Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics 9780822390978

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COMMUNITIES OF SENSE

BETH HINDERLITER , WILLIAM KAIZEN , VERED MAIMON , JALEH MANSOOR , AND SETH MCCORMICK ,

editors

Communities of Sense RETHINKING AESTHETICS AND POLITICS

Duke University Press Durham & London 2009

∫ 2009 Duke University Press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Arno with Magma Compact display by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Contents Acknowledgments vii introduction 1 PART ONE Rethinking Aesthetics

Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics 31 jacques rancière The Romantic Work of Art 51 alexander potts From Classical to Postclassical Beauty: Institutional Critique and Aesthetic Enigma in Louise Lawler’s Photography 79 toni ross Technologies of Belonging: Sensus Communis, Disidentification 111 ranjana khanna PART TWO Partitioning the Sensible

Dada’s Event: Paris, 1921 135 t. j. demos Citizen Cursor 153 david joselit

Mass Customization: Corporate Architecture and the ‘‘End’’ of Politics 172 reinhold martin PART THREE The Limits of Community

Experimental Communities 197 carlos basualdo and reinaldo laddaga Précarité, Autorité, Autonomie 215 rachel haidu Neo-Dada 1951–54: Between the Aesthetics of Persecution and the Politics of Identity 238 seth mccormick Post-Communist Notes on Some Vertov Stills 267 yates mckee Thinking Red: Ethical Militance and the Group Subject 294 emily apter INTERVIEW with Étienne Balibar 317

Bibliography 337 Contributors 355 Index 359

Acknowledgments This volume has its origins in a conference of the same name presented at Columbia University in April 2003. The editors would like to thank the participants in this conference: Susan Buck-Morss, T. J. Demos, Tom Gunning, Branden Joseph, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Pamela Lee, Reinhold Martin, Stephen Melville, Molly Nesbit, Alexander Potts, Arvind Rajagapol, and keynote speaker Jacques Rancière, as well as our faculty sponsors, John Rajchman, Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin Buchloh, and Jonathan Crary. We would also like to thank Barry Bergdoll and Hillary Ballon and the Department of Art History and Archaeology, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University for supporting the conference. Thanks go to Ken Wissoker and Mandy Earley at Duke University Press for their editorial help. Finally, we would like to give a special thanks to John Rajchman for bringing our editorial group together and for providing crucial encouragement during the early stages of this project.

BETH HINDERLITER , WILLIAM KAIZEN , VERED MAIMON , JALEH MANSOOR , AND SETH MCCORMICK

Introduction COMMUNITIES OF SENSE

The essays collected in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics are grounded in recent theoretical thinking on aesthetics, politics, and the problem of community within globalization. Over the last several decades, cultural production has often been described using terms such as postcritical and postideological. These terms suggest that the ways in which the relationship between aesthetics and politics has been formulated since the 1960s are no longer viable in the current political climate. At the same time, they foreclose the investigation of the immanence of aesthetics and politics to each other. Following Jacques Rancière’s theorization of democratic politics, the contributors here argue for a new understanding of the relations between politics and aesthetics by suggesting that aesthetics, traditionally defined as the ‘‘science of the sensible,’’ is not a depoliticized discourse or theory of art, but a factor of a specific historical organization of social roles and communality. Rather than formulating aesthetics as the Other to politics, the essays that follow show that aesthetics and politics are imbricated in the constitution of specific orders of visibility and sense through which the political division into assigned roles and defined parts manifests itself. This collection seeks to locate Rancière’s relevance to contemporary art theory and practice in what might be called the hidden vanishing point of both avant-garde art and Rancière’s political philosophy:

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namely, the problem of community and collectivism. In particular, the continuing dependence of avant-garde artistic practice and theory on collectivist models is more problematic than ever today, as the collapse of socialist politics and the violent recrudescence of various nationalist or fundamentalist forms of communitarian politics require that these models be critiqued and actively challenged. For this reason, we place Rancière’s contributions to contemporary debates on politics and aesthetics into dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy’s analysis of the concept of community. Against the backdrop of other post-Marxist accounts of community, Nancy’s work supplies a notion of contingent beingtogether that complements Rancière’s description of temporary solidarities that are constantly renegotiated through disagreement. By proposing the term communities of sense, the contributors to this volume seek to open the possibility of a politics of collectivity beyond collectivism or identity politics, on the one hand, and postcritical pluralism, on the other. To use the term community of sense is thus to particularize the meaning of community, to envision what community might mean after the fall of communism and the rethinking of democracy. It is to recognize a contingent and nonessential manner of beingtogether in a community whose coherence is no more than a fiction or a potentiality. Such a concept of community acknowledges politics to contain a sensuous or aesthetic aspect that is irreducible to ideology and idealization. This is the paradoxical core of the community of sense: that it works toward being-together only through a consistent dismantling of any idealized common ground, form, or figure. This paradox forms historical, political, and aesthetic conditions within which a critical engagement with contemporary cultural and artistic production needs to take place. While the stimulus for this project comes from Rancière’s reconsideration of the conjuncture of aesthetics and politics, which opposes the concept of ‘‘the people’’ to all forms of collective belonging based on common characteristics or values (social, ethnic, religious), the authors here seek to dismantle the typical post-Marxian opposition between ‘‘the people’’ and ‘‘community.’’ That is, they aim to reconsider and reopen the problem of community and collectivity as a crucial aporia of the historical avant-garde that has reemerged today, as contemporary artistic practices engage with the realities of globalization. Therefore, we must also acknowledge that a community of sense can

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be a reactionary formation that seeks to overcome politics by recourse to the shared experience of an organic community, like the nostalgic community of Walter Benjamin’s storyteller or the ‘‘aesthetic state’’ of political romanticism. In the place of a dissensual politics of community, these formations substitute a mythic or pseudoscientific notion of common sense. Examples of this common sense include eugenics, the romantic populism of agrarian and third-world communism, or the statistical fiction of consensus. Such formations haunt every conceptual or practical proposition of a community of sense. Yet rather than uncritically adopting or rejecting concepts and practices of community in toto, the authors here aim to open them up to renegotiation and productive debate.

The Aesthetic Turn Throughout much of the twentieth century, aesthetic theory was dismissed by artists and critics alike as a relic of bourgeois ideology and Western metaphysics. The significance of artistic and cultural production was increasingly located in its relationship to structures of representation and its dismantling of aesthetic conventions. The anti-art strategies of the historical avant-garde, from Soviet constructivism to Dada and surrealism, scandalized traditional artistic norms and institutions. These strategies were taken up again by the postwar avant-garde, whose anti-art practices became associated with forms of critical theory exemplified by the 1983 anthology edited by Hal Foster, The AntiAesthetic.∞ Such postmodernist art criticism of the 1980s, influenced by the reception of deconstruction and Frankfurt school critical theory, attacked post-Kantian aesthetics as the hidden link connecting the supposed autonomy of modernist formalism with capitalist ideology.≤ Aesthetics then became a code word for the elitist ideology of high versus low taste. Classical aesthetic standards of beauty were equally subject to skepticism. Beauty was exposed as an ideological construction whose norms varied historically and across cultures. However, with the Internet boom (and concomitant stock-market bubble) of the 1990s, popular art criticism rode the wave of ‘‘irrational exuberance.’’ This period witnessed the revival of the traditional terminology of normative aesthetics, particularly in the celebratory use of the

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term beauty. The critic Dave Hickey was among the first of those who began to proselytize for a recovery of an aesthetics of beauty in the early 1990s.≥ Hickey defines beauty simply as the visual pleasure found in the affect of images, but to this he adds a certain ethical tone, itself mobilized against right-wing moralizers. Discussing the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, he notes that it was so threatening to religious conservatives and their ilk because it made gay subcultural practices appear beautiful, by which he means that they somehow were ‘‘good’’ to behold because they were aestheticized. While bracketing the programmatic or normative implications of the term good, Hickey nevertheless suggests a universally understood value linking the good to the beautiful, which is inherent in the viewer’s apprehension of the work.∂ More recently, Arthur Danto and Elaine Scarry have radicalized Hickey’s argument by absolutizing the connection between beauty and ethics. For Danto and Scarry the case is clear-cut: that which is beautiful is that which is morally good. Danto states that while beauty may not be part of art’s essence and accordingly does not have to belong to an object for it to be considered art, those works that possess beauty generate a sense of wellbeing in the viewer, who automatically registers this beauty as morally good. Danto argues that judgments of beauty are universal, in fact. ‘‘There are,’’ he writes, ‘‘descriptions of states of affairs that would be acceptable as beautiful and as ugly by pretty much anyone.’’∑ Rather than regarding them as separate but related spheres of influence, Scarry goes even further than Danto by defining beauty as the condition of possibility for ethics. For Scarry, the beautiful automatically produces a feeling of ‘‘lateral regard’’ in which the beholder comes to care for nonbeautiful things because they also care for those that are beautiful. The unbeautiful is cared for only because of the proximate contagion of the beautiful.∏ Danto also famously argues that the ‘‘end of art’’ has arrived, insofar as aesthetics itself has been made to accord completely with everyday life. Nothing remains of art except the conceptual force of its propositions, and therefore the modern aesthetic project is brought to an end through its dissolution into philosophy. Despite the seemingly wide divergence between the critical positions represented by ‘‘the return to beauty,’’ on the one hand, and the ‘‘antiaesthetic,’’ on the other, both perspectives share a reductive definition of aesthetics as normative and apolitical. Aesthetics is thus celebrated as the basis for a new cosmopolitan universalism by the exponents of

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‘‘beauty,’’ or condemned as a bourgeois mystification by the adherents of the ‘‘anti-aesthetic.’’ Aesthetics is here defined in two opposing ways, yet with the same conclusions as to its critical viability. In both cases, the immediately political aspects of aesthetics are denied. In opposition to these formulations, Rancière points out in the opening essay of this collection that aesthetics encompasses both a historically specific mode of identification of art and the forms of visibility and speech in which politics is necessarily staged. That is, for Rancière, aesthetics participates in the historical configuration of social and perceptual experience. At the same time, aesthetics does not simply replicate or structure political systems of power, but reconfigures them in ways that suggest a different division of social roles and forms of subjectivization. Looking back over the trajectory of the arts in the West, Rancière finds three major regimes of identification of art, each of which has passed on, imperfectly and over the course of time, into the next. The arts of the modern era belong to what he calls the ‘‘aesthetic regime,’’ which he differentiates from the ‘‘ethical regime’’ that originated with Plato and the ‘‘poetic regime’’ allied with Aristotle and his legacy. Under the ethical regime, there was no Art as such, because the arts had not been designated as separate spheres with their own linked competencies. In the subsequent poetic regime, the fine arts were separated from other means of making at the same time that they were differentiated among themselves according to social hierarchies of medium, genre, and style. Within this genealogy, ‘‘aesthetics’’ marks a specific regime of art in which the identification of art is no longer based on an academic hierarchy of genres, subjects, and mediums but on the recognition of a sensible mode of being that gives art its specificity. With the advent of the Enlightenment, the fine arts became Art in general as philosophers such as Baumgarten and Kant sought to grasp the character of all the arts by linking them to problems associated with the production of sense. Yet Rancière points out that by asserting its autonomy from imitation and the hierarchies it implies, art also demolished its independence from other ways of doing and making. This exposes an underlining paradox in the aesthetic regime of art: at the same time in which sensibility constitutes the singularity of art, it also destroys any criteria upon which this singularity can be delimited.π

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This paradox indicates, for Rancière, the way in which the philosophical problem of sense is always also a political problem. The effort to isolate a specific realm of experience and a mode of thought that is inherently foreign to thought, namely ‘‘sense,’’ not only subverts the autonomy of reason: it also undermines the social distribution of roles and political forms of authority. Rancière bases this argument on his reading of Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.∫ For Schiller, the autonomy of aesthetic experience consists precisely in the freedom the mind acquires from the dictates of reason. Aesthetic experience allows for ‘‘free play,’’ that is, for the suspension of oppositions between sensation and meaning, form and matter, activity and passivity. This means that aesthetic experience is grounded not in the reversal of the hierarchical opposition between ‘‘active’’ understanding and ‘‘passive’’ sensibility, but in a new division of sense, one that is based on equality rather than on domination. Aesthetics thus delimits a space in which thought and sense coexist in a way that points to new ways of sharing. By conceptualizing aesthetics in this manner, Schiller exposed the political potential of aesthetics as a site of harmony and at the same time as a site of disagreement that challenges the hierarchical and exclusive distribution of roles between those that rule and those that are ruled. For Schiller, aesthetic experience opens the possibility to envision a new form of universality and a new kind of emancipated humanity.Ω Following Schiller, Rancière argues that the autonomy of the aesthetic was constituted through the identification of an inherently heterogeneous sensory experience and not through the opposition between the autonomy of reason and the heteronomy of ethics, as for Lyotard, or between art’s autonomy and the heteronomous conditions of its social production, as formulated by Adorno. By the same token, for Rancière the aesthetic regime does not manifest an exclusive opposition between the avant-garde’s demand for the integration of art into life and the modernist insistence on formal autonomy. Instead, it offers a paradox: neither autonomy nor heteronomy, but rather the politically effective negotiation of this opposition. By describing the historical breaks and self-contradictions that constituted the aesthetic regime, Rancière counters the tendency to essentialize Art (or ‘‘art as such’’) by historicizing aesthetics as a specifically modern project. At the same time, he corrects for the distortions of historicism by stressing the contingency of the historical forms of organi-

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zation and identification of art, including the aesthetic regime of the arts. This grasp of the contingency and self-contradictions of modern aesthetics enables Rancière to critique the false historical distinction between modern and so-called postmodern art. Such periodization, as he shows, is governed by terms that can be assigned with equal justification to either side of an ostensible postmodern break: political versus nonpolitical, aesthetic versus anti-aesthetic. The concept of the aesthetic regime also furnishes the basis for Rancière’s critique of teleological narratives of the end of art or end of politics. Since art is already circumscribed by its chiasmatic relation with life and non-art at the moment of its historical inception as a concept and a practice, its sublation has the character of an advent rather than a goal-oriented process: not the end of art, but rather its continuous restarting or false start.

Politics and the Appearance of the People For Rancière, the instantiation of politics is an exceptional occurrence.∞≠ Politics is fundamentally the particularized, and particularizing, enactment of a drive toward equality. The political therefore lies in the endless renegotiation of the terms in which politics is staged and its subjects are determined. As Rancière writes, the question of who is assigned a place in a given order of policy is determined through a specific partitioning of the sensible as the commonly given, as ‘‘an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and of the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise.’’∞∞ Politics exists when this order is disrupted by those who have no part: for example when workers, who take no part in the community of knowledge because they are defined as those who have no time for anything other than work, invalidate this order of time and its divisions into work and rest, labor, and leisure.∞≤ It is an act of repartitioning defined parts and assigned roles, disputing the inscription of equality within a space that is defined as common, of staging a clash between politics as usual (‘‘policy’’ or ‘‘the police’’ for Rancière) and a truly egalitarian politics (a definition that bears comparison with Étienne Balibar’s concept of ‘‘equa-

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liberty’’).∞≥ Politics is aesthetic in principle because it reconfigures the common field of what is seeable and sayable. Rancière’s notion of the partitioning of the sensible suggests a possible redefinition of what constitutes political artistic practice under present historical conditions. The inseparability of aesthetics from politics necessitates a different set of artistic strategies than the ones that were instrumental to political artistic practices in the seventies and eighties. By identifying artistic strategies through which new identities and communities are formed, and developing a framework in which these strategies can be productively discussed, Communities of Sense aims to show that aesthetics is not antinomic to politics. One such framework is offered by Rancière’s redefinition of ‘‘appearance.’’ In Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, he shows that politics is a stage on which the people appear as divided and where equality is enacted as both present and absent. Politics designates subjects that do not coincide with the parties of the state of society: it is therefore a site of disidentification, of a miscount in which the sum of parts never equals the whole. Rather than identification, politics enables processes of subjectivization. Political subjectivization consists in the enactment of equality—or the handling of a wrong—by people who have no part in the social whole. Politics, for Rancière, has a theatrical aspect in that it is always a matter of fictions, of a ‘‘poetic framing’’ of specific appearances. In this conceptualization of politics, ‘‘appearance is not an illusion that is opposed to the real. It is the introduction of a visible into the field of experience, which then modifies the regime of the visible. . . . It splits reality and reconfigures it as double.’’∞∂ Rancière thus differentiates his concept of politics from the one presented within Marxist discourse, in which politics is criticized as that which conceals the reality of the social. This discourse locates the truth of politics precisely in what politics is meant to conceal. Thus the main function of this discourse, designated by Rancière as metapolitics, is always to detect signs of untruth in every political practice by pointing to a gap between names and things, or between appearances and realities. Metapolitics constitutes itself as a ‘‘symptomology,’’ since it can only demonstrate that the truth of any phenomenon consists precisely in its falseness. In this regard, the term ideology is not only a new word for illusion but a term that marks a new status for the true: ‘‘the true as the truth of the false.’’∞∑ Within this new epistemology, the political

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appearance of the people in democracy is also interpreted as an illusion concealing the reality of a conflict between man and citizen, the laboring people and the sovereign people. Yet what if the fact that people are divided is not a ‘‘scandal to be deplored,’’ but the very condition for politics? For Rancière, this is precisely the case, since ‘‘there is politics from the moment there exists the sphere of appearance of a subject, ‘the people,’ whose particular attribute is to be different from itself, internally divided.’’∞∏ Thus, contrary to the claims of ideology critique, proclamations of equality like the Declaration of the Rights of Man are not ‘‘appearances’’ that conceal reality, but rather an effective mode for the appearance of the people. The problem in politics is thus not to contradict appearances but to confirm them, to maximize the powers of faint inscriptions and the spheres of their materialization.∞π What happens in our contemporary age of consensus is the erasure of divisions among the people. Consensus eliminates the splintering mechanism of appearance in favor of an approach that erases internal difference. The removal of the people’s sphere of appearance means that the ‘‘people are always both totally present and totally absent at once. They are entirely caught in a structure of the visible where everything is on show and where there is thus no longer any place for appearance.’’∞∫ According to Rancière, the problem in our age is not the ‘‘loss of the real,’’ but the loss of appearance as mechanism for producing difference. This enables the political constitution of nonidentary subjects who disturb a specific division of the perceptible by linking together separate worlds and organizing spaces where new communities can be formed. What are the stakes for artistic practices in the face of the loss of appearance? What are the implications of Rancière’s almost counterintuitive emphasis on the importance of appearance to our understanding of the political viability of contemporary artistic practices? How does his unique conceptualization of politics offer a way to rethink the historical shift from what are often described as the politicized art practices of the sixties, seventies, and eighties to the apolitical and conciliatory artistic projects of the nineties and the new millennium, whether beauty-based or community-based? Rancière’s reconsideration of appearance suggests that the difference between current artistic production and earlier, ostensibly more political artistic practices lies in the models of criticality they invoke. Models of

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seventies institutional critique, for example, were embedded in a Marxian discourse of politics and therefore conceived themselves in terms of a critical negation of institutional and art-world politics. For artists such as Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren, and Michael Asher, the focus of critique was most often the museum, which was criticized for its presentation of artworks as universal and autonomous objects devoid of any social, political, and economic values. By presenting itself as the guardian of a separate realm of aesthetic experience, a neutral space for the disinterested contemplation of art, the museum supposedly conceals its status as a political institution whose main function is to reproduce a repressive organization of power and an unjust distribution of capital. The seventies strategy of exposing contradictions was thus not only meant to uncover appearances but also to bring back ‘‘the real’’ in the form of facts. In the eighties, in response to the influential work of Jean Baudrillard, saving the real in political art through ‘‘communicative action’’ and ‘‘external referents’’ became as urgent as dismantling appearances.∞Ω Yet in our contemporary information age, opacity is often not the outcome of a gap between political appearances and social realities, but the result of the ceaseless proliferation of information. It is the persistent emphasis on information and the ‘‘facticity’’ of knowledge that leads to a particular economy of power and visibility in which, as Étienne Balibar argues, the dominant powers do not practice ‘‘secrecy’’ any longer, since the ‘‘crucial determinants of our own action remain invisible in the very forms of (tele)visibility.’’≤≠ Factographic strategies of institutional critique become complicit in the elimination of dispute by substituting the objectification of problems for the enactment of equality and the manifestation of wrong. The demarcation of ‘‘real’’ facts simply replicates the same forms of partition that enable the identification of parts and the distribution of roles, a division of the population into sociologically defined groups (capitalists and workers, oppressors and oppressed) whose conflicting interests can be resolved through laws and bureaucratic expertise. If politics is a form of aesthetics, then the problem is not how to uncover appearances and bring back the ‘‘real,’’ but how to create a sphere in which equality is enacted by the divided subject of the people. Disagreement is not simply the confrontation between interests, but the opening of forms of subjectivization for those who are in between names, groups, and classes. The goal of this type of politics is to stage a

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gap that does not reveal a secret by exposing contradictions, but that repartitions a particular order of the sensible through the splintering mechanism of appearance. The task of art today is not to make the invisible visible through the recontextualization of given information, but to reconfigure the visible and its spectacular economies in a way that reconfigures society’s current division into parties and disrupts the distribution of social roles. This form of operation necessitates a different model of criticality, one that is not based on symptomology and a negative form of critique. Such a model of criticality produces difference from within and enables processes of disidentification. For many contemporary artists, the museum is no longer merely an institution but a form of organization for possible social and cultural operations. The main challenge facing contemporary artistic practices today is thus not the critique of institutions, but the creation of what Balibar calls ‘‘places of fiction’’ and describes in terms of ‘‘the production of the real on the basis of experience itself.’’≤∞ This concern is inseparable from the question of how to create a stage upon which the people can appear, and furthermore, appear as inherently multiple.

Communities of Sense Historically, artistic practices have addressed the issue of community through problems of address, reception, and distribution. The avantgardes of the twenties, for instance, founded their formal practices on the hopes of speaking to a collective audience, and in turn transforming that audience in the service of new structures of social and political organization. These avant-gardes attempted to imagine new modes of address in order to articulate a newly understood spectatorship in response to the changing conditions of modernity. The realization that traditional forms of viewing based on individual experience were no longer relevant made the question of collectivity urgent. Yet, it could be argued that the people, as an expression of community, are precisely who or what is overlooked in the utopian practices of the early twentieth century, even though these practices claimed to speak to and mobilize a collective. The question of ‘‘the people’’ must be related to, and differentiated from, the avant-garde’s conceptualization of this collective in terms of

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‘‘the masses.’’ The avant-garde repeatedly confronted, yet never managed to theorize, the problem of the constitution of a mass audience. Walter Benjamin developed the phase ‘‘simultaneous collective reception’’ to address the possibility of cultural production that could activate collective spectatorship, a possibility that Benjamin Buchloh has addressed with reference to the work of El Lissitzky and the Soviet avantgarde.≤≤ The concept of simultaneous collective reception fails by presupposing that there exists a body capable of some form of common sense or commonality in the act of reception. To the extent that the utopian projects of the avant-garde were compromised by their mobilization under fascist and totalitarian regimes, those compromises hinged not on the fact of the work’s politicization, but rather on the assumption of a shared and common reception by a collective. This assumption neglects to conceptualize what this collective is, or, more significantly, could be. The historical avant-gardes aspired to create the conditions for a shared reception of cultural production through practices that would transform viewers’ cognitive and perceptual outlook and mobilize them as a political force. Yet while the avant-gardes experimented with ways to transform perception in the interest of an ultimate transformation of everyday life, they frequently took their audiences to be an already constituted unity. They did not attempt to find ways to approach the addressee as a member of multiple and disparate populations, or of an audience that was itself internally differentiated. As a result, their aspirations were neutralized by the enforced identifications that this concept of a pregiven commonality or collectivity necessarily entailed. The cooptation of avant-garde art practices by totalitarian modes of identification followed directly from their problematic embrace of the concept of the common as a form of identity. This need not be understood as a failure of the avant-garde project of ‘‘art into life.’’ Rather, it opens the possibility of rethinking the avant-garde project in terms of an internally plural collectivity.≤≥ After the decline of utopian thinking characteristic of cultural and theoretical production in the first half of the twentieth century, critics in the postwar period voiced skepticism concerning not only the viability of collectivity, but even its desirability. Communities of Sense is motivated, in part, by the debates over community and a politics of the people that

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have emerged in the waning decades of state socialism. Together with Rancière’s work, other theorists, including Étienne Balibar and Jean-Luc Nancy, have proposed new ways to address the problem of community beyond identitarian politics.≤∂ In the eighties, a new wave of discourses on community gained momentum and relevance by critiquing definitions of community built around identity. Benedict Anderson’s well known Imagined Communities asserted that all communities based on the concept of identity are productive fictions mobilized to the service of ideological power in the form of nationalism. As an imaginary formation, community lacks any natural basis in geographical territory, language, culture, or ethnicity. The principal problem that Anderson sets out to address is the seeming paradox of nationalism and socialism. The centrality of this issue, in turn, reflects the limits of Marxist critical thinking. The questions Anderson asks are, in part, the product of his ideological premise that socialism entailed the dissolution of atavistic forms of collectivity, as well as the preemption of community based on imagined identities. He puzzles over the fact that the fall of the Soviet republics, still an embodiment of twentieth-century Marxism, left nothing in its wake but republics, each at war over territory and sovereignty.≤∂ Within the Marxist logic of Imagined Communities, the critique of community and the critique of ideology appear to be antithetical. Despite the crucial questions it raised, Anderson’s book offered no positive or prescriptive strategy for socialist politics. Instead, it marked a disillusionment with leftist models of collectivity that had become widespread by the eighties. From the other side of the spectrum, the concept of community came under duress from situationist critiques of the commodity form. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord claimed that the spectacle tends to foreclose the possibility of community in its colonization of every aspect of everyday life. Under capitalism, which divides and arbitrates all sense, ‘‘the Spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.’’≤∑ Yet Debord wavered between his description of the total banishment of community from modern life and his faith in the capacities of small groups to reroute or reverse the effects of spectacle through play tactics that opposed the reification and commodification of everyday life. Like Anderson and Debord, Jean-Luc Nancy addresses the possible

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sense of the term community after the collapse of the utopian ideals of socialism and the historical avant-gardes. In The Inoperative Community, Nancy begins with Sartre’s assertion that ‘‘communism is the unsurpassable horizon of our time’’ to demonstrate the limits of the thinking against which community had come to be defined. These limits were bound by the regulative concepts of individuality and totality, a paradigm that depended on the acceptance of modernity as a process of atomization. Moreover, these regulative concepts rested on a set of presuppositions, among them the traditional philosophical category of the self, which not only establishes a related notion of community as a collection of identified selves, but also determines it a priori as a form of totality. This is to say that the metaphysical concept of the self as absolute subject makes thinking the plurality of community impossible. At the same time, paradoxically, it sets community up as a problem, as another kind of self mimetically linked to the individual self in the form of a unified body politic. Historically, this was expressed by the figure of a leader, such as a king, who metonymically stood in for the people. For Nancy, the absolutist logic of metaphysics casts itself into relation with its other, with that which undoes absoluteness, precisely because as absolutes, both individuality and totality exclude the possibility of their mediation. In this sense, to the degree that community is permitted to exist, to be thought, it is represented to thought as nothing other than that which dissolves what Nancy calls ‘‘the autarchy of absolute immanence,’’ the irrational fixity of absolutes.≤∏ In other words, community could be rethought, insofar as it can be expressed as a single phenomenon, as a form of relation rather than as self or being. Relationality is a function of the distribution and organization of sense, what Nancy calls ‘‘spacing.’’ This approach to the issue of collectivity posits it as internally multiple and dynamic. Being is constituted only in relation to others: one’s being is a function of the way in which sense is distributed, or rather, spaced. This spacing not only sets the condition of relationality among beings but also of each singular being’s relation to itself. Instead of an alterity founded on the originary alienation of the individual, spacing makes singular beings other, both for one another and for themselves, just as it conditions the possibility of connection and exchange among beings. Spacing introduces an interruption, an element of disjunction such that community itself becomes the enactment of a dislocation.≤π

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In this way, Nancy redefines community as the being-in-common of sociality. The potentiality of both cultural and political activity is predicated upon a new understanding of the way in which community is not a grouping of individuals already consumed in the reproduction of a static totality based on identity; rather, community is enacted through contingent modalities of spacing. Nancy thus forecloses the possibility that his idea of the ‘‘being-in-common of sociality’’ could be understood as a form of essentialism. In ‘‘Of Being-In-Common,’’ he argues that— because of the internally plural nature of being, which is always a function of process and enactment—there is no such thing as a common being, and therefore no such thing as fixed communion. By contrast, there is being-in-common. In other words, while being is not common, being-in-common is the condition for the possibility of meaning. Existence is only materialized through being partitioned and shared.≤∫ While there is no essence of being, the relationships, however dissonant, among singularities form the foundations of communication, which in turn produces community. An implication of this logic is that the sense of community is born of neither morality nor the institution of a transcendental law. Rather, this sense precedes those categories. It is sense produced in common, through the division and distribution of sensation and signification. Nancy takes care to differentiate his concept of community from formulations of collectivity and community developed by the historical avant-garde. As a point of departure for his argument, he critiques Georges Bataille’s understanding of community as the alternative to social atomism. For Bataille, Nancy claims, community was based on, and ultimately could not supersede, the ‘‘community of lovers.’’≤Ω Accordingly, Bataille despaired of any possible political form of community. Unlike Bataille, Nancy signals his investment in community as a problem of social and political vicissitudes, rather than a question of the collectivization of private experience.≥≠ In fact, private experience is a category made impossible by Nancy’s thinking, wherein sense is understood as the spacing of relationships among a plurality of terms. Critical as he is of Bataille’s emphasis on eros and eroticism as a privileged site of opposition to the empty atomism of modernity, Nancy shares Bataille’s drive to situate community as a form of resistance. The word communism, for Nancy, articulates the desire to recover community from identitarian politics, on the one hand, and from what Nancy

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terms the ‘‘techno-political dominion’’ of rational secular capitalism, on the other.≥∞ While socialist utopias faltered in part because of their eventual subordination to technocratic theocracies and totalitarian ideologies, the desire that once motivated those utopias remains relevant to the present. Moreover, as Nancy’s analysis suggests, the extent to which they became compromised through historical events also partially results from the way that collectivity was conceptualized as a form of social unity, a shared identity founded on a plurality of subjects made one through the very concept of identity. This logic led, circularly, back to atomism: the many composing the one in the absence of shared, enacted relationships. The forging of relationships between groupings that are contingent, rather than rigidly composed by either a formalist logic or a unified ideological program, emerges as a central question of the essays collected here. Our redefinition of aesthetics and politics addresses the complexity of new social formations wrought by globalization and is founded on an understanding of sociality and community as historically contingent forms of organization and distribution. This becomes all the more urgent in the face of the many turbulent outbreaks of ethnic violence, racism, and religious fundamentalism since 1989, in reaction against the increasing grip of globalization and its forms of enforced consensus. In responding to these developments, many contemporary art practices attempt to articulate new relations between the social and the common. The recent rethinking of issues of community in art projects that consider themselves community based or community oriented has had to negotiate the ambiguous legacy of the historical avantgarde’s utopian projects, as well as the ways in which these projects tend to fail under the foreclosure of social bonds by capitalism.

Contemporary Art and the Problem of Community In contemporary practices, the debate about community-based art focuses on the larger question of what a community is and whether it offers a desirable model for art or for politics. While advocates of community-based art such as Grant Kester have proposed consensual models of ‘‘politically coherent’’ community building practices, Miwon Kwon, in turn, has critiqued the ideal of community because it assumes the

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transparency of unified concepts of subjectivity and identity and reduces differences to homogeneous collectives. In her book One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, Kwon warns against the dangers of art falling into the trap of offering essentialist representations of group identity. Instead, following Jean-Luc Nancy, she affirms the possibility of a collective artistic praxis that can ‘‘unwork’’ community and thereby render it ‘‘inoperable.’’ For Kester however, community-based art has transformative potential in its ability to provide a consensual ground for public acts of political speech and resistance. Here, consensus and collectivity are valued positively as instantiations of democratic relations between the artist, the viewer, and the artwork. Collaborative strategies are deemed to resist the authority of a single artist’s voice and instead create ‘‘politically coherent communities.’’≥≤ Kester is interested in collaborative works such as those by the Austrian collective WochenKlauser (whose projects facilitate dialogues among unlikely constituents and create ‘‘interventions in community development’’), which he holds up as facilitating ethical projects building solidarity, consensus, and binding intersubjective relations.≥≥ Such an approach comes out of identity politics’ location of race and class solidarity as a precondition for collective consciousness formation and political action, an approach that extrapolates the coherence of the individual political subject and projects it onto the agency of a community. This contest of community versus being-in-common rehearses earlier struggles to negotiate the viability of critique under the onslaught of the administered world. If Marxist art criticism in the fifties and sixties seemed to have come to rest on strategies of negative critique, there was, on the other hand, a tendency to outright celebration and affirmation of design culture and its homogenizing of difference throughout the eighties and nineties. This reaction against Marxist models of critique has lead to a contemporary situation in which criticality, narrowly defined as an increasingly isolated and divisive irritant, is contrasted to the social, which is heralded as the real world out there beyond ideology. From this point of view, Nicolas Bourriaud has advocated the project of contemporary art as a struggle to make new social connections in the present, rather than an avant-gardist striving to prepare for an imminent future. His Relational Aesthetics, published after he curated a number of exhibitions in the nineties, such as Traffic at capc-Bordeaux (1996), proposed the replacement of the subversive and critical function of art

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by moments of sociability and areas of conviviality. However in this contrast of the critical to the social, the social is first collapsed to sociability, and finally and foremost to conviviality. Bourriaud asks, in Relational Aesthetics, if it is still possible to generate relationships and not just spectacular representations. He asserts that in a world of increasing mass-media saturation, communications now divide the social sphere, whereas art strives to achieve connections among viewers. Art thus becomes a kind of social agent whose employment is all the more necessary as social governmental policies were dismantled across the board by Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and the authoritarian liberalism of post-Soviet countries. There is a danger, here, of tendencies to present art as a compensatory activity, as ‘‘communitarian’’ art practices increase proportionately to the decline in leftist governmental agendas after the fall of Communism. This is the model of art as public service put forward in an exhibition like Public Service, shown at Sparwasser HQ gallery in Berlin in the summer of 2006. While curator Tadej Pogacar’s claims for ‘‘new public service models based on participation, exchange, solidarity’’ can and should be distinguished from the works presented there, a question nonetheless presents itself regarding how collaborative practices constitute a public and avoid cooptation or commodification by a global service-based lifestyle economy. As Miwon Kwon has argued, art that considers itself in the service of the public interest unproblematically assumes community as a whole and the public good as a transparent ideal, and it leads to situations in which the artist may inadvertently aid in the colonization of difference. Art in the public interest often presents the public good as consensus and replaces the disagreement of politics with a conciliatory and unproblematic approach to ideas of the public. While Bourriaud has claimed that relational art is political art, his approach has been criticized for its monolithic approach to commonality. Claire Bishop has objected to the ways in which the relationships set up in ‘‘relational’’ works rest on an ideal of subjectivity as a whole and community as immanent togetherness, rather than allowing the antagonistic confrontations that she sees as provocative of a democratic public sphere.≥∂ While Bishop’s antagonistic model challenges the convivial bonhomie of Bourriaud’s approach, her model of critique attempts to

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reclaim art from the indistinction of social praxis by asserting the spheres of the aesthetic and the social to be ‘‘mutually exclusive.’’ Aesthetics, in this case, remains caught between the rock of ‘‘political formalism,’’ as Claire Bishop charges, and the hard place of convivial sociality and compensatory public-service activity. Far from being a fundamentally apolitical smoke screen or distraction (spectacle or simulacrum, as Baudrillard and Debord argued) or a coded form of ideology (the role that it served throughout much of the history of social art), aesthetics can be taken as the space in which the limits of the political itself are susceptible of being retraced or redrawn. It is within this space that the decision on what counts as politics can itself be submitted to political contestation and debate. Art borrows or contests the authority to determine where, or in what, politics begins and ends, but only insofar as it also redefines the limits, quite simply, of art ‘‘itself.’’

Overview of Contributors The essays included in this collection pose challenging but necessary questions, while avoiding the temptation to provide definitive, programmatic answers. The first section, ‘‘Rethinking Aesthetics,’’ includes authors who are engaged in a reconsideration of aesthetics since the Enlightenment by examining its links with social and political experience. They insist on rethinking the link between aesthetics and politics today, both for a historical understanding of modern art, as well as for the continuing production of viable critical art practices. They explore the ways in which aesthetics frames the sensible and possibilities for being-in-common. Aesthetics is not taken as grounds for, but as a means to construct the possibility of, shared meaning. Jacques Rancière examines the seemingly opposed but historically intertwined logics of aesthetic autonomy and ‘‘art into life,’’ from the Enlightenment to the present day. Building on his previous work on disagreement in politics, this essay posits art as a key locus where disagreement can be staged in order to produce new communities of sense. He proposes the possibility of a positive/constructive strategy, one that exchanges the negative/critical dimension of sixties leftist politics for the staging of new subjectivities and communities. In the move

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from denunciation to staging, the contingency of the political-asenacted confronts traditional notions of politics—and of community and subjectivity—that were entirely predetermined. Undermining the separation, in theories of modernism, between aesthetic autonomy and heteronomy, he offers new possibilities for understanding the dilemmas inherent in both the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of aesthetics. To this end, Rancière analyzes contemporary artistic strategies such as the joke, the collection, the invitation, and mystery in order to challenge the ways in which recent work is or is not effectively political. Alexander Potts places theoretical arguments for the ‘‘end of art’’ in context, showing how the aporias and anti-aesthetic tendencies commonly associated with postmodernism’s supposed break with modernism can be traced back to romantic aesthetic theories and practices of the nineteenth century. Through a close analysis of individual works of art, Potts extends Rancière’s historical critique of the concept of postmodernism and Agamben’s anti-historicist critique of modern concepts of the artwork to a critical examination of anti-aesthetic qualities in the paintings of Turner and Delacroix, from the use of irony and textual supplements to strategies of narrative fragmentation. Yet unlike Agamben, Potts stresses the critical and ethical significance of the ‘‘negative dialectics’’ of romantic aesthetics, suggesting that whether elitist or democratic, a modern ‘‘community of sense,’’ unlike the classical ideal represented by Hegel’s ancient Greece, ‘‘can only be substantiated by way of a conceptual, discursive supplement’’ to the contingency and subjectivity of aesthetic experience. Anti-aesthetic strategies were therefore fundamental to the politics of the romantic aesthetic project from its historical inception. By locating the origins of Rancière’s ‘‘aesthetic regime’’ in Hegel rather than in the revolutionary republicanism of Schiller, moreover, Potts suggests that a certain model of the anti-aesthetic may have been historically mobilized against democratic forms of politics. Toni Ross argues that the postmodernist or anti-aesthetic reception of conceptual art and institutional critique represses the ethical and political implications of these practices’ adherence to a specifically aesthetic model of critical autonomy. Contrary to recent claims that have been made for relational aesthetics and for the ethical and social value of classical norms of beauty, however, Ross shows that the substitution of

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idealized forms of democratic sociality for modernist aesthetic principles actually subordinates politics to a model of harmony and symmetry that serves to stifle dissent and difference. In place of the sterile opposition between anti-aesthetic criticism and postcritical celebrations of a ‘‘return to beauty,’’ Ross proposes a psychoanalytic ethics of aesthetics in which Kantian aesthetic autonomy is understood as the ungovernable excess and alterity of sensate experience within the symbolic order of pregiven subjective and institutional identities. She considers the relevance of this model of aesthetics to institutional critique, developing a reading of Louise Lawler’s photographic work that complicates the programmatic assumptions of postmodernist art criticism while differentiating the enigmatic beauty of Lawler’s work from classical models of artistic and communal harmony. Ranjana Khanna reexamines a differing history of ‘‘common sense’’ than its well-known metaphorical definition stemming from Kant’s third Critique. Looking back to the Earl of Shaftesbury and to Vico, Khanna suggests that their usage of sensus communis presents disidentification formulated in demetaphorization. Commonality can only be sensed as coming undone through nonidentification, demetaphorization, unworking, and the sense of the liminal. Disidentification furthermore points to a means of understanding the altered conditions of contemporary art production that is no longer framed through the modernist logic of exile, but rather through a concept of asylum. Khanna sees Mona Hatoum’s work as emblematic of such a shift, using the senses to break down concepts of wholeness and metaphors of unity in order to formulate different notions of the subject, community, and the human. Hatoum’s works resist thinking diaspora and displacement in terms of a metaphysics of presence, identity, identification, or even ontology. Rather, presence is constantly fractured and broken down, presenting instead a sensual labor of non-belonging and disidentification. The second section, ‘‘Partitioning the Sensible,’’ investigates the ways in which sense has been constructed in the historical avant-garde, as well as mobilized in today’s global visual and political culture. The authors in this section analyze the evocation of sociality in terms of the economies of visibility and patterns of intelligibility that structure sensorial experience. While models of subjectivity and community often contribute to homogenizing agendas of social control and ritualized forms of violence, they also open possibilities of a politics of dissent.

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T. J. Demos locates the Dada event, including the infamous Barrès trial, as a site of disagreement in which the relationship between politics and aesthetics is negotiated anew. The event, in the context of Dada, is understood as a model of the ‘‘heterogeneous sensible,’’ or what Rancière claims to be art’s irreducible state as a form of aesthetics and politics. Demos thus positions the Dada event as an opportunity to redefine autonomy as ‘‘an autonomous form of social experience’’ rather than as an ideal realm of contemplation separated from the social and political. Dada practices, as Demos situates them, become a significant model for rethinking the relationship between aesthetics and politics today, in ways critical of the conciliatory aspects of ‘‘relational aesthetics.’’ David Joselit examines the role of community formation in contemporary social spaces that include screen-based images as an integral part of their construction. He contrasts two examples of suburban spaces whose residents have become caught in a mediated public sphere that turns them into what he calls ‘‘citizen cursors.’’ The first is a house designed by Bill Gates that surrounds the viewer with images, turning them into a living cursor that navigates its way through a half-actual, half-virtual living environment. The second is an installation by Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day Follies, which uses video to frame temporary but vital connections between the members of a suburban community. He discusses both projects in an exploration of how spaces, turned into hypermedia, apportion the senses through the adaptation to a virtual world where one can jump continuously from one picture to another. He considers the kinds of resistance possible in these spaces and the kinds of complicity they demand. Reinhold Martin relates technologies of mass customization to historical developments within corporate architecture. He traces the genealogy of this architecture and its recent emphasis on ‘‘people,’’ as opposed to ‘‘human resources,’’ through a critical case study of architecture designed for Union Carbide. By comparing two headquarters designed for the company twenty-five years apart, he finds continuity in the rhetoric of mass customization, as it papers over the contempt it has for the people it proclaims to support and brazenly reduces those it doesn’t support to a state of what Giorgio Agamben has called ‘‘bare life.’’ The third section, ‘‘The Limits of Community,’’ considers the viability of modern and contemporary models of artistic and political critique in

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the context of globalization. The essays in this section suggest a shift from utopianism toward an investigation of processes of identification and disidentification. Community is taken as a continual process of negotiation, one that can open up to new social relations but is often troubled by conflict, both internally and externally. Carlos Basualdo and Reinaldo Laddaga analyze current artistic projects that focus on social change through the formation of temporary experimental communities. These communities are defined in their essay as ‘‘boundary organizations’’ that allow for collaboration between individuals and groups with different professional backgrounds and skills (artists, architects, environmentalists, political activists) and often incompatible interests. Artists such as Marjetica Potrˇc and art collectives like Sarai pursue projects that facilitate the creation of communication networks between these groups in order to actively intervene in the ecological, cultural, and social reformation of urban spaces, while at the same time developing new representational forms to display these projects in art institutions. Basualdo and Laddaga differentiate these projects from the historical project of the avant-garde and artistic practices of the seventies, as well as from the homogeneous communities that came to be formed under recent community-based projects. They point to the need to develop an interdisciplinary critical model that will address the complex nature of these projects, in which artistic actions are inseparable from, among others, urban planning, media studies, and social activism. Rachel Haidu addresses Thomas Hirschhorn’s Musée Precaire Albinet (2004) to question the viabilities of the political and art historical category of ‘‘institutional critique’’ in the contemporary context of the contingency and impermanence of identity resulting from capitalism’s enforced migrations. Haidu argues that Hirschhorn’s strategy rests on imitation, rather than the critical methods characteristic of the institutional critique of the sixties and seventies. This imitative approach, in turn, both participates in dominant forms of institutional subjectivization and simultaneously produces different relations of exchange and interaction, in resistance to traditional forms of institutional dominance. Haidu thus suggests that artists engaging with the problem of institutions and the frame of the museum have more to do than simply expose the hidden dynamics of institutional power. They also may choose to attempt to reconfigure the social relations governed by the frame.

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Seth McCormick’s essay, ‘‘Neo-Dada 1951–54: Between the Aesthetics of Persecution and the Politics of Identity,’’ analyzes aesthetic factors of identification and political subjectivization in a work whose significance has been universally repressed in histories of the postwar period: the 1954 painting Star, commissioned by the artist Rachel Rosenthal from Jasper Johns and inspired, in part, by the early monochrome paintings of Robert Rauschenberg. Against the association of the latter two artists with a neo-Dada aesthetic of political indifference or homosexual silence, McCormick argues for a more complex interpretation of the politics of homosexual identity under McCarthyism. Examining the stakes of homosexual activism in the early fifties, when a political identity for homosexuals could be established solely through their identification with what Agamben calls the ‘‘bare life’’ of Jews under Nazism, McCormick locates a parallel in the influence of the Nazi-persecuted artist Kurt Schwitters on Rauschenberg, Rosenthal, and Johns during this period. Although the model of Schwitters’s ‘‘degenerate art’’ enabled artists to give form to the total expropriation and politicization of homosexuality under McCarthyism, Star reveals how a politics of subjectivization and an aesthetics of bare life remain inextricably linked. In ‘‘Post Communist Notes on Some Vertov Stills,’’ Yates McKee performs a close structural and historical reading of key stills from Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera according to the Benjaminian model of a ‘‘dialectics of standstill,’’ which renegotiates the sense of continuity between historical past and present. McKee situates those stills as interruptions of the ‘‘operative’’ time of Vertov’s productivist project. By locating the limitations of Vertov’s progressive politics in his films’ inability to come to terms with the Islamic other, McKee provokes a reflection not only on Russian constructivism and its legacy, but on the present-day fallout of global communism. Through performative historical readings, the essay attempts to enact a political intervention in this field. Emily Apter’s essay ‘‘Thinking Red: Ethical Militance and the Group Subject’’ aims to disentangle responsible and necessary militance from the discourse of terror and militarization that has eclipsed rigorous political activism since the late seventies. As denunciations of terrorism have veered into dismissals of leftist ideology and, worse still, authorizations of imperialist war, it is crucial now to revisit the origins of radical thought and its formulations of subjectivity. In order to reveal the disturbingly close tension between militance and militarization, Apter

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focuses on key moments of art and politics of the last thirty years. Through critical analyses of Gorin’s and Godard’s film Ici et ailleurs, Guyotat’s novel Eden, Eden, Eden, Richter’s October 18, 1977 painting series, as well as such political groups as the Red Brigade and the Weather Underground, Apter evokes a dangerous slide of ‘‘this becomes that,’’ as vigilant civic activism freefalls into paramilitary terror. The collection concludes with a special interview with Étienne Balibar, who, like Rancière, was a student of Louis Althusser and is one of the main representatives of ‘‘the political turn’’ in Marxist thought. His recent work asks whether the globalization of politics also means a politics of globalization. By formulating this question he points to the ways in which politics today is defined less as a practice of emancipation or transformation and more as a contingent set of actions and forces that counteract the cycle of violence and counterviolence that underlies political conflicts under globalization. For Balibar, violence is now introduced as an integral part of the concept and practice of politics, and the politics of violence can only be compromised, but never negated, by what he terms the ‘‘politics of civility.’’ Political transformation, he writes, is now ‘‘a question of the art of politics—and perhaps simply of art, since the only means civility has at its disposal are statements, signs, and roles.’’ One of the central projects of the art of politics, he argues, is the invention of transnational models of citizenship that will recognize the complex and dynamic processes through which cultural, national, and ethnic identities are constituted today. These models are necessary for the construction of a global public sphere in which translation, Balibar suggests, becomes a crucial social and institutional instrument for the regulation of conflicts that are not only about borders and territories, but also about modes of communication and representation. In the interview, we asked Balibar to elaborate on the possibilities of a politics of civility and community, and specifically on the role of cultural and artistic practices in the creation of political spaces and institutions that work against consensus and exclusion.

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Notes 1. Foster, Anti-Aesthetic. 2. Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, a materialist critique of the Hegelian aesthetics of the symbol, was translated into English in 1978. This work exercised a decisive impact on the theorization of postmodernism by many scholars, including Craig Owens, Benjamin Buchloh, and Douglas Crimp. See Owens, ‘‘The Allegorical Impulse,’’ and Buchloh, ‘‘Marcel Broodthaers.’’ Douglas Crimp’s definition of postmodernism in ‘‘On the Museum’s Ruins,’’ was framed in similar terms. 3. At the time, he suggested that beauty would be the most important issue of the nineties. He went on to raise the topic of beauty repeatedly, throughout the decade, at any given opportunity. Hickey, The Invisible Dragon, 11–12. 4. Ibid., 22–23. 5. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty, 29, 32. 6. Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 80–81. What she really seems to describe is love, not beauty. 7. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 23. 8. See Rancière’s ‘‘The Sublime from Lyotard to Schiller.’’ 9. Ibid., 12–13. 10. This position came to define itself, in part, against the Platonizing conception of ‘‘the political’’ espoused by the Paris Centre de Recherches Philosophiques sur la Politique, opened by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and JeanLuc Nancy in 1980. Their inaugural address spoke of a ‘‘re-treating’’ of the political in terms of its essence; for them, the questioning of the essence of politics also marked a ‘‘retreat’’ from the radical contingency of the formulation ‘‘everything is political.’’ Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, ‘‘Opening Address to the Center for Philosophical Research on the Political.’’ On the activities of the center, see also Frazer, ‘‘The French Derrideans,’’ and Critchley, ‘‘LacoueLabarthe and Nancy.’’ 11. Rancière, Dis-agreement, 29. 12. This is the subject of Rancière’s book The Nights of Labor. 13. Balibar, ‘‘What Is a Politics of the Rights of Man?’’ in Masses, Classes, Ideas. 14. Rancière, Dis-agreement, 99. 15. Ibid., 85. 16. Ibid., 87, emphasis in original. 17. Ibid., 88. 18. Ibid., 103. As we argue in the next section, this understanding of ‘‘the people’’ as a problem, rather than as the ‘‘always already there,’’ has important implications for a reconsideration of the historical artistic practices of the

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avant-garde, which erred by identifying ‘‘the people’’ with the pregiven form of ‘‘the collective.’’ 19. Ibid., 220. 20. Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, xii–xiii. 21. Balibar, preface to Droit de cité, 4, translation by Kristin Ross. 22. Benjamin, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ 211. See also Benjamin Buchloh’s essay ‘‘From Faktura to Factography.’’ 23. In this regard, the present analysis of rethinking community does not support the thesis of Boris Groys, who claims, in The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond, that the avant-garde was complicit in the eventual totalitarian logic of Soviet Communism. Groys insists on a will to totalitarian power on the part of the constructivists. The present text, by contrast, does not intend to suggest a chain of causal inevitability between avant-garde activity and totalitarian politics. Our claim is that the avant-garde was characterized by the utopian desire for collectivity that is no longer tenable and has given way to thinking about plurality and difference. 24. Anderson, Imagined Communities, xi. 25. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 2. 26. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 4. 27. Ibid., 25. 28. Nancy, ‘‘Of Being-In-Common,’’ 5. 29. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 36. 30. In this regard, Nancy differs significantly from Maurice Blanchot, who responded to Nancy’s text with Unavowable Community, in which he departs from Nancy’s inquiry into the organization of human sense. Instead, through a defense of his friend Georges Bataille, whom he believes to be misunderstood in Nancy’s account, he focuses on the communities that emerge through literary modes of production and reception of text, through writing and reading. He uses this examination of the community of text to consider the ways in which those communities confront and question, if not inscribe themselves within and thereby redefine, the very possibility of community understood as a social and political category. 31. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 1. 32. Kester, Conversation Pieces, 150–51. 33. Arguing against a recent ‘‘ethical turn’’ in contemporary art criticism, Claire Bishop demands the reimplementation of artistic standards and values such that all collaborative practices are not leveled as equally important artistic gestures of resistance. Thus, while she describes the mutual imbrication of politics and aesthetics as an important aspect of some contemporary practices (‘‘The best art will show the contradictory pull between autonomy and social

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intervention’’), she nonetheless reverts to formalist traditions of value judgments, elevating the name of art to the modernist project of disinterested autonomy. Some artists, she laments, wear the mantle of activism as if it were a veritable hair shirt, flagellating themselves in a destructive tradition of Christian self-effacement. If Bishop here seems to offer a Kleinian strategy of ego strengthening as a cultural therapeutic, Kester responds to her criticism with similar psychologization, attacking her version of negative critique as paranoia. Bishop, ‘‘The Social Turn,’’ 178, and Kester, ‘‘Another Turn.’’ 34. In her essay ‘‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,’’ Bishop contrasts artworks that she sees as affirmative and nonpolitical to the art of Thomas Hirschhorn and Santiago Sierra, which she describes as productive of the kinds of antagonistic conflict that Mouffe and Laclau have invoked as the motor of radical democracy. Liam Gillick has opposed the ways in which the artists included in Bourriaud’s exhibitions have not been differentiated from Bourriaud’s own project, and has objected to what he sees as Bishop’s facile implementation of the concept of antagonism: ‘‘Just because Hirschhorn and Sierra upset more people than Tiravanija and I do, doesn’t mean that they are closer to Mouffe’s notion of antagonism.’’ Gillick, ‘‘Contingent Factors,’’ 102. In other words, the question is whether antagonism alone is sufficient to create political intervals of dissensus.

JACQUES RANCIÈRE

Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics I do not take the phrase ‘‘community of sense’’ to mean a collectivity shaped by some common feeling. I understand it as a frame of visibility and intelligibility that puts things or practices together under the same meaning, which shapes thereby a certain sense of community. A community of sense is a certain cutting out of space and time that binds together practices, forms of visibility, and patterns of intelligibility. I call this cutting out and this linkage a partition of the sensible. There is art insofar as the products of a number of techniques, such as painting, performing, dancing, playing music, and so on are grasped in a specific form of visibility that puts them in common and frames, out of their linkage, a specific sense of community. Humanity has known sculptors, dancers, or musicians for thousands of years. It has only known Art as such—in the singular and with a capital—for two centuries. It has known it as a certain partitioning of space. First off, Art is not made of paintings, poems, or melodies. Above all, it is made of some spatial setting, such as the theater, the monument, or the museum. Discussions on contemporary art are not about the comparative value of works. They are all about matters of spatialization: about having video monitors standing in for sculptures or motley collections of items scattered on the floor instead of having paintings hanging on the wall. They are about the sense of presence conveyed by the pictorial frame and the sense of absence conveyed by the screen that takes its place.

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This discussion deals with distributions of things on a wall or on a floor, in a frame or on a screen. It deals with the sense of the common that is at stake in those shifts between one spatial setting and another, or between presence and absence. A material partition is always at the same time a symbolic partition. The theater or the museum shapes forms of coexistence and compatibility between something that is given and something that is not given. They shape forms of community between the visible and the intelligible or between presences and absences that are also forms of community, between the inside and the outside, and also between the sense of community built in their space and other senses of community framed in other spheres of experience. The relationship between art and politics is a relationship between two communities of sense. This means that art and politics are not two permanent realities about which we would have to discuss whether they must be interconnected or not. Art and politics, in fact, are contingent configurations of the common that may or may not exist. Just as there is not always art (though there is always music, sculpture, dance, and so on), there is not always politics (though there are always forms of power and consent). Politics exists in specific communities of sense. It exists as a dissensual supplement to the other forms of human gathering, as a polemical redistribution of objects and subjects, places and identities, spaces and times, visibilities and meanings. In this respect we can call it an ‘‘aesthetic activity’’ in a sense that has nothing to do with that incorporation of state power into a collective work of art, which Walter Benjamin named the aestheticization of politics. Therefore, a relation between art and politics is a relation between two partitions of the sensible. It supposes that both terms are identified as such. In order to exist as such, art must be identified within a specific regime of identification binding together practices, forms of visibility, and patterns of intelligibility. The regime of identification under which art exists for us has a name. For two centuries it has been called aesthetics. The relationship between art and politics is more precisely a relationship between the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics. How can we understand this notion of the politics of aesthetics? This question hinges on a previous one: what do we understand by the name aesthetics? What kind of community of sense does this term define? There is a well-known master narrative on this topic. According to

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that master narrative, known as the modernist paradigm, aesthetics means the constitution of a sphere of autonomy. It means that works of art are isolated in a world of their own, heterogeneous to the other spheres of experience. In this world, they are evaluated by inner norms of validity: through criteria of form, beauty, or truth to medium. From this, various conclusions could be drawn about the politicalness of art. First, artworks shape a world of pure beauty, which has no political relevance. Second, they frame a kind of ideal community, fostering fanciful dreams of communities of sense posited beyond political conflict. Third, they achieve in their own sphere the same autonomy that is at the core of the modern project and is pursued in democratic or revolutionary politics. According to this narrative, the identification between art, autonomy, and modernity collapsed in the last decades of the twentieth century. It collapsed because new forms of social life and commodity culture, along with new techniques of production, reproduction, and communication, made it impossible to maintain the boundary between artistic production and technological reproduction, autonomous artworks and forms of commodity culture, high art and low art. Such a blurring of the boundaries should have amounted to the ‘‘end of aesthetics.’’ That end was strongly argued in the eighties, for instance, in a book edited by Hal Foster and called The Anti-Aesthetic. Among the most significant essays collected in that book was an essay written by Douglas Crimp, ‘‘On the Museum’s Ruins.’’ The ruined ‘‘museum’’ was André Malraux’s ‘‘museum without walls.’’ Crimp’s demonstration rested on the analysis of the double use of photography in Malraux’s museum. On the one hand, the ‘‘museum without walls’’ was made possible only by photographic reproduction. Photography alone allowed a cameo to take up residence on the page next to a painted tondo and a sculpted relief, or allowed Malraux to compare a detail of a Rubens in Antwerp to a detail of a Michelangelo in Rome. It enabled the author to replace the empiricalness of the works by the presence of the ‘‘spirit of art.’’ Unfortunately, Crimp argued, Malraux made a fatal error. At the end of his volume, he admitted photographs no longer as reproductions of artworks but as artworks themselves. By so doing, he threw the homogenizing device that constituted the homogeneity of the museum back to its heterogeneity. Heterogeneity was reestablished at the core of the museum. Thereby, the hidden secret of the museum could be displayed in the

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open. This is what Robert Rauschenberg would do a few years later by silk-screening Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus onto the surface of a canvas containing pictures of mosquitoes and a truck, or in the company of helicopters or water towers, or even atop a statue of George Washington and a car key. Through photography, the museum was spread across the surface of every work by Rauschenberg. Malraux’s dream had become Rauschenberg’s joke. Just a bit disturbing was the fact that Rauschenberg himself apparently did not get the joke and affirmed, in turn, Malraux’s old-fashioned faith in the treasury of the conscience of Man. I think that we can make more of the disturbance if we ask the question: what did the demonstration demonstrate, exactly? If Malraux’s dream could become Rauschenberg’s joke, why not the reverse: could Rauschenberg’s joke become Malraux’s dream in turn? Indeed, this turnaround would appear a few years later: at the end of the eighties, the celebrated iconoclast filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, praised as the archetype of postmodern practice, mixed everything with anything as he implemented his Histoire(s) du cinéma, the exact equivalent of Malraux’s paper museum. Let us make the point: there is a contradiction in the ‘‘imaginary museum,’’ and that contradiction is testimony to a postmodern break only if you assume first that the museum equals homogeneity, that it is the temple devoted to the uniqueness of the work of art; second, that photography, on the contrary, means heterogeneity, that it means the triviality of infinite reproduction; third, that it is photography alone which allows us both to put cameos, Scythian plaques, and Michelangelo on the same pages and to put the Rokeby Venus on a canvas along with a car key or a water tower. If those three statements are proven true, you can conclude that the realization of the imaginary museum through the photographic means the collapse of the museum as well, that it marks the triumph of a heterogeneity that shatters aesthetic homogeneity. But how do we know that these points are all true? How do we know, first, that the museum means homogeneity and that it is devoted to the uniqueness and auratic solitude of the work of art? How do we know that this auratic solitude was fostered in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury views of art? Let us trace the issue back to the time of the highest celebration of high Art, around 1830. At that time, G. W. F. Hegel’s disciples published his Lessons on Aesthetics. At the same time,

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popular magazines such as the Magasin Pittoresque in France began to use lithographic reproductions in order to offer the treasures of world art to a broad readership. It is also at the same time that Honoré de Balzac published the first novel that he signed with his name, The Wild Ass’s Skin. At the beginning of the novel, Raphael, the hero, enters the showrooms of a curiosity shop, and this is what he sees: Crocodiles, apes and stuffed boas grinned at stained glass-windows, seemed to be about to snap at carved busts, to be running after lacquer-ware or to be clambering up chandeliers. A Sevres vase on which Madame Jaquetot had painted Napoleon was standing next to a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris. . . . Madame du Barry painted by Latour, with a star on her head, nude and enveloped in cloud, seemed to be concupiscently contemplating an Indian chibouk. . . . A pneumatic machine was poking out the eye of the Emperor Augustus, who remained majestic and unmoved. Several portraits of aldermen and Dutch burgomasters, insensible now as during their life-time, rose above this chaos of antiques and cast a cold and disapproving glance at them.∞

The description looks like a perfect anticipation of Rauschenberg’s Combine paintings. It frames a space of indistinction between the shop and the museum, the ethnographic museum and the art museum, works of art and everyday materials. No postmodern break is necessary in order to blur all those boundaries. Far from being shattered by it, aesthetics means precisely this blurring. If photography could help literature to achieve the imaginary museum, it is because literature had already blended on its pages what photography would later blend on canvas. It is this ‘‘literary past’’ of photography that appears when the combination of photography and painting turns the canvas into a ‘‘print.’’ This is the second point: how do we know that photography equals heterogeneity, infinite reproducibility, and the loss of the aura? The same year that Crimp published his essay, a significant essay on photography was published: Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. In that essay, Barthes openly overturned the mainstream argument on photography. He made photography a testimony to uniqueness. And in the following years, photography, after having been taken as the artifact best fitted for postmodern collage, would be viewed as a sort of symbol of Saint Veronica, an icon of pure and unique presence.

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This means that the argument could be overturned. The museum means homogeneity and heterogeneity at once. Photography means reproducibility and uniqueness as well. Photographic reproducibility does not make for a new community of sense by its own power. It has to be grasped within a wider form of visibility and a wider plot of intelligibility. It has to lend its possibilities to the enhancement or debasement of a form of presence, or a procedure of meaning. Rauschenberg’s use of photography does not open a new age of art. It only gives additional evidence against the modernist identification of ‘‘flatness’’ with autonomous art and the self-containment of painting. It highlights what a reader of Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘‘pure’’ poetry already knows: flatness does not mean the specificity of a medium; it means a surface of exchange; exchange between the time of the poem and the drawing of a line in the space; between act and form; text and drawing or dance; pure art and decorative art; works of art and objects or performances belonging to individual or collective life. If the production of new evidence against the Greenbergian paradigm of flatness could be viewed as the closure of an era, it is obviously for another reason. It is because there was a definite politics of aesthetics at work in that ‘‘formal’’ paradigm: that politics entrusted the autonomous work with a promise of political freedom and equality, compromised by another politics of aesthetics, the one which gave to art the task of suppressing itself in the creation of new forms of collective life. The point is that the radicality of ‘‘artistic autonomy’’ is part of a wider plot linking aesthetic autonomy with some sort of political—or rather metapolitical—implementation of community. Aesthetics—I mean the aesthetic regime of the identification of Art—entails a politics of its own. But that politics divides itself into two competing possibilities, two politics of aesthetics, which also means two communities of sense. As is well known, aesthetics was born at the time of the French Revolution, and it was bound up with equality from the very beginning. But the point is that it was bound up with two competing forms of equality. On the one hand, aesthetics meant the collapse of the system of constraints and hierarchies that constituted the representational regime of art. It meant the dismissal of the hierarchies of subject matters, genres, and forms of expression separating objects worthy or unworthy of entering in the realm of art or of separating high genres and low

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genres. It implied the infinite openness of the field of art, which ultimately meant the erasure of the frontier between art and non-art, between artistic creation and anonymous life. The aesthetic regime of art did not begin—as many theorists still have it—with the glorification of the unique genius producing the unique work of art. On the contrary, it began, in the eighteenth century, with the assertion that the archetypal poet, Homer, had never existed, that his poems were not a work of art, not the fulfillment of any artistic canon, but a patchwork of collected tales that expressed the way of feeling and thinking of a still-infant people. On the one hand, therefore, aesthetics meant that kind of equality that went along with the beheading of the King of France and the sovereignty of the people. Now, that kind of equality ultimately meant the indiscernibility of art and life. On the other hand, aesthetics meant that works of art were grasped, as such, in a specific sphere of experience where—in Kantian terms—they were free from the forms of sensory connection proper either to the objects of knowledge or to the objects of desire. They were merely ‘‘free appearance’’ responding to a free play, meaning a nonhierarchical relation between the intellectual and the sensory faculties. In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich Schiller drew the political consequence of that dehierarchization. The ‘‘aesthetic state’’ defined a sphere of sensory equality where the supremacy of active understanding over passive sensibility was no longer valid. This meant that it dismissed the partition of the sensible that traditionally gave its legitimacy to domination by separating two humanities. The power of the high classes was supposed to be the power of activity over passivity, of understanding over sensation, of the educated senses over the raw senses, and so on. By relinquishing that power, aesthetic experience framed an equality that would be a reversal of domination. Schiller opposed that sensory revolution to political revolution as implemented in the French Revolution. The latter had failed precisely because the revolutionary power had played the traditional part of the understanding—meaning the state—imposing its law upon the matter of sensations—meaning the masses. The only true revolution would be a revolution overthrowing the power of active understanding over passive sensibility, the power of a class of intelligence and activity over a class of passivity and inchoateness. So aesthetics meant equality because it meant the suppression of the

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boundaries of art. And it meant equality because it meant the constitution of Art as a separate form of human experience. These two equalities are opposed, but they are also tied together. In Schiller’s Letters, the statue of the Greek goddess promises a future of emancipation because the goddess is ‘‘idle’’ and ‘‘self contained.’’ It promises this owing to its very separateness and unavailability to our knowledge and desires. But at the same time, the statue promises this because its ‘‘freedom’’—or ‘‘indifference’’—embodies another freedom or indifference, the freedom of the Greek people who created it.≤ Now, this freedom means the opposite of the first one. It is the freedom of a life that, according to Schiller, does not rend itself into separate, differentiated forms of existence, the freedom of a people for whom art is the same as religion, which is the same as politics, which is the same as ethics: a way of being together. As a consequence, artwork’s separateness promises the opposite: a life that will not know art as a separate practice and field of experience. The politics of aesthetics rests on this originary paradox. That paradoxical linkage of two opposite equalities could make, and did historically make, for two main forms of politics. The first form aims at connecting the two equalities. ‘‘Community of sense’’ thus means that the kind of equality and freedom that is experienced in aesthetic experience has to be turned into the community’s very form of existence: a form of a collective existence that will no longer be a matter of form and appearance but will rather be embodied in living attitudes, in the materiality of everyday sensory experience. The common of the community will thus be woven into the fabric of the lived world. This means that the separateness of aesthetic equality and freedom has to be achieved by its self-suppression. It has to be achieved in an inseparate form of common life where art and politics, work and leisure, public and private life are the same. Such is the program of the aesthetic revolution, achieving in real life what both political dissensus and aesthetic enjoyment can only achieve in appearance. This program was first stated two centuries ago in ‘‘The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism,’’ proposing to replace the dead mechanism of state power with the living body of a people animated by a philosophy turned into mythology. It was continuously revived, in the projects of both a revolution conceived as a ‘‘human revolution’’ (meaning the self-suppression of politics) and an art suppressing itself as a separate practice, identifying itself with the elaboration of new forms of life. It animated

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the gothic dreams of Arts and Crafts in nineteenth-century England, as well as the technological achievements of the Werkbund or the Bauhaus in twentieth-century Germany, the Mallarmean dream of a poetry ‘‘preparing the festivals of the future,’’ as well as the concrete participation of the suprematist, futurist, and constructivist artists in the Soviet revolution. It animated the projects of situationist architecture, as well as Guy Debord’s dérive or Joseph Beuys’s ‘‘social plastic.’’ I think that it is still alive in Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s contemporary visions of the Franciscan communism of the multitudes, implemented through the irresistible power of the global network exploding the boundaries of Empire. In all these cases, politics and art must achieve their self-suppression to the benefit of a new form of inseparate life. The second form, on the contrary, disconnects the two equalities. It disconnects the free and equal space of aesthetic experience from the infinite field of equivalence of art and life. It stages the issue of communities of sense as an irreducible opposition between two communities of sense, both of which are communities of connection and disconnection. On the one side there is the community of lived experience, meaning the community of alienated life. This community is based on the originary separation of sense (sensation) and sense (meaning). In Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s narrative, this is the separation of Ulysses’s reason from both the songs of the sirens and the work of sailing.≥ That community of alienated life is achieved in the deceptive appearance of its opposite. It is achieved in the homogeneous appearance of aestheticized life and commodity culture. In contrast to that faked equality and faked community of sense stands the community framed by the autonomy of aesthetic experience, by its heterogeneity to all other forms of experience. The standard modernist paradigm is only a partial and superficial interpretation of that community, forgetful of its political content. The political act of art is to save the heterogeneous sensible that is the heart of the autonomy of art and its power of emancipation. The community of sense at work in that politics of aesthetics is a community based on both the connection and disconnection of sense and sense. Its separateness ‘‘makes sense’’ to the extent that it is not the refuge of pure form. Instead, it stages the very relationship of separateness and inseparateness. The autonomous perfection of the work has to disclose its own contradiction, to make the mark of alienation appear in the appearance of reconciliation. It reconciles the reason

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of Ulysses with the song of the sirens, and it keeps them irreconcilable at the same time. What is at stake in this politics is not so much preserving the boundary between high art and low or popular art as it is preserving the heterogeneity of two worlds of ‘‘sense’’ as such. This is why postmodernist polemicists miss the target if they think that the modernist paradigm of ‘‘politicity’’ collapsed when Rauschenberg put together a copy of Velázquez and a car key on the same canvas. The paradigm is threatened only if the boundary separating the two worlds of sense collapses. Adorno once made the tremendous assertion that we can no more hear—no more stand—some chords of nineteenth-century salon music, unless, he said, everything is trickery. Jean-Françoise Lyotard would say, in turn, that you cannot blend figurative and abstract motifs on a canvas; that the taste that feels and appreciates this mix-up is no taste. As we know, it sometimes appears that those chords can still be heard, that you can still see figurative and abstract motifs blended on the same canvas, and even make art by merely borrowing artifacts from everyday life and reexhibiting them. But this marks no radical shift from modernity to postmodernity. The paradigm is not shattered by that revelation. It is led into a kind of headlong flight. It has to reassert the radical heterogeneity of sensory experience, at the cost not only of precluding any political community of sense but also of suppressing the autonomy of art itself, of transforming it into sheer ethical testimony. This shift is most clear in the French aesthetic thought of the eighties. Roland Barthes opposes the uniqueness of the photograph of the dead mother not only to the interpretive practice of the semiologist but also to the artistic pretension of photography itself. Godard emphasizes the iconic power of the image or the rhythm of the phrase at the cost of dismantling not only the old narrative plot but also the autonomy of the artwork itself. In Lyotard, the brush stroke or the timbre becomes sheer testimony to the mind’s enslavement by the power of the other. The first name of the other is the aistheton. The second is the law. Ultimately, both politics and aesthetics vanish in ethics. This reversal of the modernist paradigm of the politicity of art is in keeping with a whole trend of thought that dissolves political dissensuality in an archipolitics of exception and terror from which only a Heideggerian God can save us. I quite hastily sketched these two communities of sense in order to remind us of the following: the project of politicizing art—for instance, in

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the form of a critical art—is always anticipated by the forms of politicity entailed in the forms of visibility and intelligibility that make art identifiable as such. We identify art in the interplay of the two forms of equality attached to its separateness and to its inseparateness. We identify it through the dialectic of its autonomy and its heteronomy. What does it mean, subsequently, to do political or critical art, or to take a political view of art? It means locating its power in a specific negotiation of the relation between the two aesthetical forms of equality. A critical art is, in fact, a sort of third way between the two politics of aesthetics. This negotiation must keep something of the tension that pushes aesthetic experience toward the reconfiguration of collective life and something of the tension that withdraws the power of aesthetic sensoriality from the other spheres of experience. From the zones of indistinction between art and life it must borrow the connections that provoke political intelligibility. And from the separateness of artworks it must borrow the sense of sensory foreignness that enhances political energies. Political art must be some sort of collage of these opposites. Collage, in the widest sense of the term, is the major procedure of critical art, of that ‘‘third politics’’ that has to weave its way between the two politics of aesthetics. Before blending Velázquez and car keys, collage blends alternative politics of aesthetics and offers the product of that negotiation to wavering forms of intelligibility, fostering wavering forms of politicity. It frames little communities of sense, little communities of elements borrowed from heterogeneous spheres. It sets up specific forms of heterogeneity, by taking up elements from different spheres of experience and forms of montage from different arts or techniques. If Brecht remained a kind of archetype for political art in the twentieth century, it was due not so much to his enduring communist commitment as to the way he negotiated the relation between these opposites, blending the scholastic forms of political teaching with the enjoyments of the musical or the cabaret or discussing allegories of Nazi power in verse about cauliflowers. The main procedure of political or critical art consists in setting out the encounter, and possibly the clash, of heterogeneous elements. The clash of these heterogeneous elements is supposed to provoke a break in our perception, to disclose some secret connection of things hidden behind everyday reality. This hidden reality may be the absolute power of dream and desire concealed by the prose of bourgeois life, as it is in the surrealist poetics. It may be the violence

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of capitalist power and class war hidden behind great ideals, as it is in the militant practices of John Heartfield’s photomontage, showing us for instance the capitalist gold caught in Adolf Hitler’s throat. Political art thus means creating those forms of dialectical collision or dissensus that put together not only heterogeneous elements but also two politics of sensoriality. The heterogeneous elements are put together in order to provoke a clash. Now, the clash is two things at once. On the one hand, it is the flash that enlightens. The connection of the heterogeneous elements speaks out of its legibility. It points to some secret of power and violence. The connection of vegetables and high rhetorics in Brecht’s Arturo Ui conveys a political message. But on the other hand, the clash is produced insofar as the heterogeneity of the elements resists the homogeneity of meaning. Cauliflowers remain cauliflowers, juxtaposed to high rhetorics. They carry no message. They are supposed to enhance political energy out of their very opaqueness. Ultimately, the mere juxtaposition of heteroclite elements is endowed with a political power. In Godard’s film Made in USA the hero says, ‘‘I get the impression of being in a film of Walt Disney, played by Humphrey Bogart, therefore in a political film.’’ The mere relationship of heteroclite elements appears, thus, as a dialectical clash playing witness to a political reality of conflict. Political art is a kind of negotiation, not between politics and art, but between the two politics of aesthetics. This third way is made possible by continuously playing on the boundary and the absence of boundary between art and non-art. The Brechtian identity of allegory and of the debunking of allegory supposes that you can play on the connection and the disconnection between art and cauliflowers, politics and cauliflowers. Such a play supposes that vegetables themselves have a double existence: one in which they bear no relation to art and politics and another where they already bear a strong relation to both of them. The relations of politics, art, and vegetables existed before Brecht, not only in impressionist still lifes, reviving the Dutch tradition, but also in literature. One novel by Emile Zola, Le ventre de Paris, had notably used them as both political and artistic symbols. The novel is based on the polarity of two characters. On the one hand, there is the poor old revolutionary who comes back from deportation to the new Paris of Les Halles, where he is overcome by the flood of cabbages—meaning the flood of consumption. On the other hand, there is the impressionist

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painter, singing the epics of the cabbages, the epic of modernity, the glass and iron architecture of Les Halles, and the piles of vegetables that allegorized modern beauty in contrast to the old pathetic beauty symbolized by the Gothic church nearby. The political allegory of the cauliflowers was possible because the connection of art, politics, and vegetables—the connection of art, politics, and consumption—already existed as set of moving borders, enabling artists to both cross the border and make sense of the connection of the heterogeneous elements and play on the sensory power of their heterogeneity. This means that the mixing of high art and low art, or the mixing of art and commodity, is not a discovery of the sixties, which would have both realized and undermined modern art and its political potential. On the contrary, political art had already been made possible by that mixing, by a continuous process of border crossings between high and low art, art and non-art, art and the commodity. This process reaches back far in the past of the aesthetic regime of art. You cannot oppose an epoch of the celebration of high art to an epoch of the trivialization or parody of high art. As soon as art was constituted as a specific sphere of existence, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, its products began to fall into the triviality of reproduction, commerce, and commodity. But as soon as they did so, commodities themselves began to travel in opposite directions—to enter the realm of art. Their power was directly identified with the overwhelming power and beauty of modern life, as happened in Zola’s epics of cabbages. They could also fall into the realm of art by becoming obsolete, unavailable for consumption, and thereby turned into objects of aesthetic—disinterested—pleasure or uncanny excitement. Surrealist poetics, as well as Benjamin’s theory of allegory or Brecht’s epic theater, thrived on this border crossing. And so too did all the forms of critical art that played on the ambiguous relationship of art and commerce, right through to many contemporary installations. They blend heterogeneous materials borrowed from artistic tradition, political rhetoric, commodity culture, commercial ads, and so on, in order to disclose the connections of high art or politics with capitalist domination. But they could do so owing to the ongoing processes that had already erased these borders. Critical art thrived on this continuous border crossing, this two-way process of prosaicization of the poetical and of poeticization of the prosaic. If this makes sense, it may be possible to reframe, hopefully on a

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firmer footing, the political issues involved in the discussion about modernism and postmodernism. What is at stake in contemporary art is not the fate of the modernist paradigm. Its validity is neither weaker nor stronger than before. In my view, it always was a very restrictive interpretation of the dialectic of the aesthetic regime of art. What is at stake is the fate of the third politics of aesthetics. The question is not: are we still modern, already postmodern, or even post-postmodern? The question is: What exactly happened to the dialectical clash? What happened to the formula of critical art? I shall propose some elements for a possible answer with reference to exhibitions which, in the last few years, offered points of comparison with the art of the sixties or seventies, and thereby some significant markers of the shift. First example: three years ago, the National Center for Photography in Paris presented an exhibition called Bruit de fond. The exhibition juxtaposed recent works and works from the seventies. Among the latter you could see Martha Rosler’s series ‘‘Bringing the War Home,’’ photomontages that bring together advertising images of American domestic happiness and images of the war in Vietnam. Nearby, there was another work related to American politics, taking the same form of a confrontation of two elements. The work Les temps du monde, made by Wang Du, consisted of two objects. On the left, there was the Clinton couple, represented in the pop manner, as a pair of wax-museum figures. On the right, there was a huge sculpture of Courbet’s Origine du monde, which, as is well known, represents a woman’s sex. So in both cases an image of American happiness was juxtaposed with its hidden secret: war and economical violence in Martha Rosler, sex and profanity in Wang Du. But in Wang Du’s case, both political conflictuality and the sense of strangeness had vanished. What remained was an automatic effect of delegitimization: sexual profanity delegitimizing politics, the wax figure delegitimizing high art. But there was no longer anything to delegitimize. The mechanism spun around itself. It played, in fact, a double play: on the automaticness of the delegitimizing effect and on the awareness of its spinning around itself. Second example: another exhibition shown in Paris three years ago was called Voilà: Le monde dans la tête. It proposed to document a century through different installations, among them Christian Boltanski’s installation Les abonnés du telephone. The principle of this installation is simple: there are two shelves on either side of the gallery with

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phone directories from all over the world, and two tables between them where you can sit down and peruse whatever directory you like. This installation could remind us of another political work of the nineties, Chris Burden’s piece The Other Vietnam Memorial. That ‘‘other memorial’’ is, of course, the memorial for the anonymous Vietnamese victims. Chris Burden had chosen the names written on the memorial by randomly picking out Vietnamese names in a phone directory. Boltanski’s installation still deals with a matter of anonymity. But that anonymity is not further embedded in a controversial plot. It is no longer a matter of giving names to those that the winners had left unnamed. The names of the anonymous become, as Boltanski puts it, ‘‘specimens of humanity.’’ Third example: in 2003, the Guggenheim Museum in New York presented an exhibition called Moving Pictures. The purpose was to illustrate how the extensive use of reproducible media in contemporary art was rooted in the critical art practices of the sixties and the seventies, questioning both mainstream social or sexual stereotypes and artistic autonomy. Nevertheless, the works exhibited around the rotunda illustrated a significant shift away from that straight line. For instance, Vanessa Beecroft’s video showing nude women standing in the setting of the museum was still put forward as a critique of feminine stereotypes in art. But obviously those nude and mute bodies followed another direction, escaping any signification or conflict of significations, evoking Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical painting much more than any kind of feminist critique. As you climbed up the round ramp of the Guggenheim, many videos, photographs, installations, and video installations enhanced, instead of critiqued, a new kind of strangeness, a sense of the mystery entailed in the trivial representation of everyday life. You sensed it in Rineke Dijkstra’s photographs of ambiguous teenagers, as well as in Gregory Crewdson’s movielike representations of the strangeness of everyday events, or in the Christian Boltanski installation included there, one composed of photographs, electric fixtures, and bulbs, which may symbolize—according to the piece—either the dead of the Holocaust or the fleetingness of childhood. At the top of the exhibition there was a kind of backtrack from the dialectical art of the clash to the symbolist art of mystery as it culminated in the video installation made by Bill Viola, Going Forth by Day, composed as a cycle of frescoes, embracing the cycles of birth, life, death, and resurrection, as well as the cycle of fire, air, earth, and water.

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Out of those three examples, chosen among many possible others, we can sketch out an answer to the question of the politics of aesthetics today: what happened to the dissensual forms of critical art? I would say that the dialectical form of the aesthetic dissensus has split up into four main forms. The first one would be the joke. In the joke, the conjunction of the heterogeneous elements is still staged as a tension or polarity, pointing to some secret, but there is no more secret. The dialectical tension is brought back as a game, played on the very indiscernability between procedures that unveil secrets of power, on the one hand, and the ordinary procedures of delegitimization that are parts of the new forms of domination, on the other: the procedures of delegitimization produced by power itself, by the media, commercial entertainment, or advertising. Such was the case of the work of Wang Du that I mentioned earlier. Many exhibitions today play on the same undecidability. For instance, an exhibition was presented at Minneapolis under the popesque title Let’s Entertain before being recycled in Paris under the situationist title Beyond the Spectacle. This exhibition played on three levels: the pop art derision of high art, the critical denunciation of capitalist entertainment, and the Debordian idea of play as the opposite of spectacle. The second one would be the collection. In the collection, heterogeneous elements are still lumped together, but they are no longer gathered in order to provoke a critical clash, nor even to play on the undecidability of their critical power. They become a positive attempt at collecting the traces and testimonies of a common world and a common history. The collection is a recollection as well. The equality of all items—works of art, private photographs, objects of use, ads, commercial videos—is thereby made into the equality of the archivistic traces of the life of a community. I mentioned the exhibition Voilà: Le monde dans la tête, which sought to recollect a century. When you left Boltanski’s room, you could see, for instance, one hundred photographs made by Hans-Peter Feldmann, representing one person of each age from one to one hundred, and many other installations likewise documenting a common history. We could find many other examples of this trend. It is obviously in tune with a motto that increasingly can be heard today: that we have ‘‘lost our world,’’ that the ‘‘social bond’’ is being broken, and that the artists must take part in the struggle to mend the social bond or

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the social fabric by bringing to the fore all the traces bearing witnessing to a shared humanity. The third form would be the invitation. I mentioned how Les abonnés du telephone invited the visitors to take a directory on a shelf and open it randomly. Elsewhere in the same exhibition they were invited to take a book from a pile and sit down on a carpet, representing some sort of child’s fairy island. In other exhibitions, visitors were invited to have some soup and get in touch with each other, to engage in new forms of relationships. Such attempts had previously been systematized through Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of relational aesthetics: an art creating no more works or objects, but rather ephemeral situations prompting new forms of relationships. As he puts it, by giving some small services, the artist contributes to the task of plugging the gaps in the social bonds.∂ The fourth form would be mystery. Mystery does not mean enigma, nor does it mean mysticness. Since the age of Mallarmé, it means a specific way of putting heterogeneous elements together: for instance, in the case of Mallarmé, the thought of the poet, the steps of the dancer, the unfolding of a fan, or the smoke of a cigarette. In opposition to the dialectical clash that stresses the heterogeneity of the elements in order to show a reality framed by antagonisms, mystery sets forth an analogy —a familiarity of the strange, witnessing to a common world—where heterogeneous realities are woven in the same fabric and can always be related to one another by the fraternity of a metaphor. ‘‘Mystery’’ and the ‘‘fraternity of metaphors’’ are two terms used by Jean-Luc Godard in his Histoires du cinéma. This work is an interesting case in point because Godard uses collages of heterogeneous elements as he has always done, but he makes them produce exactly the contrary meaning of what they did twenty years before. For instance, in a striking passage in the Histoires du cinéma, Godard fuses together three images: first, shots from George Stevens’s film A Place in the Sun showing the happiness of the young and rich lover played by Elizabeth Taylor, bathing in the sun, beside her beloved Montgomery Clift; second, images of the dead in Ravensbrück, filmed some years before by the same George Stevens; and third, a Mary Magdalene taken from Giotto’s frescoes in Padua. If it had been made twenty years ago, this collage could only have been understood as a dialectical clash, denouncing the secret of death hidden behind both high art and American happiness. But in the Histoires du cinéma, the image of denunciation is turned into an image of

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redemption. The conjunction of the images of Nazi extermination, American happiness, and Giotto’s ‘‘ahistorical’’ art bears witness to the redeeming power of images, which gives to the living and the dead ‘‘a place in the world.’’ The dialectic clash has become a mystery of copresence. Mystery was the key concept of symbolism. The return of symbolism is obviously on the agenda. When I use this term, I am not referring to the spectacular forms of revival of symbolist mythology and the dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk, as in the work of Matthew Barney. Nor do I refer only to the effective uses of symbolism such as the work by Viola that I mentioned earlier. I am referring to the more modest, almost imperceptible way in which the collections of objects, images, and signs gathered in our museums and galleries are increasingly shifting from the logic of dissensus to the logic of the mystery, to a testimony of co-presence. The shift from dialectics to symbolism is obviously linked to the contemporary shift in what I called the aesthetics of politics, meaning the way politics frames a common stage. This shift has a name. Its name is consensus. Consensus does not simply mean the agreement of the political parties or of social partners on the common interests of the community. It means a reconfiguration of the visibility of the common. It means that the givens of any collective situation are objectified in such a way that they can no longer lend themselves to a dispute, to the polemical framing of a controversial world within the given world. In such a way, consensus properly means the dismissal of the ‘‘aesthetics of politics.’’ Such an erasure or a weakening of the political stage and of the political invention of dissensus has a contradictory effect on the politics of aesthetics. On the one hand, it gives a new visibility to the practices of art as political practices—I mean practices of the redistribution of spaces and times, of forms of visibility of the common, forms of connections between things, images, and meanings. Artistic performances may appear, and sometimes do appear, thereby as the substitutes of politics in the construction of dissensual stages. But consensus does not merely leave the political place empty. It reframes, in its own way, the field of its objects. It also shapes, in its own way, the space and tasks of artistic practice. For instance, by replacing matters of class conflict with matters of inclusion and exclusion, it puts worries about the ‘‘loss of the social

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bond,’’ concerns with ‘‘bare humanity,’’ or tasks of empowering threatened identities in the place of political concerns. Art is summoned thus to put its political potentials to work in reframing a sense of community and mending the social bond. In my view, the shift from the critical paradigm onto the forms of the joke, the collection, the invitation, and the mystery testify to that reconfiguration of the political in the form of the ethical. Against the substitution, in art, of ethics for politics, certain projects today do seek a political role for art. These address matters of the distribution of spaces and issues of redescriptions of situations. It is more and more about matters that traditionally belonged to politics. This situation has lead to new attempts to make art directly political. In recent years many artists have set out to revive the project of an art that makes real objects instead of producing or recycling images, or that undertakes real actions in the real world rather than merely ‘‘artistic’’ installations. Political commitment thus is equated with the search for the real. But the political is not the ‘‘outside’’ of a ‘‘real’’ that art would have to reach. The ‘‘outward’’ is always the other side of an ‘‘inward.’’ What produces their difference is the topography in whose frame the relation of in and out is negotiated. The real as such simply does not exist. What does exist is a framing or a fiction of reality. Art does not do politics by reaching the real. It does it by inventing fictions that challenge the existing distribution of the real and the fictional. Making fictions does not mean telling stories. It means undoing and rearticulating the connections between signs and images, images and times, or signs and space that frame the existing sense of reality. Fiction invents new communities of sense: that is to say, new trajectories between what can be seen, what can be said, and what can be done. It blurs over the distribution of places and competences, which also means that it blurs over the very borders defining its own activity; doing art means displacing the borders of art, just as doing politics means displacing the borders of what is recognized as the sphere of the political. It is no coincidence that some of the most interesting artworks today engage with matters of territories and borders. What could be the ultimate paradox of the politics of aesthetics is that perhaps by inventing new forms of aesthetic distance or indifference, art today can help frame, against the consensus, new political communities of sense. Art cannot

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merely occupy the space left by the weakening of political conflict. It has to reshape it, at the risk of testing the limits of its own politics.

Notes 1. Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin, 15. 2. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 109. 3. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. 4. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics.

ALEXANDER POTTS

The Romantic Work of Art In this article I examine the longer-term history of a dialectical tension between the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic characteristic of modern thinking about the arts, with a view to reframing our understanding of the anti-aesthetic imperatives operating in the late modern or postmodern artistic imaginary. I focus on the early nineteenth century, the romantic period, when anxiety about the impossibility of contemporary art ever realizing the aesthetic values associated with the whole or complete work first became a significant issue. This anxiety began to shape the context within which contemporary artists were practicing. In this moment, urgent questions began to be posed about how a significant art might be sustained in circumstances where a split seemed be opening up between what art (and the experience of art) promised to deliver and the actual condition of the artwork in the modern world. These questions emerge particularly clearly in Hegel’s theories on the aesthetic dating from the 1820s, and his thinking on the subject is particularly pertinent to the present-day context in light of the reaffirmation, in the past few decades, of his supposed proclamation of the end of art.∞ This article, though, does not highlight the Hegel who envisaged art’s larger significance in the modern world as superseded by philosophical reflection on the aesthetic. Rather, I focus on the Hegel who speculated, often very suggestively, on the forms in which art actively persisted in his own time. These were forms that he saw as compelling to a modern subjectivity precisely because they represented the antithesis of the ideal forms of art in earlier cultures, most notably

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those of ancient Greece, that had functioned to embody the ‘‘eternal, divine, and what is true in and of itself.’’≤ Hegel’s diagnosis offers some suggestive insights into how, in the particular context of the early nineteenth century, an anti-classical, or in his terms anti-aesthetic, distinctively modern art might be conceptualized, an art that persisted by negating certain core values of a truly aesthetic art. In his writing we see an emerging idea of an art that was serious not because it embodied an abstract ideal, but because it projected a modern awareness of the contingent particularities of the material world. Hegel’s modern work of art was also one in which a split had opened up between the object as perceptible to the senses and its nonphysical or mental significance—in contrast with the classical work of art, which was the very embodiment of the ideas or ideals it sought to represent. If there was a larger significance to which modern art might aspire, in Hegel’s view, this was inherently at odds with the idea of a fully realized and whole work of art. Any sense of totality that modern art could convey was like the totality that Adorno identified in Hegel’s thinking, existing only as the ‘‘quintessence of the partial moments, that always point beyond themselves and are generated from one another.’’≥ This reexamination of the tensions between aesthetic and anti-aesthetic imperatives operating in Hegelian thinking and in the practices of major romantic artists such as Turner and Delacroix serves to demonstrate that the postmodern or late modern anxiety over, and yet fascination with, the idea of the ‘‘end of art’’ hardly constitutes a radically new economy of the anti-aesthetic.∂ Moreover, the real issue is not the end of art, but rather the persistence of art in circumstances where a negation of the aesthetic becomes the very condition of an art that continues to yield a distinctive kind of truth or awareness. The early nineteenth century casts light on issues raised by the concomitance of art’s persistence and negativity in a way that is not necessarily framed by the reactions against the high modernist cult of the autonomous artwork that have dominated thinking about visual art in the late twentieth century, from radical conceptualism to anti-aesthetic postmodernism. If we look to the work of certain artists of the romantic period, such as Turner and Delacroix, we can see that Hegel’s conception of a selfnegating modern art takes on two distinctive aspects that have continued to play an important role to this day. The narrative or allegorical work of these artists, the work that they saw as their most ambitious,

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effected a dispersal of any culminating significance intimated by the scene being represented, through an often pointed negation of the aesthetic of the pregnant moment. Theirs was a narrative that to a large degree fell apart into variegated and almost contingent details of often relatively disparate significance. This dispersal of aesthetic wholeness was sometimes played out in the comic mode, or as humor, a mode Hegel saw as characteristic of modern self-awareness that was always at some level alienated from the realities with which it was engaging and that momentarily fascinated it. Romantic sensibility, as much as the modernist one, is often envisaged as being essentially ironic. However, this misses the extent to which there was also an undercurrent of comic awareness—a sharp sense of the ludicrousness of situations acted out with great seriousness and of the curious seriousness of situations that were at many levels patently ludicrous—that nonetheless did not resolve itself as irony. Several of Turner’s works are particularly evocative of such a comic mode of awareness in a way that carries very significant political implications. Further evidence that Hegel’s conception of a distinctively modern, nonaesthetic art had a bearing on the practice of romantic artists such as Turner and Delacroix is their recognition, evident in the way they presented their art to their public, that the aesthetic impact made by their work could not, on its own, carry the larger significance they wished it to convey. The extensive textual supplements they created for their paintings indicates they were aware that in the context of the modern art world, symbolic meaning could not be made to inhere in a painting. A split had opened up between what was aesthetically compelling and what was compelling as idea, between the particularities and contingencies of the material world that fascinated the modern sensibility and a sense of what the larger significance of this world might be. The idea that ‘‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’’ may have been a powerful myth for the romantic imaginary, but it was one that could not be reconciled with the complexities and disparities of modern reality, any more than it could with the politically charged tensions between alienation and fascination that characterized modern awareness of this reality. Though both Turner and Delacroix were later singled out, in the high moment of optical formalism in the late nineteenth century, as being singularly visual and painterly, narrative was central to their work—so much so that they would usually exhibit their more ambitious works

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with quite elaborate narrative or poetic text in an accompanying catalogue. A formalist misconception of their painting, based on an exclusively visual orientation, still persists in some of the more sophisticated and critically self-conscious recent discussions of their art.∑ Such analysis fails to recognize the extent to which these artists’ ambitions were realized through narratives and iconographical details that interrupted a purely visual experience of the painterly effects in which they excelled. Turner took this further perhaps than any artist of his time, presenting his art as running in parallel with a larger epic poem he was supposedly writing, ‘‘Fallacies of Hope.’’ Fragments from this were regularly appended to his exhibited works. Delacroix may have insisted that visual art was different from literature, in that it could convey its essence and touch the soul of the spectator with an immediacy that the narrative unfolding of a text could never achieve.∏ However, he wrote obsessively about this in his journal, as if it were only through the entanglements of language that the peculiar immediacy of visual art could assert itself.π His project as an artist was based on his negotiating a recurring tension between the aesthetics of the visual and the conceptual resources of language, just as his more ambitious narrative paintings acquired much of their sense, as well as their deeper aesthetic resonance, in reference to a supplementary text that articulated the bare bones of a narrative and meaning that their visual effects could not convey on their own. Turner and Delacroix worked during a historical moment that created the romantic myth of the classic artwork that achieved, in its self-sufficient wholeness, the full visual embodiment of an idea. But it was equally a moment that envisaged, in the negation of this ideal, the possibility for creating a truly compelling modern art.∫

The Negative Dialectics of Aesthetic Theory In the late Enlightenment and early romantic period there emerged a modern understanding of art as embodying a relatively autonomous and self-sustaining engagement between the self and the sensuous qualities of the material world. This ran in parallel with a growing concern that the actual conditions of the modern world tended to block any such freely self-constituting activity and hence made the realization of an

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authentic and significant art deeply problematic. At this point, thinking about art had become a basis for thinking about the post-Enlightenment and postrevolutionary ideal of a truly free subject—both the possibilities open to it and the limitations that circumscribed it.Ω While art provided a model for imagining the possibility of a subject’s freely sustained self-realization, the present-day condition of art, by contrast, made manifest the actual unfreedom and alienation that afflicted the modern subject. Art could be imagined as figuring a utopian world that would be shaped in accord with a subject’s inner convictions and rational purposes, at the same time that the current practices of art were recognized as caught up in the abstracted and alienated realities of the modern world, and as having to deal with objects that were largely devoid of resonance rather than richly present in their symbolic fullness. Hegel pursued the consequences of this dialectic more fully than any of his contemporaries. This should be understood both in a theoretical sense (in that his philosophy was centrally concerned with the mind’s engagement with reality) and in a more concrete one (in that his lectures on aesthetics offered an unusually full discussion of the actual forms taken by works of art, both modern and ancient). Hegel never claimed that art had literally come to an end, but rather that art on its own, without the supplement of abstract philosophical reflection, could no longer be a vehicle for embodying the central values of modern culture and its highest levels of self-consciousness. A modern subjectivity, in his view, could not be fully realized in artistic form, and a work of art would always be inadequate to the modern subject’s drive to comprehend itself and the reality it inhabited. Like most German writers of his time speculating about the nature of art, Hegel viewed classical Greek art as the ideal of a perfectly realized art, as fully embodying the sense of self and the ethical values realized within ancient Greek culture. Many of his contemporaries envisaged this art as a transhistorical norm, representing the apparently seamless self-constitution achieved in the ideal forms of classical Greek art as a human ideal that modern society’s corruption, arid rationality, or constraints on freedom had made impossible. Hegel’s view was more interesting and much more complex than this. If Greek art stood, for him, as the model of perfectly achieved symbolic embodiment, an art in which the material form was fully fused with the spiritual or mental content, it did so only as the exception. In all previous art, and in all subsequent art, he detected a split between form

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and significance, between the materiality of the artwork—materiality here embracing both the literal sensuous form of the work and the cultural materials that made up its first-order content or subject matter —and the self-awareness or higher symbolic meaning it sought to symbolize.∞≠ In postclassical modern art, which bore within it an awareness of its loss of the fully integrated symbolization achieved in classical Greece, this insufficiency of the artistic symbol resulted in a constitutive alienation, occurring both within the work itself and in the subject’s apprehension of it. In his writing on aesthetics, Hegel stages something very central to the romantic artistic imaginary: namely, a dialectic in which the image of perfect embodiment achieved by an ideal artwork—set in the past as the ideal of the ancient Greeks unrecoverable in the disenchanted world of the moderns—produces a sense of the actual artwork possible in the present as inadequate, as failing to achieve symbolic fullness. However, this negativity and inner alienation of the modern artwork corresponds, in his view, more fully to a modern sense of self and reality than any ideal artwork. In a way, for Hegel, the true (in the sense of the actually existing) artistic symbol is the one in which there is a disparity between what the artwork is, as phenomenon, and the larger significance it aspires to evoke. Greek art is one notable historical exception that throws into relief the negativities inherent in the constitution of the artistic symbol in both the preclassical and in the medieval and modern world. Hegel made it clear that the dissolution of the classical ideal must be understood not as a fortuitous calamity, to which art was subjected from the outside through the extremities of the times, prosaic mentality, lack of interest, etc., but rather is the effect and the continuation of art itself, which, in so much as it proceeds to make the substance that dwells within it manifest to concrete perception, contributes in this way, with every step it makes, to free itself of its represented contents. Where art or thought presents an object so fully to our physical or spiritual eyes that its contents are exhausted, that everything is externalized and nothing obscure or inward is left, then absolute interest disappears. For interest only occurs as a result of fresh activity. Spirit or mind will only work away on an object so long as it still contains something hidden, not manifest.∞∞

When Hegel sought to define the underlying parameters of art in the modern world, the question he posed was as follows. What viable form

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could art take in a situation where subjectivity was no longer at one with objective reality and where, in art’s attempts to move beyond the realities it apprehended with the senses, it found these alien to it?∞≤ The logic of his system led him to assert that the mind had to move on from art to find its fullest satisfaction in the realm of pure speculative thinking. Nevertheless, he not only devoted considerable effort to an analysis of art and the aesthetic; he also speculated at length on the forms taken by art in its present conditions of negativity. He saw painting as having achieved its characteristically most modern form in Dutch genre painting. He highlighted the latter’s freewheeling engagement with ordinary, seemingly trivial realities and its genuine humor that registered a detachment—and hence subjective freedom—from the mundane particularities of everyday existence.∞≥ However, his richest diagnosis of the larger logic of art in the modern world comes in his discussion of modern poetry and drama. Hegel argues that in a situation where subjectivity had become alienated from reality as apprehensible in sensuous form, art became the vehicle for an unstable engagement between the subject and the actualities of the world, which alternated between close and distant. This parallels Adorno’s characterization of a mindset he suggested was appropriate for coming to terms with Hegel’s own writing: ‘‘painstaking immersion in detail, amid free detachment.’’∞∂ According to Hegel, modern art is split between a focus on free, incessantly active inner subjectivity and a preoccupation with the contingencies and particularities of an essentially alien external reality. The more compelling artworks represent the subject as ranging freely over this world by virtue of feeling detached from it and then engaging momentarily with certain features of it that strike it as compelling. Central to this process was humor and true comedy. In comedy, art’s search to manifest the ‘‘true’’ and the ‘‘eternal’’ in ‘‘real appearance and form for outer apprehension’’ was effected negatively, through the ‘‘self-destruction’’ of any identity between material actuality and higher truth.∞∑ A passage in the section of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics titled ‘‘The End of the Romantic Artwork’’ (end here being both the coming to an end and the end as destiny or inner logic) is worth quoting at some length to show how these ideas are played out explicitly in his thinking. In the ‘‘romantic apprehension of things,’’ he explains (and here he is referring to the whole postclassical rather than just the modern world),

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alexander potts the key point was the rending asunder of inner meaning and outer form, a separation which was partially revoked through the subjective activity of the artist . . . [;] Romantic art was of its very nature the deep splitting of inwardness taking satisfaction in itself, which, because the objective world was not in conformity with spirit’s inward being, remained broken apart from or indifferent to this world. The contradiction developed over the course of Romantic art to the point where we were compelled to arrive at an exclusive interest in fortuitous externality or a similarly fortuitous subjectivity. But if this pleasure taken in externality as much as in subjective representation in accord with the principle of Romanticism is enhanced to the point of being a deepening of feeling for the object, and if on the other hand humor concerns itself both with the object and to its formation within subjective reflection, then we acquire through this an intimacy with the object and, as it were, an objective humor. Such an intimacy, however, can only be partial and perhaps expresses itself only within the bounds of a song or only as part of a larger whole.∞∏

Humor, then, was for Hegel the vehicle for a characteristically modern, contingent engagement with the alien fabric of social existence as this presented itself to a freely active subject. A kind of ironic humor is widely seen as characterizing aspects of romantic literature. In romantic painting, too, one can detect signs of an objective humor, of a distanced but sustained engagement with the world in its negativity that needs to be distinguished from conventional comedy, mostly strikingly perhaps in the work of Turner. In 1841, the year after Napoleon’s ashes were brought back to Paris from the Isle of Saint Helena, where Napoleon had been banished after his defeat at battle of Waterloo, Turner exhibited a painting at the Royal Academy that represented Napoleon in exile, titled War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet (fig. 1). In this, he both dramatized and undercut the traditional romanticizing image of the great general contemplating his isolation and the tragic reversals of his destiny. The picture was able to evoke the complex realities of Napoleon’s situation in exile—both its larger seriousness and its prosaic individuality—through juxtaposing an image suggestive of the bloody devastations of the Napoleonic wars with a seemingly ludicrous detail. Napoleon looks out, guarded by an armed soldier standing bolt upright a little behind him, surrounded by the blood-red effects of a sunset reflecting on the water. He is contemplating not the wide expanse of the

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[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

1. J. M. W. Turner, War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet, exhibited in 1842. Oil on canvas, 79.4 — 79.4 cm. Tate Gallery, London. Photo ∫ Tate, London 2008.

sea, nor the momentary intimations of the horrors of war created by the blood-red sunset, but a tiny rock limpet just visible in the pool directly in front of him. The catalogue carried a fragment of verse from Turner’s purported epic ‘‘Fallacies of Hope,’’ in which Napoleon gives voice to the eccentric but totally absorbing association that had seized him: Ah! Thy tent-formed shell is like A soldier’s mighty bivouac, alone Amidst a sea of blood— —but you can join your comrades.∞π

The humor here has the effect of giving concrete resonance to the painting and undercuts any overly self-absorbed tragic depth. In a similar way, in

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Rain Steam and Speed (1844) Turner gave an almost comic everyday particularity to his brilliantly atmospheric vision of a steam train, emanating fire and smoke, hurtling toward the viewer through a violent rain storm. Here he included a diminutive hare running flat out in front of the oncoming train. The painting becomes a compelling image of the heterogeneous realities of its time by simultaneously offering up an almost sublime vision of modern technological and natural power and a comic Aesopian tale of the race between the hare and the steam engine.∞∫ According to Hegel, the subjective engagement with the material world elicited by art is distinct from the sensuous desiring of particular things, as well as from philosophical thought. In practice, however, and above all in any consideration of modern art, the aesthetic for him becomes enmeshed in both—a surrender to contingent particularity and an abstract philosophical sense of distance. Indeed, for Hegel, in a modern world where subjectivity sees itself as alienated from the existing symbolic motifs that might lay claim to carrying a higher value and meaning, a work of art can only gain a shared ethical significance by way of abstract philosophical speculation. Inasmuch as the experience of art is able to constitute a community of sense for Hegel, this is achieved by way of an anti-aesthetic, conceptual consideration of the momentary, aesthetically compelling engagements we might have with works of art. This is clearly an overtly elitist take on the part played by the antiaesthetic in any shared significance that might be attributed to the artistic in the modern world. At the same time, Hegel’s analysis, and in particular his point that art cannot, on its own, lay claim to a larger significance, points to something that is central to the broader condition of modern art. The aspiration, implicit in modern conceptions of art, to an un-Hegelian, democratic, openly conceived immediacy can only be substantiated by way of a conceptual, discursive supplement. The latter’s abstraction may be at odds with the vivid particularity of aesthetic experience, but it is also the medium through which such experience is recognized as having any universal value.

Delacroix: ‘‘The People . . . Rushed in to See the Corpse’’ Hegel’s idea of the insufficiency of the modern artwork, its curious antiautonomous autonomy, has important implications for our understand-

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ing of the painting of the romantic period—particularly at the moment in the early nineteenth century when a neoclassical, and at times revolutionary, aspiration to revive the integrated wholeness of classical artwork began to lose credibility as a working ideal. The texts that artists such as Delacroix and Turner appended to their work may often have been poetic rather than philosophical. However, they did introduce an overtly discursive, conceptual dimension to a viewer’s apprehension of their work that is no less integral to the significance to which it laid claim, and no less integral to the constitution of any full ‘‘aesthetic’’ engagement with their art, than are the texts in more overtly conceptual twentieth-century works. There is also, in their painting, an evident fascination with seemingly incidental particularity. The apparent contingency of the motifs and situations frustrates any universal sense we might attribute to their work. Their paintings’ narratives, which often seem awkward, also negate classical ideas of wholeness and, above all, the integrative logic of the pregnant moment. The viewer’s compulsion to see something significant taking place in the painting that will yield a larger social, political, or ethical truth is both blocked and provoked. The traditional, classical understanding of an integrated pictorial narrative, as exemplified in the work of an artist such as Raphael, was one in which a clearly emphasized central incident defined the core meaning of the painted scenario. This would then be elaborated by responses to the main event by figures deployed around it. The idea was given further refinement in Lessing’s theory of the pregnant moment, developed in a discussion of how a nonnarrative form such as painting might render narrative, contained in his influential treatise Loacoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766). In Lessing’s view, the painter needed to choose a moment in which the action represented not only enabled the viewer to see clearly what was happening at the time but also to infer what took place immediately before and after. This pregnant moment would be one prior to the climactic event of a narrative so it could represent the unfolding of an event rather than its completion. The ideal pictorial narrative was thus characterized by both spatial and temporal unity: spatial in that all the figures directed themselves to, and hence were integrated into, the central drama; and temporal in that the preceding and following moments of the drama were integrated into the moment depicted. A work such as Delacroix’s Marino Faliero (fig. 2), an early painting of

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relatively modest scale dating from 1825–26, very pointedly displaces such integration. At the center of the painting is the blank of a white marble staircase, not a dramatic incident, and around it are dispersed figures or groups of figures who are each acting quite independently of one another.∞Ω The prone corpse of the beheaded doge lies at the bottom of the staircase. To its left, the executioner, standing impassively without his sword, projects a strikingly silhouetted profile that is mirrored by the almost equally striking figure of an armed guard standing to the left of the corpse, facing off the populace we can just see streaming up the stairs that descend to the bottom right. On the upper level, shunted off to one side and behind the balustrade on the top right, a member of the Council of Ten gathered to oversee the execution holds up the sword with which the doge had been beheaded. Mirroring this group of dignitaries is a more socially variegated group on the other side of the blank staircase; two of them display the doge’s resplendent yellow robe, which had been removed prior to the execution. Sometimes wrongly titled The Execution of Doge Marino Faliero, this painting pointedly does not represent the execution; indeed, the doge’s body, his costume of state, the executioner, and the sword with which the beheading was carried out, as well as the various groups of people witnessing or taking an active part in the event, have become quite separated from one another. The painting looks a little like a collage made up of several distinct, relatively flattened motifs. These are not integrated pictorially, and the links we make between them have to be constituted in our mind. It would be nigh well impossible to decipher the meaning of this pictorial scenario without the accompanying text printed in the catalogue, and even with it, this takes a little time. It does not represent any one moment in the story as told in Byron’s drama, which Delacroix cites in the catalogue, but a concatenation of disparate moments. Their temporal succession cannot be inferred from the pictorial linking of the scenes represented in the painting. The drama seems in some way absent, and certainly uncentered; there is a disparity between what the picture foregrounds and one’s sense of what the drama of a major public execution might be. This enigmatic inadequacy of the immediately visible pictorial drama to what it purportedly represents means that the painting is not saturated by clearly specifiable meanings. This opens up the possibility for it to evoke, albeit allusively, a number of contemporary political realities that viewers in Restoration France might have had

[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

2. Eugène Delacroix, The Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero, 1825–26. Oil on canvas, 145.6 — 113.8 cm. By kind permission of the Trustees of The Wallace Collection.

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on their minds—such as postrevolutionary anxiety about the possibility of political betrayal and conspiracy against the state, perhaps intensified by uncertainties over the stability of the Bourbon succession after Louis XVIII’s death the previous year; vague unease about the crude violence of public executions carried out against those judged to be traitors to the state; and partially suppressed fears about the possibility of an uncontrollable upsurge of activity by the populace threatening the established order of things from below. Delacroix’s text amplifies the sense of events that have not so much unfolded as have been simply concatenated. In its comparative dryness it also makes clear that the meaning of the picture lies not just in what one can see in it, but in a complex situation that is never made fully present, either by the text or the painting—despite Delacroix’s repeated insistence, in his journal, that painting made things ‘‘instantaneously accessible to its spectators’’ and that it was not subject to the disjunctions between successive parts to which one’s attention was directed in verbal narrative.≤≠ The prosaic terseness of Delacroix’s verbal summary —which would be quite disembodied, and hence lacking in significance, without the painting, just as the vivid and intriguingly undecipherable visual spectacle of the painting would be relatively meaningless without the textual accompaniment—echoes the negation of integrating narrative in the painting. Marino Faliero. The Doge of Venice Marino Faliero, having at more than 80 years of age conspired against the republic, had been condemned to death by the Senate. Conducted to the stone staircase where the doges took their oath upon entering office, he was beheaded, after being stripped of his doge’s bonnet and ducal mantle. A member of the Council of Ten took the sword that had served for the execution, and said, holding it on high: Justice had punished the traitor. Immediately following the death of the doge, the doors had opened, and the people had rushed in to contemplate the corpse of the unfortunate Marino Faliero. (see the tragedy by Byron.)≤∞

If we were to pursue the suggestion to ‘‘see the tragedy by Byron,’’ would this mean that we should be able to delve further into the meaning of the painting, as if making sense of it were a never-ending process? But Byron’s play presents a rather different kind of drama, and turning to it as a guide would mean locking our understanding of the painted scenario into the more manageable story of the fate of one man, whose

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presence in the painting is almost incidental to the substance of what is being represented. By contrast, both the large scale and the destination of Delacroix’s later Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople (fig. 3) might seem to make it into something of a conventional history painting. It was commissioned by Louis Philippe for the Galeries Historiques de Versailles in 1838 and exhibited at the 1841 Salon under the title The Taking of Constantinople by the Crusaders—1204. This time the dramatic incident is fairly clearly articulated: a group of crusader leaders, momentarily halted in their marauding progress through the city by three inhabitants imploring mercy, fills the center of the canvas. Pictorially, though, this is a curious scene. Once we attend to it closely, the mounted crusaders are visually displaced by the vividly painted groups of victims and scenes of assault and slaughter around them (several quite unconnected with the seemingly central incident) and by the theatrical sweep of the view over the city and the sea behind them. Critics at the time described the composition as ‘‘strangled and confused.’’ They also were distracted by the difficulty of deciphering the precise meaning of the seemingly significant but subsidiary scene on the far left, in which an old, possibly blind, man, is being violently dragged away by a crusader.≤≤ In this work, the dispersal of narrative is not as immediately evident at a purely pictorial level as it is in Marino Faliero. Such an effect is constituted to a considerable degree through the interplay between the accompanying text and the image, and between what one knows of the historical events informing the scene and what is depicted in the painting. In 1204, a group of crusaders had been diverted from their supposed mission to the Holy Land by the prospects of the substantial material gains to be had from intervening in a struggle over the succession to the Byzantine throne; they ended up capturing and sacking the Christian city of Constantinople and dividing up the spoils of the Byzantine Empire among themselves. What we see in the painting does not correspond to the events specified in either of the titles by which the painting is known. It represents neither the entry of the crusaders into Constantinople nor their act of taking the city—both in any case being less-than-glorious events on any reckoning. The crusaders clearly have already entered the conquered city some time ago and are well into massacring and looting, while a few have just climbed up to one of the city’s higher reaches. The text underlies this

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[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

3. Eugène Delacroix, The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, 1840. Oil on canvas, 410 — 498 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo credit: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York.

decentering of defining dramatic incident even further, partly through a destabilizing shift between past and present tenses that represents the key event of conquest as happening prior to the scene depicted. The text states that ‘‘Badouin, count of Flanders,’’ the mounted crusader in the very center, looking down on the imploring elderly man, ‘‘commanded the French who had unleashed their assault by land, while the old Doge Dandolo, at the head of the Venetians, with their fleet, had attacked by sea. The principal leaders overrun the different quarters of the city, and desperate families meet them on their way to beg them for mercy.’’≤≥ What we have, then, is not the scene of entry, or a scene of triumph, or some central defining moment in the occupation of the city—but rather a group of crusaders wandering aimlessly through the city, after the efforts

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of their inglorious military assault are over. They just happen momentarily to have been caught short by the sight of a particularly distraught group of victims of their rampaging soldiers. The semiotic and narrative confusion is underlined by the way that the mounted soldiers at the center are presented almost as if they were gathered in some triumphal procession, or taking part in some ceremonially significant event, as if they had just scaled the heights of a fortress at the center of the city, or were dispensing charity to the defeated. But we see no such significant moment. The spectacle has no larger public significance—they are simply drawn up short accidentally by some dim but unfocused awareness of the effects of the carnage they have unleashed. Their staging at the center of the picture is both brilliant spectacle and sham illusion of commanding order, unraveling from within the logic of the pregnant moment that the scene might at first might seem to represent. Represented here is neither the triumphal leader nor the merciful leader, nor even for that matter the barbarically vicious leader, that a traditional history painting might have featured. The dispersal of larger significance initially suggested by the rich visual spectacle is the real significance here, the dissolution of any underlying ethical or political sense of purpose—good or evil—that might be expected to permeate and hold together the rich array of vividly portrayed and richly painted incidents that is the substantive reality of the scene. Hegel’s conception of a modern art, in which intimate engagement with the contingencies and particularities of a situation is embedded in disengagement and alienation from it, is almost literally enacted here, both in the person of the central figure and in the peculiar interplay between threadbare verbal narrative and vivid visual spectacle.

Turner: ‘‘Fair Shines the Morn . . . in Grim Repose’’ Turner’s famous Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (fig. 4), a relatively large-scale work exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1812, would seem by contrast to be a very direct dramatic rendering of a significant historical moment—a turning point in ancient history when Hannibal threatened the Roman Empire by unexpectedly leading his army across the Alps into Italy. At first it seems that the larger symbolic resonance of the event is directly amplified by Turner’s vivid painterly

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rendering of a sublimely atmospheric landscape. But what precisely is the event we see? Once we look at all closely, the situation depicted becomes less immediately clear. It certainly is not just the struggles of an army threatened by natural forces—savage mountain conditions exacerbated by a dramatic snow storm, even if the latter, as Turner makes clear in his title, is integral to the subject of the painting.≤∂ The center of the canvas is a gaping void; there is no Hannibal to be discerned—the one figure in the army who stands out is the unmounted, slightly threatening, anonymous standing figure seen from the back holding up a torch on the bottom right. Indeed, Hannibal’s army is only dimly present in the lower reaches of the painting, one cluster on the bottom right, and another again in the far distance, below the burst of sunlight. The most visible figures are the local tribesmen on the rocky heights in the foreground, shown helping themselves to the spoils of the Carthaginian soldiers they have slaughtered and trying to push boulders down onto the army in the valley below. That what is presented here is far from being a single integrated pregnant moment, but is rather several quite distinct scenarios spread out over a space and time, is made even more clearly evident in the text Turner supplied in the catalogue. This is the first of his texts he identified as being from his pseudo-epic, ‘‘Fallacies of Hope’’: Craft, treachery, and fraud—Salassian force, Hung on the fainting rear! Then Plunder seiz’d The victor and the captive,—Saguntum’s spoil, Alike, became their prey; still the chief advanc’d, Look’d on the sun with hope;—low, broad, and wan; While the fierce archer of the downward year Stain Italy’s blanch’d barrier with storms. In vain each pass, ensanguin’d deep with dead, Or rock fragments, wide destruction roll’d. Still on Campania’s fertile plans—he thought, But the loud breeze sob’d, ‘‘Capua’s joys beware.’’≤∑

In the poetic fragment, Saguntum refers to the Roman-controlled city in Spain that Hannibal sacked prior to leading his army into Italy through what is now southern France and over the Alps. ‘‘Salassian force’’ identifies the tribesmen harassing Hannibal’s army in the Val d’Aosta, the valley in the Italian Alps that fed into the route over the St.

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[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

4. J. M. W. Turner, Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, exhibited in 1812. Oil on canvas, 146 — 237.5 cm. Tate Gallery, London. Photo ∫ Tate, London 2008.

Bernard Pass that Turner assumed Hannibal took crossing the Alps. The reference to Capua, the city in Campania in southern Italy that Hannibal was to later make his base once he settled into his unsuccessful war of attrition with Rome, points forward to a sunny but uncertain future. Turner’s text invites us to see the scene shown in the painting as both looking back to the plundering of Saguntum and forward to the sunny plains of Campania, where Hannibal slowly lost the advantage he gained by his bold assault on the center of Roman power. Its cultural, poetical, and political complexities are very much at odds with the simple scenario of man’s struggle against the elements that the painting is often assumed to represent. It can only be interpreted in this way by ignoring not only the poetic fragment through which Turner invites one to envision the larger significance of the scene but also the details within the painting that disturb a purely aesthetic immersion in some single, vague, all-encompassing drama. Even at the level of visual spectacle, there is, once one looks closely, a multiplicity of effects. There is both storm and blazing sun, both hostile rocky landscape and spoils of plun-

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der, both the massed phalanx of a huge army and isolated scenes of pillaging and massacre, and finally a multiplicity of different lights: the white light reflected off the snow, the yellow burst of sunlight, and the duskier orange glow of artificial light emanating from the army’s torches. In addition to these details, the painting presents us with a turbulent void against which we can project our changing apprehension of the human dramas and political scenarios being evoked. The geographical particularities of place in which the scene is anchored open it up to some very urgent, contemporary political realities. St. Bernard Pass was where Napoleon had crossed into Italy at the outset of his spectacularly successful European conquests, an event commemorated in Jacques-Louis David’s much more traditional image of a general’s heroic daring—inscribed with a reminder of Hannibal’s crossing—that Turner had seen when he visited Paris in 1802. Almost certainly coincidentally, Turner’s painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy at a peculiarly opportune historical moment, the summer of 1812, when Napoleon’s fatal attack on Russia led to the decimation of his army during the winter of that year under conditions that were every bit as dire as Turner’s vision of a snowstorm and a hostile populace assailing Hannibal’s army. In the light of Hegel’s singling out the importance of the comic mode in modern art, it is appropriate to end with a very different late work by Turner, The Sun of Venice Going to Sea (fig. 5), which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1843. It is a fairly small scale easel painting, quite divested of the pictorial rhetoric conventionally associated with the representation of a significant event or natural phenomenon. At first it might seem to be a relatively straightforward, low-key seascape depicting a small sailing boat taking to sea in the morning light, with the skyline of Venice hovering in the distance. It could perhaps be experienced in purely visual terms, whether as a vividly painterly rendering of an illuminating moment of natural beauty or as a more postmodern vision of a world dissolving in sensations of light and color. However, to do so one has to turn a blind eye to the punning details Turner pointedly introduced. At one level, the ‘‘sun of Venice’’ in the title is represented in a relatively conventional aesthetic-pictorial way, as the sun shining on the city, its light reflected back to the viewer from the shimmering white buildings in the distance and from the yellow- and orange-stained clouds in the sky above. However, it is also present in the

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[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

5. J. M. W. Turner, The Sun of Venice Going to Sea, exhibited in 1843. Oil on canvas, 61.6 — 92.1 cm. Tate Gallery, London. Photo ∫ Tate, London 2008.

picture as a painted sign. In the shaded foreground, the relative absence of real sunlight is compensated by the artificial image of a sun, set in a Venetian cityscape, painted onto the main sail of the central boat. Clearly labeled ‘‘Sol de Venezia’’ (the ‘‘de’’ is rather ambiguous and should really be ‘‘di’’) the motif reads both as a second-order depiction of the sun hovering over Venice and as the name of the boat emblazoned on its sail. Once we become aware of this seemingly trivial play of pictorial and textual detail, it seems vital to turn to the poetic fragment with which Turner accompanied the painting, which he again designated as being from the ‘‘Fallacies of Hope.’’ This is not to find a key to the supposed meaning of the work, but rather to discover some basis on which to speculate about the possible significance of the seemingly unexceptional but curiously labeled scene.≤∏ The entry in the catalogue suggests in no uncertain terms that the work be seen as having a larger poetic meaning, but it does not make it

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clear how such meaning might be related to the details of the painted scene: Fair shines the morn, and soft the zephyrs blow, Venezia’s fisher spreads his painted sail so gay, Nor heeds the demon that in grim repose Expects his evening prey. —Fallacies of Hope, M.S.≤π

Are we to interpret the painting as a relatively trivial poetic meditation on the precarious voyage of the ‘‘barque of human life’’ that cheerfully sets out in the morn but is beset on its return by the threat of death lurking in the dark? We might perhaps think so once our attention is directed to a passage from a poem, well known to Turner’s contemporaries, Thomas Gray’s ‘‘The Bard: A Pindaric Ode,’’ on which Turner clearly drew for his poetic fragment. Gray’s poem evokes the fate of a succession of medieval English kings whose rule was interrupted by disastrous turns of fate. The following lines refer to Richard II, who was deposed and, according to Gray, starved to death: Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows, While proudly riding o’er the azure realm In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes; Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm; Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind’s sway, That, hushed in grim repose, expects his evening-prey.≤∫

The actual scene represented in Turner’s work, however, gets in the way of any such easy poetic resolution. There is a disparity between the image of a regal ship setting forth and the mere fisherman’s boat we see here. The latter hardly seems an appropriate vehicle for meditating on the transient destiny and reversals suffered by famous rulers and their kingdoms, or on the decline of states such as Venice, if we transfer the allegory from Britain at the beginning of the Wars of the Roses to contemporary Venice. Laments over the decline of Venice and its loss of freedom following its capture by Napoleon were a dime a dozen in British writing of the romantic period. However, if we follow this association, what precise meaning can we assign to Turner’s image of a ‘‘demon in grim repose’’ lying in wait for its ‘‘evening prey’’? It has been suggested by John Gage that Turner’s poetic fragment

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makes reference to a passage specifically about Venice in Shelley’s famous poem ‘‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills.’’≤Ω In this poem, Shelley conjures up a vision of the distant future when Venice has gone into complete decline and disappeared under the sea. At the end of day, a fisherman hastens by the site of the submerged city ‘‘Till he pass the gloomy shore, / Lest thy dead should from their sleep / . . . Lead a rapid masque of death / O’er the waters of his path.’’ Shelley then returns to the present with an image, very suggestive for the one envisioned in Turner’s painting, contrasting the distant spectacle presented by Venice’s towers ‘‘quivering through the Aëriel gold’’ and what, in the decline and loss of the city’s freedom, its buildings now hold within—‘‘Sepulchers, where human forms, / Like pollution-nourished worms, / to the corpse of greatness cling, / Murdered, and now mouldering.’’≥≠ Gage argues compellingly that Turner’s painting and poetic fragment have much more in common with the complexities of Shelley’s romantic political meditation on the state of Venice than with Gray’s somewhat banal metaphors about the morning and the dusk of life’s voyage. Turner’s poetic fragment directs us to ponder the possible meaning of the muted contrast in the painting between the brilliant, ethereal skyline and shimmering water in the distance, and the green-tinged, oily, possibly polluted water in the foreground, where wavelets suggest the presence of shallows on which the boat could run aground. The sky, too, has a dual character, with the transparent blue and white light of its lower reaches giving way to patches of red- and yellow-stained cloud above. The boat is a curious combination of modest ordinariness and almost gaudy richness, with its colored banners and painted sail, the effect of which is amplified by the large, patterned sail of a second boat just behind it. The glow on the more clearly visible woman and man seated in the boat makes it doubtful whether they are just fishers (and why would a woman be setting out with a fishing boat at dawn?) or people in more fancy garb. They certainly possess more ‘‘splendor’’ than the faded aristocrat looking at them from the boat on the far right. The painting clearly invites the viewer to engage in a freewheeling pondering of the meaning that might be attributed to the interplay between the rich and iridescent splendor and calm of morning and the darker, more opaque duskiness of the foreground. At the same time, the absence of some single allegory that would make consistent sense of the scene depicted, the eccentric labeling of a

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fisherman’s boat as the ‘‘Sun of Venice,’’ blocks the viewer from becoming too immersed in poetically resonant visions of the decline of Venice or in conventional melancholy meditations on the fate of a once-glorious city and how this might prefigure a decline of Britain’s maritime power.≥∞ There is also a certain detachment inherent in what is, after all, a relatively calm sea scene. The result is a Hegelian splitting that is not found in the poetry to which Turner’s work alludes, operating between the vivid particularities of the painting and the unstable array of readymade allusions it can evoke for the viewer, which are as banal as they are evocative—the morning and dusk of life, the threat of decline or even destruction lurking behind the precarious splendor of the city and the unreal calm of everyday life taking its ordinary course. The ‘‘objective’’ humor and detachment, combined with a responsiveness to the banal yet charged imagery floating around in the period’s poetic imaginary, and with a passionate commitment to his artistic project, enabled Turner to give real meaning to the captivating but also baffling and at times nonsensical worlds he conjured up in his painterlypoetic work. His eclectic engagement with disparate levels and fields of meaning, all jostling with one another and often sowing confusion, was possibly one way in which an art such as his could constitute a provisional community of sense amid the devalued symbols and clichéd aesthetic experiences current at the time. The latter formed the basic materials of his art, as much as it did for any of his fellow artists and writers. In a Britain where the spectacular but precarious proliferation of wealth proceeded in an uneasy political calm shadowed by indeterminate threat, one appropriate response might well be Turner’s incongruous vision of a maritime city where ‘‘fair shines the morn . . . in grim repose’’ even as its ‘‘sun’’ is ‘‘going to sea.’’≥≤

Notes 1. Hegel’s lectures were first published posthumously in 1835, the text based on notes made by his students and surviving notes he prepared for his lectures. While he had begun lecturing on aesthetics before he took up the chair of philosophy in Berlin in 1818, his ideas on the subject were most fully elaborated in the lectures he gave there in the 1820s—see Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, 3:575. In the more philosophically based recent discussions of the

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condition of contemporary art, present-day art is often envisaged as being situated historically ‘‘after the end of art.’’ This end is usually located somewhere in the latter part of the previous century and associated with the radical critique of the nature and status of the art object and with the breakup of modernism and a modernist perspective on the history of art that got underway in the 1960s. See, for example, Danto’s After the End of Art and Belting’s Art History after Modernism. The end of art became a central preoccupation with the takeoff of postmodern theory in the early eighties, this being the moment when Belting and Danto launched their ideas on the subject. Both Danto’s and Belting’s discussions of the subject demonstrate how this end of art can as easily be envisioned as a welcome entry into a world of postmodern pluralism as it can as some kind of terminus to the serious pursuit of art. 2. Hegel, Ästhetik, 3:573. 3. Adorno, Hegel, 4. 4. Jacques Rancière’s critique of postmodern meditations, whether on the demise of art after modernism or on a new era of joyful artistic license this might allow (Le Partage du Sensible), suggestively indicates how the mindset involved does not represent some major historical rupture but rather is bound into contradictory pressures already operating within earlier thinking about art. In particular, he argues that the postmodern sense of a structural break with modernism, variously envisaged as ‘‘the crisis of art’’ or ‘‘the end of art,’’ replicates, in inverted form, certain ideas central to the modernism against which it was reacting. Its disillusionment, he argues, was shaped by aporias that had been internal to the condition of art for some time; far from marking a radical new departure, postmodern art is best understood within the larger historical context of the ‘‘aesthetic regime’’ of art that established itself in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The essay has been translated as The Politics of Aesthetics—see particularly the section ‘‘Artistic Regimes and the Shortcomings of the Notion of Modernity,’’ 20–30. 5. See, for example, Damisch, La peinture en écharpe, 115–19; and Jonathan Crary, The Techniques of the Observer, 138–43. 6. Hannoosh, Painting and the Journal of Eugène Delacroix, 35–41. 7. Damisch, La peinture en écharpe, 46–61. 8. On the romantic understandings of the symbol, see Paul De Man, ‘‘Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image’’ in The Rhetoric of Romanticism. 9. Discussion of German aesthetic theory in the late Enlightenment and the romantic periods, in particular of how understandings of modern subjectivity were played out in this early speculation about art and the aesthetic theory, has featured prominently in the marked revival of interest in the aesthetic in recent years. See, for example, Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic; Bowie, Aesthetics

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and Subjectivity; and J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art. In line with the AngloAmerican philosophical preoccupation with Kantian critique rather than Hegel’s dialectics, the latter two books assign a much more central role to Kant than they do to Hegel. The anthology edited by Bernstein, Classical and Romantic German Aesthetics, in fact includes no representation at all of Hegel’s writings on the subject. Hegel features rather more prominently in Bowie’s study. Bowie, however, takes Hegel’s verdict about philosophy superseding art rather at face value and argues that Hegel, in contrast with his romantic contemporaries such as Schelling and Schleiermacher, failed to recognize the significance of art as a medium for attaining forms of critical self-awareness that were unavailable to philosophical analysis. His critique of Hegel for neglecting to recognize the full significance of art and the aesthetic, however, does not engage Hegel’s suggestive analysis of the negativities inherent in the forms of art that persisted in the modern world, possibly because Bowie is unsympathetic to the powerful antiaesthetic current that has sustained much of the radical discussion of art since the romantic period. Rancière’s recent essay on the politics of aesthetics (see note 4) identifies Schiller as the key figure in his very illuminating genealogy of modern and postmodern conceptions of art and the aesthetic. Most directly relevant to the present study’s discussion of Hegel is Giorgio Agamben’s The Man without Content. In this important analysis of the split that opened up in modern understandings of art between the practice of aesthetic judgment and artistic praxis as the expression of the pure creative principle (35– 37) Hegel plays a crucial rule. Agamben sees Hegel’s aesthetics as highlighting an equivalent split faced by the modern artist between her or his artistic subjectivity and ‘‘free’’ inner creativity and the inert, resistant world of prosaic objectivity, of which an artwork becomes part once it is made into an object of aesthetic judgment. For Agamben, the condition of modern art as envisaged in Hegel’s aesthetic theory is one in which pure creative formal principle annihilates and dissolves all content in the effort to transcend and actualize itself, with art becoming a ‘‘self-annihilating nothing’’ and the artist the ‘‘man without content’’ (54). For him, the end of art as defined by Hegel is thus not to be understood in the straightforward sense of an ending (or even of a superseding), but rather as an end, never actually reached, toward which the processes internal to the constitution of art in the modern world are constantly directed. Invaluable as a companion to reading Hegel is Adorno’s Hegel. Adorno offers a compelling characterization of the Hegelian absolute, the ‘‘end’’ of the Hegelian system toward which all speculative thought strives and in which all nonidentity would be overcome: ‘‘As if in a gigantic credit system, every individual piece is to be indebted to the other—nonidentical—and yet the whole is to be free of debt, identical’’ (147).

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10. This discussion of symbolic embodiment in Hegel is indebted to Paul De Man’s ‘‘Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s ‘Aesthetics.’ ’’ 11. Hegel, Ästhetik, 2:234. 12. See particularly ibid., 2:195–97, 220–42, 3:11–16, 123–33, 569–74. 13. Ibid., 2:129. 14. Adorno, Hegel, 95. 15. Hegel, Ästhetik, 3:573. 16. Ibid., 2:230–40. 17. Butlin and Joll, The Painting of J. M. W. Turner, 249. 18. See Gage, Rain Steam and Speed. Gage (19) quotes a comment by a contemporary of Turner’s indicating that the more perceptive critics of his work were well aware of the artist’s liking for humorous, seemingly trivial detail and contingent association: ‘‘This hare, and not the train, I have no doubt he intended to represent the ‘Speed’ of his title; the word must have been in his mind when he was painting the hare, for close to it, on the plain below the viaduct, he introduced the figure of a man ploughing, ‘Speed the plough’ (the name of an old country dance) probably passing through his brain.’’ 19. For a discussion of the way blanks of this kind were deployed in French painting of the later nineteenth century, see Kemp, ‘‘Death at Work.’’ 20. Hanoosh, Delacroix, 22, 95. 21. Brooks, History, Painting and Narrative, 25. In his extremely suggestive study, Brooks drew attention to the significance of the texts that Delacroix provided to accompany his more ambitious narrative paintings and showed how his paintings often brought together multiple moments from the stories on which they were based. However, he ended up arguing that Delacroix somehow fused these moments pictorially, striving to render ‘‘a privileged situation and make of it a perfect moment, defined as the moment which perfectly serves a narrative significance’’ (30). While Delacroix’s paintings—in presenting themselves as, and adopting some of the pictorial rhetoric of, history paintings—do raise viewer expectations that they will offer up a single, fully present, pregnant moment, they then almost always disperse or negate this expectation. In so doing, they enable the drama represented to gain a wider, if necessarily provisional and contingent, array of meanings. For a very valuable analysis of how Delacroix’s more ambitious narrative paintings, in bringing together several quite separate moments from a drama and often excluding any direct representation of the key action that defines the situation depicted, radically break with the integrative logic of the pregnant moment that dominated earlier neoclassical painting, see Allard, Dante et Virgil aux Enfers d’Eugène Delacroix, 53, 61–64. The translations of the supplementary texts Delacroix prepared for the two paintings discussed here are both taken from Brooks.

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22. Johnson, The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix, 3:98. 23. Brooks, History, Painting and Narrative, 8. Brooks does comment on the odd shift of tense in Delacroix’s text but nevertheless sees the picture as fusing in one integrated image the larger significance of the different events, past and present, being narrated. 24. This was possibly even more the case with the original title of the painting recorded in the Royal Academy catalogue, which read Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army, leaving out Crossing the Alps. The effect of this was to downplay even further the sense of some single defining narrative event and to suspend the suggestions of narrative flow implicit in the longer title by which the painter was later known. 25. Butlin and Joll, Turner, 89. 26. Here we are brought face to face with what John Gage, in J. M. W. Turner, characterized as Turner’s ‘‘approach, to introduce by means of verses more than the image could reveal’’ (187). 27. Butlin and Joll, Turner, 251. 28. Quoted from the online Thomas Gray archive, http://www.thomasgray .org, lines 71–76. 29. Gage, Colour in Turner, 146. The discussion of Turner developed here owes a great deal to Gage’s two groundbreaking studies. 30. Quoted from http://www.english.upenn.edu/Project/knark/Pshelley/ eugeanean.html, lines 135–49. 31. To be fair, Shelley does not rest with this meditative vision of Venice in decay but—in line with his radical political convictions—speculates that Venice might, if it were able to shake off its chains, yet again be able to ‘‘adorn this sunny land’’ or could, if spared by nature from sinking into the sea, crumble away to provide the ground from which new, truly free nations might spring. This alternative vision has a nice Turnerian touch, with the sun of truth dissolving the clouds emanating from the decaying city: ‘‘Clouds which stain truth’s rising day / By her sun consumed away’’ (lines 161–62). 32. In Britain, the years leading up to 1843 when Turner’s painting was exhibited were marked by severe economic recession, first in 1837, and then again in 1841–42, the latter being one of the gloomiest years of the century for the British economy. See Briggs, The Age of Improvement, 295.

TONI ROSS

From Classical to Postclassical Beauty INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE AND AESTHETIC ENIGMA IN LOUISE L AWLER ’ S PHOTOGRAPHY

In his survey of artistic trends of the eighties and nineties, Hal Foster describes the art of Louise Lawler as questioning modernist ‘‘myths of artistic autonomy and aesthetic disinterest.’’∞ These terms, of course, invoke Immanuel Kant’s contribution to aesthetic philosophy, the inference being that Lawler’s art negates the Kantian legacy, and with it the central values of modernist aesthetics. Lawler’s practice is usually located within a counterlineage of artistic production that includes the institutionally focused conceptual art of Hans Haacke and Marcel Broodthaers, as well as postmodern anti-aesthetic tendencies of the eighties. As examples of institutional critique, Lawler’s photographic ‘‘arrangements’’ document artworks in a variety of settings, including private collector’s homes, galleries, museums, corporations, and artworld businesses. As many critics have affirmed, the pictures draw attention to contextual and sociological factors that undermine the idea of ‘‘disinterested’’ aesthetic reception that Kant proposed. Yet despite this emphasis on art’s institutional determination, a handful of critics have noted that the photographs also exceed institutional analysis and antiaesthetic polemic.

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This excess was registered by a number of contributors to the catalogue for the first major retrospective of the artist’s work organized by the Kunstmuseum, Basle, in 2004. Each commentator gestures to elements of ‘‘indeterminacy’’ registered within the institutional framing of artworks made salient by Lawler’s photographic documents. Birgit Pelzer asserts, ‘‘Lawler’s oeuvre, however, cannot be reduced to a mere contextual act. There is more to her than just institutional critique. For a touch of indeterminacy remains.’’≤ The critic George Baker and the artist Andrea Fraser also contribute to the catalogue with a fascinating conversation that ranges across Lawler’s work of the last twenty or more years. Their dialogue concludes with Fraser, a member of the latest generation of institutional critics, responding to Lawler’s photograph ‘‘How Many Pictures’’ (1989) (fig. 1). This cibachrome image transforms the graphic precision of a Frank Stella protractor painting into floating colors and forms reflected on the highly polished floorboards of a museum space. But what catches Fraser’s eye is an electrical outlet stationed at the base of the gallery wall. This prosaic museum fixture obtrudes in an image dominated by the spectacular sweep of woodpatterned floor and evanescent late-modernist painting. Prompted by Baker to give the electrical socket significance, Fraser replies, ‘‘An outlet? An opening? Art? The Aesthetic?’’≥ As this reply suggests, the aesthetic here, bizarrely signaled by a functional object, suspends the institutional analysis that typically motivates Lawler’s art. At once discovered and magnified within art’s museum habitat, the electrical outlet operates, to use Baker’s term, as a signifier of ‘‘redemption’’ out of step with art’s full surrender to institutional mediation. In his recent book On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, Eric L. Santner describes institutions as ‘‘all sites that endow us with social recognition and intelligibility, that produce and regulate symbolic identities.’’∂ While Lawler’s photographs impart a similar view of art’s institutional regulation, they just as persistently register an outlet, an opening, in excess of institutional captivation. Tracing how this surfeit of institutional recognition emerges within the texture of the works bears directly on their aesthetic salience. Therefore, despite the prominence of Lawler’s practice within anti-aesthetic critical frameworks, I wish to approach her photographs from the perspective of beauty. Taking this path will effect another view of the artist’s oeuvre, one that questions the widely held assumption that the axiom of aesthetic autonomy has been

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[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

1. Louise Lawler, ‘‘How Many Pictures,’’ 1989. Cibachrome (image), 157.2 — 122.1 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.

dispelled in contemporary art. At the same time, bringing Lawler’s version of institutional critique in connection with beauty will allow an interrogation of recent efforts in art theory and philosophy to revivify the aesthetic. Those seeking to rehabilitate beauty typically reproach conceptualist and postmodern tendencies for their denigration of aesthetics in favor of art’s political or moral utility.∑ With hindsight, it seems obvious that postmodern anti-aesthetic doctrine simplistically reduced the aesthetic to visually seductive, critically anodyne modes of artistic production. Alexander Alberro has recently reendorsed this argument by casting beauty and critical engagement in art as fundamentally incompatible.∏ While rejecting Alberro’s contention, I also wish to question the conception of beauty proposed by its contemporary advocates. Many are guided

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by classical standards, where the beautiful denotes aesthetic unification, as well as objective properties of harmony, symmetry, and proportion. The alternative thinking of beauty I propose draws on the legacy of Kantian aesthetics, while being inflected by the psychoanalytic approach to beauty Santner postulates in On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life. This text brings Freudian theory alongside the Jewish theology of Franz Rosenzweig in order to amplify the ethical dimension of both thinkers’ projects. Santner’s primary aim is to reconceive communal bonds and ethical responsibility as answerable to an internal alterity akin to the Freudian unconscious, which functions as an excess pressure or ‘‘surplus vitality’’ within psychic life.π Drawing on Rosenzweig’s psychoanalytically inclined theology, Santner proposes an ethics premised on our responsiveness to others who, like ourselves, are inhabited by an unconscious: ‘‘an enigmatic density of desire calling for response beyond any rule governed reciprocity.’’∫ The postclassical conception of beauty ventured by Santner is allied to the psychoanalytic ethics of alterity he proposes. As a consequence, beauty is no longer conceived in classical terms as ‘‘a harmonization of parts within an ordered whole but rather as the representation of an interrupted whole, or better, a self interrupting whole, one animated by a ‘too much’ pressure in its midst.’’Ω Put simply, I want to make a distinction between two conceptions of beauty interpreted in ethical and political terms. The first has devolved from classical and idealist aesthetic frameworks and has recently resurfaced in Elaine Scarry’s book On Beauty and Being Just, where beauty is associated with moral justice and democratic communal bonds. The alternative, psychoanalytic account of beauty proposed by Santner takes issue with the classical formula. It questions the applicability of the classical system to the traditions of modernist and avant-garde art, while also challenging the claim that classical beauty offers an appropriate model of community and morality. The following discussion of aesthetics, ethics, and politics divides into three sections. The first presents an extended critical analysis of recent contributions to aesthetic theory by Scarry and critic/curator Nicolas Bourriaud. I argue that both authors politicize the aesthetic by recourse to a classical formula of beauty. The second section considers the ethical implications of the psychoanalytic thinking of beauty proposed by Santner. The final section addresses Lawler’s photographic works by way of a postclassical rubric of beauty.

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The Return of Classical Beauty Elaine Scarry’s book On Beauty and Being Just seeks to advance beauty’s moral and political relevance for contemporary times. In his collection of essays Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud presents another recent rapprochement with aesthetic theory. Coined by Bourriaud to describe an emergent art trend of the nineties, the term relational aesthetics has subsequently attained widespread currency in art-world contexts. Although Bourriaud makes no explicit link between beauty and relational aesthetics, I shall argue that the analogy he draws between relational art and democratic social bonds echoes key suppositions of Scarry’s thesis. On Beauty and Being Just draws an analogy between a classical formula of beauty and a liberal image of democratic social arrangements.∞≠ Here, beauty, whether manifested by natural objects or those of human manufacture, designates an organic ensemble where different parts are reconciled within the whole. Invoking the composition of the perfect cube, the four petals of the mother-of-pearl poppy, and the trireme ships of ancient Greece, Scarry describes beauty as the making visible of a symmetrical, balanced, and harmonious whole, equal in all of its parts.∞∞ Moreover, because of their exemplification of figural symmetry, ‘‘beautiful things give rise to the notion of distribution, to a lifesaving reciprocity, to fairness not just in the sense of loveliness of aspect but in the sense of the ‘symmetry of everyone’s relation to one another.’ ’’∞≤ Scarry derives this idea of intersubjective symmetry from political theorist John Rawls’s liberal conception of democracy, which interprets the democratic ideals of equality and justice in terms of the ‘‘symmetry of everyone’s relation to each other.’’∞≥ Thus, according to Scarry, the figural equipoise of beautiful things acts as a symbolic catalyst that compels us to strive toward the creation of fair and just social arrangements.∞∂ Beauty here symbolizes a moral ideal, where selfish interests are suspended in favor of a ‘‘lateral regard’’ for others and a social demand for distributional equality among people. Scarry suggests, however, that in a world full of inequities and injustices, this quasi ideal may only be realized through the contingencies of political action. As Joan Copjec has observed, for Scarry, beautiful form does not simply function as a ‘‘passive analogy’’ for political fairness; rather, it requires (political) acts to make good the alliance between aesthetic beauty and moral justice.∞∑

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The fact that Scarry makes the visual manifestation of proportion and balance the beautiful object’s most significant and pleasing attributes prompts Copjec to remark on her ‘‘disappointingly conservative notion of the aesthetic object’’; significantly few examples of modern art are referenced in On Beauty and Being Just. But Copjec also queries the thinking of a just society proffered by liberal political theory, where balance and symmetry reign supreme. The problem with such an image of democracy, reflects Copjec, is that it presupposes a utopian future where political dissent is ultimately dissolved in a state of social equilibrium.∞∏ Copjec’s doubts about the analogy between a beauty of proportional balance and democratic formations might also be directed to Nicolas Bourriaud’s account of the relational aesthetic of contemporary art. At first glance Bourriaud’s assessment of recent trends in art appears to have little to do with beauty. Indeed, he rejects as regressive Dave Hickey’s endorsement of visually seductive art as an antidote to overtly political artistic programs.∞π Bourriaud, on the other hand, stakes a great deal on the ethical and political consequences of the relational aesthetic of contemporary art. His key proposition is that a number of artists who gained notice in the nineties seek to produce alternative ‘‘models of sociability’’ to those mandated by the monological directives and media spectacle of global capitalism.∞∫ For Bourriaud, artists such as Liam Gillick, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Angela Bullock, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster have no interest in creating refined objects for individualized aesthetic contemplation. Rather, employing mixtures of installation and performance, their art choreographs participatory situations and intersubjective encounters based on a democratic model of reciprocal dialogue and exchange. An obvious question arising from this claim concerns Bourriaud’s conception of democratic social relationships. His assessment of the works of now deceased, Cubanborn artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres provides an indication. Bourriaud observes that despite the ‘‘tragic and militant content’’ of Gonzalez-Torres’s art, a content arising from the artist’s personal preoccupation with aids deaths and gay activism, its formal repertoire and mode of audience address imparts an insistent ‘‘demand for harmony and cohabitation.’’∞Ω This ‘‘life model’’ is allegorized by the ‘‘immense delicateness’’ and formal harmonies of works regularly composed of two identical or ‘‘contrastless’’ figures. Bourriaud lists Gonzalez-Torres’s works made of ‘‘two clocks with their hands stopped at the same time

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(Untitled [Perfect Lovers], 1991); two pillows on a crumpled bed, still bearing the signs of a body (24 Posters, 1991); two bare lightbulbs fixed to the wall with intertwined wires (Untitled [March 5th] # 2, 1991); two mirrors set side by side (Untitled [March 5th] # 1, 1991).’’≤≠ A structuring logic of ‘‘harmonious parity’’ also applies, as Bourriaud suggests, to the way art audiences are addressed by Gonzalez-Torres’s paper-stack and candy-pour installations. These works reach out generously to gallery visitors, inviting them to take pieces of the work away, while being left with the responsibility of deciding how much of this gift from the artist to appropriate and how much to leave behind for others to enjoy. As Bourriaud puts it, these works speak to ‘‘our sense of moderation and the nature of our relationship to the work of art.’’≤∞ Accordingly, the social relation enacted by Gonzalez-Torres’s art endorses a ‘‘criterion of co-existence’’ or a mutual complementarity between the artist, audience participants who help to ‘‘complete’’ the work, and the work of art itself.≤≤ A subsequent publication by Bourriaud summates the democratic significance of the ‘‘criterion of co-existence’’ purveyed by relational art. In the catalogue Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation, he comments that two central assumptions inform relational aesthetics: first, that ‘‘social reality is the production of negotiation’’ rather than disputation; and second, that ‘‘democracy is a montage of forms.’’≤≥ Democracy is thus conceived as a structure where disparate elements are stitched together to form a larger whole, and where social exchanges are based on the consensual negotiation of differences. For Bourriaud, this understanding of democracy distinguishes the art he champions from earlier avant-gardes, with their dissenting attitude toward the dominant culture. He contends that while the ‘‘imaginary of modernism was based on conflict, the imaginary of our day and age is concerned with negotiations, bonds and co-existences.’’≤∂ In a cogent critical response to this claim, Claire Bishop has observed that relational aesthetics makes an ‘‘empathetic connectivity’’ between people the foundation of democratic community.≤∑ I shall return to the alternative conception of democracy that Bishop introduces, but not before addressing the aesthetic plane of Bourriaud’s argument. Bourriaud forthrightly distinguishes relational aesthetics from classical beauty, which he identifies with the coercive and inflexible social relations of totalitarian states. ‘‘The forms produced by the art of total-

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itarian regimes are peremptory and closed in on themselves (particularly through their stress on symmetry). Otherwise put, they do not give the viewer a chance to complement them.’’≤∏ Yet despite this assertion, Bourriaud’s articulation of the democratic inclination of relational aesthetics echoes aspects of Scarry’s political interpretation of classical beauty. Recall that for Scarry, the formal concord of beautiful objects symbolizes a utopian faith in distributive justice and social equality, understood as the ‘‘symmetry of everyone’s relation to each other.’’ To be sure, Bourriaud downplays the internal formal relationships of art objects, accenting instead the social relations that artworks choreograph with their audiences. These are described as ‘‘microtopias’’ where intersubjective hierarchies are dissolved and equality between participants may be momentarily realized. Yet, this shift of focus simply transposes figural equipoise from the internal structure of the work of art to the structure of external relationships that artworks cultivate with beholders. The rhetoric Bourriaud employs to define the quality of these relationships—intersubjective coexistences, cohabitation, and harmonious parity—recalls Scarry’s account of beautiful form as a balanced distribution of part to whole relationships. Importantly, however, for Scarry, the fulfillment of beauty’s purely formal promise of social equality requires acts of political dissent to complete it. Bourriaud, on the other hand, decants dissent from the adaptive and pragmatic sociability of relational aesthetics. Consequently, rather than offering an especially novel conception of democratic arrangements, relational aesthetics simply mirrors the assumptions of liberal consensus politics. According to the political theorist Jacques Rancière, this philosophy has become the dominant discourse on democracy in recent decades.≤π Rancière associates consensus with the democratic state’s efforts to minimize or proscribe political dissent. The promise and presupposition of the consensual paradigm is that different parts of a population, along with their divergent interests and desires can, through negotiation, be incorporated and adjusted to the preexisting political order.≤∫ In a number of publications, including Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, Rancière questions consensus politics from a neo-Marxist and psychoanalytic perspective that differs substantially from the premises of Bourriaud and Scarry. Rancière relates consensus politics to what he calls archipolitics, a political philosophy traceable to Plato’s account of the republic. Dis-

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agreement identifies a dual dimension to the Platonic articulation of political community. On the one hand, it entails an arithmetical accounting of the capabilities, duties, and differing interests of each sector of the community. On the other hand, it speaks of the submission of these different parts of the social body to the common good. Rancière further observes that archipolitics represents the reign of the common good over and above sectional interests in a highly determined way: ‘‘As the submission of arithmetical equality, which presides over commercial exchanges and over juridical sentences, to that geometric equality responsible for proportion, for common harmony, submission of the shares of the common held by each party in the community to the share that party brings to the common good.’’≤Ω Rancière takes issue with this conception of politics on at least two fronts. He questions the pretension expressed by liberal and consensual political philosophies to make good a ‘‘full count,’’ or full inclusion of all sectors within the social totality. But he also rejects the dream of a state capable of ordering social subdivisions and frictions according to the ‘‘beautiful harmony’’ of geometrical proportion.≥≠ Despite a difference of attitude toward the socially disruptive gestures of political dissent, Bourriaud and Scarry simply take for granted the guiding principles of archipolitics identified by Rancière. Unlike Bourriaud, Rancière views dissent as a constitutive, rather than dischargeable, condition of democratic politics. Attending to the margins of the founding texts of classical Greek democracy, he focuses on references to the poor and ‘‘the people,’’ those sectors of the Athenian state who had no share in the wealth, power, or governance of that society. Politics emerges, asserts Rancière, when the people, as ‘‘the part that has no part,’’ identifies itself with the egalitarian idea, but not the fact, of the equality and liberty of all citizens. This means that politics devolves from the ongoing possibility of previously excluded segments of society demanding social recognition and thereby drawing attention to a ‘‘miscount’’ of the parts taken to make up the community as it is currently perceived. Thus, according to Rancière, ‘‘politics exists wherever the count of parts and parties of society is disturbed by the inscription of a part of those who have no part. . . . Politics ceases wherever this gap no longer has any place, wherever the whole of the community is reduced to the sum of its parts with nothing left over.’’≥∞ Rather than conceiving political community as a formation able to rationalize, incor-

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porate, and account for each of its parts, Rancière speaks of communal identity as constituted by an ongoing potential for internal torsion, a communal whole that never quite coincides with itself. This account of political community as immanently divided, as subject to disruption by societal parts repressed or excluded by prevailing communal arrangements, resonates with aspects of psychoanalytic theory. It recalls, for example, the dynamic of the Freudian unconscious as a force of interruption secreted within the normal operations of consciousness. More specifically, Rancière’s contention that ‘‘political intervals are created by dividing a condition from itself ’’ suggests an affinity with Jacques Lacan’s postulates regarding the subject of psychoanalysis.≥≤ Since I shall have cause to return to the split subject of psychoanalysis when addressing postclassical beauty, it is worth briefly rehearsing Lacan’s formulations on this matter. Lacan describes the subject of the unconscious as lacking in being, since it only attains a social identity by way of induction into a pregiven field of language, inherited knowledge, and social custom, a process that divides the subject from its innermost self.≥≥ In Rancière’s writings, this split subject coincides with those parts of society that have no part, that have no symbolic recognition or status until they demand or enact the acquisition of both as speaking beings. But an important counterpart of Lacan’s theory of subjectivization also applies to Rancière’s refiguring of political community. For Lacan, the desire of the subject of the unconscious is split between its representation by identities supplied by the signifying order, and language’s inability to articulate being directly or authentically. Conceived in structuralist terms as diacritical, reflexive, and nonreferential, the signifying network is inherently inconsistent, unable to sustain or ground itself as a complete order of truth. Additionally, the subject’s induction into the social (the field of castration) introduces a psychic memory of lack, a fantasy of a piece of being (or, a piece of the Real) foreclosed with the subject’s entry into the symbolic universe. According to Lacan, the subject’s desire is, in turn, caused and haunted by this loss of some portion of the ‘‘real’’ entailed by the symbolic construction of reality.≥∂ Rancière locates the socially fissuring affects of political dissent in the tension between these two logics, whether located on the terrain of subjectivity or community. He therefore articulates a double sense of communal belonging: an acknowledgement of the subject’s interpolation within the part-whole relations of given social properties and iden-

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tities, and a subjective (or communal) receptivity to those political fractures that testify to the impossibility of communal (or subjective) identity ultimately constituting itself as a stable and invariant whole.≥∑ Such formulations diverge from Scarry’s proposal that the sensory manifestation of beautiful form prefigures the perfected democratic state, where manifold parts of the social body are incorporated and adjusted to an aesthetic design of harmonious coexistence. As Rancière infers, the realization of such a goal, which reduces the whole of the community to the sum of its parts, would mark the end of the politics. This is because the potential for societal change suffers diminution rather than enhancement when political dissent is disavowed by a consensual ideology of ‘‘negotiations, bonds and co-existences,’’ to recall the democratic values endorsed by Bourriaud. According to Rancière’s formulation, without the disruptive gestures of political dispute, engendered by the inevitable exclusions and inequities of any social order, the prevailing consensus remains closed to contestation and reorganization. In her essay ‘‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,’’ Claire Bishop similarly counters the consensual ethos endorsed by Bourriaud with a conception of democratic society as one where ‘‘relations of conflict are sustained, not erased.’’≥∏ Bishop derives this argument from the writings of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who, like Rancière, interweave neo-Marxist political philosophy with psychoanalytic theory. Following Laclau and Mouffe, Bishop concludes, ‘‘The relations set up by relational aesthetics are not intrinsically democratic, as Bourriaud suggests, since they rest too comfortably within an ideal of subjectivity as whole and of community as immanent togetherness.’’≥π Seeking examples of contemporary art that counteract this consensual ethos, Bishop turns to the art of Santiago Sierra and Thomas Hirschhorn. She emphasizes that both artists contrive relations with art audiences ‘‘marked by sensations of unease and discomfort rather than belonging, because the work acknowledges the impossibility of ‘microtopias’ and instead sustains tensions, among viewers, participants, and context.’’≥∫ While a strong kinship exists between Bishop’s exposition and my own regarding the shortcomings of relational aesthetics as a political theory of art, I want to expand on two areas, ethics and aesthetics, that her essay broaches but does not elaborate. In her desire to dislodge the consensual harmonics of Bourriaud’s theory, Bishop ultimately privileges the dislocations of social antagonism over subjective inscription

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within the socio-symbolic field. While prioritizing what Mouffe and Laclau deem ‘‘the constitutive character of social division and antagonism’’ may be apposite to the political sphere, it doesn’t translate too well as a guide for ethical relations with others.≥Ω On the matter of aesthetics, Bishop provides an acute insight into Hirschhorn’s art that has significance for my account to follow of a postclassical modality of beauty. Bishop notes approvingly that against the current of much contemporary art and criticism, Hirschhorn reaffirms the modernist value of aesthetic autonomy, insisting on a gap between art and everyday life. Hirschhorn’s attribution of a level of independence to the aesthetic sphere also presupposes, according to Bishop, a subject of ‘‘independent thought,’’ as ‘‘the essential prerequisite for political action.’’∂≠ A subject endowed with a desire in excess of prevailing systems of societal reproduction and cultural authority is largely absent from the Platonic formula of beauty directly endorsed by Scarry, and indirectly by Bourriaud. I now wish to turn to a postclassical, psychoanalytic conception of beauty that addresses this absence.

Beauty as ‘‘Remnant’’ Kantian aesthetic theory provides one of the most influential philosophical elaborations of the modernist maxim of aesthetic autonomy, and it may, as Bishop intuits, be making a comeback in some sectors of contemporary art and theory. The following remarks amplify a number of overlaps between Kant’s aesthetic formulations and the postclassical conception of beauty referenced by Eric Santner. Based on a logic of the ‘‘remnant,’’ postclassical beauty departs from the goal of aesthetic unification that orients the classical system. For the purposes of the present discussion, I shall address two aspects of Kant’s account of aesthetic autonomy. The first concerns the cognitive indeterminacy that Kant affords judgments of beauty, and the second evolves from his remarks about aesthetic ideas. In Kant’s Critique of Judgment, judgments of beauty involve subjective reflection upon the feelings fostered by sensory phenomena, a reflection that brackets determinate judgment and its subsumption of singularities under pregiven concepts or criteria. As Kant puts it, ‘‘We regard the beautiful as the exhibition of an indeterminate concept of the under-

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standing.’’∂∞ The ‘‘disinterested,’’ conceptually undetermined attitude toward sensory particulars recommended by Kant forestalls the categorizing and schematizing impulses of conceptual reasoning. Aesthetic judgment thus responds to the sensual, material, and preconceptual structures of experience that cognitive activity tends to repress in its search for generalizing laws and concepts. Crucially, therefore, Kant aligns the autonomy of aesthetic experience with an abrogation of the subject’s reasoning power to appropriate and tame the anarchy of sensate experience. Considering my previous remarks concerning the concordant and unifying impetus of classical beauty, it should be acknowledged that Kant’s account of the subjective pleasure associated with beauty does contain a conciliatory tenor. He asserts that judgments of beauty respond to a pleasure derived from a harmony or play of sensory forms apprehended as bounded wholes. Furthermore, as numerous commentators have discerned, Kantian beauty ultimately promises an empathetic accommodation between predicative consciousness and the chaotic manifold of sensory phenomena. Yet, as Jay Bernstein has recently reminded us, Kant’s anticipation of modernism lies most notably in how he situates the aesthetic as a corrective to rational thought’s repression of a sensate and affective dimension of human experience. Kantian aesthetic experience foregrounds the material and experiential conditions of conceptualizing procedures by disrupting cognition’s mastery over the material world. In Bernstein’s words, ‘‘Most broadly, and without qualifications, we call this disruption ‘beauty.’ ’’∂≤ Beauty’s resistance to the mind’s conceptualizing powers is reaffirmed when the third Critique moves from the ‘‘free’’ beauties of the natural world to what Kant describes as the ‘‘accessory’’ beauty of fine art.∂≥ Notably, Kant’s reflections on artistic genius and art, unlike those on natural beauty, do not wholly annex aesthetic judgment from conceptual operations. Since artworks, for Kant, are manifestations of cultural and intentional production, their making and reception typically presupposes some concept of what the object is meant to be.∂∂ On the other hand, when speaking of fine art as the expression of aesthetic ideas Kant asserts that the inventive fecundity of the imagination overruns the cognitive operations of the understanding. ‘‘When the imagination is used for cognition, then it is under the constraint of the understanding and is subject to the restriction of adequacy to the understanding’s

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concept. But when the aim is aesthetic, then the imagination is free, so that over and above the harmony with the concept, it [the imagination] may supply, in an unstudied way a wealth of undeveloped material for the understanding, which the latter disregarded in its concept.’’∂∑ This passage suggests that aesthetic ideas present a superabundance of sensory, formal, or symbolic material in excess of those determinate conceptual schema that also orient the production and reception of works of art. The aesthetic here denotes not art’s unification of material reality and conceptual content but its activation of an overload of symbolization, what Kant calls ‘‘supplementary presentations’’ that exceed conceptual validation. As Robert Kaufman has observed, such formulations may be taken to situate the critical value of the aesthetic in its capacity ‘‘to offer the formal means for allowing new perceptions and concepts to come into view.’’∂∏ The particular and admittedly partial elements of Kant’s aesthetic theory previously summarized echo something of Santner’s account of postclassical beauty as the aesthetic figuration of ‘‘an interrupted or selfinterrupted whole.’’ Santner introduces this definition of beauty against the background of Franz Rosenzweig’s religious philosophy and the latter’s effort to reinterpret the Judeo-Christian tradition in nonmetaphysical terms. Following Rosenzweig, Santner associates art’s social function with its capacity to encourage communities and subjects to remain alive to a ‘‘logic of the remnant.’’∂π A beauty of remnants, remainders, and leftovers applies to works of art whose compositional structure and procedures activate a surplus of symbolic address in exˇ zek has sumcess of conceptual verification. More broadly, as Slavoj Ziˇ marized it, postclassical beauty pertains to the artwork’s indexing of repressed details that a given sociohistorical order of meaning was unable to incorporate within its prevailing narratives.∂∫ A beauty of the remnant thus generates elements of conceptual and formal superabundance that prevent the whole of the work from coalescing into a harmonized totality. At the same time, Santner stresses that the commonplace (Kantian) affirmation of the interpretive inexhaustibility of aesthetic artifacts should not be ‘‘reduced to the unfolding of the inner logic of the work.’’∂Ω A responsibility for energizing the aesthetic remnant also resides on the side of reception, where interpretive acts are required to make visible those details that may shift the work’s previous history of reception.

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The internally differentiated structure that Santner makes a feature of postclassical beauty extends his commentary on Rosenzweig’s ‘‘psychotheological’’ theory of ethics. According to Santner’s interpretation, the ethics of psychoanalysis recommends a subjective responsiveness to the claims of others, and to one’s communal or social context, which presupposes that both are inhabited by an unconscious vitality or surplus energy.∑≠ Santner’s project therefore intersects with that of other postˇ zek, Copjec, and Jean Laplanche, who Lacanian theorists, including Ziˇ understand the unconscious as an enigmatic otherness immanent to the formation of subjective or institutional identities. As a consequence, the theological side of Santner’s argument should not be mistaken for a nostalgic retreat to the certainties of premodern religious doctrine or morality. Rather, Santner approaches Freud and Rosenzweig as avowedly post-Nietzschean thinkers. This means that for both, the idea of a ‘‘spiritual’’ or transcendental surplus of human life no longer refers to a place beyond everyday life, a sublime zone outside of life where human happiness and freedom will finally be realized. Rather, as Santner puts it, the ‘‘death of God’’ implies that ‘‘the entire problematic of transcendence actually exerts its force in a far more powerful way in the very fabric of everyday life. What is more than life turns out to be, from the post-Nietzschean perspective, immanent to and constitutive of life itself.’’∑∞ Santner therefore contrasts Rosenzweig’s ethical philosophy, based on a subjective openness to the ‘‘midst or middle of life,’’ with metaphysical programs that seek either truth or redemption beyond the rituals of meaningful life.∑≤ The Nietzschean emphasis on an ethical injunction to speak and act from the ‘‘middle of life’’ carries a double connotation, however. It supposes a subject inducted into the relational networks of symbolic exchanges and social custom, just as Lacan refers to the psychoanalytic subject’s being-dividing inscription within symbolic law. Santner describes the subject’s assumption of a socially recognized identity as a process of ‘‘relational surrender’’ to the part-whole linkages that typically sustain communal bonds. Yet actively inhabiting the middle of life demands something more than relational surrender from the subject. It also requires openness to encounters with others who, like ourselves, are subject to unconscious passions and desires. Following Freud, Santner understands the unconscious dimension of the subject as inveterately out of step with the ordinances of social law

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and rational consciousness. As such, the psychoanalytic subject is not simply known or knowable according to social definitions but is also, as Santner puts it, ‘‘a stranger, and not only to me but also to him- or herself ’’ and ‘‘is the bearer of an internal alterity, an enigmatic density of desire calling for response beyond any rule-governed reciprocity.’’∑≥ The ethical here relates to the degree to which subjects and communities are open to or defend against the pleasures and anxieties that arise from encounters with the enigmatic (unconscious) dimension of the other’s desire. This includes an attitude toward other subjects that does not reduce their singularity to identities supplied by the symbolic order of social intelligibility.∑∂ Rather, Santner speaks of the unconscious or unknown ‘‘part’’ of subjective and communal identities as surplus to the ‘‘very forms of identification that normally sustain the psychic bonds of community.’’∑∑ As he acknowledges, this thinking of community is consonant with Rancière’s account of the interruptive event of politics as an impediment to the reduction of communal identity to a consensual harmonization of societal parts. On the subjective plane, this leftover of social integration attests to a dimension of the subject’s desire not captured by the mechanisms of symbolic law. In Lacanian terms, this surfeit of social inscription designates the subject’s psychic attachment to a surplus of the ‘‘real’’ within the symbolic articulation of reality. Importantly, however, the Lacanian real does not refer to either symbolically constructed reality, or to some extradiscursive ground that lies behind the screen of symbolization. Rather, the real pertains to a failure or dysfunction within the symbolic order that attests to its internal division, its falling short of full ontological consistency. Reflecting something of Lacan’s formulations regarding artistic sublimation, a beauty of the remnant invoked by Santner situates art as one means of keeping open the gap (of the real) that separates symbolically constructed reality from itself. A fidelity to this gap keeps faith with the possibility that something other than the current consensus may emerge in the world. Clearly a beauty attenuated to the real differs from the aesthetic anticipation of an ideal of subjective or communal wholeness that subtends classical beauty. Rather, the object of postclassical beauty amplifies that which disrupts (compositionally or conceptually) the organic self-enclosure of the work of art, as well as the sociohistorical context that forms its horizon. The immanently differentiated structure of this object is analogous to the subjective principle of the ethics of psycho-

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analysis. This principle acknowledges the subject’s inscription within a particular sociohistorical order, while also endorsing a subjective receptivity to the unknown part of the other’s desire. As Santner suggests, postclassical beauty implies an ‘‘Other disorientated in the world, divested of an identity that firmly locates it in a delimited context of some sort.’’∑∏ This assertion contradicts the certainty regarding art’s contextual delimitation central to practices of institutional critique, especially those informed by postmodern anti-aesthetic doctrine. Louise Lawler’s photographic works are undoubtedly part of this artistic tendency; yet, as I shall argue, they also activate a beauty of the remnant that broaches the limits of institutional theories of art.

The Antinomy of Institutional Identity and Aesthetic Enigma in Lawler’s Photographs Although a cluster of critics have noted that Lawler regularly interposes signifiers of indeterminacy within her documentation of art’s institutional environments, the aesthetic and ethical consequences of this tendency have received limited elaboration. Following from the attention that Bourriaud and Bishop devote to the quality of social relationships presupposed by works of art, I want to focus on the paradoxical mode of audience address that characterizes Lawler’s photographic arrangements. Bishop contrasts the art of Hirschhorn and Sierra with relational aesthetics by emphasizing their ‘‘tougher, more disruptive’’ strategies of audience engagement and estrangement.∑π Lawler brings a different sensibility to the inscription of friction and disturbance within her work’s allocution to spectators. The disruptions of identification and recognition registered by the photographs are usually subtle and unassuming, rarely marked by a corrosive critical attitude. Despite these differences of authorial tone, Lawler’s photographic works also address a psychoanalytic subject, one divided between being a precipitate of the relational systems of the symbolic order and a libidinal attachment to the unknown or unconscious dimension of symbolic exchanges. But before focusing on this aspect of the works, their theoretical aims contoured by institutional critique and anti-aesthetic postmodernism demands acknowledgement. As a form of social or ethnographic research, Lawler’s photographs

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document the institutional lives of works of art, emphasizing the objective conditions that coordinate aesthetic production and reception. On a rare occasion when she has overcome her usual reticence about giving instructions regarding her work’s interpretation, Lawler asserts, in the catalogue for her show, Louise Lawler—A Spot on the Wall, that her pictures ‘‘present information about the reception of artworks.’’∑∫ This laconic assertion affirms that the photographs chronicle preexisting situations where artworks are installed, stored, or arranged by parties other than the artist in order to expose how different contexts mediate our responses to works of art. Lawler’s professional career began in the late seventies, at a time when many artists were still preoccupied with what had been repressed by the central values of modernism. In dialogue with an earlier history of modern art, the photographs offer a sidelong view of artworks that discloses how vested social and institutional interests compromise the autonomy of the aesthetic as an exception to everyday patterns of experience. Thus, while the Kantian current of modernist aesthetics asserted art’s resistance to external determination, Lawler’s photographs accent art’s dependence upon institutional systems and structures. One of Lawler’s early photographs shows the extent to which she amplifies overlooked presentational devices and supplementary textual materials that support and facilitate art’s institutional existence. Produced in the early eighties, the black-and-white image ‘‘Board of Directors’’ adopts the style and technique of documentary photography. Whether working with black and white or color, Lawler often uses lowspeed, high-resolution film that enables the precise transcription of details. This ensures that prosaic incidents within the settings actively compete with artworks that would normally take center stage. ‘‘Board of Directors’’ shows an intrusively cropped segment of Jasper Johns’s White Flag painting, hung on the heavy-duty carpet of a wall in Christie’s New York auction house. Alongside the slice of painting, a shabby, fingerstained card authenticates the work’s provenance and lists its selling points: ‘‘previously part of the Tremaine collection, signed, inscribed with title and dated 1955–58. Auction estimate price ‘on request.’ ’’ Because the camera’s focus activates the space between disparate elements, signs of commercial interest and the painting’s dense, corrugated surface are interrelated, rather than set apart. In exhibition contexts, an oversized mat printed with the names of Christie’s board members

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frames the image. Listed below the picture, these corporate representatives replace the artist’s signature as owners of the artwork and the setting photographed. Such devices diminish the artist’s creative prerogatives, suggesting that art and artist are functions of the exchange mechanisms of the market. Lawler has produced numerous photographs that, with little sign of outrage or censure, reveal icons of modern art to be as expendable and exchangeable as any other commodity for sale. In the case of ‘‘Blue Nail’’ (1990) a close-up reveals a corner of the tactile blue and white overpainted surface of a Miro abstraction, framed by the mushroom-colored pile of the carpeted wall. But just as prominent are the auction house lot number stuck to the painting’s frame and a metallic blue nail that supports the canvas on the wall. Another memorable Lawler photograph, titled ‘‘Alligator’’ (1985), also contracts the gap that modernist aesthetics sought to maintain between art and the commodity. ‘‘Alligator’’ documents a tightly framed corner of a room in a private collector’s home, which is suffused in a shadowy blue-green light. The image has been cropped to reveal the upper portions of two domestic chairs, as well as architectural features and home-decorating paraphernalia. One of the chairs, prominently branded with the Lacoste alligator logo, provides the source of the image’s caption. Behind the Lacoste chair, two wood-paneled doors appear to have been permanently closed to support a Donald Judd wall sculpture in brass. In the muted light of the room the sculpture seems to float in the space above the furniture, while its polished surface carries anamorphic reflections of window shutters and curtains. Once again, the devices of camera focus and cropping are mobilized to activate linkages between artworks and objects of common culture, a procedure that deflates art’s identification with a sublime otherness located outside normal symbolic or economic exchanges.∑Ω Each of the aforementioned pictures may be situated within the discourse of cultural criticism that motivated postmodern anti-aesthetic discourse to cast a disenchanted eye upon the aesthetic. Perhaps the most telling displacement of modernist aesthetics established by this discourse was an insistence on the institutional, symbolic, or conceptual mediation of the nonverbal and affective transmissions of art.∏≠ By disconnecting art from the subjective, the singular, and the sensory, postmodern mannerism tended to imply that all of life was reducible to the generic narratives and identities produced by the symbolic order. Law-

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ler’s black-and-white photograph titled ‘‘Once there was a little boy and everything turned out Alright. The End’’ (1985) (fig. 2) might be broached in these terms. One of many documentations by the artist of private collectors’ homes, this image discloses the living room of a casually elegant French apartment with various examples of fifties abstraction adorning the walls. Three paintings share space with a pedestal television and a pair of reproduction antique chairs. Not unusually, the artworks are treated as unremarkable incidents within signs of home decoration and human habitation that divert our attention from the paintings. A branch of mistletoe hanging from a ceiling fixture breaks across our view of one of the pictures, and occupying the center of the image are two half-full wine glasses, pieces of china, and a glass jug, all arrayed across a fireplace mantle. This documentation of artworks in the midst of social or institutional contexts suggests that the subjective basis of aesthetic feeling can make no claim to be undetermined or ‘‘disinterested,’’ but invariably passes by way of the rituals of the symbolic field. It has often been noted that Lawler pictures artworks according to structuralist premises, not as entities that contain inherent qualities or significance, but as incidents that only acquire meaning and value within a network of differential signs. Andrea Fraser was perhaps one of the first critics to notice how this aspect of Lawler’s art distinguished it from the earlier institutional critique of Daniel Buren and Michael Asher. Recapping an essay she wrote for Art in America in 1985, Fraser argues that Lawler’s work presents the functioning of institutional power: ‘‘not in architecture, or in the museum as a building, or even in an elite class, but in a set of structures and systems that are discursive and also relational. I see Louise’s work as part of a step from a substantive to a relational understanding of institutions as well as of critical practice.’’∏∞ This passage suggests a view of institutions similar to that expressed by Santner, as sites that produce and regulate symbolic identities. Fraser has elsewhere described recent developments in institutional critique as based on the assumption that the museum functions as ‘‘a network of social and economic relationships between spaces, places, people and things.’’∏≤ The argument that institutions comprise not just physical sites but discursive or symbolic fields has become commonplace within approaches to site-specific and institutionally critical art in recent decades. But the passage from a substantive to a relational conception of art conveyed by Lawler’s photographs has been taken up much more widely

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[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

2. Louise Lawler, ‘‘Once there was a little boy and everything turned out Alright. The End,’’ 1985. B/w photo, transfer type on mat (image), 39.4 — 58.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.

in art and criticism of recent decades. Bourriaud’s account of relational aesthetics could be viewed as extending the consequences of a structuralist relativization of art’s identity, which has been central to the postmodern critique of aesthetic autonomy. This is the idea that the experience of art does not exist outside or before the relational logic of linguistic or semiotic nomination. In privileging the collaborative and reciprocal conception of social bonds, and emphasizing egalitarian, intersubjective exchanges, Bourriaud translates the structuralist account of the dialogical structure of signifying operations into an ethos of social interaction. Fraser’s emphasis on the discursive mediation of our encounters with art, and Bourriaud’s displacement of the aesthetic from subjective experience to communal exchanges, are different versions of the same avant-gardist gesture: the negation of aesthetic autonomy in favor of art’s submission to the directives and demands of the social field. But to focus solely on art’s discursively formed identity and value,

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its coordination and distribution within networks of relational and contextually bestowed meaning, represses its aesthetic claims on us. As previously outlined, the aesthetic—understood in modern terms— refers to art’s disruption of the generalizing impetus of conceptual knowledge in its instrumental appropriation of sensuous materiality. Both Kantian aesthetics and Santner’s account of postclassical beauty ally the aesthetic with a subjective receptivity to sensory meaning in excess of conceptual meaning. On the side of the art object, beauty pertains to the work’s activation of material details that resist a full discursive or conceptual accounting of the work. This inscription of a certain material heterogeneity within the representational texture of the work also disrupts its harmonious adjustment to the matrix of symbolic meaning that forms its context. While Fraser correctly identifies a relational logic at work in Lawler’s practice, the photo arrangements insistently convey something more than art’s relational surrender to discursive systems of meaning or the arithmetical logic of commercial transactions. It would therefore be a mistake to accept the language of taxonomic documentation adopted by Lawler at face value, as though this pseudoscientific method could, or would wish to, fully unveil art’s various contexts and related anthropological meanings. For a start, the intrusive framing and cropping of the images only ever offers truncated segments of institutional settings, a stylistic preference that recalls earlier modernist fragmentations of classical pictorial space. But more importantly, the works activate textual and sensory signs of enigmatic content that fail to serve the epistemological aims of art conducted as sociological inquiry. In other words, certain features of the works continue the anti-instrumental commitment of modern art anticipated by Kantian aesthetic theory. Take, for instance, the title of ‘‘Once there was little boy and everything turned out Alright. The End.’’ Lawler has recounted that her mother gave her the caption, having copied it from the wall of a roadside café. The title tells the beginning and the end of a generic narrative, but through the device of ellipsis, the absent center of the story generates an excess of narrative content. As a witticism directed at narrative convention, the scrap of graffiti was not invented by Lawler or her mother, but was happened upon in the world and given another life as the title of an artwork. I have little doubt, however, that what attracted Lawler to this

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found text was that it symbolized a void at the center of narrative meaning, a surfeit of communicated content out of time with the relational chain of narrative progression. This contradictory expression of transparent photographic transcription and conceptual indeterminacy distinguishes Lawler’s pictures from the stated strategies of conceptual art precedents. According to Sol Le Witt’s oft-cited formula for maintaining the antiaesthetic stance of conceptual art, one way to downplay the artist’s creative prerogatives and aesthetic choices was to follow a predetermined plan where ‘‘chance, taste, or unconsciously remembered forms would play no part in the outcome.’’ He continues, ‘‘The serial artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloguing the results of the premise.’’∏≥ Although Le Witt’s works may never have consistently enacted such a premise, it perfectly emblematizes conceptual art’s determination to strip art of any subjective or emotional valence by making it over into an objectively determined and impersonal exercise. While Lawler’s work emulates a conceptualist acknowledgement of the historically changing effects of objective culture upon aesthetic production, not all traces of the subjective are erased. Yes, the images and their textual supplements adopt the cool, impassive tone of conceptual art formats, but Lawler’s working method also attests to the ‘‘unconscious’’ outcomes of a practice directed by institutional analysis. The artist elaborates on this process in an interview with Douglas Crimp, which was published in a book collection of her photographs called An Arrangement of Pictures. Here Lawler comments: ‘‘When I’m working, I take lots of pictures. It’s a way of working that’s fairly flatfooted in that I have a sense that something is worthwhile documenting, but the pictures that work are those that are affecting in some other way.’’∏∂ The ‘‘worthwhile documenting’’ presumably refers to subjects best suited to institutional analysis. But Lawler also describes those few images selected for exhibition from the many, many photographs taken as ‘‘affecting in some other way.’’ One way of illuminating this other level of affectivity (code for the aesthetic) would be to attend further to how the photographs conduct conceptual enigma in the midst of deeply codified institutional settings. This intensification of conceptual indeterminacy within art’s institutional spaces and discursive framing produces works

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both beautiful and mysterious. Or more precisely, their effect of beauty arises from their symbolization of conceptual vacuity, a factor that imbues the works with psychic resonance. Lawler’s concern to invest the flat lucidity of the photographic document with psychic intensity finds salient expression in ‘‘Hand on Her Back’’ (1997–98) (fig. 3). As part of a larger series called She Wasn’t Always a Statue, this photograph was taken in a Munich museum that stores copies of classical sculptures. ‘‘Hand on Her Back’’ confronts us with the naked back of a crouching nymph from the museum’s collection of faded replicas of classical statuary. Typically, the photograph inflates contextual incidents that draw the eye away from the centrally focused statue. We are alerted to the uneven plastering of the wall above the statue, the cast shadows of other sculptures that encroach on the nymph on either side, and the peeling paint of the trolley that supports the sculpture. Each of these elements points to the relational identity of the work of art, its integration within a diacritical logic of symbolic meaning. Approached from this perspective, the work addresses us as the rational, self-conscious subject supposed by institutional criticism, becoming aware of how context predetermines our responses to works of art. Thus, critic Tory Dent interprets Lawler’s photographs as directing viewers to recognize themselves as socially constructed beings, as ‘‘readymades alreadymade.’’∏∑ But an additional detail breaks the surface of ‘‘Hand on Her Back,’’ a detail that detracts from Dent’s conclusion. Given added weight by the image’s caption, a child-sized hand protrudes from the upper back of the nymph, indicating that another figure was once connected to the larger statue. Lawler’s eye may have been caught by the nymph because of its deformation as a model of classical beauty, where the symmetry of the sculpture’s form is impaired by a grotesque bodily supplement that activates a number of psychic effects. The submissive back of the nude and the tender and inquiring violation of the hand evoke the psychoanalytic trope of the primordial mother-child dyad, as well as a basic gesture of human address. As the indexical trace of an unknown other, the hand incarnates an appeal of some kind, though its content remains in suspension. It seems that Lawler has discovered, within a ‘‘ready-made’’ setting, the residual trace of a modernist aesthetic supposedly displaced by conceptual and institutional theories of art. Ossified in plaster, the meeting of hand and back, which significantly occurs out of the nymph’s

[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

3. Louise Lawler, ‘‘Hand on Her Back,’’ 1997–98. Cibachrome (museum box), 153.7 — 110.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.

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line of sight, acts as an affective signifier of touch, where the pathos of the other’s palpation is felt before it is known. As a prospective inflection of our responsiveness to this photograph, a certain susceptibility to aesthetic feeling in excess of the specular and cognitive operations of consciousness is conjured up. Such a disarming of the reasoning part of subjectivity recalls the disinterested attitude, attuned to the free play of aesthetic experience, that Kant associated with judgments of beauty. However, this scene of intimate corporeal contact does not promise a recovery of the wholeness of some presymbolic (aesthetic) infancy, of a raw responsiveness to external sensation. Kant, too, detached the reflectiveness of aesthetic judgment from immediate sensation. Rather, for the viewer, the miniature handprint operates as a signifier of loss or incompletion, because while it patently provokes our attention and identification, it lacks a transparent message to identify with. We therefore encounter a sensory sign that resists cognitive processing, forestalling our capacity (or desire) to appropriate the image in an instrumental manner. As an allegory of the artwork’s address to the spectator, the ‘‘hand on her back’’ indexes something heterogeneous and unpredictable within the documentary photograph’s objective vision. A double operation may be attributed to this work. On the one hand, the forensic capacities of the photograph attest to the classical statue’s lack of self-sufficiency, offering a reflexive reporting of the cultural (and photographic) frame through which we apprehend it. On the other hand, this same forensic exactitude discovers a sensory sign of obscure origin and significance, which detours the former epistemological aim, permeating the picture with an atmosphere of enigma. This other dimension, which cuts across our acquisition of full knowledge of the setting or work before us, activates the affect of beauty as remnant. As Santner proposes, the psychic excitation occasioned by beauty arises from an encounter with an other inhabited by an ‘‘internal alienness’’ that detaches it from a delimited context of some kind. Yet, the vitalization here of a surplus of symbolic address in excess of conceptual verification should not be mistaken as a lure that encourages the search for some deeper truth beyond the appearance before us. The nodal points of visualized enigma that populate many of Lawler’s photographs of artworks descended into everyday life do not refer to a transcendent space of exception outside social or symbolic coordinates. Rather, as signifiers of aesthetic alterity they are imbricated with, rather than op-

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posed to, the theoretical enterprise of institutional critique. Considering the context of reception that has formed around Lawler’s practice, one based on a postmodern negation of aesthetic autonomy, the excess of her work arises from its creation of an aesthetic space of unprogrammed reception within a narrative of pragmatic strategizing typical of postmodern anti-aesthetic doctrine.∏∏ In this respect, her art resists recruitment to contemporary art-world claims, including the one Bourriaud makes in Relational Aesthetics—that the modernist tradition of aesthetics is definitively behind us. George Baker makes a similar point about Lawler’s self representation in publications and interviews, observing, ‘‘Somehow it is anathema to Lawler to pin her work down, to provide an explanation of her own practice sanctioned by the figure of the artist. That is the space that she needs and that the work needs to continue to claim. In some sense, it is still an aesthetic space, a claim that there is a place for interpretation and reception, and that the artist should do nothing and in fact must do nothing to interfere with this because it would betray the autonomy of the work.’’∏π Andrea Fraser responds that this seems utterly contradictory, considering that all of Lawler’s work is about the manifold forms of institutional interference that belie the ‘‘unfettered’’ notion of aesthetic reception described by Baker. I wish to propose, however, that the sustaining of aesthetic autonomy alongside its dissolution comprises a defining and productive feature of Lawler’s photographic works.∏∫ This feature has further implications for the ethical relationship with audiences enacted by the photo arrangements. A final example extracted from Lawler’s photographic archive will facilitate some concluding remarks about the consequences of her practice for thinking about beauty and ethics. With ‘‘Les coordonnées’’ (1988), Lawler has turned her camera toward an imposing filing cabinet in the Metro Pictures gallery at its previous SoHo location. Here an item of office equipment in aid of gallery management ciphers a number of art historical references. The stolid rectangular bulk of the cabinet framed by the gallery architecture recalls the literal object of minimalist sculpture uninflected by subjectivity or expression. Additionally, ‘‘Les coordonnées’’ refashions a famous work of conceptual art: British Art and Language’s Index installation of the seventies. Historically, the Index work is known for aggressively negating aesthetic seduction by making

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art out of the tools of bureaucratic administration: specifically, index card files, statistical calculations, photostats, and discursive materials submitted to the Art-Language journal. The French-language title of Lawler’s picture echoes these connotations by invoking the accoutrements of business or professional transactions: names, contact details, curriculum vitae, and so on. Each drawer of the cabinet that presumably contains such information is allocated to a named artist within the Metro Pictures stable, including one for ‘‘L. Lawler.’’ But yet again, a signifier of fugitive meaning obtrudes from a scene that attests to art and the artist’s institutional regulation. At the top right-hand corner of the cabinet just one label has been left blank, shifting focus from a process of name recognition to the symbolization of nothing in particular. Like the electrical outlet in How Many Pictures, a commonplace, utilitarian object is transformed into a locus of an aesthetic latency that loosens the binds of measurable identity. Moreover, because these ‘‘supplementary presentations’’ are laced with a superabundance of meaningful possibilities, they fail to mandate a preordained, undivided response from the spectator. As a result, the viewer, too, is addressed as enigmatic at some level, as a subject whose identity and actions are not entirely contoured by pragmatic calculation. This uncertain, nonequivalent relation between the work of art and an unknown spectator approaches a psychoanalytic view of symbolic exchanges, where the other complex cannot ultimately ground a ready-made answer to who we are. The opaque signifiers and remnants of unfixed meaning that Lawler discovers within scenes of art’s institutional confinement assert not the symbolic universe’s authority, but its impotence as all knowing. How, then, to respond to an address from the other that fails to represent a set of precedents to be followed, or a plan of action to imitate? One response to such an invitation to step into the picture would be to judge and act without these certainties. Lawler’s photo arrangements convey both statements of art’s identity as a complex of institutionalized signifieds and signifiers of conceptual superfluity that make no determined directive for judgment to emerge. This bifurcated operation coincides with Santner’s account of the effect of beauty as arising from the artistic presentation of a ‘‘self-interrupting whole,’’ one that generates more signifying material than can be contained by the symbolic context within which the work subsists. Thus, the postclassical beauty I have associated with Lawler’s practice departs from

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an organic metaphor of the work of art (or the subject) as a balanced and harmonious whole. This formula of beauty continues to be mobilized as the aesthetic basis of liberal conceptions of communal consensus and moral justice. In such cases, the social field is conceived as a relational totality of coexisting parts that in the best of worlds will subside into a reconciled totality. As Rancière observes, in the political realm, such consensual frameworks typically seek to veil over the divided condition of democratic communality and its distance from any order based on natural foundations. He asserts, ‘‘Anyone who wants to cure politics of its ills has only one available solution: the lie that invents some kind of social nature in order to provide the community with a [stable] foundation.’’∏Ω I have argued instead that Lawler’s photographs offer no such stable foundation for interpretation. Rather, they operate as internally truncated totalities that register more aesthetic ‘‘reality’’ than can be contained by the institutional contexts photographed. The ethical implications of this may well be the fostering of a subjective or communal answerability to the unthought, the inconsistent, and the unconscious secreted within the institutionalized realities of everyday life.

Notes 1. Foster, The Return of the Real, 93. 2. Pelzer, ‘‘Interpositions,’’ 27. 3. Baker and Fraser, ‘‘Displacement and Condensation,’’ 142. 4. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 26. 5. See Rolfe, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime; Beckley, ‘‘Introduction: Generosity and the Black Swan’’; Hickey, The Invisible Dragon. 6. Alberro, ‘‘Beauty Knows No Pain.’’ 7. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 31. 8. Ibid., 9. 9. Ibid., 136. 10. Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 95–96. 11. Ibid., 106–13. 12. Ibid., 95. 13. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 93. 14. Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 115. 15. Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman, 171. 16. Ibid., 171, 175.

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17. Hickey, The Invisible Dragon. 18. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 31. 19. Ibid., 53. 20. Ibid., 50. 21. Ibid., 57. 22. Ibid., 109. 23. Bourriaud, ‘‘Berlin Letter about Relational Aesthetics,’’ 48. 24. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 31. 25. Bishop, ‘‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.’’ 26. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 109. 27. Rancière, Dis-agreement, 95. 28. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 83. 29. Rancière, Dis-agreement, 4–6. 30. Ibid., 7. 31. Ibid., 123. 32. Ibid., 138. 33. Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 11. 34. Lacan, ‘‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,’’ 47. 35. Rancère, Dis-agreement, 137. 36. Bishop, ‘‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,’’ 66. 37. Ibid., 67. 38. Ibid., 70. 39. Ibid., 75n58. 40. Ibid., 74–77. 41. Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated by Werner S. Pluhar, 91. 42. Bernstein, ‘‘Modernism as Aesthetics and Art History,’’ 255. 43. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 76. 44. Ibid., 189. 45. Ibid., 185. 46. Kaufman, ‘‘Red Kant,’’ 711. 47. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 142. ˇ zek, On Belief, 96. 48. Ziˇ 49. Santner, On the Pyschotheology of Everyday Life, 132. 50. Ibid., 9. 51. Ibid., 10. 52. Ibid., 10. 53. Ibid., 9. 54. Santner has acknowledged a kinship between this ethical stance and Jacques Derrida’s endorsement of aspects of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical phi-

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losophy, which also speaks of the other as irreducible to cultural definitions and social categories supplied by the symbolic order. Ibid., 116n39. 55. Ibid., 117. 56. Ibid., 82. 57. Bishop, ‘‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,’’ 77. 58. Lawler, Louise Lawler, 9. 59. In this respect, Lawler’s art might be linked to what Margaret Iversen has described as a ‘‘deflationary impulse’’ that motivated various artistic responses in the sixties and seventies to the high modernist tradition. Iversen describes minimalist and conceptual art as inverting the ‘‘avant-garde posture of alienated outsiderism’’ keyed to an aesthetic of the sublime that pervaded the New York art world of the forties and fifties. The deflationary impulse targeted art’s identification with social or spiritual transcendence, and a related image of the artist as autonomous subject facing off against the instrumental, commercial, and bureaucratic imperatives of modern life. As Iversen observes, one way in which the generation of artists who came after high modernism ‘‘detranscendentalized’’ artistic creation was to reduce art to ‘‘a thing in the world, undifferentiated from other objects or insufficiently differentiated.’’ Iversen, ‘‘The Deflationary Impulse,’’ 81. 60. Meyer and Ross, ‘‘Aesthetic/Anti-aesthetic,’’ 21. 61. Baker and Fraser, ‘‘Displacement and Condensation,’’ 112. 62. Fraser, ‘‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institutional Critique,’’ 281. 63. Le Witt, ‘‘Serial Project No. 1 (ABCD)’’ (1966). 64. Crimp and Lawler, ‘‘Prominence Given, Authority Taken.’’ 65. Dent, ‘‘Alreadymade ‘Female,’ ’’ 24. 66. Despite Andrea Fraser’s sensitivity to the nuances of Lawler’s institutional critique, her comments on her own practice of institutional criticism indicate a more instrumental attitude toward the potential recipients of her work. On the occasion of an October roundtable discussion on ‘‘The Present Conditions of Art Criticism,’’ Fraser asserts that since art criticism, like art, cannot transcend its context, then critics, like artists, should address their publics in specific and pragmatic terms. For Fraser, this ‘‘means not misrecognizing your readership as the other [my emphasis] of your discourse but as the actual people who are probably going to be picking up the magazine and looking through its pages.’’ Foster and others, ‘‘Roundtable,’’ 223. 67. Baker and Fraser, ‘‘Displacement and Condensation,’’ 117. 68. Jacques Rancière has proposed that this double effect, the paradoxical coimplication of opposites and the effort to engage with contradiction, is in fact characteristic of the modern aesthetic tradition. In response to a question

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about the relationship between art and politics, Rancière asserts, ‘‘Suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of the political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused conversely, by the uncanny, that which resists signification.’’ Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 63. 69. Rancière, Dis-agreement, 16.

RANJANA KHANNA

Technologies of Belonging SENSUS COMMUNIS , DISIDENTIFIC ATION

In this article I am interested in the relation between the notion of sensus communis, understood variously in the modern era as common sense and sense of community, to visuality and metaphoricity. I seek to understand what happens to the sensus communis when visuality becomes dominated by consciousness of its own technological makeup and when metaphor is apparent only at the moment of its disintegration into demetaphorization. The sensus communis began to be theorized in Europe, from the eighteenth century on, as an idea (rather than something natural) and as a form of civic sense. I will address what happened to that civic sense when the perspective on the world changed dramatically from one of colonial enlightenment universalism to one of postcolonial melancholia. This change, seen here through visuality and metaphoricity, highlighted the colonial frameworks of the world in which the knowledge of Shaftesbury, Vico, and Kant emerged. Stressing this change raises questions of how colonialism and its aftermath alter the manner in which the communis was conceived and what form of sense would come to dominate the visual culture of postcoloniality. The article, then, elaborates the notion of the sensus communis in Shaftesbury, Vico, and Kant in order to understand the forms of universalism embodied within the concept’s imbrications in notions of the visual and metaphoricity that are, in the end, implicitly questioned in the works of installation and video artist Mona Hatoum. The developing visual and metaphoric implications of

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sensus communis are framed by the importance of that which is inhumanly vast or monstrous in size or strength—what Shaftesbury refers to as the ‘‘immane,’’ what Vico theorizes in terms of gigantism, and what Mona Hatoum visualizes in her large domestic installations—as well as the idea of communication that we see in epistolary forms, from Shaftesbury to Hatoum. Contemporary discussions of the sensus communis are dominated by the Kantian and post-Kantian tradition, in which questions of justice and the aesthetic were brought together through Kant’s critique of aesthetic judgment (Kant’s third Critique), which distinguished itself from the epistemological investigations of the first Critique and the moral thrust of the second Critique. It is, however, worth thinking back through the humanist thrust of the pre-Kantian formulations of the sensus communis, and in particular the status of the idea, the metaphorical, and the ‘‘as if ’’ that circulated before Kant, through formulations of the sensus communis in Shaftesbury and Vico, in spite of the quite distinct meanings of the term for each. In theorizations of the sensus communis, the status of the metaphorical in conjunction with that of the immane, a form of gigantism and machinery, helps us to understand how the machine—the wheels and counterpoises, as Shaftesbury put it—came to shape the technology of communication and exchange, and indeed came to shape belonging and unbelonging. Sensus communis has frequently been associated with the metaphorical. The article will suggest that a different form, perhaps an inhuman or diseased form of a sensus communis, presents disidentification formulated in demetaphorization. This is not the absence of metaphor so much as the dwindling of that trope’s metaphorical powers. Sometimes the technologies of belonging seem to invoke or conjure immane apparitions and specters that are indeed melancholic. Sometimes they will be in letters that foreground the machinery of their potential not to arrive, rather than their ability to communicate in the manner Shaftesbury proposes. The complex machinery of the communis—including, as it does, a teeming multitude described by Shaftesbury—also includes a grotesque and somewhat threatening kind of gigantism. Such gigantism can be the site of productive metaphor, as it is in Vico’s work. At other times, demetaphorization highlights instead the palpable sense of loss of such an idea, something we can perceive in Mona Hatoum’s installations.

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Shaftesbury Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, famously wrote in his letter on the sensus communis, ‘‘For when the mind is taken up in vision and fixes its view either on any real object or mere spectre of divinity, when it sees, or thinks it sees, anything prodigious and more than human, its horror, delight, confusion, fear, admiration or whatever passion belongs to it or is uppermost on this occasion, will have something vast, ‘immane,’ and (as painters say) beyond life. And this is what gave occasion to the name of fanaticism as it was used by the ancients in its original sense, for an apparition transporting the mind.’’∞ This letter followed on his concerns about the nature of ‘‘enthusiasm,’’ or immoderate fanaticism relating to religion. He saw extreme enthusiasm as a melancholy panic, spread through a community by either ‘‘contact’’ or ‘‘sympathy,’’ reaching ‘‘ghastly and terrible’’ dimensions.≤ Just as the source of such passion may be ‘‘immane’’—monstrous in size or strength or inhumanly huge and cruel—so too is the resulting effect in the multitude monstrous and vast. Shaftesbury paints an ugly picture of the multitude so affected, or perhaps more accurately, possessed. In his epistolary philosophizing (his treatises are frequently written in letter form), Shaftesbury is particularly skeptical of an iconic visuality responsible for instigating both a mental ‘‘transporting [of ] the mind’’ and a contagion among those fixated: ‘‘Their very looks are infectious. The fury flies from face to face, and the disease is no sooner seen than caught.’’≥ Despite his deep reverence for the Christian faith and Catholicism, his mistrust of the visual, especially in the hands of the multitude, causes him to plea for careful basic moral thought and conversation—the model of the sensus communis—that could temper extreme enthusiasm and the forms of community that arise from and are spread by it. He does not, however, aim to divest man of all feeling. Sentiment was linked to moral thought for him as imaginative force, and linguistic exchange as conversation or, in written form, a letter. Shaftesbury’s notion of sensus communis is posited as a counter to immoderate excitability, and it argues its case through the notion of good humor and ‘‘raillery’’ or banter. While there may be sensible affection among family members, clans, or tribes that emerges in the natural expression of filiation, there is also an idea of community that can will peoples together or affiliate those of the same species but without other commonalities. Shaftesbury

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is attentive to the problems of either of these forms of attachment alone. As he describes the dominance of the idea, he is wary of the degradation of the ‘‘state of nature’’ he sees in Hobbes’s political philosophy, which he suggests emerges from an egoistic social contract theory. He does not accept the amoral selfishness that characterizes the humans in Hobbes’s version of the state of nature, in which, he writes, ‘‘Civility, Hospitality, Humanity towards Strangers or people in distress’’ is understood only as ‘‘a deliberate Selfishness,’’ or where ‘‘The Love of Kindred, Children and Posterity is purely Love of Self, and of one’s own immediate Blood: As if, by this Reckoning, all mankind were not included; All being of one Blood, and join’d by Inter-marriages and Alliances; as they have been transplanted in Colonys, and mix’d one with another.’’∂ Shaftesbury goes to some length in describing his departure from Hobbes, in particular the problem of imagining a complete divide between the idea of the state of culture entered into through contract, on the one hand, and the base nature of mankind described as the state of nature. Rather, Shaftesbury sees a basic virtue that will teleologically stretch from love of self and family to love of community, one that merges the sensual and the rational or, perhaps more accurately, denies the break between them, stressing instead a teleology from one to the other. Similarly, the senses represented in Hobbes’s state of nature seem to counter the idea in the state of culture. For Shaftesbury, this risks an intense attachment to an idea of community that is typical of ‘‘the spirit of faction’’ one typically sees in states.∑ The emblem that forms the frontispiece of the essay refers to Hobbes’s philosophy and Shaftesbury’s counter philosophy, which tempers skepticism with burlesque (fig. 1). The triptych also includes a central image of an African arriving in Europe and witnessing Europeans for the first time. From Horace, Shaftesbury takes his epigraph, ‘‘hac urget lupus, hac canis’’ (on the one side a wolf presses, on the other a dog) as if to cast doubt on the dictum of Hobbes’s description of the state of nature as homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to man). Shaftesbury suggests, rather, that the human lies neither on the side of the state of nature (as wolf ) nor on the side of the state of culture (as dog). Equally, in a long footnote he draws a distinction between Greek and Roman notions of sensus communis—between the line of thinking from Aristotle (the sense through which we perceive) to Thomas Aquinas (in which this becomes reason), on the one hand, and, on the other, from Cicero (where sensus

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1. Frontispiece from ‘‘Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour in a Letter to a Friend,’’ in Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, sixth edition, London, 1737–38. ∫ British Library Board. All Rights Reserved

communis seems to carry the idea of an ethos, a society’s norms as understood by its inhabitants, edging on humanitas) to Juvenal, Marcus Aurelius, Horace, and also Seneca, ‘‘a just sense of common rights of mankind, and the natural equality there is among the same species.’’∏ His ‘‘Sensus Communis, An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour in a Letter to a Friend’’ is careful to explain that the form of ridicule referred to in the title should remain good humored and should reflect gentlemanly good breeding and paideia: through education and upbringing, which is the physical and intellectual achievement to which society aspires. It should not manifest itself, therefore, in cruel condemnation or laughing in the face of the enthusiastic multitude, which

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would amount to silencing them. This would be ‘‘a breach of the harmony of public Conversation’’ and therefore ‘‘contrary to Liberty.’’π Shaftesbury does not explicitly condemn the visual. In fact, he devotes much thought to it in his Second Characters, or The Language of Forms. He does, however, articulate that a paideia will involve a kind of education of the senses into moral groundedness. If this involves the visual, it will be through conversation about the meaning and moral uplift associated with a reading of, for example, emblems.∫ We see here how he merges the Aristotelian concern with the manner in which people perceive objects, on the one hand, and the sense of public weal, on the other. Shaftesbury included, for each of his essays as well as for volumes as a whole, a visual image, as if these essays were part of an emblem book. He also wrote about his choices of the images, which were engravings by Gribelin, who was given detailed instructions on their appearance. Shaftesbury writes, too, of the important pleasures of the allegorical interpretation, and he was also particular about communicating the rhetorical qualities of the prose through capitalization.Ω The importance of conversational exchange or dialogue is stressed in many ways in the writing, not least in the forms it takes: advice, letters, conversations, and even soliloquies assume the presence of another to whom something is being directly communicated. The metaphors of visuality—and therefore also the emphasis on the face as spectacle and, through contagion, as spectator—are particularly striking. Even as his own aesthetic theory is well developed—albeit as a branch of ethics (the branch of philosophy known as aesthetics did not exist in the Anglo-Saxon context)—his insistence on the danger of the uneducated and inappropriate look provides the paradigm for an understanding of the senses more broadly. The senses are to be educated, and indeed the affective response must be tempered with the measure that will necessarily have a beneficial impact on love of the community and that will promote natural equality among the same species. In fact, the faces of the multitude almost cast doubt on the species and the humanitas into which they must be formed. Like an artwork, they must be molded with harmonious design to become beautiful, and the production of such beauty will, in turn, assist in the production of an educated public.∞≠ Rather than melancholy panic, then, a sense of tasteful humanitas can be created and all can begin to behave like artists, as if in harmonious design, while working toward that idea. It is this idea

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rooted in feeling, rather than feeling alone, that ultimately must work toward willing the sensus communis into existence. It is the case, undoubtedly, that Shaftesbury’s sensus communis must develop through conversation and exchange among those who understand the same language, as they draw in those who are not yet able to adhere to the sensus communis. And yet there is an insistent visuality that governs his writing on the topic, in which he situates the gentleman as the artist or architect of harmonious design. And it is the gentleman, too, who will be able to distinguish faces in a crowd, so the community is not a monstrous multitude but rather a group of individuated figures who are composed together through design. The machinery of the world as community has, then, its basis in a humanitas that must be educated into willing harmony, rather than dwelling in the infectious, ghastly, terrible, and immane features of the misguided multitude. Ultimately, the interest of everyone (all humanitas) is to limit self-interest in favor of the interests of the public weal; this will oil the machinery of community spirit. The educated eye, when observing such machinery, will see that it functions not only for selfinterest but also for the common good. ‘‘Whoever looks narrowly into the affairs of it, will find that passion, humor, caprice, zeal, faction, and a thousand other springs which are counter to self-interest, have a considerable part in the movement of this machine. There are more wheels and counterpoises in this engine than are easily imagined.’’∞∞ The careful architectural and artistic design of the world as machine is the counterweight to the uneducated, grotesque faces of the infectious multitude, whose humor is melancholic. In addition, the foreigner who arrives from afar—the African in Shaftesbury’s imagination—who may arrive at the Venice Carnival and, recognizing some primitive ritual, may find the masks amusing. But also ultimately, he may push the jest too far when everyday European appearance also seems amusing, at least until he is educated into the fashion. He will face the possibility of mistaking what is deemed ‘‘nature’’ for ‘‘art.’’ The frontispiece—which, like most of the emblems, supplies an allegorical key for the essays—includes this ‘‘Ethiopian’’ arriving. Shaftesbury’s humanism—which emerges here as prejudice even as it affirms the commonality among humans—fails to recognize the amusing nature of fashion as modern ritual. Even as at times he acknowledges the artifice of fashion, at others it would seem as if he thought there were

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no art involved in the creation of the European, either in terms of fashion or in terms of education. His influence on Vico, and Kant’s departures from him, have been famously elaborated by Gadamer in Truth and Method, especially with respect to the concept of a sensus communis.∞≤ The focus of Gadamer’s claim is the way in which humanistic thought works with and against the fields of philosophy, science, and aesthetics and how Kant was responsible for divorcing an understanding of the aesthetic from the political and the moral. ‘‘The concept of sensus communis,’’ Gadamer writes, ‘‘was taken over, but in being emptied of all political content it lost its genuine critical significance.’’∞≥ It is certainly the case that both Shaftesbury and Vico worked with a more integrated relation between the aesthetic and the ethical, and yet Gadamer’s critique of Kant perhaps overstates the case, because the strong investment in communicability makes the aesthetic experience, and judgment of it, the site of some suspicion. Conversation and moral community were indeed important to Shaftesbury (Gadamer stresses the importance of wit and humor as something limited to ‘‘social intercourse among friends’’ in Shaftesbury).∞∂ The visual emphasis, and indeed the distrust of visual contagion, is striking, because it is suggestive of a lack of control when the humors are melancholic, in spite of the doubts he casts over Hobbes’s version of the state of nature. Indeed, it seems to undermine the faith in the idea of the sensus communis that Shaftesbury foregrounds and also the idea of the human that he sets forth. It is unclear whether the common weal can reach toward those who are ostensibly members of the same species, grotesque and immane as they sometimes are, and beyond life. Even if the humors can be changed through wit and raillery, the complexity of human nature, as he understands it through the humors, surely casts some doubt on the natural origin of harmonious design, even if he believes that the human is well designed when the humors are in balance.

Vico John Schaeffer has shown, in his work Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism, that Shaftesbury lived some time in Italy and that he could well have met Vico, whose work seems to have been

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influenced by him. What interests me is less the question of whether they met, and more whether Vico’s merging of the Greek and Roman traditions of the sensus communis shares or departs from Shaftesbury’s version. Just as Shaftesbury thought that ‘‘melancholy panic’’ could be rectified by the lifting of the humors through conversation rather than visual exchange, Vico foregrounded the importance of the rhetorical and also associated this with the grotesque. Attempting to find some notion of common humanity, Vico located this in primitive forms of culture. If he was interested in the manner in which rhetoric functioned to sustain sensus communis in contemporary life, it was because of his understanding of rhetoric’s relation to the visual and the oral, and ultimately to the arts. Attempting to understand the origin of sensus communis, he looked at early forms of communication that expressed ‘‘imaginative universals.’’ While these were ultimately to be sought in language, Vico saw the origins of this in pictures. Once again, the importance of the visual in the sensus communis had been foregrounded. For Vico, visuality had the advantage of large ideas that were not dependent on an ability to abstract. Visual images would simply present themselves and would sometimes combine unlikely objects, without having to conceptualize complexity or synchronicity. He described these objects from the imagination as ‘‘poetic monsters.’’ Eventually these were lost to the alphabet and subsequently other forms of representation that were no longer directly, or bodily, present to themselves. The remainders of these can be seen, as in Shaftesbury, in emblems. And yet, there we see them lurking in the midst of other representational fields, even though they are not out of synch with them.∞∑ Vico’s stages of language share something with Shaftesbury’s sketches as seen in the incomplete and posthumously published ‘‘Plastics,’’ in Second Characters, which similarly plots a movement of language from the pictorial, metaphor to metonymy and so on. And yet Vico is clearly staging a notion of history that is not shaped by religious time, and in that sense it is ‘‘secular’’ in the etymological sense (‘‘of the centuries or generation’’). It produces three major historical moments: the time of the Gods, dominated by pictures and images; the time of heroes, when gentiles became giants dominated by metaphorical language; and the time of men, shaped by epistolary language, in which there is agreement about the meanings of words. In turn, the first had a system of law governed by mysticism, the second by heroic jurisprudence, and the

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third by a sense of equity. These historical cycles, or ricorsi, do not interfere with each other. But when men become caught in ‘‘false eloquence’’ and use it for the purposes of factionalism, strife, and civil war, there is a recoil to earlier cycles, to primitive simplicity, and to the justice of the Gods. So out of base despair is produced something large, and perhaps immane, that leads to a different relation to justice through the pictorial and the metaphorical. If Shaftesbury balanced the relation between sense and idea in order to maintain the teleology of mankind so the community could function as if in consistent human spirit with the familial context, Vico returns us to the pictorial and metaphorical ‘‘as if ’’ of communication. It is, of course, somewhat akin to the ‘‘as if ’’ of Kant, which proposes the power to judge also in aesthetic terms, in order to make the leap from personal taste to universally valid judgment.

Kant The metaphorical nature of the process of judgment in Kant’s work has been attributed to the manner in which judgment of taste functions as a way of imagining community, as if both the subject and the community communicate sense or affect in ways that come to constitute them as such, and through means other than those that are a priori or can be communicated directly. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant wrote, ‘‘The judgment of taste . . . depends on our presupposing the existence of a common sense. (But this is not to be taken to mean some external sense, but the effect arising from the free play of our powers of cognition.) Only under the presupposition, I repeat, of such a common sense, are we to lay down a judgment of taste.’’∞∏ Judging is to be carried out not by empirical research, but by imagining the possible judgment of others ‘‘and by putting ourselves in the position of everyone else.’’∞π The tenor and vehicle of judgment has to shuttle back and forth between self and community so that it can seal the relationship between the two and confirm the existence of each in the process. Both self and the sense of the other come into existence through disinterested judgment of a third, emerging from the pleasure or pain felt in relation to it. Taste is, in this context, yet to be determined as law. Imaginative speculation has to occur as if one judged in the manner of the common, without prior

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implementation of rules of cultivated taste and in full knowledge of the unverifiable and absent taste of the other. The possibility of judgment comes from the ability to identify, and identify with, the absent other in full knowledge of this absence. It is not contagious in the way of Shaftesbury’s melancholic panic, nor is it cultivated as is his sense of the communis. Neither are there archetypes of an early collective that foreshadow a sensus communis. Identification, for Kant, becomes metaphorical in structure, as if there is a possibility of interjecting the absent other as oneself—without, as it were, experiencing an unpleasant or contradictory taste. Given that there is no possibility of persuasion into agreement in judgment, they have to be produced as examples; the theory of sensus communis is effectively also one of exemplarity. Examples exhibit, and are vehicles of, potential connections, even though nothing can be confirmed through deduction. Once again, the tenor and the vehicle of metaphor become the source of potential community through the senses. There is a universalism that is not normative within the theoretical framework and can in no way be argued through a set of alreadyexisting parameters of communicability. It is underscored by difference, and indeed the sensation of this difference.∞∫ Tamar Japaridze has underscored a psychoanalytic reading of this metaphorical process, which looks to the act of judgment in terms of the ability to communicate through the affect of loss. Reading the absent and yet imaginable other as a lost object of community, the process of judgment comes to form community once again through the imaginative relation, language, and metaphor as freedom from loss. He gives his reading a gloss from psychoanalysts Abraham and Torok, who discuss the process of successful mourning as an interjection that produces figurative language and recognize language as an attempt to reconstitute the loss of oral exchange (the loss of the breast is metaphorized as language).∞Ω The exilic framework of their midcentury theorization gives the possibility of community through successful mourning as metaphor.≤≠ Japaridze introduces the oral metaphorics of psychoanalytical theorization of loss, and specifically of mourning and melancholia. The interjected lost object is effectively absorbed into the self, whereas the lost object that cannot be successfully mourned is swallowed whole and introduced into the body as an alien entity, bringing about a split or critical relation to the self. The process of mourning and melancholia, then, become metaphorized as the introduction into the borders of the

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body and tells a story of hospitality and civil war that cannot necessarily be put to rest by the sovereign.

Mona Hatoum Mona Hatoum’s work raises fascinating questions today about the sensory, its relation to community, the world, and to the question of metaphor and the ‘‘as if.’’ To place all these philosophical figures in their historical contexts of the production of philosophy would raise questions about their ideas of sovereignty, civil war, colonialism, and the international, all of which have implications for amity lines (friendly relations across terrestrial or other borders) and the question of the human, individually and collectively, in such species-oriented humanism. In the moment in which Hatoum produces her work, notions of the international, and the sensus communis understood through that framework, have shifted from the concept of exile that characterized literary and artistic modernism to the concept of asylum. In that sense, questions of hospitality and of the human are highlighted once again, just as they were for Shaftesbury (in his discussion and visualization of the Ethiopian and in his critique of the political theory of Hobbes, which develops out of the context of civil war), Vico (in his discussion and visualization of the importance of the wretched and impious seeking refuge in the lands of the prosperous, seen in both his frontispiece and in the opening of New Science), and Kant (in his discussion of hospitality in Perpetual Peace). Today, once again, we cannot adequately think any notion of belonging or community without thinking through the concept of asylum or refuge into the site of hospitality and potential hostility. Asylum becomes the concept through which we can understand the emergence of different notions of the sensory subject, of community, of the human, and of the limit. Its walls and borders force an understanding not only of what must be expunged but also of the difficult negotiations over what might be drawn in for refuge, where refuge itself becomes a welcome threat to both host and guest. Questions of identity and disidentification are brought to the fore, as are the limits of the human, the processes of institutionalization, the manifestations of sovereignty, and the conse-

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quences this may have for both a sense of community and a community of the senses. Her works emphasize extraordinary fear of ‘‘domestic’’ space writ large, which suggests a foreboding sense of institutional and state control associated with objects. It also suggests relations associated with the domestic, with home, with the very concepts of belonging and community, and as a result, the constitution of the human. The affective relation to belonging at work demonstrates a profound distrust of any kind of comfort with the concept of belonging, the spatial demarcations frequently associated with it, and the workings of propriety that accompany it. It also questions the assumptions of reproducibility and legacy and a misguided sense of familial or contractual security. Even though Edward Said was attentive to the sense of threat embodied in Hatoum’s works, and particularly those that are domestic objects, he nonetheless offers an analysis that always gestures toward the prior moment of loss as the root of the doubtful comfort of the domestic setting, as if home will always be a lasting memory once dispossession has occurred.≤∞ But the senses Hatoum works with do not seem to thematize possession and dispossession in quite such a teleological manner, and they are as much forward looking as they are backward. Her works consistently attract and repulse simultaneously, and the spectator is both sensually drawn into involvement and repulsed by it, in both senses of that word. One of the ways in which Hatoum suggests these doubts about belonging is through the foregrounding of technology, almost as a way of disabusing the spectator of the sensory immediacy of the visual. Another is through challenging the borders of homes, states, and bodies in her work. Each of these demonstrates what I want to call a loss of metaphor in the visual, because her works first build on metaphors. For example, household objects are turned into instruments of harm by making them immane, giant, and grotesque (fig. 2). The presence of the stranger within borders is elaborated not by breaking down the lost or present other, and therefore the loss of self, but by introducing a camera into the body’s borders. Turning the metaphor inside out, Hatoum works as if to show that the foreigner whose right to hospitality is questioned can now tell us something about the humanist sense of community that excludes or assumes to know a species. If Shaftesbury insisted on writing his philosophy in the form of letters, insistently

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ranjana khanna 2. Mona Hatoum, Mouli-Julienne X 21, 2000. Steel. Courtesy of the artist.

interpellating ‘‘My Friend!’’ to stress community through conversation, the technology of language and letters is thrown into doubt in Mona Hatoum’s work. For example in Measures of Distance (fig. 3), words become images, and yet they are entirely emptied of metaphorical or abstracted possibility alone; more than one language is spoken, and suddenly they all become foreign and arbitrary. The loss of metaphor, or demetaphorization, has been theorized as a symptom of melancholy by the psychoanalysts Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham, who write that melancholic patients sometimes take that which is meant figuratively, and indeed makes sense only figuratively, and interpret it literally. It is obviously problematic to make a straightforward association between Shaftesbury’s melancholy multitude and Torok and Abraham’s. After all, Shaftesbury was thinking literally about a bodily imbalance of the humors and a contagious sympathy often

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3. Mona Hatoum, video still from Measures of Distance, 1988. A ‘‘Women Make Movies’’ release.

aggravated by irrational responses to visual objects, whereas the psychoanalysts considered an individuated inability to accept the loss of something, leading to unsuccessful mourning. However, if we can consider that asylum foregrounds not only the loss of one’s sense of belonging to a homeland (exile) but, in fact, also the loss of belief in the possibility of an idea of community, then perhaps there is a commonality. It may be, however, that wit and raillery will be insufficient to relieve it or to move teleologically toward a solution. There is no sense of comfort offered that could make home a desirable site, with no threat attached to it. Hatoum’s works body forth a resistance to thinking diaspora and displacement—the inverse of community—in terms of a metaphysics of presence, of identity, of identification, or even of ontology. Rather than thinking of diaspora and community in terms of bodies emerging into different spaces, they show the technologies and institutions through which life itself is defined or enframed through the violence of metaphor. The earth, the body, the familial, and the domestic are inscribed. An example is Present Tense, in which the temporality of the presence is framed by the terrestrial trials of the Oslo Accords, shown here as the

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map presented to the Palestinians plotted out with red beads inserted into bricks of Nablus soap. In other images, like Traffic, in which two suitcases made out of beeswax, cardboard, and hair draw a sensual and affective response and serve as an uncanny reminder of human lives and deaths whose traces are left on the technologies and instruments of travel, diaspora, or displacement. In spite of the insistent presence of these traces, Hatoum’s art draws on the literary and visual, the sonic and tactile, and works within a relation of belonging other than a metaphysical one. Presence, indeed, seems constantly questioned, and life is revealed as technologized and formally and sensibly enframed. The technologization of life is usefully explored by Martin Heidegger, who allows for an important understanding of the relationship between technology and belonging—indeed, of a sense of community. In the lectures in History of the Concept of Time, Heidegger discussed the concept of hearing through the German word hören, the root of which is ‘‘to attend/notice/hear/see.’’ Hören now means to hear, to listen, to attend, or to obey and is distinct from, if related to, horchen, which suggests listening in terms of hearken—in other words, listening without understanding. He writes, ‘‘Even listening is phenomenally more original than the mere sensing of tones and the perceiving of sounds. Even listening is hearing with understanding, i.e., ‘originally and at first’ one hears not noises and sound-complexes, but the creaking wagon, the electric tram, the motor-cycle, the column on the march, the North wind. It takes a very artificial and complicated attitude to ‘hear’ such a thing as a ‘pure noise.’ ’’≤≤ Heidegger goes on to discuss the compound words and related words developed out of hören—überhören (to ignore), hörig (in bondage or enslaved), and most importantly for him, gehören (to belong to). Hearing involves a moment of the ‘‘with’’—an enslavement of sorts—and belonging is togetherness. He also suggests that we hear not only others but also language itself: ‘‘We do not just speak language, we speak out of it. We can do this only by having always already listened to language. What do we hear there? We hear the speaking of language.’’≤≥ Through this, language opens up the world for us—thus belonging and togetherness are related to hearing. Language, for Heidegger, suffers from technology even though it is posited by him as ‘‘an original poetry in which a people poeticizes being.’’≤∂ Hatoum draws attention to language as technology, where technology

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is not only a technique or a skill, as in techn¯e, and is not only a begetting or production. It emerges, as with Heidegger, as a form of knowing that guides and shapes our emergence in the world. Technology, in Hatoum’s hands, becomes not only a mode of making things or of knowing how to, but precisely a mode of revealing the process of making. A technology, then, is a stand or a frame, or a rack (Gestell), and in someone’s hands, it is an enframing of the world’s resources that stand in reserve. Anything we may consider authentic to essence or being is already enframed through the foregrounding of the process of making. And in a sense, in the process of revealing we begin to see how there is no part of the earth that has not been constituted as hearing, belonging, and enframed as the world. Adding a more Marxist reading, life becomes enframed by global capital’s technology. Whether one’s sense of origin is diasporic, indigenous, or autochthonous, the focus then is on the earth that has changed into world rather than on identity or humanity. The emphasis, then, is not on being identified or disidentified, on identity or ontology, but on epistemology and revealing the mechanization of life itself, partly through the instruments of listening. In this context, Hatoum’s video Measures of Distance (1988) foregrounds the machinery of belonging and separation, and the manner in which life is technologized and voice functions. Whereas voice may allow us to assume a metaphysical presence, in Hatoum’s work voice does not grant or endow with an authenticity or, indeed, a metaphysical presence, but rather the machinery and technology of belonging is what we come to notice, and what it means to communicate and exchange within the rubric of technological living. If the video is ostensibly about letters between mother and daughter, one in Beirut, one in London, it foregrounds the singularity of that intimate relationship and every utterance. It also performs, on the level of both content and technique, the workings of mechanical reproduction and the impossibility of full communication. And yet, while the video tells the story of a relation between mother and daughter with a rather intrusive threat of the father and of borders, it also foregrounds the technology of the letter and of language. The letter has arrived from somewhere, and the technology of its vocabulary does not begin with the mother. In fact, the video asks us to hear voices before we understand a letter, to listen to language itself and not just what it denotes as we switch from Arabic to English, highlighting language as translation—as more than a transparent mech-

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anism of communication. The letter also seems to have reached its destination with the daughter, but then it moves on to us and travels even further. The letter is both a static object, fixed in time for a short moment, and also on the move again. It’s both intimate and singular to the situation, and part of a larger technology of belonging. In Hatoum’s video, video itself is denaturalized as a technology of movement and as, in a sense, a technology of diaspora. Video stills hold moments as if they were letters before the technology of mobility starts over.≤∑ The letters form more than a spoken narrative. Drawing on the use of calligraphy and the veil, Hatoum uses Arabic script over the shower curtain that hides her mother’s body, as if words, too, become the veil of modesty and function already as a concealing and restrictive fabric that nonetheless is simultaneously revealing and sensuous. The letters, then, are simultaneously a fabric of desire and intimacy, and a resistance to the possibility of unmediated access to the words of another. The letter is literalized as handwriting, the veil is produced as a curtain of restricted access, the listening is already inscribed into a technology of belonging and unbelonging, and identity in this scenario becomes of secondary importance to the technologies of existence. For Heidegger, as much as for Hatoum, the nonconceptual sound of language is where communication seems to occur, and it is this nonconceptual and sensual level in which the human as communicator paradoxically comes undone. If technology shows how we speak out of language, as much as it makes us human, it also shows the way in which hearing functions to question the limit between human and animal.≤∏ It does not become the basis of a sensus communis; rather, it becomes insight into the very difficulty of that concept. It is through technology, then, that the artwork stands in a critical relation to the forms of exchange and communication that cannot encompass the affective resistance to these forms. Hatoum’s journey into gigantism similarly works on showing the processes of technologization and the relationship this process has to language. Measures of Distance went some way to show the problems of understanding conversation and the letter as direct communication rather than sensory stimulation demanding a different form of judgment. La grande broyeuse (Mouli-julienne x 21), an installation piece, was inspired by Franz Kafka’s short story ‘‘In the Penal Settlement’’ (sometimes translated as ‘‘In the Penal Colony’’). In Kafka’s story, a huge machine, existing in a colonial time lag in a penal colony, tortures

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prisoners before killing them by literally inscribing them with the words of a death sentence, thereby supposedly performing justice. ‘‘It’s a remarkable piece of apparatus,’’ says the officer in the story’s opening, explaining to an ‘‘explorer’’ that this is the machine employed to deliver justice in the penal colony. The officer resides in what appears to be a time warp in a penal colony, and he admires the machine, describing it carefully and lovingly. He wears a uniform that, as the explorer points out, is ‘‘too heavy for the tropics’’ but that signifies home for those on the colony. ‘‘Now just have a look at this machine,’’ says the officer. The exact precision of the apparatus, which is known as ‘‘the Designer’’ (though ‘‘things sometimes go wrong, of course’’) is seen by the officer as a direct communication of the incontrovertible judgment and sentence.≤π His pride in this contraption of torture appears to the explorer outdated and horrifying, as if the pronouncement of mechanized justice belonged to some past era or to a dreaded future. The explorer is forced to witness the form of justice being carried out in the colony. In many ways, we can see that Kafka shows how life in the penal colony has attempted to replicate the life of the mother country as legislation and has thereby attempted to exact the sentence of justice most literally as if the body was exactly the paper on which the judgment and sentence were inscribed. ‘‘One of the cog-wheels in the Designer is badly worn,’’ we are told.≤∫ The former Commandant was ‘‘soldier, judge, mechanic, chemist, and draughtsmen’’ for the machine.≤Ω If Kafka already pointed out the demetaphorization that had occurred here, it was because of both the literal inscription of the sentence on the prisoner, but also because of the loss of this former Commandant and the idea of home embodied within him that the officer cannot mourn. As a settler carrying out the work of the homeland, the officer does not want to let the idea of home, and the sense of community associated with it, disappear. And yet the only solution to such a melancholic state is to seek the judgment of the explorer; when this is refused, he seeks the judgment of the lost Commandant by lying in the Designer itself and suffering its inscription, ‘‘Be Just.’’ Hatoum’s rendition of the mouli-julienne is jarring precisely because it is the image of home and domesticity that is made violent. As if moving to a Vichian stage of the giant, Hatoum shows the way in which the rough justice of colonial heroes is visited in the domestic sphere to make all home, and the forms of sovereign rule and safety associated with it,

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the source of discomfort. The penal colony is quite literally domesticated, it is made immane and ghastly, as if the absorption of such violence would always make comfort an impossibility. If Hatoum makes the entire world into a foreign land, it is to cause us to feel the violent technology of the ideology of home, which puts the very existence of the structure of humanitas into doubt. Metaphor no longer functions as a way out of this, in spite of the gigantism—in fact, we have something more of the literal fragment that insists on breaking down wholeness. Similarly, her installation/video works like Corps étranger (foreign body, strange body) play with the idea of the foreigner and the foreign object by arousing physical discomfort. Introducing cameras (foreign objects) into bodily cavities, the most intimate spaces of the human (its core nature) are themselves made utterly foreign, banalized, turned inside out, and make the human strange to itself. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes of experiencing illness, and then organ transplants, ‘‘ ‘I’ ends up being no more than a tenuous thread—from pain to pain, strangeness to strangeness.’’≥≠ In such a world of interior threat and sensory pain that divides rather than connects, it becomes less clear what it might mean to be the exiled citizen, part of a multitude, fanatical or cultivated. But it is this very sense of liminality and demetaphorization that forms the unidentifiable relation, or at least the living with the other with whom no identification can take place. Senses are, then, the very matter of sharing and division, attraction and repulsion, and the decision to be part of a world in which there is no reason for ‘‘we’’ imagined through an idea or an ‘‘as if,’’ but rather a ‘‘we’’ imagined through sensual labor. Commonality can only be found, then, as it is sensed, as coming undone through nonidentification, demetaphorization, unworking, and the sense of the liminal. The sight of the face, the reception of a letter, or participation in a conversation thus would not be an opening to familiarity and dialogue as the constitution of community, but rather the shared sense of belonging as enslavement and nonbelonging.≥∞

Notes 1. Shaftesbury, ‘‘A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm to My Lord,’’ in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 1:45. While Characteristics was first published in 1711, the 1790 edition will be used for citation. Lawrence Klein’s edition

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of Characteristics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) is perhaps the most scholarly, but does not include all images. The Oxford English Dictionary credits Shaftesbury with the first use of ‘‘fanaticism,’’ although fanatic was in use considerably earlier. The etymology is from fanum—a temple or temple ground. 2. Ibid., 1:12. 3. Ibid. 4. Shaftesbury, ‘‘Sensus Communis, An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour in a Letter to a Friend,’’ in Characteristics, 1:101. 5. Ibid., 1:97. 6. Ibid., 1:89. Philip Eyres discusses how Shaftesbury spent five years researching the Stoics, particularly Marcus Aurelius, from 1689 to 1695. See Eyres, Introduction to Characteristicks. 7. Shaftesbury, ‘‘Sensus Communis,’’ 1:63. 8. See, for example, Rand’s inclusion of a translation of ‘‘A Picture of Cebes,’’ found in Shaftesbury’s papers. Shaftesbury, ‘‘A Picture of Cebes,’’ in Second Characters, or The Language of Forms, 63–87. 9. See Shaftesbury Papers, ‘‘Virtuoso-Coppy-Book,’’ Public Record Office, London, 30/24/26/1. For commentary on the images, see Wind, ‘‘Shaftesbury as Patron of Art’’; and Paknadel, ‘‘Shaftesbury’s Illustrations of Characteristics.’’ Philip Eyres’s edition (London: J. J. Tourneisen, 1790) includes the emblems, as does Douglas Den Uyl’s (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001). 10. The most extensive discussion of the aesthetic can be found in Shaftesbury, Second Characters. 11. Shaftesbury, ‘‘Sensus Communis,’’ 1:96. 12. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 1–89, esp. 19–30. 13. Ibid., 27. It is important to Gadamer that both Vico and Shaftesbury work with the Roman, rather than the Greek, tradition of sensus communis, because it was more historically situated in terms of Roman traditions, as distinct from Greek cultivation. Ibid., 22. 14. Ibid., 25. 15. It is for this reason that Srinivas Aravamudan stresses that the giant is not the same as the specter. The Vichian cycles do indeed return, but they do not haunt each other. For one version of the return in the visual, see Modern Art and the Grotesque. 16. Kant, Critique of Judgment, translation by James Creed Meredith, 83. 17. Ibid., 151. 18. It is for this reason that Hannah Arendt chooses the Kantian framework of judgment to help her theorize political novelty, imagination, and ultimately sensus communis and the space of the political. See Lectures on Kant’s Political

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Philosophy. Linda Zerilli has recently drawn attention to the importance of this work in highlighting the distinctiveness of Arendt’s political philosophy from that of Habermas’s or Gadamer’s. See ‘‘ ‘We Feel Our Freedom.’ ’’ 19. See Japaridze, The Kantian Subject, 26. 20. See Abraham and Torok. ‘‘Introjection-Incorporation,’’ 1–16. 21. See, for example, the commentary that he provided for the exhibition famously installed at the Tate Britain gallery for its inaugural show. The catalogue for the exhibition includes Said’s essay. See Hatoum, The Entire World as a Foreign Land. 22. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, 367. 23. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 124. 24. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 144. 25. In this regard, the work of the apparatus, technology, and desire seems profoundly different for film and video. For more on this topic, see Doane, ‘‘The Film’s Time and the Spectator’s Space.’’ 26. Tristan Moyle writes of the Heideggerian sensus communis in terms of language, yet somewhat differently giving a reading that is more shaped by Gadamer. See Heidegger’s Transcendental Aesthetic, 73–82. 27. Kafka, ‘‘In the Penal Settlement,’’ 495. 28. Ibid., 496. 29. Ibid., 497. 30. Nancy, ‘‘L’intrus,’’ 12. 31. Jean-Luc Nancy’s work has been exemplary in this regard, not only his extensive and well-known work on the community, but also his The Sense of the World.

T . J . DEMOS

Dada’s Event: Paris, 1921 The ‘‘1921 Dada Season’’ opened in April with a visit to the courtyard of St.-Julien-le-Pauvre, the thirteenth-century church located directly across the Seine from Notre Dame de Paris. The destination was perfect for the Paris Dadaists, including Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Francis Picabia, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Tristan Tzara, who wished ‘‘to set right the incompetence of suspicious guides’’ and lead a series of ‘‘excursions and visits’’ to places that had ‘‘no reason to exist,’’ as explained in the flyer and public invitation published in several newspapers to announce the visit. ‘‘It’s wrong to insist on the picturesque (lycée Janson-de-Sailly), historical interest (Mont Blanc), and sentimental value (the Morgue).’’∞ Only areas considered not picturesque, nonhistorical—or at least not conventionally historical—and unsentimental would qualify for Dadaist tours, beginning with St.Julien’s abandoned courtyard, which—although it was situated next to the oldest standing church in Paris—existed in a state of disrepair and was then mistreated as a garbage dump by residents of the fifth arrondissement. Other than the series of provocative phrases that floated around the announcement’s surface in diagonal and upside-down positions—such as ‘‘Wash your breasts like your gloves!’’ ‘‘One must cut one’s nose like one’s hair!’’ ‘‘Property is the luxury of the poor—Be Dirty!’’—and a listing of proposed future visits (which would in fact never be carried out), including Le Musée du Louvre, the park at Buttes Chaumont, Gare Saint-Lazare, Mont du Petit Cadenas, and Canal de L’Ourcq, there was no further information on what was planned.

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It would be easy to view the visit to St.-Julien—which did take place as planned, for the most part—as a precursor to later and more familiar artistic forays into public space, such as the surrealist excursions to flea markets and covered arcades or the situationist dérives. But such an approach would be only partly justified; the visit to St.-Julien was merely a tentative and somewhat inarticulate dry run to those later experiments in collective walking, lacking the theories of psychoanalysis, cultural geography, and urbanism that would come to frame them. Termed a Dada ‘‘event’’ by Breton, the visit inaugurated a new form of practice in 1921, one that has received little attention to date, despite its rich legacy. This low profile undoubtedly owes to the fact that the activity fell far outside of recognizable artistic conventions at the time. Consequently, it was largely ignored by its contemporaries and generated little discussion in its immediate aftermath (other than the few bemused reports in local newspapers well practiced in sensationalizing Dada’s succès de scandale). Owing to the fact that the visit left no significant artistic objects that could feed the market or be analyzed by art historians (except for the flyer and the few banal photographs of the event), it was destined to oblivion. Were the visit to St.-Julien to occur today, it would do so within an art world saturated with experimental practices venturing into public space. Think of Andrea Fraser’s experimental docent tours of museums, or Christine Hill’s alternative walks around New York City (Tourguide? 1999), or Martha Rosler’s guided visit to the Frieze Art Fair in 2005, which figure as merely three examples among hundreds we could reference.≤ By mirroring everyday activities and institutions—from commercial businesses to theatrical productions to governmental services—these practices privilege the creation of social events over the production of art objects for contemplation. They do so most commonly, as is well understood by now, to critique the false autonomy of art, which is shown to be fully immersed within capitalist institutions, and to create spaces of sociability different from those enmeshed within a reality perceived to be dominated by commercial spectacle and its reified social relations. Such socially engaged practice—the discourse around which has recently been energized by the reception of French curator Nicholas Bourriaud’s text Relational Aesthetics—has grown in prominence over the last fifteen years, to the point where it can now rightly claim to be among the most dominant forms of contemporary art. This, despite criticism that its

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proponents often overlook prior historical models, such as Fluxus and conceptual art, that similarly dissolved the barriers between art and life to critical effect. The earliest examples of avant-garde practice that transgressed the domain of art and crossed over into social space, however, occurred within Dada. Its event-based form consequently becomes newly visible in relation to contemporary practices and their substantial critical-theoretical reception. Not only have these developments made the historical consideration of their antecedents increasingly significant today; there also remain important lessons for contemporary art to be discovered in Dada, particularly in terms of how it intertwined aesthetics and politics. In ‘‘Artificial Hells,’’ an essay written in May of 1921, Breton explains that while he doesn’t know who had the idea of the first Dada ‘‘event,’’ its origins must be traced to the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich—the experimental performances of Hugo Ball and the simultaneous poems of Tzara come to mind—and, more locally, to the poetry readings of Guillaume Apollinaire, Aragon, Breton, Blaise Cendrars, Phillipe Soupault, and Pierre Reverdy that were performed in Paris around 1919. Delivered in ‘‘one hall or another to the same audience, who invariably applauded,’’ these readings were increasingly met with a ‘‘profound boredom,’’ invariably ending in the ‘‘bewildered public’s incomprehension.’’ This desperate situation led to the favorable welcoming of Dada in Paris, which ‘‘promised lively polemics and large audiences.’’≥ Tzara, who arrived in Paris on January 22, 1920, gave the necessary spark to the movement, inaugurating the Paris chapter of Dada the following evening with a performance in which, instead of reciting a poem as announced, the Romanian provocateur read a political article while an electric bell rang loudly in the background, drowning out his voice. Tzara’s commitment to the critique of language’s communicative functions catalyzed Paris Dada; but the new terms of the Dada event that developed the following year, which privileged moral conviction over such negative aesthetics, would threaten the movement’s demise. In contrast to those Dadaist spectacles, which represented a migration of Zurich cabaret to Paris and were largely engineered by Tzara and Picabia, the Dadaist event ‘‘requires an almost total change of viewpoint [from previous Dadaist activities] if we are to see it accurately.’’∂ Organized collectively, the event was constituted above all by the social

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experience of the dissolution of the boundary between art and life, a dissolution that also led to the interpenetration of aesthetics and politics. Dada’s event, however, never had time to develop fully as an artistic paradigm; rather, it figured as an experimental modeling of a new kind of activity, one that has only recently come to fruition with the trend toward social engagement within recent art (though it still might be added to the list of Dada’s major contributions to modern art, including the ready-made, montage, and performance∑). While surely prefigured by Dadaist performance—with its embrace of spontaneity, refusal of representational clarity, attack on the transparency of language, and disturbance of the conventional modes of reception and distribution— the event is irreducible to it, entailing, above all, an escape from the cabaret. One motivation behind the event’s new development was the perceived loss of Dada’s shocking edge by 1921, felt not just by critics but by the participants themselves.∏ Although Dada’s transplantation to Paris in early 1920 had clearly done much to revolutionize existing artistic practice in France—raucous manifesto-reading replaced genteel poetry recitals, rebellious publics filled previously silent auditoriums—Breton was nevertheless disappointed soon after because the movement quickly succumbed to routine. Dadaist performances were ‘‘patterned after cabaret shows,’’ yet the lack of creative innovation eventually left its practitioners ‘‘discontented, hardly proud of the pitiful carnival ruses’’ they had employed to attract audiences. Breton noted that ‘‘the general scandal they provoked was the only benefit’’ the Dadaists reaped, ‘‘but even this was increasingly unable to hide the poverty of the means used, which moreover were pretty much the same every time.’’ These means had now become ‘‘stereotyped, ossified.’’π The solution, proposed by Breton’s reinvention of Dada through the concept of the event, was to break out of the theater and enter everyday life: ‘‘We imagined guiding our public to places in which we could hold their attention better than in a theater, because the very fact of going there entails a certain goodwill on their part.’’∫ Connected to this desire to escape the familiar and stultifying institutions of its theatrical performances was Breton’s additional aim (one not widely held by the group) to move Dadaist practice beyond its familiar nihilism and negativity: ‘‘Last year, Dada activity remained wholly artistic (or anti-artistic, if one

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prefers—I don’t distinguish between the two). This year, Dada proposes to raise the debate and take the discussion on moral grounds.’’Ω Breton’s surprising announcement, however, failed to elaborate fully on the new moral program of Dada. In relation to the St.-Julien visit, one might surmise that Dada was moving against Catholicism in particular, or religion in general, undertaking a radically secular ethics to direct the movement’s familiar nihilism toward a positive set of beliefs; yet nothing that happened or was said at St.-Julien indicates such a direction or offers any other clear explanation of Breton’s remarks.∞≠ What occurred at St.-Julien, over the course of an hour and a half in the pouring rain, was a fairly familiar repertoire of Dadaist pranks, whose schematic details have been culled from several fragmentary reports. First were the strident declarations of Breton and Tzara, representing the more or less expected Dada-inflected aspersions cast at the onlookers (Breton: ‘‘Do you think that we have talent, that we are bound to some success other than the scandal that you have made of us? We can imagine the worst vulgarities, you always find us an excuse. But you say one thing well: we will never amount to anything—but neither will you!’’; Tzara: ‘‘Drink some beer, follow a regular life and become a grandfather. I have a horror of that. The horror is horrible!’’∞∞) Next came Ribemont-Dessaignes, who performed as a baffling tour guide, inexplicably reading entries at random from a Larousse dictionary as he approached various columns and sculptures on the church’s exterior. Said Breton, ‘‘[The rain] kept us from putting into action several of our ideas, among them an auction of abstractions that might have been sensational’’; on this, unfortunately, he fails to elucidate.∞≤ One explanation for the vagueness of the event’s ‘‘moral grounds’’ is that the St.-Julien visit occurred on April 14—that is, a month before Breton’s written report on these activities in ‘‘Artificial Hells’’ (just after the Barrès trial). In other words, the visit may have figured as an early experiment, preceding the event’s full conceptualization by Breton; if this is the case, it may have failed to substantiate the moral claims that were made for it the following month. Perhaps it is for this reason—that the objectives of the St.-Julien visit had not yet been defined—that it resulted in disappointment, at least for Breton. Of the visit to St.-Julien, Breton would later recall ‘‘the laborious nullity of the speeches, delivered in a tone that strove to be provocative.’’ He lamented, ‘‘Moving

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from auditorium to the open air was not enough to get us away from the ‘Dada’ cliché.’’∞≥ Sealing its failure, paradoxically, was its popular success: ‘‘One or two hundred onlookers were huddled there, silent under their umbrellas to the point that we wondered whether Dada was ready to disappear, following a famous axiom we often invoked: ‘A successful man, or simply one who is no longer attacked, is a dead man.’ ’’∞∂ Still, one could argue conversely that the event was neither a failure for its lack of a clearly articulated moral program, nor a success for its rather phenomenal popularity; for accepting either conclusion surrenders a more nuanced comprehension of the event’s significance. That Breton was unsatisfied with the outcomes of the visit—it neither provoked its onlookers sufficiently nor transcended the cliché of Dadaist performance—should not overshadow the promise of its radical gesture: to dissolve the division between the life of art and the art of life. It is in this sense that the Dada event, rather than existing as either historical anomaly or failed experiment, can be seen to embody what Jacques Rancière has termed ‘‘the aesthetic regime,’’ which, for him, defines the logic fundamental to modern art.∞∑ This logic comprises art’s twofold promesse de bonheur—of both a new world of aesthetic experience and a new life for individuals and community. From modern art’s claims for both aesthetic autonomy and political engagement—what represents its fundamental antinomy—unfold the numerous negotiations of avantgarde positions, from the most hermetically sealed forms of abstraction that nevertheless maintain utopian social hopes, to the most politically activist practices that still rely on a form of autonomy that constitutes their difference from everyday life.∞∏ The productive aspect of the Dada event is that it raises this contradiction to a new historical intensity, refusing to resolve it one way or the other. Breton’s refusal to distinguish between the artistic and anti-artistic does not mean that the event did not differentiate between the artistic and the nonartistic; although the Dada event critically blurred these categories, the transgressive nature of its strategy depended on the maintenance of the categories, even if they emerged altered in the process. In addition to situating Dada within an expansive historical paradigm, Rancière’s view of aesthetics reveals the significance of viewing the event as a model of the ‘‘heterogeneous sensible’’—what Rancière defines as art’s irreducible state of plurality as both a form of aesthetics and of politics. This significance is not to be found in reducing Dada simply to

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art or non-art; in this sense, the narratives of Dada that stress either its escape from artistic conventions (acceding to the social processes of everyday life) or its aestheticization of the world (through its generalized theatricalization) appear insufficient.∞π Rather, it is by sustaining and exploiting the tension between art and life that the Dada event, in my view, acquires its moral cast—that is, what Rancière would call its politics: ‘‘its way of producing its own politics, proposing to politics rearrangements of its space, reconfiguring art as a political issue, or asserting itself as true politics.’’∞∫ More than merely coupling two distinct elements—joining art and life, and advancing an ethical impulse— the event realizes its ‘‘moral directions’’ by both transgressing and perpetuating the division between aesthetic autonomy and social practice. In this sense, the visit to St.-Julien can be deemed successful. The visit to St.-Julien was thus neither merely a mimicry of a guided tour, nor simply a parody of it, but rather both and neither: it punctured the wall between artistic performance and social process, resulting in a new kind of assertion of art’s autonomy—not as a self-contained ideal realm of aesthetic experience, but rather as an autonomous form of social experience.∞Ω The Dada event consequently unleashed several effects: its artistic practice opened up a creative zone of possibility within everyday life, where its accepted rules were challenged (suggesting the potential for different forms of life, modes of socialization, and types of discourse, while implicitly rejecting established conventions); and its social procedures reinvented its artistic practice through its very hybridization (thereby challenging the repetitions and the suppression of innovation within Dada). In addition, following the abandonment of traditional artistic venues came the experimental rezoning of public space as one of ‘‘dissensus,’’ to use another of Rancière’s key terms. This meant not simply creating an arena of dissent that would function as the opposite of consensus—whose false unity, constituted by the expulsion of social antagonism, the Dadaists certainly attacked. It also meant a ‘‘recomposition of the landscape of the visible’’—that is, what can be said where, when, and by whom—entailing a refusal of the normative conditions by which social life is reproduced.≤≠ The second major ‘‘event’’ of the 1921 Dada season was the public trial of journalist and politician Maurice Barrès. As Breton later explained, the trial was motivated by the quest ‘‘to determine the extent to which a

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man could be held accountable if his will to power led him to champion conformist values that diametrically opposed the ideas of his youth.’’ In the case of Barrès, ‘‘how did the author of Un homme libre become the propagandist for the right-wing Echo de Paris? If there was a betrayal, what were the stakes? And what recourse did one have against them?’’≤∞ In his earlier life, Barrès represented the paragon of anarchist individualism, authoring the trilogy Le culte du moi (1880–91), as well as L’ennemi des lois (1892), which celebrated personal liberty over moral conventions (Breton, Éluard, and Soupault courted him as late as early 1921≤≤ —and indeed Barrès performed quite well in a recent Littérature poll that rated him favorably≤≥). But Barrès later transformed into a reactionary conservative, joining the nationalist Cult of the Dead (who elevated warfare to mythic status) and serving as president of the Ligue des patriotes. He was understood to have contributed to the offensive culture of nationalism, xenophobia, and militarism during the Third Republic’s period of political backlash, which encompassed continued patriotic reprisals against Germany, ongoing racist attacks on immigrants, and the antidemocratic machinations of Charles Maurras’s L’action française to restore the hereditary French monarchy. The admirable status earned in his early life made his subsequent political turnabout all the more condemnable for the Dadaists. Barrès was consequently charged by the Dadaists with committing an attack on ‘‘the security of the mind.’’ Advertised in advance in several newspapers, the trial took place in the Salle des Sociétés savantes on May 13. Aragon and Soupault played defense attorneys, Ribemont-Dessaignes acted as prosecution council, and Breton presided as judge and president of the tribunal. The Dadaists ‘‘subpoenaed’’ witnesses, and twelve members of the public, solicited in advance, would compose the jury. All servants of the court dressed in the official ceremonial outfits of white blouses and berets, which were the standard dress in the actual hearings at the Palais de justice, which Breton had attended to study the procedural aspects of litigation in advance of the mock trial. The defendant Barrès was invited but unable to attend, as he was already committed to a prior engagement in Aix-en-Provence, where he was to discuss ‘‘The French Soul during the War.’’ In lieu of the man, a mannequin sat in his place, displaying the author’s signature moustache. For Breton, according to his biographer, ‘‘this was no parody, but the real thing—or as close as his lack of judicial authority would allow.’’≤∂

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On the heels of the visit to St.-Julien, the Barrès trial advanced the creative re-zoning of the spaces of art and life and, consequently, pushed further the moral directions of the movement—although not owing to the overt ethical content of its trial.≤∑ The Barrès event became political inasmuch as it created an opening for disagreement and renegotiated the institutions that organize social life. In other words, it was the formal process by which the defendant was judged that constituted the trial’s political nature that matters here, not the judgment itself, more on which below. As with the St.-Julien visit, the Barrès trial was neither a parody nor a straightforward mimicry of its real-life model: instead, it represented a further destabilization of the boundary between the sites and institutional procedures of socio-legal discourse and artistic practice. This erosion of categories between art and life represented the extremely experimental aspect of the trial. On the one hand, its artistic realization borrowed from the institutions of litigation in order to scrutinize a writer’s political vicissitudes, thereby joining aesthetic to ethical judgment and reinforcing it with (pretend) legal authority.≤∏ This produced an early example—excessive and preposterous—of what would later be termed the ‘‘aesthetics of administration’’ within the context of conceptual art.≤π The trial’s unconventional mixture of categories and conventions was such that it rejected the claim that artistic practice is merely aesthetic, whether in terms of the autonomy of pure art (as in abstraction) or that of an art of total nonsense (as in earlier Dada). On the other hand, it transferred the forms of aesthetic creativity into legal affairs, so that an intellectual’s political developments and ensuing contradictions could be publicly debated and the offender held accountable within an unconventional courtroom that was sui generis. This autonomy of art’s form of life was precisely what the Dada event achieved, and as such it represented both a critique of real social processes and an attempt to suggest alternatives, even if these were whimsical and unconventional.≤∫ One should note that, according to Rancière’s argument, the aesthetic regime introduces a continuity between art and politics, such that aesthetics exceeds the realm of art by endowing the political world with visible forms. Yet the aestheticization of politics is not by necessity a recipe for totalitarianism, as Walter Benjamin would famously warn later in the context of Nazi fascism. Rather, the aestheticization of politics represents ‘‘the assertion of the aesthetic dimension as inherent

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ˇ zek glosses Rancière.≤Ω in any radical emancipatory politics,’’ as Slavoj Ziˇ Embodying its own radical politics as a ‘‘heterogeneous sensible’’ zone between art and life, the Barrès trial interrupted the otherwise rational administration and regimentation of social processes within public space—what Rancière terms the ‘‘police function,’’ according to which every individual is clearly categorized and carefully distributed within the social and political machinery in order to advance its uninterrupted reproduction. Because the trial represented a staging of disagreement— a questioning, even, of its own function—it became, by extension, a trial over whether the trial form was adequate to address Dadaist concerns. The Barrès trial was no premonition of the coming Stalinist show trials of artists in the Soviet Union, which extended, rather than disrupted, the police function, projecting it into the artistic arena with deathly results. That the Dadaist event was a mock trial—in other words, that it maintained its aesthetic distance from the real thing—kept the game partly within an aesthetic register. While the jury pronounced Barrès guilty as charged and sentenced him to twenty years of hard labor (short of the death penalty Breton desired), he would never serve a day. Rancière’s insights regarding the aesthetics of politics are also relevant to the concerns of socially based contemporary art. In particular, they substantiate Bourriaud’s argument when, responding to critics who point out the practical ineffectuality of his project, he suggests that what is often overlooked in criticism of relational aesthetics is the fact ‘‘that the content of these artistic proposals has to be judged in a formal way: in relation to art history, and bearing in mind the political value of forms (what I call the ‘criterion of co-existence’ . . . ).’’≥≠ The ‘‘political value of forms’’ parallels Rancière’s notion that art posits a form of life: that is, the aesthetics of politics—which, in the case of Dada, would represent both its ‘‘redistribution of the sensible’’ via the undoing of the division between art and life and its modeling of an experimental form of social relations based on the public expression of division and dissent—refuses to resolve the antinomy between aesthetics and politics, instead keeping both in play. One offense that the Dada event could not be accused of committing is the creation of spaces of ‘‘conviviality,’’ which points to one major difference between Dada and certain modes of contemporary relational art (though not other forms of socially engaged art that give expression to dissent). Building such ‘‘microtopias of community,’’ recent relational

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aesthetics, according to Bourriaud, has yearned to enact a disalienating rapprochement of self and other in order to escape the ‘‘general reification’’ that reflects the ‘‘final stage in the transformation to the ‘Society of the Spectacle.’ ’’≥∞ He argues that the relational art he supports carves out ‘‘social interstices’’ within the capitalist field: ‘‘It creates free areas, and time spans whose rhythm contrasts with those structuring everyday life, and it encourages an inter-human commerce that differs from the ‘communication zones’ that are imposed upon us.’’≥≤ While this goal seems worthy for its attempt at building alternatives to a social reality molded by advanced capitalism, it nevertheless carries its own risks, insofar as it relies on a notion of community defined as social fusion, where convivial agreement drives out the antagonism that is, for others, the very basis of democratic process.≥≥ By eliminating the visibility of social exclusion and the signs of political inequality and economic injustice, relational aesthetics—at least as elaborated by Bourriaud≥∂ —proposes, at its worst, an imaginary world of fantasy, where aestheticism tips into the unacceptable escapism of ‘‘convivial’’ niceness.≥∑ This one-sidedness has similarly become an emerging problem with activist-inspired practice that discounts all aesthetic criteria, rejecting as irrelevant the consideration of how visible forms might advance social and political objectives; its ethical commitments, according to Claire Bishop, paradoxically parallel a counterproductive retreat from the politicization that ensues from exploiting the relation between art and life.≥∏ Herein is the lesson of Dada’s model for contemporary art: the event’s political force is generated by placing aesthetics and politics in a productive tension, where neither term eclipses the other one. By placing aesthetics and politics in relation, Dada joined dissensus to dissent and the redistribution of the sensible to the expression of social and political antagonism. Dadaist dissent, of course, pursued goals converse to those of relational aesthetics, even while attacking many of the same enemies in their earlier states of historical development, such as commercial appearance, administered social relations, and manufactured consumption. In addition, the Dadaists directed their critical assaults against the social conditions of national unity, responding directly to the conservative retour à l’ordre following World War I. According to Breton, ‘‘We had gotten away from the war, that much was certain. But what we couldn’t get away from was the ‘brain washing’ that for four years had been turning men—who asked only to live and (with rare

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exceptions) get along with their neighbors—into frenzied and fanatical creatures who not only did their masters’ bidding, but could also be ruthlessly decimated.’’≥π The combating of such social docility explains the initial objectives of Paris Dada—to provoke the audience to the point of rebellious transgression of social etiquette, to challenge the conventional active performer–passive audience relationship, to contest the instrumentalized language of politics and the marketplace, and to assault the European Enlightenment logic that was perceived to have led to the catastrophe of world war in the first place. The Dada trial strove to counter precisely the social conditions that were the cause and the consequence of Barrès’s social and political conformity. It did so first by unleashing the expression of political difference between Dada and its critics, inviting those detractors of Dada to the trial proceedings (such as one Marguerite E. Valette, who, writing under the pseudonym Mme. Rachilde, had published scathing, nationalist-inspired critiques of the movement in the arts and culture daily Comoedia≥∫). Second, the trial’s format provided a template by which the disagreements between Dadaists could be systematically voiced and publicly expressed—not so much to spectacularize them as sensationalist entertainment (though this appeared to be the attraction for Tzara) but rather, at least for Breton, to allow the voicing of political and artistic differences to enter into the social domain and thereby enact a viable alternative to conventional social relations constituted by the repressive expulsion of difference.≥Ω Clearly, the very idea of the postwar indictment of a heroic French patriot would draw the expected reactionary response, and the most extreme xenophobic forms of nationalist indignation were indeed aired in the anti-Dada French press following the Barrès trial.∂≠ The eruption of political opposition to Dada also occurred at one dramatic moment during the trial, when Benjamin Péret, dressed in a German uniform and wearing a gas mask, appeared on stage to perform a parody of the culturally sacrosanct ‘‘unknown soldier.’’ He yelled out some lines in German before goose-stepping out of the theater, barely avoiding the charge of the shocked patriots in the crowd who replied by breaking into song, opposing the Dadaist blasphemy with ‘‘La Marseillaise.’’ Of greater interest, however, is the less expected divisions expressed during and within the trial between the organizers themselves, and particularly during Tzara’s testimony, when he was questioned by Breton.

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breton: What do you know of Maurice Barrès? tzara: Nothing. breton: You have nothing to testify? tzara: Yes, I do. breton: What? tzara: Maurice Barrès is for me the most unlikable man that I’ve met in my literary career; the greatest rogue that I’ve met in my poetic career; the biggest swine I’ve met in my political career; the greatest scoundrel which Europe has produced since Napoleon.∂∞

The dialogue reads as a provocative conflict between, on the one hand, Tzara’s performance of contradiction (his commitment to which had been infamously established in his 1918 Dada manifesto, which was of catalytic importance to the formation of Paris Dada), and on the other, Breton’s wish to consider the political content of Barrès’s career in a transparent language modeled on legal discourse. The exchange encapsulated the dispute between Tzara’s politics of representation and Breton’s representation of politics—what must be seen as a specific version of the larger conflict between art and non-art that would eventually lead to the rupture of Paris Dada. But at the trial, aesthetics and politics combined explosively in a staging of disagreement that entailed the refusal of social unity and the explicit questioning of Dada’s capacity to render justice—thus a questioning of the trial form from within the trial itself. The Barrès trial staged social and political difference as a fundamental principle of Dada’s collective definition (even if it was not maintained for long): ‘‘No one has made any attempt to have Dada account for its will not to be considered a school. People love to insist on the words group, ringleader, and discipline. They even go so far as to claim that, in the guise of extolling individuality, Dada constitutes a real danger to it, without stopping to notice that we are especially bound together by our differences.’’∂≤ Breton’s view is corroborated by the inclusion of Tzara in the trial, who flat-out rejected its premises, claiming while on the stand that he had ‘‘no confidence in justice, even if this justice is delivered by Dada,’’ before insulting the participants: ‘‘You’ll agree with me, monsieur le president, that we are all only a bunch of bastards and that the question of little differences—whether greater or smaller bastards—has no importance.’’∂≥ Breton would only agree to disagree: ‘‘Our interest in this

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problem [of the Barrès case] lay in the possibility of interpreting it variously, and that we were inclined to nothing so little as cohesion.’’∂∂ Whereas Tzara disparaged logic to embrace paradox, Breton’s Act d’accusation functioned as a rejoinder to Tzara’s nihilism in advance: ‘‘The business of the generation that preceded ours was the passage from certainty to doubt: now it is a matter of passing from doubt to negation without losing all moral worth.’’∂∑ Although Tzara clearly thought himself the more radical of the two, each position, on its own, was equally conservative: Tzara’s because it would not relinquish the autonomy of his own aestheticist position, entailing the complete disengagement with the world that was the end point of his totalizing negativity; and Breton’s for its correlative disregard for the element of aesthetic play within the realization of the trial, which, without its detractors, would risk transforming the event’s politics into the moralistic. Tzara finished his testimony by singing a nonsensical song and then stepped down from the witness chair and left the stage, slamming the door behind him. This exit would represent the end of the relay between art and life that Paris Dada pursued in its provocative complexity for less than a year. Answering Tzara’s aestheticist solipsism, Breton beat his own retreat into politics by assembling the Congrès de Paris, which, while promising to formulate collaboratively and earnestly—without Dada’s ironic reflexivity—the future path of contemporary art, abandoned the Dada event’s goal of operating in the interstice between artistic process and social practice. If Breton ended up unsatisfied with the results of the Barrès trial and in turn with Dada in general, which propelled him toward the Dada congress, perhaps it was because he had overestimated the capacity for artistic practice to achieve its political ends. This outcome again rings true with Rancière’s scenario: ‘‘Aesthetic art promises a political accomplishment that it cannot satisfy, and thrives on that ambiguity. That is why those who want to isolate it from politics are somewhat beside the point. It is also why those who want it to fulfill its political promise are condemned to a certain melancholy.’’∂∏ Not until the formation of surrealism a few years later, with its Bureau of Surrealist Research and further strolls through Paris, would the ambiguity and promise of the Dada event be imagined anew.

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Notes 1. The Lycée Janson-de-Sailly represented the high ground of the Parisian bourgeoisie; Mont Blanc is the tallest and most famous mountain in the French Alps. 2. See the lists in Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics; Bishop, ‘‘The Social Turn’’; Sholette, ‘‘Dark Matter’’; and the recent special issue of Third Text 18, no. 6 (2004), on art and collaboration. 3. Breton, ‘‘Artificial Hells,’’ 137–38 (quote rearranged). On this text and Paris Dada during the 1921 season, see Witkovsky, ‘‘Dada Breton.’’ 4. Breton, Conversations, 53. 5. As David Joselit describes them by way of suggesting the ‘‘diagram’’—the mechanomorphic figures produced in the work of Duchamp and Picabia during the teens—as a further addition. ‘‘Dada’s Diagrams.’’ 6. For Breton, Dada’s reception in Nouvelle Revue Française, and particularly Jacques Rivière’s ‘‘Reconnaissance à Dada’’ [Thanks Be to Dada], ‘‘struck Dada a heavy blow by placing it on the verge of literary acceptance’’ (Breton, Conversations, 47). Also see Francis Picabia’s ‘‘Mr. Picabia Breaks with the Dadas’’: ‘‘The Dada spirit only really existed from 1913 to 1918, an era during which it never stopped evolving and transforming itself. After that time, it became as uninteresting as the output of the École des Beaux-Arts or the static elucubrations offered by the Nouvelle Revue Française and certain members of the Institute’’ (145). Dada, in other words, had become a victim of its own popular acceptance, as if it turned into an accepted wing of the official art institutions of France. Yet Picabia failed to appreciate that Dada, under Breton’s direction, was already in the course of developing its own new tactics. 7. Breton, Conversations, 50–51. 8. Breton, ‘‘Artificial Hells,’’ 140. 9. Ibid. Breton explains further that this moral development had already been initiated in the work of Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, and Jarry. 10. In fact, Picabia, subjected to an ongoing illness and unable to attend, protested against such ‘‘morality’’ in advance: ‘‘All that I hope is that [the visit to St.-Julien] presents no political character—clerical or anti-clerical—because I will absent myself always from participating in such manifestations considering that dada, like an individual, has nothing to do with beliefs, whatever they are.’’ In Hugnet, l’Aventure Dada, 98. 11. These declarations, according to Sanouillet, were improvised. There is no script other than the ‘‘more or less faithful’’ transcriptions made by certain journalists who witnessed the event. See Sanouillet, Dada à Paris, 257. Another part of Breton’s speech is recalled in his ‘‘Artificial Hells,’’ 140. 12. Breton, ‘‘Artificial Hells,’’ 141.

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13. Breton, Conversations, 52. 14. Breton, ‘‘Artificial Hells,’’ 141. 15. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics. The author differentiates the aesthetic regime, which reputedly received its first articulation in Schiller’s 1795 series of letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man, from the ethical and representative regimes that preceded it, according to Rancière’s theoretical model. 16. See Rancière, ‘‘The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes.’’ 17. On Dada’s theatricalization, see Witkovsky, ‘‘Dada Breton’’; on Dada’s entrance into life, see the classic account in Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde. My argument indicates a move from Bürger’s ultimately unsatisfactory account of the avant-garde (for its failed sublation of art and the praxis of life) to Rancière’s view of the sustained tension between aesthetics and politics that constitutes modern art. Bürger appears to acknowledge the limitations of his theory at one point, where he explains the ultimate cancellation of the category of art if it were sublated in life: ‘‘When art and the praxis of life are one, when the praxis is aesthetic and art is practical, art’s purpose can no longer be discovered, because the existence of two distinct spheres (art and the praxis of life) that is constitutive of the concept of purpose or intended use has come to an end’’ (51). He concludes with a moment of speculation that prefigures the theoretical development in Rancière’s aesthetics (in which art is both autonomous from politics, and always already political insofar as it contains the promise of a better world): ‘‘Given the experience of the false sublation of autonomy [owing to the continuation of bourgeois society in which such a sublation can not authentically occur], one will need to ask whether a sublation of the autonomy status can be desirable at all, whether the distance between art and the praxis of life is not a requisite for that free space within which alternatives to what exists become conceivable’’ (54). 18. Rancière, ‘‘The Aesthetic Revolution,’’ 137. I am suggesting a bridge between what Breton termed ‘‘moral’’ and what Rancière terms ‘‘political’’ and thereby resisting the temptation to see the event in relation to Rancière’s denigration of ethics as an organizational system—like political philosophy— that abolishes politics by transforming it into a clearly organized system that divides people into conventionally defined and systematically maintained groups, positions, and functions. The Dada event, as we shall see, achieved just the opposite. 19. See also Rancière, ‘‘The Aesthetic Revolution,’’ 136: ‘‘The ‘autonomy of art’ and the ‘promise of politics’ are not counterposed. The autonomy is the autonomy of experience, not of the work of art.’’ 20. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 45. 21. Breton, Conversations, 53.

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22. In 1919, Breton had asked Barrès to preface the volume Lettres de guerre by Jacques Vaché, and he sent Barrès a complimentary copy of Champs magnétiques in 1920. Soupault and Éluard shared this admiration, even as late as 1921. See Bonnet, L’Affaire Barrès, 15. 23. See ibid., 14. Using a rating system from –25 to +25, with 0 expressing absolute indifference, the results for Barrès’s respectable average of 0.45 were: Aragon 14, Breton 13, Drieu La Rochelle 16, Éluard –1, Fraenkel 9, Péret 4, Ribemont-Dessaignes –23, Soupault 12, and Tzara –25. 24. Breton, Conversations, 156. 25. At this point, Rancière’s differentiation of politics from ethics enables my argument. 26. Breton, Conversations, 53: ‘‘The issues raised—which were of an ethical nature—might of course have interested several others among us, taken individually; but Dada, with its acknowledged bias toward indifference, had absolutely nothing to do with them.’’ 27. See Buchloh, ‘‘Conceptual Art 1962–1969.’’ 28. As Rancière says, in one possible scenario, art’s ‘‘sensorium of autonomy’’ might propose ‘‘the ‘self-sufficiency’ of a collective life that does not rend itself into separate spheres of activities, of a community where art and life, art and politics, life and politics are not severed one from another.’’ ‘‘The Aesthetic Revolution,’’ 136. ˇ zek, ‘‘The Lesson of Rancière,’’ 76. As a historical example of political 29. Ziˇ ˇ zek recalls the staged performance that reenacted the stormaestheticization, Ziˇ ing of the Winter Palace in Petrograd on the third anniversary of the October Revolution, November 7, 1920, which was coordinated by army officers, avantgarde artists, musicians, and directors, from Malevich to Meyerhold, with soldiers and sailors (some of whom had actually participated in the original events) playing themselves. He repeats Russian formalist theoretician Viktor Shklovski’s assertion that ‘‘some kind of elemental process is taking place where the living fabric of life is being transformed into the theatrical’’ (77–78). But it is questionable whether this event was not also a show of collectivity that eradicated social difference, replacing ‘‘emancipatory politics’’ with depoliticized spectacle. 30. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 82: ‘‘It would be absurd to judge the social and political content of a relation ‘work’ by purely and simply shedding its aesthetic value, which would be to the liking of those who see in a Tiravanija or Carsten Höller show nothing more than a phonily utopian pantomime, as was not so very long ago being advocated by the champions of a ‘committed’ art, in other words, propagandist art.’’ In other words, aesthetics and politics must be taken into account when considering such practices.

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31. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 9–16. 32. Ibid., 16. 33. See Deutsche, ‘‘Agoraphobia’’ in Evictions; Mouffe, ‘‘For an Agonistic Public Sphere’’; and Bishop, ‘‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.’’ 34. The failure to distinguish between Bourriaud’s theories and the artistic practices he discusses may, however, risk shortsighted dismissals of the work grouped under the term ‘‘relational aesthetics.’’ 35. This is registered in the abundant criticism around relational aesthetics: Beshty, ‘‘Neo-Avantgarde and Service Industry’’; Bishop, ‘‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’’; Foster, ‘‘Arty Party’’; Holmes, ‘‘Interaction in Contemporary Art’’; Scanlan, ‘‘Traffic Control’’; and Wright, ‘‘The Delicate Essence of Collaboration.’’ Bourriaud, however, is not as one-sided as he is sometimes made out to be. Referencing Guattari’s Chaosmosis, Bourriaud proposes a model of subjectivity, for instance, that is an outcome of ‘‘dissensus, of gaps and differences, of alienating operations, it cannot be separated from all the other social relations’’ (92). 36. Bishop, ‘‘The Social Turn.’’ 37. Breton, Conversations, 37–38. 38. See Comoedia, April 16, 1920, 1; and Janine Mileaf and Matthew S. Witkovsky’s discussion of Paris Dada, ‘‘Paris,’’ 352. Breton invited an old communard worker-poet, who was not able to attend. See Bonnet, L’affaire Barrès, 10. 39. On Zurich Dada’s related artistic protest, see my ‘‘Zurich Dada.’’ 40. Examples are quoted in Bonnet, L’affaire Barrès, 91–94: ‘‘So much baseness, villainy, and coarseness in the farce should naturally revolt all those who possess a French soul’’ (La Presse, May 14, 1921); ‘‘It is surely time that one verifies the papers of these people. . . . As to the French Dadaists, if they really do exist, one would do right with a little hydrotherapy’’ (La Justice, May 15, 1921); ‘‘Dada exaggerates. Is the passport of this noisy stranger in order?’’ (Le Matin, May 16, 1921). 41. Bonnet, L’affaire Barrès, 38. 42. Breton, ‘‘For Dada,’’ 56. 43. See Bonnet, L’affaire Barrès, 38. 44. Breton, ‘‘Artificial Hells,’’ 143. 45. From the ‘‘Acte d’accusation,’’ quoted in Bonnet, L’affaire Barrès, 33, and published in Littérature 20 (August 1921). 46. Rancière, ‘‘The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes,’’ 151.

DAVID JOSELIT

Citizen Cursor In 1963, the sociologist William Dobriner described suburbia as a machine for visualizing class difference. Rather than attributing middleclass traits to residence in the suburbs, as many commentators did at midcentury, Dobriner reversed the conventional order of causality by insisting that class identification was primary and that the urban middle classes shared a great deal with their suburban counterparts. What suburban topographies could do more effectively than urban ones, however, was to make class stratification visible. In Class in Suburbia, Dobriner wrote, ‘‘The visibility principle operating within the flat, horizontalized, and relatively simple institutions of the suburbs has brought out in bold relief many of the current features of the middle class. It has been middle class behavior, not necessarily suburban behavior, which has been so fully reported [by other sociologists]. Suburbia has functioned, rather, as a lens to bring into sharp focus many of the germinal variables of the urban middle classes.’’∞ In a move reminiscent of the artist Dan Graham, who in 1978 linked suburbia to voyeuristic exposure by proposing to replace the front façade of a tract house with an enormous wall of glass, Dobriner associates suburban life with visibility.≤ To the widely noted suburban characteristics of middle-class values, homogeneity, geographical remoteness from a city center, and commuting culture he adds the visibility principle, by which ‘‘suburbanites can observe each other’s behavior and general life style far more easily than the central city dweller.’’≥ This simple form of disciplinary voyeurism is supplemented by a further

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order of visualization in which suburban residents are sorted according to the ruthless market segmentation of residential subdivisions. In this way, the minutely differentiated strata within the middle class are diagrammed in the supposedly classless society of the United States. As Dobriner writes, ‘‘Of all the factors which determine where a suburbanite lives, the economic probably plays the most decisive role. The first thing he must decide is his price range. . . . If homogeneity exists, income again probably plays the decisive role. In effect, occupational and income homogeneity becomes a function of another variable—the status and class structure.’’∂ Since the publication of Dobriner’s book, the early twentieth-century model of the suburb as a garden city planned to retain pedestrian scale and village centers has given way to edge cities or exurbs, in which office, retail, and residential subdivisions—rigorously segregated from one another through zoning regulations—encroach on formerly undeveloped green fields in areas convenient to highways and interchanges.∑ This new model of metropolitan growth only accentuates the conditions Dobriner had recognized in more traditional suburbs. As the New York Times reported in 2005, ‘‘relos,’’ the nomadic executives of exurbia who earn their moniker by relocating regularly at the behest of their corporate employers, tend to choose new neighborhoods according to fine distinctions in price: ‘‘Converging on these towns, relos have segregated themselves, less by the old barriers of race, religion and national origin than by age, family status, education and, especially, income. Families with incomes of $100,000 head for subdivisions built entirely of $300,000 houses; those earning $200,000 trade up to subdivisions of $500,000 houses.’’∏ If Dobriner is right in viewing suburban development as a lens for visualizing the fine differentiations within middle-class identity in the United States, then the ostensibly bland—and habitually overlooked— conditions of suburban life would seem an urgent topic for intellectuals, including experts on visuality such as art historians. The importance of acknowledging and understanding such class distinction was amply demonstrated by the American presidential election of 2004, where the divide between urban and suburban populations was widely credited for the stark opposition between so-called red and blue states. Given the disproportionate power of middle-class voters in the United States, it is well worth asking: What kind of political community is produced in the suburbs?π

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The New York Times report on relos offers a chilling initial answer to this question. As is often the case in investigative journalism, a single family, the Links, who resided at the time in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta, serve as protagonists in the article. Jim Link, the father and sole breadwinner, gives a surprisingly frank account of the neighborhood: ‘‘The good thing about it is that it is a very comfortable neighborhood to live in,’’ Mr. Link said. ‘‘These are very homogenous types of groups. You play tennis with them, you have them over to dinner. You go to the same parties.’’ ‘‘But we’re never challenged to learn much about other economic groups,’’ he said. ‘‘When you talk about tennis, guess what? Everybody you play against looks and acts and generally feels like you. It doesn’t give you much perspective. At work, diversity is one of the biggest things we work on.’’∫

As Link’s comments suggest, suburban visibility is not limited to surveillance and social mapping, but also includes the pressure to occupy and embody a rigorously homogeneous ideal image, which is continually mirrored back and policed by neighbors. This is the meaning of ventures such as Martha Stewart’s partnership with the major developer kb Home to license subdivisions whose models are based on her own private residences. As Stewart guilelessly declared in an article announcing the deal, ‘‘ ‘Let’s face it, everybody wants to live in one of my homes. . . . You see one and you don’t want to leave. The idea here is to give a flavor of that in affordable housing.’ ’’Ω But inhabiting a readymade lifestyle requires strict limitations on one’s sensorium, as well as one’s politics. As Jim Link admits, this form of segregation allows one to forget about ‘‘other economic groups.’’ The visibility of the suburban tract is a kind of class apartheid. The distribution of citizens by income (as well as by race and ethnicity) across the landscape of suburbia and exurbia has changed the nature of community in the United States. In her recent history of suburban development, Delores Hayden demonstrates that throughout the twentieth century, government policy and free markets have encouraged a form of development where private communities are established in the absence of the public or civic services normally associated with towns and cities: ‘‘Under fha [Federal Housing Administration], the federal government encouraged private developers to build the house and sell it as if it were a consumer good like a chair or a table, leaving the costs of a sound residential neighborhood (such as sewers and schools)

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to be borne by local taxpayers.’’∞≠ A corollary to such development, which has enabled the kind of sprawl characteristic of the metropolitan United States, is the citizen’s identification not with a local town or city, but rather with a subdivision functioning as a semiautonomous civic entity. In his book Privatopia, Evan McKenzie describes this privatization of local government, in which the affluent withdraw from public life into residential corporations, making regional planning (not to mention more amorphous forms of collective civic identification across class) difficult, if not impossible. Already in 1963, Dobriner had clearly diagnosed this condition. He recognized that the suburbs were much more complex than the sitcom image of upper-middle-class homogeneity and that suburbanites often worked not in the city but in a neighboring suburb. But greater overall suburban diversity did nothing to undermine a sense of community responsibility set adrift: Indeed, the metropolis is a vast tissue of interlaced journey-to-work patterns which carry the area workforce from one political jurisdiction into another— from city to suburb, from suburb to city, from fringe to suburb, from county to county, and so forth. It is certainly significant if the labor force of an area resides in one political jurisdiction and works in another. Yet, in spite of the economic integration of metropolitan areas, it is now apparent that these areas are an unmanageable hodgepodge of fragmented political units. The unfortunate result of the growth of political ‘‘independencies’’ within metropolitan areas has made it extremely difficult to solve area problems.∞∞

The conditions Dobriner describes have only been accentuated with the migration of many corporate headquarters to edge city or exurban locations, close to the residential communities preferred by their executives. It is the kind of person who moves from one political independency to another, belonging to all without fully identifying with any, that I wish to call Citizen Cursor. Like its analogue on the computer screen, Citizen Cursor is characterized by frictionless mobility, possessing the ability to go anywhere with a weightlessness and ambidirectionality worthy of El Lissitzky’s prouns. But the proximate source and subject of this mobility—the human being seated in front of an expensive home appliance—is characterized by stasis.∞≤ Citizen Cursor organizes its fantasy of global citizenship from the safety of a privatized cocoon. She or he is a participant in what Richard Sennett has recently called consuming politics, a term that plays

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on the multiple meanings of consuming, denoting both the purchase of commodities and their disposability, their rapid consumption through use. Sennett sketches a condition where the selling of politicians, like the selling of inanimate products, is rooted in branding, on the one hand, which stimulates the imagination with fantastic ‘‘product’’ associations, and promises of exorbitant potency, on the other, which offers more power than one could ever use, as in his example of MP3 players with a capacity to store and recall songs on a scale beyond human imagination. As a result, political expectations are aroused that are both impractically ambitious and rudderless: fantasies of perpetual change in the absence of specific action. For me the most pertinent observation Sennett makes regarding consuming politics (as well as the new corporate bureaucracies to which it is linked) regards its divorce of power from authority. In the realm of business, this division occurs by outsourcing strategic planning to consulting firms who devise painful reorganization plans without retaining any responsibility—or authority—for their eventual actualization. In the realm of government, such abdication of authority underlies the policies of recent American and British neoliberal regimes that have aggressively shrunk public services, especially for the most vulnerable citizens, while massively centralizing power (and money) in the hands of the affluent.∞≥ It is precisely such a divorce of power from authority or responsibility that manifests itself topographically in suburbia. The fantasmatic power of unlimited mobility within the ‘‘vast tissue of interlaced journey-to-work patterns’’ in American suburbia and exurbia establishes a late-capitalist mode of potency that exists outside any coherent political culture. Instead of a single jurisdiction or a regional authority whose purpose is to coordinate neighboring towns, the suburbs produce an incoherent array of independencies with weak ties to most of their constituents.∞∂ The Citizen Cursor inhabits this landscape, embodying a thoroughly privatized mode of liberty.∞∑ But what does this liberty feel like? This question, as Jacques Rancière teaches us, is far from irrelevant in understanding politics and community. For Rancière, community arises through a particular distribution of the sensible—regimes of visibility and invisibility that produce social positions, or occupations, as the building blocks of shared worlds. Politics itself, which is much rarer and more specific in Rancière’s conception than it is in common usage, erupts out of challenges from outside

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these normative distributions, launched by those who are (as of yet) unauthorized to speak, who have no standing or visibility.∞∏ If there is a politics appropriate to Citizen Cursor (or a politics for assailing Citizen Cursor), it must take measure of the community of sense that renders such a figure intelligible. To this purpose, I have argued that suburbia, the native habitat of Citizen Cursor, is organized according to three types of visibility: (1) being a picture for an other within the surveillance culture of subdivisions; (2) occupying or identifying with a ‘‘type picture’’ through the pressure to manifest an appropriate market-driven lifestyle; and (3) inclusion as an element in the picture of a class through the distribution of housing tracts. In each case, the relation between persons and pictures is central to suburban sociality. But how is this intimate relationship established? What is the nature of the encounter between self and image that brings Citizen Cursor into being? The fantasies of the rich are often useful diagnostic tools. It may be argued that the palatial suburban house of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, constructed on Lake Washington outside Seattle at the reported cost of $30 million, was self-consciously developed as a spatial prototype of the Internet. Though the building’s interiors have not been published, Gates describes them at length in his 1995 biography, The Road Ahead. According to this account, occupants of the building were meant to function literally as cursors: The electronic pin you wear will tell the house who and where you are, and the house will use this information to try to meet and even anticipate your needs—all as unobtrusively as possible. Someday, instead of needing the pin, it might be possible to have a camera system with visual-recognition capabilities, but that’s beyond current technology. When it’s dark outside, the pin will cause a moving zone of light to accompany you through the house. Unoccupied rooms will be unlit. As you walk down the hallway, you might not notice the lights ahead of you gradually coming up to full brightness and the lights behind you fading. Music will move with you, too. It will seem to be everywhere, although in fact, other people in the house will be hearing entirely different music or nothing at all. A movie or the news will be able to follow you around the house, too. If you get a phone call, only the handset nearest you will ring.∞π

Gates’s account of the human cursor, equipped with an ‘‘electronic pin,’’ is striking in its loneliness. The mobile media cocoon projected by

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the ‘‘smart house’’ envelopes one person at a time, who floats through space like a specter—unable, it seems, to sit still long enough to view an entire movie or news broadcast from a single room.∞∫ The light, the entertainment, and the phone—all follow restless inmates around the house, as if in permanent exile, leaving vacated rooms in darkness. Whatever the resident or visitor to Gates’s house does, she or he does alone: music ‘‘will seem to be everywhere, although in fact, other people in the house will be hearing entirely different music or nothing at all.’’ One wonders what would happen if two (or more) people navigated the structure together, causing electronic chaos from the interference of distinct individual tastes. The architecture Gates imagines is mobile and contingent, only nominally reliant on physical space (each Cursor makes his own house), but rigorously solitary. It is consequently no surprise that, for him, even romance may be satisfactorily conducted through technological mediation: The new communications capabilities will make it far easier than it is today to stay in touch with friends and relatives who are geographically distant. Many of us have struggled to keep alive a friendship with someone far away. I used to date a woman who lived in a different city. We spent a lot of time together on e-mail. And we figured out a way we could sort of go to the movies together. We’d find a film that was playing at about the same time in both our cities. We’d drive to our respective theaters, chatting on our cellular phones. We’d watch the movie, and on the way home we’d use our cellular phones again to discuss the show. In the future this sort of ‘‘virtual dating’’ will be better because the movie watching could be combined with a videoconference.∞Ω

The model of ‘‘spending time together on e-mail,’’ in which two persons are joined in textual exchange while physically remote from one another, paradoxically describes the function of physical space in Gates’s house, where humans interact (or fail to interact) as individual cursors, tracing their own private paths. It is an indication of how little this building was meant to accommodate conventional human togetherness that, in 2001, Gates applied for zoning permission to add a bedroom for his third child to a house that already measured 37,000 square feet.≤≠ The privatization of sensory (and sensual) experience that characterizes life as a cursor in Gates’s house is matched by a second and even more insidious form of privatization that runs counter to all myths about the Internet’s inherent democracy: the massive accumulation and

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capitalization of visual resources. Gates started Corbis, which is now a major digital image-licensing firm, or ‘‘the world’s preeminent visual solutions provider,’’ according to the company’s Web site in 2005, as an outgrowth of his efforts to acquire a vast archive of images to play across the digital walls of his house.≤∞ Corbis’s holdings include the famous Bettmann archive and the archive of United Press International (upi), as well as a dozen smaller archives. It also possesses rights to the images of various museum collections, including the Kimball Art Museum, the Barnes Foundation in Merion, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, London’s National Gallery, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.≤≤ In an inadvertent parody of the extraction of natural resources as a form of capital, these images are kept in cold storage in a mine in Pennsylvania, and like coal, they may be considered a ‘‘natural resource’’ in a culture where the media functions as an autonomous ecology. But Gates’s efforts to corner the market on the world’s visual ‘‘commons’’ emerged from his impulse to decorate—to have unlimited images available to haunt his domestic perambulations. Like the great monarchs of the past who endowed their palaces with painting, sculpture, furnishings, and textiles, Gates sought to animate the electronic ‘‘info-walls’’ of his giant suburban house with the image patrimony of the world: ‘‘I will be the first home user for one of the most unusual electronic features of my house. The product is a database of more than a million still images, including photographs and reproductions of paintings. If you’re a guest, you’ll be able to call up portraits of presidents, pictures of sunsets, airplanes, skiing in the Andes, a rare French stamp, the Beatles in 1965, or reproductions of High Renaissance paintings, on screens throughout the house.’’≤≥ In other words, the resident or visitor to Gates’s house will have all of Western culture—high- as well as middlebrow—at their fingertips, from Renaissance paintings to lurid sunsets.≤∂ In Gates’s residence, the encounter staged between persons and pictures realizes a fantasy of pure possession: images glide alongside their masters like servants. They pop up as the nearly unconscious satisfaction of a desire, since, like a good servant or a good dream, the house is designed ‘‘to meet and even anticipate your needs—all as unobtrusively as possible.’’≤∑ In this realm the image functions, as W. J. T. Mitchell has proposed, as a subaltern, while the human master is a lonely potentate

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attended by digital companions.≤∏ This fantasy—which closely resembles that of the Internet—reverses the power relationship presumed in Dobriner’s principle of suburban visibility. In Dobriner’s vision, on the contrary, persons are in thrall to images in at least three ways: (1) via their surveillance by neighbors, (2) through the compulsion to embody lifestyle types, and (3) according to the transparent distribution of households by income and class. We might conclude, then, that Gates’s imperial fantasy of dominion over images serves to reverse, if not quite to conjure away, the more prosaic and disciplinary conditions of humanimage detente that obtain in the ordinary suburban world where his middle-class executive employees might live. But his fantasy is not limited to those who can afford to appropriate vast digital resources for their own pleasure and profit; it has been widely promoted in the context of new work protocols like telecommuting, on the one hand, which make it possible to fuse home and office digitally, and new modes of home entertainment on the other, which endeavor to transform family rooms into multiplexes.≤π The October 1998 issue of House Beautiful, for instance, included a version of Gates’s utopia intended for ordinary middle-class readers: a Digital House for ‘‘the next millennium’’ by New York architects Hariri & Hariri, which was later exhibited in the influential Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Un-Private House (fig. 1). This project, scaled to upper-middle-class incomes, as opposed to the super-rich, and rendered in a chic technomodernism distinct from the updated Northwest lodge idiom of Gates’s digital utopia, is premised on the same three conditions regulating the encounter between persons and pictures. First, it assumes residents who behave like cursors. Second, it is premised on solitary individual activity that implicitly loosens conventional familial ties. And third, it celebrates remote and disembodied forms of sociality. The core of the Digital House is structured like a four-story gridded screen, sheathed in liquid crystal displays inside and out. Significantly, this narrow central armature includes no standard rooms (which are attached as independent volumes to its surfaces) but is instead given over entirely to stairways and ramps, causing the inhabitants to circulate inside the screen, like cursors. According to the architects, rooms for living, cooking, eating, and sleeping would be factory-made and plugged in to the structural spine, ‘‘more like appliances that can be added and exchanged to reflect new domestic situations.’’≤∫ In an earlier project

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1. Hariri & Hariri, The Digital House Project, 1998. Principal façade, computer-generated drawing. ∫ Hariri & Hariri—Architecture.

addressing the same themes, ‘‘The Next House: House for the Next Millenium’’ (1993), the Hariris are more explicit in their preference for circulatory space over conventional rooms: ‘‘The mundane corridors of contemporary construction will be transformed into a network of major transient spaces. . . . They are spaces for contemplation, for physical fitness and spiritual well-being.’’≤Ω The screen at the core of the Digital House, thickened sufficiently to allow human mobility alongside the play of pictures, is precisely such a ‘‘major transient space.’’ The Digital House itself is not aggressively anti-communal, though its three bedrooms are stacked vertically, each adjoining its own study, giving the impression of a hotel crossed with an office building. But the Next House seems positively dismissive of collective life: Our proposal is a decentralized residence. We think that the typical centering of the home on the ‘‘family room’’ will become obsolete in the next millen-

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nium. Soon work, shopping, schooling, and entertainment will all take place at home. We sited the house near an expressway exit; its inhabitants were imagined to be a family of four independent people free from preconceived notions of gender roles and domination, and sexual preference.≥≠

While I’m no fan of ‘‘family values’’ as pandered by social conservatives, this seems a rather bleak account of a ‘‘family,’’ each member of which is poised to jump on the neighboring expressway. By way of compensation, the Hariris put great stock in remote socialization. Just as Bill Gates knew how to enjoy a date over his cell phone, the residents of the Digital House need not limit their social circle according to mere locality. A caption of the House Beautiful article enthuses, ‘‘The kitchen . . . is equipped with a laboratory-long counter for food preparation and snacks. The display wall based on nasa-type liquid-crystal technology would enable the family to prepare a meal with the help of a virtual chef from a favorite restaurant anywhere in the world, and then have dinner with a virtual guest.’’≥∞ While the Digital House (like Gates’s mansion) assumes a built-in alienation from the nearest and dearest, it promiscuously enables connections with those who are far away. The fleshand-blood family gives way to the ‘‘virtual guest.’’ Citizen Cursor oscillates between two modes of interaction among persons and pictures: a disciplinary process of tabulation in which people identify closely with an array of commercially derived lifestyles (suburbia’s principle of visibility) and a frictionless and virtually disembodied form of navigation through pictorial worlds, which is spatialized in Gates’s and the Hariris’ digital architectures. While these perspectives seem to contradict one another, they are structurally linked. Indeed, while I have relied on luxurious domestic follies to theorize the liberatory or navigational relation to pictures, analogous fantasies of mobility are present in the mainstream of middle-class life. Any consumer of decorating magazines or House and Garden Television (hgtv) can attest to the frequency with which recent trends in domestic décor are premised on turning bathrooms into spas and living rooms into the lobbies of boutique hotels.≥≤ We all, it seems, want to imagine ourselves as guests—even when at home. What the tabular and navigational paradigms share is an extreme privatization of social horizons. The tabular does so by narrowing an individual’s identification to, for instance, a homeowner’s associa-

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tion, as opposed to town or regional government, while the navigational accomplishes the same effect through an excessive generalization, whereby one is omnisciently connected to the ‘‘world,’’ but in fact rooted nowhere in particular. Images, it seems, may be tools for lifting citizens from their locales (the locus of politics) and inserting them into supralocal commercial communities—in an instance of Sennett’s consuming politics. The political question thus becomes: How can images be resituated as communal? How can they participate in breaking down the privatization of citizenship? In a 2004 interview, the French artist Pierre Huyghe declared, ‘‘A film is a public space, a common place. It is not a monument, but a space of discussion and action. It’s an ecology.’’≥≥ Huyghe’s suggestion that pictures may become places, and that such places may serve as platforms for collective action, seems a promising strategy for politicizing Citizen Cursor. But how can a film become a space of discussion, let alone of action? Huyghe’s 2004 installation at the Dia Art Center in New York, Streamside Day Follies, attempted such an act of media alchemy (fig. 2).≥∂ At the heart of this work was a single-channel video projection centered on the opening festivities of a planned suburban neighborhood in upstate New York. The videotape was screened within a pavilion constituted from the walls of the gallery in which it was exhibited (or at least, white planar segments which, in their ‘‘receded’’ state, rested close against the gallery walls). These segments were fitted into curvilinear ceiling tracks and, in a kind of architectural parade or procession, they slowly convened from their resting places in three separate galleries to create a five-sided enclosure in the largest space of Dia’s fourth floor. All but one of the corners of this irregular pentagonal space were impassable, causing viewers either to congregate in advance within the precincts of the ad hoc theater or to enter through a single corner. As the wall segments moved away from their resting places, they revealed an iridescent verso (whose subtle glow was visible from the side in their original positions). Where these segments had once rested, faint green line drawings were revealed, like afterimages that had somehow been transferred from the iridescent surfaces recently facing them. The video glow of these greenish surfaces functioned as a metaphor for the projection itself, suggesting an elision of architecture and media (rendered as the two sides of a single plane). Under this interpretation, the pavilion,

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which housed the projection on the one hand, but whose outer walls also signified the infinite play of electronic information, functioned as both the container of moving images and as an edifice made from its planar elements—a kind of spatialization of pictures analogous to Gates’s mansion or the Hariris’ Digital House. If the anti-democratic nature of Citizen Cursor derives in large part from the ideological belief that one can possess images (including selfimages) as private property, then an appropriate political riposte would include inventing ways of sharing or extending the production and reception of images among disparate groups. While the pavilion in Streamside Day Follies, which resembled a tent or a house of cards, was characterized by the destabilized mobility that Dobriner associated with suburbia, its migrating walls behaved very differently from the ‘‘subaltern’’ pictorial surfaces that Gates or the Hariris imagine. In those digital houses, pictures attended people like good servants, whereas in Streamside Day Follies the elements of a nomadic ‘‘theater’’ herded individuals into an intimate enclosure where they had to stand or sit in close proximity to watch a film. While it may not be possible to call this ad hoc group a public, or even a community, Huyghe made anonymous spectators conscious of the possibility of group identification by sweeping them out of their private reverie as museum-goers and into physical relation with one another. Streamside Day Follies makes the constitution of its audience into an event. The video at the core of Huyghe’s installation centered on a festival, designed and initiated by the artist (but not closely scripted by him), to commemorate the opening of an actual suburban community that, like so many such places, is artificially sited on an area of land scraped out from the surrounding forest. It would be easy for an artist (and perhaps even easier for a foreign artist like Huyghe) to stage and film such an event with great condescension. But while the tape has its satirical moments, it also conveys a serious respect for the emotional current that runs through it. The video is organized according to two overlapping rhetorical axes: first, a series of oppositions between ‘‘virgin’’ forest and the housing development that supplants it; and second, the procession of events staged as the celebration itself. Huyghe makes no effort to veil his pseudoanthropological nature/culture distinctions: the first section of the tape opens with idyllic shots of landscape and forest animals and ends by showing a deer wander into a house under construction like

2. Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day Follies, 2003. Installation, Dia: Chelsea. 5 moving walls; digital video projection from film and video transfers, 26 minutes, color, sound; five colored pencil drawings. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Photo credit: Ken Tannenbaum.

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Bambi expelled from the Garden of Eden into suburban purgatory. Later, in the festival, legions of children are dressed in costumes impersonating the animal ‘‘innocents’’ of the early scenes. These structural oppositions revolve like a double helix around the axis of the celebratory day itself, while the representation of the Follies just as straightforwardly embraces the clichés of suburban kitsch, ranging from simulated pussy willow branches made with marshmallow ‘‘blossoms’’ to a guitarist/vocalist singing the Streamside theme song off-key on a makeshift stage. In Huyghe’s embrace of such blunt images, he paradoxically directs us to see through the hackneyed tropes of middle-class America rather than to accept them at face value. What one glimpses through this looking glass is the impulse to build civic institutions within the privatized space of a planned community. For Huyghe, such rituals are a means of using commercial culture to stage communal celebrations. As he stated in the 2004 interview: A celebration is supposed to be something that we have in common, that we share, and that we celebrate because of this common basis. It is like a monument. But unlike a monument, an event can be renegotiated each time it is repeated, although that is rarely the case. . . . For Streamside Day I was searching for something that the community shared—what was the minimum common denominator between all these people? The answer I came to was that everyone came from a completely different place, and so the idea of migration would have to be important.≥∑

A parade costume is a type of image that is inhabited and activated by a participant. In Streamside Day Follies, such image-agents reenact migration—to the suburbs, from nature to culture, or from one end of a subdivision to the other. The distinction Huyghe makes between a celebration and a monument pivots on the capacity of the former to repeat. In his theory of collective life, repetition matters; it offers an opportunity for renegotiation, and renegotiation unfixes the ties of ownership between persons and pictures. The image is deployed rather than possessed—and consequently a film may function as public space. According to Rancière, politics can only arise through the provocation of those who have ‘‘no part’’—those who are invisible under a particular distribution of the sensible. ‘‘There is politics when there is a part of those who have no part, a part or party of the poor. Politics does not

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happen just because the poor oppose the rich. It is the other way around: politics (that is, the interruption of the simple effects of domination by the rich) cause the poor to exist as an entity.’’≥∏ In other words, politics presupposes a fundamental demand for visibility. But Citizen Cursor, as the avatar of the middle class, belongs to the most visible register of the American public and is therefore constituently resistant to politics as defined by Rancière. Its tabular and navigational modes of visibility produce a paradoxical form of ‘‘disciplinary liberty’’ whose ideology has enabled the extremes of consumer indulgence and careless warmongering that characterize the contemporary United States. Rancière’s rigorously narrow definition of politics should remind us that, as academics and intellectuals, our analysis of oppressive structures is not automatically subversive. But Rancière is equally emphatic that aesthetics are relevant to politics, not least because they serve as a form of research into new modes of visibility. This argument, in which the aesthetic becomes a social principle, as opposed to a mere ‘‘reflection’’ of social principles, seems a powerful reinvigoration of the avant-garde project.≥π The latter faltered precisely because too many artists (and art historians) held their engagement with aesthetics apart from those commercial systems for organizing or ‘‘partitioning’’ the sensible, like television or the Internet, that structure the everyday lives and social horizons of most Americans.≥∫ In repurposing mechanically reproduced pictures as social forums, Pierre Huyghe is one of several artists straining toward a different distribution of the sensible. He has said, ‘‘I am interested in an object that is in fact a dynamic chain that passes through different formats.’’≥Ω Such an object, in Huyghe’s terms, is one that includes several perspectives or reenactments of a particular event. In the tabular paradigm of suburban visibility, persons are enslaved or possessed by their desire to mimic pictures, whereas in the navigational fantasy of frictionless dominion, pictures are the servants of persons. In both cases, possession is fundamental to visibility: the image is property. In Streamside Day Follies, as in other of Huyghe’s installations, pictures are enacted as dynamic chains that pass through different stages and formats. They have what Arjun Appadurai has called ‘‘social lives,’’ meaning that they experience successive particular engagements with human beings. Huyghe’s images are vehicles, not fetishes.∂≠ They function as platforms intended to reinvent social interactions that were long ago abandoned by the Citizen Cursor.

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Instead of consuming pictures (which includes ‘‘interpreting’’ them), Huyghe challenges us to negotiate with and through them, to reuse and recycle them. The result might be a new kind of agency appropriate to a new sort of social space lodged within the texture, or grain, of mechanical reproduction. It would involve the reappropriation of ‘‘image commons’’ and a politics of visibility that art must find a way to enter.∂∞

Notes I wish to thank my research assistant, Jay Curley, for his customary skill and good humor in helping me to find sources for this essay. 1. Dobriner, Class in Suburbia, 49. 2. This project was titled Alteration to a Suburban House. 3. Dobriner, Class in Suburbia, 9. 4. Ibid., 15. 5. The term ‘‘edge city’’ was invented and enumerated by Joel Garreau in Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. 6. Kilborn, ‘‘The Five-Bedroom, Six-Figure Rootless Life.’’ William Leach extends the Times’s more anecdotal account in ‘‘The Landscape of the Temporary.’’ 7. Joel Kotkin makes this point in ‘‘Suburban Tide.’’ Kotkin argues that the Democrats must consider carefully the suburban constituency if they are to revive their party. 8. Kilborn, ‘‘The Five-Bedroom, Six-Figure Rootless Life.’’ Even David Brooks, who often seems a kind of apologist for exurbia, makes it clear that groups become more homogeneous there, even if, taken as a whole, exurbia is quite diverse. See Brooks, ‘‘Our Sprawling Supersize Utopia.’’ 9. Lyman, ‘‘Marthatown.’’ 10. Hayden, Building Suburbia, 167. 11. Dobriner, Class in Suburbia, 22. 12. I am well aware that public libraries make the Internet available to patrons who cannot afford a computer, and yet the sense of command over cyberspace among those with such limited access (not only in terms of location, but also regarding time limitations or lack of privacy) cannot be imagined as the same as those who have constant and easy access in their home. In any event, I am using the ‘‘cursor’’ as a metaphor in this context for a particular kind of fantasmatic dominion. 13. See Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism, esp. chaps. 1 and 3. 14. One might convincingly argue that urban residents share the qualities of Citizen Cursor. While I think this is very true, I would argue that, as Dobriner

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contends with regard to class, the suburbs map, and indeed concentrate, the qualities of disembodiment from community architecturally, making them more prominent and visible. The introduction of suburban modes of development such as big-box stores and national chains into the most urbanized areas of the United States, such as Manhattan, may be proof that the landscape of Citizen Cursor is everywhere. 15. A strong case is made for regional planning in Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck, Suburban Nation, chap. 8. 16. For the best introduction to Rancière’s concept of politics, see The Politics of Aesthetics and Dis-agreement. 17. Gates, The Road Ahead, 330–31. 18. Lynn Spigel compares Gates’s ‘‘smart house’’ with earlier paradigms of postwar media domesticity and also discusses the Digital House by Hariri and Hariri (which I discuss below) in her ‘‘Media Homes,’’ esp. 398–407. 19. Gates, The Road Ahead, 310–11. 20. Uhlig, ‘‘75 m Pounds Microsoft Mansion Needs an Upgrade.’’ 21. http://www.corbis.com/corporate/overview/overview.asp, accessed November 2006. The connection between Corbis and Gates’s house is made in McMillan, ‘‘Content is King at Corbis Corporation.’’ 22. See Failing, ‘‘Brave New World or Just More Profitable?’’ 117. 23. Gates, The Road Ahead, 338–39. 24. Domestic technologies seem to be a consistent interest of Gates. Microsoft has established the ‘‘Microsoft Home’’ on the company’s Redmond Washington campus as a model for new household gadgets. See Barron, ‘‘Speak Clearly and Carry a Manual.’’ 25. Gates, The Road Ahead, 330. 26. In his What Do Pictures Want? W. J. T. Mitchell suggests that one way of gauging the desire of images is to ‘‘(1) assent to the constitutive fiction of pictures as ‘animated’ beings, quasi-agents, mock persons; and (2) the construal of pictures not as sovereign subjects or disembodied spirits but as subalterns whose bodies are marked with the stigmata of difference, and who function both as ‘go-betweens’ and scapegoats in the social field of human visuality’’ (46). 27. For an exhibition that addresses how these new modes of domesticity are developed in recent architecture, see Riley, The Un-Private House. 28. Ibid., 56. 29. Frampton and Holl, ‘‘The Next House: House for the New Millenium 1993,’’ 70. 30. Ibid. 31. Zevon, ‘‘Pushing the Digital Envelope,’’ 68.

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32. ‘‘Far more than any other group of people anywhere, American businessmen (and most have been men) have been inclined to create a landscape of temporary housing because they themselves treat their own homes as temporary dwellings (despite their worship of home ownership).’’ Leach, ‘‘Landscape,’’ 77–78. 33. Baker, ‘‘An Interview with Pierre Huyghe,’’ 96. 34. The following discussion is based on my earlier account of Huyghe’s Streamside Day Follies, though it differs in significant ways. See ‘‘Inside the Light Cube.’’ 35. Baker, ‘‘An Interview with Pierre Huyghe,’’ 85. 36. Rancière, Dis-agreement, 11. 37. ‘‘Art anticipates work because it carries out its principles: the transformation of sensible matter into the community’s self presentation. . . . It is this initial programme [German idealism’s aesthetics], moreover, that laid the foundation for the thought and practice of the ‘avant-gardes’ in the 1920s: abolish art as a separate activity, put it back to work, that is to say, give it back to life and its activity of working out its own proper meaning.’’ In Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 44–45. 38. Specifying the social form of television and video is the ambition of my book Feedback. 39. Baker, ‘‘An Interview with Pierre Huyghe,’’ 90. 40. See Appadurai, ‘‘Introduction.’’ 41. In many ways, twentieth-century art is a history of widening such ‘‘image commons’’ from the ready-made through pop art, appropriation art, and identity politics, to mention only a few instances where the privatization of images was powerfully challenged.

REINHOLD MARTIN

Mass Customization CORPORATE ARCHITECTURE AND THE

‘‘ END ’’

OF POLITICS

Much has been said in recent years about the role of computers in the production of architectural objects, while relatively little has been said, in architecture, about their role in the production of subjects. To address this omission, a repositioning of architecture within the broader crosscurrents of contemporary culture and politics is in order. This repositioning would shift the discussion around computers from one centered on their capacity to redirect the discipline, to one centered on the discipline’s tendency to refract world-historical patterns, including patterns of subject formation associated with new techno-economic relations. This is not to reduce architecture to a symptomatic, surfacelevel expression of such patterns, but rather to understand its field of production as a topologically complex, distorting mirror that faces both inward and outward at once. In reproducing itself internally as an aesthetic discipline, architecture reveals and engages entire worlds externally. In that sense, its status as an aesthetic medium is tied (rather than opposed) to its status as one among many mass media. So, rather than stage a contest over the nature and scope of the aesthetic medium in an effort to secure architecture’s autonomy over and above mass-mediated spectacle, we must learn to look into architecture’s mirror and to take

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advantage of its structurally multi-mediated character in order to identify sites of both interpretation and intervention. Leaning heavily in a formalist direction and with an inherited stake in disciplinary autonomy, the vanguard that coalesced around computers during the nineties in the American academy positioned itself as an Oedipalized heir to the neo–avant-gardes of the seventies and eighties, frequently claiming to have replaced the collage-like, fragmented objects associated with that period with a formal language of seamless integration. This initial, experimental development of ‘‘nonstandard’’ digital design and production techniques that have now made their way into the professional mainstream also sought—sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly—to replace the mechanical, fragmented, and repetitive mass ornament that Siegfried Kracauer saw embodied in the coordinated gyrations of the Tiller Girls, with an endlessly variable yet unified product line.∞ Far from representing the latest innovation, however, this proposition was dreamed in advance by experimental architecture’s corporate unconscious. As a result, with respect to the corporate architecture of the seventies and eighties, the newer digital architecture appears more symptomatic than innovative. Conversely, that same corporate architecture, in failing fully to domesticate its own aesthetic surplus, ultimately fails—despite itself—to confirm the absolute closure of a techno-economic system that seems increasingly to co-opt alterity and differentiation in advance. Instead, this politically unsavory task has been taken up by the digital vanguard as its own, thus further securing architecture’s engagement with a new kind of mass subject who must now be called a ‘‘person.’’ The complex architectural geometries made possible by the new software and hardware produced by transnational corporations may be of only secondary importance here, since these new technologies have also borne an old aesthetic promise that architecture has, by definition, long defied: the promise of a one-to-one match between representation and constructed reality. That is, computers promise to collapse the various stages in the production of buildings, which have heretofore run from exploratory sketch to presentation drawings to physical models to construction drawings to technical (or ‘‘shop’’) drawings executed by the fabricator to assembly in the field. If architecture has, in that sense, traditionally been a multimedia practice, not only is it now possible to

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model an object digitally and literally to ‘‘print’’ a three-dimensional version of it; it is also possible to fabricate the pieces of a building directly from computer files, with no intermediary representations. Carried to a logical conclusion, the new media thus promise an end to mediation itself—a condition where, in the language of computerinterface designers, ‘‘What You See Is What You Get’’ (wysiwyg). A more concrete accompaniment to this dream of technical transparency has been enhanced flexibility in fabrication, since adjustments made on the computer can be transferred to production on demand, with a minimum of intermediary steps and with minimal retooling, in a process known as mass customization. Though to date mainly implemented at the level of assembly in manufacturing, and at the level of information extraction in nonmanufacturing industries such as data mining and profiling (for example, surveillance, for both marketing and ‘‘homeland security’’ purposes), such techniques are gradually entering the international construction industry. In principle, mass customization makes available to the consumer a rainbow of aesthetic and technical choices within parametrically variable tolerances. These parameters can be adjusted in a digital model to suit ever more personal preferences, in a cascade of what Theodor Adorno long ago called pseudopersonalization, thus making each version of each product distinct from every other version produced and sold.≤ Contemporary architectural experimentation diagrams this new stage in consumer capitalism with such propositions as Greg Lynn’s no-twoare-the-same Embryologic Houses of 2000, a mass-customized remake of Buckminster Fuller’s utopian, mass-reproducible Dymaxion House of 1927. Lynn describes his project (with no hint of irony) as ‘‘engag[ing] the need for any globally marketed product to have brand identity and variation within the same graphic and spatial system allowing both the possibility for recognition and novelty’’ since, as he puts it, ‘‘with the progressive saturations of our imaginations by an advanced media culture . . . a more advanced generic identity is . . . necessary for advanced domestic space.’’≥ In other words, a consumer who now imagines herself as different from every other consumer must have objects to match. Thus we are also given Lynn’s Alessi tea service (2003), prototyped for some fifty thousand uniquely similar variations, as well as the something-foreveryone family of serially differentiated skyscrapers dancing around the memorial campfire of the global village proposed for Ground Zero in

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New York by the team that called itself the United Architects, of which Lynn and other proponents of a market-theological approach to mass customization were key members. If Kracauer saw the mechanical movements of the Tiller Girls and of the mass ornament as ‘‘demonstrations of mathematics,’’ the parametric variation celebrated in these recent postmodern designs can be summarized as what Lynn has aptly called sketching with calculus.∂ These new forms of digitally aided heimlichkeit comprising integrated families of teapots, houses, and skyscrapers correspond not so much to a depoliticization of vanguardist architectural discourse as to a repoliticization on the order of Francis Fukuyama’s neoliberal ‘‘end of history’’ thesis. In architecture, this was for a time given the embarrassingly frank name of ‘‘postcritical.’’ Simply put, the ‘‘postcritical’’ posture (of which the United Architects group was exemplary) seeks fully to disengage architecture from any form of emancipatory politics implicit even in Manfredo Tafuri’s critical melancholy, but not in order to secure architecture’s silent, defeated autonomy, as Tafuri once suggested of the earlier generation of architectural formalists led by Lynn’s early sponsor, Peter Eisenman.∑ Rather, the new, metaphysical ‘‘postcriticality’’ has promised—in the manner of a politician—an unmediated intimacy, a millenarian transparency of production to consumption and, at the aesthetic level, of object to subject. In that sense, under the regime of the postcritical’s technical correlate, mass customization, the personal is apparently postpolitical. In the seamlessly pliable network of personal choices thus called forth, conflict and dissent are therefore assimilated into a pluralistic, managerial utopia of the sort that Jacques Rancière has dryly characterized as nurturing a ‘‘type of individual who lives in a permanent universe of freedom, of choice and of relaxed and lighthearted attitudes toward choice itself ’’: in other words, ‘‘a world of self-pacified multiplicity’’ that announces, in the specifically political form of a promise, an ‘‘end’’ to politics itself.∏ Similarly, the technical effort to do away with technical mediation ultimately promises to do away with architecture, in the historical sense of an aesthetic practice that actively mediates social relations, including relations of production and consumption. In contrast, to posit architecture as a mass medium here is to insist on a paradoxical, internally differentiated specificity, an obdurate historicity that is reducible neither to the posthistorical and postpolitical promises of technological processes nor to the late modernist autonomy of architecture-as-such,

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remaining instead the basis for its own sociopolitical immanence. This immanence is secured by virtue of aesthetic and technical developments specific to the discipline and manifest in its objects, where architecture’s mirror reflects itself even as it reflects the work of history on the socioeconomic and political registers. On either side of this double mirror, we can see both in and out at once. In the interest of activating such a vision, a brief prehistory of the turn outlined above can be sketched in the form of a single case study involving two corporate headquarters designed for the same company, the Union Carbide Corporation, about twenty years apart, by different architects, in relation to changing social, economic, and technological conditions. In August of 1955, Union Carbide announced that it would build its new executive headquarters in midtown Manhattan, on Park Avenue, between 47th and 48th streets. The architect was to be the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (som), with Gordon Bunshaft (who had recently completed Lever House a few blocks north) as chief designer. The decision was noteworthy not only because of its architectural implications but because Union Carbide had been considering moving its headquarters to a suburban site north of the city. To remain in Manhattan was to remain visible, a function amply satisfied by som’s new building, which was described in the architectural press as, first and foremost, a ‘‘striking ‘corporate image.’ ’’π Completed in 1960, the Union Carbide headquarters was a fifty-three story skyscraper comprising 1.5 million gross square feet of sheer office building (fig. 1). Its presence on Park Avenue is announced by an attenuated plaza that sets the building’s façade off from the street line, while a lower extension fills out the block and presents a secondary street façade on Madison Avenue. On the face of it, the tower’s looming height thus monumentalizes the pinnacles of power—America’s multinational corporations—that were gradually transforming this part of the city during the fifties. Like Lever House and the Seagram Building nearby, the architecture of the Union Carbide headquarters might also seem the apotheosis of massification—an ‘‘enormous file’’ filled with robotlike workers, as the sociologist C. Wright Mills described the new, modern office buildings being built during the period.∫ To be sure, it has all the telltale signs: a gridded, modular curtain wall, an empty plaza adjacent to an equally

1. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Union Carbide headquarters, New York City, 1960. Photograph by Ezra Stoller.

[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

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empty lobby, rows and rows of desks, a gridded luminous ceiling, and interchangeable, standardized office partitions. In other words, the Union Carbide Building was a fully integrated and apparently seamless system, the very image of administrative rationality that Kracauer had already discerned in the mass ornament. Mesmerized by the promise of a ‘‘total architecture’’ underwritten by the corporations, Bunshaft and som extended the building’s systematicity into its most intimate details, including its desks, its filing cabinets, its drinking fountains, and its light switches. And yet, the subject of corporate capitalism under construction here was already changing from the masslike, robotic automatons projected by Mills into a new kind of human, the prototypical subject of what managers had called since the 1930s ‘‘human relations.’’ At Union Carbide, the primary indicator for this was the building’s overdetermined flexibility, registered visually in the grids and technically in the moveable, standardized units. This flexibility was correlated both to the unpredictable needs of a changing market, as reflected in ongoing changes in Union Carbide’s internal organization, and to the functional adaptability demanded of the human module out of which this organization was assembled, the so-called organization man. Despite his standardization, the organization man was no mere cog in a machine. He was, instead, a stereotypically sentient, emotional being who identified with the corporation as though it were his family, while adapting himself to the changes undergone by both with the postwar expansion of corporate capitalism. As such, the organization man was also in a sense made visible—mirrored even—by the architecture of buildings like the Union Carbide headquarters, with its stilted ‘‘flexibility.’’Ω Likewise, though the postwar suburbanization of the United States appeared to maintain rigidly separate spheres for work and for living— the city and the suburb—the distance between these too was already collapsing. Thus, in 1978, in the wake of New York City’s fiscal crisis, Union Carbide announced that it would abandon its Park Avenue building and relocate its headquarters to a new suburban facility in Danbury, Connecticut. By this point, the company had grown into a massive multinational conducting approximately 33 percent of its business outside the United States, with over 130 subsidiaries and five hundred manufacturing facilities in thirty-six countries worldwide. In addition to reflecting heightened anxieties about urban life among the managerial

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classes, the move out of New York reflected a complex tendency toward invisibility that accompanied global growth. As Fortune magazine put it that same year, despite its Park Avenue presence, Union Carbide had been ‘‘a corporate giant that has somehow managed to project the public profile of a midget.’’∞≠ At the time of the move, however, it was (again according to Fortune), ‘‘striving to raise its profile to something like true size.’’ But this did not necessarily mean brazen swagger. Instead, it meant stealth, or what Fortune called ‘‘advocacy in a low key,’’ in an effort to establish Union Carbide as a ‘‘responsible corporate citizen’’ in the eyes of government regulators, legislators, and others whose actions directly affected the company’s bottom line. Union Carbide’s new public relations strategy was, therefore, ‘‘to try to discern the popular will and then see how it can then tailor its own interests to that sentiment.’’∞∞ The design of its new headquarters coincided with this strategy. The site, located about an hour’s drive from New York but only about twenty minutes’ drive from the suburban domiciles of many managers, consisted of 645 acres of thickly wooded, gently rolling terrain. And in stark contrast to the Park Avenue original, this new headquarters was to be visible in its entirety only from the air, with its architecture and entry sequence actively preventing full apprehension from the ground (fig. 2). Often described as a skyscraper turned on its side, the new complex for 3,500 Union Carbide employees, designed by Kevin Roche of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates and completed in 1982, can be more accurately described as a skyscraper turned inside-out. The selection of Roche was the first sign of a cultural shift, to the extent that Union Carbide’s management had, according to its architect, had been taken by his assertion that ‘‘office design should come from the people.’’∞≤ In turn, Roche’s design for the new headquarters was a selfconscious response to the earlier som building—an attempt further to ‘‘humanize’’ what, despite the inroads made by the human relations counselors into the organization man’s soul, would still have appeared as a modular abstraction, its curtain-walled façade folded onto every surface and into every detail of its gridded interiors. Thus Roche began the design process with an exhaustive analysis of the existing headquarters, including extensive employee interviews. One finding was that employees objected to the spatial hierarchies still allowed by the existing building. Despite its egalitarian pretensions, the flexible partition system had in fact enabled offices of different sizes to be distributed to workers

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2. Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, Union Carbide headquarters, Danbury, Connecticut, 1982. Aerial view. Courtesy of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates.

of different rank, while the building’s urban location and monolithic configuration yielded select corner offices with double views that could be likewise rationed.∞≥ Roche’s response was to develop a set of technical parameters based on the variable iterability of a single unit of space: an individual office. Regardless of rank, each worker would receive 180 square feet of private office space, with each unit possessing an equivalent but different view of the surrounding forest. Environmental control was likewise personalized, with each office for each employee equipped with separate lighting and temperature controls, so that each could surround him- or (significantly for the corporate imagination of the late seventies) herself with the climate of their choice. Thus the design problem became fundamentally topological: 3,300 units of space had to be organized in relation to one another and to the outdoors to achieve a new, architectural parity. Due to its incipient capacity to model, with quantitative exactitude, multiple variations of a given problem, the computer was called in as a

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design tool (a practice still relatively uncommon at the time).∞∂ A number of diagrams were tested and rejected, beginning with a 2.6 mile long tube of continuously varying dimension, from minimum to maximum, which allowed proportional as well as dimensional variation in the individual offices and other (larger) program spaces arrayed along its length, while affording the requisite equality of view. Other rejected schemes included a spine with bristles in which offices would wind up facing each other instead of the trees, as well as a multiple courtyard scheme with a similar problem. The organization that was ultimately selected (and realized in modified form) had the fractal-like, crenellated perimeter of a snowflake. The units themselves were oriented at 45 degree angles to one another in clusters strung along the edge of the snowflake, thus affording the desired view without compromising privacy (fig. 3). Dropped onto the site and surrounded by the requisite parking however, the snowflake became a kind of alien spacecraft that would have exposed Union Carbide’s new home to full public view (fig. 4). Alternative massing studies were thus undertaken, resulting in a gently curved bar that could be inserted surgically into a contoured open field with minimum disruption (fig. 5). The inside-out design of the building that had begun by equilibrating the views from within each office was completed with the internalization of the parking into a series of multilevel garages with access bridges matched to the office clusters, thus enabling each worker literally to drive in and park adjacent to their office (fig. 6). The office building was now effectively one terminal in a continuous interior, in which these knowledge workers could move almost seamlessly from their house to their garage to their car to their garage to their office, and back again, day after day. There was no need to go outside. It should not be surprising, then, that the extent to which this design also redesigned—indeed customized—the subject of corporate capitalism is measured most accurately in the interiors of the offices themselves. Roche Dinkeloo developed thirty different office styles, ranging from what they called ‘‘very modern to traditional,’’ with each set of furniture and accessories costing the same (again to avoid any insinuation of class whether on the basis of rank or of aspiration). Full-scale mock-ups of each office style were built, complete with simulated forest view (again: unmediated transparency, or wysiwyg) (fig. 7). These

Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, Union Carbide headquarters, Danbury, Connecticut, 1982. Courtesy of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates.

3. Preliminary layout.

4. Preliminary site plan.

5. Plan.

6. Axonometric.

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7. Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, Union Carbide headquarters, Danbury, Connecticut, 1982. Office interior. Courtesy of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates.

were shown to three thousand employees, who were then interviewed for their choice of carpet, desk, counter, light fixtures, plants, pens and pencils, and ashtrays. Each choice was input into a computerized purchasing database. A design was output. Thus also, fourteen categories of art were offered to decorate these thirty office models, from figurative to abstract. The final purchases were made on the basis of percentages drawn from the employee surveys. Roche himself asserted, ‘‘I felt, very strongly, that we should not impose our design aesthetic on people; let them choose as they wished,’’ a strategy that was, as he put it, a ‘‘radical idea at the time.’’∞∑ As it turned out, no imposition was necessary. The furniture set designed in-house by the Roche office was the most popular selection, with second place going to an office with what Roche called a ‘‘very conservative desk,’’ and least popular of all being the ‘‘contemporary’’ office with glass table top and chrome legs (too flashy, it seems).∞∏ This level of detail is relevant here only to insist on the systematic, inside-out nature of this reinvention of Union Carbide’s corporate identity. Not only does the new personalization reach into every detail of corporate life; it involves, at every step, a biopolitical refashioning of its employees themselves into ‘‘persons’’ equipped with variable tastes, individual lifestyles, and eventually personal computers. Thus did Union Carbide announce, in its annual report of 1981 as the building was nearing completion at the height of an economic recession, its new ‘‘emphasis on people,’’ or what the company’s Chairman and ceo Warren M. Anderson called ‘‘human resources.’’ As Anderson put it in his letter to stockholders: ‘‘Union Carbide is a good place to work, and we are determined to make it an even better one, with opportunity and

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incentive for every employee to become personally involved in our objectives and our progress.’’∞π But it is equally clear that Union Carbide did not regard all of its constituents as ‘‘persons,’’ and perhaps not even as humans. On the night of December 2, 1984, two years after Roche’s building was completed, forty-five tons of the lethal methyl isocynate (mic) gas leaked from a poorly maintained storage tank at the Union Carbide battery and pesticide manufacturing plant in Bhopal, India. The body count remains indeterminate. Though the Indian authorities stopped counting at 1,754, official government estimates put the immediate death toll at approximately 3,800 (roughly equivalent to the number of well-maintained persons housed in Union Carbide’s Danbury headquarters).∞∫ Unofficial estimates of the death toll run to more than three times that many, and the consensus among activists and survivors groups hovers between 7,000 and 10,000 in the immediate aftermath and 20,000 in the years that followed.∞Ω An estimated 500,000 people were injured, many severely and permanently. Most of the victims, including an unknown number of Union Carbide employees (so-called human resources), lived in the shadow of the plant and were overcome by the gas as they slept. Many were from the poorest classes of Indian society and lacked identification documents such as citizenship papers, marriage certificates, or land deeds and were often omitted from official census counts.≤≠ Mass burials and mass cremations left fewer bodies accessible to officials, which meant that such records were often the only available evidence that an individual had existed in the first place. Union Carbide and its affiliates never stood trial in India. Anderson, the ceo who had announced the company’s new ‘‘emphasis on people,’’ traveled to India and was arrested upon arrival, but he was released on bail and allowed to leave the country. In 1986 he retired and has never returned to face the criminal charges against him, despite a formal extradition request from the Indian government in 2003. Ongoing efforts in the United States (where punitive damages as well as compensation are permitted by the courts) to sue Union Carbide on behalf of the victims for a sum of US$15 billion have been unsuccessful. With respect to this initiative, one member of the company’s legal team reportedly asked, ‘‘How can one determine the damage inflicted on people who live in shacks?’’≤∞ In 1985, two analysts advocated in The Wall

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Street Journal that punitive damages be taken off the table, thus reducing Union Carbide’s exposure dramatically, as follows: ‘‘A very rough calculation can be made of the probable compensatory (not punitive) award. Based on a recent Rand Corp. study of wrongful-death awards in Chicago, an American’s life is worth about $500,000. But in settling monetary value on the damage inflicted [in Bhopal], U.S. courts will take into account the differences between U.S. and Indian costs and standards of living. India per capita gross national product is only 1.7% of the U.S. figure ($256 compared with $15,000). Thus a U.S. court might award only $8,500 for an Indian’s death.’’≤≤ In 1989, Union Carbide settled out of court with the Indian government for US$470 million. The first round of compensation occurred in the early nineties, and by late 2004, on the twentieth anniversary of the catastrophe, each affected family expected to receive between 100,000 and 200,000 rupees—between US$2,150 and US$5,300, or roughly 5 percent of the American ‘‘standard.’’≤≥ According to activists, compensation has thus far been made for only about six hundred deaths, while approximately five hundred thousand disability claims have been filed with an average compensation of US$500 each.≤∂ But beyond the grossly diminished numerical value placed on the lives of the victims, the larger point here has to do with the extraordinary fragility of this elementary form of representation—counting—when confronted with the task of representing a subject on the verge of invisibility. Evidence suggests that the ‘‘persons’’ in Danbury were aware in advance of the risks to the rather more abstract corporate subjects in Bhopal, where Union Carbide had minimized its own economic exposure through cost-cutting in the event the plant was nationalized under Indian legislation.≤∑ The global outrage, however, did not reach the fever pitch that became familiar in the United States in the wake of September 11, demanding instant, personalized commemoration of each victim. The company erected no memorials, listed no names, published no pictures. Instead, it circulated sabotage theories while divesting itself of its assets to protect against litigation. Thus, in 1987 the company sold its already invisible Danbury headquarters and adjacent development rights to the Related Companies, a real estate group, becoming a leaseholding tenant in its own building.≤∏ In 1999, Union Carbide itself disappeared, though not because it was bankrupted by the relatively scant settlement; rather, it too was assimilated through corporate mer-

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ger into an even larger network operating in 168 countries and employing forty-nine thousand people: Dow Chemical. What, then, of architecture here? Back in Danbury circa 1990, a Union Carbide executive noted that the company’s response to what he called the ‘‘shock’’ of Bhopal was to reemphasize its social responsibilities, while also noting that the move to Danbury had itself succeeded in converting Union Carbide managers from alienated commuters to active members of the local community, for whom ‘‘diversity is the new name that’s creeping into everybody’s language.’’≤π Roche had already accommodated this diversified corporate community in, for example, a cafeteria divided into six unique sections dedicated to six different lifestyles, including a back room modeled on a men’s club and a singles bar. But, commenting on his firm’s design practices, Roche uncannily (and perhaps unconsciously) sees a ghost in the ubiquitous mirrored surfaces adorning these pseudopublic interiors, or ‘‘living rooms’’ as he called them (fig. 8). For Roche, these faceted and rounded mirrors were ‘‘constantly alive,’’ as they reflected both the ‘‘sparkle’’ and ‘‘dark spots’’ of the ‘‘real world.’’≤∫ Designed by an architect who, as an associate of Eero Saarinen, had produced the first mirrored-glass curtain wall at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey in 1962, the mirrors thereby distill architecture’s paradoxical, noncommunicative specificity as mass medium, as they move from exterior (at Bell Labs) to interior (at Union Carbide). Initially, the mirrors may be interpreted as a response to Roche’s teacher Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose glass and steel Federal Center in Chicago had been described by Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co as ‘‘reflecting images of the urban chaos that surrounds the timeless Miesian purity.’’≤Ω In contrast to Mies, the mirrors at Union Carbide promise—again, in the manner of a politician—to make visible (indeed to reflect) the new corporate subject, a person at home in the seamless domestic interior of the office. Here is Roche: ‘‘We tried to deinstitutionalize the building so that it seemed lively or more domestic, in a character appropriate to a corporate family.’’≥≠ But as in the curtain wall at Bell Laboratories, in these interiors there remains—rather literally, as Roche implies—nothing in the mirror, only agitated blurs and glancing highlights that refuse to coalesce. Thus, where Kracauer had found in the unconscious ‘‘surface-level’’ expressions of the mass ornament what he took to be ‘‘unmediated access to the fundamental sub-

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8. Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, Union Carbide headquarters, Danbury, Connecticut, 1982. Cafeteria. Courtesy of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates.

stance of the state of things,’’ we discover something like the reverse at work in Union Carbide’s hall of mirrors: an unconscious gap or hole in the surface giving access to invisible mediations and to the active production of alterity on the supposedly unmediated interior of a diversified corporate self.≥∞ Here too we glimpse an inadvertent perceptual denaturalization, a momentary yet persistent estrangement that is also an internal multiplication. To see such a depersonalization is, in a sense, to see those in Bhopal whose ‘‘bare life’’ was opposed to but also constitutive of the welladorned personhood cultivated in Danbury. And I use Giorgio Agamben’s terminology advisedly here, since for Agamben ‘‘bare life’’ denotes life exposed to a state of exception that has become a norm, to which the law is no longer applicable. Under a state of exception, according to Agamben, it is ‘‘permitted to kill without committing homicide.’’≥≤ Homo sacer, the ambiguous figure from ancient Roman jurisprudence who may be killed with impunity but not sacrificed, is Agamben’s name for all those who live without the protections of the law, a state of affairs for which the death camp is the defining instance. And while Union Carbide’s plant and its surroundings were not a camp, the relative invisibility of the Bhopal victims and the partial suspension of what might be termed their political right to be counted as dead, dying, or permanently impaired locates them—in only a slightly less literal sense—tendentiously in the space of Homo sacer, the subject of ‘‘bare’’ or ‘‘naked’’ life. Under such conditions, unseen/uncounted also describes a subjectivity that is not exactly unmediated, but rather inaccessible to the spectacular mediation that is scaled down to the personal level under mass customization. And yet, though their own lives are thereby con-

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demned to relative exteriority, the labor of those who are invisible to the spectacle remains necessary for the consumer-masses of mass customization to come into view—indeed, to enter the field of visibility as ‘‘persons.’’ In ‘‘incidents’’ such as the Bhopal catastrophe, the act of counting thus approaches the limit case of deaths that no longer count (or at minimum, do not count enough) but that nevertheless remain inextricably linked to the predatory expansion of multinational capital. These deaths cruelly rehearse the logic of a ‘‘life that does not deserve to live’’ uncovered by Agamben’s philology, a cruelty that is underpinned by a structural, technologically enabled blindness (a consequence of what Rancière has called a ‘‘distribution of the sensible’’) that must itself be brought into view.≥≥ Conversely, the architectural trajectory followed by the two Union Carbide headquarters actively consolidates what Gilles Deleuze called the ‘‘dividuation’’ (or infinitely divisible, distinguishable coding) that increasingly characterizes a mode of subjectivity immanent to global capital.≥∂ To this we can add that the ‘‘dividual’’ appears here as a subject converted into a numerical variable in a new form of mass—or now, mass-customized—ornament. This visibility imposes itself in a manner comparable to that of universal computation (or universal computability, as Alan Turing would have it). Like the mass ornament before it, the parametrically regulated technical means by which this is achieved in architecture and other domains begins and ends with numbers. The historical difference with respect to modernism is that, rather than defining an optimized standard to which design and production must conform, the new postmodern numbers enumerate and serialize difference itself. But the computer’s supposed universality, translated into a capacity to register near-infinite differentiation in its new figuration as an instrument of choice under mass customization, already contains something like a built-in limit case in the form of a constantly shifting horizon of visibility and of counting. What cannot be seen cannot be counted. Whereas at the other pole, what can be seen reveals retroactively a threshold that is also built into Kracauer’s notion of the mass ornament. As an organized figure ‘‘composed of elements that are mere building blocks and nothing more,’’ Kracauer attributed to the mass ornament a rationality closed off from reason that mirrors the calculability demanded by capitalist production. This leads to, among other things, a ‘‘blurring of national characteristics

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and to the production of worker masses that can be employed equally well at any point on the globe.’’≥∑ Its precondition (as well as its end point) is the socioeconomic and technological process of massification, whereby ‘‘only as parts of a mass, not as individuals who believe themselves to be formed from within, do people become fractions of a figure.’’≥∏ Under mass customization, massification has been scaled down to the level of the ‘‘person.’’ But this person is not to be understood in classically humanist terms as a bounded individual in possession of a unique and unassailable soul—a figure that Kracauer had already judged anachronistic with respect to the earlier phase of modernity he was describing. A person, now, is a figure composed of numbers inside and out. In biopolitical terms, such a figure is theoretically customizable under a computationally intensive human genomics, as well as under a computationally enabled, expansionist corporate consumerism and the subjectivities it proliferates. Similarly, outward industrial expansion—exemplified in this case by India’s chemically enhanced ‘‘green revolution,’’ of which the Union Carbide pesticide plant was a part—is now accompanied by an expansion inward, into the interiority of the self. So even as the mass ornament might still be useful to describe the homogenizing reach of industrial capital into new ‘‘frontiers,’’ it reaches its limit case internally as those frontiers simultaneously turn inward. For this, a complementary figure—the ‘‘person’’—must be articulated alongside the mass ornament, to make visible the spectacle of (in)dividuation that is made possible by numerical abstraction, and its dependence on the invisibility of others outside whose deaths remain uncounted. Thus we arrive at a somewhat counterintuitive formulation. At one level, the subjective by-product of the cybernetic revolution is not a faceless, digital automaton, but a hyperindividuated, spectacularized quasi singularity, composed of ever finer (and potentially incommensurable) data sets that profile personal taste, personal habits, personal opinion, and so on. While at another level, a complementary by-product of informatization is ultimately the invisible subject of bare life whose death is not counted and therefore does not count. This is the horror of Bhopal and of so many other less visible catastrophes. In these, the biopolitical machinery of computational equivalence—enumeration, that is, and with it, interpellation into Deleuze’s control society as a

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mathematical variable otherwise known as a ‘‘person’’—functions increasingly via a symmetrical exclusion from counting, and indeed, from visibility, as an exception that has become internalized, or rather, incorporated as a norm. The relative invisibility of the deindividuated Bhopal victims (stripped of even the mass ornament of enumeration) has helped foreclose their access to jurisprudence while also helping, along with the company’s own invisibility, to ensure Union Carbide’s survival under the sign of Dow Chemical. Still, as a biopolitical machine designed to make the personalized subject of global capital visible to itself, and thereby to rehearse the process of narcissistic self-identification and production, architecture cannot help but register here a kind of splitting open that releases a depersonalized remainder. This comes in the form of a shimmering blind spot, whose spectral presence organizes the deepest interiors of corporate domesticity. In that sense, the Union Carbide headquarters in Danbury was from the beginning haunted by the ghosts of Bhopal, on behalf of whom, in an act of counter-memory, we may now claim it as a kind of inverted memorial—a memorialization in advance. This haunting, this commemoration in the future anterior tense, takes the form of an irreducible abstraction that, in effect, transcends the spectacularized numerical abstraction of the mass ornament that is sublimated into mass customization. This other, postmodern, abstraction is most obviously mirrored in the mirrored surfaces that line the building’s interior. But it is also discernible elsewhere: in the mechanical emptiness of the parking garages, for example (which offer a kind of final resting place for the mass ornament in their rows of empty machines), as well as in the less obvious emptiness of the office itself, to say nothing of the view out the window and, today, into the windows of the personal computer. As seen in these surfaces, the ‘‘person’’ called forth by mass customization is doubly spectral: first, in the Derridean sense, extrapolated from Shakespeare via Marx, of a fetishized commodity in which the social relations among things associated with industrial capital have been transformed into social relations among images; and second, in the uncanny co-presence of a global other structurally condemned to silence and invisibility.≥π To see, or indeed to hallucinate, a ghost in the empty halls of the transnational corporate edifice is hardly to excuse the blind and systematic enthusiasm with which architecture services a hegemonic world order. On the contrary, it is to locate strategically its internal aporias, the

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holes in the screen of mass-customized bliss. We cannot claim, with paternalistic sanctimony, to speak directly through these holes on behalf of a subaltern, or even to offer an opening onto visibility per se. But we can and must speak in unequivocal solidarity with her. Such solidarity, emanating from within the very headquarters of empire, is inadvertently enabled by the blind spots in an architectural dispositif or diagram that otherwise reproduces itself with ever-greater efficiency. Today, this reproduction occurs most perversely in the name of a postpolitical multiplicity—a pseudopersonalization embraced by corporate global villagers and computer-aided architects alike. Yet what we see in these mirrored interiors, which perhaps mark the end of corporate architecture’s mirror stage, is not our selves projected outward—customized masses converted into persons—but the names and faces of nameless, faceless others within, for whom the personal remains political, both out there and in here.

Notes 1. There is a growing literature on digitally aided design and fabrication in architecture. For a summary of the experiments in what has been called ‘‘nonstandard’’ design, see the exhibition catalogue edited by Frederic Migayrou, Architectures non standard. See also ‘‘Versioning: Evolutionary Techniques in Architecture,’’ a special issue of Architectural Design 72, no. 5, guest edited by SHoP/Sharples Holden Pasquarelli (September/October 2002). Kracauer, ‘‘The Mass Ornament.’’ 2. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 173. 3. Lynn, ‘‘Embryologic Houses,’’ 11. 4. Kracauer, ‘‘The Mass Ornament,’’ 76; Lynn, Animate Form, 17. 5. On the postcriticality debate, see Baird, ‘‘ ‘Criticality’ and Its Discontents’’; and Martin ‘‘Critical of What?’’ 6. Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, 22. 7. ‘‘Union Carbide’s Shaft of Steel,’’ Architectural Forum vol. 113 (November 1960): 120. 8. Mills, White Collar, 189–212. 9. On flexibility and the ‘‘organization man’’ in the postwar office building, see Martin, The Organizational Complex. 10. Menzies, ‘‘Union Carbide Raises Its Voice,’’ 86. 11. Ibid., 86–87.

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12. Kevin Roche, as quoted by Kudo, ‘‘World Headquarters, Union Carbide Corporation,’’ 112. 13. Roche, ‘‘Design Process, World Headquarters, Union Carbide Corporation,’’ 115–19. 14. On the use of mainframe and personal computers in architectural offices as design and production tools in the early eighties, see, for example ‘‘Computers in Architecture,’’ Progressive Architecture 65, no. 5 (May 1984), a special issue on the subject. See also Giovannini, ‘‘Architecture of Information.’’ 15. Roche, ‘‘Design Process,’’ 132. 16. Ibid., 135. 17. Warren M. Anderson, Chairman, and Alex Flamm, President, ‘‘To Our Stockholders,’’ Union Carbide: Putting Technology to Work, Annual report, 1981. Emphasis added. 18. A variety of sources list the official government count at 1,754, including the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (http://www.bhopal.net/ gda/facts.html), and Lapierre and Moro, Five Past Midnight in Bhopal, 375. 19. Amnesty International, Clouds of Injustice, 10–12. 20. Bridget Hanna, personal communication with the author, January 10, 2006. Hanna maintains the Web site for the Bhopal Memory Project (http:// bhopal.bard.edu/), is a coeditor of The Bhopal Reader, and is currently working with victims’ advocacy groups in Bhopal. 21. Lapierre and Moro, Five Past Midnight in Bhopal, 380. 22. Besharov and Reuter, ‘‘Averting a Bhopal Legal Disaster,’’ 32. Besharov is identified as an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and Reuter as a senior economist at the Rand Corporation. 23. Bridget Hanna, personal communication with the author, January 10, 2006. See also Das, ‘‘Moral Orientations to Suffering’’; and Sharma, ‘‘Catastrophe and the Dilemma of Law.’’ 24. Hanna, personal communication with the author, January 10, 2006. See also Amnesty International, Clouds of Injustice, for estimates of actual compensation made by 1995. According to Hanna, ‘‘activists have tried over the years to create alternate counts to interrupt official numbers. In one particularly important move, the group that has evolved into the Sambhavna Trust Clinic and Documentation Center began to do ‘verbal autopsies’ in 1996, coming up with a set of questions through which they could determine if a death was the result of gas exposure and therefore try to affect the official count’’; personal communication, January 10, 2006. 25. Hanna, ‘‘Bhopal as Planned.’’ 26. ‘‘Carbide Plans Sale of Headquarters Site for $340 Million,’’ Wall Street Journal, November 7, 1986, 58; and ‘‘Carbide Closes Sale of Headquarters,’’ Wall

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Street Journal, January 2, 1987, 5. Five days before the sale was announced, the New York Times reported, ‘‘The Indian Government is urging a district court to restrain the Union Carbide Corporation from selling any more of its assets, saying such sales could reduce any eventual settlement of the 1984 gas tragedy.’’ Hazarika, ‘‘India Fighting Sales of Union Carbide Assets.’’ 27. James N. Barton, Director, General Services, Union Carbide Corporation, interviewed by Kunio Kudo in ‘‘World Headquarters, Union Carbide Corporation,’’ 147. 28. Asked by Francesco Dal Co about the generous use of mirrors on the interiors of many of his firm’s office buildings, Roche replied, ‘‘The interesting thing about mirror is that it is very inexpensive, almost as inexpensive as paint. Most interior surfaces are static, unchanging: if painted, the paint remains the same until it fades. The marvelous thing that happens with mirror, if used in a certain way, is that it is constantly alive, constantly alive as one moves. It becomes a kinetic surface, a kinetic experience of light. It picks up reflections, sparkle. Dark spots, a constant painting where the real world is reflected in a painterly way. A tremendous decorative effect from what exists, always changing, always moving.’’ Roche, ‘‘Kevin Roche on Design and Building,’’ 85. 29. Tafuri and Dal Co, Modern Architecture, 2:314. 30. Roche, ‘‘Design Process, World Headquarters, Union Carbide Corporation,’’ 134. 31. Kracauer, ‘‘The Mass Ornament,’’ 75. 32. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 83. Emphasis in original. 33. On ‘‘the life that does not deserve to live,’’ see Agamben, Homo Sacer, 136– 43. On the ‘‘partition [or distribution] of the sensible,’’ see Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics. 34. Deleuze, ‘‘Postscript on Control Societies,’’ 180. 35. Kracauer, ‘‘The Mass Ornament,’’ 78. 36. Ibid., 76. 37. Derrida, Specters of Marx.

C ARLOS BASUALDO AND REINALDO L ADDAGA

Experimental Communities It might seem a strange paradox that, to begin a discussion of a number of recent projects pointing toward the formation of a new culture in the arts, we must start with a toilet. This toilet, however, is very different from the one that, almost a century ago, Marcel Duchamp presented at the Society of Independent Artists in New York. Duchamp signed his piece ‘‘R. Mutt’’ and gave it a title that served to distance or extract it from its daily uses. In 2003, the Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrˇc proposed the installation of two dry toilets in an outlying area of the city of Caracas, working in collaboration with the La Vega neighborhood association, the Caracas Urban Think Tank (ccstt) and the architects Ana María Torres and Liyat Esakov.∞ The toilets were proposed as a solution to the sewage contamination and water shortages that the inhabitants of the ciudad informal (‘‘informal city,’’ the euphemism used to refer to the slums or shantytowns of Caracas) deal with on a daily basis. Potrˇc’s and Esakov’s solution was to take effect during a six-month trial period, after which it could be adopted by the area’s residential complex. In the artist’s own words, this project—which involved the establishment of a collaborative group, including neighbors from La Vega, the architects, and the artist herself—represents the culmination of a long search for solutions to a number of concrete problems. Potrˇc is part of a growing group of artists whose members do not necessarily know each other and whose importance in the contemporary art world has been steadily increasing during the course of the last decade. These artists refuse to make objects that are self-sufficient and

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stable, or specific events or performances confined to a clearly delimited place and a brief time; instead, they propose open projects whose development implies the formation of experimental communities that include artists and nonartists. Their works consist of inventing devices and providing resources for dialogues in which forms of knowledge, imaginaries, and social relations can be clarified, enhanced, and developed. At the same time, they generate presentations in art spaces of the images, sounds, and discourses that result from their specific projects. What is finally shown is both a set of more or less durable artifacts and a record of the production of the collectivities from which these arise. Potrˇc, for example, employs the medium of drawing to convey the variety of urban situations that insistently attract her attention and to explore a range of possible solutions, both realistic and utopian. Reminiscent of Yona Friedman’s sketches from the seventies, Potrˇc’s colorful drawings seem to perform a pedagogic role, informing the art audience of the developments of the artist’s work outside the boundaries of the exhibition space. Combining words and images, the drawings bridge the apparent gap between Potrˇc’s investigations into the urban and her desire to operate in specific situations while functioning according to the conventions of a more traditional definition of artistic practice. A number of her recent drawings from Caracas allow the art audience to understand the process by which Potrˇc and her group arrived at the dry toilet as a possible solution for an endemic problem of the city’s shanties. Potrˇc usually complements her presentations in institutional contexts with a Web site devoted to her work, featuring examples of urban and architectural practices generated as responses to a wide array of local problems. She also includes display structures strategically placed in the exhibition space containing experimental prototypes and utilitarian objects that she calls ‘‘power tools,’’ which offer paradigms for a wide variety of already existing ‘‘solutions.’’ Potrˇc’s solutions are not instrumental in the sense of merely proposing technical solutions to problems. Her works do not attempt to formalize what is informal about these neighborhoods by integrating them into the macroeconomic urban system; instead, they explore the methodology of self-help and economically sustainable solutions in different environments. She is less interested in carrying out an activity linked to social engineering than in the progressive consolidation of a model of urban intervention. In this

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model, a problem is seen both as an obstacle to be overcome and as the occasion for an interrogation of social relations and the subsequent elaboration of alternative forms of sociality. During this process, the artist and the newly formed community create archives that can be circulated outside the site of their original production, whose function is to memorialize and publicize the model. The sociologist Stephen Turner has proposed a term that usefully describes Potrˇc’s work: the ‘‘boundary organization,’’ which he defines as a space and a group of protocols that provide ‘‘a framework of flexible mutual expectations.’’≤ This framework allows for the collaboration between individuals or groups with very different backgrounds, skills, interests, and desires. A particularly relevant example of the kind of boundary organizations to which Turner refers are the increasingly frequent associations between scientists and laypersons that form to discuss ecological crises. These are temporary organizations that communicate between worlds whose coupling would initially seem unlikely. This coupling depends on the establishment of transitory domains where gatherings can take place, where processes of translation can develop, and where results can be accumulated and organized. These domains are not isolated, in the same way that an eddy is not isolated in a current; rather, they are embedded in the social worlds that they link by the mere fact of their existence. We have chosen to call the gatherings that take place around projects like Potrˇc’s ‘‘experimental communities’’: durable associations of individuals who explore anomalous forms of being together while addressing a problem in a certain locality, producing objects, texts, films, and images that can circulate in the art world as aesthetic manifestations of the social knowledge that emerges in the process. The particular profile that the universe of the arts has adopted in the last few years depends on the presence and the influence of a growing number of artists who are interested in developing boundary organizations where experimental communities can start, expand, subsist, and transform. This process takes place against the background of that series of developments and transformations that is usually called globalization, a widely contested term that we understand as a large increase in communications and connections and a generalized destructuring of the

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institutions and ways of life that were developed in the context of the Euro-American type of national-social states of the central decades of the twentieth century. The tasks that these artists seem to have set for themselves amount to the invention of new forms of being-in-common and representing that commonality, in circumstances in which the social forms that emerged in the context of the social capitalism that prevailed in the second part of the twentieth century are progressively dissolved. In the world of globalization, the conception of art as a space in which a fundamental truth about individuals or communities is manifested through those objects or events usually called ‘‘art works’’ seems to be losing its centrality. The range of indicators of this process go from the passive acceptance, by some artists, of the role of producers of highquality goods (as with the works of Takashi Murakami or Damian Hirst) to an aggressive affirmation of subjectivity that is more like a symptom of its own dissolution (as in the case of Matthew Barney or Tracey Emin, among others). That is to say, the art world cynically affirms exchange value as universal equivalency and spectacularly displays mythologies of a strictly personal nature. In this context, some artists have generated strategies that react to this set of situations by taking up certain moments from the avant-garde tradition that remained insufficiently explored and developing them in original ways. Here, we are referring mostly to the several historical attempts to imagine possible connections between producers and receivers that would not be mediated by the traditional form of the artwork. Thomas Hirschhorn’s installation at Documenta 11 in 2002 is an example of these strategies. The piece involved the construction of a series of precarious buildings in the Friedrich Wöhler-Complex, a public space in the north of Kassel, inhabited mostly but not exclusively by immigrants of Turkish descent. The set of buildings was called Bataille Monument. The project consisted of a set of discrete elements and actions, including a sculpture of wood, cardboard, tape, and plastic (the ‘‘Sculpture,’’); a Georges Bataille ‘‘Library,’’ with books that refer to Bataille’s oeuvre, arranged according to categories of word, image, art, sports, and sex (a collaboration with Uwe Fleckner) (fig. 1); a ‘‘Bataille Exhibition’’ with a topography of his oeuvre, a map, and books on and by Georges Bataille (a collaboration with Christophe Fiat); various workshops realized through the duration of the exhibition (a collaboration with Manuel

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Thomas Hirschhorn, Bataille Monument, 2002. Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002. Photo by Werner Maschmann, courtesy of Gladstone Gallery.

1. Library.

2. Bar.

Joseph, Jean-Charles Masséra, and Marcus Steinweg); a stand with food and drinks (fig. 2); a shuttle service to transport the visitors and neighborhood residents between Documenta 11 and the Bataille Monument (fig. 3); a television studio that broadcast daily a brief show from the Bataille Monument on the Kassel public-access channel (fig. 4); and a Web site with live feedback from webcams installed in the different sections of the Bataille Monument. In Hirschhorn’s project, educational organizations (the workshops and the library) join mechanisms aimed at articulating the relationship between the audience and the work of art (the ‘‘Sculpture’’ [fig. 5] and the ‘‘Bataille Exhibition’’ [fig. 6]), which in turn are linked to parodic forms

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Thomas Hirschhorn, Bataille Monument, 2002. Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002. Photo by Werner Maschmann, courtesy of Gladstone Gallery.

3. Shuttle service.

4. TV studio.

of public transportation (two dilapidated Mercedes-Benzes served as shuttles), a local television channel, the Web, and fast-food services. This heterogeneous, stratified community is firmly anchored in the diverse instances of daily life but subject to a radical temporality concerning its duration and intensity. It is the ‘‘form’’ of a possible community that seems to interest Hirschhorn primarily, a form that is not created once and for all but that is rather the result of an assembly process, open (to a certain extent) to the unforeseen. Although Hirschhorn seems at times an artist involved mostly with the tradition of sculpture, and more specifically, with its public incarnations, his concern instead seems to be the forms of experience that an object or set of

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Thomas Hirschhorn, Bataille Monument, 2002. Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002. Photo by Werner Maschmann, courtesy of Gladstone Gallery.

5. Sculpture.

6. Georges Bataille exhibition.

objects might enable. The artifact that he constructs is precisely the assembly of relationships between a diverse group of actors and communicational situations. Through these multiple situations, the Bataille Monument set out to present a series of events and to open up a space where exchanges between the neighborhood and its surroundings could take place. But it also tried to assemble a program in which the process of constructing the piece demanded the invention of a possible community integrated by locals and visitors, inhabitants and passers-by. This community, while composed of certain preexisting instances and elements, would end up incorporating elements that were, initially, foreign to it. At first, these projects might seem close to things familiar: forms of art

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for the community as they are conceived by state bureaucracies, or the projects associated with a ‘‘new public art’’ of a few years ago, like Mary Jane Jacobs’s ‘‘Culture in Action’’ of 1993. But the conception that lies at the base of both those strategies is essentially conservative, insofar as they conceive of artistic production as a compensatory activity, an activity where individuals, in their leisure time, communicate their personal emotions, goals, and desires through texts or images, without linking them critically to the matrix of social forces from which they emerge. At the same time, they tend to operate under the assumption that communities have an identity that is independent of the acts of expression in which they engage, not recognizing that identity formations are contingently constituted by these very acts. Projects associated with identity politics usually fall prey to exactly this set of problems.≥ The relevance of projects like Hirschhorn’s resides precisely in the fact that they occur in spaces and situations where even the existence of a set identity cannot be assumed. Indeed, the very premise of projects like the Bataille Monument is that all identities, even the most stable ones, are inexorably volatile and constantly being produced and reproduced. Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument, like several of his previous ‘‘Monuments,’’ attempts to disturb the presumed stability of the contexts in which it takes place, while also proposing a new space in which the knowledge and actions that arise from this disturbance can circulate, be recorded, displayed, and metabolized by the newly constituted community. In this way, a project like Hirschhorn’s differs from those earlier projects that Nicolas Bourriaud addressed in his brief book on relational aesthetics.∂ The corpus of relational aesthetics, as it was initially presented in Bourriaud’s book, consisted mostly of punctual interventions in relatively homogeneous and stable regions of social life. Examples included Rirkrit Tiravanija organizing a dinner at a collector’s house, Philippe Parreno inviting people to practice their favorite hobbies on May 1, Pierre Huyghe assembling a casting session, or Gabriel Orozco placing oranges in an empty Brazilian market. All of these projects are micro-actions that inflect a state of things without breaking it. Bourriaud’s book—extremely valuable in its introduction of both a group of artists that would become particularly central to the current critical discussions and a useful perspective for looking at their work—carries with it the early-nineties ethos of modesty, an instinctive refusal to engage in anything that could smell of Grand Politics. To this attests his in-

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sistence on the value of the micro-gesture and the interstitial. But this modesty is also its main limitation. The artists that we mention (who are, we would suggest, some of the most interesting and intense of the more recent artistic production) try to overcome this limit by designing and producing engagements that are sustained in time and take place in tense environments, where forms of conflict can’t be avoided. Hirschhorn’s Monument is clearly an example of these kinds of engagements, specifically meant to be the occasion for the development of a particular type of learning process that, starting from a specific situation (a group of residents of Hamburg who design a park, a group of residents and architects in Caracas who design toilets), involves the formulation of objectives and the production and self-representation of the agency of the collectivity concerned. These are truly open processes in relation both to the contingencies that may occur while the project is being carried out and to the makeup of the communities that they assemble. In his Art as a Social System, Niklas Luhmann suggests that an artwork is an entity that ‘‘directs the beholder’s awareness toward the improbability of its emergence.’’∑ From the point of view of the artist, this means the invitation to practice her art in such a way that the results of her actions could not be anticipated—perhaps the oldest imperative of the culture of the arts in modernity. In a recent interview Hirschhorn, commenting on the Bataille Monument, states: My monuments aren’t spectacles for me but rather events. An event is also something you can’t plan ahead of time because you never know what will happen. And in fact that is what happened [in the Bataille Monument]. If I already know in advance what kind of experience will be generated, it wouldn’t be an event, it wouldn’t be an experience. I feel that the condition of spectacle always results from thinking of an event in terms of two groups, one that produces something and another that looks at it. That is not the case here. And it is possible to create an event that will be so difficult and complicated and incredibly exhausting that it will always make excessive demands on the spectator. The first to be overburdened was me, the next was my coworkers, or the people from the housing project, and then perhaps the third, I hope, was the visitor. In this sense I believe that if there is such constant challenge, one can fend off the spectacle.∏

We call ‘‘experimental communities’’ communities formed under the pressure of the kind of ‘‘excessive demand’’ to which Hirschhorn refers.

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It is of the nature of the excessive demand to allow for a redistribution of positions and of roles in the site in which it takes place. This redistribution allows for processes of learning that subsist, at least for as long as the project continues. Intensity not just in contemplation but fundamentally in learning is what these projects propose. The work of Jeanne van Heeswijk clearly incarnates these distinctive facets of the experimental community. Face Your World, a 2002 collaboration between the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Central Ohio Transit Authority (cota), and the Children of the Future program of the Greater Columbus Arts Council (gcac), was intended to allow a group of children ages five to twelve to produce their own images of their urban surroundings by using computer software. This software, called the Interactor, was developed by van Heeswijk in collaboration with the poet and philosopher Maaike Engelen and a group of software designers from the city of Rotterdam, the V2 Organisation’s Institute for the Unstable Media. The software was installed in a number of computers inside a small cota bus that was used to take the kids around the city of Columbus. The bus functioned simultaneously as an exploration tool and an urban laboratory for the imagination. The results of the children’s work, a collection of personalized images of imaginary public spaces, were displayed on three ‘‘bus stops,’’ which were in fact slightly anthropomorphic public sculptures designed by another van Heeswijk collaborator, the Dutch artist Joep van Lieshout and his Atelier van Lieshout. Face Your World operated through images. The dimension of excess that is always implicated in the image (excess of meaning, to start with, as images are always that which escapes the very possibility of being signified) is precisely what authorizes its audience of users to appropriate their world while they produce it. This appropriation was, of course, not entirely factual. The audience (although it might be better to refer to them as ‘‘actors,’’ as their participation in the project was an active one) was not intended to reconstruct the actual city but simply to imagine or produce the possibility that their environment could change. What the project created was, first and foremost, the possibility of collective invention. Potrˇc’s, Hirschhorn’s, and Van Heeswijk’s projects start from an affirmation of the primacy of collaborative production processes over indi-

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vidual ones. This stance is linked to the assumption that where a large number of individuals with access to different types of knowledge converge, a situation is created whose complexity is impossible for individuals to attain. This condition allows for the development of a practical conception of society in which a human group takes form through a learning process carried out by means of a sustained conversation between its members. The same process occurs in another recent project, Cybermohalla, ongoing in New Delhi since the year 2000. Started by Sarai: The New Media Initiative, the project consists of a group of Indian artists, filmmakers, and computer experts who work in collaboration with Ankur, an ngo dedicated to experimental educational processes. Cybermohalla sets up meeting spaces for young people and provides them with assistance to carry out collaborative projects that usually take the form of interviews and annotations in hypertextual diaries that are later submitted for public discussion. The project takes place in various parts of the city: in 2002, in Dakshinpuri, a resettlement colony in the south of Dalhum; in 2001, in lnjp, an illegal squat in the middle of the city; and in 2000, in the Sarai Media Laboratory, in the north of Delhi. A combination of text, image, and sound, these materials originate in conversations that take place in the spaces themselves, in the neighborhoods, or through email exchanges. From this process particular forms of representation have developed, forms that are, at the same time, sites for the construction of subjectivity. ‘‘Keeping and maintaining diaries is a practice that allows for an engagement with ‘reality’ and the context one is situated in, through constant reflection and articulation via the language of text and other media,’’ writes Shudda Sengupta, a member of Sarai. ‘‘Diaries have the potential to evolve newer languages that further displace dominant discourses because they are situated and personal, outside of the domain of the ‘expert’ and the technocratic language, that expertise entails. Written across dimensions of space, time, specific contexts and subjectivities, diaries can also be seen as databases of multiple narrative strands, as a plurality of comment, observation, word-play and reflection; as adventitious micro-histories of the present.’’π For this to occur, the diaries must become public. The ‘‘interviews, stories, writeups, photographs, animation on gimp (free software image manipulation application) and audio recordings (sounds of the basti, interviews taken, etc.) that make up the diaries have been presented in a variety of

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ways: A book (By Lanes), a set of 10 booklets, 5 postcards and a CD that the practitioners call the ‘Book Box,’ a batch of stickers with statements culled from diary entries, monthly wall magazines and a multimedia installation titled ‘Before Coming Here Had You Ever Thought of a Place Like This’ which uses video, animation, photography, print and posters to create an immersive rescension of the Cybermohalla experience.’’∫ In the St. Pauli district of Hamburg in 1993, the final stage of another process of this kind brought together exhibition, conversation, and celebration in a circuit in which each one of these instances reinforced the others. That year, a diverse alliance of neighbors, musicians performed in a club in the area (Pudel Club), and members of a network of squatters started a protest to keep the city government from giving an important lot in the neighborhood over to private developers. When some artists, including Christoph Schaeffer, Cathy Skene, and later Margit Czensky joined the effort, they proposed calling the complex series of activities in which this multidisciplinary group engaged ‘‘Park Fiction.’’ In the words of Schaeffer, the terms that best describe the project are a ‘‘collective production of desire’’ and ‘‘collaborative planning.’’ The idea was to propose to the Hamburg city government an urban plan and program of activities that would be carried out jointly by the neighbors and the members of the group. Their plan consisted of a series of activities aimed at making manifest the knowledge and desires in the St. Pauli neighborhood, while at the same time contributing to the formation of unlikely community alliances. Some of these activities would be specific, like a series of events called ‘‘infotainment’’ that was a combination of conference, workshop, and festival.Ω Others would be ongoing and take place every day in a container that the group had set up in the lot. There, a series of objects and documents associated with the project (archives and communication media) were housed. A third set of activities involved the tour and exhibition of the project (in the Vienna Kunstverein in 1999 and in Documenta 11 in the summer of 2002). Here, the documentation related to the project was shown in an installation, designed by architect Günther Greis, that evoked the constructivist language of the Soviet avant-garde. Lastly, at the time when the park was built, a meeting of collectives from all over the world called ‘‘Unlikely Encounters in the Urban Space’’ was organized in Hamburg. On this occasion, several groups of artists, including Ala Plástica from Argentina

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and Sarai, visited Hamburg for a series of presentations that took place over several days. All of the aforementioned cases involve the construction of environments where artists and nonartists come together to produce representations and communities. For these artists, the idea is to avoid the temptation that characterized many earlier community projects, the desire to become part of the ‘‘community’’ where the project takes place, so as to break away from the sacrificial figure of altruism. They see themselves belonging to a genealogy that includes figures such as Hélio Oiticica, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Robert Smithson. Those artists did not materialize an a priori plan in their work but rather developed the ability to respond to the openness and unpredictability of everyday life situations. But Matta-Clark, Smithson, and Oiticica operated within the mobile and contingent world of concepts and practices to which they belonged, and as such they responded to problems different from those imposed on artists such as van Heeswijk and Hirschhorn.∞≠ Therefore, these younger artists have an ambivalent relationship to this modern tradition and particularly to one of its elements: the radical desire to produce a space ‘‘outside’’ institutions and their conventions. Unlike the preceding generation, they utilize the spaces and institutions of art as channels for producing and broadcasting their work. These projects aspire to expose the practice of contemporary art as we know it to spaces and situations where it is not usually found, so as to test to what degree it is alive and still able to elicit forms of interrogation, while including those spaces in the economies of the art institutions. By presenting their work in these spaces, these collectivities can take distance from themselves and maintain an openness that allows them to avoid hardening into rigid identities. At the same time, art spaces are also part of a circuit of communication media that allows these artists to expand into other networks. Claire Bishop, in a recent article, suggests that a serious limitation of many (if not most) of the discourses held on recent projects of collaborative art is the propensity among the theorists, critics, and artists that hold them to celebrate a ‘‘self-sacrificial’’ figure of the artist and to fail to offer an aesthetic evaluation of the projects they address. This limits them to basing their evaluations on ethical judgments of the intentions of the artists involved. She suggests that this indifference to the specifi-

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cally artistic dimension is the result of a miscomprehension of the way the social and the aesthetic have been linked in the modern culture of the arts. She sees this, following the writings of Jacques Rancière, as characterized by the attempt to articulate ‘‘faith in art’s autonomy and belief in art as inextricably bound to the promise of a better world to come.’’∞∞ Bishop is right to suggest that the critics that address projects like these from an exclusively ethical point of view simplify both the specific projects and the potentialities of artistic practice. But it is also true that some of the most interesting of these projects can’t be read as belonging completely to the domain of art. Inasmuch as projects like Sarai’s, Van Heeswijk’s, and Potrˇc’s attempt at the same time to modify the local conditions of the sites where they operate, to build anomalous forms of association among diverse groups of actors, and to produce things that can be circulated and are susceptible to being judged in terms of their semantic and formal properties (as artworks), they result in hybrid entities that bridge and recombine the traditional domains of art, activism, urban planning, literature, etc. (the list is always open) as we know them. In this way, they demand complex forms of judgment (both aesthetic and ethical, political and practical) and schemes of evaluation that go beyond the disciplinary framework that even a sophisticated elaboration such as Rancière’s still preserves.∞≤ This is the case with a project started by a group of individuals in Argentina associated with the artist Roberto Jacoby, who has been active in the Argentinean art scenes since the late sixties. In 1999, at a time of severe economic and political crisis in the country, Jacoby invited several dozen people to develop a fictitious market. The means of exchange in this market would be a specific currency, which he called ‘‘Venus’’ (this is why the project was given the name of Proyecto Venus).∞≥ Each member received a set number of Venuses and was invited to announce services and goods that he or she would be willing to offer on the project’s Web site. The service and goods were bought and sold using the new currency. A multitude of offerings were immediately produced, from the most trivial (classes in painting or English, woodcutting services) to the most idiosyncratic (the preparation of unusual banquets and other anomalous social gatherings). The Web site became a magnifying glass that allowed both its members and the anonymous visitor to observe the state of the

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imagination and desire in an area of the arts community of Buenos Aires while also stimulating the production and circulation of other images and desires. But it was also a tool that allowed events to be organized, public discussions to be held, and personal relations to be formed. The project sets out to be a place where processes of cross-fertilization could occur by means of a device that could interrogate the actual forms of sociability while, at the same time, offering the possibility of creating new forms. Furthermore, the processes of fertilization took place in public space: not only on the project’s Web site but also in a series of presentations in galleries and cultural centers in Buenos Aires. The project amounted to the construction of a site where the development of a vast network could be observed, through countless actions that ranged from the most private (meeting new people) to the most public (performances, shows, conferences, and festivals). While projects like the Proyecto Venus obviously belong to the tradition of engaged or political artistic practice, they intersect it in a newly defined fashion. The preferred politics of the historical avant-garde was revolutionary transformation, while the political use of arts more frequent in art institutions is the continuation of the status quo, with minor tinkering. Instead, the politics of the artists that we have mentioned is analogous to what Brazilian political theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger calls, in several recent publications, ‘‘revolutionary reformism.’’ Revolutionary reformism, says Unger, ‘‘is the counterpart to the most advanced and experimentalist forms of economic activity: those that turn production into collective learning and permanent innovation, breaking down the rigid contrasts between cooperation and competition, as well as those between supervision and execution. In this form of production, people redefine their tasks in the course of executing them, and treat the idea of the next step as a permanent style of action.’’∞∂ The objective of projects like these is to develop a form of association where—to borrow terms from Arjun Appadurai—‘‘internal criticism and debate, horizontal exchange and learning, and vertical collaborations and partnerships with more powerful persons and organizations together form a mutually sustaining cycle of processes.’’∞∑ And for this reason they are a constituent part of a certain universe in the making, one characterized by the open-source movement and the establishment of social networks and alternative systems of microcredit, and local

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empowerment through global connection and the communal reappropriation of expert knowledge. These effect a ‘‘globalization from below,’’ in words borrowed from Appadurai. We call ‘‘experimental communities’’ those that are constituted in the universe of the arts (while linking this universe with other regions of human life) to explore forms of articulating competition and cooperation, collective learning and radical innovation, design and execution, direction and realization, in such a way that the archives of this exploration can travel and be exhibited. The communities gathered around the projects of Sarai, Park Fiction, Jacoby, or Van Heeswijk participate in new modes of organization under conditions of globalization that are the defining feature of our current condition. How can very diverse local intentions be brought together in unified actions and shared values? How can divergent positions be distributed and enumerated in conversation? These problems have become central. Is it possible for the arts to intervene in this new conjunction, which so fundamentally determines the constitution of contemporary society? It is to these questions that the projects described provide a number of provisional, but nonetheless eloquent, answers.

Notes 1. The Caracas Urban Think Tank is a Venezuelan organization directed by two architects, Herbert Klumpner and Alfredo Brillembourg. The specific project in which Potrˇc participated was financed by the German Cultural Foundation. Potrˇc’s project received financial aid from the Venezuelan Department for the Environment (Ministerio del Medio Ambiente) toward the construction of two dry toilets. For more basic information about the project, see http:// www.u-tt.com. 2. Turner, Liberal Democracy 3.0., 133. 3. This point was noted by Miwon Kwon in her book One Place After Another, where she suggested a model of collaborative art that, in her perspective, would overcome the difficulties of projects like Culture in Action. The model in question is what she calls a ‘‘collective artistic praxis.’’ She defines it as a ‘‘projective enterprise’’ that ‘‘involves a provisional group produced as a function of specific circumstances instigated by an artist and/or cultural institution, aware of the effects of these circumstances on the very conditions of

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interaction, performing its own coming together and coming apart as a necessarily incomplete modeling or working-out of a collective social process’’ (154). The suggestion is interesting, but, unfortunately, remains insufficiently developed in Kwon’s book. 4. Bourriand, Relational Aesthetics. 5. Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 126. 6. Buchloh, ‘‘An Interview with Thomas Hirschhorn,’’ 86. 7. Shudda Segupta, electronic communication with the authors, December 2003. 8. Ibid. 9. Describing an ‘‘infotainment’’ in an e-mail to the authors, Christoph Schaeffer wrote, Everything came together with Park Fiction 4—one day desires will leave the house and take to the streets, a series of talks and lectures, an exhibition of works by neighbors and professional artists in all the shops surrounding the park, even in private flats and the priest’s house, all related to parks or gardens or other issues connected with the park; a model by ‘kinderhaus am pinnasberg’—a place where children who cannot live at home for various reasons, runaways and street kids from the neighborhood live together. The children made a one week workshop, built a complete model of the park in their spring holidays, did tours to parks in Hamburg, read inspiring books, and build a great model—that was the most effective propaganda item, when it was in all its beauty in a shop window, and made the thought of the park as a real possibility much more actual than other artists’ works that were conceived specifically as propaganda. Some ideas from that model are still in the now existing plan. It was shown alongside works by renowned artists like Dan Graham—who sent 4 photos of urban gardens in Hamburg—works by Annette Wehrmenn, Claudia Pegel, Andreas Siekmann, Daniel Richter, Ingo Vetter and Annette Weisser. We produced the first brochure, developed by the group but especially by Katrin Bredemeier, then the designer of the group. Hans Christian Dany and myself developed together a glamorous construction sign for the park that survived till 1998. For the opening we built a salad bar, shaped like an English garden. It was part of the Park Fiction-style to always combine content and comfort, to create a lounge, welcoming atmosphere and not just speak about utopia. Park Fiction 4 was so important, because it was the moment when ‘art & politics made each other more clever’ as Margit Czenki put it.

10. In an important recent book, Laurence Bertrand Dorléac shows the extent to which many of the practices of the fifties and sixties were based on a conception of the art event as the place that, in the context of an increasingly rationalized social world, offered itself as a space for nonproductive actions. These actions, which refused to be incorporated into the circuit of economic

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exchange, manifested an archaic desire that at the time was still denominated the ‘‘sacred.’’ The art event would then take the form of the anarchic manifestation that interrupted the deployment of regular social life. This might explain the insistence on the figure of the mythic in Oiticica or Matta-Clark, or the passion for the prehistoric in Smithson. Dorléac, L’ordre sauvage. 11. Bishop, ‘‘The Social Turn,’’ 183. 12. Rancière insists on the continuity between older and more recent forms of collaborative art, inasmuch as they belong to what he calls the ‘‘aesthetic regime.’’ For a detailed comment and a critique of the way this position is developed in Rancière’s work, see Laddaga, Estética de la emergencia. 13. The name has recently changed, for legal reasons, to Proyecto V. The Web site of the project is http://www.proyectov.org. 14. Unger, False Necessity, xxvi. 15. Appadurai, ‘‘Deep Democracy,’’ 46. The case on which Appadurai bases his theorization is an alliance of groups mobilized to address the issue of housing for the poor in Mumbai, India.

RACHEL HAIDU

Précarité, Autorité, Autonomie Exiting the rer (Réseau Express Régional) rapid transit rail station named for the silvery, hulking, almost always empty Stade de France, one spied the first physical indicators of the Musée Précaire Albinet, handmade signs cut out of cardboard and pinned to wire fences (fig. 1). If you weren’t from the neighborhood, the meaning of the term Albinet on these cardboard arrows might be lost on you. The Cité Albinet is a building of subsidized apartments, or h.l.m. —habitation loyer modéré —across the street from the abandoned lot where, in the summer of 2004, Thomas Hirschhorn chose to site his project. And though the multiple meanings of the modifier précaire would probably not be lost on anyone in the Paris banlieue in 2004, the manner in which it would prepare you for Hirschhorn’s work is ambiguous. According to their dictionary definitions, précaire and précarité merely describe a certain category of states of being: those that are exercised only through a revocable authorization. But recently précarité has entered the political argot in France, invoking states of being that are fragile and impermanent because this is cost effective to forms of capitalism that dispense with human well-being as an imperative. An organization that calls itself Réseau stop précarité, claiming to have been born from the strikes at McDonald’s and Pizza Hut that sprung up in Paris in late 2000 and early 2001, declares that the term précarité was once ‘‘reserved for homeless persons’’ but ‘‘now belongs also to the world of work.’’∞ The term is also used to refer to the ‘‘precariousness’’ of dynamic markets or to the immigrant groups that almost universally

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1. Thomas Hirschhorn, Musée Précaire Albinet, Cité Albinet, Aubervillliers, 2004. Courtesy of the Artist and Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Aubervilliers.

perform the contingent labor to which the contemporary service economy has given rise. Today, the French press uses the term in a variety of contexts, such as calling ‘‘to diminish structural unemployment and thus précarité’’ or referring to the ‘‘génération précarité,’’ young people in insecure jobs or unpaid internships who have no contracts and do not enjoy full employment benefits. In a general sense, Hirschhorn’s Musée was précaire most precisely because it operated through the mere authorization of an artist: in other words, it was an institutionally precarious, easily revocable thing.≤ To the chagrin of some critics, Hirschhorn (as he has done in the past) hired local residents to help him construct, maintain, and dismantle his work, allowing short-term, low-paid or unpaid—i.e., precarious—labor to operate as a standard (fig. 2).≥ And the Musée proliferated the precarious nature of that labor and construction in its visual aspects: in its open, skeletal building style, which allowed visitors to readily understand how it was made and how it could be unmade; in the cheapness of the materials with which it was made, which could not have withstood a Parisian winter, let alone years of institutional wear and tear; even in its

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changeable surfaces, which featured new colors each week on the interior walls of its exhibition hall and a surface for uncensored public graffiti on its exterior walls. Précarité thus seemed to serve as a mechanism of transparency: the museum should look just as precarious as it was. On the one hand, this is a familiar logic from generations of institutional critique that would have us understand that the values of an institution are manifest in the details of its physical plant: plastic précarité thus would substitute for the luster of marble balustrades or the elegance of floating walls. On the other hand, we also know that museums exert their influence most surreptitiously and powerfully through the views on history and identity that they project, and that their most effective tools of projection are often the objects (and arrangements of objects) on display. And finally, as Andrea Fraser has argued, the museum is hardly a mere external framework for art, acting upon and exploiting art; it is, as she puts it, ‘‘the absolute and irreducible condition of [art’s] existence,’’ and as such a mere set of signifiers for what art is.∂ If the Musée and its exhibits testified to anything in particular, they testified to the radical contingency—précarité, perhaps—of artistic utopias. But to insist on Hirschhorn’s success in conveying the precariousness of the historical, canonical artistic utopias on display is already to grant to the Musée success in the deployment of a certain kind of institutional authenticity. I will make the argument that the Musée was successful in this respect, as an institution: it was full of the kinds of social joys we associate with thriving institutions. It taught people things; it allowed them the pleasure of knowledge and a sense of the world beyond itself; it spawned jobs, internships, social interaction, friendships, and basic forms of civic participation. But to grant the Musée success as an institution—or even to judge it according to the criteria of institutional success—is to occlude its status as an artwork that imitated a museum for its own ends. In the finer details of that imitation lie the clues as to whether such strategies might or might not constitute a critical method, and whether Hirschhorn’s Musée Précaire Albinet points critique in a different direction altogether.∑ What might Hirschhorn’s laboratory-like experiment in running a pseudoinstitution tell us about the contemporary state of art, such that institutions per se are not a target but rather a set of operational structures and achievements that are of interest in themselves? How might its modes of relat-

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rachel haidu 2. Thomas Hirschhorn, Musée Précaire Albinet, Cité Albinet, Aubervillliers, 2004. Courtesy of the Artist and Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Aubervilliers.

ing to institutionality complicate claims about the inherently political nature of art—or, to borrow from current nomenclature, of art’s relational aesthetics? The Musée Précaire Albinet ran for eight weeks in Aubervilliers, France, in the summer of 2004. It consisted of two built rooms and a hallway, a prefab trailer of the kind that is usually found on a construction site, and an open-air buvette (café), all set on an abandoned lot. It was also a series of eight week-long exhibitions of original works of art borrowed from the collections of the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Centre Georges Pompidou. And it was a series of weekly activities, including children’s workshops, writing workshops, art history lectures about each artist on display, and public debates about unrelated matters of general interest. The Musée’s three components—physical plant, ex-

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hibition schedule, and activities schedule—were complementary and mutually contingent in many ways. The dynamism of the schedule mimicked the logic of most institutions: it was rigorous, repetitive, and driven by a number of logistical and ‘‘institutional’’ considerations (how to involve a variety of participants, according to their age, interest, availability, and so on; how to use external agencies such as La part de l’art, a municipal organization that runs children’s workshops on art; how to broaden the institution’s purview to address community interests and needs, and so on). In addition, this schedule was driven by Hirschhorn’s prescription that something happen every day, so that the Musée would never be inert or inactive, a passive receptacle and purveyor of a cultural patrimony.∏ The Musée’s physical plant, continually repainted, redecorated, and intentionally exposed to spontaneous alterations like graffiti and vandalism, was no more static than its weekly schedule. (It should be noted that while the Musée did not experience any vandalism of its structures, the occasional appearance of graffiti targeting one of Hirschhorn’s female interns hardly made it a stress-free zone.) Thus, its dynamic schedule was not merely ‘‘institutional,’’ nor did it merely set about producing a notion of ephemeral or transient community: it was also legible as a sign for Hirschhorn’s general artistic attitude (for example, ‘‘Quality, No: Energy, Yes!’’), as, of course, was its physical plant, which exploited such signature Hirschhorn materials as duct tape, Xeroxed reproductions, and graffiti. Just as the plant, exhibition schedule, and activity schedule interlocked, the issues of material precariousness, authorial identity, and the boundary of the artwork as work—its ‘‘autonomy’’—were in constant, reciprocal play. No discussion of any particular aspect makes sense without allowing for its contingency and effect on other aspects. Each week of the Musée’s run, from April 19 through June 14, featured work by one of the eight artists in Hirschhorn’s lineup: Duchamp, Malevich, Mondrian, Dalì, Beuys, Le Corbusier, Warhol, and Léger. Hirschhorn selected all exhibited works from the French public collections, so that though the Musée sought a more complex relationship to its own authority than that asserted by a state patrimony, it nonetheless presented itself as a pseudomuseum that was both French and Hirschhornian in terms of how it defined its cultural treasures. Those cultural treasures had more in common, however, than merely having been produced by Hirschhorn’s favorite artists (the sole justification offered

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for their selection). Their week-after-week sequence rotated apogees of artistic utopianism with moments of severe ambiguity. Three of Malevich’s plaster Architektons (1923–26), Le Corbusier’s wood model for a unité d’habitation in Tiergarten (1957–58), and Léger’s Les disques dans la ville (1920) made for an almost nostalgic celebration of earlier periods, when dreams of industrial efficiency and beauty drove artistic experimentation. But such dreams were broken up by displays such as, for example, Beuys’s Das Schweigen, a multiple from 1973 that consisted of the copper- and zinc-coating of the five reels of Bergman’s film The Silence, left inside its canisters; the video recording of Beuys’s 1974 performance I Like America and America Likes Me, in which he (allegedly) lived with a live coyote in a gallery; and Warhol’s 1967 Electric Chair, a silk-screen painting of the photographic trace of an instrument of (American) state-mandated execution. The dystopic—canisters of a beautiful film, rendered unseeable, and an electric chair presented as an icon— carved out a strange place in the midst of a lineup that was heavily slanted toward the utopic, providing not so much an alternative voice as a recurring note in the utopian scales with which the twentieth century kept practicing. The meditative, elegiac logic of the exhibition schedule was set against a repetitive and vigorous schedule of weekly activities. Monday, the works from the previous weeks were removed and the interior of the exhibition hall repainted a different color. Tuesday, new works were picked up from their warehouses and installed in time for an opening, with free food, drinks, and open-mic rap. Wednesdays, La part de l’art produced workshops in which neighborhood children observed aspects of an artist’s work through related activities, such as making costumes inspired by Fernand Léger’s set and costume designs and showing them off in a runway show (fig. 3). Thursday afternoons, invited authors such as Catherine Henri or Oscarine Bosquet led writing studios for neighborhood adults. Friday evenings witnessed public debates—on the subject of ‘‘Jews/Arabs,’’ ‘‘Europe/USA,’’ or ‘‘Literature/Drugs,’’ for example— which were led by invited speakers, such as Leïla Shahid, the French representative of the Palestinian Authority. Saturdays, art historians lectured on that week’s featured artist, and Sunday evenings a communal meal, usually cooked by the women who also ran the buvette, was offered to anyone around. There were also weekly trips, often out of town, related to the artist on display that week: for the Malevich week, a group

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3. Thomas Hirschhorn, Musée Précaire Albinet, Cité Albinet, Aubervillliers, 2004. Courtesy of the Artist and Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Aubervilliers.

of local residents went on a field trip that included a visit to the headquarters of the French Communist Party, a visit to Chartres, and a lunch in the countryside; for the Le Corbusier week, another group went to the Maison Radieuse at Rézé, had lunch, met with a committee of local residents, and visited a working architect’s office. The Musée’s physical structure changed from week to week. Some changes correlated to the weather or activity schedule and reflected the principles of modularity and flexibility emphasized in some of the exhibits. Black curtains were taped up to facilitate art historians’ projections; the Plexiglas windows and tent top covering an outdoor eating area were removed in good weather; an outside hallway served as a speaker’s (and rapper’s) podium during weekly openings. All of these reflected the kind of thinking prevalent in exhibits like those of Malevich and Le Corbusier. Perhaps the most striking demonstration of Hirschhorn’s interest in design was the exhibition hall, whose walls were repainted every week in strident, loud colors (green, red, ochre) to receive the changing exhibits. This last element, a subtle remarking of the

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institutional frame, echoed precedents set by the exhibited avant-garde artists who disturbed conventional uses of color to distinguish figure and ground, object and surface. If the formal history of this question became clear in exhibits of works by Mondrian and Léger, it was forcefully asserted as a didactic tool in the week that the Electric Chair was exhibited. In that silk-screen painting, where mottled scarlet and blue patterns further abstract a remote, iconic image of judicially sanctioned death, any figure-ground distinction is almost entirely consumed by the optical play of saturated colors. This was a museum that would dramatize its framing devices—and its own operation as a framing device—in as many ways as possible. Thus did the line between his project and the exhibited avant-garde utopias blur and then crystallize. So too did the line between Hirschhorn’s visual noise and the idea of a participating local community blur, and then become extremely evident. Efficient, problem-solving solutions, used again and again in the Musée’s construction, created a sense of universalism opening up for art, architecture, and design that was echoed in the works of art being exhibited. But in the place of legitimating links to historical avant-garde practices were indicators for a kind of contemporaneity that would differentiate Hirschhorn’s utopia in kind from that of Malevich, Le Corbusier, or any of the other artists exhibited. A fake museum in place of an institution that is also the place of a work of contemporary art, the Musée asserted its proxy status by indicating the nonsimultaneity or discontinuity between what was on display and itself, just as it reinforced the disjunctions and discontinuities between itself and the communities of its emplacement. It was as if Hirschhorn were out not to dissolve the differences between the surrounding community’s identities and his work’s autonomous authority, but rather to materially erect and reify all possible breaks and ruptures. The Musée comprised three well-defined indoor spaces—the library, studio, and exhibition hall—plus a covered hallway linking the spaces and a similarly well-defined outdoor space that left the majority of the empty lot untouched, except for the occasional appearance of a pingpong table. Emphasizing its own compactness and modest scale within the allotted space, the Musée fit in with surrounding houses and apartment buildings, which ranged from small two-story private houses to modest apartment buildings such as the Cité Albinet across the street

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4. Thomas Hirschhorn, Musée Précaire Albinet, Cité Albinet, Aubervillliers, 2004. Courtesy of the Artist and Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Aubervilliers.

(fig. 4).π The Musée could be entirely indoors on a given day, or spread out over a dozen additional meters for a communal meal or an opening. But it was its surfaces that provided the most mutable, contingent element of the Musée’s physical plant. Untreated plasterboard walls served as a kind of perpetually changing two-dimensional surface, with pinned-up graffiti, announcements, workshop output, and press clippings representing the most utopian, and perhaps naïve, slant on the nature of précarité. For each exhibit, Hirschhorn would produce a series of cutout images and text on the walls of the exhibition hall. Actual catalogue pages, black-and-white and color Xeroxes, would then contrast with the ‘‘auratic’’ original works of art. Press clippings attached to both internal and external walls grew in number by the week, creating a kind of media archive for local residents, who could regularly locate their (and their friends’ and kids’) images in the press photos. Often the output from the children’s workshops—Xeroxes of cell phones, blockcolored in the style of Warhol silk-screen paintings; graffitied, creatively titled cut-out illustrations of masterpieces, à la L.H.O.O.Q.∫ —decorated the various walls of the Musée, inside and outside. One resident put up an illustrated history of the neighborhood made of cut-out Xeroxes of

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image and text, which mimicked the collage aesthetic of the whole structure. Indeed, there was little difference between what could be pinned up or graffitied on an indoor wall as opposed to an outdoor wall (aside from a few critical pieces of paper, like the work schedule). Operational transparency and intelligibility seemed paramount, not only in the very open architecture of the physical structure but also in correlation to the activity schedule’s emphasis on textual information, education, and debate for all. In the end, the structure’s precariousness—its fluid adaptation to need and circumstance—accommodated a premium on meaning, as if Hirschhornian didacticism had a Darwinian gift for survival. Such an emphatic dedication to text in all its forms, to open-ended debate, and to pedagogy recalls many of Hirschhorn’s gallery and museum installations, in which cut-out texts or sometimes entire books can disperse over many different surfaces and media. Sometimes books are chained to another structure, as in Spinoza Monument (1999) or Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake (2000); sometimes they are interspersed with graffiti or cut-out images from pornography or other mass-media sources, as in Chalet Lost History (2003), and sometimes they are complemented by lectures or theatrical performances, as in Swiss Swiss Democracy (2004– 5), which featured daily lectures on philosophical themes by Marcus Steinweg and a play performed nightly by Gwenaël Morin’s troupe. A careful balance of visual clutter and structure results in a kind of overflow and perforation of information from multiple voices and media, forcing Hirschhorn’s audiences to consider the degree to which they have ‘‘understood’’ or even encountered the work. This requires a degree of self-confrontation that can be almost intolerable, as it was in Superficial Engagement (2006), in which the geometric abstractions of Emma Kunz were incongruously set against images of the Iraq war taken off of the Internet. This is the ‘‘work’’ of Hirschhorn’s work—an often uncomfortable disorientation forced on the viewer that in turn implicates that viewer in the quasi-anthropological logics on display, able to figure out only some of what is being said, while being distracted by continual jarring reminders of our fantasies about what we are looking at.Ω Visitors to Cavemanman (2002) were supposed to be struck by reminders of daily collective life: trash on the cavelike floor was clumped around trash bins, signifying the ways in which people neatly cluster their trash near filled-to-overflowing trash bins on city street corners.

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But the conceit of the piece—that it was the cave of a hermit trying to make sense of our world—accentuated a feeling of touristic or ethnographic voyeurism, an uncomfortable sense that we were not looking at our life but at someone else’s. The end result was a powerful perceptual overlap between ‘‘our world’’ and that of society’s rejects, homeless and hermits alike. Similar feelings were even sharper, and even more politically hard to take, for visitors to the Musée Précaire Albinet and the Bataille Monument at Documenta (2002). In both cases spectators from outside the neighborhood, de facto ‘‘art spectators,’’ came to see a work of Hirschhorn’s and found themselves looking ‘‘in on a community,’’ usually defined by a racial or national majority (in Landy, the neighborhood where the Musée was sited, Malian and North African immigrants are in the majority; in Kassel, Hirschhorn selected a housing project dominated by Turkish immigrants as the locale for Bataille Monument). Despite an unremitting emphasis on unrestricted information and learning-for-all, universalism seemed trumped by the socioeconomic realities of race relations, heightened exponentially by the confrontation between the art world’s internationalism and the effects of migrancy on urban geographies. In Kassel, tables and tables of Bataille information, Bataille videos, and a lending library of Bataille-related books made a kind of potlatchlike extravaganza out of the concept of learning. What you made of that combination of excess and didacticism, however, seemed overdetermined by who you were, and that process of overdetermination seemed almost certain to make everyone at least a little bit uncomfortable. Among the potential kinds of identity that can uncomfortably affect one’s perception of or participation in Hirschhorn’s work is gender. The Bataille Monument was marked, for some critics, by its emphasis on the erotic (or pornographic) component in Bataille’s thinking, which played obtusely against some of the sexual mores of the largely Muslim community of its emplacement. Hirschhorn took a different approach to his ‘‘issues’’ with gender and local community in the Musée Précaire. All of the artists whose work he selected for the exhibits are dead white males, while almost all of the invited speakers at the weekly events were women.∞≠ A certain ‘‘lived,’’ experiential level of the Musée used gender to contrast with the temporally frozen, physically contained masterworks. Accentuating this difference was the buvette, run by eight local

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(African) female residents, the one part of the Musée that was completely independent of Hirschhorn’s authority. Although he and his workers built it, and Hirschhorn set it up (with a microwave and so on), the women who sold food and drinks there each day made their own profits and divided up the work on their own. Thus did the ‘‘lived’’ component of the Musée seem to extend to its commercial venue, which was similarly all-female. If ever there were a public art project that set out to underscore the traditional gender hierarchies in the world of art, the Musée Précaire would be it. Its operational structures—putting large numbers of women into positions of commercial and discursive power while reserving the maleness of the historical pool of authors—were almost perfectly mimetic (which is not to say that it was critically so). Its capacity for translating typical institutional logics as if they were normal was entirely—as at the Bataille Monument—a function of whether it was seen as an institution or as an artwork. It should be noted, first, that the participating community was not identical to the local community: only a small portion of Landy’s residents came to the Musée, although those who did came frequently, if not every day, and the chief of the local Malian community thanked Hirschhorn with a musical procession and a speech at the communal meal on the Musée’s final Sunday. Thus, though there may be no way of describing this community as having demographic parameters, a visual aesthetic, or any other discrete identity other than its geographic location, certain distinctions between communities, seemingly differentiated by what Miwon Kwon calls ‘‘locational identity’’ went into play at the Musée.∞∞ Visiting art spectators came to the site in order to see a work by Thomas Hirschhorn, while local residents used the Musée as an ephemeral institution. Though everyone participating in the Musée represented some form of community to someone else, the different communities’ relationships to their institutionalization made for markedly different perceptions of what was happening. The sense that the Musée was engendering ephemeral communities was common among the participating residents that I interviewed. Certainly this was a symmetrical operation, in that communities of visitors existed in the collective perception of the residents, and communities of residents in the collective perception of the visitors. But my often-repeated question to participating residents about what they thought of Hirschhorn’s work—as opposed to the works of Duchamp, Malevich, and so on—met with laughter and perplexity. In other words,

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though they were conscious of Hirschhorn’s identity as an artist and various communities’ roles as collaborators, the notion that the Musée Précaire itself was an artwork was fugitive. Only some of those who worked on the Musée considered themselves collaborators or participants in an artwork: the collective and individual role of the Musée’s ‘‘local community members’’ was left largely to individuals to negotiate. What am I doing here? what does this work mean about me? how does it address me?—these were questions about which the Musée Précaire seemed conspicuously circumspect. Why? Here, I think, we find a path that is defined less by the ethics of community formation than by the particular politics of institutionality that allowed the Musée to form its ‘‘communities.’’ And, in keeping with the relationships of interdependence that I signaled at the start of this essay, such a politics of institutionality could only be performed through the intersection of formal play, authorial identity, and the proposed autonomy of art, which was both something on display and performed throughout the Musée’s operations. In this sense, the Musée can be seen as a reorientation of the long-term and profound kinds of perception that Kwon invokes in the final sentences of her seminal book on issues of community involvement and site-specific public art: Today’s site-oriented practices inherit the task of demarcating the relational specificity that can hold in dialectical tension the distant poles of spatial experience. . . . This means addressing the uneven conditions of adjacencies and distances between one thing, one person, one place, one thought, one fragment, next to another, rather than invoking equivalences via one thing after another. Only those cultural practices that have this relational sensibility can turn local encounters into long-term commitments and transform passing intimacies into indelible, unretractable social marks—so that the sequence of sites that we inhabit in our life’s traversal does not become genericized into an undifferentiated serialization, one place after another.∞≤

The Musée seems keyed toward the heightening of ‘‘the uneven conditions of adjacencies and distances between one thing, one person . . . next to another.’’ If this is the case—if, that is, the Musée can be seen as consistent with Hirschhorn’s other works—then it is a project that pushes the investigation of précarité beyond its defining opposition with permanence. For while institutions (and especially museums) may be eternally allied with the notion of permanence in their structures and

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values (and the value of permanence, in turn, will be contaminated with the hegemonic forms and means of power that institutions apply), Hirschhorn’s ‘‘precarious’’ museum pushes all of its participants toward an investigation of what might or should remain from an experiment like the Musée’s. The appropriateness of permanence, or even ‘‘indelible, unretractable social marks’’ (beyond their value to a critique of artists’ short-lived exploitations of sites, communities, and neighborhoods) finally comes under investigation, while passing intimacies and even institutions are also revalued. What would be the best ‘‘indelible’’ legacy of such a work: A sense of the possibilities that can be opened up by institutions—which would indeed be a useful lesson anywhere in Western Europe? A sense of the potential value of ephemeral or ‘‘precarious’’ communities—a value that is, after all, strongly upheld in many middleclass traditions, such as summer camp, exchange programs, vacation communities, and so on? A sense of the power of art in forming collective and individual identities? Or a sense of art’s reliance on certain discursive and institutional performances—lectures and workshops, not to mention community reception—to give it such power? In other words, by resituating and renegotiating the components that create public, site-specific art—institutionalization, the artistic author, the invitation to collaborate, and the visual appearances and operations of the artwork—the Musée successfully undoes the gloss that much ‘‘relational specificity’’ accomplishes: its subsumption of all those critical aspects of any artwork and its reception into a seemingly immanent politicization of art. If the Musée imitated an institutional frame (or even some of the characteristics of the artistic utopias on display) by imitating pedagogical earnestness and other systems of transparency, it remade that frame on its own terms, most often by formally and complexly disrupting any anticipated or projected sense of transparency or continuity between the work and its community. A viewer’s sense that the Musée was continuous with or transparent to its surrounding community was invited in modes as ambivalently deliberate as Cavemanman’s piles of crushed soda cans. For example, the duct tape that was wrapped around the two-by-fours that held up the tarp roofs of the external hallway connecting the Musée’s three rooms also framed the paintings borrowed from France’s national collections, so that they were both ‘‘signed’’ by Hirschhorn but also

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framed against the wall. And the color-saturated graffiti that Hirschhorn commissioned from local residents identifying different rooms and upcoming events was joined by uncommissioned graffiti, so that tags and insults also crossed the threshold into a decorative medium. Not only did graffiti seem pseudoinstitutionalized as a signifying system (and not for the first time); the Musée seemed to exploit a position in which its own stylistic energy and authority could absorb even spontaneous and anonymous writings and sentiments—even reactions to the Musée (as every inscription on its walls, on some level, was). In this sense, the function of graffiti is unclear, as it appears to re-mark the surfaces of the Musée as if it were collectively and not individually authored, as if its physical plant were capable of absorbing critique, as if there were no verbal or ideographic violence that could be done to the Musée that was not, in fact, already a part of its structure. Thus, the Musée could appear to have a dangerously organic relation to the community of its emplacement. Such a reading would mean that instead of performing mimicry, the Musée was using the visual and operational structures it borrowed from society at large as a kind of camouflage.∞≥ This sense might be confirmed by Hirschhorn’s frequent remarks that his use of duct tape is merely the reuse of a common material in a world of incessant circulation and migration. He would then be assimilating his museum into a neighborhood defined by the effects and continuing process of migration by metonymically indicating the process of migration as an aspect of his visual design. But there is more to Hirschhorn’s uses of duct tape and graffiti, and even to the Musée’s open, skeletal construction that renders such a reading problematic. In the Musée, duct tape also was insistently a set of internal frames, re-marking the ruptures and tears within the naturalistic, coherent ideological picture produced by circulation in all its guises. If we consider an ability to circulate (as interior-ready pedestal sculptures and market-ready easel paintings) to be an aspect of art lent by modern institutions such as art markets and museums, then the use of duct tape to frame the pictures, as well as the Xeroxed reproductions placed around them, seem apt reminders of the process of moving works of art from place to place—a process that the entire Musée represented. Then, in place of camouflage, duct tape has the effect of denaturalizing the public discourse on a ‘‘neighborhood in transition’’ such as the area around the Stade de France. As a material it gains the effect of inviting comparison between various discourses that

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value circulation as a form of collateral development within modernity (and permanence, irreplaceability, and authenticity as circulation’s corollary): between the movable and reproducible nature of modern artworks and the appropriable and thus precarious nature of much urban residence (regardless of how permanent it looks); between the irreplaceable and authenticating nature of artistic labor and the perpetually replaceable nature of almost all other forms of modern labor; between the aspired permanence of home and the impermanence of all other forms of community. On yet another level, the duct tape operates as a kind of faux fauxwood surface, brown like the brown of imitation wood surfaces, but utterly unlike wood itself. In using such an effect, Hirschhorn echoes precedents set in the field of collage, a constant reference in his aesthetic. In Picasso’s 1911–13 collages, new, mass-produced materials (wallpaper, tack paper) introduce the principle of imitation. But they are distinctly parts of collages, parts of a surface that effectively supplants imitation. Wallpaper becomes a signifier for representation even inside a medium that holds out the mirage of a solution to representation, to the ordinary figure-ground distinctions within which color conventionally finds its place. For Rosalind Krauss, who first articulated this operation, wallpaper, ‘‘color now bracketed as a sign,’’ also signifies the issue of ornamentation, increasingly powerful as Picasso’s identification with his own semiotic discovery quickly overripens.∞∂ Wallpaper becomes a signifier for representation within a system that proposes to sublate— assimilate, resolve, and thereby renounce—representation’s paradoxical reliance on absence; the totalizing possibilities in such a formal resolution holds out the specter of subsuming the artist’s identity in a single gesture. Hirschhorn’s Musée puts duct tape into the same kind of semiotic position but displaces the allegory from a purely semiotic register to a social one. If this museum could hold out the specter of any kind of utopian solution, it is held together, architecturally and symbolically, by a material that reminds us of the new meanings of homelessness and migration to which any modernist idealization of circulation must respond.∞∑ And similarly, the frequency with which duct tape is used in his work raises the question of how such a field of meanings can be differentiated from the artist’s—Hirschhorn’s—identity, or brand name.∞∏ The Musée echoed other anti-naturalist traditions, and in every case we can see their use as commentaries on the nature of authorial identity. For

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example, in its rectilinear, open, skeletal framework, the Musée cited the forms favored by Soviet constructivists. Unlike the constructivists, however, whose use of such forms became meaningful only in their conjunction with rationalized labor and mass production, Hirschhorn’s openframe Musée, like other projects he has done in public space, undermines the ideals for which ‘‘rational’’ labor was once mobilized. He operates such undermining pointedly, as if to delineate a paradox. Paid labor, incorporated into his artworks, helps articulate its corollary, the irrational value placed on artistic labor. But no accumulation of multiple forms of labor actually undoes the artistic author’s mandate. Hirschhorn remains the boss, and the one who will ultimately take credit for the Musée as a ‘‘work.’’ Thus, even as he undermines the rationalization of labor in his projects in public space (by training and hiring local residents, for example, rather than using his own assistants), he underscores his own role as manager, if not owner, of the means of production (by training and hiring local residents, controlling their wages, and so forth).∞π Into his projected production costs he factors the probability of vandalism from workers who would stand to gain from being rehired, and he daily performs various repairs in a manner that underscores artisanlike principles of reuse and refurbishment. These irrational labor costs may re-mark the institution as one operating outside the norms of contemporary capitalism, but they do little to actually resolve the paradox of an artist whose brand name authorizes a pseudopublic institution and whose idiosyncratic preferences determine its operations. If this is the paradox facing many contemporary artists working in public spaces, it is as defined in Hirschhorn’s work by its art-history lineage, as well as by its ethical or pseudoethical ramifications. Another way to put this is: Hirschhorn re-marks the work he puts on display (his own, the Musée) and the historical art that he puts on display (Duchamp, Malevich, and so on) as a way of describing his position, unique in a history of art whose pretensions to social and political problem solving have only grown in tandem with formal experimentation. Which is not to say that these pretensions are, in fact, consistent, or that they could ever be consistent with a transparent authorial figure, one whose social intentions would be consistently ideal (democratic, for example) or less than paradoxical. Thus, while I have been detailing the Musée’s visual, performative, operational description of ‘‘Hirschhorn’s’’ position, he provides a rather different means of access

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to it. Over and over, the complex, genealogically rich nature of the various ‘‘art into life’’ gestures that were on display—even the ‘‘art into life’’ gesture that the Musée seemed itself to rather obviously play out— met with the earnest, commanding, discourse-paralyzing authority of Hirschhorn’s verbal discourse. At the Musée, Hirschhorn’s persona took the form of his own daily onsite presence at the work. He was the work’s initiator, its organizer, its leader, the primary negotiator on its behalf (with the press, the fire department, the police, local community leaders, collaborating institutions, and so on), and a constant friendly presence; he was also its author, its definer, its giver-of-meanings in the form of completely accessible interviews, speeches, and handouts.∞∫ Thus the effect of his discourse on the subject—the Musée itself—was as permeating as it was paralyzing: I believe, its a fact, that art can, art should, art wants to transform—let’s not be afraid to say it: to change life. If as an artist I want to make works in public space I have to agree with public space. . . . . . . To agree means to be in agreement with an impossible mission. I said in proposing the project to the inhabitants of the cité Albinet and the Landy neighborhood that the Musée Précaire Albinet is a mission. A ‘mission impossible’ that is based in an agreement.∞Ω

Such rhetorical maneuvers produce Hirschhorn’s belief system and convictions in the place of a rational argument. A statement that begins ‘‘I believe’’ proceeds anaphorically and ends with an imperative; an ifthen statement ends by describing something that is being done as something impossible, but also something based on a kind of utopian concordance. Both are pleas to an imaginary audience—but strangely put, as if to give that audience no choice but to agree. We hear eager earnestness shading into imperative command, and complex relationships and contradictions entirely subsumed by blanket statements of imperative being. Similar statements suggest that his materials are merely ‘‘economical . . . disposable . . . everyone knows them and uses them’’ or that ‘‘precarious’’ materials are de facto unintimidating, belying the kind of semiotic maneuvers that they perform—and the inadequacy of such descriptions.≤≠ In that supplementary, radically uncomplicated belief system, I think that Hirschhorn acts out what it is to be a critic of such work as his own, and in his flat statements of conviction, I

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think we witness the kind of hermeneutic aporia such work delivers. What kind of approach do we take to a work that mixes explicit sociocultural agendas with sophisticated formal experimentation? What kinds of relations between the planes of meaning—between the formal expressions of précarité and its sociological implications; between an exhibited, historical utopia and an ongoing one; between perceptions of community and their realities—can be drawn? Consider the recent contribution by Claire Bishop, a critic and art historian who called the Musée Précaire ‘‘one of the best examples of socially collaborative art.’’ She writes that ‘‘The aesthetic is, according to Rancière, the ability to think contradiction: the productive contradiction of art’s relationship to social change, characterized precisely by that tension between faith in art’s autonomy and belief in art as inextricably bound to the promise of a better world to come. For Rancière the aesthetic doesn’t need to be sacrificed at the altar of social change, as it already inherently contains this ameliorative promise.’’≤∞ Though her argument borrows the language of dialectics from the work of Jacques Rancière, her version of the aesthetic seems to merely absorb political and social ambitions. The aesthetic inherently contains the promise of ameliorative social change rather than actively struggling with the contradictions such desires and promises impose on the work of art. There is a kind of blank where the complications that have been historically visited on such terms as art’s autonomy and a better world to come belong, a blank that sits in the place of all the arguments that have been made against art’s elitism, the manufacturing of its autonomy as a political and economic gesture, and the historicism of art’s utopianism. In other words, there is a blank in the place of our understanding of what Fraser calls ‘‘the institution of art,’’ an institution that is hardly innate or endemic to the aesthetic except insofar as that aesthetic could be seen as an all-rationalizing, all-subsuming framework. To marshal all the criteria for the aesthetic—the production of certain kinds of affect, of a particular historical lineage, of a certain explicit intentionality—as Bishop does, in order to reaffirm it as the singular, privileged means to ‘‘think contradiction’’ is precisely to reaffirm the aesthetic as its own institution. Only once institutionalized can something as open ended as formal experimentation assimilate social ends; only once it has been embedded as discourse—and, of course, only for those who speak and hear that discourse—can it signify politically. To confirm the imma-

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nence of politicization or sociocultural meaning to artwork is not only to preemptively shut down its struggle with its own status, its own place and position (everything, in other words, that makes art vibrate); it is also to assign it a place and position, condemning it to precisely the rigid systems of meaning that only institutionalization can provide. I have noted myriad ways that the Musée Précaire re-marked itself as frame, or set up series of internal frames such that it could not be a transparent organ for the transmission of social values, in the manner that institutions inevitably are. Hirschhorn’s Musée self-consciously reifies the overlaps between institutionality and utopia: where the two come together, where they reinforce one another, where they sprout one another. In the deepest sense, I believe that was his artwork’s utopianism: that the most positive effects of an institution come reflexively, jarringly, with a costly inquisition into the values that such an institution propagates and depends on. Finally, of course, the Musée was neither utopian nor institutional: the semiotic operation of Hirschhorn’s utopian—that is, self-conscious, re-marked, reflexive—museum did not work for everyone. Some people (neighbors and art critics alike) read it as an institution, at one with an explicit political agenda; even Hirschhorn himself seems to struggle with ways to describe how his work works. And of course, it was far from utopian, with its minor labor disputes, insulting graffiti, and the authoritarian persona of its author overseeing the utterly revocable nature of its operations. But its failure as a utopia and as an institution acts as a very modernist, almost obsolete criterion for what might constitute its success; its arbitrary unintelligibility resists any peaceful, universally pleasing definition of the aesthetic that would assimilate a static, univocal relationship to social change.

Notes 1. See their Web site at http://www.stop-precarite.fr. 2. Exactly what it takes to mount such a museum—or to revoke it, administratively—is clarified in the publication completed one year after the Musée ended. An annotated compilation of three-and-a-half years’ worth of e-mails and faxes pertaining to the Musée, complemented by photographs and souvenirs of the project (including, for example, participants’ writing exercises from the weekly workshops), it can be considered a documentary portion of

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the project itself. See Hirschhorn, Musée Précaire Albinet. A much earlier version of this essay appears in that volume, and I would like to thank Thomas Hirschhorn for the several interviews that he has granted. I would also like to thank Peter Haidu and Allan McCollum for their invaluable input, editorial readings, and close friendship and support. 3. Hirschhorn made the dismantling of the Musée into a community-oriented festivity by organizing a free raffle of its usable parts (fluorescent lights, microwave, TV and VCR, etc.) as well as additional books and toys he purchased. Every local resident who wanted one received a ticket to the raffle. 4. Fraser, ‘‘Why Does Fred Sandback’s Work Make Me Cry?’’. See also her ‘‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique.’’ 5. I address this question in a very different context in my ‘‘Review of Daniel Buren’s 2005 Eye of the Storm.’’ 6. Interview with the artist, June 2004. 7. Hirschhorn chose the neighborhood—known as Landy—for the modest scale of its architecture, its relative proximity to the center of Paris, and its generally relaxed air. Yvane Chapuis, of the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, contrasted his choice with the more distant reaches of Aubervilliers, known for their high-rise subsidized housing structures. Interview, June 2004. The area is also notable for the large-scale building projects going up in the area immediately surrounding the stadium and is thus the focus of municipal attention as a neighborhood in transition. 8. L.H.O.O.Q. is a work by Marcel Duchamp from 1919, in which he drew a mustache and added the abbreviation as title to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. 9. The charge that Hirschhorn is a perfect example of the phenomenon that Hal Foster describes as ‘‘The Artist as Ethnographer’’ falters, I think, to the degree that we are never looking at a version of ‘‘the way things are’’ but merely a mirror of how, in our fantasies, these things fit together—that’s how loose and abstract Hirschhorn’s ‘‘anthropological’’ juxtapositions are. See Foster, The Return of the Real. 10. This is to say that, with five exceptions—Hirschhorn himself, Jacinto Lageira, and Bernard Blistène, who gave art-historical lectures, and his friends Christophe Fiat and Manuel Joseph, who collectively led one of the debates— all (twenty) of the art historians, public speakers, and invited authors were female, as were both educators running the La part de l’art workshops for children. Note that others of Hirschhorn’s works, from the Kiosks (1999–2002) to his recent Superficial Engagement (2006) often focus on female artists of the European historical avant-garde (but not necessarily of the first order of prominence), such as Meret Oppenheim, Liubov Popova, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Emma Kunz.

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11. Kwon, One Place After Another. 12. Ibid, 166. 13. This would not be a visual camouflage, as there is nothing particularly transitory-looking about Landy, where the Musée’s messy graffitied walls and duct-taped beams were striking interruptions of a clean and mostly graffiti-free neighborhood of families living in France for years if not generations. The systems, sources, and visual designs of camouflage were taken up as subject matter in one of Hirschhorn’s next projects, Utopia, Utopia = One World, One War, One Army, One Dress, hosted at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in November 2005–6, in which these were investigated as a fetishistic play of the intersection of three fields: military operations; artistic experimentation; and the perplexing oxymoron, fashion ‘‘choices.’’ 14. See Krauss, The Picasso Papers, 180, and her ‘‘In the Name of Picasso,’’ in The Originality of the Avant-Garde. 15. On this conjunction, see the work of T. J. Demos, especially The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp. 16. In this respect, Hirschhorn joins—and perhaps reinterprets—the plight of many of the neo–avant-garde artists whose early careers lead them to a seemingly complete articulation of the problems they negotiate: Buren’s stripes, Warhol’s silk-screen paintings, Lichtenstein’s ben-day dot paintings, and Nauman’s live video installations are all examples of formal solutions so precise that they threaten to ‘‘brand’’ an artist’s identity. 17. The wages of all of the Musée’s workers—along with the various production costs associated with building, maintaining, and running it—can be found in the correspondence published in the above-cited publication, Musée Précaire Albinet. 18. Hirschhorn had already made several public works—the Deleuze Monument in Avignon and the Bataille Monument in Kassel—that suffered, according to his own testimony, from his erratic schedule. He made a point of remaining on-site for the entire duration of the Musée’s eight-week tenure (except for one overnight) and even amplified this ‘‘on-site’’ form of authorship in his next works in Paris, 24 heures Foucault, at the Palais de Tokyo, and Swiss Swiss Democracy, at the Centre Culturel Suisse. 19. ‘‘Je crois, c’est un fait, que l’art peut, l’art doit, l’art veut transformer, n’ayant pas peur de le dire: changer la vie. . . . Si en tant qu’artiste je veux faire un travail dans l’espace public je dois être d’accord avec l’espace public. . . . Être d’accord veut dire en accord avec la mission impossible. J’ai dit en proposant le projet aux habitants de la cite Albinet et au quartier du Landy que le ‘‘Musée Précaire Albinet’’ était une mission. Une mission impossible qui est basée sur un accord.’’ ‘‘Note of intention,’’ Thomas Hirschhorn, February 2003 (see Musée

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Précaire Albinet): À propos du ‘Musée Precaire Albinet’, à propos d’un travail d’artiste dans l’espace public et à propos du role de l’artiste dans la vie publique, Xeroxed handout by Thomas Hirschhorn distributed at the Musée Précaire Albinet, dated May 15, 2004. 20. See his ‘‘Four Statements, February 2000,’’ 252; and his notes for Skulptur: Projekte in Münster 1997, 211–17, revised in Buchloh, Gingeras, and Basualdo, Thomas Hirschhorn, 132. 21. Bishop, ‘‘The Social Turn,’’ 183.

SETH MCCORMICK

Neo-Dada 1951–54 BETWEEN THE AESTHETICS OF PERSECUTION AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTIT Y

Ever since Moira Roth’s essay ‘‘The Aesthetic of Indifference’’ was published in 1977, the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg has been criticized for conforming to the repressive conditions of political censorship that dominated the context of their early work’s production and reception under McCarthyism. Roth’s polemical intervention in the formalist ethos of seventies art criticism represented the first attempt at a sociopolitical critique of Johns’s and Rauschenberg’s art, and it has served as a point of departure for more recent interpretations that focus on issues of sexual identity, uncovering encoded signifiers of a nominally censored or closeted homosexuality within these artists’ works.∞ In more recent years, Roth has proceeded to enlarge and expand upon her critique of the postwar avant-garde, motivated, in part, by her opposition to the canonization and contemporary influence of artists whose work she regards as apolitical, from Marcel Duchamp and John Cage to Rauschenberg and Johns. Against the coolly cerebral, detached, and depersonalized ‘‘aesthetic of indifference’’ embraced by the followers of Cage and Duchamp, Roth champions examples of contemporary art that base themselves upon an identity politics of gender and sexuality, including the work of performance artists Shigeko Kubota and Rachel Rosenthal.

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Interestingly, although this connection is not emphasized by Roth, in the early fifties Rosenthal herself had been a close friend and associate of Johns and Rauschenberg. At the time, her artistic production was largely divided between her involvement with the experimental theater and dance of Erwin Piscator and Merce Cunningham, and her work in sculpture, which she would later describe as heavily indebted to Rauschenberg’s work of this period.≤ In 1954, moreover, Rosenthal commissioned a work from Johns, Star, that marked a crucial transition in both artists’ careers (fig. 1). Immediately after his execution of the commission, Johns destroyed all his previous work that was still in his possession and initiated a mode of painterly production, famously inaugurated in his work Flag (1954–55), that clearly differentiated his work from Rauschenberg’s and that subsequently came to define his identity as an artist. By contrast, after 1954 Rosenthal’s own interests shifted entirely away from studio art, toward the improvisational mode of theater that would establish the basis of her later work in performance.≥ Star thus represents a peculiarly hybrid object, whose authorship remains open to interpretation and debate. Conceived by Rosenthal as a painting in the shape of a Jewish star, the work’s construction was executed by Jasper Johns.∂ In this sense, it is the product of a collaboration between two artists. On the other hand, Star is also the product of a commission, in which Rosenthal played the part of creative director and patron while Johns assumed the role of the craftsman: in this respect it was not so different from the department store window-display commissions Johns and Rauschenberg received from Gene Moore in this period, which remained their principal source of income between 1954 and 1958.∑ Finally, the work belongs to a phase of Johns’s and Rosenthal’s careers in which their work was dominated by Rauschenberg’s influence, even as they struggled to develop independent artistic identities of their own. Viewed in these terms, Star is a product of contract, collaboration, and polemics, a site of disputation between the artists most closely involved in its making and the art historians who argue over their respective legacies. A close analysis of this work and the context of its production, therefore, may serve to demonstrate the complexities in these artists’ production at a moment when it was not yet possible to clearly differentiate between the two artistic trajectories outlined by Roth. Indeed, in this

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[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

1. Jasper Johns, Star, 1954. Oil, beeswax, and house paint on newspaper, canvas, and wood with tinted glass, nails, and fabric tape. The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo by HickeyRobertson, Houston.

moment, the opposition between a politicized thematic of identity and a depersonalizing aesthetic of political persecution becomes a structuring element of Star. At the same time, both artistic projects are coimplicated in larger historical formations of power and prejudice, whose unity is given only in the confluence of personal and political circumstances that led to the production of Star. A closer study of this work may shed light on the ways in which the seemingly opposed models of identity politics and avant-garde aesthetics remain mutually imbricated even today, not only in their theoretical and methodological applications but at the level of political praxis, in the form of a romanticization and aestheticization of persecution. The supposedly repressive blanks and anti-expressive silences of the works that Johns, Rauschenberg, and Rosenthal produced prior to Star did not conform to the imperatives of homosexual closeting and political censorship; rather, their highly determinate content reveals the limitations of these concepts’ applicability to the economy of homosexual visibility in the United States of the fifties. This content is neither

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representational nor formal but rather literal and material, consisting of the collage incorporation of found papers and other detritus into the work’s surface or ground. Deriving from the work of the Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters, the aesthetics of this mode of collage were shaped by medical, sociological, and ethnographic constructions of pathology and health that mediated between avant-garde art and the norms of ethnic, sexual, and social identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the concept of degeneracy. These constructions haunted Schwitters’s reception in his own time, when his work was branded ‘‘degenerate’’ by the Nazis and ‘‘garbage art’’ by fellow Dadaists, as well as in the first decades after the Second World War, when a new generation of artists discovered the history and legacy of Dada through the writings of Schwitters’s severest critics within the Dada movement. As a hypothetical condition of biological decline afflicting individuals, races, populations, and societies, ‘‘degeneracy’’ was pseudoscience, pure and simple; as a set of disciplinary and aesthetic discourses and practices, however, it was possessed of a materiality capable of producing very real political effects, both lethal (at the limit, the authorization and organization of genocide on a historically unprecedented scale) and insurrectionary (the consolidation of oppositional identities and crossidentifications among a heterogeneous range of persecuted classes, ethnicities, and sexualities).∏ In some cases, these discourses and practices outlived the productivity of the biological theory of degeneracy, as witnessed by their persistence within psychoanalytic theories of homosexuality and in the government purges of homosexual employees that accompanied McCarthyism.π For homosexuals in the postwar United States, identification with the persecutory category of degeneracy, like silence, was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it was immediately implicated within Nazi-era medical and juridical techniques of ethnic and sexual persecution that continued to inform policies of homosexual persecution in the postwar United States. Both in its historical origins and its ongoing biopolitical deployment in the postwar context, the identification of sexual minorities as degenerate remained a powerful technique for criminalizing and pathologizing homosexuality. This technique simultaneously denied homosexuality the distinctiveness of an identity or essence that would distinguish it from other criminalized groups. On a rhetorical or performative level, however, the foregrounding of

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this identification brought to light the hidden continuity from the system of concentration camps to McCarthyism. By showing that the juridical status assigned to homosexuals in American society differed only in degree from the total expropriation visited upon Jews, homosexuals, and Communists by Nazism, this identification challenged the postwar consensus that the political systems of totalitarianism and Western liberal democracy were diametrically opposed. I therefore argue that these three artists’ strategic embrace of a Schwittersian aesthetic of degeneracy, despite its collusion with a typically McCarthyist conflation of Communists, homosexuals, and criminals, was at the same time the condition of possibility for a new form of political subjectivation, based on a performative misidentification of homosexuals with the Jewish victims and survivors of Nazism. This misidentification revealed the hidden continuity of McCarthyism with totalitarianism and thereby demonstrated the necessity of breaking with that double bind of invisibility and exposure, secrecy and confession, that even today, in the ever-widening zone of indistinction between public and private life, governs the extent and limits of political rights. In seeking to complicate received notions of the relationship between art, censorship, and identification in the McCarthy era (the so-called age of conformity), I refer to Jacques Rancière’s critique of essentialist identity politics. Rancière argues for a practice of political subjectivation that does not depend on the assumption of a preconstituted community of political interests or on a mimetic or romantic identification with the mechanisms of political persecution and exclusion. Rancière discusses the exemplary case of Auguste Blanqui, the nineteenth-century French revolutionary leader prosecuted for rebellion. Questioned by the prosecutor as to his profession, Blanqui answered, ‘‘Proletarian.’’ On being informed by the prosecutor that this was not a profession, Blanqui responded, ‘‘It is the profession of the majority of our people who are deprived of political rights.’’ Rancière notes that Blanqui, although not a worker, was correct in arguing that proletarian was not a name belonging to any identifiable social group in the given political order but was instead the site of what he terms an ‘‘impossible identification’’: Proletarians was the name given to people who are together inasmuch as they are between: between several names, statuses and identities; between humanity and inhumanity, citizenship and its denial. . . . Political subjectivization is

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the enactment of equality . . . by people who are together to the extent that they are between. It is a crossing of identities, relying on a crossing of names: names that link the name of a group or class to the name of no group or class, a being to a nonbeing or a not-yet-being. . . . In the demonstration of equality, the syllogistic logic of the either/or (are we or are we not citizens or human beings?) is intertwined with the paratactic logic of a ‘‘we are and are not.’’∫

Taking my cue from Rancière’s concept of subjectivation, I argue that Star’s iconographic investment in Judaism as the model for a politicized homosexual identity represents an attempt to break with a persecutory aesthetic of degeneracy. Star’s crossing of identities links the name of a recognized group (Jewish citizens) to the name of no group (homosexuals denied the rights and visibility of citizenship under McCarthyism). This misidentification is the performative enactment of an equality. Within the visual economy sketched by Star, however, it is an equality that remains forever deferred by the association of the signifiers of ethnic identity and nationality (the Star of David) with historical techniques of political persecution (the Judenstern of the concentration camps). Such associations transform a revolutionary contestation of the existing distribution of roles, meanings, and appearances into what Rancière terms the handling of a ‘‘wrong,’’ a matter of policy or policing. In this way, the aesthetic operations of Star expose the trap of an ethnicized model of identity politics, a trap from which the work of equality is unable to wholly release itself.Ω

A Metaphorics of Secrecy: Between Passivity and Politics The immediate artistic context in which Rosenthal and Johns collaborated on Star was dominated by the powerful examples set by their friends, the artist Robert Rauschenberg and the composer John Cage. ‘‘In 1950, John Cage made a major leap of imagination by entering into his experiments with chance,’’ Moira Roth recalls; ‘‘although the Zen-like chance operations of Cage were exciting to invent, they also exhibited an extreme passivity: a decision not to assert but rather to let happen what may. . . . A similar theme of emptiness and passivity resided in Rauschenberg’s white paintings of a year or so earlier. The large all-white canvases contained no image except the fleeting shadows of passers-by.’’∞≠

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Roth quotes a poem Cage wrote for the occasion of the White Paintings’ first exhibition in 1953, ‘‘To whom / No subject / No image / No taste / No object / No beauty / No message / No talent / No technique (no why) / No idea / No intention / No art / No feeling.’’ She calls this ‘‘a poetic manifesto of the Aesthetic of Indifference,’’ noting, In the spring of 1953, McCarthy’s henchmen Roy M. Cohn and G. David Schine made a lightning censorship tour of the American overseas information program in Europe. Their search for ‘subversive’ Communist literature led to a monstrous ‘cleaning up’ of libraries and, literally, to bookburning. In the political ambience of hysterical anti-Communism and right-wing action, the Cage poem reads like an unconscious tragic acknowledgment of total paralysis. The Aesthetic of Indifference had literally gone ‘blank.’ There are no messages, no feelings and no ideas. Only emptiness.∞∞

Roth goes on, however, to distinguish Johns’s works, with their ostensibly more specifically McCarthyist themes, from the White Paintings’ passive acceptance of conditions of political censorship: ‘‘What emerges out of a collective examination of his work is a dense concentration of metaphors dealing with spying, conspiracy, secrecy and concealment, misleading information, coded messages and clues.’’∞≤ In differentiating Johns’s inauguration of this ‘‘second and more poignant phase of the Aesthetic of Indifference’’ from the earlier art of Cage and Rauschenberg, Roth accords Johns’s work a more particularized treatment than many of the social art historians who studied this period in subsequent decades, most of whom have focused on the sexual identity politics of these artists’ works. Both Kenneth Silver’s 1993 ‘‘Modes of Disclosure’’ and Jonathan D. Katz’s more recent studies of the Cagean milieu, for instance, locate the artist’s work within the context of an emergent postwar homosexual aesthetic.∞≥ Their interpretations inevitably accentuate the commonalities between Cage, Rauschenberg, and Johns as representatives of an ostensibly closeted, pre-Stonewall homosexual subjectivity. Viewed through the lens of identity, the artists’ works are simultaneously linked and contrasted with later, more overt artistic expressions of homosexuality, as in the case of Andy Warhol’s life and art. These shifts in interpretation have obscured the distinction, which Roth originally wanted to underscore, between the coolly impersonal aesthetic of Johns and Rauschenberg and the sexual identity politics of seventies art. By defining the former as a developmental stage of the

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latter, Silver and Katz implicitly conflate these two models of artistic practice. Restoring attention to the points of divergence between Rauschenberg’s ostensible passivity and Rosenthal’s interrogation of the performativity of gender is not just a matter of salvaging the uniqueness and originality of each artist: as Roth’s argument clearly shows, it is a question of the political differences that separate these two formations. The importance of these differences would seem to be borne out by an analysis of the traces of these artists’ respective influences on the production of Star. On Rosenthal’s side, the commissioning of Star could be read as a kind of performance of her self-identification as a Jew, constituting the earliest example of the artist’s subsequent lifelong engagement with the aesthetic expression of personal identity. At the same time, it seems to announce a shift in Johns’s artistic practice as well, in the way that it anticipates certain key elements of what Roth identifies, in Flag and later works, as a thematics of secrecy and concealment. On the level of the work’s physical structure, for instance, the two interlocking triangles of the Jewish star are transformed into the forms of a shallow triangular box with a triangular lid that has been rotated 180 degrees, obscuring part of the box’s interior and concealing its contents. In the tension established between these elements, the work bears the marks of a struggle between the representational and political content of the Jewish star and the modernist formal strategies of monochrome and collage, a struggle that could be understood in terms of the conflicting imperatives of Rosenthal’s iconographic program and Johns’s aesthetic sensibility. Thus, the work seems to embody the simultaneous emergence and divergence of two models of artistic production polemically contrasted by Roth: Johns’s elaboration of a ‘‘metaphorics of secrecy’’ against the historical backdrop of government persecution and censorship of modern artists, Communists, and homosexuals, versus Rosenthal’s performative engagement with the politics of identity. At the same time, by situating Johns’s work within the broader context of McCarthyism, Roth’s analysis of its ‘‘metaphorics of secrecy’’ is more open ended than the interpretations developed by Silver and Katz. In Roth’s 1977 essay, the metaphorical content of Johns’s work has a political valence that cannot be confined to homosexual closeting alone, but has equal relevance to the situation of other individuals and groups in a time of espionage trials and Communist purges. For Silver and Katz, these metaphors refer to the ground of an essential authorial identity

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provided by Johns’s homosexuality.∞∂ In this way, something of the commonalities that unite Rosenthal and Johns at this particular moment in time, and that allowed them to collaborate on Star, falls outside discussion; so too does the possibility of connecting Star’s borrowings from the aesthetic strategies of Rauschenberg’s White Paintings with the politics of Rosenthal’s self-identification as a Jew. What is precisely so remarkable about this work, in fact, is the relationship it establishes between the Jewish star, as an ambiguous emblem of Jewish sovereignty and vicitimization, and the work’s concretization of a Johnsian metaphorics of secrecy. The work is governed by an absolute spatial and semantic proximity between the forms of specifically Jewish identification embodied in the work’s physical structure and the zone of this identity’s submersion in, or indistinction from, a shared and nonspecific thematic of secrecy, concealment, and silence. This is perhaps most evident in the difficulty of distinguishing between the work’s putative metaphorics of the homosexual closet and its recourse to a figural language of Jewish and homosexual persecution under Nazism that was specific to the literature and journalism of this period, ranging from the use of the Jewish star and pink triangle as identifying insignia in Nazi concentration camps (described in Eugen Kogon’s widely read report on the camps, The Theory and Practice of Hell) to the ‘‘secret annex’’ made famous by the 1952 English publication of The Diary of Anne Frank.∞∑ This proximity between visual structures of Jewish identification and political structures of homosexual persecution, moreover, is not unique to this particular work. Rather, as I will attempt to show, it is rooted in the conditions of contemporary social and political discourse and in the aesthetics of so-called neo-Dada art of the early fifties. Such indistinctions were governed and granted consistency by formations of power and knowledge that gave a very concrete form to the visibility of homosexuality in the United States of the fifties, a form that does not correspond to contemporary notions of the homosexual closet. Restrictions upon homosexual action and speech were not, in fact, the principal mode by which these conditions exercised their effects, as the hypothesis of censorship implies. Instead of limiting the field of what was visible, sayable, and knowable about homosexuals, I argue, these formations saturated knowledge, speech, and sight, making it impossible to

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identify a domain of homosexual identity that was not overcoded by other identifications: criminal, Communist, subversive, spy. Attention to the historical factors that connected the emergence of the homosexual rights movement to postwar constructions of Jewish identity may clarify the relationship between the activities of Rauschenberg, Johns, and Rosenthal in the broader political and historical context of McCarthyism. Where Roth ties her interpretation to political events that are specific to the artists’ chronological development but arguably remote from their personal concerns, Silver and Katz associate the works with social and psychological conditions of homosexual invisibility that are germane to the artist’s biographies. This, however, dehistoricizes their work by measuring it against post-Stonewall discourses and practices. The task, therefore, is to connect these two perspectives in a way that does not take the relationship between aesthetics and politics for granted and that remains sensitive to the particular historical context of these artists’ production. By conflating legal and political developments with ahistorical factors of social or psychological prejudice, sociological analyses of homophobia and closeting deflect attention from the specificity of homosexual persecution in the United States of the fifties. This persecution consisted not so much in the concealment or censorship of homosexual identity as in its obsessive disquisition within literary, scientific, and political discourse and in the forcible identification and elimination of homosexuals from government and private employment. To those homosexuals who first recognized the need to organize politically in the early fifties, these bureaucratically administered and highly visible mechanisms of identification appeared to have more in common with the political persecution that had confronted Jews under Nazism than with the haphazard forms of police harassment and homophobic violence to which homosexuals had been routinely subjected in the past. The purges of homosexual ‘‘security risks’’ from public and private employment did not merely represent a threat to free expression and self-identification, as the diagnosis of censorship would suggest: rather, they uncannily echoed the situation of Jews in France in the years of the Dreyfus Affair, a situation whose essential continuity with Nazi persecutions of both homosexuals and Jews was analyzed in Hannah Arendt’s contemporaneous The Origins of Totalitarianism.∞∏

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The Specter of Nazi Germany In a July 1950 document titled ‘‘Preliminary Concepts,’’ a draft proposal for the formation of an organization to defend the civil rights of homosexuals, Harry Hay defined the homosexual citizen of the United States as the contemporary juridical equivalent of the Jew in Nazi Germany. In this document, Hay asserted that ‘‘the government indictment against Androgynous Civil Servants’’ offered evidence of an ‘‘encroaching American Fascism.’’ He pointed out that homosexuals were being targeted in the same manner as Communists and argued that ‘‘the Government’s announced plans for eventual 100% war production mobilization’’ would also exclude homosexuals from employment in the private sector. He implicitly evoked the possibility that if McCarthyism triumphed, homosexuals could one day be interned in concentration camps similar to those used to exterminate the Jews.∞π The organization Hay proposed in 1950 would eventually be named the Mattachine Foundation; it became the first national organization to fight for homosexual rights in the United States. The beginnings of the homosexual civil rights struggle in this country can therefore be traced directly to this founding document, in which the subjectivation of homosexuals as United States citizens is effected in the form of their identification with persecuted Jews. Through this identification, homosexual activists linked the criminal inhumanity of the Nazi’s Jewish genocide with the political and juridical persecution of homosexuals under McCarthyism. Provisions for the investigation and termination of homosexual government employees originated in the language of a 1947 rider to the House appropriations bill for the State Department. The McCarran rider stipulated that any State Department employee regarded as a ‘‘security risk’’ could be investigated and terminated at the ‘‘absolute discretion’’ of the secretary of state. According to historian David K. Johnson, the rider’s language had been composed with the express intent of targeting homosexuals.∞∫ Over the course of the fifties and sixties, approximately one thousand State Department employees were removed from their jobs on suspicion of homosexuality; furthermore, statistics indicate that these firings represent only about 20 percent of the total number of government workers who were either fired or resigned in the course of the widening investigation.∞Ω

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Meanwhile, in 1950 Congress passed the Internal Security Act, also known as the McCarran Act or the Subversive Activities Control Act, requiring the registration of Communist organizations and authorizing the establishment of the Subversive Activities Control Board to investigate ‘‘loyalty risks’’ and persons accused of ‘‘un-American’’ activities. Immigrants who fell under the provisions of the act could be barred from United States citizenship, while citizens could be denaturalized within five years. Title II of the Act, called the ‘‘Emergency Detention Act,’’ made provisions for the detention of any person whom the administration judged likely to commit acts of sabotage or espionage in the event of an ‘‘internal security emergency.’’ Passage of the bill led to the establishment of six ‘‘detention camps,’’ which were never used, although their very existence served as a reminder of the executive’s emergency powers and as a continual threat to political dissidents.≤≠ The transition from the firing of homosexuals under the McCarran rider of 1947 to their complete expropriation under the Internal Security Act of 1950 was a leap, but McCarthy’s supporters in Congress actively contrived to blur the distinction between security risks and loyalty risks in order to expand their own claim on executive powers. The more interchangeably the terms were used, the greater the threat that homosexuals would, like suspected Communists, be defined as ‘‘subversives’’ and subjected to denaturalization and internment.≤∞ Hay’s reference to ‘‘American Fascism’’ therefore offered an accurate description of the political logic of the newly introduced internal security measures. In its juridical-political structure, the government purge of homosexuals was virtually indistinguishable from the administrative mechanisms that were used to identify spies and Communists, and it was distinctly similar in character to the legal apparatus that had condemned large numbers of homosexuals and Communists, as well as millions of Jews, to the Nazi concentration camps. These circumstances may serve to explain why, in what was arguably the first effective articulation of a discourse of homosexual civil rights in postwar society, the possibility of a homosexual politics was made contingent upon acceptance of the historical parallel with the Jewish victims of Nazism. Hay did anticipate a positive alternative to this fate, which required that American homosexuals organize politically to demand their civil rights. In drawing a parallel between Jews and homosexuals, he did not

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simply draw attention to their shared history of victimization; he also evoked the possibility that homosexuals could one day win the same degree of respect and recognition now accorded to the Jews, who could now no longer be politically scapegoated without public protest.≤≤ At the same time, however, it may be argued that Hay’s analogy revealed the extent to which a nascent politics of positive homosexual identity was circumscribed by an assumption of victimhood that was predicated upon, and might even have served to reinforce, persecutory constructions of homosexuality. But what about modes of homosexual identification that were not strictly political or not framed in the representational language of Hay’s prospectus? What about identifications established on the level of aesthetic experience, social praxis, or psychological expression? How was the fate of homosexuals in government service, or even in the private sector, related to the material conditions of avant-garde artistic production, or was it even related at all? What exactly was the nature of the relationship (if any) between the juridical-political structure of homosexual visibility under McCarthyism and the structures of visibility and identification afforded to homosexual artists by the strategies of modernist abstraction: grid, monochrome, ready-made, collage?

Kurt Schwitters’s ‘‘Degenerate’’ Aesthetic The political threat posed by McCarthyism in the postwar United States exercised a controlling influence over avant-garde artists’ ability to connect with the sources of a Western artistic tradition irreparably compromised by its continuity with fascism. Just as the contemporary discourse of homosexual rights can be traced back to Hay’s reference to Nazi precedents for the State Department purges, it could be argued that abstract painting in the early fifties could present contemporary conditions of homosexual persecution only through an engagement with the aesthetic modes that were historically associated with persecutory constructions of deviance and degeneracy. Homosexuals’ exclusion from a specifically political identity, and their unlimited exposure to expropriation and death, could thus be directly represented through an identification with aesthetic practices that were designated as ‘‘degenerate art’’ (entartete Kunst) under Nazism. In particular, I would argue, it was

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through an engagement with the work of the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, whose death in 1948 occasioned renewed and widespread attention to his life and art, that Johns and his fellow artists Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly were able to broach the relationship between McCarthyist persecution and a longer history of totalitarian constructions of identity. According to Calvin Tomkins, ‘‘Rauschenberg had often been told, since his Betty Parsons show [of 1951], that his work resembled that of the German artist Kurt Schwitters.’’≤≥ Certainly Rauschenberg’s production of 1953–54 recalled Schwitters’s collage aesthetic: densely layered, heteroclite in its juxtaposition of imagery and materials, delighting in the poetry of discarded pieces of paper, cloth, and other refuse. The influence is particularly marked in Rauschenberg’s Red Paintings (his first to incorporate collaged objects) and the early Combines and Combine paintings. Rauschenberg is known to have visited the important Sidney Janis show, ‘‘Dada 1916–1923,’’ which ran from September 29 through October 31, 1953, and which included several of Schwitters’s Merz collages. He may have been introduced to the artist’s work even prior to this by his fellow artist and Black Mountain College alumnus Cy Twombly, who began producing collages under the direct inspiration of Schwitters while still a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in 1948.≤∂ Meanwhile Leo Steinberg, in his 1963 monograph on Jasper Johns, notes that Johns was also told early on that his ‘‘small abstract collages from paper scraps . . . looked like those of Kurt Schwitters’’ and that he subsequently ‘‘veered away—to be different.’’≤∑ It is possible that Johns would have encountered Schwitters’s work prior to meeting Rauschenberg or being exposed to his production. I would argue, however, that the works Johns produced shortly before or after his move to Pearl Street with Rauchenberg in the summer of 1954, following the start of their professional collaboration on window-display commissions, are the first to show any influence of Schwitters’s model of collage and are most likely the ones that triggered the comparisons mentioned in Steinberg’s anecdote.≤∏ This strongly suggests that the influence of Schwitters on Johns’s work was primarily mediated by Rauschenberg’s example, and that his mobilization of a Merz aesthetic demands to be read in terms of the dialogical relationship between the two homosexual artists’ works.

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Schwitters’s Merz cannot be regarded simply as one example among others of ‘‘degenerate art.’’ A close reading of the documentation available in the early fifties would have shown that at the time of its production, the materials and compositional principles of Schwitters’s art were understood to bear an ambivalent relationship to the popular notions of degeneracy that influenced Nazi ideology. Robert Motherwell’s anthology The Dada Painters and Poets, published in 1951, featured anecdotes about Schwitters and accounts of his works that emphasized the ambiguous relation between Schwitters’s art and certain reactionary strains in modernist German culture. One of the most powerful portraits of Schwitters found in Motherwell’s anthology was authored by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, wife of the Bauhaus artist and American émigré Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Motherwell quotes an anecdote from her previously published biography of her husband, recounting an event that took place in the immediate aftermath of the fascist seizure of power in Berlin. The account reveals with particular poignancy both the dangers in which Schwitters was placed by the Nazi campaign against ‘‘degenerate art’’ and the ways in which the artist’s overidentification with his art reinforced the ambiguity of his work’s ideological commitments. Sibyl and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy had received an invitation to a German press association from the poet and author of the ‘‘Futurist Manifesto,’’ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an early supporter of the Italian Fascist Party and a sometime fellow traveler of Dada. Laszlo MoholyNagy had no interest in going. Having been threatened with arrest for refusing to accept censorship of his paintings, he had already made preparations to leave Germany. Schwitters, who was staying with them at the time, was also ‘‘profoundly worried about the political tide’’ but had no plans to leave Germany: ‘‘There was nothing he dreaded more than emigration.’’ He finally convinced his hosts that they should attend, ‘‘to honor the revolutionary in Marinetti.’’ Short of Hitler, all the Nazis were present: Goebbels and Goring, August Wilhelm of Hohenzollern, the president of the Berlin University, Gerhart Hauptmann . . . Moholy, Schwitters, and I were sandwiched between the head of the National Socialist Organization for Folk Culture, and the leader of the ‘‘Strength Through Joy’’ movement. . . . The more Schwitters drank, the more fondly he regarded his neighbor.

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‘‘I love you, you Cultural Folk and Joy,’’ he said. ‘‘Honestly, I love you. You think I’m not worthy of sharing your chamber, your art chamber for strength and folk, ha? I’m an idiot too, and I can prove it.’’ Moholy put his hand firmly on Schwitters’s arm and for a few minutes he was silent, drinking rapidly and searching the blank face of his neighbor with wild blue eyes. ‘‘You think I’m a Dadaist, don’t you,’’ he suddenly started again. ‘‘That’s where you’re wrong, brother. I’m merz.’’ He thumped his wrinkled dress shirt near his heart. ‘‘I’m Aryan—the great Aryan merz. I can think Aryan, paint Aryan, spit Aryan.’’ He held an unsteady fist before the man’s nose. ‘‘With this Aryan fist I shall destroy the mistakes of my youth’’—‘‘If you want me to,’’ he added in a whisper after a long sip.≤π

The portrait of Schwitters presented by this exchange touches on one of the central problems of his reception by his fellow Dadaists. In his intoxication and desperation, Schwitters puts on a performance that is neither pure parody of his Nazi hosts nor sincere schwarmerei, but rather an unstable compound of the two. The thematic of this ambiguity is taken up in several places in Motherwell’s anthology. George Grosz, Motherwell reports, was among the most unsympathetic to Schwitters’s work. Grosz described Schwitters’s Merz paintings and Merz poems in terms not unrelated to those applied to ‘‘degenerate art’’ by the Nazis, as ‘‘garbage’’ pictures and ‘‘garbage’’ poems.≤∫ Like Grosz, the Berlin Dadaists Richard Huelsenbeck and Raoul Haussmann also criticized Schwitters for the ambiguity of his work’s aesthetic politics. The paradoxical alliance Schwitters forged between revolutionary negation and a conciliatory modernist aesthetic of ‘‘harmony and form,’’ they felt, traced its roots to the same source that nourished Nazi ideology, namely, German romanticism.≤Ω As George Hugnet noted in his essay ‘‘The Dada Spirit in Painting,’’ included in Motherwell’s anthology, impurity and corruption furnished both the thematic material and the modus operandi of Schwitters’s art: ‘‘At home, heaps of wooden junk, tufts of horsehair, old rags, broken and unrecognizable objects, provided him with clippings from life and poetry, and constituted his reserves. . . . To the principle of the object, he added a respect for life in the form of dirt and putrefaction.’’≥≠ Entformeln (deformation) and Entmaterialisierung (dematerialization) were princi-

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ples that Schwitters continually stressed in his writings about his work, employing a rhetoric that possessed uncanny echoes of the term Entartung, or ‘‘degeneracy.’’≥∞ Like the latter concept, ‘‘Merz’’ was constituted as an overarching category that both culminated and dissolved all typological categories—racial, social, and psychological. In a time obsessed with purity, Schwitters confronted constructions of impurity and hybridization as both a limit case and an enabling condition of his work. Viewed in this light, Schwitters’s self-identification as ‘‘the great Aryan merz’’ in the Moholy-Nagy anecdote strikes a disquieting note, for it suggests that Schwitters alone among the German Dadaists was aware of the extent to which avant-garde artists had already implicated themselves in popular and propagandistic constructions of degeneracy. In distancing themselves from Schwitters’s dependence upon romanticnationalist models of cultural production, the Berlin Dadaists may have sought to deny their own culpability in fulfilling Nazi prophesies of decline in the cultural sphere. The description Schwitters gave of his work in his 1920 Merz essay, reprinted in Motherwell, gave credence to the notion that art could be identified in terms of pathology and health, deformation and the harmony of form. In this Schwitters was quite unlike his ostensibly more politicized colleagues within the Dada movement, who, trusting in the patent absurdity of such denominations, never recognized the logical consistency that led from an aesthetics of nonsense and feigned insanity to a medical, juridical, and political apparatus of human liquidation.≥≤ Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s narrative concludes with the dramatic events that followed upon Schwitters’s drunken provocation of the ‘‘Strength through Joy’’ man. Leaping to the rescue of his beleaguered friend, Marinetti jumped to his feet and launched into a recitation of his sound poem ‘‘The Raid on Adrianople,’’ complete with spoken sound effects of bombings, trains suicides, and telegraphic communications from America. At the poem’s climax, Marinetti threw himself upon the table, and as he whispered its concluding line, ‘‘Vanitéeeeee, viande congeléeeeeeee— veilleuse de La Madone,’’ he dragged the tablecloth with him onto to the floor, spilling food, wine, and tableware onto the lap of Cultural Folk and Joy. Meanwhile, Schwitters had jumped up at the first sound of the poem. Like a horse at a familiar sound the Dadaist in him responded to the signal. His face flushed,

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his mouth open, he followed each of Marinetti’s moves with his own body. In the momentary silence that followed the climax his eyes met Moholy’s. ‘‘Oh, Anna Blume,’’ he whispered, and suddenly breaking out into a roar that drowned the din of protesting voices and scraping chair legs, he thundered: ‘‘Oh, Anna Blume, Du bist von hinten wie von vorn [You are the same from behind as from the front], A-n-n-a.’’≥≥

In this linkage of sentimental German love poetry with a perverse, even scatological mixture of aesthetics and tastes—modernist and romantic, materialist and lyrical, working class and bourgeois—Schwitters’s Merz stood for the principle of an impure federation of mobile and decentering sexualities, races, and classes. At the same time, and by the same token, it consolidated and spectacularized the terms under which ‘‘degeneracy’’ art was made useful to Nazi propaganda, most famously in the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich, in which Schwitters’s work was included.≥∂

Between ‘‘Bare Life’’ and Disagreement The two examples given above—Hay’s ‘‘Preliminary Concepts’’ and the recovery of Schwitters’s Merz aesthetic in the early work of Rauschenberg, Twombly, and Johns—suggest some of the ways in which homosexuals in the fifties could and did identify with the situation of various other groups persecuted under Nazism, including Jews and modern artists. But there was a very considerable difference between the two different poles of this identification. This difference can be described, somewhat cursorily, in terms of the opposition between a politics of victimhood and a politics of responsibility. The first conforms to a mode of political romanticism that in some respects actually reproduces the logic of Nazi persecution. By identifying with the complete expropriation and powerlessness of the Nazis’ victims, the politics of victimhood perpetuates those forms of depersonalization by which Nazism stripped its victims of the essentially human qualities of agency and responsibility. The politics of responsibility, by contrast, emphasizes precisely these qualities in its identification of the victims of political persecution. Hay, although motivated by the real conditions of victimization that he

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and other homosexuals faced, proposed a model of homosexual identity that was oriented toward activism and political agency: this was the model of the homosexual as citizen. Hay did not conflate the distinct identities of Jews and homosexuals by attempting to explain (and implicitly, to naturalize) the reasons for their similar treatment under Nazism and McCarthyism. Most importantly, his comparison of Jews with homosexuals did not seek some basis for their victimization on the level of common sociological or psychological characteristics, or shared aesthetic sensibility. Arguably, however, it was only within the confines of such an aesthetic of victimhood that the foundations of a political identity for homosexuals could be represented in the early fifties, although necessarily in an apolitical form, or at most in a form whose politics could as yet be dimly perceived. By the same token, this identity was given in a form that was not yet a distinctly or specifically homosexual politics, or whose homosexuality was not yet specifically political; a form that accorded political identity to homosexuals only insofar as they were subjected to the same forms of political expropriation as other victims of Nazism: paradigmatically, the Jews of the concentration camps. In this form, homosexuality is political only insofar as it is denied a distinct identity of its own. Instead it is identified, immediately and without reserve, with the generic condition identified by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben as ‘‘bare life.’’ Agamben uses the term bare life to refer to the inclusion of zoe—a term the ancient Greeks used to refer to ‘‘simple fact of living common to all living beings’’—within political life, bios politikos. He takes as his point of departure Michel Foucault’s studies of the historical shift from the ‘‘territorial state’’ to the ‘‘state of population,’’ in which the biological health of the populace becomes the central problem of state power. The development of eugenics was a crucial factor in the consolidation of what Foucault terms ‘‘biopower,’’ the transferal of political power from the feudal sovereign’s right over his subjects’ life and death to the ‘‘exigencies of a life-administering power’’ that functions ‘‘to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it.’’≥∑ According to Agamben, the limitation of Foucault’s analysis of modern political power is to be found in the historical and theoretical distinction Foucault draws between the juridical-political institutions of sovereignty and the social and scientific techniques of biopower. In fact, Foucault did recognize that there were intersections between these two

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modes of operation of power, as exemplified by Nazism, ‘‘doubtless the most cunning and the most naïve (and the former because of the latter) combination of the fantasies of blood and the paroxysms of a disciplinary power.’’ Under Nazism, ‘‘a eugenic ordering of society, with all that implied in the way of extension and intensification of micro-powers, in the guise of an unrestricted state control, was accompanied by the oneiric exaltation of a superior blood: the latter implied both the systematic genocide of others and the risk of exposing oneself to a total sacrifice.’’≥∏ The problem with Foucault’s analysis, in Agamben’s view, is that this ‘‘unrestricted state control’’ over biological life does not represent a transitional or accidental admixture of two historical epochs or dimensions of power, one ruled by law and the other by the domination of nature; rather, biopolitics is the very paradigm of sovereign power, establishing a direct continuity between the Hobbesian ‘‘state of nature’’ and the modern ‘‘state of exception,’’ codified in executive privilege or martial law. Under Nazism, biological life was politicized: that is, subjected to the direct exercise of state power precisely through the constitution of the biological health of the Volk as the sole political value. Agamben claims that this determination of the proper object of politics as the ‘‘good life,’’ understood as biological health and happiness, has gone hand in hand with sovereign power’s recourse to an unlimited monopoly over violence since the dawn of Western history. The only distinction that Agamben admits between premodern forms of sovereignty and modern biopolitics is that the historical ‘‘state of exception,’’ whether referring to martial law, the spaces of the concentration camp, or the bare life of those stripped of their membership in the human community, has now become the rule. Agamben’s concept of bare life shows how forms of identification grounded in political expropriation (in this case, the identification of postwar artists with Schwitters’s degenerate art) could be articulated under McCarthyist conditions of censorship and persecution, even as the artistic presentation of a specifically political homosexual identity remained foreclosed. I have argued that in the work of artists who faced persecution as homosexuals under McCarthyism in the fifties, and whose inability to articulate a politics of positive homosexual identity paradoxically enabled a more generic identification with the expropriation of so-called degenerate individuals under Nazism, the recuperation

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of a Merz aesthetic served to mediate their work’s relationship to the political and social conditions of its production. But while an aesthetic politics of degeneracy may have offered the possibility of collectivist identification among diverse groups targeted by biopolitical persecution (including Jews, homosexuals, and Communists), it also carried the risk of complicity in the very techniques of visual identification and control by which these same groups were reduced to bare life. Neo-Dadaist artists ran the risk of reinforcing the very stereotypes whose political effects were imprinted upon their work. This would be born out in the critical reception accorded Johns’s and (especially) Rauschenberg’s artistic use of found objects and waste matter during this decade, from Hilton Kramer’s archly homophobic jibe of 1959, ‘‘Like Narcissus at the pool, they see only the gutter,’’ to Newsweek’s deadpan observation that Rauschenberg’s 1955 Bed ‘‘recalls a police photo of the murder bed after the corpse has been removed.’’≥π Meanwhile, the early fifties saw the publication of several historical studies of the mésalliance between aesthetic romanticism and stereotypes of sexual deviance, from Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt’s critical history of Nazi cultural policy, Art under a Dictatorship, to literary critic Mario Praz’s pathologizing investigations of the erotic sensibilities of romanticism.≥∫ Such histories would have indicated, either by argument (Lehmann-Haupt) or by example (Praz), how identification with an aesthetics of decadence and degeneracy might perpetuate stereotypes of biological and psychological deviance still disseminated by a supposedly liberal postwar social science.≥Ω Whether triggered by a reaction against homophobic criticism or by greater awareness of the relationship between a romantic aesthetic of degeneracy and the historical persecution of racial and sexual minorities, the work of all three artists seems to shift away from the techniques of Merz collage after 1954. In my view, it is implausible to attribute this shift solely to the desire, as Steinberg puts it, ‘‘to be different.’’ Rather, I would suggest that it was the dialogic and collaborative context of Star’s production that threw the political and historical limitations of this aesthetic into stark relief. In its formal structure, Star combined a hybrid mode of painterlysculptural relief with a monochromatic overlay of overpainted collage. In the use of these techniques, Star maintained the continuity of Johns’s and Rosenthal’s dialogue with Rauschenberg’s previous work, from his Black

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Paintings (initiated in 1951) to his early Combine paintings and freestanding Combines of 1954, all works shaped by the legacy of Kurt Schwitters. Yet in Star, the double-edged character of this recuperation was first made fully visible in its identification with the ambiguous significance of the Jewish star. Like the history of political expropriation embedded in neo-Dada aesthetics, this icon symbolized both the politics of Jewish nationalism and, in the forms of the Judenstern, the enforced visibility of Jewish and homosexual identity in the concentration camps. Conversely, the enunciation of a positive Jewish identity in Star was itself overshadowed by, or mixed up with, forms of identification and separation that had administered the bare life of Jews and homosexuals under Nazism. In the interlocking forms of the Jewish star and the inverted triangle, the identifying symbols of the Jewish and non-Jewish inmates of the camps, Star made recourse to their common victimization under Nazism in a way that prevented the possibility of distinguishing in any absolute way between particular groups.∂≠ The conflict between the articulation of political identity and its submersion into bare life is played out on a level where it is not possible to discriminate rigorously between them: where identity politics remains lodged in the aestheticization of victimhood and where a metaphorics of political censorship or secrecy is seen as containing a specific referential ground and ultimate horizon of significance, namely the bare life exemplified by the Jews under Nazism. As the model of a potential politics of homosexual subjectivation, Star thus highlighted the limitations of the aesthetic politics of Dadaist degeneracy while also showing that even a more particularized identity politics—so long as it remains based on the model of victimization exemplified by the logic of bare life—cannot fully extricate itself from these foundational limitations.∂∞ The complicity of these modes of identification with the logic of political persecution is made visible in the way in which the interlocking shapes of the Jewish star and the inverted triangle form a partially lidded, partially glassed-in space like that of a locked display case in a department store, a space in which privacy and concealment are not to be distinguished from incarceration and enforced visibility. Thus, if Star implicitly opposes two models of artistic practice or aesthetic politics, they are not the ones that Moira Roth had in mind when she contrasted the aesthetic of indifference with a politics of self-

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represented identity. Far from being simply indifferent to contemporary politics, the recuperation of a totalitarian paradigm of degenerate art aimed to reoccupy and reclaim persecutory modes of identification, transforming the aesthetic codes of degeneracy and subversion into practices of opposition. In so doing, however, it risked reinforcing the very structures of persecution that foreclosed the possibility of its own political subjectivation. To this model is opposed a second, the model of misidentification, in which a particular political identity is figured, but not for its own sake and not in order to abrogate for itself the status of a persecuted minority (a claim that would merely rehearse the risks attendant upon the first model). In Star, just as in Hay’s ‘‘Preliminary Concepts,’’ the founding document of the Mattachine Society, the figuration of a particularized Jewish identity serves primarily as a means to refuse totalizing structures of persecutory identification and domination. This refusal involves the staging of a disagreement, an event that becomes political, as Jacques Rancière has theorized, not due to the nature of the competing interests or claims at stake, but only insofar as the very identities of the two parties, and their acceptance or refusal of a common language, become the object of dispute. In explicating this concept of disagreement, Rancière refers to Livy’s story of the secession of the Roman plebeians on Aventine Hill, reinterpreted in 1829 by the nineteenth-century French philosopher and poet Pierre-Simon Ballanche. Following their uprising, the seceding plebs demanded a conference with the patricians. In Ballanche’s account, as Rancière describes, this request met with incredulity: The position of the intransigent patricians is straightforward: there is no place for discussion with the plebs for the simple reason that plebs do not speak. They do not speak because they are beings without a name, deprived of logos—meaning, of symbolic enrollment in the city. Plebs lead a purely individual life that passes on nothing to posterity except for life itself, reduced to its reproductive function. . . . Between the language of those who have a name and the lowing of nameless beings, no situation of linguistic exchange can possibly be set up, no rules or code of discussion. This verdict does not simply reflect the obstinacy of the dominant or their ideological blindness: it strictly expresses the sensory order that organizes their domination, which is that domination itself.∂≤

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As Rancière points out, what Ballanche emphasized in the story was that the plebeians were not motivated principally by poverty or the state of their living conditions, but by the inequality of the sensory order, in which they were allowed no name of their own and in which their speech could not be heard. When the plebeians begin acting like patricians—consulting their own oracles, naming their own representatives —this is not merely a dumb show of powerlessness: ‘‘In a word, they conduct themselves like beings with names. . . . They write, Ballanche tells us, ‘a name in the sky’: a place in the symbolic order of the community of speaking beings, in a community that does not yet have any effective power in the city of Rome.’’∂≥ In 1954, Rachel Rosenthal, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg did not yet have any power or influence, but they formed a community that changed the relationship between the sensory order and the politics of authorship. In revealing the limitations of the language then available for the articulation of their particular and collective identities, they wrote their own name in the sky.

Notes 1. See the essays by Moira Roth and commentary by Jonathan D. Katz collected in Ostrow, ed., Difference/Indifference, including Roth’s reprinted 1977 essay, ‘‘The Aesthetics of Indifference.’’ 2. Interview with Rachel Rosenthal conducted by Moira Roth, Los Angeles, California, September 2, 1989, for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/rose nt89.htm. Accessed November 21, 2006. 3. Rosenthal’s work in performance art has been documented in a monograph by Moira Roth, Rachel Rosenthal, and in Chaudhuri, ed., Rachel’s Brain and Other Storms. 4. Rosenthal’s commission was inspired in part by an earlier work by Johns, a cross-shaped painting produced sometime in the summer of 1954, which is apparently no longer extant. See Bernstein, ‘‘Jasper Johns’ Paintings and Sculptures 1954–1974,’’ 217n20; Tone, ‘‘Chronology,’’ 124; and Crichton, Jasper Johns, 26, 76n4. 5. See Tone, ‘‘Chronology.’’ 6. Something of these insurrectionary effects seems to be implied within the dissident surrealist Georges Bataille’s concepts of basesse and l’informe, especially as they are elaborated by Rosalind Krauss in her essay ‘‘No More Play,’’ in

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The Originality of the Avant-Garde, and in the exhibition catalogue she coauthored with Yve-Alain Bois, Formless. Neither Bataille nor Krauss, however, consider the ways in which these quasi-mythic, quasi-ontological concepts lend themselves to recuperation by totalitarian political romanticism. On the political usefulness and limitations of Bataille’s ‘‘sur-fascism’’ in thinking contemporary problems of community and sovereignty, see Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community. Similar reservations could be leveled against Leo Bersani’s polemics against deconstructionist theories of sexual identity in Homos, in which he argues for the potentially critical or politically subversive value of a homosexual aesthetic of the gay outlaw. 7. For the former, see note 39, below. On the persecution of homosexuals under McCarthyism and the birth of the homosexual rights movement, see Johnson, Lavender Scare; D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 41–53, 63; Adam, Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement, 60–65; and Terry, An American Obsession, chap. 11. 8. Rancière, ‘‘Politics, Identification, Subjectivization,’’ 66–67. 9. John D’Emilio contrasts the homosexual rights movement’s ‘‘retreat to respectability’’ in the mid-fifties, consisting of its acceptance of the medical establishment’s pathologization of homosexuality and its corresponding turn from political activism to social outreach, with the radicalization of the movement under the influence of the civil rights struggles of blacks and other racial minorities in the sixties (Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 75–91, 108–25, 166–68). Barry D. Adam and Paula C. Rust describe how radical feminism, itself influenced by ethnic politics, further ethnicized homosexual activism as lesbians in particular adopted the theoretical arguments and political strategies of what Adam terms ‘‘feminist nationalism.’’ See Adam, Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement, 91–97; Rust, Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics, 171–83. As this paper will demonstrate, however, the ethnicization of homosexuality can be traced to early activists’ comparison of McCarthyist homosexual purges with the Nazi persecution of Jews (and possibly still earlier, to fascist and protofascist comparisons of Jewish and homosexual ‘‘vice’’: see note 16, below). This raises the question of whether the increased militancy of homosexual activism in the sixties should be attributed to the impetus of ethnicization or whether the self-pathologization of an earlier ‘‘retreat to respectability’’ was not itself the result of activists’ identification of homosexual politics with the needs and interests of a preconstituted (and thus, quasi-ethnic) community. 10. Roth, ‘‘The Aesthetics of Indifference,’’ 40. For a very different interpretation of the White Paintings that emphasizes their opposition to reified forms of experience under capitalism, see Joseph, Random Order, 25–71.

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11. Roth, ‘‘The Aesthetics of Indifference,’’ 41. 12. Ibid., 43. 13. Jonathan D. Katz has published numerous essays focusing on issues of homosexual identity in the work of Cage, Rauschenberg, and Johns. See in particular ‘‘The Silent Camp’’; ‘‘John Cage’s Queer Silence’’; and ‘‘Lovers and Divers.’’ Kenneth Silver’s essay ‘‘Modes of Disclosure’’ represents an important early contribution to queer theory and postwar art history. To my knowledge, Fred Orton has the distinction of having published the earliest critical analysis of homosexual self-censorship in Johns’s art: see his essay, ‘‘Present.’’ However, Orton’s focus is on the politics of representation, and he does not contextualize Johns’s work within the history of homosexual art or identity politics. 14. In fact, Katz devotes considerable attention to the Cold War cultural context in his essay ‘‘Passive Resistance,’’ but this analysis primarily addresses the ways in which the political and sociological discourse of the time was overdetermined by ‘‘the loss of faith in a coherent, masculinist oppositional posture,’’ to which he relates Johns’s and Rauschenberg’s gendered political passivity. 15. Silver attributes this thematic of the closet to similar boxed and lidded constructions created by Johns immediately after Star (see Silver, ‘‘Modes of Disclosure,’’ 188). Kogon’s book, The Theory and Practice of Hell, was closely studied in the literary-anarchist circles in which John Cage moved, having been reviewed in the Vanguard Group’s periodical Resistance (Katz and Wieck, ‘‘Political Behavior’’). As a political symbol of homosexual liberation, however, the pink triangle did not come into common use until considerably after 1954. 16. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl recounts how the writing and publication of this book was shaped by the author’s desire to intervene in contemporary polemics over McCarthyism in her biography Hannah Arendt, 211. Arendt’s historical argument drew directly upon Marcel Proust’s portrait of the milieu of the Dreyfus Affair in Sodome et Gomorrhe, the book that her friend Walter Benjamin had been laboring to translate into German in the early years of their acquaintance (ibid., 122, 142). According to Arendt, Proust’s sketches of the artistic salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain revealed the hidden logic that linked the newfound social privilege of Jews and homosexuals in turn-of-thecentury France with their political and juridical expropriation. Such parallels would not have been lost on another avid reader of Proust, Rachel Rosenthal, whose identifications with the writer were personal as well as artistic: born to a life of privilege in aristocratic Parisian society before the war, Rosenthal was forced to flee Europe with her family in 1940. See Roth, ‘‘Rachel Rosenthal,’’ 92, and her interview with Roth, cited above. 17. Hay’s ‘‘Preliminary Concepts.’’ See also Johnson, Lavender Scare, 170. 18. In the convoluted logic of the national security state, homosexuals were

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identified as a security risk because it was assumed that they had something to hide: their susceptibility to blackmail, it was argued, made them probable targets of recruitment by foreign intelligence agencies. Johnson, Lavender Scare, 20–22. 19. Ibid., 166. 20. As late as 1968, three years before the Emergency Detention Act was repealed, the House Committee on Un-American Activities recommended their use for the detention of black nationalists and Communists. See Louis Fisher, ‘‘Detention of U.S. Citizens,’’ CRS Report for Congress, April 28, 2005, http://digital.library.unt.edu/govdocs/crs//data/2005/upl-meta-crs-6144/RS 22130—2005Apr28.pdf. Accessed November 8, 2006. 21. Johnson, Lavender Scare, 25–38. 22. In an interview given in 1974, Hay noted that in the fifties, Jews could not be targeted for discrimination because of the ‘‘painful example of Germany.’’ Quoted in Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History, 408. (The author and interviewer, a noted historian of gender and sexuality, should not be confused with the art historian Jonathan D. Katz cited above.) 23. Tomkins, Off the Wall, 79. 24. See Varnedoe, Cy Twombly, 12 and 54n17. 25. Steinberg, ‘‘Jasper Johns,’’ 21, italics in original. Steinberg reports that Johns began to make these collages after his discharge from the army ‘‘in 1952.’’ Johns was not actually discharged from the army until 1953. 26. Prior to this point, it seems likely that Johns knew very little about Schwitters’s art or life firsthand, and the works that appear to have been produced when Johns was still living at East 8th Street bear little resemblance either to Schwitters’s collages or to Rauschenberg’s more Schwittersian works (e.g., the Red Paintings, the Combine paintings, and the freestanding Combines). I present a more detailed version of this argument in my doctoral dissertation, ‘‘Jasper Johns,’’ 77–78. 27. Quoted in Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets, xxix. 28. Grosz, A Little Yes, cited in ibid., xxvii. 29. Something of these internal Dada politics is conveyed in Georges Hugnet’s ‘‘The Dada Spirit in Painting,’’ which was published in abbreviated form as the essay ‘‘Dada’’ in Barr’s Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism, and later reprinted in full in the Motherwell anthology Dada Painters and Poets. See in particular Fantastic Art, 28, and The Dada Painters and Poets, 162–64. Huelsenbeck expressed his criticism of Schwitters clearly in his later writings, most succinctly in a letter to Werner Schmalenbach in which he stated, ‘‘Schwitters was in my eyes at that time a German Romantic.’’ See Schmalenbach, Kurt Schwitters, 366n6.

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30. Hugnet, ‘‘The Dada Spirit,’’ 163–64. 31. References to deformation are found in the Schwitters essay included in Motherwell’s anthology, The Dada Painters and Poets, 63. On the cover of Merz 2, no. 7, also reproduced in the Motherwell anthology, is inscribed, ‘‘Merz ist Form. Formen heißt entformeln.’’ The term entformeln is discussed in Gamard, Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau, 28. Gamard, however, sanitizes the problematic connotations of Schwitters’s rhetoric, anachronistically assimilating entformeln to the Wittgensteinian concept of a ‘‘form of life.’’ 32. Neil Levy explores the usefulness of certain tendencies within Dada and expressionism to Nazi propagandistic needs in his essay, ‘‘ ‘Judge for Yourselves’!’’ His conclusions indicate that the ostensibly oppositional works of Berlin Dadaists like George Grosz and Otto Dix were no more exempt from this ideological complicity than the art of the ‘‘romantic’’ Schwitters, who at least can be credited with some level of ironic self-awareness. (The significant exception, Levy argues, is John Heartfield: his photomontages could not be included in the Degenerate Art exhibition without implicitly demonstrating the ease with which images and documentation can be manipulated for propagandistic aims.) 33. Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets, xxx, my translation. 34. For more on this exhibition, see Levy, ‘‘Judge for Yourselves!’ ’’ 35. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1–11; Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 136. 36. Ibid., 149–50. 37. Kramer, ‘‘Month in Review,’’ 48–50; Newsweek, March 31, 1958, 94. Although Newsweek’s sensationalistic description of Bed was appended to an article that was, in the main, more circumspect about the artist’s private life, the anonymous author did not neglect to mention that Johns and Rauschenberg lived and worked in adjoining floors of the same building. For reference to this article and a discussion of bodily metaphors in Bed and other works by Rauschenberg, see Leggio, ‘‘Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed.’’ 38. Paul Schultze-Naumburg’s Kunst und Rasse and Max Nordau’s linkage of romanticism with degeneracy and disease are discussed in Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a Dictatorship, 37–44. The book also contained one of the earliest and most comprehensive reports on the Degenerate Art exhibition (78– 87). Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony, the English translation of his La carne, la morte, e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica, enjoyed a certain cult appeal in its day and was even publicly criticized for popularity among ‘‘sexual delinquents.’’ 39. On the role of the American psychoanalytic establishment in the postwar stigmatization of homosexuality, see Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry, chap. 1; and Lewes, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality. The

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most infamous figures in this history were the psychoanalysts Edmund Bergler, Irving Bieber, and Charles Socarides, all three of whom argued that homosexuality was a curable psychopathology. See Bergler, Homosexuality; Bieber, Homosexuality; and Socarides, The Overt Homosexual. Martin Duberman’s Cures offers a first-person account of author’s experiences in the pre-Stonewall era of homosexuality’s pathologization. In more recent years, the theories of Bergler, Socarides, and Bieber, long since discredited in mental-health circles, have been cited in support of the work of fundamentalist Christian organizations that claim to ‘‘convert’’ homosexuals to heterosexuality: in this way, the argument that homosexuality is curable continues to exert social and political effects. 40. See my comments on the relationship between the pathologization of homosexuality and the ‘‘ethnicization’’ of homosexual identity politics, note 9. 41. In later work of the fifties and sixties, all three artists would find ways of qualifying or circumscribing their identification with a neo-Dadaist aesthetics of degeneracy: as Rosenthal and Rauschenberg became increasingly involved with identity-based and Cagean modes of performance, respectively, Johns devoted increasing emphasis to the iconographic register of his work, which generally functioned to cancel out, rather than reinforce, any association between his use of collage and a Schwittersian aesthetic of degeneracy. 42. Rancière, Dis-agreement, 23–24. 43. Ibid., 24–25.

YAT E S M CK E E

Post-Communist Notes on Some Vertov Stills To read a work . . . is to allow yourself to lose the bearing which assured you of your sovereign distance from the other, which assured you of the distinction between subject and object, active and passive, between past and present (the latter can neither be suppressed nor ignored); lastly it is to lose your sense of the division between the space of the work and the world onto which it opens. CL AUDE LEFORT, ‘‘The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism’’ Islamism and avant-garde art . . . les extremes se touchant. SUSAN BUCK - MORSS , Thinking Past Terror

Still The still is still here—not quite present, but uncertainly remaining. It lingers, suspended and mute in the absence of the work, after the completion of its diegetic movement, after we think we’ve processed it at the level of experience or cognition. Conventionally, we are trained to grasp it as a part of an absent totality, a stand-in that leads us back to a conscious memory of a specific scene, a general plot, an ideological

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yates mckee 1. Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera, 1929. Film still.

operation, or a formal convention. It is an agent of recalling and preserving, though it sometimes brings with it something we never fully experienced, something that hits us in an untimely or belated way. However we assume it to operate, the still is a kind of ruin, bearing witness to violence in more ways than one. The present text takes this ruinous violence as its starting point, responding not to a self-contained work but to an image that has been arrested and cut off from its original context, detoured from its presumed destination, exposed to unforeseeable readings and reinscriptions. Yet while the image has been deprived of its original time and space as the absolute anchor of meaning, the still has a certain (displaced) role to play: we know that the image is not just anything we want it to be, that it doesn’t come out of nowhere or submit passively to our willing manipulation. It is an irreducibly singular image taken from Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) (fig. 1).∞ It will be immediately apparent to anyone familiar with the film that this procedure is no coincidence—that it borrows its strategic resources from the very thing it violates, if only to exceed it, making the film tremble from within. This trembling calls out for what Walter Benjamin called a ‘‘constructive’’ reading, rather than a pious historicism that would be content to establish Man with a Movie Camera either as the progenitor of an idealized digital revolution in which the empowered ‘‘image manipulator’’ reigns supreme or, conversely, as the paternal guarantor of a beleaguered academic avant-garde anxious to protect its authority in the intellectual division of labor.≤

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Hailed by these antithetical voices, both of which imply a certain kind of closure (the one celebratory, the other melancholic), I want to ask, ‘‘Is that all?’’ This is the question that haunts Roland Barthes’s essay ‘‘The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills.’’ It comes at a moment when Barthes, having exhaustively accounted for the formal and ideological codes at work in an Eisenstein film still, is confronted with something that refuses to fit into his preestablished theoretical matrix, exceeding the structuralist mandate of making evident the image’s meaning. It fulfills no apparent purpose in the functioning of the film, yet it remains there, ‘‘disturbing—like a guest who obstinately sits on saying nothing when one has no use for him.’’≥ This useless, uncanny guest demands that we bear witness to what Barthes calls the ‘‘gash’’ that it effects in the process of signification. According to Barthes, such an encounter is foreclosed by our everyday viewing habits, ensnared as we inevitably are in the diegetic movement of cinema, which tends to ‘‘suture’’ the gash and absorb it as a ‘‘signifying accident.’’ It is for this reason that Barthes praises the ‘‘major artifact’’ of the still for its capacity to overflow the function typically assigned to it: providing a metonymic sample of a film text assumed to otherwise coincide with itself in its temporal unfolding, what he calls the ‘‘operative time’’ of cinema. Brought to a standstill, pinned down in front of us, the image does not secure our analytical gaze; paradoxically, it is only in being arrested that it opens onto an enigmatic temporality of reading that oscillates in an incalculable way between past, present, and future: the third meaning ‘‘appears necessarily as a luxury, an expenditure with no exchange. This luxury does not yet belong to today’s politics, but nevertheless already to tomorrow’s.’’∂ This essay will attempt to unfold the implications of Barthes’s cryptic evocation of a politics-to-come by performing a historical reading of a still from Man with a Movie Camera. In keeping with Barthes’s sense of the still as an interruption of ‘‘operative time,’’ reading historically will here involve cutting the image out of the established narratives into which it has hitherto been inserted and placing it in relation to other images, times, and spaces—which, as we shall see, are in fact uncannily proximate to the oeuvre of Vertov himself.∑ This displacement will be informed by a certain post-Communism. This term marks both the specific post-1989 geopolitical conjuncture in which any contemporary practice of reading must take place and a theoretical orientation at odds

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with—but not simply opposed to—the neo-Communist revival that has taken place among some political theorists and art critics of the Left during the past decade. The aim of my reading is to provoke critical reflection on the heritage of world history imparted to us from Vertov, yet informed by Jacques Derrida’s caution, in Specters of Marx, that ‘‘an inheritance is never gathered together, it is never one with itself. . . . If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it . . . one always inherits from a secret—which says ‘read me, will you ever be able to do so?’ ’’∏

Mirror of Production As suggested above, Vertov was, up to a point, familiar with the violence of the still, emerging as it does out of more general violence at work in cinematic meaning itself: ‘‘to edit; to wrest, through the camera, whatever is most typical, most useful, from life; to organize the pieces wrested from life into a meaningful rhythmic visual order.’’π Man with a Movie Camera famously makes this process visible, especially in the scene at the editing table that cuts between moving images and their constitutive stills, exposing the undecidable play between human and technical animation that underlies cinematic diegesis. The latter is shown to be an effect of a dynamic act of production, illuminating the status of the film qua signifying visual structure and industrial artifact. Throughout the film, cinematic labor is foregrounded and analogized with the other labor practices it depicts (and which it depicts itself depicting). The scene at the editing table makes this especially clear: the work of the editor is likened to the work of textile production, as both involve the cutting and sewing together of heterogeneous pieces into a continuous socio-material text. Yet because of this very visibility, the seamlessness usually achieved by the ideological mechanism of ‘‘suture’’ is here suspended, making it available to consciousness. As Erik Barnouw puts it in a typical assessment, ‘‘The artificiality is deliberate: an avant-garde determination to suppress illusion in favor of heightened awareness.’’∫ Barnouw’s remark captures the dialectical inversion that animates Vertov’s epistemology, which was inseparable from his praxis as a whole. Influenced by futurism, Vertov repudiated attempts by ‘‘literary’’ film-

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makers to transcend the perceptual and cognitive dynamism of modernity by appealing to a mythically natural human sensorium. For the latter, film would reproduce a static, pregiven perceptual world (whether real or fictional), treating the camera as a transparent medium passively reflecting reality rather than intervening upon and negating its givenness. It was precisely this capacity of man, supplemented and extended by technology, to negate given reality that constituted the essence of the Communist project within which Vertov was immersed. Equipped with a movie camera, man would not merely show this process from the outside but would materially enact it, giving an immanent demonstration of the new principle upon which Communist society would be founded: the sovereignty of the collective as a producer of objects, films, and ultimately its own self-consciousness. As Vertov put it early in his career, ‘‘We/Want/To/Make/Ourselves.’’Ω Insofar as industrial Communist ‘‘making’’ in general involved dynamism, speed, automation, repetition, fragmenting, decomposing, and recomposing, a revolutionary cinema had to make these processes central to its own synaesthetic articulation of a ‘‘meaningful rhythmic visual order,’’ or ‘‘visual symphony,’’ as it is called at the opening of the film. Not present to the naked, merely human eye, ‘‘film truth’’ was graspable only through an active dialectical vision that Vertov figured in terms of reading and writing: on the one hand, Kino-eye performed a kind of hermeneutics of the social text, ‘‘the communist decoding of the world on the basis of what actually exists.’’ Yet freed from its encryption in naïve perceptual reality, the hidden meaning of the world would have to pass back through another media—the ‘‘absolute film writing’’ comprising the final film text—in order to become legible. The perceptual shock and disorientation initially effected in viewers by these ‘‘absolute’’ cinematographic strategies would break the passivity of reception mandated by conventional cinema, requiring them to come into their own as active readers or coparticipants in the decoding of visual meaning, and by analogy the project of social construction as a whole. The film exhibits an oft-celebrated self-reflexivity concerning the social and perceptual activity of cinematic reception.∞≠ Viewers watch the filmmaker making the film and then, enabled by his visual techniques, watch themselves producing the material foundations of society and enjoying its fruits. Yet this self-visibility is taken to an even higher level when we recall that spectatorship is itself overtly visualized throughout

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the film. It is posited at once as an internal, partial cog in the everyday lifecycle, as well as a privileged means of making that cycle available in its entirety to consciousness. The circular structure of self-conscious spectatorship allegorizes the infinite spiraling forward of historical development itself, what Jean Baudrillard, once called ‘‘[man’s] continual deciphering of himself through his works . . . reflected by this operational mirror, this sort of an ideal of a productivist ego.’’∞∞ Following Jean-Luc Nancy, who commented slightly later on the ‘‘mirror of production’’ set up by Communism, we can say that Vertov aims to interpellate an ‘‘operative community,’’ which is to say, a community grounded and unified in a shared process of working together, a gathering of ‘‘human beings defined as producers . . . and fundamentally as the producers of their own essence in the form of their labor or their work.’’∞≤ Vertov’s operative community is one of immanence; ideally, it is not moved or marked by anything other than its own internal circuits of production, distribution, and ‘‘simultaneous collective reception,’’ to cite the key phrase from Benjamin Buchloh’s authoritative account of the constructivists’ post-faktura aspiration to radically redefine the conditions of mass spectatorship in line with the processes of rapid communist industrialization—and, implicitly, national-popular subjectivization —in the late twenties and early thirties.∞≥

Caesura Yet, there is an event in the film in which this operational dialectic of self-recognition suffers a hitch, short-circuiting what Annette Michelson describes as ‘‘the formal instantiation of a general community and a common stake in the project . . . that has radically reorganized the property relations subtending industrial production.’’∞∂ Something other than the famous dynamism of intervals that otherwise structure the film, this event should be understood as a caesura in the synaesthetic movement of the film’s ‘‘meaningful rhythmic visual order.’’ Whether in music or poetry, the auxiliary function of the caesura seems fairly straightforward: it is a gap or delay that ensures the proper spacing and timing of the elements of a work. But if this gap is conventionally associated with an ultimate continuity and functionality, it can also portend lack and

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insecurity, betraying its etymological derivation from the violence of cutting.∞∑ The caesura comes at an emblematic moment of spectatorial self-consciousness: the third and final mise-en-scène of the movie theater, in which we as viewers alternate between a position of exteriority to the audience, viewing them viewing, and one of immanence, in which our field of vision appears to coincide with theirs (fig. 2). But any such symmetry is lost as the film cuts abruptly from the face of a bemused audience member to a visual field evacuated of any recognizable figure, human or otherwise. What replaces the figural self-visibility of the audience? It is not nothing, in any simple sense. Quivering with an arrhythmic intensity, a black surface appears that at once saturates and doubles the screen itself. Three bands of light traverse the surface, providing a reflective index of its inhuman palpitations. Though evenly spaced and vertically aligned, they do not function to symmetrically center our gaze or to hold together the screen, which appears on the verge of being shaken apart. An upright, columnar orientation—associated perhaps with the stability of a corporeal or architectonic gestalt—only appears in its dissolution, as its form comes undone. Precarious from the beginning, the linear contours of the bands of light progressively break down, giving way to a series of frenzied electromagnetic waves whose oscillation traces a palpable disturbance in the equilibrium of the perceptual field. Punctuated by several shots of the audience, this formless, flickering surface holds our gaze for some fifteen seconds before returning to a familiar montage sequence involving dancers and musicians. This is long enough to leave some impression in our perceptual awareness, yet too ephemeral vis-à-vis the diegetic rhythm of the film to become available for cognitive scrutiny. The gap passes us by, or rather passes through us, in such a way that it might easily be absorbed as what Barthes called a ‘‘signifying accident,’’ an ultimately forgettable supplement to the essential movement of the film. This seismic disturbance is something other than the deliberate shaking up of perception effected by the kinetic dynamism of the rest of the film: from the cranking of the camera, the whirling of the spindle, the chugging of the wheels of the locomotive, or the montage technique itself, the intensity of mechanico-muscular motion evoked throughout

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yates mckee 2. Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera, 1929. Film still.

the film continues to produce a more general sense of linear and cyclical self-propulsion, allegorizing class consciousness as the motor of history. In both form and content, the film’s kinesis is always oriented around doing something and going somewhere: each cog in the film’s intricate dialectical machinery makes its contribution to the synaesthetic realization of the ‘‘meaningful rhythmic visual order.’’ Even before being fixed as a still, the caesura opens onto a region uncannily suspended between motion and stasis, activity and passivity, life and death. The irregular pulsations of the surface seem depleted of teleological energy, functional purpose, or communicative significance; they do not appear to be going anywhere, doing anything, or saying anything. Nevertheless, something happens, or comes to pass; the force of the happening seizes our attention, but with a strange indifference to our presence. In the synaesthetic terms of the film, we might say that in the caesura, we are exposed to a kind of senseless visual noise, a murmuring that announces, but in which nothing is announced. This is not the glorious audiovisual cacophony of the city-as-symphony, the rhythmic humming and clanking and riveting of industrial modernity. Nor does it provide a quiet, contemplative pause where we might take a breath and gather ourselves between the disorienting assaults of montage. This caesura is restive, rather than restful. Its cutting leaves what Barthes would call a ‘‘gash razed in meaning’’ that cannot be easily sutured, even by the most deliberate of dialectical surgeons. It is the coming-to-pass of this murmuring wound that is put under

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arrest in the still, reactivating the conscious and unconscious traces it may have left within us, liberating it from the ‘‘operative time’’ of cinema. Yet even when the gears of the film are brought to a standstill, enabling the singularity of this image to show up without the burden of movement, it refuses to stay in place. Though it is seemingly present, frozen in the here and now, we still manage to miss it, arriving at the moment of its withdrawal. As Barthes says, the image ‘‘compels an interrogative reading,’’ yet it does not unfold itself in response to our questioning. Not because of its infinite, ineffable depth, but precisely because it doesn’t stand for anything, not even itself. Testifying to the ‘‘difficulty in naming’’ he undergoes in the face of the obtuse meaning, Barthes asks, ‘‘How do you describe something that doesn’t represent anything?’’ We can take this one step further and ask: how does this arepresentational image affect us as readers, split as we already are between immanent identification with the Communist audience pictured in the film and the position of irrecoverable geopolitical and historical distance any contemporary audience must now occupy?

An Empty Place Barthes’s remark on the signifier’s ‘‘permanent state of depletion’’—its lack of any positive substance subtending below, behind, or within it— resonates in an interesting way with Claude Lefort’s contention that with the advent of democracy, ‘‘the locus of power becomes an empty place.’’ Conceived as more than a set of institutional practices, democracy for Lefort involves a ‘‘symbolic mutation’’ in the representation of society, in which the latter is deprived of any transcendent source of legitimacy, rendering it an ‘‘ungraspable’’ enigma. Previous political forms relied on a logic of incorporation, in which society was figured as a finite, unified body whose constituent parts each played their given, proper role. With democracy, on the other hand, society is ‘‘disincorporated’’: it loses the bodily gestalt or figure that would have provided society with a secure, bounded image of itself upon which to base judgments and undertake plans. This loss at once constitutes and blocks the identity of ‘‘the people’’ that comes into being with the passing of the old regime. While a potentially limitless array of particular bodies compete to fill in the empty place, none can ever coincide with it in a

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universal way: there is no complete representative of society, insofar as the latter is defined essentially as an enigma. The people are deprived of the possibility of transparent self-visibility; it is only visually incarnated insofar as it becomes the object of conflictual mediations. In other words, the appearance of the people occurs only in the event of their disappearance as an immediate entity: that is, with ‘‘the dissolution of the markers of certainty’’ and an experience of ‘‘a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law, and knowledge, and as to the basis of relations between self and other.’’∞∏ Lefort’s thought on democracy developed in response to the Western Left’s failure to come to terms with Soviet totalitarianism. While the crimes of Stalin were duly denounced when they came to light under Khrushchev, many in the West subscribed to the analysis of Trotsky, who held that Stalinism represented a ‘‘degeneration’’ of the original program of the Bolsheviks, a ‘‘parasitic’’ aberration that would correct itself with the maturation of the revolution. According to Lefort, the Trotskyite analysis failed to interrogate the principle upon which Bolshevism erected itself: the possession of ‘‘scientific’’ knowledge of the material foundations of history and class struggle, the laws of which were taken to mandate the establishment of the authoritative body of the party, supplemented by its various organs. Lefort saw in Bolshevism the immanent possibility of totalitarianism qua political form, which he understood as a kind of reaction formation to the ungrounding of the social: ‘‘An apparatus is set up which tends to stave off this threat, which attempts to weld power and society back together again, and to efface all signs of social division, to banish the indetermination that haunts the democratic experience.’’ At the level of the imaginary, this involved the reincorporation of the people through the articulation of two key images: the body and the machine.∞π Society was figured as a well-functioning technological organism, with muscular and mechanical operations becoming interchangeable in the carrying through of the collective labor of class-conscious social construction. Anything exceeding the operations of this organism became an ‘‘enemy of the people,’’ an obstacle to the proper unfolding of history itself, deserving of official denunciation, if not outright elimination. What does it mean to reread Vertov through the lens of Lefort’s analysis of the totalitarian body—and its potential unworking or depletion? Any association of Vertov with a such a model of community risks

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affiliating itself with the simplistic teleological narrative of art historian Boris Groys, who argues that the seeds of Stalinist terror were inherently germinating in the early Soviet avant-garde’s project of engineering subjects-of-history appropriate for a new world of egalitarian industrialization—a post-utopian admonishment of the sort caricatured by Slavoj ˇ zek when he writes, ‘‘benevolent as it is, it will inevitably end in the Ziˇ gulag!’’∞∫ Indeed, Vertov’s reputation as an exemplary practitioner of the critical avant-garde has long been founded precisely in opposition to the aesthetico-political imaginary of Stalinism. Annette Michelson, in her authoritative introduction to Vertov’s writings, explicitly analogizes his gradual marginalization in the Soviet film industry with the fate of Trotsky, mourning both as bearers of a lost revolutionary potentiality stifled by socialist realism and Stalinism more generally. Though referring to Eisenstein rather than Vertov, this narrative is echoed in the selfexpository introduction to the anthology October: ‘‘ ‘But why October?’ our readers still inquire? . . . October is exemplary for us of a specific historical moment in which artistic practice joined with critical theory in a project of social construction. . . . We had no desire to perpetuate the mythology of the revolution. Rather, we wished to claim that the unfinished, analytic project of constructivism—aborted by the consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy, distorted by the recuperation of the Soviet avant-garde into Western idealist aesthetics—was required for a consideration of the aesthetic practices of our time.’’∞Ω At one level, the formal strategies innovated by Vertov—‘‘the Trotsky of cinema,’’ as Michelson describes him—are obviously incommensurable with the visual culture of Stalinism, realizing a dynamic activity of perception rather than a reified pantheon of heroes to be passively emulated. However, I have intimated above that even within the avantgarde masterpiece that is Man with a Movie Camera, it is possible to discern the structure of an ‘‘ideal of a productivist ego,’’ whose would-be circularity bears within it a potential for exclusionary violence. It is with reference to this potential or actual violence that I suggest we read the caesura as an ungraspable moment of depletion in the collective body constructed by Vertov, an index of ‘‘the indetermination that haunts the democratic experience.’’ For however fleeting a moment, we witness a certain disincorporation, the dissolution of the markers of visual certainty required for the stabilization of the identity of the people. It is in this interruption of dialectical circularity that the image

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calls out for a historical reading in the sense given this term by Eduardo Cadava, when he speaks of ‘‘the emergence and survival of an image that, telling us it can longer show anything, nevertheless shows and bears witness to what history has silenced, to what, no longer here, and arising from the darkest nights of memory, haunts us and encourages us to remember the deaths and losses for which we remain, still today, responsible.’’≤≠

Scotoma Such a reading can proceed by reading the caesura that interrupts Man with a Movie Camera alongside a remarkable film still that is to be found on page 137 of Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. It shows a ghostly figure ensconced in a cloak, who appears to face the camera. But where we might expect to recognize this figure’s face and meet its gaze, we encounter instead an aperture that exposes us to a kind of flat, impenetrable darkness, almost as if the still—or is it our eye?—has had a hole burnt into it by sunlight refracted through a magnifying glass. Frozen in the still, cut off from whatever cinematic movement it was meant to assist, this blind spot, or scotoma, effects a kind uncanniness in the viewer, piercing us with the sense of some forgotten, abysmal loss. But when processed through Vertov’s epistemological machine, we grasp the dialectical function that this moment of obscurity plays in the ‘‘communist decoding of the world.’’ Far from accidental, it provides precisely the challenge set out for Kino-eye in 1924, ‘‘to show people without masks, without makeup, to catch them through the eye of the camera . . . to read their thoughts, laid bare by the camera. Kino-eye as the possibility of making the invisible visible, the unclear clear, the disguised overt, the acted non-acted; making falsehood truth.’’≤∞ When the still is returned to its original context, we recognize the power relations implied by Vertov’s epistemological metaphors of enlightenment, revelation, unmasking—and the broader project of social construction they served to legitimize. In Three Songs of Lenin, we witness the actualization of these optical metaphors through the bodies of subjects marked pejoratively as other, those who haunt Vertov’s project of building a ‘‘visual bond between the peoples of the U.S.S.R and

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the world based on the platform of the communist decoding of what actually exists.’’≤≤ Vertov made Three Songs of Lenin in 1934, five years after Man with a Movie Camera and ten years after the death of Lenin. The film commemorates the late leader’s revolutionary accomplishments by recording songs of mourning among workers and peasants across the ussr. Though subdued significantly, the film continues to deploy several of the unorthodox cinematic strategies explored in Man with a Movie Camera, reaffirming the analogy between the activation of spectatorial awareness and the self-realization of the Communist subject. Yet rather than the urban proletariat of Man with a Movie Camera, the emergent Communist subjects featured in the later film are bearers of an unsettling form of cultural difference: they are the Muslim peoples of Central Asia, a region inherited by the Bolsheviks from the Tsarist Empire and subsequently referred to as the Soviet East. I want to briefly consider the first of these three songs and attempt to draw it into the constellation of questions provoked by the enigma of the caesura that lies at the origin of this essay. The title page of the first song reads ‘‘My Face Was in a Dark Prison,’’ establishing a first-person narrative of transition from the imprisonment of the past to the emancipated space of the present, a space that enables free speech and public self-disclosure. Following the title page, the film opens with an exemplar of that past, obscure imprisonment: The camera follows a woman covered from head to toe in a chador, her face concealed by an additional black garment, metonymizing the ‘‘dark prison’’ (fig. 3). As this figure passes in front of the camera, a soundtrack of Central Asian folk music begins, guiding us for several minutes through the physically and culturally decrepit landscape of an anonymous eastern town. Among the ruined Islamic arches and narrow streets, turbaned men are shown malingering listlessly, apparently lacking in productive capacity. A mosque appears, but only through a delirious, unfocused shot that echoes the simulation of ‘‘intoxicated’’ vision in the bar room scene of Man with A Movie Camera, signaling a temporary aberration in consciousness: religion as the ‘‘opiate of the people,’’ as Marx might have put it. But from this state of visual impairment, the film cuts to a stable, elevated vantage point, enabling us to gaze down on worshippers kneeling in unison as the muezzin calls prayer. This opening sequence, which features seven shots

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yates mckee 3. Dziga Verov, Three Songs of Lenin, 1934, Song 1: ‘‘My Face Was in a Dark Prison.’’ Film still.

of veiled women, is intercut with the (written) words of the first-person ‘‘I’’ announced in the title: ‘‘My face was in a dark prison. I led a blind life. In ignorance and darkness, I was a slave without chains.’’ The author of these words becomes apparent as the sequence abruptly cuts to an image of a Muslim woman who sits writing at a window. While her hair is covered by a scarf, her face is entirely visible as she sits pensively with pen in hand. ‘‘But a ray of truth began to shine—’’ she writes, ‘‘the dawn of Lenin’s truth.’’ As she appears, the soundtrack also makes an abrupt cut form the unfamiliar sounds of the folk music to the upright call of the bugle, which issues from a column of Communist Youth as they march toward the decadent, crumbling town. As she notices their arrival, she feels compelled to leave the seclusion of the house and walk unaccompanied through town to the ‘‘Turkic Women’s Club.’’ Recalling the analogy of window shades and eyelids in Man with a Movie Camera, as she opens the door to go inside, her action is dialectically echoed at the level of another body: we see a different young woman joyously throwing off her veil, opening herself onto the enlightening gaze of the camera. The eyes of the woman are shown gazing upward as the song conjures for her a monumental vision of Lenin’s generous contributions to the lives of the eastern peoples: the film cuts from town to country, where men, women, and children, with the help of Russian experts, are shown enthusiastically realizing Soviet plans for the modernization of agriculture. ‘‘My State Farm!’’ reads an intertitle, as a woman feeding a huge

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flock of chickens is intercut with the graceful visual patterns of a mechanized harvester and a fertilizer plane. In between driving tractors, assembling parts, and picking cotton, male and female workers gather to read newspapers announcing the tenth anniversary of Lenin’s death, but the soundtrack has once again shifted to the upright marching of the brass band rather than the melancholic dirge. Injunctive intertitles continue to appear: ‘‘My Country!’’ ‘‘My Land!’’ ‘‘My Family!’’ ‘‘My Hands!’’ A darkened room is suddenly illuminated by a lightbulb, revealing the face of a Muslim woman: ‘‘He made light of the darkness, a garden of the desert, and life of death.’’

Unveiling Unveiling The opacity of the veil is quickly dispelled by Vertov, as he stages the literal unveiling of women in order to allegorize the coming to class consciousness of an entire population—a process of Communist secularization that depends on the suppression of Islamic ‘‘backwardness’’ in particular, and religion in general, for its sense of historical purpose. This weaving together of secular enlightenment, economic development, and the liberation of women can be identified as part of a determinate Soviet ideological nexus, the consequences of which can still be felt today. It developed as a panicked response on the part of the Bolshevik leadership to the indeterminate, empty place left in Central Asia following the crumbling of the Tsarist administration. As Ahmed Rashid reports, the period between 1917 and 1923 saw a ‘‘brief flowering of ideological ferment’’ in which a variety of political discourses, most of which incorporated Islamic elements, competed to set the terms for an alternative modernity in the region—and a postcolonial relationship to Russia.≤≥ Along with conservative religious revivalism and tribal and clan autonomism, Rashid sees two discourses as being of especial interest: first, he mentions Jadidism, an Islamic reform movement dating from the late nineteenth century that stressed pan-Turkic self-determination from Russia and the inventive reinterpretation (itjihad) of the Koran vis-à-vis liberal constitutional principles to which Central Asian intellectuals had been exposed in Europe. Second, Rashid draws our attention to the little-known phenomenon of Muslim Communism, a more radical offshoot of Jadidism that nevertheless stressed the primacy

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of national liberation over the strategy of an eventual global proletarian revolution. Under the slogan ‘‘East Is Not West, Muslims Are Not Russians,’’ intellectuals such as Mir Said Sultan Galiev set up a Muslim Communist Party and showed solidarity with the Bolsheviks, helping to enlist some 250,000 Central Asians in the Russian civil war. Theoretically, Galiev’s position was in keeping with Lenin’s ‘‘Theses on the National Question,’’ though as Rashid points out, the self-determination ultimately envisioned by Lenin for the peoples of Greater Russia could not countenance actual secession. The elimination of these movements during what Rashid calls the ‘‘reconquest’’ of Central Asia legitimized itself by denouncing the ‘‘reactionary’’ and ‘‘decadent’’ character of Islam, which was brutally suppressed in all its forms. It was in the name of a de-Islamicized class consciousness—in which the ‘‘woman question’’ was a central battleground—that Stalin carried out the forced settlement and collectivization of nomadic herders. This policy had devastating consequences: some 1.5 million Kazaks alone are estimated to have died during the first decade of their recolonization by the Bolsheviks. This is a postcolonial history scotomized by Michelson’s authoritative, celebratory introduction to the oeuvre of Vertov in 1984, as well as her obliquely ambivalent and disciplinarily eclectic analysis of Three Songs of Lenin, published in October six years later.≤∂ In the latter text, Michelson notes the persistence of various modes of avant-garde experimentation in the film—the still, the superimposition, the heterodox spatiotemporal rhythms and camera angles—and cites Vertov’s crucial declaration of the continuity between Songs and his earlier work: ‘‘It required making use of all previous experience of kino-eye filmings, all acquired knowledge, it meant the registration and careful study of all other previous work on this theme. . . . In this respect Man With a Movie Camera and Enthusiasm were of great help to our production group. These were, so to speak, films that beget films.’’≤∑ Claiming an interest in ‘‘the location of the precise signification, its political function within the historical situation of the ussr in the 1930s,’’ Michelson distinguishes Songs from Man on the grounds that the former was an instrumental project officially commissioned and approved by the state, and thus a turn away from the ‘‘wholly autonomous metacinematic celebration of cinema as a mode of production and epistemological inquiry’’ represented by Man. Michelson reads the 1934 film as a ‘‘monument of cinematic hagiography’’ that enacts a transvaluation of the spatial and pictorial logic of the tripartite Eastern Orthodox

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iconostasis into cinematic terms, with Lenin, the Lost Liberator, supplanting Christ as a figure that is both an anthropomorphic representation and material (‘indexical’) emanation of a transcendent presence ‘‘located on the boundary between the human and the divine.’’ Central to Michelson’s analysis of the locally inflected religious resonance of Songs is Vertov’s foregrounding of the ‘‘folk tradition of the female mourner’’ and the ‘‘extremely rich tradition of the oral lament traversing Russian literature.’’ Appealing to the account, written in the forties by Freudian anthropologist Geza Roheim, of the ‘‘practices of the tribal order on which the sense of the dead—of the murdered father—is felt as a potentially powerful threat that behooves the mourner to seek protection through magic,’’ Michelson effectively hypostatizes and universalizes the female figures around which Songs revolves, thus falling prey to two inexcusable ideological operations: first, while acknowledging the ‘‘hagiographic’’ conventions employed by Vertov himself, she takes for granted the documentary and ethnographic self-evidence of the female mourner’s ‘‘tribute to their dead liberator’’; second, she collapses all of the women featured in the film into a generalized ‘‘Russian’’ psychological, cultural, and religious disposition, thus disavowing the specificity of the violent anti-Islamic campaign in which Vertov was partaking in the name of enlightened class consciousness. This campaign is one of the historical contexts within which it is necessary to read Vertov’s practice in general, and Three Songs of Lenin in particular, a film to which he explicitly repeated his early 1924 injunction: ‘‘to show people without masks, without makeup; to catch them with camera’s eye . . . to read their thoughts, laid by kino-eye.’’≤∏ Rather than a passive vehicle of an aberrant Stalinist policy beyond his control, it is evident in both his film and his writing that Vertov played an enthusiastic role in legitimizing this project, which, as Rosalind Morris has recently shown, Lenin and Trotsky had themselves sanctified in their highly gendered denunciations of pan-Islamism throughout the early twenties: ‘‘Lenin the giant and the beloved Ilyich, close friend and great leader . . . that is how Lenin’s image is seen by the emancipated Turkmen and Uzbek; that is how he appears to the doubly, triply emancipated woman of the Soviet East.’’≤π While Michelson concludes her analysis with an oblique lamentation of the way in which Vertov’s pioneering ‘‘assault upon the conditions

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and ideology of cinematic representation’’ had by 1934 come to serve in a process of mourning and monumentalizing ‘‘a deeply cathected image of the founder and the liberator,’’ she abstains from any explicit political judgment on the hagiographic dimension of Songs, a film that cites and hybridizes, in virtuosic fashion, the techniques of each supposed phase of the Soviet avant-garde from formalist faktura to documentary factography to monumental mythography.≤∫ While purporting to elucidate the film’s ‘‘political function in the ussr of the 1930s,’’ Michelson’s analysis ends up positing a Russo-centric narrative of artistic and cultural continuity that takes the formal logic of Orthodox iconography and ‘‘tribal’’ mourning practice as its supreme measure, disavowing the extent to which these frames of reference—and the historical process they aim to analyze—are predicated on the absenting of Islam and, specifically, the contested modes of gendered personhood marking the latter in the context of the Soviet imperialism. Michelson’s analysis is thus highly ambivalent; in one sense it registers what Lefort called the ‘‘permanence of the theologico-political’’ in Soviet ideology, but it explains this away with reference to the residual, regressive traces of local religious tradition to which Vertov found it necessary to appeal in his interpellation of the Soviet masses during the thirties. By implication, then, the full-fledged modernist project of Man with a Movie Camera— the ‘‘wholly autonomous metacinematic celebration of filmmaking as a mode of production and mode of epistemological inquiry’’—was not marked by this aberrant, if necessary, appeal to the theological, belonging instead to the universal realm of social construction, in which the immanent actuality of man qua producer, rather than the mystical transcendence of God, provides the ground of political community. Yet without simply collapsing the two films in either formal and ideological terms, it is worth questioning the extent to which these figures can be rigorously separated, and whether such an attempt at separation itself does not set the conditions for a certain kind of covert theological violence against those who appear to deviate from the circular operative community elaborated by Vertov: those, for instance, who might look to something other than the dynamic divinity of the proletariat—or its mythographic incarnation in Lenin/Christ—as the source of right, justice, or community. To reiterate: in a way that is structurally similar to the caesura in Man with a Movie Camera, I have read the (dis)appearance of the veiled

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woman that haunts Three Songs of Lenin as a cipher for the unworking of Vertov’s project of ‘‘seeing without limits,’’ an enigmatic blind spot in the dialectic of enlightened visibility, operative community, and secular humanization pursued by avant-garde Communist aesthetics. In analyzing Vertov’s encounter with the veiled woman, that undecidable logic of the veil is worth considering here: on the one hand, it can work to seclude and restrict women to a private sphere, protecting the masculine public from carnal distractions. On the other, it can work as a screen to protect women from the potential violence of the possessive male gaze, especially in the colonial context. The visual disappearance into privacy instantiated by the veil can paradoxically enable the public appearance and spatial mobility of women in such a way as to escape harassment, abuse, and surveillance.≤Ω Without celebrating the veil as inherently a technique of resistance—though, when targeted by state authorities, it has often been recoded as such by indigenous populations —Mallek Alloula writes of the insecurity it effects in the colonial archive: ‘‘Thrust in the presence of a veiled woman, the photographer feels photographed; having himself as an object-to-be-seen, he loses initiative: he is dispossessed of his own gaze.’’≥≠

The Permanence of the Theologico-Political As suggested above, it is necessary to read Vertov’s participation in the Soviet hujum, the campaign to unveil Muslim women begun in 1927, as it echoes other European colonial encounters with locally specific veiling practices, and the recurrent script described by Gayatri Spivak— ‘‘white men saving brown women from brown men’’—that underwrote such encounters in Egypt, Algeria, and elsewhere.≥∞ It also bears an important affinity with the ubiquitous iconography of women ‘‘throwing off the veil’’ in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, which was narrated as the privileged route to the full humanization of these so-called faceless women by many Western commentators. Vertov’s positing of unveiling as the condition for an enlightened, operative community also finds an urgent contemporary resonance in Western Europe, where the veil has in recent years been constituted as a highly charged symbolic site in public debates surrounding the status of

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immigrant Muslim communities and the secularist claims of the nationstates in which they reside. This partakes of the same secular fundamentalist conceit: that both civil society and the state are universal realms in which particularistic matters of theological concern—such as religiously articulated codes of feminine piety—can and should be suspended in favor of transparent public communication on the basis of an essential commonality of values. The public realm, in other words, is construed as a space of value neutrality, into which subjects are assumed to enter and participate on equal terms.≥≤ Any articulation of difference that renders the experience of communication or community in that realm ‘‘uncomfortable,’’ in British MP Jack Straw’s words, is marked as a mortal obstacle to the operation of sociality itself, a sociality that is grounded theologically, as it were, in a transcendental economy of mutual visibility, specular recognition, and, ultimately, unmarked public appearance. Without reducing the historical, geopolitical, and ideological difference separating Vertov’s quest to liberate the ‘‘surrogate proletariat’’ of Central Asia from the normative parameters of public visibility in contemporary Western Europe, these two episodes share a certain theologico-political repudiation of Islam that frames the latter as exemplifying the particularistic illusions and opacities of religion as such; for Vertov, following Marx, the task of historical materialism is ‘‘to unmask selfestrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human selfestrangement has been unmasked’’; it is to reveal, in other words, the fact that ‘‘man makes religion, religion does not make man,’’ and that the religious ordering of sociality can be overthrown in favor of the universal self-consciousness of the proletariat.≥≥ In the predominant discourse on the veil in contemporary Europe, the task of secularism is not explicitly to liberate subjects from religious illusion but rather to prevent the latter from making undue incursions into the properly political sphere. Thus, religion is marked as a domain of private difference to be integrated, tolerated, and managed vis-à-vis the normative realm of the public. In both cases, however, Islamophobic repudiations have become the occasion for the often-violent resurfacing of the disavowed religious remainders subsisting in any social formation or image of the demos, whether it be Communist or liberal democratic—what Claude Lefort once called ‘‘the permanence of the theologico-political’’ in modernity. Questioning Marxist and Kantian teleologies of secularization alike, Lefort asserts that ‘‘despite all the changes that have occurred, the

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religious survives in the guise of new beliefs and new representations’’ and describes a paradoxical movement in which ‘‘any move toward immanence is also a move toward transcendence; any attempt to explain the contours of social relations implies an internalization of unity; that any attempt to define objective, impersonal entities implies a personification of those entities. . . . The workings of the mechanisms of incarnation ensure the imbrications of religion and politics, even in arenas where we thought we were dealing with purely religious or purely profane practices or representations.’’≥∂ In Vertov, this movement takes the oxymoronic, hybrid form of an avant-gardist hagiography in which Lenin incarnates both the people and Christ—an artifact ‘‘located on the boundary between the human and the divine,’’ as Michelson put it, that the filmmaker himself insisted represented the formal and ideological culmination of the entire project of Kino-eye. Rather than lament the irreducible proximity of the religious and the political, or simply accept the inevitability of their collapsing into one another in this or that hegemonic regime (whether covertly or explicitly), Lefort surprisingly locates a certain open-ended political challenge in the universal religious appeal to ‘‘the experience of a difference that is not at the disposal of human beings and that cannot be abolished therein; the experience of a difference that relates human beings to their humanity, [which means] that their humanity cannot be self-contained. . . . Every religion states in its own way that human society can only open itself to itself by being held in an opening it did not create.’’≥∑ Lefort provocatively recodes the religious as that which, far from being ‘‘simply a product of human activity,’’ in fact exposes humanity to something irreducible, to ‘‘the illusion of pure self-immanence’’—a risk of interiorization structurally associated with any incarnation of the demos whatsoever—thus rendering the contours, origins, and ends of humanity’s enigmas whose answer is constitutively unavailable to that humanity and thus perpetually exposed to indeterminacy and potential conflict vis-à-vis the inhuman. The polemical spatiotemporal displacement I have attempted to perform in this reading is haunted by a set of questions that remain obtuse vis-à-vis the politics of secularism and multicultural community in contemporary Europe, or even the liberal imaginary of unveiling in Afghanistan. These questions pertain to the specific historical and political legacies of the Soviet reconquest of Central Asia, and specifically its

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implications for subaltern women such as those whose indexical traces survive, enigmatically, in Vertov’s film. Even as we join Ahmed Rashid in mourning the loss of political possibility during the Soviet reconquest of Central Asia, we cannot take for granted their potential emancipatory effects any more than we can those of the Bolsheviks—whose material advances for Muslim women in terms of health, literacy, education, and employment it would be irresponsible to underestimate. No simple nostalgia for political Islam in and of itself is viable, however heterogeneous or locally exotic it may have been in Central Asia. As demonstrated by the meticulous archival research carried out by the historical anthropologist Douglas Northrop in his groundbreaking Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia, the hujum campaign of the thirties resulted in a highly contested recoding of chavon (the full-body hijab practice featured in Three Songs of Lenin) as an exemplary signifier of recently invented ‘‘national’’ traditions (Uzbek, Kazak, Turkmen, and so on) to be defended and attacked as such by Islamists and Bolsheviks respectively. Significantly, the Bolshevik reformers in question were not exclusively male or Russian—for better or worse, the hujum was often carried out with the collusion of educated female activists hailing from the Muslim regions in question. Though throughout the thirties such campaigns related tangentially to the horrific Stalinist policies of collectivization, they also coincided with the long-term improvement of Central Asian women’s living conditions, at least according to the biopolitical indices of health, education, and employment, as well as a certain criteria of participation in the party, such as it was. If, following Gayatri Spivak’s critique of colonial discourse studies, we are not content to simply unveil Vertov’s imperialist aesthetics of unveiling as an ethical end in and of itself, nor with relating the latter to the relatively Eurocentric problematic of postsecular rights claims on the part of discriminated metropolitan immigrant communities (a group that arguably has come to stand in for the subject-of-history for postMarxist political theory), an additional imperative of reading would refocus our attention on the situation of women in the post-Communist conjuncture of contemporary Central Asia. To take only the most disturbing representative of this conjuncture, post-Communist Uzbekistan has been presided over, since 1991, by the authoritarian secularist regime of the former kgb agent Islam Karimov,

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which officially foreclosed what was a brief flowering of democratic ideological ferment in the postindependence period (including a neoJadidist movement). Rather than productively engage Islamic political elements, Karimov, invoking the specter of terrorism and receiving support from the United States, launched a campaign of suppression not only against militants but against all forms of political Islam, as well as secular reform movements. This conjuncture came to a head in the spring of 2005, when twentyfive Uzbek businessmen accused of having ties with Islamic activists were swept up by the government and put on trial for endangering ‘‘the security of the nation’’; over the course of the two-week trial, what began as a small vigil by the wives, relatives, and employees of the businessmen outside the courthouse became a daily protest encompassing thousands of Uzbek citizens demanding democratic reforms and the release of hundreds of others detained on suspicion of being Islamists. On May 25, Karimov declared a state of emergency that authorized the police to open fire on the increasingly agitated demonstrators, killing an estimated six hundred people, many of them women. Under pressure from human rights activists, the uk government publicly reprimanded Karimov, though it refrained from any further pressure; the United States, for its part, issued a tepid call for restraint to its partner in the War on Terror. Russia, China, and India—all of which are currently aiming to suppress Islamist unrest within their own borders in the name of national unity—lent their legitimacy to a sham international investigation of the event at the behest of Karimov.≥∏

Conclusion Informed by theorists such as Rancière, Nancy, and Lefort, the rigorous probing of (in)operative political community put forward in Communities of Sense has proven crucial in taking art history beyond the avantgardist paradigms of aesthetic autonomy, critical negativity, or collective immanence that in various combinations have informed the agenda of a journal such as October for the past thirty years—a legacy metonymized for me by the uncritical celebration of Vertov’s oeuvre by a scholar such as Michelson. Yet if this emergent impulse—with which my own text bears an obvious affinity—takes its own quasi-transcendental terms as

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ends in themselves, it will remain hopelessly inadequate in confronting the forms of governmental impunity and international indifference (if not complicity) evident in an event such as the Andijan Massacre, which is one among the many (post)communist histories inscribed in the Vertov stills that have been under consideration here. The imperative that flows from this admonishment is that art historians situate their objects of study vis-à-vis an expanded field not only of oppressive visual cultures—those of early Soviet imperialism, for instance—but also the proactive technologies of witnessing developed by nongovernmental human rights activists over the past fifteen years. As exemplified by the production, brokering, and training activities of the organization Witness, such an imperative does not necessarily involve foregoing questions of form, poetics, and sense in the name of some kind of political immediacy; on the contrary, it is precisely because of the failures of the old axiom ‘‘mobilizing shame’’ and its positing of an automatic relay between visual revelation and ethico-political responsibility that aesthetic, rhetorical, and technical mediation becomes central to activist tactics. The point is not to dissolve the artistic realm—a move that has historically provoked all manner of reactive disciplinary posturing—but rather to expose it to a broader set of concerns, commitments, and communities in the hopes of redirecting its own rich histories and competencies from a ‘‘left melancholic’’ fixation on a mythic avant-garde to a renewed sense of cross-disciplinary humanities research that would track, across time and space, what Judith Butler has called ‘‘the emergence and vanishing of the human at the limits of what we can know, what we can hear, what we can see, and what we can sense.’’≥π

Notes 1. This essay originated in an invitation extended by the filmmakers Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn to several dozen writers in early 2003 to respond to the same single digital film-still from Man with a Movie Camera. I regret that an earlier version of this essay was not able to be included in the results of their project, Vertov from Z to A. 2. See Benjamin, ‘‘Konvoult N.’’ I refer to Rosalind Krauss’s and George Baker’s attempt to reclaim the film from its perceived abuse by Lev Manovich in his book The Language of New Media. Introducing a special issue of October

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(Spring 2002) devoted to the critical potential of obsolescence (including that of October itself ) in an era of alienating digitization, Krauss and Baker write, It is thus with some interest that we witness the usage of a crucial avant-garde film such as Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera as the opening recent text in the ‘‘language of new media’’ just at it once served as the signal image some years ago for the very first issue of this journal. And it is also with some doubt that we listen to these same theoreticians of the new digital media proclaim that cinema and photography—with their indexical, archival properties—were merely preliminary steps on the path to their merging with the computer in the uber-archive of the database. Much of what is most important to cinema and photography is wiped away by such a teleology. And much of what seems most critical in contemporary artistic practice reacts to just such an erasure. (‘‘Introduction,’’ 4)

After the present essay went to press, October published a special issue devoted to new work on Vertov (Summer 2007). Malcolm Turvey frames the ambition of the issue as a critical complication of a certain ‘‘familiarity effect’’ among historians with respect to the status of Vertov’s films as political-modernist classics (‘‘Introduction’’). While Turvey acknowledges that ‘‘none of this new work, so far at least, has overturned the political-modernist view of Vertov’’ (4), the scholarship collected in the issue is impressive in its close attention to archival materials and hitherto unaddressed facets of the filmmaker’s oeuvre. The most significant of these revisionist essays in light of my own concern to defamiliarize this view of Vertov is Oksana Sarkisova’s, ‘‘Across One Sixth of the World.’’ 3. ‘‘The Third Meaning,’’ 63. 4. Ibid., 57. 5. My sense of what it means to read historically derives from Eduardo Cadava’s discussion of Benjamin’s notion of ‘‘dialectics at a standstill’’: ‘‘For Benjamin, there can be no history without the capacity to arrest or immobilize historical movement, to isolate the detail of an event from the continuum of history. . . . It short circuits, and thereby suspends, the temporal continuity between a past and present. This break from the present enables the rereading and rewriting of history, the performance of another mode of historical understanding, one that would be the suspension of both ‘history’ and ‘understanding.’ ’’ Words of Light, 59. 6. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 16. 7. Cited in Michelson, ‘‘Introduction,’’ xxvi. 8. Barnouw, Documentary, 63. 9. Cited in Michelson, ‘‘Introduction,’’ liii. 10. Constance Penley discusses the centrality of Man with a Movie Camera for sixties avante-gardists Peter Gidal and Malcolm Le Grice’s attempt at realiz-

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ing ‘‘a filmic practice in which one watches oneself watching . . . filmic reflexiveness is the presentation of consciousness to itself.’’ Penley points out that they disregarded any notion of the unconscious, lack, or desire, resulting in a masculinist conception of the political as the self-conscious construction of history. See ‘‘The Avant-Garde and Its Imaginary.’’ 11. Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, 7. 12. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 2. 13. Buchloh, ‘‘From Faktura to Factography,’’ 94. 14. Michelson, ‘‘Introduction,’’ xxxvii. 15. See Cadava’s chapter ‘‘Caesura’’ in Words of Light, 59; and Andrzej Warminksi’s discussion of the caesura in Holderlin: ‘‘Rather than allowing the human subject to recognize himself in his own other, the caesura rips him out of his own sphere of life, out of the center of his own inner life, and carries him off into another world and tears him into the eccentric world of the dead.’’ Cited in Keenan, Fables of Responsibility, 238. 16. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 19. Here it is important to acknowledge the work of Rosalyn Deutsche, who introduced Lefort into discussions of art and the public sphere in her Evictions. 17. Lefort, ‘‘The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism,’’ in The Political Forms of Modern Society, 305. 18. See Groys, The Total Art of Stalin. For a substantial critique of Groys’s teleology that demonstrates the latter’s affinity with Fukuyama’s post–Cold War ‘‘end of history’’ narrative, see Wood, ‘‘The Politics of the Avante-Garde’’; ˇ zek, ‘‘Afterword: Lenin’s Choice.’’ Ziˇ ˇ zek criticizes the journal in 19. Michelson et al., October, iv. Incidentally, Ziˇ the following way: ‘‘Let’s talk as much as possible about the necessity of a radical change, to make sure that nothing will really change! The journal October is typical of this: when you ask one of the editors what the title refers to, they half-confidentially indicate that it is, of course, that October [the Eisenstein film]—in this way you can indulge in jargonistic analyses of modern art, with the secret assurance that you are somehow retaining a link with the radical revolutionary past’’ (‘‘Afterword: Lenin’s Choice,’’ 172). 20. Cadava, ‘‘Lapsus Imaginus,’’ 36. 21. Vertov, ‘‘The Birth of Kino-Eye,’’ in Kino-Eye, 41. 22. Vertov, ‘‘My Latest Experiment,’’ in Kino-Eye, 137. 23. Rashid, Jihad. 24. Michelson, ‘‘Introduction,’’ and ‘‘The Kinetic Icon in the Work of Mourning.’’ 25. Cited in Michelson, ‘‘The Kinetic Icon in the Work of Mourning,’’ 18. 26. Repeating almost word by word the injunction from ‘‘The Birth of Kino-

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Eye,’’ this passage is from the 1934 journal entry ‘‘Kino-Pravda’’ in Vertov, KinoEye, 132. 27. Morris, ‘‘Theses on the Question of War’’; Vertov, ‘‘My Latest Experiment,’’ in Kino-Eye, 137. 28. Drawing upon and complicating Benjamin Buchloh’s linear periodization of constructivism in ‘‘From Faktura to Factography,’’ Mariano Prunes provides a convincing account of such formal and ideological hybridity in ‘‘Dziga Vertov’s Three Songs about Lenin.’’ Prunes explicitly aims to reintegrate the study of Vertov’s cinematic production with the factographic activities of his colleagues such as Rodchenko, especially those related to the journal ussr in Construction, conceived as an instrument of mass enlightenment during the first Five Year Plan. While Prunes deserves credit for recovering the status of Vertov’s film as an artistic, rather than merely propagandistic, artifact, he foregoes even the ambivalent crypto-political analysis given it by Michelson in her October article, celebrating it as an exemplary instantiation of avant-garde culture. Symptomatically, like Michelson, Prunes ignores the problems of gender and religion that Vertov himself enthusiastically announced as key motivations in his production of the film in the first place. 29. For a multifaceted account of veiling practices and their perpetually contested status, see the texts, images, artworks, and documents brought together in Bailey and Tawadros, Veil. 30. Alloula, The Colonial Harem, 182. 31. Spivak, ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’ 235. 32. See Mouffe, ‘‘Religion, Liberal Democracy, and Citizenship.’’ 33. Marx, ‘‘Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,’’ 244. 34. Lefort, ‘‘The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?’’ 187. 35. Ibid., 157. 36. On the Andijan massacre and the international response, see Anora Mahmudova, ‘‘Uzbekistan’s Growing Police State’’; (May 27, 2005) http:// www.alternet.org/story/22097/ and the special report by Human Rights Watch, ‘‘Bullets Were Falling Like Rain.’’ 37. Butler, Precarious Life, 151.

EMILY APTER

Thinking Red ETHIC AL MILITANCE AND THE GROUP SUBJECT

As leftist political traditions are accused of ‘‘theory terror’’—that is, causally linked by conservative opinion to a postmodern ethical relativism deemed responsible for the decadent turn of global democracy—it seems imperative to investigate how the discourse of terror has supplanted critical accounts of ethical militance. Such an investigation would dare to confront the terror inherent in thought itself without lapsing into free associations between theory and its radioactive cousin, terrorism, by bringing into renewed focus the laws and principles of revolutionary logic that accord theory and critique the power to terrorize, as well as the power to effect what Alain Badiou calls an Event. For Badiou, the Event refers to an epochal realization of world-historical change: the French Revolution, the October Revolution, the Cultural Revolution, or the name Marx taken to stand in for the advent of class consciousness. Badiou has set the terms for a political theory of ethical militance that reinvigorates the tradition of revolutionary thinking, experiments with a formal logic of revolutionary groups, and focuses attention on the importance of radical theories of the subject to the regrounding of ethics. This project can be traced from his adherence to ‘‘communist invariants’’ in the Jacobin play The Red Scarf, to his intent to purge art of all ‘‘isms’’ for the sake of a new political art form (Handbook of Inaesthetics).∞ It can be distilled from his mathematically driven, subtractive political ontologies (developed in Theory of the Subject,

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Being and Event, Manifesto for Philosophy, and A Transitory Ontology), from his scathing attack on the bad faith of human rights discourses (Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil), and from his outline for an intractable universalism in Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. It can be outlined from his commitment to a ‘‘politics without party’’ (the activist period of L’organisation politique) and from his attempt, in Metapolitics, to ‘‘de-Thermidorize’’ political time by discarding temporal epistemes such as cause and effect, the dialectic, and conventional measures of periodicity such ‘‘the century.’’≤ If Badiou’s writings have increasingly been used as a reference point for defining militance in the post–September 11 political climate, they must be seen in the broader context of Red thinking, pre- and post-1968, that undergirds the parameters and tenor of theory today, especially in the immediate aftermath of the so-called ethical turn. The early seventies witnessed, as we do now, the embrace of terrorist tactics by the Left and the Right and saw its revolutionary stance of ethical militance compromised by the impetus toward militarization. For this reason, and in the interest of marking a refusal to abandon the program of a revolutionary future, I want to alight topographically on key moments of seventies art and politics (primarily in France) that reveal the tension between militance and militarization, filtering them through the postethical communism of Badiou, as well as through Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the group subject. Such examples supply more than just historical context and material density for the ongoing prospects of Red thinking; they encapsulate the way in which the seventies recycled a Jacobin politics of the Terror that imagined stopping the clock before the revolution devoured its own. Filtered through the lens of Badiou’s theory, these examples prompt a renewed look at the politics of the group subject as they informed, and continue to inform, radical agendas for freedom and justice. Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jean-Luc Godard’s film Ici et ailleurs—made in 1970 at the invitation of the Palestinians as a documentary of the Palestinian Revolution and transformed in the course of production into an anguished reflection on the entrapment of revolutionary images within the televisual culture of consumption—offers a glimpse into the proximity between militance and militarization as it conveys what happens when a radical group becomes armed. An opening shot reveals a train-

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ing camp and a Palestinian leader speaking to the people, with his gun by his side. After a flash heading—‘‘Armed struggle’’—the film cuts to close-up footage of a machine gun giving fire. The enemy is not in the picture—this is rifle practice—but the point is to assign pride of place to the weapon, honoring it as an autonomous subject of the film, as if it were the mouthpiece for the cause. Ici et ailleurs commemorates the short-lived, euphoric period of 1970–71 in the life of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (plo), during which rituals of self-armament in daily life imparted a jubilant group subjectivity, a sense of marvelous hope—sealed, in the eyes of its participants, by cathexis with the gun. ‘‘In 1967 in the West Bank, for the first time in my life I felt that I was a real human being. I had a gun in my hand,’’ the charismatic plo commander Salah Tamari would confide to journalist Jonathan Dimbleby.≥ Remembering his first sojourn with the Palestinians in 1970, Jean Genet would observe how ‘‘the young soldiers maintained their arms, took them apart in order to clean them, greasing and reassembling them with great haste. Some achieved the feat of disassembling and reassembling their weapons blindfolded for success at night. Between each soldier and his arm there was an amorous, magical relationship. Since the feddayin were barely beyond adolescence, the gun, as arm, was the sign of a triumphant virility.’’∂ In this ecstatic account, folded into a bitter exposé written in 1982 concerning the horrors witnessed in Chatila, the gun emerges as a totemic ensign: the equivalent of the Black Panthers’ self-image accoutered in beret, black jacket, and gun (to the rallying cry ‘‘What we need now are guns and more guns!’’); or the Red Brigade’s mantra ‘‘Never Again without a Rifle!’’; or the heraldic logo of the Red Army Faction featuring a machine gun encased in a black star; or the Weather Underground’s anti-Viet Nam poster pairing a gun with the slogan ‘‘Piece Now!’’; or the image of the ‘‘rpg [rocket-propelled grenade] kids’’ (Lebanese-born Palestinian refugees), ‘‘armed with a rage for release from the senility of the Idea,’’ evoked by Mahmoud Darwish in his account of Beirut under siege in 1982.∑ These cameos of selfarmament encapsulate what Darwish calls ‘‘the sport of active death,’’ a phrase suggesting a desire for the deathly agon that goes beyond the foot soldier’s noble willingness to perish for god and country.∏ In Ici et ailleurs, the machine gun signifies something other than hope; it consecrates an erotic contract with fatal destiny. This fatality is historicized as documentary clips of fedayeen engaged in military exercises, commu-

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nity building, and political education slam into harrowing stills of Black September, the charred and defaced bodies of revolutionaries massacred by the U.S.- and Israeli-backed Jordanian army. In a matter of months, so the narration goes, ‘‘ceci est devenu cela’’—this has become that. From a contemporary vantage point, the quotation of Victor Hugo’s famous phrase ‘‘ceci est devenu cela’’ reads not so much as shorthand for a revolution that failed but as a presage of intifadas to come. The Palestinian casualties of 1970–71 ask to be interpreted not as an end to armed struggle but as an inaugural episode in the ongoing bid for statehood and the right of return. But the film shows, too, what happens when thought is channeled into weapons and radical groups assume the restraints and sacrifices of group fealty characteristic, according to Bataille, of ‘‘the structure and function of the army.’’π For under these conditions, and in the last two decades, armed insurrectional groups, El Fatah included, have become increasingly hard to distinguish from paramilitary operatives: ira details, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, The Abu Sayyaf network in the Philippines, Sri Lanka’s contraband-financed Tamil Tigers, the unita people’s party in Angola, Columbia’s farc guerillas engaged in arms and drug traffic, Mafia-style commando units of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the Algerian gia (Armed Islamic Group), set up, as one commentator describes it, ‘‘as a combination of a mystical and a military organization that acts on fatwas.’’ Each is representative of how insurgent rebel armies can seemingly flip into or be mistaken for state or cartel-controlled paramilitary troops.∫ The point here is not to hold radical thought accountable for allowing ethical militance to free-fall into paramilitary terror (misrecognizing its own camouflage, as it were) but rather to see how ethical militance might be preserved, kept at a remove from terrorism even when it comes mimetically close to militarization. This may appear to be a naïve or futile task: like attempting to rescue Marxism from Leninism, or secular revolution from jihad, or armed struggle (posited as the right to resist Western institutions of democracy) from suicide bombing, but under political circumstances in which denunciations of terrorism veer into blanket indictments of revolutionary ideology, accusations of sedition, or worse—authorizations of imperial warmongering. It therefore becomes necessary to resuscitate what was good about the Jacobin vision of a just and equal society regulated by the general will and infused with

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philosophical partisanship. In his chapter ‘‘Oath, Conjuration, Fraternization or the ‘Armed’ Question’’ (in The Politics of Friendship), Derrida examines the partisan as post-Enlightenment insurgent, a figure born in Berlin during what von Clausewitz called ‘‘an enormous spiritual moment’’ in the life of the Prussian state.Ω The partisan eschews the codes of conventional warfare (including the dictates of constitutional and international law), blurs the boundaries between enemy and friend (the partisan ‘‘has no enemy in the classical sense of the term’’ according to Derrida), radicalizes the hostility of the friend-enemy, and maintains the tradition of ‘‘telluric autochthony’’ (a sense of national destiny qualified as ‘‘an aggravated national feeling united to a philosophical culture’’) (PF 146–47). A kind of theory terrorist, the partisan understands the inherent violence of thought. Derrida explicitly affirms the connection between armament and intellectual critique when he discerns ‘‘the enemy present in the very form of the question’’ (PF 149–50). In this formulation, the question itself is mobilized as a form of armament—‘‘It is the army,’’ states Derrida (PF 150). Derrida’s depiction of partisanship as a variant of weaponized thought invites a reconsideration of those parts of the Terror that produced a vigilant civic rigidity worthy of detachment from the narrative of revolutionary show trials, personality cults, and serial beheadings that defined the Enlightenment version of the nightmare of history. It is this Jacobin virtue, the engine of successive generations of enragés and insurgents, that may be drawn on to respond to the question of what’s left of the revolutionary Left in a state of emergency imposed by the Right. It prompts a bold rethinking of the Jacobin origins of radical thought that would explain, for example, why in 1985 the situationist gauchiste Guy Debord might so willingly accept the charges of theory terrorism levied at him by the Right in a pamphlet titled Considérations sur l’assassinat de Gérard Lebovici: ‘‘I accept the last two names: ‘theoretician,’ that goes without saying, although I have not practiced that exclusively nor with a specialized title, but in the end I have been one as well, and one of the best. And I also accept ‘enragé,’ because in 1968 I acted in concert with the extremists who at the time gave themselves that name; and in addition because I have an affinity for those of 1794.’’∞≠ Debord embraces the moniker ‘‘Terrorist’’ in the same pamphlet out of solidarity with the French film producer and left-wing publisher Gérard Lebovici, shot execution-style in his car in an underground

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parking garage, it was widely held, as retribution for his publication of The Death Instinct, a book written by the ‘‘terrorist’’ Jacques Mesrine that had been banned by the French government. In this pamphlet, Debord seeks to avenge the media’s savage treatment of the Left in the mid-eighties, and his target, as it was earlier in his life, remains the society of the spectacle. Derridean partisanship, along with the specter of a ‘‘terrorist’’ Debord, are evoked not to romanticize terrorism, nor to overfetishize the embattled condition of the Left under siege, but rather to underscore the extent to which the example of the revolutionary enragé comes close to realizing Badiou’s Pauline ‘‘theorem of the militant’’ (which posits the universal address of truth, of fidelity, of love, and of hope), alongside a revolutionary secularism awaiting articulation: one that would block what Lacan diagnosed as the suicidal drive of revolutionary hope.∞∞ Badiou is particularly interesting because he has consistently opted for militance against all odds. In questing for a logic of revolt (modeled on Rimbaud’s ‘‘révoltes logiques’’) that enables philosophy to marshal thought in the struggle against injustice; in positing equality as the norm of the general will embodied in the collective being of citizenmilitants, in boldly arguing (against metaphysical pluralism) for a universal and univocal truth in the face of a glaring lack of clear directives for distinguishing ‘‘truth events’’ from historical lies, Badiou refuses to renounce the possibility of revolutionary change. In ‘‘Politics as Truth Procedure,’’ he wants to numerically count out equality: ‘‘to count as one that is not even counted is what is at stake in every genuinely political thought, every prescription that summons the collective as such. The 1 is the numericality of the same, and to produce the same is what an emancipatory procedure is capable of. The 1 disfigures every non-egalitarian claim. . . . To produce the same is to count each one universally as one, it is necessary to work locally, in the gap opened up between politics and the State.’’∞≤ Badiou’s repeated injunctions to ‘‘keep going’’ and to ‘‘get up and walk,’’ display a militant conviction, a zealous contestation of political realism, or politics as usual, coupled with an abiding belief in the revolutionary community to come.∞≥ Badiou’s marching orders invoke a quickening of the blood, a stiffening of resolve, and a readiness that shatters the quiescence of being. In these commands, Marxist utopianism and the charge to change the world is re-

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awakened. Badiou is begging for a fight against the commercialization of value and the society of calculation. It is not national ideology or religious belief that drives Badiou’s will to revolt, but rather a condition whereby revolt is seen as the only way to act against economic imperialism, social inequality, and the slackness of everyday life. Badiou, as ˇ zek notes, is here entirely consistent with, and, of course, enSlavoj Ziˇ tirely conscious of, Lacan’s understanding of desire. ‘‘When Lacan formulates his maxim of psychoanalytic ethics, ‘ne pas céder sur son désir,’ that is, ‘don’t compromise, don’t give way on your desire,’ the desire involved here is no longer the transgressive desire generated by the prohibitory Law, and thus involved in a ‘morbid’ dialectic with the Law; rather, it is fidelity to one’s desire itself that is elevated to the level of ethical duty, so that ‘ne pas céder sur son désir’ is ultimately another way of saying ‘Do your duty!’ ’’∞∂ Badiou’s injunctions constitute no simple code of ‘‘do and do not’’ (typical of some forms of fundamentalist thinking, from Christian fundamentalism to conservative Islam) but rather an alliance of logic and politics. They derive their militance from a political ontology vested with a truth value that is ‘‘true,’’ in the mathematical sense—algorithmically ordered and subject to proof. For some readers, Badiou’s commitment to set theory as the road to a radical situationalism of the truth event appears to return to the old philosophical game of thinking up possible worlds governed by formal logic (from Kantian categorical imperatives to Wittgensteinian propositions). For ethical truths to be mathematically true seems to risk justifying some form of theory terror in the name of the matheme (mathemes, as Joël Dor reminds us, are the ‘‘mathematical formulations devised by Lacan with the aim of making psychoanalytic theory more rigorous and precise’’).∞∑ But this skepticism succumbs to disbelief in the power of philosophy to remake the subject of politics. Badiou’s militant ‘‘exceeds’’ the bounds of individual subjectivity and assumes singularity in political time as a numerical subject 1 coincident with the event.∞∏ If, as I am suggesting, ethical militance brokers dangerous liaisons between logic and politics, this liaison proves, nonetheless, to be indispensable to theories of political collectivity that seek to supplant bourgeois individualism with a new notion of the group or ontological set. The idea of the group subject—diminished over the years as a utopian

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attempt to foment an anti-bourgeois ego ideal within the radical collective or as the dream of an alternative order of secular statehood—is worth revisiting now in terms of what it might offer a militant ethics of community defined outside of, transverse from, or below the radar of the nation-state. In Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s multitude, the group subject may be identified with an anti-globalist iteration of Gramsci’s Marxist-Leninist proletarian revolutionary mass subject: one who dispenses with the individual ruler on the way to a classless society, or what the authors call a ‘‘perpetually modulating atopia.’’∞π Between Marx’s mass subject and Hardt and Negri’s multitude, and providing what is possibly the crucial link between them, lies the theory of group ontology outlined by Deleuze and Guattari in the wake of May ’68 and transformed into a virtual mathematical ontology of the set by Badiou. It was within a culture of group activism—collective bargaining, discussion groups, group sex, communal property—that the conceptual category of the group subject took hold as a kind of Venn diagram of militant subjectivity. Shaped by Che Guevara’s definition of the guerilla band of compañeros (‘‘an armed nucleus, the fighting vanguard of the people’’) and by the anti-Oedipal culture of group therapy fostered in the mid-sixties by R. D. Laing’s ‘‘safe house’’ at Kingsley Hall, the group identity of the late sixties has been dismissed as lifestyle politics.∞∫ Memoirs such as Sheila Rowbowtham’s Promise of a Dream, which nostalgically evoke youth in the thrall of a group agency obtained at the expense of personal intimacy, have encouraged such dismissals. Rowbotham writes, ‘‘Personal feelings removed themselves from the foreground. My sexual encounters were snatched in between meetings and somehow the customary emotions didn’t settle upon them. . . . [T]he energy of the external collective became so intense, it seemed the boundaries of closeness, of ecstatic inwardness, had spilled over on the streets.’’∞Ω And yet, as Julia Kristeva notes, the ‘‘savage strike’’ against bourgeois morality and the traditional conception of love—achieved through ‘‘group sex, hashish etc.’’—produced nothing short of ‘‘a worldwide movement that contributed to an unprecedented reordering of private life,’’ a jouissance to be achieved ‘‘not ‘in private’ nor even away from the world, in the extra-territoriality of religion, but in the public domain, extended from the family to society and to the nation.’’≤≠ Constructing what she calls ‘‘a new type of inadmissable sublimation’’ by unleashing eros on paternalism, Deleuze, in Kristeva’s estimation,

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emerged as the ‘‘most original and radical of contemporary French thinkers,’’ the one who ‘‘put the family, God and language into question without trying to get away from them’’ (rss 21). The anti-paternalist group subject of Deleuze (and Guattari) was born of opposition to Freud’s Oedipal reading of group psychology, in which Christ and the commander-in-chief, stand-ins for the church and the army, shape what Freud calls ‘‘artificial groups’’: groups, that is, defined as communities of believers, or rank and file, kept in social alignment by the punitive force of the law. Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), it must be acknowledged, overhangs virtually all post-’68 endeavors to theorize the group subject. Beginning this short book with a gloss on Gustave Le Bon’s foundational Psychologie des foules (1895), Freud moves Le Bon’s psychology of crowds and swarms to the psychic arenas of inverted narcissism, libidinal cathexis, and identification. Freud quotes passages from Le Bon’s study that emphasize the collective’s cellular morphology and motility as a constantly self-transforming ‘‘live’’ body. He also pays particular attention to Le Bon’s pathological understanding of group behavior: specifically, the famous thesis that groups are particularly liable to affect, vulnerable to the contagion of irrationalism, credulity, and corporeal stupidity. This we might call the ‘‘Dummkopf ’’ factor, as exemplified by Schiller’s couplet: ‘‘Jeder sieht man ihn einzeln, is leidlich klug und verständig; / Sind sie in corpore, gleich wird euch ein Dummkopf daraus’’ [Everyone, looked at alone, is passingly shrewd and discerning; / When they’re in corpore, then straightaway you’ll find he’s an ass].≤∞ Le Bon’s vision of the autonomous vitalism of crowds and their susceptibility to the herd instinct becomes, in Freud’s hands, a model for the collective unconscious. Freud then goes on to examine how the magically adhesive force of libido enables self-love to be converted into love of family, comrades, humanity at large, and even concrete objects and abstract ideas. Language is particularly helpful in effecting the extension from individual to group, for the word love (Leibe) has ‘‘numerous uses’’ (gp 91). Group love (ihren zu Leibe), a love ‘‘that is for their sake’’ or ‘‘for the love of them,’’ suffused with Platonic eros and Saint Paul’s ‘‘love above all else,’’ allows for the diversion of sexual aims to a broad array of affective attachments (gp 92). For Freud, identification is critically operative in the making of a group subject: ‘‘it remoulds the ego in one of its important features—in its sexual character—upon the model of what

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has hitherto been the object’’ (gp 108–9). The exchange of the object for the ego, the sublation of sex and oceanic ‘‘love’’ in the Oedipalized institutional body (be it the family, the nation-state, an institutional body, or an ideological cause) are the crucial procedures of Freud’s group subject in the making. Deleuze and Guattari passed on the possible usefulness of Freud’s nuanced reading of ihren zu Leibe in their anti-famialist rush to unseat Oedipal capitalism. Their group subject drew instead on a plurality of philosophical sources impossible to summarize within the confines of this discussion. The parameters were defined by Spinoza’s notion of ‘‘the laying out of a common plane of immanence on which all bodies, all minds, and all individuals are situated,’’ as well as by his concept of the ‘‘extensive’’ relation (propelling new compositional sociabilities and intensities).≤≤ Bergson’s neovitalist ‘‘logic of multiplicities’’ and Ruyer’s concept of ‘‘real extension’’ (partes in unitate), qualified as a ‘‘fusional multiplicity,’’ might have been equally constitutive.≤≥ Crucial too, for both Deleuze and Guattari, was the thesis of Gilbert Simondon (1924– 89), published in 1958 as L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Breaking down the distinction between individuation and individualization, Simondon cast the subject not as a result, but as a milieu of individuation, more of a situated event than a stasis of being. This biophilosophy of ontogenesis, governed by the principle of fluctuatio animi, led to a theory of phased being (l’individu polyphasé) emphasizing a state of becoming always engaged with unfolding subjective futurity. Polyphased becoming, the basis of Simondon’s ‘‘transindividual collective,’’ yields a Deleuzian ontology ‘‘in which Being is never One,’’ in which the subject, ‘‘individuated, remains multiple.’’≤∂ Group subjectivity was also indebted to the early Deleuzian concept of an absolute singularity that sees difference and repetition as enabling the unfurling multiple of the one (worked out in those quintessential philosophical works of ’68, The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition). The group subject that emerges from these two works offers an ontology of singularity aligned with collective life-form harking back to Bergsonian élan vital, in which essence ‘‘individualizes’’ through serial repetition, and differentiation retains the essence of singular being. Deleuze drafted from the neovitalist ontologists a nondialectical, antiindividualist theory of the subject. As Brian Massumi has shown in his essay ‘‘Deleuze and Guattari’s Theories of the Group Subject through a

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Reading of Corneille’s Le Cid,’’ group subjectivity was effected through a perambulation around individual/society binarism: ‘‘They don’t add yet another synthesis of the individual and society, with still more mediations. They abolish both terms and all mediations in one simple move: by saying that the individual is a group. The distinction they make is not between a group subject and an individual subject, but between two kinds of group subjects, both of which exist on the socalled individual level and the societal level at the same time and without foundation.’’≤∑ Massumi’s emphasis on deindividuated ontology is well exemplified in a short text by Deleuze titled ‘‘Three Problems of the Group,’’ which he drafted as a preface to Guattari’s 1972 book Psychanalyse et transversalité. In this sketch of a friend, Guattari is seen to embody group subjectivity in his very person: It so happens that a political militant and a psychoanalyst converge in the same person, and, instead of staying compartmentalized, they are endlessly imbricated, running interference, communicating, taking each for the other. This is a rare occurrence since Reich. Pierre-Félix Guattari preoccupies himself very little with the problem of the unified self. The self belongs to things that must be dissolved, subject to the coordinated assault of political and analytical forces. The words of Guattari, ‘‘we are all group cells,’’ designate the search for a new subjectivity, a group subjectivity, that refuses to let itself be enclosed in a totality ready to revert to the ego, or worse still, the superego, but which extends itself to several groups at one and the same time, divisible, multipliable, open to communication and forever revocable. The test of a good group is that it refuses to think itself as unique, immortal, and full of significance, like a bureau of defense or security, or a veterans’ ministry, but instead branches out to confront the possibilities of non-sense, of death or implosion, ‘‘precisely because of its opening up to other groups.’’ He himself is this kind of group. Guattari embodies, in the most natural way, the two sides of this anti-ego [anti-Moi]: on one side, like a catatonic stone, his body, blind and hardened, is penetrated by death the moment he takes off his glasses; on the other side, he is burning with a thousand flames, teaming with multiple lives as soon he watches, acts, laughs, thinks, attacks. Also, he is named Pierre and Félix: schizophrenic powers.’’≤∏

In this relatively under-commented yet significant text, Deleuze summarizes the distinction drawn by Guattari between groupes assujettis

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(subjectivated groups) and groupes-sujets (group-subjects or the subjectgroup). Groupes assujettis are characterized by hierarchy, vertical or pyramid organization, and a drive to self-conservation that excludes other groups and discourages creative ruptures and collective enunciation. They promote the production of stereotypes that cut subjectivity from the real and constitute the imaginary of Oedipalization, superegoicization, and the castration of the group. Groupes-sujets, by contrast, are defined by transversal relations that challenge totalities and hierarchies, act as supports of desire, and seek connections to mass desire or the desires of other groups. The anti-Oedipal, anti-statist drive embedded in the group subject allows psychoanalysis to be brought to militant revolutionary groups. This is precisely the move that Deleuze credits to Guattari. For Deleuze, Guattari personifies a revolutionary war machine that resists oiling the wheels of a new state apparatus as it hurls libidinally charged intercepts at the organizational hierarchies of state power. Desire and truth are associated with a schizoid group subject committed to analysis (in the psychoanalytic sense) and girded against paranoid spasms. Guattari himself remained wary of the susceptibility of Red armies to co-optation by the state and never fully specified (except, perhaps in his 1991 collaboration with Negri on the broadside Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance) how collective agents articulating new forms of desire would actually succeed in rupturing the fabric of social determinism or in effecting ‘‘une dérive de l’histoire.’’ And yet, his ideas came out of, and gave rise to, the radical praxis of guerilla groups. In his ‘‘Remarks on the raf Spectre: ‘Abstract Radicalism’ and Art,’’ Klaus Theweleit evokes 1967 as the year of ‘‘group explosion,’’ a year that saw ‘‘sub- and group-languages’’ bubble up from the underground into the public sphere, drawing on the languages of Marxism, psychoanalysis, militant internationalism (anti-USA/anti-Vietnam) and what he calls ‘‘the speech mode of sexualized impertinence that seized everything.’’≤π Theweleit acknowledges the influence of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of subjective multiplicities (later formulated in their book Mille plateaux) on the ideology of the Red Army Faction: ‘‘1,000 planes, 1,000 poles, the emergence of voices from many places where silence had been imposed; the raf came from the same generational background.’’ Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was also essential, in his

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view, to Baader-Meinhof ’s resolve to fight institutionalized paternalism in all its forms: including ‘‘parent terror, teacher terror, officer terror, block warden terror, terror from judges and police’’ (raf 88). In fighting terror with terror, the raf realized the full meaning of the expression ‘‘thinking Red;’’ a term used by the military in reference to ‘‘thinking like the enemy’’ in order to second-guess his hand in a war game. In a statement prepared for declaration at one of their trials, Baader and Meinhof exhort the group to ‘‘think like the state’’ in order to disrupt the state’s ability to promote domestic stability by acting preemptively against terrorism. In effect, they want to head the state’s ability to think like a revolutionary group off at the pass. This preemptive, mimetic logic led inexorably to the militarization of consciousness. For the raf, thought itself had to resemble a ‘‘commando structure.’’ ‘‘Get ticking,’’ a favored Baader-Meinhof phrase, referred literally to the ticking time bomb and the need to mobilize as a revolutionary force. More broadly still, it designated the group’s selfdefinition as ‘‘self-timers,’’ setting their internal clocks to their own revolutionary pulse. According to Astrid Proll, a member of the raf who would later publish an album of photographs (decried by some critics as a leftist coffee-table book) titled Baader-Meinhof: Pictures on the Run 67–77, out of trust and love relationships there grew the closeknit unit of the selbtauslöser: ‘‘We were self-timers who acted cut off from reality in a void. We lived a sort of armed existentialism. The men were ready to go. While they were busy affectionately cleaning their weapons the women did the major part of the organising and thinking. . . . I also carried a weapon, though I would have done everything else to defend myself before using it. The weapon was the membership card of the raf which we, in accordance with the Black Panthers, considered to be a pure means of defense.’’≤∫ The self-timer is a kind of self-terrorizer, taking the Maoist dictum ‘‘armed struggle is the highest form of class struggle’’ to a higher power in the form of an ideal of armed existentialism. The self-timer’s bellicose self-discipline bears affinities to Bataille’s schematic view of Islamic hadith, a militant code of ethics that posits violence against the infidel as an unequivocal good and encourages renunciation engaged against oneself.≤Ω The self-timer, who lovingly archives photos of raf arms caches and explosives arsenals, forms him or herself as a soldier dedicated to the secular equivalent of holy war and to the absolute ethical militance

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of the group form. In her fragment on ‘‘the structure of the group,’’ written in 1976 as a refutation of the government’s claim that Andreas Baader was the raf’s sole operational mastermind, Ulrike Meinhof took pains to argue that, while Baader may have established himself as the group’s ‘‘Che’’ or model urban guerilla, as such he embodied the singular autonomy of the group rather than the bourgeois individualism of each member of the collective.≥≠ Where the raf took ‘‘thinking Red’’ to the arena of armed violence, binding it to a code of honor that gave shape to the underground cell, its counterparts in Britain and France tended to ground their revolutionary praxis in a mixture of violent agitprop and nonlethal obstructionism. The Women’s Liberation Movement, especially in Britain, stopped short of abridging militance and militarization, proposing a wedge between them in its politic of the Small Group. Defined as ‘‘anything from six to two dozen women,’’ according to Juliette Mitchell, the Small Group was identified as the most effective unit of political organization, particularly when it came to countermanding hierarchic social structure and the domineering tendencies of male-dominated radical collectives: ‘‘Opposing any form of domination in theory, and having suffered its effects in previous radical groups, all Women’s Liberation politics act on the basis of developing collective work and preventing the rise of ego-tripping leaders. Outsiders, trying to pin down the politics of a group, complain of the lack of a centre. They are so used to ‘spokesmen’ that their absence confuses.’’≥∞ Like Guattari, Mitchell insisted on the psychotherapeutic dimension of group consciousness in advocating the political deployment of group therapy to achieve the liberationist ends of woman’s solidarity and safety. If the Women’s Liberation Movement subscribed to a militant strain of anarchism—utopistically described by Mitchell as the pure expression of liberation: ‘‘a release of all one’s dammed-up psychic energies’’ and a legitimation of random violence as the only viable antidote to the chokehold of bourgeois opinion—it stepped back from endorsing the ‘‘Spontaneist-terrorists’’ who, in today’s parlance, might be characterized as weaponized Small Groups. Squadrons of women who ‘‘model themselves as rocks to throw at the walls of bourgeois society,’’ these militant feminists were dismissed by Mitchell and her cohort for an excessive ‘‘offensiveness’’ read as overcompensation for middle-class self-

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hatred.≥≤ Violence as a form of personal therapy was seen as a liability, potentially obstructing the movement’s broader aims. In France, Red thinking was similarly channeled into nonviolent manifestations, as evidenced by Alain Badiou’s depiction of himself in the early seventies as an agent provocateur of the classroom whose target was none other than Deleuze: For the Maoist that I was, Deleuze, as the philosophical inspiration for what we called the ‘‘anarcho-desirers,’’ was an enemy all the more formidable for being internal to the ‘‘movement’’ and for the fact that his course was one of the focal points of the university. I have never tempered my polemics: consensus is not one of my strong points. I attacked him with the heavy verbal artillery of the epoch. Once, I even commanded a ‘‘brigade’’ of intervention in his course. I wrote, under the characteristic title ‘‘Flux and the Party,’’ an enraged article against his conceptions (or supposed conceptions) of the relationship between politics and mass movements. Deleuze remained impassive, almost paternal. He spoke of me as an ‘‘intellectual suicide.’’≥≥

Though Badiou’s self-portrait as an enragé describes the displacement of the Deleuzian group by the more hard-line brigade, it is a brigade that resists any real call to arms, for Badiou, like most of his cohort, Maoist or otherwise, tended to confine militance within the parameters of what he called, in Being and Event, a ‘‘speculative leftism’’ (‘‘un gauchisme speculative’’).≥∂ As the ex-situationist soixante-huitard leader René Vienet argued in Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement (written in the thick of the events), or as another May student leader, Antoine Linniers, held (in a book chapter titled ‘‘Objections to the Taking Up of Arms’’), terrorism—the so-called real thing—was generally not endorsed by French militants. Linniers attributes this recoil from armed violence (including his own group’s inability to carry out a plan to assassinate the ex-collaborationist Paul Touvier in 1985) to a number of factors, predominant among them the French Left’s historic deference to the French Communist Party, the lack of a radical Christian tradition comparable to that which energized the Italian Red Brigades, and an absence of the visceral anti-Nazi, anti-nato sentiment that galvanized the raf.≥∑ If, in the context of France’s May ’68, the form assumed by ethical militance was the group itself—multiple, fractious, formless, yet connected—it was a heavily discursive, self-theorized group subjectivity. By

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the mid-seventies, such discursivity gained layers of ‘‘theory.’’ Situationist projections of the commodification and subjective impoverishment of everyday life; Lacanian-inflected Marxism (typified by Althusser and his students Rancière, Balibar, Foucault) that posited the policed, ideologically surveilled subject; Lacan’s formulas of subjective destitution, along with his ritual unmasking of the master’s discourse; and Deleuze and Guattari’s socialization of the individual—all contributed to a politics of the group that seems increasingly relevant as a corrective to the contemporary zeitgeist in which isolate bourgeois existence is fully capitalized despite the lure of collective activism on the Internet. Looking back, what may have been the most radical French effort to ‘‘think Red’’ by thinking the group subject as a political esthetic was Pierre Guyotat’s novel Eden, Eden, Eden, published in 1970. Officially banned by the Pompidou government for its so-called pornographic content and rereleased only after public outcry was raised in the wake of a petition signed by Sartre, Beauvoir, Barthes, Leiris, Sollers, Foucault, Claude Simon, Derrida and many others, Eden features a society of ‘‘all against all,’’ a penal colony set in an abstracted landscape that recalls the razed and ravaged hilltop territories of the Algerian War. Soldiers practice rape as a form of social control, but sexual punishment blurs into polymorphous pansexualism. Guyotat’s vivid scenes of interracial, crossspecies, cross-gender, and intergenerational copulation, prostitution, child abuse, and group sex offer a total eradication of the individual. Personhood is imploded into an expressive multiple, at once sexualized and textualized. In the words of Guyotat, ‘‘There is no ‘love’ but a scripto-seminalo-gramme, if one can say that, in the sense of an electrocardiogram.’’≥∏ In making sexual violation and historical regression thematic coordinates, Guyotat’s avowed intention was to ‘‘emancipate the base’’ by reasserting the preeminence of ‘‘basses fonctions’’ (bodily functions of the lowest order). Like Bataille’s valorization of ‘‘base materialism’’ (identified with excess, waste, expenditure, acephalic consciousness, coprophilic desire, human matter over reason), Guyotat’s social body is constructed in the name of depsychologizing the person. Human subjects, no longer hierarchically superior, are placed on par with animals, plants, and things, generating a militant communalism that anticipates Antonio Negri’s phantasm of ‘‘the revolutionary monster that has Multitude for a name.’’≥π Guyotat’s novel is a revolutionary novel of ’68, I would argue, because it shows group subjectivity arising

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from erotic enslavement, an enslavement that, no matter how odious morally, levels power differentials between prisoners and their keepers. The group forms a dystopian socius, to be sure, but it reveals unsuspected reserves of revolutionary potentia. Guyotat’s Eden, Eden, Eden, exemplifying the way in which seventies fantasies of violent group sex were extended into dreams of radical communitarianism, does for narrative what Gerhard Richter’s BaaderMeinhof cycle of paintings ‘‘18. Oktober 1977’’ does for visual representation. Recalling Ben Shahn’s ‘‘The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti’’ (a series painted in 1931–32 based on newspaper photos and newsreel images of the pair, invariably photographed as a pair), Richter’s cycle, painted in 1988, homes in on the haunting of a later era by an earlier era’s praxis of radical group subjectivity. Though there continues to be considerable debate over whether Richter liberated the revolutionary image from the commodified spectacle or whether he portrays, as Theweleit would have it, the ‘‘inherently unradical’’ status of art, parasitically feeding off the revolutionary act through representations that are the very ‘‘antithesis of art’’ (raf 96), the cycle stands as a kind of homage to the idea of ethical militance as it emerged in the radical Left in the seventies. Militance is conveyed as much through the blur between photographic realism and the medium of paint as through the work’s historical framing of how ‘‘an abstract desire for revolution foundered in the political vacuum,’’ making for ‘‘a particularly helpless group autumn fantasy’’ (raf 96). The blur effect possesses each of Richter’s images in differing degrees, especially in the scenes devoted to Gudrun Ensslin based on photos of her, alive (wearing prison togs in an identification lineup) and dead in her prison cell. In the pictures of dead revolutionaries, which resemble nineteenth-century gisants, the fade-out of the subject’s features suggests the vanishing of revolutionary idealism or a ghostly aura originating, perhaps, in the haunting of an East German painter by ‘‘specters of Marx.’’ And, yet, another way to deal with the blur is to see what kind of shape it assumes. In some scenes it becomes a form in its own right, like an anamorphic shadow that seems to spring into legibility when the right viewing angle is found. Detached from the narrative of revolutionary failure, the blur communicates an effect of revolutionary vigilance that refuses to die with the ‘‘death of socialism.’’ It presents an ethical militance unto death, rather than, as some would

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have it, a terrorist ‘‘cult of death.’’≥∫ As the anamorphoses double the blurred horizontals and verticals of the bodies—horizontal when laid out on the floor, vertical when hanged—the function of the bodies as pointers cross-referencing one another is accentuated. Together, these directionals diagram a group subject that acts relationally even in death. They ‘‘make a matheme,’’ as it were, in the sense of Badiou’s statement that ‘‘the group makes a matheme for thinking the subject,’’ advanced in a chapter of Briefings on Existence titled ‘‘Group, Category, Subject.’’≥Ω Like the directionals, drawing the disparately arranged bodies into force fields of connection, the hyphen in Baader-Meinhof—a name that is itself a composite of two names that together and alone stand in for many other people—helps to formalize an algorithm of group subjectivity. The hyphen becomes yet another relational sign supporting the reading of Richter’s Baader-Meinhof series as a diagram of the motto: ‘‘their Being is their Number,’’ a paraphrase of Badiou’s ‘‘Le Nombre est une forme de l’être-multiple’’ (‘‘Number is a form of being-multiple’’) (ct 149). The hyphen also doubles as a minus sign, suggesting a subtractive force that suctions up individual essences. The group subject arises out of this black hole as a set of zero, positively equal to none: that is to say, equal to radical impropriety or loss of the proper. This zeroing out of ontology exerts its strange appeal on the formal structure of the group subject, itself the model for the ascetic revolutionary cell, with its promise of group love in exchange for self-sacrifice and its idea of truth as mathematically true. The problem of ethical militance thus conceived would seem to assign the idea of the group a special place as cornerstone of the revolutionary multitude by collapsing the multiple into the multitude, streaming into it elements of Spinoza’s plural individual, the Rousseauist general will, sansculotte ideals of civic conscience and supreme being, the Communist International, the algorithmic ‘‘transfinitude’’ of Cantorian set theory, the logic of multiplicities and of pre- and deindividuation put forth by Simondon, Deleuze, and Guattari, and a social understanding of individuality that fulfills Negri’s proposition that ‘‘there is for a body no possibility of being alone.’’∂≠ Marrying principles of Enlightenment revolution and ‘‘a physiology of collective liberation’’ to analytic truth values, the logic of the group subject involves hewing to your ethical truth despite the risk of projecting into the mental space of the enemy so successfully that you assume its form (as when militance misrecognizes

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itself as militarism), and despite the risk avowed by Badiou: ‘‘My fidelity may well be terror exerted against myself.’’∂∞ For Badiou, the ethics of militancy would seem to require holding fast to the exigent logic of the mathematical proof: first, to ward off lassitude; second, to maintain the ‘‘numbers’’ of the group subject; and third, to allow the terror of theory to carry on as the possibility of a revolutionary truth event. It is surely no mere happenstance that the art and politics of the seventies have come back to haunt us in the wake of 9/11.∂≤ E-activism was particularly in evidence in mobilizing opposition to the Iraq war. Geert Lovink’s writings on Net culture offer a lucid account of how political collectives have used the Net. Tom Keenan has written on new political formations spawned by media culture. And in a very interesting article, ‘‘Doing Their Own Thing, Making Art Together,’’ Holland Cotter surveys the resurgence of collaborative art collectives in the medium of digital networks. Cotter recalls how groups from the sixties such as the Artworkers Coalition and the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition ‘‘made concerted attempts to pry open institutional doors and let in a multicultural world,’’ while ‘‘non-militant movements like the Dadainspired Fluxus produced an ephemeral, give-away, anyone-can-do-it art that amounted to a kind of passive resistance to the market economy.’’ The new virtual collectives, he points out, take full advantage of the Internet as a fundamentally collective medium. Groups such as Royal Art Lodge, Beige, Slanguage, Flux Factory, Dearraindrop, and Milhaus are posed as the inheritors of The Hairy Who (of the sixties) and Destroy All Money (of the seventies) in Cotter’s scheme. The most interesting thing about these new collectives, he points out, is that members of the collective often do not know each other, creating a model of anonymous community that complements the dematerialized nature of their cyber-spatial site specificity. While evincing skepticism about the depth of commitment to a political or utopian ideal of collectivism on the part of these Web-based groups (many of these sites evoke a ‘‘slacker’’ sensibility), Cotter discerns genuine critical activism in works sponsored by the Radical Software Group or new groups such as RTMark, Critical Art Ensemble, Ultra-Red, and Electronic Civil Disobedience. With their international network of programmers and fluid organization of participants, these groups belong to the burgeoning counterculture of artists’ collectives.

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Also in evidence in recent years, a rash of documentaries and art projects has scoured the representational surface of the not-so-distant radical past in an effort to retrofit the culture of group solidarity and the weaponization of thought. German filmmaker Andreas Veiel’s 2001 documentary The Black Box revisits the question of why raf members Wolfgang Grams and Alfred Herrhausen armed themselves in the name of moral vigilance and took on the ‘‘enemy’’ of the German Federal Republic. The movie Human Weapon investigates the history of suicide martyrdom for political causes, emphasizing how group subjectivity has been key to the passage à l’acte. My Terrorist, an autobiographical documentary, charts the effort of a former Israeli flight attendant, wounded in a foiled 1972 hijacking attempt, to release her assailant from a British prison in the name of an alternative to the Israel/Palestine stalemate. The Weather Underground traces how the incredibly rapid succession of American political atrocities from the late sixties into the seventies—the My Lai massacre, the murders of Black Panther leaders Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, the assassination of Salvador Allende, Kent State—led inexorably to the group’s conviction that violent acts of sabotage were the only means possible in a war stacked in favor of the military-industrial complex. Moving from film to art installation, Mary Kelly’s Circa 1968 (2004) is a projection of a famous photograph from May ’68 of a female demonstrator held aloft and brandishing a flag. Composed out of compressed lint, the medium works to dematerialize the outlines of faces and bodies, allowing then to flow seamlessly into now. For artist Renée Green, the year 1970 provides the occasion, in a work titled Partially Buried, to examine the legacy of the Adorno–Angela Davis connection and the killings at Kent State (where Green’s mother was a student at the time). And in the arena of performance, a 2002 video by the artist Sharon Hayes—reenacting Patty Hearst’s appeal for ransom payment as she repeats and strays off message (itself dictated by the offcamera group voice of the Symbionese Liberation Army)—underscores the strange speech rhythm that gets established between the serial instructions of mind control and the mouthing of fractured voices speaking as one.∂≥ Roland Barthes might have designated this rhythm ‘‘idiorrhythmie religieuse,’’ a term he applied, in his 1976 seminar on Mount Athos, to ascetic, monastic federations regulated by the mystical beat of prayer calibrated to the rhythm of heart and breath.∂∂ These retrospective exhumations of seventies radical movements, each of which sits in a

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much larger field of examples, form a fascinating pendant to the representations of ethical militance that emerged in the period itself. They are compelling, perhaps, because they afford a glimpse of the last moment before the last: that is to say, the fleeting specter of a revolution that was never allowed to happen or think its way into political time. Drawing on Sylvain Lazarus’s The Anthropology of the Name, Badiou asks, ‘‘Can politics be thought as thought?’’∂∑ I would say in response to this key question that the politics of group subjectivity, articulated in 1968 but foreclosed by the narrative of revolutionary failure, has yet to be ‘‘thought as thought,’’ its episteme entered into political time.

Notes 1. For the best summary of Badiou’s early political trajectory (as well as his broader philosophical engagement), see Hallward, Badiou, 30. For the best discussion of Badiou’s theories of militance, see Laclau, ‘‘An Ethics of Militant Engagement.’’ See too, Hallward’s introduction to a special issue of Angelaki, ‘‘The One or the Other: French Philosophy Today,’’ and the special issue of Polygraph on Badiou (no. 17, 2005) edited by Matthew Wilkens. 2. Badiou begins Le siècle with an astonishing replay of Genet’s preface to his play Les nègres: ‘‘One evening an actor asked me to write a play for an all-black cast. But what exactly is a black? First of all, what’s his color?’’ Badiou appropriates this strategy to re-time the political: ‘‘A century, how many years is that? A hundred years? This time it is Bossuet’s question that imposes itself: ‘What is a hundred years, what is a thousand years, if a single instant can efface them?’ Shall we ask then what is the exceptional moment that will efface the twentieth century? The fall of the Berlin wall? The sequencing of the genome? The launching of the Euro?’’ Le siècle, 9–10. 3. Dimbledy, The Palestinians, 132. 4. Genet, ‘‘Quatre heures à Chatila,’’ 244, my translation. 5. Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness, 12. 6. Ibid., 11. 7. Bataille, ‘‘The Structure and Function of the Army.’’ 8. Khanna, ‘‘The Experience of Evidence,’’ 110. 9. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 147. Further references to this work will appear in the text abbreviated PF. In this section Derrida is drawing on Carl Schmitt’s Theorie des Partisanen, Zwischenbemerkung zum Begriff des Politischen (1963) [Theory of the Partisan and The Concept of the Political] and Carl von Clausewitz’s 1832 treatise Vom Kriege [On War].

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10. Debord, Considerations on the Assassination of Gérard Lebovici, 75–76. 11. Badiou, Saint Paul, 97. See Catherine Clément’s review of Jacques Lacan’s Télévision, psychanalyse, in ‘‘Une Leçon,’’ 101. 12. Badiou, ‘‘Politics as Truth Procedure,’’ in Metapolitics, 150. 13. The slogan ‘‘keep going’’ is enunciated in Badiou’s Ethics, 79. In a talk titled ‘‘The Desire For Philosophy and the Contemporary World,’’ Badiou affirmed: ‘‘The world is saying to philosophy ‘Get up and Walk!’ ’’ ˇ zek, The Ticklish Subject, 153. 14. Ziˇ 15. Dor, Introduction to the Reading of Lacan, xxiii. 16. Badiou writes, ‘‘The subject of a revolutionary politics is not the individual militant—any more, by the way, than it is the chimera of a class-subject. It is a singular production, which has taken different names (sometimes ‘Party,’ sometimes not). To be sure, the militant enters into the composition of the subject, but once again exceeds him (it is precisely this excess that makes it come to pass as immortal)’’ Ethics, 43. 17. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 60. 18. Guevara, Guerilla Warfare, 17. 19. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, 196. 20. Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, 35. Further references to this work will appear in the text abbreviated rss. 21. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), 77. Further references to this work will appear in the text abbreviated gp. 22. Deleuze, Spinoza, 122 and 126, respectively. 23. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 117. 24. Deleuze, ‘‘Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sa genèse psycho-biologique,’’ in L’île déserte et autres textes, 124. 25. Massumi, ‘‘Deleuze and Guattari’s Theories of the Group Subject through a Reading of Corneille’s Le Cid,’’ 814. 26. Deleuze, ‘‘Trois problèmes de groupe,’’ in L’île déserte et autres textes, 270. Il arrive qu’un militant politique et un psychanalyste se recontrent dans la même personne, et que, au lieu de rester cloisonnés, ils ne cessent de se mêler, d’interférer, de communiquer, de se prendre l’un pour l’autre. C’est un événement assez rare depuis Reich. Pierre-Félix Guattari ne se laisse guère occuper par les problèmes de l’unité d’un Moi. Le moi fait plutôt partie de ces choses qu’il faut dissoudre, sous l’assaut conjugué des forces politiques et analytiques. Le mot de Guattari, ‘nous sommes tous des groupuscules’, marque bien la recherche d’une nouvelle subjectivité, subjectivité de groupe, qui ne se laisse pas enfermer dans un tout forcément prompt à reconstituer un moi, ou pire encore un surmoi, mais qui s’étend sur plusieurs groupes à la fois, divisibles, multipliables, communicants et toujours révocables. Le critère d’un bon groupe est qu’il ne se rêve pas unique, immortel et signifiant, comme un

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syndicat de défense ou de sécurité, comme un ministère d’anciens combattants, mais se branche sur un dehors qui le confronte à ses possibilités de non-sens, de mort ou d’éclatement, ‘en raison même de son ouverture aux autres groupes.’ L’individu à son tour est un tel groupe. Guattari incarne de la façon la plus naturelle les deux aspects d’un anti-Moi: d’un côté, comme un caillou catatonique, corps aveugle et durci qui se pénètre de mort dès qu’il ôte ses lunettes; d’un autre côté brillant de mille feux, fourmillant de vies multiples dès qu’il regarde, agit, rit, pense, attaque. Aussi s’appellet-il Pierre et Félix: puissances schizophréniques.

27. Theweleit, ‘‘Remarks on the raf spectre,’’ 75. 28. Proll, Baader-Meinhof, 10. 29. Bataille, The Accursed Share, 83 and 84. Paraphrasing Dermenghem, Bataille stresses the twofold nature of Islam, endorsing the view that ‘‘for Mohammed the great holy war is not that of the Moslem against the infidel but that of the renunciation one must engage in against oneself,’’ while insisting, nonetheless, that in the eyes of the Muslims ‘‘every violent action against infidels is good.’’ Islam, he concludes a bit later on, ‘‘is a discipline applied to a methodical effort of conquest.’’ 30. Meinhof, ‘‘Fragment sur la structure du groupe,’’ 59 and 60. 31. Mitchell, Women’s Estate, 58. 32. Ibid., 69. 33. Badiou, Deleuze, 2. 34. Badiou, L’être et l’événement, 232. 35. Liniers, Terrorisme et Démocratie, 202–3. 36. Guyotat, Littérature interdite, 31, my translation. 37. Negri, ‘‘Pour une définition ontologique de la multitude.’’ 38. See Purdum, ‘‘What Do You Mean ‘Terrorist’?’’ 5. Purdum draws on Jessica Stern’s book The Ultimate Terrorists and quotes her as saying, ‘‘It’s hard to say that these Palestinian bombers even have political objectives. . . . It’s almost nihilistic. It’s almost a kind of epidemic, a cult of death that comes out of a sense of cultural humiliation.’’ 39. Badiou, Briefings on Existence, 175. Further references to this work will appear in the text abbreviated ct. 40. Ibid., 42. 41. Badiou, Ethics, 79. 42. On the politics of retro-feminism, terrorism, and the recycling of the seventies, see Karen Beckman’s article ‘‘Terrorism, Feminism, Sisters, and Twins.’’ 43. Sharon Hayes, ‘‘Symbionese Liberation Army (sla) Screed # 16 Patricia Hearst’s 2nd Tape.’’ 44. Barthes, Comment vivre ensemble, 66. 45. Badiou, Metapolitics, 46. Badiou glosses Sylvain Lazarus’s Anthropologie du nom.

Interview with Étienne Balibar The following interview was conducted over the course of several meetings, both in person and through e-mail, between November 13, 2005, and September 1, 2006. The questions were composed by the editors. QUESTION In ‘‘Three Concepts of Politics,’’ you state that in the political scene today, resistance to the ‘‘communications, control, and consumption mega-machine’’ can no longer viably take the form of either ‘‘becoming majoritarian,’’ or ‘‘becoming minoritarian.’’ In the absence of a theoretical choice of this kind, you reframe the problem by stating that ‘‘it is a conjectural question, a question of the art of politics—and perhaps simply of art since the only means civility has at its disposal are statements, signs, and roles.’’∞ Several questions emerge from this assertion. Could you elaborate on how a ‘‘politics of civility’’ conjoins specifically with a question of art? If the means that a politics of civility has at its disposal are statements, signs, and roles, how would this politics be transmissible or translated to a broader range of subjects without resorting to the aestheticized mass politics of the last century? How could this politics of civility be enacted in the expanded field of social experience? What material processes are at its disposal in order to translate it, and therefore to enact it at a broad level?

I think that the best way to answer your question is to insist on the equivocity of the category of art in our modern languages. It encompasses the two meanings of tekhnè and poièsis, ‘‘technique’’ and ‘‘cre-

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ation,’’ and therefore draws our attention to the fact that, despite strong tensions, they can never be completely separated. To see politics as an art means, on the one hand, that it is neither an ethical discipline, governed by the categorical imperative of moral or religious values (which is not to say that values and ethical choices are not involved in the goals and means of political action), nor a mere application of scientific knowledge, as the positivist tradition has repeatedly maintained (which is not to say that knowledge of facts and structures is irrelevant to politics). Rather, it is a discipline of action, combining forces and changing their relationship within aleatory environments in a manner that remains always contingent. This was basically Machiavelli’s conception, into which I am trying to insert a renewed vision of the critical dimensions of modernity. On the other hand, to see politics as an art means that an aesthetic dimension is intrinsic in it. (This idea was not alien to Machiavelli, a ‘‘republican’’ thinker who in this respect stands at the opposite pole from the fascist and state-socialist strategies of aestheticized mass politics to which you allude, but whose thought can also be opposed to liberal forms of political ‘‘marketing.’’) This aesthetic dimension refers both to the production of political agency within a variety of fictions (narratives, representations, performances), and to a conception of the ideological element of politics in terms of the elaboration of a common or shared sensorium, to borrow Jacques Rancière’s idea. I shall return to these two aspects, taking advantage of your next questions. Let me finish with this preliminary point by clarifying that a politics of civility is specifically aimed at counteracting the tendency toward extreme violence which makes the ‘‘art’’ of politics impossible. In this sense, civility is not a particular form of politics, but rather a necessary dimension of politics as such. Although it is not to be confused with nonviolence, it should be identified with every form of collective agency that interrupts the cycle of violence and counterviolence and prevents violence from being carried to extremes. To combine this aim with other critical dimensions of political practice (politics as emancipation, as conquest of equaliberty, and as transformation of social structures and power relations), is also clearly an art, in both of the senses mentioned above. It requires skill and judgment to develop narratives and representations which counteract the inner tendency of modern (and postmodern) mass politics to

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produce consensus and exclusion by transforming social and ideological conflict into an absolute ‘‘friend vs. enemy’’ relation, where the ‘‘us’’ is perceived as a unity or identity vitally threatened by the existence of the other. It also involves risk. A politics of civility therefore aims at changing the social conditions of perception, which are not only cultural, but also institutional. Such change is possible provided we do not adopt a narrow, purely legal and administrative view of institutions, but see them as a dialectical interplay of traditions and critiques, collective and individual inventions, where the exception and the provocation shape new normativities. Which is typically what writers, artists, and experimental thinkers aim to do. QUESTION In your lecture ‘‘Europe as Borderland,’’ you refer to Zygmunt Baumann’s work on the importance of translation as a form of social practice informing everyday interactions, citing his notion of ‘‘communities of meaning.’’≤ You then point out that the activity of translation has acquired a political legitimacy today and that it should be considered a crucial instrument for the creation of a European public space. Translation as both a pragmatic and institutional practice can become, you argue, ‘‘a form of virtual de-territorialization, which makes it possible to anticipate and control political processes where the borders are displaced and the meaning of borders is transformed. Therefore it makes it possible also to ‘appropriate’ or ‘inhabit’ a transnational political space and transform it into a new public sphere.’’≥ For you, translation offers both a reciprocal and a conflictual model of communication, since languages are always translated yet remain untranslatable, while the common ground of languages through which the practice of communication takes place is never given but has to be constantly constructed and negotiated. Translation is, you state, the common language of Europe: an instrument and ‘‘a regulating ideal for the political handling of ‘multi-culturalism.’ ’’∂ Can language as a model of conflictual communication also include the heterogeneity of perceptual and sensorial experience that is bound, yet irreducible, to language and meaning? How can your notion of translation be extended to include other formative aspects of social experience, such as particular economies of visibility and nonlinguistic patterns of intelligibility? In what way do ‘‘communities of meaning’’ already form a part of specific regimes of sense, what Jacques Rancière terms ‘‘partition-

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ings of the sensible’’? Can the conception of translation as a social practice offer us new ways to understand the conjuncture of culture and politics within the framework of globalization? This is a crucial but difficult question. It touches the core of the philosophical problem that I have been trying to tackle in my recent essay ‘‘Sub specie universitatis,’’ whose title is a pun on the history of ‘‘universal languages.’’∑ For the sake of clarity, allow me to divide the difficulty by suggesting that, implicit in your formulation (and I would accept that), is the idea that the term translation here serves as a bridge between three different domains, or rather structures, because the domains are not separated, but the historical and psychological relationships which intervene obey different logics. These include the political structures of territory, borders, migrations, and citizenship; linguistic and discursive structures of communication; and aesthetic practices of representation, creation, and reception. I would suggest that the category of translation in its ‘‘proper’’ sense belongs to the discussion of the structures of communication, inasmuch as they have a linguistic basis, but we immediately discover that this ‘‘proper’’ sense cannot be isolated from other structures: not only does the idea of translation already involve a spatial metaphor that inevitably has political and aesthetic connotations, but in fact there is a permanent interaction between, and overdetermination of, these structures. The question of translation is therefore connected to the question of migration (exile, diaspora, cultural hybridity, etc.), and to the question of the ‘‘partitioning of the sensible’’ and its conflictual rearrangements, to borrow Rancière’s very apt category. Indeed Rancière, Baumann, and I would say also Lyotard (in The Differend), with all their differences, are crucial theoretical resources to understand these issues. Together, they help to elaborate a conceptual framework which retains something of the old Marxist and post-Marxist notion of ideology, but also transforms it and pushes it beyond its cultural limitations. On this background, allow me to associate three remarks with your question: First of all, I want to rectify a distortion involved in the phrase ‘‘translation is the common language of Europe.’’ It should be understood as ‘‘there is no common language of Europe other than translation.’’ This means that no single national language will become dominant in Europe in the way in which, with few exceptions, the constitution of nations has ANSWER

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traditionally been accompanied by the development of a dominant idiom. As a consequence, Europe as a public space and a cultural sphere will never become a quasi-nation or a super-nation. Another side of the question concerns the function in the European construction of the modern international or universal language, namely English. There is no doubt that the existence of such a mediating idiom plays an important role in the transnationalization of communications, in Europe as elsewhere: it is clearly one of the phenomena which make the construction of a European confederation an aspect of globalization. But again, my suggestion is that this is only one aspect of a more general and complex linguistic regime, in which the mobile element of heterogeneity and conflict that I tend to associate with the dialectical and dialogical experience of the ‘‘untranslatable’’ and its displacements is never entirely reduced. In that sense, it can be said paradoxically that ‘‘translation is the common language of Europe,’’ a quasi-language for a quasi-community, where unity and difference maintain an unstable equilibrium. At the same time, I suggested that this process had cultural and institutional roots in a specific regime of languages, involving dominance but also reciprocity (therefore the practice of translation). This regime, which has characterized the status of national languages in European history since the Middle Ages and the dissolution of the Latin universitas, is incorporated in the general educational system of the humanities. Although this regime remains important in my view, it leads to a narcissistic consequence, namely the thesis that the idea of translation is purely European, or that Europe made translation its privilege. This is clearly not true, as there are other models of translation in the world cultures—perhaps each great civilization has invented its own model of translinguistic communication. To compare these models, their histories, their past and present interferences, the concepts of language implied in them, is a fundamental object of anthropological research. It is also an essential way of ‘‘provincializing Europe,’’ to borrow Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ironic formulation—a necessity for Europe itself in the global world. Second, I want to return to your reference to Rancière’s concept of ‘‘the sensible,’’ as compared with Bauman’s ‘‘communities of meaning,’’ a notion, in fact, adapted from Wittgenstein. I don’t believe that Rancière would reduce the sensible to pure visibility, even if he is particularly interested in visual arts, if only because his main interest has been in

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literature. The visibility at stake here involves strictly visual elements, such as pictures and exhibits, mainly because Rancière insists on the fact that it concerns bodies and the materiality of the social ‘‘masses.’’ But it is more generally a metaphoric visibility, identified by Rancière with a paradoxical scene where discourses are staged in their difference. It is therefore a stage on which the actors perceive themselves as bearers and speakers of antagonistic discourses, discourses which do not obey the same rules or belong to the same code (this is its crucial difference from a Habermasian pragmatics of communication), but nevertheless contribute to the same political process. This is the double meaning of partage, if you like the pun on the French word, which means at the same time ‘‘partition’’ and ‘‘sharing’’—almost an oxymoronic word. It would be fascinating, if we had time, to discuss these concepts’ relationship to a traditional notion of ideology in the Althusserian sense. From Althusser, Rancière inherited a Brechtian insistence on the reciprocity of perspectives between theater and politics, which allows one to understand how political agents can distance themselves from their own representations in history or actively produce new ones. But Rancière completely rejected the Marxian idea that discourses—with the ideal exception of the discourse of a scientific practice of politics—remain blind to their own determinations. This also leads him to suggest another possible understanding of the aesthetic metaphor of the theatrical stage, the one that I borrowed from Freud’s idea of ‘‘the other scene,’’ that is, the theater of the unconscious. This has been for years the latent, at times even explicit, divergence between Rancière and me (perhaps two very different ways of departing from Althusser): he would insist on the manifest side of the scene, the semantic and sensible process that makes the conflict visible, and I would insist on the hidden side of the scene (except for some violent intrusions), which calls for a ‘‘civilization’’ of revolution itself. He would also insist on the emancipatory breakthrough that sets a new stage for the political by giving a new visibility to the discourses and the bodies that were barred from public expression; and I would insist on the risks, the ambivalence of the violence that is necessary to break the consensus, to remove or open up the power structures that prevent the subaltern from sharing in the public sphere or the dominant culture. Perhaps what is at stake in this opposition will be clarified by the following remarks. I think that the generalized concepts of a ‘‘translation’’ between cul-

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tures and a ‘‘poetics’’ of the democratic transformation address the intrinsic relationship between conflict and politics from opposite angles. They are not identical, but also not absolutely incompatible. Take a situation like the one illustrated by the ‘‘riots’’ or ‘‘uprisings’’ in the French banlieues in the fall of 2005, which have been widely reported. The choice between the two names is a semantic and political problem which commands different visibilities and a different partition of the communities and their meanings. What I find important is not simply that a generation of urban youngsters, who had been massively excluded from both employment and social recognition through a combination of class policies and racial (postcolonial) discrimination, forced the political class and the public opinion to hear their claims and protests. (Although this in itself is already a complex process that has to be accounted for: the immediate reason for the uprising was the unbearable character of the daily violence imposed by police forces on these youngsters.) Nor is it just a matter of the provocative way in which the state pictured them as thugs and barbarians, so that it became a battle of words and images as much as a physical battle in the streets, a sort of controlled guerilla warfare aimed at projecting a defiant image of the banlieue itself. What is most important is to observe that the language of the revolt was quite different from what most politicians and pundits had announced both inside and outside France. It had very little to do with multiculturalism and religion, or rather these dimensions of the social conflict were incorporated into a more general discourse on justice and dignity, a demand for what I call droit de cité, a right of both citizenship and allowance, and therefore of residency. In other terms, the (violent) discourse of the excluded, the outsiders, emerged in a different place: not the one which the dominant discourse had prepared to secure its neutralization (and the repression of its speakers), but one that in some sense reversed the institutional principles of the republican state, showing its limits and exposing its hidden side. There is a poetic element here, but also a virtual deterritorialization, a transitory displacement of the barrier between different social idioms, that is as important as the barrier between national idioms. QUESTION In your discussion of the problems of identity and security, which you map along a shared axis in the lecture ‘‘Europe as Borderland,’’ you discuss the possibility that European states may delegate the

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tasks of border control and the limitation of immigrant refugees to neighboring states such as Turkey, Morocco, and Libya, which would act as auxiliary immigration officers. You point out that this act of projecting power outside the state dialectically illustrates the incapacity of the superstate to regulate difference within its own limits. You refer to this as the transportation of actual borders beyond the borderline. Then, in a striking analogy, you say that this phenomenon ‘‘seems to be the meaning of the project of externalizing the camps.’’∏ What do you mean by this reference to the camps? Are you referring to a historical camp or those of the present? For example, how does territorial consolidation through the paradoxical enactment of deterritorialization, extending the boundaries of a nation-state, operate in the case of Guantanamo Bay? How does Guantanamo Bay act as a compensatory measure for the failure to regulate the entwined problems of identity and security? In connection with this question of the camps, what do you think of the way in which the concentration camp is invoked in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer as the ‘‘hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living?’’π Does this relate to your suggestion that the current crisis in drawing national borders, bound up in problems of visibility and representation, is also a matter of the externalization of the camp? For you, is the camp a transhistorical structure that determines the present and the production of sense, or has the very sense of the camp been transformed in the present? It seems to us that you have formulated a notion of the camp that is more historically differentiated than Agamben’s. In what ways could we see Abu Ghraib and the media representations of Abu Ghraib as symptomatic of a historical transformation in the function of the camp? The camp is not a stable, invariant, or transhistorical structure; on the contrary, it is constantly changing shape and function, transferring techniques from one function to another. It is an inconvenience of Agamben’s formulation to suggest that there exists an ideal type of the camp, and to incarnate it in the figure of Auschwitz, thereby adopting one of the two metaphysical interpretations of the uniqueness of the extermination of the European Jewry by the Nazis: not the one that says that nothing can be compared to the extermination, but the one that says that everything has to be compared with it. Perhaps we should

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rather take here as our model the way in which Foucault, in his extraordinary series of lectures at the Collège de France, The Abnormals, proposes a typology of different strategies used in the classical age to confront epidemics: expulsion or imprisonment of the contagious persons. In her Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt follows a different path: she traces a genealogy of the camp, showing how it became a different structure when ‘‘imported back’’ from the European colonies in Africa to the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. This genealogy could be expanded, particularly by bringing in the whole tradition or return of slavery and slave trade. These are also important references, because Agamben’s theory arises, to some extent, from a combination of the Arendtian and the Foucauldian legacy, the exterminist state and the normalizing society, with their specific ties to nineteenth-century racism. One has to admit that the refugee camps and detention centers used to regulate the flows of illegal migrants on the borders of Europe, which the current policies tend to push beyond the virtual wall of ‘‘Fortress Europe’’ into the periphery, that is, practically to the south shore of the Mediterranean, are not camps of extermination, even if they are associated with police operations that produce many deaths and casualties (as I pointed out in my recently published discussion with Sandro Mezzadra).∫ On the other hand, every camp is haunted by the proximity, the possibility, or the trace of an extermination. This was indeed the case for the camps established in East Africa after the genocides in Rwanda and Congo. It was indeed the case for the Soviet Gulag, which resulted in millions of deaths. And even the camps established today at the borders of Europe or in other parts of the world, where the affluent North gathers the ‘‘superfluous’’ men and women after selecting their migrant workforce, have a lethal side when combined with fortified fences and patrols: they are seated atop myriad stories of starvation and hazard. The conclusion I draw from this is that the camp, in its variations and complexity, is indeed a biopolitical institution of modern society—perhaps the third pole in a triangle that includes also the prison and other penitentiary establishments, and the places of medical seclusion. And even if I discuss what I perceive as a certain essentialist orientation of Agamben’s description, I must admit that he has powerfully indicated this central function. But he has done more than that, by generalizing the concept of the ‘‘state of exception,’’ that is, a situation of lawlessness legally installed, or a self-negation of

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the rule of law, without which it would not perform its political function, and which bears the permanent trace of the old sovereign power. And this is clearly where Guantanamo Bay, with its re-creation of the figure of the interior enemy at global level, becomes emblematic. Although belonging to the same system as Guantanamo, and having clear links with it, I would suggest that the Abu Ghraib story has other interesting aspects. Above all, there is the fact that the tortures and their staging were revealed by some of the perpetrators themselves, the rank and file, who circulated the pictures taken with their video and digital cameras. This effect of visibility not only testifies to the quasi-impossibility, in today’s world, of something like a ‘‘secret war’’ that is not paradoxically displayed in the open (which is also true for Guantanamo): it also reveals an economy of desire permeating this visibility. In a sense, the soldiers serving in Abu Ghraib were offering their own bodies and deeds, together with the bodies of their victims, to the scopic pulsions of the world opinion, but I am convinced that they also knew, somehow, that this display would lead to their indictment and punishment as scapegoats of the United States military, so that they were acting (and projecting) a tale of guilt and abjection. QUESTION In a lecture given at Columbia University in the spring of 2005 on the topic of ‘‘strategies of civility,’’ you suggest that any analysis of extreme violence must take into account how it is inextricably linked to aesthetic and ethical concerns. You stated that what is needed is a ‘‘representation of the unbearable’’ to function as a threshold that expresses the ‘‘limits of the inhuman.’’ How is the representation of the unbearable linked in your thought to a politics of civility? Can you point to any recent instances of an adequate representation of the unbearable nature of extreme violence?

The unbearable is, by definition, a subjective notion: there is no such thing as the unbearable per se. It only exists for a subject in a given situation and in relation with others, who can be actually there or imagined. This raises the question of how we know, or decide, that something subjective is not arbitrary. Second, the unbearable is clearly a changeable notion: individuals or groups, collectivities, cultures come to bear what they (or others) found unbearable (e.g., blasphemy) or the converse (slavery, humiliation of racial and sexual others, inequality).

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And finally, it is also practically a paradoxical notion, because we do observe that the unbearable is never exactly where we imagined: it is always much closer or much more remote. We bear the unbearable, yet we find it impossible to keep accepting some banal behavior or custom. This leads me to suggest that what is most significant in these matters are changes, transitions, and limits. It is a phenomenological determination which belongs to a typical series of affects, for example, the ancient tragic ‘‘shame’’ (aidos), or the ‘‘compassion’’ in Rousseau (pitié), with the special character of pushing to act, or protest, or revolt, even internally. All these nuances explain why I have difficulties in giving instances of unbearable extreme violence without the help of literature or visual arts (including photography and film) that sets the scene for such experiences. One recent example that comes immediately to my mind is the 2003 French-Belgian movie La blessure [The Wound] by Nicolas Klotz, which transposes the autobiographic tale of Jean-Luc Nancy’s heart transplant into a story about the deportation of undocumented migrants caught by the border police. QUESTION Quite some time ago you asked the question ‘‘Whither Marxism?’’ suggesting that the old antagonisms between classes had long since ceased to be the primary arbiter of social struggle. You have more recently proposed identity as a locus of struggle against the state. Rather than uphold a fixed notion of identity, you suggest that identity is as much a function of disidentification as identification, but one that is constantly being put in place by state nationalism and racism. Nevertheless you seem to uphold a notion of the nation as the necessary precondition of citizenship and so as a place that can also arbitrate a space for equaliberty. How do you reconcile this tension between ambiguous identities and national borders? Aren’t transnational identities (from global corporations to fundamentalisms to blog culture) as important today as those fixed by the state? Is the state the only possible place for the management of equaliberty? If identities can only give access to micropolitics (to the coil of the snake, rather than the burrow of the mole, as Hardt and Negri put it), are there systems of identification today which offer larger possibilities for ‘‘the art of politics,’’ as you call it, just as class once did? Can art itself still function as a semiautonomous site for the political critique of given identities, institutional or otherwise?

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I believe that the formulation of the question rests on a misunderstanding of what I have been trying to elaborate and explain, since my contributions to Race, Nation, Class at least.Ω But certainly the responsibility lies with me: it means I have been obscure, or incomplete, or contradictory. Perhaps the only way to clarify some of the difficulties would be to attempt a new exposition of fundamental concepts, except that the method I would suggest for that today would be less deductive and more descriptive (comparative and typological) than my contribution to Reading Capital forty years ago. It would be more in the spirit of Max Weber’s attempt in the first section of his unfinished work known as Economy and Society, but this unfinished attempt shows that there is a difficulty here also: when you try and elaborate typologies, you discover that what is most important is that which is on the edge, the processes that escape the typology. To begin with the negative, in a sharp manner: I did not suppress classes and class struggles in order to replace them with ‘‘identity’’ or with conflicts among and within identities; and I did not designate the (nation) state as ‘‘the only possible place for the management of equaliberty’’: perhaps just the opposite, although this depends on what you mean by ‘‘management.’’ I believe that class determinations and class struggles are today more important than ever, both inside states or national constituencies and at the global level, which becomes more and more the relevant framework. On this I completely agree with Wallerstein and other theoreticians of the world system. I even believe that we find ourselves in a historical phase where some classical descriptions of class formation (concerning polarization, proletarianization as uprooting of individuals, the emergence of a transnational bourgeoisie, etc.) become again almost palpable—which is not to say that they will produce the consequences predicted by Marx, any more than they did the first time. And I believe that equaliberty, which I defined as the absolute reciprocity or mutual implication of equality and liberty, is a principle and a force that is insurrectional rather than constitutional. Therefore, while equaliberty forms the driving force behind the emergence of democratic institutions (or more democratic institutions, what Claude Lefort called ‘‘the invention of democracy’’), it must remain at odds with every institution, threatening it or challenging it as much as it legitimizes it. The (nation) state is or can be one of them, but there is no reason to believe that it is such by nature, forever, and that this dialectic ANSWER

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does not have other historical sites. On the contrary, I agree that in the current transition period there is an urgent need to locate transnational institutions which can form new possible sites for this dialectic, together with corresponding ‘‘translations’’ of the discourses of equaliberty. And this displacement is crucial to understand what the art of politics includes today. So, why are there still difficulties? Let me look at the double side of the question again. The difficulty with the class vs. identity issue comes from the fact that in the orthodox Marxist view, the formation of collective identities—which is always an ideological process involving the construction of an imaginary scene and the invention of narratives allowing for individual subjects to think of themselves as members of a collective—has been described as an automatic consequence of class conditions (unless false consciousness distorts it). The class conflict has been seen as the only decisive antagonism in history. As a consequence, whenever other identities (gender identities, national identities, religious identities, etc.) prevail, they are perceived as a reversal of the materialist conception of history and a revenge of the ideologies upon class and socioeconomic factors. But in fact, class identities are subject to the processes of disidentification and identification that you mention, just like any other form of identity, and these are more or less powerful according to the circumstances: this is already a political phenomenon. And other identities, however symbolic they seem to be, also have roots and conditions in basic antagonisms, power relations, and material structures (such as language and sexuality). Overdetermination and ambiguity are the rule. The art of politics will not cease to take into account class issues (in the current conjuncture, I am tempted to say that there is too much blindness in this respect rather than the opposite), but it will never return to a pure apocalyptic class scenario. The difficulty with equaliberty and the state, which I take to be equivalent with the nation-state in your formulation, is basically a difficulty with the concept of citizenship. For some political philosophers, particularly Arendt, I think that the category of the citizen is necessary to democratic politics (a principle to which Rancière is very much opposed). The sense of this necessity may give some of my texts a ‘‘republican’’ flavor, even when they deal with civil disobedience as a necessary aspect of droit de cité. Together with citizenship goes an institutional dimension, an ambivalent call for law, sovereignty, status,

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and resistance to domination and power. For a long period now the state has monopolized the institutional dimension of politics in the national cadre and around it, therefore appearing at the same time as an instrument of emancipation (when pushed to democratize itself or to guarantee fundamental rights) and as the most powerful alienating structure. This gives a certain credence to the anarchist thesis, according to which ‘‘to raise demands toward the state is already a way to acknowledge its domination.’’ Art itself, in the modern age, with its educational and its subversive functions, was taken in by this ambivalence, as you rightly suggest. But the history of the citizen as institutional and political figure cannot become imprisoned in this single determination. Clearly, other institutional levels of politics and democracy need to be identified. This is the meaning of current debates on cosmopolitics and transnational citizenship, which seem to resume Arendt’s problem where she had left it: namely, the aporia of the construction of rights beyond the crisis of the nation-state. The global sphere of communications is clearly a major site of struggle and tension here, where aesthetic inventions combine and compete with the market. It is a question of determining the language in which the masses become included or excluded, reduced to hegemonic identities or capable of expressing their differences and raising their autonomous claims. But I would also insist on the importance of a critical work within the concepts of law and norms beyond the national cadre, which is why I find Negri and Hardt’s notion of the multitude here much too abstract. On the contrary, I find very important what Agamben discusses in Homo Sacer when he dissociates authority from sovereignty. Perhaps we could say that this is the core of the art of politics, inasmuch as it is centered on the democratic invention of forms and practices of citizenship to come: combining a recognition of the multiplicity of collective identities, and of the plasticity of mass formations, with an awareness of the unfinished process of the institution of rights. QUESTION In your essay ‘‘Citizen Subject,’’ obedience to the law is what transforms the legislating citizen into a subject of the state: in the formulas of Rousseau’s social contract, you write, ‘‘we see the final appearance of the ‘subject’ in the old sense, that of obedience, but metamorphosed into a subject of the law, the strict correlative of the

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citizen who makes the law.’’∞≠ This exposes a constitutive paradox of democratic citizenship: as a legislator, the citizen is above the law, or ‘‘free’’; as a subject, the citizen is under the law, and unfree. Such a paradox seems to naturally lead to situations where the citizen’s freedoms (freedom of speech, freedom of religion) must themselves be legislated, as in the case of the conflict over the recent ‘‘veil law’’ in France.∞∞ In this conflict, religious law and state law prove impossible to reconcile as concepts. Yet your essay implies that the very paradox of the citizen subject, who is simultaneously dominated and free (or free only in being dominated), results from the theological determination of the metaphysics of the subject. In other words, democratic citizenship itself remains overdetermined by the very antinomies of political theology that it is supposed to have overcome. This finding could be taken in support of the argument that citizenship in France, with its cult of laïcité, is today a ‘‘secular fundamentalism,’’ historically opposed to but philosophically cognate with religious fundamentalism. At the same time, in ‘‘Citizen Subject’’ you also make the point that these tensions and contradictions of citizenship are precisely what ensure its open determination, such that your projected history of the citizen is not simply ‘‘a materialist phenomenology of the transmutation of subjection,’’ as you describe Foucault’s The Order of Things, but also the history of what you call a ‘‘perpetual revolution.’’ Is a theological problematic, then, a necessary element of revolution, and more particularly of utopian revolutions? I cannot write now a complete history or phenomenology of the ‘‘citizen’’ as the mobile political figure to which I was just alluding above. I am working in that direction, from different angles, at times addressing contemporary political issues (such as the new function of laïcité in postcolonial France and its perverse associations with ‘‘new racism,’’ mainly directed against immigrants and Muslim communities), at times revisiting philosophical texts which have acquired a quasiinstitutional value (such as Rousseau in France, and more generally in the republican tradition). Hopefully they will converge. The important word in your question, from my point of view, is ‘‘paradox.’’ The relationship of French laïcité to the Rousseauist heritage is indeed paradoxical. In its most coherent formulations, not exactly the same thing as its daily invocations in political maneuvers, it certainly retains and activates

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a notion of ‘‘civic religion’’ that Rousseau had thought was indispensable for the production of the consensus or the community effect of a republican state. But this is a very tense relationship, because Rousseau’s notion of the legislative power of the citizen (or the citizen as lawmaker) to which you allude is at the same time illiberal and anti-statist, something very difficult to understand from a libertarian point of view. In practice, laïcité as it was progressively created by the bourgeois republican state and as it has been incorporated within the constitution, both returns to a more statist, pre-Rousseauist concept, and shifts to a more liberal-bourgeois form of historical compromise between mass ideologies and philosophies (such as positivist anti-clericalism and dominant Christian culture), based on a sharp distinction between the public and private realms (hence the hypersensitivity of family and gender issues). Paradoxically, again, theology is not at its strongest where we might think: Hobbes’s Leviathan, or the myth of the sovereign state, is much more theological (and monotheistic) than the relations of forces between secular and religious political parties. Rousseau himself, as I understand him, is the most unstable exponent of prerevolutionary political theology, because he tries to redeem the absolute concept of sovereignty by depriving it of every transcendence (not even a transcendence of the law, since law is only the ‘‘general will’’) and incorporating it into the immanent life of the people. The utopian element is very strong here, and it powerfully influenced all modern revolutions, especially the French and the Russian. The theological dimension of these revolutions is unquestionable, but not exactly in the Rousseauist sense, if only because there is no messianic dimension in Rousseau, whose ‘‘political time’’ is the present and not the future. QUESTION Beyond its religious motivations, defiance of the ‘‘veil law’’ could and has been understood, in a strictly political and secular sense, as the practice of a certain politics of visibility. Appearing veiled in school involves the making visible of religious association; it also involves the making invisible of ethnic and physical features whose presentation serves the purposes of administrative identification. What seems to be at stake in such conflicts is a crisis in the forms of visibility of the citizen, as both a public and a private individual. Can the concept of the citizen accommodate the sort of challenge to its principle presented by the legislation of visibility? How does one legislate commu-

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nity without reverting to the theological and absolutist problematic of the precitizen subject? From my point of view, there is a lot of theology (or secularized theology) in laïcité, as in Western secularism more generally. In an essay that I wrote during the recent controversies, ‘‘Dissonances within Laïcité,’’ I even called laïcité a ‘‘form of monotheism.’’∞≤ But there is very little theology in the ‘‘veil controversy’’ and the ‘‘veil law,’’ which is much more about the status of immigrant or immigrant-born communities in French society and the symbolic manifestations of the authority of the state to which many teachers, but not all of them, are fanatically devoted. Therefore, you might say that this is basically an issue of institutional racism, where religion is a cultural marker of identities, mixed with others. What accentuates the religious connotations is the crossing of the race/culture issue with the gender issue, giving rise to a simultaneous exacerbation of male-chauvinist tendencies within the migrant communities and the republican constituency, with the Muslim schoolgirls caught in the middle. I completely agree with your idea of a ‘‘politics of visibility’’ (on both sides), but I would formulate the stakes in a slightly different manner. The administration does not highlight or target ethnic or physical features as such: it is the society that does it (or the police). I tend to believe that many of the girls who wanted to appear veiled at school did it for individual, rather than communitarian, reasons. It was a symbolic move against repressed questions of identity, social status, history teaching, and French society and the educational system, which claimed a provocative association with the current revival of Islam as a world religion. By banning the veil—after confused debates, combining openly racist and disciplinary norms—the French state has crushed this move, making invisible not so much the cultural difference as the educational crisis itself, therefore depriving the community of citizens of a possibility to elaborate a progressive solution. This is all the more absurd in that the institution does not only have negative sides. The question whether Anglo-Saxon tolerance (as in Britain) or continental secularism (as in France) offers more or fewer opportunities to manage the postcolonial tensions, not to say the ‘‘clash of civilizations,’’ is an open one.∞≥ And the same school system (or many of the same teachers) who fiercely rejected the veil are now strongly opposing governmental instructions to expel illegal undocumented stuANSWER

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dents. So the situation, from the point of view of visibility and institutional racism, is a very unstable one, in which theological or religious motivations only represent a partial dimension. QUESTION In your preface to Droit de cité: Culture et politique en démocratie, you write that our problem now is ‘‘how to take a vacation from utopia, while at the same time freeing the powers of the imagination.’’∞∂ You argue that within globalization the very foundations of classical utopia have been radically destroyed. We have gone beyond the condition of its realization, since ‘‘it appears that the unity, at long last realized, of the human species in a single world, governed by the same economic regulations, confronting the same environmental problems, situated under the gaze of the same surveillance satellites, looks much more like the ‘war of each against the other’ described by Hobbes as a state of nature, than like a civic or a civil place.’’ Yet, while you criticize the term utopia, you emphasize the role of the imagination in politics, particularly in the field of institutional creation and what you call ‘‘fiction’’: ‘‘the production of the real on the basis of experience itself, knowledge and action inextricably mixed, insurrection opening into constitution.’’ You also point out in the preface to Politics and the Other Scene ‘‘that ‘material’ processes are themselves (over- and under-) determined by the processes of the imaginary, which have their own very effective materiality and need to be unveiled.’’∞∑ What kind of materiality is involved in the process of the imaginary? Are you suggesting that the function of the imaginary within contemporary politics has shifted and therefore cannot be sufficiently accounted for within the theoretical framework of ideology critique? How does the role you assign to the imagination in the present differ from the role it played in the past in the creation of utopian visions of the future? Can you elaborate on the use value of fiction in the production of political and civil possibilities?

This is a difficult but also a fascinating question. To some extent, it involves conventions of language, but they can help understand what is at stake. Indeed, the term utopia can be defined in either a restrictive or a broad sense. It is used very often—perhaps most of the time—in contradistinction to something else, as one term in a couplet of opposites. Synonymously with ‘‘fiction,’’ utopia is frequently opposed not only to reality, but also to ideology: this is the meaning coined by ANSWER

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Karl Mannheim and largely adopted by Ernst Bloch and Paul Ricoeur. While ideology refers to a legitimation of the present state of affairs, utopia denotes the possibility of a radical novelty, transforming or opening history onto an emancipatory future. Utopia has also been opposed to ‘‘heterotopia,’’ a neologism coined by Foucault. Whereas utopia—literally meaning ‘‘place of nowhere’’—refers to an ‘‘other’’ way of life or form of society imagined in the past, the future, or some mythical place, heterotopia—literally ‘‘other place,’’ ‘‘place of otherness’’—refers to the places of difference (abnormality, exception, exclusion, subversion) within the current, actual system of institutions. What I conclude from this is the fact that our debates about the role of utopias are in fact debates about differences, or even (to borrow Derrida’s crucial category différance) debates about difference: that is, the work of otherness and its incalculable outcomes within the appearance of sameness and fixed identities. This seems to me to be quite obvious in your final opposition between ‘‘imagination in the present’’ and ‘‘utopian visions of the future.’’ But I am not sure that the two temporal dimensions can be separated as simply as that (even if I may have given this impression in some passages). A certain classical and romantic utopia, which Marxism largely retained in spite of its claims to positivity and scientificity (or precisely because of these claims), was largely the inverted picture of the current state of affairs. In this utopia, the capitalist form of exploitation and the national bureaucratic state were inverted by pushing the rational element of capitalism and bureaucracy to a point of perfection. Utopia is, therefore, a highly contradictory and tense mode of fiction, where rebellion and normality are reconciled in the imaginary. This is what makes Thomas More’s Utopia a twin discourse not of Machiavelli’s Prince, as Habermas has argued, but of Hobbes’s Leviathan. Or take the cosmopolitan utopia of Kant and Saint-Simon, a critical by-product of the modern world system and its architecture of dominant and dominated nation-states, whose material conditions of existence have, paradoxically, been undermined in the very moment in which it could seem that the final hour had come in the era of globalization and world communications. This is not to say that nothing should be retained from the classical utopias. First of all, many of them are beautiful works of art themselves, aesthetic and theoretical instruments that allow us to ‘‘read’’ the vir-

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tualities and intrinsic multiplicity immanent in our inherited institutions. Second, the understanding of their appeal to mass movements and cultural common sense is just as important for our analysis of politics and history as the understanding of religious traditions, of which they form the rationalist, enlightened counterpart. There are many concrete domains of social and political practice, from ecology to urbanism to pedagogy, where this endless confrontation with utopia is inevitable.

Notes 1. Balibar, ‘‘Three Concepts of Politics,’’ in Politics and the Other Scene, 35. 2. Balibar, ‘‘Europe as Borderland.’’ 3. Ibid., 20, emphasis in original. 4. Ibid., 21, emphasis in original. 5. Balibar, ‘‘Sub specie universitatis.’’ 6. Balibar, ‘‘Europe as Borderland,’’ 16. 7. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 166. 8. Bojadˇzijev and Saint-Saëns, ‘‘Borders, Citizenship, War, Class.’’ 9. Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class. 10. Balibar, ‘‘Citizen Subject,’’ 48, emphasis in original. 11. Article 141-5-1 of Law No. 2004-228 in the Code d’Éducation. 12. Balibar, ‘‘Dissonances within Laïcité.’’ 13. See the recently published inquiry by the Pew International Center on comparative situations in various European countries: ‘‘The French-Muslim Connection.’’ 14. Balibar, Droit de cité, translation by Kristin Ross. 15. Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, xiii.

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Contributors EMILY APTER is a professor in the department of French at New York University. She is the author of Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (1991) and Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects (1999). ÉTIENNE BALIBAR is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Paris-X Nanterre and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. His books in English include Masses, Classes, Ideas: Race, Nation, Class (with Immanuel Wallerstein, 1994); Reading Capital (with Louis Althusser, 1998); Politics and the Other Scene (2002), and We, the People of Europe? (2003).

is the curator of contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and an adjunct professor at the University Iuav of Venice, in Italy.

CARLOS BASUALDO

T. J . DEMOS

is a critic and a lecturer in the department of art history at University College London. The author of The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (2007), his essays on modern and contemporary art have appeared in international journals such as Artforum, Grey Room, October, and Texte zur Kunst. He is currently at work on a new book, provisionally titled Migrations: Contemporary Art and Globalization.

teaches in the department of art and art history and the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Her essays on Thomas Hirschhorn, Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, and Piero RACHEL HAIDU

356

contributors

Manzoni have appeared in Documents, Texte zur Kunst, and Obieg and in the books Part Object, Part Sculpture and Musée prècaire Albinet. She is completing the book Marcel Broodthaers 1964–1976, or, The Absence of Work. BETH HINDERLITER has recently completed her dissertation on Kurt Schwitters and El Lissitzky at Columbia University. She is an assistant professor at Buffalo State College.

teaches in the department of the history of art at Yale University and writes frequently on contemporary art and culture. He is most recently the author of American Art since 1945 (2003) and Feedback: Television Against Democracy (2007). DAVID JOSELIT

is an assistant professor of aesthetics and critical theory and the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. His current book project is titled The Immediate, on early video art, telecommunication, and the critique of publicity. His recent essays include ‘‘Steps to an Ecology of Communication: Radical Software, Dan Graham and the Legacy of Gregory Bateson,’’ in Art Journal (Winter 2009) and ‘‘Computer Participator: Situating Nam June Paik’s Work in Computing,’’ in Mainframe Experimentalism: The Experimental Arts and Early Digital Computing (forthcoming).

WILLIAM KAIZEN

RANJANNA KHANNA is an associate professor in the department of English at Duke University. She is the author of Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (2003) and Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present (2007).

is an associate professor in the department of romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent books are Esthetics of Emergency (2006), Reality Shows (2007), and Three Secret Lives: John D. Rockefeller, Walt Disney, Osama bin Laden (2008).

REINALDO L ADDAGA

is a full-time lecturer in the department of art and design at Northeastern University. A recipient of a J. Paul Getty postdoctoral research fellowship for 2007–8, she is currently working on a book manuscript titled Singular Images, Failed Copies: On the Virtuality of Early Photography.

VERED MAIMON

is an assistant professor at the School of Art at Ohio University. Her work has appeared in Artforum, Texte Zur Kunst, and October, as well as exhibition catalogues. She works on mid-century European abstraction. JALEH MANSOOR

contributors

357

is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. He is a founding coeditor of the journal Grey Room, a partner in the firm of Martin/Baxi Architects, and the author of The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media and Corporate Space (2005).

REINHOLD MARTIN

SETH MCCORMICK defended his dissertation, ‘‘Jasper Johns, 1954–1958: Persecution and the Art of Painting,’’ at Columbia University in the spring of 2007. His essay ‘‘ ‘In Memory of My Feelings’: Jasper Johns, Psychoanalysis, and the Expressive Gesture’’ is scheduled to be published in a forthcoming issue of Source: Notes on the History of Art.

is a professor and the chair of the History of Art department at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (1994) and The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (2000). ALEXANDER POTTS

is professor emeritus at the University of Paris VIII. His recent books include The Politics of Aesthetics (2006), Film Fables (2006), and The Future of Images (2007).

JACQUES RANCIÈRE

is a senior lecturer at the School of Art History and Theory, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. She is co-editor of Refracting Vision: Essays on the Writings of Michael Fried (2000) and author of ‘‘Aesthetics, Ethics and Historicism in Gordon Bennett’s Art: A Response to Ian McLean,’’ in Radical Revisionism: An Anthology of Essays on Australian Art (2005). TONI ROSS

YATES MCKEE is a doctoral candidate in art history at Columbia University and teaches contemporary art at Cooper Union and the University of Ohio. His work has appeared in venues such as October, Grey Room, Art Journal, and Parkett. He is associate editor of Nongovernmental Politics (2007) and coeditor of The Visual Cultures of Nongovernmental Politics (forthcoming).

Index Abraham, Nicolas, 124 Absence, 8, 31–32 Absoluteness, 14 Address and community, 11–12 Adorno, Theodor, 6, 17, 39, 40, 174 Aesthetics: of administration, 143; aesthetic regime, 5–7, 32, 36–37, 140, 143; autonomy of, 6, 20–21, 33, 36, 41, 60, 90–92, 96, 99, 105, 210; beauty and, 4, 81–82, 100; blurring and, 35; defined, 1; dismissal of theory, 3; as elitist term, 3; end of art and, 4, 20, 33, 51, 52, 55, 76 n. 9; equality and, 36–38; ethics and, 82; historicism of, 6–7; homogeneity and, 34; of indifference, 238; judgment, 112; origins of, 36; politics and, 2, 6, 8, 19, 22, 31–50, 82, 143– 44, 318; post-Kantian, 3; relational, 20, 22, 83–86, 89, 99, 105, 144–45, 218; social roles and community in, 1–2, 5; state, 37; terminology, 3–4. See also Anti-aesthetic Agamben, Giorgio, 20, 22, 24, 76 n. 9, 187, 256–57 Ala Plástica, 208–9 Alberro, Alexander, 81 Alessi, Lynn, 174–75

Alienation, 14, 39, 53, 55–56, 67, 163 ‘‘Alligator’’ (Lawler), 97 Alterity, 82 Althusser, Louis, 322 Anderson, Benedict, 13 Anderson, Warren M., 183 Andijan Massacre, 290 Anonymity, 45 Anthropology of the Name, The (Lazarus), 314 Anti-aesthetic, 3–5, 54, 56–78; beauty and, 21, 81; communities of sense and, 60; conceptual art and, 101; end of art and, 20, 52; modern art as, 51–53; modernity and, 51, 55; postmodernity and, 51, 79, 95, 105 Anti-Aesthetic, The (Foster), 3, 33 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 137 Appadurai, Arjun, 168, 211–12 Appearance, 7–11 Aragon, Louis, 135, 137 Archipolitics, 86–87 Architecture: corporate, 22, 175, 177– 85, 188–90; computers and, 172– 74; mirrors in, 172–73, 176, 186– 87, 191 Arendt, Hannah, 247, 325, 330 Aristotle, 114

360

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Art as a Social System (Luhmann), 203 Art criticism: Marxist, 17; popular, 3– 4; postmodernist, 3 ‘‘Artificial Hells’’ (Breton), 137 Artistic production, 2, 9, 33, 79, 81, 204, 245, 250 Art projects, 16–19, 23, 211 Arturo Ui (Brecht), 42 Asher, Michael, 10, 98 Asylum, 21, 122, 124 Atomism, 15, 16 Audience address, 95, 102–5 Autonomy, aesthetic, 6, 20–21, 33, 36, 41, 60, 90–92, 96, 99, 105, 212 Avant-garde art: anti-art strategies, 3; collectivisim and, 1–2, 11–12; community and, 1–2, 11; critique of, 238; dissent and, 85; globalization and, 2; integration into life, 6; revolutionary transformation by, 211; sense and, 21 Baader, Andreas, 307 Baader-Meinhof group, 306–7, 310, 311 Backwardness, 281 Badiou, Alain, 294–95, 299–300, 308, 311–12, 314 Baker, George, 80, 105 Balibar, Étienne, 7–8, 10, 11, 13, 25; citizenship, 330, 331; class and identity, 327–29; concentration camps, 324– 25; interview, 317–36; politics of civility, 317–19; politics of visibility, 333–34; sovereignty concept, 332; on translation and language, 320– 22; unbearable as subjective, 326; utopia and globalization, 334–36 Ballanche, Pierre-Simon, 260–61 Ball, Hugo, 137 Balzac, Honoré de, 35 Bare life concept, 22, 24, 187, 256– 57, 259 Barnouw, Erik, 270

Barrès, Maurice, 21, 141–44, 146–48 Barthes, Roland, 35, 40, 269, 275, 313 Bataille, Georges, 15, 200, 297 ‘‘Bataille Monument’’ (Hirschhorn), 200–6 Baudrillard, Jean, 10, 272 Baumann, Zygmunt, 319, 320 Beauty: aesthetics of, 4, 81–82; classical, 20, 83–90, 91, 94; ethics and, 4, 82, 83; good and, 4; judgments of, 104; perspective in photography, 80–82; politics and, 21, 82, 83–84, 86; postclassical, 90, 93, 94–95, 100, 104–5; pure, 33; as remnant, 90– 95; standards of, 3; truth and, 53 Beecroft, Vanessa, 45 Being-in-common, 15, 17, 19, 200 Benjamin, Walter, 3, 32, 143, 268 Bergson, Henri, 303 Bernstein, Jay, 91 Bhopal, India, Union Carbide plant, 184–87 Biopolitics, 183, 189–90, 241, 257–58, 288, 325 Biopower, 256 Bishop, Claire, 18–19, 85, 89–90, 95, 145, 209, 233 Black Box, The (documentary), 313 Black September, 297 Blanqui, Auguste, 242–43 Bloch, Ernst, 335 ‘‘Blue Nail’’ (Lawler), 97 Bolshevism, 276 Boltanski, Christian, 44–45 Border-crossings, 43, 49, 324 Boundaries: art and life, 137, 138, 143, 148; blurred, 35; globalization and, 39; high vs. low art, 40, 43; organization, 199; suppressed, 37–38 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 17–18, 47, 82, 83– 90, 99, 136, 144–45, 204 Brecht, Bertolt, 42 Breton, André, 135, 136, 137, 138–40, 141, 142, 145–48

index Broodthaers, Marcel, 79 Brooks, Peter, 77 n. 21, 78 n. 23 Buchloh, Benjamin, 12, 272 Buck-Morss, Susan, 267 Bunshaft, Gordon, 176, 178 Burden, Chris, 45 Bureau of Surrealist Research, 148 Buren, Daniel, 10, 98 Butler, Judith, 290 Cadava, Eduardo, 278 Cage, John, 245–46 Camera Lucida (Barthes), 35 Capitalism: art projects and, 16; modernist formalism and, 3 Caracas Urban Think Tank (ccstt), 197 Cendrars, Blaise, 137 Censorship, 244, 246, 252, 257 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 321 Cicero, 115 Cid, Le (Corneille), 304 Circa (Kelly), 313 Citizen Cursor, 157, 159–69; defined, 156; visibility and, 158 Citizenship, 25, 320, 330, 331 Civility, 25, 317–19, 326 Clausewitz, Carl von, 298 Collaborative production, 204–10, 227 Collection in art, 20, 46 Collectivism: avant-garde art and, 1– 2; cyberspace and, 312; identity and, 228 Collectivity: artists and, 17; community vs., 15; militancy and, 300– 301; modes of address and, 11; people vs., 2; politics of, 2; relationality and, 14; socialism and, 13 Commodity culture, 33, 39, 43, 97 Common sense, 3, 7, 12, 21, 111, 120, 336 Communism: fall of, 2, 18; global, 25; post-ethical, 295; use of term, 15. See also Red thinking

361

Communities: aesthetics and politics of, 1–2; anonymous, 312; collectivity vs., 15; defined, 14–15; displacement and, 21, 125; experimental, 23, 199–212; identity and, 13, 88–89, 94; of meaning, 319; modes of address, 11; negotiation and, 23; operative, 272; people vs., 2; political, 87–88; spectacle and, 13; subjectivity and, 21, 89 Communities of sense, 11–16; antiaesthetic and, 20, 60; art and politics as, 32, 38; Citizen Cursor and, 158; defined, 31; disagreement and, 19; fiction and, 49; use of term, 2. See also Sensus communis Community-based art, 16–19, 23, 209 Computers and architecture, 172–74. See also Mass customization Concentration camps, 324–25 Conceptual art, 20, 79, 101–2, 105, 109 n. 59, 137, 143 Conflicts, 25 Congrès de Paris, 148 Consensus: artists and, 17, 18; enforced, 16; social divisions and, 9 Consuming politics, 156–57, 168 Contemporary art, 51–53 Cooper, Anthony Ashley (Lord Shaftesbury), 21, 111, 112, 113–18 Copjec, Joan, 83–84 Corbis (firm), 160 ‘‘Cordonnées, Les’’ (Lawler), 105–6 Corneille, Pierre, 304 Cotter, Holland, 312 Crewdson, Gregory, 45 Crimp, Douglas, 32, 101 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 21, 90– 91, 112, 120 Crowd psychology, 302 Culte du moi, Le (Barrès), 142 Cult of death, 311 Cunningham, Merce, 239 Cybermohalla, 207–8

362

index

Cyberspace: collectivism and, 312; command over, 169 n. 12; popular art criticism and, 3 Czensky, Margit, 208 Dada movement: avant-garde art and, 137; dissensus and dissent in, 145; event concept, 136, 138; life span, 149 n. 6. See also Paris Dada Danto, Arthur, 4 Darwish, Mahmoud, 296 David, Jacques-Louis, 70 Death Instinct, The (Mesrine), 299 Debord, Guy, 13, 298–99 de Chirico, Giorgio, 45 Deconstruction, 3, 262 Degeneracy, 24, 241–42, 250–55, 258 Delacroix, Eugène, 20, 52–54, 60–67 Deleuze, Gilles, 188, 301–5, 308, 309 Demetaphorization, 21, 111, 112, 124, 129–30 Democracy: community and, 2; as empty place, 275; as montage of forms, 85; political theory and, 1, 86, 107 Dent, Tory, 102 Derrida, Jacques, 270, 298 Desire: aesthetics free from, 37; ethics and, 300; hidden, 41; unconscious and, 88, 93–95, 292 n. 10 Diaries, 207–8 Diaspora, 21, 125–26, 128 Digital House, 161–63 Dijkstra, Rineke, 45 Dimbleby, Jonathan, 296 Dinkeloo, John, 179, 181–83 Disagreement (Rancière), 8 Disidentification, 8, 11, 21, 23, 123, 130, 327, 329 Dissensus, 141, 145 Dissent: avant-garde art and, 85; Dadaist, 145; political, 21, 86–89; social equilibrium and, 84, 86 Dividuation, 188

Dobriner, William, 153, 156 Documenta 11, 200, 201, 208 Dorléac, Laurence Bertrand, 213–14 n. 10 Dow Chemical, 186, 190 Du, Wang, 44, 46 Duchamp, Marcel, 197 Duct tape, 228–30 Dymaxion House, 174 E-activism, 312 Eden, Eden, Eden (Guyotat), 25, 309, 310 Eisenman, Peter, 175 Éluard, Paul, 135 Embryologic Houses, 174 Emergency Detention Act, 249 End of art, 4, 20, 33, 51, 52, 55, 76 n. 9 Engelen, Maaike, 206 Enlightenment: aesthetics since, 19, 55; art and sense in, 5, 54–55; revolution and, 298, 311; world war and, 146 Ennemi des lois, L’ (Barrès), 142 Ensslin, Gudrun, 310 Entry of the Crusaders in Constantinople, The (Delacroix), 65–67 Equality: aesthetics and, 36–38; appearance and, 9; beauty and, 86; Jacobin vision of, 297; politics and, 7, 10, 38–39; presence vs. absence of, 8 Eros, 15 Esakov, Liyat, 108 Ethical regime, 5 Ethics: beauty and, 4, 82, 83; desire and, 300; politics and, 40, 49 Eugenics, 256 Exchange value, 200, 210 Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero, The (Delacroix), 61–65 Exile and the Rock Limpet, The (Turner), 58–60

index Face Your World (Heeswijk), 206 Falseness, 8 Fanaticism, 113 Feldman, Hans-Peter, 46 Feminism: militant, 307; radical, 262 n. 9 Film stills, 24 Flatness paradigm, 36 Flexibility, 178 Fluxus, 137, 312 Foster, Hal, 3, 33, 79 Foucault, Michel, 256, 325, 335 Fraser, Andrea, 80, 98, 100, 105, 109 n. 66, 217, 233 French Communist Party, 308 French Revolution, 36–37 Freud, Sigmund, 302, 322 Fukuyama, Francis, 175 Fuller, Buckminster, 174 Fundamentalism, 16 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 118 Gage, John, 72–73 Galiev, Mir Said Sultan, 282 Gates, Bill, 22, 158–61 Gender, 225–26, 238 Gigantism, 112, 128, 130 gimp (software), 207 Globalization: art as space and, 198; avant-garde art and, 2, 22–23; boundaries and, 39; politics and, 25; social formations and, 16; utopia and, 334 God, death of, 93 Godard, Jean-Luc, 25, 34, 42, 47, 295 Good and beauty, 4 Gorin, Jean-Pierre, 25, 295 Graffiti, 229 Graham, Dan, 153 Gramsci, Antonio, 301 Grams, Wolfgang, 313 Gray, Thomas, 72–73 Greek art, 20, 55–56

363

Green, Renée, 313 Greis, Günther, 208 Grosz, George, 253 Ground Zero global village, 174–75 Group love, 301, 302–3 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Freud), 302 Group subjectivity, 300–305, 308–12, 313, 314 Guattari, Félix, 301–5, 309 Guerilla warfare, 301 Guevara, Che, 301 Guns, 296, 297 Guyotat, Pierre, 25, 309, 310 Haacke, Hans, 10, 79 ‘‘Hand on Her Back’’ (Lawler), 102, 103 Hannibal, 67–80 Hardt, Michael, 301 Hariri & Hariri (architecture firm), 161–63 Harmony: aesthetics and, 6, 21, 82, 89, 92, 253; beauty and, 83, 91–92, 100, 106–7; community and, 87, 94, 116–17 Hatoum, Mona, 111–12, 122–30 Haussmann, Raoul, 253 Hayden, Delores, 155 Hayes, Sharon, 313 Hay, Harry, 248, 255, 260 Hearing, 126 Hearst, Patty, 313 Heartfield, John, 42 Heeswijk, Jeanne van, 206, 209 Hegel, G. W. F., 34, 51–53, 55–60, 67, 76 n. 9 Heidegger, Martin, 126, 128 Herrhausen, Alfred, 313 Heterogeneity, 22, 34, 35, 39, 41, 43, 46–47, 140 Hickey, Dave, 4, 84 Hirschhorn, Thomas, 23, 89–90, 95, 200–6, 209, 215, 232. See also Musée Précaire Albinet

364

index

Histoires du cinéma (Godard), 47 Historical cycles, 119–20 History of the Concept of Time (Heidegger), 126 Hobbes, Thomas, 114, 118, 334 Homogeneity, 34, 154 Homosexuality: aesthetic of, 244; civil rights and, 248, 262 n. 9; government purges of, 248–49; identity, 24, 243, 247, 250, 256, 257; persecution and, 241, 247, 257; signifiers, 238; visibility of, 24, 240, 246 Horace, 114 Horkheimer, Max, 39 Housing subdivisions, 156 ‘‘How Many Pictures’’ (Lawler), 80, 81, 106 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 253 Hugnet, George, 253 Hugo, Victor, 297 Humanitas, 115, 116, 117, 130 Human nature, 114–15 Human Weapon (film), 313 Humor in art, 20, 46, 53, 57–60, 74 Huyghe, Pierre, 22, 164–69 Ici et ailleurs (film), 25, 295–97 Identification of art, 5–7, 12, 23, 32, 36–37. See also Disidentification Identity: citizenship and, 25; class, 153–55, 327–29; collective vs. individual, 228; community and, 13, 88–89, 94; formations, 204; institutional, 95–107; locational, 156, 226; politics, 2, 15–16, 238, 242, 244, 259; as relational surrender, 93; security and, 323–24; subjectivity and, 17; transnational, 327 Ideology: critique of, 13; use of term, 8 Illusion, 8–9 Image archives, 160 Imagined Communities (Anderson), 13

Info-walls, 160 Inoperative Community, The (Nancy), 14 Institutions: of art, 233; critique of, 20–21, 23, 80–81, 96–98, 101, 105; defined, 80; reality of, 107; space outside of, 209 Intelligibility, 21, 31–32, 36, 41, 80, 94, 224, 319 Interactor (software), 206 Internet: collectivism and, 312; command over, 169 n. 12; popular art criticism and, 3 Invisibility, 11 Invitation in art, 20, 47 Irony in art, 53 Islam, 24, 281–82, 285–86, 288–89 Iversen, Margaret, 109 n. 59 Jacobs, Mary Jane, 204 Jacoby, Roberto, 210 Jadidism, 281 Janis, Sidney, 251 Japaridze, Tamar, 121 Jewish identity, 245, 246, 259–60 Johns, Jasper, 96, 238–40, 243–44, 246, 251, 258, 261 Johnson, David K., 248 Jokes in art, 20, 46, 53, 57–60, 74 Just society, 297 Kafka, Franz, 128–29 Kant, Immanuel, 21, 79, 90, 100, 104, 111, 112, 120–22 Karimov, Islam, 288–89 Katz, Jonathan D., 244–45 Kaufman, Robert, 92 Keenan, Tom, 312 Kelly, Mary, 313 Kent State killings, 313 Kester, Grant, 16–17 Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo and Associates, 179, 181–83 Kino-eye, 271, 278, 287 Kino-Eye (Vertov), 278

index Klotz, Nicolas, 327 Kracauer, Siegfried, 173, 175, 178, 188–89 Kramer, Hilton, 258 Krauss, Rosalind, 230 Kristeva, Julia, 301 Kubota, Shigeko, 238 Kwon, Miwon, 16, 18, 226, 227 Lacan, Jacques, 88, 93, 299, 300, 309 Laclau, Ernesto, 89 Laing, R. D., 301 Language: Dada critique of, 137, 138; as technology, 126–27, 128; translation and, 320–21; universal, 320 Lawler, Louise, 83–94; audience address, 95, 102–5; beauty perspective, 80–82, 104–5; contextual art, 101–2; institutional critique, 21, 80–81, 96–98, 101, 105; institutional identity in photographs, 95– 107; placement in aesthetics, 79 Lazarus, Sylvain, 314 Le Bon, Gustave, 302 Lefort, Claude, 267, 275–76, 284, 286–87, 328 Lehmann-Haupt, Hellmut, 258 Lenin/Christ incarnation, 283, 284, 287 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 61 Lessons on Aesthetics (Hegel), 34 Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Schiller), 6, 37, 38, 150 n. 15 LeWitt, Sol, 101 Lieshout, Joep van, 206 Link, Jim, 155 Linniers, Antoine, 308 Lissitzky, El, 12 Laocoön (Lessing), 61 Loss theory, 121–22 Lovink, Geert, 312 Luhmann, Niklas, 205 Lynn, Greg, 174 Lyotard, Jean-François, 6, 40, 320

365

Made in USA (film), 42 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 36 Malraux, André, 32–34 Mannheim, Karl, 335 Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov), 24, 268–70, 274, 277, 278–80, 284 Man without Content, The (Agamben), 76 n. 9 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 4 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 252–53, 254–55 Marxism: collectivity and, 13; neoMarxist political philosophy, 89; political turn in, 25; utopianism of, 299 Mass customization, 22, 174–91 Mass ornament, 173, 175, 178, 186–90 Massumi, Brian, 303–4 Mathemes, 300, 311 Mattachine Foundation, 248 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 209 Maurras, Charles, 142 McCarran Act, 249 McCarran rider, 248 McCarthyism, 24, 238, 241–42, 245, 248, 250, 256 McKenzie, Evan, 156 Measures of Distance (Hatoum), 124, 125, 127 Meinhof, Ulrike, 307 Melancholy panic, 113, 116, 119, 121 Merz collages (Schwitters), 251– 55, 258 Mesrine, Jacques, 299 Metaphors: communication and, 120; fraternity of, 47; identification and, 1, 120; loss theory and, 121–22; optical, 278; productive, 112; secrecy and, 245–46; of visuality, 116. See also Demetaphorization Metapolitics, 8, 295 Michelson, Annette, 272, 277, 282, 284, 289 Microtopias, 86, 89, 144

366

index

Migration, 23, 167, 230, 320 Militance, ethical: discourse of terror and, 25, 294, 297–98; group form and, 306–7, 308, 311–12, 314; militant theorum, 299; militarization vs., 25, 295; paramilitary terror and, 297; political collectivity and, 300–301 Mills, C. Wright, 176, 178 Minimalist art, 105, 109 n. 59 Mirrors in architecture, 172–73, 176, 186–87, 191 Mitchell, Juliette, 307 Mitchell, W. J. T., 160–61 Mobility, 156–57, 163 Modern art, 51–53 Modernity: anti-aesthetic in, 51, 55; atomism of, 15; imaginary and, 85; modernist formalism, 3, 6; shift to postmodernity, 20, 40, 44 Moholy-Nagy, László, 252 Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl, 252, 254 Moore, Gene, 239 More, Thomas, 335 Morris, Rosalind, 283 Motherwell, Robert, 252, 253 Mouffe, Chantal, 89 Mouli-Julienne X (Hatoum), 124, 129 Moving Pictures (exhibition), 45 Multiculturalism, 319, 323 Musée Précaire Albinet, 215–16, 227, 229–34; artists in, 219–20, 224; art spectators and, 225; description, 218–19, 222–23; field trips, 220–21; gender and, 225–26; institutional authenticity and, 23, 217; neighborhood of, 235 n. 7, 236 n. 13; speakers in, 220; text in, 224; transparency and, 217, 224, 228 Museums: critique and, 10; frame of, 23; homogeneity vs. heterogeneity and, 36; without walls, 33–34 Muslim Communist Party, 280–81

Mystery in art, 20, 47–48 My Terrorist (documentary), 313 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 2, 12, 14–16, 130, 272, 327 Napoleon Bonaparte, 59 Nationalism, 13 Nazism, 241–42, 247, 248–50, 252, 255–57, 259 Negation. See Anti-aesthetic Negativity in art, 57 Negri, Antonio, 301, 305, 309, 311 Neo-Dada, 24, 238–61; aesthetics, 246; stereotypes and, 258 Nihilism, 138, 139, 148 Northrop, Douglas, 288 Objectivity: humor and, 58; subjectivity vs., 57 Oedipalization, 303, 305 Oiticica, Hélio, 209 On Beauty and Being Just (Scarry), 82, 83–87 ‘‘Once there was a little boy and everything turned out Alright. The End’’ (Lawler), 98, 99 On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life (Santner), 80, 82 Origins of Totalitarianism, The (Arendt), 247 Palestinian Revolution, 295–97 Paradigm of flatness, 36 Paris Dada, 22, 134–36, 139–40, 145, 149; art/life boundary in, 138, 148; Barrès trial, 22, 141–44, 146–48; critique of language event, 137, 138; objectives of, 146; St.-Julien visit, 136–41 Partially Buried (Green), 313 Paternalism, 306 Pelzer, Birgit, 80 People: appearance and, 9; collectivity and community vs., 2, 11–12;

index depsychologizing, 309; divided, 8– 9, 10; presence vs. absence of, 9; utopianism and, 12 Péret, Benjamin, 146 Photography: double use of, 33–34; heterogeneity and, 34, 35; reproducibility of, 36; uniqueness of, 36, 40 Picabia, Francis, 135, 137 Pictorial narratives, 20, 61, 64–67, 68–69, 71–74 Piscator, Erwin, 239 Place in the Sun, A (film), 47 Places of fiction, 11 Plato, 86–87 Poetic regime, 5 Pogacar, Tadej, 18 Political persecution, 240 Politics: of aesthetics, 19, 31–50; aesthetics aspect, 2, 6, 8, 19, 22, 82, 143–44, 318; appearance and, 7–11; beauty and, 82, 83–84, 86; of civility, 25, 317–19, 326; community and, 1–2; consuming, 156–57, 168; equality and, 7; fundamentalist, 2; globalization of, 25; identitarian, 2, 15–16, 238, 242; independencies, 156; metapolitics, 8, 295; nationalist, 2; people divided and, 8–9; relational art and, 18; subjectivization and, 8, 10; truth of, 8; of violence, 25; visibility and, 167– 69, 333–34. See also Marxism; Socialism Post-Communism, 269–70 Postmodernity: anti-aesthetic in, 51, 79, 95; shift to, 40, 44 Potrˇc, Marjetica, 23, 197–99 Praz, Mario, 258 Precariousness (précarité), 215–17, 219, 224, 227–28, 232–33 Pregnant moment theory, 53, 61, 67– 68, 77 n. 21 Presence and absence, 8, 9, 31–32

367

Privatopia (McKenzie), 156 Proll, Astrid, 306 Promise of a Dream (Rowbowtham), 301 Proyecto Venus, 210–11 Psychologie des foules (Le Bon), 302 Racism, 16, 333–34 raf (Red Army Faction), 305–7, 308, 310 Rancière, Jacques: aesthetic regime, 140, 143; aesthetics defined, 5, 233; aesthetics of politics, 22, 144, 150 n. 17; collectivity and people concept, 2; community and sense, 157; critique of postmodern meditations, 20, 75 n. 4; democratic politics theory, 1, 86, 107; disagreement concept, 260–61; double effect characteristic, 109–10 n. 68; end of art narratives, 7, 20; historicization of aesthetics, 6–7; identity politics theory, 242; partitioning the sensible, 8, 319–20, 321; politics and invisibility, 167–68, 322; politics of Dada, 141 Rashid, Ahmed, 281, 288 Rauschenberg, Robert, 24, 34, 36, 40, 238–40, 244–46, 251, 258, 261 Rawls, John, 83 Realities: appearances vs., 8, 9, 10; exposing contradictions and, 10; fiction vs., 49; institutionalized, 107 Reason, 6 Red Army Faction (raf), 305–7, 308, 310 Red Brigade, 308 Red Scarf, The (Badiou), 294 Red thinking, 25, 295, 305–8 Relational aesthetics, 20, 22, 83–86, 89, 99, 105, 144–45, 218 Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud), 18, 83–86, 105, 136 Relocation, 154–55 Reverdy, Pierre, 137

368

index

Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges, 135, 139 Richter, Gerhard, 25, 310 Ricoeur, Paul, 335 Road Ahead, The (Gates), 158 Roche, Kevin, 179, 180, 183, 186 Roheim, Geza, 283 Rokeby Venus (Velázquez), 34 Romantic art period, 52, 61–78; anxiety over contemporary art, 51; humor and, 53, 57–60, 74; irony and, 53; self and art in, 20, 54–56 Rosenthal, Rachel, 24, 238–39, 243, 245 Rosenzweig, Franz, 82, 92–93 Rosler, Martha, 44 Roth, Moira, 238, 243–44, 259–60 Rowbowtham, Sheila, 301 Ruyer, Raymond, 303 Safe houses, 301 Said, Edward, 123 Saint Paul (Badiou), 295 Santner, Eric L., 80, 82, 90, 92–95, 100, 104, 105 Sarai, 23, 207, 209 Scarry, Elaine, 4, 82, 83–87 Schaeffer, Christoph, 208 Schaeffer, John, 118 Schiller, Friedrich, 6, 37, 38, 76 n. 9, 302 Schwitters, Kurt, 24, 241, 250–55, 259 Second Characters (Shaftesbury), 116 Secrecy, 245–46 Security and identity, 323–24 Self and art, 20, 54–56 Self-timers, 306 Sengupta, Shudda, 207 Sennett, Richard, 156–57 Sense: art and, 5, 54–55; avant-garde and, 21; beauty and, 89; defined, 15; equality and, 5; as political problem, 6; relationality and, 14; sensory revolution, 37. See also

Common sense; Communities of sense Sensible, partitioning of, 7–8, 11, 32, 319–20 Sensoriality, 42–43 Sensus communis: asylum in, 122; civic sense of, 111; disidentification and, 21, 112; ethos in, 115; model of, 113. See also Communities of sense Sensus Communis (Schaeffer), 118 Sensus Communis (Shaftesbury), 114, 115–16 Shaftesbury, Lord (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 21, 111, 112, 113–18 Shelley, Percy, 73 She Wasn’t Always a Statue (Lawler), 102 Sierra, Santiago, 89, 95 Silver, Kenneth, 244–45 Simondon, Gilbert, 303 Skene, Cathy, 208 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (som), 176, 178 Small Group, 307 Smithson, Robert, 209 Snow Storm (Turner), 67–70 Social hierarchies, 5 Socialism: collapse of, 2, 12–14, 16, 310; realism, 277 Sociality, 15–16, 19, 21, 158, 161, 163, 195, 286 Social roles, 1–2, 5, 6, 11 Society of the Spectacle, The (Debord), 13 Solidarity, 17, 18, 191, 282, 298, 307, 313 som (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill), 176, 178 Soupault, Phillipe, 137 Space: spacing, 14; art, 209; art as, 198; of conviviality, 144; partitioning of, 31; redistribution of, 48; social reformation of, 23 Spectacle, 13 Specters of Marx (Derrida), 270 Spinoza, Baruch, 303, 311

index

369

Spivak, Gayatri, 285, 288 Stalinism, 276 Star (Johns), 240, 243, 250 Steinberg, Leo, 251, 258 Stevens, George, 47 Stills from film, 24 Straw, Jack, 287 Streamside Day Follies (Huyghe), 22, 164–67 Subjectivity: community and, 21, 89; identity and, 17; objectivity vs., 57; radical thought and, 25; romantic art and, 20, 57–58, 60, 75–76 n. 9 Subjectivization: aesthetics and, 5; politics and, 8, 10, 88, 243 Suburbia and visibility, 153–55, 161 Sun of Venice Going to Sea, The (Turner), 70–74 Surrealism, 148 Symbolism, 48

Ulysses, 39–40 Unconscious: collective, 302; corporate, 173; desire and, 88, 93–95, 292 n. 10; function of, 82, 88, 93; theater of, 322 Unger, Roberto Mangabeira, 211 Union Carbide Corporation case study, 22, 176–90; Bhopal, India plant, 184–87; Danbury headquarters, 179–84, 187; New York headquarters, 176–79 United Architects, 175 Universalism, universality, 4, 6, 111, 121, 188, 222, 225, 295 ‘‘Unlikely Encounters in the Urban Space,’’ 208 Untruth and politics, 8 Unveiling, 285–89 Utopianism, 11–12, 23, 55, 217, 222, 234, 299, 334–36

Tafuri, Manfredo, 175 Tamari, Salah, 296 Technology, 126–28 Telluric autochthony, 298 Terror, 25, 294, 297–98 Thomas Aquinas, 114–15 Thought, weaponization of, 313 Three Songs of Lenin (Vertov), 278– 80, 282, 284–85 Tiller Girls, 173, 175 Toilet art project, 197–98 Tomkins, Calvin, 251 Torok, Maria, 124 Torres, Ana María, 108 Totalitarianism, 16, 85–86, 251 Translation, 319, 320 Truth: beauty and, 53; politics and, 8 Truth and Method (Gadamer), 118 Turner, J. M. W., 20, 52–54, 58–60, 67–74 Turner, Stephen, 199 Twombly, Cy, 251 Tzara, Tristan, 135, 137, 139, 148

Veiel, Andreas, 313 Veiled Empire (Northrop), 288 Veiling, 281–85, 331, 332, 333 Velázquez, Diego, 34, 40 Ventre de Parie, Le (Zola), 42 Vertov, Dziga, 24; caesura and, 272– 75; displacement in, 268, 269; postCommunism and, 269–70, 271; scotoma and, 278–81; Stalinism and, 276–77; unveiling in, 285–89; veil in, 281–85; violence in, 268, 270, 277 Vico, Giambattista, 21, 111, 112, 118–20 Viola, Bill, 45, 48 Violence: ethnic, 16; politics of, 25; ritualized, 21; stills and, 268, 270, 277 Visibility: appearance and, 9; of citizen, 332; class identification and, 153; community of sense as, 31, 41; experience and, 8; forms of, 32, 48; homosexuality and, 240, 246; metaphoric, 322; persons and, 188; pol-

370

index

Visibility (continued) itics and, 167–69, 333; reconfiguring, 11; regimes of, 157; suburbia and, 153–55, 161; translation and, 319; types, 158 Visuality, 111, 113, 116, 117, 119, 122, 170 n. 26 Voilà (exhibition), 44, 46

Weber, Max, 328 White Flag (Johns), 96 White Paintings (Rauschenberg), 244, 246 Wild Ass’s Skin, The (Balzac), 35 WochenKlauser, 17 Women’s Liberation Movement, 307 World as machine, 118

Weapons: radical groups and, 297; virile, 296 Weather Underground, The (film), 313

ˇ zek, Slavoj, 92, 277, 300 Ziˇ Zola, Émile, 42

L I B R A RY O F CO N G R E S S C ATA LO G I N G - I N - P U B L I C AT I O N DATA

Communities of sense : rethinking aesthetics and politics / Beth Hinderliter ... [et al.], eds. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-4497-1 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-4513-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Arts, Modern—20th century—Philosophy. 2. Arts, Modern—20th century—Political aspects. 3. Aesthetics, Modern. 4. Art and society—History—20th century. I. Hinderliter, Beth, 1973– nx456.c66 2009 700.1%030904—dc22 2009012703