Neo-Aesthetic Theory E-Book

Miško Šuvakovic

• Herausgeber: Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 536

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

A permanent state of emergency: a neo-aesthetic view on contemporary politics and art Miško Šuvaković describes his experience of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as a "permanent state of emergency". The author explores this perspective in relation to the politics of time (dialectic historicizing) and the politics of space (geographic difference). By mapping visual arts, performance arts, architecture, music, new media and postmedia arts with contemporary theory, philosophy and aesthetics, he challenges established conceptualizations in modern and contemporary art movements.

Leseprobe

MIŠKO ŠUVAKOVIĆ

NEO-AESTHETIC THEORY

COMPLEXITY AND COMPLICITY MUST BE DEFENDED

This book is dedicated with love to my mother, Ljuba Šuvaković

Editor: Tatjana Marković

Translation: Žarko Cvejić, Irena Šentevska,

Branka Nikolić, Goran Kapetanović,

Dragana Starčević, Sonja Bašić

English copy-editing: Chris Prickett

Layout and cover: Nikola Stevanović

Printed and bound in the EU

Miško Šuvaković: Neo-Aesthetic Theory. Complexity and Complicity Must Be Defended.

Vienna: HOLITZER Verlag, 2017

Cover image: Provisional Salta Ensemble, Corridor - Hotel Regina, Vienna, April 5, 2013

Courtesy Provisional Salta Ensemble

© HOLITZER Verlag, Wien 2017

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ISBN 978-3-99012-372-0 ePub

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

POLITICS OF THEORY

1THEORIES OF MODERNISMPolitics of Time and Space

2THE RETURN OF THE POLITICALin Contemporary Aesthetics, Philosophy and Art

3TROUBLES WITH THE ECONOMY, GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORYThe Social Turn

4GRAY ZONES – POLITICAL ECONOMY THROUGH FORMS OF LIFEEleven Theses on Feuerbach, Friedman, Hayek and Speculative Realism

SOCIALISM / COLD WAR / POSTSOCIALISM

5THE AESTHETICS OF DISRUPTIONPlatforms of Avant-Garde Production in Socialist Yugoslavia and Serbia

6CONCEPTUAL ARTThe Yugoslav Case

7BEYOND BORDERSJohn Cage, Cold War Politics and Artistic Experimentation in the Socialist FederalRepublic of Yugoslavia

MUSIC THROUGH AESTHETICS

8THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE SCREEN (AND / OR / AS) EVENTMusical De-Ontologisation

9AESTHETICS, POLITICS AND MUSICThe Context of Contemporary Critical Theory

10MUSIC AND POLITICSThe Reconstruction of Aesthetics and the Contemporary World

CRITICAL ARCHITECTURE

11GENERAL THEORY OF IDEOLOGYArchitecture

12ARCHITECTURE AS CULTURAL PRACTICEThe Market’s Appropriation of the Social or the Ideology of the Multitude

PERFORMANCE ART

13TECHNOLOGIES OF PERFORMANCE IN PERFORMANCE ARTConcepts and Phenomenological Research

14THE AVANT-GARDE: PERFORMANCE AND DANCEIdeologies, Events, Discourses

15DISCOURSES AND DANCEAn Introduction to the Analysis of the Resistance of Philosophy and Theory towards Dance

16THEORETICAL PERFORMANCEPerformative Knowledge

POST-MEDIA ART

17APPROPRIATIONS OF MUSICPostmedia: Music

18BEYOND PAPERPostmedia and Flexible Art

19BIO ARTThe Prehuman / The Human / The Posthuman

20SIMULTANEOUSLY ALWAYS, NOW AND EVERYWHEREA Real Fiction

21MULTIPLE POLITICAL/SEXUAL BODIESBetween the Public and the Intimate

22AUTO-CRITICISM OF SUBJECTIVISATIONPainting as Postmedia Politics

EXPERIMENTAL THEORY

23A CLAUSTROPHOBIC EVENTBare Life

24A NARRATIVEAn Utterly Ordinary Evening – PETIT a

ABOUT THE ESSAYS

LITERATURE

ANNOTATIONS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

01 Provisional Salta Ensemble: State of Exception 1, photo-essay, photomontage, 2011Courtesy Provisional Salta Ensemble

INTRODUCTION

Neo-Aesthetic Theory is oriented toward research and interpretation of THE unmissed encounters between Philosophical Theories and Contemporary Arts.

This book can be read from different positions of understanding, experiences, living, events and interpretations of “contemporarity”, but there is one characteristic and visible platform from which it is written: this is the platform of a permanent state of emergency. The writer of these lines could say, similarly to those who have “strongly” experienced the differences and conflicts of the 20th and early 21st century: my life unwound and is unwinding between the public and private – the depicted and the undepicted – in a permanent state of emergency: communist revolutions, self-governed freedoms from bureaucratic communism, crises of real-socialism, transitional primary accumulations of capital, nationalistic hysterically-paranoid proscription and the establishment of global neo-liberalism and a global crisis. This is something which cannot be overcome even with good intentions or a cheery disposition. It is something which is always played out with consequences. This is why there is a recurrence, in the lines of the letter which follows, with the only weapons which modern man has been able to build-up in his resistance to a permanent state of emergency, and this is a minimum of rationality, a critical approach and radical analysis. The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live in is the norm. We have to reach a concept of history which suits this (Walter Benjamin).

It is the construct that emerges from the encounter between object and subject, between an effect and an affect, or affect and concept or meaning: “But what’s the real or more precise linkage among these texts or topics? – the constitution of a territory (is it literature, the legible, an unordered catalogue of images of life?)” (JeanLouis Schefer).

I would like to get out of the bottle just like that fly which was taught this by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Research, but I am afraid that by coming out of ‘my’ bottle I will find myself in some other bigger or smaller bottle which will once again be mine and for me, for us and for the “lives” of others. If I am always caught in a space and time of supervision, control and regulation – the burnt ships behind me from adolescent pirate stories remain just a spectre of childish fictions and commercial prose – then, carrying out a minimum of rationality, a critical approach and radical analysis remain the means which “keeps” a precarious hope in place of the broken class-based and ethnic “utopias” about God’s graciousness, the Heavenly Kingdom, the island of humanity, brotherhood, equality and freedom, about socialism, about communism, about individual freedoms and liberalism.

But, towards what are a minimum of rationality, a critical approach and radical analysis oriented? Definitely towards that which is caught – meta-physically and existentially – between the undepicted, mute life and the depicted, enunciated life. What is “that” which is in a trap? That which will maybe be recognised, i.e. named as “life”. In other words, there will be word of a state of emergency in which “life” is played out in all the evasions and approaches within the events of contemporarity.

This is a desire for an unfulfilled, real and direct democracy.

It is self-evident that nothing concerning art isself-evident anymore, not its innerlife, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.1

It is self-evident that nothing concerning art isself-evident anytime, not its innerlife, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.

It is self-evident that nothing concerning art isself-evident anywhere, not its innerlife, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.

Note:

“Generally, I hardly ever quote a text as such, but I lightly modify it in such a way as to make it ‘meld’ into my own text. This is much closer to the effect of memory in a text”.2

… thought immanent to the multiple …3

… life immanent to the multiple …

… art immanent to the multiple …

… body immanent to the multiple …

… production immanent to the multiple…

… postproduction immanent to the multiple …

… economy immanent to the multiple …

… time immanent to the multiple …

… politics immanent to the multiple …

… space immanent to the multiple …

1Theodor W. Adorno: Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 2002, 1.

2Jean Louis Schefer: in: Paul Smith “Introduction”, in The Enigmatic Body. Essays on the Arts by Jean Louis Schefer, ed. and trans. Paul Smith,. Cambridge GB.: Cambridge University Press, 1995, xv.

3Alain Badiou: ”So Near! So Far!”, trans. Louise Burehill, in: Deleuze. The Clamor of Being. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 4.

POLITICS OF THEORY

1THEORIES OF MODERNISMPolitics of Time and Space

2THE RETURN OF THE POLITICALin Contemporary Aesthetics, Philosophy and Art

3TROUBLES WITH THE ECONOMY, GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORYThe Social Turn

4GRAY ZONES – POLITICAL ECONOMY THROUGH FORMS OF LIFEEleven Theses on Feuerbach, Friedman, Hayek and Speculative Realism

02 Provisional Salta Ensemble: Shadows - Walking through Paul Chan Shadows, photo-essay, photomontage, 2011Courtesy Provisional Salta Ensemble

1

THEORIES OF MODERNISMPolitics of Time and Space

THE MODERN, MODERNISM, AND REPETITION: NEW/ THE NEWEST

The modern and modernism are artistic, cultural, and social formations that refer to changes in art, culture, and society in historical and geographical terms. The modern and modernism are viewed as formations that should uncover a new “state of affairs” within contemporaneity. On the other hand, viewed ontologically, the modern and modernism are also about redefining the potentially new into a sustainable new or the “tradition of the new” as a permanent search for and realisation of a “different world” as “the horizon of possibility” for the newer than new. This search for and realisation of a “different world” or “new state of affairs” as the horizon of feasible possibilities for the newer than new may be identified with the concept of permanent modernisation.

The modern and modernity are interpreted as situations of a new sensibility of time within contemporaneity. The paradigms of the modern or modernity were established as contexts of Western society, culture, and art between the 18th and the mid-20th centuries.1 The feeling of modernity signifies the possibility of identifying the current moment: the here and now as opposed to the overcoming of the past and an expected future. The modern begins in the history of the West at the moment of an artistic and aesthetic, as well as a cultural and political break with the past as a safe tradition. The modern is characterised by opposing the present or contemporary time of the past – it rejects all narratives of memory, tradition, and history. For instance, Peter Osborne views the modern and modernity as expressions of a specific politics of time:

“Modernity”, we have seen, plays a peculiar dual role as a category of historical periodisation: it designates the contemporaneity of an epoch to the time of its classification; yet it registers this contemporaneity in terms of a qualitatively new, self-transcending temporality which has the simultaneous effect of distancing the present from even that most recent past with which it is thus identified.2

In the European context, the politics of time signifies procedures whereby social, cultural, and artistic phenomena are selected with regard to contemporaneity, which means regarding differences between the past, the contemporary as the new or newer, and the future.

Modernism is a developed and “accelerated” modern. Modernism emerges when the contemporary interval of being here and now is posited as a practice that is superior to all aspects of social life and when the desire for the new is posited as a source of permanent social “breaks” leading either to emancipation or to cultural fashion. Whereas the relatively static modern was characterised by the bourgeois national industrial capitalism of the 18th and the 19th centuries, modernism is characterised by moving from capitalism as an “industrial system of production” toward an internationalised global market system. In other words, the modern is defined by a recognised modernisation of production within national cultures, whereas modernism is determined by a global modernisation of mass consumption. Permanent modernist emancipation refers to processes of social, cultural, and artistic progress that direct human life toward ever-increasing freedom. Permanent fashion refers to the consumerist craving for the new and newer-than-new that over time starts repeating itself, directing itself toward the production, exchange, and consumption of the newest. Modernism is thus a selective political practice that enables a choice that inevitably leads toward the new and newer-than-new.

At this point, the stable model of the bourgeois proprietary modern, based on aesthetic identification by way of a culturally protected privacy and established autonomous art, is replaced by a permanent emergence of ever-newer artistic products with aesthetic or anti-aesthetic properties. Artistic products suggest novelty and consumerist enjoyment in the new, as opposed to the traditional model of identifying within one’s own class and its patriarchal structures. Terry Eagleton has emphasised the class model of the modern aesthetic:

My argument, broadly speaking, is that the category of the aesthetic assumes the importance it does in modern Europe because in speaking of art it speaks of these other matters too, which are at the heart of the middle class’s struggle for political hegemony.3

Eagleton’s discussion of “the ideology of the aesthetic” and then T. J. Clark’s critical identification of, say, the role of Impressionist painting in the construction of modern bourgeois life point to a transition from a static to a dynamised modernity, i.e. liberal modernism:

As the context of bourgeois sociability shifted from community, family and church to commercialised or privately improvised forms—the streets, the cafés and resorts—the resulting consciousness of individual freedom involved more and more an estrangement from older ties; and those imaginative members of the middle class who accepted the norms of freedom, but lacked the economic means to attain them, were spiritually torn by a sense of helpless isolation in an anonymous indifferent mass. By 1880 the enjoying individual becomes rare in Impressionist art; only the private spectacle of nature is left.4

The modern is viewed as the determining context of a realised, urbanised, liberal, and bourgeois contemporaneity. In The Arcades Project, for instance, Benjamin wrote about the analogy between capitalism and nature: “Capitalism was a natural phenomenon with which a new dream-filled sleep came over Europe, and, through it, a reactivation of mythic forces”.5

In his Philosophy of New Music, Adorno critically characterises the realised modern as the “dialectics of loneliness”.6 He thereby identified bourgeois contemporaneity as an effect of alienation in the industrial and emerging market world. Fredric Jameson likewise emphasizes the capitalist character of the liberal modern, regarding modernist abstract art, positing a correspondence between the abstraction of money and that of painting and sculpture: “Modernist abstraction, I believe, is less a function of capital accumulation as such than rather of money itself in a situation of capital accumulation”.7

THE ONTOLOGICAL CORE OF MODERNISM

There is more than one periodisation of modernism. For instance, according to Raymond Williams, modernism is periodised as art after 1950.

“Modernism” as a title for a whole cultural movement and moment has then been retrospective as a general term since the 1950s, thereby stranding the dominant version of “modern” or even “absolute modern” between, say, 1890 and 1940 […] Determining the process which fixed the moment of Modernism is a matter, as so often, of identifying the machinery of selective tradition.8

Regarding Williams’s notion of modernism, I will use the term “high modernism”, dating it in the Western world in the post-World War II period. Unlike Williams, I will use modernism to label various phenomena in society, culture, and art that began around 1900, when there was an accelerated shift of cultural and artistic fashions: Post-Impressionism, various expressionisms, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, Suprematism, Neo-plasticism, Constructivism, Surrealism, Art Deco, Retour à l’ordre, New Objectivity, etc. We may understand Williams’s modernism, that is, in my modification, “high modernism”, as the highest or final stage of international modernisation as a social, cultural, and artistic project.

Historically, modernism, as the phenomenon of acceleration in the sequence of various paradigms of emancipation and types of fashions, signified technological, social, cultural, and artistic changes during the 20th century. In such a periodisation, modernism signified three characteristic phenomenological moments: (1) the break with the past, (2) the establishment of the contemporary, and (3) the anticipation of the future. Every fresh seizure of contemporaneity was signified with the demand that the feeling of confronting the new be repeated regarding the new that had become the old and regarding the future that would become potentially possible only with the next turn from the new that would grow obsolete into the new that has yet to come and be the newest. This obsessive repeatability of attaining the newer-than-new would become the ontological core of modernism.

Thus emerges the formula of permanent repetition: “Times have changed” and again, “Times have changed”, and again […] The consequence is that things no longer stand in the stable traditional or usual way. It seems as though something from the past has become superfluous or impossible,9 and something new from the present has emerged in a way that was erstwhile unthinkable. To its contemporaries, the new therefore always seemed unjustified, opaque, and incomprehensible, although, at the same time, fatally attractive as well. That is probably why Theodor W. Adorno at the beginning of his Aesthetic Theory felt compelled to call for a redefining of the self-evidence of contemporary art: “It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist”.10

With the accelerated shifts of modernist paradigms, art increasingly differed from the real or the ideologically projected ideal tradition of great Western art (Antiquity, Renaissance, Baroque). It became necessary to perform a new interpretation of art and culture simultaneously and in parallel with the emergence of new art within a changed culture. That was probably why Arthur C. Danto made his claim that interpretation was constitutive of modernist art: “My view, philosophically, is that interpretations constitute works of art, so that you do not, as it were, have the artwork on one side and the interpretation on the other”.11

This claim enables the understanding of the modernist notion of “artworld”, which Danto opposed to the tradition of understanding the pure and universal work of art within the modern and an imaginary Western tradition that linked the modern with the timelessness of the classical, i.e. that of Antiquity: “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld”.12 Therefore, the art of modernism must be viewed in its variability as a complex web, intertwining the sensory and the discoursive, and relating to cultural and social contexts.

The modern and modernism traversed the path from an anticipated potentiality, which would be the regime of alternative and avant-garde practice, to a realised potentiality as an attained new with all the consequences that accompany the establishment of artistic, cultural, and social hegemony in relation to other historical and geographical formations. Between anticipating a potentiality and realising it as something new, there comes the demand for something newer than what was already achieved, which leads toward transcending the realised modernity in order to reach an even more characteristic modernity. Modernism was more modern than the modern, and post-World War II modernism was more modern than interwar modernism.

LIBERAL DIFFÉRANCE: MODERNIST PAINTING

The historical debates about modernism were developed on the basis of a canonical definition of the international – and this signifies hegemonic – Western modernism as a grand and totalising post-World War II style. This is the “Western story” of universal modernism and its realised autonomy, i.e., its emancipatory potentiality. Here we will mention Clement Greenberg’s concept of modernist painting and Charles Harrison’s critique of that concept.

Clement Greenberg interpreted the concept of “modernist painting”, as it was established after World War II, ranging from abstract expressionism to post-painterly abstraction, as an expression of a historically directed evolution of the immanent means and effects of painting. Greenberg’s aesthetics of painting is a neo-Kantian aesthetics of liberal artistic creativity with a precise experiential distinction between aesthetic judgement and aesthetic enjoyment in relation to intuitive insight.13 This evolution led from illusionistic realist painting via Impressionism, Expressionism, and Cubism, to “pure abstraction”, free of direct references to literary narratives or sculptural three-dimensionality. Greenberg’s evolutionism posited modernism not as a break with the past, but as a gradual self-reflexive perfection and development of the autonomy of the artistic medium in discovering the immanent nature of painting. The medium of painting thus became the essential topic of a creative treatment of surface:

Modernist painting asks that a literary theme be translated into strictly optical, two-dimensional terms before becoming the subject of pictorial art – which means its being translated in such a way that it entirely loses its literary character […] It should also be understood that the self-criticism of modernist art has never been carried on in any but a spontaneous and subliminal way. It has been altogether a question of practice, immanent to practice and never a topic of theory.14

Greenberg advocated aesthetic formalism based on the transformation of the “modern tradition”:

Thus, Constructivism – in the works of Gabo and Pevsner, and most certainly in the words of Greenberg in 1958 – finally had reached the stage of the “mirage”. What had once been tactile and contingent had become “optical”, what had been rigorously anti-illusionistic in emphasizing weight, physical mass, and process, in foregrounding surface and texture, and in “baring the structural device” had turned into an “illusion of modalities”.15

03 Provisional Salta Ensemble: Claude Monet – Jackson Pollock, photo-essay, photomontage, 2011.Courtesy Provisional Salta Ensemble

Modernist painting might therefore be interpreted as an evolution within the “tradition of modernity”. He understood this notion of evolution, predicated on a modernisation of painting, not in the Marxist sense of “social practice”, but in terms of liberal, i.e., individual mastering of creative skills in art as a free and specialised pursuit of human “self-expression” and “self-positing”. Greenberg’s interpretative discourse recognised the painterly production of Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and the like as exceptional achievements of the modernist evolution whereby the pictorial plane witnessed pictorial inscriptions of the hand or the body of the artist. Those inscriptions could not be related verbally; they are exclusively a painterly trace and as such geared toward an optical effect that one may only indirectly and insecurely verbally present as metaphor in judging a work as such.

In Charles Harrison’s view, Clement Greenberg was the critic who set up terms for periodizing and defining modernism in the sense of identifying the essential properties of a painterly work of art.16 Harrison viewed Greenberg’s method of defining modernism as an essentialist objectivism opposed to the theoretical relativism of the avant-gardes and popular culture. For Greenberg, painting was always a matter of objective taste, rather than a demonstration of a theoretical position in a work of art. Or in Harrison’s words: “For example, asked for evidence that esthetic judgments are indeed involuntary and objective, rather than being governed by specific theories or individual preferences, Greenberg pointed to a ‘consensus (of taste) over time’ which has settled on the defining high point of an artistic tradition”.17

Greenberg’s theory is characterised by his claims that the creative transcends the critical, that artistic practice is governed by intuitions as direct expressions of emotions, and by a direct, all-encompassing experience of the work of art. Therefore, artistic creativity invariably precedes theory, i.e. art theory is merely a secondary addition to the organic wholeness and fullness of artistic expression. Greenberg wrote: “Art is a matter strictly of experience, not of principles”.18

Harrison opposed Greenberg’s neo-Kantianism, which excluded any kind of intellectual engagement with artistic creativity and advanced an intuitive establishment of a unitary and universal model of modernism. In Harrison’s view, in contrast to Greenberg’s “one-dimensional definition of modernism”, the history of modernism after World War II has been determined by two mutually opposed concepts of understanding the character of artistic labour.

The first is Greenberg’s concept of high modernism, based on the link between intuition and taste, which brings the values of the autonomy of abstract painting into a position of aesthetic dogma in Abstract Expressionism and in post-painterly abstraction:

The production of the modern artist, it is assumed, are determined by some special insight into the nature of reality – be it the reality of the natural or of the social or of the psychological world. The work of art is an assertion of the human in the context of the real. Although the values of humanity are seen as “relatively constant”, art of “quality” is a form of stimulus to spiritual change.19

The other voice, and this is Harrison’s innovation, is critical of high modernism, where intuitions, spontaneity, expression, and aesthetics are independent of the semantic and political conditions of contemporary society, culture, and art:

In the second version of the story, the first is taken as given. It is quoted in a spirit of scepticism, not as a true story, but as one typical of a certain culture and rooted in certain interests. The second voice seeks to explain what the first has said, and how it has come to be saying it.20

04 Provisional Salta Ensemble: Robert Morris/Social Context, photo-essay, photomontage, 2013.Courtesy Provisional Salta Ensemble

Harrison’s thesis is that the first voice intended to show that artistic production always and by necessity intuitively preceded theory (the painting of Jackson Pollock and Kenneth Noland). By contrast, the other voice disregards this separation of the creative from the critical and shows that that distinction in artistic positions is not an effect of the nature of art or creative individualism, but a consequence of the organisation of artistic culture in society. This other voice (Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, Robert Morris) is determined by a critical approach that insists on a link between the conceptual and the sensual in the context of social differences and antagonisms.

MODERNISM AND THE NEO-AVANT-GARDE: DIALECTICAL DIFFÉRANCE

If one transferred Harrison’s “second voice” from its Anglo-American context to a European, Asian, or South-American context, the critical potential of the artistic acting against the autonomous aestheticism of high modernism could be identified with the term “neo-avant-garde”. The concept of neo-avant-garde signifies a “second avant-garde” about which rather divergent interpretations exist.

For instance, the early avant-garde of the early 20th century is viewed as original pioneering artistic acting with a pronounced transgressive and innovatory potential. The post-war avant-gardes are identified as institutionalised avant-gardes, i.e. second-hand avant-gardes, remakes of the first (the “historical”) avant-garde in the context of high modernism. For instance, in his retrospective defence of his thesis of the neo-avant-garde as an institutionalised avant-garde, Peter Bürger made the following suggestion:

The argument of Theory of the Avant-garde runs as follows: the neo-avant-gardes adopted the means by which the avant-gardists hoped to bring about the sublation of art. As these means had, in the interim, been accepted by the institution, that is to say, were deployed as internal aesthetic procedures, they could no longer legitimately be linked to a claim to transcend the sphere of art. “The neo-avant-garde institutionalizes the avant-garde as art and thus negates genuinely avant-gardiste intentions”.21

Against Bürger’s conception, one could argue that after World War II the avant-garde realised and concretised those technological utopias and projects of the early avant-gardes that could not be realised before. For instance, solutions in art, design, and architecture that the Soviet avant-garde, Bauhaus, and De Stijl offered on a utopian level became part of the international style and mass market only in American high modernism.

Likewise, one might also argue that the neo-avant-garde was a specific set of movements and individual effects between 1950 and 1968 that critically provoked the unitary essentialism and universalism of high modernism. Therefore, the neo-avant-garde regime denotes a critique, subversion, or deconstruction of the realised possibilities of high modernism, or, more accurately, the artistic, social, and cultural hegemonies of the realised modern and modernisms.

The neo-avant-garde may be understood in two ways: (1) as a transgression that disrupts the newly established order of the latest hegemonic high modernism and (2) as a strategy and tactic of established modernism itself that, out of fear that otherwise it might turn into a frozen or petrified “new tradition”, produces its own self-critique to destabilise, destroy, or overcome the attained state of affairs. We might compare this dynamic as it is established between the avant-garde, modernism, and the neo-avant-garde with Thomas S. Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions. The theory of paradigm shifts in science was applied to art by Charles Harrison in his interpretations of the activities of the Art & Language group.22

In other words, my position is that the avant-garde was an artistic or aesthetic vanguard or anticipation of modernism, whereas the neo-avant-garde was a critical and excessive practice within the dominant high modernist culture. One might say that in the context of liberal Western high modernism, predicated as it was by an aesthetic and poetic fetishisation of the autonomy of the disciplines and the media of art, the neo-avant-gardes performed a trans-disciplinary critique or transgression by pointing to the potentialities of “the open work of art and acting in art”, that is, to a political critique of the modernist professionalisation and institutionalisation of the production, exchange, and consumption of art (Lettrism, experimental art, happening, Neo-dada, Fluxus, New Tendencies). One might also say that the historical avant-gardes (Futurism, Dada, revolutionary constructivisms) generated alternative micro-social formations (groups, movements) that opposed the system of modern art at the time, which was still insufficiently institutionalised. On the other hand, the neo-avant-gardes became active against high modernism’s formally and pragmatically established system of institutions. Whereas the historical avant-gardes, with their various techniques (collage, montage, assemblage, readymade, avant-garde periodicals as collage-montage visual texts), anticipated the aesthetic nature of emerging consumer, popular, and mass culture, the neo-avant-gardes acted in historical conditions where the paradigms of elite high art modernism were explicitly opposed to those of consumer, mass, and popular culture. The aesthetic dialectic23 of high taste (the autonomous values of art) and popular taste (the functions and effects of mass consumption) were thus confronted with a third party – the critical-subversive and emancipatory potential of the neo-avant-garde, which was nomadically traversing both systems—the high and the popular – of modernist art, relativising their boundaries, deemed to be unconditional and impregnable at the time.

05 Szalma László: Homage to Dada, photo, 1972.Courtesy Marinko Sudac Collection

MODERNISM AND THE NEO-AVANT-GARDE: ARGAN’S PROJECT THEORY

The relationship of modernism and the neo-avant-garde may also be noted in Italian art historian Giulio Carlo Argan’s theory of “the modern project”. As a leftist intellectual writing in the European context, he recognised the emancipatory social potential of an innovative artistic practice that had traded its imaginary creative autonomy for the context of real social antagonisms. Unlike American conceptions of high modernism (Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Michael Fried), in Western Europe high modernism had no dominant canonical current; instead, the differences between various artistic modernisms were established in terms of political differences and their implementations in the then contemporary artworlds.

For Argan, it was important to critically re-examine the conditions of the relationship between art and society. In his view, the basic dispositif of modernism was established around the concept of the project of a critical and exploratory art within a neo-capitalist system that enslaved and alienated the individual. The dialectic of the individual (liberal) and the collective (social) is essential in his thinking. The modern project denotes plans, visions, projections, and anticipations of an emancipatory transformation of society and art. The “modern project” is associated with critical approaches to the notions of social, technical, and artistic progress in the name of social liberation. The project of art is characterised by participation in the social event. Therefore the artistic project is opposed to social passivity:

Just as it once discovered in the object the immobile structure of the objective world, today art is discovering in the project the mobile structure of existence. The project, which art must furnish with a methodological model, finally constitutes a manoeuvring defence of social, historical life in its perennial conflict with eventuality and chance.24

By positing art as a project, Argan takes art itself into a complex and multifaceted fight for actualising human life in the modern world. Therefore, artistic projecting is the opposite from as well as an alternative to technological projecting qua programming, i.e. controlling alienated living in liberal neo-capitalism. In Arganian thinking, a liberal aesthetic and artistic liberation from the non-optical in the work is insufficient; art should instead be viewed as a domain of sociality and, therefore, of the social struggle for human liberation and genuine emancipation. The target of his discourse is the technocratic and market alienation of neo-capitalist neoliberalism.

Argan developed his theoretical position by linking critical Western Marxism with an existentialist Sartrean examination of forms of life and the modernist trust in the potentiality of art as a dispositif of emancipation. In Argan’s view, the survival of art in tomorrow’s world hinges on the project, making the art of today conditioned by the art, culture, and society of tomorrow. In this respect, he is quite close to the neo-avant-garde way of thinking. Opposed to “market fashions”, Argan offers the conception of a political change in art as an important factor in social emancipation. Rather than privileging the immanence of artistic form, Argan advocates anti-form (Informalism: Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri) and art beyond the borders of artistic disciplines (post-Informalist art: Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani), to point to the place of the work or act of art in a web of antagonistic social relations. According to Argan, art that acquires an exploratory character25 initiates the passage from the work into performing practices and production that provoke or even change forms of modern life amid alienated consumption.

MODERNISM AND THE NEO-AVANT-GARDE: MULTIPLE MODERNITIES

Beyond the Western context, the term “neo-avant-garde” signifies complex processes of artistic subversion and a critique of locally dominant modernisms, i.e. alter-modernisms. These are manifestations of modernisation “beyond the cultural-geographic sphere” of Western Europe and the United States. Alter-modernisms may denote various geographical modernities and modernisms that occurred in the specific contexts of colonial or real-socialist societies, away from direct or profound impacts of Western liberal modernism’s hegemonies. Alter-modernisms differ from Western international modernism. In local environments, certain Alter-modernisms become hegemonic centres of artistic influences, while others become their peripheral followers. In relation to the notions of “global modernity” as a multiplicity of Alter-modernisms, Western modernity and modernism are viewed only as one possible instance of modernisation. That is why one speaks of “Multiple modernisations” or “Multiple modernisms”: “This is seen to be indicated by the move away from an idea of the singularity of modernity, based on more traditional, non-linear, historical understandings, to discussions about the multiplicity of modernities”.26

Destabilising “unitary” or “holistic” modernism led from asking “How to periodise unitary and universal modernism?” to asking how and why modernism took place and under what social, cultural, and artistic conditions. Furthermore, the concept of theoretical reflection on multiple modernities and multiple modernisms stems from three theoretical models that question unitary and universal Western modernism:

(1) postcolonial studies, which project notions of modernity and modernisms in the Third World whilst “avoiding Euro-centrism”27 – the colonial societies of Asia, Africa, South America, and the Pacific Islands;

(2) socialist and post-socialist studies, that address modernity and modernisms in the real-socialist societies of Europe and beyond, highlighting asymmetries with Western modernism – the so-called Second World societies;

(3) the humanities and social studies, above all art-history studies,28 led by concepts from the Spatial Turn.

The concept of horizontal or geographical distinctions in modernism is notable in authors working outside of the European context (China, the Arab world, South-American cultures), as well as in some European theorists of art. For instance, British art theorist Paul Wood’s discussion of conceptual art may be read in terms of a horizontal distinction between Western and other modernisms:

“conceptualism” takes on a double identity. “Analytical” conceptual art gets downgraded as the art of white male rationalists, mired in the very modernism they sought to critique. The expanded history, on the other hand, begins to excavate a huge array of artists, men and women alike, deemed to have been working in a “conceptualist” manner from the 1950s onwards, on a range of emancipatory themes ranging from imperialism to personal identity in far-flung places from Latin America to Japan, from Aboriginal Australia to Russia.29

This shows that in alter-modernisms, different neo-avant-gardes are established, too. For instance, neo-avant-gardes working in alter-modernist contexts are characterised by critiques of racial, gender, and class identities, as well as Western economic or cultural imperialism (Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Antonio Dias, M. F. Husain, Wang Jin).

SOCIALIST MODERNISM AND NEO-AVANT-GARDES: PERMANENT TRANSITIONS

The notions of the Western capitalist, i.e. the liberal concept of modernisation, developed from modernity to modernism, were confronted by those of revolutionary communist modernisation in the countries of real socialism (i.e., the Second World). The primary communist modernisation was based on a revolutionary and anti-liberal ideology of modernisation. Above all, it concerned the urbanisation and industrialisation of the underdeveloped Russian Empire in the form of the Soviet Union.

Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country. Otherwise the country will remain a small-peasant country, and we must clearly realize that […] Only when the country has been electrified, and industry, agriculture and transport have been placed on the technical basis of modern large-scale industry, only then shall we be fully victorious.30

In the Soviet context, modernisation determined industrial and economic development, associated with realising the ideal of the “class struggle”. But in terms of aesthetics and art, modernisation ranged from radical avant-garde projects (Cubo-futurism, Suprematism, Constructivism) in the early days of the revolution to the canonisation of socialist realism as a stable expression of modern revolutionary and didactic creativity. The ideal of modern art in terms of modern realism was established as the canonised ideal. For instance, Leon Trotsky defined revolutionary realist art in the following way:

When one speaks of revolutionary art, two kinds of artistic phenomena are meant: the works whose themes reflect the Revolution, and the works which are not connected with the Revolution in theme, but are thoroughly imbued with it, and are coloured by the new consciousness arising out of the Revolution.31

Trotsky’s understanding of the revolution was in terms of “the permanent revolution”.32 One might understand it as a radical and permanent modernisation, passing through constant transitions toward the universal and geographically global communist society of the future. Moving from an avant-garde to a revolutionary and then to a socialist-realist modernisation of art meant creating a specific modern expression serving the party and the state.

Then, in the 1950s and 1960s, the movement from Socialist Realism to socialist modernism marked the constitution of a hegemonic artistic pattern in Eastern Europe. Socialist modernism pointed to the potentiality of a liberal-oriented creation of abstract – qua Western – artistic forms and, at the same time, to a symbolic or topical interpretation of such forms, articulated by the party. The liberalisation of Socialist Realism in favour of socialist modernism enabled the establishment of Eastern European socialist modernism as a bureaucratised and institutionalised art in state socialism.

The emergence of the neo-avant-garde in Eastern Europe was a critique of the link between Socialist Realism as a revolutionary art and the phenomenon of socialist modernism33 as the art of a bureaucratised post-revolutionary state. Eastern European neo-avant-garde practices34 were motivated by seeking to establish an “alternative artistic space” or alternative artworlds. Alternative spaces were outside of the bureaucratically led institutions of Socialist Realism and modernism. Alternative spaces were “dark zones” within tightly controlled societies with one-dimensional state programmes of supporting and surveying culture and art.

Alternative artistic space might also be termed “the second public sphere”.35 In Eastern Europe, in the domain of culture, neo-avant-garde and conceptual artistic practices took place outside the official state public sphere, in spaces where privacy was territorialised as public space (from the studio to the commune). Eastern European neo-avant-garde artists created alternative institutions, such as exhibitions and theatre plays, in private apartments or studios, founded communes on the principles of self-organising and direct democracy, published so-called samizdat periodicals and books in small print runs. Also, Eastern European neo-avant-gardes occupied socially indeterminate spaces that were meant for youth culture, student cultural institutions, as well as amateur cultural institutions (for instance, photo and film clubs), which in socialist societies had state support as a matter of policy.

06 Vojin Bakić: Model for the Monument to Marx and Engels, 1953.Magazine Jugoslavia, Belgrade

Eastern European neo-avant-garde artists built their production by moving nomadically through various art disciplines (literature, theatre, music, film, fine arts). They produced open and multimedia works of art (happenings, performances, installations, artists’ books) that represented generational, gender, and cosmopolitan identities geared toward stepping out of closed societies. In the collectivist cultural order of real and self-managed socialism in Eastern Europe and in contrast to the pronounced individualism of their Western colleagues, Eastern-European neo-avant-garde artists worked with dialectical differences halfway between liberal individualism and self-organised collectivism. Noteworthy examples of Eastern-European neo-avant-garde practices certainly include the theatre experiments of Polish director Tadeusz Kantor and multimedia artist Józef Rabakowski, those of Czech visual poets and performers (Milan Knižák, Jiři Valoch, Jiři Kovanda), the Slovenian OHO group, the Croatian group Gorgona, Hungarian experimental artists Miklós Erdélyi and Támas Szentjóby, Serbian composer Vladan Radovanović, Yugoslav novelist Bora Ćosić, Serbian painter Radomir Damnjan, Hungarian visual poet and conceptual artist Sazalma Laszlo and Szombathy Balint (group Bosc+Bosch).

07 Radomir Damnjan: In Honour of the Soviet Avant-garde, b/w print, 1973. Courtesy Radomir Damnjan

CONCLUSION: DIFFERENCE / DIALECTICS

My intent in this chapter was to point to the hybrid complexity of modern and modernist phenomena in relation to the criteria of the politics of time (dialectic historicisation) and politics of space (geographic difference). In relation to every contemporaneity that has occurred or is occurring at different times and in different places, the modern and modernism required different conceptualisations of “modernisation” and different conceptualisations of a critical response to the transition of modernisation practices from the margins of society to its hegemonic centre, both internationally and locally.

08 Bálint Szombathy: Bauhaus, photo, 1972.Courtesy Bálint Szombathy

2

THE RETURN OF THE POLITICALin Contemoporary Aesthetics, Philosophy and Art

The crisis of philosophy and aesthetics certainly began during the philosophical century. It started when Marx highlighted the “misery of philosophy” in a world of real human misery, in the industrial society of exploitation.36 It also began with Friedrich Nietzsche’s “grandiose” and immanently philosophical failure to derive yet another great totalising philosophical system of thinking about everything and for all. It was then, for the first time, that the idea of a failed philosophical project became a basis for reorganising philosophy. Finally, it also began when Dr. Sigmund Freud set up the universal discourse of the subject and subjectivity in human life, a humanistic discourse that passed over the empirical and pseudo-empirical fields of biomedical and socio-cultural hypotheses beyond the professional security of philosophical paradigms/styles. Then, in the first half of the 20th century, the philosophy of Martin Heidegger was an attempt to find the essential potentiality of only yet another important step for philosophy, there and then, in what was for him an unacceptable modernity.37 That one step for philosophy was assumed in the conservative direction of invoking and responding to “originary” philosophical voices amidst the nightmare of the great Western tradition of thinking in metaphors, i.e. metaphysical figures of being, truth, and the subject. But “that one step for philosophy” was also marked with the concretely political failure of the traditionally and conservative-oriented modern philosopher with almost nihilistic misgivings regarding progress. Facing the powers and events of an all-human catastrophe, the devastating totalising state of emergency that Nazism produced with its anti-liberal programmes in the Third Reich,38 this philosopher reconstituted his anti-modern “right to universal truth”.

Quite asymmetrically, in relation to Martin Heidegger, stood the anti-philosophical endeavour of Ludwig Wittgenstein, anti-philosophical in terms of preserving and cherishing the tradition of autonomous Western philosophy, with Wittgenstein trying to pose, in his individually manifested everyday human drama, some basic commonsensical questions – almost “dilettantish” – in the face of the security of philosophical jargon and its abstracting of the individual’s lived activity. Wittgenstein’s critical and analytical philosophy of philosophy is “dilettantish” inasmuch as he is commonsensical and, from platforms of everyday speech, asks questions about philosophy’s internal affairs, which learned philosophers, who mature in philosophical discourses and jargons, as Theodor W. Adorno, for instance, put it, do not ask.39 Here, a “dilettante” in philosophy implies not a “self-taught” or “committed amateur philosopher”, but one who deliberately and self-reflexively, demonstratively violates the professional ethics of philosophising by straying from the normative/canonical jargon of Western philosophy. Such a philosopher asks “impolite questions” concerning the basic meanings of words and their impact on the lived activity of philosophers and philosophy as a social practice. He diverts from the doxa of philosophers who do not pose those basic questions as important questions of philosophy, but construct narratives or models for presenting thought within already established philosophical networks and methods. Those philosophies are quite close to the discourse of the philosophical hierarchy of power. This concerns the canonical acceptability of jargon and the conceptual atmosphere of stable thinking in defined social frameworks. These frameworks disable writing or thinking about something or anything related to philosophy outside of jargon topics or objects of debate. Wittgenstein’s reductionist transgressive solution was to translate philosophical terms from the discourse of philosophy to the language of the everyday use of words in speech, a task he saw as showing the fly out of the fly-bottle.40 Finding a way out of conceptual and linguistic traps was the main task of Wittgenstein’s philosophising. In that sense, another great “anti-philosopher” was the French doctor, founder of theoretical psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan, who, unlike Wittgenstein’s analytical reductionism, resorted to a “baroque” passage through all the spaces and times of philosophy, metaphorically speaking, like “a bull in a china shop”. This metaphor bespeaks an author who sees discomfort in the order of meaning precisely as his key intervention in the materiality of speech, which is under the impact of the signification order, that is, the unconscious. Lacan’s luxurious “dilettantism” differs from Wittgenstein’s puritan analytical work on the “absurdities” of philosophy, but the point is the same: to achieve something with philosophy in a way disallowed by its traditional discourses, that is, jargon frameworks. For Lacan, this meant moving the reality of the unconscious in any discourse, including philosophical. In Lacan’s mind, philosophical discourse must face its supporting web of signification that modifies webs of signified, i.e. conceptual ideas. That means having to face the structural principle of determination that eludes the philosopher’s conscious intent and will to express “this and that, there and then”; that is, a psychoanalytic theorist faces the material order of speech, including philosophical speech, which shows, in its complexity, what it omits, represses, covers, or negates.

Finally, French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s intervention showed that the “central world of philosophy” as much as “the margins of philosophy” constitute the problem of philosophy. He was entirely committed to philosophy, although his early concept of deconstructing European philosophical logo-centrism – the centrism of thinking as opposed to speaking and writing – offered some potential directions for thinking and presenting inter-textually the limits of the philosophy of transcendence. Those who have invoked Derrida and radicalised his offers and promises have either moved out of philosophy and into the domain of the material practice of writing, of which philosophy is only an instance, or, like others, who were never in philosophy in the first place, have embraced the possibility of performing the event of theorising and thereby pointed to the resistance of the materiality of theory to the illusory esoteric quality of philosophy. After Derrida, there occurred quite diverse inter-textual and multidirectional rearrangements of the relationship between philosophy and theory, from literary critic Paul De Man, artist and theorist of culture Victor Burgin,41 to novelist and essayist Kathy Acker.42 The extent of the crisis of philosophy was also enhanced by the feminist, feminine, gender, and queer theorisation of philosophy, more precisely, by asking that really singular question extending from Simone de Beauvoir via Hélène Cixous to Judith Butler and Joan Copjec: Does philosophy have a gender? Then another, even more complex and philosophical question may be posed: “How was gender in philosophy, i.e. history of philosophy, and thereby the singularity of the identity of philosophy itself as a social practice reduced to a universal philosopher?” But that question, as well as similar questions, despite their attractive and seductive philosophicality, were closer to the singularity of the practice of theorisation within social, humanistic, or hybrid platforms of interpretation and textual production about and against philosophy.

In the late 1960s, the notions of theory and theorisation gain a special meaning and thus certainly an exclusive role with regard to knowledge (discourse, thinking, writing, behaviour), culture, and society.43Theory and theorisation denote the hybrid genres or poly-genres that developed in parallel in artistic, activist, and academic circles (France, Great Britain, USA, Eastern Europe) by means of critiquing autonomous canonical models and institutions of scientific and philosophical labour in society, culture, and art. The theoretical was posited as the textual and theoretical labour as a more literal or less literal textual production of a critical discourse. Writings by French structuralists from the 1960s and international post-structuralists from the early 1970s advanced the critical position that philosophy should be essentially redefined. That meant transforming philosophy as general thinking about sciences into a critical theory based on reflecting the material practice of signification whereby philosophic texts are produced. The practice of philosophy was thus interpreted as material production of specific social texts. In his Consequences of Pragmatism, Richard Rorty pointed out that modernity witnessed an unprecedented “blending” of the borders of certain autonomous scientific and theoretical disciplines.44 The result was a new kind of writing, which was neither about evaluating aspects of literary, artistic, scientific, or cultural products, nor intellectual history, nor a philosophy of good and practical acting in culture and art, nor the interpretation of society, but all of that combined in the open and variable poly-genre of writing. Theoretical writing exceeds the boundaries between individual social and humanist sciences, pointing to forms of production, presentation, and expression in contemporary plural and global mass and media culture. As a poly-generic practice, theory asks questions regarding the self-reflexive character of writing about the nature, conditions, paths, and concepts of generating theoretical texts and their effects.45 Then, questions were also posed regarding the epistemological character of mediating knowledge and therefore also of institutions that establish and govern meanings, sense, and values within a culture or interrelations between different cultures. Likewise important are questions regarding the critical character of the conditions and circumstances whereby a theory emerges, is exchanged, governs a certain or uncertain scene of writing or scene of presenting, and then experiences a crisis, disappears, or transforms. Also important are questions regarding deconstructing, dislocating, or decentring the inscription of theory or its effects into a certain mass, elite, or professional public opinion, as well as traces of theory in its modifications, their erasure or accumulation on the jetties46 of meaning, sense, values, and identities of culture. But there also emerge psychoanalytical questions about how the desire for knowledge emerges, how pleasure occurs in a theoretical text or in a process with texts (inter-textuality) in media culture. For something – a thought, speech, writing, or media representation – to be theory, it must contain aspects that enable or realise an identification, description, explication, and interpretation, that is, debate. This is the open and indeterminate conception of theory. It is open enough to encompass quite varied procedures: identifications, descriptions, explications (readings), interpretations, and debates. What distinguishes theory from all other cultural activities, disciplines, and institutions is the demand that any kind of speaking or writing aspiring to be theoretical must meet, and that is to ask what theory is, how it functions and identifies, describes, explains, and interprets itself as theory or theorisation within quite specific cultural and social practices. Therefore, theory is not the opposite of practices, but the performance of an invariably specific material social practice that is posited in such a way that it problematises – reflects, explains, interprets, produces – concepts, discourses, and representations of theory as a practice, from specific conditions and circumstances.

The crisis of postmodern liberal pluralism after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, that is, following the end of the Cold War and the establishment of “global politics” and domination of a single superpower and, more importantly, of a single economic and biotechnological political order, re-provoked possibilities for examining “politics” and “the political” as a significant response to the apparent weakness or absence of any kind of the political in the apparently apolitical or extra-political neoliberal technological practices of organising public and private everyday life in post-modernity.47 In postmodern and then globalised neoliberal society, politics has acquired the character of a techno-managerial cultural practice, moving from fundamental social, global questions to individual cultural as well as artistic activities in the domain of identity and representation in the everyday. A cynic might conclude that in globalised times, everything – meaning culture and art – is politicised, except politics itself, which is depoliticised.48 Therefore, in the 1990s and 2000s, it became important to invoke and reconstruct “politics” and “the political” in relation to politics as a form of sociality, as well as a form of organisation, governance, control, and implementation. At that moment, “politics as a practice within or across general sociality” manifested a need or, even, desire for meta-theory as the organisation of the singular as opposed to the particular in relation to universal political knowledge and action, and traditionally, the meta-theory of “politics” is philosophy.49 As the meta-theory of big politics, philosophical universalism was “used” as an intervening sign for a critique of the anti-essentialism and social constructivism of “small politics” and “micro-ecologies” in culture and, certainly, art. Philosophical universalism thereby enabled asking questions about acting responsibly for every social intervention and risk of intervention. This kind of demand for another large-scale politicisation on the level of philosophy and intervention in global social processes after the Cold War occurred in very different ways, above all in philosophers, sometimes mutually incomparable and often confronted: Jacques Derrida and his new reading of Marx,50 Chantal Mouffe and her discussion of the return of the political, Ernesto Laclau and his theory of emancipation in the epoch of post-modernity and then globalism, Alain Badiou and his Platonist-oriented metapolitics, Terry Eagleton and his leftist critique of hybrid theories, Jacques Rancière and the preservation of the traditional European Aristotelian philosophical “political”,51 Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and their critique of the current global empire, Giorgio Agamben and his reconstruction of great philosophy by means of bio-politics,52 Paolo Virno and his theorisation of labour in global or post-Fordist capitalism, and Brian Massumi and his analysis of the new media on the horizon of critical sociality.

Philosophy’s invoking of “the political”, its “return to the political” emerged not out of a structuring of reality undertaken by a party or state, but of performing a philosophical desire for post-theoretical speculative philosophical constructions of the “crisis” character, functions, and plural, which also means arbitrary, effects of current socialities in capitalism, dominant but crisis-ridden. For example, the separation of politics and power, which characterises the neoliberal rise and, certainly, the global crisis of neo-liberalism, has had the effect of depoliticising “politics” and transferring the complex of the political and politics into the field of culture and art. Almost all of early-21st-century vital art is politicised, from a “political fictionalisation of the real” (the Irwin group with their NSK global state project) to various political or cultural activisms (the Critical Art Ensemble, Slavs and Tatars, Alfredo Jaar, Tadej Pogačar, Zoran Todorović, Artur Żmijewski).

09 Irwin: Time for a new state, print, 2012.Courtesy Irwin

10 Irwin: Time for a new state, billboard, Leipzig, 2012.Courtesy Provisonal Salta Ensemble

For instance, the conflict, a sort of revival of the Cold War in 2007 in 2008, between the US and Russia is not a conflict between the liberal and the communist, that is, between capitalist and social property, but between two capitalist imperial models. It is a conflict between the American neoliberal model of capitalism and Russian autocratic nationalist capitalism. Therefore, the philosophical derivation of meta- and macro-politicisation marked a critical and that means analytical reactivation of the contradictory relations of local – minority – bodies of knowledge as opposed to global – dominant, majority – bodies of knowledge in establishing and performing “universal” historical and geographical power. Moreover, this is not about opting between the local and the global, i.e. the particular and the universal; opting like that has cost dearly, with the defeats of modern projects in totalitarian regimes (the USSR, the Third Reich, fascist Italy, the Khmer Rouge Democratic Kampuchea, the Cultural Revolution in China), as well as the defeats of postmodern conceptions, i.e. in the preservation of “weak” or “soft” power and its concomitant comprehensive plurality in ethnic wars and genocides, from the former Yugoslavia to Africa in the 1990s. This concerns deriving a philosophical understanding of how global as universal power is realised in relating – naturalising the universal with the particular and, to be sure, conversely, the particular with the universal. If one pays attention to questions regarding the character of today’s society, then one must ask about relations between global and local modes of material production and their fundamental refractions in individual and, certainly, global projections. Then one may ask, in philosophic-metaphysical terms, “who” or “what”, “when” or “where” constitutes the production of universal knowledge and thereby global as universal power. The relationship between the global and universal is posited as a problematic and intriguing trap. In other words, the important philosophical question is how singularity produces universality and what it is that enables surveying and regulating that production not only behaviourally, but also epistemologically and existentially? The critical question is this: can singularity produce universality?

Interpreting the complex process of integrating hybrid and anti-essentialist theorisations into the neoliberal global system of power, some philosophers have suggested, as an alternative, the potentiality of resisting global market capitalism by means of a universalistically posited philosophy. This would be a philosophical intervention stemming from:

(1) the collapse or disorientation of the traditional Left and its theory and

(2) the global domination of “rightwing”, “neoliberal”, and “populist” discourses, as well as the integration of “soft” or “weak”, that is, “post-philosophic” hybrid theories into the neoliberal system of a flexible technocratic regulation of power.

In theoretical terms, such an intervention would mean a philosophic/theoretical turn from the 20th-century linguistic turn to the early 21st-century philosophy of the event.

3

TROUBLES WITH THE ECONOMY, GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORYThe Social Turn

WHAT MAKES THESE SCULPTURES SO DIFFERENT? GRADES OF ABSTRACTION