Rex Butler
Undoubtedly, of all the attempts to think a post-capitalist scenario, that of the Russian art theorist Boris Groys is amongst the most interesting. Born 1947 in East Berlin and originally studying mathematical logic at Leningrad University, Groys became interested in the Soviet dissident art of the 1960s and '70s, for which he soon became one of the chief theoreticians and spokespeople. And, although emigrating in 1981 to West Germany, where he undertook a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Miinster and later became a Professor of Aesthetics at the Karlsruhe Centre for Art and Media, he remained interested also in Communist art, both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the final dissolution of the Soviet Socialist Republic in 1991. But, for all of his real-life experience of life under Communism, at no point in his work is Groys simply opposed to it. The book that first made his name (at least in the West) was Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin or The Total Art of Stalinism, published in Germany in 1988, which against all of the usual understandings of the period argues that Stalinism does not at all come to repress or do away with the great experiments of the Russian Contructivists of the teens and '20s, but in fact arrives to realise them. That total renovation of society the first generation of the Russian avant-gardists dreamt of actually comes to pass under the dictatorship of Stalin. And in Groys' much later The Communist Postscript (2006), he insists that Communism has not ended as though defeated by capitalism, but rather ends itself—ends itself in the very form of capitalism. In other words, that triumphant Francis Fukuyama-style universal capitalism of post-1989 (and. in a way, the same thing goes for capitalism from the beginning) is only the effect of a prior Communism. Or, to invert for a moment the premise of this collection, it is a question not of a Communism, that comes after capitalism, but of a capitalism that comes after Communism, a post-Communist capitalism.
In Our Fate as a Living Corpse ...,'an extended interview with Hannah Abdullah and Matthias Benzer for the journal Theory, Culture and Society, Grays says three important things for our purposes here. One: that Communism is in effect the precondition for capitalism, which it allows us to think and make clear to ourselves. So long as there is capitalism, then, there must also be Communism. Historically existing Communism is the only form in which this idea of Communism has ever appeared on earth, and it is therefore always open to be revived in the future. Communism is a "living corpse"—Grays' analogy is that it is like an Egyptian Pharaoh who is potentially able to be dug up after many years and come back to life: "I would not be surprised if the socialist or even the communist projects also came back to life in 800 or 1000 years—and maybe vers successfully too. What I do not believe in at all is the end of communism, because I think that this dream of withdrawing from time and living in eternity is an everlasting dream" (Abdullah and Benzer 2011: 84). Two: in our culture, the only object that is currently like this mummy that comes back to life is art. which similarly, in the form in which it is kept in our museums and art galleries, is preserved against time and is always able to take on a new meaning or relevance. The work of art. that is. is able to break with all exigency, all sense of capitalist emergency, the shortness of time that capitalism (and, according to Grays, some theory) imposes, and occupy another time: a time of eternity or looking back from the end of tilings that Grays will call inetanoia: "Every work of art indicates the transience of the conditions in which this artwork emerges. What the ancients understood very well was ars longa, vita brevis. But the point here is that not only vita is brevis, but also capitalism is ultimately brevis. Capitalism, too, can be outlived" (83). And three: artworks in the museum are exactly one of those objects that exist outside of capitalism and are unable to be exchanged for anything else except other works of art. The space of the museum, properly considered, is a kind of common space, and thus thinking about art in relation to the museum is always to think a certain post-capitalist scenario: "Communism is a Louvre, a British Museum. The circulation of commodities, money, the entire exchange no longer existed. Capitalism was divested of a part of its territory for the purpose of creating something that was meant for eternity and not for time" (84).
We follow Grays' argument here, first through a outlining of his position with regard to the relationship between Plato and the Sophists, which we will see is ultimately that between philosophy and capitalism. We will see Grays defend Plato against the Sophists, which defence he will conceive—along with a number of other thinkers working today—as necessarily involving a break with that otherness and difference associated with post-structuralism and other forms of "weak" thought. Then we will attempt to elaborate Grays' conception of thought as metanoia, which we might understand as a kind of doubling of what is—and which is the truth not only of Communism, but of all authentic thought (including that of several of the post-structuralists). Finally, we will conclude with a consideration of Grays' extraordinary The Communist Postscript, which precisely grasps capitalism (for a moment) as the postscript to Communism, before another Communism.
The revolution that marks contemporary philosophy—and the distance that separates it from the long-running hegemony of post-structuralism—is seen nowhere more clearly than in the recent defence of Plato against the Sophists. Of course, it is found in its most high-profile instance in Alain Badiou's advocacy of Plato in his Being and Event against—for all of his admiration of him—Gilles Deleuze's championing of the Sophists in his The Logic of Sense (see Badiou 2005: 31-7). And Badiou's position has been justified and elaborated at great—indeed, almost inordinate—length by Slavoj Žižek (2012: 52-78) in his recent Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. But it is a defence that art historian Boris Groys also participates in. In some very important pages in his The Communist Postscript, Groys takes as well the side of Plato against the Sophists, arguing that Socrates' "questions break through the smooth, glittering surfaces of sophistical speech and uncover its contradictory, paradoxical core" (Groys 2009: 4).
In an inversion of the commonly held view, that is, it is for Groys the Sophists who do not adequately grasp the paradoxical nature of reason, but rather seek to hide it. While they know that reason is essentially self-contradictory, they attempt in their oratory to constmct logical, consistent argumentative positions, which take only one side (the one that is paying them), although they admit the point of view of the other to be equally valid. As a result, the true nature of reason remains obscure, and this leads to the suspicion in their listeners that there is something hidden beneath what they say. a suspicion that the Sophists, for their part, are happy to play on. In fact, for all of the Sophists' denial of the merits of the other side's case, ultimately they are prepared to compromise. However, this compromise is brought about not logically, but through money, involving the compensation of both sides for accepting the arguments of the other. The Sophists—and Groys undoubtedly means to speak here of such figures as politicians and the official representatives of justice in our society—win either way, which leads to Groys' definition of a commodity (for example, the money the Sophists are paid with). A commodity, says Groys, is a paradox that has lost its paradoxical quality.
As opposed to this, it is Plato who exposes paradox in his dialogues, both through his analysis of the speech of others and in his own (unanalvsed) speech. As a result of such self-exposure. Plato is able to win the trust of his listeners, so much so that, as Groys suggests, "for lengthy periods of time" (Groys 2009: 5)—although this is complicated and we will have to come back to it in what follows—they are spellbound and unable to tear themselves away from him. Here precisely—and this is the basis of the paradoxical and self-contradictory nature of philosophy for Groys—the philosopher is not a "wise man" but merely a "seeker after wisdom" (6). They do not stand anywhere outside of the paradoxes they are remarking on. as with the "dark spaces" (11) of the Sophists. On the contrary, the Platonic philosopher operates entirely within the realm of the paradoxes they speak of. in the "bright light" or "effulgence" (17) of an exposure that would leave no room for "darkness"
We might see more clearly the distinction between Plato and the Sophists in some subtle passages Grays writes concerning the relation of each to doxa or common opinion. Of course, it is often suggested that philosophy begins in Ancient Greece because we had there for the first time with its commercial markets and trade with other countries the free exchange of ideas. And yet—and Deleuze and Guattari argue this also in their What is Philosophy?—it is the breaking with this opinion that constitutes philosophy's defining task (see Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 99-100). And, in many ways. Grays retraces the same trajectory. He begins by noting the situation of our own modern democracies, crossed as they are by rumours, paranoias, conspiracies, characterised we might say by the collapse of the symbolic order. Within this democratic space, each person is entitled to their own opinion, regardless of its truth or coherence. No opinion rules out any other; no opinion understands itself as ruling out any other. (When Grays speaks of the "dark spaces" behind the pseudo-logical surfaces of the Sophists, into which their listeners can enter, he means to speak of the way both that these Sophists'—think here of someone like radio shock jocks—arguments are constructed so that we see ourselves reflected in them and that there is a fundamental lack of curiosity about others' arguments.) And. as Grays (2010: 137-8) goes on to argue in his essay 'Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction' even the famous religious freedom of the West works like this. Not only do the various religions have to tolerate each other, but the atheist has to tolerate the religious, as the religious has to tolerate the atheist. There can be no attempt to refute another's belief by reference to any "fact" or "truth." or to persuade them that one is right. (Indeed, Grays sees much post-structuralist theory working in this manner: its emphasis on "otherness" or "difference" does not truly confront the capitalist marketplace, but merely adds another voice, another opinion, to the chorus).
What, then, is the proper philosophical response to this? Certainly, in one way, the philosopher is only able to add another opinion to all of the others. But, in another way, they must seek to formulate the rule of these conflicting opinions. In a first step, they must note that there are a number of conflicting opinions and that, moreover, each opinion—although it would deny this—clearly acknowledges that there are other opinions, and that it would make no sense outside of them. This insight is essential, but it is ultimately no more than that of the market itself: each opinion is only one of a number of conflicting opinions, without a common measure, but with these differences able to be reconciled via the medium of money. It is the market in the end that judges which opinions are best and by how much. No. the real philosophical insight is not that opinions are contradictory, but that each opinion is self-contradictory. divided from itself, in a way it cannot master or subsume. As Grays (2009: 8-9) writes: "Every speaker says what he intends to mean, but he also says the opposite of this ... For this reason, the philosopher can conceive of what is common to all discourses, the totality of discourses, and can transcend mere opinion in this way without thereby asserting a claim to the truth of his own opinion."
Grays' argument here, however, is complex. As he suggests, it is not a matter of the philosopher simply formulating the truth of the plurality of opinion. This is not only because the philosopher does not offer their own truth but only their own paradox, but also because it is only this paradox that allows us to see this plurality of opinion for the first time. It is what Grays (2009: 16) calls the "icon" that allows us to see for an instant—again, the temporality is very complex—the whole of language. In other words, this totality does not exist before its paradox. (Grays is using the word "icon" here in its Christian meaning of an image that does not refer to a pre-existing original or referent.) It is in this sense that we would say that the contemporary marketplace of ideas is both a falling short of the paradox of philosophy—a not-yet—and a forgetting or covering-over of the paradox of philosophy—an already-past (which is why Grays speaks of the icon holding for only a certain time). It is for this reason that Grays (2009: 25) argues both that philosophy must appropriate the "diabolical reason" of the market—which would otherwise remain hidden and undeveloped—and that the sophism of the market will come to cover over this paradox in order to enclose or "privatise" it again. (At this point. Grays comes close to Hardt and Negri's arguments (2000: 301-3) concerning the way that capitalism draws on or parasitises the previously liberated or deterritorialised state of paradoxical opinion or "commons"—and, indeed, Grays has an essay entitled 'Privatizations, or the Artificial Paradises of Post-Communism' in his 2008 collection Art Power that speaks of just this.) Although formal logic has its own interest in doing away with the third or tertium, following the law of the excluded middle, this compromise is nevertheless always actually brought about by money. This is the inevitable compromising—selling out—of the paradox by both the Sophists and the market. Capitalism does, in fact, get close to self-contradiction. It involves a constant overturning or transgression, but like the Sophist it is assured of a profit no matter what the outcome. As Grays (2009: 24) writes in The Communist Postscript: "If the worker receives higher wages, they can buy more and profits grow. If the worker receives lower wages, savings can be made on labour power and profits continue to grow." It is for this reason that capitalism, like the Sophist, can give the impression that it is not entirely caught up in its own self-contradiction, that somehow behind it there is a "diabolical subject" manipulating these contradictions for its own unknown ends.
How, then, does the philosopher expose the self-contradiction of opinion and the marketplace? How do they actually produce or bring about paradox? Grays provides several examples of this philosophical paradox in action. He begins, of course, with Plato's Socrates, who does not merely uncover the paradoxes of others, but also makes (unremarked) paradox the basis of his method. Grays then suggests Descartes, whose decision to suspend all opinion while living through a moment of doubt is just as paradoxical or self-contradictory as the decision to negate or affirm all opinion. And Husserl and the epochē or bracketing of his transcendental reduction is another form of this. The post-structuralists too. like Bataille, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze and Derrida. are understood—whatever else their limitations—as striving for an ever more radical and self-contradictory paradox. And Stalin himself, like every Communist leader a proper philosopher, was also a great proponent of paradox. As Grays (2009: 29) writes in The Communist Postscript, casting Communism as precisely the fulfilment of the original Platonic inspiration: "The [Communist] exposure, production and appropriation of paradox are genuine philosophical achievements, which empower the philosophers to rule." (Interestingly, given the recent work of Žižek. Grays considers Hegel, whose dialectical method, of course, involves the holding together of seeming opposites, to be not paradoxical, but finally attempting to construct a discourse that is formally-logically consistent). But. again, how to produce this paradox that reveals or. better, actually produces the whole? How to bring about this state in which—as opposed to the Sophists, who secretly choose sides, or the post-structuralists, whose otherness or difference merely repeats the contradictions of the market—opposites are simultaneously true, that is. authentic self-contradiction? In fact. Grays is not always as good on this as he might otherwise be. Perhaps it is his rejection of Hegel that blinds him. (Hegel's notion of "reflexive determination," in which the identity of a thing is given by its standing in for its opposite, for example, would appear to be very useful for Grays' undertaking). Grays' account is in a way clear in its description, but not so strong on its logic. Certainly, as the example above indicates, paradox involves a particular bracketing or suspension along the lines of Descartes' doubt or Husserl's phenomenological reduction, and even a certain finitising or hastening of time, a bringing on of the end. And in a later chapter of The Communist Postscript, Groys will speak of this philosophical strategy using the word "metanoia" (2009: 106). a religious term referring to a change or alteration from the object to the context surrounding the object, brought about by adopting a different perspective, say a shift from life to the after-life.
Indeed, considered properly, "metanoia" in Groys' sense is precisely the attempt to reveal the "transcendental" ground for things. As Groys (2009: 108-9) describes it: "Metanoia. understood as the transition from the usual, worldly, natural perspective to an alternative, universal and metaphysical perspective, entailed the abstraction from one's worldly, 'natural' perspective." This is why paradox allows the whole—in the sense of both the object and its context—to be seen for the first time. And it is for this reason that it is only paradox—and not mere contradiction—that involves the question of both a thing and its opposite. That is. how again to produce the authentic philosophical statement, in which we have at once A and not-A? The point is that, no matter how subversive or transgressive, extreme or extravagant we make a statement, we do not necessarily have a paradox (and this is once more Groys' position with regard to both Bataille and the whole post-structuralist tradition that came after him and so much self-proclaimed radical art). All of this is merely different, another opinion for the sake of the market. It is not authentically self-contradictory. We only have true opposites. paradox, self-contradiction when we attempt to formulate that for which all of these various differences (of opinion of commodities) stand in. Metanoia is the statement of that absence which all that is present takes the place of. Now, the word for that for which all stands in—even in dialectical materialism—is "spirit," which is ultimately a kind of nothingness. This is why, to recall for a moment an argument from Grays' The Total Art of Stalinism. Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov and artist Kazimir Malevich both sought to overcome ordinary linguistic and artistic forms, invent a new language of communicative universality and use it to remodel the world in its image—and do all of this, moreover, on the basis of a certain "nothing," an "all-negating material infinity, a non-objectivity of the world" that "transcended all beliefs and ideologies" (Grays 1992: 31).
However, as Grays' subsequent criticism of Malevich for dubbing his artistic movement Suprematism reveals, this "nothing" is always something; the artist cannot simply transcend all beliefs and ideologies. Malevich falls back into the trap of thinking that his discourse is non-contradictory. This is the unavoidable risk of speaking of the transcendental, which is why the attempt to do so is always self-contradictory, and why Grays can speak of the necessary hiding or covering over of paradox, when this is meant to be rather an outcome of the market. It is to point to the fact that the transcendental is always both transcendent and, insofar as we can think it at all. empirical. Grays puts this in precisely Hegelian terms when he speaks the way that, if there is to be metanoia, there must always be another possible metanoia. in which we ask not merely about the context but about the context of that context, leading back, as Grays (2009:107) suggests, to the "'earlier perspective at a different level of reflection." It is to begin to think—in what Hegel indeed called "reflexive determination"—not that there is some opposite beyond things for which they stand in. but that things are their own opposites. stand in for themselves. (And this would be Grays' response to those "deviationists." a term of Soviet obloquy, who insisted that with regard to dialectical materialism it was not enough to assert the thesis, it was necessary also to deny and negate the opposite of what just had been asserted: "The negation of what has been asserted appears to be a trivial consequence of the first assertion itself. But for dialectical materialism, this second step is logically independent of the first step, and moreover it is this second step that is critical" [Grays 2009: 40-41], In fact, Grays' argument is that this first step is its own denial and negation. Things are already the opposite of their opposite. Or, to employ a Hegelian vocabulary, they are the negation of their negation).
It is for this reason that metanoia leaves us in a radically undecidable position. Dialectical philosophy does not merely propose some new and unrealised transcendental condition for things. Grays (2009: 105) breaks with any Kantian Enlightenment-style infinite striving, which he compares to the "bad infinity" of capitalism. Rather, the radical "anti-utopianism" of the Russian revolution—which is also a form of utopianism—tells us that we are in a world that is post-Enlightenment and post-modern in which there is no longer any rational approach towards the real. Utopia is at once already here (insofar as art and language always go further than capitalism) and can never be realised (not only because capitalism still persists, but because this Utopia could always be the work of the devil). Metanoia operates as a kind of pure doubling of the world, at once irrefutable and undemonstrable, rendering everything at once the same and different. As Grays (2009: 125-6) writes of Soviet Communism: "It is impossible to dismiss the famous claim 'it is done' from the world once and for all simply by referring to factual injustices and shortcomings, for it involved a paradoxical identity of Utopia and anti-utopia, hell and paradise, damnation and salvation" And the example Gray s uses to explain this performative doubling—very reminiscent of Baudrillard's arguments concerning simulation, which are also a perfect instance of the paradoxical metanoia Groys is advocating—is terrorism. The paradox of terrorism, or the so-called "war on terror" we seem to be involved in is not only that random accidents can now always be understood as coming about as a result of terrorist acts, but that the fight against terrorism—with its state of constant surveillance and curtailing of civil liberties—would be the very terrorism anti-terrorism fights against (both in the sense that these infringements are what would occur if we were somehow taken over by terrorists and that these infringements, as seen recently in Britain, are actually what produces home-grown terrorists) (see Baudrillard 1983: 31-2).
We might return once more to Groys' argument that French philosophy's resistance against capitalism fails because capitalism is already self-subverting, because it can be not-Ajust as easily as A. No, we would not oppose capitalism by means of the Other but only by proposing another Reason. It would be the idea that behind capitalism there is always a possible conspiracy, a diabolical subject that plays a game it always wins, insofar as it can profit from seemingly opposed outcomes. But then, as Groys (2009: 24-6) goes on to argue, the aim of the philosophical subject—by which he means the revolutionary subject—is to "appropriate" this diabolical logic by means of a doubling in which it cannot lose. However, at the same time it must also be admitted that capitalism would not be diabolical before its appropriation like this. This is why Groys speaks of the "suspicion" that there is not just capitalism but as well a certain conspiracy behind capitalism. This doubling would undoubtedly be a slander, but. as Groys argues, following Kojeve, the ultimate responsibility for this slander would be seen to lie not with the one making it but with the one about whom it is made. And this is why Groys speaks of this capitalist diabolical reason as a kind of "obscure object" that cannot be seen because it can only ever be reproduced as "black on black." For precisely the aim of these doubling hypotheses is to bring out this obscure object by introducing a split between it and itself, between the world and its transcendental condition, between black and black. It is an exercise motivated by the belief that there is a subject or reason lurking behind appearances; but this subject would not exist until after the attempt to bring it out by means of tiiis doubling, and indeed this doubling is the very subject. The philosophical task begins with a kind of suspicion, and yet it does not want it entirely confirmed, when it would turn into merely another opinion or commodity. (If Groys speaks of a paradox that conceals its paradoxical nature by becoming a commodity, we might equally suggest that a paradox that entirely reveals its paradoxical nature also becomes a commodity. In a way, one paradox is revealed only by another, in what suggests itself as an infinite cascade of paradoxes.)
Following this logic. Grays (2009: 29) suggests that Communism is revolutionary not by opposing capitalism but proposing itself as the diabolical reason behind capitalism. It puts itself forward as an "answer" to the paradoxical nature of capitalism and its commodities, which means as the repressed contradiction behind capitalism. And the great achievement of Soviet philosophy, particularly under Stalin, is the absolute liberation of paradox in this sense. A proper Soviet philosophy would exist, insists Grays, but only insofar as it is able to think its opposite. As he says: "The demand to think and feel globally and with the whole of language was paradoxical insofar as it presupposed that the thought of the Soviet person was both Soviet and anti-Soviet at the same time" (Grays 2009: 70). And the most profound sign of this coming together of Soviet and anti-Soviet thinking is the idea that capitalism is possible only because of Communism, that capitalism becomes visible only from the perspective of Communism. Indeed, this doubling is repeated from both ends, in line with that paradoxical temporality we have previously attempted to outline. We would say that Communism comes after capitalism, as the essential linguistic freeing-up of the restricted economy of the circulation of commodities. This would be Grays' argument that in capitalism large-scale social projects are always unfinished because of a lack of funds, that capitalism is a necessarily unfinished project: "The reason why things are finite, why they are present at all. why they have a form, why they are offered to the gaze of the observer as these concrete objects, is because they are under-financed" (94). And. against this, Communism seeks to grasp things from a radically inetanoic change of perspective (again like that of the religious after-life), which at once sees things as complete and opens them up to another entirely different destiny. But perhaps more profoundly—and paradoxically—Communism can also be seen as coming before capitalism. This is Grays' idea that the true advent of capitalism in the former Soviet Union is to be understood not as any kind of defeat or surpassing of Communism, but on the contrary as the last act of Communism itself, its perestroika or auto-dissolution, as it were. That is, capitalism is possible only because of a prior Communism: the commodity is a forgetting of the paradoxical nature of reason; exchange value is merely the compromise struck between various incommensurable and self-contradictory positions. Again, as Grays explains: "Passing from a project to its context is a necessity for anyone who seeks to grasp the whole. And because the context of Soviet Communism was capitalism, the next step in the realization of Communism had to be the transition from Communism to capitalism. The project of building Communism in a single country is not refuted by this transition, but is instead confirmed and definitively realized" (103-4). If capitalism makes the contradictions of Communism clearer by turning them into commodities, capitalism for its part is able to be explained only because of a certain Communist Reason. As Grays (2009: 123-4) writes of the recent period of post-Soviet privatisation or appropriation of previously Communist resources: "In both cases [Communism and post-Communism], private properly is equally subordinate to a raison d 'état... The post-Communist situation is distinguished by the fact that it reveals the artificiality of capitalism, in that it presents the emergence of capitalism as a purely political project of social reorganization, and not as the result of a 'natural' process of economic development." In other words, if there is a Communist postscript, it is written by Communism itself. Or. indeed—and this brings us back to the Christian origin of the notion of metanoia—if Communism lives on after its death, it is in a sense only because it is already dead. It lives its life as a kind of after-life, as its own postscript, as it were. It lives—to recall what we began by speaking of here—as a work of art lives on, as a "living corpse" that is able to be revived at any moment.
The Communist Postscript is in many regards the logical continuation of Groys' The Total Art of Stalinism, originally published in 1988. There, in a now famous thesis, Grays argues that Stalinism is to be understood not as the enemy of, reaction to or censoring of the avant-garde of Mayakovsky and Malevich. but as its most profound continuation. It is Stalin who inherits—and ultimately realises—the avant-garde ambition for the total making-over of society. In a sense—and here we have a premonition of Grays' analysis to come—Stalin represents a more complete "nothing" than even the Suprematism of Malevich, for he adds the figure of the "diabolical" to it. He is the author who is always missing in the avant-garde, the author exactly in the sense of "demiurge" (Grays 1992: 56), who opens what is up to its transcendental conditions. Indeed, the only thing that Grays does not like about Stalinist art at this stage—this is where he differs from his later Postscript—is its belief that it had effectively brought history to an end. In a complex formulation uniting modernism, post-modernism and anti-modernism. Grays (79) writes that we have post-modernism as the anti-modern in the (Stalinist) modernist idea of a totally harmonious society brought about by the halting of history. This is why Grays sees Stalinist art—again, against its common conception and already as an indication of his later taste for paradox—as essentially eclectic, citational and heterogeneous. And it is a post-historicality that Soviet dissident art (for example, Ilya Kabakov and Erik Bulatov), for all of its apparent opposition to Stalinism, would share. But what Communism did not foresee—and how could it in 1988, the year before the fall of the Berlin Wall?—was that history had one more twist in store for it: the turning of it into capitalism, capitalism as the completion of Communism.
We have the same paradoxical Communism in Grays' essay 'The Logic of Equal Aesthetic Rights' from Art Power. In this essay, Grays argues for a certain universalising or making-equal of all images. But, read carefully, this universality is not a mere plurality. Again. Grays sees the post-modern plurality of simple difference or transgression as merely standing in for the market. Rather, this universality is to be grasped only through paradox, or this universality must itself be paradoxical. In 'The Logic of Equal Aesthetic Rights,' Grays brilliantly inverts the usually understood relationship between the museum and the mass media, between what we might call elitism and populism. In fact, it is not the mass media or popular taste that opens up the otherwise closed or restricted canon of museum or high art images. On the contrary, it is the museum that challenges the prevailing consensus—the consensus of both the market and the media—as to what is (or can be recognised as) the shocking and different. The paradox of the museum is that a new work can enter it only if it resembles nothing inside if it. But implied in this is something more than mere "opinion." The new work of art is also about this newness, about this break it makes with other works of art. It might be able to enter the museum only insofar as it is different from all of the other works in it. but it is also a difference that allows us to see all of these other works for the first time, or at least allows us to see them in a new way. In a complex sense—which bears some relation to what we were saying a moment ago about that fleeting moment during which the listeners are under the speaker's spell in Plato—the new work of art attempts to state the conditions of possibility of all of those other works of art already in the museum. The avant-garde, as Grays (2010: 111) says, produces "transcendental images, in the Kantian [but. as we will see. not quite Kantian] sense of the term." Each new image—as new—is the image that all images now stand in for. But this is paradoxical because this new image is at once, therefore, the same as and different from all other images, which—it demonstrates—were also originally like this. It is for this reason that Grays can speak of each new image at once "clarifying and confusing" (116) the others. That is. again—and here Grays renovates the logic of American art critic Harold Rosenberg in his The Tradition of the New: Grays is profoundly modernist at this point—the image is new only insofar as it reveals all of the others as the same, insofar as it is speaks of what is common to all of them. In fact, as we have seen, this very "wholeness" or '"equality" could not have been seen before this new image. But, it must be emphasised, each new addition has to be able to do this before entering the museum. This is why modernism has constantly to be renewed in order to continue or. to put it otherwise, modernism—in almost a Beckettian sense—is always beginning again from zero. As Grays (2009: 112) writes in The Communist Postscript: "Metanoia leads to a renunciation—namely the renunciation of always doing the same thing, of always following the same path, always seeking to ride out further in some bad infinity. Badiou speaks about fidelity to the revolutionary event. But fidelity to revolution is fidelity to infidelity."
Paradoxically, then, each new image aims at the equality of all images by being the single one different from all of them. This image is therefore self-contradictory, not so much in the sense that it is both the same and different (this will be realised at different times: it is always another that speaks of how it is the same) as because it speaks of all images as the same while it regards itself as different. This is undoubtedly the modern image's (for example, Warhol's) complex relationship to capitalism: it at once stands outside of what it speaks of. like the Sophists, hoping to profit from either alternative (the same or different), and it is a critique of the capitalist necessity to have one image different from another. All of this is why in the essay 'The Weak Universalism' Grays speaks—perhaps against his earlier Kantianism—of all new images being at once transcendental and empirical. Again it would be not simply because they have to be visibly manifested in order to be art, but because, if each new image posits itself as transcendental, it can do so only by rendering all images as empirical. The new arises not merely to replace what has become old and familiar, but to show that what we have previously taken to be new is itself old and familiar. This is why Grovs' "taste" prefers not the otherness or difference of post-modernism but the uniformity or regularity of something like the Bauhaus. It is undoubtedly because from the beginning it realises not merely that all other images are equal but also that its own are equal, seen from the point of view of the transcendental condition it introduces. It is why Grays (2008: 29) speaks, for instance, of Duchamp's readymade—one of the great "transcendental" works of art—as introducing not a difference but a "difference beyond difference": it is a difference that allows all other images to be seen as different; the variety of possible images to be universal; the entire range of visual experience to be covered in the images' difference from each other. The avant-garde work of art does not so much repeat a difference, even a critical one. such as race, gender or class, which society already formulates for itself, but invents a transcendental difference, a difference that does not yet exist, which allows us to see all of those other differences, that is. formulate the actually-existing field of art as such in its sameness or comparability.
But all of this must be treated with great caution. Grays in The Communist Postscript speaks of the way that there can be any number of philosophical paradoxes because these paradoxes do not affect each other; but it is perhaps also true to say that each new entry to the museum becomes harder and harder because each has to double, that is, reveal the transcendental condition of, all of the others. Put simply, it gets more difficult as time goes on to make a work that at once looks like and does not look like other works of art. It is in this sense that we must understand Grays' point that modern art is not a series of liberations or breakings of taboo, which make art easier, but rather a series of reductions or renunciations, a constant introduction of limits or tilings that can no longer be done, which make art harder. And this is Grays' point in 'The Weak Universalism': that any proposed universal must constantly be getting weaker, insofar as it has to keep on including all of those previous "weak" universals. It is just this "weakness" that is Grays' unemphatic. almost invisible avant-garde art—it is what connects Malevich's Black Square, Duchamp's readymades. Fischli and Weiss's remakes of Duchamp's readymades as fabricated products and the Slovenian collective Irwin's Corpse of Art (2003). It is also what explains for Grays the revival of religion and religious images in an age of digitality (and let us not forget that Grays [2008: 29-30] refers to Duchamp's Fountain as a "Christ" among tilings and the art of the readvmade as a "Christianity of the artworld"—in part at least because Christ too in his difference from us constituted us all as the same).
Why is it exactly. Grays asks, that religious images are so suited to the era of mechanical reproduction, when this has previously always been associated with the loss of aura? In his essay 'Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction,' Grays makes the point that what characterises fundamentalism is an adherence not to some inner spiritual truth but to the external form of ritual, by which he means the repeated performance of belief and not belief itself. But Groys then goes on to invert the view that this adherence to the letter is the sign of a "dead" rather than a "living" religion. On the contrary, it is the living religions in their flexibility and adaptation to changing circumstances that are dying today and the dead ones in their observance of outer form and the letter that are flourishing. As Groys writes: "Thus, contemporary religious fundamentalism may be regarded as the most radical product of the European Enlightenment and the materialist [we would add dialectical materialist] view of the world. Religious fundamentalism is religion afterthe death of the spirit, the loss of spirituality" (Groys 2010: 143). That is. if we can say this, if fundamentalism reduces sprit to the letter, this is only because for it this letter is the spirit. Conventional religions, in seeking to adapt themselves, universalise themselves, propose themselves as different and as responsive to difference, reduce themselves to the status of "opinion." and will always eventually run out of the circumstances in which they apply. They are not truly transcendental, and will die out in wishing to retain some "inner" spirit or content outside the letter or law. no matter how minimal. On the other hand, fundamentalism, in being a kind of nothing, in having no inner content but existing only n its reproduction, will live on forever. And this is indeed like digital reproduction, seemingly the very antithesis of these "primitive," non-Western religions. Again, in one of Groys' startling inversions of common sense, he insists that what characterises digital reproduction is precisely not its unchanging code, the way that unlike analogue it reproduces itself perfectly, but the fact that it is now transmissible across a potentially infinite number of plateaus, in a potentially infinite variety of circumstances. Indeed, that apparently "unchanging" code is never seen as such: it is already reproduced, different from itself, from the very beginning (see Groys 2010: 147-9). And this is, for all of Groys'criticism of it, the deepest truth of Christianity. Again, not only is God's Word not some unchanging core of doctrinal orthodoxy, but—as historically has always been the case—only whatever its listeners take from it. And, more than this—this is what allows it to break with doxa and become a true, self-fulfilling prophecy—its proper lesson just is this fact. The fundamental content of Christ's teachings is the very scene of instruction or transmission itself. Put simply, the word of God is always different, but it is also about this difference, that is. it is always different from itself (and one because of the other). As Groys (2009: 73) says, in an undeniably religious locution: "Only those who are themselves flames can pass through the flames unburnt."
All of this accounts for Groys' interest in the new participatory media—blogging. Facebook, Twitter—in which the participants are the audience. Not only, argues Grays, are such social media indebted to the practices of the neo-avant-garde artists of the 1960s, but they actually come to realise the dreams of such Utopians as Joseph Beuys that everyone become an artist (in something of the same way that Stalin came to realise the dreams of the Constructivists). The idea of actually becoming an artist when everybody is already an artist, therefore, is a weak gesture, but it is not altogether nothing. Grays writes at the end of his essay 'The Production of Sincerity' that "when the viewer is involved in the artistic practice from the outset every piece of criticism uttered becomes self-criticism ... To put it bluntly, it is now better to be a dead artist than a bad artist. Though the artist's decision to relinquish exclusive authorship would seem primarily to be in the interest of empowering the viewer, his sacrifice ultimately benefits the artist by liberating his or her work from the cold eye of the uninvolved viewer's judgement" (Grays 2010: 49). It is, of course, the fundamentally Christian idea of the artist living on through their disciples that is at stake here, with the undoubtedly paradoxical corollary that it is the artist's death that is necessary to allow them to live on. And Grays' own critical writing—pursued primarily today through the internet in such journals as e-flux—follows a similar logic. It is transcendental, unsurpassable, indispensable, precisely in its weakness, its uneinphaticness. its non-judgmentality. even its self-erasure and self-contradictions. In a radical sense, as Grays admits, it is not even critical, in the sense of negating, excluding or opposing to the world as it is the way it should be. Rather, Grays' discourse attempts simply to double the world, opposing we might say the world only to itself. The world now. after the revealing of its transcendental condition, which is nothing else but more of the world, is at once unchanged and totally transformed. Like the world after Communism. Indeed, as Grays says of the Utopian ambitions of Communism, in a description that applies also to his own practice: "The politics of inclusion was pursued by many Russian and Eastern European artists even after the break up of the Communist regime. One might say that it is the extension of the paradise of real Socialism in which everything is accepted that had previously been excluded ... This kind of radicalized Utopian inclusivity was often misunderstood as irony, but it is rather a post-historical idyll that sought analogies instead of differences" (Grays 2008: 170). And Grays' point ultimately is that this Utopia has already been realised. Grays is not only a Communist art historian, but the world is already Communist in the most profound sense: it includes everything.
In Grays' writing on art, there are only rarely images or examples. This would be because, as we have tried to make clear, his writing is transcendental: it attempts to propose the conditions that make all images the same. (This is why Grays' writing so suits the internet or, at least, so brilliantly adapts itself to the internet: in the essays Grays writes for e-flux, for example, it is almost as though the images chosen to illustrate his argument are arbitrary, nothing more than a random sampling of a database on contemporary art. At once no image could illustrate what Grays says about art and any image could be seen to illustrate what he lias to say about art.) But one beautiful "image" of what Grays is speaking about is to be found in the essay 'Beyond Diversity' in Art Power. It concerns the rebuilding of an exact replica of the Cathedral of Christ in the middle of Moscow in the late 1990s after it had been torn down by Stalin in 1931. with the site remaining empty for many years before being turned into a public swimming pool some time in the 1960s. Grays' obvious point is that in today's post-Soviet society an original ethnic or religious identity is now replayed as ersatz postmodern diversity. But Grays' more subtle point is that between the two copies of the same tiling or, indeed, introducing a split between what we might see as the same thing is a certain Communist "void" or "absence." As Groys writes: "The Soviet time manifests itself here as an ecstatic interruption of historical time, as a pure absence, as materialized nothingness, as a void, a blank space. So it seems that if this void disappears, nothing will be changed: the deletion will be deleted, and a copy will become identical with the original" (Groys 2008: 161). And here is the Communist metanoia in a nutshell: a kind of "nothing," as figured by that vacant lot or swimming pool, for which everything that is stands in. It is a nothing that separates what is from itself, turning it into a kind of simulacrum or false copy of itself. So that not only can the pre-Communist only be seen as already Post-Communist, but the post-Communist can only be seen as the harbinger or forerunner of a Communism to come. To attempt to think a post-capitalist scenario is precisely a metanoic gesture of this kind.
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— (2008) Art Power. Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press.
— (2009) The Communist Postscript. London: Verso.
— (2010) Going Public. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
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