The Spatial Autonomous Zone
B
ack in the day, Hakim Bey (Peter Wilson) combined Deleuzean notions of the ‘nomadic war-machine’ and Negri’s ‘autonomy’ with direct action and carnival to create nomadic ‘temporary autonomous zones’ (TAZ). In his strategy, “the ‘nomadic war-machine’ conquers without being noticed and moves on before the map can be adjusted.” However, his insistence on time – the temporary autonomous zone – may be misplaced. If we look at the use of monuments in political struggles, they act as a spatial focus, a spatial zone of autonomy, which, while it may be used temporarily for a ritual of commemoration, remains after the event as a formal reminder. Abramson: “Monuments, like history, ideally connect the past to the future through present engagement and hortative content.” Thus the monument becomes a spatial autonomous zone. This is linked to art through two things- in traditional aesthetics, the twentieth century saw a shift in focus from content to form: “The concept of form suggests that two requirements must be fulfilled and inscribed into perception: the form must have a boundary, and there must be an “unmarked space” excluded by this boundary.” (Luhmann, p.45) David Summers, in his post-formalist art history, pushes this further into an exploration of space: Real space is the space we find ourselves sharing with other people and things; virtual space is space represented on a surface, space we ‘seem to see’. In fact, space can only be represented visually as virtual, but at the same time we always encounter a virtual space in a real space. Sculpture and architecture are the principal arts of real space. Within the general category of real space, sculpture is the art of personal space and architecture is the art of social space. […] Virtual spaces are always representations of space, and we can see any number of specific representations as spatial. […] The same conditions under which virtual spaces cannot fully show what they mean that there may be specifically bounded and qualified apparent regions of space and time for an observer, within which things seem to exist in certain ways. […] The encounter of an observer with a virtual space, […], takes place before a culturally specific format – a screen, polyptych or book for example – in personal and social space. (pp 43-44) While Summers tries to resist the application of linguistic principles to art, Luhmann’s suggestion that art works “individualize themselves by excluding the sum total of everything else; not because they are construed as given but because their significance as objects implies a realm of social regulation” (p.47) resonates with Searle’s basic thesis that the entire human social world is based on a single linguistic move – the ‘status function declaration’. Thus the spatial autonomous zone becomes an art work that represents real space in a virtual manner – but inserted into real space – having its own culturally specific format in each instance, allowing it to interrogate the norms of social regulation while declaring its own status as ‘art’ – thereby guaranteeing its ‘autonomy’.
Nanda and Malik both argue that the pluralist “injunction to prefer cultural authenticity over truth, or at least to consider authenticity as a determinant of truth, plays into the hands of religious and cultural nationalists who are sowing the seeds of reactionary modernity” (Nanda, 2003, p.127, Malik, 2008). This is effected through an epistemological and cultural relativism that resorts to canonical texts and cultural tradition for authority, a new cultural essentialism. This results in what Appiah terms the ‘Medusa Syndrome’, whereby acts of recognition “ossify the identities that are their object” (Appiah, 2005, p.110). Post-modern selfconscious traditionalism aims to preserve traditions as a social, political and moral good, as social cohesion is only possible “if both the individual and the culture remain authentic” (Malik, 2008, p.175). “In order for a culture to be lost … it must be separable from one’s actual behaviour, and in order for it to be separable from one’s actual behaviour it must be anchorable in race” (or some other ‘authentic’ essence) (Benn Michaels, 1995, p.123). Thus diversity “has become the bridge between the cultural and the biological and between the liberal left and the reactionary right” (Malik, 2008, p.264).
(Now with added fizz!)
‘Culture’ was originally a noun of process, describing the culture (cultivation) of crops, and, by extension, the human mind. In the late Eighteenth century, Herder first used it as a noun in the plural sense, describing the cultures (ways of life) of different peoples. Three separate meanings then arose: (i) “Culture” as an intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic state of development of the mind, as in ‘a person of culture’, indicating the kinds of things a person ought to learn in order to become a fully worthwhile moral agent, with some things such as classical music, having more cultural value than others; (ii) “Culture” as the works and practices of such intellectual and especially artistic activity: learned, adapted symbolic behaviour, a complex of skills that depends on a capacity to organise relationships between communities; and (iii) “Culture” as a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general, as in Russian culture, folk-culture, medieval culture (Williams, 1985). The UN Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions 2005 is predicated on the idea of culture as a ‘way of life’, which is seen as something in need of ‘protection’- implying that is static, rather than a fluid on-going process.
In Ireland, culture is like sex – you can’t ask for it directly!
What the hell is art anyway? “Art cannot merely be the expression of a particularity (be it ethnic or personal). Art is the impersonal production of a truth that is addressed to everyone” (Badiou, 2003). “The work of art draws on sensuously perceptible media for its own self-explication, no matter what is subsequently presented as an internal play of forms.” (Luhmann, 2000, p. 45)
Despite attacking ‘the privileged position of the artist’, Mouffe’s suggestion that critical art is ‘constituted by a manifold of artistic practices aiming at giving a voice to all those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony’ (Mouffe, 2007, p. 4, emphasis added) is surely a restatement of that privilege, insofar as the artist is accorded the power of enabling others to speak.
Is this just a cop-out for bad art?
Rancière’s theory of the politics of the ‘aesthetic regime’ of art “may be summed up in three points. First, the autonomy staged by the aesthetic regime of art is not that of the work of art but of a mode of experience. Second, the ‘aesthetic experience’ is one of heterogeneity, such that, for the subject of that experience, it is also the dismissal of a certain autonomy. Third, the object of that experience is aesthetic, insofar as it is not, or at least not only, art” (Rancière, 2010, pp. 116-117). “One element of this is art’s promise of its own abolition through selfrealisation in a new form of collective life, the tragic dream of the various twentieth-century avant-gardes. Tragic, because art must either suppress itself in the cause of the revolution or refuse absolutely to engage in any form of aesthetic militancy” (Ibid., pp. 178-179).
“The aspiration is always to move beyond art, but never to the point of comparable projects in the social domain” (Bishop, 2012, p.19) – meaning this kind of work escapes being judged as either art or community development work. This connects to Groys’ argument that the contemporary sacrifice of autonomy through participation “ultimately benefits the artist by liberating his or her work from the cold eye of the uninvolved viewer’s judgment” (Groys, 2010, p.49).
Thinking about the link between ‘New Age’ forms of idealism, art practises and astrology: How can you hope to change the world if you believe in a pre-determined course of events? What would be the point? “Pseudoscience may well be more natural for our species. To maintain a scientific outlook requires a constant intellectual and emotional struggle against wishful, teleological and anthropomorphic thinking, misjudgments of probability, correlation and causation, perception of nonexistent patterns, and the tendency to seek confirmation rather than refutation of our favourite theories.” (Sokal, 2008. p.345)
The doctrine of predestination led reformation figures like Erasmus, Luther and Calvin to reject good works as a fundamental breach of the law that salvation is through faith alone. Even the most orthodox Marxists accepted that there was an element of contingency in historical materialism, and that the transition to socialism could not be effected by the economic process alone, but also in the superstructure (see Kołakowski and Jakubowski), allowing for an element of voluntarism. “Modern art is a product of the Enlightenment, and of
enlightened atheism and humanism” (Groys, 2008,p.2).
Are the arts poisonous sweets? At the sight of the Muses of Poetry at Boethius’ bedside dictating words to accompany his tears, Philosophia became angry: Who has suffered these seducing mummers to approach this sick man? Never do they support those in sorrow by any healing remedies, but rather do ever foster the sorrow by poisonous sweets. These are they who stifle the fruit-bearing harvest of reason with the barren briars of the passions: they free not the minds of men from disease, but accustom them thereto (Boethius, 1902 (524), p.3).
A “mode of behaviour is rational for a given person if this person feels comfortable with it, and is not embarrassed by it, even when it is analyzed for him” (Gilboa, 2010, p.6).
Does art return us to our passions, distracting us from the struggle for Utopia?
Does capitalism work for you? How are commitments to cultural diversity, interculturalism and integration compatible with the normative claim that artists “interpret our past, define who we are today, and imagine our future”? (Arts Council of Ireland, 2010)
Are participatory art practices a stalking horse for fascism? “Theses about the art of the proletariat […] brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery – concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense.” (Benjamin 1936, p. 212) As Rancière (2010, p. 115) puts it, the basic idea is that ‘there exists a specific sensory experience that holds the promise of both a new world of Art and a new life for individuals and the community, namely the aesthetic.’ This promise has been realised both in the Gesamtkunstwerk that is a totalitarian society, and the ‘Spectacle’ of a commodified culture.
Dialogue can provide solidarity, which feels empowering while leaving power structures unchallenged – in fact it can reify ‘power through constituting an us/them binary – us minority/them privileged – without interrogating how these positions are possible’ (Kaufmann, 2011, p. 470). In the conventional discourse of civility, differences are bracketed out to enable decision-making in a contingent world. One version of this civil solidarity could produce the Gleichschaltung of both the Nazis and Stalinism, where all difference/dissent was wiped out – although as Agamben (2005, p. 5) points out, ‘it is important to remember that the modern state of exception is a creation of the democraticrevolutionary tradition and not the absolutist one.’ For Badiou 2005, p.105) however, ‘it is always in subjectivity, rather than the community, that the egalitarian edict [l’arret] interrupting and overturning the usual course of conservative politics is uttered.’
The language of ‘community’, the ‘local’, ‘culture’, ‘values’, ‘family’ and ‘place’ all sit far better within the rhetoric of the right than the left, with the tradition of organic integration into the community – the natural order of things – going right back to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Why are these terms now part of the vocabulary of artists working in a socially engaged mode?
But surely there is no threat from fascism any longer?
“Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.” (Benjamin, 1936, p.234.)
The British National Party “merely wishes to preserve those differences which make up the rich tapestry of human kind … [in order] to protect and preserve the racial and cultural integrity of the British people – and of others too – the party believes in separation.” (BNP website, 2012)
New forms of right-wing thought have arisen in the last few years, particularly (but not exclusively) within the EU, which have attracted the label of ‘populist-integralism’. “Populism
is, in brief, the belief in the political and social value of belonging to a group or culture. It is, therefore, inextricably linked with the threat of alienation – the uprooting of persons, their deracination and cultural estrangement – all themes that provide vivid imagery to modern populist-integralisms. [… This
includes] a tradition of expressionism, according to which all human creations have a ‘voice’, which, in effect, articulates a deeper, and more real, ‘inner truth’ and ideal. […] Populism also draws on a strand of pluralism that rests on a belief in the multiplicity and, above all, the incommensurability of the values of different cultures and societies.” (Stewart, 2012, p.11) Populist-integralism, unlike former brands of fascism, seeks to use the means of democracy and the language of rights to promote their programmes. This includes using the EU to promote nationalist agendas in strong states (Euro-nationalism), using the Social Catholic idea of ‘subsidiarity’ to promote a ‘Europe of the regions’, that will then enable the ‘preservation of separate cultures’, in a broadly Christian (read anti-Muslim) Europe.
If politics isn’t where it used to be, who are our friends?
On the Artway of Thinking website (http://www.saic.edu/webspaces/art_on_location/pages/ENVISION.html) we see links to the work of P.D. Ouspensky – whose ideas, as promoted by A.R. Orage in the New Age magazine, introduced a combination of Nietzsche and Gurdjieff to what had been a socialist milieu, shifting it radically to the right. These ideas are still core to versions of populist-integralism, including those like the so-called ‘metaphysical ethical socialists’ who use the word socialism as a label to mask themselves (http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/nietzsche/sectiontwo.html ), although their core position is a radical anti-cosmopolitanism, with varying shades of overt racism.
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