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philosophy MAY/JUNE 2006
Editorial collective
COMMENTARY
David Cunningham, Howard Feather, Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie, Kevin Magill, Stewart Martin, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford
‘The journalists of Jyllands-Posten are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs’: The Danish Cartoon Controversy and the Self-image of Europe
Contributors
Heiko Henkel .................................................................................................. 2
Heiko Henkel teaches anthropology and European studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. In January 2007 he will take up a position as an assistant professor in Copenhagen. Esther Leslie lectures in the School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, London. Her latest publication is Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (2005). Peter Sloterdijk is Professor of Philosophy and Rector of the School of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe. His numerous books include Critique of Cynical Reason (1983), Rules for the People Park (1999) and the recent trilogy Sphären (Spheres, 1998–2002). Peter Weibel, artist and media theorist, is Director of the Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe. His books include Fast Forward: Media Art (2004) and The Open Work, 1964–1979 (2005). Boris Groys is Professor of Art Theory, Philosophy and Media Theory at the School of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe. His books include Stalinʼs Total Work of Art (1988), Die Kunst der Installation (with Ilya Kabavov, 1996) and Logik der Sammlung (Logic of Collection, 1997). Peter Osborne is Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University. His latest book is How to Read Marx (Granta, 2005).
From Stillness to Movement and Back: Cartoon Theory Today
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Esther Leslie................................................................................................... 8
DOSSIER
Spheres of Action – Art and Politics ................13
War on Latency: On Some Relations between Surrealism and Terror Peter Sloterdijk ............................................................................................ 14
Re-presentation of the Repressed: The Political Revolution of the Neo-avant-garde Peter Weibel ................................................................................................. 20
The Politics of Equal Aesthetic Rights Boris Groys ................................................................................................... 29
ARTICLE The Dreambird of Experience: Utopia, Possibility, Boredom Peter Osborne .............................................................................................. 36
Mark Neocleous, The Monstrous and the Dead: Burke, Marx, Fascism Terry Eagleton .............................................................................................. 45 Alexei Monroe, Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK Chris Thompson ........................................................................................... 47 Cecilia Sjöholm, The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire Kaye Mitchell ............................................................................................... 50 Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjaminʼs ʻOn the Concept of Historyʼ Esther Leslie................................................................................................. 52 Nikolai Bukharin, Philosophical Arabesques Craig Brandist .............................................................................................. 54
COMMENTARY
‘The journalists of JyllandsPosten are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs’ The Danish cartoon controversy and the self-image of Europe Heiko Henkel
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s the controversy over the Danish ʻMuhammad cartoonsʼ gathered momentum, the apparent ease with which the cartoons – or rumours about them – were able to mobilize ʻcivilization-speakʼ, and occasional violence, around the globe was one of its most disturbing features. If one saw the angry crowds in Pakistan, Malaysia, Syria and elsewhere on the evening news, or read through pages of commentary in Europeʼs newspapers and blogs lambasting the intolerance of Muslims, it sometimes felt as if the Danish cartoons had indeed simply highlighted the clash of two hostile civilizations. While much evidence suggests that this is not the case, the public controversy about the cartoons has certainly pushed in that direction. We now know that the images did not simply ʻspreadʼ but were initially distributed by a disgruntled Danish Muslim, who not only presented governments and organizations across the Middle East with the published cartoons but included in his portfolio especially offensive images that were not, in fact, published by Jyllands-Posten. But even if we allow for this and the fact that governments in the region had vested interests in promoting the issue, and if we also concede that the cartoonsʼ religious offence probably didnʼt cause the torching of the Danish embassies but, like the 2005 Paris riots, provided disenfranchised groups of young men with an excuse to act – the ease with which a single publication in a provincial Danish newspaper could trigger massive global protests condemning Denmark or the West wholesale as enemies of Islam must set off alarm bells for those weary of civilization theories. What interests me here, however, is the no less troubling tendency, especially among continental European commentators, to view the affair as a conflict between Islam and ʻthe European value of freedom of expressionʼ. What is perceived as Muslim intolerance has become a foil against which Europeans increasingly assert the notion of European culture.
Placing the cartoons Given the overwhelmingly peaceful existence of religious Muslims in Europe and their largely measured reaction to the Danish cartoon saga, why does ʻIslamʼ so easily become the object of European outrage? And why do so many Europeans across the political spectrum feel compelled to jump to the defence of our ʻfreedom of expressionʼ over the publication of openly racist cartoons? With black eyes looking slyly from
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underneath bushy eyebrows, the hooked nose, and the curved dagger already drawn, the figures that stare at us from some of the cartoons clearly betray kinship to those that populated the anti-Semitic cartoons of the 1920s and 1930s. Surely, this should cause liberal Europeans to reflect and be less sanctimonious in their condemnation of Muslim intolerance. The Danish cartoon controversy highlights a pincer movement that has increasingly come to characterize Europeʼs relationship with its Muslim minority. By depicting the most venerated figure of Islam as a bloodthirsty terrorist with clearly racialized features, the cartoons explicitly do the work that much public commentary in Europe does implicitly: linking dark-skinned people to the notion of irrational dogma and violence. No less damaging, however, is the blanket condemnation of Muslim protests against the cartoons as intolerant. To demand toleration from the targets of a racist slur coupled with blunt religious insult, and to brand those who refuse to be silent as fundamentalists – thus denying them any legitimate place within European society – is more than simply inconsiderate. It performs a double delegitimation of religious Muslims on the grounds of being both foreign and intolerant. To find evidence that the drawings were not simply ʻsatireʼ, as it is so often claimed, one only needs to read the article that accompanied the twelve cartoons when they were published by Jyllands-Posten in September 2005.1 Here, the journalist Flemming Rose frankly explains that the published cartoons were the result of a deliberate challenge sent out to all members of the ʻAssociation of Danish Cartoonistsʼ, daring them to submit cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. The staging of this deliberate provocation, Rose insists, was important to counteract the creeping advance of self-censorship, increasingly preventing Danes from poking fun at Islam. It should be noted here that while some supporters of Jyllands-Posten now claim to defend ʻfree speechʼ in general, Jyllands-Posten clearly does not. When the same newspaper was offered a series of Jesus cartoons in 2003, the editor declined with the argument that they would provoke public outcry amongst its Christian conservative readership.2 More importantly, the solicitation and publication of the ʻMuhammad cartoonsʼ was part of a long and carefully orchestrated campaign by the conservative Jyllands-Posten (also known in Denmark as Jyllands-Pesten – the plague from Jutland), in which it backed the centreright Venstre party of Prime Minister Fogh Rasmussen in its successful bid for power in 2001. Central to Venstreʼs campaign, aside from its neoliberal economic agenda, was the promise to tackle the problem of foreigners who refused to ʻintegrateʼ into Danish society. Venstreʼs electoral success highlights the fact that Danish society, with its traditionally strong ethos of equality and social proximity, has found it difficult to come to terms with the challenges of cultural heterogeneity produced by transnational migration. And while Fogh Rasmussenʼs own party has sought to avoid openly racist rhetoric, its minority government depends on the support of Denmarkʼs notoriously racist Dansk Folkeparti, whose shameless attacks on foreigners regularly outflank Le Penʼs Front National. In fact, one of the original twelve cartoons published by JyllandsPosten eloquently makes this point in a remarkable act of genuine political satire. We see, pointing to a blackboard filled with Arabic script, a Danish schoolboy called Mohammed naughtily sticking his tongue out at us – or at the editor of Jyllands-Posten as the case may be. The boy sports the football shirt of a club called Fremtiden (The Future), suggesting that this little Mohammed represents Denmarkʼs future. The writing on the board says, in Farsi: ʻThe journalists of Jyllands-Posten are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs.ʼ As it turns out, Jyllands-Postenʼs provocateurs have found many vocal allies across Europe who argue that Muslim protests against the cartoons confirm the newspaperʼs initial proposition, and claim the right, even the duty, of the press in democratic societies to (re-)publish the cartoons in order to resist Muslim intimidation. Others have argued against this that the cartoonsʼ racist and inflammatory imagery makes
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them a case of ʻhate speechʼ that should be punishable by law. While racist features are clearly evident in some of the cartoons, I am not sure that legal injunction adequately addresses the matter. Rather, the widespread (although by no means unanimous) support for Jyllands-Posten in Europe indicates the emergence of a political constellation that demands a political – and perhaps philosophical – response. For Europeʼs lingering xenophobia coupled with deplorable opportunism on the political Centre-Right does not alone explain the enthusiasm with which so many Danes and other Europeans have come to rally in support of the cartoons – and apparently feel so little sympathy for their offended Muslim countrymen and -women. To understand why so many Europeans turn a blind eye to the stigmatization of Muslims in Europe it is important to consider that, over the past fifteen years or so, the critique of ʻMuslim fundamentalismʼ has become a cornerstone in the definition of European identities. As well as replacing anti-communism as the rallying point for a broad ʻdemocratic consensusʼ (and, in this shift, remaking this consensus), the critique of Islamic fundamentalism has also become a conduit for imagining Europe as a moral community beyond the nation. It has emerged as a banner under which the most diverse sectors of society can unite in the name of ʻEuropean valuesʼ: feminists and Christian conservatives, social democrats and neoliberals, nationalists and multiculturalists, civil rights activists and consumption-oriented hedonists. The tendency to define Europe in contrast to Islam is not new, of course.3 But the deepening crisis of the European project, with its growing social inequality and the failure of the European Union to provide broadly convincing alternatives to national models of sovereignty and democracy, make it attractive once more. Amidst the dissolution of older social ties, the formation of transnational European elites, and the struggle of nation-states like Denmark to retain the semblance of national sovereignty, the perception of an Islamic threat to European values provides the opportunity for a dramatic call to arms, conveniently diverting public concern from more divisive issues.
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Yet while the critique of fundamentalism provides a platform for demonstrating community, it also highlights the internal heterogeneity and tension that characterize the European response. While some lament the incompatibility of Muslim culture with distinctive national (and now increasingly European) culture(s), others criticize Muslims for failing to adjust to Europeʼs open and universalist civility. The latter response is often articulated in terms of modernization theory. Real or imagined Muslim intolerance here becomes more than the failing of individual Muslims or Muslim organizations. It becomes the emblem that marks religious Muslims as ʻfundamentalistsʼ, and thus as categorically unfit for democratic society. To clarify this point, let me turn to Jürgen Habermasʼs influential intervention in the debate on multiculturalism.
Fundamentalism and republican citizenship In a remarkable reformulation of his original concept of communicative action, Habermasʼs writing on multiculturalism makes the inclusion of the cultural ʻotherʼ central to the project of democratic society.4 Given the globalizing tendencies inherent in modern society, he argues, contemporary democracies can no longer define criteria of belonging in terms of ethnicity or cultural homogeneity.5 In these inevitably plural societies, criteria for citizenship must be tied to the acceptance of a political framework, defined by the constitution, rather than by the prerogatives of majority culture. In this reorientation from the culturally defined nation-state to a ʻrepublicanʼ state, Habermas argues, ʻthe majority culture must detach itself from its fusion with the general political culture in which all citizens share equally; otherwise it dictates the parameters of political discourses from the outsetʼ.6 The emergence of the Federal Republic of Germany after World War II, he suggests, is an example of such a democratic framework. Habermas argues that in the postwar period a patriotic commitment to Germanyʼs democratic constitution has replaced notions of nationality based on shared ethnic origins or a set of norms and values. In this perspective of constitutional patriotism, the inclusion of other cultural traditions in the national framework is both imperative and possible. Imperative because, in the context of Habermasian discourse ethics, any truth claim that does not open itself to the challenge of all competing claims within a discursive community automatically loses its legitimacy. Possible because once the identity of a political community is detached from a particular cultural tradition, the bond of a shared political culture is strong enough to hold society together. By differentiating the realm of ʻgeneral political cultureʼ from that of the various cultural traditions from which individual citizens draw their norms and values, Habermas gains a dynamic model of a political community in which the basic rules that govern the community can change over time. This community is shaped not so much in direct negotiations between different cultural traditions but as the result of partially shared, if differently interpreted and discursively mediated, experiences. Despite the persistent social marginalization that continues to plague many Muslim communities across Europe, and despite occasional acts of violence in the name of Islam, there are clear signs of such a process. José Casanova has called this development that has made Muslim communities and organizations increasingly active players in Europeʼs civil society a Muslim aggiornamento.7 On the whole, mature multiculturalist democracy theories, such as Habermasʼs or Seyla Benhabibʼs,8 are well suited to describe the trajectory of many sections of Europeʼs new Muslim minority. There is, however, an important ambivalence in the Habermasian model when applied to the relationship of European majority society to religious Muslims. Even though his model is in principle open to the inclusion of other cultural traditions, Habermas leaves no doubt that there are definitive limits to their inclusion in the European (or any other democratic) framework: ʻintegrationʼ, Habermas writes, ʻdoes not extend to fundamentalist immigrant culturesʼ (my emphasis).9 In so far as this simply means that no
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democratic society can work if some of its members refuse to participate in a dialogue over crucial controversial issues, it may be a necessary and uncontroversial caveat. The concept of fundamentalism, however, does more work in this context than is initially apparent. A closer look at Habermasʼs historical reconstruction of modern society shows that it is central to his dramatic historical narrative of modernization. Philosophically, of course, Habermasʼs critique of fundamentalism derives from Kantʼs critique of religious orthodoxy, understood as the rationally unjustifiable foreclosure of critical inquiry and debate. But Habermas explicitly ties this philosophical critique to the Durkheimian model of the historical transition from traditional to modern society. In Postmetaphysical Thinking, for instance, he argues that the totalizing metaphysical world-views of traditional society (where religious orthodoxies apparently held sway) disintegrated in the complexities of modern society and gave way to ʻdecentralizedʼ modern world-views.10 These decentralized world-views became, in turn, the precondition for the emergence of civil society and, eventually, democracy and republican citizenship. It is obvious, then, that in this scheme the charge of fundamentalism carries a political denunciation that could hardly be more serious. It marks the addressee as categorically incompatible with membership in democratic society. And yet, fundamentalism remains here largely an abstraction. In not only the Habermasian œuvre but also in much public commentary, it does not (or does only superficially) derive from the critical analysis of actual Muslim concerns and social projects, but emerges as the theoretical backdrop against which the ʻunfinished project of modernityʼ and its emancipatory potential can be elaborated. This problematic conception of fundamentalism is tied to another ambivalence in Habermasʼs republican model of democratic citizenship: the distinction between the ʻculturalʼ and the ʻpoliticalʼ. Habermas is arguably over-sanguine about the ease with which a shared political culture can be shorn of particular cultural traditions, given that this includes a whole legacy of political values and historical narratives that have shaped the understanding of democracy and indeed politics itself. His own genealogy of democratic society is a case in point. For many religious Muslims in Europe and elsewhere, the reconstruction of their ʻarrivalʼ in modern (and now increasingly liberal democratic) society differs from mainstream European narratives. Crucially, their narratives hinge not on the rejection of revealed religion and orthodoxy but on a continuing reinterpretation of their place in society. In my own work on contemporary Turkish Islam and its transformation since the 1960s, I am continually struck by the growing openness and attraction to democratic and pluralist notions of society in many Muslim cemaats, and at the same time by their continuing commitment to an orthodox (in the eyes of their secularist critics: fundamentalist) understanding of Islam.11 What we have here is an apparent paradox. There seems to be an increasing convergence between many religious Muslimsʼ attitude toward democracy and civil society and those dominant in European publics. And yet this does not mean that religious Muslims in fact understand this Muslim aggiornamento in terms easily reconcilable with the historical narrative so central to Habermasʼs conception of republican citizenship. This is not to dismiss the model of republican citizenship as such, but simply to point out that new cultural traditions may not quite as easily be incorporated into European political culture(s) as Habermas seems to suggest. It is no doubt legitimate when Habermas and others ʻdraw a lineʼ between what they see as admissible and what for them is beyond the pale of democratic society. To make ʻfundamentalismʼ the dominant term in the public debate, however, is unhelpful. It suggests that we know in principle all that needs to be known about religious Muslims in Europe, in the absence of any real engagement with the concerns and aspirations of communities that have often come to embrace democratic society along different historical trajectories. It becomes crassly tendentious when, as for instance in André
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Glucksmannʼs commentary on the cartoon affair, the apparent modernity–tradition hiatus between the ʻWestʼ and ʻIslamʼ is the excuse for a verbosely self-satisfied secularism caught up as much in dubious metaphysical certainties as the discourse of any Muslim ʻfundamentalistʼ.12 Undoubtedly, the encounter of European societies with their increasingly selfconfident Muslim minorities is beset with serious conflicts and hard processes of adjustment. As the controversy over the Danish cartoons highlights, what makes this process of integration particularly difficult and unwieldy is that it takes place amidst two powerful and often converging claims that the Islamic tradition and liberal democratic society are mutually exclusive. The wholesale condemnation of Denmark or the West by sections of the Muslim movement shows that Islam can provide powerful ammunition in polarizing the debate. But so do European discourses that use distorted representations of Islam as the foil against a bogus ʻEuropean cultureʼ. For those on the Left, the challenge is not to be drawn into these false oppositions. Amid the current excitement it should be remembered that the frictions that today accompany the process of integrating religious Muslims into European society are by no means without precedent. What is European history other than a long and arduous process of integrating diverse ethnic groups, countless waves of migrants, political projects and religious traditions? It is a history as ripe with successes as with ongoing tensions and, let us not forget, with ugly and sometimes genocidal policies against demonized minorities. Much would be won if rather than seeing in the encounter of Europe with Muslim communities a clash of civilizations or a confrontation with Europeʼs own less enlightened past, we could see it simply as a new chapter in the European history of integrating new social projects. Raymond Williams developed the model of a society in which different social projects – most importantly those of the bourgeoisie and the working class, but also a number of residual and emerging projects – competed with one another for hegemony. The cast in the current drama may have changed. Perhaps it is now Habermasʼs republican notion of society that is solidly entrenched as the dominant social project in Europe, while Christianity, socialism, neoliberalism and, of course, numerous nationalist movements compete as secondary, perhaps residual, projects partially incorporated into the overall republican framework. Muslim movements are not yet part of this hegemonic configuration, and what is currently at stake is whether they will be in the future.
Notes 1. F. Rose, ʻMuhammedʼs ansigtʼ [Muhammadʼs face], Jyllands-Posten, 30 September 2005, p. 3. 2. P. Reynolds, BBC News, 13 February 2006. 3. See A. Pagden (ed.) The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002. 4. J. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, Heinemann, London, 1984; ʻStruggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional Stateʼ, in A. Gutman (ed.), Multiculturalism, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1994; The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1998. 5. Here Habermasʼs argument intersects with his position in the famous Historikerstreit that galvanized public interest in West Germany in the 1980s. 6. Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, p. 144. 7. J. Casanova, ʻCivil Society and Religion: Retrospective Reflections on Catholicism and Prospective Reflections on Islamʼ, Social Research, vol. 68, no. 4, 2001, pp. 1041–80. 8. S. Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2002. 9. Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, p. 229. 10. J. Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1992, p. 39. 11. H. Henkel, ʻRethinking the dâr al-harb: Social Change and Changing Perceptions of the West in Turkish Islamʼ, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 30, no. 5, 2004, pp. 961–77. See also M.H. Yavuz, The Emergence of a New Turkey: Islam, Democracy, and the AK Parti, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 2006. 12. A. Glucksmann, ʻChoc des civilisations? Non: des philosophiesʼ, Le Monde, 4 March 2006, p. 20.
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COMMENTARY
From stillness to movement and back Cartoon theory today Esther Leslie
J
ust as in recent months caricatures have thrust themselves forcefully into public awareness, in the reaction to Danish newspaper cartoons of Muslim religious icons, their moving cousins, animated cartoons, are likewise more present in the world than ever before.* Cartoons have infiltrated cinema and, more widely, public consciousness in a number of more or less visible ways. Animation is viewable in regular movie theatres in big blockbuster cartoons such as Shrek or Monsters Inc. or The Polar Express. Such films are aimed at children like the Disney feature-length films before them, but they also have a second adult-oriented life, a public presence in the city. For these are the cartoons, computer animations, that were first used as the demonstration films in electrical outlets showcasing the new generation of LCD and plasma television screens and home cinemas. These particular cartoons were used not just because of their eye-catching cuteness, but also because of their remarkable vividness in modelling 3D, their supersaturated colours and their sharp syncing of motion and sound, so innate to cartoon worlds from the start, but intensified by digital processes. Only computerized animation – and, subsequently, the nature sublime of tropical forests and underwater – appears adequate to selling televisionʼs updated machineries of fantastic reverie. These new displays are touted for their ever higher definition lifelikeness, but their perfect output is the least realistic, most processed binary confection of contemporary digital animation. The situation is similar to that in the 1960s when Walt Disney helped promote, and therefore sell, colour television in the United States through the show Walt Disneyʼs Wonderful World of Color, broadcast by the NBC network because its parent company, RCA, manufactured colour television sets. Indeed it could be argued that blockbuster computer animations are more showcases for technical processes (as newly purchasable technologies) than thought-through entertainments. Springing up across commercial zones, animationʼs in-store multi-screen garishness is directly hitched to the new buyable worlds of seeing. Feature-length cartoons such as Spirited Away (2001), Howlʼs Moving Castle (2005) and the Wallace and Gromit series – not just directed at children, though childlike in their sensibilities – find broad distribution in a variety of conventional and arthouse cinemas. Many audiences and critics take these films to heart, but they remain foreign, essentially strange within the context of usual cinema output because of their lack of stars and their absence of hooks to the outside world of gossip, fashion and journalistic discussions of contemporary morality and how ʻweʼ should live our lives. This commentary was developed from a paper given at the annual conference of the Cine-Club of Faro, University of the Algarve, 9 December 2005. *
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Radical Philosophy 137 (May/June 20 06)
Such transgenerational animation films are frequently quaint and charming. Their sources are European fairytales, Alice in Wonderland, old black-and-white movies. These references contribute to a vague sense of pastness, which could be nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century. The setting in the past is contrasted again with technologies that are out of their time, machineries that stem from yet another epoch – or none at all – such as the bullet train in Spirited Away, blasting into the Neverland of the palace, Howlʼs steam-punk castle or Wallace and Gromitʼs Heath Robinsonesque contraptions. The animations render in plastic or drawn form marvellous worlds of magic melded with technology. These films reflect and rely on technology as a kind of benign but spirited magic. Their technologies are obstinate, but ultimately, like the gremlins in folk tales, obliging. These films combine traditional techniques − such as hand-drawn cell animation or clay modelling − with digital techniques. This eclectic melange of technical processes mirrors the filmsʼ more expansive sense of animationʼs possible forms, audiences, applications and meanings.
Counter-culture cartoons Another type of contemporary animation, more firmly anchored in the adult world, is the animation-documentary, which combines cartoon, drawing, acting and documentary. American Splendor (2003), a biopic on the comic-strip writer Harvey Pekar, uses animation to reflect on the banality of everyday life – something rarely seen in Hollywoodʼs usual output – and, while representing it, attain some sort of critical angle on it. Similar films include De-Railroaded (2005), about the mad ʻoutsiderʼ singer Wild Man Fischer, and Crumb (1994), which focuses on the life and cartoons of R. Crumb. De-Railroaded, a low-budget digital video production by the Rubin Twinz, uses animation to get across subjective craziness, which is effectively the world of Fischer, and draws on the work of a comic strip artist who has illustrated Fischerʼs life. Crumb, like American Splendor, is about an author of comic strips, and animation provides a convenient way of rendering the source comic strips into filmic form. But more than this, the films insist on fusing documentary, acting, cartoon and comic strip, as part of a commentary on the flexibility of our worlds, the blurring of subjective and objective environments, the colouration of our contexts by our self-reflection. This is exemplified in the segment ʻWho is Harvey Pekar?ʼ in American Splendor, which is precisely about the impossibility of pinning down an identity. The sequence opens with an entirely white screen. It mimics the blank page of the comic book. As the actor representing Pekar walks across the unmarked screen something like a pencil line appears and marks out the dimensions of a room. Next other lines and a telephone appear, and all are recognizably in Pekar illustrator R. Crumbʼs style. Film and comic combine in an animated sequence. The scene cuts suddenly to Pekar the actor on a real, filmed street. Stepping through a drawn window Pekar re-enters the drawn room, before the scene whites out, imitating once again the unmarked page. Documentary, fiction, comic strip and cartoon are shown as interchangeable modes of representation. This is a universe without stable boundaries between the true and the fictional, the subjective and the objective. The way animation is used in American Splendor is symptomatic of a much broader trend within movie-making, whereby animation, obviously or covertly, reconfigures contemporary filmic production. The animation documentary may have its roots in the counterculture, but its formal – technically based – components are manifest in the most mainstream products. There is a sense in which American Splendor inhabits the mainstream of commercial US cinema. It is a film of a comic book, and films of comic books have long been a staple of Hollywoodʼs production, though this particular example is atypical. Comic-book supermen have featured since the late 1920s. No sooner were these men of special powers, fetishized human beings, godlike creatures dominating the scene in
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comic books than they were translated into animated shorts and live-action, if highly artificial, studio films. Taken seriously or not, film and television versions of Superman and Spider-Man strips conjured up a world in which superheroes averted disaster and combated evil. That the form has endured is testament to the fact that film and comic culture mesh well. The superhuman exploits of Spider-Man, Superman and the rest can be rendered easily in cel-animation, which is the translation into mobile form of the comic booksʼ drawn panels. The studio film found ways of emulating comicsʼ appearance for non-animated film, and the special effects available to cinema from its earliest days − slow-motion, time-lapse, film reversal, montage − simulate superheroic illusions. The political connotations of superheroism – American heroes saving the world – are obvious. But there are times when this ferociousness appears less appropriate, when the hegemon is cowed, insecure or operating under a different ideological flag. At those moments, campness and irony, selfconsciousness and handwringing enter into the frame. The types of comic books chosen for filming change too. American Splendor is an example of this. It claims to present the ʻdumb averageʼ, ordinariness and banality, everyday frustrations at incompetence and failure. Harvey Pekarʼs world is all Clark Kent and Peter Parker trapped in their office routines before their transformation into superheroes. Such a world finds its best representation not in film of live actors pretending – that is reserved for Hollywood fantasies of distinctly non-average scenarios – but rather in animation, which comes to represent a moment of genuineness because of its links to the subjective reality of the protagonist, and its ability to explore ordinary worlds and experiences intimately.. Such a comic-book film allows for an opening up to the non-spectacular, reversing the usual drive of commercial comic culture. Documentary reinforces this quest for reflection and meta-commentary, as the real Harvey and his real wife comment in the course of the film on their fictionalized selves. Documentary is not used to open up a realm of the real versus the represented, but rather to suggest the multiplicity of stances towards the past in the present. In various ways, a film such as American Splendor makes graphic the parameters of much contemporary commercial film. This predominantly concerns the use of technology in its intermeshing with narrative and temporality. Animationʼs technological appropriations of reality reformulate − and legislate − the very basis and meaning of film. Even comic-book films that do not represent superheroes exemplify a formal shift in film-making. The comic-book film is the essence of contemporary Hollywood, where new modes of storyboarding, derived from the technological processes central to contemporary commercial film, make for a peculiarly episodic type of cinema. Films are now organized around episodes, sections, skits, as are comic strips (which tend also to have short sequences) and cartoons, which are based on gags. With DVD technology the episodic nature of contemporary film seems underlined, as films are now clearly composed of divisible segments or ʻchaptersʼ. Much commercial film is now structured like a comic strip, and is also arguably reliant, gesturally, on caricature. (The stereotypes of Arabs in the controversial Danish cartoons are familiar from Disneyʼs Aladdin, Scooby Doo and Popeye). If film owes much to the comic strip, it is also the case that much film, including live action, has become a type of animation. This too is a feature of the technical processes used in contemporary filmmaking. Unlike American Splendor, most films do not admit their animated mode, but rather use animation
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– understood here as synonymous with computer processing – to compensate for the inadequacies of the real, as well as to generate special or even quite normal effects. It is in this sense that animation has infiltrated itself unseen into the contemporary filmscape. Most importantly (and most invisibly) animation has found its way into regular ʻrealistʼ studio features. Action films, along with other genres, use computer animation as an essential part of their digital post-production. Filmʼs original configuration (which consists in film frames animated into movement) is recapitulated in a new visual production field where computers freeze film in order to build it up again digitally and propel it into movement. With digital technology, much of film is based on animation in a practical and technical sense. Animation, digital or otherwise, allows an endless and absolute manipulation and revision of filmic material. Contemporary film becomes endlessly revisable, less and less reliant on the shot footage that comes to provide only a stimulus for the film. Commercial film is no longer in any meaningful sense a recording of the real transposed into fiction, yet anchored in reality. Alongside its technical uses, the computerized animation of film has an ideological supplement. On the behest of a now-vicious, now-cowed US hegemon film-makers have the tools to revise and reshape the USAʼs image in sensitive times, when image control and damage limitation form the political orders of the day. The aerial attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001 provide an apt marker for this, because these events had an impact on visual culture in a number of ways. Fiction film played a particular role. Cameras had caught the towers when they still existed, inscribed – intentionally or otherwise – in film footage. Editing eradicated them subsequently. The World Trade Center featured prominently in the marketing campaign for the film of Spider-Man made in 2001. In the film trailer, Spider-Man snared villains in a web spun between the two towers. This could not be used when the film was released the following year. Filmʼs techniques, the special effects and new digital processes that make it so adaptable for cartoon superheroics and action movies, can efface historical, documentary reality. A panicked America has the tools to revise its image faced by a crisis of legitimacy. Digital processing allows for the instituting of an ideal reality. The illusion of reality is maintained, but tidied up, corrected, made acceptable and desirable for the contemporary moment. Where historical movement was, now there is the stillness of the digitized simulation, tweaked frame by frame.
Film stills and moving photographs Film is composed of stills. It is stillness whirred into movement by the energy of the projector. In this illusioning a simulation of past historical activity is achieved. Movements caught on celluloid overcome their freezing into frames to be rendered smoothly mobile again. Some film-makers − for example, Vertov − have exploited this fundamental basis of film, arguing that to return film to its component stillness is to make it available for analysis. Exploiting the stillness of film opens up Walter Benjaminʼs ʻoptical unconsciousʼ of photography, the camera visionʼs complete and indiscriminate recording of a whole field that can, after the event, be scrutinized for chunks of historical actuality. The computer processing of film is another type of freezing of the image, seizing each frame in order to manipulate its contours. A contrary movement now meets it. Where the processes of digital post-production arrest the movement of film, elsewhere movement is introduced into the stillness of the photograph. This has occurred in feature films, as well as documentary, in the Bullet-Time or Time-Slice process. A moment is frozen as still cameras encircling an object simultaneously click. Transferred to a computer, these images are then viewed sequentially, rendering a still object animated. It appears as if the viewer moves around an object during a moment that is frozen in time. This process has been used as much in fiction film and documentary as
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it has in computer games such as the Max Payne series, Enter the Matrix (2003) and The Path of Neo (2005). In gaming, it enables players to slow down the game-world, while allowing them to look and aim at normal speed. Frozen-time-effect technologies stretch out a single moment. This does not appear to be in order to gain further knowledge through an enforced period of reflection, as in Eisensteinʼs ʻintellectual montageʼ, with its dissection of time and combination of perspectives. Rather it is a stunt, and used for stunts. The photographic booty is seen from all sides, panoptically, but this pan-seeing, with its stretching of a moment in time, ejects the object from time. In gaming, it exposes it to the decision to shoot. In film, it interrupts narrative flow and excerpts a moment of the film into space rather than time. As effect, it is the synthetic creation of wonder, conveying the totally processed nature of the visual field. Perhaps it is even an effort to expunge the ʻoptical unconsciousʼ, by making the object fully exposed rather than discovered in its interstices. Elsewhere, another spurious movement used in documentary film repeats and replaces the original configuration of the filmic image as a still whirred into movement. This involves animation of still photography. One technique is to excerpt a foreground figure from the photograph, disassociated from the background, and then, via some sort of computer trickery involving focus and simulated depth of field, to offer a fake parallax. Once this is achieved, the camera pans in across the field now rendered ʻmore lifelikeʼ. This is akin to another type of animation of still photography, also pioneered in documentary film, called the Ken Burns Effect after the influential US documentary film-maker. This has been popularized and made available in image-processing packages, such as iPhoto and iMovie and Premiere, in which an automated function allows any photograph to be slow panned and swooped across as if it were a 3D realm. In these computer techniques, movement is faked where stillness was. Animation is thrust on the past technically. But its vectors only generate the simulation of movement. Such effects misunderstand the extent to which the details caught in photographs are set in movement not by crude zooms across an homogeneously analysed field, in a technical synthesis of movement, but rather in their pinpointing in relation to an idea in the present that detonates them. Through this they are, in Walter Benjaminʼs phrase, ʻblasted out of the continuum of historyʼ and brought to life via intellectual reasoning. Today, a doubled and contradictory movement ensues when it comes to animation. Animation is introduced where stillness was, and stillness is introduced where the animated traces of life once were. To animate photography with the illusion of movement is not to analyse but to produce a pseudo-experience – as if giving you more knowledge. And in the same way, moving in an opposite direction, to freeze film into frames that can be digitally manipulated is also to make experience, the experience traced in celluloid, pseudo. Documentary – as the original film footage or as the still photograph explored technically – is no longer the archival trace of historical activity, but an activity that is about its own process of arrested or faked flurry. Fiction films tidy up the archival record that they capture in the course of filming, but they make obvious the fact that they are constructed fancies for entertainment purposes. Documentary, by contrast, claims to be a true rendition of past actuality. But documentarists have broken with the stillness of that past. The animating techniques are developed to counter the numb stillness of the archive. It is as if we are not allowed to face the past in all its frozen closedness. These processes are on a par with the colouration of black-and-white movies or the desperate search for colour film in the historical archive, as if this were more realistic, more seeable than the duotone stuff. Perhaps it is akin to the use of music in early film. Adorno wrote of how in film music lends the cinematic vision a veneer of humanity, a semblance of liveliness, by masking the whir of the projector in the background, the proof that we exist under the sway of mechanization. Without it, we are blankly exposed to our counterparts, the two-dimensional shadows that cavort on screen, as Adorno and Eisler observed in their 1947 Composing for the Films. 12
DOSSIER
Spheres of action Art and politics In the anglophone context of the last thirty years, the phrase ʻcritical theoryʼ has been used in two quite different ways. On the one hand it refers to the project of the Frankfurt School, in its various formulations, over a fifty-year period from the early 1930s (from early Horkheimer through to ʻmiddle periodʼ Habermas). On the other hand it has come to denote a far broader but nonetheless discrete tradition, with its roots in Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Saussure, and its primary manifestations in France in the period from the late 1950s to the end of the 1990s, with Barthes, Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard as its main representatives. In the first case, the phrase is both selfdesignating and the object of explicit theoretical reflection. In the latter case, however, it was the result of the reception of a theoretically heterogeneous tradition into the literary departments of the Anglo-American academy, where ʻcriticismʼ was an established professional activity. Consequently, while the conceptual emphasis in the reception of the Frankfurt School has been on criticism or critique (Kritik) – the main opposition being between ʻTraditional and Critical Theoryʼ (Horkheimer, 1937) – the emphasis in the reception of the French tradition was placed heavily on ʻtheoryʼ, the main opposition being between theoretical and a- or anti-theoretical (historically, aesthetic) interpretative practices. Yet ʻtheoryʼ, here, is not a name for an alien philosophy (in the way in which ʻcritical theoryʼ was initially an alias for a certain philosophical reception of Marxism) but a purportedly post-philosophical pursuit, occupying the place, but not the mode, of a Heideggerian ʻthinkingʼ. What these two bodies of thought share is a suspicion of the self-sufficiency of philosophy, an orientation towards inter- and trans-disciplinarity, an openness to the general text of writing, and a critical attitude towards the institutions of Western capitalist societies. Where they differ is in their relations to the philosophies of Hegel and Heidegger. The former is self-consciously post-Hegelian and anti-Heideggerian, while the latter is insistently anti-Hegelian and generi-
cally post-Heideggerian. As Jean-Luc Nancy put it at the end of the 1980s: ʻ“French” thought today proceeds in part from a “German” rupture with a certain philosophical “France” (which is also a rupture with a certain “Germanity”).ʼ It was this displaced Germanicism of French thought that was the object of attack in Habermasʼs polemic The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) – a book that appeared in the wake of the extraordinary success in Germany of Sloterdijkʼs Critique of Cynical Reason (1983). The philosophically ʻGermanicʼ character of much French critical theory is thus well established. Less attention has been paid to the influence of French thought – including that which proceeds from ʻa German rupture with a certain philosophical Franceʼ – on the German critical tradition. Yet some of the most productive developments within the orbit of Frankfurt critical theory have been driven by a reflective intensity in the relationship to intellectual and artistic events in France. (This is true not only of Benjamin, but also of aspects of early Horkheimer and Adornoʼs mature thought too.) More recently, there is a ʻpost-Frankfurtianʼ German thought of the 1980s and 1990s that has been profoundly influenced by currents of French theory of the 1960s and 1970s: French Nietzscheanism, structuralism, Barthes, Foucault, situationism, Deleuze/Guattari and Baudrillard. This problematizes the nationalism of German philosophy in a quite different way from Habermasʼs identification with American pragmatism and his concern to reformulate normative issues within the terms of post-analytical philosophy. It is notable that these currents have all been concerned in some way with aesthetic aspects of political action and the political meaning of art; and that they have been able to flow more freely, in Germany, in the art school than the philosophy department. The papers that follow* are by a trio of thinkers from Karlsruhe, whose writings are marked by different aspects of the French thought of the 1960s: vitalism, structuralism and deconstruction, in Sloterdijk, Weibel and Groys, respectively. PO
*These papers were presented at ʻSpheres of Action – Art and Politicsʼ, Tate Britain, London, 12 December 2005, organized by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University. List of Weibelʼs images appears on p. 56.
Radical Philosophy 137 (May/June 20 06)
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War on latency On some relations between surrealism and terror Peter Sloterdijk Of all offensive gestures of aesthetic modernity, surrealism, more than any other, strengthened the insight that the main interest of the present time must focus on the explication of culture – provided we understand culture as the quintessence of symbolforming mechanisms and art creation processes. Surrealism follows the command that demands occupation of the symbolic dimensions in the crusade towards modernization. Its articulated and unarticulated aim is to make creative processes explicit and elucidate their sources as much as possible. For this purpose and without ceremony it brings forward the fetish of the epoch: the concept of ʻrevolutionʼ, legitimization of all things. However, as in political spheres (where it de facto has never been a question of an actual ʻturningʼ in the sense of a reversal from top to bottom, but of proliferation of top positions and their reappointment by representatives of the offensive middle classes, which indeed would not be possible without a partial transparency of the mechanisms of power – that is, democratization – and seldom without an initial phase of open force from below), the misnomer of events is also evident in the field of culture. Here, too, there was never a reversal or Umwälzung in the precise sense of the word, but, rather, solely a redistribution of symbolic hegemony – which demanded a certain revelation of artistic processes and called for a phase of barbarisms and Bilderstürme. In the field of culture, ʻrevolutionʼ is a pseudonym for ʻlegitimateʼ force against latent tendencies. It causes the new performers, who act with a clear conscience, to break from the holisms and comforts of bourgeois art settings. The recollection of one of the best-known scenes from the surrealistic offensive may well explain the parallelism between the atmo-terrorist explications of the atmosphere and the culturally revolutionary blows to the mentality of a bourgeois art audience. On 1 July 1936, Salvador Dalí, who was at the start of his career as a self-proclaimed ambassador from the kingdom of the surreal, gave a performance at
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Radical Philosophy 137 (May/June 20 06)
Londonʼs New Burlington Galleries on the occasion of the International Surrealist Exhibition, in which he intended to explain the principles of the ʻparanoiac critical methodʼ he had developed, with reference to his own exhibit. In order to make quite clear to his audience by his appearance that he was speaking to them as a representative of a radical Elsewhere and in the name of the Other, Dalí chose to wear a diving suit for his lecture. According to the report in the London Star on 2 July, a car radiator was attached to the top of the helmet; the artist was also holding a billiard cue in his hand and was accompanied by two large dogs.1 In his self-portrayal, Comment on devient Dalí, the artist retells a version of the incident that resulted from this idea: I had decided to make a speech on the occasion of the exhibition, but wearing a diving suit, in order to allegorize the subconscious. Hence I was dressed in my armour and even put on shoes with lead soles, thus preventing me from moving my legs. I had to be carried onto the podium. Then the helmet was placed on my head and screwed tight. I started my speech behind the glass of the helmet – in front of a microphone that was obviously not able to pick up anything. My facial expression however fascinated the audience. Soon I was gasping for breath with my mouth wide open, my face turned red at first and then blue and my eyes started to roll. Apparently one (sic) had forgotten to connect me to an air supply system, and I was close to suffocation. The expert who had fitted me had disappeared. By gesticulating I made my friends aware that my situation was becoming critical. One fetched a pair of scissors and tried in vain to pierce the suit, another wanted to unscrew the helmet. As his attempt failed, he started to hit the screws with a hammer … two men tried to tear off the helmet, a third continued to hit the metal, so that I almost lost consciousness. There was now a wild scuffle on the podium, during which I surfaced now and again like a jumping jack with dislocated limbs, and my copper helmet resounding like a gong. The audience then applauded this successful Dalí mimo-drama, which, in their
eyes, no doubt showed how the conscious tried to seize the unconscious. This triumph was, however, almost the death of me. When they finally pulled off the helmet, I was as pale as Jesus on his return from forty days fasting in the desert.2
This scene illustrates two things: surrealism is a dilettantism, where technical objects are not employed on their own terms, but as symbolic draperies; nevertheless, it is part of the explicit-making movement of modern art, as it unmistakably presents itself as a process that breaks latent tendencies and dissolves backgrounds. An important aspect of dissolving backgrounds in the cultural field is the attempt to destroy the consensus between the producing and the receiving side in artistic activity, in order to set free the radical intrinsic value of the showing-event and uncover the absoluteness of the production and the intrinsic value of receptivity. Such interventions are valuable as elucidation measures against provincialism and cultural narcissism. It was not without reason that the surrealists, in the early phase of their wave of attacks, developed the art of astounding the bourgeois as a form of action sui generis, since this helped the innovators distinguish between in-group and out-group, and also allowed the public protest to be considered a sign of the successful dismantling of a handed-down system. Whoever scandalizes the public admits to progressive iconoclasm. He or she uses terror against symbols to burst mystified latent positions and achieve a breakthrough with more explicit techniques. The legitimate premiss of symbolic aggression lies in the belief that cultures have too many skeletons in the closet and it is time to burst the interrelations between armament and edification that are protected by latency. When the early avant-gardes nevertheless came to an erroneous conclusion, this could be seen in the fact that the populace they intended to frighten always learned its lesson faster than any one of the aesthetic bogeymen ever anticipated. After only a few rounds of the game between the provocateurs and the provoked, a situation arose in which the bourgeoisie, enticed by mass culture, took over the explication of art, culture and significance
through marketing, design and auto-hypnosis, whilst the artists often continued to astound only formally, without noticing that the time for this method had passed. Others underwent a neo-romantic turn and once again came to terms with profundity. Soon, many modernists seemed to have forgotten the basic principle of modern philosophy defined by Hegel that applies analogously to aesthetic production: the depth of a thought can only be measured by the power of its comprehensiveness – otherwise it remains an empty symbol for unconquered latent elements. These results can be measured by Dalíʼs failed and hence informative performance. It proves, on the one hand, that the destruction of consensus between the artist and the public cannot succeed once the latter has understood the new rule through which the extension of the work to the environment of the work becomes itself the form of work. The enthusiastic applause that Dalí received at the New Burlington Galleries illustrated how consistently the educated audience adhered to the new terms of art perception. On the other hand, the scene showed the artist as latencybreaker, conveying to the profane people a message from the kingdom of Otherness. Dalíʼs function in this game was distinguished by its ambiguity, which tells us a great deal about his vacillation between romanticism and objectivity. On the one hand, he commends himself as a technician of the Other, since in the lecture he never held, but which can easily be anticipated by its title, ʻAuthentic Paranoiac Fantasiesʼ, he intended to deal with a precise method that would make access to the ʻsubconsciousʼ controllable – that paranoiac critical method with which Dalí formulated formal instructions for the ʻConquest of the Irrational.ʼ3
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He confessed to a kind of photo-realism with regard to irrational inner pictures: he intended to objectify with masterly precision what had become apparent in dreams, delirium and inner visions. At this time he already understood his work as an artistic parallel to the so-called ʻdiscovery of the unconscious through psychoanalysisʼ – a scientific myth adopted wholesale by the aesthetic avant-gardes and the educated audiences of the 1920s and 1930s (and brought to esteem once again by Lacan between the 1950s and 1970s when he reanimated the surrealistic form of lecture for a ʻreturn to Freudʼ). From this perspective, surrealism takes its place in the manifestations of the operational ʻrevolutionʼ, which carries on the continuous advancement of modernization. On the other hand, Dalí adhered, decidedly countercritically, to the romantic conception of the artist-ambassador who among the unenlightened transforms into a delegate of the Beyond, pregnant with sense. This attitude reveals him as a domineering amateur, surrendering to the illusion that he is capable of employing complicated technical devices to articulate metaphysical kitsch. The user attitude is typical in this case, childishly leaving the technical side of his own performance to experts of whose competence he had not convinced himself. Also the fact that the scene was not rehearsed shows the artistʼs poor, literary treatment of technical structures. Nevertheless, Dalíʼs choice of outfits has an illuminating aspect; his accident is prophetic – not only in terms of the reaction of the spectators, who proclaimed applause for what they failed to understand as a new cultural bearing. The fact that the artist chose a diving suit equipped with an artificial air supply for his appearance as ambassador from the deep leaves no doubt about his connection with the development of atmospheric consciousness, which, as we attempt to show here, is central to the self-explication of culture in the twentieth century. Even if the surrealist achieves only a semi-technical interpretation of the global and cultural background as the ʻsea of the subconsciousʼ, he or she already postulates a competence to navigate in this space with formally expanded procedures. His performance makes it obvious that, in the present age, conscious existence must be lived as an explicit dive into context. Those who venture out of their own camps in multimilieu society must be sure of their ʻdiving equipmentʼ – that is, of their physical and mental immune systems. The accident cannot be accounted to dilettantism alone; it also discloses the systematic risks of technical atmospheric explication and technically forced access to an other element – precisely in the way that the risk of
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poisoning the home troops was inseparable from the actions of military atmo-terrorism in gas warfare. If Dalíʼs portrayal of the incident is accurate, then he was not far from going down in history as a martyr of dives in the symbolic sense. Under the given circumstances, the accident proved to be a form of production, in that it triggered panic in the artist, which had always been inherent as impetus for his work.
Permanent revolution, permanent fear In the unsuccessful attempt to present the ʻsubconsciousʼ as a navigable zone, the very fear of annihilation came to the fore, which the aesthetic explication process was activated to conquer and expel. To put it in general terms: the contraphobic experiment of modernization is never really able to emancipate itself from its background of fear, as this would not be capable of appearing until fear could be allowed to enter into existence as fear itself – which, by the nature of things, presents an impossible hypothesis. Modernity as a background explication therefore remains caught in the circle of victory over fear through technology that causes fear. Primary as well as secondary fear always provides a fresh boost for the continuation of the process; its urgency justifies the use of further latency-breaking and background-controlling force at every stage of modernization – or, according to prevailing phraseology, it demands permanent basic research and innovation. Aesthetic modernity is a process of using force not against persons or objects, but against non-clarified cultural relations. It organizes a wave of attacks against the holistic attitudes of the types belief, love and honesty and against pseudo-evident categories such as shape, content, image, works and art. Its modus operandi is live experimentation on the users of these definitions. Aggressive modernism consequently breaks away from the respect for classicists, in which, as it remarks with great aversion, at least vague holism is manifested – combined with a tendency to continue to follow a ʻtotemʼ, retained in its undefined and undeveloped state. As a result of its keen wish for explicitness, surrealism declares war on mediocrity: it sees in it the opportune hideout for antimodern lethargies, which oppose the operative development and reconstructive revelation of integrated rules. As normality rates as a crime in this war of mentality, art as a medium of combating crime can build on unusual combat orders. When Isaac Babel declared ʻbanality is the counterrevolutionʼ, he indirectly expressed the principle of
ʻrevolutionʼ. The use of fear as force against normality bursts aesthetic and social latency and raises to the surface laws according to which societies and works of art are construed. Permanent ʻrevolutionʼ calls for permanent fear. It postulates a society that proves itself repeatedly as readily frightened and controllable. New art is saturated with the excitement of the very newest, as it appears terror-mimetic and warlike – often without being able to define whether it declares war on the war of societies or wages war on its own behalf. The artist permanently faces the decision of whether to advance against the public as saviour of differences or as warlord of innovation. In view of this ambivalence in modernistic aggression, so-called postmodernism was not entirely wrong when it defined itself as an anti-explicit and anti-extremist reaction to the aesthetic and analytic terror of modern art. Like all forms of terrorism, the aesthetic falls back on the unmarked background in front of which works of art articulate and makes it appear on the forestage as an intrinsic phenomenon. The prototype of modern painting of this trend, Kasimir Malevichʼs ʻBlack Squareʼ of 1913, owes its inexhaustible interpretability to the artistʼs decision to evacuate the image space in favour of the pure, dark surface. Thereby its squareness itself becomes the figure, which in other pictorial situations appears as the carrier in the background. The scandal of the work lies in, among other things, the fact that it still stands its ground as a painting in its own right and by no means presents merely an empty canvas as object of interest, as would have been conceivable in the context of Dadaistic campaigns to deride art. It may well be that the picture can be regarded as a minimally irregular platonic icon of the equilateral rectangle, deserving tribute due to its sensuousness. It is, however, simultaneously the icon of the aniconic or pre-iconic – of the normally invisible picture background. The black square therefore stands before a white background, which surrounds it, almost as a frame. In the ʻWhite Squareʼ painted in 1914 even this difference is almost compensated. The basic gesture of such formal representations is the raising of the non-thematic to the thematic. Not only are the possibly varied picture contents, which could appear in the foreground, reduced to a background which always appears the same, but, far more, the background as such is painted with the greatest care and thus made explicit as figure of the figure-bearer. The terror of purification can be unambiguously seen in the desire for the ʻsupremacy of pure feelingʼ. The work of art demands the uncondi-
tional capitulation of the beholdersʼ perception before its real presence. Although suprematism, with its anti-naturalism and its anti-phenomenonalism, makes itself clearly known as an offensive movement on the aesthetic flank of explication, it remains bound to the idealistic belief that to make explicit means the return of what is sensually present to what is spiritually absent. It is bound to old European and Platonic rules, in so far as it explains things upwards and simplifies the empirical forms to pure, primary forms. In this respect, surrealism operated differently by following more closely the materialistic, downward manner of explication – without going so far as to be named sous realism. Yet, whilst the material trend remained coquetry for the surrealist movement, its alliance with depth psychologies, in particular the psychoanalytic trend, revealed its own characteristic trait. The surrealistic reception of Viennese psychoanalysis is one of numerous cases illustrating that the initial success of Freudianism among the educated audience and numerous artists was not achieved as a therapeutic method, which naturally only a very small number of persons experienced first hand, but as a strategy for the interpretation of symbols and background manipulation, leaving every interested party open to the choice of application to suit individual requirements. Is not indeed the analysis one did not undergo always the most appealing? Freudʼs approach led to the unfolding of a realm of a special kind of latency and came to be known by an expression adopted from idealistic philosophy – namely from Schelling, Schubert, Carus and the nineteenthcentury philosophies of life, especially Schopenhauer and Hartmann – as ʻthe unconsciousʼ. This defined a subjective dimension of security, of inner latencies and of the invisibly overlapped preconditions for an ego-ish state. According to the Freudian formulation, the meaning of the expression had narrowed radically and become so specialized that it could be put to clinical use. It no longer signified the reservoir of dark, integrating forces in a preconscious nature that possesses healing power and creates pictures, nor the underground of blindly, self-affirming streams of will below the ʻsubjectʼ. It defined a small, inner container that becomes filled with repressed emotions and is subjected to neurotogenic tension through the buoyancy of the repressed.4 The surrealistsʼ enthusiasm for psychoanalysis was due to the fact that they confused the Freudian definition of the unconscious with Romantic metaphysics. From creative misinterpretation arose declarations such as Dalíʼs Declaration of Independence of Fantasy and
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Declaration of Human Rights to Madness in 1939, in which sentences are found such as: A man has the right to love women with ecstatic fishheads. A man has the right to find lukewarm telephones repulsive and to demand telephones as cold, green and aphrodisiac as the sleep of a Spanish fly when haunted by faces.5
The surrealistic allusion to the right to be mad warns individuals of their tendency to submission to normalizing therapies; it wishes to make monarchists out of the usually unhappy patients who pursue their own return from an exile, neurotic with reason, to the kingdom of their very personal madness.
Total war, environmental war We should not forget that what is today called the consumer society was invented in a hothouse – in those glass-covered arcades of the early nineteenth century, in which a first generation of adventure-customers came to breathe the intoxicating perfume of a closed inside world of consumer goods. The arcades represent an early stage of urban atmospheric explication – an objective turning out of the ʻhome addictedʼ disposition, which, according to Walter Benjamin, seized the nineteenth century. Home addiction, says Benjamin, is the irresistible urge ʻto found a homeʼ in all surroundings.6 In Benjaminʼs theory of the interior, the ʻsupertemporalʼ need for uterus simulation, expressly with the forms of a concrete historic situation, has already been conceived. Indeed, the twentieth century with its large buildings has shown how far the erection of ʻliving spaceʼ can be extended beyond the boundaries of the need to search for a comfortable interior. The year 1936 is enrolled in the chronicle of aesthetic and cultural theoretic atmospheric explication not only through Salvador Dalíʼs accident in London in a diving suit. On 1 November of the same year, the 31-year-old author Elias Canetti gave a speech on the occasion of Hermann Brochʼs fiftieth birthday, a speech which was unusual in content and tone, in which he not only drew a detailed portrait of the author he was honouring, but at the same time shaped a new genre of laudation. The originality of Canettiʼs speech was that it raised the question of a connection between an author and his time in a manner previously unknown. Canetti defined the artistʼs stay in time as a breath-connection – as a special way of diving into the concrete atmospheric conditions of the epoch. Canetti sees in Broch the first grand master of a ʻPoetry of the Atmospheric as a Staticʼ – meaning, of an art which would be capable
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of illustrating ʻstatic breathing spaceʼ, expressed in a manner: making visible the climatic design of persons and groups in their typical spaces. ʻ[His] involvement is always with the entire space in which he is present, with a kind of atmospheric unity.ʼ7 Canetti praises Brochʼs ability to grasp every person he attempts to portray, also in an ecological sense: he recognizes the singular existence of every person in his or her own breathing air, surrounded by an unmistakable climatic membrane, embodied in a personal ʻbreathing householdʼ. He compares the poet to a curious bird with the freedom to creep into every possible cage and take ʻair samplesʼ from them. Thus he knows, bestowed with a mysteriously keen ʻmemory for air and breathʼ, how it feels to be in this or that atmospheric habitat. As Broch turns to his characters more as a poet than a philosopher, he does not describe them as abstract ego-points in a universal ether; he portrays them as personified figures, each one living in its characteristic air membrane and moving between a variety of atmospheric constellations. The question of a possibility of poetry ʻdrawn from breathing experienceʼ leads only to fruitful information in light of this multiplicity: Above all, the answer would need to be that the diversity of our world consists, for the main part, of the variety of our breathing spaces. The space in which you are now sitting in a certain order, almost completely closed in from the environment, the manner in which your breath blends to an air common to all … all this is, from the point of view of the person breathing, a unique … situation. Yet, go a few steps further and you will find a completely different situation in another breathing space. … The city is full of such breathing spaces, as full as it is of individual human beings; and in the same way as the split up of these people, of whom no one is the same as the other, a kind of every manʼs cul-de-sac constitutes the main excitement and main misery of life, one could also lament the split up of the atmosphere.8
According to this characterization, Brochʼs art of narrative is based on the discovery of atmospheric multiplicity through which the modern novel reaches beyond the representation of individual destiny. Its theme is no longer individuals in their limited activities and experiments, far more the extended unity of individual and breathing space. The actions are no longer carried out between persons, but between breathing households and their respective occupants. Through this ecological viewpoint, the alienation-critical motive of modernity is given new basic principles: the atmospheric separation of people among themselves accomplished by their
own respective ʻhouseholdsʼ; the difficulty for those with different outlooks, different membranes, different climates to reach them appears more justified than ever. The division of the social world into individual spaces of obstinacy, inaccessible to one another, is the moral analogue to the microclimatic ʻsplit up of the atmosphereʼ (which for its part corresponds to a split up of ʻworld valuesʼ). As Broch, after his advance onto the individually climatic and personally ecological plane, had quasi-systematically grasped the depth of isolation in modern individuals, the question of the conditions of their unison in a common ether beyond the atmospheric separation must have occurred to him with a clearness and urgency unequalled in his own time or at a later point in time in the history of sociological examinations on the elements of social connection – with the possible exception of Canettiʼs related attempt in Crowds and Power. In his speech in 1936 Canetti recognized in Hermann Broch the prophetic warner of an unprecedented danger to humanity, that in the metaphoric as in the physical sense was an atmospheric threat: Yet the greatest danger that has ever occurred in the history of mankind has chosen our generation as its victim. It is the defenselessness of breath that I would like to now finally speak of. It is difficult to grasp its real significance. Human beings are more receptive for air than for any other thing. They still move within it like Adam in paradise … Air is the last common property. It belongs to all collectively. It is not pre-portioned; even the poorest may take their share.… And now this last thing that was common to us all is to poison us all.… Hermann Brochʼs work is positioned between war and war, gas war and gas war. It is possible that he still now feels the toxic particles of the last war somewhere … but it is certain that he, who understands how to breathe better than we ourselves, is suffocating today on the gas that will take the breath from us others, whoever knows when that will be.9
Canettiʼs impassioned observation shows how information of the gas warfare from 1915 to 1918 had been abstractly translated by the most intensive diagnostician of the 1930s. Broch had realized that after the intentional atmospheric destruction of chemical warfare, social synthesis began in many respects to take on the character of gas warfare, as if atmoterrorism had turned inwards. The ʻtotal warʼ heralded by old particles and new signs would inevitably take on the characteristics of an environmental war: during this war, the atmosphere itself would become a theatre of war; furthermore, air would become a kind of weapon and a special kind of battlefield.
And, in addition, from the commonly breathed air, from the ether of the collective, the community, in its mania, will in future wage a chemical war against itself. How this can happen can be explained by a theory of ʻsemi-consciousnessʼ – undoubtedly the most original, if also the most fragmentary part remaining of Brochʼs mass psychological hypotheses. A state of semi-consciousness is that in which people move merely as trend followers in a trance of normality. As the prevailing total war is waged principally atmoterroristically and ecologically (this in the medium of total mass communication), it spreads to the ʻmoraleʼ of the troops, who can now hardly be distinguished from the population. Through toxic communions, the fighters and non-fighters, the synchronically gassed and simultaneously excited, consolidate in a collective state of subconsciousness. The modern masses see themselves integrated in an emergency communistic unit that should give them an acute feeling of identity due to their common threatened state. The climatic poisons emanated by the people themselves then prove to be especially dangerous, as long as they are standing beneath sealed communication domes, hopelessly aroused. In the pathogenic air-conditioning systems of synchronically excited publics, the inhabitants breathe in their own breath, again and again. Whatever is in the air is put there through totalitarian circular communication: it is filled with the victory dreams of offended masses and their drunken, far from empirical self-exaltation, followed like a shadow by the desire to humiliate others. Life in a multimedia state is like a stay in an enthusiastic gas palace.
Notes 1. See Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, Norton, New York, 1998. 2. Salvador Dalí, Dalí, translated into German by Franz Meyer, Moewig, Rastatt, 1988, pp. 229–30. 3. Salvador Dalí, La Conquête de lʼIrrationnel, Éditions Surréalistes, Paris, 1935. 4. The philosophical sources of the definition of the unconscious are illustrated mainly in the works of Odo Marquard, Transzendentaler Idealismus. Romantische Naturphilosophie. Psychoanalyse, Verlag für Philosophie Dinter, Cologne, 1987; and Jean-Marie Vaysse, Lʼinconscient des modernes. Essai sur lʼorigine métaphysique de la psychanalyse, Gallimard, Paris, 1999. 5. Dali, Dalí, p. 290. 6. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1999, p. 220 [1,4,4]. 7. Elias Canetti, ʻHermann Broch. Rede zum 50. Geburtstagʼ, in Elias Canetti, Das Gewissen der Worte. Essays, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1981, pp. 22, 18. 8. Ibid., p. 23. 9. Ibid., pp. 23–4.
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Re-presentation of the repressed The political revolution of the neo-avant-garde Peter Weibel Traditionally, the neo-avant-garde after 1945 is discredited as a purely formalist movement, blinding out the political content of the avant-garde of the 1920s. However, assuming that the avant-garde movements from 1950 to 1970 share the same epistemic field as the cultural theories of their time, from semiotics to psychoanalysis, we can apply these theories to those art movements, to produce a new interpretation of the period. When we do this, we discover that the neo-avant-garde was in fact a political art, not on the level of representation, but on the level of the dispositif. It transformed our traditional concept of the image, destroying it and deserting it, extending it into space and time, and redefining it as an arena of action. It thereby expanded our conception of art and art activities, in daily life, on the streets, beyond the studios and museums. There was a political revolution of the neo-avant-garde at the level of the display, the dispositif, the tool, negating traditional media of memory and representation, because after Stalinism, Fascism and Hitlerism, it became difficult to believe in the means of traditional culture. To understand this revolution we have to change the dominant model of representation. We have to understand that the neoavant-garde exchanged the transformation of formal systems of representation for the transformation of the means and materials of representation – and the criticism of artistic representation as such. In addition, we have to expand our tools of interpretation and experimentation to include psychoanalytic methods, models and modes of social deconstruction. When we do this, the neo-avant-garde appears as a re-presentation of processes of social and psychic repression, and Viennese Actionism appears in its full, exemplary force.
Wunderblock One model of representation, of the past but also of reality, is the Wunderblock, the ʻmystic writing padʼ. In ʻA Note upon the “Mystic Writing-Pad”ʼ (1925),
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Radical Philosophy 137 (May/June 20 06)
Freud developed a concept of the unconscious by referring to a childʼs toy consisting of a thin sheet of clear plastic covering a thick waxed board. The user can write or draw on it with any pointed instrument, pressing through the sheet of plastic, making traces in the surface below. As soon as the sheet is lifted up, the image above disappears, while traces of it remain on the wax surface underneath. Freud suggests that the way the Wunderblock records is similar to the way in which the psyche records its material. The psychic system receives sense impressions from the outside world, but remains unmarked by those impressions, which then pass through it to a deeper layer where they are recorded as unconscious memory. The writing technique of pressing through a sheet of plastic to make traces on the surface below mirrors Freudʼs differentiation between the surface-character of the conscious and the unconscious as a field of traces beneath. The pressing technique is a linguistic allusion to the concept of the repressed. Pressing through the sheet of plastic creates the repressed and dislocates information from the conscious to the unconscious level. The Wunderblock illuminates the mechanism by which the repressed becomes the prototype of the unconscious. This writing of the unconscious, this pressing of the repressed, was the model for Lacanʼs famous phrase ʻthe unconscious is structured like a languageʼ. But it also has affinities with the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, because the Wunderblock enables us not only to discover the writing of the unconscious but also to make explicit repressed meanings in the writing. The Wunderblock is a means of representation, a representation of the unconscious and the repressed, that corresponds to Derridaʼs idea that we have to deconstruct writing in order to gather hidden meanings that are deeper than the evident meaning of a text. Both Freud and Derrida look at the text as a pure trace. The concept of the text as a trace, and the trace
as representation of the repressed and unconscious, makes a shift from an external representation to an internal one, from the representation of reality to the representation of the psyche. The text is the means to discover the unconscious, the unconscious of a text and the unconscious of the psyche. This is precisely what Ludwig Wittgenstein reproached psychoanalysis with, in 1946: ʻWhat Freud says about the unconscious sounds like science but in fact is just a means of representation.ʼ Freudʼs theory of the unconscious and the repressed, as the cornerstone of psychoanalysis, expands the concept of representation. Since psychoanalysis, the concept of representation means more than just representation of the visual on the level of iconography. ʻWhy does meaning express itself in the dream?ʼ asked Michel Foucault in 1954. The answer is clearly that there exist mechanisms of the mind and the soul that prohibit certain meanings from expressing themselves in ordinary language or in conscious terms. Repression is Freudʼs term for the mechanism that turns away desires that are unacceptable to the ego and the superego. Those unruly desires are repressed, made inaccessible to our thinking. The unconscious and later the ʻidʼ are
the terms Freud uses for this realm of inaccessibility. Our repressed desires appear to us disguised as dreams, symptoms and in other seemingly incoherent, uncontrolled actions. The repressed returns disguised. In that way, dreams, symptoms and the rest are also systems of representations. The disguise is another way of representation. Representation is not only what is visible and evident; disguise and erasure can also be mechanisms of representation. The traces that are left after the erasing of the writing, even if barely visible, are still telling us their secrets, revealing the truth, the causes and reasons for repressions. Representation must be read as a system of symptoms. Then the question that Jean-Paul Sartre posed about ʻthe knowledge that is ignorant of itselfʼ can be answered positively. We can represent the unconscious, the individual unconscious, but also the social unconscious. We can represent knowledge that is ignorant of itself, disguised as dreams, symptoms – and as art. To paraphrase Foucault: why does meaning express itself in art and not in science? The answer is that society itself turns our unacceptable desires, insights, facts and knowledge away from us. There is some knowledge in our society that is repressed by the society itself. Disguised as art, this social unconscious, this repressed, can return to the mind and to reality. Naturally, Freudʼs concept of the repressed is an attack on the Cartesian conception of a rational mind and subject and therefore also a rational reality. This is why art is always blamed for being irrational, while science is defined as rational. But art is also a rational way to deal with the irrational, the unconscious, the repressed. The popular misunderstanding that art is the expression of drives, of uncontrolled drives, is untrue. Just the opposite is the case. Disguised as art, the repressed, the knowledge ignorant of itself, expresses itself. Art is not only a mechanism of representation of reality but also a mechanism of representation of the repressed. An iconic understanding of visual representations is a limited tool, because it is more or less a retinal representation. As a model of the unconscious and the repressed, the Wunderblock shows us that there are more traces of reality and that the mechanisms of representation are more complex than just the representation of external reality. The dynamic interaction of internal and external mechanisms of representation, reflected in the dynamic interaction of the conscious and the unconscious, shows us that mapping reality includes mapping the mind, and that it is not enough to define a representation isomorphically. This is the meaning of Magritteʼs famous painting, ʻThis Is Not
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a Pipeʼ (1928/29), and the reason it is so attractive to philosophers, like Foucault. If we stick to the conception of a purely visual representation, then we would have to deny the possibility that music and painting can have a political dimension, as Sartre did, when he proposed in What is Literature? (1946) that only literature, a complicated text, can have a political dimension, but not music or painting, not the visual arts. Besides the Wunderblock, psychoanalytic theory offers other mechanisms of representation of the repressed to help us construct an aesthetics of symptoms. Among them are the highly effective defence mechanisms of sublimation, displacement and reaction formation. Reaction formation is one of the most powerful concepts for understanding the text of the neo-avant-garde.
Reaction formation Reaction formation belongs to the category of defence mechanisms of the ego – Ich, the ʻIʼ. According to Freudʼs theory, the ego is situated between biology (represented by the id – Es, the ʻitʼ) and society (represented by the superego). According to Freudʼs famous formula Wo Es war soll Ich werden (Where ʻitʼ was ʻIʼ shall be), it is the aim of the psychic processes to replace the unconscious restraints of biology by the conscious actions of a sovereign ego. But during this process conflicting demands are made upon the ego and therefore this ego feels threatened, it feels anxiety. And the ego starts to develop defence mechanisms against these demands, be they from society or biology. It unconsciously blocks demands or transforms them into
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a less threatening form. Among others, Anna Freud in ʻThe Ego and the Defence Mechanismʼ (1946) developed a better understanding of these mechanisms and provided us with a list of strategies: denial, repression, regression, rationalization, displacement, projection, introjection, sublimation and reaction formation. Denial is the case if a person simply refuses to experience a situation or has blocked this situation from awareness. Repression, on the other hand, is ʻmotivated forgettingʼ. A situation or event or person which is or was too dangerous for the ego cannot be recalled or remembered, but this threatening situation is unconsciously effective. Repression is the most famous defence strategy. The repression of a traumatic event, as we know, will always return but in a different, masked way. Regression happens when we are faced with stress, troubled or frightened. The ego turns back to previous behaviours, more childish or primitive, such as sucking the thumb. We return to a state when we felt saved and secure, as in childhood. Rationalization is a way to make an impulse less threatening by explaining it in a rational manner, excuses that have a tendency to deny the facts. Acts, thoughts and emotions, the real psychic conditions of which are denied, are legitimized as logically coherent. Displacement is the redirection of an impulse to a symbolic substitute. Some people may have difficulties with love and substitute cats and dogs for human beings. Projection is another technique for displacing unacceptable desires or features onto other people (Anna Freud called it ʻdisplacement outwardʼ). A man who has sexual feelings about his friend but cannot acknowledge these feelings to himself increasingly
complains about the presence of homosexuality in society. Introjection or identification is an opposite technique. It not only defends the ego against threatening demands, but supports the integration of the ego into society. It even helps develop our superego. A child that feels lonely tries to act like a mother in order to lessen the fear. Teenagers with a troubled identity imitate their favourite star to establish their own identity. With this example we can understand why Freud saw defence mechanisms as necessary. He even suggested that there is a positive defence, which he called sublimation, which is the transformation of an unacceptable impulse into a form that is not only socially acceptable but even productive. Sublimation was for Freud the source of creation. A person with latent aggression may sublimate it into sport. Freud thought of most creative activities as sublimations, predominantly of the sex drive. Reaction formation is comparable to sublimation, because it is a mechanism that also transforms an unacceptable impulse into its opposite, to become socially acceptable. A child abused by its father is naturally unable to accept this traumatic experience and therefore turns even more to the abusing father, which appears rationally inexplicable. Defence mechanisms are processes by which the ego adapts to the reality principle. The study of defence mechanisms is thus extremely useful for the understanding of cultural productions and the uncovering of the socially unconscious. Reaction formation, described by Anna Freud as ʻbelieving the oppositeʼ, is a way of turning reality into its opposite. Adolescents often speak about the opposite sex as being annoying in order to hide their overwhelming desire. Aggression can be transformed into exaggerated tenderness. But reaction formation can also mix with the techniques of displacement or projection. A human being can project their own unacceptable activities onto others, but they can also project other unacceptable activities onto themselves, in a kind of inverse displacement. This projection or displacement happens in a binary code, as positive or negative reaction. Reaction formation is one of the most powerful codes in the encounter of a subject with the social system. In some cases it is more suitable than sublimation for explaining the mechanisms of cultural creativity.
Art The reduction of representation to purely visual representations of reality is a conceit of modernity. Modern art tried to reduce techniques of representation in the visual arts to the surface of the plastic sheet.
Greenbergʼs modernism was obsessed with the idea of the surface. Until the invention of photography the main visual form of representation of reality was painting. Painting experienced a crisis when, with the advent of photography around 1840, it was doubled by another technique of visual representation which could imitate reality even better. Modern art is the result of this crisis of representation, which started as a crisis of painting at the very moment when painting lost its monopoly of visual representation. Since before photography there was no visual system of representation other than the painted image, and the painted image reigned over thousands of years. People got used to the idea of comprehensively identifying painting with art itself – identifying the representational system of art, exclusively, with the representational system of painting. But this was wrong because painting was just one visual system of representation. The so-called crisis of representation forced painting to leave visual representation to photography and move to abstraction – that is, the denial of representation. Given that people wrongly believed in the equation ʻart is painting is visual representationʼ, it is understandable they would think that the loss of the monopoly of painting was the end of painting; and that the end of painting was the end of art; and the end of art, the end of representa-
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Each surface is a mere surface and there shall be no more representation. Each surface is filled to the border with one singular colour.
These sentences correspond with a placard unveiled by Heartfield and Grosz at the 1920 Dada exhibition in Berlin: ʻArt is dead. Long live Tatlinʼs new machine art.ʼ
Taboo
tion. This delineation follows the logic of modernity. The crisis of representation is just an expression of the loss of the monopoly of representation by painting, because after photography, film, television, video and the computer could also produce images, even moving images, and transmit images in real time. Modern art may thus be seen as a questionable delineation of the transformation of systems of representation through the advent of the technical image. The outcome of this so-called crisis of representation was modern art. As the cornerstone of modern art in the first half of the twentieth century, abstract art followed the logic of self-dissolution in three steps: (1) shifting accents (paint was analysed, and the retinal impression of colour was emphasized, in Impresionism); (2) declaring independence and autonomy (paint left behind the loss of local object-bound colours and gave colour an absolute status without referential ties to the world of objects, in symbolism and suprematism); (3) substitution (paint as a material (Faktura) was replaced by other materials – white colour by aluminium, the tissue of canvas by wood – in Russian constructivism). In abstract art not only was the representation of an object omitted but colour and form could also be omitted in a monochrome painting. The monochrome, or even paint-less, easel painting could be cut (Fontana), the surface of the canvas could be replaced by the surface of a skin (Metzger), and naked bodies covered with paint could cover the canvas (Yves Klein). Painting could become an arena of action. The action could take place on the canvas, in front of the canvas or even without the canvas. This is what Rodchenko, who painted ʻBlack on Blackʼ in 1918, called the ʻend of representationʼ, on the occasion of his execution of the first three monochromes in art history in 1921: I have brought painting to its logical end and have shown three paintings: one red, one blue and one yellow. I have done this in the knowledge that: everything is over. These are the primary colours.
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This formalist view from inside the evolution of modern art is complemented from the outside. The evolution of art corresponds with the evolution of society, and both had reasons to transform the systems of representation. Art had formalist reasons and society imposed these formalist reasons on art for reasons of its own, which were mechanisms of repression. The problem of repression and representation is the problem of the taboo. When something is happening that cannot be accepted, whether by the ego or the superego, whether by the individual or an institution, whether by a subject or a system, then this event is so deeply repressed and so totally denied that it is not possible to speak about it or to hear of it. But, as we know, the repressed has to return even in a disguised form. This is the way to understand the classic formula speculum artibus. Art is a mirror of society, not only on an iconic level, but also disguised as a symptom. This encounter of the two different systems of representation, the representation of reality and the representation of the repressed, expresses itself most clearly in the zone of taboo. The greatest taboo of modernity is the Holocaust. It is completely unacceptable for the modern mind, for the Cartesian subject after the Enlightenment, that in highly civilized Europe the Holocaust was
possible. After two world wars and the Holocaust, it became clear that representation had to end. This was expressed most famously by Adorno, in 1949 in his essay ʻCultural Criticism and Societyʼ: Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.
The Holocaust researcher Raul Hilberg follows the same line in The Politics of Memory (1996). Asking himself how Hitlerʼs Germany could be represented, he cannot imagine an adequate visual representation and refers instead to a real enactment to enable the return of the repressed: a can of Zyklon gas ... with which the Jews were killed in Auschwitz and Maydanek. I would have liked to see a single can mounted on a pedestal in a small room, with no other objects between the walls, as the epitome of Adolf Hitlerʼs Germany, just as a vase of Euphronios was shown at one time by itself in the Metropolitan Museum of Art as one of the supreme artifacts of Greek antiquity.
To move beyond this crisis of representation we have to change our concept of representation. We can see this necessity when we compare a sculpture by Polyclitus with a sculpture by Arno Breker. We easily accept the idea that the rise of Greek art corresponds to the rise of democracy. The aesthetic canon and the social canon were mutually determining. The representation of citizens in a shared aesthetic ideal of equality corresponded to the representation of the citizen in the shared social ideal of equality. We easily
believe in the parallelism between the emergence of Greek democracy and Greek classicism, between the political and the aesthetic form. This seems to be the meaning of speculum artibus. A beautiful art, an ideal body with perfect proportions, is mirroring a beautiful society. The political ideal corresponds to an aesthetic ideal. But we have to remember that Greece was a class society (reportedly, 20,000 free citizens and 400,000 slaves). The ideal body was only the expression of a certain class, the rise and emancipation of the Greek citizen against the former aristocracy. Art and society are interwoven, but not in a purely isomorphic visual form. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, imitating Greek architecture and ideal forms was an attempt to pretend, through the mirror of art, that a social order existed, an order of equality and democracy, that did not actually exist – just the opposite, in fact, a barbarian order of exploitation. The twentieth-century totalitarian systems (National Socialism, Fascism, Stalinism) proclaimed the ideas of Greek classicism and democracy to hide the fact that the social opposite was the case, to hide and disguise the repression. So when we compare Polyclitus and Breker we can see that art is not a visual mirror of society, or we would have to accept that Greece was a barbarian society like Hitlerʼs Germany and Stalinʼs Russia. My proposal is to use the psychoanalytic model of representation of the repressed to understand what art is actually mirroring. In the first phase of modern art, artists like Picasso and Bacon tried to show in distorted images of the body – completely different from the ideal body of Polyclitus – the distortion of reality. From Picasso to Bacon, art still followed the classical logic
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of visual representation. A destroyed city like Guernica is mapped by a destroyed representation. Yet cubism, decades before Guernica, had destroyed perspective as a mode of representation. The destruction of classical representation systems by Picasso has nothing to do with Guernica. The public love Guernica by a sheer misunderstanding because here the formal destruction of representation systems and the destruction of reality coincidentally correspond. We could also say that the destroyed faces painted by Picasso and Bacon mirror the destruction of human values in two world wars. But when we look at the work of Frankl and music, we see that the victims of the Holocaust can still be represented without distortion of the visual system of representation. The real crisis of representation happened through the neo-avant-garde of the postwar
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period, when not only the systems of representations were destroyed but the tools of representation as well. From Rainer to Fontana to Gutaj to Metzger we see destroyed canvases; from the Vienna Group to Fluxus we see destroyed instruments of cultures like pianos; from Happenings to John Latham we see destroyed books, canvases and films. The case of Yves Klein allows us to demonstrate the limitations of formal interpretations of this kind of work, which help to suppress precisely the content against which Klein revolted. The reason for the denial of representation by Yves Klein, his destruction of canvases through fire-guns and his celebrations of bodily traces on canvases, was the traumatic experience of Hiroshima and the atomic bomb. He was, in a certain sense, a disciple of Adorno and Hilberg. In his youth Klein visited Japan and saw the traces of the victims on the ground. He saw the traces of the burned victims and he realized that he could no longer visually represent the horror of an atomic war in the manner of Picasso – by distorting the visual system of representation but not touching the tools of representation, the canvas, the brush, etc. Together with the heroes of the theatre of the absurd and other neo-avant-gardists after 1945, Klein found it difficult to believe in the traditional means of culture, since culture had not prohibited or prevented the horror. Even worse, the horror was executed in the name of culture. So he decided with many others to destroy not only the mechanisms of representation but also the means of representation, the tools, the dispositifs, in order to expose as a symptom the horror of the atomic war. His cut is the cut of traces similar to those in Derridaʼs theory of traces. The seemingly clean ZERO-group from Manzoni to Uecker also showed the destruction of the means of representation. The reception of this group of artists after World War II was a misunderstanding and a part of the continuing repression. After the
war, people didnʼt want to speak or hear about the war. The war became taboo. But these people saw in the erased white canvases of ZERO their own erased memory. They liked the gesture of erasure in art from Rainer to Rauschenberg because it erased their memory too, their complicity with Fascism. (Fontana even had personal reasons for destroying the means of memory, because he had to hide the fact that he worked for Mussolini and made sculptures for the Fascist movement.) The shooting at canvases with guns by Niki de Saint Phalle or with arrows like Guenther Uecker around 1960, the destruction of screens by the Gutai group, the destruction of canvases with nails by Guenther Uecker or with acid by Gustav Metzger, the burning of books and canvases by John Latham – these all show a deep mistrust in the means of art, in the means of cultural memory and in culture itself. The Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) in 1966 in London and actions by Franz Kaltenbeck and Peter Weibel destroying public museum windows anonymously at night, and many other similar actions by artists, show the revolt on the level of means of representation. Viennese Actionism with its rituals of self-mutilation, real or simulated (Brus, Schwarzkogler), of violations and victimizations of others, defilements and contaminations, to spatter with colors, dirt, urine and faeces, are clearly an unconscious reaction formation in art against the conscious purification of postwar Austria from its crimes in World War II and its participation in the Holocaust and fascism. After 1945 Austria officially denied having been a part of German National Socialism and its crimes. It preferred to see itself as
a victim of National Socialism. This famous OpferLüge, the lie of being the victim, was the basis for the foundation of the second Austrian Republic. Since Austria had purified itself so deeply and heavily, its art did the opposite. It bathed in impurity, in blood and dirt. The mirror of art, as we can now see, is not a simple mirror-function. It is a negative mirror, based on comparability. Representation mechanisms in art represent not only what you see consciously, but also what you donʼt see, even unconsciously. Only the study of reaction formation and similar defence mechanisms of society and its individuals can give you a true representation, a true image. The re-presentation or, better, the repetition of the repressed traumas of two world wars, the Holocaust and the atomic bomb is the content of the neo-avantgarde by way of a reaction formation and an active differentiation of its reality conditions. The neo-avantgarde is not a purely formal repetition of the historical avant-garde. It is a real postwar art, an art about memory, forgetting, repression, trauma and the return of the repressed. As such, the neo-avant-garde begins the critical exploration of the reconversion of the obscure disaster of World War II into the Year Zero of a grey pseudo-democracy. The radical exemplarity of the ʻpolitics of experienceʼ of Viennese Actionism lies in the opposition of its events/actions – polymorphic machinations of the body-psyche – to any artistic representation closed in on itself.
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The politics of equal aesthetic rights Boris Groys
Art and politics are connected in one fundamental respect: both are realms in which a struggle for recognition is being waged. As defined by Alexandre Kojève in his commentary on Hegel, this struggle for recognition surpasses the usual struggle for the distribution of material goods, which in modernity is generally regulated by market forces. What is at stake here is not merely that a certain desire be satisfied but that it is also recognized as socially legitimate. Whereas politics is an arena in which various group interests have, both in the past and the present, fought for recognition, artists of the historical avant-garde have contended for the recognition of all individual forms and artistic procedures that were not previously considered legitimate. Indeed, the historical avantgarde has opened up the potentially infinite horizontal field of all possible real and virtual forms endowed with equal aesthetic rights. One after another, socalled primitive imagery, abstract images and simple objects from everyday life have all acquired the kind of recognition that once used to be granted only to certain privileged images and objects. Both forms of struggle for equality – political and aesthetic – are intrinsically bound up with each other, and both have the goal of achieving a situation in which all people with their various interests, as indeed also all forms and artistic practices, will finally be granted equal rights. But, clearly, such a condition of total equality has de facto never been attained, either in the political or in the artistic realm. Contemporary art, like contemporary politics, still operates in the gap between formal equality and factual inequality. So the question arises, what are the mechanisms of this inequality – how we can define them and deal with them if we want to keep the promise of equality given by the historical avant-garde? When the avant-garde started its struggle against aesthetic inequality, it was the museum that was considered the main enemy, as a place of inequality par excellence. The museums were perceived as guardians of the old privileges, as the places of the Romantic
iconophilia admiring the masterpieces of the past and preventing the emergence of the new, as the churches of the new religion of art with its strange rituals and esoteric conventions – closed spaces where the initiated few decided the fate of art beyond any democratic discussion and control. Accordingly, the avant-garde understood itself as an iconoclastic movement, as an attempt to secularize and democratize art in the name of equal aesthetic rights. Such appeals and demands have meanwhile become quite commonplace, even to the extent of now being regarded as a cardinal feature of contemporary art – they remain, of course, in many ways still legitimate. But the question arises, is the museum today still the central place of contemporary iconophilia and the origin of contemporary aesthetic inequality? Is the struggle that is directed against the museum – and the art institutions connected with the museum – truly iconoclastic under the contemporary aesthetic regime? Personally, I doubt it. In the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth, the socially dominating tastes were defined and embodied by the museum, indeed. The criteria on which the museum based its choice of ʻgoodʼ art were generally accepted as the aesthetic norm. But today it is simply not the case any more. Under the dominating aesthetic regime the museum has indisputably been stripped of its normative role. In our time it is the globalized mass media that dictate aesthetic norms, having long since dethroned the museum from its position of aesthetic dominance. The general public now draws its notion of art from advertising, MTV, video games and Hollywood blockbusters. The contemporary mass media have emerged as by far the largest and most powerful machine for producing and distributing images – vastly more extensive and effective than the contemporary art system. We are constantly fed with images of war, terror and catastrophes of all kinds, at a level of production with which the individual artist with his or her artisan skills cannot compete. Nowadays, every major politician, rock star, television entertainer or sporting hero generates thousands of
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images through their public appearances – much more than any living artist can even imagine. The dominating aesthetics of our time is the aesthetics of the commercialized mass media – not of the museum.
Museum or media? In the context of contemporary, media-generated tastes the call to abandon and dismantle the museum has taken on an entirely different meaning from when it was voiced during the avant-garde era. Nowadays this protest is no longer part of the struggle waged against prevailing normative tastes in the name of aesthetic equality but is, inversely, aimed at stabilizing and entrenching currently prevailing tastes. Characteristically, it is the gurus of the contemporary neoliberal media markets who wonder today – in the style of the early avant-garde – why anyone at all is needed to decide what art is and what it is not. Why canʼt we just choose for ourselves on the open markets what we wish to acknowledge or appreciate as art without patronizing advice from curators and art critics? Why does art refuse to seek legitimation on the open media market just like any other product? From the perspective of the media market the traditional aspirations of the museum seem historically obsolete, out-of-touch, insincere and even somewhat bizarre. The strategies that are operating behind museum collections and exhibitions are treated in the mass media mostly as the workings of a shadowy conspiracy, as an intrigue masterminded by insiders, as a display of the hidden power of curators and museum directors far removed from any form of democratic legitimation – in other words, as an impenetrable swindle. Instead, artists are invited to follow the enticements of the mass media age, in the quest to be disseminated through media channels. This allows them to address and to seduce a much larger audience; it is also a decent way of earning money – for which the artist previously had to beg from the state or private sponsors. The mass media give the artist a new sense of power, social relevance and public presence within his or her own time. But that means precisely: the critique of the museum has lost today its avant-garde edge. Instead, the call to break loose from the museum amounts de facto to a call to medialize and commercialize art by accommodating it to the aesthetic norms generated by todayʼs media. At the same time – and at first glance strangely enough – the mass media also appear as a new space for the true art that was in a certain sense betrayed by contemporary art as a result of its quest for equal aesthetic rights. Certain images circulating in the
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media become the icons of contemporary aesthetic and political imagination, not only because they are easily accessible, almost omnipresent and conform to the prevailing aesthetic taste, but in the first place because they are regarded as being true, being real – and as being true precisely in the very old romantic, iconophilic sense. Kojève pointed out that the moment when the overall logic of equality underlying individual struggles for recognition becomes apparent creates the impression that these struggles have to some extent surrendered their true seriousness and explosiveness. This was why, even before World War II, Kojève was able to speak of the end of history – in the sense of the political history of struggles for recognition. Since then, the discourse about the end of history has made its mark, particularly on the art scene. People are constantly referring to the end of art history, by which they mean that these days all forms and things have ʻin principleʼ already obtained the right to be considered works of art. Accordingly, the aesthetic equality of all images that modern art has fought to establish is now frequently considered a sign of their arbitrariness and irrelevance. For if, as is argued, all images are already acknowledged as being of equal value, this would deprive the artist of the possibility of creating the images that could break taboos, provoke, shock or extend boundaries of art. Instead, by the time history has come to an end each artist will be suspected of producing just one further arbitrary image among many. Were this indeed the case, the regime of equal rights for all images would have to be regarded not only as the telos of the logic followed by the history of art in modernity but also as its terminal negation. Accordingly, we now witness repeated waves of nostalgia for a time when individual works of art were once still revered as eminently precious, unique and singular because of being in some emphatic sense true. Under these new conditions, in which musealized art has seemingly lost its seriousness and its claim to be true, it is the media that become the space where the quest for the true art takes place. In todayʼs world, the images of terror and of war against terror function primarily as such true images – as authentic icons of the contemporary political sublime. Especially video art became the medium of choice for the contemporary warriors – and because of that the medium of truth. As we know, bin Laden is communicating with the outer world primarily by the means of this medium: we all know him as a video artist, in the first place. The same can be said about the videos representing beheadings, confessions of the terrorists, and the rest.
In all these cases we have consciously and artistically staged events that have their own easily recognizable aesthetics. Here we have the people who do not wait for an artist to represent their acts of war and terror. They do not wait for a new Goya, or a new Picasso. Instead, the act of war itself coincides here with its documentation, with its representation. The traditional function of art as a medium of representation and the role of the artist as a mediator between reality and memory are here completely eliminated. The same can be said about the famous photographs and videos from the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. These videos and photographs demonstrate an uncanny aesthetic similarity with alternative, subversive European and American art and film-making of the 1960s and 1970s. The iconographic and stylistic similarity is, in fact, striking (for example, Viennese Actionism and Pasolini movies). In both cases the goal is to reveal a naked, vulnerable, desiring body that is habitually covered by the system of social conventions. But, of course, the strategy of the subversive art of the 1960s and 1970s had the goal of undermining the traditional set of beliefs and conventions dominating the artistʼs own culture. In the Abu Ghraib art production this goal was, we can safely say, completely perverted. The same subversive aesthetics was used to attack and to undermine a different, other culture in an act of violence, in an act of humiliation of the other (instead of self-questioning including self-humiliation) – leaving the conservative values of artistʼs own culture unquestioned. In any case, it is worth mentioning that on both sides of the war on terror the image production and distribution are effectuated without any intervention of an artist. The political action becomes here identical with the artistic, aesthetic action – without any need for an additional artistic practice of aestheticization. It is important to state that we are speaking here about the images that became the icons of the contemporary collective imagination. The terrorist videos and the videos from Abu Ghraib prison are impregnated in our consciousness or even subconsciousness much more deeply than any work of any contemporary artist. This elimination of the artist from the practice of image production is especially painful for the art system because at least since the beginning of modernity artists wanted to be radical, daring, taboo-breaking, going beyond all limitations and borders. The avant-garde art discourse makes use of many concepts from the military sphere, including the notion of the avant-garde itself. There is talk of exploding norms, destroying traditions, violating taboos, practising certain artistic strategies, attacking existing institu-
tions. The artists of the classical avant-garde saw themselves as agents of negation, destruction, eradication of all traditional institutions of art. In accordance with the famous dictum ʻnegation is creationʼ, which was inspired by the Hegelian dialectic and propagated by authors such as Bakunin and Nietzsche under the title of ʻactive nihilismʼ, avant-garde artists felt themselves empowered to create new icons by destruction of the old ones. A modern work of art was measured by how radical it was, how far the artist had gone in destroying artistic tradition. Although in the meantime modernity itself has often enough been declared passé, to this very day this criterion of radicalness has lost nothing of its relevance to our evaluation of art. The worst thing that can be said of an artist continues to be that his or her art is ʻharmlessʼ. Along these lines, Don DeLillo writes in his novel Mao II that terrorists and writers are engaged in a zero-sum game: by radically negating that which exists, both wish to create a narrative which would be capable of capturing societyʼs imagination – and thereby altering society. In this sense, terrorists and writers are rivals – and, as DeLillo notes, nowadays the writer is beaten hands down because todayʼs media use the terroristsʼ acts to create a powerful narrative with which no writer can contend. But this kind of rivalry is even more obvious in the case of the artist. The contemporary artist uses the same media as the terrorist or the warrior: photography, video, film. At the same time it is clear that the artist cannot compete with the terrorist in the field of radical gesture. In terms of the symbolic exchange operating by way of potlatch, as it was described by Marcel Mauss or Georges Bataille, this means that in terms of the iconoclastic rivalry understood as rivalry in destruction and selfdestruction, art is obviously on the losing side. Yet this increasingly popular way of comparing art and terrorism, or art and war, is fundamentally flawed. I will try to show where I see the fallacy. In fact, terrorism is not iconoclastic. Terrorism and war are extremely iconophilic practices. Indeed, the terroristʼs or the warriorʼs image production has the goal of producing strong images – the images that we would tend to accept as being ʻrealʼ, as being ʻtrueʼ, as being the ʻiconic revelationsʼ of the hidden, terrible reality that is for us the global political reality of our time. These images are the icons of the contemporary political theology that dominates our collective imagination. These images answer the postmodern iconophilic nostalgia for a true image and at the same time they draw their power, their persuasiveness, from a very effective form of moral blackmail.
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Presentation that presents itself After so many decades of modern and postmodern criticism of the image, of mimesis, of representation, we feel ourselves somewhat ashamed to say that the images of terror or torture are not true, not real. We cannot say that these images are not true, because we know that they are paid for by a real loss of life – a loss of life that is documented by the images. Magritte could easily say that a painted apple is not a real apple or that a painted pipe is not a real pipe. But how can we say that a videotaped beheading is not a real beheading? Or that a videotaped ritual of humiliation in the Abu Ghraib prison is not a real ritual? After so many decades of the critique of representation directed against the naive belief in photographic and cinematic truth, we are now ready to accept certain photographed and videotaped images as unquestionably true, again. We are confronted here with a strategy that is historically quite new. The traditional warrior was interested in the images that would be able to glorify him, to present him in a favourable, positive, attractive way. And we, of course, have accumulated a long tradition of criticizing, deconstructing, such strategies of pictorial idealization. But the pictorial strategy of the contemporary warrior is a strategy of shock and awe. And it is, of course, only possible after the long history of modern art producing images of angst, cruelty, disfiguration. The traditional critique of representation was driven by a suspicion that there must be something ugly and terrifying hidden behind the surface of the conventional idealized image. But the contemporary warrior shows us precisely that – this hidden ugliness, the image of our own suspicion, of our own angst. And precisely because of that, we feel ourselves immediately compelled to recognize these images as being true. We see things that are as bad as we expected them to be – maybe even worse. Our worst suspicions are confirmed. The hidden reality behind the image that is shown to us is as ugly as we expected it to be. So we have a feeling that our critical journey has come to its end, that our mission as critical intellectuals is accomplished. Now, the truth of the political has revealed itself – and we can contemplate the new icons of the contemporary political theology without a need to go further, because these icons are terrible enough by themselves. And so it is sufficient to comment on these icons. It makes no sense any more to criticize them in aesthetic terms. That explains the macabre fascination that finds its expression in many recent publications dedicated to the images of the war on terror emerging on both sides of the invisible front.
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The source of contemporary iconophilia is not the museum but the mass media. The struggle of the avantgarde against the museum can be properly understood only by keeping that in mind. In fact, art became art originally through iconoclastic practice – of curators rather than artists. The first art museums came into existence at the turn of the nineteenth century, and became established in the course of that century as a consequence of revolutions, wars, imperial conquest and pillage of non-European cultures. All kinds of ʻbeautifulʼ functional objects, which had previously been employed for various religious rituals, dressing the rooms of power, or manifesting private wealth, were collected and put on display as works of art – that is, as defunctionalized, autonomous objects of pure contemplation. The curators administering these museums ʻcreatedʼ art through iconoclastic acts directed against traditional icons of religion or power, by reducing these icons to mere artworks. Art was originally conceived as ʻsimplyʼ art. This perception as such is situated within the tradition of the European Enlightenment, which conceived of all religious icons as ʻsimple thingsʼ – as mere artworks. But the same should be said also about the icons of contemporary mass consciousness. They are simply certain images among other images – nothing more. The art of today can keep its promise of equality of all images only by secularizing the icons of todayʼs neoliberal and pseudo-democratic, populist media in the same way as it reacted towards the old icons of religion and power. And by doing so one should not be afraid to be accused of being elitist and undemocratic. The requirement of aesthetic equality of all images is much more radical that the requirement of the democratic, popular legitimization of certain images by the will of the majority. An allegedly democratically legitimized image is just an image – even if it is functioning as an icon of the mass media. Given our current cultural climate, the art museum is practically the only place where we can actually step back from our own present and compare it with other historical eras. The museum is a place where we are reminded of the tradition of secularization and of radical egalitarian art projects of the past – so that we can measure our own time against them. Of course, museums cannot be the places where all possible images are exhibited on a basis of perfect equality. The space of a museum is always limited. That leads to a selection of exhibited images by a curator – a selection that is always questionable and must be questioned. But the work of a curator is primarily not an act of selection. As I have suggested,
in our time the work of selection is effectuated by the mass media, not by the museum curators. The work of a curator is an act of presentation – the act of presentation that presents itself. And that is the central difference between the museum, on the one side, and the globalized media and art market, on the other. The curator cannot but place, contextualize and narrativize works of art – which necessarily leads to their iconoclastic relativization. The museum makes the act of showing, exhibiting, curating images visible; the art market and the media market conceal it, creating the illusion of the autonomy of the image. The museum is a place where the act of curating becomes obvious – even if many curators try to reduce their curating to non-curating, to zero-curating in a tradition of Romantic iconophilia.
Iconoclastic visibility Giorgio Agamben writes that ʻthe image is a being, that in its essence is appearance, visibility, or semblance.ʼ But this definition of an artworkʼs essence does not suffice to guarantee the visibility of a concrete artwork. A work of art cannot in fact present itself by virtue of its own definition and force the viewer into contemplation – artworks lack vitality, energy and health. They are, rather, genuinely sick and helpless; in the museum a spectator has to be led to the artwork, as hospital workers might take a visitor to see a bedridden patient. It is no coincidence that the word ʻcuratorʼ is etymologically related to ʻcureʼ. Curating is curing. The process of curating cures the imageʼs powerlessness, its incapacity to present itself. The artwork needs external help; it needs an exhibition and a curator to become visible. Certainly, the hidden curatorial practices of contemporary media create the illusion that the images are per se strong and powerful – because they are able to invade our visual space beyond or even against our explicit consent. These images are presented in the media as, so to say, super-images endowed by supernatural strength and dynamics – and precisely the same super-images are treated by the media as true images, as icons of our time. But the museum curatorial practice undermines this kind of iconophilia, for its medical artifice cannot remain entirely concealed from the viewer. In this respect, museum curating remains unintentionally iconoclastic even as it is programmatically iconophile. Indeed, curating acts as a supplement or a pharmakon (in Derridaʼs usage), in that it cures the image even as it makes it unwell. Yet this statement opens the question: which is the right kind of curatorial practice? Since curatorial practice taking place in the
museum can never totally conceal itself successfully, the main objective of museal curating must be to visualize itself, by making its practice explicitly visible. Only then can the museum take a stand against the new icons of the popular imagination – in the name of the equal aesthetic rights of all the images. The museum can do so effectively by using – we can say also misusing – the artworks as mere illustrations of art history, by recontextualizing images, by making problematic their autonomous status. Orhan Pamukʼs novel My Name is Red features a group of artists searching for a place for art within an iconoclastic culture, namely that of sixteenth-century Islamic Turkey. The group are illustrators commissioned by the powerful to ornament their books with exquisite miniatures; subsequently these books are placed in governmental or private collections. Not only are these artists increasingly persecuted by radical Islamic (iconoclastic) adversaries who want to ban all images; they are also in competition with the Occidental painters of the Renaissance, primarily Venetians, who openly affirm their own iconophilia. Yet the novelʼs heroes cannot share this iconophilia, because they do not believe in the autonomy of images. And so they try to find a way to take a consistently honest iconoclastic stance, without abandoning the terrain of art. A Turkish sultan, whose theory of art would actually serve as good advice for contemporary curatorial practice, shows them the way. The sultan says the following: an illustration that does not complement a story, in the end, will become but a false idol. Since we cannot possibly believe in the absent story, we will naturally begin to believe in the picture itself. This would be no different than the worship of the idols in the Kaaba that went on before Our Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, had destroyed them.… If I believed, heaven forbid, the way these infidels do, that the Prophet Jesus was also the Lord God himself,… only then might I accept the depiction of mankind in full detail and exhibit such images. You do understand that, eventually, we would then unthinkingly begin worshipping any picture that is hung on the wall, donʼt you?
This subtle iconoclastic strategy proposed by the sultan – turning the image back into an illustration – is actually much more effective than the avant-gardist one. We have known at least since Magritte that when we look at an image of a pipe, we are not regarding a real pipe but one that has been painted. The pipe as such is not there, is not present; instead, it is being depicted as absent. In spite of this knowledge we are still inclined to believe that when we look at an artwork, we directly
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and instantaneously confront ʻartʼ. We see artworks as incarnating art. The famous distinction between art and non-art is generally understood as a distinction between objects inhabited and animated by art, and those from which art is absent. This is how works of art become artʼs idols – that is, as analogous to religious images, which are also believed to be inhabited or animated by gods. To practise the secularization of and by art would mean understanding artworks not as incarnations of art, but as mere documents, illustrations of art. While they may refer to it, these are nevertheless not art. To a greater or lesser extent this strategy has been pursued by many artists since the 1960s. Artistic projects, performances and actions have regularly been documented, and by means of this documentation represented in exhibition spaces and museums. However, such documentation simply refers to art without itself being art. This type of documentation is often presented in the framework of an art installation for the purpose of narrating a certain project or action. Traditionally executed paintings, art objects, photographs or videos can also be utilized in the framework of such installations. In this case, admittedly, artworks lose their usual status as art. Instead they become documents, illustrations of the story told by the installation. One could say that todayʼs art audience increasingly encounters art documentation, which provides information about the artwork itself, be it art project or art action, but in doing so confirms the absence of art in the artwork. The artist becomes here an independent curator – and an independent curator becomes an artist. The independent curator is a radically secularized artist. He is an artist because he does everything artists do. But the independent curator is an artist who has lost the artistʼs aura, one who no longer has magical powers at his disposal, who cannot endow objects with artʼs status. He doesnʼt use objects – art objects included – for artʼs sake, but rather abuses them, makes them profane. Yet it is precisely this which makes the figure of the independent curator so attractive and so essential to the art of today. The contemporary curator is heir apparent to the modern artist, although he doesnʼt suffer under his predecessorʼs magical abnormalities. He is an artist, but atheistic and ʻnormalʼ through and through. The curator is an agent of artʼs profanation, its secularization, its profane abuse. ʻUtopia Stationʼ is a good example: curated by Molly Nesbit, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravanija, this exhibition was presented at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. Critical and public discussion of this exhibition stressed the issues of whether the concept
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of utopia is still relevant in this day and age; whether what was put forward as a utopian vision by the curators could really be regarded as such, and so on. Yet the fact that a curatorial project that was clearly iconoclastic could be presented at one of the oldest international art exhibitions seems to me to be far more important than the above considerations. It was iconoclastic because it employed artworks as illustrations, as documents of the search for a social utopia, without emphasizing their autonomous value. It subscribed to the radical iconoclastic approach of the Russian avant-garde, which considered art to be documentation of the search for the ʻnew manʼ and towards a ʻnew lifeʼ. Most importantly, though, ʻUtopia Stationʼ was a curatorial and not an artistic project (even if one of the curators, Rirkrit Tiravanija, is an artist). This meant that the iconoclastic gesture could not be accompanied – and thus invalidated – by the attribution of artistic value. Nevertheless, it can still be assumed that in this case the concept of utopia was abused, because it was aestheticized and situated in an elitist art context. And it can equally be said that art was abused as well: it served as an illustration for the curatorʼs vision of utopia. But in both cases the spectator has to confront an abuse, be it an abuse of art or by art. Here, though, abuse is just another word for iconoclasm. The space of a museum exhibition or of an artistic installation is often disliked in our day because it is a closed space – contrary to the open space of the contemporary media. But the closure that is effectuated by a museum should not be interpreted as an opposition to ʻopennessʼ. By closure the museum creates its outside and opens itself to this outside. The closure is here not an opposition to the openness but its precondition. The media space, on the contrary, is not open because it has no outside – media want to be not open but total, all-inclusive. The art practice that is conceived as a machine of infinite expansion and inclusion is also not an open artwork, but an artistic counterpart of the imperial hybrid of the contemporary media. The museum exhibition can be made into a place of openness, of disclosure, of unconcealment precisely because it situates inside its finite space, contextualizes, curates images and objects that also circulate in the outside space; and in this way it opens itself to its outside. Images donʼt emerge into the clearing of Being on their own accord, in order for their original visibility to be abused by the ʻexhibition businessʼ, as Heidegger describes it in ʻThe Origin of the Work of Artʼ. It is far more that this very abuse makes them visible.
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The dreambird of experience Utopia, possibility, boredom Peter Osborne What future for utopia? Or, rather, what future for the utopian after the critique of utopia? What future for possibility after the critique of its depiction as actual?* Utopias have a notoriously contradictory structure: they evoke possibilities by depicting them as actual, yet thereby, in themselves partaking of the actual – as depictions – they necessarily foreclose the most radically possibilizing aspects of their own imaginings (the infinity of possibility), by restricting possibility to the limits of an ideally determined state of affairs. This contradictory structure does not vitiate the concept of utopia – utopia is eminently dialectical, this contradiction is its life – but it has come, increasingly, to erode its credibility under the historical conditions of both capitalist and socialist modernities. That it has done so is not unconnected to the structure of modernity as a form of historical time; or, at least, it is not unconnected to the history of that structure in its main socioeconomic, technological and political forms.
Utopia and the utopian Utopia is a distinctively modern concept. It is inscribed in historical rather than theological time – a time of politics rather than a time of providence – precisely because of its founding spatial character. Its ʻnowhereʼ is an ʻelsewhereʼ on earth as opposed to heaven, albeit most frequently nowadays other ʻearthsʼ than ours, in the sense of other planets. Yet its temporal structure of anticipation, or what we might call possibilization, has been progressively undermined by the ever more relentless temporality of modernity as a logic of the new. For in a world of restless ʻinnovationʼ and spectacularly achieved change, the imagined is in ever-increasing danger of becoming confused with the potential – that is, the already actually possible – and thereby with a hidden dimension of actuality itself.
Utopia is doubly discredited here: first, in its reduction of possibility to determinacy, which, in the context of real possibilities, appears as the alleged authoritarianism of the blueprint or the plan, excluding other possibilities, other desires; second, because it increasingly becomes diffused into actuality, as a series of partial achievements or instalments of the plan. As Ernst Bloch put it in his 1964 discussion with Adorno on the contradictions of utopian longing, responding to Adornoʼs description of a world in which ʻnumerous so-called utopian dreams – such as television, the possibility of travelling to other planets, and moving faster than sound – have been fulfilledʼ: ʻ[Utopia] is diffused, and there is a reification of ephemeral or nonephemeral tendencies, as if it were already more than being-in-tendency, as if the day were already there.ʼ Yet, as Adorno points out, this ʻfulfilment of utopia consists largely only in a repetition of the continually same “today”ʼ.1 For at the level of its abstract temporal logic alone, which is indifferent to social content in the same way in which exchange-value is indifferent to use-value, the new is an invariant. ʻLonging for the newʼ thus ʻrepresses durationʼ.2 Hence both the ʻeternityʼ of utopia and its susceptibility to fashion, the ever-changing forms of the eternally new, the ever-changing forms of ʻthe ever-selfsameʼ.3 What this teaches us, according to Adorno, is that ʻthe false thing … is actually the only form in which utopia is given to us at all.ʼ4 Add to this the historical failure of scientific-socialist utopianism of the statesocialist variety – the ironic ʻbecoming utopianʼ (in its own ʻbadʼ sense of being unrealizable) of scientific socialism, in the context of a partially dystopian actualization – and the double discrediting of utopia appears in two distinct, historically antagonistic but nonetheless mutually reinforcing forms. The critique of
This is a revised version of a paper first presented to ʻThe Future of Utopiaʼ conference, Duke University, Durham NC, April 2003. *
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Radical Philosophy 137 (May/June 20 06)
utopia is thus not just a theoretical critique, but, indeed primarily, a historical critique as well. As socialism became a bad utopia in actually existing socialist states, in both senses of the phrase ʻbad utopiaʼ (splitting between an apparently unrealizable possibility and a false actuality), so the technologically based fulfilment of various utopias became absorbed into the time-consciousness of the culture of capitalism. This involves not just technological change itself, but differential temporalities produced by the geopolitical incursion of particular technologies, via capitalism, into often previously non-capitalist social spaces (ʻunderdevelopmentʼ as a condition of ʻmodernizationʼ). This is a contradictory actualization in which utopia and dystopia become inextricably bound together; or, to put it another way, the dystopian aspect of utopia itself comes to the fore. Hence the agreement between Adorno and Bloch, in their conversation, on the prohibition of ʻcasting a pictureʼ of utopia, the famous ʻban on imagesʼ of utopia, in any direct depictional sense. If the false is the only form in which utopia can be given, then, in Adornoʼs words, ʻone can actually talk about utopia only in a negative wayʼ, as a determinate negation of what is (negative in the logical sense, that is, not in the sense of depreciation). Or, as Bloch put it: ʻthe essential function of utopia is a critique of what is present. If we had not already gone beyond the barriers, we could not even perceive them as barriers.ʼ5 One might locate this going ʻbeyond the barriersʼ as part of the structure of the image in general, rather than anything to do with any particular contents. Indeed, the utopian structure of the image – possibilization, the presentation of something which is not (yet) present – is in contradiction with the identification of utopia with any particular determinate content. (There can be no ultimate fixing or determination of utopian content because the endless variety of possibilities is part of its idea.) Thus the critique of utopia as depiction does not lead back to ʻscienceʼ and an alternative social content, which was considered its ʻhistorical truthʼ in nineteenth-century Marxism, but which itself became the main site of utopian projection during the twentieth century. The critique of utopia leads forwards to an affirmation of the utopian (the utopian contra ʻutopiaʼ) as an aspect or dimension of human experience and desire in general. The utopian, or the spirit of utopia, is described by Bloch as an ʻinvariant longing, completely without consideration at all for contentʼ. Such a longing, Bloch continues, is ʻthe pervading and above all only honest quality of all human beingsʼ. This longing is inherently
connected to possibility, the possibility that things be otherwise, in the most radical metaphysical as well as political sense (utopia is a metaphysical political concept par excellence): the possibility of an end to suffering, even, most radically, an ʻelimination of deathʼ that would be desirable, rather than merely horrendous. A reaction against death, Adorno and Bloch agree, is at the root of utopian longing.6 One might even say that it is an existential ground of politics itself. Beingtowards-death is in this (decidedly non-Heideggerian) respect always also being-against-dying. The question of the future of the utopian after the critique of utopia is thus primarily the question of the future of possibility. Possibility is the privileged mode of utopian thought. Indeed, it is the modal condition of politics in general. Hence the ineliminability of utopia from politics. But what concept of possibility does the utopian involve? And what are the ʻconditions of possibilityʼ for its actualization: the actualization of possibility qua possibility (rather than the actualization of the determinately possible)? In addressing these questions, I shall take my cue from Heideggerʼs 1929–30 lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, specifically the idea that boredom – a very particular form of boredom, which Heidegger calls ʻprofound boredomʼ – is the feeling of possibility itself.7 However, contra Heidegger – whose analysis is strictly existential, despite its explicit acknowledgement of a historical ground – boredom also has a history, a social history. Fragments of such a history are to be found in Convolute D of Benjaminʼs Arcades Project, the material for which, from 1928/9, is almost exactly contemporaneous with Heideggerʼs lectures.8 There is a utopian function to boredom in modernity as the basis of a distinctive experience of possibility. In Benjaminʼs phrase from ʻThe Storytellerʼ, which gives this essay its title, boredom is ʻthe dreambird that hatches the egg of experienceʼ.9 Filling in the blank space of history in Heideggerʼs analysis, one might postulate that boredom is a privileged point of entry into the experience of modernity – ʻthe characteristically modern sentimentʼ (Callois)10 – because it is the one of the main temporal forms of the experience of abstraction that characterizes the culture of modernity more generally. Boredom is a particular temporal experience of abstraction, or mode of experience of the inherently abstract temporality of modernity itself.11 As Benjamin saw, it is the other side of fashion, the dialectical counterpart and existential background to the libidinal discharge associated with the object of fashion, an integral part of the complex and paradoxical temporality of the new: ʻboredom is the grating
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before which the courtesan teases death.ʼ12 As such, it is part of a constellation of terms, including attention, curiosity, distraction, fascination, indifference and reverie or day-dreaming, that point towards a phenomenology of modernity as utopian longing.13 Combined with its utopian function as an existential mood – possibilization – this connection to abstraction suggests that boredom may function politically as the basis for a new mode of appropriation, within abstraction: a retemporalization or rehistorization within abstraction consistent with the structure of modernity itself as a temporal–historical form. Indeed, perhaps, at best, it might provide the existential ground for a distinctively modern form of political subjectivity. As such, there would be both a politics to boredom, as the appearance of possibility – what Marx called boredom as ʻthe longing for a contentʼ14 – and an art of boredom, a practice of the production of boredom. Such a politics would be far more dialectically entwined with boredom than the situationism that declared ʻWe have a world of pleasures to win, and nothing to lose but boredom.ʼ15 Such an art has become ever more important within art itself since the Second World War, as a defensive reaction against the expansion of the culture industry into its field of operations, leading most recently to the culture industryʼs incorporation of the artworld itself.16 So, viewing boredom through the lens of utopia, we find at least four interacting discourses on boredom: philosophy of boredom, history of boredom, politics of boredom, art of boredom, corresponding to four aspects of the utopian function of boredom in modernity. Here, I shall restrict my remarks to a discussion of the first of these, the utopian dimension of the philosophy of boredom. The link between boredom and the utopian is possibility.
Possibility Philosophically, one can distinguish between at least four main concepts of possibility, each of which grasps a different aspect of the utopian: (1) a formal logical conception of possibility, associated in modern philosophy with Kant; (2) an objective-real conception of possibility as unrealized potentiality, derived from Aristotle and important to the work of the later Marx; (3) an existential conception of possibility, articulated in its explicit difference from the first two conceptions in section 31 of Heideggerʼs Being and Time; and (4) a metaphysical conception of virtuality, derived from Bergson but rendered explicit as a philosophical alternative to the concept of possibility by Deleuze. Kantʼs formal-logical conception of possibility treats as possible anything that is thinkable without
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contradiction, without regard to any conditions of actualization. It is thus an ideal conception of the broadest kind, central to utopiaʼs projection of a ʻpossible worldʼ of a radically different character to our own, irrespective of the conditions required for its realization. This conception marks the transcendent power of thought or reason, a spontaneous power, for Kant, with its source in the transcendental imagination, but from the standpoint of the actual it appears as a mere possibilism. Aristotleʼs category of potentiality, on the other hand, signifies that which is not yet but may become actual, although it is at no time necessary that it be so. It is a kind of ontological reserve, the actually possible. It is on a lower ontological level than both actuality and necessity, but is nonetheless tied to actuality for the image of its determinacy.17 As the phrase ʻnot yetʼ – so central to Blochʼs philosophy, but taken here from Heideggerʼs gloss of Aristotle – signals, possibility as potentiality also has a central role to play in the depiction of utopia, in so far as it is a logical requirement for the fiction that utopia is actual, albeit in no (known) place. For to function as a political category, utopia must be more than ʻlogicallyʼ possible, in the broadest sense, meaning capable of depiction; it must be conceived as in some sense actual, elsewhere. It must have some (albeit unknown) conditions of realization. Otherwise it could not function as an image of fulfilment. However, it is as a basis for the prediction of historical developments – most famously in Marxʼs image of a new mode of production developing within the ʻwombʼ of capitalism – that this conception has acquired its main political applications. The notorious naturalism of historicism is broadly Aristotelian in this sense. Heideggerʼs existential conception of possibility is neither formally logical nor modal in a categorial sense but pertains to existence itself, in the sense that for Heidegger ʻexistenceʼ is a term reserved exclusively for the ontology of the human, or, more technically, Dasein, Heideggerʼs distinctive conception of ʻthat being which we ourselves areʼ. ʻDaseinʼ, Heidegger writes in section 31 of Being and Time, ʻis primarily being-possible … possibility as an existentiale is the most primordial and ultimate positive in which Dasein is characterized ontologicallyʼ.18 This sense of possibility as an existential mode, I want to suggest, links possibility immanently to longing in Blochʼs utopian sense. Utopian longing, one might say – a longing ʻwithout consideration for contentʼ (Bloch) which is nonetheless a ʻlonging for contentʼ (Marx) – arises out of possibility in the existential sense, the sense of exist-
ence as possibility, of being human as being-possible. This is the felt sense of possibility upon which the life and force of utopian thinking ultimately depend. The Bergsonian–Deleuzean concept of virtuality also aims to close the ontological gap between the actual and the possible. However, unlike Heidegger, who locates Dasein at (and as) the point of ontological difference and hence as possibility itself, Bergsonʼs concept of virtuality involves a positivization of the virtual as real, and a corresponding account of actuality as the effect of the self-differentiation of the virtual. The ontological difference at stake here is thus not one between Being and beings (Heidegger) – out of which possibility emerges as the essence of a special ontic-ontological entity, Dasein – but that between the virtual and the actual. And it is bridged by the self-differentiation of the virtual itself, through which it ceases to be virtual and becomes actual. This is less an alternative conception of possibility than the destruction of the very concept of possibility by an ontological monism of self-differentiating virtuality. Nonetheless, it retains a functional relation to the utopian, since it removes all ontological constraints on actuality. Indeed, it is a kind of utopian metaphysics for which literally everything is possible, in a manner unrelated to history. For this point of view, as Deleuze himself put it, ʻhistory is never anything other than a matter of factʼ.19 Of these four philosophical concepts of possibility (assuming we can speak of virtuality as a concept of
possibility), each has a different relation to time. The formal logical conception abstracts from time completely – leading to the notorious problems associated with Kantʼs concept of freedom. Nonetheless, this is the basis of its political radicalism: its refusal of the currently actual. The objective-real conception, on the other hand, presupposes the objective chronological framework of a shared cosmic time in which time is figured spatially as a measurable continuum and, crucially, future-time is ontologically indifferent from past time. This is the famous ʻempty homogeneousʼ, chronological time of historicism, which is also the time of narratives of the future. The existential conception of possibility is based, in turn, upon Heideggerʼs distinctive account of the ontological priority of ʻtemporalizingʼ (Zeitigung), as the existential process of the production of time, over the ʻeverydayʼ chronological time of the objective-real conception, which is treated as a derived and reified form. It is the philosophical difference between these two forms of time – time as temporalizing and time as chronology – that underpins the contradictions inherent in the concept of utopia (which led to the ban on its depiction) from which I set out. Finally, Bergsonʼs concept of virtuality was itself derived from the ʻpure qualitative differentiation without quantitative measureʼ of his concept of duration – a concept of time as pure continuity, ʻsuccession without distinctionʼ, which he too opposed to the abstract idea of time as a ʻhomogenous mediumʼ, represented spatially in the form of a line. Pure duration,
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as a time absolutely indifferent to space and hence to being, is the (fundamentally theological) time of the eternity of utopia itself. Here, I shall concentrate on Heideggerʼs account of the appearance of existential possibility in boredom, as the feeling of time: the ʻself-awareness of the self-temporalizing temporality of Daseinʼ. In profound boredom, Heidegger argues, we experience the fact that human existence essentially is the self-awareness of its own self-temporalizing temporality.
Boredom It is a mark of the modernity of Heideggerʼs early philosophical work that, for a period at least, it considered the analysis of boredom a necessary preparatory stage to outlining the fundamental questions of metaphysics concerning world, individuation and finitude. Indeed, in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, one particular kind of boredom – what Heidegger calls ʻprofound boredomʼ – appears as the fundamental attunement or mood of the ʻcontemporary Daseinʼ of the times (1930).20 The self-temporalizing structure of human existence, which is presented in Being and Time as analytically dependent on the anticipation of death (as the constitutive limit of temporalizing), is represented here, purely phenomenologically, as revealed in and by boredom, without any relation to death. Heidegger was interested in boredom as the phenomenological condition of a particular kind of questioning (and hence of philosophy itself), rather than in possibility as such. However, it is via possibility that the analysis proceeds – from boredom, via possibility, to ʻthe essence of timeʼ as the root of metaphysical questioning – and it is this aspect of the analysis to which I shall attend.21 Heideggerʼs discussion is long and complex, full of false starts, gaps, leaps, isolated insights, redundancies and etymological short-cuts, as befits a lecture course. Indeed, it leads one to think that Heideggerʼs notorious etymologism was largely an artefact of his teaching – much like Raymond Williamsʼs. So I shall be brutally reductive. The analysis develops through three main stages or ʻformsʼ of boredom of increasing existential-ontological depth: (1) becoming bored ʻbyʼ something, (2) being bored ʻwithʼ something, and (3) profound boredom or ʻit is boring for oneʼ. Its five most salient features are as follows. (1) An etymological definition of boredom derived from the German word Langeweile as a lengthening of time (literally ʻlong whileʼ). Boredom is a temporal concept that involves a peculiar remaining, enduring or dragging. More specifically, according to Heidegger, ʻBecoming bored is a peculiar being affected by time
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as it drags and by time in general, a being affected which oppresses us in its own way.… a peculiar impressing of the power of that time to which to which we are bound.ʼ22 (2) The idea that our immediate relation to boredom is a negative one, in so far as it manifests itself ʻordinarilyʼ, in everyday life, only via our attempt to combat boredom by ʻpassing the timeʼ (Zeitvertreib – literally, a ʻdriving away of timeʼ). Since boredom is a lengthening of time (too much time! too long a while!), we drive boredom away by driving time itself away; or, at least, by driving away our sense of time as lingering. Boredom thus ʻalways shows itself in such a way that we immediately turn against itʼ. There is ʻa peculiar unity of a boredom and a passing the time in which a confrontation with boredom somehow occursʼ.23 This will be crucial to its critical function. (3) This passing the time/driving time away, or, more colloquially, ʻkilling timeʼ – an important idea in
Pauline Kaelʼs famous account of Andy Warholʼs early films: ʻTimekillers on the way to the graveʼ – is also necessarily a driving of time onwards, into the future: ʻPassing the time is a driving away of boredom that drives time on.ʼ Reflection on boredom thus reveals the temporalizing power of our intentional relation to things, at the same time as it reveals ʻthe strange and enigmatic power of time itselfʼ. This is the power, first, to ʻhold us in limboʼ or to suspend us in time, and, second, to ʻleave us emptyʼ in such a way that things appear to refuse us something we expect from them: namely, an ability to be present or to engage us in such
a way that time passes, without our having to force it to pass, to drive it on.24 It is the indeterminacy of our relation to boredom here, our failure to grasp quite what it is about something that bores us, that leads Heidegger to posit his second main form of boredom: being bored not ʻbyʼ something, but ʻwithʼ it. (4) According to Heidegger, t here is a deeper form of boredom than being bored by some determinate object, in which what bores us (what lengthens time) is indeterminate. It has no specific object. This is because here it is ʻpassing the timeʼ or driving time away itself with which we are bored. (Heideggerʼs example is a dinner party at which he didnʼt realize he had been bored until he got home.) In this situation ʻboredom and passing the time become intertwined in a peculiar wayʼ.25 It is not just that boredom manifests itself through our confrontation with it in passing the time (the example there was waiting on a deserted railway station for a train), but that boredom and passing the time – fighting boredom – become one. We are doing what we are doing, not for its own sake, but only in order to pass the time. Hence we are bored with this too. (There is a phenomenological version of the dialectic of boredom and distraction, familiar from analyses of the cultural industries, buried here beneath Heideggerʼs abstract prose: distraction itself becomes boring.) What bores us in this boredom is, according to Heidegger, ʻI know not whatʼ, Je ne sais quoi:26 that very attribute of an object that was held, in eighteenth-century France, to distinguish it as an object of aesthetic appreciation, a work of art.27 The temporal immanence of being bored ʻwithʼ the passing of time – its failure to release us from the hold of time – is Heideggerʼs cue for a further ontological deepening of his analysis, reaching the culminating position of what he calls ʻprofoundʼ boredom. (5) Profound boredom, as the structural unity and temporal immanence of the earlier two forms (becoming bored by and being bored with), is taken to spring from the temporality of human existence itself. Profound boredom, Heidegger argues, ʻarises from a quite determinate way and manner in which our own temporality temporalizes itself.ʼ ʻWhat bores us in profound boredom … what is solely and properly boring, is temporality in a particular way of its temporalizing.ʼ28 The third and final form of boredom, profound boredom, thus has the more neutral grammatical form of ʻit is boring for oneʼ, where the ʻitʼ in question is the temporal character of existence itself. Existing, merely existing, as temporalization, the production or lengthening of time, is itself boring. Profound boredom is the feeling of time in its ability
to expand itself. It is not just a structure of feeling, in Raymond Williamsʼs sense, so much as the structure of feeling. Profound boredom is the temporal structure of affectivity itself. For if human existence is a process of self-temporalizing, within which the ʻIʼ is a moment of self-awareness – time as pure self-affection, in Heideggerʼs reading of Kant – profound boredom is the phenomenological register of temporalityʼs ʻstretchingʼ of itself out into ʻtimeʼ, chronological time, its objectified shell. Profound boredom is an ʻentrancementʼ of existence by time, or, more fundamentally, ʻthe entrancement of the temporal horizon: ʻthe horizon of whiling … expands itself into the entire temporality of Daseinʼ, covering over its own shortness. The experience of timeʼs lengthening turns out to be a peculiar vanishing of its inherent shortness, its constitutive limit: namely, death. Indeed, it is a kind of disawoval or wishing away of death. In so expanding itself, profound boredom makes what Heidegger calls ʻthe extremity of the moment of visionʼ – the moment of action – vanish. It would therefore appear to be the very opposite of a possible ground for politics. However, Heidegger insists, ʻonly the [particular] possibility vanishes here, whereby the possibility of whatever is possible is precisely intensified.ʼ29 This affective intensification of possibility, per se, in profound boredom, which Heidegger remarks upon in passing but never develops – and which has few of the usual connotations of boredom – is the existential basis of what Bloch calls the ʻcontentlessnessʼ of utopian longing and what Adorno identified as the testimony of ʻthe reality of artworksʼ: ʻthe possibility of the possibleʼ.30 It may be understood historically – contra Heidegger – as being both based in and a reaction against abstraction in the precise sense in which, in his critique of Hegel in the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx writes of boredom as ʻthe mystical feeling that drives the philosopher forward from abstract thinking to intuiting – longing for a contentʼ.31 (Marx is discussing the impulse behind the transition from logic to nature in Hegelʼs system, a discussion that interestingly parallels Kierkegaardʼs account of Godʼs creation of the world.) For Marx here, boredom is the affective and productive experience of the emptiness of self-sufficient abstraction – a ʻbeing left emptyʼ by abstraction, rather than by ʻthe refusal of thingsʼ (Heidegger). Boredom drives subjectivity forward in the search for social content, much as, in psychoanalytical accounts, boredom is associated with the ʻsuspended animation of desireʼ, a return to the childhood mood of ʻdiffuse restlessness which contains that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desireʼ.32
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We might transpose this analysis into Marxʼs later thought, where what has changed is not the relation to abstraction, but the ontology of self-sufficient abstraction. There, the illusion of self-sufficiency is no longer exclusively associated with philosophy (and hence subject to epistemological critique), but is identified with the actual abstractions or objective idealities of the value-form (and hence subject to social critique). In this respect, boredom becomes a central part of that form of subjectivity constituted by the dynamics of the commodity form – as Benjaminʼs pathbreaking but fragmentary analyses testify. But how is this experience of profound boredom, as the experience of possibility per se – the existential ground of utopian longing – connected to Benjaminʼs ʻegg of experienceʼ? How does the dreambird hatch its egg? And to what does it give birth? It is at this point that we encounter the aporia of action in Heidegger and Benjamin alike. It is marked – and covered over – in both cases by the metaphor of awakening, but in different ways, linked to their very different projects and perspectives. Heideggerʼs primary concern in Part One of his 1929–30 lectures is indicated by its title, ʻAwakening a Fundamental Attunement in Our Philosophizingʼ. It is the mood or attunement of profound boredom, ʻconcealed in our contemporary Daseinʼ, which is itself to be awakened. It does lead to any further awakening/hatching, but to metaphysical questioning. And awakening it, oddly, ʻdoes not mean making it awake in the first place, but letting it be awake, guarding against it falling asleepʼ. Once it is ʻlet be awakeʼ, it is taken simply to ʻgiveʼ the metaphysical questions of world, individuation and finitude. Heidegger is explicit: the ʻdemandʼ with which it is associated – ʻnot to let boredom fall asleepʼ – ʻhas nothing to do with some human ideal in one or other domain of possible actionʼ. It is ʻthe liberation of the Dasein in manʼ that is taken to be ʻat issueʼ.33 Heidegger is not interested in any particular possibilities, any possible actualities, that might be made possible by the affective intensification of possibility as an existential mode. Benjamin, on the other hand, clearly is: specifically, in the actualization of the dreams of the past. Yet the metaphorics of sleep, dream, and awakening to which he too is so attached block the thinking of the passage from existential possibility to actualization. In fact, ironically, given Benjaminʼs famous criticisms of the naturalism of historicism, they naturalize this passage, in a quasi-psychoanalytical manner, offering no opening onto the (narrative) horizon of the temporality of action.34
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The ʻfounding conceptʼ of historical materialism, Benjamin insisted, ʻis not progress but actualizationʼ.35 Yet he never moved beyond the image of actualization as awakening to be found in Marxʼs early letter to Ruge: ʻthe world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality … it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realising the thoughts of the past … mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work.ʼ36 Boredom functions for Benjamin as one of a number of threshold or liminal concepts, located on the surface of the boundary between sleeping and waking, between the wishful dreams carried forward from the past and their future actualization. On the one hand, boredom is the ʻwarm grey fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colourful of silksʼ in which ʻwe wrap ourselves when we dreamʼ and hence ʻthe external surface of unconscious eventsʼ. As such, it is ʻan index to participation in the sleep of the collectiveʼ. On the other hand, it is (supposedly, thus) ʻthe threshold to great deedsʼ, as ʻhe who waitsʼ takes in time ʻand renders it up in altered form – that of expectationʼ.37 (The difference from Heidegger here is that in Benjamin boredom is identified with a transfiguration of sleep on the threshold of awakening, rather than being the thing which is to be kept awake.) But the expectation that is generated is no less abstract than that of utopian longing itself: possibilization as the temporality of anticipation. The idea of actualizing the thoughts and wishes of the past, as a whole – for it is the whole of history that is to be redeemed, for Benjamin – is a pure wishfulness, incapable of translation onto the plane of action, except metonymically, in a manner in which each act stands (indifferently) for the whole. In particular, it appears incompatible with the idea of the qualitatively historically new, upon which revolutionary thought of social transformation depends. The contradiction between the two main temporal forms of Benjaminʼs thought – redemption and the new – remains stubbornly undialectical. Benjamin never moved beyond the series of elliptical formulations about boredom, interspersed with materials for a history of boredom, in the Arcades Project. But he indicated one way forward with the (unanswered) question, ʻWhat is the dialectical antithesis to boredom?ʼ38 At one level, the answer would seem to be ʻdistractionʼ – hence Benjaminʼs subsequent interest in developing a (technologically based) theory of reception in distraction.39 However, there it is attention that appears as the dialectical counterpart to distraction. Thus we can see the emergence of a con-
stellation – boredom, distraction, attention – fracturing any simply binary dialectical relations, dependent upon detailed accounts of historically specific technologies and institutions for its articulation. In this respect, boredom does indeed appear to offer the possibility of mediating an existential analysis of utopian longing with a historical account of its conditions and a sociocultural account of its predominant forms, in a manner that would move decisively beyond Benjaminʼs own enabling, but blocked, formulations. Such an account would reintroduce something of the determinacy of ʻutopiaʼ into the utopian, without reifying it in the form a fixed historical end. Stripped of these mediations, and in particular their subjection to the additional mediation of a reflective and collective political discourse, ʻcontentless longingʼ can point in any political direction at all, as both Bloch and Benjamin became only too aware during the course of the 1930s. For it is one thing to theorize the existential ground of political possibility as utopian longing; quite another to render the insight concrete by reconstructing the coordinates of political possibilities themselves.
9.
10. 11.
12. 13.
14.
Notes 1. ʻSomethingʼs Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longingʼ (1964), in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklensburg, MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1988, pp. 1, 11, 2. 2. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997, p. 27. 3. Walter Benjamin, ʻCentral Parkʼ, in Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2003, p. 175. 4. Bloch and Adorno, ʻSomethingʼs Missingʼ, p. 12. 5. Ibid., pp. 10–12. 6. Ibid., pp. 5, 8, 10. 7. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1995, pp. 59–167. 8. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1999, pp. 101–19. For an analysis of the contradictory relation to history in Heideggerʼs account of boredom, and its symptomatic significance for the ʻturnʼ in his thought during the 1930s, see Miguel de Beistegui, ʻBoredom: Between Existence and Historyʼ (2000), Thinking with Heidegger: Displacements, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2004, pp. 61–80. In so far as there is a historical dimension to Heideggerʼs analysis, in its reference to ʻour contemporary Daseinʼ, it is part of an epochal history of Being – a subjection of history to Being – rather than anything approaching a history with its own temporality of social forms. The (elite-theoretical) sociology of Being and Time is thus displaced by an even more undiffer-
15. 16.
17.
entiated history of epochs of Being. 1840sʼ France may have experienced an ʻepidemicʼ of boredom (Benjamin, Arcades Project [D3a, 4], p. 108), but it was Weimar Germany that was the site of the outbreak of its analyses. See also, in particular, Siegfried Kracauer, ʻBoredomʼ (1924), in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed., Thomas Y. Levin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1995, pp. 331–4. Walter Benjamin, ʻThe Storytellerʼ (1936), in Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2002, p. 149. Benjamin, Arcades Project [D4A, 2], p. 110. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, Verso, London and New York, 1995, ch. 1; ʻThe Reproach of Abstractionʼ, Radical Philosophy 127, September/October 2004, pp. 21–8. Benjamin, Arcades Project [B1, 1], p. 62. There is a characteristic tension in Benjaminʼs remarks on boredom, distributed across various texts, between the idea that ʻthe activities that are intimately associated with boredom … are already extinct in the citiesʼ (ʻThe Storytellerʼ, p. 149) and the suggestion that boredom is an integral part of the experiences of a whole range of figures characteristic of modern metropolitan life, including the courtesan, the gambler, the flâneur, and ʻhe who waitsʼ (Arcades Project [D3, 4], p. 107). Karl Marx, ʻEconomic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844ʼ, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 3, 1843–1844, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1975, p. 344. Marx is alluding to Hegelʼs analysis of Stoicism in the Phenomenology of Spirit: ʻThe True and the good, wisdom and virtue, the general terms beyond which Stoicism cannot get, are therefore in a general way no doubt uplifting, but since they cannot in fact produce any expansion of the content, they soon give rise to boredom [Langeweile].ʼ Hegelʼs Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977, p. 122; translation modified. G.W.F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Reclam, Stuttgart, 1987, p. 153. Raoul Vaneigem, ʻPostscriptʼ (1972), The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Rebel Press, London, 1983, p. 216. See, in particular, Dick Higgins, ʻBoredom and Dangerʼ (1966), Something Else Newsletter, December 1968. Duchamp associated the artistic production of boredom with Happenings: ʻHappenings have introduced into art an element no one had put there: boredom. To do a thing in order to bore people is something I never imagined! And thatʼs too bad, because itʼs a beautiful idea.ʼ Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (1967), trans. Ron Padgett, Da Capo Press, New York, n.d., p. 99. Characteristically, the deliberate production of boredom is expressly rejected by Heidegger. ʻAre we explicitly and intentionally to produce boredom in ourselves? Not at all. We do not need to undertake anything in this respect. On the contrary, we are always already undertaking too much. This boredom becomes essential of its own accord, if only we are not opposed to it, if we do not always immediately react to protect ourselves, if instead we make room for it.ʼ Fundamental Concepts, p. 82. Such is the naturalism of the history of Being. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Blackwell, Oxford, 1962, p. 183. I take Heideggerʼs presentation in this passage
43
18. 19.
20.
21.
22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.
44
of possibility as a modal category of presence-to-hand to be a gloss of Aristotle on potentiality. Aristotleʼs own presentations are less concerned with temporality. See for example, Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 4, ch. 12. Ibid. Gilles Deleuze, ʻBergsonʼs Conception of Differenceʼ (1956), in his Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953– 1974, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles and New York, 2004, p. 41. Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts, p. 153. Heidegger emphasizes that there is not one but ʻseveralʼ fundamental attunements (p. 59). However, boredom is taken to be the fundamental attunement of ʻthe dayʼ. Hence the importance of the unacknowledged problem of the definition of the historical present. A phenomenological analysis begins with the most familiar, culturally given form of an object and attends to the totality of the descriptions of this form in such a way as simultaneously to deepen and to make less certain our sense of it, by revealing contradictions in the descriptions, to the point at which a new sense of it, centred on a new description of it, emerges. This new conception is then subjected to the same process, and so on. In Hegel, this leads inexorably to a phenomenological construction of the absolute, as the only possible endpoint of the process. In the early Heidegger, on the other hand, as a systematic procedure, phenomenology takes the more Kantian form of the elaboration of a series of ʻequiprimordialʼ or equally basic conditions of the object. The formality of this procedure, notoriously, introduces a crucial indeterminacy into the relations between the various conditions. But it has the advantage of imparting a certain independence to each analytical stage, allowing a recontextualization of the argument. Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts, pp. 96, 98. Ibid., p. 95. Ibid., pp. 93, 106, 99, 101. Ibid., p. 113. Ibid., p. 116. This second phenomenological form of boredom appears close to what is understood by the French term ennui, received into English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), in the mid-eighteenth century to denote a diffuse form of ʻmental weariness and dissatisfaction arising from want of occupation or lack of interestʼ. Although Heidegger himself does not make the connection, art and ennui are, of course, bound together in aestheticism, which, one might propose, was a cultural condition of Heideggerʼs analysis. The OED etymology of ʻennuiʼ cites the Latin phrase in odio as its source (as in the expression mihi in odio – it is hateful to me), thereby connecting it directly to both the English ʻannoyʼ and ʻodiumʼ, via ʻanuiʼ, a term common to Middle English and Old French. In fact, the substantive ʻannoyʼ was apparently originally equivalent to ʻennuiʼ in its sense of ʻa disturbed or ruffled feeling arising from impressions … which one dislikesʼ, before acquiring its current sense of active discomfort. The OED cites the expression ʻHis ennui amounted to annoyʼ from 1812. The origin of the English word ʻboreʼ, on the other hand, is (satisfyingly) unknown; although it appears as a synonym for the malady of ennui in the 1760s, at more or less the same time that ʻennuiʼ first appears in English, in the phrase ʻFrench boreʼ, connoting ʻdullness or lack of interestʼ, but which my OED (1973) admits it is unable to explain. It certainly lacks both the intensity
28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.
of aversion associated with ʻodiumʼ and the ʻruffledʼ element of dislike in ʻannoyʼ. All of which suggests that Heideggerʼs second phenomenological form of boredom secretly draws on a separate, less Alemmanic, more modern, and essentially French semantics – a position which is explicit in Benjamin, for whom boredom was central to the emblematic cultural status of Paris, as the capital of the nineteenth century, and Baudelaire, as the poet of early modernism. Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts, pp. 127, 158. Ibid., pp. 152–3. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 132. See note 14. Adam Phillips, ʻOn Being Boredʼ, in On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Faber & Faber, London and Boston, 1993, pp. 82, 71. Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts, pp. 79, 171–2. See Osborne, The Politics of Time, pp. 150–59. Benjamin, Arcades Project [N2, 2], p. 460. Marx to Ruge, September 1843, Marx/Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3, p. 144. Benjamin, Arcades Project [D2a, 1; D2a, 2; D3, 7; D2, 7; D3,4], pp. 105–8, 118. Ibid. [D2, 7], p. 105. See Howard Eiland, ʻReception in Distractionʼ, boundary 2, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 51–66; Peter Osborne, ʻDistracted Reception: Time, Art and Technologyʼ, in Jessica Morgan, ed., Time Zones, Tate Publishing, London, 2004, pp. 70–79. The connection was first made by Kracauer in the mid-1920s. His essay on distraction followed that on boredom (see note 8) by two years. Kracauer, ʻThe Cult of Distractionʼ (1926), The Mass Ornament, pp. 323–8.
E NGAGING
B AUDRILLARD The UK’s first major international conference on Jean Baudrillard’s radical thought
S WA N S E A U N I V E R S I T Y
4–6 September 2006 KEYNOTES Mike Gane Douglas Kellner Mark Poster Details: www.swan.ac.uk/mediastudies/baudrillard/ Email:
[email protected]
REVIEWS
Common monstrosity Mark Neocleous, The Monstrous and the Dead: Burke, Marx, Fascism, University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 2005. 160 pp., £45.00 hb., £17.99 pb., 0 7083 1904 1 hb., 0 7083 1903 3 pb. Some spasm of the Zeitgeist (or was it an astrological conjunction?) in the 1990s gave birth to an extraordinary rash of books about vampires, werewolves, zombies and assorted mutants, as though a whole culture had fallen in love with the undead, those monstrous, liminal figures which hover between life and death as surely as the commodity form or a DVD. Perhaps this was because a jaded postmodern sensorium for which even sodomy and necrophilia were as tedious as high tea could now reap feeble stimulation only from such Gothic grotesquerie or Transylvanian exotica. Mark Neocleous begins this book by noting the cultic nature of such obsessions, without pausing to comment on why he is feeding them. Neocleousʼs study is concerned with the politics of remembrance – with how commemorating the unjustly dumped and discarded can help them to live again, this time as comedy rather than tragedy. The past is unfinished business, and what will determine its meaning, indeed its very continuing existence, is our own political activity in the present. Though Neocleous finds this an alluring enough notion, he is also a mite embarrassed by it, since he is the kind of leftist who suspects that the backward-looking is inherently conservative. His book is among other things an attempt to resolve this uncomfortable tension. Just as there are radicals who hold the astonishing opinion that all authority is oppressive and all hierarchy obnoxious, so there are radicals who believe that a preoccupation with the past is inertly traditionalist. They are thus at odds with Leon Trotsky, who once observed that ʻwe Marxists have always lived in traditionʼ. There is a good deal of salvage, retrieval and conservational work at stake in any revolutionary project. Even in revolutionary situations, there is more continuity than change in human affairs. It is curious why some on the Left see tradition as about the Changing of the Guard and the House of Lords, rather as Tories do. The only difference between the two camps on this score is that the former condemn what the latter commend. The truth is that all good radicals are traditionalists. It is from the Jacobins, Chartists, suffragettes and the like that we draw our vampiric resources. A
spot of political blood-sucking never did anyone any harm. What spurs men and women to revolt, as Walter Benjamin once remarked with his customary Judaic piety, is not dreams of liberated grandchildren but memories of oppressed ancestors. It is the Blairites who seek to erase history with their modernist blather about drawing a line beneath the past and moving wide-eyedly on. Just as historicism strives to disavow the dead, since nothing in this grandly unfurling evolution can ever be absolutely lost, so the ideologies of progress and modernization seek to write the dead out of the historical record. It is a pity, however, that Neocleous takes as his paradigm of conservatism the most magnificently eloquent scourge of colonial oppression that these islands have ever produced. Edmund Burke was not a Tory; he was a Rockinghamite Whig who bravely opposed the corrupt cabal clustered around the king, and inherited from the eighteenth century the liberal doctrine (not untouched by a strain of classical republicanism) that political authority is legitimate only when it loyally serves the interests of the common people. (He did not, to be sure, hold that such authority should be elected by the common people, but one would scarcely expect him to be a prototype of George Galloway.) Neocleous, by contrast, defines Burkeʼs interest in the people only in terms of his celebrated contempt for the mob or swinish multitude, apparently unaware that for this resplendent example of a liberal Whig ʻmobʼ and ʻpeopleʼ were by no means cognate terms. Burke was certainly a conservative in a broad sense of the word, but he was so, like, say, Samuel Johnson or John Ruskin, in all the most honourable ways. He did not believe that a jumped-up middle-class caucus of quacks, projectors and wild-eyed experimenters should have the right to tear up for their own selfish interests the dense thicket of common law and customary privileges which protected the vulnerable. If he turned to tradition, it was in some remarkably subversive ways. At dire risk to his seat in parliament, he lent his incomparably persuasive voice to the cause of the American insurrectionists, in the faith that their strike against colonial power was an affirmation of traditional British liberties. No other ʻBritishʼ politician
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(and Burke was not of course British) has matched the scurrilous, superbly burnished rhetoric of his assault on British imperialism in India, whose odious chief officer Warren Hastings he dragged before the House of Commons and pilloried with such merciless venom that ladies in the public gallery fainted melodramatically away. Derided as a potato-eating Paddy himself, Burke was a champion of otherness and monstrosity, not a smugly suburban critic of them. His scorching, lushly figurative denunciations of the colonial junta of his own native land, the Anglo-Irish Ascendency, are legendary even in the well-stocked rhetorical annals of Irish nationalism. On his death bed, this bitterly disenchanted defender of the Irish poor was as close to support for the revolutionary United Irishmen as one who loathed and dreaded such political turmoil could conceivably have been. (He was, to be sure, outdone in this respect by his compatriot, parliamentary colleague and fellow prosecutor of Warren Hastings, the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a man who secretly fellow-travelled with the United Irishmen while holding government office, and thus covertly pledged to bringing down the very imperial power of which he was officially a servant.) If Burke excoriated the Jacobins, it was because he classed them, however deludedly, alongside the AngloIrish Ascendency, the East India Company and British colonial rule in America. All were self-elected sinister interests inimical to the good of the people. Burkeʼs theme from beginning to end is hegemony – the belief that only that power that has secured the affections of the people is legitimate. In the case of Ireland and India, this meant revering local customs and cultures, which in Burkeʼs eyes were quite as precious as those he venerated at home. No reader of Neocleousʼs account of this reviled colonial, the product of a hedge school in County Cork, would have the least inkling that he was anything but a kind of Michael Oakeshott in knee breeches. Even so, Neocleous has some illuminating commentary on Burkeʼs notions of the sublime, and on the relations between his aesthetics and politics. He sees shrewdly that sublimity for Burke is intimately allied with death; but he overlooks the fact that what is secretly at stake in this connection is the sublime as Thanatos or the death drive. The sublime is that chastening, daunting, humbling, intimidatory, exhilarating, exuberant, expansive force which in the usual manner of jouissance or obscene enjoyment is both living and dead, annihiliating and invigorating. The sublime is the Law, superego or political authority which demands that we
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reap a masochistic pleasure from its furious, sadistic dismemberment of the self, one which is most effective when it presents itself in the vicarious form of tragic art. Tragedy for Burke is a kind of Schadenfreude in which we relish the sufferings of others, secure in the knowledge that we ourselves cannot be harmed. It is a drawing life from the dead, plucking redemption from the jaws of defeat. Burke regards this sublimely unrepresentable Law as terroristic; but he had witnessed enough political terror in the gibbet-ridden Ireland of his youth (one of his own relatives was hanged by the British) to wish to temper and modulate its unlovely force. The terrorism of the sublime had consequently to be softened and feminized by the ʻbeautyʼ of custom, grace and civil society, if men and women were to look upon this Gorgon-like power and not be turned to stone. A coercive, inherently masculine Law had thus to tart itself up in the decorous garments of a ʻfeminineʼ consensuality. The law for Burke is effective only when it is a cross-dresser. It is thus, in Neocleousʼs terms, a kind of monster in its hybridity, as indeed is the whole concept of hegemony – though Neocleous might have noted that one of the meanings of ʻmonsterʼ in classical antiquity is a creature which is entirely self-sufficient, as the deluded Oedipus believes himself to be. In this sense of the term, what is most monstrous about modernity is also what is most central to it: the idea of freedom as self-determination. In a useful chapter on Marx, Neocleous rightly registers his ambivalence about the dead. On the one hand, we have the brusque ʻLet the dead bury their deadʼ of the Eighteenth Brumaire, a typically modernist exercise in the politics of amnesia. Given the vital importance of such rituals in Judaism, even a thoroughly secular Jew like Marx could hardly have allowed these words to pass his lips without the faintest frisson of guilt. (The slogan derives, of course, from another secularizing Jew, Jesus.) On the other hand, there is Marxʼs Jewish preoccupation with commemorating the casualties of that long atrocity known as history. Neocleous identifies this tension perceptively enough, though like Marx in his more avant-garde moods he does not seem to see that we can only break with the past by deploying against it the contaminated instruments which it has bequeathed us. Besides, avantgarde ruptures with history have a depressingly long history. The very term ʻmodernʼ comes to us from antiquity. Like a good many leftists, Neocleous is also reluctant to acknowledge that the tradition which roused Marx most was that of the bourgeoisie. It was not only the victims of class society which the present
was to cherish, but the mighty spiritual and material resources of bourgeois culture, without which any socialism was doomed to be no more than generalized scarcity. Marxists are to be distinguished from other leftists by their fervent enthusiasm for the middle classes. They are traditionalists because they wish to safeguard the working class from the horrors of that modernist rupture with history known as Stalinism. As though someone shy of pursuing such unpalatable reflections, the book turns instead to an account of the most necromantic Marxist of them all, Walter Benjamin, who knew a thing or two about seeking to preserve the dead from the violence of the living. The bookʼs most impressive chapter by far is its erudite, politically impassioned account of fascism, a movement for which the dead will never quite lie down. The book might have added that this is because fascismʼs stereotypical enemies, epitomized in the Jew, are embodiments of a sinister, nameless negativity corrosive of all national or ethnic substance; and nothingness, as symbolist poets and metaphysically minded anarchists do not need to be told, is the one thing that cannot be annihilated. Neocleous sees that Thanatos – an ecstatic embrace of death – lies at the core of fascist doctrine. From St Paul to Martin
Heidegger, however, there is more than one way of actively embracing oneʼs death. If there is the path of fascism and nihilism, there is also the path of the most authentic brands of tragedy, for which embracing oneʼs death signifies a Lear-like openness to oneʼs finitude and mortality which lies at the root of all realism, and thus of all moral virtue. It also involves a refusal to give way on the desire of which death is the final signifier, and thus a refusal of bogus ideological consolation. Neocleous writes of the need not to see others as inhuman monsters; but the finest of tragedies understand that only when we encounter one another on the basis of our common monstrosity, relating not in some imaginary or symbolic mode but on the properly inhuman ground of the Real, can our relationships be said to be genuinely human. It is when we are stripped of our kin, kind and culture that we are most inhuman – which is to say of course, like Lear on the blasted heath, most purely and intolerably human as well. The Monstrous and the Dead, a book written with all the stylistic elegance one would expect of a doyen of Radical Philosophy, is a useful place from which to begin such investigations. Terry Eagleton
Postapologetic Alexei Monroe, Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK, foreword by Slavoj Žižek, Short Circuits, MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2005. xxi + 314 pp., £22.95 pb., 0 262 63315 9 pb. ʻNo apologies.ʼ These words begin Monroeʼs Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK, or rather they begin his ʻPrefaceʼ, which is the third section in the book, following two prefaces by Slavoj Žižek – one introducing MIT Pressʼs Short Circuits series, which he edits and of which this book is a part, and the second previewing the radical encounter with the interlinked Slovenian avant-garde artistic and political collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) and post-punk band Laibach, which are the subject of the book. But before Monroeʼs rhetorical refusal to atone for the complexity and difficulty of his study, Laibach get the first words: ʻThe explanation is the whip and you bleed.ʼ This line is a lucid capturing of the power of Monroeʼs project and the avant-garde cultural production it tackles; Monroeʼs book is the first to engage the work of NSK and Laibach with serious historical and theoretical rigour. (Interrogation Machine is the updated English version of the Slovene book Pluralni monolit – Laibach in NSK, published in 2003.) Laibachʼs words also offer a crystallized forecast of the
methodological problems of a study that tries to couple this sort of brutal practicality together with complex historiography and theoretical sophistication. This is the sort of book that eschews any particular methodology in favour of throwing itself headlong into an experimental engagement with a vast, difficult and continually changing historical and aesthetic terrain. If punk meant never having to say youʼre sorry, then Interrogation Machine aims to perform a kind of Laibachian scholarship. What unfolds over the course of Monroeʼs book is a variety of cultural history in which a way of being in the world is not just at issue but genuinely at stake. But for that kind of scholarship to produce modes of ʻexplanationʼ that can become operational, it has to succeed in making contact with flesh and making something or someone bleed. In endeavouring to do so, Monroe produces an exhilarating and properly punitive study, one that occasionally loses its own thread through the complexity it relishes, but that nevertheless does some serious and deserved violence to the clinical complacency of the art history
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industry and its well-oiled recuperations of any and all avant-garde activity. Interrogation Machineʼs appearance in English means that the anglophone academy can have no excuse for not dealing with its provocation to virtually all efforts to theorize the avant-gardes and their histories.
Spanish literary theorist Federico de Onis, who first coined the notion of postmodernismo in 1934 to characterize a then-contemporary conservative tendency within modernism – ʻone which sought refuge from its formidable lyrical challenge in a muted perfectionism of detail and ironic humourʼ – believed that the momentary postmodern period would be followed by a phase he named ultramodernismo. This would consist of the activities of a series of interwoven avant-garde practices whose effects would actualize the radical experimental promise of modernism, focus it by means of the creation of a ʻrigorously contemporary poetryʼ that would be universal in scope. The established histories of the avant-garde that have been produced by and for the West have scant room for this sort of enterprise. It is little surprise but nevertheless a disappointment worth registering that the recent tome Art since 1900, team-written by four of the most accomplished art historians and theorists of our time and imagining itself to be (however partial) a comprehensive panorama of important radical artistic practice over the last century, does not have the time of day for NSK, surely one of the most consequential avant-gardes in European history. (And the only Irwin it mentions is Robert.) So, apart from Interrogation Machineʼs importance as a source that traces the genealogy of NSK and Laibach and their historical and cultural contexts, the book also demonstrates the fertile dialogue, largely unmined, between them and the Western European and American postwar avant-gardes. ʻLaibach and NSK works
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are permeated with either direct borrowings from or references to conceptual art,ʼ notes Monroe, ʻparticularly that of Duchamp, Fluxus, and Beuys, all of whom they cite at some stage.ʼ In fact, Beuysʼs death in 1986 prevented him from realizing a planned collaboration with Irwin in which they ʻwould perform a joint action sowing the Slovene fieldsʼ. It may be here – in staging the beginnings of a history of avantgarde practice and performance that links the well-worn Duchamp–Cage– Beuys–Fluxus scenario with the lesser-known Russian constructivist– Suprematist–NSK–Laibach lineage – that Monroeʼs book will offer its most lasting contribution. For instance, with Interrogation Machine as a mediating agent it becomes not just possible but almost necessary to rethink Fluxus ʻfounderʼ George Maciunasʼs endeavour to fashion a kind of contemporary socialist avant-garde in America in the 1960s. Poet and Fluxus artist Jackson Mac Low described Maciunas as a peculiar sort of Marxist–Leninist, or better a ʻRussianistʼ; he remembers Maciunas once showing him a letter he had just mailed to Nikita Khrushchev ʻin which he urged the Soviet ruler to encourage “realistic art” ([Fluxus event scores and Fluxkits] such as [George] Brechtʼs, La Monte [Young]ʼs, and to some extent [Emmett Williamsʼs]) as being more consonant with a “realistic economic system” such as that of the Soviet Union than the old-fashioned “socialist-realist” art then in favour.ʼ Would art history not understand Fluxus (and its debt, little-remarked in comparison to the endless accounts of Duchampʼs and Cageʼs importance, to the Russian avant-garde) in a much more interesting and political manner if we approached its activities and its structure through, for example, Eda Cufer and Irwinʼs 1993 statement ʻNSK State in Timeʼ? One of the aims of Neue Slowenische Kunst is to prove that abstraction, which in its fundamental philosophic component – suprematism – explains and expels the political language of global cultures from the language and culture of art, contains a social program adequate to the needs of modern man and community. The NSK state in time is an abstract organism, a suprematist body, installed in a real social and political space as a sculpture comprising the concrete body warmth, spirit and work of its members. NSK confers the status of a state not to territory but to mind, whose borders are in a state of flux, in accordance with
the movements and changes of its symbolic and physical collective body.
In 1995, exactly a decade before the publication of Interrogation Machine, the most puzzling of teddy bears made its way to the shelves of shops in Ljubljana. Cute, cuddly and sporting an armband with a black cross, Ursula Noordung was the collaborative creation of Irwin and NK (Novi Kolektivizem – New Collectivism). (The primary groups within NSK are Laibach, Irwin, Noordung (formerly Red Pilot and prior to that Scipion Nascise Sisters), New Collectivism Studio, and the Department of Pure and Applied Philosophy. See www.ljudmila.org/embassy/.) Monroe notes that this bear was sold to raise money for charity. A ʻsymbol of childhood innocence… problematized by a black-cross armbandʼ, it was precisely the sort of volatile theoretical object in whose production NSK and Laibach have specialized. However, according to NSK member Eda Cufer, the Ursula Noordung teddy bear – its artistic dimension notwithstanding – was entirely a profit-making venture by the artists, and was not sold for any charitable purpose. As Cufer has noted, the Ursula Noordung project was actually made for the Soros Foundation-sponsored URBANARIA exhibition. The charitable version of the bear came later, when Ursula was appropriated by Mobitel, a Slovenian telecommunications company with ties to the arts, who developed it as a fundraiser for its own philanthropic activities. But Monroeʼs mix-up of the two teddy bears is fortuitous rather than merely ironic, in that it points to the necessity of thinking of the activities of the NSK constellation in relation to the seismic shift from post-communism to free-market capitalism in Slovenia during the 1990s. Though Monroe notes the movement in Irwinʼs work in the 1990s away from more ʻmonumental national and political themes of the 1980sʼ and towards deliberately ʻuser-friendlyʼ forms that intersect with ʻovertly kitsch territory, often using domestic and commercial elementsʼ, he does not take up the opportunity at this moment to theorize the deeper reasons behind Irwinʼs strategic change in its themes and forms of address. Monroe is correct on the one hand to characterize Irwinʼs development during this period as a response to ʻrecontextualizing and renarrating their history within NSK … driven by the accumulated momentum of the NSK project onto their own increasingly distinctive territoryʼ. But, at the same time, it is not possible to understand this very modification of NSKʼs strategies for artistic and ideological production without recognizing the force of the challenge of suddenly having to survive in the open market. As Cufer explains, ʻit was
not only new but also scary for the artists in the East to be able (to be suddenly forced, in order to survive) to sell their work in the free market economy.ʼ In moving away from the concreteness of that challenge and its demands on NSKʼs practical as well as ideological concerns, and slipping into this sort of speculative art historical generalization, Monroeʼs analysis loses much of what is at other moments a whipstinging bite. One of Monroeʼs most inventive and successful instances of fusing brutality and nuance is his reframing of Arthur C. Clarkeʼs portentous black monolith from 2001, configuring it as a tool for thinking through Interrogation Machineʼs objectives and procedures. Comparing it to the black cross that appeared on Laibachʼs first poster in 1980 and that has remained a central symbol ever since, he describes it as ʻa communicative symbol, abstract but active… The cross, as a mute but active symbol, is like the monolith in the way it resists interrogation while itself interrogating.ʼ This interrogative function becomes a kind of permanent provocation to Laibachʼs audiences as well as to the historian: The ʻnarrativeʼ of this book and the course of Laibachʼs work can be framed around the cross as a constant symbol of Laibachʼs presence. Where and why has it appeared? When has it appeared, and how has it been received? What significances and effects has it generated?
And so with the charge of this abstract but active symbol underwriting as well as perpetually threatening the organization of his ʻnarrativeʼ, Monroe proceeds to develop his sprawling nonlinear study, any chapter of which could be the starting point for any particular reader. There seems nonetheless to be an end: Chapter 10, ʻDas Ende?ʼ, concludes the book by looking at the current work and concerns of NSK in the early twenty-first century, eliciting from them a guardedly optimistic vision of an avant-garde practice that just might continue to matter, against the odds: The raison dʼêtre or raison dʼétat of artists such as NSK is to reveal what authority wants concealed (everything), and to conceal what authority wants revealed (everything). One of the key values of this approach is the ability of NSK works to hold together, and slow down and make visible all these contradictory forces we are structured by and exposed to.… By continuing to slow down the accelerating flows of culture and politics, NSK may be able to maintain and defend a space within which it remains possible to render perceptible the underlying noise and shadowy forms of power.
Chris Thompson
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Maria complex Cecilia Sjöholm, The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 2004. 240 pp., £32.50 hb., 0 8047 4892 6. In this rather dense and opaque book, Sjöholm sets out to formulate an ʻAntigone complexʼ which will be a better model for the understanding of ʻfeminine desireʼ than the much-maligned Oedipus complex – better because it is non-structural, relates feminine desire to ethics, politics and the law, and figures this desire as ʻcomplexityʼ and ʻalterityʼ, rather than as merely sexual. However, the notion of ʻfeminine desireʼ perhaps requires more clarification and concretization than it gets here and the ʻAntigone complexʼ, she writes, ʻrefers not to an actual function of the feminine, but rather to the complexity introduced in any discussion of desire where the feminine is concerned.ʼ This, then, is a complex which is not a complex, which refers (to the extent that it ʻrefersʼ to anything) to a certain resistance to and undermining of systematization and structurality on the part of the feminine. This seems simultaneously its strength and its weakness. Sjöholm is particularly concerned with the relationship between desire and ethics, and so uses her first chapter to trace the establishment – and subversion – of a certain negative relationship between feminine desire and morality during the Enlightenment: the development of the now-familiar opposition between ʻmasculineʼ reason and morality, and ʻfeminineʼ irrationality and sensuality. Feminine desire, she notes, is generally figured as ʻexcessʼ or ʻdeficiencyʼ in moral terms. Chapter 1 proceeds via readings of two unlikely bedfellows – the Marquis de Sade and Mary Wollstonecraft – both of whom are held up as facilitating a view of woman as an autonomous moral agent, because, not in spite of, her ʻdesiresʼ. The way in which this is achieved, however, is rather tendentious, for Sjöholm reads Wollstonecraft as suggesting that the feminine inclination towards submission comes from within rather than without: ʻFeminine desire is the product of a pervasive and crippling fantasy, which ultimately has its origin in the continuous investment of women in their own submission.ʼ Despite the very negative (practical, political, social) ramifications of this argument, Sjöholm asserts that this allows Wollstonecraft to depict women as ʻautonomousʼ, as ʻmoral agentsʼ – because they fall into submission. The opposite could surely be asserted – that submission denotes a lack of agency, despite recent attempts within feminist and post-feminist theory, fiction and film to ʻrecuperateʼ female masochism as a paradoxical form of agency
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and source of potential power within patriarchy (for example, Anita Phillips, A Defence of Masochism); more problematically, Sjöholmʼs argument relies on what looks like a misreading of Wollstonecraft. On the basis of the relatively uncontroversial claim that Wollstonecraft ʻdoes not explain the misery of women through social conditions aloneʼ, Sjöholm asserts the much stronger claims that ʻthere is no causal link between moral degeneration and social downfallʼ and that the miserable heroine of Maria is ʻnot subjected to any man, or any law, but only to the machinations of her own desireʼ. The middle way here would be to assert that female submission results from the internalization of ʻouter forceʼ – that is, of dominant (patriarchal) ideologies. This is not the same as saying that it originates in the subject, because the subject is, precisely, a product of the social. As Foucault and, more recently, Butler, have stressed, power doesnʼt work upon the subject (as a force external to it) but rather through the subject, through the constitution or enactment of subjectivity. But this isnʼt the point that Sjöholm seems to be making in her discussion of the female subjectʼs ʻfeelingsʼ and ʻinclinationsʼ. What Wollstonecraft actually says in the Introduction to Maria, which Sjöholm alludes to without directly citing, is that she means to exhibit ʻthe misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of societyʼ. Is this not quite unambiguous? Sjöholmʼs rather off-kilter reading appears to arise from her desire to figure ʻmoral reasonʼ as ʻa domain detached from social conditioning in the absolute sense of the termʼ, but as a founding premiss of her argument this must be subject to interrogation, given the historical and cultural contingency of concepts like ʻmoralityʼ and ʻreasonʼ (not to mention ʻfemininityʼ). The aspiration to make a positive link between feminine desire and morality is an admirable one, but at times in this book it seems to come at too high a cost, entailing a view of feminine desire as (self-imposed, voluntary) masochism or, at the very least, marginality (outside the Law, the Universal, the Symbolic Order). This is an impression compounded by Sjöholmʼs choice of Campionʼs The Piano and Jelinek/Hanekeʼs The Piano Teacher as her literary/filmic examples, and even by the choice of Antigone as the text around which her argument is structured. In her reading of Antigone,
Sjöholm says that, although Antigoneʼs act ʻseems utterly self-defeating, as if she were crushed under the weight of a punishing superego demanding her deathʼ, nevertheless she represents ʻa feminine alternative to the oedipal structure of identification with the lawʼ because ʻher death does not simply signify submission to the aggressive punishments of the superegoʼ. But why doesnʼt it? Is a will to self-destruction admirable simply because it is a will? Yet this reading of Antigone comes much later in the book. After the first chapter, the book proceeds via readings of Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan and Judith Butler. The fact that these are readings of readings of Antigone occasionally has a disorientating effect – whose argument is it we are being offered here? Hegelʼs – or Sjöholmʼs own? In each case, she considers the ʻuseʼ of Antigone within a philosophical system and uses this as a jumping-off point for her own development of a model of feminine desire. So, although there is no explicit discussion of femininity (or sexual difference) in Hegelʼs treatment of Antigone, Sjöholm asserts that in figuring Antigone as ʻan impossibility in and limit of the communityʼ, [Hegel] provides us with the sketch of a form of subjectivity that is not defined as the selfconsciousness of the social agent, but rather as a desire that finds satisfaction and recognition neither in the ethical order nor in the modern form of universality. Such a subjectivity … is … the margin, the fault, the deficiency that opens up the gap in the social fabric of any historical community. We have stumbled across a possible figure of feminine desire.
This is still a notably negative definition of feminine desire (as margin, fault, deficiency, as neither/nor); femininity as faultline of the ethical order may indicate its subversive potential, but it also offers grounds for its containment and/or exclusion. She fails to admit this possibility, despite subsequently citing Judith Butlerʼs view that the Hegelian conception of women is ʻnot really subversive, because it merely enforces their exclusion from the stateʼ. The benevolence here is Sjöholmʼs, not Hegelʼs. As she acknowledges, ʻwe may choose to read Hegel against himself and make his notion of femininity into an unstable and uprooted form of subjectivity rather than just another symbol for excess and irrationality.ʼ Well, we may… Sjöholmʼs reading of Heidegger is similarly optimistic, as she suggests that the gender-neutral term Dasein ʻdoes not so much invite us to ignore sexual difference as show us a way of conceiving of sexual difference beyond a structuralist or metaphysical point of viewʼ. She later avers, in an interestingly convoluted way, that
ʻa picture emerges that could serve as a substitute for a theory of feminine desire that Heidegger never hadʼ and much of the work of the book consists in ʻsubstitutingʼ for what is not, in fact, there. The picture that emerges, in her reading of Heidegger, is again a picture of feminine desire as that which subverts or renders impossible the structural and the universal – so here it is ʻa foreignness that shatters the ground of neutrality on which the being of Dasein is supposed to standʼ. Despite Sjöholmʼs insistence at various points that the figure of Antigone stands, amongst other things, for ʻthe collapse of heteronormativityʼ, she fails to acknowledge that the feminine desire of which she writes is fundamentally heterosexual. This is implicit in her criticism of the Oedipus complex in Chapter 4, where she argues that, for woman, ʻthere is no immediate coherence between the prohibiting law [against incest] and the object of desire, and therefore no possibility of simply constructing a metonymic chain of displacements from the maternal body.ʼ She assumes here that the ʻobject of desireʼ for woman is, necessarily, man. As Adrienne Rich has effectively shown in ʻCompulsory Heterosexualityʼ, the Oedipus complex can be employed to argue the ʻnaturalnessʼ of homosexuality for women, by contrast with the ʻnaturalʼ heterosexuality of men. The reading of Lacan again serves to reiterate a negative conception of feminine desire as ʻthe void of the symbolic system, the nihilistic disruption of its construction, … enigmatic and seemingly uncontrollableʼ. Nevertheless, Sjöholm sees this as an advance on the Freudian conception of feminine desire, in its focus on cause rather than aim or object, and thus its move away from a structuralist understanding of desire. The preferred model of desire (which, given its focus on origins, can hardly be termed ʻpost-structuralʼ) is one for which Antigone serves as paradigm, and feminine desire, in turn, stands as the paradigm of a certain modern conception of subjectivity. In the final chapter Sjöholm fights a Lacanian corner against Judith Butler, whilst detailing the latterʼs view of Antigone as ʻthe limit of cultureʼ and intelligibility. She asserts the value of the symbolic and the real against Butlerʼs emphasis on language and culture, claiming that ʻsocial and cultural norms do not simply form subjects, but are dependent also on the investments of those subjects. A cultural order is not to be understood merely on the basis of its values, but on the desires investing those values.ʼ What this reveals – apart from a somewhat simplistic reading of Butler, who surely doesnʼt deny a certain reciprocity in the relationship between subject and culture
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– is that Sjöholm situates desire outside the cultural, reading it as something instinctive, pre-linguistic, presocial, rather than as something culturally produced and regulated (as Butler would contend). She also figures cultural constructivism and ethics as somehow mutually exclusive. Sjöholmʼs own ethical model is a Lacanian one. Her argument stems from this: That feminine desire is an excess of the symbolic order does not mean that woman fails to incorporate or enact ethical norms, which was the Enlightenment view. It means rather that feminine desire indicates the possibility of an ethics situated in the rift between symbolic prohibition and normative injunction. Antigone allows us to formulate an ethics in which the subject is not only autonomous but also exposed, not only finite but also destructive, not only vulnerable but also monstrous.
Desire doesnʼt pull against or undermine moral values, it contributes to them – this is an appealing idea, but leads us only to the conclusion that ʻthe ethics of
psychoanalysis becomes … to act according to your desireʼ, which is something less than a model for living. The book ends on a note of excitement and promise: ʻall we need to do is affirm something that is sustaining us, between those two walls of impossibility that we are up against. What a chance, and what a surprise!ʼ But it remains unclear exactly what this ʻaffirmationʼ might involve and what advantages the assertion of femininity as alterity might really bring. In linking feminine desire to ethics, Sjöholm sometimes unwittingly abstracts it from the ʻrealʼ world of the social. The fact remains that how women experience and express their desire has significant consequences in the world, not least for how they are constituted as subjects, as ʻwomenʼ. This is something that Antigone learns to her cost. Sjöholm undoubtedly recognizes this, but situates her argument in a realm where such recognition is consistently suppressed. Kaye Mitchell
Wide awake Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjaminʼs ʻOn the Concept of Historyʼ, trans. Chris Turner, Verso, London and New York, 2006. 144 pp., £16.99 hb., 1 8446 7040 6. Studies of Walter Benjamin, of which it is obligatory to say there are many, often focus on a theme – the city, literary criticism, technology, reproduction, experience and so on. This book, instead, restricts its focus to one piece of writing by Benjamin, and a short one at that. The book is devoted to a reading of the series of theses known as ʻOn the Concept of Historyʼ. These theses have, to be sure, been subjected to critical evaluation before. What has tended to happen in the literature though is that either the theses as a whole are mentioned in passing in more general studies of Benjaminʼs work, or a single thesis – most particularly the one about the Turkish chess automaton or the one about Paul Kleeʼs ʻAngelus Novusʼ – is blasted out of the theses and even out of the context of Benjaminʼs work to become emblematic for some other statement about progress, catastrophe or the ʻcunning of historyʼ. This book is unusual in that it addresses the theses as a whole, but enters Benjaminʼs broader thoughts and relevance through close scrutiny of this small chip. The main part of the book is a thesis-by-thesis reading. Seventeen main theses are discussed plus four extra variants and unpublished theses. Between two and ten pages are devoted to each thesis, for, as Löwy admits, some parts speak to him more than others which continue
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to remain opaque. Löwy uncovers an internal structure to the work: for example, how theses II and III mirror each other. A growing body of Benjaminiana includes illustrations, prompted in part by the great value that Benjamin sets on the visual and optic. This little book is not short of them, and includes a scattering of odd images such as an illustration of Nepomukʼs automatic chess player, Messonierʼs ʻLa Barricadeʼ, a mural by Diego Rivera, a painting of Blanqui by his wife, Daumierʼs ʻLʼÉmeuteʼ and, of course, Kleeʼs ʻAngelus Novusʼ. The theses were first published in 1942, two years after Benjaminʼs death, in a hectographed volume called Walter Benjamin in Memoriam, issued, under Adornoʼs care, by the Institute for Social Research in Los Angeles. The volume was a special issue of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. This publication reached a relatively select number of readers. Löwy notes that the first proper publication was in French, translated by Pierre Missac in 1947 for Les Temps Modernes. This publication garnered no response. Silence greeted the theses again in 1950 when they were published in German in the Neue Rundschau. The critical buzz around the theses is revealed by Löwy to be a more recent phenomenon. Löwy refers, for example, to responses to
the theses by Habermas, Wohlfahrt, Agamben, Greffrath. Most influential perhaps was the response by Benjaminʼs friend Scholem, who predetermined many interpretations of the theses, by branding them a product of Benjaminʼs shocked awakening to the nasty reality of Marxism, at the moment when the Hitler–Stalin pact was signed. Scholem fixed an image of Benjamin as a naive, disillusioned utopian and insinuated that the theses move away from politics in order to ʻleap into transcendenceʼ. This contradicts Benjaminʼs own account of the thesesʼ motivation in a letter to Gretel Adorno. They represent well-pondered thoughts, because the theses, he reveals, had been germinating for twenty years (see editorial notes on ʻÜber den Begriff der Geschichteʼ, Gesammelte Schriften 1.3, p. 1226). That is to say, from 1939 backwards two decades to 1919 – when the thought seed is planted after the final, fatal struggle of the one political group enthusiastically referenced in the theses, Luxemburgʼs and Liebknechtʼs Spartakus, revolutionary competitor against social democracy, cut down with its inferred approval). The theses are a reckoning with the Left, and Löwy notes the signing of the Hitler–Stalin pact was a ʻdirect spurʼ, along with the outbreak of war and occupation in Europe, but they do not represent a sudden turning point in Benjaminʼs thought. Löwy sets his interpretation firmly within a class struggle frame of reference, but not only that. The introduction sets out three sources that nourish the text: German Romanticism, Jewish messianism and Marxism. Löwy argues that the result of the mixing of these three is not a simple synthesis but the invention of a new conception. The theses are here subjected to what Löwy terms a ʻ“Talmudic” analysisʼ, which is to say, word by word and sentence by sentence. Löwy hopes to surmount some of the problems and contradictions of previous approaches, identified as coming from one of three schools of interpretation of Benjaminʼs work as a whole: the materialist school à la Brecht, the theological as promoted by Scholem, and the trend that argues that Benjaminʼs work as a whole is contradictory and brings into alliance elements that are impossible to mix – such a position is represented
by Habermas and Rolf Tiedemann. Löwy proposes a fourth approach whereby Benjamin can be both Marxist and theologian. He admits that usually such approaches would clash, but notes that Benjamin is no usual thinker. This claim is a prelude to an interesting piece of original information. Löwyʼs research in the archives has established that parts of the theses are modelled on Scholemʼs ʻtheses on the concept of justiceʼ, from 1919–25. Löwy always writes unambiguously, unlike much commentary on Benjamin whose formulations twizzle and tangle much more than Benjaminʼs own. The theses are, quite simply, statements of political philosophy and Löwy treats them as resources for intellectual history and political analysis. Any names referenced therein are explained – such as Lotze, Ranke, Schmitt. There is an illuminating recovery of forgotten figures – such as Josef Dietzgen, mentioned in the theses but rarely analysed in the secondary literature (indeed the editor of the theses in English, in Illuminations, misnamed him William Dietzgen). Links are made between, on the one hand, structures of thought or phrases and expressions and, on the other, systems of thought such as Judaism or Cabbala, the Bible, Romantic philosophy or varieties of materialism. Special emphasis is given to connections between Benjamin and Trotsky, in particular Benjaminʼs non-linear concept of history and historiography and Trotskyʼs idea of permanent revolution or combined and uneven development. (This is an interesting contribution to connections already made between Trotsky and Benjamin in other publications by Löwy and other French Marxists such as Daniel Bensaïd and Enzo Traverso, as well as by Terry Eagleton and me.) Through this connection, Löwy is able to explain how the theses combat the illusions and malpractices of Stalinism as well as German Social Democracy. The core of Löwyʼs analysis revolves around the question of progress. In the course of the introduction Löwy raises an issue that he has addressed before: Benjaminʼs supposed anti-technologism (which, he insists, was only briefly countered by a short period of falling under the influence of Brecht). From 1936 to
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1940 Benjamin develops his thoughts against progress in a number of essays, culminating in the theses. The reading of the theses builds up to an inspirational political crescendo as postwar revolutionary heroes of the oppressed (Zapata, Sandino, etc.) are discussed in the context of a Benjaminian ʻhistory from belowʼ and collective memory. The final chapter is called ʻThe Opening-Up of Historyʼ. These last few pages return us to the general context of Benjaminʼs relationship to critical and revolutionary thought. While the theses do not appear to be on the main route of the history of ideas in the twentieth century, their significance must not be overlooked. The whole book has established them as a secret template of past, present and future historical actions. Löwy describes the theses as constituting a ʻphilosophical manifestoʼ. He uses the conclusion to make general observations on the fate of Marxism, which he establishes as split from the very start by irresolvable tensions. Marxism as represented by Marx and Engels sometimes assumes a natural scientific model of the evolutionary development towards socialism, and at other times sees the revolution as an exceptional moment, a moment of sudden revolutionary action. These two concepts mark the subsequent heritage of Marxism, which, according to Löwy and Benjamin, is firmly rooted in the latter vision. Löwyʼs opening claim for the theses is a grand one: the theses represent the most significant revolutionary document since the Theses on Feuerbach and are to be placed within a revolutionary tradition that includes Leninʼs April Theses. Benjaminʼs text, however, needs
much more interpretation – it is hermetic, allusive and enigmatic. This book provides useful and necessary services, both in interpreting the document and in establishing why it is so important. Löwy first read the theses in 1979, and admits that they have haunted him for twenty years. The theses changed his thinking utterly. One thing that intrigues him is that the texts are endlessly reinterpretable. He has discovered new things in each reading over the years. This does not, however, intend to throw any reading of them into freefall. Certain ʻheavy weightsʼ, as Benjamin puts it, can anchor the analyses, but it is also the case that as history develops the theses gain new relevance. Löwyʼs analysis is written from a retrospective perspective too: a perspective that knows the Holocaust that Benjamin did not live to witness. This is one of the subsequent contexts for the theses, which revises their meanings in a fashion that exemplifies Benjaminʼs own sense of an artworkʼs ʻafterlifeʼ. Benjamin is cast, in a way, into the role of prophet. He predicts the inhuman horrors of technocratic fascism, wherein the Holocaust is the outcome of a deadly combination of different modern institutions: the Foucauldian prison, Marxʼs factory and Taylorʼs scientific division of labour. The theses do not cease to have an ʻafterlifeʼ and, occluding the subsequent nightmares that they play a part in revealing, they also encompass utopian actions. Löwy suggests one aspect of their contemporary relevance in a photograph captioned ʻYoung Indigenous Brazilians Firing at the Clock at the Official Commemoration of 500 Years since the Discovery of Brazilʼ. Esther Leslie
Sketchy Nikolai Bukharin, Philosophical Arabesques, trans. Renfrey Clarke, with editorial assistance by George Scriver, Pluto Press, London, 2005. 448 pp., £35.00 hb., 0 7453 2476 2. Languishing in the Lubyanka prison on fabricated charges of treason for which he would pay with his life, the prominent Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin remarkably completed three books in 1937, a collection of poetry, the autobiographical novel Vremena (The Times, published in 1994, and in English translation as How It All Began in 1998) and this philosophical tract. Despite its title suggesting something much more fragmentary, Philosophical Arabesques actually constitutes a single sustained work on materialist dialectics. The scope of this work alone earns it a place alongside that other great Marxist work written in political incarceration, Antonio Gramsciʼs Prison Notebooks.
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Bukharinʼs philosophical work is much narrower in focus, however, and often reads as a belated attempt to disprove Leninʼs assessment that Bukharin never really understood dialectics. It is not surprising, therefore, that the 1996 Russian edition is subtitled ʻdialectical sketchesʼ. Here we find a detailed engagement with Hegel as viewed through Leninʼs Philosophical Notebooks (which had been written chiefly during the First World War but published only in 1929) and a development of the themes found there. If we compare this work with Bukharinʼs earlier Historical Materialism (1920, translated 1925), which earned the critical attention of, inter alia, Georg
Lukács, Karl Korsch and Gramsci for its mechanical approach to Marxism, Philosophical Arabesques marks a significant advance. It is structured according to a dialectical spiral rising from the contradictions of solipsism and ʻthings in themselvesʼ through the nature of reason, the distinguishing features of idealism and materialism, and the concept of truth, before arriving at the divergence of Hegelian and Marxist dialectics. To summarize this adequately would be impossible within the space of a short review, but it is possible to draw out certain themes that receive special attention. The practical, theoretical and aesthetic relations towards the world are held to constitute a single process that leads to a broadening understanding of practice. Theory and practice are shown to be mutually implicated and mutually informing at every level and locked into a rising spiral. Connections within nature are held to be multifarious, encompassing causal, functional, statistical and teleological (the last understood as a ʻmoment of necessityʼ). The sociology of thinking is seen as an introduction to philosophy, growing out of an analysis of the interrelationship of modes of production and of representation, where the last includes ideological forms and ʻstyles of thinkingʼ. The role of experience and co-experience in art is seen as the equivalent of the immediacy of knowledge in science. And, finally, the unity of theory and history is posited, according to which theory is historical and history theoretical. This all clearly marks a major departure from the ʻnotorious “theory of equilibrium”ʼ, according to which dialectics is understood as ʻthe conflict of forces, disturbance of equilibrium, new combination of forces, restoration of equilibriumʼ. This had originated in the work of Aleksandr Bogdanov and dominated Bukharinʼs earlier work. Here, however, it is regarded as ʻa refined variant of mechanistic materialismʼ. Such
shifts in position in Bukharinʼs philosophical thought require the close attention of a scholarly editor, as do the engagements with many ideas that were current at the time and that are now of varied relevance: neo-Kantianism, hylozoism, fascist racial ʻtheoryʼ and Hindu mysticism. Clearly a work so rooted in its historical context is not easily digested by todayʼs readers of radical philosophy, but one should expect to be illuminated about the more obscure references. Unfortunately, the editors of this volume do not provide an adequate critical apparatus to guide todayʼs (relatively) casual reader through the intellectual riches on offer here, or to give the more specialist reader a way in to the debates of the time. One example will suffice, though several could be raised. In Chapter 22 Bukharin refers respectfully to the now discredited ʻJapheticʼ theory of language developed by the controversial but, at the time, highly influential Soviet archaeologist and philologist Nikolai Marr. The importance of Marrʼs work for understanding Soviet scholarship on language between 1930 and 1950 is difficult to overstate, but his work is little known to a contemporary readership. This is clearly a case where editorial assistance is required. The notes correctly identify Marr, but tell us nothing about the ideas Marr developed, his position in Soviet scholarship, or where the reader might look for information on these important issues. This is even more concerning since Marrʼs controversial contention that language forms part of the ʻsuperstructureʼ arising on the economic base had most likely been adopted from Bukharinʼs Historical Materialism. Bukharin also considers the sources of Marrʼs ideas about the origin of language in the works of Ludwig Noiré, Wilhelm Wundt, Max Müller and another figure whose name, the editors tell us, appears in the Russian edition as ʻLaz. Geirʼ, but who has not been identified. Reference to works on or
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by Marr, or on the history of scholarship on the origin of language, would quickly have yielded the name of one of the most important figures in the field, Lazarus Geiger. Similarly, while the English text reads very fluently, the editors rarely give us the opportunity to glimpse the original Russian terms behind the English translation. This becomes an obvious problem when a term as problematic as ʻtruthʼ appears, since this could be the translation either of istina or pravda, terms that have specific connotations in Russian philosophical and political discourse. The editorial work is, therefore, inadequate for this type of work, but we should have no hesitation in welcoming the appearance of this text in English. It is a work of real philosophical interest, but also of historical importance since, among other things, it underlines the tragedy of Bukharin as a historical figure. The introduction to the volume is urbane and sympathetic, but Bukharinʼs repeated attempts to see in the grim realities of the Soviet Union of the 1930s the realization of the ideals of socialism can only make one wonder how such an acute mind could accommodate such blind faith. On two occasions when discussing the transition from the realm of necessity to that of freedom Bukharin cites Stalinʼs ʻwell-known formula “the plan? We are the plan!”ʼ where ʻWeʼ is understood not as his jailerʼs evocation of the ʻroyal “We”ʼ but (apparently without irony)
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ʻorganized society, planned society, the manifestation of the collective will of society as the expression of the totality of individual willsʼ. This recalls the excruciating final letter Bukharin wrote to Stalin from prison, recently published in Getty and Naumovʼs The Road to Terror (1999), in which he begs Stalinʼs forgiveness, asks to be given poison rather than shot and declares his continuing faith in the progress of the Revolution. Even now, when facing death, Bukharin was incapable of facing the reality of Stalinʼs rule, which he had helped to install through his elaboration of the theory of ʻSocialism in One Countryʼ, cultural revolution, and in practical support in the struggle of the Party bureaucracy against the left opposition. The Russian edition of Bukharinʼs Prison Manuscripts is a two-volume set, the first of which remains untranslated and is entitled Socialism and its Culture. Bukharin was an extremely influential writer on culture in the 1920s and 1930s and was responsible for the shift away from the Leninist cultural policy to one that officially accepted the notion of ʻproletarian cultureʼ and legitimized the move against the culture of Soviet intellectuals. These works from the pre-prison period remain untranslated. The appearance of Philosophical Arabesques makes the translation of all Bukharinʼs major writings on culture highly desirable. Craig Brandist
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Images in Peter Weibel, ‘Re-presenting Repression: The Political Revolution of the Neo-avant-garde’ p. 21 p. 22 p. 23 p. 24 p. 25 p. 26 p. 27
Polyclitus, Doryphoros, 450–440 BCE. Arno Brecker, The Party and the Army – this pair of statues stood outside the entrance to Hilterʼs Chancellory. Arnulf Rainer, from Black Architecture, 1967. Hiroshima. Invitation to Zero Avantgarde, Galeria il Punto, Turin, 1956. The Vienna Group, Literary Cabaret, 1958; Yves Klein producing a fire-picture, 1961. Gustav Metzger, Misfits evening, 1962; Festival of Psycho-Physical Naturalism (Dieter Haupt covers Nitsch with Blood), 1963. p. 28 [left to right, top to bottom] Peter Weibel/Valie Export, Cutting, 1967–8; Otto Muehl, Apollo 11, 1969; Art and Revolution, 1968: poster and performance; Günther Brus, Clear Madness – Urination, Excretion, Cut, 1970.
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Radical Philosophy 137 (May/June 20 06)
