Let us recall the conversation between a Japanese person and an Inquirer in Heidegger’s On the Way to Language where Heidegger himself appears as the Inquirer and engages in a conversation with his Japanese interlocutor. The conversation begins with a recollection of Count Shuzo Kuki who had studied with Heidegger. Count Kuki is now dead and the Japanese interlocutor tells Heidegger how his Japanese student had devoted himself to reflection on what Japanese call Iki. Heidegger says he recalls conversation with Kuki about that word but he was not sure what it meant. The Japanese interlocutor then says that once Count Kuki had come to Japan he had tried “to consider the nature of Japanese art with the help of European aesthetics.” Heidegger is skeptical if this is at all possible, while the Japanese interlocutor says why not, to which Heidegger responds: “the name aesthetics and what it names grows out of European thinking, out of philosophy. Consequently aesthetic considerations must remain alien to Eastasian thinking.”1
Philosophy
Let me take that conversation now into a different direction, banking on that nearly impossible inhibition, and shift the question to the applicability of not just what Heidegger calls “aesthetic” consideration that must remain alien to Eastasian thinking and thus art. That moment of critical intimacy between Heidegger and his Japanese interlocutor is infinitely superior and path breaking to a moment a couple of hundred years earlier when in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1763) Kant had no other word for Indian art except “grotesque” and “grotesquery.”2
In a world of radical and transformative change, that condition that Heidegger calls “nearly impossible” must be jettisoned in the directions of European ruptures, abandoning its delusional phases of metaphysical certainties about itself—ruptures spreading all over the European history, all the way from Thrasymachus to Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Gramsci, Benjamin and Bakhtin. Away from any systematic consideration of European thinking or aesthetics, but when that thinking and aesthetic has met its own moments of rupture and implosion—predicated upon its own traumas.
On those momentous occasions of traumas, the metanarrative of Europe and European existence comes to share the traumas of the rest of the world—as Aimé Césaire, for example, argued how the European Holocaust and the structural violence of colonialism share a common thread. The categories of regional and global discourses in our understanding of contemporary art already beg the larger question that is embedded in the two opposite end of these two designation—namely local and universal. That universal has been the prerogative of art as produced in Western Europe and North America—and their extended shadow upon the world they call “the Rest.” Not just under the condition we call globalization but more importantly because of the massive democratic uprisings we witness from the area and Muslim world into the heart of Europe, our inherited colonial geography and its implicit categorization of universal and regional is now irrevocably dismantled. From curatorial practices to academic discourses the constitution of the contemporary art is either explicitly or implicitly performed under the shadow of the delusion that has violently termed itself the West and subjected the world to the status of the rest.
Terms such as “Middle East,” “contemporary” or “modern” art or disciplinary formations such as departments of “art history,” namely the very tropes that are to guide our reading of this particular constellation of art, are themselves the most basic, the most flagrant, traps that thinking about these artistic expressions pose. The very designation of this conference3 that is to include “the international body of art theorists and historians, together with regional scholars and professionals in the field,” already exposes the problems we face. Who is an “international art theorist and historian,” and by what authority, and how are we to distinguish them from “regional scholars and professionals?”
Contemporary art in the areas colonially constituted as “the Middle East” are as old as any another region of the world—and yet like any other art produced in any other parts of Asia, Africa, or Latin America it is seen in the shadow of “Western European” and “North American” understanding, canonization, and theorization of the selfsame art. Chiefly responsible for this subjugation are the curatorial policies of art museums and biennales who have to sell their ideas to directorial decisions that cannot imagine an African, an Asian, or a Latin American to picture vision of the world outside the purview of his or her own imagination—these arts can only be seen as the flawed, distorted, no matter how excellent still a bit offbeat version of the audacity of the Western original.
Theorization of the art from the Arab and Muslim world, from the West Asian and North African nations that have all been cast under the colonial shadow of the term “Middle East” has finally reached or perhaps even crossed the line when it must be once and for all liberated from a curatorial and art historical frame of reference almost entirely framed in North American and Western European epistemic prejudices that calls itself “the West” and in which most of these exhibitions and perforce conferences are organized.
The issue for us is entirely epistemic and not in the domain of identity politics. Curators and theorists carrying an Arab or Muslim patronymic are not in any way shape or form exempt from continuing the colonial imaginary of “the Middle East” into the categorical and curatorial decisions they make in how to frame their next exhibition. The fabrication of liminal spaces is not equally inadequate to place these arts in the no-man’s-land of cross border identities, nor is the assumption of postcolonial nation-states any longer sufficient.
Terms such as “modern” or “modernity” are not sufficient either—not because “modernity” in its colonial gestation has had no impact on the art of the world at large, but because the trauma of capitalist modernity with all its calamities and efficacies was far more global than merely European, and thus the Europeanization of the project is precisely the axe we need to grind in the context of our contemporary history.
There is also much housekeeping that needs to be done on the postcolonial side of the divide. By giving the primacy agency to knowledge production of the European project of orientalism and not to the mode and manners of discursive and aesthetic resistance to imperialism (Said), by questioning the ability of the subaltern even to speak in a European language of agency and subjection let alone to sing and dance and paint and photograph (Spivak), by entrapping the fate of the postcolonial subject to the meager domain of liminality (Bhabha), what all these Europeanists have ultimately done is not to provincialize Europe but in fact to recapitalize and recenter Europe as the center of universe. It is not accidental that almost without any exception most of these postcolonial theorists are in fact housed in the department of English and what they call “comparative literature.”
Beginning with Orientalism, the shift to the European site and its manners of representation became the theoretical foci of an entire generation of scholarship—neither of these two thrust—Europe or its representations—having anything to do with the world that these Europeans had sought to dominate but failed precisely because the range and reach of those representations were far too limited. All the while, the world was producing, speaking, singing, dancing, painting, and photographing—but both the myth of the West and those mystified by it could scarcely see or hear or even imagine that world except through either European mimesis or the critic of the European mimesis.
The task is no longer a critique of European representation, but a critical grasp of the manner of non-Western subjection, agential historicity in worlding a map for the longest time covered and glossed over by the singularity of the Western world that either by imperialism or by the critique of that imperialism keeps inscribing itself upon not just the older maps but the ones waiting to surface.
These works of art have been the visual and aesthetic vanguards of the emerging world that cry for self-consciousness, and yet their curatorial condemnation into the cul-de-sac of the horrid colonial legacy of “the Middle East” keeps categorizing them in the compromising context of a politics of location precisely at the sublime moments of their defiance—and then a band of postcolonial theorists from Bengal keep regurgitating the postcolonial condition, and the impossibility of the subaltern speaking, and the liminality of their space and thus while they talk about provincializing Europe they in fact recapitalize it as the center of universe. Argument to provincialize Europe in fact continues to universalize Europe in critical terms, fetishize its particularity beyond history, as if there is anything different about European imperialism of today than myriad of other imperial formation one to twenty centuries earlier. All empires produced knowledge in a manner that serves their interests. Abbasids did the same as did the Sassanids or the Romans, or the Seljuqs, the Mongols, the Timurids, the Mughals, the Ottomans. The radically present and ahistorical disputation of literary critiques who theorize the condition of postcoloniality or their vantage point from the defeated position of the Mughal Empire and the might of British imperialism may in part explain this ahistorical privileging of European imperialism and its particular mode of knowledge production. The critic of this particular empire and its mood of knowledge production must be done in comparative historical terms so that Europe is neither demonized nor beholden, neither fetishized nor sought to be provincialized.
The transversal intersections of the three leitmotifs of trauma, memory, and history that I have suggested in my title I propose as a preliminary frame of reference for us to begin to think of alternative manners of curating and theorizing the contemporaneity of the art that comes to us from the inside of those vanishing borders that can scarcely hold them to any national or regional identity.
Theory
I began this reflection where Heidegger and his Japanese interlocutor had left off about the impossibility of where Asia and Europe could possible meet—aesthetically. Let me now continue with a different path that Walter Mignolo saw opening at the Sharjah Biennial 11 (SB11) in an essay he published on May 8, 2013:
In this fair-haired age of Biennials, Triennials and Quinquennials, there is an anxiety to be the “newest” and a fear of being “behind” on the latest artistic and aesthetic theories. It is refreshing and empowering to have a biennial exhibition like the Sharjah Biennial, which turns its back on the intellectual Euro-American fashions that have dominated, until recently, the “-ennial” market place. Sharjah Biennial 11 drastically deviates our attention from this codification in such events and forces us to revise our assumptions about what art is, what “Biennials” are, and what cultural cartographies we have been accustomed to until now. Sharjah Biennial 11 undeniably achieved what most events that mark a turning point generally accomplish—it announced the desuetude of deep-seated ways of thinking, giving us “an other” conceptual and historical narrative. Re: emerge, Towards a New Cultural Cartography opens up the silenced and marginalized creativity of the “Global South” and “Global East”. What has been announced with Sharjah Biennial 11 is nothing less than the end of an illusion of the successful fiction of western modernity from the European Renaissance through to the European Enlightenment right through to the end of the twentieth century.4
The key question, of course, is how to read what Mignolo rightly terms: “the desuetude of deep-seated ways of thinking, giving us ‘an other’ conceptual and historical narrative.” His very encouraging reading of the Sharjah Biennial 11 is: “when the biennial as an institution moved from western Europe—where it originated—to the Middle East, the result was not an imitation nor was it indicative of a desire to have in the Middle East what Europe had. On the contrary, it was to appropriate the form of the biennial to do what it was not doing in Europe: open spaces for artists, memories, cultures, languages, sensing and knowledge to come together beyond Europe.” I read Mignolo’s magnificent essay less as what has actually happened and more as a map of what is to come. For as he knows very well, the changing center of the globalized capital from London or Paris or New York to Sharjah does not mean the cultural or artistic accouterment of power is going immediately to change course, without a necessary critical intervention of the sort for which he in fact is a perfect example.
On that particular path, where Mignolo’s assessment can begin to mean beyond any politics of location, the creative intersection where an artist attends to historical events and visually remembers them anew inevitably provokes the traumas that have constituted a collective subconscious. In visual and performing arts from West Asia and North Africa there are numerous occasions when the artists attend to these traumatic moments in a manner that restores and digs out new meaning and significance to them. The affective history of these aesthetic experiences of national traumas works through the collective recollections of the uncanny—as read from Nietzsche and Jentsch to Freud—when and where the familiar is made foreign by bringing it up close for a visual or performative encounter. These traumatic experiences in contemporary art have two complementary effects: first they posit the traumatic art as “contemporary” by way of a delayed remembrance and thereby historicizing its own past, and second by permanently investing the present with a past it can only forget at the cost of aborting its own agency. The now of this time is always already delayed and the appellation of contemporary to it something memorial.
To bring all the traumatic moments of contemporary history evidenced in the works of art they have produced together, we need (first and foremost) metaphorically to take them all out of their museumizing and curatorial trajectories and begin to look at them anew as the fragments and allegories of something beyond their aggressive commodification in the contemporary art industry. Here Eisenstein and Benjamin come together to read the result as a filmic montage that brings out their untold truth by exposing their fragmented disposition and categorical absence of their manufactured self-sufficiency. Here I have a far less sanguine reading of biennales, art exhibitions, art galleries, and national museum industries of the emerging nation-states like Qatar or UAE. The circularity of the globalized capital that might coagulate in New York one day and in Doha another is not a reliable measure of where and how art needs to be unearthed and theorized.
The intersections of trauma, memory, and history, to me are a far more necessary, reliable, and enduring theoretical grid for us to consider. My contention is that a renewed encounter with two seminal thinkers of the twentieth century are crucial for those of us in the twenty-first who believe in the aftermath of the Green Movement in Iran, the Arab Spring in the Arab world, the rise of the Eurozone crisis and the Indignado in Europe, the Occupy Wall Street in the United States, and now the no less spectacular uprisings in Turkey and Brazil. With all their regional and global repercussions, we have entered a world historic moment when the exhaustion of the postcolonial knowledge production and political praxis has already necessitated the articulation of a post-metaphysical thinking in which we can incorporate the overshadowed theorists of the ephemeral, the fragments, the ruins, and thereby the allegorical, and the carnivalesque. From Benjamin’s fragmented allegories to Bakhtin carnivalesque, we have a spectrum of theoretical thinking that needs to be picked up from the no-man’s-land between Europe and non-Europe to overcome the binary and be more truthful to the emerging geographies of liberation we navigate around the world.
Before you are sent off tangent, as some of my European philosopher friends do, wondering why at this crucial moment of liberation from Eurocentricism I opt for two European thinkers, let me remind you, if I need beyond the rhetorical register of the move, that, in the aftermath of the Eurocentric world, I whose Oriental signs are categorically sous rature/under erasure am no longer either frightened or friendly, neither beholden nor hostile, to thinkers whose mystified European signs I have lifted and pushed into the open. We are already farthest removed from such unnecessary anxieties. In a recently finished and groundbreaking doctoral dissertation, my student Ajay Chaudhary has comparatively examined the work of Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Walter Benjamin, who he argues have dealt with similar and synergistic critiques of modernity through their respective engagement with religious ideas. What emerges in Chaudhary’s work is the proposition that these conversations, now mitigated through a third-party reading, challenges their civilizational divide by way of teasing out their almost identical use of “religion as critique” in the early Frankfurt School authors and thinkers like Al-e Ahmad or Shari’ati. Chaudhary has in effect picked from where Terry Eagleton left off—the full recognition that
Walter Benjamin … presses Marx’s dictum to a parodic extreme. His messianic reading of history forbids him any faith in secular redemption, dismantles all teleological hope, and in an astonishingly bold dialectical stroke locates the sign of salvation in the very unregeneracy of historical life, in its postlapsarian suffering and squalor. The more history presents itself as mortified and devalued, as in the sluggish, spiritually bankrupt world of German Trauerspiel, the more it becomes a negative index of some utterly inconceivable transcendence waiting patiently in the wings …. Only the fragmentary work of art, that which refuses the lures of the aesthetic, of Schein and symbolic totality, can hope to figure forth truth and justice by remaining resolutely silent about them, foregrounding in their place the unredeemed torment of secular times.5
That messianic reading of history projects far-reaching implications for the task we face at the closing junctures of our condition of postcoloniality—for in Richard Wolin’s terms—reading the intersections of experience and materialism and Benjamin’s Passagenwerk:
The … more satisfactory approach to understanding history—and especially history under capitalism—as a dream is consistent with Benjamin’s new self-styled “Copernican turn” in history writing, in which the traditional (read: German historicist) method of conceiving of history is reversed: the past is no longer valued for its own sake …. But only insofar as it is relevant to the present …. In this connection, two additional categories come to occupy pride of place: the categories of awakening and remembrance. The function of both is interrelated. For only insofar as the nature of history as a spell, a trance, a dream, is reflected upon and made conscious—the task of historical remembrance—can humanity hope to awaken therefrom.6
An allegorical or carnivalesque, to bring Bakhtin and Benjamin together, reading of fragments and ruins reaches out for the truth of a center-less world to bring to surface and reveal itself in the acts of remembering itself by way of imagining its future. Because in Benjamin’s conception of allegory the ephemeral restores the most trustworthy, where at the ending game of the postcolonial ruins we might begin to think of where and how our artwork may jell with our emerging world lines—now perhaps best evident most visibly in how two by now entirely fictive nation-states of Iraq and Syria are dismantled to that level of despair that they can now begin to seek the necessary intuition of transcendence in Benjamin’s search for redemption right in the middle of their ruinous fragments. In my book on Shi’ism as a religion of protest, I have extensively demonstrated how the partition of the aesthetics and politics has occasioned this politics of despair. In the emerging organicity, that aesthetic will embrace the political to stage a renewed sense of intuition of transcendence beyond the politically degenerated Islamic juridical scholasticism.
As beyond the parameters of the globalization of the neoliberal bourgeois morality people around the globe begin to come to terms with the manner in which they are to own and to own up to their emerging world, fragments and ruins of the bygone ages now assume renewed allegorical meaning. The aggressive and militant globalization of bourgeois life-forms more than ever necessitates Benjamin’s search for meaning not beyond but through the ruins. That intuition of transcendence the work of art can generate and sustain not despite but through the ruins—as perhaps best evident in Kamal Aljafari, Aydin Aghdashloo, Shirin Neshat’s alphabet that do not really mean in anything, Mona Hatoum’s “Suitcase,” Emily Jacir’s “Sexy Semites.”
Works of art precisely in their ruinous disposition before and after their museumization in any museum of modern art are a contradiction in terms. Outside the galleries, outside the museums, and outside the biennales where the artworks frame themselves to nullity and corporate commodification these ruins are made accessible precisely as ruins, and precisely as fragments of the emerging allegories.
The obscene corporatization of the American art scene has now reached a point where even old-fashioned galleries are losing their sites and momentum to online auctions that has let art critiques writing obituaries for the gallery scenes, which had already deeply compromised the artist by catering to corporate tastes and power. As Jerry Saltz puts it in his “Saltz on the Death of the Gallery Show,” now widely circulated among artists:
… the blood sport of taste is playing out in circles of hedge-fund billionaires and professional curators, many of whom claim to be anti-market. There used to be shared story lines of contemporary art: the way artists developed, exchanged ideas, caromed off each other’s work, engaged with their critics. Now no one knows the narrative; the thread has been lost. Shows go up but don’t seem to have consequences, other than sales or no sales. Nothing builds off much else. Art can’t get traction. A jadedness appears in people who aren’t jaded. Artists enjoying global-market success avoid showing in New York for fear any critical response will interfere with sales. (As if iffy international art stars could have their juggernauts stalled by a measly bad review or two. A critic can only dream.) Ask any artist: They’re all starting to wonder what’s going on … The auction houses are in on the new game as well. Christie’s, in partnership with a company called Y&S, now provides “a venue for emerging artists not yet represented by galleries” and “creates a bridge between young artists and a young audience.” Translation: “We’re cutting out dealers. Come on down. Make a killing.” Thus, unrepresented artists go straight to auction. Work that is sold this way exists only in collector circles. No other artist gets to see it, engage with it, think about it. The public functions of the gallery space and its proprietors—curation, juxtaposition, development—are bypassed and eliminated.7
What I am suggesting here is not the shape of things to come, but the fate of the work of art as it is—all you might say I am suggesting is to create something of a pirate bay for art historians, critics, and theorists, to intercept the thing between that online auction house and that hedge-fund billionaire. Artwork as ruins, remnants, traces, and intercepted allegories of the emerging world, pulling them out of museums and curatorial distortion and doing precisely the opposite of what curators or auctioneers do with them—which is narrating them within palatable clichés systematically twisting the defiant disposition of works of art to make them palatable to banal and boring corporate sponsors.
Was it something of a fateful fact that Passagenwerk/Arcade Projects is only a “torso,” as Richard Wolin puts it, so that the fragmentary disposition of the work would also make it allegorical of a time and place and a thinker on the run for his life only to take it himself. What can Benjamin’s search for a pre- or perhaps post-Kantian conception of history that overcomes Kantian methodological mechanism, and thereafter his reach for Kabala—somewhere in between his “Theological-political fragments” (1920) “Thesis of the philosophy of history” (1940)—mean? The distance between profane history and redemption now must be read against the background of the end of the postcolonial history where upon its allegorical ruins we must cultivate an intuition of transcendence, Benjamin’s “redemption,” that spells out our “Copernican turn.” Visual, performative, poetic and literary arts produced in that prehistory of our emerging presence—their totality is now broken down to the ruins of our emerging allegories.
I look at the expansive work of Ibrahim Mohammed El-Salahi, Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Aydin Aghdashloo, Shazia Sekandar, Mona Hatum, Emily Jacir, Shirin Neshat, Ardeshir Mohassess.8 Nikzad Nodjoumi,9 and scores of other artists I know and admire—and then I read through Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art, featuring works at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art at Doha. I look at the ruins of Youssef Kamal, or Ala Bashir, or I look at the meandering wonders of Charles-Hossein Zendehroudi and Dia Azzawi, Rafik Lahham, or Shakir Hassan Al Said, etc. and I wonder.
What holds the world together or else pulling it apart on its seams is no longer any imperially manufactured axis of “East–West” (or “South–North” for that matter). What holds the world together is what is threatening to tear it asunder—momentous traumas around the globe—from massive labor migrations on a global scale, rampant poverty in and beyond nations, illegal immigration, refugees, environmental catastrophes, regional and global crisis, corporate greed, political corruption, the expansive reach of the surveillance state (as now evident in the Edward Snowden case), and the militarized police brutality when people rise to make themselves heard, one linked to all. Under these circumstances, even nation-states can scarcely mean anything let alone colonially manufactured geographies of imperial domination like the Middle East? It is only in the lazy journalistic and even less excusable curatorial practices that these terms seek to cater to corporate sponsorship, cultural anxieties of the newly minted nation-states, or else the Ninja turtle band of hedge-fund billionaires. Where is the public, and where is the public space, upon which any meaningful art can resonate with the contemporaneity of our realities? If not the false colonial geographies and falsifying corporate framing, where and how then do the sign of contemporary art would make any sense? Let us now ask ourselves why would it be important to dwell on this moment of trauma when through the operation of the Freudian uncanny the artist remembers the things past but in an uncanny way—and let us ask this question along the lines that Walter Benjamin sought to realign the received conception of historical materialism, now read as fragments, and remembrance.
Benjamin detected something in the Arcades that would take a decade or two to come to Roland Barth in his Mythologies (1957), Guy Debord in his La Société du spectacle (1967), and ultimately to Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Rancière—the fetishized transmutation of things to images and thus for images to become reality. From Origin of German Tragic Drama (1925) to Passagenwerk (1940), Benjamin was detecting and cataloguing the emerging constellation of where the fetishized commodification of life and history was taking us. In Terry Eagleton’s reading of Benjamin:
Lukács opposes the artefact to the commodity; Benjamin, in another feat of dialectical impudence, conjures a revolutionary aesthetics from the commodity form itself. The blank, petrified objects of Trauerspiel have undergone a kind of leakage of meaning, an unhinging of signifier and signified, in a world which like that of commodity production knows only the empty, homogeneous time of eternal repetition. The features of this inert, atomized landscape then have to suffer a kind of secondary reification at the hands of the allegorical sign, itself a dead letter or piece of lifeless script. But once all intrinsic meaning has haemorrhaged from the object, in a collapse of the expressive totality which Lukács espouses, any phenomenon can come by the wily resourcefulness of the allegorist to signify absolutely anything else, in a kind of profane parody of the creative naming of God. Allegory thus mimes the leveling, equivalencing operations of the commodity but thereby releases a fresh polyvalence of meaning, as the allegorist grubs among the ruins of once integral meanings to permutate them in startling new ways. Once purged of all mystifying immanence, the allegorical referent can be redeemed into a multiplicity of uses, read against the grain and scandalously reinterpreted in the manner of Kabbala.10
That passage very much outlines the contours of where we are headed in reading the ruins of our postcolonial history in the making of a new liberation geography and the art that must keep it company.
Praxis
My proposal is that we must actively snatch away the work of art that testifies to our world historic changes from their systemic appropriation into outdated museums, cyclical biennales, and passively or actively commodified curatorial practices. Upon the very existence, logic, and rhetoric of the globalized bourgeois public sphere the work of art instantly degenerates into fetishized commodity. Works of art need to be seen as fragments, as ruins, and thus as allegories, and this is precisely what Benjamin considered “the Copernican turn” in reading and minding history,11 which perforce implicates their traumatic memories.
That appropriation is the mark of a self-transcendence in which it no longer matters what our patronymic name is and where we hang our hat and say no to power. This is the time of a complete collapse of absolute identities and thereby alterities. It is not accidental that it is only now, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the flimsy attempts of Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington to declare the “end of history” or to fabricate new enemies for “the West,” in a presumed “clash of civilization,” that Jean-Luc Nancy thinks of being in his Être singulier pluriel/Being Singular Plural (2000), when he addresses the question of how we can speak of a plurality, of a “we” without making the “we” a singular identity. Of course there is no longer any being without “being-with,” that there is no existence without coexistence. For there is no meaning if that meaning is not shared.
Can our contemporary art be anywhere other than on the site and citation of the condition of globality? Is Aljazeera de-Americanizing globality, or as the distinguished Palestinian thinker Azmi Beshara put it glibly, is Aljazeera moving to America or America to Aljazeera? What are the structural links among Azadi, Tahrir, Taksim, Syntagma, Puerta del Sol, and Zuccotti, or the boulevards of Rio de Janeiro? Obama’s drones fly over Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen and kill Muslims, as Muslims dodge and turn around and come back to bomb Boston Marathon or decapitate British soldiers in London. The state of exception is now the rule. Camp Zaatari in Jordan is where the Middle East has finally come to an end. Labor migration, the prospect of a darker Europe, and a more colored United States craft a bizarre trio among Pamela Geller, Brigitte Bardot and Oriana Fallaci, to oppose it, precisely at a moment when the actual work of art produced in the Middle East, or the rest of Asia, Africa, or Latin America has already run away from their clichés.
A new generation of theorization of the work of art requires a revolutionary confiscation of the work of art out of their violently fetishized commodification into any and all forms of institutional framing—from museums to galleries to exhibitions, biennales, etc. In the age of online auctioning, this confiscation too is online—rendering the original entirely superfluous, leaving them to collect dust in private collections, graceless corporate headquarters, empty museum halls, and cyclical biennales: “In the fields with which we are concerned,” let us remember Benjamin’s flashing insight, “knowledge [Erkenntnis] comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows.” We can do without that thunder. This revolutionary confiscation radically decontextualizes the commodified narratives of contemporary art to restore to them their fragmented facts and ruinous disposition—that they are the allegorical remnants of a past that need to be reconstellated (Benjamin’s term) on the fictive and fruitful borderlines of traumas, memories, and history. What we lose from the aura of the work of art, we more than gain in liberating their memories and allowing them a far richer and more fulfilling life where they belong, in the fragile but fertile memories of all our imperfect tenses.
*First published in Contemporary Art from the Middle East: Regional Interactions with Global Art Discourses, Hamid Keshmirshekan (Ed.), (2015).
1See Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language (New York: Harper One, 1982): 1–2.
2Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011): 58. See also “The Sublime and The Beautiful in The Time of Terror” in this volume.
3The conference entitled “Regional vis-à-vis Global Discourses: Contemporary Art from the Middle East” and was held in 2013 at SOAS, University of London. Here the author refers to the introduction to the conference written by its convener Hamid Keshmirshekan (editor’s note).
4See Walter D. Mignolo, “Re: Emerging, Decentring and Delinking, Shifting the Geographies of Sensing, Believing and Knowing” Ibraaz, 8 May 2013, available at: http://www.ibraaz.org/essays/59. Accessed on June 19, 2013. I am grateful to Professor Mignolo for kindly alerting me to this essay.
5Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991): 326.
6Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994): 172.
7Jerry Saltz, “Saltz on the Death of the Gallery Show” (Vulture, 3/30/2013). Available online at: http://www.vulture.com/2013/03/saltz-on-the-death-of-art-gallery-shows.html. Accessed on January 10, 2014.
8See “Ardeshir Mohassess, Etcetera” in this volume.
9See “Nicky Nodjoumi, Nahid Haghighat: Liberating Fragments Against Totalizing Myths” in this volume.
10Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic: 326–327.
11Wolin, Walter Benjamin: 220.