What is art’s standard claim to the political? ‘Art’ is a general term used in contemporary culture that, firstly, designates the images it produces as a correlate of the real, a real that is supposedly free from law and that embodies uncertainty, contingency and flux. At the same time, this claim to the real is reliant upon the nature of the images that art produces; upon their occupying a particular space that manifests the innate and essential character of freedom. On account of this condition of image-reality, art has come to symbolize an image of freedom from law, a prepolitical state of infinite and dynamic uncertainty, openness and flux; yet at the same time, art has tasked itself with the labour of achieving freedom, in the project of social emancipation.
Two contradictory points follow from these characteristics. The first is that a certain theory of aesthetic form emerges here, characterized by the claim of the instability of the image as a condition that appeals to a universal and prelinguistic experience. This produces an ontology that is tied to a certain epistemology. For instance, in dialectical critical theory, the alterity of the real, manifest as aesthetic experience, is mapped onto a potential political project of social freedom. Thus, ironically, what art is already supposed to possess inherently, it must now achieve in actuality: it must realize its essence in the given. Secondly, this diagnosis of art is centred on a moral axis that smacks of both Platonic philosophy and Judeo-Christian theology: Images are powerful because they are real, slippery and abstract; images dupe us into believing that the malign forces in our lives are natural, when in fact they are constructed. But at the same time images are weak, because they are incapable of achieving emancipation in political terms; they can only gesture towards this potential. Actual images are considered to be disappointingly weak, with no power to effect social change, since the image abides by the normative systems in which it operates, and in fact it gives rise to the very malign power that demands critique. This mode of critique rehearses the standards of dominance that it rails against, since it invests in and invents the fiction of stable forms of power that it seeks to free itself from. In order to sustain this critique, art and those systems must be somehow rendered unreal, called into question as ‘mere images’, surpassed and destroyed in favour of a more pure form of reality. Once Art is understood as representational and interpretative in a particular modality, it becomes something that supposedly hampers a natural access to the real in itself, since art is never anything but always something. Which means that images are considered to be weak, but special.
These points connect to the paradigm of difference around which critique is centred, and which produces these contradictions that I’m spelling out: Art is considered to be different from the norm, but it must also struggle to be different. On the other hand, art is simultaneously considered not to be different from the norm, and must struggle to locate itself in empirical reality as part of the social. It must struggle to normalize itself in particular ways.
As a consequence of these contradictions, art achieved a new self-consciousness. It began to understand itself as being constituted by this dilemma of its own invention, but from which it could not escape. And post-conceptual ironic forms of practice, including Institutional Critique, inform us readily that art is in crisis and will stay in crisis due to its habituation to this critical methodology: Art justifies itself, as art, by reflecting this condition; by giving us the facts about its own materiality and ideals, its own limits and failures. It becomes a knowledge economy, a metacritical reflection upon its own tragedy, and a manifestation of itself as loss.
So one of the elements I want to address today is how art has attempted to escape these dead ends, in part by claiming for itself some sort of science through and with the image.1 I want to press home how very often this claim towards scientificity has problematically reproduced a self-annihilating culture of art—produced yet another form of self-hatred, based in a resentment of the mediating faculty of the image.
This scientism proposed as a new self-conscious framework has embedded itself as the primary paradigm of artistic critique, as a way in which art in contemporary culture is more than comfortable in defining itself. It can easily be recognized as the foundational moment of many art practices that are regarded as conceptual or post-conceptual. For example, it was taken up in the false nihilism of BritArt; it swept through the Philistinism of the post-punk world; lapsed into the houses of relational aesthetics; it has been reviewed under the auspices of ‘glam’ or even a committed reenactment of cultural and political stories; claimed woefully, but with a certain due pleasure, through the games of irony, and harnessed with the new ‘edgy cool’ in an aesthetics of dispassion, dispossession and cold-war technologies that reoccupy the terrain of the sublime. It has exerted a constraining dominance over art by defining the operations of art in terms of a persistent claim for difference, naively constrained within its own universalizing rule of infinitudinal pluralism, and as such is capable only of an arbitrary commitment to the language that it takes up (its form and matter).
In addition, certain claims towards science have tied together too quickly the moral, the political, and the scientific as the connective tissue of the artwork. Here I mean art practices which, in the name of materialism, turn to method over form: the empirical research project, the phenomenal experience, the ‘you just had to be there’ moment where artworks turn towards (supposedly) ‘unmediated’ and pure experience as the measure of art’s newfound delivery of the real. Much performance art is testament to this correlation between the real, the unmediated image, and the claim for a politicized practice, as is the employment of the aesthetics of immediacy in documentary-inspired art.2
What I’m describing here is the following problem: artistic practice has often sought to embed itself within certain territories that we might call ‘scientific’ only in a weak sense. It has done this in order to escape the problematic weight of mediation that it carries, so as to better progress towards the achievement of what it thinks of as a more pure form. In order to do so, the work must abstract itself from itself, and achieve freedom from the problematic ideality of representation. It must become invisible. The concept of image-as-mediation now becomes the dominant target of, and the victim of, the mission to undo actual material power—at least this is the poetic claim that is made.
An example of this connection to science can be seen in popular artworks that privilege the cult of the processual and the predilection for the temporal. And to me, this is completely illogical. A denial of representation (a kind of invisibility) is correlated with a cumulative gain for an egalitarian concept of visibility in a political sense. Following this logic, if a representational politics is evacuated, then we attain the ‘free appearance’ of the multitude. This strange correspondence between the annihilation of mediation and the access to the real is as evident in the history of the dematerialization of the artwork of the 60s, as in attempts to privilege the significance of our physical forms of being together, towards life, as in those practices that we saw in 80s and 90s realism.3
I would argue that material-based practices and realist practices present two faces of a faith in empiricism that goes unaccounted for in practice. In them we find an interest in the objecthood, temporality, materiality, entropy and lifespan of the artwork shown to us as a set of processes, or as a presentation of its existence as part of the quotidian.4 On one hand we encounter the idealization of the object made available through phenomenology, on the other hand the idealization of the subject that can depict ‘world’ as a specific condition. In both cases, Art must turn to the facts of life, to the matter of life, in order to get its business in order and to move beyond the false fictions that are stirred up through and by the image—an image which it associates with the irrational faith of a universal and irrational aesthetics: the bulwark to any science. In order to deny the false idealising function of art, then, the empirical is advocated as the real path to a more true and more real reality, as if to leave behind the confines of art as category-form.5
This kind of attempted escape from art into science is in fact built into art’s standard critical method. All of this adds up to a predilection for a certain paradigm of art, and articulates a kind of ‘spontaneous philosophy of artists’. Despite the supposed premise of a radical unbinding from the conditions that would constrain the image to specific referents, and despite the claim that art is now free from the dominance of the principle of freedom, in fact this principle is reasserted in new terms, terms that are compliant, conservative, and really unable to see beyond an existing set of conditions that define human agency—precisely because they are obsessed with human agency and its power. So what we can’t get our hands on here is a general theory of aesthetics that is capable of expressing reality in such a way that we can consider how images participate in the structure of the real.
We are faced with an art that is defined through its purchase in difference; art’s employment of science embodies this difference. Understanding this, we must distinguish this relative notion of difference from the potential for a form of difference that can only be purchased by refusing contingency as a paradigmatic thought for difference. Freedom, in the contexts that I have described, is understood as the nature and the task of art; and this is asserted on the basis of a theoretical connection between image and reality—the notion that these two are innately connected. This is manifested in practice in art’s critical method, which exhibits its core values. But these methods are in fact false. These methods, in turn, have resulted in a discourse of tragedy and crisis: the figuring of finitude. In other words, they leave art at a loss. The line that has been drawn between the mediated image and the scientific image has exacerbated a form of tragic parlance of the image, and a tragic conception of the political, where the image as artwork is left to narrate its dual constraint: it is constrained both by its task of vigilance and by its own spontaneous nature.
In these terms, we might think of the relation between art and politics in relation to how politics, by necessity, demands the existence of ideology, since it asks for a programme of some kind; and, as in the context of Althusser’s Philosophy Course for Scientists, how the political demands that the circle of decision produce lines of demarcation.6 That particular discourse of Althusser’s was an attempt to think a form of science and philosophy that couldn’t speak of art at all (art was somewhere there on the trash-heap). For me, one of the key problems with Althusser’s lectures is that they end up in a sort of figuration, which risks becoming a standard philosophy itself, because philosophical-scientific method cannot avoid a thinking of the image that is connected to its disavowal of consistency and stability. As such, the circle of decision that Althusser draws, and which for him is not a circle at all, but rather the line of demarcation that arcs, is in fact very stable in its reproduction of specific methodological principles that figure philosophy as the stamp of ultimate power. I am interested in the way that philosophy often, despite (and because of) itself, produces a figure—and how, at that precise point, art, or the image, is suddenly invited back in.
This reminds us of the essential and grounding distinction between the recognition of the circle as a practice of power which bears no relation to itself and can never know itself, and the production of the circle as the figure of thought as nature reinstating itself in relation to itself. Here we witness the shift from a practice of non-knowledge to a practice that is thoroughly conscious on the one hand, and yet on the other hand relies upon the immemorial turning of the circle as a ceaseless mark of an inaccessible reality. This is the distinction between the production of lines of demarcation and the repetitive stamp of the circle as a more mystical form.7
François Laruelle talks about how no circle is required at all, and as such there is no line of demarcation; and that leads me to ask some other questions that seem unanswered. In The Concept of Non-Photography8 Laruelle says that the circle needn’t be entered in the first place: the assumption that we are always already involved in the circle, and that a philosophy needs to work through it in order to overcome it, is just another mark of spontaneous philosophy (and all philosophy is spontaneous). In which case, how the image operates as part of a scientific matrix becomes another question for me, because it means that we must ask how we account for the category of difference—the kind of difference that Laruelle is talking about: a difference that refuses an account of difference, and a concept without difference.
One of the things I should bring up here is that Laruelle makes me wonder whether this idea of a non-differential space of the generic matrix poses some particular threats to art as we know it; whether it is threatening to the paradigm that we know and which I have just outlined.
The question for me is: What is the distinction between the paradigm of art as we know it, and another category of art that we could imagine in this new configuration? I ask this because naming is crucial to politics. And I want to really rethink the question of how we employ the name of art, and what that means when we are producing these things that we call ‘art objects’. In Laruelle, I have the feeling that art itself—as a general category—is put at risk: because why bother producing this thing that we call art if the level of science is already achieved, a level where the image is already adequate to the real? Here we can identify two problems: On the one hand, we can say that we are revisiting some sort of pragmatism: we’re already doing it, just do what comes naturally…. And, of course, if we just do what comes naturally, well, the risk is that art’s ‘critical’ claim will persist within the same old aesthetic/ethical standards. This non-standard political or scientific moment in itself risks a pragmatic naturalism that would turn a complex refusal of existing structures into an unapologetic and naive affirmation of the status quo and a new ontological normativity. If art already embodies the potential of a non-standard existence, would this not mean that we would be stuck in a semantic game of interpretational formalism: reinterpreting the artwork in novel terms but without altering the principles of its production? On the other hand, what possibility remains for any investment in the category ‘Art’, and what is produced under its name? Is the generic matrix in the end an intolerant matrix, with its own standards conditional upon the assertion of another naturalism?9
I think there are certain risks in the theory that I’m interesting in exploring and which are necessary; and which are also vital in terms of art-making itself, because when I make art, I’m constantly thinking about this: I don’t want to make art under the name ‘Art’ as I know it; but I’m an artist, I’m making art! So what is it that I’m clinging to? That’s the personal moral question: What is it that I’m clinging to, when I say I’m an artist? Does it (‘art’) matter, and how does it matter, and what are the politics of that mattering when we do not invest in a concept of art’s causal relation to the political, nor one of its essential relation to the real? This is something I’m working through constantly in my practice, something my practice is constantly questioning: The role of naming, the authority of producing names, the authority that art has in generating force in the name of that production, and the way that art cannot apologise for the fact that it is an image, that it mediates, and that it can be a participant in organising and producing power. This returns us to the question of the necessity of the name and its operation within and as another system of power: the name beyond aesthetics.
I think that a lot of these theories that we inherit from art practice very much assume stable and fixed moral identities that are often located within their claims to the invisible, to dispersion and to pluralism. And these theories are where we see the standard moral definition of a liberal arts practice, where ‘evil’ power is ‘over there’ and we can just go and work out our critique of it, and art is ‘good’ and is ‘over here’. Extending from this is the guilt-laden critique of art’s self-conscious grappling with its own corruption, and its love affair with critiques that would antagonise and brutalise its own set of standards. So that, if art is good, then it must deny itself. Often, as I have tried to demonstrate here today, the way in which it denies itself is by performing this very weak ‘science’ for which the mediated image is the prime target. In doing so, however, it reinstates both the mysticism of aesthetics as a process, and, along with it, the reification of the subject. This is my problem with art as it stands. For me, to claim art as science is also to claim some sort of demanding power within the political, and this requires a serious investment in a scientific method and a materialism. This is a question of how an artwork might always already inhabit this science, and also a question of how the artwork articulates that crucial and political shift from standard aesthetics to non-standard aesthetics.
The difficulties that art has faced when attempting to do just this compel us to look at how the images that we construct permit and actually promise such a science, rather than offering the thought of the world that we perceive as its correlate. This might not mean asking what images mean, or if it is possible to mean what we say, but rather understanding their persistence in a mechanics of force, as forces that are mobile and institutionally no more ‘free’ than any other form. To take the image seriously is to understand how images exact force. This is not a modification of art under the name Art, but an interrogation, a traversal, and a leaving behind of the name itself, the name as we know it. This is to understand the power of semblance and to comprehend images as representational action.
An artwork can only effectively participate in such a transformation, then, by participating in an interdisciplinary project of a scientific realism where the force of any concept of art lies in a grasping of relations—what might be understood as a type of montage—that is, direction without ground. This is a leaving behind of the category of the uncategorisable, an unraveling of a politics that requires an order of ontological and non-ontological dimensions, and an overcoming of the fear of representation as a connector to our anxieties of consistency and stability. It is also to understand the image again, as a critical-political project.
1. This science is diverse in interpretation and implementation, and includes an appeal to the aesthetics of science in the name of a materialism, often with an ultimate attempt to think past the humanist-inspired role of the author and to overcome the investment in representationalism. Together their mutual destruction would overcome the faith-based assertions and habits of a self-conscious crisis-ridden and/or naive artistic practice that turn out to guarantee the legitimacy of stable and fixed identities.
2. For instance, the populism of the observational lens common in video and film artworks ranging from socially-committed documentation of warzones or sites of conflict to the fascination with the computer-generated image in an aesthetics of gaming technologies. In both cases the aesthetics of art enjoys producing a mythological association of technology with alterity, objectivity and neutrality.
3. The historical cultural critique of the dematerialization of the art object into or with ‘life’ stands as testament to this faith in invisibility. If the artwork can evade its promise of representation then so much the better—it has merged with ‘life’. This evasion of representation is also evident in modernist painterly abstraction. However, in both cases, for the artwork to be understood as egalitarian it must claim that it produces an egalitarian experience of a special and abstract language; or vice versa, an ordinary language that is offered as a special experience. In this sense, the equality that is aspired to within the denial of representational form is lost through the framework that presents the experience, as much as the claim that the artwork can achieve the great escape from the modality of its actual material (that is, inorganic) construction.
4. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question, What is Postmodernism?’, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Lyotard makes the crucial distinction between two forms of art: those of a social realism and those that move towards another form of realism, and into the territory of the sublime. Performative and processual works are set out as the perfect mode of containing and expressing this shift to another alternative register of thought-perception. However, in Lyotard’s analysis we return to the same problem of a hierarchical iteration of one form of expression versus another: One form of art that better benefits a theory of the real than another.
5. We can see this move towards life again in the legacy of the Duchampian paradigm, which set out the strategy of the convergence of art and life from the 1920s onwards. Here the institutional borders of galleries and artistic and economic power were called into question by artworks and collapsed, on one hand, as a primary form of critique and on the other hand, in order to live out the claim of art as accessing/being its essential reality. The problem here is that the exact conditions of art’s generic paradigm vis-à-vis Duchamp—the principle that art can be anything and therefore must indicate this potentiality of ‘the anything’—encouraged all forms of art to proliferate, but the principle itself that supports this system stands strong. Practices that imagined an outside to the system of Art and their ability to occupy this as a real and occupied space quickly rethought their positions and ended up with the status of ‘institutional critique’. As such, the game of institutional critique lived out its self-conscious reinforcement of the trap of Art’s own mythology. Other approaches to the attack on the concept of art itself deserve more attention here. Work (such as Alan Kaprow’s, for example) that sought to ‘un-art’ the Art paradigm is key, but also demonstrates the problems of the hierarchy of the concept of the genre of the generic over the concept of the generic that would promise the unbinding of all such relations.
6. ‘I entered the necessary circle deliberately. Why? To show even crudely that whilst it is indispensable to leave philosophy in order to understand it, we must guard against the illusion of being able to provide a definition—that is, a knowledge—of philosophy that would be able to radically escape from philosophy or a “meta-philosophy”; one cannot radically escape the circle of philosophy. All objective knowledge of philosophy is in effect at the same time a position within philosophy. […] There is no objective discourse about philosophy that is not itself philosophical’. L. Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays (London: Verso, 1990), 73.
7. P. Macherey, ‘Althusser and the Concept of the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists’, tr. R. Mackay, Parrhesia 6 (2009), 14–27. Macherey’s text identifies certain errors implicit in Althusser’s critique that cannot be accommodated by Althusser’s self-reflexive argument. First Macherey identifies ‘an absolute confidence in the impartial mission of philosophy’. He then goes on to articulate a final problem latent in this description of the circle: ‘This intervention consists in tracing the lines of demarcation, which in reality only retread the lines already traced, and demand to be retraced again, with no assignable issue, in so far as the conflict of forces that it brings to light cannot emerge as a definitive division that would once and for all isolate all its manifestations. One might see in this approach the index, not so much of a vulgar theoreticism, as of a mystique of the philosophical, which would fundamentally be the last word of Althusserianism, a last word which no “autocritique” would succeed in rescinding’ (26).
8. F. Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic and Sequence Press, 2010).
9. Problematically for Laruelle, the concept that stands as the truth upon which the image can be unbound from aesthetics, and by which thought can be free from philosophy, risks producing a more basic form of philosophy. This is both despite and due to a ‘theoretical autonomy of the visual order’ that is, ‘a function of the vision-force alone—of the Identity of the real—rather than of the World’ (Concept of Non-Photography, 76). For it is here that the real remains defined in relation to the image by thought, and non-philosophy cannot give up on its determination of philosophy as the axiom against which it determines its own purchase.