Preface

Marx made the notion sound already like a cliché when he first presented it in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852): “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”¹ The tragedy was the seizing of dictatorial power by Napoleon in 1799, and the farce was the repeating of this act by his nephew Napoleon III in 1851. How could the Bonaparte clan get away with the same power grab twice? Although it seemed that nothing was learned in the repetition, this was not the case according to Marx, for it did clarify an essential point: that the bourgeoisie was only too ready to ditch its democratic values—liberté, égalité, fraternité—if doing so meant that it could retain its economic domination. Alarmed by the 1848 revolution, the ruling class acceded to another emperor, a copy more ridiculous than the original.

In our time, Donald Trump has performed a similar clarification: apparently, many American plutocrats regard the trashing of constitutional laws, the scapegoating of immigrants, and the mobilizing of white supremacists as a small price to pay for even more capital concentration through financial deregulation, tax cuts, and corrupt deal-making. And, like the lumpenproletariat in France then, millions in the United States today have succumbed to “the fascist virus,” which promises to protect them from such exploitation even as it delivers them all the more completely to it.²

If farce follows tragedy, what follows farce? Along with a modicum of clarity has come a lot of bullshit. As the philosopher Harry Frankfurt argued in his classic essay on the subject, the liar lies knowingly, and so maintains a relation to truth, whereas the bullshitter cares nothing about veracity, and so is all the more corrosive of it.³ A posttruth politics is a massive problem, of course, but so too is a postshame one. Locally, where does this double predicament leave artists and critics on the Left? Among other effects, it complicates critical methods that aim at exposure. How to demystify a hegemonic order that dismisses its own contradictions? How to belittle a political elite that cannot be embarrassed, or to mock party leaders who thrive on the absurd? How to out-dada a president whose prototype seems to be the child monster Père Ubu of Alfred Jarry? And, in any event, why add outrage to a media economy that thrives on the same?⁴

I take up these questions and many others in the short texts gathered here. Drafted over the last fifteen years, a period punctuated by the financial crisis of 2008 and the perpetual catastrophe that is Trump, these bulletins comment on shifts in art, criticism, and fiction in the face of the current regime of war, terror, and surveillance, as well as of extreme inequality, climate disaster, and media disruption.⁵ In an attempt to gauge this situation, I consider a range of practices, variously, as symptomatic expressions, critical probes, and alternative proposals. The first section focuses on the cultural politics of emergency since 9/11, including the use and abuse of trauma, paranoia, and kitsch. The second part reviews the neoliberal makeover of art institutions during the same period, as both the market and the museum expanded enormously and artists responded, critically and otherwise, to these spectacular changes. Finally, a third group surveys transformations in media as reflected in recent art, film, and fiction; among the phenomena explored here are “machine vision” (signs produced by machines for other machines without a human interface), “operational images” (images that do not represent the world so much as intervene in it), and the algorithmic scripting of information that is so pervasive in our everyday lives.

If all this sounds dire, it is. In many respects we look out on a world that has moved, not only politically but also technologically, beyond our control. And this extreme situation has prompted extreme formulations by artists and critics alike. Thus, for example, Trevor Paglen sees art as a “safe house in the invisible digital sphere,” while Claire Fontaine imagines it as a “human strike” against all scripted identities, even as Hito Steyerl declares that, since subjectivity is colonized by capitalism, we might as well identify with objects.⁶ In this harsh light, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the critical and the dystopian. Sometimes, too, the ambient nihilism of the neoliberal order seems redoubled as much as challenged.⁷ Nevertheless, each of my three sections concludes with practices that offer a “utopian glimmer of fiction.”⁸

The pattern of tragedy followed by farce is still a logic of sorts: history retains a narrative even if it is a bathetic one. Yet perhaps this coherence was an illusion, and, again, what could come after farce anyway? Nothing necessarily. Palliatives like “the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice” or “we must strive for a more perfect union of the nation” hardly soothe anyone anymore. Nothing is guaranteed; everything is a struggle. Again locally, it is no longer clear whether art can depend on its own past, and its present seems institutionally tenuous too. At such a time, one might be forgiven for clutching at etymological straws. Originally a farce (which derives from the French farcir, to stuff) was a comic interlude in a religious play. A farce might be understood, then, as an in-between moment, maybe along the lines of “the morbid interregnum” between old and new political orders articulated by Antonio Gramsci circa 1930. At the very least, an interlude does suggest that another time will arrive.⁹

This is where my other term, debacle, comes into play. It too derives from the French, for “downfall, collapse, disaster,” but its root is débâcler, “to free,” from the Middle French desbacler, “to unbar,” and its literal meaning is “the breaking up of ice on a river,” as in a flood in spring. A debacle is thus a sudden release of force, usually for the bad but possibly for the good. “Debacle” might even point to a dialectic of breaking and making otherwise, with regard to conventions, institutions, and laws alike.¹⁰ Such is the opportunity in the current period of political upheaval: to transform disruptive emergency into structural change, or at least to pressure the cracks in the social order where power can be resisted and reworked.

This is not necessarily wishful thinking. For too long, it is said, the Left has focused on cultural identity and ceded political control to the Right. Yet the cultural realm—museums, universities, and the like—is where many of us can exert what little leverage we do possess. And, lately, we have seen a partial recharging of these institutions, largely as a result of three movements: an increased awareness, thanks to Occupy Wall Street, of the plutocratic order that underwrites most large organizations; a renewed agitation, thanks to Black Lives Matter, regarding the colonialist basis of many great museums, not to mention the racialist hierarchy of almost all staffs; and a reanimated critique, thanks to the #metoo phenomenon, of persistent structures of sexism and patriarchy. There is much to debate in terms of tactics and effects. Yet, certainly one result of these developments is an unexpected return of the museum and the university as possible sites of a reclaimed public sphere, where, at least in principle, critiques can be voiced and alternatives proposed. In any case, they have emerged as pressure points for activist artists and critics, who have worked to explore the tensions between the public commitments of such institutions and the private interests that direct them.¹¹