and Derrida hew to the political left. This is reflected in their philosophies. Badiou’s thought, however, is more strongly inflected by Marxist and Maoist forms of communism.1 Perhaps for this reason Badiou adopts what he refers to as a Platonic view of the event, that is, the event as responsible for the possibility of universal and eternal truths.2 This version of the event implies that materializations of the truths associated with it are “possible.”3 It therefore deviates sharply from what we learned of Derrida’s own view of the unconditional event in chapter 3: that the non-regulative idea of democracy to come is “possible only as impossible.” We will want to see if Badiou’s alternative formulation of the event—his communist-oriented idea of democracy and equality— can successfully negotiate the dilemma of diversity (and the related problem of accommodating Claude Lefort’s notion of democracy as “the image of an empty place”) with which we confronted Derrida, Rawls, and ourselves. The nature of Badiou’s and Rancière’s success or failure

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will, as I said, help us in further formulating the criterion of public art as an act of citizenship.

Being and the Void In the first century CE, the Jew and citizen of Rome, Paul of Tarsus, experienced an epiphany and became a leading apostle of the dead and resurrected Jesus of Nazareth. In short, the later Saint Paul was considered a major proponent of what came to be called Christianity. In Saint Paul, Badiou introduces two of his key ideas through concrete examples: the idea of an event through the resurrection of the crucified Jesus, and the notion of truth through Saint Paul’s declaration of that event. Badiou himself is not a believer in resurrection or other religious ideas.4 But he feels referring to Saint Paul might bring from the past a figure who can help meet the present need for a new exemplar of what Badiou will call the “party militant.” This need has become especially acute since the demise of leaders such as Lenin and his Bolsheviks.5 Moreover, his own favored idea of communism as an event can easily be substituted for the resurrection. We will make this substitution later in relation to Badiou’s idea of democracy. That idea will be different than the “capitalist-parliamentarianism” of current democracies.6 In Saint Paul, Badiou succinctly states the aim of his philosophy: “to refound a theory of the Subject that subordinates its existence to the aleatory dimension of the event as well as to the pure contingency of multiplebeing without sacrificing the theme of freedom.”7 I have explicated the terminology in this sentence through a painstaking exposition of Badiou’s use of set theory and other technical terminology. To avoid taking us on an overly arduous journey, I have placed that exposition and its full documentation in the appendix to this book. I will provide here a truncated and more immediately accessible version of it. The notion of “multiple-being” is based on what Badiou welcomes as a “meta-ontological” and unverifiable “decision.”8 The decision asserts that set-theory or mathematics is an ontology and claims that a multiple includes only “multiplicities,” each of which is a multiple.9 Multiples themselves are indifferent to things, sensory qualities, or any other content we might assign to their elements.10 But they take on content, are no longer an uncounted “nothing,” as soon as the operation “count-as-one” creates

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what Badiou calls a “situation.” This self-created situation is split into two absolutely incommensurable but nonetheless indissociable multiplicities: a knowable “consistent multiplicity,” on the one hand, and an unknowable “inconsistent multiplicity,” on the other. The galaxies, persons, and other such elements that constitute the consistent multiplicity (the world as you and I normally know it) are referred to as “counted-as-one,” and the inconsistent multiplicity as “nothing” or “not-one.” Anything that is “presented” is ipso facto counted as one; the count operates on the not-one, the inconsistent multiplicity, leaving us to presuppose correctly that prior to the count the one is not—that there is something more basic than the countedas-one that gets counted.11 The ontological task is to discern through thinking (rather than sensory experience) the inconsistent multiplicity. But this must be done without the ontologist thereby counting it as one, without defining it and making it part of the consistent multiplicity.12 Badiou also refers to the inconsistent multiplicity as the “void,” as the nothing (the uncounted) from which everything precedes.13 “Void” is therefore the proper name of being (being qua being). More exactly, and for reasons that stem from Badiou’s use of set theory (see the appendix), the void is included but not presented, not known, in what it founds, the consistent multiplicity.14 Badiou holds that the operation itself of counting is also unpresented, unlike the counted as one that results from this act.15 Badiou is not satisfied with only one count. Because the act itself of counting is not presented in the situation, its efficacy in counting all the subsets in the situation is unpredictable: it might not count the subsets that can remain in excess of what is initially presented in the situation. These subsets must, then, be controlled by a second structuring: “it is necessary that the structure [the original consistent multiplicity] be structured [once more].”16 Badiou states that the motivation for this second structure is “anxiety” over the “errancy of the void,” that the situation is “haunted” by the danger of being overflowed by the multiples of the inconsistent multiplicity and that the one (the consistent multiplicity) might thereby be disrupted.17 To eliminate this danger, Badiou postulates that the situation adds a “metastructure,” a “state of the situation,” to the initial structuring. This new structure provides a “count of the count,” that re-presents or “represents” the terms of the initial count. For example, the government or state, as the primary metastructure, determines who

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qualifies as a citizen of the state (a subset) rather than just who is an individual with a cluster of personal qualities (the presented elements of the first count).18 Only an unexpected event, one that in some sense evades the constraints of the count, could break through the “one” of the state. This event has a positive meaning to go along with its fearful countenance as an eruption in the situation and the state. But to comprehend this meaning, and to add a qualitative or historical materialization to the abstract formal features we’ve been previewing, we can appeal to concrete examples from Saint Paul along with further formal language from Being and Event.

The Event and Its Site Badiou provides a scholarly history of Saint Paul and his times. But our focus will be on Badiou’s use of Saint Paul to illustrate his major philosophical concepts, including those that we have already covered. Badiou begins his book on Saint Paul by invoking what he feels are the limitations of current French society. He claims that the “articulated whole” (a consistent multiplicity) of the French situation consists of or counts two intertwined forces: the “capitalist monetary abstraction” and “identitarian” or communitarian “closed identities” (such as proletariat or bourgeoisie, Jew or Catholic). The monetary abstraction does not count the “free human life” that could interrupt its homogenizing universality; for their part, the closed identities fragment society and promote “relativist ideology.” These two forces—monetary abstraction and closed identities—simultaneously draw upon and discredit each other.19 Together they constitute Badiou’s idea of “the state of the situation,” that which, as we saw, counts the count of the situation into its governing metastructure. Most importantly, capitalism and communitarianism work to constrain that which would break the “unity of [their] count.” He calls that interrupting force the “singularity” of a “truth procedure” (introduced by an event) that is “immediately universalizable.” The truth procedure would interrupt the “axiomatic principle” that governs the “repetitive series” of the capitalist and communitarian situation.20 In Saint Paul, the situation of the Roman Empire at the beginning of Christianity has the same form as the situation of contemporary France. The state of the Roman Empire consists in the symbiotic relation between

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two otherwise very different doctrines: the universal philosophical-moral laws of the Greek cosmological discourse and the communitarian vision of Jewish religion and law.21 Saint Paul’s break with these two discourses and their laws occurs when, on the road to Damascus, he is “summoned” by a “secret Voice” and has his epiphany. Badiou characterizes this voice as a subjective sign of the event proper, the resurrection of the dead Christ.22 The event itself exceeds, indeed is formally prohibited entry by, Badiou’s mathematical ontology: it is “that-which-is-not-being-qua-being.” This phrase reflects the title of Badiou’s book: Being (the inconsistent multiplicity) and Event (that which “is not” and exceeds being as being). The event introduces “historicity” into the formal demeanor of the ontological axioms of the ontology.23 More specifically, the event is a multiple composed of two elements. The first element consists of the elements of the “evental site.” The event presents those elements and thereby keeps itself related to a historical situation.24 In the case we are examining, the key element of the evental site is the death of Jesus and the presumed reconciliation of God and humans it marks—that is, God’s “immanentization” or renunciation of “his transcendent separation” from humans. This death constructs the evental site only if the event of the resurrection (which can’t be inferred directly from the reconciling death) “will have been addressed” to the subjective situation of people. Just as the reconciling death is the “given” of the evental site, so resurrection and salvation are the given of the event.25 The evental site/reconciling death is the condition of the event/ resurrection, but fulfills this role only if the event is actually materializable, only if it “will have been” always the event it presumably is.26 We will see in the next section what more is required for this materialization to take place. For now, we also must understand the evental site in terms of belonging and inclusion. This is important because it will help us see that the realization of the event is going to require a pure subjective “decision” and militants or true believers that must follow a “truth procedure.” The steps to that conclusion are a bit complex. First, a “normal” multiple is both present/belonging to and included/represented in the situation: counted twice, once by the situation, once by the state or metastructure.27 For example, the crucifixion of the rebel Jesus, a criminal by the lights of the state, is counted twice (as a person, and then as a criminal). In contrast, the evental site differs from the normal multiple—is

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abnormal—because none of its elements, for example those related to the resurrection (the auspicious Death and other miraculous items related to it, but not the resurrection itself), are present or represented in the situation; only the normal dead, not the dead as reconciling God and humans, belong to the situation’s count-as-one. Therefore only the site itself, not its elements, is present in (belongs to, is an element of) the situation: from the structured situation’s standpoint, the evental site is like an empty container with nothing inside it. The site is therefore what Badiou calls a “totally singular” multiple: presented, but not its elements; belonging to but not included/represented in the metastructure.28 Although this total singularity is an anomaly relative to the structured situation, it is also distinct from the multiples of the void, none of which are presented in/belonging to the situation. For technical set-theory reasons (see appendix), Badiou can also say paradoxically that the void, unlike the evental site and the event, is included/represented in the situation, indeed, universally, in every part of it.29 Badiou therefore says that the evental site is “on the edge of the Void”—immanent in the situation but not included/represented in it.30 To proceed from the edge of the void to the event that will mobilize it for changing the situation, we should now turn to the event’s second element. The first element of the event, the uncounted elements of the evental site, was surprising enough. But its second element purposely defies the standard set-theory rule that a set cannot be an element of itself. Badiou contravenes this rule and stipulates that the event itself, by way of the pure and immanent signifier of itself (its name), is “self-belonging” and is thus an element of itself.31 The event cannot present the elements it possesses of the evental site, for then it would be a normal multiple and counted by the metastructure or state as well as by the first count of the situation. But it can use its self-belonging as an element to present in the situation and thereby belong to it. This qualifies the event as a singularity in the strict sense of the term (one of its elements is presented) and “blocks [the] total singularization” that we saw characterized the evental site (none of whose elements are presented).32 More specifically, this belonging of the event to the situation via its self-belonging “comes down to saying that [the event] is conceptually distinguished from its site by the interposition of itself between the void and itself.”33 If its self-belonging did not save it from not presenting itself, it would be like the void, technically “nothing.”

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As I said, these steps are complex, though we are nearing the end. These qualifications of the event lead us to a form of undecidability that is as challenging as the version we encountered with Derrida in chapter 3. Because the situation presents the event’s self-belonging, Badiou says the event appears to “fall under the count-as-one” of the state and is therefore like any other term of the situation.34 But if that is so, the event could introduce nothing radically new in the situation, and would not help us see that the elements of the evental site are actually elements of an event— would not aid us in seeing that the dead Jesus is actually the guarantee of universal resurrection and salvation; nor, to take another example, would it help us in realizing that exploited and alienated workers have been and perhaps still are the harbingers of a world-historical event, a revolution producing a classless society. More specifically, the event would not be able to “relate to the particularity of a situation from the bias of the void”; it, like the site, would remain only on the “edge” of the void.35 This path indicates, then, that we cannot say the event is presented in the situation. On the other hand, if the event is not presented in the situation, then “nothing is presented by it from the standpoint of the situation.” Its name, though one of its two elements, would be addressed only to the void and not to us or anything else in the situation.36 The event would not have achieved its “fundamental ontological” purpose: “to name or inscribe the situated void for which it is an event,” to “call forth” or “convocate” the void so that we can see that the situation limits us and then act upon that revelation.37 It would be as if “the Resurrection” or the “French Revolution” were only “pure” words and that “nothing of such sort ever took place”;38 the event would have little ability to induce us to militancy on behalf of the truth to which it would have linked us—Paul simply would have dismissed the “summoning Voice” or epiphany as the result of too much sun and kept on his way to Damascus. If, then, the event should appear to us in either of these two conditions, too much like the situation or too different from it, it wouldn’t be able to tell us whether it is really an event or not and hence whether a given site is really “evental.” Thus Badiou states the problem this way: “If there exists an event, its belonging to the situation of its site is undecidable from the standpoint of the situation itself.”39 We really aren’t able to say if the event belongs or not to the situation of its site.

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For Badiou, this conundrum means that we are left with simply “deciding” that the name of the event presents itself in the situation and nonetheless introduces something radically novel; that the event itself, and not the state, is doing the counting-as-one in this case; that its interposition between itself and the void “ruptures the site’s [being] ‘on-the-edgeof-the-void’” and, like the voice St. Paul heard, summons us to truth.40 But this means that subjectivity must then play a role in taking the name of the event seriously, turn it into a truth, and thereby verify that the decision about the name’s import was correct.41 More specifically, we need to make an “interpretive intervention.”42 We need to “declare” the event’s belonging to the situation and thus “force the situation to confess its own void, and to thereby let forth, from inconsistent being and the interrupted count, the incandescent non-being of an existence,” the event itself.43 Instead of prohibiting the irruption of the void and the event’s emergence, Saint Paul’s declaration in response to the summoning Voice decides the undecidable and forces this new truth onto an unsuspecting world.44 The event, a creative force in the world, proposes a possibility whose name is a regulative Idea, but the fulfillment of this name or Idea depends “on the way in which [this possibility] is grasped, elaborated, incorporated and set out in the world,” what Badiou calls a “truth procedure.”45

Truth Procedures and Interpretive Interruption In Saint Paul, Badiou fills in the steps by which any militant carries out and is transformed by the declaration of the event. This declaration is the “decision”—rather than a verification—that the event and the Idea it suggests is present in the situation despite its heterogeneity or supplementary status. The declaration inaugurates a truth that “groups together all the terms of the situation which are positively connected to the event.”46 Because this grouping is a process that takes place over time, it is more properly called a “truth procedure.” In gathering evental terms, it simultaneously breaks with the principles and identitarian subjectivities that lack an organic truth and constitute the metastructure of the situation.47 It includes “interpretive interventions” whose function is “to make a name out of an unrepresented element of the [evental] site,” that is, to change the completely anonymous name of the nameless event into one that is proper

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to the occurrences of the site, for example, resurrection or revolution.48 Adding the name therefore helps the event establish itself between the void and the site in league with the “interventional retroaction” of the truth procedure.49 The state misses this establishment of the event because only the site as a set (not its subversive elements) is presented within the situation that the state has meta-structured; the name of the event therefore has no initial significance for the state.50 But the intervention itself requires evental recurrence for its possibility: the time of truth, apart from the time of the structured situation, is “intervention itself, thought of as the gap between two events.” In other words, the circulation, the inherent repetition, of an event that has already been decided is “the real of the conditions of the possibility of intervention” from the very beginning: other virtual resurrection-like events or other attempts at revolutions must be possible for any one of them to have the intervention they require for their existence: “an intervention is what presents an event for the occurrence of another.”51 This symbiotic relation between the event and interventions means that “speculative leftism” makes a self-defeating mistake when it glorifies the occurrence of the event at the expense of its consequences, that is, the infinite number of possible interventions. That number is also the basis for the truth’s status as “eternal.”52 The completeness of the radical break involved in the declaration and its aftermath is made clear by the singularity and universality of the truth procedure. From within the initial count of the situation, the truth procedure is included/represented but not present there: it is not recognized as a truth by the state of the situation. It is therefore formally called an “excrescence” and is not yet a singularity. However, the truth procedure becomes a singularity if it finally “forces” the existence of a novel situation, one in which it is now presented but no longer represented in the metastructure of the original state. In other words, it remains indiscernible in relation to what still counts as standard knowledge but is nonetheless immanent in the situation and received as such. An example of this would be the recognition that there are now Christians or resurrectionists as well as the Jews and Greeks that were counted there before; or, to take the other example, revolutionaries who before were recognized only as workers.53

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Besides being singular, the truth procedure is also universal in that it is free of identitarian or communitarian beliefs and commitments.54 It includes everyone in principle: anyone can be resurrected or otherwise free of the constraints of the original metastructure. Another way of expressing this universality is to say that it is a “generic” truth. This term “positively designates that what does not allow itself to be discerned is in reality the general truth of a situation, the truth of its being, as considered as the foundation of all knowledge to come.” Put negatively, “generic” indicates that the truth is, like the indiscernible, that which “makes a hole” in the knowledge that characterized the preceding situation.55 The eternal temporality of the intervention/event relation discussed above places a special duty on those declaring a truth. These militants must practice “fidelity” to the truth procedure through an “organized control” of the time of the intervention.56 In doing so, each of them is transformed from being a “human animal” into an “immortal subject.”57 Being immortal in this general context does not mean everlasting life or resurrection. Rather, the militants are immortal insofar as they are faithful in the here and now to the idea that the verification of this infinite and hence eternal truth will show that the event was truly an event—that it did actually break with the count and introduced something entirely new. In that case, the event “will have been” addressed to humanity all along.58 Moreover, the universality of the truth procedure—its inclusiveness of everyone—will establish a community of equals. We can make the idea of the militant more concrete by seeing how Badiou treats it in relation to Saint Paul as an “apostle.”

The Subject and Its Virtues: Justice, Faith, Hope, and Love It will help to note at this juncture that we are moving from revolutionary events and their truth to Badiou’s view of the virtues required of the militants for carrying out the procedures, to a proper ethics, and then to democracy and the communist hypothesis followed by a criticism of Badiou’s idea of democracy. To begin with the virtues, Paul is the “apostle” or militant of the “Good News” of the resurrection. Badiou characterizes the event of the resurrection as disrupting and completely departing from the Jewish and Greek discourses of a “salvation that is given to us

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within the universe.” Jewish “ritualism” and “prophetism” think salvation will come through mastering a tradition and interpreting signs correctly; Greek “wisdom” sees the good as resulting from thought’s direct mastery of the universe.59 In contrast, Paul experiences his encounter with the resurrection as a “pure beginning.”60 Its “post-evental” truth (as opposed to the event itself) is “entirely subjective,” based on Paul’s public declaration of his conviction about the event of resurrection: this truth comes about when the empirical knowledge of the Jewish deciphering of signs and the Greek conceptual philosophy fall apart. The truth of resurrection is singular in that it is not drawn from either of the two discourses that structure the situation; yet it is now present in the situation.61 The apostle literally “knows nothing” and professes no more than “pure fidelity to the possibility opened by the event,” that is, everlasting life. Moreover, this possibility is universal in that it is for everyone, Greek, Jew, or otherwise.62 Badiou emphasizes that the evental truth is not a matter of revelation or illumination. It is a procedure or process that begins with a declared conviction, continues as the drawing of the truth’s consequences for thought and action, and is verified only when it “indexes the real” and becomes the truth of the whole situation.63 As stated above, absolute fidelity to this process transforms the human animal into an immortal subject. The subject as subject does not preexist the declaration of the event.64 More specifically, “evental grace” is the “evental rupture” of the subject into the “not” of “being under the law (the path of “flesh” as suspension of the subject’s destiny) and the “but” of “being under grace” (the path of “spirit” as fidelity to the event). This “not . . . but” is “precisely the form that bears the universal.” It is neither on the side of flesh (legal conventions and worldly states) nor on the side of spirit (personal inhabitation by grace and truth). Rather, it points to the task of faithful labor and the universal admission of all those “opened up by the event [of resurrection]” and inaugurated by grace and the truth procedure into a “community of destiny.”65 In this community, love of the truth of the resurrection or the Christ Event is the love of self that is also love of neighbor, the universal address of that relation to the post-evental self. In practice, this address or love as universal power, this extension of faith as “liberation” to love as salvation, is the militancy of universalism, of spreading the word to everyone alike.66

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But faith and love still leave the third of the Pauline trinity, hope. Badiou interprets it as having two related meanings for Paul. On the one hand, it refers to “fidelity to fidelity,” the subjective continuation of the work of faith in the here and now. On the other, it means “justice”: not a Last Judgment or attitude of resentment that divides humanity into the damned and the saved; rather, a justice that pertains to the singularity of subjects and their salvation so long as the latter is universal and means “every victory [through fidelity] in reality is a victory for everyone.” Badiou emphasizes that hope and hence justice refers not to the future salvation but to the subjects as affected in the present by their fidelity and universal love. Hope is life and the “death of death,” that is, the elimination of laws and communitarian particularity.67 Badiou’s discussion of Paul’s notion of justice and universality returns us to our long-term theme of the dilemma of diversity and its two conflicting horns of unity and plurality. Badiou claims that people can adhere to the generic universality of the truth procedure without having to give up their worldly plurality. He says that this is like “the mass line” of the Chinese communists—consulting with and interpreting the will of the people— and cautions that this universality must tolerate but otherwise remain “indifferent” to particular cultural and other differences.68 Indeed, he announces that being counted by the universality of truth means “the subsumption of the Other by the Same,” producing a “Sameness and an Equality.”69 The subject of a truth therefore always adopts a name like that of Christ, a “name which is above every name,” rather than a “closed” name “proper to particular languages and sealed entities.” Badiou caps this point through reference to a well-known biblical edifice: “Every name from which a truth proceeds is a name from before the Tower of Babel. But it has to circulate in the tower.”70 Later we will assess the value of this view for dealing with the dilemma of diversity and also its implications for the idea of citizenship.

Ethics Beside justice and faith, hope, and love, the truth-procedure also provides the basis for Badiou’s view of ethics and the Good. He condemns modern ethics as based on the renunciation of the one thing that distinguishes the human species from the predatory living organisms that it also is: the

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ability to take up eternal truths.71 In positive terms, ethics concerns the labor of bringing these truths into the world.72 The more specific meaning of this labor or ethical maxim is to “persevere in that which exceeds your perseverance,”73 to “Keep going!”, that is, to remain faithful to the evental truth, the “non-known,” and thereby continue to be an Immortal subject as well as the human animal that found itself enthralled with the evental process of a truth.74 Because Badiou equates these truths with the Good, he also defines ethics as the “capacity to name and strive for a Good,” or the “superhumanity of humanity.”75 We should note here that the Good refers collectively to at least the four singular truths that are recognized by Badiou—politics, love, science, and art—and that there are as many subjects and modes of ethics as there are eternal truths.76 The priority that Badiou assigns to the Good leads him to view “Evil” as having only a privative meaning. Evil amounts to the failure to live up to the Good and thus can take place only if one is already in a relation with the Good.77 A reactive part of the ethic of truths is therefore to reject the evil that this ethics has made possible.78 Badiou holds that his notion of Good implies the possibility of there being three types of these evils. He calls the first “simulacrum” and defines it as being “the terrorizing follower of a false event.”79 His primary example of this type of evil is the National Socialists, or Nazis, who came to power in Germany. The Nazis used the name revolution and socialism for their singular takeover of Germany. But this name only mimics the characteristics of an event. The Nazis did not name the bringing into being of the void of a situation, that is, a singular truth that is addressed universally; instead they heralded only “the absolute particularity of a community” rooted in soil, blood, and race.80 The content of their fidelity to this simulacrum of the truth was war and massacre, culminating in the attempt to purify the Aryan race through the Holocaust. The real void of National Socialism carries the name “Jew.” It was materialized by “cutting into the flesh itself,” directing “terror . . . at everyone,” and reducing all “to their being-for-death.”81 The second evil possibility is “betrayal” or allowing some human animal interest to make us jettison fidelity to the truth.82 Although subjects cannot renounce the event that has made them subjects, they can deny the voice of the Immortal in themselves and turn away from truth.83 The third evil, “disaster” or “the forcing of the unnameable,” is a belief in truth’s total power.84 The “subject-language” that inscribes truth from the

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perspective of the event has the power to evaluate and modify the “language of the situation.”85 Taken to its fullest extent, the Immortals could replace the language of the situation with their own and thus “negate” the human animals that articulate the former. But this would backfire because truths can become present only through making a hole in the language of the situation. We therefore must remain beings that are both human and immortal. Making the whole world good would be a “disaster induced by the absolutization of [truth’s] power.”86 To avoid this disaster, Badiou introduces an element that he calls “the unnameable of a truth.” The truth is unnameable in the subject-language that acknowledges its gesture to the void, even though it is nameable (but not understood) in the ordinary language of the situation. For example, the political naming of a community or collective would be a disaster— the closing of a community through Nazi or some other communitarian ideology—and thus it is crucial to acknowledge that a true community is the unnamable of its political truth.87 It would be like Derrida’s notion of democracy as always and only to come, and hence intrinsically indecidable, except that Badiou does believe that a situation can be transformed into a truth, the “Idea of equality,” as we will see. The unnameable, then, is supposed to act as a placeholder for the truth procedure that can fill it.88 If we use the word “citizen” to stand in for Badiou’s Immortals, then citizenship would consist in, on the one hand, compliance with the four virtues (justice, faith, hope, and love) and, ethically, bringing eternal truths into the world as the Good (the superhumanity of humanity), and, on the other, resisting the three types of Evil (simulacrum, betrayal, and disaster). Although the terms change a bit, we will now see that this idea of citizenship persists in Badiou’s idea of democracy as communism.

Democracy and the “Communist Hypothesis” When we consider Badiou’s views on democracy and communism, his ethics can properly be called a political ethics. His book on ethics characterizes democracy as one of the evils that his notion of the Good is intended to push away. But he wants this criticism to apply only to the type of democracy that “blocks the way towards the Good as the superhumanity of humanity, towards the Immortal as the master of time, and accepts the play of necessity as the objective basis for all judgments of

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value.”89 He clarifies his mixed view of democracy in two later articles, one on democracy and the other on his own position, communism.90 In the first of these two articles, Badiou reminds us that democracy is the dominant “emblem” of contemporary political society.91 He tries to dispel its aura by flatly stating that today it is the word of a “conservative oligarchy” using it to justify their power. Badiou takes this description as the “objective status of democracy,” the form of state that it is, but sees its greatest harm in the kind of subjectivity it creates. The main characteristics of this subjectivity are “egoism and desire for petty enjoyments.”92 Drawing from Plato, he splits this picture of homo democraticus into two generational groups: adolescents, whose cravings for pleasures provide the lively existence of the polis, on the one hand, and, on the other, the old, whose wisdom amounts to approving money as the essence of all that is. In short, “homo democraticus is an avaricious old fellow grafted onto a craving adolescent. The adolescent makes the wheel turn, and the old fellow reaps the profits.”93 In the second article, Badiou argues that communism points to a true form of democracy. The form he has in mind is a society that would eschew voting and the other procedures typical of the state and its mode of domination and inertia. Instead, this society would be political in the sense of realizing the “communist hypothesis.”94 This hypothesis holds that a collective organization could bring about a possibility repressed by the State: the elimination of “the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour.” To test this hypothesis we must think of the consequences—its past and future instantiations—implied by the initiating event and its truth procedure. Badiou states that this thinking is guided by a Kantian “regulative Idea,” the “pure Idea of equality,” and indicates that it and the communist hypothesis have existed for as long as there have been states that have avoided it.95 Indeed, the hypothesis (and its recurring truth procedure or consequences) include the militant activity of Spartacus, Thomas Müntzer, the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and on up to and through the Bolshevik Revolution, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and a number of other liberation attempts that have occurred in the twentieth century. But Badiou believes that the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary organizations of the twentieth century no longer have utility for political praxis. He urges us instead to focus on the current conditions of existence for the communist hypothesis and to be “experimental” in our

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attempts to show that domination by the ruling class is not the inevitable fate of labor.96 Badiou presents one major reason why he thinks the communist hypothesis and the form of society it favors is congruent with democracy. He holds that only communism is literally the meaning and “creative fulfillment” of democracy as “the power of the people over their own existence.” The politics Badiou seeks in this connection is a familiar refrain: people power and the State’s withering away.97 He thinks this power will follow its own “atemporal norms” and be a “force in the breast of the assembled and active people driving the State and its laws to extinction.” Inverting Plato’s republic, it will be an “aristocratism for everybody” rather than just for philosopher kings.98 True democrats are the communists we can become.99 But to become them, Badiou counsels us to declare what he has already emphasized in his treatment of Saint Paul and ethics: that “there is only one world” and that we should “consolidate what is universal in identities.” We should do this as we struggle within particular circumstances such as the obscenity of calling undocumented workers “illegals.”100

Criticism of Badiou’s Idea of Democracy Badiou, then, portrays current democracy as a conservative oligarchy that corrupts the character of its citizens. He lauds his alternative conception of it, the communist hypothesis, and its desire for social and economic equality, elimination of the division of labor, an experimental approach to new ideas of work, and people power, the “aristocratism of everyone.” These are possible aspects of democracy that public art can explore and that we can include in the political part of our criterion for assessing public art as acts of citizenship. But some of his ideas about this communist democracy are open to criticism from the position we have been developing. We can begin our criticism of Badiou’s idea of democracy by reflecting on some shortcomings of his broader political ontology. Badiou stocked the ontological situation with axioms from set theory that produce absolute incommensurability between knowable consistent multiplicities on the one hand and unknowable inconsistent multiplicities on the other, that is, between the situation and the void. He therefore required

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the event to interrupt the situation and provide a glimpse of the inconsistent multiplicities and their promise. But it seems counterintuitive to say that an absolutely singular event is required for society to suspect that disgruntled workers might become or already are a revolutionary collective, or that dead martyrs might be the harbingers of everlasting life for everyone. The saliency of such possibilities, of such voices, may vary according to the autocratic and other oracles that dominate society at any given time, but a difference in degree of awareness or accessibility is more likely than the chasm between absolute countability and the absolute “nothing” favored by Badiou. Even Badiou’s own declaration of this chasm indicates the opposite of what it purports. He explained the existence of the metastructure—the state—as the reaction to the possibility that inconsistent presentations have gone uncounted and might irrupt into the situation. But the premonition of being overwhelmed by these sorts of irruptions indicates that the inconsistent multiplicity must exist as more than Badiou’s “nothing” for the “human animals” that participate in the counting. Otherwise, they would have had no inkling of the inconsistent multiplicity’s existence. To use the vocabulary we introduced in chapter 2 and elaborated in subsequent chapters, the social body is an interplay among voices contesting with one another over the audibility of their particular notions of the good. This interplay is always challenged or diminished by the one true God, the pure race, market fundamentalism, or other oracles. But oracles never have absolute closure on society and at the very least need to keep some dissenting voices in play as objects of fear or resentment. The presence of these maligned voices is used by the oracle’s enunciators to justify or bring about the oracle’s hegemony. However, this means that recognition of the tension between these two voices—the oracle and its maligned other—keeps alive for us the counter-memory of the creative interplay among voices and the ideal of justice as their equal audibility in the public sphere. We also saw that Badiou makes an absolute distinction between the immortal subjects or militants and human animals. The former are constituted by the singular event and the eternal truth procedure that it makes possible; they are the vanguard for a possible democratic community in  which there is an “aristocratism for everyone” and a consolidation of “what is universal in identities”; in contrast, human animals are simply concerned with that to which the truth is “indifferent.” This amounts

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to a hierarchical inequality among the evental chosen and the rest.101 Even though there might be equality with respect to the capacity to think the truth and become a piece of its process, its meaning is obliterated in the here and now of who is and who is not linked to the truth. This point is especially salient when we remember that for Badiou the adherence to fidelity in the present is more worthy than a fixation on some future time even if the latter is a constituent part of that virtue. This inequality can be captured from another angle and linked to a further deficiency. The absolute division between immortal subjects and human animals implies that for the militant dialogue can only be monologue: if we are captivated by what we think is an eternal truth and have pledged absolute fidelity to it, then the only reason for us to converse with outsiders is to convert them in accord with that truth and its universal pretension.102 This unwittingly suggests that the meaning of communication for the militants would be manipulation when they are not in power and dictation when they are. This monological tendency would also preclude the idea that dialogic interplay among subjects can create new truths or modifications of previous ones. The evental truths, the ones carried out by the militants, would be viewed as the only ones that count when we speak of the “Good” of society. Fecundity is therefore limited by the truths that destiny has already selected. Indeed, this truthful “monoglossia,” to use a Bakhtinian term, requires an initial subordination of pre-immortal subjects to the events that befall them and that elicit their declaration and fidelity. The militants can mishandle a singular event in the ways discussed earlier or mistake a false event (for example, German National Socialism) for a true one. But they are precluded from creating truth-bearing events of their own. Destiny becomes the only source of such evental truths, and not us.103 Plato vanquishes Protagoras and his dictum of “man is the measure.” We can put these critical questions into a form that fits the issue of the dilemma of diversity. One of the strengths of Badiou’s political ontology is its establishment of a basis for the political virtue of solidarity. We can all be immortal subjects by declaring fidelity to the regulative Idea and eternal truth of communist equality in a (non-captialist/parliamentarian) democracy—an Idea, we saw, that came from “before the Tower of Babel” as an “indifference tolerating difference” and epitomizing “the subsumption of the Other by the Same.” But this emphasis on sameness and

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a non-dialogical “tolerance” means that the price of its solidarity is the sacrifice of heterogeneity. A sacrifice of this magnitude either expresses the wild courage of the gambler, placing all her chips on a dizzying decision about the absolute truth, or a nihilistic response to the anxiety of living in an unapologetically labyrinthine world. We seek a committed solidarity, and Badiou has reinforced our desire for it, but we want one that we can affirm as part of the political trilogy: solidarity, heterogeneity, and fecundity. We need all three, and equally valorized, as the ingredients of the idea of a democracy that will play its role in our criterion for public art as an act of citizenship. In short, Badiou has enriched our idea of democracy and thereby contributed to the political part of our criterion of public art; but he has also helped us by unintentionally showing what our criterion should not valorize: a divided citizenship (human animals and Immortals) and a monological truth.

R ANC I È R E ’ S P O L I T I C A L O NTO LO GY

Like Badiou, Rancière also is influenced by and advances Marxist and Maoist thought, albeit in a more anarchistic spirit.104 But in the following comprehensive statement Rancière indicates his difference from both Derrida and Badiou: “I am not a thinker of the event, of the upsurge, but rather of emancipation as something with its own tradition, with a history that isn’t just made up of great striking deeds, but also of the ongoing effort to create forms of the common different from the ones on offer from the state, the democratic consensus, and so on.”105 He particularly suspects that the event-like character of Derrida’s unconditional “democracy to come” makes politics “dependent on a [heretic] theology” rather than on the people themselves.106 Rancière’s emphasis on subjects as agents with respect to justice is closer to Rawls’ idea of “public reason.” But his upholding of “dissensus” as the basis of democratic politics is opposed to Rawls’s penchant for “overlapping consensus” among comprehensive doctrines of the Good. We will now see how Rancière’s discontent with transcendent events applies to Badiou. But we will also be attentive to whether or not his view of events as immanent to (rather than transcending) history can simultaneously affirm the three political virtues that I feel must be incorporated into our criterion for assessing public artworks

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as acts of citizenship. To tackle these two concerns, we must first introduce Rancière’s notion of democracy and some of its parallels with Badiou’s communistic democracy.

Politics and Police, Dissensus and Consensus Rancière’s political ontology is minimalistic to the point that he never refers to himself as having one. The degree to which he does characterize the being of society will become clear as we systematically compare his view of democracy with that of Badiou’s.107 We can begin with Rancière’s distinction between “politics” and its opposite, “police,” as a form of systematic exclusion even at the level of perception. At least superficially, these two dimensions of social-political reality have the same form as Badiou’s distinction between the void and the metastructure or state of the situation. Politics as democracy. Rancière is in favor of a radical understanding of politics and democracy. He breaks absolutely with the idea that politics is the “logic of the arkhe [origin].” This logic “partitions” society in terms of those exercising power and those subjected to it.108 Rancière thinks this definition amounts to an “axiom of domination,” a hierarchical relation “between a capacity for ruling and a capacity for being ruled.” To this axiom he opposes “liberty” or the “axiom of democracy.” It requires an “absence of any qualification,” of “any entitlement to rule,” on the part of any of the subjects that constitute the “demos” of a society. He holds that the demos and its absence of entitlement—and hence of hierarchy—is the condition that makes possible politics and democracy. Indeed, he declares that democracy is not a particular political regime but “the very institution of politics itself.”109 These statements are helpful as an introductory overview and statement of Rancière’s valorization of democracy. But they state only the two axioms—domination and democracy—and not the dynamic relationship between them. Rancière claims that this relationship is not the opposed interests of different groups; rather, it is “an opposition between logics that count the parties and parts of the community in different ways.” The two axioms, then, are really two logics, one of the police (domination), the other of politics (democracy). The logic of the police is the same as that of the arkhe mentioned above and counts only “real parts” or the actual

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groups that compose the social body. It doesn’t refer directly to the cop on the beat. It signifies a more basic “symbolic constitution” of the social body, a partition of the sensible that establishes a relation between “the distribution of exclusive parts” and “a shared common.” For example, interest groups in the United States are the exclusive parts; the arena in which they are allowed to compete for power and wealth is the shared common. This relation between parts and shares takes place at the level of sensory experience; such experience, however, presupposes an even more basic “distribution of what is visible and what not, of what can be heard and what cannot.”110 The demos as supplementary existence. In this logic, Rancière claims that the police omit any reference to the “supplements” that are most important in the second of the two logics, that of politics.111 As we have already noted, politics is the activity of the demos. But the demos is no more, and no less, for Rancière than a “supplementary existence” to the count or partitioning of the police. It “inscribes the count of the uncounted, or part of those who have no part,” onto the social body. This uncounted form of existence is ultimately the equal status of all beings who speak and the prerequisite for conceiving inequality. Rancière adds that this view of the demos is structural rather than populist. More specifically, the structure consists in a “void” and a “surplus.” The void involves democracy as the name of the supplementary part that separates the community or demos from the counted parts that make up the social body. The surplus concerns the effect of this separation: the founding of the supplementary subjects’ politics and their existence in excess of any counts of society’s parts. Rancière emphasizes that we must understand this surplus in a generic sense and not as the collection of community members, the working class, ethnicities, or any other social configurations.112 These groups qualify as political subjects only when they act as the part of no part rather than as parts of the already distributed parts of society.113 Politics as dissensus. Politics intervenes in the police order when a part that has had no role up to that moment contests the desire of the police to either deny political logic or claim it as theirs. This political form of contestation first and foremost intervenes in the established visible and sayable.114 It specifically consists in three activities: in rendering the unseen visible; noise as speech; and pleasure and pain as a “shared feeling of a good or an evil.” Rancière uses the term dissensus to refer to this

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re-figuration of the visible and the audible. He claims it is the “essence of politics.” Rather than a conflict between interests or points of view, it reveals “a gap in the sensible itself.” Revealing this gap involves “placements” of various sorts: the factory as a public space is now placed in the space where it had always been private, minorities in the world of the majority, women in that of men, and similar resituatings. In short, dissensus is the “construction of a paradoxical world that puts together two separate worlds.”115 The opposite of this, consensus, always consists in the attempt to replace politics with the police or to keep constant the usual state of affairs—to eliminate the concept and natural precarity of politics.116 At this point, Rancière’s notion of police seems very much like Badiou’s idea of the metastructure of the situation. Both exclude what we might call the other: the demos or part of no part for Rancière, and the void or inconsistent multiplicity (being-qua-being) for Badiou. Moreover, Rancière’s demos is reminiscent of Badiou’s immortal subjects or militants. We can see how the meaning of these terms differ for the two thinkers by now placing them in the context of the notion of equality.

Equality as a Presupposition The above exposition of Rancière’s idea of politics as dissensus raises a fundamental question: in the name of what do we disturb the consensus of the police? Rancière makes clear that political subjects act as if a wrong done to a particular group is a “wrong done to anyone by the police distribution.” These subjects, as political subjects, must act “as if they were the [whole] demos,” that is, the uncounted parts of society.117 Moreover, this reference to anyone means that “the community is borne at each and every moment by someone for someone else,” a “potential infinity of others,” and therefore “has no material substance,” “occurs, but . . . has no place.”118 The type of universality of these subjects is reminiscent of Marx’s view that the proletariat speaks in the name of everyone—a classless society—rather than just for their own pre-revolutionary class. It is in the name of this placeless community that the part of no part reconfigures the sensibility of society. Equality. But this claim just pushes the original question back one step: why should the part of no part care about other parts not being part of

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the community? What is the basis of solidarity? The immediate answer might involve the concept that seems to have highest importance for Rancière: equality. He proclaims that the critical function of democracy is to jam “the wrench of equality . . . into the gears of domination.”119 But it is not clear immediately what equality means for Rancière beyond this critical function of breaking up what is already there. Rancière does say that democracy is the “equality already at the core of inequality.” It therefore is that which is inherently in conflict with the police. But he adds that this equality is a “presupposition” rather than an “ideal” or a “goal to be obtained.”120 Equality and intelligence. To clarify the meaning of his use of “presupposition,” Rancière begins by referring to the ideas of nineteenth-century French schoolmaster Joseph Jacotot. Jacotot argued that egalitarians should not combine two types of “arbitrariness”: that of an “egalitarian logic” implicit in the act of speaking and that of an “inegalitarian logic” intrinsic to the social body. The arbitrariness of the egalitarian logic is the positive one of viewing language as an open vehicle for the meanings that people want to ascribe to its sentences. It recomposes every linguistic act into a journey that “presupposes the tense interaction of two wishes: a wish to say and a wish to hear.” More specifically, the equality of these two wishes is the presupposed seat of the “equality of intelligences.” This equality is that language has meaning only if two factors obtain: the first is that engaged subjects seek to discern a truth in their linguistic exchanges that is not prescribed in advance; the second factor is that this discernment or mutual understanding is the sole way of being intelligent.121 This second factor speaks directly to the arbitrariness of the inegalitarian logic and challenges it at the same time. This arbitrariness is the lack of any inherent social order or purpose: the social body “can have no wish to speak to anyone”; belonging to it simply requires that we consent to its contingent rules of the moment and participate in the “inequality of intelligences” it prescribes. This inequality is that the more intelligent rulers of society give commands and explanations to the less intelligent. The latter are simply supposed to listen to and follow these strictures. Rancière grants that this social order is prior to all community or equality of intelligences.122 But he points out that the less intelligent must understand what the more intelligent explain if this society is to exist, and that this understanding implies that the act of explaining, and therefore the solidifying

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of society, presuppose equality of intelligences instead of their inequality: these explanations and orders are transmittable only if the ruled can understand and know that they are intended to obey them. Thus the groups are equally intelligent on this level of communication capability whether or not the leadership of the society recognizes this fact or misleads itself by the fiction of the inherent inequality it favors.123 Society and the community of equals. Just as the social body ultimately requires the equality of intelligences, so the community of equals needs the social body in order for it to challenge the partitioning of society and to manifest itself in society. But this manifestation can be only a “supposition to be posited from the outset and endlessly reposited.” As we saw, the community of equals cannot gain substantial form as an institution, goal, or an ideal to be accomplished. Rancière therefore states that “a community of equals can never become coextensive with a society of the unequal, but nor can either exist without the other.”124 Equality and the politics of reconfiguration of the sensible. These comments establish that the demos and the social body—politics and the police—presuppose one another. But this is so in any significant sense only if we understand the equality of intelligences (those of the ruler and those of the excluded demos) to mean that the demos has the capacity to respond to and reconfigure the police order. In other words, equality really means politics, and the latter, as we know, means the possibility that the part of no part, of any such group that would ever form such a part, can reconfigure the police distribution of the sensible and become an audible voice for the demos as a whole. Equality is this possibility and it is why we earlier noted that Rancière says that democracy is the equality already at the core of inequality and that democracy “jams the wrench of equality into the gears of domination,” into that inequality. Equality as violence. Rancière goes on to qualify this dynamic notion of equality-democracy as a type of violence. Because a community of equals is more ephemeral than the inegalitarian logic of the social body, Rancière reaffirms that its subjects’ creation of equality is always a continuous project.125 In order to manifest itself and result in action, the egalitarian presupposition requires an event, a violence that is not necessarily physical. This event introduces a previously uncounted part into the broader community of speaking beings and makes debate possible.126 But the event can have this laudatory effect only if the subjects of this part can

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“project [it] back into the past” and thereby activate and make socially effective the means of verifying equality or “community” within the social body.127 Rancière gives as evidence for this claim the example of the 1986 struggle in France to eliminate any form of selection for determining which students have the right to attend university. He claims that the success of this movement was due to the memory of the earlier violence and revolutionary hopes of 1968. That violence made use of the public streets to bring about dialogue between the university and greater society.128 Indeed, Rancière maintains that a “declaration” of equality repeats the earlier egalitarian event, such events being “designed for repetition” and thus always indicative of further such events.129 There is no final moment, only “the ever-to-be-recommenced invention of the community of equals.”130 At least superficially, this sounds much like Badiou’s idea of events and the infinite truth procedures they initiate and require. Rancière uses the term “dialogic moments” to refer to this combination of an event and the projections into related events of the past that verify it.131 He emphasizes that these moments are “artificial” in the sense of something that must be invented.132 Most importantly, he holds that an egalitarian creation of community resists being forced to choose between “the immateriality of egalitarian communication and the inegalitarian weight of social bodies.” Escaping that choice is possible because evidence in favor of the event’s meaning of equality can allow the “wishto-say” to traverse the social body with an “obligation to hear.” The “there is of the event” and this obligation to hear bring out a “facticity of beingthere-together.” This means for Rancière that the community of equals can sometimes imprint the social body with the effects of the event that introduces a new part into the broader community.133 These thoughts on dialogic moments lead Rancière to make two concluding pronouncements. The first is that the resolve for realizing the egalitarian exception—equality as the exception rather than the rule in societies—can be measured by the repeated violence in response to the efforts at suppressing it.134 The second is that the inscription of equality on the social body takes place only through experiencing “the measurement of incommensurables.” These incommensurables are the equality of the demos and the inequality of the social body; they become transitorily commensurable and are experienced as such by remembering “the event that

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constituted the inscription of the presupposition of equality” and by repeating it.135 This second pronouncement takes us back to a statement by Rancière that was cited at the very beginning of this section. In that statement he indicated his alliance to history over the upsurge of singular events and eternal truths. He restates this earthiness of his minimalist political ontology in a recent interview: “what we call history is what is woven by people as they construct a situation in time out of their own lives and experiences.”136 The events are the acts of subjects and not the intrusions of Badiou’s singular occurrences that create the possibility of eternal truths. We can call Rancière’s ontology minimalist because he holds that the interplay among the voices of history and society produces the event— the reconfiguration of sensibility—rather than the event producing the possibility of eternal truths that would transform human animals into immortal subjects. For Rancière, subjects operate within the context and demands of their particular historical circumstances rather than because a transcendent force throws them into the fray. His idea of an  historically and subject-based (as opposed to transcendent) event would therefore seem to be close to the view we presented at the end of chapter 3 as a revision of Derrida’s unconditional injunction of “democracy to come”: the social body and democracy as a creative interplay of voices. But this suggestion of our proximity to Rancière’s idea of an immanent event will require a caveat.

The Presumptiveness of Rancière’s Presupposition Rancière and Badiou both put forward their political ontologies in the name of equality. Badiou’s notion of equality is universal in the sense of including all those—literally everyone—who have the capacity to think the Idea of a singular event and the eternal truth associated with it. However, we saw that this ontology also divides society into a hierarchy of those in the truth and those outside it at any given time. It implies a basis for a possible solidarity around certain truths but limits meaningful response to the monologue of the immortal subjects. Without a dialogic basis for discussing the Good, without an interplay among equally audible voices, heterogeneity among voices is precluded from the start.

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In contrast, Rancière’s equality of communicative intelligences—the mutual capacity to understand explanations and orders—is universal at all times and a perquisite for having a social body.137 But this equality is empty without a key implication of Rancière’s minimalist ontology: that the part of no part has the capacity to challenge and reconfigure the police distribution of the sensible that has blocked the audibility of the demos in society. This implication ensures both heterogeneity and a basis for solidarity: heterogeneity, because the part of no part includes any voice that has been marginalized; solidarity, because the challenge instigated by the part of no part counts as the politics of equality only if its attempts at reconfiguring the police distribution are done in the name of all the parts of no part. In providing a clear affirmation of the political virtues of solidarity and heterogeneity, Rancière’s political ontology offers an advantage lacking in Badiou’s set-theory divide between disparate types of multiplicities—the consistent and inconsistent ones, the worldly situation and the void— crossed only with the help of absolutely aleatory events. Rancière’s ontology therefore comes closer to avoiding a goring by either horn (homogenous unity or fragmented difference) of the dilemma of diversity. It seems more in the spirit of Lefort’s “empty place” characterization of democracy and more able to fill it while still posting the vacancy sign. However, Rancière’s minimalist ontology still leaves us with a problem. He does not tell us what sort of reconfigurations by the demos are worthy except that they must simultaneously affirm the other parts of no part that have the same general goal of reconfiguring a current sensibility. But these affirmed parts of no part could include Timothy McVeigh or other white supremacists as readily as they could the part of supplementary subjects like those involved in the United States’ civil rights and workers’ rights movements of the 1960s. Unless Rancière says more about qualifying the parts of no part in question, we would have no way of differentiating the reprehensible from the valorizable parts of no part.138 We therefore would be left with a disquieting arbitrariness. Indeed, we would be left with the empty tautology that redistributions are good because they are redistributions, that politics is good because it is politics. We can perhaps revise Rancière’s hospitality to all the parts of no part by recourse to the critical response in chapter 3 that we made to the autoimmune structure Derrida assigned to democracy: we have to hear all

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voices courageously, always open to revising our own discourse in light of what they say, but reject all policies as non-democratic that do not provide a dialogic space for rejoinders to those policies. Unless such policies include this proviso, they cannot say that even a majority vote in their favor means that they are implemented in the name of democracy—or in the name of Rancière’s idea of a (democratic) politics that would now include only the affirmation of those parts of no part that could make the same pledge. In that white supremacists qua white supremacists would not include the civil rights movement as an affirmed part of no part at any time, their exclusionary policies would be excludable without self-contradiction. Peter Hallward raises a second, though related, problem. The interaction between the demos and society consists primarily in the reconfiguration of the partition established by the police. But Hallward points out that the chasm between politics and the police order, demos and society, seems as deep and absolute as that between Badiou’s state and void: “Rancière doesn’t consistently recognize the immeasurable difference between “‘nothing’ and ‘very little’, between ‘no part’ and a ‘minimal part.’”139 Even if one could cross this chasm, Rancière’s descriptions of these reconfigurations suggest that they do not involve the dialogic moment he praised. Instead, they raise the worry that such reconfiguration can be brought about at most by his notion of unilateral dissensus rather than through agonistic dialogue among all the inhabitants of society. This criticism does not preclude that unilateral dissensus is often required to provoke into reality the virtual dialogue it might desire. Given these two criticisms, a problem for the remaining chapters on this topic will be to find a more definitive way to determine the acceptability of reconfigurations within the dialogic relationship among voices. It will have to avoid the fatal arbitrariness still permitted by Rancière’s appeal to the historical event of reconfiguring the sensible for the sake of doing so. In other words, it will require imagining the social body and democracy as the kind of event that affirms simultaneously all three political virtues and not just fecundity alone. Before moving to part II of this chapter and the same two thinkers on political aesthetics, we should delineate the discoveries in this and chapter 3 that are relevant for the relation between democracy and our criterion for public art as an act of citizenship. Derrida and Badiou oriented

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their basis for solidarity around transcendent or supposedly unconditional events: for Derrida, the injunction of democracy to come, for Badiou, events that initiate eternal truth procedures and inaugurate immortal subjects. If our arguments in both cases were correct, however, their forms of transcendence undermined rather than sponsored democracy. Derrida’s injunction was too inclusive: it permitted people to participate who were defined as being able to overthrow democracy in its own name simply because they could form a numerical majority. In other words, his penchant for absolute hospitality undermined the solidarity around the democracy that his injunction was supposed to obtain. In contrast, Badiou’s evental truth was too exclusive: it disallowed true dialogue between the immortal subjects and human animals. In other words, his desire for absolute truth undermined the heterogeneity his universal truths were supposed to give us. In contrast to Derrida and Badiou, Rawls and Rancière took the immanent or low road to democracy. But neither position achieved a satisfactory negotiation with the dilemma of diversity. Rawls’s notion of an original position was actually a circular reinstatement of the liberal tradition of democracy and amounted to a comprehensive idea of the good rather than the neutral political conception of justice he was seeking. The narrowness of its basis for solidarity therefore undercut its hopes for an overlapping consensus among truly diverse ideas of the good. It could not fill the empty place of democracy and still keep it open to heterogeneity. Rancière’s notion of equality had the opposite problem: it could not distinguish between the parts of no part that would, and those that would not, permit an open dialogic space as the condition for a redistribution of the sensible that simultaneously provided a basis for democratic solidarity. These two positions advanced us to an immanent basis for democracy and emphasized the dialogic character of that polity. But they could not do so without sacrificing either solidarity (Rancière) or heterogeneity (Rawls) to an unacceptable degree. Lefort’s empty place was either closed too little (Rancière) or too much (Rawls). Our treatment of Badiou and Rancière, but also Rawls and Derrida, carries implications for the notion of citizenship. In particular, our reflections during the course of this treatment affirm that citizenship must involve thought and action that explicitly or implicitly valorize the three political virtues of solidarity, heterogeneity, and fecundity. The four

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thinkers fail in this even while introducing other important qualities of the citizen and thus enriching the idea of acts of citizenship. The ontological basis for the latter concept is our notion of the creative interplay among voices and the claim that each voice is at once part of the identity and the other of the rest. But the incarnation of citizenship in these acts requires further elaboration. For example, we have thus far only hinted how the ancient Greek notion of parrhesia and Foucault’s treatment of it will help us accomplish this endeavor. In light of these pronouncements, we can now specify some of the characteristics of democracy that we must keep in mind in formulating our criterion for assessing public artworks as acts of citizenship. The political part of the criterion must be able to appeal to any of the three political virtues (solidarity/unity, heterogeneity/diversity, and fecundity) without sacrificing either of the other two. Although the four theorists that we have covered thus far failed in their attempts to resolve the dilemma of diversity and successfully fill Lefort’s empty place, they made clear that a democracy worthy of the name must valorize these political virtues. They also highlighted that such a democracy must resist the oracles that would attempt to undermine these virtues: for Rawls, the oracles of “unreasonable” comprehensive doctrines that would void the pluralism or overlapping consensus of political liberalism; for Derrida, the oracle of the sovereignty or messianism that rejects democracy to come and alterity; for Badiou, that of the meta-structure of the State that hides the inconsistent multiplicity or democracy as communism; and for Rancière, that of the police opposed to the politics of the part of no part. For the reasons given in chapter 2 and since, we will continue articulating these three political virtues and other characteristics of democracy and citizenship in a vocabulary that includes the notions of voice, a dialogic body or creative interplay among voices, and the oracles trying to block that interplay. Once again, this is appropriate for four reasons: (1) the political is about which voices are heard and which not; (2) voices are readably specifiable by the discourses they express; (3) voice is flexible or broad in its application; and (4) the idea of these voices allows us to capture effectively the three major terms of this essay in political aesthetics—democracy, citizenship, and public art—and the interconnection among them. Having presented the political ontologies of Badiou and Rancière, we can now turn to their thoughts on political aesthetics and receive help

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from them for the second, the aesthetic, part of the criterion for assessing public artworks as acts of citizenship in a democracy.

PA RT I I : P U B L I C A RT A N D D E M O C R AC Y B ADI O U ’ S “ I NAE ST H E T ICS ”

Badiou argues that the traditional and avant-garde schemas for understanding the relation between art and philosophy are now “saturated,” have exhausted themselves, and a new schema is required.140 Because the traditional desideratum of philosophy is truth, and because Badiou thinks philosophy has no singular truth of its own, he initially catalogues the four schemas he acknowledges in terms of the status each assigns to truth in relation to art. The first of these, the “didactic” schema, follows Plato in condemning art as a mere imitation or “semblance” of truth. This semblance “charms” us and diverts us from contemplating truth itself.141 On the basis of this “truth itself,” philosophy’s task with respect to art is to evaluate its effects on the public.142 Plato’s well-known decision was to ostracize all but the most controlled forms of art from his ideal republic. Badiou formulates this Platonic relation of truth to art as not immanent but singular: truth is not immanent to art because it exists outside art; however, the relation between the two is singular because on this view “only art can exhibit truth in the form of semblance.”143 A second schema, the “Romantic,” goes to the extreme opposite of the didactic. It glorifies art as the “incarnation” of what it teaches—the power of the “infinity” that art holds “within the tormented cohesion of a form”— and as the sole source of truth. It therefore goes beyond philosophy and teaches “the ecstasy of allegiance” to art instead of the “severity of control” proposed by the didactic schema.144 On the Romantic schema, then, truth is immanent to art because it “exposes truth,” the “finite descent of the [infinite] Idea;” but truth is not singular to art, because it is not “the truth,” not something to which the thought of the thinker is attuned apart from what the poet says or the material of the art object.145 Badiou associates this schema with Heidegger’s idea that poetry discloses the being that philosophy takes as the truth it seeks but cannot gain through its own resources.146

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Different from these two other schemas, the “classical” (following Aristotle) views art as providing the public service of “catharsis.” It bears enough semblance to the truth that people can transfer their passions onto the art object and thus “dehystericize” or otherwise treat “the affections of the soul.” On this schema, philosophy concerns itself with “aesthetics,” that is, with identifying the rules that art uses for accomplishing the verisimilitude of this mimetic semblance.147 Thus for the classical schema truth’s relation to art is neither immanent (verisimilitude, not truth, is internal to its utilitarian effects) nor singular (truth doesn’t belong to it in any manner).148 Badiou also dismisses Dadaism, Situationism, and other avant-garde views of art that have faded away in recent times. He claims that they amounted to a combined “didactico-romantico” schema because they rejected art for its “alienating character” (hence these views were didactic) and then reinstated it as having an “undivided awareness of its operations or its own immediately legible truth” (hence these views were romantic art, art for art’s sake). Their contemporaries condemned them for being too much one or the other of these two schemas.149 Badiou considers the three schemas just covered and the avant-garde views of arts as “aesthetics,” that is, any position seeing art as inseparable from philosophy, the political realm, community, or any other instance of “non-art.”150 He contrasts them with his own “inaesthetic” and its modality of the link between art, truth, and philosophy. More specifically, he declares that “art itself is a truth procedure” of the sort discussed in the section on Badiou’s political ontology. Truth is therefore immanent and singular with respect to art: it is immanent because “art is rigorously coextensive with the truths it produces” (it is nothing more than its truth procedure), that is, it is “a thought in which artworks are the Real” and “not the effect” of the thought; and it is singular because the truths of the sort it produces are found nowhere else than in art. Its “pedagogical function” is “to arrange the forms of knowledge [within the structured situation] in such a way that some truth may come to pierce a hole in them.”151 In philosophy’s turn, Badiou holds that it does not itself produce truths; its role is to show truth procedures only as they are and the sense in which they are immanent and singular to their given modality (politics, art, mathematics, or love).152

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More specifically, Badiou understands art as a truth but a truth that “is an artistic configuration initiated by an event (a singular multiple of works) and unfolded through chance in the form of the works that serve as its subject points,” that is, “the differential points [or works] of a truth.” This means that neither the author nor an individual artwork is the pertinent unit for thinking of art as an immanent and singular truth. The unit can’t be the author because every truth originates with an event; for example, “Aeschylus” only “names” or is the “index” for “a central void in the previous situation of choral poetry” and the truth procedure initiated by it, that is, the tradition of Greek tragedy from Aeschylus to its point of saturation with Euripides.153 But the unit cannot be the individual artwork either, because the event gives rise to an inexhaustible truth procedure, in this case an “intrinsically infinite configuration” of artworks rather than an individual piece. Any evental truth, even the saturated tragic one just mentioned, can be recalled in difficult times or reformulated when a new event is designated. In general, any configuration initiated by a chance event can supersede an earlier configuration even by reintroducing a formerly saturated one.154 As a truth procedure, a “configuration thinks itself in the works that compose it.” This implies that each of those finite works “thinks the thought that the configuration will have been (under the presupposition of its infinite completion).” Each is therefore an “inquiry” that “reconstructs [the configuration] locally, sketches its ‘to come,’ and retroactively reflects its temporal arc.” In other words, each configuration, and therefore art, is the thinking of the regulative thought that it is in all its “points.”155 Moreover, the novelty of the event and its associated thought means that its truth procedure or configuration and thus each of the latter’s finite works of art or enquiries (Badiou also calls them “subjects”!) are likewise novelties.156 At the heart of Badiou’s view of art, then, is a Platonic-like “Idea”—thought—that is evental, novel, and regulative of its associated truth procedure.

RA N C I È R E ’ S A E ST H E T I C R E G IME O F ART

Like Badiou, Rancière looks at art from the perspective of the main schemas of the relation between it and truth, most importantly, that of

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political concerns. But the result of his position will be to unhinge Badiou’s claim that the truth of art is both singular and immanent, obtainable only through and completely coincident with art, that is, an “inesthetics” rather than an aesthetics. Rancière has his own idea of what the major schemas are for understanding the relation between art and politics. He begins his review of them by noting the exhaustion of “aesthetic utopia.” This utopianism amounted to an alliance between artistic radicality and political radicality, that is, the capacity of art “to perform an absolute transformation of the conditions of collective existence.”157 An example of this transformation would be political subjects in one class attempting to overthrow the order established by those in a dominant and oppressive class. The related art would be a direct aid in this process. In response to the presumed exhaustion of aesthetic utopia, of the alliance between artistic and political radicality, post-utopian art has divided into two versions of artistic radicality: a “sublime” one and one that Rancière refers to as the “new modesty.” The first of these two understands art in the tradition of Kant’s notion of the sublime, a “power that tears experience from ordinariness.”158 This sublime power is interpreted in two ways. The first interpretation of it stresses art’s ability to found “a being-in-common” that unlike the former aesthetic utopia is outside worldly politics, for example the early Manet painting, Le Christ Mort, which substitutes art’s “power of presentation” for “the communitarian power of Christian incarnation.” The second interpretation of the sublime power construes it as an “irreducible gap” between the sensible aspect of art and the unpresentable that the former invokes, for instance, the lightning flash that cleaves Barnett Newman’s monochrome canvas.159 Although both these interpretations of the sublime reveal a spectacular “heterogeneous singularity of artistic form,” the sense of community suggested by that form is “an ethical community which revokes every project of collective [political] emancipation.”160 Like these two interpretations of the sublime, the new modesty version of post-utopian artistic radicality eschews the aesthetic utopian’s penchant to transform the world. But it also rejects the spectacular singular objects favored by the sublimists. It replaces these objects with “micro-situations” that re-arrange objects or images of the ordinary world, often ironically or playfully, in order to change our take of the surrounding ambiance. An example of this new modesty or “relational aesthetics” is the large

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photographs that Pierre Huyghe puts on billboards. They ironically and playfully display no more than the places and the people at work or leisure where each billboard is located.161 Rancière asks us to focus on the source of these two versions of modern artistic radicality—the sublime and the new modesty—in order to understand their source in the aesthetic relation between art and politics. He notes that both of these versions reassert in their different ways the function of creating a new world space.162 This function combines art and politics: art, in its “singularity,” establishes a “space-time” that suspends “the ordinary forms of sensory experience” even if the objects so framed are themselves ordinary or spectacular; and politics “reconfigures” the “distribution of the sensible which defines the community.”163 This reconfiguring is not political in the sense of a message about transforming society or critically representing social structures, groups, or conflicts;164 rather, it introduces novel objects and subjects into the common distribution, rendering “visible what had not been,” and making “heard as speakers those who had been perceived [in the police order] as mere noisy animals.” In other words, the relation of art to politics in the post-utopian artistic radicality is “creating dissensus” by the intervention of the “politics of aesthetics” in the “aesthetics of politics.” As a single act with these two dimensions, the aesthetic and the political, artistic radicality reconfigures the distribution of the sensible that was already in place and under the heading of police. The sublime version of this artistic radicality accomplishes reconfiguration as the “valorization of the solitude of a heterogeneous sensible form,” as in an abstract painting; in contrast, the new modesty does it through a “gesture that draws a common space,” as in the installations of relational aesthetics. Most importantly, both forms of this artistic radicality link art’s specificity to forms of community that are not overtly political, even if political actors independently could use the subtle politics of this radicality for their explicitly collective operations.165 Rancière wants us to see these versions of modern artistic radicality— the sublime and the new modesty—as illustrative of what he calls the “aesthetic regime of art.” Negatively, this means that we don’t view the art of either version through the eyes of the “ethical regime of images,” that is, as the non-art of a religious icon or some other image possessing an intrinsic truth (for example, that a particular god or goddess exists) and that is intended to have a specific impact on a community’s way of life. Nor

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through the eyes of the “representational regime of images,” that is, as an object that obeys the standard rules of craftsmanship and is intended to represent—imitate—something outside itself.166 Instead, and positively, the aesthetic regime of art means “the politicity of art” as, paradoxically, “tied to [art’s] very autonomy.”167 Rancière agrees that the famous Juno Ludovisi can be viewed through the lenses of the ethical and representational regimes of art. But he thinks that the sculpture is also a perfect example of how art and politics are seamlessly combined when the sculpture is apprehended within the “modern” and now dominant aesthetic regime of art. This seamless combination is due to a “specific sensorium” or aesthetic distribution that underlies its artistic and political dimensions.168 Art and the political are therefore contained within the autonomy of this sensorium: “it is by dint of its purity that the materiality of art has been able to make of itself the anticipated materiality of a different configuration of the community.”169 More specifically, Rancière follows Friedrich Schiller and holds that the Juno Ludovisi is an “appearance” free of dictates external to it—a “free play” of sensory elements and thus different from the usual kinds of sensory experience as well as being absent of any ends extraneous to itself, of any intent to win “affective power over things or persons.”170 The sculpture’s aesthetic play or appearance and its transformative effect on its viewers refutes the idea that there is any conflict between intelligent form and sensible matter within the sensible. The refutation of this conflict works politically in that, as Schiller originally suggested, it suspends the idea of “men of culture over men of nature,” that is, the split between “two humanities.” In other words, it, or the politics of its aesthetic, its new distribution of the sensible, founds “a new form of ‘lifein-common,’ ” a “new community.”171 This new community is a revolution of sensible existence rather than one of state organization. Because it is based on the autonomy of a form of sensory existence, it indicates that the aesthetic regime can maintain the union of art and politics without going beyond itself: “The aesthetic regime of art institutes the relation between the forms of identification of art and the forms of political community in such a way as to challenge in advance every opposition between autonomous art and heteronomous art, art for art’s sake and art in service of politics, museum art and street art.”172

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But this does not end the story. Although Rancière proclaims that the reasons just given prove that “there is no conflict between the purity of art and its politicization [as the reconfiguration of sensible existence],”173 he adds that, nonetheless, “there is a conflict within purity itself, in the conception of this materiality of art which prefigures another configuration of the common.”174 This conflictual prefiguration of art’s materiality is heralded by the two great politics of aesthetics. Rancière refers to the first of these as “the politics of the becoming-life of art,” and the second as the “politics of the resistant form.”175 In modern art, the first is the new modesty, and the second the sublime, both of which were introduced above.176 Rancière claims that the autonomy of the politics of the becoming-life of art is due to the way of living established by the artwork. Thus the Juno Ludovisi or the large photographs in Pierre Huyghe’s billboards can be taken as expressing the free community that the artists have established in the arrangement of their materials. It is the result rather than the cause of the special community.177 But in that case, art “effaces its difference as art, becomes a form of life [instead].”178 In contrast, the autonomy of the politics of the resistant form consists in its being “closed upon itself, inaccessible to the thought, desires and ends of the subject contemplating it.” It therefore “bears the mark of man’s full humanity and the promise of a humanity to come, one at last in tune with the fullness of its essence.”179 It is the cause of rather than the result of a community of sense. Thus Juno Ludovisi, and also Manet’s Le Christ Mort and Barnett Newman’s monochrome canvas, promise community because they are art, because each is “the object of a specific experience and thereby institutes a specific, separate common space.”180 But in that case, these examples of the resistant form also trouble their purity: “art is art insofar as it is also non-art,” the latter being the promised community prefigured by the art. Rancière therefore states the paradox or contradiction in both these two politics of aesthetics in the following way: In [the aesthetic] regime, art is art insofar as it is also non-art, or is something other than art. . . . There is a contradiction that is originary and unceasingly at work. The work’s solitude carries a promise of emancipation. But the fulfilment of that promise amounts to the elimination of art as a separate reality, its transformation into a form of life.181

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Rancière concludes that this contradiction or tension between art and non-art within art’s autonomous or pure materiality both threatens the aesthetic regime of art and makes it function. The tension makes the regime function because it keeps the two—politics and art—together;182 but the tension threatens the regime because art can always be eliminated in the name of the life of a new community183 or, contrarily, dreams of a new community can be eschewed in the blaze of art as a spectacle or pure Other.184 Because this tension exists, we are not obliged to think that there will ever be an end of the aesthetic regime of art; we need note only the “paradoxical constraints” that worry the seemingly simple project of critical art to use artworks to explain domination or to compare the world’s current state with what it could become.185 Rancière’s allegiance to the aesthetic regime of art has two implications. The first is related to the regime’s function of keeping art and its limited politics together: this function is still far removed from Badiou’s claim that pure art and its eternal truth procedures must be extracted from the consistent multiplicity of “situations.” The second implication involves two points. On the one hand, Rancière reminds us that the representative and ethical schemas of art we noted earlier are still at play in contemporary art. Indeed, several temporalities or “regimes coexist and intermingle in the works themselves.”186 On the other, Rancière holds that when art’s singularity or autonomy is combined with political possibilities that go beyond the forms of life we have been discussing, then the price of this integration is “abolishing the singularity of art, that of politics, or both together.”187 This claim is related to the aesthetic dimension of our criterion for public art as an act of citizenship—the creative tension between the aesthetic and political dimensions of a public artwork. It may be that Rancière has gone too far with his division between art’s aesthetic autonomy and the overt political roles it may have. But before we address that issue, we must examine Rancière’s criticism of Badiou’s anesthetics.

Rancière’s Criticisms of Badiou’s Political Aesthetics In response to Badiou, Rancière argues that inaesthetics inadvertently ends up affirming that art is linked to non-art. Contrary to Badiou, then, art’s singularity includes an unavoidable linkage to politics, philosophy, or other modalities of non-art, involves a form of indiscernibility, and

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therefore fits perfectly into Rancière’s aesthetic regime of art. Rancière begins his argument by reminding us that the adherents of modernism want to believe that art has a nature, a univocal identity or autonomy of its own: literary language freed from communication, pictorial art from figuration, twelve-tone music from expression. For the modernists, each form of art is separate from the others and all are freed from non-art.188 As we have seen and as Rancière restates here, Badiou shares this antimimetic modernism with these other thinkers but with the twist that the specificity of the arts resides in the ideas of these arts rather than in their “respective [artistic] languages.”189 This twist or “torsion” reflects Badiou’s Platonism of the multiple. The relevant ideas for art are the regulative ideas or thoughts that we saw Badiou associate with the multiples of the eternal truth procedures for Greek tragedy, cubism, and any other artistic event that shatters a situation. Like Plato, the pedagogical value of these ideas for Badiou is their role in teaching the eternal truths associated with them. But unlike Plato, he cannot accept a mimetic relation between the ideas and sensory particulars, cannot accept that the latter are imitations of the former. Instead, the eternal ideas must “transpire” in sensory givens that are totally different than themselves. More specifically, the sensible material of the world can be the site only for the repeated beginnings of one or another of the evental artistic truths that qualify as eternal and “integrally consume the sensible” in their passage into the world: [Badiou] wants eternity to pass in the ever-renewed separation which shines the Idea forth in the fading of the sensible, to affirm the absolutely discrete and always similar character of the advent of the Idea, by not allowing its cipher to disappear in the muteness of stone, the hieroglyph of the text, the dècor of life or the rhythm of the collective. He wants this less for the purpose of reserving a specific domain for poetry or art than of persevering the educative value of the Idea.190

Rancière’s criticism is precisely that this educative “contemplation of ideas” forces Badiou into the “logic of mimesis” and the linking of art with non-art—the aesthetic regime of art—that Badiou wants to avoid.191 He points out that Badiou wishes to commit two conflicting moves at once: to “subtract” the idea from the sensible—thereby keeping it pure—and yet keep it from totally vanishing by “inscribing” its “name” in the sensible.192

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For example, the art that Badiou thinks is the purest form of art, the poem, is itself this inscription or name. But what it inscribes and thereby conserves “is not the thing that has disappeared but the disappearance itself.”193 As we saw in the section on Badiou’s inaesthetics, this disappearing of the event and the declaration of it in a poem or other artwork (“subjects”) initiates an infinity of possible artworks (“inquiries”), each of which is the thinking of the same eternal idea that regulates the configuration they form. Rancière claims that Badiou fails to show that the poem is an inscription of an eternal idea. More specifically, Badiou states that “the poem is by definition a trace, an inscription, especially in its Mallarmean conception.”194 Rancière counters that the wording and format of Mallarmé’s poems are never the trace of an already transpired event, but the very act of a tracing: the deployment of an appearing and of a disappearing which is laid out in analogy with the “subject” of the poem—the movement of a fan, of a headdress, of a curtain, of a wave, of the streaming of the gold of fireworks or the smoke of a cigarette. It is this deployment in analogy which constitutes the poem as the effectiveness of the Idea.195

Mallarmé’s poems are inscribed analogies of what they are saying, then, rather than traces of an eternal Idea beyond the poems’ materiality. In line with this characterization of Mallarmé’s work, Rancière accuses Badiou of seeing the poems as “an allegory of the event in general and the courage of the effort of the thought whereby its ordeal is kept alive through new additions to the configuration of poems.” Badiou therefore overlooks what Mallarmé’s poems really are, an “allegory,” a valorization, of the poem itself and not of an Idea. This means that Badiou’s inaesthetics ends up literally making the poem a mimesis of the Idea related to the event, a metaphor that has the poem saying “only what philosophy has need of it to say.”196 But the poem is free of “any scribe’s apparatus” and requires no statement of its intent, because the imagery captures disappearing or tracing directly, is itself the Idea, rather than pointing to a singular Idea that bears no relation to anything else. Badiou therefore inadvertently ties art to non-art (philosophy in this case), missing the real non-art to which Mallarmé’s poetry is connected, the “formation of a community of sense”

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mentioned earlier, that is, missing the poetry’s status as an example of the aesthetic regime of art rather than of the purity of Badiou’s inaesthetics. Rancière also thinks that cinema and other genres of art that are a mixture of various arts are actually obvious examples of a particular subtype of the aesthetic regime of art. Each of them is “a regime of indistinction between art and the arts” and thus would violate Badiou’s claim that the different types of art are singular, each with its own specific truth procedures and configuration of artworks. Rancière argues that Badiou obfuscates cinema and the other counter examples to his inaesthetics by claiming that such arts “are not really arts” and actually “impurify” the singular arts that they combine.197 The thrust of the Mallarmé example and of cinema, then, illuminates Rancière’s conclusion that inaesthetics does not educate us about the Idea of art and its singular and immanent type of truth; rather, Badiou’s inaesthetics inadvertently points to the aesthetic regime as the leading characterization of today’s art and the singular tension between art and non-art. I find Rancière’s criticism of Badiou’s anesthetics convincing; it also reinforces our earlier and more general criticism against Badiou’s theory of Ideas and events.198 But for our purposes, the criticism helps safeguard the claim that, at least in the case of public contributions, the aesthetic dimension and political dimension of an artwork are always at play together though with varying levels of success. Indeed, in the case of government supported art, or art which dissents from it, the two dimensions are by definition at play. We need to turn now, however, to the question of whether they are at play in a designation that is broader than the restricted terms of Rancière’s particular characterization of the aesthetic regime of art.

T HE RE L AT I O N B E T W E E N T H E AE ST H E T IC AND P OLI T I C A L DI ME N S I O N S O F ART WO RKS

Recent criticism suggests that Rancière wavers between a historicist and an essentialist view of the aesthetic regime of art.199 Gabriel Rockhill, for example, feels that Rancière makes an essence of both art and politics, leaving “art and politics proper cut off from one another.”200 We can put this another way by harking back to the last chapter. In the section there

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on participatory art, Claire Bishop criticizes a number of examples of such art for rejecting any aesthetic dimension for their overtly political art and for not recognizing that even their own works usually had an aesthetic dimension in one form or another. In the same context she speaks favorably of Rancière’s aesthetic regime of art and its particular fusion of aesthetics and political or other didactic material. But she also makes statements that suggests she would join Rockhill in having the aesthetic regime include art that clearly intends to promote the socialpolitical goals of participatory art. Such art would therefore go beyond the mere redistribution of the sensible as in Rancière’s favored interpretation of the Juno Ludovisi.201 At the very least we could say that in any public art related to democracy, the aesthetic dimension requires a political dimension whether of Rancière’s sort or of the overtly emancipatory intent or effect type. We have already seen a compelling example of this broader aesthetic in our discussion of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s The Homeless Projection in chapter 2. Incensed by the real estate industry and city government alliance’s use of Manhattan’s Union Square as an icon for their exploitive “revitalization” project, he declared “slide-warfare” on them. His counterarchitecture consisted in seamlessly melding images onto the statues of Washington, Lincoln, Lafayette, and Charity (a woman and two children) and thereby converting them into the sort of homeless people evicted from the park by the city and real estate industry. The icon for the revitalization project was now a memorial to the death of the homeless and the publicizing of social injustice. The statues converted into the aesthetic images of the homeless lent their force to the sociopolitical message that Wodiczko wanted to inscribe in the name of the homeless. Art was not sacrificed for non-art; instead, the aesthetic dimension and the political dimension of the project/projection were effectively fused in the artwork. Indeed, this charged fusion fulfills Rancière’s own formula for the proper relation between the two dimensions, but now applied more broadly than his own characterization of the aesthetic regime of art: Suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification. In fact, this ideal effect is always the object of

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a negotiation between opposites, between the readability of the message that threatens to destroy the sensible form of art and the radical uncanniness that threatens to destroy all political meaning.202

The criterion for public art as an act of citizenship in a democracy involves two maxims. The first is that it contribute critically and innovatively to the characteristics of democracy that we have formulated from our examination of the disparate views of Rawls, Derrida, Badiou, and Rancière. These characteristics and their implications for our criterion were summarized at the end of part I of this chapter. We have now performed a similar extraction with respect to the aesthetics of public art. In chapter 3, we discussed contemporary art in terms of contemporaneity heterochronicity, and anachronicity. Jacques Derrida, Terry Smith, Keith Moxey, Peter Osborne, Robert Smithson, Georges Didi-Huberman, and others criticized the Eurocentric and teleological narrative that portrayed Western art as the goal of all art. They valorized instead the extreme heterogeneity of contemporary art—its many “temporalities” or cultural expressions—as well as the importance of the aesthetic dimension, its aura, which we have just summarized through the quotation from Rancière. Although we agreed with their valorization of art’s heterogeneity, we argued that a criterion for public art in a democratic society should also not neglect allusions to the unity or solidarity involved in that sort of polity. We will follow Bishop’s and Rockhill’s urging to include more explicitly political art into our characterization of Rancière’s aesthetic regime of art. The next two chapters will treat, respectively, Chicago’s Millennium Park and New York’s National 9/11 Memorial and Museum. The task in those chapters will be to provide a fuller characterization and more precise delineation of our criterion for assessing public artworks as acts of citizenship. This treatment of this criterion includes both its political part, that is, the relation of a public artwork to democracy and the aspects of the latter we have been elaborating, and the criterion’s aesthetic part, that is, the creative tension between the aesthetic and the political dimensions of a given public artwork. The public piece must be good art as well as good politics to live up to the criterion of public art we are steadily constructing.

6 THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF CHICAGO’S MILLENNIUM PARK

I

n the last chapter, we examined the views of Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière on democracy and aesthetics. This effort helped us to develop further our engagement with these themes in earlier chapters of this book. The results of these queries, summarized at the end of the last chapter, sketched the characteristics of democracy and the relation between the aesthetic and political dimensions of art that we needed for constructing a criterion of public art as an act of citizenship. We will now examine Chicago’s Millennium Park and its architecture and sculptures as a means of deriving a more compelling articulation of our criterion. The park is an example of public art as a celebration of life. In the next chapter, we will test further the adequacy of our criterion by assessing its effectiveness in the context of death and mourning provided by New York’s National 9/11 Memorial and Museum and Krzysztof Wodiczko’s alternative to it, City of Refuge.

F R O M B U R N H A M ’ S W H I T E C I T Y TO M I L L E N N I U M PA R K

Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 (figure 6.1). The aim of its chief designer, Daniel Burnham, was to outshine the 1889 World’s

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World’s Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago, 1893. From James W. Shepp and Daniel B. Shepp, Shepp’s World’s Fair Photographed: Being a Collection of Original Copyrighted Photographs Authorized and Permitted by the Management of the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago: Globe Bible Pub. Co., 1893). Courtesy of the Frick Fine Arts Library, University of Pittsburgh

FIGURE  6.1

Fair in Paris, L’Exposition Universelle, and its crowning glory, the newly built Eiffel Tower. He also hoped to overcome the taunts of New Yorkers and other easterners that the City of the Big Shoulders could “produce only a country fair.”1 To meet these challenges, Burnham hired America’s best architects. He assigned them the task of creating the temporary structures of the Exposition in Beaux Arts style and demanded that they complete them in an impossibly short period. The result of his effort was the internationally acclaimed “White City.” Despite this success, Burnham received stinging criticism for importing the majority of his architects from

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outside Chicago and for promoting the conservatism of their designs. Louis Sullivan, the famous Chicago builder, complained that the White City had killed off “architecture . . . in the land of the free and the home of the brave—in a land declaring its fervid democracy, its inventiveness, its resourcefulness, its unique daring, enterprise, and progress.”2 In earlier chapters, we noted that government-sponsored public art is usually expected to reflect or advance the values of the people in whose name it has been solicited. We therefore should not be surprised that Sullivan’s criticism of Burnham’s White City appealed to the idea of America’s “fervid democracy.” Nor should we be amazed, a hundred and some years after the Columbian Exposition, that the Windy City’s recently completed Millennium Park is frequently judged on the basis of its adherence to democratic virtues (figure 6.2).3 These judgments have referred to both the park’s artworks and the social-political groups involved in its planning, management, and use. For some, the park expresses Whitmanesque democracy and interactive art; for others, it epitomizes autocracy and spectacle or “wow” architecture. Millennium Park, therefore, will serve as an excellent source for further determining the democratic and aesthetic aspects of the criterion we are seeking for assessing public art as an act of citizenship. The initiative for creating Millennium Park came from an alliance between politicians and the heads of a number of corporations and local leading families. Mayor Richard M. Daley was the principal politician and the main client of the artists and donors who contributed to the park.4 He appointed former Sara Lee CEO John Bryan to head up the project and to be its chief fundraiser. Some of Bryan’s motivations for accepting the appointment echo Burnham’s reasons for his White City. Bryan says, for example, that “the whole idea was to get the world’s leading artists and designers and architects to come and do the enhancements to this space that would actually help define Chicago and perhaps become iconic, some of them.” He adds that local sculptors submitted their work over the years but only one was accepted—a repeat of Burnham’s tendency to seek architects outside Chicago.5 The result of this “Pax Daleyorum”—of this public–private corporation alliance6—now occupies twenty-four and a half acres of downtown Chicago and connects the city to the body of water that forms its eastern border, Lake Michigan. From an urban-design point of view, Millennium Park replaces the railroad yard trench that formerly separated the city

FIGURE  6.2 An aerial view of Chicago’s Millennium Park, 2004. Photo by Scott McDonald. Photo copyright © Hedrich Blessing

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from its shoreline.7 Most important, Millennium Park contains spectacular structures. Some of the more prominent of these are the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, a bandshell designed by Frank Gehry (figure 6.3); the Crown Fountain by Jaume Plensa (figure 6.4); Lurie Garden by Kathryn Gustafson, Jennifer Guthrie, and Shannon Nichol (figure 6.5); and, on the AT&T Plaza, Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor (figure 6.6). The artists who have designed these structures are known worldwide. One of the architects among them, Frank Gehry, is even referred to as a “starchitect.”8 According to Bryan, the impact of the park and these artists

FIGURE  6.3 Millennium Park’s Jay Pritzker Pavilion and Concert Hall, by Frank Gehry. Photo by Scott McDonald. Photo copyright © Hedrich Blessing

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elevates the “people’s vision of what can be done” and “does something to the spirit of the city that is almost impossible to define.”9 But perhaps the highest compliment comes from Mayor Daley himself: “Politicians come and go; business leaders come and go, but the artists really define a city.”10

M I L L EN N I U M PA R K AND I TS DE MOCRAT IC PRO MIS E

Most of the people involved in the creation and management of Millennium Park associate Bryan’s “spirit of the city” and Daley’s “definition of the city” with democratic values. Thus Frank Gehry sees present-day urban areas as “the chaotic . . . product of democracy.” He adds that this chaos is a persistent theme of his work, which includes the bandshell for Millennium Park.11 From a more specific (though less profound) angle, Gehry claims that his bandshell was designed as a democratic proposal because he and his associates wanted to ensure that the “people sitting on the lawn would have the same quality of musical experience as the people sitting up front” and that, as much as possible, they would have “equally democratic . . . sight lines” for seeing the stage (see figure 6.3).12 The architect Thomas Beeby echoes Gehry’s sentiments when he says that the theater he planned for Millennium Park (figure 6.7) “was meant to be extremely democratic: “no box seats . . . a democratic way of thinking . . . where the audience is all equal . . . diverse . . . and [there’s no] sense of any kind of social stratification.”13 One of the donors for whom the theater is named, Joan Harris, adds that democracy is also reflected in the choice of materials for the Harris Theater: “No chandeliers and no marble; none of the stuff of the old elegance,” thus evoking “racial and economic neutrality.”14 Similarly, Christopher Perille exclaims that the classical peristyle of the Millennium Monument funded by his firm for the park fulfills what he thinks is the “intent of any public space”: its use by a “democratic cross-section of the city” (figure 6.8).15 Moreover, the website for Millennium Park states that the mission of the galleries sponsored by Boeing Corporation is to be democratic in the sense of providing the public with direct exposure to the creations of living artists and architects in a “high-quality historical, social and cultural context.”16 Although these comments reflect the association of public art with democracy, we

FIGURE  6.4 Millennium Park’s Crown Fountain, by Jaume Plensa. Photo by Scott McDonald. Photo copyright © Hedrich Blessing

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will have to see if the park itself can provide a deeper, more provocative, and satisfying idea of the political system that its benefactors are praising.

MILLENNIUM PARK: A UNITY COMPOSED OF DIFFERENCE

Throughout this book we have spoken of the idea of a unity composed of (rather than imposed on) difference. Difference in this context has referred to class, gender, ethnicity, and all other heterogeneous manners of existing that in any way embody or suggest different ideas of the good; it also highlights fecundity or the continuous creation of new ideas of what is good politically for a society. It is similar to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idea of “chaosmos,” the “composed chaos” of diverging series that communicate with one another only as the production of a new “assemblage.”17 The generative series or elements remain at play within their new creation, still contesting with it and each other for prominence. We have seen evidence of this heterogeneous form of unity in our discussion of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection and in the examples of contemporaneity and heterochronicity we explored in chapter  4. We can add some finality to this radical form of unity by seeing how it is exhibited systematically in Millennium Park. Burnham’s White City wore the uniform face of classical architecture: buildings with columns and pediments, evoking “the glories of ancient Rome.”18 It imposed upon its elements a unity generated by an externally derived and univocal formula. In contrast, the sculptures, buildings, and other art objects in Millennium Park are disparate, each commissioned independently of the others and designed by highly individualistic artists. Indeed, the official historian for the park, Timothy Gilfoyle, remarks that the park “embodies no singular theme . . . advertises no consistent message” and “was ‘planned’ by a series of committees, informal negotiations with [the] mayor, and the organizational talents of John Bryan and Ed Uhlir.” Even “the array of artists was unplanned, part of a decentralized, evolving process.”19 Despite its heterogeneous elements and resistance to hierarchical or other types of homogenizing order, it is still called by a single name. How is that possible? Many of those who have played a part in its development suggest that the interplay among the diverse artworks and other aspects

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of the park generates its distributed form of unity. For example, Plensa says that his video fountain and Kapoor’s Cloud Gate “are completely different and [yet] approach [each other] well.”20 Similarly, Lurie Garden (figure 6.5) is distinct from the rest of the park, a “closed, tightly knit space” that stands in “dramatic spatial contrast” to the open expanse of the immediately adjacent lawn of Gehry’s Concert Hall.21 Yet the garden’s huge shoulder hedges, its Dark and Light floral plates, and wooden waterway (or seam) are “aligned with the infrastructure that supports [the surrounding city], both fiscally and physically.”22 More specifically, the Dark Plate represents Chicago’s pre-urban history and “evokes humankind’s immersion in nature”; the Light Plate represents the plains of the Midwest and the building of Chicago (that is, “the domination over nature, and the future”); and, lastly, the seam’s wooden path mimics the original

FIGURE 6.5 Millennium Park’s Lurie Garden, by Kathryn Gustafson, Jennifer Guthrie, and Shannon Nichol. Photo by Shawna Coronado. Photo courtesy of GGN

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wooden walkways that were once constructed over the swampy terrain of Chicago and also trace Lake Michigan’s historical shoreline and the railroad right-of-way that used to exist below.23 Moreover, once the idea for a monumental sculpture by Jeff Koons was eliminated from the park’s design, one official commented that Lurie Garden was “an avenue for dialogue” between the new wing of the Art Institute of Chicago located next door to the park, Gehry’s music pavilion, and Kapoor’s close-by sculpture.24 Gilfoyle reinforces this idea of interactive, distributed unity when he adds that Lurie Garden “connects the work of the two great architects at the millennium—Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano—while simultaneously echoing the historic geography of Grant Park: the railroad and the lake.”25 Piano, a winner of the Pritzker Prize for architecture, designed two of the Exelon Pavilions that lead down into the parking garage under the park. But most importantly in this context, he is the architect of the recently completed addition of the art institute that looks out onto Lurie Garden. Because of these many interconnections among disparate elements, Gilfoyle pointed out to Gehry associate Craig Webb that officials were worried the park design might seem as if “all the artists are screaming at one another.” Webb replied that “even though the parts visually may be somewhat disparate, it’s all going to be woven together by the tree canopy and . . . will work that way.”26 Despite Webb’s observation, the trees seem one interactive piece among others rather than a defining element of the park.27 The park’s diffuse unity is something more than the secondary effects of the trees or the streets and lake forming its boundaries. Gilfoyle suggests what the specific identity of the interactive aspect of the park’s unity might be when he says that “through the use of scale and color, the pavilion, bridge, fountain, garden, and sculpture relate to and engage in an architectural dialogue with the surrounding skyscrapers and lake.” 28 For example, Millennium Park officials “were particularly drawn to the original proposal [for Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate sculpture] because of its interactive qualities, reflecting the skyline, the clouds, the lake, and individual observers, sometimes simultaneously.”29 But one must add that Cloud Gate also literally reflects the other sculptures in the park; indeed, all the park’s sculptures are in dialogue with each other as well as with their urban setting and watery border.

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FIGURE 6.6 Millennium Park’s Cloud Gate, by Anish Kapoor, in AT&T Plaza. Photo by Scott McDonald. Photo copyright © Hedrich Blessing

The notion of a dialogue as used here fits well with our idea of voice and of society or a park as a multivoiced body. Thus Millennium Park’s unruly body is not only the sculptures and gardens that help constitute it. Like Union Square and its statues (see chapter 2), the park is also the discourses of the artists who created the art objects for it; of the politicians who commissioned them; of the corporate philanthropists who largely paid for and selected them; and of the park-goers who enjoy them. Like the dialogue between its art objects, the park also consists of the

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Millennium Park’s Harris Theater, by Thomas Beeby. Photo by Jon Miller. Photo copyright © Hedrich Blessing

FIGURE 6.7

exchanges among these discursive voices. Moreover, their exchanges produce modifications in their discourses and even create new voices. Thus Millennium Park exists in time as well as space: its being, like that of society itself, is its becoming—indeed, its continual metamorphosis with each new perspective upon it and any future artworks that may be added to it. More generally, and to remind us of what has been discussed in previous chapters, each voice points in three directions at once: (1) to the subjects that enunciate it, (2) to the discourse it expresses, and (3) its ceaseless interplay with the other voices in the same domain. This interplay

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simultaneously holds these voices together and keeps them apart. In other words, it makes them a collective body—in this case, a park. This description and the interplay it specifies constitute what in chapter 3 we called the temporal axis of the dialogic body. More profoundly yet, each of these voices is what it is because of its difference from the others; each voice is shot through with the others, at once part of the identity and the other of the rest. In words that we used just a moment ago, each voice is a dialogic hybrid intersected by the rest. Thus Gilfoyle says that “Millennium Park is a cultural hybrid, a vivid illustration of the intersecting relationship of art, corporate sponsorship, urban politics, and globalization.”30 In chapter 3, we compared this profound dimension to the diacritical unity of the synchronic structure of Ferdinand Saussure’s linguistic notion of la langue. We referred to it as the “spatial axis” of the dialogic body and noted that it was intrinsically temporalized by the dynamic interplay among these voices on the social body’s other axis. The dialogic intersectionality of the park’s voices is especially evident in its artwork. For example, Burnham’s voice—the language of Chicago’s architectural past and the Beaux Arts tradition—is kept alive in the park by the Doric-columned peristyle at Wrigley Square. Indeed, one of the peristyle’s designers says that the “juxtaposition” and the “dialogue” between the classicism of the Millennium Monument (figure 6.8) and the modernism of Gehry’s bandshell “speaks to the pluralism of our time.”31 Similarly, Kapoor states that “he wanted [Cloud Gate] to have a classical feel yet at the same time to be very contemporary.”32 This sort of cultural hybridity is also achieved by the proportioned columns that Gehry uses to anchor the trellis sound system for his silvery bandshell and its outdoor lawn.33 Thus the more pervasive contemporary art styles in the park (that is, the voices of project manager Bryan and the majority of the park’s artists) not only define themselves in part by their difference from the nineteenthcentury Beaux Arts architecture of the past, but also by incorporating aspects of that language within their own artistic languages. Their views are an echo of Georges Didi-Huberman’s characterization of the many artistic anachronisms folded into Fra Angelico’s medieval Madonna of the Shadows and his suggestion that this hybridity marks all art objects; that the “sovereignty of anachronism,” of its interruption of the present, undermines the art historians’ preference for the “myth” of “euchronistic consonance” and its emphasis on “temporal concordance.”34

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Other types of cultural hybridity are also evident in the park. For example, a hint of Disneyland struggles with the park’s artistic achievements. Thus Bryan mentions that some critics thought of the Crown Fountain as “amusement passing for art.”35 Even Mayor Daley worried about Plensa’s fountain possibly “Disneyfying” the park.36 Moreover, Gehry’s work has sometimes been called “entertainment architecture.”37 Despite these charges, Bryan claims that the planners purposely avoided making the park appear like Disneyland, the neighboring Navy Pier, or any other theme park.38 Gilfoyle, in his turn, praises what he feels are the profundities of the art pieces in the park and contrasts them with “theme park planning, [which] is organized around deception and subterfuge.”39 But even Bryan and Gilfoyle would not deny that these works have at least a playful aspect mixed in with their seriousness. Nature and culture are also fused together in the park. This is selfevident in the artistic formation of Lurie Garden. But it is also as such in Plensa’s video fountain: he sees the water in the fountain as reflecting Chicago’s lake in the specific sense of “the memory of the water as the fluid, as the humility, as the reason of the origin of all kinds of life—water.”40 This nature-culture hybridity is most obvious in the park’s mediation between the congested urban area and the expansive lake. Craig Webb, Gehry’s architectural partner, particularly notes the strength of the asymmetry between nature, as represented by the lake, and the congested urban area that make up the sides of the park.41 Nonetheless, the park emphasizes art over nature, and this is part of its—and Bryan’s—break with Burnham as well.42 There are, then, a number of voices that are mixed together in the art objects of the park and contest with one another for audibility: Beaux Arts and contemporary art, amusement and profundity, nature and culture.

M I L L E NNI U M PA R K : R E L AT I O N A L AE ST H E T ICS

The appropriateness of characterizing Millennium Park as a dialogic and multivoiced body is illustrated further when we consider the particular relation between the artists’ creations and their viewers. On this score, Gilfoyle argues, the park avoids both traditional commemorative art and modernism’s emphasis on the self-expression of the artist.43 Instead,

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“Cloud Gate, the Crown Fountain, BP Bridge, and even Lurie Garden generate ongoing, multilevel, participatory dialogues between artists and viewers. In the view of their creators, art that provides multiple ways for viewers to partake of and participate in the art itself makes it ‘democratic.’ ”44 Gilfoyle’s emphasis on this democratic interactivity is echoed by the comments of many of the park’s artists and planners. For example, the fountain designed by Plensa is actually two towers, each fifty-twofeet tall, which face each other across the length of a quarter-inch deep reflecting pool. Water cascades down the towers over the ever-changing video portraits of more than one thousand Chicagoans. Plensa says that he wants viewers to “take part in his piece” through their recognition of the types of people whose faces show up on the screen of his fountain.45 He also thinks that another of its interactive qualities consists in the people walking on the shallow waterbed between the two video display-fountains.46 Moreover, Gilfoyle paraphrases Plensa as saying that public art presents “the challenge of how to integrate the viewer into an interactive relationship with the art, or, in Plensa’s direct words, ‘to succeed to be as one with it.’ ”47 Plensa’s gallery director, Paul Gray, adds that he, like the sculptor, wants public art “to have some kind of interactive quality between the observer, the artist, and the piece itself.”48 The interactive aspects of Plensa’s fountain are also attributed to Kapoor’s Cloud Gate. For example, one Chicago art official notes how the polished surface of Kapoor’s sculpture mirrors everything surrounding it including its viewers.49 Kapoor himself says he wanted a work that “was drawing in the sky [while] allowing you to enter it like a piece of architecture that was pulling your own reflection into the fulcrum, making a kind of participatory experience.”50 He adds elsewhere, “[all work] is completed by the person who is looking at it.”51 In a similar vein, the architect for the Harris Theater in Millennium Park (figure 6.7) emphasizes “the engagement between the audience and the stage,”52 and one of the creators of Lurie Garden says that its collections of trees, hedges, and other plants “treat visitors as players in a theater of their own devising.”53 Even the architects for the park’s peristyle claim interactivity for their piece: they designed it so that people could more easily read the names of the donors for the park inscribed on it.54 The irony of this last statement will become clear later when we confront the darker side of Millennium Park.

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Millennium Park’s Millennium Monument, by Christopher Perille. Photo by Bob Harr. Photo copyright © Hedrich Blessing

FIGURE 6.8

The emphasis upon their interactive qualities suggests that the art objects in the park are more than mute content for the voices of the artists who created them, the politicians and corporations who commissioned them, and the park-goers exposed to them. We can begin specifying the nature of this content by comparing the art objects with the voices of the subjects who comment on them. The syntactical complexity of linguistic discourse allows voices and those who enunciate them to be reflexive. More specifically, this syntactic complexity makes it possible for us to name or otherwise capture an object and then, on the basis of that capture, imagine and articulate this content differently than it currently presents itself. In addition, we saw in chapter 2 and elsewhere how the

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discourses associated with voices establish the identity of the individuals who enunciate them and contest with each other over the meaning of the park as an “iconic symbol of Chicago at the turn of the millennium.”55 Because these voices survive the lives of the individuals currently enunciating them, it is appropriate to focus on them and their discourses rather than the biographies of their individual enunciators in this analysis of the park and public art. Although art objects are not reflexive in the sense that voices are, we can repeat a point about them that was made in chapter 2: their interactivity marks them as “quasi-voices” or expressive gestures.56 As expressive gestures, art objects are in the type of relationship with voices that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari refer to as “reciprocal presupposition.” Specifically, art objects and voices are “isomorphic,” that is, related to one another but with neither ever completely dominated by the other.57 Indeed, art objects can create a rupture and force a revision in the discourses that simultaneously shape them as their content.58 The interactive aims of the artists of Millennium Park and the reference to the notion of reciprocal presupposition indicate that the art objects under consideration are examples of what Nicolas Bourriaud and a number of other art theorists call relational aesthetics. According to Bourriaud, relational aesthetics is “democratic”59 and, rather than forming “imaginary and utopian realities,” it introduces “ways of living and models of action within the existing real.”60 More specifically, Bourriaud claims that relational art objects are both the outcome and the producers of human relations. These objects are the outcome of our relations to them insofar as they “render [our] social work concrete,” and they are the producers of these relations insofar as they “organize types of sociability and regulate inter-human encounters.”61 Moreover, these interactive artworks introduce a “formal disorder” into the aesthetic arena. This disorder inherently provokes dialogue with the viewers of these objects and implies a “discursiveness” that is never finished. Although Bourriaud claims that work conforming to the model of relational aesthetics is unique in art history, he feels that it can appear “as the obvious backdrop of all aesthetic praxis, and as a modernist theme to cap all modernist themes.”62 I am using the term “relational aesthetics” in this extended sense. Of course, many non-aesthetic objects have this property of organizing around them the very people who simultaneously shape them. But

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these objects fulfill such a role by virtue of their function of assisting us in surviving, doing our jobs, or otherwise carrying out our routine tasks. In contrast, art objects organize us by breaking with all these functions, by going beyond their usual practical purpose and arranging us around them on a novel basis, one created in the moment of the interaction between us and them. Even though Jürgen Habermas favors other forms of rationality, he too notes that aesthetic objects have the power to create the criteria by which they are judged.63 This creative power explains why such objects are so often effective in rupturing the discourses addressing them and bringing about new ones. On the basis of this characterization of art objects, we can borrow some terms from Edward Casey and say that Millennium Park’s multivoiced body consists of “spirit” (the voices articulating the art objects) and “place” (the surroundings and art objects that serve simultaneously as the location of the voices and the content of their discourses).64

T H E O R AC L E S O F MI L L E NNIU M PARK

This portrayal of the park as spirit and place, as a multivoiced body, passes over a darker side of Millennium Park that raises a serious problem in relation to the democratic aspects of its artwork. The creative interplay among the participants of this body is often curtailed by voices that are raised to the level of what we have been calling “oracles.” In the sense that we are using the term, an oracle proclaims itself to be the one true God, the pure race, capital, or any other doctrine that treats itself as a nonrevisable and universal truth. In the case of Millennium Park, there are two chief oracles. One is the tendency for art to be pure spectacle. Gehry, for example, would like to see his concert hall and other architectural sculptures as structures that make people question what architecture is all about. But he concedes that some of his critics see his extraordinary architecture as mesmerizing, as creating a muting “wow” effect.65 Indeed, Mayor Daley worried about the park being “Gehry-ized” for just this reason.66 This effect may also characterize the other artworks in the park and undermine their interactive or democratic impact. The concept of spectacle has long been noted as a problem for art. To add to some of our earlier references on this phenomenon, the most

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trenchant criticism of art as spectacle comes from Guy Debord. In The Society of the Spectacle, he argues that “the spectacle proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that . . . all social life is mere appearance.” The duty of critique is therefore to expose spectacle “as a [visible] negation of life that has invented a visual form for itself.”67 More recently, a group of leading art historians and theorists called “Retort” have equated spectacle with the “constantly self-administrated” state of “alienationinto-a-realm of images,” a “constant image-flow of contentments, obedience, enterprise, and uniformity.”68 For this group, spectacle is only the imagistic side of a repeated form of violence against “real human possibilities, real (meaning flexible, useable, transformable) representations, real attempts at collectivity.”69 In a similar vein, Terry Smith charges that Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and by extension his bandshell in Millennium Park, are “spectacle architecture,” embracing “the image function above all other purposes in the service mainly of the globalizing cultural industry.”70 Elsewhere, Smith speaks of spectacle as the capacity to distract us from more social and political concerns and asks if much of contemporary art is “simply a fancy name for the most refined of those objects that serve spectacle society by inducing in the beholders the preferred state of attenuated distraction.”71 The second type of oracle is perhaps more threatening than spectacle for the claim that Millennium Park is democratic. It points to an autocratic tendency in relation to contemporary public art. Since the cuts by President Ronald Reagan on federal aid to states and cities, as well as the pervasive emphasis on reducing taxation, many cities in the United States have been forced to form partnerships with corporate elites to finance public art. This form of privatization contrasts with the typical practice in Europe for governments to use their own funds to finance public art. In Chicago, public–private cooperation has been a reflection of the tendency by former mayor Richard M. Daley and other politicians to switch from municipal patronage and help from labor unions to a business model, cutting back on labor costs and jobs.72 This switch is also indicative of Chicago’s change from an industrial city to a service city—that is, to a prime example of the effects of globalization on the United States and other countries.73 Globalization also includes the tendency of Chicago and other cities to undertake public art projects in order to transform themselves into destinations for global tourism and to attract finance capital and economic

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investment.74 For all these reasons, privatization became an accepted means to reduce municipal spending in constructing Millennium Park while still reaping the benefits of this facility for the area. Because of this financing trend, Mayor Daley gave John Bryan the job of seeking out civic-minded corporate heads who would contribute over five million dollars each in exchange for naming opportunities; in other words, for having the site of a particular artwork named after their families or family members—hence the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, the Crown Fountain, Lurie Garden, Wrigley Square, Harris Theater, and the AT&T Cloud Gate Plaza. More specifically, these “modern Medicis” were told: “You are going to be responsible for creating the most beautiful space, ornament or building that is going to define Chicago for the next century. It will have your name on it, and it will be a gift to the people of Chicago from those people who were successful and prominent at the time of the millennium.”75 This arrangement also left the task of selecting the art in the hands of Bryan and the donors, with minimal comment from cultural institutions or other civic bodies.76 Moreover, some critics contend that this privatization means that the future direction of the park will be disproportionately in the hands of corporations and their CEOs. Although Gilfoyle replies that the space stays under the supervision of the city or park district, Bryan and the donors are building an endowment for maintaining Lurie Garden, Cloud Gate, and the Crown Fountain. This might give them large control over future modifications of these sites.77 Because of this privatization, architectural historian Paul Jaskot argues that “Millennium Park has used culture to naturalize the simultaneity and compatibility of social values and capitalist interest.”78 This naturalization makes it appear unremarkable that a large degree of control is given to the private sphere in determining the shape of public spaces. It therefore decreases people’s readiness to see the need for struggle against private interests. Thus Jaskot emphasizes that the project’s “complicity in threatening the economic roots of democracy” puts into question the idea that the park is “deeply democratic” just because it combines “entertainment, delightful forms, and the socially-benevolent need to gather as a people, particularly in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center.”79 We can add to his account that this culturally induced myopia is increased by our tendency to view art in separation from the voices and oracles that help shape its fuller meaning and direction.

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In light of these considerations, we can now see the full sense in which Millennium Park is a multivoiced and dialogic body. It is both the creative interplay among its many voices and the constant threat of the domination of this interplay by those of its voices that have become oracles. It is, in other words, a social body that continually contests its worse tendencies in the name of its best. On this view, Millennium Park or any other piece of government-sponsored art is an act of citizenship so long as its aesthetic objects and their allied voices suggest a deep enough sense of democracy to counter the tendency of some of the other voices in the park to become oracles such as “wow” art and capital. Indeed, democracyaffirming art would act as a counter-memory, reminding us that society is a dialogic body—that, when not stultified by oracles, we are participants in a creative interplay among the many voices that constitute our existence. To complete this account of art and citizenship, then, we must make more explicit what Millennium Park and the relational aesthetics of its art objects teach us about democracy and public art.

R E S I S T I N G O R AC L E S : A N I S H K A P O O R ’ S C LO U D G AT E

We can start the task of evaluating the park as an act of citizenship by concentrating upon one of its sculptures, Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate. Kapoor’s work begins with a “void.” Thus, the shiny, apparently seamless surface of the Cloud Gate is an emptiness that gives rise to the figures that structure it transitorily.80 More specifically, the sculpture is shaped like a kidney bean. When you walk beneath the concave underside or omphalos of the bean, you at first find the reflections of all the other people crowded around the sculpture and not your own. When you do finally locate yourself, the contours of the omphalos make your reflection overlap or fuse with many of the others. You experience yourself as a hybrid creature, at once identical with and yet different from the others. Despite the strangeness of this type of encounter, the viewers seem to enjoy moving, merging their images together and finding themselves anew. They continually glance from the people around them to the new combination of images their movements construct, as if realizing and relishing a new sense of what it is be together with others.

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FIGURE  6.9

Merged images reflected on Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate. Photo by Fred

Evans

In light of this experience, Kapoor comments that his sculpture is “a picture plane that forces the viewer toward a deeper interior.”81 Part of what he means by this interior is that “we are all in exile, in a positive state of cultural ambiguity.”82 Reinforcing this suggestion, Pier Tazzi declares that we “see ourselves [in Kapoor’s sculptures] as uncertain larva without place and without age” and that “this obscures our unsustainable identity.”83 Mary Jane Jacob helps clarify this “unsustainable identity” by drawing on Kapoor’s Indian origins and the inspiration he takes from Buddhist and Hindu thought. She argues that Kapoor’s sculptures reflect the “net” of the Hindu god Indra. The knots of this infinite net are multifaceted jewels, each reflected in all the others. In other words, they

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symbolize what Kapoor himself refers to as “infinite interconnectedness” or “complementary cosmic forces creating and sustaining the universe through their essential and intimate interaction.”84 Jacob links this idea of interconnectedness specifically to Cloud Gate when she declares that its polished surface is “not so much a mirror of the self or of the city as a mirror into the self and in which we can see ourselves in union with others.”85 This union, however, is one composed of difference. The reflected images in Cloud Gate have already indicated this. But Nicholas Baume reminds us of it again when he says that Kapoor’s work, like the Hindu god Vishnu, represents “simultaneous unity and multiplicity.”86 As these comments indicate, Cloud Gate contradicts the usual notion of identity. Instead of sameness, each of the sculpture’s reflected figures can be understood as at once part of the identity and the other of the rest. Only at the absolute and unattainable limit do the figures become completely merged or entirely separate. Moreover, Cloud Gate is perpetually producing new images. Thus Gilfoyle enthuses that “as one moves around the sculpture, the hypnotic reflections and even the shape change; it is never one thing in one place. The stationary object is always in transition, continually in a state of flux.”87 In its creator’s own words, Cloud Gate is “a space of becoming.”88 These descriptions of Cloud Gate help deflate the criticism that Kapoor’s sculpture is a case of mesmerizing spectacle or “wow” art. Put more positively, they support his claims that his art is interactive, an instance of a relational form of aesthetics.89 The sculpture does not so much hold us in awe as invite us to interact creatively with it and the other viewers. But if these considerations save Kapoor from the charge of spectacle art, other commentators, as we noted earlier, see them as pointing to a different criticism—that the interaction between the viewers and the surface of Cloud Gate is equivalent to standing in front of a funhouse mirror, that the sculpture is only entertaining and would more appropriately be placed in Disneyland.90 In response to this second line of criticism, Jacob claims that Cloud Gate is “no funhouse mirror trick.” She argues instead that the sculpture illustrates “the power of phenomenological experience over the intellect,” allows us to glimpse simultaneously our materiality and immateriality, and presents our nature as a “constantly changing state of becoming.”91

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In an interview with Kapoor, Baume reinforces Jacob’s thoughts by exclaiming on the magic of Cloud Gate, its being “so completely different from everything around it, which it also reflects and transforms.” In reply, Kapoor admits that it is “a short trip from Disneyland to something truly mysterious.” But he feels that his sculpture avoids Disneyland because it retains a “nonphysical, non-object-related character” and is thus “a matter of meaning.”92 What these commentators say of Cloud Gate, Gilfoyle attributes to the whole park: “Millennium Park encourages visitors to interact with some form of art. How many Disneyland or theme park visitors contemplate their ‘nothingness,’ as Kapoor asks? Do any ponder the duality of life posed by Plensa? Who examines the chaos of music and urbanity posed by Gehry’s music pavilion?”93 Thus Kapoor, Gilfoyle, and the other commentators see the extraordinariness of Kapoor’s artwork as offsetting any funhouse or Disneyland effects it might be thought to have. In other words, just as the mirror needs viewers and is thus relational, the viewers require the aura of the mirror in order to see their own interaction and reflected images as special. Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, then, does have aspects of spectacle or “wow” art, but they are in the service of the art’s relational aspects, that is, the work’s ability to entice the viewers’ participatory interaction with it and each other as well as its capacity to suggest new thoughts about community. The view of Cloud Gate that I am suggesting conforms to the more inclusive version of Rancière’s “aesthetic regime of art” at which we arrived in chapter 5. Like Rancière, our version eschews Badiou’s anesthetics, the idea that art produces truths that are completely immanent or coextensive with the artworks themselves and are singular (its type of truths is found nowhere else but in art). But, unlike Rancière, our version of the aesthetic regime of art includes art whose aesthetic force combines effectively with overt political content. It includes but does not limit itself to artworks that allude only to novel forms of community or reconfigurations of the sensible. Our version, but not Rancière’s, would therefore admit the example of counter-architecture we examined in chapter 2: Wodiczko’s The Homeless Projection and its straightforward but aesthetically well-formed political resistance to the real estate industry and its effort to force the homeless out of Union Square. However, Rancière’s original version of the aesthetic regime of art (and therefore also our more inclusive version) would accommodate Kapoor’s Cloud Gate: the aesthetic

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force of its perfect, shining surface reconfigures the bodies of its visitors by luring them to intermingle with each other while they search for their individual images under its concave belly, thus reflecting their intersecting existence on that same surface. This complex artwork therefore hints at a sense of community that lies just beneath or within our more individualized existence, a sense that neither atomizes us nor obliterates our heterogeneity. It would have to make the political meaning of this community more explicit, to suggest its resistance to capitalist society more directly, to have the political clarity of Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection. But it can still be said that Cloud Gate and the other art in Millennium Park can remind us of what the oracles in society have made us forget and even fear: that we are members of a dialogic society that continually creates new discourses and practices through the interplay among its voices.94

M I L L E N N I U M PA R K : A N AC T O F C I TIZE N S H I P ?

The bodies reflected on the shiny surface of Cloud Gate are almost as rarified as voices. We can therefore think of them as suggesting a deep form of democracy, one that involves and affirms the simultaneous solidarity, heterogeneity, and fecundity reflected in the interplay of the images produced by the viewer’s bodies. It’s the same reflecting body but always as different. Moving from the figures on Cloud Gate’s surface to the voices of the elected officials, corporate donors, viewers, artists, and the other voices and quasi-voices that make up Millennium Park, we can encapsulate this idea of democracy in a principle of justice that supports an open and creative interplay among equally audible voices. This principle urges us not to dismiss or simply register the words of the other voices. Rather, we should hear them in the engaged manner that risks our own discourses undergoing possible changes on the basis of what these others say. A dialogic encounter of this sort affirms the other voices intertwined with ours and ensures that none of democracy’s three dimensions should be sacrificed on the altar of the other two. Solidarity cannot become a univocal voice that would eliminate difference and novelty; heterogeneity cannot become a plurality of voices that cease or minimize the creative interplay that holds them together; and fecundity cannot become a futurism that

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silences or dismisses any voice that fails to follow the command to create at the expense of all else. In other words, this view of democracy combines modernity’s emphasis upon unity with postmodernity’s penchant for difference and novelty. Moreover, this combination does not reject the traditional ideas of safeguarding individual rights or electing representatives. Rather, it provides these ideas with a deeper basis than pragmatic expediency and pushes beyond them by calling for social, economic, and other policies that intentionally promote creative and metamorphosing interplay among the voices of society.95 Even Mayor Daley joins this chorus in his earlier statement about the importance of art and artists. Millennium Park, then, suggests a criterion of public art as an act of citizenship that can be turned back upon the park and used to judge it and other public art in democratic societies. The park itself constitutes such an act to the extent that it embodies the three political virtues and thereby resists the limits that the oracles of spectacle and capital place upon the creative interplay among the voices of society. More specifically, to the degree that the art objects in the park provoke their viewers to interact with or participate in them and to have some sense of a deeper social and democratic meaning—that is, to the degree that the objects rupture our more restrictive notions of togetherness—they resist being “wow” art. Rather than dazzling and blinding us, they become a new voice; rather than contemporary art that just happens to harbor fragments of Beaux Arts style and other artistic idioms, they set up interactions with its viewers and suggest a novel sense of democratic community. Rancière can help us clarify further the sense in which Cloud Gate indicates a more radical notion of democratic society that goes beyond implicit criticism of hierarchical or homogenizing forms of unity. He links what has been called the “avant-garde” to his aesthetic regime of art. He does this by distinguishing between two meanings of “avant-garde.” On the one hand, there is a “strategic” form: “the archi-political idea of a party” or “political intelligence” that states “the essential conditions for change.” On the other, there is the “aesthetic” form, which fits into his aesthetic regime of art: “the meta-political idea of global political subjectivity, the idea of the potentiality inherent in the innovative sensible modes of experience that anticipate a community to come.”96 Of the two forms, Cloud Gate and the architectural formation of Millennium Park are compatible with his aesthetic avant-garde. But our more inclusive version of

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the aesthetic regime of art has a place for the strategic as well as the aesthetic avant-garde. We add the proviso, however, that if the strategic version allows its political goal to mute the aesthetic force of the artwork, then it no longer has innovative artistic value and cannot meet our criterion of public art as an act of citizenship. Jean-Luc Nancy makes this sort of distinction clear when he speaks of how music is betrayed when “it is indexed to a mode of signification and not to a mode of sensibility.”97 He gives as an example the “signifying and oversignifying imposition [that] characterizes Nazi music.” Generalizing, he adds that the specificity of all forms of art has “a tendency to disappear in this [kind of] imposition.”98 When we move from the aesthetic to the economic–political sphere, Cloud Gate and the other art objects in the park increase the audibility of the park’s democratic voice. In particular, they resist autocracy to the degree that they can strongly challenge the oracle of capital and the naturalization of it due to the naming opportunities offered to donors. More broadly, public parks must resist using privatization at least as a major or exclusive means of funding their art. Indeed, this protest should extend to the privatization of public space that occurs through shopping malls, gated communities, business investment districts, and other practices that limit democracy in the name of consumer comfort and commercial profits.99 It is clear, however, that the artworks in Millennium Park do not challenge the oracle of capital and privatization directly. But they do suggest a radical idea of democracy, one that affirms simultaneously solidarity, heterogeneity, and fecundity. This idea is part of the criterion that can help us judge the park and other public art as acts of citizenship. When we turn this criterion back on Millennium Park, back on a multivoiced body that contests its own oracles, the results may still be debatable. Some will argue that the park and its art objects merely provide an attractive setting for the oracles of spectacle and capital, for images that distract us from recognizing the ongoing privatization of the public realm. Others will, like the first group, note with alarm the dominance of these two constricting forces in today’s society and the limits they place on art sponsored by the government. These inquirers will also put their hopes in art that makes fewer compromises, art projects of dissent like Wodiczko’s The Homeless Projection, which have their source neither in capital nor government.100 But they will hold in addition that because the art objects suggest an

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alternative sense of democracy and act to counter the oracles in Millennium Park, they, if not the park as a whole, qualify as acts of citizenship. Indeed, within the limits already placed on government-sponsored art by capitalism and a national taste for spectacle, can we reasonably ask of this category of art that it do any more at this time than offer the degree of resistance to these oracles that we have noted here? Whichever of these two views of the park we might affirm, collusion or resistance, we must admit that this is an age where images and public art increasingly guide our lives and politics. Thus, no matter how obscure the democratic message of the works in the park, no matter how muffled this voice is by the oracles of spectacle and capital, we must applaud it and seek to increase its audibility. We have used Millennium Part and particularly Kapoor’s Cloud Gate to illustrate our criterion for public art as an act of citizenship. We have specified that fulfillment of this criterion involves the following traits: politically, the artwork should be consonant with the three political virtues of democracy (solidarity, heterogeneity, and fecundity) and should resist oracles, at least the first two we have identified, spectacle and capital; artistically, both the aesthetic and the political (non-art) dimension of a public artwork are required for public art that effectively conveys democratic values and resists oracles—neither should cancel out the other. To state this criterion in more general terms, public art as an act of citizenship in a democratic country should promote and reveal new democratic values, resist autocratic ones, and be aesthetically effective in achieving these two directives. But we must test this criterion further and see what other qualifications are necessary to address the questions and criticisms of it that may still occur to us. We can undertake this task by examining New York’s National 9/11 Memorial and Museum along with Wodiczko’s artistic response to it— that is, by moving from the context of life to that of death and mourning and by assessing the challenge that a dissident public art project presents to the most important public artwork sponsored by the U.S. government since the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

7 THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF NEW YORK’S NATIONAL 9/11 MEMORIAL

I

n the last chapter, Millennium Park was the vehicle we used for delineating further the criterion for public art as an act of citizenship in a democracy. We equated Millennium Park with “life” because it is a gathering place for enjoying public artworks and the company of other visitors. Now we should test the range of our criterion and how compelling it is by assessing its value in the context opposite to life: death and mourning. This is also fitting because we began this book by noting that the inaugural years of the United States were marked by a contentious debate over whether George Washington would be more appropriately remembered by a stone monument or by “a plain tablet, on which every man could write what his heart dictated.”1 That debate has continued up to the present day, including the memorial we will now examine, New York’s National 9/11 Memorial, especially Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence (figure 7.1) and the later completed museum accompanying it. Our examination will include extensive consideration of a critical alternative to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s proposed City of Refuge (figure 7.2).2 We will also encounter again the theme of the fragility of democracy and public art’s possible responses to it.

FIGURE  7.1 Arial view of Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence and the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum, New York. Photograph by Jin S. Lee

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FIGURE  7.2 Krzysztof Wodiczko’s preliminary drawing of City of Refuge: Skyline, 2009. Photo copyright © Krzysztof Wodiczko

THE CIRCLE OF CANDLES

The day after the attacks on the twin towers in lower Manhattan, many New Yorkers found themselves standing together in places like Union Square. They formed circles, holding candles as the night descended on the city. They were the old and young; rich and poor; black, white, and the other colors of humanity; Muslim, Christian, Jew, atheist, and many other spiritual denominations; they also encompassed a broad range of often conflicting political views. I was moved personally by a letter from a Colombian friend who saw the second plane hit the tower and later participated in the circle of candles. She wrote that in the midst of her  “Colombian-ness” she discovered that she was also “profoundly neo-yorkina, americana, y universal.”3 The diversity and nonhierarchical ordering of the circle of candles epitomizes the idea of a unity composed of difference. Because of this characteristic, as well as the sentiment of mourning and hope, the circle of candles also inspired the two versions of the 9/11 memorial that we are

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examining. The jury selecting Arad’s Reflecting Absence to occupy the ruins of the World Trade Center says that his memorial includes the whole process that began with these candlelight vigils.4 Wodiczko similarly states that the commemorative action of the vigils “brought back to life . . . ethical, discursive, and critical ways of mourning.”5 More importantly, the spirit of the circle of candles is reflected in the main concepts guiding the design and purpose of the two memorial projects. For example, a key member of the Memorial Jury, the art historian James Young, describes the official 9/11 memorial as an “evolving memory.” This memory includes building a “worldview” into the site that allows for “ongoing negotiations” between past and present and among the competing agendas of those affected by 9/11 and the lives that will be subsequently shaped by the memorial.6 More specifically, Young states that this “interactive, dialogical quality” includes the voices of the artist who creates the memorial, the viewers who respond to this creation, and the political, religious, and other figures who support and make use of it in their social or political endeavors.7 We must also note one of our emphases in earlier chapters: the art object or material structure of the memorial is a quasi-voice in these dialogues. Most importantly, the aesthetic presence of such an object often interrupts the set discourses within which we or even its creator would wish to enclose it.8 Memorials, then, are not merely physical; each is the quasi-voice of a material presence that participates in the dialogic interplay among the many distinct voices that speak of it. Wodiczko too portrays his proposed memorial as a dialogical exchange among voices. More precisely, he refers to his memorial as “a place for  “memory in action,” an “interrogative and ‘agonistic’ . . . institute of memory . . . from which to initiate new transformative projects.”9 Although Wodiczko’s idea of agonistic memory, of contesting memories, is close to Young’s notion of evolving memory, some of Wodiczko’s words on the 9/11 memorial suggests a gap between it and his project. He refers to his City of Refuge as “parallel and supplemental” to the official 9/11 memorial. But his criticisms of the 9/11 memorial indicate that his project is actually an alternative idea of what such a memorial should be. He contends, for example, that there was never a “thorough, open and inclusive public discussion” of the “social and symbolic possibilities” for commemorating the September 11 attacks.10 In other words, we can take Wodiczko to feel

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that the official memorial is deficient in regard to democratic ideals and thus is not an act of citizenship in the sense we have been defining it. To see if this suspicion is prescient, we will introduce and assess the two memorials by seeing how they address three oracles. We confronted two of the three in our political aesthetic analysis of Millennium Park—the aesthetic oracle of spectacle and the economic one of capital— and will now add a third: American exceptionalism. Although the latter refers to the nation as whole, to nationalism, we also acknowledged in chapter 1 that exceptionalism has been associated with white supremacy throughout the history of the United States—at the nation’s founding, in the post-Reconstruction period after the Civil War, and still today when we think of the racially charged events at Ferguson and Flint, Charleston and Charlottesville. In their struggle with these oracles, we will see how the memorials by Arad and Wodiczko comport themselves with respect to the three political virtues of solidarity, heterogeneity, and fecundity and the idea of a unity composed of difference. Moreover, we will note how they deal with the relation between the aesthetic and political dimensions of public artworks. Indeed, we will see if they can paradoxically fill without closing Lefort’s idea of democracy as an “empty place” and Congressman John Nicholas’s idea of democratic art as the “plain tablet”—a paradox alluded to throughout this book. We will begin with the oracle of spectacle.

T H E A E S T H E T I C O R AC L E O F S P EC TAC L E A EST HE T I C A N D P O L I T I C A L DI ME N S IO NS O F ME MO RIALS

In past chapters we covered three topics pertinent to the relation between the aesthetic and didactic dimensions of public art, between art and “nonart”: Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection in chapter 1; contemporaneity, heterochronicity, anachronicity, and participatory art in chapter  4; and Badiou’s “inaesthetics” coupled with Rancière’s “aesthetic regime of art” in chapter 5. In chapter 6, we went further and used Anish Kapoor’s contribution to Millennium Park, Cloud Gate, to show how its spectacular and seamless surface contributed to its social-political meaning. Its

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concave or “bean” shape causes the audience to intermingle in a manner that produces intersecting images of them on its shining surface, suggesting that each image is part of the identity and, at the same time, the other of the rest, that is, a unity composed of rather than imposed on difference. We saw that without the auratic effect of the sculpture, the suggestion of this idea of democratic community most likely would be reduced to the entertainment value of standing in front of a fun house mirror. In the other direction, the absence of this idea of community would reduce the experience of the aesthetic quality of the artwork to the limited pleasure of seeing a shiny surface. Cloud Gate, then, provided a compelling example of how the aesthetic and political dimensions are integral parts of the artwork, each enhancing rather than canceling out the contribution of the other. In a recent book, Henry Pickford shows how the combination of aesthetics and relevant historical facts contribute to the power of Holocaust memorials and, by extension, to other monuments concerning mass fatalities.11 Pickford begins his task of applied philosophical aesthetics by noting that controversies over Holocaust memorials assume that normative criteria exist for judging “what a Holocaust artwork should be like if it is to succeed.”12 These criteria are at play for a reason that is reminiscent of what we learned from Rancière’s aesthetic regime of art—that artworks can be viewed as involving a tension between art and non-art, between the aesthetic and the didactic. More specifically, Pickford holds that artworks related to the Holocaust must fulfill at least a historical relation to it (must bear some “intentional relation” or reference to the actual Holocaust) and an aesthetic relation (must involve sensuous aspects that can produce striking or appealing experiences of the artwork). If its aesthetic dimension is not adequate, the memorial becomes no more than a document, artifact, chronicle, or some other “merely informative” vehicle of idealized content; if it lacks an adequate historical dimension, it becomes only aesthetically pleasing, mythological, or otherwise “merely formal.” If the aesthetic-historical artwork is to succeed, then, it must exhibit an “implicit tension” between its aesthetic and historical dimensions rather than one distracting us from or otherwise canceling out the effect of the other.13 Pickford demonstrates his claim about the necessity of this implicit tension in his discussion of recent trends in memorial design. He points out

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that contemporary society involves a “multiplicity and heterogeneity of narratives and traditions vying for the status of public memory.” A major consequence of this tendency is the prevalence of abstract, minimalist, and other art forms instead of figurative monuments. The abstract and minimalist types of memorial are thought to allow for greater social inclusivity and to avoid other problems associated with more traditional figurative monuments.14 In the case of the Holocaust, the non-figurative or “nonrepresentational” brand is often referred to as a “counter-monument.” Pickford describes three types of these counter-monuments. The first two are the “negatively sublime” and the “self-thematizing” types of memorial. His discussion of Peter Eisenman’s well-known Berlin monument, Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, illustrates the meaning of these two types of memorials. Eisenman’s monument consists of a vast grid of irregularly sized concrete blocks. It fits the negatively sublime meaning insofar as it can be taken to refer indirectly (“negatively”) to the Jews, their unimaginable fate, and the sublimity of our memory of them. This interpretation would fit with Eisenman and the general description of his work—“presentness” or the “trace” of absence—which we discussed in chapter 4. It also fits the self-thematizing form of counter-monument insofar as its labyrinth of concrete blocks self-reflexively symbolizes or literally spatializes the “difficulties of the ever-incomplete, infinite task of remembrance.” In other words, the monument is about the “perpetual process” of remembering the absent rather than “for” the memory of them. One could also say that it has the theological overtones for which we saw Derrida criticize Eisenman’s work in chapter 4. Either way, negatively sublime or self-thematizing, Pickford declares that these two types of countermonument lack “any historical causality and agency.”15 Pickford’s third category of countermonument consists in “ ‘limit-case’ artworks that tend toward their own self-abnegation in favor of historical documentation.”16 He uses an interesting example to illustrate this third category, Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock’s memorial Places of Remembrance in Berlin’s Bavarian Quarter. The two artists installed eighty street signs around this quarter of Berlin. The signs are like all the other municipal signs there except that one side contains an icon of one or another profession or practice and the other side a corresponding legal ordinance that adversely affected Jews during the Nazi period. One of the examples Pickford gives is a brightly painted thermometer on the icon side

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of the street sign, and the following citation on the ordinance side: “Henceforth Jewish doctors are not allowed to practice. 25.7.1938.”17 Pickford’s basic point is that Stih and Schnok achieve an effective interaction or dialectic between the aesthetic and historical dimension of their memorial and avoid the pitfalls of the other types of memorials and countermonuments. He also praises their memorial for another positive achievement: it “ ‘performs’ when it successfully shocks the viewer into an experience and understanding of a given building or institution as a ‘dialectical image’ of its past misuse under National Socialism.”18 We will have more to say about Pickford’s idea of a performative memorial when we further discuss Wodiczko’s City of Refuge. For now, we can make two additional comments concerning Pickford’s account of monuments. Pickford would most likely agree with the first: his aesthetichistorical relation applies not just to Holocaust monuments but also to 9/11 and other memorials related to historical atrocities or tragedies. The second comment, however, is a caveat. It concerns Pickford’s limiting of the non-art dimension of memorials to historical factors. He acknowledges that some would claim that Holocaust memorials also involve a “moral-political relation” to go along with the historical and aesthetic relations they embody. For example, he says that one might maintain that a Holocaust memorial should condemn those who committed that atrocity or ought to mourn or show tribute to its victims. But he is content for memorials to omit this moral-political relation from consideration because it might “short-circuit experience of the artwork by replacing such experience by, or substituting it under, a proffered lesson or morale.” He thinks that it is “sufficient if a Holocaust artwork displays a tone and decorum proper to its subject matter, and such matters fall within the artwork’s aesthetic dimension.”19 In contrast, our view is that an artwork can perform (invoke or otherwise express) democratic values that remain integrally and positively related to it without distracting from its aesthetic, historical, or other dimensions. Our treatment of Millennium Park’s Cloud Gate has already demonstrated this capacity in the context of non-memorial public art or life, and we now need to see how it works with New York’s 9/11 memorial, that is, in the context of death and mourning. We will also use this section on the aesthetic oracle of spectacle to characterize in turn the general structure and origin of the two memorials.

THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF THE NATIONAL 9/ 11 MEMORIAL189

A R AD’ S R EF L E CT I NG A B SENCE

The official 9/11 memorial involves much more than the monument named Reflecting Absence. Shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center, an arm of the city and state called the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation began planning the rebuilding of the destroyed site. The corporation elected to achieve a balance between revitalizing the commercial life of the area and commemorating the lost lives and the vanished towers. This meant that the sixteen acres of the new World Trade Center would include five enormous skyscrapers for business offices and retail spaces. These structures would surround and tower over the memorial that now occupies the footprints of the original twin edifices.20 The Development Corporation has also created a number of committees to govern the design and implementation of the memorial itself. These committees included family members of the victims and heroes of the 9/11 attacks, business and government people, and art experts such as Young and the designer of the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial, Maya Lin. The directives produced by these committees stipulate that the commemorative function of the memorial should treat the site as a “place made sacred through tragic loss,” “preserve freedom,” and “inspire an end to hatred, ignorance, and intolerance.”21 In other words, the memorial is supposed to refer to a hopeful future as well as to a mournful past. To fulfill these directives, the Memorial Jury chose the entry by Israeli American architect Michael Arad. Arad’s minimalist design for his memorial creates, in his words, “a constant sense of absence, an inexplicable sense.”22 Commentators generally follow Arad and repeat that making absence present is the key motif of the memorial.23 More specifically, the design makes this absence present, marks it, by carving two enormous voids into the place formerly occupied by the footprints of the destroyed towers. Visitors standing at the edges of these structures see curtains of water that continually cascade down the walls of the voids into pools 30 feet below. The placid surface of the water then spills into a smaller void located at the center of each pool and disappears into recycling reservoirs beneath the memorial. The two voids never fill up and thereby continue to mark the absence of those lost in the 9/11 attacks (figure 7.3).24

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FIGURE  7.3

South Void of Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence, 2013. Photograph by

Jin S. Lee

Young comments that the selection jury felt that the voids “made the footprints themselves the memorial, in their geometric form,” that they were the “most authentic reference to the site.” Moreover, the openings of the voids are at street level. The selection jury felt that the downward flow of the water would “suddenly remind [visitors] of the towers’ implosion.” They would gain a sense of the enormity of the loss of city structures and life due to the attacks on the World Trade Center.25 The visitors would be particularly reminded of the individual victims as they lean forward to look into the pools and consequently touch the recessed names that are inscribed in the parapets forming the outer rims of the two voids (figure 7.4). Although the presence of absence is the major intention behind Arad’s memorial, he also wanted it to carry more than just that. He therefore collaborated with landscape architect Peter Walker to plant rows of swamp

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Close-up of the engraved names of victims of the 9/11 attacks on Arad’s Reflecting Absence, 2013. Photograph by Jin S. Lee

FIGURE  7.4

white oaks and sweetgums in the plaza that surrounds the two voids. He felt that the seasonal changes these trees undergo would suggest the life cycle and thus rebirth as well as loss.26 The trees and the Memorial Plaza are also a “mediating space.” They are intended to allow New Yorkers to make use of the memorial grounds as a place to sit, drink a cup of coffee, read the newspaper, and engage in other everyday activities. The plaza and its trees are therefore a “living part of the [city]” as well as part of the memorial.27 In addition, the Plaza symbolically links Reflecting Absence to other green spaces and commemorative structures scattered throughout New York.28 Despite the healing power and serene and contemplative atmosphere that Reflecting Absence is intended to produce,29 its minimalism may bring it into unintentional complicity with the three oracles that we have said a democratic memorial should resist and also with some of the problems

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that Pickford mentioned in relation to his three categories of Holocaust monuments. For now we will assess these possibilities by dealing with the aesthetic oracle. The aspects we should consider are the aesthetic effectiveness of the memorial’s design and the worthiness of the political or other didactic content it provides. With respect to aesthetic effectiveness, leading art critic Martin Filler describes the memorial as “at once . . . a sobering, disturbing, heartbreaking, and overwhelming masterpiece.”30 He adds that it left him with “the same feeling that overtakes one after a funeral or memorial service for a relative or close friend.”31 Paul Goldberger echoes these sentiments, remarking on the memorial’s “sense of dignity and repose” and its simultaneous capture of the loss of the people by the Twin Towers’ footprints, the names of the victims, and the rebirth of the city through the new towers in back of them.32 Four years from the time the above comments were made and with the completion of the memorial, its accompanying museum, and the almost finished construction of the buildings surrounding it, Adam Gopnik reaches a more deflating assessment of Reflecting Absence’s aesthetic dimension. He claims that the “ ‘reflecting pools’ . . . are not pools, and they leave no room for reflection.” In particular, he notes that the subterranean waterfalls are “wildly out of scale with the rest of the site in their immensity” and that “their constant roar interrupts any elegiac feeling that the lists of engraved names of the dead which enclose them might engender.” He adds that emotively the “pattern of falling, draining, and recycling . . . suggest[s] less the promise of eternal memory and more a cycle of endless loss and waste” as well as its unsuitability “to the necessary reticence of an effective memorial.” He cites Emily Dickenson’s criticism of a formal feeling that “theatricalizes [pain] for centuries” rather than containing it and giving it shape.33 These comments have concerned the aesthetic aura of Arad’s monument. There are others that assess the relation between this aura and its didactic meaning. They echo some of Pickford’s comments on the countermonuments for the Holocaust and particularly relate to Reflecting Absence’s minimalism. For example, Michael Kimmelman states that lately (see ground zero) Minimalism has become the default mode for our memorial culture, the proverbial blank slate onto which we inscribe what we want the future to remember about us. Austerity and authority,

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Minimalist tropes, implying puritan spirituality, are serving the role that angels did on sculptural monuments in the past.34

In his turn, Gregory Hoskins suggests that we should assess minimalist or other commemorative designs by using a distinction that Tzvetan Todorov makes between “literal” and “exemplary” memory. Literal memory leaves us stuck in the past, solidified only in our shared sense of being victims of an atrocity.35 In contrast, exemplary memory links the 9/11 attacks or memories of similar injustices with injustices that are occurring today. This type of memory, then, is like the dynamic form that we saw advocated by both Young and Wodiczko. Hoskins adds that memorials which lean toward exemplary memory would be “a significant aide in the process of encouraging the formation of multiple cultural identities that affirm and defend a unifying democratic civic identity.”36 We can think of the identities that make up this democratic civic formation as the voices we described as being part of the identity and simultaneously the other of the rest, that is, as forming the social and political unity composed of rather than imposed on difference—the dialogic body that we have been depicting as the basis for an exemplary form of democracy. If this sort of achievement does preserve, create, or valorize the sort of multiplicity and heterogeneity of which Pickford and the supporters of contemporaneity and heterochronicity have spoken, then it would help contribute to the unifying democratic identity or solidarity that we have been extolling. If the distinction between literal and dynamic memory is applied to Reflecting Absence, one might join with the art critics who think that the sparseness and simplicity of minimalist designs allow viewers to come up with their own interpretations of the meaning of a memorial. These memorials would then seem to be a form of dynamic memory and to reflect the democratic value of independent thought. For example, Filler states that the abstract nature of Arad’s design, which rejects all representational imagery, will “allow visitors to project onto it thoughts and interpretations of a much more individual nature than if the memorial had been laden with prepackaged symbols of grief.”37 Filler’s view therefore suggests that the memorial’s minimalism is closer to exemplary than literal memory and that it shares the democratic spirit of Congressman Nicholas’s plain tablet form of public art.38 We can add as well that the names inscribed on the ledges of Arad’s memorial contribute to the

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concrete historical reference that Pickford favors as the content of Holocaust monuments. Filler’s effusive praise of the Arad memorial’s relation to democratic values is implicitly challenged by the reflections of other thinkers. For instance, Erica Doss puts minimalistic memorials in historical perspective and notes a strong contrast between the minimalism of the 1960s and that of more recent times. The former was a transformative vehicle of public agency and democratic action; it preferred the “transgressive possibilities of felt experience” rather than fixing on “commonly held feelings.” In contrast, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial and many other such endeavors following its example aim at the “revelation of loss and the reaffirmation of [national and individual] stability.”39 Because of its historical context—the loss of many U.S. soldiers’ lives in an unpopular and unjust war—Lin’s emphasis on reconciliation and stability had some transgressive power.40 But many of the minimalistic designs of others provided a blank slate that invited only the present attitudes and beliefs we brought to them.41 In other words, minimalist memorials do not necessarily lead us to think critically about or imagine innovatively beyond the standard interpretations of the commemorated events that have been encouraged by mass media, the government, or other influential sources. The cautions from Doss about these later minimalist memorials apply to Arad’s memorial. The memorial’s voids, flowing water, arrayed names of the victims, and unmistakable references to the destruction of the World Trade Center strongly suggest a single narrative, that of loss and mourning. These help explain the “funereal” atmosphere that capped Filler’s visit to the memorial. Moreover, the size and uniform presence of the memorial, as well as the constant roar generated by the falling water, mesmerize or silence us, inhibiting critical thinking and discussion among visitors about the events of 9/11 and their implications for democratic societies. If Gopnik’s experience of theatricality or carnival—the crashing of the huge waterfalls—is the more obvious take-away than Filler’s somber one, then that atmospheric effect too might limit the more expansive thoughts and varied feelings merited by the murderous and internationally important event. Congruent with these critical indications, Doss applies to the 9/11 memorial a distinction of Dominick LaCapra’s between a “discourse of generalized absence” and the harsher idea of “loss.” Doss says that the

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memorial’s more pervasive emphasis on generalized absence suggests “vacancy and lack” rather than the “destruction and disappearance” of loss; it therefore impedes our ability “to address the specific forms, and meanings, [of absence and loss] on historical and sociopolitical levels” or even to distinguish between absence and loss. An addressable loss is converted into non-presence. She therefore adds pithily that “ ‘reflecting absence’ ” is more like “ ‘reflecting amnesia.’ ”42 Maureen Dowd’s response to the closure, or “hopefulness and reintegration,” signified by the design motifs of light and water in this and similar memorials, was even stronger: “Mass murder dulled by architectural Musak.”43 Later we will introduce further criticisms of Reflecting Absence that are similar to the ones we’ve just considered. Though they still concern the relation between the aesthetic and political dimension of 9/11 memorials, they will fit better in the context of another oracle we will examine, American exceptionalism. Another telling rejoinder to the 9/11 memorial and its relation to democracy comes from those critics who are attentive to the power of spontaneous gestures or street art. Gopnik, for example, compares the “sublime minimalist reticence” of memorials like the 9/11 one to the spontaneously produced handbills and photographs of the missing faces posted all over lower Manhattan just after the attack. He contrasts their live expression— that “life is tragic and precious and fragile, that there is an irreducible core of violence in the world” from which we failed to protect ourselves— with the death they undergo when collected in museums: the loss of “their spontaneity and their essential privacy, their innocence of manipulative address.”44 He points out that this authentic spontaneity is evident at Lin’s Vietnam War Veterans’ Memorial when visitors place “mementos” near the names of the dead soldiers to whom the objects belonged. Although these mementos add a special touch to the Vietnam War Veterans’ Memorial, I saw none near the names of the victims on the parapets around the voids of the 9/11 memorial when I visited. Indeed, one commentator reported that first responders and other witnesses complained that “tourists show disrespect and treat the 9/11 memorial in New York as a playground”; they were particularly shocked at the coffee cups and soda bottles that were left on top of the names of the victims.45 Haskins and DeRose make a suggestion about spontaneous commemorations that is similar to that of Gopnik. They hold that “the noisy democracy of ephemeral street commemorations suggests that the model

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for a memorial to 9/11 should be a place that guarantees the rights to express, disagree, assemble, claim, and collectively own.”46 This comment indicates that memorials should reflect some combination of formal commemoration and critical or imaginative engagement on the part of the public. This would avoid the “playground” problem but still allow room for spontaneous gestures congruent with the specific remembrance commemorated by the memorial. Whether Filler’s “masterpiece” or Gopnik’s “theatricality,” the above comments suggest that Arad’s memorial neither deprecates nor enhances democratic values. Its presence does not emulate Nicholas’s plain tablet or Todorov’s and Hoskins’s idea of exemplary memory. Focusing on the relation between its aesthetic and didactic dimensions, Reflecting Absence risks suffering from the aesthetic oracle that Guy Debord and other thinkers have called “spectacle” or “wow” art.47 Its aura distracts rather than helps other aspects of it move us individually or collectively toward critical questions and innovative imaginings concerning the 9/11 atrocities, U.S. democracy, and international relations. We will have more to say about this aura when we discuss the presence of the iconic skyscrapers and their relation to the oracle of capital. In a work that he wrote before his involvement in the selection of the 9/11 memorial, Young made remarks that reiterate the sort of critical comments we have used in assessing Arad’s monument. He notes that another art critic laments the failure of today’s artists to capture commensurate ideals for a public composed of “disparate experiences and understandings.” Young replies that public monuments need not presume that these commonalities exist. They should instead produce an “architectonic ideal” that would include “competing memories” and in this paradoxical way overcome social fragmentation and provide unity.48 He adds that a monument cannot be split from its public life and that the “social function of such art is its aesthetic performance.”49 Memorials should therefore be “icons of remembrance” that invite the creation of new voices rather than “idols of remembrance” that induce muteness or the repetition of blinkered ideas.50 Arad had hoped that his minimalist idea of absence would be the sort of icon that Young applauds. The criticisms we have reviewed suggest that it fails in that effort despite the beauty that many people think its

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material embodiment achieves. We now must see if there is a mode of aesthetic presence that captures both the sensuous power of memorials like Reflecting Absence and the democratic spontaneity and authenticity of the street art that others have praised. Such an aesthetic mode must help its artwork fulfill our criterion for public art as an act of citizenship, including, in accord with our present topic, an effective relation between its aesthetic and didactic dimensions. We therefore now turn to Wodiczko’s City of Refuge to see if it illuminates and meets the criterion we tentatively have already put forward.

WO DI C Z KO ’ S C I T Y O F R EFU GE

In contrast to Arad’s minimalism, Wodiczko offers an aesthetic that appears to enhance rather than distract from its didactic content. He says that the aim of the aesthetic design of his “commemorative agora” is “to create a place for a more active, critical, and discursive memory of the Sept. 11 attack.” The attack would be examined in three registers: its history and political context, its military aftermath, and its effect domestically and internationally.51 Wodiczko feels that this sort of agonistic memory would be a primary contribution to preventing the global injustice and combination of ignorance and arrogance that creates anger and the basis for future attacks.52 To accomplish these two goals, Wodiczko thinks his alternative memorial should have an aesthetic design that is compatible with the official emphasis on a “place made sacred through tragic loss” and, at the same time, evokes an innovative view of democracy. I will show that the aesthetic design of his proposed memorial has three interrelated aspects: auratic, geometric, and performative. The aura or auratic aspect of Wodiczko’s proposed 9/11 memorial originates with his intention to emulate the Cities of Refuge described in the Old Testament. These biblical cities provided sanctuary for anyone who unintentionally killed another person and consequently was being hunted by “avengers of blood.” The cities were also spaces for Talmudic study and ethical learning.53 After participating in the educational process provided by their hosts, the “manslayers” would return home for trial. If their homicidal acts were proven unintentional, they would

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escape punishment and could go back to the city of refuge. They were, in short, considered “half-innocent, half-guilty”: innocent of murder but guilty of negligence. Wodiczko’s reference to these cities of refuge invites us to focus on ourselves as well as on the perpetrators of 9/11. He feels that most of us (though not the perpetrators) are innocent of murder but guilty of not actively challenging policies that have caused poverty, injury, and even death at home and abroad. We are, that is, at least partially responsible for governmental policies that have harmed others while increasing our own prosperity. Wodiczko therefore likens New York’s metropolitan area to a city of refuge, in which most New Yorkers are half-innocent, halfguilty and are also threatened by modern-day avengers of blood.54 The auratic aspect of the memorial’s aesthetic is enhanced because Wodiczko proposes to locate his memorial in the middle of New York City’s harbor. It therefore would be accessible and visible to all the city’s inhabitants. Moreover, its location would connect it to the World Trade Center site, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and other places that carry symbolic value. But Wodiczko’s memorial also would point beyond to the ocean and the “stormy lands overseas,” some of which are sites of the U.S. government’s unintentional or premeditated misdeeds while others are places from which new exiles might come in their flight from avengers of blood.55 More specifically, the central structure of Wodiczko’s memorial is a floating, slowly rotating globe, indicating genesis as opposed to stasis. The plans for the memorial include four floating spherical satellites that would receive special ferries going back and forth between the satellites and locations in New York City that are relevant to the memorial’s mission. After the ferries have docked at the satellites, they and their occupants would be escorted to the memorial’s floating globe. This journey would be elaborately ritualistic and thus part of the aesthetic aura of the memorial. It would include liminal interactive media programs and events that would constitute a rite of passage to “prepare New Yorkers for conscious engagement in the mission and work of the memorial.”56 In short, it would simulate the half-innocent, half-guilty and their passage to the biblical cities of refuge. The simulation of this passage from danger to refuge indicates that the auratic aspect of the memorial’s aesthetic is therefore also an act of ethical

Map view of the proposed cite of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s City of Refuge, in the middle of New York Harbor. Krzysztof Wodiczko, preliminary drawing of City of Refuge: Harbor View, 2009. Photo copyright © Krzysztof Wodiczko

FIGURE 7.5

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imagination. Indeed, Wodiczko wants us to think of the victims of 9/11 as if they “were watching and critically evaluating” our work for a better world.57 In other words, they are voices that we still hear. They therefore would vicariously still participate in the memorial. The other two aspects of the memorial’s aesthetic, the geometric and performative, are also very prominent. The geometric aspect consists in the spherical shape of the central globe and the spherical and circular shapes of the other spaces, creating a nonhierarchical visual presence of the memorial (figure 7.6). This geometrical aspect of the aesthetic design becomes more emphatic as we describe the performative aspect of the memorial’s aesthetic. It begins with the ritual boat trip and the visitor’s entrance into a semi-spherical agora or auditorium in the central globe and their subsequent conversion into participants or audible voices in the transpiring events. More specifically, the auditorium or forum is the main structure in the upper-half of the globe and is designed to accommodate spirited debates about “unfolding or potential ‘malignant’ . . . conflicts in the world,” for dissensus as much as for consensus.58 Speaker platforms that

FIGURE  7.6 Model plans of the interior of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s City of Refuge. Krzysztof Wodiczko, preliminary drawing of City of Refuge: Central Globe, 2009. Photo copyright © Krzysztof Wodiczko

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can be moved mechanically and other technological innovations help to maximize the variety of rhetorical and other styles of interaction that participants might choose to use in expressing their points of view. An Urban Communicating Center, a smaller half-sphere, sits above the forum and facilitates communication with institutions, organizations, urban centers and other points in New York related to City of Refuge’s memorial activities.59 The lower half of the proposed globe also consists of circular and spherically shaped facilities of various sizes. They too would function to inform participants about conflicts occurring around the world and how to intervene in them in legal and other ways that have healing as their objective.60 This dialogic apparatus and visitor participation means that the memorial doesn’t just represent democracy visually; it organizes visitors into voices that contest one another’s discourses. Its architectural language therefore performs as well as symbolizes the agonistic type of democracy that the memorial promotes. Indeed, it reverses the meaning of the traditional memorial by asking us to go beyond the more common emphasis on mourning and personal healing and to instead play an active role in bringing about a collective and future renewal. We can even think of it as a radical elaboration of Congressman Nicholas’s idea of the plain tablet, as Wodiczko wants us to occupy the tablet with collective and ongoing exchanges among contesting voices rather than just inscribing our individual ruminations.61 These reflections highlight how the aesthetic dimension of Wodiczko’s memorial lends force to its didactic or political meaning. Without the aura of its geometric shapes, ritualistic practices, and the spectral voices of the 9/11 victims, the witnessing and the verbal exchanges taking place in the Central Globe might seem to be no more than the verbal gymnastics of a debate team. But with this aura, these dialogic exchanges take on the more profound meaning of what the Greeks called parrhesia—of courageous speaking and hearing—and thereby suggest that democracy should be more than voting and speeches. In turn, the interplay among the gathered voices ensures that the aesthetic dimension of the memorial will not be a spectacle that distracts us from the deeper political meaning of City of Refuge. In other words, there are grounds for assessing Wodiczko’s dissident method of commemoration to be an effective balance between the aesthetic force and critical thought. To the degree that this evaluation of his memorial

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is credible, it sharpens the suspicion that Arad’s Reflecting Absence fails to escape the muting effect of the aesthetic oracle of spectacle.

T H E O R AC L E O F C A P I TA L

Having discussed the aesthetic oracle, we can continue on to the second one, the oracle of capital. By capital I mean a voice that combines a particular discourse with economic practices. The discourse includes a description of the practices and legalities that constitute it. It becomes oracular, a free-market fundamentalism, when it adds that capitalism is the natural and most fruitful economy for humans and that these basic tenets need not be revised—voices to the contrary will be tolerated but automatically dismissed rather than actually heard. The practices dictated by this oracle are straightforward: everything, including mental and physical labor, is regarded as a commodity; the monetary value of these commodities is the measure that we use to rank-order them and determine their exchange value; and the goal of this oracle is to accumulate capital in order to accumulate still more of it.62 Democracy and all other values are in effect, if not by intention, subordinated to and often contorted by these practices.

A R AD’ S R EF L E CT I NG A B SENCE

The oracle of capital figures into the beginning of the 9/11 memorial and its present situation. The start of the memorial is the original World Trade Center. In an early article on Arad’s initial proposal for the 9/11 memorial, Stuart Kaplan cites Immanuel Wallerstein as arguing that the hijackers flew their planes into the World Trade Center because the towers were a metaphor for “American capitalism and its associated values and achievements.”63 One oracle, Islamic fundamentalism, destroying another. Doss cites Osama bin Laden as indicating that he felt the Twin Towers were “the prime symbol of American capitalist arrogance.”64 The oracle of capital still remains dominant in the present time of the 9/11 memorial. Its prominence is indicated in several ways. The first is in

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the aesthetic presence of the five enormous skyscrapers planned to surround the memorial (figure 7.1). Several are already constructed. The ones that are not will fill in the open space between those that are already present. These icons are considered part of the memorial along with its monument, Reflecting Absence. But their towering heights overwhelm Reflecting Absence’s message of tragic loss and rebirth. Art critic Gopnik has complained that the memorial is reduced to the status of an amenity to the skyscrapers and the restaurants and other tourist attractions that they will house.65 He also refers to the monument as a “cemetery that cowers in the shadow of commerce” and remarks that the “dazzling,” “genuinely handsome” new One World Trade Center building “seems to rebuke the memorial park at its base.”66 Terry Smith uses his notion of “iconomy” and argues that these iconic skyscrapers possess the same oracle of spectacle that we attributed to the monument itself: “Awe before icons may be nothing more complex than an acculturated conflation of the sense of beauty with any powerful, moving, spectacular visual image—the iconomy is, after all, the aesthetic regime now shared by more people than any other.” Thus the entire memorial, the twin pools plus the capitalist icons, might be apprehended as one “wow” experience blended into another. He goes on to argue that we require an architecture that is no longer subject to spectacle, that “the rebuilt site at Ground Zero—all architecture to come—should be shaped by heterogeneity, and designed in such a way that it never becomes a single, supreme symbol of any one ideology, way of life, or faith (and thus a target).”67 Both Young as a selection committee member and Arad suggest that they feared Reflecting Absence might be overwhelmed by the aesthetic presence and message of capital. Young indirectly indicates this worry when he says he hopes Arad’s artwork will highlight and rejuvenate the other New York memorials because before they were “dwarfed and literally overshadowed by the towering twin icons of American commerce.”68 But he offers no convincing reason to show that the new towers will be any less overpowering in relation to Reflecting Absence. For his part, Arad says, plaintively perhaps, that the complexity of the recovery effort was suggested to him by a schematic diagram of the site that he found in the New York Times. This made clear to him that the effort to rebuild the World Trade Center would involve not just his memorial, but also a museum center, train station, a shopping concourse, and office towers.

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He noted that “all of these have to work together” but that “they are all being run by different project teams, jockeying for real estate.”69 We can conjecture that this phrase, “jockeying for real estate,” harbored Arad’s fear that commercial concerns might eclipse the healing power of his voids and the absence that they are intended to reflect. Capital’s presence is also indicated by the monument’s placement of the reflecting pools in the footprints of the Twin Towers. The pools seem intended to commemorate the destroyed structures they replace and not just the victims that were inside them. Indeed, Marita Sturken comments that “although intended as a memorial to the people who died, its aesthetic of absence seems primarily to evoke the absence of the towers. . . . One could argue that the desire to rebuild the towers and the designation of voids where the towers once stood are essentially the same.” She adds, however, that at least the emphasis of the monument on mourning and reflection can “counter the emphasis on commercialization.70 Sturken is right to hold that Arad’s monument itself is not a symbol of capitalism and does not directly support its oracle. But the five icons of commerce on the memorial’s location—three finished (1, 4, and 7 WTC), two others not (2 and 3 WTC) as of 2017—are considered part of it and therefore raise a question that we confronted in our examination of Millennium Park. The icons of capitalism, the emphasis on the footprints of the original Twin Towers, and the monument’s possible status as an “amenity” to the skyscrapers and their commercial purpose, suggest that the monument contributes to the naturalization of capitalism. In other words, it helps make capitalist fundamentalism appear to be an ineliminable and acceptable part of U.S. democracy. Even the memorial’s role as a tourist attraction contributes to the prestige and monetary value of these five icons of capitalism. Moreover, the considerable role that private corporations played in funding all aspects of the 9/11 memorial helps naturalize the growing privatization of public space. The memorial’s blurring of the lines between public and private control of democratic spaces is therefore as threatening as we saw it to be in the case of Millennium Park and in our extended discussion of the public realm in chapter 2.71 Indeed, it is difficult for this aspect of the 9/11 memorial not to remind us of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and how it has extended privatization to the U.S. electoral system itself, replacing democracy with plutocracy.

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These considerations suggest two points with regard to Arad’s Reflecting Absence and its relation to the oracle of capital. The monument and its reflecting pools do not intrinsically favor or disfavor capitalism. More specifically, its emphasis on mourning and death—to the degree that it outweighs the theatricalization and playground charges against it—is different than commercialization. But difference here does not amount to Sturken’s claim that it counters the area’s aura of commercialism. It therefore cannot be said to resist the naturalization of the oracle of capitalism, its omnipotence, and the anti-democratic privatization of public space. Could we imagine any memorial to 9/11 in New York resisting capitalism and still doing justice to its role of remembering and honoring the dead? Wodiczko’s proposed memorial, City of Refuge, showed us that a public artwork can embody a powerful aesthetic design that enhances its content, that is, its performance of commemoration and democracy. Can it also effectively resist the icons of capitalism and privatization that mark the current memorial’s setting?

WO DI C Z KO ’ S C I T Y O F R EFU GE

The detailed description of Wodiczko’s alternative 9/11 memorial and of the oracle of capital that we have already presented means that we can answer quickly the question that we just proposed about resistance. Wodiczko’s proposed City of Refuge would resist the oracle of capital and its attendant privatization of public space in two ways. First, its proposed location in the middle of New York harbor, facing out into the vast expanse of the ocean as well as toward the city, would allow it literally and metaphorically to escape from under the shadow of the capitalist icons on the site of the official memorial. More importantly, the critical discussions that would take place in the floating sphere would help “pave the way for a less stratified and more egalitarian social structure and economy.” For Wodiczko, this hope includes resistance to a number of more specific inequalities and destructive tendencies related to techno-capital’s power: gated communities and the more general tendency toward the overt or covert privatization of public space; Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, and other aspects of the security state that limit our civil liberties; and foreign military adventures that have brought death to innocents that far

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outnumber the immediate victims of the murderous attack on the World Trade Center.72 The performative aspect of Wodiczko’s proposed memorial would also resist a related problem: the market’s conversion of artworks and architecture into the commodity form. Thus Terry Smith points out that “the market or auction house converts the art object into an absolute abstraction that can be matched to a particular amount of money.”73 Similarly, Anthony Vidler insists that within the capitalist economy architecture is transformed into “an image that serves marketing more than either architecture or society.” 74 We have already seen how commercialism at the site of Reflecting Absence has had this coercive effect on its aesthetic presence. But in City of Refuge, critical discussion of these tendencies is, as we have already noted, an intrinsic part of the performative aspect of its particular aesthetic design. Wodiczko’s City of Refuge, then, shows how the didactic content of his memorial is enhanced by its aesthetic design. It is a veritable interplay among contesting voices wrapped in a three-fold aesthetic (auratic, geometric, performative). This interplay includes critical discussion of capitalism and its relation to the 9/11 attacks and a people’s possible status as half innocent, half guilty in the production of avengers of blood; it also concerns the corrupting fundamentalism of capitalism. Because this dialogic and critical performance is an intrinsic part of the aesthetic of the memorial itself, Wodiczko’s City of Refuge resists the oracle of capitalism and all other fundamentalisms. Moreover, it does so as part of its tribute to those who died at that tragic site. It therefore provides a model of how public art can resist the first two oracles we have engaged: spectacle and capital.

T H E O R AC L E O F A M E R I C A N E XC E P T I O N A L I S M

We can present the third oracle, American exceptionalism, by following the same format we used for aesthetic spectacle and capital: beginning with the official memorial and then proceeding to Wodiczko’s alternative, dissident proposal (figure 7.7).

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FIGURE  7.7 Visitors to the National 9/11 Memorial. September 11, 2011, New York. Photo by Carolyn Cole-Pool. Photo copyright © Getty Images

A RA D ’ S R EF L E CT I NG A B S E NC E AND T H E NAT IO NAL S E P T E MB E R   1 1 ME MO R I A L MU S E U M

The critical literature on 9/11 memorials emphasizes two direct consequences of national exceptionalism: victimhood and the naturalizing of terrorism. Victimhood has been particularly predominant in the media and the political treatment of 9/11. These sources have tended to present this calamity as a strictly American phenomenon, usually omitting reference to the critical history surrounding it and the many non-U.S citizens killed in the attack. These omissions encourage those of us who are U.S. citizens to think of ourselves as innocent victims and the United States as a victimized nation. Erica Doss suggests that this picture of ourselves makes us feel that we are absolved from “reflecting on issues of historical responsibility.”75 For example, we overlook the United States’ role in the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh and in similar events that have undermined the national sovereignty of Middle Eastern countries and caused them pervasive destruction and war

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casualties. Ironically, we even have forgotten an event occurring on 9/11 for which we were responsible: the 9/11/1973 military coup that the United States helped engineer in Chile. It brought about the death of the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, and the subsequent installation of the fascist dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. It also produced many more deaths than in the New York 9/11 attack. The belief in our exceptional innocence has led to two other baleful results. It made more likely our resort to retribution—to invading Iraq, carrying out torture and extraordinary rendition, and otherwise nullifying our traditional values. Exceptionalism has also produced a thoughtless condemnation of those who do think critically about the 9/11 attacks. For example, Doss argues that “attempts to contextualize 9/11 within narratives of either domestic or international terrorism, or within the nation’s larger history of violence, are deemed disrespectful to the memory of those who died, and traitorous to the national duty of patriotic revenge.”76 Gopnik echoes this view: the “deep and mostly unspoken work of architectural memorials” is “to sacralize their subject in a way that . . . makes contention come at an extremely high price in social discomfort and disapproval.”77 The second major consequence of American exceptionalism has been the naturalization of terrorism. We see terrorism as an endemic evil. As evil, it is not necessary to inquire into why the 9/11 perpetrators committed such a nefarious event; the historical context fades into irrelevancy. The only necessary response is to condemn the event and seek retribution. The tendency to naturalize such a phenomenon therefore contributes to the same myopic consequences produced by victimhood.78 But claiming that Arad’s Reflecting Absence itself is an expression of American exceptionalism would be inaccurate. It does not say that U.S. citizens are exceptional, that their mourning is more justified or important than the sentiments of people outside the United States. On the other hand, the minimalism of Arad’s memorial does nothing to counteract this tendency. Despite a forum that would have allowed it to do so, it does not directly stand against the myopic exceptionalism that mimics the tunnel vision of the terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks. It does not, then, resist the oracle of American exceptionalism. Mindful of these types of criticisms, the committees in charge of the official 9/11 memorial built into their plan a way to escape the oracle of

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U.S. exceptionalism. The plan included provision for the museum that has now been completed on the memorial site, the National September 11 Memorial Museum. It fills a cavernous area seventy feet underground, and is carved out along the sides of Arad’s two voids and the footprints of the two former Twin Towers. In addition to its trapezoidal entry pavilion, the contents of the museum include over four thousand artifacts, everything from a wedding band and huge architectural remains of the towers to a repository for the unidentified remains of some of the victims.79 The degree to which the museum might undercut American exceptionalism is diminished by two sets of problems. The first concerns the possibility that a museum attached to a memorial can detract from it. For example, Pickford argues that the Eisenman Holocaust memorial and its attendant museum cancel out the respective contributions of each: the aesthetic and historical dimensions “become autonomous and selfsufficient, the aesthetic tending toward myth, the historical toward mere document.”80 The separate entrance to the 9/11 museum, its location not between but to the side of one of the voids, diminishes dynamic tension between it and Arad’s memorial and leads one to think of them as disparate entities. Gopnik once again presents the most biting criticism of the museum’s design. He states that, like the Washington Holocaust Museum, the 9/11 museum adopts the typical mid-twentieth-century style for monuments: a “muted or off-center or jagged modernist hull, monolithic and windowless, open[ing] down onto a tomblike, dramatically lit, vast inner space.” To establish contrast, Gopnik praises the recent redesign of an Israeli monument that ruptures the theatricalized gloom, and is skylit, thereby “memorializ[ing] the dead without becoming macabre.”81 The second problem concerns the educational and political function of the museum. We can begin by contrasting it with a special situation at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The officials in charge of that memorial are worried about time erasing its meaning for future visitors. They are therefore adding an underground visitor’s center whose function will be to provide both personal and historical context for the memorial. The website for this addition therefore states: “What was once The Wall that Heals has now become The Wall that Educates.”82 We would expect something similar to this from the September 11 Memorial Museum. But a conflict occurs between the educative history we might wish of the museum and what in fact it provides. In particular, we would anticipate

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the 9/11 museum to pay some enlightening attention to the Al Qaeda operatives. According to its director, Alice Greenwald, the mission of the museum is to honor those who were killed or survived the attacks, maintain the architectural site and artifacts of the 9/11 attack, and explain what happened at the site. She adds that the museum should be a “moral platform” against “mass murder as a response to grievances.”83 Despite these lofty aims, external pressure forced museum officials to curtail their initial plans for representing the perpetrators. They had to retreat from an in-depth presentation that might appear to humanize those who many think we should see only as murderers.84 The officials therefore decided to display just the evidence confirming the guilt of the hijackers. They rationalized that this restriction would not encourage similar attacks by other zealots. To avoid further humanizing the perpetrators or the appearance of “blaming the victim,” the officials excluded attempts to explain the motives and grievances of the attackers.85 This tension between commemorating and documenting comes to its climax with the issue of photos and the problem of giving terrorists the honor of being seen in the same company as the victims of their crime. The museum curators therefore originally decided to shrink the images of the hijackers to thumbnail size (2 by 1½ inches) and to place them on a slanted board, in a narrow partitioned alcove, thus requiring viewers to turn their heads at an odd angle to see the likenesses. The captions under the photos were to include statements from the terrorists that confirmed their part in the attacks. Thus Greenwald was able to claim that “we’re allowing them to indict themselves as mass murderers, not giving them a platform for propaganda.”86 The actual placement at the museum today is not so dismissive as the original plan, but the terrorists’ stories are still truncated.87 This reduction of the lives of the terrorists to their murderous deeds is matched by applying informational cosmetics to certain aspects of 9/11. In order not to overshadow the theme of “hope over despair, and the resiliency and selflessness of the rescue efforts,” such mishaps as acts of looting, xenophobic reactions to the attacks, and communication breakdowns among rescuers were purposely omitted from the permanent exhibition or otherwise downplayed in the museum.88 Thus Greenwald concludes that “it’s not always an authoritative museum. It’s about ‘collective memory.’”89 In his assessment, Gopnik claims that despite the presence

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of “a few grimly eloquent objects—a half-crushed fire engine, a fragment of the pancaked floors from one tower—nothing is really taught.”90 Gopnik’s view may seem to conflict with the great effort throughout the museum to provide enormous amounts of information. But he could reply that information is not necessarily knowledge. This view is reinforced by Philip Kennicot. He describes the museum as “spectacle,” “religious ritual,” and “nationalistic,” and concludes: “The museum doesn’t get the facts of Islam wrong; it simply leaves no room for anything that can’t be assimilated into an essentially Americanist and Christian world view.”91 We have, then, treated two consequences—victimhood and naturalizing terrorism—of the national exceptionalism related to the 9/11 memorial and museum. But Kennicot’s reference to an “Americanist and Christian world view” invites us to consider a third. This one brings us back to prejudices that are similar to the racism and white-supremacy broached at the beginning of chapter 1. They concern omissions by the 9/11 memorial and museum officials that took place more than a decade after the 9/11 attacks and at the inauguration of the museum in 2014. Rather than racism against African Americans, the prejudices in this context concern attitudes in the United States toward Arabs and Islam. Arabic was excluded from the first ten languages into which the brochures of the 9/11 memorial were translated. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) complained that the intention behind the omission might be political. A representative for the memorial replied publically that Arabic speakers constituted only the twentieth-fifth largest group of visitors and therefore did not appear in the initial ten translations. This overlooked that Arabic is the language of the fourth largest linguistic group in the world and is spoken by a constituency in New York that is larger than other ones represented by some of the ten translated languages.92 More importantly, the appearance of a translation of the official brochures in Arabic would have helped visitors to the site realize that the 9/11 attacks were committed by a small group of terrorists who do not represent Arab Americans and Muslim Americans or Arabs and Muslims worldwide. It is still possible that the memorial officials might correct this unfortunate omission. A second omission concerns a request by historians and preservationists who represent a district in Lower Manhattan that was once part of the neighborhood later dominated by the Twin Towers. The

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representatives reminded the 9/11 memorial officials that the district was called “Little Syria” and, since the late 1800s, had been the heart of Arab American life in New York. These historians and preservationists petitioned Director Greenwald to mention Little Syria in the 9/11 museum’s “permanent history.” This type of accommodation had already been granted to another historical neighbor of the Twin Towers, the “Radio Row” electronics district. However, Greenwald and the 9/11 memorial’s CEO and president turned down the Little Syria request. Once again, and perhaps against the personal sentiments of the museum and memorial officials, an opportunity had been passed over to unite all citizens of the United States and to show that the country harbored no animosity toward the great majority of Arabs and Muslims in the world.93 Indeed, the addition of the language and the history of Little Syria to the memorial and museum could help people more clearly see the United States as a multiethnic, multicultural society rather than as a bastion of whiteness and a single religion.94 The considerations amassed here suggest that the 9/11 museum still abets rather than challenges the American exceptionalism it harbors. In his discussion of the monuments on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., Kirk Savage proposes that we should “treat the memorial landscape more as an open conversation than a quest for an immutable national essence.” He returns to a theme we have cited him for a number of times already: “Nicholas’s tablet—on which people write what their hearts dictated—would be perfectly in place here. . . . Many voices would find room for expression, creating a far more open, democratic sphere of memory.”95 In tune with this same political/educational issue, Doss asks, “Can American memorials ‘hold a presence’ for victims of terrorism without reifying tropes of national innocence, blood sacrifice, and violent reprisal?” She responds to her question by providing a number of affirmative examples.96 We can approximate a response similar to Savage’s and Doss’s by appealing to Wodiczko’s City of Refuge.

WO DI C Z KO ’ S C I T Y O F R EFU GE

Wodiczko’s City of Refuge contrasts starkly with the 9/11 Memorial and Museum on the issue of American exceptionalism. The official

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memorial divides its commemorating and historical-political dimensions into a physically and functionally separate monument (Reflecting Absence) and museum (the September 11 Memorial Museum). In contrast, we have seen how the performative aspect of Wodiczko’s proposed 9/11 memorial includes the nonhierarchical choreography of dialogic exchanges among visitors on the full meaning of the attacks and other issues of local and world violence and exile. The visitors are transformed into the participants of this performative part of the memorial. Therefore, this aspect of the memorial’s aesthetic, combined with its auratic and geometrical aspects, provides an effective tension between its commemorative and didactic (historical-political) functions. Indeed, the performative aspect or relational aesthetic includes the spectral voices of the 9/11 victims, the living ones of their surviving kin and many sympathizers, and at the same time acknowledges the humanity, motivations, and grievances of the hijackers.97 It performs parrhesiastic democracy at the same time that it encloses it within an aura that sets it apart from mere conversation or entertainment. In other words, Wodiczko’s memorial satisfies Savage’s appeal to the democratic promise of Congressman Nicholas’s plain tablet and addresses Doss’s concern for a presence of the victims in a way that does not translate into retaliation or Wodiczko’s avengers of blood. One thing is clear: Wodiczko’s memorial does not succumb to American exceptionalism and its myopic consequences. We have now compared the two memorials. I have argued that Arad’s falls prey to all three of the oracles we have discussed: the aesthetic oracle of spectacle (the memorial’s minimalism mutes critical thought); the oracle of capital (the memorial becomes an “amenity” for the icons of capitalism surrounding it); the oracle of American exceptionalism (though the memorial doesn’t promote, it doesn’t counter our desire to see ourselves as innocent victims rather than as the half-innocent, half-guilty actors that Wodiczko describes; the museum does abet the innocent victim view). In contrast, Wodiczko’s resists all three of these oracles: its three aesthetic aspects—the auratic, geometric, and performative—enhance rather than distract from the radical democratic meaning it enacts; it makes capitalism and privatization of public space a target of criticism rather than the natural state or destiny of society; and it condemns rather than appeases American exceptionalism.

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The remark that Wodiczko’s memorial enhances the democratic meaning it enacts goes even further than what I indicated. The dialogic character of City of Refuge, like that of Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, suggests that they are both microcosms of a positive form of democracy. Because the characterization of democracy is an important part of the structure of our criterion for public art, we must clarify further the dialogic character of democracy as suggested by Wodiczko’s version of the 9/11 memorial. This clarification involves addressing a facet of 9/11 memorials that we have so far neglected: therapeutic catharsis. It also requires that we respond to another thinker, the contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and his view of dialogue or, more broadly, of language, community, and art. The art historian Joel McKim has recently used Agamben’s work as a means to assess the standing of New York’s 9/11 memorial. He does this in ways that appear similar to our use of Wodiczko’s views for the same purpose.98

T H E R A P E U T I C C AT H A R S I S

We noted in chapter 5 that both Badiou and Rancière rejected reducing art to its cathartic or therapeutic value. But that does not mean eliminating these attributes altogether. Indeed, many think that the therapeutic healing of individual or national trauma is a strength of memorials in general and of Arad’s Reflecting Absence in particular. More specifically, the minimalism of Maya Lin’s and Arad’s memorials is thought by many to commemorate trauma for two reasons: on the one hand, they evoke the horror of the recalled events and, on the other, suggest an idealized recovery from them, a rehabilitated memory of them for individual and national or ethnic memory.99 The healing potential of the official 9/11 memorial in New York is contested. Filler implies that it does have such potential. He says that he wept at his first view of the sight of the memorial and “came away with the same feeling that overtakes one after a funeral or memorial service for a relative or close friend” even though he did not know any of the fallen personally.100 But Gopnik’s experience of the “pattern of falling, draining, and recycling” of the two pools was completely the opposite of Filler’s: he saw

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the “sinks” as “less the promise of eternal memory and more a cycle of endless loss and waste.”101 Even the families of the victims expressed contrary feelings about the healing power of the memorial.102 Despite the mixed opinions on its therapeutic value, Arad’s Reflecting Absence has at least the pretense and for some the reality of healing power. We can ask if Wodiczko’s City of Refuge performs this sort of therapeutic function. Finding an answer is facilitated by a recent collection of articles discussing Wodiczko’s alternative 9/11 memorial. Wodiczko and the editors of the volume invited a number of leading critics to voice their opinions of his project. We have already cited one of these critics, Kirk Savage, a number of times in this book. He looks upon Wodiczko’s project favorably, but joins in the spirit of the invitation and asks several critical questions that fit our current theme. The first of Savage’s questions arises in the context of Wodiczko’s rejection of the “standard political calculus” for deciding in advance of debate which names should be included in a memorial. Wodiczko wants us to consider adding other names to those who died in the destruction of the World Trade Center. These new names would include those of “traumatized US soldiers and their families, Afghan and Iraqi soldiers and civilians, [and of] domestic victims of Homeland Security repression.” He also plays down the rhetoric of honor and healing, and some might think his exhortation to acknowledge our own half-guilt, half-innocence serves to “excuse the perpetrators” of 9/11.103 Given the broad inclusiveness of Wodiczko’s proposal concerning the names and appropriate rhetoric, Savage worries that City of Refuge might lack sufficient moral clarity to provide the therapeutic power necessary for inducing recovery.104 On Wodiczko’s behalf, however, we can reply that he does recognize that bearing witness to events like 9/11 “may be essential for traumatized survivors.” But he also points out that survivors could “heal their traumatic wounds [by choosing] to work toward a more conscious and a less inhuman, violent and vengeful world.”105 If this is a satisfactory response to the problem of therapeutic power, there is still a second issue. For a memorial to be effective in achieving this and its other purposes, it must create an aura that makes visitors empathetically identify with what it commemorates. Savage points out that Wodiczko rejects such “parareligious” icons.106 Nevertheless, we have seen that Wodiczko establishes an aesthetic as well as an ethical aura by associating his memorial with the

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“sacredness” and “ritualistic” aspects of the biblical cities of refuge. This effect is enhanced by the memorial’s spheres and circles, by its geometric and performative aesthetic of democracy. Once again, we can draw a parallel with Kapoor’s Cloud Gate and note that the aura of the latter aided its intimation of a new idea of community. It thus saved the artwork from serving solely as spectacle or entertainment. Despite the appeal to this sort of aura, it is fair to continue questioning whether the aesthetic dimension of City of Refuge is as effective as we are claiming here. This is especially true when we recall that the alternative memorial has not been built and probably never will be. For that reason what would have been its real presence can’t play a strong role in our judgment of the contribution its aesthetic force would make to the total artwork. City of Refuge does, however, provide us with a sufficient model for at least understanding what we mean when we speak of an integrally effective relation between an artwork’s aesthetic and didactic dimensions.107 But if we are right in holding that Wodiczko’s memorial could be aesthetically effective if it were built, then it still runs into problems that Savage thinks pertain to traditional memorials and their auras. He asks if this kind of aura—such as the site, relics, and names of the official 9/11 memorial—could “spur [visitors] to think, speak, and act?” Because City of Refuge, unlike these other memorials, has dialogic behavior already built into its design and purpose, we can reply that the question for it has already been answered in the affirmative. But if we are granting this aesthetic power to Wodiczko’s alternative memorial, we have to address an extension that Savage adds to his first question. This addition asks if a memorial with a “sacred core”—perhaps the biblical aura of Wodiczko’s city of refuge and the symbolism of the ferries—would be oracular, the “unquestioned voice of authority that demands deference and silences its visitors?” In particular, would “the names of the dead silenced by al-Qaida . . . be used in turn to silence us, as if any attempt to speak and debate in their presence was blasphemy?”108 This applies to City of Refuge because we have already noted that it is intended to incorporate the names of the victims of the 9/11 attack along with those of many others harmed by the history and governmental policies surrounding that event. Given that Wodiczko has also acknowledged his memorial’s therapeutic role,

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Savage’s concluding formulation of his question applies squarely to City of Refuge: “Could a therapeutic memorial or documentary museum use these spectral voices to create an anti-oracular monument, a space open to a multiplicity of viewpoints shaped in other parts of the world and by other events in the past and future?”109 A final answer to this question will not appear until the next chapter and after we first have considered Giorgio Agamben’s work, which includes his negative reaction to the very notion of voice, spectral or otherwise.

G I O R G I O AG A M B E N A N D N E W YO R K ’ S 9/ 1 1 M E M O R I A L

There are several reasons why we must introduce the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben as the concluding concern of this chapter. Some of the reasons are general, and others are connected to specific issues we addressed in the last section. The general reasons include Agamben’s stature as a leading contemporary writer on the aesthetics and history of art as well on language and community. To not mention his work in a book on political aesthetics and the specific issues we have raised would be amiss on those grounds alone. Most of the more specific reasons for including Agamben are brought to light in an insightful essay on Arad’s 9/11 memorial by art historian Joel McKim. In an implicit reply to our above question about therapeutic effects and an anti-oracular monument, McKim argues that Agamben’s theory of language “may help us imagine a Ground Zero memorial that moves beyond a strictly didactic or therapeutic role and seeks instead to bring into being a radical space of communication.”110 This radical space of communication sounds similar to the communal aspects of Wodiczko’s City of Refuge and congenial to the apparatus of voice we have been using to discuss the relationship between democracy, acts of citizenship, and public art. We can therefore use Agamben’s idea of language, McKim’s comments on it, and our critical reflections on both to clarify this space of communication. This endeavor will also add to our thoughts on Wodiczko’s memorial and its implications for our criterion of public art.

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However, there is another equally strong motive for this encounter: Agamben, paradoxically, sees the centrality of voice as anathema to his chief idea of “pure potentiality.”

P U R E P OT E N T I A L I T Y

Early in his analysis of Agamben, McKim reiterates the four views of art by Alain Badiou that we discussed in chapter 5. He joins Badiou in holding that we should avoid assuming that memorials or other forms of art must fit the didactic, romantic, or cathartic schemas of art’s relation to truth. He adds that Agamben follows Badiou in offering a fourth modality of art. Unlike Badiou’s inaesthetics, however, this modality does not “sever the connection between politics and aesthetics.”111 It therefore is closer to our more inclusive articulation of Rancière’s aesthetic regime of art. To capture this fourth modality, McKim provides a helpful exposition of Agamben’s treatment of three related topics: aesthetics, language, and community. He then innovatively applies this treatment to the 9/11 and other memorials. Rather than follow the order of McKim’s exposition, we will begin with a concept that underlies the three topics McKim highlights. The concept is Agamben’s novel treatment of the traditional idea of “potentiality.” His insight is contrary to the philosophical tradition on this idea: he holds that “pure potentiality” has primacy over “actuality” rather than the other way around. The potentiality he has in mind is not the generic sort—for example, the ability that children have for eventually acquiring knowledge. Rather, it is the “existing potentiality” of architects and others who can immediately actualize their specific capacity without requiring further learning or any other alteration in their being at that moment. Agamben argues that this form of potentiality is at once the capacity to do or not to do something, to actualize or not actualize itself.112 He cites Aristotle on vision as one piece of evidence for this claim: the potentiality for light and hence sight is also the capacity for distinguishing them from darkness—as when we see shadows—and thus the capacity to differentiate “not to see” from actually seeing.113 Agamben refers to this “welcoming of non-Being” or “fundamental passivity” as “impotentiality.” He interprets Aristotle to mean by the latter term that one is always in relation to “one’s own

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privation” of a given capacity. In other words, a potentiality such as the capacity not to see, an impotentiality, “preserves itself as such in actuality” and thus doesn’t disappear when we are currently seeing. Only humans, he feels, have this form of pure potentiality. Indeed, Agamben states that we are “free,” truly possess our potentialities, because we exist “in relation to [our own impotentiality].” In surviving its actualization, potentiality “gives itself to itself ” and thereby opens us to be free, that is, to be other than what actuality would prescribe in advance.114

A RT AND P U R E T R ANS MI SS IB ILIT Y

This still abstract notion of pure potentiality can be made more concrete and accessible by considering its instantiation in art, language, and community as well as in relation to the 9/11 memorial. Agamben views modern art as simultaneously a great failure and a great promise. He first discusses premodern art and portrays it as the artist existing in intimate unity with the spectator, both of them seeing “in the work of art only [their] own faith and the highest truth of being brought to art.” A problem of art does not exist in this case since it “is precisely the shared space in which all men [sic], artists, and non-artists, come together in living unity.”115 More specifically, he argues that the original structure of the work of art consisted in a rhythm that was at once a “gift” and a “reserve.” It was a gift because it interrupted time’s “incessant flow of instants” and thereby revealed to us a more original, almost atemporal mode of time. But it was also a reserve because it simultaneously concealed what it revealed in “the one-dimensional flight of instants.” Thus this rhythm can hold us in the sense of granting us at once “the ecstatic dwelling in a more original dimension” and a contrary “fall into the flight of measurable time.”116 The work of art’s structure as rhythm does more than just open us to our “authentic temporal dimension.” It provides us with the space of our “belonging to the world.” Only within this space can we “take the original measure of [our] dwelling on earth and find again [our] present truth in the unstoppable flow of linear time.” Indeed, this space is the transcendental basis for our action and existence, for praxis or “willed and free activity,” for history and the past and future that is always at stake for us.117

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Agamben contrasts this premodern art with the modern variety. He feels that the latter is the negative historical moment when the willfulness of a distorted praxis replaces the poiesis that directly unveils the space of eternal truth and builds this world for our dwelling on earth.118 More specifically, he thinks that during the historical upsurge of property, market economies, technology, and individualism, artists began to adopt the expression of “a free creative principle” as the central meaning of their work. The spectators of this art do not possess this creative principle. They therefore can see in the artists’ work only a measure of their own taste for the pure beauty of aesthetic objects.119 The only ground for art is now a continual “creative transcendence beyond itself,” but a transcendence toward nothing other than the mere repetition of this movement. The artist therefore becomes a “man without content” and aesthetics the name of an empty gesture. Rhythm is lost and so is the “essential solidarity” or common ground of artists and spectators. Art exists as the continual negation of its ideal content: “being destines itself in man in the form of Nothingness.”120 Despite the descent into nihilism, Agamben finds modern aesthetics to have a saving grace. This grace is predicated on the notion of the “transmissibility of art” and its impossibility in contemporary art. In mythicaltraditional systems, all value existed in the act of cultural transmission, the absolute identity between the act and the thing transmitted. Agamben argues that the emphasis of modern art on continual transcendence destroys this transmissibility of culture, of the past or tradition of things (their traditional content and hence comprehensibility). It replaces this transmissibility with the resulting shock of “intransmissibility” or discontinuity between past and present as “the last possible source of meaning and value for things themselves”; thus “art becomes the last tie connecting man to his past” but with the loss of any feeling for its original meaning.121 In other words, modernity produces what we examined in chapter  4: the prophets of contemporaneity, heterochronicity, and anachronicity who valorize the intransmissibility of culture, its indecidability and heterogeneity, as the source of art’s fecundity. We saw that this valorization was exemplary in Georges Didi-Huberman’s ecstatic timedisrupting experience of the spots of white paint that Fra Angelico purposely had flecked on the faux marble base of his fifteenth century Madonna of the Shadows.

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For Agamben, this loss of heritage, even if it leaves objects with the aesthetic aura acclaimed by Didi-Huberman, wedges us between an indecipherable past and an unpossessed future.122 It leaves us with two different but inseparable angels: on the one hand, Walter Benjamin’s treatment of Klee’s famous Angelus Novus as the “angel of history”—an angel who can look only at the wreckage of time’s passage piling up in front of him as he is blown backward further into the future; and, on the other hand, Agamben’s interpretation of Dürer’s Melancholia as the “angel of aesthetics” who is “immersed in an atemporal dimension” and surrounded by everyday items that are alienating in appearance, the “ciphers for something endlessly elusive.” Neither the first angel’s storm of history nor the second’s atemporal dimension full of the ruins of the past can give us the premodern mythical-traditional system that Agamben appears to see as the only salvation, however impossible it may seem to us now.123 But in this wreckage lies a form of salvation nonetheless. Modern aesthetics destroys the transmissibility of the past and thereby makes intransmissibility and aesthetic beauty values in themselves. But in its doing so, Agamben says that art becomes “the transmission of the act of transmission” itself, that is, transmission without relation to any content except itself. It closes “the gap between the thing to be transmitted and the act of transmission” by making the latter the thing transmitted. In this auto-affection, modern art approximates the mythic-traditional system that has its tradition for its content and forms an intimate unity of artists and spectators. But it’s only an approximation: necessarily linked to history, modern art cannot cross the threshold of this mythical system without losing itself. The saving grace is that it at least makes us aware that we exist as the potentiality for this system.124 In other words, the transmission of the act of transmission itself—the self-affection of transmissibility, and thus the capacity for non-transmission—is like the pure potentiality with which we started this section. This pure transmissibility of content, the option of either/or, preserves itself in the presence of each modern artwork. Agamben says that it is like a “burning house”: just as this house allows us to see the fundamental architectural problem, so art makes visible its own “original project.”125 It thereby transforms “its historical status, perennially suspended in the inter-world between old and new, past and future, into the very space in which [we] can take

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the original measure of [our] dwelling in the present and recover each time the meaning of [our] action.”126 What can this dwelling be other than the hint that transmissibility lacks the kind of content it used to have and now, in its pure form, becomes the praiseworthy replacement of any particular content? McKim points out correctly that Agamben is trying to sell us neither Heideggerian romanticism nor artistic conservatism. Instead, Agamben wants to trace out the implications of a “contentless communication,”127 that is, the primacy of language, a “coming community,” and the sense in which both of these are forms of pure potentiality. We can look at Agamben’s idea of language first, pass on to his notion of community, and then see how McKim thinks these insights apply to the 9/11 memorial.

P UR E L A N GUAGE A N D CO M MU NICAT IO N

In his essay, “Pardes” (Hebrew for “Paradise” and “supreme knowledge” that is “asignifying”), Agamben provides one of his clearest statements on language and how it contrasts with a close cousin, the différance or “spacing” of Derrida that we addressed in chapter 3. Rabbi Elisha ben Abuya, referred to as Aher or “Other” because of his sin, enters Pardes with three other rabbis. He there commits his sin, separating the Tree of Knowledge from the Tree of Life, and thus represents humanity.128 In effect, he conducts an “experimentum linguae” and takes the “moral risk” of separating the revelatory powers of speech from the things it discloses as well as from “voice,” “pronunciation,” and “semantic value.” This disrobing provides language with an “autonomous consistency.” But the price of this autonomy, according to the Talmud, is that Aher “will not be judged, but neither will he [exit Pardes and be able to] enter into the world to come.”129 He has the Word but not its “life.” Agamben refers to another experimentum linguae as an initial clarification of the first one. This second experiment is the “contemporaneity” of Derrida’s systematic deconstruction of “philosophical vocabulary,” leaving its terms unmoored from univocal meanings and “float[ing] interminably in the ocean of sense.”130 The relationship between presence and that which exceeds it is always a trace that signals the entirely other relatum (the one that exceeds presence) and erases itself at the same time. In this way, the

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trace does not nullify the otherness of the relatum in the general movement of différance and its temporality of always and only “to come.” The trace of the sign does not signify presence but only “the trace of the erasure of the trace.”131 This means that the trace or term still signifies, but only itself. Agamben enlarges on the paradoxical outcome of this auto-affection or self-referentiality: either the term signifies itself as signifying and thereby makes an object of itself and no longer signifies, or it has no signification at all. He adds that if Derrida escapes this aporia, it is because his traces or names (terms) are what they do and thus don’t make objects of themselves.132 And he asks why Derrida, replacing “sense” with “trace,” attempts, in Derrida’s own words, “to name the name” (for example, différance) with “a writing without presence and without absence, without history, without cause, without arche [beginning, origin], without telos [end, purpose], absolutely dislocating all dialectics, all theology, all teleology, all ontology”?133 Agamben makes his own attempt to solve the meaning of writing and to transform the aporia of self-reference into a “euporia,” a good or helpful paradox rather than what he takes to be a debilitating one.134 He uses Aristotle’s metaphor of the mind as a “writing tablet” that is the pure potential for something written or not written. In other words, he appropriates Derrida’s notion of trace and rewrites it as the pure potentiality introduced earlier. All thought and language are simultaneously the potential to act and not to act, and are preserved as such, as the ability to “not not-act,” even when this potential is actualized in specific thoughts and words, spoken or written.135 Once more Agamben uses the example of experiencing darkness to claim that sight is capable of auto-affection, of apprehending itself as the pure potentiality for sight—to hold, more generally, that each trace is a “potentiality that is capable and that experiences itself, a writing tablet that suffers not the impression of a form but the imprint of its own passivity, its own formlessness.”136 Agamben emphasizes that this “pure potential to signify (and not to signify), the writing tablet on which nothing is written,” is no longer “meaning’s self-reference” or a “sign’s signification of itself”; it is the “materialization” of itself.137 Thus “pure matter,” the potentiality that is both the capacity to be and not-be its actualization, supplants the traditional idea of the primacy of form over matter: “pure actuality,” the “actuality

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of an act,” is now taken by Agamben (and in Aristotle’s name) to be “pure potentiality, that is, the potentiality of a potentiality,” in short, pure matter.138 Indeed, Agamben overwrites Derrida once more by claiming that pure potentiality is the meaning of the notion of “khora” prized by Plato and Aristotle as well as by the French deconstructionist. The experimentum linguae, then, is not the idea of a Derridian “interpretive practice directed toward the infinite deconstruction of a text” or a “new formalism,” not the self-reiterating and interrupting “to come”; it is instead “the decisive event of matter.”139 This means, presumably, that the experimentum linguae is the life of words rather than Derrida’s words as only iterative forms; that Derrida is the imprisoned Aher.

P URE M E DI AL I T Y A N D T H E CO M ING CO MMU NIT Y

Agamben closes “Pardes” by saying that the recognition of matter as pure potentiality (at least in the context of human activity) is also to realize the path toward an “ethics.”140 In The Coming Community, Agamben holds that ethics is based on a permanent debt we “have and feel”: the debt of being what one is as a singularity, the “exposure” of “being (one’s own) [pure] potentiality.”141 This exposure is linguistically based on “beingcalled” this or that rather than existing as a set of well-defined properties or as an essence.142 The linguistic qualification of the idea of exposure in this manner allows Agamben to refer to us as singularities whose only principle of individuation is our “manner of rising forth,” a “free use of the self or “being engendered” continually (a being “thus” that is “without remainder,” “irreparably” ourselves, a “whatever singularity”).143 He also refers to the exposure or singularity status rendered by pure potentiality as an “idea” or “something like a profane halo” that is ours but also “floats” above “all the elements and creatures of the world.”144 This identity/non-identity with the corresponding idea allows Agamben to say that the realization of ourselves as this idea can be muted by debilitating circumstances, as we will now see. In contrast to the ethical good of our exposure, “evil” is to “regard potentiality itself . . . as a fault that must always be repressed.”145 Agamben repeats some of our own earlier predilections and characterizes one of these evils as capitalism’s capacity for limiting human nature to the

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“mediatization” of ourselves as “spectacle” or commodity. But this allows the human body to continue its “precarious existence” behind the “glorious body of advertisement” and the mask it provides us. Perhaps, then, there is still the possibility of combining body and image in a way that no longer separates them and thus would render commodities as the “unknowing midwives of this new body of humanity.”146 The idea of singularity might appear as a purely personal form of existence. But Agamben means it to provide the most pervasive and basic (we could say transcendental) characterization of community. As pure potentiality, each singularity is an exemplar of the whole group and thus communicates with the others in a space that assigns them nothing in common except their singularity and mutual exposure to one another.147 This communication of singularities is a “solidarity that in no way concerns an essence”; it is also an “irrevocable hospitality,” an “exiling” of each into the other as what each is.148 It is therefore reminiscent of one of the themes of chapter 3: Derrida’s idea of unconditional hospitality. The communication that Agamben describes here is possible because language is pure potentiality and thus in principle permits us to escape the limits on speech imposed by what he calls the “democratic-spectacular State-form.” Indeed, Agamben claims that our current alienation from linguistic being is also a “devastating experimentum linguae.” It “unhinges and empties traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities.” This emptying of linguistic content has the saving grace of allowing us to experience our “pure potential to signify (and not to signify)” and thus to regain our own linguistic being and the community of singularities in which we exist, our vital dwelling in language. Those who bring language to itself “will be the first citizens of a community with neither presuppositions nor a State, where the nullifying and determining power of what is common will be pacified.” They will overcome the loss of the world to come that Aher missed in splitting knowledge (language) from life; they will then be like the favored of Aher’s colleagues, Rabbi Akiba, and “enter the Paradise of language and leave unharmed,” that is, live in the paradox of self-reference without being imprisoned by it.149 In The Coming Community, Agamben asks what could possibly be “the politics of whatever singularity?” Any community this politics might propose cannot be mediated by being Italian, communist, or any condition of belonging that would return us to essentialism or univocal identity; nor

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can it be mediated by a purely negative principle such as the absence of conditions. The community of whatever singularity is itself pure mediality. Agamben therefore answers his initial question by saying that the politics of this whatever singularity must be “belonging itself” and offers Tiananmen Square as an example of what he means. He emphasizes that the protests at Tiananmen lacked any determinate content except the “generalities” of democracy and freedom.”150 He surmises that this refusal of any identity or “societas” by the whatever singularities involved in the protest constituted the reason for the extreme reactive violence of the Chinese state and its penchant for hierarchical and well-defined order: “Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principle enemy of the State.”151

AG AMB E N AND T H E 9/ 1 1 M E MO RIAL

In his exposition of many of the passages we have covered, McKim summarizes them by stating that the gesture of the Tiananmen protestors communicated the “fact of communicability itself,” of language itself, and not some particular goal.152 In other words, pure potentiality, dwelling in language, and its promise of the possibility of transcending limiting actualities are once again taken as the basis of our existence. McKim applies Agamben’s view of pure language to the design of memorials like those for 9/11. His aim is to show how such memorials could “activate the potential of language without a prescribed outcome or predetermined role.”153 These spaces of communication would be designed to prompt visitors to envision new forms of social relations and to allow “for unpredictable responses.” McKim’s main example of a non-prescribed space of communication is an artwork proposed by Jochen Gerz. In the mid-1990s, Gerz entered his design into the Memorial to Murdered Jews of Europe competition. He named it “Warum?”(“Why?”). The ultimately unsuccessful proposal called for using a center named “The Ear” that constructed by Iranian architect Nasrine Seraji. The visitors to the center would discuss “why the Shoah could have occurred” and its implications for the present. McKim

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feels that Gerz must have sensed that the coming together of the visitors for this purpose and in that setting would release a “moment of poiesis,” suspend “the flow of common time,” and thereby create something similar to Agamben’s being-in-language that could address events like the Holocaust and 9/11. Only this sort of space could be as much the “zone of risk” as the “place of comfort” necessary for interrupting the expected tropes for these traumatic events and thus allowing the emergence of new forms for addressing them.154 McKim believes that Agamben’s appeal to language as “pure mediality” (that is, indifferent to any content other than its auto-affection) and a design like Gerz’s should have been the preferred type of national memorial for 9/11. His criticisms of the actual memorial are much like those we discussed in the previous chapter. But McKim adds to these criticisms one that we omitted: two centers, much like the one proposed by Gerz, were unfortunately rejected by a significant portion of the victims’ families and New York politicians; they felt these centers (“The Drawing Center” and the proposed “International Freedom Center”) violated the site’s “sacred ground.”155 McKim published his article before Wodiczko proposed City of Refuge. But it should be clear that McKim’s description of the open communication of Gerz’s proposed memorial is very similar to that described by Wodiczko and illustrated by his globe in New York’s harbor. In particular, Wodiczko’s combined aesthetic of aura, geometric shapes, and dialogic performance captures the critical and creative dialogue honored by McKim’s Agamben. Moreover, the three aspects of this combined aesthetic perform the effective integration or creative tension of the proposed memorial’s aesthetic and political dimensions. As we know, that creative tension is an indispensable part of the criterion for public art as an act of citizenship.

VO I C E S A N D AG A M B E N ’ S “ P U R E P OT E N T I A L I T Y ”

I have interpreted Wodiczko’s notion of communication in terms of our framework of a dialogic social body and its interacting voices along with the ancient Greek notion of parrhesia (courageous speech and

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hearing). More will be said about parrhesia in the next chapter. For now we can note that these notions capture some aspects of Agamben’s idea of “being-in-language.” However, Agamben cannot accept the notion of voice. He claims that it is “always a mythologeme or a theologoumenon” and that “outside theology and the incarnation of the Verb, there is no moment in which language is inscribed in the living voice, no place in which the living being is able to render itself linguistic, transforming itself into speech.”156 In contrast to Agamben, I am arguing for the primacy of voice, society as a creative interplay among voices, resisting the oracles that threaten the simultaneous affirmation of the three political virtues of solidarity, heterogeneity, and fecundity. This interplay, as I claimed at the end of chapter 3, makes possible, is the transcendental network necessary for, the particular exchanges that take place among the enunciators of the constituent voices. We can bolster this view with the two following arguments against Agamben’s ideas of “pure potentiality” and “pure language.” The first of these two arguments is that pure potentiality, the dual capacity to be and not to be, is either nonsensical or simply a restatement of actuality in misleading terms. Despite Agamben’s scholarly interpretation of Aristotle’s notion of potentiality, it is clear that at least some of Aristotle’s characterizations of this term imply that actuality or “form” determines the specificity of any potentiality, of any capacity or disposition.157 Without form the potentiality could not be a capacity for doing this or that or anything at all. In particular, the potentiality of verbal communication is only the actual voices (any producer of discourse) that make speech possible. “Voice” here includes “thought” as inner dialogue or what we often refer to as “mind.” Without an actual voice, the potentiality of speech and language becomes absolutely indeterminate, indeed, nothing at all. The same is true for any potentiality unaccompanied by a form. With the exception of his notion of the unmoved mover, Aristotle also holds that the inverse is true as well: form cannot exist without the potentialities—the matter—which it defines. The other side of this potentiality-actuality coin is captured in a statement by Agamben that I cited earlier. Agamben says that “pure actuality, that is, the actuality of an act, is pure potentiality, that is, the potentiality of a potentiality.” The latter is, for example, a “potential to think (and not to think) that is turned back upon itself.”158 But why isn’t this potential

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simply an actuality “that turns back on itself,” one that is always remaining itself or transforming itself into something else possible for it, one that is a specific form of becoming itself with its accompanying potentialities? In other words, Agamben’s notion seems equivalent to voice in the way that we characterized it in chapter 2: a force that has the potential to express itself in infinite variations of its particular discourse; a voice that intrinsically refers to its enunciators, discourse, and addressees or respondents; a voice shot through with all the other voices of society, a dialogic hybrid or intersectional being, each voice being part of the identity of the rest and their other at the same time; voices whose enunciators can also incorporate discursive fragments from the discourses of their interlocutors to the point that they produce a new voice; indeed, to the point that, for better or for worse, they take on this new voice as their own or adopt one of the other voices that previously had been part of their identity but with a lower saliency or weaker audibility—for example, a progressive political position that conflicts with their earlier conservative one. The second criticism of pure potentiality questions its political implications. To escape actuality in this context is to exchange democracy and all other political specificity for a pure exposure to each other that can mean anything at all. In his reflections on Tiananmen Square, we saw Agamben characterize the protesters’ valorizations of “democracy and freedom” as mere “generalities.” Their lack of a more specific content had the positive result of confounding the authorities. These generalities without content, as well as the exposures or pure potentialities that Agamben favors, may free us from an imposed sovereignty. But they appear purposefully to offer us nothing with which to replace such sovereignty, on pain of repeating it.159 If these two criticisms of Agamben’s idea of pure potentiality—and hence his idea of art, language, and community—are compelling, then we must retain our notion of voice as the means for showing how Wodiczko’s City of Refuge is an exemplary model of public art as an act of citizenship. Our discussion of Wodiczko’s memorial has indicated that the criterion for public art as an act of citizenship involves affirming the positive aspects of democracy as well as resisting oracles and maintaining a creative tension between the aesthetic and political dimensions of a public artwork. In the next chapter, we will conclude this essay in political aesthetics by providing a full statement of the criterion, assigning some

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important qualifications to it, and characterizing it as an “event.” Its characterization as an event will conclusively answer Savage’s question about whether a memorial like Wodiczko’s—one involving even the spectral voices of the 9/11 dead—could constitute “an anti-oracular monument, a space open to the multiplicity viewpoints shaped in other parts of the world and by other events in the past and future”?

8 PUBLIC ART AS AN ACT OF CITIZENSHIP

W

e began this book discussing two events related to public art: the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee and several other Confederate monuments in New Orleans (figure  1.1), as well as the installation of Danzas Indigenas, in Baldwin City, California (figure 1.2). The first event was a rejection of the white supremacy symbolized by the Confederate monuments; the second celebrated the multiethnic and multicultural reality of its own locale and of the country. But each of these events was also accompanied by intense and frequent protests against them. The counterprotests, along with the resurgence of ethnic nationalism and proto-fascist movements around the globe, indicated the fragility of democracy: its propensity to be taken over, often in its own name, by bigotry and authoritarianism. The two events also emphasized the pervasiveness of public art in society and its power either to incite or to resist antidemocratic tendencies. Our response was to construct a criterion for determining which public artworks augment democratic tendencies and therefore qualify as acts of citizenship in a democracy. This endeavor in political aesthetics took us to an historical event in the earliest years of the United States as a republic. The episode was a tumultuous debate between the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans over whether a stone monument or a plain tablet was the more fitting memorial for the first president of the United States. Democracy required both unity and diversity. But the stone monument of the Federalists

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suggested an authoritarian unity that would muffle the divergent voices of the populace. The Democratic-Republicans and Congressman John Nicholas’s plain tablet, on which all would be allowed to inscribe their opinions, risked the opposite: the fear of a fragmented society in which unity would be impossible. What sort of public art could respond successfully to this dilemma of diversity, could escape being gored by one or the other of its two threatening horns, the stifling homogeneity of unity or the fragmentation of a heterogeneous society? What sort could adhere to the idea of a unity composed of difference rather than one imposed on difference? Moreover, the aesthetic dimension of artworks involved a dilemma of its own: what works could maintain their artistic status without sacrificing their aesthetic dimension in the bluster of their political proclamations or their political value in the glare of their aesthetic aura? The first of these two dilemmas, the dilemma of diversity, indicated the main source of democracy’s fragility but, ironically, also its openness to innovative change. We saw that a leading proponent of democracy, Claude Lefort, referred to democracy as “the image of an empty place, impossible to occupy, such that those who exercise public authority can never claim to appropriate it.” As empty, no authority could claim the “power of the people” as its own; but if no one appropriated it, filled its empty place, democracy would be rudderless or nothing at all.1 Indeed, this perplexing indefiniteness applied to all three of the major terms involved in constructing the criterion we were seeking: democracy, act of citizenship, and public art. We would therefore have to characterize the three, always provisionally, at the same time that we were trying to specify our criterion for assessing public art: the proverbial building of our ship while sailing on it. The voyage on this uncertain vessel took us through chapters concerning public space, democracy, contemporary art, and encounters with leading philosophers, artists, art historians, and critics; all this was melded together in the two penultimate chapters that interrogated Chicago’s Millennium Park and New York’s National September 11 Memorial and Museum. These monuments were more subtle in their intent than Confederate statues supporting white supremacy or artworks that explicitly opposed bigotry and tyranny. They therefore served to help us refine our criterion of public art more carefully and fully than we might have otherwise.

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In this journey, we also discovered that our technical and guiding terms of “voices,” “oracles,” and “multivoiced body” could be considered as an ontology. The voices, their diacritical relations, and the creative interplay among them, were a transcendental network or “garb of voices” that made possible the more particular dialogical exchanges between the enunciators of these voices. They established our status as dialogic beings. Said otherwise, the terminology that guided us in evaluating public art was vindicated, elaborated, and changed by that same art into a founding ontology for democracy and citizenship. A virtuous circle. These reminders will allow us now to clarify the sense in which democracy, citizenship, and public art are what many contemporary philosophers call “events.” We can then give a clear and complete statement of our criterion of public art, specify its “evental” status, and illustrate as well as enhance it through further prompts from what we discussed earlier and by some new observations. We will also respond to a question raised at the end of the last chapter: whether or not the inclusion of the voices of the dead in Krzysztof Wodiczko’s City of Refuge would reveal it to be an oracle like the nihilistic discourses it opposes.

E V E N TS

In chapter  3, Derrida told us that events were injunctions always, and only, “to come.” He said that democracy was such an event. We saw that this meant it was “indecidable,” indeed, an “autoimmune” structure. We agreed that democracy was at least never finalizable as an idea or in practice. But instead of attributing this quality and the evental status of democracy to the work of time itself, we claimed that time and the open texture of the democratic way of life had a different source. That source was the primordial interplay among the constituent voices of society. This interplay not only held the voices together and at the same time kept them separate; it also produced new voices. Because of their diacritical character, each being what it is through its difference from the others, we claimed that each was part of the identity of the rest and simultaneously their “other.” Because each was part of the identity of the others, the ongoing production of new voices would transform the others—in the

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same way that a new gender would change the meaning of “male” and “female.” More astoundingly, this meant that the creation of each new voice was the metamorphosis of society: the very being of society’s multivoiced body was its metamorphoses. It was the same body, but as always differing from itself. We saw also in chapter 3 and in subsequent chapters that this description of the multivoiced body, of agonistic society, implied democracy’s affirmation of society as a unity composed of difference along with its three political virtues: solidarity, heterogeneity, and fecundity (the production of new voices and metamorphosis). This meant that our public art criterion must also reflect this type of unity and its three political virtues. We can now proceed to see how this affects our formulation of the public art criterion and then use that result to help us characterize the political ethics of democracy. These achievements will complete our remarks on the political aesthetics of public artworks that speak to democracy and its fragility. Given the evental nature of democracy, citizenship, and public art, their status as pure becomings, the statement of our criterion of public art can only be provisional and hopefully work as a lure to others who might revise it for the better.

T H E C R IT E R I O N O F P U B L I C A RT

We can state the criterion of public art in two ways. The first is static, but the second restates the latter in the more dynamic terms of an event. I will describe the static version first—the criterion in statement form—and then transform it into the version that takes part in the becoming—the event—of political society.

C RI T ER I O N O F P U B L I C ART AS A STAT E ME NT

We have seen that the criterion of public art as an act of citizenship in a democracy consists of two parts. The first part is political and concerns the relation of public art to democracy; the second is aesthetic and addresses the relation between the aesthetic and political dimensions of

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a public artwork. The political part contains two types of acts of citizenship: the first type involves innovative affirmations and creative nuances of democracy and its three political virtues; the other type consists of acts that resist spectacle, capital, American exceptionalism, white supremacy, and other nihilistic oracles. Public artworks that qualify as acts of citizenship can involve either of these two types of acts. But if they directly affirm democracy, they indirectly resist the oracles that are undermining it. The same claim is inversely true of the second type of acts: if they directly perform or express resistance to oracles, they also indirectly affirm democracy. The political part of the criterion of public art, however, does not by itself sufficiently qualify an artwork as an act of citizenship. The artwork must also fulfill the second or aesthetic part of the criterion. This part— the aesthetic character of public art—adheres to our more inclusive version of Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic regime of art. It holds, as we saw in chapter 4, that a public artwork can qualify as an act of citizenship only if its aesthetic dimension sustains or reinforces its political dimension. A public artwork must accomplish this goal in two ways. First, it must resist the oracle of spectacle, that is, its aesthetic dimension must not distract or otherwise detract from its political content. Second, it has to help constitute the artwork as a “quasi-voice” that can interrupt the predetermined or stereotypical ways the artwork might be received by those encountering it. These interruptions are necessary for allowing public art to introduce novelty in its aesthetic form as well as in its content. This aesthetic forcefulness of the artwork helps us distinguish it from public art that expresses democratic values merely as patriotic clichés or bromides.2 Our criterion is therefore critical of an aesthetics that amounts to spectacle. But it holds the opposite as well: the political content must not cancel out the force of the artwork’s aesthetic dimension; it must not reduce its poetry to prose, art to political philosophy. The aesthetic part of the criterion, then, requires that the aesthetic and the political dimensions work together to augment the presence of the public artwork, neither one reducing the role of the other. Instead, the artwork must permit the seamless fusion or creative tension between the two that we saw in Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (figure 6.6, 6.9), Wodiczko’s City of Refuge (figure 7.2), and some of the other artworks that we discussed.3

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These two parts—the political (with its innovative relation to democracy and its resistance to oracles) and the aesthetic—constitute our criterion of public art as an act of citizenship. The examples that have been presented and our treatment of them throughout the preceding chapters fill out this brief summary of the criterion. The criterion is intended to be exemplary rather than definitive. It is more a touchstone, providing examples rather than a final definition of what it intends to say. It is meant to be a spur for other voices that address the dilemmas and paradoxes it involves and to interrupt any one of those voices that would claim to be the final statement on the matter. The criterion therefore serves as an initial statement of a research project that invites others to take it up in their own manner. It has the added value of provoking further thought about the interrelationship between democracy, acts of citizenship, and public art.

C RI T E R I O N O F P U B L I C ART AS AN E VE NT

We have characterized society as a creative interplay among voices. This interplay is an event: the voices, and therefore we who enunciate them, exist as nothing other than the dialogic exchanges that propel us ahead of ourselves and, in that primordial process, serendipitously produce new voices and the ongoing metamorphosis of the social body. Because of the fecundity of this interplay, the participants in dialogue about democracy itself must always anticipate that a new discourse on this topic might emerge from their exchanges and gain audibility relative to the previous ways of articulating it. The only constraint on such a new discourse is that it must be in accord with the “open space” requirement of democracy and the three political virtues. The former assures that room must exist for rejoinders to any statement about democracy, including those that would call for its elimination (thus it can never be eliminated in its own name, is intrinsically reiterable); the latter, the three political virtues, guarantee that the democratic polity must remain a unity composed of difference rather than one imposed upon it. The term “difference” in this phrase signifies the myriad heterogeneous voices of society but also the social body’s continual metamorphosis through its production of new voices—its continual differing from itself.

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This characterization of the social body as a dynamic event also transforms our statement of the criterion of public art into an event. More generally, it converts democracy, citizenship, and public art into expressions of the social body’s creative interplay among voices and thus its status as an event. The three are participants in the social body’s endless becoming of what it is. Our criterion of public art is also no more, no less, than an expression of this event. Thus all four—democracy, citizenship, public art, and our criterion—help produce the body whose evental existence guarantees that their meaning—their sense and direction, their being evental—can never be made final. To complete this characterization of the social body and its affiliates (democracy, citizenship, public art, and our criterion) as an event, we must add that this body is always in conflict with itself. We have already seen that some voices become oracles—discourses that are nihilistic in that they present themselves as non-revisable truths and attempt to curtail the interplay among the other voices and the creation of new ones. We can go further and suggest what the most profound expression of their origin might be.4 The description we have given of the social body points to a lowlevel but endemic anxiety of being overwhelmed by the clamor of the many voices at play within society and by their intersecting with one another. When societies are threatened by invasion, epidemics, economic collapse, or other social traumas, this endemic anxiety is exacerbated. The augmentation of this exacerbation can transform the creative interplay among the voices of society into a downward spiral toward self-abolition. In response, society raises one of its voices to the level of an oracle and suppresses the creative interaction among the other voices—even to the extent of the suspension of civil liberties, ethnic cleansing, and other atrocities. As an event, the political part of our criterion for public artworks as acts of citizenship goes from being a statement to becoming an invitation and an injunction: it invites revision of its statement of itself at the same time that it enjoins—indeed, urges—public art to suggest new directions for democracy, on the one hand, and to resist oracles, on the other. Simultaneously, the aesthetic part of the criterion encourages the creation of new forms of art for their own sake as well as a means of enhancing public art’s role in carrying out its first part. This criterion is not ruled by the pronouncements of a grand inquisitor of art. Its unfolding rests with the artworks themselves as well as the critical commentary of artists,

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historians and critics of art, philosophers, social scientists, and of all others who acknowledge and support the power of public art in its relation to democracy and other aspects of social life. These voices are participants in society’s becoming, in its evental existence. We can illuminate the public art criterion in its evental form by recalling some of the artworks it has affirmed. In relation to the political part of the criterion, we praised Baca’s Danzas Indigenas (figure 1.2) for emphasizing the ethnic, religious, political, and other groups, women as well as men, who constituted the history of the Baldwin Park area. This accomplishment, along with its arch and the other particularities of its aesthetics, composed its innovative relation to democracy, that is, its achievement of one of the two types of acts that make up the political part of our criterion. More comprehensively, Danzas Indigenas illustrated the heterogeneity and creative interplay among the diverse voices of the community and their particular solidarity (“las danzas”) and thus the three political virtues and the idea of a unity composed of difference. Danzas Indigenas accents the innovative type of act of the political part of our criterion when it valorizes diversity. We saw that Wodiczko highlighted resistance to oracles (the second type of political act) in our treatment of his The Homeless Projection in chapter 2. His “slide warfare” mode of dissident art was a “counter-architecture” to the city’s and real estate industry’s joint cooptation of Union Square and its statues of Washington, Lincoln, Layfette, and a mother and her child. The city and real estate forces appropriated it symbolically and physically in the name of building luxury condominiums and thereby “revitalizing” the city. In response, The Homeless Projection clarified the true meaning of that architecture: the “death” of the homeless people whom the city and real estate industry ejected from the square and its vicinity. In illuminating the artistic value of Baca’s Danzas Indigenas and Wodiczko’s The Homeless Projection, our criterion of public art is more than a statement: it participates in the same event as these public artworks, the becoming of a democratic society. I would like to introduce a new example of a participant in this event, the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It serves as a bookend and a fitting response to the first part of chapter 1, concerning the monument to Confederate general Robert E. Lee and its symbolic meaning of white supremacy. The museum is much more than an act of

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resistance, though it is that too. My reflections upon it here are based on an afternoon visit to the museum in August 2017, a year after its completion and a week after the violence of the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia. It is neither hyperbolic nor too simplistic to describe as beautiful the museum façade’s three tiers of bronze-colored, filigreed panels. These outer walls enclose objects and artifacts, photos and films, descriptions and stories, documenting the history of the enslavement of a people and their difficult and still in-process movement to freedom as well as their overwhelming accomplishments in economics, invention, culture, politics, war, sports, and other human endeavors. What could have been a story of suffering and terror reveals those horrors as part of another, more profound narrative. It speaks of a force, one that in an affirmation of itself pushes aside all attempts at blocking it. In terms of our criterion, the museum is a public artwork that celebrates the perseverance and creativity of a people. It thereby illustrates both the innovative and resistance types of acts of the criterion of public art along with aesthetic mastery. These cases are only a small sample of the kinds of public art that could illustrate the evental character of public artworks and our criterion. Erica Doss’s Memorial Mania is full of others: Duluth’s lynching memorial evokes and condemns the virulent racism past and present against African Americans in the United States; Edgar Heap of Birds’ Building Minnesota and his other temporary memorials reveal and counter the historical erasure of genocide and other abysmal aspects of the relation of whites to Native Americans; the NAMES Project Foundation’s AIDS Memorial Quilt speaks for the gay community and the traumas they have faced; and the Manzanar National Historical Site memorializes the Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals living in the United States during World War II and unjustifiably interned in concentration camps.5 These additional examples of public artworks as acts of citizenship indicate that our criterion can be developed and tested in a range of artworks greater than the ones upon which we were able to concentrate here. To those we just mentioned, we can add public artworks concerning speciesism, immigration, and others only tangentially mentioned in this book.

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CO U N T E R - ME MO RY

I want to add another term—one barely touched on earlier in the book—to our vocabulary surrounding the idea of the event. When societies are dominated by ethnic, religious, or other oracles, then public art, a criterion such as ours, and other social and cultural voices often act as the articulation of what Michel Foucault called “counter-memories.”6 A good example of this is Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (figures 6.6, 6.9), which we discussed in chapter 7. In our view, Kapoor ironically uses the spectacular appearance of his sculpture to resist the oracles of spectacle and capital, on the one hand, and to affirm the intersection of voices in society and agonistic democracy, on the other. We focused on the people gathered underneath Could Gate’s concave structure, their intersecting images reflected on the stainless steel surface of “The Bean.” As they moved about trying to find themselves on the sculpture’s concave expanse, their images were partially merged, transforming them into an intersecting totality, into a oneness and a plurality of singularities at the same time, that suggested a togetherness; one that sharply contrasted with the atomized existence that we experience in our lives when we are oriented solely toward routine work and commercial pursuits. Aesthetically, the aura of the shiny, reflective surface did not mesmerize the participants. That is, it did not amount to an oracular spectacle that could cancel out the sense of the overlapping existences of the participating individuals; instead, we took its aura as helping the visitors to distinguish their momentary playfulness and joy in regard to one another from the sort of entertainment that they might receive by looking at themselves in a fun house mirror or by taking in the attractions of a Disneyland-like theme park. In more formal terms, the captivated participants could feel themselves to be part of each other’s identity and yet, at the same time, to be one another’s alterity: The sculpture oriented them around itself, affirming in the process their solidarity and heterogeneity, as well as the fecund mixing of the images produced by their moving bodies. We can restate this in other words. Cloud Gate converted the memory of this obscured type of togetherness into a voice whose performative discourse—the interplay of the images—awakened an alternative to the oracles of capital and spectacle, however momentarily. It therefore counts as an act of citizenship on our criterion. It suggests the unity composed

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of difference that solves the dilemma of diversity—the tension between unity and plurality—with which we started the book. It also gives content to Claude Lefort’s “empty place” of democracy while at the same time eschewing the idea that any sovereign other than the people should occupy it. Its aura also provides the aesthetic dimension that Congressman Nicholas’s “plain tablet” seemed to lack and links it to a political meaning that does not cancel it out. If we figuratively convert the visual images on the face of Cloud Gate into voices, we come close to Wodiczko’s City of Refuge. As we saw, his memorial is literally a microcosm of the dialogic body of voices we have been describing and hence of its innovative evocation of democracy. This creative interplay is captured by the architecture of the memorial: its spherical shape, circular rooms, media outlets, and the provocative context for discussion established by 9/11 together eschew hierarchical order. Moreover, the memorial’s reference to the historical tradition of cities of refuge, the ferries proposed to carry the “half-innocent, half-guilty” passengers from special sites in New York City to the globe in the harbor, the geometric aesthetic (the globes and the circular discussion rooms), and the performative aesthetic (the ethico-political dialogues among the participants), all provide the aura needed to clothe the proceedings in a meaningfulness that prevents them from becoming the more contrived undertakings of a debate club. This discussion of public art as an event has also illustrated how public artworks are themselves quasi-voices that can and often do creatively insert themselves into the political interplay of the voices constituting their surroundings. Those that we have explored have countered oracles; reminded us of the three political virtues and other democratic values as well as nuancing them in novel ways; affirmed the multivoiced body through their participation in it; and, like our criterion of public art, contributed to the audibility of the voices whose discourses support and nuance democracy.

PA R R H ES I A

Wodiczko goes a step further with his memorial. He clarifies the meaning of the three political virtues of democracy by an appeal to Michel

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Foucault’s exposition of the ancient Greek idea of parrhesia. This idea concerns communication and therefore helps us to further elaborate one of our themes in the previous chapter: the articulation in our own terms of Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “being-in-language” and Joel McKim’s use of Jochen Gerz’s “open communication” for proposing a different 9/11 memorial. We briefly encountered Wodiczko’s reference to the idea of parrhesia earlier but I will now state more fully its meaning and significance for the criterion of public art as an act of citizenship. In his lectures on parrhesia (the very last of his life), Foucault defines the term as “true discourse in the political realm,” a political structure that is related to the freedom for citizens to speak in democracies and, with certain restrictions, in autocratic polities.7 This freedom to speak involves telling the truth, “binding” ourselves to our statements and their content, and making a “free pact” to run the personal risks they entail in the agonistic contests of the political realm.8 But the risks of this pact are not concentrated in speaking alone. The parrhesiast’s commitment to communicate truth courageously must be complemented by the hearer’s willingness “to demonstrate his greatness of soul by accepting being told the truth.” Foucault adds that the two together are at the center of what he calls “the parrhesiastic game.”9 More generally, parrhesia is speaking courageously or openly to others and hearing them in the same manner. This mode of hearing signifies our willingness to court changes in our own discourse on the basis of what others say. Indeed, the changes constitute a risk in that one does not know beforehand what they will be. At one point, Foucault suggests that the parrhesiastic way of speaking and hearing together opens up the space for us in which this sort of truth-telling can persevere.10 Such a place would be the same open space that, in our critical discussion of Derrida, we saw as a sine qua non for democracy: the space that serves as the dialogic arena in which challenges to democracy must always be allowed to be answered, thereby reiterating the open space of democracy without end. Foucault argues that parrhesia as well as care for oneself and others was practiced with astonishing commitment by the ancient Cynics. He saw them as upholding an ethical universality that consisted in an “individual bond with all individuals.” The Cynics took this bond to represent “true political activity, the true politeuesthai,” the “true sovereignty,” and applied it to the whole world.11 More specifically, they thought that

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caring for the humanity in others was at the same time to care for oneself. Foucault uses the word “solidarity” to capture the Cynics’ relation to humanity: “thus it is [the Cynic’s] own solidarity with humankind which is questioned, which is the object of his care, concern, and supervision when he looks at how men act and spend their lives, and when he enquires into what they take care of.”12 Foucault also thinks the Cynics constitute a historical category that runs throughout all of the West’s existence.13 We can see it, then, as pertinent to our own critical look at today’s democracies. In our framework of voices, the Cynics’ idea of solidarity is articulated both ontologically and in ethico-political terms. Ontologically, our idea of solidarity repeats what we said about it in chapter 3’s appropriation of Derrida’s idea of identity from alterity. We held there that this sort of identity is another way of stating our characterization of the spatial axis of society’s dialogic body: each voice is part of the identity of the rest (unity or solidarity) and at the same time their other (difference or heterogeneity); thus the autochthonous affirmation of one’s own voice is the implicit valorization of them all. The idea of parrhesia—courageous speech and hearing—that we are adopting from Foucault and Wodiczko is therefore the ethico-political expression of the ontological basis for solidarity and heterogeneity and operates as our democratic norm for society.14 Indeed, it captures a very strong meaning of solidarity: the mutual commitment to parrhesiastic democracy by the enunciators of society’s garb of voices. It is also the ethico-political expression and valorization of the fecundity—the creation of new voices and consequent metamorphosis of society—that results from the interplay among these heterogeneous voices. In short, the phrase “parrhesiastic democracy” encompasses what we have been calling agonistic and dialogic democracy. We can use the remarks of Andrew Shanken, another of Wodiczko’s commentators, to state a further aspect of this ethico-political appropriation of parrhesia. Shanken challenges Wodiczko for what he takes to be the latter’s emphasis on guilt in relation to the City of Refuge: Where most memorials assume the conventional emotions of mourning, City of Refuge is based on a philosophical interpretation of the nature of guilt. . . . Should responsible action in the world grow from a collective sense of guilt, or might we make use of other more positive emotions,

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such as surprise, wonder, hope, or even ambiguous ones, such as pride, envy, or longing.15

In the last chapter, we saw the guilt to which Shanken is referring: it was based on Wodiczko’s request for us to participate in his city of refuge as half-innocent, half-guilty citizens of the United States. Without denying the validity of Wodiczko depicting himself and us in these terms, we can follow Shanken’s advice and appeal to a more positive characterization of the agonistic setting provided by Wodiczko’s globe in the harbor (figure 7.5). By participating in the deliberations of the agonistic space of the globe, we commemorate the tragic losses of 9/11 and admit the guilt of which Wodiczko speaks. But we can also understand this participation as a celebration of ourselves and the dead—the “spectral voices”—as dialogic creatures and members of a multivoiced society. For this reason, and not just our half-guilt, we should continue the legacy of the circle of candles in the days after the 9/11 attacks and resist the oracles—both our dogmatic discourses and those of the attackers—that played a role in bringing about 9/11. So long as this creative interplay continues, we and the spectral voices of the dead retain a presence in the dialogue that later generations will repeat and vary, in memorials or otherwise, as their form of democratic existence.16 Parrhesiastic democracy will perform a political ethics of celebration rather than just an ethics of obligation; a celebration of the past, present, and future of our dialogic existence, an amor fati (love of our “fated” dialogic existence) rather than an obedience to abstract moral laws.17 This celebratory note addresses another issue of democracy as a way of life and not just a procedure for the smooth transition of power. For citizens to identify with democracy, to take joy in the very idea of it, they must see themselves as dialogic beings. One of the roles of public art, but also philosophy, poetry, film, theater, and the humanities and fine arts generally, is to galvanize empathy with ourselves as participants in parrhesiastic democracy. In an earlier text, I gave example after example of such sources for the idea of ourselves and society as multivoiced bodies.18 Here I can only say that I hope this book too contributes to this sort of empathy.

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PA RRH E S I AST I C DE MO C R ACY: AN O RACLE ?

We could end this book with the above description of our criterion of public art and the qualifications we have added to it. But if we did we might leave the impression that our criterion was final and that it now allows us to stand outside the social body and impose our judgements upon the public art it has generated. It would be as if the criterion were an oracle and thus contradicted its very own injunction that public artworks must resist such nihilistic forces in order to qualify as acts of citizenship. This predicament would also affect the status of the public artworks that helped us define our version of the criterion and its political and aesthetic guidelines; the same criterion with which we then determined whether they and other public artworks qualified as acts of citizenship in a democracy. Furthermore, the predicament would also leave unanswered the question that Kirk Savage posed in our previous chapter about Wodiczko’s City of Refuge or any other memorial to 9/11: “Could a therapeutic memorial or documentary museum use these spectral voices [of the 9/11 dead] to create an anti-oracular monument, a space open to a multiplicity of viewpoints shaped in other parts of the world and by other events in the past and future?”19 Savage’s reference to a “space open to a multiplicity of viewpoints” adds a difficulty to the hope that democracy as well as memorials can be antioracles. We noted this in chapter 3. All voices, including the spectral ones, are involved in this multiplicity. We have stated that each of these voices is part of the identity of and, at the same time, the other of the rest. Thus the affirmation of any one voice is a valorization of all of them and their differences. But this affirmation unfortunately includes the voices of white supremacy and other nihilistic oracles. We replied to this embarrassment in chapter 3 but can now do so again in a way that includes the ethico-political norm of parrhesia. We should courageously speak the truth to others and hear them courageously, that is, with our own discourse open to changes in light of, and at the risk of, what these oracles say. But parrhesia also means that we have to resist allowing antidemocratic oracles to become policy-making voices, must paradoxically but legitimately attempt to “exclude the excluders” in the name of democracy, that is, in the name of the creative interplay among the voices of

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society and the three ethico-political virtues. To repeat, this effort to resist oracles still requires that we hear their enunciators parrhesiastically. This requirement ensures three important dicta: (1) that we stay true to the affirmation of our dialogic roots, (2) continually check whether we have correctly identified the discourses in question as oracular, and (3) allow the enunciators of these discourses the chance to adopt a voice other than their oracular one. But if not everyone is considered to have the same status as policymaking voices, does not that make parrhesiastic democracy an oracle? Our characterization of democracy in terms of voices might be considered oracular in that it affirms equally the three political virtues and their ethico-political expression through parrhesiastically speaking to and hearing one another. That is, it prescribes a particular set of characteristics as more valuable than other possibilities in the same context. To counter this appearance of oracularity, we must first recall in abbreviated form what we concluded in chapter 3 and our critical discussion there of Derrida’s own use of the notion of voice. The social body as a metamorphosing event, as a body whose very being is to generate new voices via the fortuitous interplay of its other voices, means that none of the discourses expressed by these vocal participants can claim to be the final definition of the multivoiced body. In effect, the social body exists as an implicit injunction to continue the dialogue about itself, but this dialogue ensures that it must always, and only, be yet to come. The body’s temporality is produced by the creative interplay among its voices, the anticipation of a response by each from the others; its future dimension is therefore an open space awaiting the new voices that will propose further suggestions for the social body to answer the question about itself. These new proposals and their temporary effects can as easily diverge from as converge on the answers that will have emerged from the previous contestations about the body’s being. Either way, divergence or temporary convergence, difference—and never a guaranteed sameness—is the hallmark of this dialogic enterprise. The social body’s injunction is its internal amor fati, and the fate it embraces is the intrinsic resistance to being finalized or, in Derrida’s terms, the “indecidability” of the contestation about its fate. In other words, the social body’s interrogatory injunction about itself ensures its status as an anti-oracle.

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Because democracy, citizenship, public art, and our criterion for evaluating public art are participants in the social body’s becoming, they too function as anti-oracles. Their definitions of themselves are therefore always, and only, to come—always evental. In other words, they exist as continual contestations about themselves and thus as lures for always further vocalization of what they are and as interruptions of any articulation of them that presumes itself to be final.20

T HE C RI T E R I O N O F P U B L I C ART AS A “DIALO G ICALLY A   P R I O R I T R U T H”

The anti-oracular status of our criterion of public art and the other terms just exposited may suggest that they are fatally relativistic—that any definition of them at a given time would be no more worthy than any other. It is true that the future is not finalizable in advance. But we live in our immediate historical situation, not in the ones that come after our disappearance. For that situation, taken in itself, it does not seem to be a priori true or false that there is a more worthy version of our criterion (or of the other terms we mentioned).21 We must then opt for what we can call a “dialogically a priori truth.” According to this notion, an articulation of our criterion for evaluating public art as an act of citizenship in a democracy can possibly make itself more compelling than the other voices contesting it over that topic. If so, it will be the most compelling relative to the other voices of its time. Moreover, it also has to appear as the more compelling alternative for as far as we can imagine into the future. The new voices that come with time can always undermine its status as a dialogically a priori truth. But this, by the notion of an event, is as it should be.

T HE UN I V ER SA L I T Y O F T H E C R I T E RIO N O F PU B LIC ART

There is one more stipulation for the anti-oracular character of parrhesiastic democracy and our self-interrupting criterion of public art as an act of citizenship. These two are both necessary when so many of the voices of the world are politically stifled and so many people are forced to migrate

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from one locale to another in search of a place from which they can speak. The autochthonous valorization of voices—which occurs with the affirmation of any one of them (each being part of the identity as well as the other of the rest)—includes the voices of all these people. In affirming our national citizenships, then, we spontaneously valorize global citizenship no matter how much we might violate that tribute. The primary ethicopolitical meaning of this valorization of dual-citizenship is the parrhesiastic hearing of and responding to the discourses of as many of these voices as possible. The voices that can participate in interrupting and revising the always provisional meaning of democracy and its public art criterion must therefore be able to come from anywhere. The identity from alterity of these and all other voices means that they fulfill simultaneously two traditionally rival positions: They have the shared identity valued by communitarians (each voice is part of the identity of the others), but also the universality and individuality sought by liberals through rights and other relatively abstract principles (all voices are included, but each also persists in its alterity).22 Thus Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, Wodiczko’s City of Refuge, and other public artworks that celebrate democracy and resist oracles do so immediately in their own names and in the name of all those from elsewhere who would characterize democracy in their own way—all those who would enter their views into the circle of clamorous voices contesting each other for the right to the impossible throne of democracy and its public art.

A P P E N D IX BADIOU ON “BEING AND THE VOID”

T

he term “multiple-being” carries the most importance for understanding some of the key notions in Alain Badiou’s major text, Being and Event.1 We can therefore begin by examining his use of multiple-being in that text. “Multiple-being” means that which is “composed solely of multiplicities,” each of which is itself a multiple.2 Badiou places this idea at the center of his philosophy on the basis of a pure, unverifiable decision, a philosophical or “meta-ontological” one, that “mathematics is ontology—the science of being qua being.”3 This science consists in “the axiomatic decision which authorizes set theory.”4 According to Badiou’s adaptation of set theory, the multiple presents “nothing.” But this nothing is not empty, because multiple is “presentation itself.” It therefore does not refer to the ideal objects of Platonism, innate ideas of Descartes, conventions of formalism, or any other candidate for being an object of mathematics. Multiples are strictly indifferent to things, sensory qualities, or any other content we might assign to the pure elements (further multiplicities) they contain.5 This indifference restricts access to the multiple and the idea of presentation except through thought; at the same time, this indifference to content ensures the universal applicability of set theory: the notion of multiple covers “everything that is, in so far as it is.”6 Situations. The concept of “multiple” and the meta-ontological decision concerning it may seem barren and arbitrary. But these two anomalies become more tolerable and concrete when Badiou introduces the idea of

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a “situation.” The multiple is a situation as soon as it is takes on content and is designated as a specific set of elements, that is, as soon as it is “countedas-one” and thus no longer the uncounted “nothing” it was before the count occurred.7 This self-counting or “structuring” renders the situation at once a “consistent multiplicity” and an “inconsistent multiplicity”: a “one/multiple couple for any situation.”8 The consistent multiplicity is the result of the operation of the count-as-one, for example, a structured set of galaxies, persons, or even things selected at random. In contrast, the inconsistent multiplicity is a nothing or “not-one.”9 It is impossible for this type of multiplicity to be presented without becoming countedas-one in the situation to which it is linked. It is “retroactively discernable” only as being “anterior” to the count.10 Indeed, this inconsistent multiplicity is “solely the presupposition that prior to the count the one is not.”11 It is the “not-one” upon which “the count operates.”12 Ontology. How can Badiou or we speak of an inconsistent multiplicity without thereby counting it as one? Badiou’s answer: Access to the inconsistent multiplicity can take place only through “the ontological situation.” This situation is the only one by means of which Badiou or any other ontologist can think this multiplicity. It, and only it, has the task of “the presentation of the presentation,” that is, the presentation of the multiple prior to its being made a one-effect by the structure of a nonontological situation. More specifically, the task of the ontological situation is to “discern [the unpresented or inconsistent] multiple without having to make a one out of it,” that is, “without possessing a definition of [it].”13 In line with Badiou’s proclivity for unconditional decisions, the axiom system (not intuition or sensory perception) authorizes the conversion of the inconsistent multiplicity into an ontological consistency that, unlike all other consistencies, is not composed “according to the [count as] one” of situations. The prescriptions of the axiom system—ontology—thereby “deconstruct any one-effect” and “unfold, without explicit nomination, the regulated game of the multiple such that [ontology] is none other than the absolute form of presentation, thus the mode in which being proposes itself to any access.”14 This discernment, of course, is that of thought and not through sensory perception or intuition. But its upshot is clear even if stipulated only by fiat: the pure multiple is, the one is not (only from within the nonontological situation is it the case that the reverse is deceptively true, that the multiple “is not” and the one “is”).15

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The void as the name of being. Badiou complicates this ontology by referring to the inconsistent multiplicity as the “void.” The term highlights that the inconsistent multiplicity and the operation of the count (as opposed to the result of this counting) are both “nothing,” that is, the “unpresentable” or “undecidable of presentation.”16 The one in the case of the operation of the count is just the operation of creating ones and does not refer to a being behind the scenes. Badiou therefore says that this “one,” like the inconsistent multiplicity, “is not” even though it creates situational ones (organized multiples) from the inconsistent multiplicity. Because the unpresentable (the inconsistent multiplicity and operation of the count) must exist in order for there to be a count and hence a situation, the term “nothing” is a “name” for more than non-being. It is “subtracted” from the count, “sutures” the situation to its being (the inconsistent multiplicity), and, as “the non-one of any count as one,” is “scattered all over, nowhere and everywhere.”17 Badiou prefers the term “void” to “nothing” in the context of naming the being of inconsistency.18 Either way, void or nothing, this presents a problem: the void is not one, but, as nothing, neither can we say that it is multiple. Badiou responds to this issue by saying that we can still consider the void as the “multiple of nothing,” which also means that it is “subtracted from the one/multiple dialectic” and designates “being qua being.” We can do this because under the “law” of the ontological situation we can “know nothing apart from the multiple-without-one” and thus must define the void as the multiple of nothing in light of the original decision to endorse ontology as mathematics, that is, as set theory. More exactly: In ontology . . . the unpresentable occurs within a presentative forcing which disposes it as the nothing from which everything proceeds. The consequence is that the name of the void is a pure proper name, which indicates itself, which does not dispose any index of difference within what it refers to, and which auto-declares itself in the form of the multiple, despite there being nothing which is numbered in it.19

The proper name “void,” then, makes “nothing,” the unpresentable, be or exist as the only existent and as that from which “everything proceeds.”20 Indeed, Peter Hallward points out that this implies that the

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name in this case “invents, literally ex nihilo,” the multiplicity that it names.21 It will help to remember that the unpresentable, the void itself, is the inconsistent multiplicity, pure presentation, in relation to the situation that it sutures to the latter’s real being (the inconsistent multiplicity), from which it, the situation, was produced by the count as one. As the title of “Meditation Four” in Badiou’s Being and Event proclaims, “void” is “the proper name of being.” The void as founding. There are two more parts to this “ontological discernment” of the void. The first concerns a precise sense in which the void “founds” each situation and is thus, as we said, the nothing from which everything proceeds. Because the void is the only multiple that is the multiple of nothing, it is also an “empty set”: it cannot, in the technical terminology of set theory, belong to, cannot be presented in, any situation. But as Hallward clarifies, “it is included [though not belonging to, that is, not presented] in every situation.” This is because a set is included in another if it has “no elements that are not themselves included in [the other] set”; the “void,” as the only “empty set,” has no elements and therefore doesn’t have any that are not themselves included in the situation. It therefore is automatically included as a subset of every possible situation and set. It, like all other sets, is also a subset of itself. Because a subset is not itself an element, the void cannot, despite its inclusion, be presented in—belong to—a situation; it therefore cannot be known within the situation that includes it.22 As we might guess, these technical distinctions are preparing the way for delegated beings, under special circumstances, to be capable of seeing or thinking what others cannot discern in a situation. Because the void is nothing, it also limits the situation of which it is a subset: as nothing, it, unlike any other set, cannot be decomposed into further elements; it is therefore the rock bottom of any situation or any of its sets. This constitutes it as the “founding” term of any situation.23 Moreover, this foundation has what we might call a hidden depth: the empty set, like all sets, always has an “excess” of subsets over the elements in the set or situation in which it is included; this is because a subset can be composed of the many possible combinations of the elements of the original set to which it belongs, even if these combinations are infinite in number. This excess implies that “it is impossible that every [subset] of a multiple belongs to [the situation]” and therefore some subsets will not be counted in a situation. They will be presented only by the proper name of the void

APPENDIX253

that speaks “nothing”—unless, as we shall see, special “events” occur to disturb this scene and allow some to see what others fail to apprehend.24 The void and a second count of the one (the State). Before following up on this mention of events, we must first deal with the second and last qualification that comes by discerning the void from within the ontological situation instead of through the lenses of the less exalted situations, the ones that are counted-as-one. Badiou says that the count of the one must take place twice. We saw earlier that the act of structuring, like the inconsistent multiplicity itself, is not presented in the situation, only its result, the presented or consistent multiplicity (what you and I see or otherwise encounter as aspects of the one). The act is therefore part of the void and not ultimately predictable as to the efficacy of its counting operation. In particular, it might not count the subsets that can remain in excess of what is initially presented in the situation. These subsets must, then, be controlled by a second structuring: “it is necessary that the structure be structured.”25 Badiou states that the motivation for this second structure is “anxiety” over the “errancy of the void,” that the situation is “haunted” by the “danger” of being overflowed by the multiples of the inconsistent multiplicity and that the one might thereby be disrupted.26 To eliminate this danger, Badiou postulates that the situation adds a “metastructure,” a “state of the situation,” to the initial structuring. This new structure provides a “count of the count,” that re-presents or “represents” the terms of the initial count. For example, the government or state, as the primary metastructure, determines who qualifies as a citizen of the state (a subset) rather than just who is an individual with a cluster of personal qualities (presented elements).27 Only an unexpected event, one that in some sense evades the constraints of the count, could break through the “one” of the state. This event has a positive meaning to go along with its fearful countenance. But to comprehend this meaning, and to add a qualitative or historical materialization to the abstract formal features we’ve been previewing, we can appeal to concrete examples from Saint Paul along with more formal language from Being and Event. (For this appeal, continue with the section entitled “The Event and Its Site” in chapter 5.)

NOTES

1. DEMOCRACY’S FRAGILITY AND THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF PUBLIC ART 1.

2.

3.

The terms “monument” and “memorial” can be used interchangeably, but I will usually follow the official choice for any given instance. For a helpful summary of the twists and turns of the debate about the meaning of the two terms, see Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 37–48. The other monuments in the New Orleans case included one for Civil War general P. G. T. Beauregard; a statue of the president of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis; and an obelisk commemorating a militant opponent of the brief Reconstruction period (1863–1877) that followed the War Between the States. For other remarks concerning their removal and meaning, see Daniel Victor, “New Orleans City Council Votes to Remove Confederate Monuments,” New York Times, December 17, 2015, accessed July 21, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/us/new-orleans-city-counil -confederate-monuments-vote.html; and Tegan Wendland, “With Lee Statue’s Removal, Another Battle of New Orleans Comes to a Close,” National Public Radio, May 20, 2017, accessed July 28, 2017, http://www.npr.org/2017/05/20/529232823/with-lee-statues-removal -another-battle-of-new-orleans-comes-to-a-close. For an example of one of these more benign reasons for not removing the memorials, see Barry  D. Wood, “New Orleans Monument Removal Is a Disgrace,” Charlotte Observer, June 3, 2017, accessed July 28, 2017, http://www.charlotteobserver.com/opin ion/op-ed/article154118164.html. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “What This Cruel War Was Over: The Meaning of the Confederate Flag Is Best Discerned in the Words of Those Who Bore It,” Atlantic, June 22, 2015, accessed July 20, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/what-this - cruel-war-was- over/396482 /. See also Derek Cosson, “Transcript of New Orleans

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4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

Mayor Landrieu’s Address on Confederate Monuments,” May 19, 2017, accessed July 23, 2017, The Pulse, http://pulsegulfcoast .com /2017/05/transcript-of-new-orleans-mayor -landrieus-address-on-confederate-monuments. Sarah Beetham, “From Spray Cans to Minivans: Contesting the Legacy of Confederate Soldier Monuments in the Era of ‘Black Lives Matter,’ ” Public Art Dialogue 6, no. 1 (2016): 9–33. Ibid., 16–17, 18. The removal of the monuments leave some questions in their wake: Where and if they should be relocated? Would a plaque with an anti-racist message or a counter-public artwork placed next to the monuments have been a more appropriate democratic response? For more of these sorts of issues, see the essays in Erica Doss, ed., “The Dilemma of Public Art’s Permanence,” a special issue of Public Art Dialogue 6, no. 1 (2016). It is also worth noting that the Constitution of the Confederate States of America was modeled on the Constitution of the United States. On paper, it therefore was just as republican (that is, founded on “the sovereignty of the people”) as the U.S. Constitution and committed its citizens to voting and similar democratic procedures. There are, however, at least two telling differences between the two documents: the Confederate constitution did, and the U.S. version did not, invoke “the favor and guidance of Almighty God”; the Confederate did, and the U.S. version did not, explicitly refer to non-free persons as “slaves” and indicate that “slavery” would be a permanent institution in the Confederacy. See the Preamble and Article I, sec. 9.4 and IV, secs 2.1, 2.3, and 3.3 of the Constitution of the Confederate States, March 11, 1861, available at the Lillian Goldman Law Library’s “The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy,” http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century /csa_csa.asp, accessed July 20, 2017. See also J. J. McCullough, “The Constitution of the Confederate States of America,” J. J. McCullough.com (blog), http://jjmccullough .com /CSA .htm. For this quotation, images of Danzas Indigenas and the mobile monument You Are My Other Me, and statements by Judy Baca, city citizens and officials, the white supremacist group “Save Our State (SOS)” that protested Danzas Indigenas, and the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), see “Baldwin Park Controversy” at the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), accessed July 23, 2017, http://sparcinla.org / baldwin-park-controversy/, and the “Danzas Indigenious” page on the artist’s website at http://www.judybaca .com /artist /portfolio/danzas-indigenious/, accessed July 23, 2017. All quotes concerning the two monuments and the protests come from these sources. I also found Erika Doss’s pages on these two memorials very helpful, Memorial Mania, 366–76. See also Fred Evans, “Public Art in Urban Spaces,” in Handbook of Philosophy and the City, eds. Sharon Meager and Ronald Sundstrom (New York: Routledge, forthcoming). Doss, Memorial Mania, 374. See the articles in the special issue “Fascism Rising,” ed. Christopher Shay, World Policy Journal 34, no. 1 (Spring 2017); and Robert O. Paxton, “The Future of Fascism,” Slate, April  6, 2017, accessed July  26, 2017, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and _ politics /fascism /2017/04 /fascism_didn_t_die_in_1945_it_evolved_and_took_new _form.html.

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9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

For discussions of the threat of proto-fascism in the Trumpism of the United States, see Evan Osos, “The Fearful and the Frustrated: Donald Trump’s Nationalist Coalition Takes Shape—for Now,” New Yorker, August 24, 2015, accessed July 26, 2017, http:// www.newyorker.com /magazine/2015/08/31 /the-fearful-and-the-frustrated; Jamelle Bouie, “White Nationalism in the White House,” Slate, November 14, 2016, accessed July  26, 2017, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/11/don ald_trump_s_pick_of_stephen_bannon_means_white_nationalism_is_coming.html; Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017); and Paxton, “The Future of Fascism.” For the sort of “public art” that might be suitable for Donald Trump, see William Menking, “SAD! How Donald Trump Transformed New York Without Any Regard for Design Quality,” Architects Newspaper, June 15, 2016, accessed July 26, 2017, https://arch paper.com/2016/06/donald-trump-architecture/. See below for a fuller definition of this term and references to its sources. John Nicholas, Annals of Congress, 6th  Cong., 2nd  sess., December  5, 1800. These remarks are based on the material presented by Kirk Savage in his Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), esp. 40–43, 93, 127, 267, 312. For more on the Federalists and particularly their distrust of the people whom they nonetheless accepted as the source of sovereignty, see John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy (New York: Norton, 2009), 280–81. Savage, Monument Wars, 1, 141–42. Ibid., 266–67, 270–75. We will discuss Lin’s monument and the problems and promises of minimalism in chapter 7. Ibid., 312; see also 310–11. For a comprehensive treatment of the relation between democracy and citizenship, see Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 137–39. For the more specific idea of “an act of citizenship,” see below and Engin F. Isin, Citizens Without Frontiers (London: Continuum, 2012), and the introduction and articles in Engin Isin and Greg Nielsen, eds., Acts of Citizenship (London: Zed Books, 2008). Lambert Zuidervaart’s Art in Public: Politics, Economics, and a Democratic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) covers democracy and public art in a comprehensive fashion. But Zuidervaart’s ultimate and explicitly stated aim is to influence government policy on aid to the arts, whereas mine is to determine a criterion for judging public art. Doss, Memorial Mania, 37 (Doss’s italics). For others who make a similar point about the power of art in public spaces and its connections with citizenship and democracy, see Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Michael Kammen, Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Doris Sommer, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Clair Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012); and Zuidervaart’s Art in Public.

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19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

Fred Evans, The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Krzysztof Wodiczko, “The Homeless Projection: A Proposal for the City of New York,” October 38 (Autumn 1986): 3–22. Rosalyn Deutsche, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection and the Site of Urban ‘Revitalization,’ ” October 38 (Autumn 1986): 63–98; reprinted in her Evictions, 3–48. See also Deutsche’s chapter, “Krzysztof Wodiczko,” in her Hiroshima After Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Lambert Zuidervaart, Art in Public, 80. Isin, Citizens Without Frontiers, 110. Ibid., 130, 109. Constitution of the Confederate States, Article I, sec. 9.4 and IV, secs. 2.1, 3, and 3.3. For a similar use of the notion of the age of diversity, see James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For a fuller treatment of the dilemma of diversity, see part 1 of my Multivoiced Body. For other but like-minded versions of this dilemma, see Amy Gutmann, “Preface and Acknowledgements,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Roots of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), xiii; John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), xviii; Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 108; Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Ann Brault and Michael Nass (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 38–39; and Jean-Marie Guéhenno, The End of the Nation State, trans. Victoria Elliot (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 138–40. The full meaning of “difference” here will become clearer in chapters 2 and 3. Something like this formula has been used by philosophers as distinct as Hegel and JeanLuc Nancy. I give my own formulation of it in Multivoiced Body, 8 and passim. See also Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, part 1 of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1850), trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 12; and Jean Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 18. My thanks to colleague Jennifer Bates for the reference to Hegel. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 279, and his Democracy and Political Policy, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 18. Daniel Bensäid, “Permanent Scandal,” in Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj Žižek, Democracy in What State?, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 43. Bensäid explicitly allies himself in this article with the French political philosopher Jacques Rancière, about whom I will have more to say in chapter 5. Wendy Brown also echoes Lefort’s idea of the “image of an empty place” by referring to democracy as an “empty signifier” in her chapter, “ ‘We Are All Democrats Now . . . ,’ ” in

1. DEMOCRACY’S FRAGILITY AND THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF ART259

29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

Agamben et al., Democracy in What State?, 44–45. See also Rosalyn Deutsche, “Agoraphobia,” in her Evictions, 273. Kristin Ross, “Democracy for Sale,” in Agamben et al., Democracy in What State?, 96. The theme of autocratic encroachment on democracy is repeated in the other six chapters in Democracy in What State? and is a well-known complaint by almost every scholarly commentator on democracy. It will be elaborated later in this essay, especially when we consider some key examples of public art. See also Keane, Life and Death of Democracy, and his discussion of the privatization of democracy in its “caudillo” form (412). John Keane, Life and Death of Democracy, 687; see also xiv–xv. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Finite and Infinite Democracy,” in Agamben et al., Democracy in What State?, 58. Auguste Blanqui, letter to Maillard, June  6, 1852, in Maintenant, if faut des armes (Paris: La Fabrique, 2006), 72–186; translated by and quoted in Ross, “Democracy for Sale,” 91. Rosalyn Deutsche, “Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy,” Social Text, no. 33 (1992): 35. See also “Agoraphobia,” in Deutsche, Evictions: the “emergence of [the issue of democracy] in the art world is part of a far more extensive eruption of debates about the meaning of democracy currently taking place in many arenas: political philosophy, new social movements, educational theory, legal studies, and mass media and popular culture” (270–71). Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). Quoted in Steve Coll, “The Internet: For Better or for Worse,” New York Review of Books, April 7, 2011, 24. With his phrase “popular ethic,” Wu is speaking of our relation to the open use of information, but the same point applies to cultivating democratic sentiments and practices. For the problem of motivating people to fulfill civic responsibilities, see Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 137–39. Sabine Hake, Screen Nazis: Cinema, History, and Democracy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 10, 14. George L. Mosse, “Beauty Without Sensuality/The Exhibition Entartete Kunst,” in “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, ed. Stephanie Barron (New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1991), passim, 25–31. Jeremy Treglown, Franco’s Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013), 57– 64. See also Carrie L. Ruis, “Pieces from the Past: Contestation around Francoist Monuments in Modern-Day Spain,” in Outrage: Art, Controversy, and Society, ed. Richard Howells, Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, and Judith Schachter (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012), 101–28. See also JeanLuc Nancy’s discussion of the “massive way” in which the Nazis imposed “signifying and oversignifying” on their music (Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell [New York: Fordham University Press, 2007], 58). For an overview of this issue of relativism in contemporary art, see Andrew McNamara, “Critical Reckonings: Global Art and Art History After West and Eurocentrism,”

2 6 0  1 . D E M O C R ACY ’S FRAGILITY AND TH E P O LI TI CA L A ESTHETI CS OF A RT

39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

review of Western Art and the Wider World by Paul Wood, Art Journal 74, no. 3 (2015): 67–69. Also see pages 5–6 and the concluding chapter of Wood’s Western Art and the Wider World. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Walter Benjamin, Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968): “Fascism is rendering [politics] aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art” (242). Ever since Benjamin distinguished between these two poles, authors have tended to use “political aesthetics” to refer to one or the other of them. See, for example, Harold Marcuse, “Dachau: The Political Aesthetics of Holocaust Memorials,” in Lessons and Legacies III: Memory, Memorialization and Denial, ed. Peter Hayes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 138–168, 278–287; and Crispin Sartwell, Political Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). For a close-grained assessment of what Benjamin meant by the relation between the “aestheticization of art” and fascism— of the Nazi or the Italian variety—see Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 206–7; and Martin Jay, “The Aesthetic Ideology as Ideology; Or, What Does It Mean to Aestheticize Politics?,” Cultural Critique, no.  21 (Spring 1992): 41–61. After a review of the literature on the topic, Jay argues convincingly that the aestheticization of politics can have a broader and more positive meaning than its dour identification with the fascist use of the term. We will see in chapter 6 how that can be. I borrow “detached opticality” from Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 61. If we strip away art’s aesthetic dimension we may be left with philosophy alone—and, despite Hegel’s words to the contrary, art does not acquire “its real ratification only in philosophy” or, we can add, in amusement, pedagogy, or other non-aesthetic concerns (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, trans. T. M. Knox, vol. 1 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975], 603, cited in Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999], 40–41.) These philosophical or instrumental values are important effects or aspects of art, but not its whole story. Savage, Memorial Wars, 4. Because of the perceived importance of the bombing, U.S. citizens and others refer to it simply as 9/11, as if the date’s importance requires no mention of the year in which it occurred. But there are other 9/11s of equal importance to the people they involved— just to take one example, the U.S. government’s role in the overthrow and elimination of Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende (September 11, 1973). Krzysztof Wodiczko, “A Memorial for September 11: A Proposal for New York City as International City of Refuge,” in City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial, eds. Mark Jarzombek and Mechtild Widrich (London: Black Dog, 2009). Evans, Multivoiced Body, 14, 53, and passim. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, with Mathieu Copeland (France: Les presses du reel, 2002); Alfred Gell, Art and Agency:

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An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998,) 26–27, 36–37; and Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 190–93.

2. VOICES AND PLACES: THE SPACE OF PUBLIC ART AND WODICZKO’S THE HOMELESS PROJECTION 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

I borrow the term “expressive gesture” from Edward S. Casey. Personal communication. See his Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2002). I will say more about the status of the aesthetic object as a “quasi-voice” later in the book. In her Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), Judith Butler speaks of “precarity” (33, 67, 97) and the decision about whose “life is grievable and worth protecting” and whose is not according to the social norms that determine our well-being amidst the environmental and political risks that go with one’s nationality, class, gender, ethnic, and the other statuses by which we often catalogue each other (119). One might say that politics is all about deciding who is allotted a “livable life” (41). But first comes whose voice has the say on life and specifies which factors constitute precarity. Thus voice still has political priority. Krzysztof Wodiczko, “The Homeless Projection: A Proposal for the City of New York,” October 38 (Autumn 1986): 3–22. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1977), 76–77. Ibid., 77–80. Lambert Zuidervaart argues in Art in Public: Politics, Economics, and a Democratic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) that Fraser assumes “social equality as a necessary condition for participatory parity in specifically political institutions.” Her “totalizing approach” thereby “makes political democracy seem unattainable for the foreseeable future” (103–4). But Fraser appears to be saying only that a thriving democracy, the one she and Zuidervaart both want, is not possible without social equality. In the meantime, our far less than satisfactory democracy (especially with the U.S. Supreme Court’s corporation-friendly Citizens United decision) still provides outlets for democratic resistance to the forces that perpetuate social inequality and institutions that are far less democratic than they present themselves. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 80–85. In a response to John Rawls, Amartya Sen develops the idea that contesting points of view is a better way to arrive at democratic ideas than by using “transcendent” or axiomatic approaches. See his The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), xiii, 129–30, 144–45, 148, 197–99, 321, 402–3. See also Zuidervaart, Art in Public, 105, 106–7. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 85–88. Ibid., 70.

26 22. VO ICES AND P LACES

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

Ibid., 89. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 90–91. Ibid., 92. See also Mary Kupiec Cayton, “What Is Public Culture? Agency and Contested Meaning in American Culture—An Introduction,” in Public Culture: Diversity, Democracy, and Community in the United States, ed. Marguerite  S. Shaffer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Cayton argues that the meaning of “public” depends on the implicit epistemological and political models involved in one’s use of the term. She distinguishes four such models: (1) liberal democratic; (2) Marxian (including Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School); (3) communicative rationality (Habermas); and (4) postmodern (Michael Warner, Nancy Fraser, Mary P. Ryan, Madan Sarup, Iris Marion Young, and Lauren Berlant); and her own “generative” notion (4–25). The characterization of public space here will encompass all four of these, though without naming them. Rosalyn Deutsche, like Fraser and Cayton, is against “mapping a rigid ‘inside the institution/outside the institution’ opposition into an equally rigid public/private opposition” and adds that “these proposals expel feminist politics of representation from the artistic public sphere.” See Rosalyn Deutsche, “Agoraphobia,” in Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 314. See also Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015); and David Held and Anthony McGrew, Globalization and Anti- Globalization: Beyond the Great Divide, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 186–89. Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), quoted in Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 82–83 (my italics). Several other scholars express views that are similar to Fraser’s and Eley’s characterization of public spaces. For example, Margaret Kohn in Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space (New York: Routledge, 2004) states that “public space belongs to the citizens at large and is open to general use” (196). One of its main purposes is “to overcome social-economic stratification and provide an occasion for contact between people from different subcultures, residential enclaves, and social classes” (196). In terms of social cohesion, the purpose of public space is to “create a shared set of symbols and experiences that create solidarity among people who are separated by private interests” (8). Thus the “three core components” of the definition of public space are “ownership, accessibility, and intersubjectivity” (11). She also strongly contrasts public space with “social space.” Unlike public space, gated communities, shopping malls, business improvement districts, and other social spaces are privately owned and place restrictions on rights such as free speech and association (196; see also 8 and 11). In addition, Kohn warns that BIDs (business improvement districts) and other means of subtle privatization are reducing public space. Kristine F. Miller in Designs on the Public: The Private Lives of New York’s Public Spaces (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) argues that “public space, if it is going to

2. VO IC ES AND P LAC ES 263

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

play a role in democratic life, must be a hybrid of actual physical places and active public spheres” (xii), where the latter means “a dynamic relationship among publics formed around issues of concern and bodies accountable for addressing these issues” (xvii). As an example, she argues that when an atrium manager posts rules prohibiting otherwise legal activities—for example, loitering or sleeping—then the space can no longer legitimately be called “public” (xi). In Kohn’s terms, it would merely be a “social space.” The larger problem indicated by both these scholars, and of which later I say more, is the progressive conversion of public space into merely social space—in effect, the privatization of public space. Deutsche, “Agoraphobia,” 288–89; 320. See also Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 127. Paraphrasing the work of Carole Pateman (Participation and Democratic Theory [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970]), Doss states that “ ‘participation’ is often championed as an expedient tool of consensus rather than a transformative vehicle of democratic action; participation does not, in other words, guarantee public agency.” Deutsche, “Agoraphobia,” 325 (my italics). We can see this phobia even more today when we reflect on the reaction by governments to an open internet and especially to WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing. Another example of agoraphobia are the nationalistic reactions to “stranger persona”—to exiled public intellectuals—in the United States during the global “cold war” era. See Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Intimate Strangers: Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said in American Political Discourse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 254–56, and Barbara McCloskey, The Exile of George Grosz: Modernism, America, and the One World Order (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). McCloskey’s book also discusses how the U.S. press and the political establishment addressed the views of Grosz and some other exiles on the idea of a postwar “new world order.” Ibid., 290. Nietzsche contrasts “the activity of fights which are contests” with the “activity of fights of ambition.” In a contest or “agon,” the activity is honored as much as or more than the outcome: “That is the core of the Hellenic notion of the contest: it abominates the rule of one and fears its dangers; it desires, as a protection against the genius, another genius”—see “Homer’s Contest,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 371. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), 101–2. See also William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), x–xi, for his similar notion, “democratic agonism.” Rosalyn Deutsche, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection and the Site of Urban ‘Revitalization,’” October 38 (Autumn 1986), 79; reprinted in her Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 3–48. Deutsche is paraphrasing an official document that she cites: Karl Bitter, “Municipal Sculpture,” Municipal Affairs, 2 (1898): 73–97. She also notes that “the sculptural program of Union Square is commonly considered to symbolize concepts of liberty and individual freedom,” an “assessment [that] originated in the nineteenth century when two of the sculptures

26 42. VO IC ES AND P LACES

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

fortuitously shared a common subject: heroes of the revolution” (“Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection, ” 89). See also Edward S. Casey, “Public Memory in Place and Time,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall A. Phillips (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004). During this period, I was part of a city-sponsored, poverty-level “homesteading” group doing “sweat equity” in exchange for eventual occupation of an abandoned building on Manhattan’s 108th Street. Especially at that time, New York’s poor were desperate for living quarters of almost any kind. See Fred Evans, The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 206–11, 270–76. Deutsche, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection,’ ” 63–66, 72–74, 95–98. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 73. Karl Marx states this antagonistic relation in more stark terms when he speaks of the capitalist as functioning “only as personified capital, capital as a person, just as the worker is no more than labour personified,” and thus of “the rule of the capitalist over the worker” as “the rule of things over man, of dead labor over the living, of the product over the producer.” See Karl Marx, “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” trans. Ernest Madel, in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1976), 1:989–90. Deutsche, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection,” 74–77, 79–80. These references are, respectively, to Georges Haussmann, who was Napoleon III’s architect and the transformer of Paris’s cityscape, and to Jeremy Bentham’s famous tower proposed for use in prison control. See ibid., 85–86. Ibid., 83–85. Ibid., 68n14. Ibid., 69 (Deutsche’s italics). For a magisterial treatment of the idea of place, see Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) and The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 273. See also page 365: “A dialogue of languages is a dialogue of social forces.” For an extensive treatment of Bakhtin’s view of dialogue, as well as its relation to Nietzsche, Gadamer, Habermas, and other thinkers on language, see Evans, The Multivoiced Body, 62–89, 190–91. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), xi. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans, A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 38, 48, 72–73, 91–92. Ibid., 86–87. This implies that the linguist Noam Chomsky may be right about the generative source of language, but not about discourse, including the discursive

2. VO ICES AND P LAC ES 265

39.

40. 41.

42.

43.

formation of which Chomsky’s own theory is a part (see Evans, The Multivoiced Body, 171–72, and also chapter 4). Indeed, Foucault’s discussion of discourse supports linguists who argue that grammar is not an innate cognitive structure à la Chomsky but rather an epiphenomenon or artifact that emerges out of and changes with discursive practices. See, for example, Paul J. Hopper, “Emergent Grammar,” in The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Linguistic Structure, ed. Michael Tomasello (Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum, 1998). The technical notion of statements implies that they pertain to discursive formations (“exteriorities”) rather than to the intentions of subjects (“interiorities”). Thus, to give another example, when professors teach their classes, they enunciate a voice that has already been established for them—the university voice, the norms of that institution’s discourse, of how professors and students are to comport themselves and regard each other, with what authority and what degree of knowledge, on pain of being denied their titles and role. The sense in which we are captured by the voice we speak, the discursive formation within which we articulate ourselves, is clear when professors and students realize that they would be regarding each other completely differently if their first meeting happened to be in a café and without any of them having knowledge of each other’s professional standing (see also Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 122, 200, 229). The idea of “elliptical identity” that I will introduce below means that we can go only part way with Foucault on his notion of the determining power of “statements” and “discursive formations.” For a criticism of Foucault’s notion of the subject, see Evans, The Multivoiced Body, 130–31. Béatrice Han (Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, trans. Edward Pile [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002]) and Johanna Oksala (Foucault on Freedom [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005]) explain in documented detail the problems associated with the notion of a free subject in Foucault’s work. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 104–5. The term “anexact” is used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 367, 407– 9, 507. The original discussion of this topic (“morphological” versus “ideal” essences and concepts), to which Deleuze and Guattari refer, is in Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1931), 207–21. As addicts of tales of origin, we can assume that there was an earlier community, one in which bodies were intrinsically joined together by non-linguistic gestures. This group underwent a Deleuzian “deterritorialization,” transforming the pre-linguistic community into a body of intersecting voices and their enunciators into linguistic beings. For the notion of “deterritorialization,” see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 56, 508–10. For the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari enlisted here, see their Thousand Plateaus, 145, and also 108, 140–41, 146. For an extended discussion of reciprocal presupposition, see Fred Evans, “Deleuze’s Political Ethics: A Fascism of the New?,” Deleuze Studies 10, no. 1 (2016): 85–99, and The Multivoiced Body, 43–45, 147–49, and its chapter 2 for an elaboration of their cosmological philosophy.

26 6 2. VO ICES AND P LACES

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 48–48, and passim. Deutsche, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection,” 94; see also 74–75. Ibid., 95–96. Ibid., 97; see also 63–64, 91. Ibid., 66; see also 80, 98. Ibid., 77–78. Ibid., 79–80. Or, more strongly put: “forces that profit from the destruction of public spaces and cultures pose as their protectors” (Deutsche, “Agoraphobia,” 291). Ibid., 66. Edith Hamilton, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (New York: Mentor, 1953), 256–61. Plato, Republic, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2004), 100 (415c). Material for this brief biography of Wodiczko comes from two online publications: Culture .PL, May 31, 2007, http://culture.pl /en /artist /krzysztof-wodiczko, and Wikipedia, s.v. “Krzysztof Wodiczko,” last modified April 3, 2018, 11:36, https://en.wikipedia .org /wiki /Krzysztof_Wodiczko. See ibid., 3–22. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 16. The resulting montage of the visually transformed sculptures, in combination with a brochure by the author, were used in 1986 to construct a public installation in the 49th Parallel, a Manhattan gallery. The brochure distributed there is some of the material reprinted in the Autumn 1986 issue of October (Wodiczko, “Homeless Projection”). For reproductions of the brochure material and further discussion of them, see Deutsche, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection”; her “Agoraphobia,” 269–327, and her “Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy Author(s),” Social Text, no. 33 (1992): 34–53. Unfortunately, Wodiczko’s prior experience with community boards in New York City discouraged him from attempting to attain permission for a longer-term production of this art in Union Square itself—longer than the time to do the initial projections and record them. Even in its installation form, however, the project tacitly referred to and condemned the crown of the “revitalization” campaign, the huge Zeckendorf Towers luxury apartment buildings constructed adjacent to the square. See Douglas Crimp, Rosalyn Deutsche, and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, “A Conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko,” October 38 (Autumn 1986): 22. Wodiczko, “Homeless Projection,” 12. Ibid., 11. Deutsche, “Wodiczko’s Projection,” 89, 91. Ibid., 92. In Crimp et al., “Conversation with Wodiczko,” the artist explains how the aesthetic “seamlessness” works: “At first, people don’t see architectural structures as images in themselves; they see them as physical surfaces, as screens for the projection. But keeping the image static helps to integrate it with the architecture” (25). See Deutsche, “Wodiczko’s Projection,” 66; see also, 68, 93.

3. D EM O C RACY’S “E M P TY P LACE”267

63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70.

71.

72.

Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others, vol. 2, Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 (New York: The New Press, 1998), 374–75. Deutsche, “Agoraphobia,” 279. In support of this idea of homelessness as a way of life (not necessarily a chosen one) is the Spare Change News, a newspaper for the homeless in Cambridge, Massachusetts. See Wodiczko, “Homeless Projection,” 16. Wodiczko, 16. The question of the status of voices that have been silenced because they are racist or otherwise nihilistic as regards hearing others will be addressed the next chapter. Crimp et. al., “Conversation with Wodiczko,” 23–24. Deutsche notes that Wodiczko’s slide warfare does not permanently disfigure the statues in Union Square. It therefore differs from the changes in the square’s infrastructure undertaken by the city’s planning commission (Deutsche, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection,” 68). See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995); and Iain A. Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, new ed. (New York: Verso, 2006), 187, 203. Deutsche, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection,” 88. My description of the relation between the public sphere, civil society, and the state is purposely limited to the points I have made above. For a more general and “dialectically” stratified presentation of these spheres and their relation to “art in public” and art institutions, see Zuidervaart, Art in Public. See Lisa Saltzman, “When Memory Speaks: A Monument Bears Witness,” in Trauma and Visuality in Modernity (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006), 94–95.

3. DEMOCRACY’S “EMPTY PLACE”: RAWLS’S POLITICAL LIBERALISM AND DERRIDA’S DEMOCRACY TO COME 1. 2. 3. 4.

John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy (New York: Norton, 2009), 866–87. For Keane’s treatment of assembly democracy, see ibid., xv–xvii, 41–47; for representative democracy, especially xvii–xix, 161–69. Ibid., 688. Ibid., 743. Another example of monitory democracy is the Pittsburgh Police Civilian Review Board. I mention it because one of the leading political thinkers in the United States, Iris Marion Young, discusses it as part of the introduction to her influential book, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1–3. We both participated in the ultimately successful effort to establish the board. In her introduction, she describes the collecting of petition signatures; alliances; neighborhood meetings; resistance to the board by the chief of police, the mayor, and the City Council; an affirmative referendum on Election Day; and other intricacies of the full

26 8 3. D EM O C RACY’S “E M P T Y PLACE”

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

undertaking. Her actions aligned with the theory argued for in Inclusion and Democracy and her other books and are also congruent with Keane’s account of monitory democracy. Keane, Life and Death of Democracy, 765–66, and the whole of the chapter, “Memories from the Future.” Ibid., 709. Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 166. In the same volume, Sandel provides a helpful working characterization of “communitarianism,” which we can keep in mind while delineating Rawls’s opposing political conception: “To achieve a just society we have to reason together about the meaning of the good life, and to create a public culture hospitable to the disagreements that will inevitably arise” (281). The “right” for Sandel is to be elucidated in light of the “good” rather than other way around—that is, rather than the way represented by Rawls’s political philosophy. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 4. The lineage of this movement harks back to Friedrich Nietzsche. For a critical and historical treatment of it, see Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L.  Scott-Fox and J.  M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Leonard Lawlor, Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); Alan  D. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Fred Evans, The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Ann Brault and Michael Nass (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 38–39, cited in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), 170–71. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 128. Johan van der Walt is responsible for the comparison of these two citations and the text citation for Derrida’s comment. See his “Rawls and Derrida on the Historicity of Constitutional Democracy and International Justice,” Constellations 16, no. 1 (2009): 31: “The only life worth living is an im-possible life beyond the economy of the possible” is Walt’s translation of “une vie autre que celle de l’économie du possible, une vie im-possible sans doute . . . mais la seule qui vaille d’etre vécue . . .”) from Jacques Derrida, États d’ame de la psychanalyse (Paris: Galilée, 2000), 82. In this section on Rawls, I refer primarily to three key texts by him: A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Political Liberalism; and Law of Peoples. For citations in the main text, I will use TJ, PL, and LP respectively for Rawls’s three books and follow them with the relevant page numbers. I’ll use their abbreviated titles when I refer to them in the endnotes. Rawls, Theory of Justice, 17–18, 41–43, 380–81; see also Rawls, Political Liberalism, 45–46. Rawls adds that our “considered (moral) judgments” are those “in which our

3. D EM O C RACY’S “E M P TY P LACE”269

14.

15.

16.

17.

normal moral capacities are most likely to be displayed without distortion,” for example, judgments about which we are not hesitant and ones which we do not make under conditions of greed or fear (Political Liberalism, 42). Rawls, Political Liberalism, 93–98. Rawls calls this method “political constructivism” and acknowledges its relation to, and differences from, Emmanuel Kant’s moral philosophy and method as well as Kant’s notion of the “kingdom of ends.” His use of “reasonable” in this context is a theme to which we shall later return. Rawls, Theory of Justice, 462–64. For Rawls’s linkage of the regulative role of the principles as “right” and good” with the “Aristotelian Principle” of the “good life,” see Theory of Justice, 364, 374; with the idea of “a rational plan of life,” pages 380, 392–94, 450–51; with a “moral person” and his or her capacity to have a conception of “their good as expressed by a rational plan of life” plus a “sense of justice,” pages 415, 418–19, 442–43; and with our “social nature,” pages 458–59. This possible democracy could be construed as either a communitarian idea of the good or a universal principle transcending any possible tradition. For the pros and cons of each of these two alternatives—communitarianism or a universal principle—in general and in relation to Rawls specifically, and also their connection to such topics as justice, citizenship, and nationalism, see Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 136–37, 209–10, 212, 252–61, 268–70, 299, 310–12. For the claim that Rawls’s political liberalism is basically a form of liberal communitarianism, see Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 58–59 and passim, and, in the same volume, Michael Waltzer’s “Comment,” 99. Onora O’Neil, in her article, “Constructivism in Rawls and Kant,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), suggests a form of communitarianism when she states that the Rawlsian as opposed to the Kantian notion of “reasonableness” is “identified . . . with the public reason of fellow citizens in a given, bounded, democratic society” (362). William Rehg, in his Insight and Solidarity: The Discourse Ethics of Jürgen Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), goes in the opposite direction and says that Rawls should recognize political liberalism as a universal principle and provide a moral intuition as its foundation (123–24). On that point, see also Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), 94–95. Jürgen Habermas’s position is close to Rawls’s, but is clearly universalist. For my critical examination of his view, see Evans, Multivoiced Body, 176–79, 183. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 291–92, 332; see also 5–7). The difference principle is intended especially to ensure that the least advantaged have sufficient income and wealth “to make use of the equal basic liberties enjoyed by everyone” (326). Rawls says that his version of the difference principle is more demanding than what is strictly required for a political conception of justice, that is, “a social minimum providing for the basic needs of all citizens” (228). Note that “perfectionist” refers to views that subordinate human endeavors to the obtainment of the highest cultural values (Rawls, Theory of Justice, 285–87).

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18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

Rawls, Political Liberalism, 49. He adds elsewhere that “free and equal” in this context includes that the participants are not being dominated, manipulated, or coerced because of an “inferior political or social position” (xlii, 446). See Rawls, Law of Peoples, 136–37, and Rawls, Political Liberalism, xlii, xliv, 446. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 11, 11n11, 147. Rawls also refers to reasonableness and the criterion of reciprocity as “intrinsically moral” (xlv, 51; see also Political Liberalism, xlii, 49–51, 95). For further details of “realistic utopia,” see Rawls, Law of Peoples, 5–7, 11, 14, 17–18, 126–28: this term applies to the “Society of Peoples” as well as to politically liberal societies. See Rawls, Theory of Justice, 226, and Rawls, Political Liberalism, xlin8, 77–79, 199–200, 375n3; see also xlv. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 446–47. Ultimately, neither Rawls’s political liberalism nor utilitarianism or any other particular political conception of justice can specify public reason: public reason, in conjunction with reflective equilibrium (28), is used to determine which of the family of reasonable political conceptions of justice is the most adequate (l–li). Rawls thinks that political liberalism and his two principles of justice will ultimately win. Ibid., xlii, xlv, 40, 441–46. As these cited pages attest, the political conception of justice is freestanding in that its moral status is independent of any comprehensive doctrine of the good. Ibid., 446–47. He prefaces this comment with: “This fundamental political relation of citizenship has two special features: first, it is a relation of citizens within the basic structure of society, a structure we enter only by birth and exit only by death; and second, it is a relation of free and equal citizens who exercise ultimate political power as a collective body” (445). In the context of public art, we will be looking for a criterion of citizenship that is more specific. “The idea of the reasonable makes an overlapping consensus of reasonable doctrines possible in ways the concept of truth cannot” (Rawls, Political Liberalism, 94; see also xlv, 39–40, 144–50). Moreover, the moral status of an overlapping consensus is assured because its object, “the political conception of justice, is itself a moral conception” and because the principles of justice and other grounds upon which the consensus is affirmed are seen as moral from within people’s comprehensive moral view as well as from within the original position (147–48). Rawls also thinks his notions of “reasonable pluralism” and “overlapping consensus” require that he eschew the more unitary concept of “community” because it is always based on one or another comprehensive doctrine of the good (146, 201). Rawls, Political Liberalism, 468–69. See Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 236–41, 243–44. This criterion of reasonableness would also exclude theocratic democracies, that is, ones that respect their citizens’ human rights and have regular elections but restrict on religious grounds who can hold at least high political office. More specifically, Rawls’s “law of peoples” can include non-liberal though “decent” groups, for example, theocracies that respect their citizens’ human rights and consult regularly with the subcommunities of their society but restrict who can hold high

3 . D EM O C RACY’S “E M P TY P LACE”27 1

29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

political office. However, these groups must agree to a liberal political conception of justice in international forums. Peoples, rather than individuals, become the primary citizens on this global political arrangement. See Rawls, Law of Peoples, 17–19, 62–68, 75–76, 83; see 79 for a list of “urgent” human rights. Ibid., 6, 80–81. For the use of the term “ontology” in connection to Rawls’s distinction between peoples and individuals, see Philip Pettit, “Rawls’s Political Ontology,” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 4, no. 2 (2005): 157–74. For a trenchant criticism of exempting individual members of some peoples from the requirement of free and equal standing, as well as an attack on Rawls’s tolerance of global economic inequality, see Thomas Pogge, “Do Rawls’s Two Theories of Justice Fit Together?,” in Rawls’s Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia?, ed. Rex Martin and David A. Reidy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 206–25. Pogge also makes the correct point that Rawls’s way of speaking of peoples presupposes “a division of humanity into distinct culturally cohesive peoples (ibid., 208–9; 210). But it is doubtful that any such cohesiveness exists anywhere or is even possible and thus Rawls’s “Society of Peoples” would have the inadvertent effect of supporting the dominant viewpoint in a supposedly “common” culture, thus curtailing or favoring one side against the others in the continual process of internal struggle over cultural direction. In the context of his comments on “reasonable pluralism,” Rawls expresses the importance of the social stability that he hopes his political liberalism will achieve as follows: “The problem of stability [surprisingly] has played very little role in the history of moral philosophy . . . yet [it] is fundamental to political philosophy” (Political Liberalism, xvii; see xvi–xix). This subordination of diversity to stability is reinforced by a statement earlier cited above: “How is it possible for there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens, who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?” (Rawls, Political Liberalism, 4). Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 236–41. For the reference from Mill, see John Rawls, “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7, no. 1 (1987): 6, 24, cited in Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 243. Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 240. van der Walt, “Rawls and Derrida,” 28. van der Walt, 27. Michael Sandel makes a similar argument and provides abortion, same-sex marriage, and other cases as illustrative examples. See Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 251–60. Van der Walt argues that this sort of discrepancy also shows up in cases of attempting to determine what punishments are commensurate with the crime committed (“Rawls and Derrida,” 28–29). van der Walt, “Rawls and Derrida,” 27. See Rawls, Political Liberalism, liii–lv, and above. van der Walt, “Rawls and Derrida,” 27. See Rawls, Political Liberalism, liii. This example is a free rendering of one offered by Jean-François Lyotard, though he does not use it the context of an explicit criticism of Rawls’s political liberalism. See

2723. D EM O C RACY ’S “E M P T Y PLACE”

40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrase in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 9–10. I find van der Walt’s criticism compelling: a comprehensive doctrine of the sort Rawls criticizes appears tacitly to be at play when one doctrine is chosen over another, even though both satisfy the strictures of Rawls’s conception of political reason. But I don’t think it would be right to accuse Rawls of “cynically”—that is, intentionally—claiming that “everyone is being treated as free and equal” when that is not the case in situations like the one presented above. Rawls may have been wrong when he made this claim but I see no evidence that he made it knowing it to be wrong. Stephen Mulhall and Adam Smith, “Rawls and Communitarianism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 483. Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 126–128; see also 148n¥, 199, 322, 403. Ibid., 402. See also 130, 144–45, 148, 197, 403. Ibid., xiii. Rawls, Law of Peoples, 14–15. For a more thorough statement of Rawls’s “minimal instrumentalism” position on art, see Lambert Zuidervaart’s Art in Public: Politics, Economics, and a Democratic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2011), 56–59. Rawls, Theory of Justice, 292. See Zuidervaart, Art in Public, 56–59. See the section “Overlapping Consensus” earlier in this chapter. We can add that for Rawls the idea of an intrinsic value of diversity or fecundity might be too close to a comprehensive doctrine of the good and not compatible with his political conception of justice. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2005), 9, 18 (Derrida’s italics). See also Derrida, The Other Heading, 77–78; and Jacques Derrida, “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” in The Late Derrida, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 238. I have documented and elaborated upon Derrida’s extensive use of the notion of “call” and “voice” in three other works: “Cosmopolitanism to Come: Derrida’s Response to Globalization,” in A Companion to Derrida, ed. Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 550–64; “Derrida and the ‘Autoimmunity’ of Democracy,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 30, no. 3 (2016): 303–15; and “‘Murmurs’ and ‘Calls’: The Significance of Voice in Foucault and Derrida,” in Between Foucault and Derrida, ed. Yubraj Aryal, Vernon Cisney, and Nicolae Morar (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 303–15. Derrida, Rogues, 9. Ibid., xiv, xv. Ibid., xii, xiii–xiv. Ibid., 29, 82. Derrida states that the democratic is “constitutive” of the political because of “the indetermination and the ‘freedom’, the ‘free play’, of its concepts” (28). We will treat these remarks of Derrida at more length.

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53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70.

Ibid., 35–39. See also Jacques Derrida, “Khora,” in On the Name, ed. and trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 124–25; Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 28–29, 33; and Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 85–86. Derrida, Rogues, 52–53, 135; see also 144, 148, 152. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 85–86. Derrida, Rogues, 25, 38–39. Derrida, 90; see also 28–29, 84, 89, and Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 105–6. Derrida, Rogues, xiv, 85–86 (Derrida’s italics); Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides—A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in Philosophy in a Time of Terror, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), 120, see also 128–29. Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 120, see also 128–29. Derrida, Rogues, xiv; Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 120, 128–29; see also Derrida, “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” 240–42. Derrida, Rogues, 84, 144. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 73, see also 59, 65. Derrida, Rogues, 144; see also 83–84, 84. Derrida, “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” 236. See also Maxime Doyon, “The Transcendental Claim of Deconstruction,” in A Companion to Derrida, ed. Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 141. Derrida, “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” 234. Derrida, Rogues, 84. Ibid., 83–84. Derrida even says that we have the possibility of abandoning the name or heritage of democracy, but “always in the name of the name, thereby betraying the heritage in the name of the heritage” (Derrida, Rogues, 89; Derrida’s italics). Also, a timeless truth (for example, a Platonic form or geometrical theorem) does not appear at first to be an event because of its timelessness. But all such entities are for us linguistic creatures, each part of a discourse in which we speak about them, the meaning of each inseparable from the meaning of the other terms in the discourse, and therefore each possesses an identity that is indefinitely deferred along with that of the discourse enclosing it (see Derrida, Positions, 26). We cannot ultimately call geometrical discourse Euclidean, Riemannian, or by the name of any other determinate geometry we might mistake for the one always and only to come. See Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2008), 211n9. Derrida, Rogues, 84–85, 158; see also Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 298.

2743 . D EM O C RACY’S “E M P T Y PLACE”

71. 72. 73. 74.

75.

76. 77. 78.

79.

Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 79; see also Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 104, and Derrida, Rogues, 89. Derrida, Rogues, 73, 74; see also 86. Jacques Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s “Specters of Marx,” ed. Michael Sprinker (New York: Verso, 1999), 254. Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001), 44–45; Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 129–30; Derrida, On Hospitality, 79; Derrida, Rogues, 92–93. Referring to “democracy to come” as a “benign” oracle means that I am not placing its “guiding” role in the same class as fascism and other oracles that present themselves as non-revisable. “Democracy to come” means that possible democracies are nothing but revisable. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s use of this claim to refute empiricism and rationalism. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (1963; Repr., London: Routledge, 2003), 3–4. The phoneme or grapheme “democracy” by itself won’t do to link the unconditional with the conditional democracy. Because homonyms (e.g., “bow” [bow and arrows vs. a bow in one’s hair]) or different pronunciations (“bow” and “bow-wow”) are prevalent in languages, something more—a third thing—is needed to indicate that the two incidents of “democracy” are not homonyms and are in the same domain. In Derrida’s case, the third thing to link “democracy” as conditional and unconditional is “freedom” (see below). Derrida, Rogues, 22. Ibid., 24–25, 87; see also 48, 72, 90, and Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 121. Derrida, Rogues, 90. One might want to claim that Derrida does not mean “democracy to come” to be so “heterogeneous” to possible/conditional democracies as he seems to make out, and that therefore the unconditional and conditional democracies require no mediating link. But then we would have a view of heritage closer to Merleau-Ponty’s movement of transcendence in which the true or more developed democracy to come would already be implicitly contained within the past and present version, albeit as a suggestive or not fully determinate pattern. See, for example, his long, footnoted exposition of historical materialism in existential phenomenological (or hermeneutical) terms in Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 198–201. But Merleau-Ponty’s idea clearly does not allow for the absolute indecidability that Derrida champions. Indeed, Derrida also moderates his claim to absolute unconditionality in his discussion of Marx; he wants to avoid an International that would designate a true “son” of Marx and commit the sin of “messianism” yet claims that Stalin cannot count as a political son of Marx. But ruling out Stalin from the Marxist lineage, no matter how desirable otherwise, presupposes some criteria for distinguishing between those in the lineage or “legitimate descent” and those not—that is, some qualified way of characterizing Marxism and its followers. See Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” 232, 241, 243, 251; Derrida, Specters of Marx, 90, 92; and Evans, The Multivoiced Body, 272–75. Derrida, Rogues, 25: Liberty is “the right and power of each to do what he or she pleases” (decision and self-determination) and license is “to play with various possibilities,” both presupposing unconditional freedom.

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80. 81. 82. 83.

84.

85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

90.

Ibid., xiv, 102. Ibid., 84–85, 158 (Derrida’s italics). See above and also Derrida, “Negotiations,” 298. Derrida, Rogues, 48–49, 53–54. Ibid., 60, 86, 149; see also Derrida, On Hospitality, 77, 79. For a scholarly and comprehensive treatment of the many meanings that “equality” has taken on in the modern era, see Pierre Rosanvallon, The Society of Equals, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Derrida, Rogues, 86, 35–36. “The ‘to come’ not only points to the promise but suggests that democracy will never exist, in the sense of a present existence: not because it will be deferred but because it will always remain aporetic in its structure” (86; my italics), that is, autoimmune (86–87). This qualification is interesting because it does seem that the “to come” temporality by itself secures the impossibility of a finalized definition of democracy. Also, autoimmunity requires “to come” as the temporality of democracy in order to make sense of itself. I think that Derrida opts for autoimmunity because it has stronger implications as a guard against democracy’s misuse than does the temporality argument. The latter allows one to say, “So we can never know if we have true democracy because it is unfinalizable in principle. Well, we live in the present, and so here we can give our best reasons for regarding one form of democracy over another and accept that they may not hold in the future; but they do for now so long as we are concerned about the historical world in which we live and not the abstract world to come” (indeed, this will become my own view after I have criticized the autoimmunity position; see also my allied comments in the final chapter, the notion of a “dialogic a priori”). But if democracy is autoimmune in the present, then there can’t even be a best and temporary choice among the contenders in and for a given period. See also Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post- Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1987), 30; Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 146–47; and Fred Evans, Psychology and Nihilism: A Genealogical Critique of the Computational Model of Mind (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 185–87. Derrida, Rogues, 40–41, 63, 86–87; Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 128–29. Derrida, Rogues, 33–34 (my italics); see also 30, 30–31, 34–35. Ibid., 86, 96, 105, 158. Ibid., 150–51, 158–59. The notion of “open space” here is similar to the “empty place” that Claude Lefort holds to be at the core of the notion of democracy and that we discussed in chapter 1 and have mentioned in chapter 2 and this chapter: “the image of an empty place, impossible to occupy, such that those who exercise public authority can never claim to appropriate it.” Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 279. A similar criticism of autoimmunity might arise in the case of spacing (différance) and its identification with the idea of life. If the self-differentiation of the present is life itself, then one does not necessarily die in its name as some proponents of autoimmunity might think, does not die just because the present requires its own effacement in order

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91.

92. 93. 94. 95.

96.

97. 98. 99.

100.

to be a present moment and because one arbitrarily can refer to this necessary aspect of forward movement as “death.” If to live is to vocalize one’s ideas, feelings, and other dispositions to oneself and others, then there is nothing intrinsically suicidal in that; we will all die, but not primarily because we speak. Indeed, Derrida would appear to agree that life is more than just biological existence when he states that there is no “strict opposition” between zoe (biological life) and bios (cultured life) (Derrida, Rogues, 24). A claim against the autoimmunity of the idea of life is supported when we recall that religious people think life is everlasting; hedonists that life is no more than what transpires in the present moment, with the rest, even death, an irrelevancy; and reductionist naturalists that life is existence and the latter just a continuous and unending transformation of the organization of matter. Hélène Cixous, “Jacques Derrida: Co-Responding Voix You,” in Derrida and the Time of the Political, ed. Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 50. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. D. Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 35. Derrida, The Other Heading, 7. Derrida, Positions, 85–89. See Evans, Multivoiced Body, 123 and passim, and Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), chap. 7. Derrida, The Other Heading, 10, 15, 77–78. See also Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), esp. 265–70, 284–86, 298, 299–300, 301. Derrida, The Other Heading, 29–30. Derrida, Rogues, 53. This turn to the “immanent” might be favored by those who find Derrida’s quasitranscendental notion of democracy to come and its variants too abstract, empty, or “theological.” See, for examples, Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); articles by Aijaz Ahmad, Terry Eagleton, Antonio Negri, and others in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1999); and Jacques Rancière, “Should Democracy Come? Ethics and Politics in Derrida,” in Derrida and the Time of the Political, ed. Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 282, 287–88. One might find this immanent view of temporality closer to Merleau-Ponty’s idea that “time is someone,” a “thrust which is subjectivity itself,” and simultaneously is that within which we are “situated,” “already committed to” (Derrida, Phenomenology of Perception, 490, 492); or Gilles Deleuze’s idea that “univocal Being is the pure form of [Aeonic time],” suggesting that both it and “the Aeon” are joined at the hip as “the unique cast [of the dice] from which all throws are qualitatively distinguished” and that those “throws” are “the qualitative forms of [that] single cast which is ontologically one,” that is, Being. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 180,

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101. 102.

64, 59. See also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 254, for a description of Being equivalent to the one given for Aeon. For a perceptive argument that Derrida is a philosopher of immanence rather than of transcendence, see chapter 8, “The Beginnings of Thought: The Fundamental Experience in Derrida and Deleuze,” in Leonard Lawlor, Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 123–41. I think that everyone would have to agree, however, that Derrida’s idea of unconditionality makes him a philosopher of transcendence at least relative to Rawls and his regulative ideas for democracy. See Doyon, “The Transcendental Claim of Deconstruction,” 144. Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II), Lectures at the Collège de France: 1983–84, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), esp. 11–16.

4. PUBLIC ART’S “PLAIN TABLET”: THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF CONTEMPORARY ART 1.

2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

Terry Smith, “Conversation with Jacques Derrida: Restaurant Le Train Bleu,” Gare du Nord, Paris, May 31, 2001, np. We know from the previous chapter the temporal implications of Derrida’s famous phrase, “democracy to come.” I thank Smith for allowing me to refer to his transcription of this unpublished recording. Ibid., np. Ibid., np. Jacques Derrida, “The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida” (by Peter Brunette and David Wills), in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, ed. Peter Brunette and David Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 10, 15, 24. The notion of spatiality—of différance—runs throughout Derrida’s work and thus bridges his earlier and later efforts. Ibid., 22; see also 21 and 23. See the previous chapter for Derrida’s idea of spacing. Smith, “Conversation,” np. Compare Derrida’s comments on the “voice” of his letter criticizing the architect and friend Peter Eisenman in Jacques Derrida, “Letter to Peter Eisenman: Oct. 12, 1989,” in Choral Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, ed. Jeffrey Kipnis and Tomas Leeser (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997), 161, 162. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Derrida uses the terms “subjectile,” “trait,” and “parergon” to refer to the deconstructive forces or “marks” that undermine mimetic functions. For a helpful summary of these forces, see Julian Wolfreys, “Art,” chap. 10 in Understanding Derrida, ed. Jack Reynolds and Jonathan Roffe (New York: Continuum, 2004), 84–92. Wolfreys points out that these forces “all make possible the assignment of the condition of art as art, even though they are in excess of and incommensurate with that condition, that identity” (91).

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8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

Jacques Derrida, “Architecture Where Desire May Live,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), 322–23. See also Jacques Derrida and Jeffrey Kipnis, “Afterword,” in Choral Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, ed. Jeffrey Kipnis and Tomas Leeser (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997), 170. Note that we have already discussed Derrida’s notion of an unconditional “promise” in the previous chapter. For Eisenman’s own description of the philosophical side of his project (“presentness” and “aura”), see his reply to Derrida’s letter to Eisenman: Peter Eisenman, “Post/El Cards: A Reply to Jacques Derrida,” in Choral Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, ed. Jeffrey Kipnis and Tomas Leeser (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997), 187–189, and, in the same volume, his “Separate Tricks,” especially where he speaks of designing walls, floors, and other concrete, functional architectural elements so that they bear “traces” of the “lost presence” of their resonance with one another at certain moments in their history (134). Derrida, “The Spatial Arts,” 26–27. See also Jacques Derrida, “Letter to Peter Eisenman,” 161, 164–65. Eleanor Morgan, “Derrida’s Garden,” Fillip, no.  2 (Winter 2006), http://fillip.ca/con tent/derridas-garden. Jeffrey Kipnis, “Twisting the Separatrix,” in Choral Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, ed. Jeffrey Kipnis and Tomas Leeser (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997), 154–55. Bernard Tschumi, “Introduction,” in Choral Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, ed. Jeffrey Kipnis and Tomas Leeser (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997), 125. Derrida and Kipnis, “Afterword,” 171. But Derrida also complained that Eisenman’s specific ideas for incorporating scaling seemed to lack functionality and did not reflect issues such as poverty and homelessness (Derrida, “Letter to Peter Eisenman,”163). Derrida’s surprisingly “conservative” complaints are particularly well documented and mocked (via Eisenman’s quotes of Derrida, such as “How can it be a garden without plants?”) in Kipnis, “Twisting the Separatrix,” 138–39. We could say that Derrida’s idea of “autoimmunity” is at play here: for a construction to count as architecture, it must have functionality; but if it is functional, it is to that degree caught up with notions of identity or totality and thus not architecture in the sense of what Derrida called above an (unconditional) “desire” for always “a new type of diversity with different limitations, other heterogeneities than the existing ones”—that is, an architecture always and only “to come.” Jacques Derrida, Peter Eisenman, Alain Pelissier, and Renato Rizzi, “Transcript Two: Paris, Nov. 8, 1985,” in Choral Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, ed. Jeffrey Kipnis and Tomas Leeser (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997), 34. Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), 1, 2. For some corroboration that this general notion of contemporaneity and contemporary art is pervasive today, see also Antinomies of Art and Culture, ed. Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). This book includes articles on contemporaneity and the idea of contemporary art by many of today’s leading art historians and thinkers on art.

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17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Smith, What Is Contemporary Art?, 5–6. Ibid., 264–69. In a personal note, Smith told me that since 2009 he has resisted naming this third world current because it is “inherently more open-ended, indeed indecidable, than the other two.” We should therefore take this name as a placeholder for a more open-ended current. See Smith’s latest note on this current in his The Contemporary Condition, the Contemporary Composition (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 25. Ibid., 268–69. See also 224. Smith, “Introduction,” in Antinomies of Art and Culture, ed. Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 8–9. Smith, What Is Contemporary Art?, chap. 11. Ibid., 186. Ibid., 181. Smith, “Introduction,” 10. See also Marc Augé, The Anthropology of Contemporaneous Worlds (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 89. Smith, What Is Contemporary Art?, 196–97. Smith, “Introduction,” 9. Terry Smith, The Architecture of Aftermath (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2006), 197. Ibid., 203. Paul Wood, Western Art and the Wider World (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 280–91. Neither Wood nor Smith are friends of neoliberalism, though they take different avenues to oppose it. See Smith, Contemporary Condition. Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 8. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 13–14. The use of the word “time” here may be misleading. It sounds very abstract, empty, unless one is also indicating the time generated and embodied by the voices and their accompanying cultural and political discourses taking place “at” a particular time. For example, another author notes three different art temporalities: the modern with its emphasis on the “new,” contemporary with the “now” (its “eternal” present), and the avant-garde with “tomorrow” (Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art [London: Verso, 2013], 175.) But these three temporalities are discourses—indeed, dynamic and contesting ones—and therefore what we have been calling voices. The same holds for the time of Sekoto’s neo-impressionism in South Africa and for the dominant Western voice and the periods that constitute the temporality of its teleological trajectory. Indeed, Moxey emphasizes that time cannot be separated from places and presumably the voices that inhabit and give life to such space (Visual Time, 4–5). He also speaks of “time’s varied significance in different cultural contexts,” suggesting again that temporality cannot be separated from a meaning—a voice—that it is bringing forward or that is carrying it along (both are true at once) (ibid., 47). But we must remember that whether we refer to these forces as times or

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36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53.

voices, each of them implies that there is no master voice (no oracle) nor temporal framework to which their heterogeneity can fully be subordinated. Moxey, Visual Time, 44, 47. Ibid., 47, 46. Ibid., 46; see also 42–43. Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013), 17 (Osborne’s italics). Ibid., 22–26; see also 35 for an explicit reference to “to come” and 205–8 for Osborne’s important distinction between “anticipation” and “expectation.” Note that for Kant, as opposed to Osborne’s disjunctive unity, there is only one time: a homogeneous temporal form of intuition that brings together the disparate sensations of our sensorium. For Kant, this unity is constitutive of sensory experience; for Moxey, it is only a heuristic idea; for Osborne, it is a way in which we hide from the fearsome suggestion of the chaos that a disjunction of times might bring about. Ibid., 3. Osborne acknowledges the Hegelian legacy of “speculative proposition” but does not intend it in the sense of the closed totality so often, correctly or incorrectly, attributed to Hegel. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 3 (Osborne’s italics). See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), esp. “On the Aesthetic Presentation of the Purposiveness of Nature,” 29–31. Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 41, 42 (Osborne’s italics). Ibid., 45–46. My italics. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 109–10. Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty (1972),” in Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 152n1. The quotation is a remark about an earlier work, Mono Lake Nonsite, but clearly intended to cover the more general relation including its materialization in perhaps Smithson’s most celebrated art work, Spiral Jetty. Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty (1972),” 146. Besides Osborne, I have been aided in my understanding of Spiral Jetty by Ed Casey’s phenomenological description of it. In particular, he pays attention to the role of the embodied subject in creating this and other “mappings” of the earth. See Edward S. Casey, Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Smithson, The Spiral Jetty, 146. Later in the book, Smithson speaks of the multiplying “ambiguities” and “contradictions” in the Spiral Jetty that happily put “purity” in jeopardy, and he makes other references to the dynamic hybridity of the elements of this materialization of the site/non-site concept.

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54.

55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 108. See also 114. Indeed, Osborne mentions that Smithson made an Alfred Hitchcock–like film of the process of constructing Spiral Jetty. He and others see the film as part of the entire work and hence yet another category melted into this work. This suggests that Spiral Jetty and postconceptual art itself should be thought of not so much as concerning the space of objects but rather “project space,” the space “of possibilities within a historically rapidly shifting matrix of places, non-places and flows, their combinatory articulations and effects” (175). Ibid., 28. Ibid., 35. Osborne is referring here to the art of the Atlas Group, which he thinks is emblematic of contemporary art. Ibid., 25, 27. Ibid., 24. The reference to “contract” here is from Terry Smith, whom Osborne cites as sharing his view about the intrinsic presentness of the contemporary and its difference from the modernity of modern art. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 211. Ibid., 195. See Moxey, Visual Time, 1. Indeed, Moxey suggests that a definition of “anachronicity” in art is “a means of describing the process of mediation that goes on between artifacts that both solicit an affective response and invite the desire of the contemporary historian or critic to make meaning.” This response “disrupts any absolute distinction between past and present” (45). Ibid., 54. Georges Didi-Humberman, “Before the Image, Before Time: The Sovereignty of Anachronism,” trans. Peter Mason, in Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History, ed. Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg, 31–44 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). See also Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995). For a presentation of the full fresco and not just the “Sacred Conversation” half, see Annelice  E. Ream, “Figuring the Unfigurable: Symbolism in Florentine Art and Culture, August  5, 2014, https://figuringtheunfigurable.wordpress.com /2014 /08/05 /madonna-of-the-shadows/. Didi-Huberman, “Before the Image,” 35. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 37–38. Ibid., 38–39. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 40, 41. Cf. Moxey, Visual Time, 25, 28, 31, 60, 61, 70, 156–58. Didi-Huberman, “Before the Image,” 41. In his Creating a Chicago Landscape: Millennium Park (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), Timothy J. Gilfoyle reports a

2824. P U BLIC ART’S “P LAIN TA B LET”

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94.

95. 96.

visual event of Frank Gehry’s that is very similar to Didi-Huberman’s: the architect came up with the idea for the pleats in the stainless steel roof of his concert bandshell for the park upon being struck by the “bright, almost translucent pleats” on the shoulders of the woman in Johannes Vermeer’s painting, Woman with a Water Jug, a favorite of Gehry’s (226). Didi-Huberman, “Before the Image,” 40. Ibid., 41–42, 42. See Moxey, Visual Time, 174. Ibid., 173. See ibid., respectively, 53, 55, 155; see also 62, 66, 70. Ibid., 54–55. Ibid., 55. See also 99. Ibid., 174–75. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 175. Ibid., 175. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 1–2. Ibid., 6; see also 2, 7, 12. Ibid., 175 For a brief summary of both the negative and the positive aspects, see ibid., 37–40, and passim. Ibid., 19, 276, 277–78. Ibid., 20–21. Ibid., 22. For another example of the aesthetic dimension of a participatory art work, see Bishop’s comments on artist Jerry Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave. She points out that all of Deller’s choices in his reenactment of the famous Thatcher- era battle between miners and the police had an artistic (aesthetic) as well as social dimension (33). Ibid., 284. Bishop’s sentiments are echoed in this poignant remark by Paul Wood in his Western Art and the Wider World: “Art still looks both ways: onto the world around it, the real, mutable, historical world, but also onto a different sense of the world viewed sub specie aeternae, onto the aesthetic dimension. The tension between these two continues to constitute the place where art gets made. When either falls from view, something is lost” (287). Wood is thinking here of the relation between contemporary art and the past or history, but it holds equally for the relation between the political and the aesthetic dimensions of art. Ibid., 287. Ibid., 25. In the same sentence, Bishop includes Slavoj Žižek as a third such philosopher. But space does not permit an extended and critical exposition of his views on top of those of Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière.

5 . D E M O C RACY AND P U BLIC A RT283

5. DEMOCRACY AND PUBLIC ART: BADIOU AND RANCIÈRE 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

For the intellectual and political background of Badiou’s work, as well as helpful and insightful commentaries on his texts, see Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Christopher Norris, Badiou’s Being and Event (London: Continuum, 2009); and Ed Pluth, Alain Badiou (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2001), 59, 120. Alain Badiou, Philosophy and the Event, trans. Louise Burchill (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 9–10. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 4. Ibid., 2, 5; see also 37. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 4. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 29, 45, 57, 61. Ibid., 4, 13–14, 23–24. Ibid., 6–7, 8, 57–58, 60, 61. See Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, 63, 63–64. Badiou, Being and Event, 24, 25, 52, 55, 56; see also 504, 514, 519. Ibid., 27, 29, 43, 48, 52, 57. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 55, 56, 58–59, 64–67, 81–84, 86–89, 102, 184–87; see Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, 66, 87–88, 102. Badiou, Being and Event, 24. Ibid., 93 (Badiou’s italics). Ibid., 94, 95. Ibid., 95, 96, 107, 109. See also Pluth, Alain Badiou, 55. Badiou, Saint Paul, 9–11. Ibid., 11. For Badiou’s formalistic definition of “singularity,” see Being and Event, 522, and below. Badiou, Saint Paul, 13–14; 41–43; 56–57. Ibid., 17. Badiou, Being and Event, 184. See also 181, 190, 304. Ibid., 179, 180. Badiou, Saint Paul, 70. The elements of the evental site in this case also includes “the nation bound together by the Old Testament” (22). Ibid., 70. See also Badiou, Being and Event, 179. Badiou, Being and Event, 515.

28 45 . D E M O C RACY AND P UB LI C A RT

28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

Ibid., 175, 507. Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, 102; see also 64–66. See Badiou, Being and Event, 86–89, for the set-theory formulas that illustrate the sort of universality and the voidsubset relation that makes the latter possible, and 81–84, for an extended presentation of his formal distinction between “belonging” and “included.” See also Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, 117. Badiou, Being and Event, 181, 204 (my italics). Just as Jesus as the dead Son of God was an element in the evental site for the resurrection, so the “peasants of the Great Fear” during the French Revolution are the non-presented elements of the evental site for that revolution (181). Badiou sometimes says that the evental site is not “part” of the situation (131, 175), but for the same reason that it is not “included” in it, not counted by the metastructure or state of the situation. Badiou, Being and Event, 179, 180, 506–7. Ibid., 522; see also 174. A term is “singular” if it and at least one of its elements is presented but not represented in the situation, belongs to but is not included in the situation. The event will be such a singularity, but the evental site has none of its elements present in the situation and so is called a “total singularity.” One non-presented element in a set is sufficient to render the whole set singular (present but not represented) in the situation; the non-present element (e.g., an undocumented and clandestine family member) is not presented in the situation even though its set (the family) is (174, 522). Ibid., 181–82 (Badiou’s italics). Because this interposition means that the same thing (the event) is counted two times (though not via a metastructure)—“once as a presented multiple, and once as a multiple presented in its own presentation”—Badiou calls the event an “ultra one.” Ibid. Badiou, Ethics, 73. Badiou, Being and Event, 182. Badiou, Ethics, 69, 71, 72. Thus Badiou says that Marx is the event for political thought because he names the proletariat as the central void for bourgeois society, for whom the proletariat as proletariat is absent from the political stage until the revolution begins (69). Badiou, Being and Event, 182. Ibid., 181. See also Norris, Badiou’s Being and Event, 160. Badiou, Being and Event, 182. See also Alain Badiou, “On Subtraction,” in Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2004), 114–15. Badiou, Being and Event, 183. Ibid., 182–83; see also 201–2. Ibid., 183. See also 181, 304. Ibid., 183. Badiou, Philosophy and the Event, 10, 14–15, and also 12. See also Badiou, Being and Event, 204, and Pluth, Alain Badiou, 64.

5 . D EM O C RACY AND P U BLIC A RT285

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

Badiou, Being and Event, 335 (Badiou’s italics). Badiou, Saint Paul, 11. Badiou, Being and Event, 204, 205. Ibid., 206. Ibid., 207–8. Ibid., 209–10. Ibid., 210–11; see also Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, 159. Badiou, Being and Event, 342–43; see also 427–28, 507, 522. Badiou, Saint Paul, 11. Badiou, Being and Event, 327; see also 332, 333, 335–38, and 510–11. In his Philosophy and Event, Badiou says that prior to the event the prospective militant must be “subjectively disposed to recognizing new possibilities,” for the event “is necessarily unforeseeable” because, as we already know, “it doesn’t fall under the law of prevailing possibilities” in the structured situation. This disposition requires that we remain “faithful to a past event, to the lessons given to the world by that event,” and thus wary of the propagandized society to which we belong. We must always be an “interval” between the “impact” of an earlier event and the one to come. The disposition also requires that we be “critical of the established order,” able to show that the possibilities the establishment offers to us are “inhuman,” that is, do not offer to “living humanity” (the “social collectivity”) the sort of “possibilities that do justice to that of which it is capable” (13). Badiou, Being and Event, 211. Badiou, Saint Paul, 66; see also Being and Event, 329–30. Badiou, Being and Event, 403. See also Badiou, “On Subtraction,” 114–15. Badiou, Saint Paul, 42; see also 48. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 14; see also 21–22, 43, 59, 88. Ibid., 45. See also 14–15, 76, 85. Badiou’s distinction between the universal truth procedure and communitarian doctrines parallels Rawls’s distinction between the more inclusive “political conception of justice” and the plurality of “comprehensive doctrines of the good” (see chapter 3). But Rawls’s political liberalism has no room for a singular event that initiates a truth procedure, and Badiou would not see the necessity of an “overlapping consensus” between the Greek cosmologists and the Jewish text decipherers or between any other group of comprehensive doctrines or communitarian positions. Ibid., 21–22. Ibid., 14; see also 17–18. Ibid., 63–64 (Badiou’s italics); ee also 49, 60, 62, 76–77, 78, 81–85, 111. Ibid., 89–90, 91–92, 93. Ibid., 95, 96–97; see also 108–9. Ibid., 99. See also Badiou, Ethics, 27. Badiou, Saint Paul, 109. Ibid., 110. Badiou, Ethics, 90.

28 6 5 . D EM O C RACY AND P UB LI C A RT

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

102.

Ibid., 28. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 67, 91; see also 49, 69. Ibid., 30, 31–32; see also 16, 87, and 91. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 91; see also 71. Ibid., 72–73. Ibid., 76–77. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 81, 82. Ibid., 84, 85. Ibid., 86. See Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, 319–20. Badiou, Ethics, 31–32. Alain Badiou, “The Democratic Emblem,” in Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj Žižek, Democracy in What State?, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 6–15, and “The Communist Hypothesis,” New Left Review 49 (January–February 2008): 29–42. Badiou, “Democratic Emblem,” 6. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 11. Badiou, “Communist Hypothesis,” 31. Ibid., 35. In his “A Speculative Disquisition on the Concept of Democracy,” (Metapolitics [2005]: 78–95), Badiou adds that the democracy he has in mind “presents equality” (93; Badiou’s italics) and “exposes a certain eternity,” the “foreseeable return of justice” (94), no doubt as an “unnameable.” Badiou, “Communist Hypothesis,” 37; see also 42. Badiou, “Democratic Emblem,” 15. Ibid., 14–15. Ibid., 15. Badiou, “Communist Hypothesis,” 40. Jeff Love and Todd May make a similar point. See their “From Universality to Equality: Badiou’s Critique of Rancière,” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 12, no. 2 (2008): 61–63. Compare Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, 269, and Oliver Marchart, PostFoundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). Marchart argues that Badiou, in effect rather than by intention, places the ethics of fidelity to a singular truth over politics

5 . D E M O C RACY AND P U BLIC A RT287

103. 104.

105.

106.

107.

108.

109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115.

116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

122.

and the latter’s implication of a “single terrain of intermingling forces” (132). His complaint fits well with our notions of the creative interplay among voices and an agonistic social body and democracy. See Pluth, Alain Badiou, 173. See Alain Badiou’s extensive and informative comments on the similarity of their backgrounds in his “The Lessons of Jacques Rancière: Knowledge and Power after the Storm,” in Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, ed. Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 30–35. Jacques Rancière, “Democracies Against Democracy: An Interview with Eric Hazan,” in Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj Žižek, Democracy in What State?, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 79–80. Jacques Rancière, “Should Democracy Come? Ethics and Politics in Derrida,” in Derrida and the Time of the Political, ed. Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 288. Badiou himself already has done one version of this comparison, insinuating that Rancière copied him and yet drew the wrong conclusions. See Alain Badiou, “Rancière and Apolitics,” in Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005), 114–23, and the paper by Jeff Love and Todd May, who question the correctness of Badiou’s insinuation: Love and May, “From Universality to Equality,” 51–69. See page 30 in Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” in Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), 27–44. Ibid., 31, 32. Note that this is similar to Derrida’s idea of the relation between democracy and the political—see chapter 3. Ibid., 36. Ibid. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 35. See also Rancière, “Should Democracy Come?,” 277. Rancière, “Ten Theses,” 35–36. Ibid., 38, 39. See also Jacques Rancière, “The Use of Distinctions,” in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), 212–13. Rancière, “Ten Theses,” 42–43. Rancière, “Should Democracy Come?,” 278. Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of the Political, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 2007), 82. This is a substantial part of Rancière’s otherwise minimalist ontology. Rancière, “Democracies Against Democracy,” 78. Rancière, “Democracies,” 78–79, 80. See also Rancière, On the Shores, 84. Rancière, On the Shores, 81–82 (Rancière’s italics). At least the first factor—the inherent ambiguity of language—is close to Derrida’s view of linguistic meaning (see chapter 3). Ibid., 82–83.

288 5 . D E M O C RACY AND P UB LI C A RT

123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136.

137.

138.

139. 140. 141.

Ibid., 82. See also Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 16, 33–34. Rancière, On the Shores, 84. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 85. Ibid., 85–86, 86–87. Ibid., 90–91; see also 86–87. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 91. Ibid. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 88. Ibid., 89; see also 87–88. Rancière, “Democracies Against Democracy,” 80. Gabriel Rockhill, in his Radical History and the Politics of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), argues that equality is a “relational universal” for Rancière: “it only exists in concrete acts of struggle rather than an abstract universal resting on an a priori foundation” (161). Yet the division between politics (and thus equality) and the police seems to be far stronger than an empirical generalization for Rancière; we saw above that he referred to the presupposition of equality as a “structure” though this is the only instance of use of that term in this context that I have found. Thus Rockhill immediately goes on to note that Rancière’s work manifests a tension between a tendency toward an “historical transcendentalism” and a contrary tendency toward a “historiography of immanence founded on the analysis of specific aesthetic-political formations” (161). In his article, “Thinking Equality Today: Badiou, Rancière, and Nancy” (French Studies: A Quarterly Review 67, no. 4 [2013]: 522–34), Christopher Watkin points out that this reliance on intelligence for equality in the case of both Badiou (common capacity to think the truth) and Rancière (common capacity to understand explanations and orders) excludes the mentally impaired from the ranks of the equal (527). It also excludes nonhuman animals. These, and even land and other natural formations, can be considered part of a more encompassing society. See Oliver Marchart, “The Second Return of the Political: Democracy and the Syllogism of Equality,” in Reading Rancière, ed. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (London: Continuum, 2011), 136, for a similar criticism. In his “Staging Inequality: On Rancière’s Theatrocracy” (New Left Review 37 [2006]: 109–29), Peter Hallward also makes a similar claim: “[Rancière] has developed an inconsequential account of democracy” (128). See also some of the other “strategic questions” he poses for Rancière in Hallward, “Staging Inequality,” 122–29. Hallward, “Staging Inequality,” 128. Alain Badiou, “Art and Philosophy,” in Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). Ibid., 2; see also 14.

5. DEMOCRACY AND PUBLIC ART289

142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150.

151.

152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166.

167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173.

Ibid., 2–3. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 9 (Badiou’s italics). Ibid., 7–8. Badiou associates the didactic schema with Marxism (5–6) and the classical schema with the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan (7). Ibid., 4–5. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 8. This is Rancière’s characterization of the meaning of “aesthetics” for Badiou, but it seems correct. See Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 63–64; see also 2. Badiou, “Art and Philosophy,” 9. The artistic truth in this case is presented but not metastructured by the situation because it has transformed the latter into the true situation with respect to art—thus truth is singular and “immanent” to the new situation according to Badiou’s set theory terminology. Ibid., 9–10. Ibid., 12, 13. Ibid., 13–14. Ibid., 14 (Badiou’s italics). See ibid., 12. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 19, 21–22. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 20–21. Rancière says that this form is preferred by philosophers and art historians. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 22, 25. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 25; see also 23–24. Ibid., 28–29. See also 64– 66, and Jacques Rancière, “Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, AntiAesthetics,” in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward (London: Continuum, 2004), 219. Rancière, Aesthetics, 26. Ibid., 29. Rancière thinks this is also true of Barnett Newman’s contemporary Vir Heroicus Sublimis and the installations and performances of relational art (ibid.). Rancière, Aesthetics, 32. Ibid., 30; 34–35. Ibid., 30–31, 32. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 32.

29 0 5 . D EM O C RACY AND P UB LI C A RT

174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183.

184. 185.

186.

187. 188. 189. 190. 191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199.

Ibid., 34. Ibid., 43–44. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 36; see also 44. In “Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-Aesthetics,” Rancière gives “form of life, a communal mode, a religious manifestation” as examples of “non-art” (220). Rancière, Aesthetics, 44. Ibid., 39. “In all these cases [Kazimir Malevich’s integrated spaces, Guy Debord’s type of play], the politics of the free form demands that the work realize itself, that it eliminate itself in act, that it eliminate the sensible heterogeneity which founds aesthetic promise.” Ibid., 43. “This jealously guarded art tends to become a mere testimony to the power of the Other and the risk of catastrophe continuously run by forgetting it.” Ibid., 44; see also 46. On pages 53–60, Rancière presents what he feels are four major figures in the contemporary phase of critical art: the play, the inventory, the encounter, and the mystery. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 50. See also Gabriel Rockhill, “Recent Developments in Aesthetics: Badiou, Rancière, and Their Interlocutors,” in Emerging Trends in Continental Philosophy, ed. Todd May (London: Routledge, 2014) for expansion on this dynamic mixing of the different regimes of art in Rancière (41–42). For the relation between Rancière’s three regimes of art and the French historiography that forms its background, see also Rockhill’s Radical History, 140–53. Rancière, Aesthetics, 60. Ibid., 64, 68–69. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 75–76. Badiou, “Dance as a Metaphor for Thought,” in Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, 66, cited in Rancière, Aesthetics, 76. Rancière, Aesthetics, 76. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 83–84. For a succinct statement of some of the major arguments against Badiou’s inaesthetics, see Rockhill, “Development in Aesthetics,” 45–46. See in particular Rockhill, “Recent Developments in Aesthetics,” 47–48, and passim, for critical remarks on the political aesthetics of both Badiou and Rancière. For criticisms favorable to Rancière, see Joseph J. Tanke, “Reflections on the Philosophy and

6 . T H E P O LITIC AL AE STH ETIC S O F M ILLEN N I UM PA R K291

200.

201. 202.

Anti-Philosophy of Art,” Philosophy Today 53, no. 3 (2009): 217–30. For criticisms more favorable to Badiou, see Devin Zane Shaw, “Inaesthetics and Truth: The Debate Between Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière,” Filozofski Vestnik 28, no. 2 (2007): 193–99. For a review celebratory of and helpful with understanding both thinkers, see John W. P. Phillips, “Art, Politics, and Philosophy: Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière,” Theory, Culture, and Society 27, no. 4 (2010): 146–60. Rockhill, Radical History, 171, 178. Note that by “politics proper” Rockhill means politics that aims at bringing about changes in a current society or the state and thus beyond the restricted scope of politics that Rancière wants for his aesthetic regime of art. See Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 28, 29–30. Rancière, Aesthetics, 63; cited in Bishop, Artificial Hells, 293n56.

6. THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF CHICAGO’S MILLENNIUM PARK 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 77. Louis H. Sullivan, The Autobiography of an Idea (1924; Repr., New York: Dover, 1956), cited in Larson, The Devil in the White City, 376. The desire to outshine the French and New York is also still alive. Thus Randal Mehrberg, lakefront director for the Chicago Park District during the years 1993–1997 and active in the city’s effort to take over the rail yards where Millennium Park would eventually be built, said “we should all be very grateful and proud that there’s going to be this incredible icon in Chicago which is going to be our Eiffel Tower or Empire State Building, and what’s remarkable and the media doesn’t seem to pick up is [that] the civic and corporate leadership in Chicago has stepped up in a very united way that you don’t see— a united fashion that you don’t see in a whole lot of other cities—to help bring this dream to fruition.” See Timothy J. Gilfoyle, interview with Randal Mehrberg, August 29, 2001, transcript, Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, IL. I examined the Mehrberg interview transcript and many others at the Chicago Historical Society. Hereafter, all such material will be cited as “Gilfoyle interview with [the interviewee’s name and the date of the interview].” Gilfoyle interview with John Bryan, August 10, 2004. Gilfoyle interview with John Bryan, August 10, 2004. Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 95. Gilfoyle interview with Craig Webb, February 28, 2002. Blair Kamin, “How Stellar Are ‘Starchitects’?,” Chicago Tribune, January 27, 2002. Gilfoyle interview with John Bryan, August 10, 2004, also cited in Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 348. Interview quotation, Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 352.

2 92  6 . TH E P O LITIC AL AE STH ETIC S O F MI LLEN N I UM PA R K

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

Quote from Gehry in Ross Miller, “The Master of Mud Pies,” Interview (January 1990), cited in Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 230–31. Plensa, creator of the Crown Fountain in the park, makes a similar comment about cities, though he does not explicitly link it with democracy (Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 285–86). Gilfoyle interview with Frank O. Gehry, March 31, 2003. Gilfoyle interview with Thomas Beeby, June 12, 2003. Cited in Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 259; see also 255, 259–60, 348–49. Gilfoyle interview with Christopher Perille, July 31, 2002. Perille is communication director for the William Wrigley Jr. Company. “Boeing Galleries,” City of Chicago Millennium Park, accessed December  2, 2011, https: // www .cityofchicago .org /city /en /depts /dca /supp_info /millennium_park _-artarchitecture.html#boeing. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), xiii, 111, 174–76, 264; Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 57, 123–24, 199, 219; and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 118, 204–8. See also chapters 1 and 2 of Fred Evans, The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) for a detailed treatment of the notion of “a unity composed of difference” as well as of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. Larson, The Devil in the White City, 106. Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 341, 343. Gilfoyle interview with Jaume Plensa, October 10, 2003. Interview with Kathryn Gustafson, in Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 310. Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 310–11. Ibid., 306–7. Ibid., 121; quote from Gilfoyle’s interview with Michael Lash. Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 295. John Bryant echoes this point about the connection between Lurie Garden and the Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano works (Gilfoyle interview with Frank O. Gehry, March 31, 2003; cf. Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 244–45). Gilfoyle interview with Craig Webb, February 28, 2002. They are, however, an element very congruent with the park’s unity composed of difference. In his Monument Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), Kirk Savage points out that “unlike traditional monuments, which fixed their meaning in permanent inscriptions and images, trees changed with the seasons, growing and aging, and as they did their meanings visibly changed. Celebrated trees accumulated new stories, legends, and memories over time. In this way memorial trees were like John Nicholas’s “plain tablet” in lieu of a stone monument for George Washington—a blank slate on which memory could be written and rewritten, as long as the hero remained alive in cultural tradition” (93). Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 341 (my italics); see also 121. In other words, these art objects provide the park with the sort of “edges” that Ed Casey describes as porous

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

“boundaries” and contrasts with exclusionary “borders.” See Edward S. Casey, “Borders and Boundaries: Edging into the Environment,” in Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy: Dwelling on the Landscape of Thought, ed. Suzanne L. Cataldi and William S. Hamrick (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007). For a more complete treatment of the notion of “edges,” see Casey’s The World on Edge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 261. Ibid., 341. Ibid., 338. Gilfoyle’s paraphrase of Kapoor’s comment can be found in Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 261. The “classical feel” presumably refers to the sculpture’s symmetry. Gilfoyle interview with Frank O. Gehry, March 31, 2003. For more on the tension between the Beaux Arts and contemporary styles in the planning of the park, see Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 123, 334. See chapter 4. Gilfoyle interview with John Bryan, August 10, 2004. Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 290; see also 291. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1990), 81, 236–40. Davis’s comment is centered on work Gehry did for Disney; it’s not clear that Davis would hold the same view about the bandshell in Millennium Park. Gilfoyle interview with John Bryan, August 10, 2004. Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 347. The profundities that Gilfoyle praises are given below. Gilfoyle interview with Jaume Plensa, October 10, 2003. Gilfoyle interview with Craig Webb, February 28, 2002. Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 125. Ibid., 341. Ibid., 345; see also 341–49. Gilfoyle interview with Jaume Plensa, October 10, 2003. See also Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 277. Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 291. Ibid., 285. Gilfoyle interview with Paul Gray, October 4, 2001. Gilfoyle interview with Michael Lash, director of public art at the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, February 21, 2001; see also Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 263. Quoted in Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 264. Quoted in ibid., 341. Gilfoyle interview with Thomas Beeby, June 12, 2003. Quotation from Robert Israel, in Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 308. Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 337. Ibid., 114. Note that the art object is an enunciation of the artist’s voice, or rather, of the voice(s) he or she is articulating in the creation of the art object. However, for the rest of us, and perhaps even for the artist in his or her subsequent reflective mode, the art object

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57.

58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

can suggest new meanings and even dynamically resist attempts to keep it within the limits of one’s discourse—it can be a quasi voice that is as much active as passive. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 145; see also 108, 140–41, 146. See also Deleuze’s work on Michel Foucault’s construal of the relation between the “sayable” and the “visible” in his Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 61, 67–69. Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1955), 10–14; and Edward S. Casey, Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xvi, also suggest a relation between discourse and the art object similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of reciprocal presupposition. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 307–8. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, with Mathieu Copeland (Paris: Les presses du reel, 2002), 57 (Bourriaud’s italics); see also 109. Ibid., 13. I introduced relational aesthetic more generally in chapter 4. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 26. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. I, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 20. See also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 208. See Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 83, 114, for this emphasis on the park as a place and his reference to Blair Kamin’s article, “A No Place Transformed into a Grand Place,” Chicago Tribune, July 18, 2004. Edward S. Casey argues that place is irreducible to any other terms and that each place has a “spirit,” in Getting Back into Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 15, 312–14. In The Multivoiced Body, I contend that “spirit” is “voices” and place is “content” (146–47). The two together constitute any public artwork, including, of course, Millennium Park. That dialogue has been continued in my chapter “Voices and the ‘Spirit of Place,’” in Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey: Giving Voice to Place, Memory, and Imagination, ed. Azucena Cruz-Pierre and Donald  A. Landes (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). See Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 125. Gilfoyle interview with John Bryan, January 31, 2001. See also Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 123–24. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 14 (Debord’s italics). Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, new ed. (New York: Verso, 2006), 187, 203. Ibid., 131; see also 180–83. Terry Smith, “Spectacle Architecture Before and After the Aftermath,” in Architecture: Between Spectacle and Use, ed. Anthony Vidler (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008), 5; see also 11.

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71.

72.

73. 74. 75.

76.

77. 78.

79.

80.

Terry Smith, “Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 4 (Summer 2006): 696. See also his The Architecture of Aftermath (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), especially his comments on “iconotypes” (179–80) and his contrast of this dimension of architecture with the latter’s “contemporaneity” and democratic aspects (15, 182, 179, 194–5, 197, 203). Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 93. We should note, however, that the Chicago World Fair of 1892 was also largely financed by private means, though under federal and state oversight. Given the greater awareness of racism built into many of our monuments and public names (see chapter  1 and its discussion of New Orleans’s Confederate statues), we should also realize that the Fair was officially a celebration of Christopher Columbus and his “discovery” of America. See Julie K. Rose, “World’s Columbian Exposition: The Official Fair—A History,” accessed September  10, 2017, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma96 /wce/history.html. Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 147. Ibid., 93–96, 147, 170. For further elaboration on these economic matters, see also 102–3; 349–50. Ibid., 104. The largest percentage of the donors, 36 percent, come from the finance, insurance, and real estate—FIRE—services; see 47–58 for a complete breakdown of the donors. Ibid., 126–27. Of the art in the park, only the Lurie Garden involved a formal competition, though this was the decision of the donor family and thus is still a reflection of private rather than public power (295); see also 350–51 for other, more favorable comments on public scrutiny of the art selection process—but none of these observations overturn the point that the selection was largely in the hands of the donors. Ibid., 348. Paul B. Jaskot, “Marxism and the Built Environment in the Twenty-First Century: Millennium Park in Chicago and the Question of Private and Public Space,” in As Radical as Reality Itself: Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century, ed. Matthew Beaumont, Andrew Hemingway, Esther Leslie, and John Roberts (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 130 (my italics). Ibid., 123–24. Gilfoyle also notes that this privatization has led some critics to question the democratic credentials of the park (Millennium Park, 345). Some of the specifics of this privatization, and the questions raised concerning it, are the park’s private police force, its closing at night (11 p.m. to 6 a.m.), the unlikelihood of it being “a space for political rallies,” the closing of the park for its inaugural celebration, and that the park’s “roll call of millionaires advertises not only the excess bounty of a society organized around the private market, but the private usurpation of public space.” Despite Gilfoyle’s replies to these criticisms (341–56), none of them address Jaskot’s specific argument concerning the “naturalization” of privatization. See the quotations from Kapoor in Homi K. Bhabha, “Anish Kapoor: Making Emptiness,” in Anish Kapoor, ed. Homi K. Bhabha, Anish Kapoor, and Pier Luigi Tazzi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 14, 18, 25, 30, 35–36. See also Bhabha’s comments, particularly, “the void as shape, as physical presence, may remain the

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81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

‘same’ but, as a sign of emptiness, that something ‘other’ that animates the material of true making, is always different” (27; see also 24, 31, 35). Anish Kapoor, “Anish Kapoor in Conversation with Nicholas Baume,” in Anish Kapoor: Past, Present, Future, ed. Nicholas Baume (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 50. In his “History, Memory, and Anish Kapoor” (ibid., 104–119), Partha Mitter makes a comment on some of Kapoor’s other works that also holds for Cloud Gate: “The void gives the impression of an irresistible force pulling the viewer into its vortex” (114). Interview with Anish Kapoor, in Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 265. Pier Luigi Tazzi, “Journey,” in Anish Kapoor, ed. Homi K. Bhabha, Anish Kapoor, and Pier Luigi Tazzi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 111. Mary Jane Jacob, “Being with Cloud Gate,” in Anish Kapoor: Past, Present, Future, ed. Nicholas Baume (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 131. Ibid., 132. Jacob adds that we also see “the transience and fleetingness of our life and that of others” in the sculpture’s reflective surface. Nicholas Baume, “Floating in the Most Peculiar Way,” in Anish Kapoor: Past, Present, Future, ed. Nicholas Baume (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 22. Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 272–73. Anish Kapoor, quoted in Baume, Anish Kapoor, 36; see also Baume, “Floating in the Most Peculiar Way,” 16. Kapoor, quoted in Baume, Anish Kapoor, 16; Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 261. See Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 345–46, for a summary of these entertainment-related criticisms. Jacob, “Being with Cloud Gate,” in Baume, Anish Kapoor, 126. Kapoor, “Anish Kapoor in Conversation with Nicholas Baume,” 39. Gilfoyle, Millennium Park, 347. In“Commitment” (Aesthetics and Politics, ed. and trans. Ronald Taylor [New York: Verso, 1977]), Theodor Adorno argues that art worthy of the name suggests that “[things] should be otherwise.” He adds that this lament or demand must be “mediated through nothing other than the form of the work itself, whose crystallization becomes an analogy to that other condition which should be” (194). I, however, am talking about the total artwork, the aesthetic and content dimensions constituting it, and so the “crystallization” in the case of Cloud Gate consists in the overlapping images (content/community) against the background of the sculpture’s spectacular surface (the aesthetic factor or form). It should be clear that the two dimensions in question are inseparable, each contributing to what the other is: splitting the form and content amounts to the destruction of the art object. Although the notion of the avant-garde in art has apparently been surpassed by contemporaneity and the other forms we discussed in chapter 4, Jochen Schulte-Sasse, in his foreword to Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant- Garde (trans. Michael Shaw [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002]), makes some comments that are pertinent to our revised version of Rancière’s aesthetic regime of art. He says that avant-garde aesthetics “reintegrates art into social praxis” and breaks with the “organic unity of the bourgeois institution of art” (xxxviii). More specifically, he argues that this form of aesthetics allows for “a

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95.

96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

concept of experience that proceeds from the discrepancy between concrete experience and socially prefabricated schemes of interpretation” (xliii; xxxviii). To bring about this discrepancy, avant garde artists create “unclosed, individual segments of art that open themselves to supplementary responses” and challenge their recipients to make them “an integrated part of [their] reality” (xxxviii). In other words, their work does not, like the “classical-romantic art of modern society” and other “detached and autonomous” art, end up serving paradoxically to “both protest and protect the status quo” (xxxv). In The Multivoiced Body, I provide a detailed description and account of how the trio of solidarity (unity), heterogeneity (difference), and fecundity (the ongoing production of new voices through the contestation for audibility among the others) make up society and are the basis for the principle of justice mentioned above as well as for a more profound notion of democracy. I also show how my view implies “economic democracy,” including democratization of the workplace, cultural group rights as well as individual rights, and, I would now add, housing areas as public rather than just private space. For a systematic treatment of the notion of economic democracy, see David Schweickart, Against Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), esp. 67–77, as well as Tony Smith, Globalization: A Systematic Marxian Account (Boston: Brill, 2006) and his related idea of “democratic socialism.” Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 29–30. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 57. Ibid., 58. See the extended discussion of public versus private space in chapter 2. See the discussion of Wodiczko’s The Homeless Projection in chapter 2.

7. THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF NEW YORK’S NATIONAL 9/11 MEMORIAL 1.

2.

3.

John Nicholas, Annals of Congress, 6th Cong., 2nd sess., December 5, 1800, cited in Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 42. All the images related to Krzystof Wodiczko’s City of Refuge in this chapter are in Krzysztof Wodiczko, City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial, ed. Mark Jarzombek and Mechtild Widrich (London: Black Dog, 2009). Those concerning Arad’s Reflecting Absence come from various sources as indicated for each one. Sonia Ospina, “Y Sigo Creyendo Que la Paz Es Possible. . . . ,” September 15, 2001, personal letter. I have also found Edward S. Casey’s eye witness reflections inspiring as well as philosophically insightful; see his “Public Memory in the Making: Ethics and Place in the Wake of 9/11,” Architecture, Ethics, and the Personhood of Place, ed. Gregory Caicco (University of New England Press, 2007), 1–28.

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4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

“WTC Memorial Jury Statement for Winning Design,” National September 11 Memorial and Museum, January 13, 2004. The statement is reprinted in full in James E. Young, “The Stages of Memory at Ground Zero,” in Religion, Violence, Memory, and Place, ed. Oren Baruch Stier and J. Shawn Landres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 230–33. Krzysztof Wodiczko, “A Memorial for September 11: A Proposal for New York City as International City of Refuge,” in City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial, ed. Mark Jarzombek and Mechtild Widrich (London: Black Dog, 2009), 17. Young, “Stages of Memory,” 216; see also 218. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), xii–xiii, 1. This power of the art object is clearly indicated when we remember that then U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell found it necessary to place a cover over the reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica in the vestibule of the United Nations. Officials realized that the Spanish artist’s famous anti-war painting would conflict with his speech attempting to justify the invasion of Iraq that already had been planned by the Bush administration. Wodiczko, “Memorial for September 11,” 12. Ibid., 12, 17–18. A similar complaint is offered by Michael Sorkin, Starting from Zero: Deconstructing Downtown New York (New York: Routledge, 2003), 123–27. Henry W. Pickford, The Sense of Semblance: Philosophical Analyses of Holocaust Art (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). Ibid., 1 (Pickford’s italics). See also his definition of “Holocaust artwork” (3). Ibid., 3–4, 5; see also 124, 139. Ibid., 77, 115. Ibid., 120, 121, 120–24. See also Young, Texture of Memory, esp. 48, for a characterization of “countermonument.” In that book, Young provides many helpful examples. For a view of Eisenman’s Memorial for the Murdered Jews, see the image, https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki /Memorial_to_the_Murdered_Jews_of_Europe #/media /File:Memorial_to_the _murdered_Jews_of_Europe.jpg. Pickford, Sense of Semblance, 115. Ibid., 125–26. Ibid., 121; see also 123, 125, 131, 135–36. The form of dialectic Pickford has in mind is Theodor Adorno’s “dialectic of aesthetic semblance” (4–5). Ibid., 3–4. Pickford will later speak of a moral “normative source” for the historical and aesthetic normative criteria; see Pickford, 204–9. Pickford’s fear of moralistic artwork distracting from historical context is echoed by a veteran who said of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial and its minimalism and aim of reconciliation that “Our healing here is therapeutic, but not historic,” and by another that “The memorial says exactly what we wanted to say about Vietnam—absolutely nothing.” Both quotes cited in Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 130.

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20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

In relation to the balance between the commercial and the commemorative aspects of the memorial, see Paul Goldberger, “Shaping the Void: How Successful Is the New World Trade Center?,” New Yorker, September 12, 2011, 78–80, esp. 78; Adam Gopnik, “Stones and Bones: Visiting the 9/11 Memorial and Museum,” New Yorker, July 7 and 14, 2014, 38–44, esp. 41; and the official National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum website, https://www.911memorial.org /. Young, “Stages of Memory,” 219. Michael Arad, “Reflecting Absence,” Places 21, no. 1 (2009): 44. See for example, WTC “Jury Statement,” 23, and Doss, Memorial Mania, 143, 145. Arad, “Reflecting Absence,” 44. Sam Lubell, “Inside the Jury: An Interview with James Young,” Architectural Record 192, no. 2 (February 2004), 24. Not all would agree that the “downward flow of the water” captures the idea of “implosion” (for example, the view of one of the anonymous referees for this book). More specifically, Arad states: “I started to consider a series of bands, which would run across the site. These would pick up significant edges—the edge of the pool and the surround—and would allow bands of trees to be arranged in perfect alignment, almost like beads on an abacus. But as you turned and faced this same arrangement from 90 degrees, the order would completely disappear, and it would resemble a forest. There was an intrinsic order underlying it, but it would not always be apparent. It seemed that was the way to bring landscaping to the project in a much lower register and a softer key that would not compete with the first move, to create the two voids” (“Reflecting Absence,” 48–49) As Arad comments, “I wanted to strike a balance between the needs of the memorial and of the city at large, and to try and heal this site. . . . But I also did not want to create a pattern on the plaza that would distract from or diminish the two voids” (“Reflecting Absence,” 47–48). Young, “Stages of Memory,” 218. Arad says this “serene and contemplative atmosphere” is the type of effect he wanted the plaza and memorial to have (“Reflecting Absence,” 47–48). Martin Filler, “A Masterpiece at Ground Zero,” New York Review of Books, October 27, 2011, 8. Ibid., 10. Marita Sturken (“The Aesthetics of Absence: Rebuilding Ground Zero,” American Ethnologist 31, no. 3 [2004]: 311–325) points out that Arad’s aesthetic of absence seems primarily to evoke the absence of the towers. . . . One could argue that the desire to rebuild the towers and the designation of voids where the towers once stood are essentially the same.” She also feels, however that “at least this emphasis [on mourning and reflection] counters the emphasis on commercialization” (323). We will soon see whether it “counters” this emphasis or merely holds it in suspension for a moment. Goldberger, “Shaping the Void,” 80. Gopnik, “Stones and Bones,” 39. For a similar but less provocative criticism, see Sturken, “The Aesthetics of Absence,” 322–23. Note that Filler, in “A Masterpiece at Ground

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34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

Zero,” in contrast to Gopnik, thinks the “overall dimensions” of the two pools are just right and seem as if “they might have been determined by an environmental sculptor of uncommon talent” (10). Michael Kimmelman, “A Minimal Future: How Much Is a Whole World?,” New York Times, April 2, 2004, cited in Anne K. Swartz, “American Art After September 11: A Consideration of the Twin Towers,” Symploke 14, no. 1–2 (2006): 91n15. See also G. Roger Denson, “Michael Arad’s 9/11 Memorial ‘Reflecting Absence’: More Than a Metaphor or a Monument,” Huffington Post, July 11, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/g-roger -denson/michael-arads-911-memoria_b_955454.html. This reiterates a criticism that Pickford makes of the sculpture by Käthe Kollwitz, Mother with her Dead Son, that was placed in Berlin’s Neue Wache’s memorial site. He argues that the fusion of mother and child depicted by the sculpture offers only the “fantasy” of a “subsuming reunion” between us and, as inscribed there, “the Victims of War and Tyranny” (Sense and Semblance, 116). Gregory Hoskins, “The Politics of Memory and the World Trade Center Memorial Site,” Journal of Social Philosophy 38, no.  2 (Summer 2007): 247. See also Tzvetan Todorov, “The Abuses of Memory,” trans. M. Chang, Common Knowledge 6 (1996): 13–15. Hoskins decries New York governor George Pataki’s politically based rejection of the International Freedom Center originally envisioned as part of the “living memorial” proposed by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. It advocated the linkage of past with present injustices included in the idea of exemplary memory (“Politics of Memory,” 251–52). Filler, “A Masterpiece at Ground Zero,” 10. In Arad’s own words, the memorial marks only “with absence, creating a significant and clear void, finding a place for people to gather and contemplate” (“Reflecting Absence,” 50). Doss, Memorial Mania, 127, 130. See Savage’s Monument Wars for a description of the transgressive qualities of Lin’s memorial as a monument to the Vietnam War and a space of reconciliation in the context of the meaning of the war for U.S. Americans (265–79), as well as how it faces a dilemma because of whom the list of names on its walls exclude (279–84). Doss, Memorial Mania, 130–31. Ibid., 145. See Dominick LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical Inquiry 25 (Summer 1999): 698. Maureen Dowd, “Unbearable Lightness of Memory,” New York Times, November 30, 2003, cited in Doss, Memorial Mania, 146. Gopnik, “Stones and Bones,” 44. Katie McFadden, “Tourists Show Disrespect and Treat the 9/11 Memorial in New York as a Playground,” Travelers Today, September 4, 2012, http://www.travelerstoday.com /articles /2926/20120904 /tourists -show-disrespect-and-treat-9–11-memorial-in-new -york-city-like-a-playground-september-11th-ground-zero-terrorist-attack-reflecting -pools-victims-tourism-tourists.htm. Ekaterina V. Haskins and Justin P. DeRose, “Reflections on Commemoration(s) of 9/11,” Space & Culture 6, no. 4 (November 2003): 377–93. For other examples that reinforce

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47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

Gopnik’s and Haskins and DeRose’s valorization of democratic street art, see Ekaterina Haskins, “Between Archive and Participation: Public Memory in a Digital Age,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37, no. 4 (2007): 401–22; and Haidy Geismar, “Building Sites of Memory: The Ground Zero Sonic Memorial Sound Walk,” Fabrications 15, no.  2 (December 2005). Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 14. Young, Texture of Memory, 6. Ibid., 13 (Young’s italics). Ibid., 14. Wodiczko, “Memorial for September 11,” 28. See also Patricia C. Phillips, “Creating Democracy: A Dialogue with Krzysztof Wodiczko,” Art Journal 62, no. 4. (Winter 2003): 32–47. Wodiczko, “Memorial for September 11,” 12. Many other commentators on the 9/11 memorial have emphasized the need to balance both unity and diversity. See, for example, Anne K. Swartz, “American Art After September 11: A Consideration of the Twin Towers,” Symploke 14, no. 1–2 (2006): 81–97; and Haskins, “Between Archive and Participation, 4, 401–22. Wodiczko, “Memorial for September 11,” 16. Ibid., 19–20. Ibid., 34–35. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 36, 37. Ibid., 42. Krzysztof Wodiczko, “Memorial Plans,” in City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial, ed. Mark Jarzombek and Mechtild Widrich (London: Black Dog, 2009), 87. The planned forum includes mechanically moveable speaker platforms that permit up-close debate when desired and also contain small auditoria for roundtable debates. This arrangement maximizes the variety of rhetorical and other styles of interaction that “the Heads and Members of Delegations” might choose to use in expressing their points of view. An “Urban Communicating Center,” a smaller half-sphere, sits above the forum and facilitates communication with institutions, organizations, urban centers, and other points in New York City related to the City of Refuge’s memorial activities. Large spaces around the forum accommodate special events and gatherings as well as “special ‘Conflict Transformation’ ritualistic events and other cultural activities related to peacemaking.” Ibid. The lower half of the planned globe also consists of various sizes of circular and spherically shaped facilities. The situation room is the most important of these. Its function is to display pre-, current-, and post-conflict zones. At the center of this room is a smaller globe with dynamic audiovisual display. This allows the visitors to obtain two perspectives on the display: one from outside the globe (that is, from a spiral observing deck that mimics the Earth’s orbit) and the other from inside the very center of the globe. These twin perspectives enhance an “engaged learning of the conflict situations and troubled world zones.” Below and around the situation room, Wodiczko proposes

3 02  7. T H E P O LITICAL AE STH ETIC S O F TH E N ATI ON A L 9/ 1 1 MEMOR I A L

61.

62.

63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

a “Conflict Transformation Center” and a “Peace Building Institute” with facilities for local, regional, and global research. In the underwater part of the globe, Wodiczko recommends a number of facilities for legal and more specialized ways of studying the world situation and undertaking interventions that have healing as their objective. As Kirk Savage suggests, Wodiczko’s memorial discourse rejects Arad’s minimalist aesthetic and the “private reckoning” of trauma and recovery to which it restricts itself. Instead, it sets up a “collective discussion” or group interrogation of the international and other political meanings of 9/11. See Kirk Savage, “The Impossible Monument,” in City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial, ed. Mark Jarzombek and Mechtild Widrich (London: Black Dog, 2009), 56. More generally, Savage points out that most memorials “inscribe the past in a fixed container,” the better “to make authoritative statements about the nature and significance of the historical event.” But they thereby “seal themselves off from the processes of debate and revision and curtail the possibilities for active response” of the sort that Wodiczko desires (58–59). For more specifics, see my “Marx: Historical Materialism, Ethics, and Communication” in An Encyclopedia of Communication Ethics, ed. Ronald C. Arnett, Annette M. Holba, and Susan Mancino (New York: Peter Lang, forthcoming). Immanuel Wallerstein, “America and the World: The Twin Towers as Metaphor,” in Understanding September 11, ed. Craig J. Calhoun, Paul Price, and Ashley Timmer (New York: New Press, 2002), 345–60, cited in Stuart J. Kaplan, “Visualizing Absence: The Function of Visual Metaphors in the Effort to Make a Fitting Response to 9/11,” in Readings in Propaganda and Persuasion: New and Classic Essays, ed. Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell (New York: Sage, 2005), 243–57. Doss, Memorial Mania, 144. Gopnik, “Stones and Bones,” 38–39. Ibid., 38. Terry Smith, The Architecture of Aftermath (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006). 197. Young, “Stages of Memory,” 218. Arad, “Reflecting Absence,” 50. Marita Sturken, “Memorializing Absence,” in Understanding September 11, ed. Craig J. Calhoun et al. (New York: New Press, 2002), 322–23. Doss, Memorial Mania, 174–75. Wodiczko, City of Refuge, 26, 23–27. Art historian Barbara McCloskey points out to me that there is one sense in which City of Refuge may be said to have failed in resisting capital: the very fact of its not having been constructed. Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 146. Anthony Vidler, ed., Architecture: Between Spectacle and Use (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008), viii. Doss, Memorial Mania, 122. Ibid.

7. T H E P O L IT ICAL AE STH ETIC S O F TH E NATION A L 9/ 1 1 MEMOR I A L303

77.

78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87.

88. 89.

90. 91. 92.

Gopnik, “Stones and Bones,” 42. See also Aaron Lazare, On Apology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 41, and Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2003), 53. Similarly, Doss states that the “dehistoricizing” of 9/11 as an exceptional event and “uniquely American trauma” tends to “‘naturalize’ terrorism’s violence as unpredictable and indiscriminate, as inexplicable actions by unknown outsiders that can only be ‘endured’ in America” (Memorial Mania, 122). See the official National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum website (http://www .911memorial.org /museum) and Filler, “A Masterpiece at Ground Zero,” 10. Pickford, Sense of Semblance, 123. Gopnik, “Stones and Bones,” 39–40. Cited in Savage, Monument Wars, 288–89; see also Sturken, “Memorializing Absence,” 323. Patricia Cohen, “At 9/11 Museum, Talking through an Identity Crisis,” New York Times, June 3, 2012. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation guidelines stipulate that the Museum should present “a factual presentation of what is known of the terrorists, including their methods and means of preparation.” Quoted in Cohen, “At 9/11 Museum,” 20. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 21. My personal observation at the museum. But see also Gopnik, “Stones and Bones”: “the curators show the killers’ faces at a lower level and on a smaller scale than those of their victims, sensitivity taking the form of primitive superstition” (40). Jim Dwyer, Kevin Flynn, and Ford Fessenden, “Fatal Confusion: A Troubled Emergency Response; 9/11 Exposed Deadly Flaws in Rescue Plan,” New York Times, July 7, 2002. Cohen, “At 9/11 Museum,” 21. For a catalogue and critical discussion of the disagreements surrounding the aspects of the official 9/11 memorial that concerned design, financing, and family or group sensitivities, see Doss, Memorial Mania, 168–76. On financing issues—such as illegal sources of funds, real estate speculation, and related problems— see Filler, “A Masterpiece at Ground Zero,” 8; Joe Nocera, “9/11’s White Elephant: The Memorial Will Be an Office Building Only the Government Could Love,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 29, 2011, and, with respect to security concerns countermanding the aesthetic and commemorative demands of the New York 9/11 memorial, see Adrian Parr, “One Nation Under Surveillance: turning striated space inside out,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 11, no. 1 (April): 200, and Joel McKim, “Agamben at Ground Zero: A Memorial Without Content,” Theory, Culture & Society 25, no. 5 (2008): 83–103. Gopnik, “Stones and Bones,” 40. Philip Kinnicot, “The 9/11 Memorial Museum Doesn’t just Display Artifacts, It Ritualizes Grief on a Loop,” Washington Post, June 7, 2014. Chris Fielder, “9/11 Memorial Insults Arabic Speakers,” Kansas City Star, May 27, 2014. http://www.kansascity.com/opinion/readers-opinion/guest-commentary/article 419268/911-memorial-insults-Arabic-speakers.html. See also Wikipedia, s.v. “National

3 0 4  7. T H E P O LITICAL AE STH ETIC S O F TH E N ATI ON A L 9/ 1 1 MEMOR I A L

93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

September 11 Memorial & Museum: Controversies,” last modified May 4, 2018, 23:39, https: //en .wikipedia .org /wiki /National_September_11_Memorial_%26_Museum #Controversies_2. Controversy also has surrounded a 9/11 Museum film, The Rise of Al Qaeda; see Sharon Otterman, “Film at 9/11 Museum Sets Off Clash Over Reference to Islam, New York Times, April 23, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24 /nyregion /interfaith-panel-denounces -a-9–11-museum-exhibits -portrayal- of-islam .html?mcubz=0. Todd Fine, “Memorializing 9/11, Remembering ‘Little Syria,’ ” Inculseum, September 4, 2013, https://incluseum.com/2013/09/04/memorializing-911-remembering-little-syria/. For the idea of “whiteness,” see George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America, 2nd ed. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). Savage, Monument Wars, 312. Doss, Memorial Mania, 180; see also 180–85. For a thorough coverage of the views, background, and roles of the 9/11 perpetrators, see Terry McDermott, Perfect Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It (New York: Harper, 2005). In summary form, McDermott characterizes the hijackers in terms of their radical Al Quds faith and resentment of Western economic and cultural manipulation of the Middle East: “Throughout the 1990s, a new radical Islam was being promulgated in [mosques around the world]. It was a fire that had been building for decades, fed by the Islamic revolution in Iran and fanned by the wars that came later in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Bosnia. This new Islam was based in equal parts on reverence for Qur’anic text and deep resentment at the place of Islam in the contemporary world” (4; other useful passages for understanding the motives of the hijackers are located on 31, 35, 88, 94– 95, 130–31, 133, 210, 218–19, 230–32, 232, 256–57, 268–69). McKim, “Agamben at Ground Zero,” 83, 90. See Doss, Memorial Mania, 133. Filler, “A Masterpiece at Ground Zero,” 8, 10. Gopnik, “Stones and Bones,” 39. Filler, “A Masterpiece at Ground Zero,” 10. See Savage, “Impossible Monument,” 58. In a comparison of Maya Lin’s minimalistic Vietnam War Memorial and Wodiczko’s “City of Refuge 9/11 Memorial,” Savage points out that Lin considers her monument to be a “private reckoning” between the spectator and the names inscribed on the black marble wall of her memorial. The names ask the spectator to honor their bearers and “reckon with their deaths.” In contrast, Wodiczko’s memorial urges its spectators to join a “collective discussion” about the meaning of 9/11. This verbal interaction is to take place from the perspective of the perpetrators as well as of the victims (Savage, “Impossible Monument,” 57). For further clarification of his remarks on Lin, and of his further point that, despite what Lin says, her memorial also encourages collective interaction on the part of the spectators, see Savage’s Monument Wars, 270–71, 280. Also, Doss points out that names can bear witness but they can also, if not provided with the “how” and the “why” of their presence,” be “reduced to a deceitful narrative of national consensus” (Memorial Mania, 152). More generally,

7. T H E P O L IT IC AL AE STH ETIC S O F TH E NATION A L 9/ 1 1 MEMOR I A L305

104. 105. 106. 107.

108. 109.

110. 111. 112.

113. 114. 115. 116. 117.

118. 119. 120. 121. 122.

“rather than reckoning with the intentionality of terrorism, which aims to violently destabilize political and economic systems deemed exploitative by its perpetrators, naming practices in America’s 9/11 memorials frame a unifying narrative of national innocence” (152). Kirk Savage, “Impossible Monument,” 60; see also 56. Wodiczko, “A Memorial for September 11,” 37. Savage, “Impossible Monument,” 60. See Daniel Bertrand Monk: “The Politics of Pseudo-Morphosis,” in City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial, ed. Mark Jarzombek and Mechtild Widrich (London: Black Dog). Monk suggests that “Wodiczko’s oeuvre breaks faith with its own medium—art—which differs from philosophy because it can only tell the truth in the form of illusion” (78). I  think that what we said about the three aspects of Wodiczko’s aesthetic-political design has already shown how artistic force—the aura—is effectively present in The City of Refuge. Savage, “Impossible Monument,” 60. Ibid. In the context of “anti-oracular monument,” Savage explicitly refers to my use of “oracle” and “voices” and implicitly to conversations we have had on these matters. From all my references in this book to Savage’s work, it should be clear that I have learned a great amount from him. McKim, “Agamben at Ground Zero,” 83. Ibid., 90. Giorgio Agamben, “On Potentiality,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 179–80. Agamben, “On Potentiality,” 181. Ibid., 184. Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 36–37. Ibid., 99–100. Ibid., 101. This experience would seem to be very much like what we discussed in chapter 4: the erratic white specks that Fra Beato Angelico purposely flecked onto the faux marble base of his Madonna of the Shadows; the white spots that, centuries later, Georges Didi-Huberman experienced in “a present” that saw itself “stopped in its tracks and simultaneously in the experience of the gaze.” However, Didi-Huberman takes this experience, abetted by his knowledge and love of Jackson Pollock’s paintings, to indicate an anachronicity that indicates heterochronicity rather than the homogenous tradition that Agamben says was shared by the Greeks. Ibid., 70. Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 36–37. Ibid., 58, 102; see also 70, 72, 110–11. Ibid., 106–7. Ibid., 109.

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123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128.

129. 130. 131.

132. 133. 134. 135. 136.

137. 138. 139.

140. 141. 142. 143. 144.

Ibid., 108–12. Ibid., 114. Ibid., 115. Ibid., 114. McKim, “Agamben at Ground Zero,” 93. Giorgio Agamben, “Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 206. Ibid., 207. Ibid., 209. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 65. Quoted in Agamben, “Pardes,” 210–11. See also Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 26–27. In the example, Derrida is speaking of “presence” as Heidegger’s rendition of metaphysical being and of “excess” as that which exceeds that meaning “before or beyond Greece.” The “trace,” again, is the relationship between these two relata. Agamben, “Pardes,” 212. Ibid., 214. Ibid., 217. Ibid., 215. Ibid., 216 (Agamben’s italics). See McKim, “Agamben at Ground Zero,” for comments on Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” protest, gesture, and other evidences that Agamben offers as manifestations of pure potentiality (95–96). Agamben, “Pardes,” 218. Ibid., 216. Ibid., 218–19. Agamben does not criticize Derrida explicitly in this discussion of his work, but I take it as clear that the critical reference to deconstruction here is aimed at Derrida. More generally, Agamben is locating the “passivity” of pure potentiality in language rather than in what is designated by the non-totalizing “metaphysical name” of Derrida’s notion of différance (209) and the primacy it assigns to the temporality of “to come.” See Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 189–91; see also Georgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 129–30, and Daniel McLaughlin, “From Voice to Infancy: Georgio Agamben on the Existence of Language,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 18, no. 4 (2013): 157–58, 161. Ibid., 219. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 43–44. Ibid., 9–11; see also 72, 74. Ibid., 28–29, 39 (Agamben’s italics). Ibid., 40, 54–55. This “idea” is the “totality of [a singularity’s] possibilities,” and the singularity’s relation to it or “bordering” of “all possibilities” amounts to a “threshold,” to an always empty “external space” of possibility that constitutes our experience of

8 . PU BLIC ART AS AN ACT O F CIT I ZEN SHI P307

145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156.

157.

158. 159.

being-within and outside” ourselves, a “pure exteriority” or “pure exposure” (66–67; see also 75–77, 92). Ibid., 44; see also 31, 39. Ibid., 50; see also 64–65, 79–80. Ibid., 9–10. Ibid., 18, 24–25. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 85. Ibid., 86, 87. McKim, “Agamben at Ground Zero, 97. Ibid., 97–98. Ibid., 98–99. Ibid., 99. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 129; see also McLaughlin, “From Voice to Infancy,” 161–62, and Giorgio Agamben, “The Idea of Language,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 42–43, 45–47. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 828–31 (Book IX, 1050b–1051a). See also Joseph Owens, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1963), 406–9. Agamben, “Pardes,” 216. Peg Birmingham develops this sort of argument in great detail in her “Law’s Violent Judgment: Does Agamben Have a Political Aesthetics?,” New Centennial Review 14, no. 2 (2014): 99–110.

8. PUBLIC ART AS AN ACT OF CITIZENSHIP 1.

2.

3.

Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 279, and his Democracy and Political Policy, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 18. Crispin Sartwell suggests that even “political ideologies and constitutions are aesthetic systems” (Crispin Sartwell, Political Aesthetics [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010], 2). This is perhaps true, but unless the force of this aesthetics goes beyond the well-worn example of “table leg”—that is, a phrase that has lost its original metaphoric value (the supports of the table are like our legs)—it falls short of the sort of public art and its aesthetics that we are considering. Everything may have a design that can be called aesthetic, but most things do not have aesthetic force for us within their usual context, including our reduction of them to their functional value. Some of these other artworks, along with the two I just mentioned, are: Jacques Derrida’s and Peter Eisenman’s contribution to Parc de la Villette (chapter  4); Robert Smithson’s The Spiral Jetty (chapter  4); Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (chapter  6);

3 0 8 8 . P U BLIC ART AS AN ACT OF CI TI ZEN SHI P

4.

5.

6.

Georges Didi-Huberman on Fra Beato Angelico’s Madonna of the Shadows (chapter 4); Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence (chapter  7); Krzysztof Wodiczko’s earlier Homeless Projection (chapter  2) and his later City of Refuge (chapter  7); and Jacques Rancière’s reflections on the Juno Ludovisi (chapter 5) and his and Alain Badiou’s disputes over the poetry of Mallarmé. Our consideration of all these helped suggest that the three political virtues should be included as flexible guidelines in our criterion of public art as an act of citizenship. In chapter 2, I compared the use of “oracle” here with that of the ancient Greeks. What I now say about the origin of oracles is mentioned in chapter 5 in the context of criticizing some of Badiou’s ideas. I enlarge on this origin in Fred Evans, The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 206–11, 270–72. Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Doss does more than catalogue memorials critical or otherwise; she shows how they are “archives of public affect,” the material embodiment of different types of “feeling and emotions” (13). For the issue of immigration, see Edward Casey and Mary Watkins’s discussion of Alejandro Santiago’s sculptures, 2505 Migrantes, and their relation to the wall between the United States and Mexico: Edward S. Casey and Mary Watkins, Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 212–15. For resistance to the gun lobby and gun violence, see Susanne Slavick’s traveling, multimedia group exhibition, Unloaded (Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, 2015) as well as her piece Romantic Resistance, and that of Andrew Johnson’s Rehearsal in the same exhibition. This range of resistance also includes granting ethical status to natural formations as a means of protecting them from destruction for entrepreneurial reasons; see also Fred Evans, “ ‘Unnatural Participations’: MerleauPonty, Deleuze, and Environmental Ethics,” Philosophy Today 54 (2010): 142–52. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others, vol. 2 of Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 (New York: New Press, 1998), 385. It is the memory that remains of the multivoiced body—the creative interplay among its voices and its three political virtues—when it is dominated by an oracle. No matter how pervasive an oracle can become, it must retain some voices other than its own. It declares that voice to be its enemy and uses its possible suppression to justify the oracle’s own ascendancy. The falsely demonized voice will usually be one that exemplifies the heterogeneity and fecundity of society’s multivoiced body. Solidarity will have already been taken over and homogenized by the oracle. The continued existence of the voice the oracle condemns, however, can remind the members of society of the creative interplay among voices in which they used to participate. This counter-memory can then be the source of resistance to the nihilistic oracles that attempt to repress all traces of the voices related dialogically or agonistically in a democracy. We also need to remember that “agonistic” does not mean “antagonistic.” As we saw in chapter 3 (in relation to Jacques Derrida’s notion of “democracy to come”), voices that relate agonistically to each other valorize the dialogic space of democratic society and agree to keep it open while they contest one another over its meaning.

AP P E ND IX 30 9

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France: 1982–83, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, vol. 1, The Government of Self and Others (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 6, see also 71, 301. Ibid., 65–66, 156. Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France: 1983–84, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, vol. 2, The Courage of Truth (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 12–13. Foucault, vol. 1 of The Government of Self and Others, 203. Foucault, vol. 2 of The Government of Self and Others, 302–3. Ibid., 312. Ibid., 174. Leonard Lawlor has written a systematic and original use of parrhesia in his From Violence to Speaking Out (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016); his book constitutes a hallmark treatment of this topic. George Yancy has also used this notion in the context of race theory; see his Look, A White! Philosophical Essays on Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), esp. 66, 130, 143. Andrew M. Shanken, “Guilt Architecture,” in City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial, ed. Mark Jarzombek and Mechtild Widrich (London: Black Dog), 69. Cf. Kirk Savage, “The Impossible Monument,” in City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial, ed. Mark Jarzombek and Mechtild Widrich (London: Black Dog) 56. I use amor fati (love of fate) in the Nietzschean sense of a spontaneous affirmation of the worldly setting of our lives; in our context, our dialogic and, by extension, democratic existence. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1974), sec. 276. Evans, Multivoiced Body. Savage, “The Impossible Monument,” 60. Geoffrey Bennington has argued compellingly for a Derridian version of this sort of self-interruption in his Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000). This may sound very close to Derrida’s idea of “negotiations” between the unconditional injunction of democracy to come and the conditional democracies. But Derrida’s negotiations are motivated by what he took as the autoimmunity of democracy. Ours are motivated by the opposite of this: by the realization of democracy’s “open space” requirement and its intrinsic reiteration. For a more detailed statement of this point, see Evans, Multivoiced Body, 260–68.

APPENDIX: BADIOU ON “BEING AND THE VOID” 1. 2.

3.

Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005). Ibid., 29, 45, 57. If every multiple in multiple a is presented in multiple b, and vice versa, a and b are identical; if a multiple in a or in b is lacking in the other, then a and b are different (61). We will see later that one very special multiple is an empty set and thus has no further multiples. Ibid., 4, 13–14, 23–24.

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

Ibid., 6. Ibid., 7, 57–58, 60, 61. See Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 63, 63–64. Badiou, Being and Event, 6–7, 8 (Badiou’s italics). Ibid., 24. In his later Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), Badiou calls “situation” a “world” (99). Badiou, Being and Event, 25, 24. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 24; see also 504, 514, and 519. Hallward is particularly clear about the one and the effect of its count: “The one is not, but every presented multiplicity is presented as one-ified. Such one-ification does not affect the be-ing of what it counts, which remains pure (or ‘inconsistent’) multiplicity. But it constrains, and constrains absolutely, every presenting of be-ing. Nothing can be presented that is not presented as one” (Subject to Truth, 63). Badiou, Being and Event, 52. Ibid., 55, 56. Ibid., 27, 29; see also, 57. Ibid.. 30, 31; see also 33. Ibid., 43, 48, 52. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 56. Ibid., 58–59 (Badiou’s italics). Ibid., 66–67. Hallward, Subject to Truth, 66. Ibid., 102; see also 64–66. See Badiou, Being and Event, 86–89, for the set-theory formulas that illustrate the sort of universality and the void-subset relation that makes the latter possible, and pages  81–84 for his distinction between “belonging” and “included.” See also Hallward, Subject to Truth, 117. Badiou, Being and Event, 184–87. See also Hallward, Subject to Truth, 87–88. Badiou, Being and Event, 87–88, 89. Hallward in Subject to Truth emphasizes Badiou’s claim that he has a fully univocal ontology because, via the name of the void, “being and nothingness are the same thing” and the ontology does not rely on an entity, figure, or force that transcends the multiple (102). Ibid., 93 (Badiou’s italics). Ibid., 94, 95. Ibid., 95, 96, 107, 109. See also Ed Pluth, Alain Badiou (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 55.

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INDEX

absence, 189–91, 194–95, 300n38; aesthetics of, 204, 299n31; architecture of, 85. See also Reflecting Absence abstract machine, 35–36 abstract monuments, 187 abstract painting, 144 act of citizenship. See citizenship, act of actuality, 218–19, 228–29 ADC. See American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee adolescents, 124 Adorno, Theodor, 296n94, 298n18 adventitiousness, 90 adversarial relations, in public sphere, 28 Aeschylus, 142 aestheticism, Kantian, 94–95 aesthetics: of absence, 204, 299n31; anachronicity and, 98–99; of City of Refuge, 197–98, 200, 216; conceptuality and, 95; contemporary art and, 82; context in, 36–37; degradation of, 106–8; democracy and, 18; and didactic dimension, 42; discourse, 37; ethics and, 107–8, 215–16; of globalization, 88; masculinist, 14–15; modern, 221; oracles

of, 36–38, 185–88; public art and, 15–22, 152; of Reflecting Absence, 192, 196–97; regime of art, 142–52, 176–79, 186, 218; relational, 143–44, 166–70; on rules of art, 141; seamlessness and, 266n61. See also art; inaesthetics; politics, aesthetics and aesthetic time, 103–4 aesthetic utopia, 143 Agamben, Giorgio, 22, 214; on being-inlanguage, 226–28; on capitalism, 224–25; The Coming Community by, 224–26; on Derrida, 222–24, 306n139; on différance, 222–23; on experimentum linguae, 222; McKim on, 217–18, 222, 226–27; on National September 11 Memorial, 217–30; “Pardes” by, 222, 224; on pure language, communication, 222–24; on pure mediality, coming community and, 224–26; on pure potentiality, 218–19, 227–30; on pure transmissibility, 219–22; on singularity, 224–25 agent, subject as, 128 agon, 263n18 agonistic democracy, 28, 44–45, 77

328IND E X

agonistic memory, 197 agoraphobia, 263n17 Aher, 222, 224 Allende, Salvador, 208, 260n43 alterity, voices of, 75–80 American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), 211 American citizenship, 4–5 American exceptionalism, 195; City of Refuge and, 212–14; oracle of, 185, 206–14; Reflecting Absence and, 207–12 Americanist, Christian world view, 211 amor fati, 244, 246, 309n17 anachronicity, 82, 281n62; of art objects, 98–99, 104; of contemporary art, 98; euchronistic consonance and, 99–100, 102; of Fra Angelico, 99–101; heterochronicity and, 92, 103–5 anachronic time, 103 anachronism: montage of heterogeneous times forming, 101; sovereignty of, 165 anesthetics, 150. See also inaesthetics antagonism, 28 anti-monument, 6–7 anti-oracle, 38–44, 305n109 Arab Americans, 211–12 Arabic language, 211 Arad, Michael, 181, 184, 299n29, 299n31, 299nn26–27, 300n38. See also Reflecting Absence architecture: of absence, 85; contemporaneity of art and, 90–91; dialogue, 162–63; interrogative, 91; of language, 42–43; postmodern, 85; spectacle, 171; of White City, 154–55. See also counter-architecture Aristotle, 223–24, 228, 269n15 arkhe, 129–30 art: aesthetic regime of, 142–52, 176–79, 186, 218; anachronicity of, 98–99, 104; autonomy of, 145–47; avant-garde, 140–41, 178–79; capital and, 16–17, 173; classical views of, 141; conceptual, 94–95, 97;

contemporary, 15–16, 82; democracy and, 22, 49; freedom to make, 97; Hegel on, 260n41; language of, 148; materiality of, 146–47; modern, 145; modernism, 92–93; non-art and, 146–47, 149–50, 185; participatory, 83; Plato on, 140; politics and, 85, 144, 147, 150; postconceptual, 94–97; post-utopian, 143; premodern, 220; pure transmissibility and, 219–22; rhythm and, 219–20; Romanticism, 140; singularity of, 143–44, 147; transmissibility of, 220; truth and, 140–43, 219–20, 289n151. See also contemporaneity, of art; plain tablet; public art art history, 99–102 Artificial Hells (Bishop), 107 art in public, 9. See also public art artistic radicality, 143–44 art objects: anachronicity of, 98–99, 104; hybridity of, 165–66; interactivity of, 169; in Millennium Park, 178–80; organizing around, 169–70, 201; power of, 298n8; voices in, 169, 293n56 artworks: aesthetic, political dimensions of, 150–52, 180, 185–86, 229–30; as inquiries, 142; truth procedure of, 142 assembly democracies, 49–50 audibility, 24 Augé, Marc, 89 authoritarianism, 231–32 autocracy, 12–13, 24, 45–46, 81–82 autoimmunity, of democracy, 71–75, 78, 81, 136–37, 275n84, 275n90 autonomy, 145–47. See also full autonomy avant-garde art, 140–41, 178–79 Baca, Judith, 3, 7, 66, 238 Badiou, Alain, 22, 107–10; Being and Event by, 249, 252–53, 284nn29–30; on democracy, 111, 123–28, 286n95; Derrida and, 137–38; on the event, 116–17, 284nn32–33, 285n55; on evental truth,

IND E X 3 29

120; on evil, 122; on the good, 121–22; idea of democracy, 125–28; inaesthetics of, 140–42; on Marx, 284n37; mathematical ontology of, 114, 249; McKim on, 218; on metastructure, 112–13, 131; on multiple-being, 111, 249; on multiplicities, 111–12, 115, 249–50; on the other, 121, 131; on poetry, 149; Rancière and, 135, 147–50, 153; Rawls and, 285n62; Saint Paul by, 111, 113–14, 117, 253; on set theory, 112, 136; on virtues, of subject, 119–20; on the void, 251–53. See also political ontology Bakhtin, Mikhail, 31 Baldwin Park, 3, 3–4, 23 basic structure of society, 56–57, 270n25 Baume, Nicholas, 175–76 bearing witness, 215 Beeby, Thomas, 158 being, 111–13; event and, 114; the void, as name of, 251. See also multiple-being; ontology Being and Event (Badiou), 249, 252–53, 284nn29–30 being-in-language, 226–28, 242 being-there-together, 134 Benjamin, Walter, 17, 221 Berlin Holocaust Memorial, 85 Bishop, Claire, 106–8, 150–51, 282nn93–94 Blanqui, Auguste, 13 body. See dialogic body; multivoiced body Bolshevism, 124 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 169 Bruegel, Pieter, 105 Bruyère, Jean-Michael, 89 Bryan, John, 155, 157–58, 166, 172 Burnham, Daniel, 153–58, 160, 166 Butler, Judith, 261n2 capital: art and, 16–17, 173; finance, 171–72; Marx on, 264n28; oracle of, 196, 202–6, 213; presence of, 204; resisting, 302n72; spectacle and, 180, 185

capitalism, 27, 97–98, 113, 180, 202, 204–5, 213, 224–25 capitalist-parliamentarianism, 111 Casey, Edward, 170, 264n21, 264n34, 292n28, 294n57, 294n64, 297n3, 308n5 categorization, 96–97 catharsis, 141, 214–17 Cayton, Mary Kupiec, 262n13 chaosmos, 160 “Charity” (statue), 29 Chicago. See Millennium Park Chile, 208 Chomsky, Noam, 264n38 Christ. See Jesus Christianity, 111, 113–14, 143, 211 cinema, 150 circle of candles, 183–85 circularity, of political liberalism, 63–64 cities of refuge, 197–98, 215–16 citizen, 123; equal, free, 53–54; society and, 270n25; of state, 112–13 citizenship: American, 4–5; democracy and, 139; legal, 10; qualities of, 138–39 citizenship, act of: City of Refuge as, 229; The Homeless Projection as, 44–47; Millennium Park as, 177–81; public art as, 7–11, 14–15, 22, 48, 125, 128–29, 139, 147, 236 Citizens United, 204, 261n5 City of Refuge, 46, 153, 181, 183, 184–85, 188; as act of citizenship, 229; aesthetic aura of, 197–98, 200, 216; American exceptionalism and, 212–14; dialogic character of, 213–14; ethical imagination of, 198, 200; forum of, 301n59; geometric, performative aspects of, 200; globe of, 301n60; guilt and, 243–44; interior, model plans of, 200; Monk on, 305n107; oracle, of capital and, 205–6; political meaning of, 201; proposed cite of, 199; Savage on, 245, 302n61; therapeutic value of, 215–17; voices of, 217. See also oracles civic art, 7

3 30 IND EX

civil society, 27 Civil War memorials, 1, 5 Cixous, Hélène, 75 classical liberalism, 27 Cloud Gate, 157, 161–62, 163, 167, 174, 213–14; aesthetic regime of art and, 176–77; identity and, 175; interconnectedness of, 174–75; interior, 174; mirror of, 176; as non-memorial, 188; resisting oracles, 173–77, 216; surface of, 173, 175–77, 185–86; voices of, 179, 240–41 collective dialectical unity, 97 Coming Community, The (Agamben), 224–26 commemoration, 195–97, 201 commercialism, 206 common good, 25–26 communication: open, 242; pure language and, 222–24; of singularities, 225; Tiananmen Square and, 226; Wodiczko on, 227–28 communicative intelligences, 136 communism, 17, 123–25 communitarianism, 61, 113–14, 248, 268n7, 269n16, 285n62 community: coming, 224–26; of equals, 133–34; free, 146; new, 145, 147; open, 91; politics and, 225–26 comprehensive doctrine of the good, 60–62 comprehensive doctrines, 58–59 conceptual art, 94–95, 97. See also postconceptual art Confederate monuments, 1–2, 11, 13, 15, 23, 231, 238–39 conflict, 43 consensus, 57–58, 128, 131, 270n26, 285n62 considered judgments, of justice, 54 considered moral judgments, 268n13 consistent multiplicity, 112, 125 constitutional democracy, 58 contemporaneity: adventitiousness of, 90; of Derrida, 222; as encounter, with the other, 83–84; as ontology, of the present,

88–89; political dimension of, 90; as speculative proposition, 94; temporality and, 90 contemporaneity, of art: architecture and, 90–91; Derrida on, 83–87; Osborne on, 95, 97; Smith on, 87–92, 94 contemporaneity to come, 82–84 contemporary art, 15–16, 86, 171; aesthetics and, 82; anachronicity of, 98; globalization, inequity, spectacle in, 87–88; postconceptual art and, 94–97; temporality in, 89, 94 content, discourse and, 35–36 context, in aesthetics, 36–37 contract theory. See social contract theory cooperation, social, 57 counter-architecture, 8–9, 21, 25, 39, 43–44, 48, 176, 238 counter-memory, 240–41 counter-monuments, 187 Covent Garden, 86 creative interplay, among voices, 36, 77, 109, 170, 173, 177–78, 228, 233 creative transcendence, 220 criterion of public art: aesthetic, political parts of, 235–36, passim; as counter-memory, 240–41; as dialogically a priori truth, 247; as event, 238–39; as statement, 234–36; its universality, 247–48 critical questioning, in democracy, 74 Crown Fountain, 157, 159, 166 cycle of devalorization, 30 Cynics, the, 242–43 Daley, Richard M., 155, 158, 166, 170–72, 178 Danzas Indigenas, 3, 3–5, 7, 23, 32, 66, 231, 238 death: of Jesus, 114–16; mourning and, 180–81, 188 Debord, Guy, 170–71, 196 decent hierarchical peoples, 59–60 Declaration of Independence, 29

IND E X 3 31

deconstruction, 85, 250 Deleuze, Gilles, 35–36, 160, 169, 276n100 deliberation, public, 25–27 Deller, Jerry, 282n93 Delphic oracle, 38 democracy: aesthetics and, 18; agonistic, 28, 44–45, 77; ambiguity of, 12–14; art and, 22, 49; assembly, 49–50; autocracy and, 12–13; as autoimmune, 71–75, 81, 136–37, 275n84, 275n90; Badiou on, 111, 123–28, 286n95; capitalist-parliamentarian, 111; citizenship and, 139; communist hypothesis and, 123–25; constitutional, 58; critical questioning in, 74; as emblem, of contemporary political society, 124; equality and, 133; fragility of, 2–3, 5–6, 8, 11–12, 21, 66; freedom and, 226, 229; future, 68; idea of, 66, 125–28; immunity, to autoimmunity, 73–75; impossibility of, 49–52, 66–75; indecidable essence of, 68; interactivity of, 167; Keane on, 49–51; legacy of, 66–68, 75; memory of, 68; monitory, 50, 267n4; negotiations in, 73; numerical majority in, 71, 74; parrhesia and, 244–47; politics as, 129–30; possibility of, 49–66, 69, 72–73, 269n16; public art and, 2–14, 21 (see also specific topics); representative, 50; resisting oracles, 139; the state and, 125; as unconditional injunction and promise, 68–71, 74–75, 81; United States, 64; voices in, 51, 136–37; voting procedure in, 74. See also empty place, of democracy; specific topics democracy to come: as benign oracle, 274n74; Derrida on, 21, 51–52, 66–76, 110, 123, 128, 135, 138 democratic promise, of Millennium Park, 158–60 democratic society, 46 democratic theory, 49 demos, 129–31, 134, 137

Derrida, Jacques, 49, 55, 272n52, 273n68; Agamben on, 222–24, 306n139; on autoimmunity, of democracy, 71–75, 78, 136–37, 275n84; Badiou and, 137–38; on contemporaneity, 222; on contemporaneity, of art, 83–87; on democracy to come, 21, 51–52, 66–76, 110, 123, 128, 135, 138; on différance, 222; Eisenman and, 85–86, 278n9, 278n14; on equality, freedom, 70–71; on European voice, 76; on the event, 65, 67– 68, 110, 116, 233; hermeneutics of, 66– 68; on Marx, 274n78; on negotiation, 309n21; on open space, 74; on Plato, 85–86; on postmodern architecture, 85; public art on, 72–73; Rawls and, 72–73; Smith and, 82–83, 90; on spatiality, of voices, 84; on temporality, 78; on temporality to come, 98, 222–23; on texts, 84; on time, 67– 68; on the trace, 222–23; on unconditional injunction, of democracy, 68–71, 81; on voices, of alterity, 75–80 deterritorialization, 265n42 Deutsche, Rosalyn, 13–14, 27–31, 37, 42, 259n33, 263n20, 267n69 devalorization, 30 diacritical space, 77 diagram, 35–36 dialectic, 98 dialogic body: Millennium Park as, 166–67, 173; society as, 31, 34–36, 48, 75 dialogic interplay, among voices, 76–78, 139, 164–65, 173, 178 dialogic moments, 134 dialogue, 31, 138, 162–64, 213–14 Dickenson, Emily, 192 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 98–104, 165, 220–21, 305n117 différance, 67, 222–23 difference, 12, 73, 236; in identity, 77; montage of, 101; principle, 55, 63, 269n17; unity composed of, 160–66, 183–84

3 32IND EX

dilemma, of diversity, 11–12, 25, 28, 51–52, 60, 72, 81, 136, 138, 232, 236, 240–41 discourse: aesthetic, 37; autocratic, 45–46; content and, 35–36; scientific, 32; voices in, 32–34 discursive formations, 32–33 discursiveness, 169 discursive practices, 36 Disneyland, 166, 175–76 dissensus, 28, 128, 130–31, 144 dissimilitudo, 100 diversity: dilemma of, 11–12, 25, 28, 51–52, 60, 72, 81, 136, 138, 232; as heterogeneous voices, 65; Rawls on, 51–52, 60; unity and, 231 domination, 129, 132 Doss, Erica, 4– 5, 7, 194– 95, 202, 207– 8, 212; Memorial Mania by, 239; on memorials, 308n5; on naturalizing terrorism, 303n78; on participation, 263n16 Dowd, Maureen, 195 edge, of the void, 115–16 Eisenman, Peter, 85–86, 187, 209, 278n9, 278n14 ekphrasis, 105 Eley, Geoff, 27 elliptical identity, 34–35 empty place, of democracy, 72, 81; Lefort on, 12, 14–16, 21, 23, 45, 48–49, 107, 185, 232; open space and, 275n89 Environmental Impact Statements, 37 equal and free citizens, 53–54 equality, 123–24; of communicative intelligences, 136; community and, 133–34; democracy and, 133; freedom and, 53–54, 70–71, 74–75, 270n18; intelligence and, 132–33; politics of reconfiguration of the sensible and, 133; as presupposition, 131–35; as violence, 133–35. See also inequality eternal idea, 148–49

ethics: aesthetics and, 107–8, 215–16; the Good and, 121–22, 224; images and, 144; imagination of, 198, 200; in political ontology, 121–23; popular, 259n34 euchronistic ideal, 99–100, 102 euporia, 223 Euripides, 142 Europe, 76 Evans, Fred, 297n95 event, the, 229–30; Badiou on, 116–17, 284nn32–33, 285n55; being and, 114; Christ and, 120; Derrida on, 65, 67–68, 110, 116, 233; as immanent, 128; public art as, 22, 236–39; Rancière on, 134–35; Saint Paul and, 113–14; as self-belonging, 115; site of, 113–18, 284n30; subject and, 135; unconditional, 137–38. See also Being and Event (Badiou); criterion of public art evental truth, 120–22 evil, 122–23, 224–25 exceptionalism. See American exceptionalism Exelon Pavilions, 162 experimetum linguae, 222, 224–25 L’Exposition Universelle, 153–54 expressive gestures, 24 fairness. See justice as fairness faith, 120–21 fecundity, 65–66, 90, 177–80 Federalists, 6–7, 32, 33, 231–32 fictional construction, 94 fidelity, 119–20, 122, 127 Filler, Martin, 192–94, 196, 214–15, 299n33 flexibility, 24–25 formation, discursive, 32–33 Foucault, Michel, 32–33, 36, 43, 241–42 founding, the void as, 252 Fra Angelico, Beato, 99–102, 104, 165, 220, 305n117 Fraser, Nancy, 25–28, 261n5

IND EX 3 33

freedom: democracy and, 226, 229; equality and, 53–54, 70–71, 74–75, 270n18; to make art, 97; unconditional, 70 full autonomy, 57, 61–62 fundamentalism, 202, 204, 206 gap, in the sensible, 131 Gehry, Frank, 157–58, 161–62, 166, 170 generic truth, 119 gentrification, 30 geopolitical fiction, 94, 97 Gerz, Jochen, 226–27, 242 Gilfoyle, Timothy, 160, 162, 165–67, 172, 175–76, 295n79 globalization, 87–88, 91, 171–72 God, 84, 114–15 Goldberger, Paul, 192 good, the, 60–62, 121–24, 128, 224 “Good News.” See resurrection, of Jesus; Saint Paul Gopnik, Adam, 192, 194–96, 203, 208–11, 214–15 government sponsorship, of public art, 10–11, 19–20 grammatical voice, 35 Gray, Paul, 167 Greek oracles, 38, 308n4 Greek philosophy, 119–20 Greenwald, Alice, 210 Guattari, Félix, 35, 160, 169 guilt, 243–44 Gustafson, Kathryn, 157 Guthrie, Jennifer, 157 Habermas, Jürgen, 26–27, 170 Hake, Sabine, 14 Hallward, Peter, 137, 251–52, 288n138, 310n10, 310n24 Harris, Joan, 158 Harris Theater, 158, 164, 167 Harvey, David, 30 healing, 214–15 Hegel, G. W. F., 260n41

Heidegger, Martin, 140 hermeneutics, 54, 66–68 heterochronicity, 82; anachronicity and, 92, 103–5; Moxey on, 92–94; Osborne on, 94; of voices, 104 heterogeneity, 66, 81, 84, 90, 136, 138, 160, 179–80; The Homeless Projection on, 43; multiplicity and, 186–87; of voices, 65, 236 heterogeneous temporalities, 93, 98, 101 heuristics, 93–94 historical time, 94, 98, 103–4 historicity, 114 history, of art, 99–102 Holocaust memorials, 122, 186–88, 191–94, 209 homelessness, 30, 43, 267n65 Homeless Projection, The, 11, 28, 31, 66; as act of citizenship, 44–47; as anti-oracle, 38–44; as counter-architecture, 8–9, 21, 25, 39, 43–44, 48, 176, 238; as dissent, 42, 179; five theses of, 43; on heterogeneity, 43; political message of, 45; as processual, 42, 44–45; real estate industry and, 43–44, 151, 176; as slide warfare, 42, 238; Union Square and, 39, 40, 41, 43–44, 46, 105 homo democraticus, 124 Hoskins, Gregory, 193 human nature, 224–25 human rights, 59–60 Husserl, Edmund, 34 Huyghe, Pierre, 143–44, 146 hybridity, 76, 165–66 iconomy, 203 icons, 196, 202–3, 215 idea, 94, 142, 148–49 identity, 24–25; Cloud Gate and, 175; difference in, 77; elliptical, 34–35; voice and, 77 idioms, heterogeneity of, 84 images, 87, 101–2, 144–45, 171, 175

334IND E X

immanent event, 128 immanent truth, 141, 289n151 immortal subject, 119, 123–24, 127 inaesthetics, 140–43, 147, 149–50 Inclusion and Democracy (Young), 267n4 incommensurables, 134 inconsistent multiplicity, 112, 125, 250–52 individuation, 224 inequality, 26, 55–56, 126–27 inequity, 87–88 infoscape, 87 inquiries, artworks as, 142 intelligence, 132–33 interactivity, 167, 169 interconnectedness, 174–75 interior, 174 interpretive interruption, 117–19 interpretive interventions, 117–18 interrogative architecture, 91 interruption, of oppression, 46 Iran, 207–8 Isin, Engin, 10–11 Islamic fundamentalism, 202 isomorphic, voices as, 169 Jacob, Mary Jane, 174–75 Jaskot, Paul, 172 Jay Pritzker Pavilion, 157, 157 Jesus, 114–16, 119–21, 284n30. See also Christianity Jews, 122. See also Judaism Joyce, James, 86 Judaism, 113–14, 119–20 Juno Ludovisi, 145–46, 151 justice, 177, 269n15, 270n23; considered judgments of, 54; the good and, 60–61; political, 57; Saint Paul on, 120; two principles of, 55–56, 62 justice as fairness, 51, 53–54, 56–57, 65 Kant, Immanuel, 94–95, 269n14 Kapoor, Anish, 157, 161, 167. See also Cloud Gate

Keane, John, 13, 49–51 Kennicot, Philip, 211 khora, 67, 84, 86, 224 Kimmelman, Michael, 192–93 King Jr., Martin Luther, 59 Klee, Paul, 221 knowledge, 120 Ku Klux Klan, 1 Kymlicka, Will, 61–62 LaCapra, Dominick, 194 Lafayette, Marquis de, 29 Laius, 38 language: Agamben on, 217; Arabic, 211; of architecture, 42–43; artistic, 148; Chomsky on, 264n38; différance and, 222; grammatical voice in, 35; literary, 148; pure, 222–24, 228; subject-language, of truth and, 122–23. See also being-in-language langue, la, 165 law, 120 Lawlor, Leonard, 268n9, 276n95, 309n14, 376n100 Law of Peoples (Rawls), 59, 270n28 Lee, Robert E., 1, 2, 23, 231 Lefort, Claude. See empty place, of democracy liberalism. See political liberalism liberal model, of public sphere, 25–26 liberty, 29, 55–56, 274n79 license, 274n79 life, of Millennium Park, 153, 180–81 Lin, Maya, 6–7, 189, 194, 214, 304n103 Lincoln, Abraham, 29 literary language, 148 Little Syria district, 211–12 loss, 194–95, 214–15 love, 120–21 Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, 189, 303n84 Lurie Garden, 157, 161, 161–62, 166–67, 295n76

INDEX335

Macon, Nathanial, 6 Madonna of the Shadows, 99–101, 165, 305 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 149–50 Marchart, Oliver, 286n102 Marx, Karl, 131, 264n28, 274n78, 284n37 materiality: of art, 146–47; repeatable, 33 mathematical ontology, 114, 249, 251 McCloskey, Barbara, 302n72 McDermott, Terry, 304n97 McKim, Joel, 214, 217–18, 223, 226–27, 242 mediality. See pure mediality mediated information, 87 Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, 187, 226 Memorial Mania (Doss), 239 memorials, 86, 185–88, 196, 206, 231–32, 308n5. See also Holocaust memorials; National September 11 Memorial; Vietnam Veterans War Memorial memory: agonistic, 197; of democracy, 68; dynamic, literal, 193; of multivoiced body, 308n6; produced, 101. See also counter-memory Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 274n75, 274n78, 276n100 metastructure, 112–13, 119, 131 micro-situations, 143 militants, 127 militarization, of memorial landscape, 7 Millennium Monument, 158, 165, 168 Millennium Park, 16–20, 22, 204, 291n3; as act of citizenship, 177–81; aesthetic regime of art and, 178–79; art objects in, 178–80; Crown Fountain of, 157, 159, 166; as democratic, 171–72, 180; democratic promise of, 158–60; democratic virtues of, 155, 156; as dialogic body, 166–67, 173; dialogue in, 162–64; financing, 171–72, 295nn75–76; Harris Theater of, 158, 164, 167; hybridity of, 165–66; interactivity of, 169; Jay Pritzker Pavilion of, 157, 157; life of, 153, 180–81; Lurie Garden of, 157, 161, 161–62, 166–67, 295n76; as

multivoiced body, 166, 170, 173; oracles of, 170–73, 185; politics, aesthetics of, 180; quasi-voices of, 177; relational aesthetics of, 166–70; in space, time, 164; structures of, 157, 172; as unity, composed of difference, 160–66; urban design of, 155, 157; from White City to, 153–58. See also Cloud Gate mimesis, 148–49 minimalism, 187, 189–94, 197 modern art, 145. See also contemporary art modernism, 92–93, 148, 169 modernity, 97, 178, 220 modesty, 143–44 monitory democracy, 50, 267n4 Monk, Daniel Bertrand, 305n107 montage, of difference, 101 monument: anti-oracular, 305n109; of Lee, 1, 2, 23, 231; to Washington, 17, 23, 82 monuments, 254n1; abstract, 187; aesthetic, political meanings of, 44–45; Civil War, 1, 5; Confederate, 1–2, 11, 13, 15, 23, 231, 238–39; of Federalists, 231–32; Holocaust, 122, 186–88; minimalist, 187; neoclassical, 37; as processual, 42–45; removal of, 1–3, 7, 15, 255n5; values of, 37. See also Millennium Park; National September 11 Memorial; Union Square; Vietnam Veterans War Memorial; World War II Memorial monument wars, 6 Monument Wars (Savage), 292n27, 300n40 morality, 56–57, 188 moral judgments, considered, 268n13 Morgan, Eleanor, 85–86 Mosaddegh, Mohammad, 207–8 Mosse, George, 14 Mouffe, Chantal, 28 mourning, death and, 180–81, 188 Moxey, Keith, 92–94, 97, 103, 105, 281n62 Mulhall, Stephen, 63–64 multeity, 89 multiple-being, 111, 249

3 36 IND EX

multiplicities, 111–12, 115, 125–26, 186–87, 249–52 multivoiced body, 233–34, 244, 246; memory of, 308n6; metamorphosis of, 78, 234, 236; Millennium Park as, 166, 170, 173; society as, 78–79; Union Square as, 29–36 Multivoiced Body, The (Evans), 297n95 music, 179 Muslim Americans, 211 mutual responsiveness, 34 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 13, 179 National Mall, 7, 212 National Museum of African American History and Culture, 238–39 National September 11 Memorial and Museum, 16–20, 22, 90–91, 153, 207, 214. See also Agamben, Giorgio; City of Refuge; Reflecting Absence naturalization, 172, 204, 303n78 Nazism, 14–15, 17, 38–39, 122, 179. See also Holocaust memorials negotiation, 73, 309n21 neoclassical monuments, 37 Newman, Barnett, 143, 146 New Orleans, 1–3, 5, 15, 23, 231 New York. See City of Refuge; Little Syria district; National September 11 Memorial; Planning Commission, New York; Reflecting Absence; Union Square NGOs. See nongovernmental organizations Nichol, Shannon, 157 Nicholas, John, 6, 21–23, 25, 32–34, 42, 45. See also plain tablet Nielsen, Greg, 257n16 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 96, 263n18, 309n17 9/11 memorial. See National September 11 Memorial and Museum non-art, 146–47, 149–50, 185 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 50

nothing, 115–16, 126, 176, 251–53. See also void, the numerical majority, in democracy, 71, 74 Oda Projesi, 106 Oedipus, 38 ontology: mathematical, 114, 249, 251; multiplicity and, 250; of peoples, 60; of postconceptual art, 96–97; of the present, 88–89; of Rancière, 135–36. See also political ontology open communication, 242 open communities, 91 open space, 74, 236, 275n89 oracles: aesthetic, 36–38, 185–88; of American exceptionalism, 185, 206–14; benign, 274n74; of capital, 196, 202–6, 213; City of Refuge resisting, 201–2, 206, 213–14; Cloud Gate resisting, 173–77, 216; democracy resisting, 139; democracy to come, as benign, 274n74; in Greek myth, 38, 308n4; of Millennium Park, 170–73, 185; parrhesia and, 245–47; of spectacle, 185–88, 201–2, 213; voices, 29, 38, 79. See also anti-oracle organization, around art objects, 169–70, 201 original position, the, 53–54, 64–65, 138 Osborne, Peter, 94–98, 280nn40–41, 281n54 other, the, 83–84, 121, 131, 147, 222, 224 overlapping consensus, 57–60, 128, 270n26, 285n62 “Pardes” (Agamben), 222, 224 Paris Commune, 13 parliamentary sovereignty, 27 parrhesia, 139, 201, 213, 227–28, 241–47, 309n14 participation, 263n16 participatory art, 83, 106–8, 150–51 Pataki, George, 300n36 Paul (saint), 113–14, 116, 119–21, 125 peoples, 59–60, 271n29

IND EX 3 37

performative memorial, 188, 206 Perille, Christopher, 158 periodization, 94, 103 Piano, Renzo, 162 Pickford, Henry, 186–88, 191–94, 209, 298nn18–19, 300n35 Pinochet, Augusto, 208 Places of Remembrance, 187 plain tablet, 15–17, 23–24, 32, 107, 181, 185; memorials as, 86; public art and, 81–82; Savage on, 212–13; stone monument as, 231–32; as vacancy, 48–49; Wodiczko and, 201 Planning Commission, New York, 36–37, 44 Plato, 124–25, 127; on art, 140; Derrida on, 85–86; on ideal city, 38; idea of, 148; on khora, 67, 224 Plensa, Jaume, 157, 166–67 pluralism, 16, 271n30 pluralist relativism, 91 plurality, 11–12, 65 Pluth, Ed, 283n1 poetry, 140, 149–50 poiesis, 220, 226–27 point grid, 86 police, 129–31, 136 policy, public, 44, 79 political constructivism, 269n14 political geometry, 50 political justice, 57 political legitimacy, 58 political liberalism, 21, 51–52, 72, 270n23, 271n39; as circular, 63–64; as comprehensive doctrine of the good, 60–62; as cynical, 62–63; morality of, 56–57; problems with, 60–65; reasonable comprehensive doctrines in, 59; reflective equilibrium in, 54 Political Liberalism (Rawls), 54, 60 political ontology, 110; Badiou’s idea of democracy, 125–28; being and the void, 111–13; democracy, communist hypothesis and, 123–25; equality as

presupposition, 131–35; ethics in, 121–23; the event, site of, 113–17; politics, police and, 129–31; presumptiveness of Rancière’s presupposition, 135–40; subject, virtues of, 119–21; truth procedures, interpretive interruption and, 117–19 political parties, 50 political reason, 72 politics: art and, 85, 144, 147, 150; of City of Refuge, 201; community and, 225–26; of contemporaneity, 90; as democracy, 129–30; as dissensus, 130–31; morality and, 188; police and, 129–31; public art and, 11–15; of reconfiguration, of the sensible, 133; redistributing the sensible, 144 politics, aesthetics and, 17, 23–24, 42, 82, 108, 139–40; Agamben on, 217; of artworks, 150–52, 180, 185–86, 229–30; free form, 290n183; of memorials, 185–88, 231–32; of monuments, 44–45; Rancière on, 144, 146 Pollock, Jackson, 102 popular ethic, 259n34 postcolonial awareness, 92 postcolonial multiplicity, 88 postconceptual art, 94–97 postmodern architecture, 85 postmodernism, 98, 178 post-utopian art, 143 potentiality, 228–29. See also pure potentiality poverty, 30 Powell, Colin, 298n8 practical reason, 54 praxis, 219–20 precarity, 261n2 premodern art, 220 presence, 190–91, 197, 204 present, the, 68–69, 88–90. See also contemporaneity present moment, the, 67–68

3 38 IND E X

presentness, 86 principle of liberty, 55–56 privatization, 13, 204–5, 213, 295n79 Protagoras, 127 public art: as act of citizenship, 7–11, 14–15, 22, 48, 125, 128–29, 139, 147, 236; aesthetics and, 15–22, 152; against autocracy, 81– 82; as contemporary genre, 46–47; creating, 3–4; democracy and, 2–14, 21; depicting women, 14–15; Derrida on, 72–73; as dialogically a priori truth, 247; as event, 22, 236–39; financing, 13, 171, 179; government sponsored, 10–11, 19–20; politics and, 11–15; quasi-voices of, 8, 20–21, 24–25, 105, 241; removal of, 1–3; as statement, 32–33, 234–36; universality, of criterion of, 247–48. See also specific topics public policy, 44, 79 public reason, 57–58, 60–62, 64 publics, competing, 25–27 public space, 262n15; contesting voices in, 45–46; privatization of, 13, 205 public sphere, 20–21, 25–28, 126 pure language, 222–24, 228 pure mediality, 224–27 pure potentiality, 218–19, 223–25, 227–30 pure transmissibility, 219–22 quasi-voices: of Millennium Park, 177; of public art, 8, 20–21, 24–25, 105, 241 racism. See white supremacy radical artists, 38 radicality, artistic, 143–44 Rancière, Jacques, 22, 107–10, 288nn136–37; aesthetic regime, of art of, 142–52, 176–77, 186, 218; on aesthetics of politics, 144, 146; Badiou and, 135, 147–50, 153; on cinema, 150; on the event, 134–35; on mimesis, 148–49; ontology of, 135–36; on

police, 129–31; presupposition of, as presumptive, 135–36; on relation of art, truth, 142–43. See also political ontology Rawls, John, 49, 268n13; Badiou and, 285n62; on basic structure of society, 56–57; on comprehensive doctrines, 58–59; on decent hierarchical peoples, 59–60; Derrida and, 72–73; on diversity, 51–52, 60; on equal and free citizens, 53–54; on freedom, equality, 270n18; on full autonomy, 57, 61–62; on the good life, 269n15; Kymlicka on, 61–62; Law of Peoples by, 59, 270n28; on original position, 53, 138; on overlapping consensus, 57–58, 128; on political constructivism, 269n14; Political Liberalism by, 54, 60; public art and, 65–66; on realistic utopia, 57; on reasonableness, 56–57, 63–64, 270n20, 270nn26–27; on reasonable pluralism, 271n30; on reflective equilibrium, 54–55; on Society of Peoples, 59, 271n29; A Theory of Justice by, 54–55; on time, 54–55; on two principles of justice, 55–56. See also political liberalism Reagan, Ronald, 171 real estate industry, 29–34, 43–44, 151, 176 realistic utopia, 57, 81 reason. See political reason; public reason reasonable comprehensive doctrines, 58–59 reasonableness, 56–58, 63–64, 72–73, 270n20, 270nn26–27 reasonable pluralism, 271n30 reciprocal presupposition, 35–36 reciprocity, 58–59, 61, 270n20 reconfiguration, of the sensible, 133, 144 Reconstruction, 2 redistribution, 136 Reflecting Absence, 181, 182, 184, 190, 191; aesthetic aura of, 192, 196–97; American exceptionalism and, 207–12; commercialism of, 206; dynamic, literal

INDEX339

memory, 193; as funereal, 194; loss and, 194–95; minimalism of, 191–93; National September 11 Memorial Museum and, 207–12; oracle, of capital and, 202–5, 213; oracle, of spectacle and, 196, 201–2, 213; therapeutic value of, 215 reflective equilibrium, 54–55 relational aesthetics, 143–44, 166–70 relational survivalism, 88 relativism, pluralist, 91 relatum, 222–23 religion, 59 remembrance, 196 repeatable materiality, 33 representational regime, of images, 144–45 representative democracy, 50 responsiveness, mutual, 34 resurrection, of Jesus, 114–15, 119–20 Retort, 171 revitalization, urban, 29–31, 36, 43–44, 151 rhythm, 219–20 Ritivoi, Andreea, 259n37, 263n17 Rockhill, Gabriel, 150, 288n136, 291n200 Roman Empire, 113–14 Romanticism, 140 Ross, Kristin, 13 Rousseau, 70 rules of formation, 32–33 sacredness, 215–16 Saint Paul (Badiou), 111, 113–14, 117, 253 Saltzman, Lisa, 46 salvation, 119–20 sameness, 127–28 Sandel, Michael J., 268n7, 271n35 Sartwell, Crispin, 307n2 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 165 Savage, Kirk, 6–7, 215–17, 230; on antioracular monument, 305n109; on City of Refuge, 245, 302n61; Monument Wars by, 292n27, 300n40; on plain tablet, 212–13 Save Our State (SOS), 4

saying, seeing and, 36 scaling, 85 Schiller, Friedrich, 145 Schnock, Frieder, 187–88 Schweickart, David, 297n95 scientific discourse, 32 sculpture, 37. See also Cloud Gate; monuments seamlessness, aesthetic, 266n61 seeing, saying and, 36 Sekoto, Gerard, 92–93 selves, 51 Sen, Amartya, 63–65, 261n6 sensible, the: gap in, 131; material of world, 148; politics redistributing, 144; reconfiguration of, 133, 144 September 11, 2001, 260n43. See also City of Refuge; National September 11 Memorial; Reflecting Absence Seraji, Nasrine, 226 set theory, 112, 136, 310n22 Shanken, Andrew, 243–44 simulacrum, 122 singularity: of art, 143–44, 147; communication of, 225; individuation and, 224; total, 115, 284n32, 306n144 site, of the event, 113–18, 284n30 site/non-site relation, 96 situation, the, 116, 125–26, 147, 249–50 slide warfare, 42, 44, 151, 238, 267n69 Smith, Terry, 206; on contemporaneity, of art, 87–92, 94; Derrida and, 82–83, 90; on iconomy, 203; on multeity, 89; on 9/11 memorial, 90–91; on spectacle, 171; What Is Contemporary Art? by, 87; Wood on, 91; on world currents, 88 Smith, Tony, 297n95 Smithson, Robert, 95–98, 280n53 social body, 77–79, 134–35, 227–28, 237, 245 social contract theory, 53, 66 social cooperation, 57

3 40 IND EX

social-economic principle, 55–56 social media, 9 social turn, toward participatory art, 106–8 social unity, 60, 79 society: basic structure of, 56–57, 270n25; civil, 46; as community of equals, 133; demos of, 129–31, 134, 137; as dialogic body, 31, 34–36, 48, 75; as multivoiced body, 78–79 Society of Peoples, 59, 271n29 Society of the Spectacle, The (Debord), 171 solidarity, 91, 98, 127–28, 136–38, 177, 179–80, 243 SOS. See Save Our State space-time, 144, 164 Spain, 15 spatial axis, 165 spatiality, of voices, 84 spectacle, 36–38, 45, 170; of architecture, 171; capital and, 180, 185; in contemporary art, 87–88; oracle of, 185–88, 201–2, 213; Reflecting Absence as, 196, 201–2, 213 Specters of Marx (Derrida), 83 Spiral Jetty, 96, 98, 280n53, 281n54 state, the, 27, 112–13, 118, 125, 253 statements, 32–33, 234–36, 265n39. See also Environmental Impact Statements state of nature, 53 Stih, Renata, 187–88 structural anticipation, 94 Sturken, Marita, 204, 299n31 subject, 97; as agent, 128; event and, 135; immortal, 119, 123–24, 127; of poem, 149; of truth, 121; virtues of, 119–21; voices enunciating, 31–32 subject-language, of truth, 122–23 sublime, the, 143 Sullivan, Louis, 154–55 supplementary existence, 130

Supreme Court, 204, 261n5 surplus, 130 Swift, Adam, 63–64 symbolic constitution, 130 Talmud, 222 Tazzi, Pier, 174 temporality: alternative, 92; contemporaneity and, 90; in contemporary art, 89, 94; heterogeneous, 93, 98; immanent view of, 276n100; present, 94; of social body, 78 temporality to come, 98, 222–23 terrorism, 207, 210–12, 303n78 texts, 84 theology, 228 Theory of Justice, A (Rawls), 54–55 therapeutic catharsis, 214–17 Tiananmen Square, 226, 229 time, 279n35; aesthetic, 103–4; anachronic, 103; common, flow of, 227; Derrida on, 67– 68; historical, 94, 98, 103–4; immortality and, 123–24; khora and, 67; in modernism, 93; natural hierarchy of, 104; place and, 103; Rawls on, 54–55; space and, 164; visual, 92. See also space-time; temporality Todorov, Tzvetan, 193 tolerance, 127–28 torsion, 148 total singularity, 115, 284n32, 306n144 tourism, 171–72 Tower of Babel, 84–85, 121, 127 trace, the, 222–23 Train Bleu, Le, 83 transcategorization, 97 transcendental network, of voices, 78–79 transmissibility. See pure transmissibility trauma, 214 truth: art and, 140–43, 219–20, 289n151; eternal, 121–22; evental, 120–22; generic, 119; the good and, 121–22; as immanent, 141, 289n151; public art, as

IND E X 3 41

dialogically a priori, 247; subjectlanguage of, 122–23; subject of, 121; the unnameable of, 123 truth procedures, 117–19, 142 Twin Towers. See National September 11 Memorial; World Trade Center two principles of justice, 55–56, 62 unconditional event, 137–38 unconditional freedom, 70 unconditional injunction, of democracy, 68–71, 74–75, 81 unconscious, 32 Union Square, 21, 25, 28, 163, 183; aesthetic oracle of spectacle, 36–38; beautification, 36; The Homeless Projection and, 39, 40, 41, 43–44, 46, 105; Latino population and, 31; as multivoiced body, 29–36; Planning Commission on, 36–37; real estate industry and, 29–34; revitalization of, 36; voices in, 51 United States. See American exceptionalism; specific topics unity, 11–12, 73, 97; authoritarian, 231– 32; composed of difference, 160–66, 183–84; diversity and, 231; social, 60, 79 universalism, 120 univocity, 98, 148 unnameable, the, 123 unpresentable, the, 251–52 unreasonable comprehensive doctrines, 58–59 urban design, 155, 157 urbanization, 30 urban revitalization, 29–31 utopia: aesthetic, 143; realistic, 57, 81 Valle de los Caídos, 15 van der Walt, Johan, 62 Varsari, Giorgio, 101 victimhood, 207, 210, 212 Vidler, Anthony, 206

Vietnam Veterans War Memorial, 6–7, 189, 194–95, 209, 304n103 violence, 133–35, 171 virtues, of subject, 119–21 Vishnu, 175 visual time, 92 voices, 8–9, 12, 20–21, 126; of alterity, 75–80; art objects and, 169, 293n56; audibility of, 24; of City of Refuge, 217; of Cloud Gate, 179, 240–41; contestation among, 28, 45–46; creative interplay among, 228, 233; in democracy, 51, 136–37; dialogic interplay among, 76–78, 139, 164–65, 173, 178; in discourse, 32–34; enunciating subjects, 31–32; flexibility of, 24–25; grammatical, 35; heterochronic, 104; heterogeneous, 65, 236; hybrid, 76; identity and, 77; as isomorphic, 169; mutual responsiveness of, 34; oracles, 29, 38, 79; plurality of, 65; policymaking, 245–46; pure potentiality and, 227–30; reciprocal presupposition of, 35–36; Saint Paul hearing, 114, 116–17; selves and, 51; spatiality of, 84; transcendental network of, 78–79; in Union Square, 51; in writing, 76. See also multivoiced body; quasi-voices; univocity void, the, 111–13, 115–16, 125, 130, 173, 189, 251–53 voting, 74 Walker, Peter, 190–91 Washington, George, 6, 17, 23, 29, 82, 181 Washington Holocaust Museum, 209 Watkin, Christopher, 288n137 Webb, Craig, 162, 166 What Is Contemporary Art? (Smith), 87 White City, 153–58, 160 white supremacy, 4–5, 75, 136–37, 211, 231, 295n72. See also Confederate monuments; Nazism Whitman, Walt, 6

342IND EX

Whittier, John Greenleaf, 6 wisdom, 120 Wodiczko, Krzysztof, 11, 18–19, 266n57; on communication, 227–28; counterarchitecture of, 8–9, 21, 25, 39, 43–44, 48; as dissident, 38; on parrhesia, 241–44; plain tablet and, 201; on public policy, 44; resistance by, 38–39; on slide warfare, 42. See also City of Refuge; Homeless Projection, The Wolfreys, Julian, 277n7 Wood, Paul, 91, 282n94 world currents, 88

World’s Columbian Exposition, 1863, 153–55, 154 World Trade Center, 17–18, 29, 189–90, 194, 203. See also National September 11 Memorial World War II Memorial, 7 Yancy, George, 309n14 You Are My Other Me, 4 Young, Iris Marion, 196, 203, 267n4 Zeckendorf Towers, 30, 32, 36–37, 46 Zuidervaart, Lambert, 9–10, 65, 261n5

CO LUMBIA THEMES IN PHILOSOPHY, SOCIAL CRITICISM, AND THE ARTS

Lydia Goehr and Gregg M. Horowitz, Editors Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz, eds., The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on the Legacy of an Opera Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno Gianni Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, edited by Santiago Zabala, translated by Luca D’Isanto John T. Hamilton, Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language Stefan Jonsson, A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions Richard Eldridge, Life, Literature, and Modernity Janet Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory Christoph Menke, Tragic Play: Irony and Theater from Sophocles to Beckett, translated by James Phillips György Lukács, Soul and Form, translated by Anna Bostock and edited by John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis with an introduction by Judith Butler Joseph Margolis, The Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism Herbert Molderings, Art as Experiment: Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance, Creativity, and Convention Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism Gerhard Richter, Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics Boris Groys, Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of the Media, translated by Carsten Strathausen Michael Kelly, A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art Stefan Jonsson, Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism Elaine P. Miller, Head Cases: Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and Art in Depressed Times Lutz Koepnick, On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of Radical Contemporaneity John Roberts, Photography and Its Violations

Hermann Kappelhoff, The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism Cecilia Sjöholm, Doing Aesthetics with Arendt: How to See Things Owen Hulatt, Adorno’s Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth: Texture and Performance James A. Steintrager, The Autonomy of Pleasure: Libertines, License, and Sexual Revolution Paolo D’Angelo, Sprezzatura: Concealing the Effort of Art from Aristotle to Duchamp