Third Text, Vol.

23, Issue 4, July, 2009, 393406

The Fear of Heteronomy

Gail Day

both art and emancipatory politics always have a surplus.1 Not so long ago, discussion of politics in art was something that had to be treated indirectly or approached by way of ruses. The search for seeds of time (Fredric Jameson) or identification of placeholders for the critical spirit (J M Bernstein) that once preoccupied the discussions of left aesthetics have subsided. No one seems to believe any more that critical distance is under threat in the same way that is, terminally or ontologically crushed by capitals powers of penetration. Those powers are fully recognised, of course, especially in a period that is seeing their further and grotesque extension through the remaining commons, but what has altered is that there is a growing sense that these developments must and can be resisted. Emancipatory aesthetic discourse is no longer dominated by the fear that the last flicker of critical thought might be about to be extinguished because it burns in our daily life and because we are exercising it. Debates in art have been driven in directions that are increasingly radical, concrete and explicitly (and, often, unapologetically) committed, and it is often remarked that there has not been so much political art since the 1960s or even the 1930s. Talk now is peppered with a new (or renewed) vocabulary: alongside analyses of empire and awareness of precariousness, there has been growing attention to the coming community, event, singularity, potentia, multitude, exodus, commons, contretemps, actuality, praxis. While most of these terms have been around for some time, they have recently gained a more consistent presence. Within this matrix of ideas, the rearticulation of the relationship of aesthetics and politics and the notion of the avant-garde maligned and declared redundant for the past twenty years or so has returned to the fore of serious consideration. Even back in 2000 already in the wake of Seattle but still prior to the destruction of the World Trade Center (that is, at the moment so often deemed a high point in the ascendency of the movement of movements) John Roberts, a theorist not known for shying from the idea of avant-gardism, was rather cautious in the way he described its relevance. Challenging those who would confuse the demise of the historic avantgarde with the would-be cessation of arts labour of negation, Roberts
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online Third Text (2009) http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09528820903007677

1. Dmitry Vilensky, You Cant Anticipate Explosions: Jacques Rancire in Conversation with Chto delat, Chto delat?, 17, August 2007, unpaginated; accessible at: http://www.chtodelat.org/ index.php

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2. John Roberts, On Autonomy and the AvantGarde, Radical Philosophy, no 103, September/October 2000, pp 258. More recently, Roberts has returned to the question of the avant-garde and event in Avantgardes After AvantGardism, Chto delat, 17, August 2007; available online at http:// www.chtodelat.org/ index.php 3. Jennifer Roche, Socially Engaged Art, Critics and Discontents: An Interview with Claire Bishop, Community Arts Network Reading Room, July 2006, available online at http:// www.communityarts.net/ readingroom/archivefiles/ 2006/07/ socially_engage.php 4. Claire Bishop, The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents, Artforum, February 2006

noted that the former may have ended for now as a historical possibility, but the latter continues inexorably to exert its demands and responsibilities.2 The situation, it seems, has moved on. Below the surface of this new politicised language of art, however, can be found some widely different responses. It is striking just how often commentators find the need to urge caution about the presence of explicit social impulses in current art; we are repeatedly warned about the dangers of risking arts autonomy and reminded of the threats presented to art when its ambitions become too political. There is a fear of arts reduction to social servitude and the instrumentalities believed to characterise committed practices. In a recent interview, for example, Claire Bishop a critic who has gauged the current mood states that it is crucial for art practices to tread a careful line between social intervention and autonomy.3 Discussing the recent wave of engaged art practices in Artforum, she argues that the most successful address the contradictory pull between autonomy and social intervention, and reflect on this antinomy both in the structure of the work and in the conditions of its reception. The apparent balance presented by this statement, however, is belied by her concerns that art is being overtaken by ethical criteria and her call for a commitment to the aesthetic. To underline and qualify her point, she appeals to the work of Jacques Rancire: the aesthetic, she asserts, doesnt need to be sacrificed at the altar of social change.4 Stances such as this and Bishops is just one of the more carefully posed observations among those arguing that art must not be reduced to politics result, one suspects, more from what have become the accepted routine reflexes of professional critical art discourse and pedagogy than from a thoroughgoing critical reflection on the situation. The alleged risk to art today is vastly overstated. Indeed, most so-called political art remains thoroughly autonomous in its mode, institutional function and discursive situation (even if not necessarily in the desires of, or terms of self-presentation used by, the artists). This is the case even with those post-relational works where aesthetic form seems to have dissolved totally into the social matrix; they nevertheless remain completely and, for the moment, irrevocably grounded by autonomy as an institution. Despite sharing many surface characteristics, there is still a world of difference between the situation of a jobbing community artist and the most full-on post-relational activities. Whatever their overlaps the crossing of institutional spaces or even of personnel they clearly emerge from, and are sustained by, different parts of the social division of labour within which art under capitalism has attained its unique placing(s). The anxiety over defending autonomy expressed by some commentators even when especially when in the act of championing some form of political practice is wildly misplaced. Autonomy is not remotely under threat just because some artistic collaborations have accessed funding or venues by trading on their social relevance, nor because a number of articulate artists have committed themselves to the anti-capitalist movement. The unease might be more justified and matters might be considerably more interesting were this in fact the case. To be sure, there is much confusion over autonomy and heteronomy, with the terms being used in multiple and conflicting ways. For instance, Pierre Bourdieu argued that the field of cultural production should be understood as a site of struggle shaped by the double hierarchy

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5. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, The Field of Cultural Production, ed Randal Johnson, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1993

of heteronomous and autonomous principles.5 Nothing especially unusual there, we might say, except that Bourdieu identified heteronomy as the official, dominant and recognised practices of bourgeois art, and saw autonomy as arts aspiration to total freedom from market laws and to its own internally focused legitimisation. Todays debates, in contrast, are far more likely to treat heteronomy as politically orientated practices which explicitly challenge the social framework of capitalism and seek freedom from the market, even if not necessarily from the contemporary institutions of bourgeois art (and here one might think of Documenta or the biennials). Bourdieus focus was on the nineteenth century, which may help account for the dislocations in the use of these terms. In his schema, those orientated towards the autonomous principle include not only the more conservative advocates of lart pour lart but also an emergent avant-garde (which he understood as Impressionism, etc). In this sense (and in this alone), Bourdieus schema could be compared with Clement Greenbergs account of modernism, the difference being that the latter was a dedicated partisan of the autonomous Manet and after tradition who located heteronomy not only with the middle-brow market of Western capitalism but also with political propaganda and realist aesthetics. Many of Greenbergs critics from the 1960s to the present have tended to treat autonomy and heteronomy (often further narrowed into the opposition of formalism and anti-formalism) as if they represented types of art practice between which artists made ideological choices. From such perspectives, autonomy is disliked because it is thought to represent institutional power and because it claims its aesthetic to be (indeed, claims that the aesthetic per se is) above and beyond politics. Already sketched out here is an array of conflicting meanings and values attached to the terms autonomy and heteronomy. Further complexity has been contributed by accounts emanating from the Frankfurt School and their repeated rearticulation in discussion over the conjuncture of aesthetics and politics. Such approaches consider the dialectic between autonomy and heteronomy as a socio-aesthetic profile associated in some form (the exact relations being much debated) with the rise of capitalism. Combining a theory of alienation drawn from Marx and Hegel with the Weberian account of the separation of the spheres of experience (scientific, moral, aesthetic), the point about autonomy here is its constitutive role for art as such. Thus, irrespective of whether an artist identifies his/her practice politically or ideologically as autonomous or as anti-autonomous, it will nevertheless be conditioned by the prevailing condition of arts (social) autonomy. Those complacently satisfied with their autonomous status those who live inside what was once known as aesthetic ideology proceed in self-delusion or in bad faith, ignorant of their own social and historical specificity, and putting at risk arts very hold on, and ability to sustain, relevance. In short, autonomy is predicated on heteronomy, heteronomy on autonomy. Whether assessing one particular instance or generating an overarching theory appropriate to an entire historical phase, or whether giving the problem a more philosophical or more sociological emphasis, what is central for this tradition of thinking is how the dialectic is calibrated and its internal tensions weighed. Today, the frameworks for understanding autonomy and heteronomy outlined above are frequently combined in an eclectic manner. Few

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6. Stewart Martin, Critique of Relational Aesthetics, Third Text, 21:4, July 2007, pp 36986 (originally published in 2006). 7. See Vilensky and Rancire in You Cant Anticipate Explosions, op cit. 8. Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum Books, LondonNew York, 2004 (original French edition, Le Partage du sensible: Esthtique et politique, La FabriqueEditions, 2000). The question of autonomy and heteronomy, however, is most focused, and his discussion most sustained, in his essay The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy, New Left Review, 14, March/April 2002, pp 13351. As The Politics of Aesthetics has been accused of being an overly allusive (and, for some, evasive) text, the essay for NLR has proved clearer for drawing out the politics of the politics of aesthetics. For criticism of The Politics of Aesthetics, see Stewart Martin, Culsde-sac, Radical Philosophy, 131, May/June 2005, pp 3944. 9. Rancire, The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes, op cit, p 136, p 134. The discussion of Schiller receives more cursory treatment in The Politics of Aesthetics, p 27 and pp 4344, and the aesthetic regime is addressed on p 22.

are prepared to appeal to autonomy in its Greenbergian mode. On the contrary, most commentators are happy to see, indeed, are invigorated by, art that has some social and political oomph but only so far. There is something distinctive about the drift and tone of discussions where the contemporary heteronomous impulse must be kept at bay. The worries expressed over the dangers of going too far seem to employ a concept of autonomy that hybridises a more standard ideology of asserting arts uniqueness with the Adornian concern to preserve critical distance from the identity modes characteristic of the culture industry. What is striking is how the appeal to, say, T W Adornos defence of autonomy seems to be made in terms which render the issue one of preserving at all costs autonomy per se qua autonomy in ways which flatten and thereby short-circuit the dialectic. The politics of contemporary practices add some frisson, and some much-welcomed claim on relevance, but, so the argument goes, art must nevertheless tread a careful line lest it degenerate into mere propaganda or become servile to government-led agendas. In a situation where autonomy is not remotely under threat by current artistic strategies when, as Stewart Martin has so well put it, autonomy now secures its relevance precisely by its appeal to the social what might such unease represent?6 Martin uses the term social autonomy. While acceptable in a general sense, at our current juncture especially, the term social autonomy potentially confuses discussion by introducing (inadvertently in Martins case) both the postoperaist/and post-autonomist concept of (worker) autonomy and that advanced as the autonomy of social movements or the autonomy of the social. Indeed, Dmitry Vilensky has made precisely this connection between aesthetic autonomy in the Adornian sense and post-operaist political autonomy; responding to him, Jacques Rancire was adamant his own concept of autonomy should not be confused with that derived from Italian debates.7 Today, it is as or more likely to be Rancires writing on the subject of autonomy and heteronomy, rather than Adornos, that is assumed as the defining point of reference. Indeed, so over-familiar has it become by way of references, quotations and epigraphs that it is worth returning to some of the key points in his argument on le partage du sensible.8 Addressing the writing of Friedrich Schiller, Rancire explores the initiation of the aesthetic regime the regime which, he argues, succeeded the ethical and the representational ones and which created a specific sensorium, a new partition of the perceptible. Schillers aesthetic promised a reciprocal interlocking of autonomy and heteronomy in which the claims to aesthetic autonomy (understood as its freedom from social constraint) were entwined with the very idea of a new life (that is, with the project for social freedom). This double project, Rancire argues, has subsequently shaped various emplotments of aesthetic theory. If, for much of the twentieth century, aesthetic debates have posed the narratives of autonomy and heteronomy as mutually exclusive, for Rancire, in contrast, they should be understood as together constituting a meta-narrative which repeatedly invokes the ambitions of the Schillerian original scene. The autonomy of art and the promise of politics are not in (simple) opposition; rather, it is their very conjuncture which grounds both the artistic autonomy and the project to change life.9 At the same time, this conjuncture also produces

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10. Rancire, The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes, op cit, p 150 11. Ibid, p 137 12. Ibid, p 149. As Rancire sees it, Lyotards aesthetics of the sublime is an argument that devises a way of blocking the originary path from aesthetics to politics, imposing a detour to ethics, in which art witnesses the unrepresentable. Lyotard does this, despite his antiHegelianism, by drawing on Hegels description of the sublime as the impossible adequation between thought and its sensible presentation, not because there is something unrepresentable, but because it fulfills the desire that there be something unrepresentable, something unavailable, in order to inscribe in the practice of art the necessity of the ethical detour, p 150. Rancire also advances his critique of Lyotard in What aesthetics can mean, trans Brian Holmes, From an Aesthetic Point of View: Philosophy, Art and the Senses, ed Peter Osborne, Serpents Tail, London, 2000, pp 1333. 13. Ibid, p 143. These qualities can also be found articulated in On the Shores of Politics, Verso, LondonNew York, 1995 (originally published 1992). 14. Begg and Vilensky, On the possibility of avant-garde composition in contemporary art, Chto delat, 17, August 2007, unpaginated (emphasis added); available online at http://www.chtodelat.org/ index.php

two vanishing points: the danger of arts reduction to mere life and that of its reduction to mere art (both of which have already been rehearsed above).10 The contradictions and oppositions that we repeatedly encounter in debates on modern culture (art/life, high/popular, art/non-art, etc), then, are taken as symptoms of this deeper contradiction, namely that art is art to the extent that it is something else than art. It is always aestheticized, meaning that it is always posed as a form of life.11 Rancires purpose in The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes is to challenge the dominant plot of autonomy, especially that provided in Jean-Franois Lyotards reading of Kant (although Rancire notes that Kants writings do not fit the Kantian frame set out by Lyotard).12 His argument also challenges binarist models that baldly counterpose art and life, and those single-track entropic narratives that, in the late twentieth century, often accompanied discussions of the end of art. Emphasising the ongoing force of the heterogeneous sensible, Rancire resists the silencing of the Schillerian promise and the suppression of the aesthetics heteronomous dimensions. Rancire certainly acknowledges the aporetic consequences of various scenarios unleashed by the aesthetic regime, but, unlike many accounts describing aporia, his concern is with maintaining both a politics and an aesthetic characterised by openness and possibility. Resisting straightforward narratives of progress (or regress), and emphasising the mutual permeability of art and life, he sets out a social concept of the aesthetic. It is easy to see why Rancires writing has had a wide appeal: he asserts the life of art against its death; he promotes potentiality against historical foreclosure; he gives the aesthetic a central place, not just for art but also for our understanding of how social emancipation was formulated; and he dismisses as beside the point those who would seek to remove politics from art. In short, his argument has a dialectical mobility which by emphasising scenarios of latency and reactualisation indicates potentials for and of transformation.13 It should not be surprising, then, to find that the emphasis on the politics of aesthetics in Rancires work has opened onto debates over the avant-garde which have again resurfaced with the wave of politically orientated practices in recent years. There have been a number of artists and theorists who have identified the rise of a new avant-gardism. An edition of Chto delat?, which includes a long interview with Rancire, has been specifically devoted to the question. In one article, Zanny Begg and Dmitry Vilensky argue for the need to take current avant-gardist strategies seriously, and outline what they take to be their different internal tendencies. As they put it: we believe that some of the essential content of the avant-garde is crucial for an understanding of contemporary art.14 Rejecting concepts of the avant-garde based on formal or stylistic innovation, on a direct identity with radical politics or on the association with vanguardism, they instead draw on Rancire to point to the avant-gardes poietic force, that is, its ability to question and destabilise the very notion of the political, social, cultural and artistic. The concept of the avant-garde, they argue, turns on the political understanding of the aesthetic confrontational approaches towards the culture industry and direct interaction with activists who, and institutions which, question the established order of what art is, and they call for a:

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15. Begg and Vilensky, op cit 16. Rancire , You Cant Anticipate Explosions, op cit. He treats the autonomy of aesthetic experience as the first or prior issue for the aesthetic regime. 17. Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics, op cit, p 45. Elsewhere, Rancire has spoken of the democratic experience as a particular aesthetic of politics and the demos as the autonomous power to separate from the ochlos, On the Shores of Politics, op cit, pp 51 and 32. Aesthetics has been described as the originary knot that ties a sense of art to an idea of thought and an idea of the community in What aesthetics can mean, op cit, p 33. 18. Rancire, You Cant Anticipate Explosions, op cit 19. One can compare Rancires earlier writing on the processes of aspiration born of the meeting of classes and the type of political, intellectual and aesthetic projects developed and the processes of mutual self-transformation occurring within such spaces. (See, for example, The Nights of Labor: The Workers Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1989). The connection with his writings on worker intellectuals and utopian socialism is made explicitly in The Politics of Aesthetics: It is this paradigm of aesthetic autonomy that became the new paradigm for revolution, and it subsequently allowed for the brief but decisive encounter between the artisans of the Marxist revolution and the artisans of forms for a new way of life (p 27); see also his reference to The Nights of Labor, p 40. 20. Rancire, You Cant Anticipate Explosions, op cit

return to a discussion of the avantgarde but through a different reading of its composition: a reading which not only locates the political potential of art within the autonomy of the aesthetic experience but also within the autonomy of art as rooted within the political context.15

It may not be immediately apparent what is at stake here. Rancire has increasingly emphasised a point that comes out especially forcefully in his conversation with Chto delat? that his discussion of autonomy concerns not that of art (or the artwork) but the autonomy of aesthetic experience.16 The inauguration of the aesthetic regime was the moment when this specific form of experience could be appealed to, deriving its force precisely because it lay outside any direct social function. This definition of aesthetic experience, of course, goes well beyond the idea of the appreciation of art (a point that Rancire had already made in The Politics of Aesthetics).17 Accordingly, the potential of aesthetic experience qua autonomous experience was the basis for arts political claims.18 In one of the most insightful parts of Rancires account, this potential pertains equally to the way the idea of social emancipation could be construed by the emergent movements of radical workers.19 There was a sense in which, in addition to arts own political claims, modern forms of political radicalisation were also connected to the emergence of the autonomisation of aesthetic experience from the ethical adequation between art and life that had previously prevailed.20 Rancire is correct, I think, to maintain his distance from those who would extend this insight into the bald claim which would see aesthetics as supplanting politics, or who would fail to recognise the different modes of dissensuality at work in art and political practice;21 his point is more subtle and its implications more convincingly squared with history. Nevertheless, whether this autonomised faculty that he describes is solely reducible to aesthetic experience is surely questionable. In a sense, what is being described comes close to the recognition of the transformation concepts taking place at this time, many of which wrought a decisive change in content (from liberty and equality to art, aesthetics and politics) and set the course for the emergence of their modern usage.22 This is what has long been known within Marxism and the social sciences as the historicisation of categories which makes attempts to deploy such terms as if they were neutral to history fraught with problems.23 Rancire is knowledgeable enough to know this, but he is inclined to be selective regarding which terms, categories and projects he subjects to the historical perspective. While his emphasis on the aesthetic mode of thought enlightens important aspects of the historical transformation represented by the aesthetic regime, Rancires insistence on keeping at bay the question of arts autonomy fails fundamentally to address the accompanying history of autonomys social institutionalisation.24 It is at this point that Begg and Vilensky try to go beyond Rancire (or, to put it another way, to return his account to an earlier moment where the distinction between arts autonomy and the autonomy of aesthetic experience was less rigidly posed). They not only wish to follow him in locating the political potential of art within the autonomy of the aesthetic experience, they also aim to explore how that potential emerges within the autonomy of art as rooted within the political context. I think they point not only to an

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21. Rancire interviewed by Christian Hller, The Abandonment of Democracy: An Interview with Jacques Rancire, Springerin, 3, 2007, unpaginated; available online at http:// www.springerin.at/en 22. Raymond Williamss Keywords remains the classic exposition. 23. Rancire himself pays close attention to the shifting conceptual status of the sensible and aisthesis in What aesthetics can mean, op cit. Interestingly, this problem of categorial historicisation features frequently within efforts to conceptualise the avantgarde, autonomy and heteronomy. See for example, Peter Brger, on The Historicity of Aesthetic Categories, in Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans Michael Shaw, University of Manchester Press/ University of Minnesota Press, 1984; Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, op cit. 24. Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics, op cit, p 45 25. John Roberts cited by Begg and Vilensky, op cit 26. Rancire, The Abandonment of Democracy, op cit 27. Harold Rosenberg, Toward an Unanxious Profession, in The Anxious Object, University of Chicago Press, Chicago London, 1982 (originally published as collection in 1966), pp 1320, and On the De-definition of Art, The De-Definition of Art, University of Chicago Press, ChicagoLondon, 1983 (originally published as a collection in 1972), pp 1114; Clement Greenberg, The Recentness of Sculpture, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol 4, ed John OBrian, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1993, pp 2506 (the essay was

important elision in Rancires approach, but, without developing their argument, also to something crucial for their understanding of the avantgardes essential content. Bringing together Adornos notion of the new (understood as the possibility of keeping alive arts non-identity in the face of its own institutionalisation and, as such, in the face of the meansends rationality of capitalist exchange value25) with Alain Badious event, Begg and Vilensky argue for a mediated understanding of art in both its social and its autonomous aspects. Rancire justifies his dismissal of the notion of arts autonomy with reference to the problem of aesthetic indistinction. The autonomy of aesthetic experience, he argues:
is not tantamount to the autonomy of the artwork, since this separation of a sphere of experience goes along with the loss of any determined criterion of difference between what belongs to art and what belongs to nonartistic life.26

While it is true that the criteria for distinguishing artistic from nonartistic life in capitalist modernity cannot be fixed in an absolute way, it is surely incorrect to say that parameters and boundaries are lost, and still more erroneous to conclude from this situation that one can no longer speak of arts institutional autonomy. On the contrary, there have been ongoing struggles over what might, or should, be admitted to art; this seems to be the substance of much of the critical debate through the twentieth century. Almost fifty years ago, Harold Rosenberg referred to this very phenomenon as the anxiety of art, and Greenberg found much contemporary art wanting because he detected its elision with nonart; Michael Fried, famously, worried that Minimalist works were becoming theatre; development in conceptual art further challenged the defenders of what were then arts borders.27 Concerns with arts lack of categorial distinction with commodification have rumbled on since Pop, and, despite a period in which he feared that contemporary art had lost its coordinates, Hal Foster has since expressed concerns about how art borders design.28 There may have been a pluralisation of artistic media and modes (from the admission of documents to that of post-relational events within arts field), not to mention much post-Jamesonian theoretical touting of the postmodern collapse of determinations. However, it could be argued that, at the same time as so-called aesthetic indistinction has expanded (the claim, I think, is superficially derived and overblown), the categorial borders of artistic activity have been both strengthened and shored up institutionally. Indeed, much of the unease being expressed in the face of the current wave of political art (including some from Rancire himself) the concerns to protect arts autonomy, the efforts to reel back where art might go without losing its identity represents yet another moment in this long debate. Anything but indistinction, one might conclude. Contestations may challenge and relativise aesthetic values, but this does not amount to claiming that determinate criteria are erased (unless the term determined criteria is to be taken, falsely, in the most statically or formally conceived manner); relativisation, after all, is itself a determinate process, both determined and determining. Rancire rejects the longstanding distinction of modernism (autonomous) and the avant-garde (art/life). This is handled most fully in The

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published on three occasions in 19671968); Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, University of Chicago Press, Chicago London, 1998, pp 14872 (originally published in Artforum 5, June 1967, pp 1223). 28. Hal Foster, Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes), Verso, London New York, 2002 29. Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics, op cit, p 26, p 29 30. Rancire, You Cant Anticipate Explosions, op cit, The Politics of Aesthetics, p 30. Rancire qualifies even this schema, noting several artists who, while attempting to fuse art and life, simply wanted art to fit with the qualities of modern life but lacked political avant-gardist commitments. 31. Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics, op cit, p 29 32. It is useful to compare Rancires own points on the political subject which he advances especially clearly in the interview for Springerin, op cit. Here, he argues that political people only existed in its action and as the construction of its own space. Democracys people, he argues, is not to be understood as the positivistic conception of a social body, but is created by forms of subjectivisation, by the configuration of dissensual scenes.

Politics of Aesthetics, where he outlines two major variants on the discourse of modernity and two ideas of the avant-garde.29 In the Chto delat interview, however, he appeals to the complex heterogeneity of examples, a tactic which is used to deflect the arguments of others but which also has a tendency to rebound across the core of his own thesis. (It would be possible make the same case against the theoretical armature that Rancire is prepared to admit, not least his regimes of art; history was, after all, so much more complex.) However, dissolving into the infinite regress of appeals to particularities effectively hiding behind the multifariousness of material history or the irreducibility of the concrete world is not particularly helpful. Without doubt, the opposition of a modernist autonomy to the anti-autonomy avant-garde has been treated in overly simplistic terms, and Rancire correctly identifies some of the problems in seeing the art-into-life project too straightforwardly. As he argues: the idea of the avant-garde entails two different ideas of the connection between the artistic and the political: on the one hand, those who try to merge art and politics, to create a new fabric of sensible life and new forms of collective experience (he cites the Russian futurists and constructivists) and, on the other, those who sought the creation of a new sensorium and aesthetic break (for which Joyce and Pollock are the examples).30 This broadly corresponds to the two ideas of the avant-garde presented in The Politics of Aesthetics, but there is something deeply unconvincing about the separation he makes: If the concept of the avant-garde has any meaning in the aesthetic regime of the arts, it is not on the side of the advanced detachments of artistic innovation but on the side of the invention of sensible forms and material structures for a life to come.31 This separation between two concepts of the avant-garde, one understood in terms of a strategic conception (associated with the military and vanguardist metaphor), the other in terms of an aesthetic conception (Schillers aesthetic anticipation of the future), is totally artificial, ignoring the fluidity of social process and the mutability of political subject formation under determinate situations. (Try accounting historically for the political and aesthetic choices made at different moments by Tzara, Hlsenbeck, Boccioni, Carr, Russolo, Richter, Aragon, Pret, Naville, Breton, Brik, Kemny, Ehrenburg, Cahun, Modotti, May, Stam, Meyer, Teige, Deren, etc, etc hardly side-shows on avant-gardist history, except, that is, on its most clichd art-driven and conservative versions.) The problem is further compounded by Rancires elevation of the aesthetic conception as avant-gardisms privileged meaning.32 Interestingly, for Peter Brger, author of Theory of the Avant-Garde, the failure to distinguish between modernism and the avant-garde a problem he identifies specifically with Adorno and Habermas produces more than just a categorial problem. Brgers theory of the avant-garde strictly, the historical avant-garde has suffered from its widespread reduction to some familiar sound-bites. Brgers extended methodological precursus, however, is concerned to explore the historicisation of aesthetic categories and to elaborate how these serve to help or hinder our grasp of historical transformations in art. Certainly, his account is not above criticism: Brgers theory was subject to extensive scrutiny when first published in Germany, and due to its evasion of political developments, especially the Bolshevik Revolution, and his limited

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33. Focusing on the case of German literature, Christa Brger shows how the emergence of bourgeoisautonomy involved the repression of the Enlightenment-bourgeois model. Christa Brger, Human Misery or Heaven on Earth? The Novel Between Enlightenment and the Autonomy of Art, in The Institutions of Art: Essays by Peter Brger and Christa Brger, trans Loren Kruger, University of Nebraska Press, LincolnLondon, 1992, p 110 34. Brger, The Significance of the Avant-Garde for Contemporary Aesthetics: A Reply to Jrgen Habermas, New German Critique, no 22, Winter 1981, p 22. He goes even further, claiming that the achievement of the historical avant-garde provided the preconditions for Habermass (and also Wellmers) reclamation of certain Enlightenment values art with cognitive and moral aspects, which seems rather more farfetched. 35. Brger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, op cit, pp 901

engagement with Soviet avant-garde experience Theory of the AvantGarde has, justifiably, been accused of being bloodless. Nevertheless, as a serious attempt to reflect on art at a level of historical theorisation (albeit one that is now thirty-five years old), it usefully compares with Rancires. Both chart the passage of arts historical transformations, Brgers sacral, courtly and bourgeois periodisation contrasting with Rancires designation of ethical, representational and aesthetic regimes of art; both give Schiller a central place in their accounts. If Rancire approaches his topic as a historically informed philosopher (and one-time philosophical social historian), Brger does so as a philosophically informed cultural and literary historian: that is, we might expect to find some productive confluences as well as instructive divergences between their approaches. The specific conceptual condensations and distributions each deploys might profitably be explored as a way to develop the historical debates on aesthetics and politics; here there is only space to hint at one aspect. Adorno and Habermas, Brger argues, were unable to differentiate the specific features of the historical avant-garde from those of modernism in general because they avoided consideration of art at the level of its institutionalisation. One virtue of Brgers approach, which was developed further in the project he conducted with Christa Brger, is its attempt to track historically the emergence of artistic autonomy as a social institution; by attending to the process of functional transformation, it is able to draw out the associated practices, discourse and ideologies of this form of institutionalisation, and to demonstrate the exercises of power and vested interests in autonomising positions, in contrast, for example, to alternative institutionalisations that could have emerged;33 it also tries to keep to the fore how central categories (such as art, artist and audience) were being shaped into their modern forms. Rancire becomes caught in much the same difficulty as Adorno and Habermas, in part, it would seem, due to his insistence on autonomy as pertaining to aesthetic experience alone and his sidestepping the problem of institutionalisation, and in part because of the mode of argumentation he adopts. The points introduced by Brger go well beyond the mere problem of categorial definitions and their drawbacks in capturing historical complexity. The elision between avant-garde and modernism, he argues, obscures the avant-gardes historical achievements; the event of the avant-gardes challenge to arts autonomy, he argues, has provided us with the possibility for overcoming [its] limitations.34 Brger also argues that one of the momentous consequences of the historical avant-garde was that, by removing the demand for organic totality, it fundamentally altered the parameters of and, to an extent, abolished the longstanding opposition of pure and engaged (political) art.35 Faced with questions over the legacy of the early twentieth-century avant-garde for todays artists, Rancire responds that the project of art into life was not unique to this period; the same ambition, he argues, can also be found in the ethical regime. His point is not without validity, but only in the most general of terms; it begs the central question of how art, not to mention life, would be constituted in these different contexts, and how art into life under the ethical regime differed from the understanding of the same project in the 1920s or

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36. Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics, op cit, p 23 37. Rancire, You Cant Anticipate Explosions, op cit 38. Rancire, The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes, op cit, p 151

even in the twenty-first century. What is interesting here is the parameters taken by the discussion. Admittedly, the course of an interview shapes the argument of the interviewee; qualifying what is presented to him by his interlocutors, the directions taken by Rancire and emphases that he puts on his dialectic are produced and orientated dialogically. Still, the specific discursive production should not go unnoticed: his argument is repeatedly shaped around the historical and logical privileging of autonomy. (And not just the autonomy of aesthetic experience: while explicitly evading the idea of arts institutional autonomy, its presence is nevertheless sustained through the discussion.) While finding little more than echoes of Plato in the avant-gardes heteronomous tendencies and his claim for the singularity of the aesthetic regime notwithstanding36 he seems not to identify any earlier lineages for autonomy. Implicitly, he produces a progressivist model of history, in which heteronomy is always primarily, and essentially, characteristic of other regimes; heteronomous tendencies are forever condemned to being, at best, nothing new or, at worst, posited as simply retrograde. Presumably, this meta-discursive uni-directionality is not what Rancire wants from his account, but it is a problem that comes to the fore when he encounters questions posed from todays would-be left avantgarde. This problem is not only elicited by the nature of a particular interview discussion; it is also produced by limitations within his argument. Rancire is among the most historically and artistically aware of philosophers, yet his account is subject to a certain dehistoricisation that follows from the rigid separation he makes between the autonomy of aesthetic experience and autonomy within historical and institutionalised social practices. Peter Brger and Christa Brger note the presence of autonomous tendencies within the social formation preceding autonomys modern ascendancy (so it too could be said to be nothing new). They also show how art was separated from moral purpose and political utility, not only as part of a general shift from courtly to bourgeois periods, but also as part of an inner struggle within the bourgeois period itself. Furthermore, they suggest that far from leaving behind the relation of art to ethics, the transition to modern artistic autonomy was achieved, paradoxically, on the basis of a meta-moralistic claim about arts moral purpose (that is, its purposelessness). It could be argued that Rancire accepts the results of this meta-moralistic claim rather too uncritically. It is impossible to isolate art from politics, Rancire argues, qualifying the autonomous drive with heteronomy. Addressing the issue from the other perspective, he notes the contradiction facing the avant-garde: in trying to create a new sensorium of common life it must simultaneously work against its grounding in autonomy, as he puts it, to stop precisely this separation.37 Thus, since art promises a political accomplishment that it cannot satisfy, the desire to fulfil the promise of a new life invariably ends, in his account, in disappointment.38 The sense of agency and praxis that accompanies the avant-gardes heteronomous impulse is not only played down, but such praxis is condemned, avant la lettre, to melancholy. The dialectic of autonomy and heteronomy is neutralised and one-sidedly weighted. There is something horribly quietistic about the meta-conclusions to Rancires meta-narrative, which seems utterly out of kilter with those currents in recent art that would

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39. Ibid 40. Brgers conclusion to Theory of the Avant-Garde also returns to autonomy: the avant-garde, he argues, wanted not to dissolve the emphasis on meansends in the projects of art into life, but to refigure life on arts terms (the Romantic legacy). 41. Jack Straw interviewed on Today, BBC Radio 4, 23 September 2008 42. Rancire, The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes, op cit, p 148

seek to exceed their accepted place of fiddling with sensoria while the world burns. They would be, on this account, in a state of being always already defeated, their actions perennially self-defeating. It seems that what is of crucial importance to Rancires politics of aesthetics is not only his articulation of aesthetic autonomys dialectic with heteronomy but rather his desire to emphasise the ambiguity or undecidability induced in the shuttling between the aesthetic regimes two vanishing points. 39 Rancires account has internal motility, which is part of its attraction, but its dynamism is circumscribed by the essential stasis of an overarching aporia in which any moments of heteronomous transitivity are repeatedly curtailed.40 Interestingly, Rancires readers divide into those who all-too-readily accept the quietistic implications of the argument, extending them even to places at which Rancire might baulk, essentially a sanitised notion of autonomy decked out with a few political accessories, and, on the other hand, those who cannot disavow the meaning of the heteronomous power and who would try to press through the desire for political accomplishment. Faced with enthusiastic enquiries about a contemporary avant-gardism from his some of his readers, it is unfortunate that Rancire has tended to retreat to a magisterial position which sees in their ambitions little more than just the latest race of the shuttle towards the heteronomous scenario. Thus the constant shuttling between scenarios of autonomy and heteronomy, which Rancire describes as the life of art, is reproduced at the level of his own meta-account. It is impossible to isolate art from politics; absolutely true, but dissensual practice, whether in art or politics, has to accede to determinate points and decisions (and also to partisanship) if it is not to be drained of content. Rancire himself refuses to be lured into second-guessing, or acting as a guide for, the future. This is probably wise, but one consequence of his avoidance of even tentative articulation is that the presentation of the dilemmas and paradoxes of the aesthetic regime develops a centripetal force from which there is no escape. For those desiring political accomplishment (of both arts promise and social emancipation), the aesthetic regime has to be thought of not as prognosis, as a future shaped by an eternal present, but as itself at least potentially transient. Few would venture to predict the historical and temporal scale of aesthetic or social transience (although, on 23 September 2008, Jack Straw, the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain and Secretary of State for Justice and he was not alone did suggest that the collapse of capitalism had almost occurred last Wednesday).41 However, if the promise is to have any meaning (if it is not to be merely a gesture internal to the aporia), the conception of temporality has to project beyond aporetic logics. And this is what had begun to change, and all cautions and qualifications due is what makes it reasonable to speak again of avant-gardes. Mobilising around Rancires theory, they pursue his point that if it is to retain the promise of the aesthetic scene, advanced art has to stress more and more the power of heteronomy that underpins its autonomy.42 The great strength of todays emergent avant-gardists is that, after decades in the doldrums, they want to exercise arts heteronomous impulse, not just to recollect the Schillerian promise, but to break open the aporetic condition itself. The argument offered by Begg and Vilensky starts to run in excess not only of Rancires articulation of the politics of the aesthetic; they

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43. Hal Foster, Arty Party, London Review of Books, vol 25, no 23, 4 December 2003, pp 212 44. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, Les presses du rel, Dijon, 2002, p 36 (French edition, 1998). The formulation of fluctuating over the real comes from Manfredo Tafuris account of Griss cubism. For Tafuri, it conveyed the limitations of Griss practice (it merely fluctuated and did not touch the real). I use it here with a different emphasis one more appropriate to our, often too complacently, disillusioned times to stress the tensions set in play by the striving towards social immediacy. Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal C, Modern Architecture, 2 vols, trans Robert Erich Wolf, Faber & Faber, London, 1976 (Italian edition, 1976), vol. 1, p 105. 45. Begg and Vilensky, op cit 46. Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, New Left Review, 49, January/February 2008, pp 389

also read Adorno, if not exactly against the grain, then certainly by attending to specific moves in Aesthetic Theory from which a more militant edge might be constructed. A similar excessive reading could be seen to have been construed from Bourriauds Relational Aesthetics: the strong social and dialogical emphases on process; the appeal to the social potential of microtopias; an argument, in contrast to the prevailing artworld Deleuze-fest, advancing a specifically Guattarian militancy; the assertion of arts political nature and, especially, his defense of the idea of an avant-garde. Whatever the drawbacks of Bourriauds thesis (the inadequacy of the thesis to the artworks addressed, or the art to the thesis, or the danger of confusing mimetic adaptation to contemporary managerial techniques and marketing strategies with emancipatory potential), the critical engagement with this project has propelled discussion and action leftwards. The explicit concern with transitivity, articulated in Bourriaud at a microtopic and relatively abstract level, has been pushed and extended in an effort to break precisely his accounts limitations. The point about the microtopias of Relational Aesthetics is not so much that they are little more than an arty party (a judgement that poses as sophisticated critique while being little more than a banal stating of the obvious), but that even in ideal terms they fail to live up to the ambitions unleashed by their own promise.43 The transitive understood simply as an inter-subjective dialogic and confined to a metaphoric, and sometimes metonymic, invocation of the social has been increasingly transformed into projects framed by the ambitions for social transformation. The microtopic claim of Relational Aesthetics to fill in the cracks in the social bond tips over into the project to address its causes echoing the historical avant-gardes own fluctuations over the real, from its attempts to dispense with metaphor and make language direct through to the preparedness of some of its members to risk, or even abandon, their attachment to, and identification with, art itself.44 In seizing on the language of Alain Badiou, Begg and Vilensky are among many who have positioned Seattle as event (which they specifically ally to Seattles transformative effect on the understanding of subjectivity and potentiality45). Yet, a demonstration however significant (and Seattle certainly rates highly on that score) cannot constitute an event in Badious sense; even the vnements of May 1968 do not accede to that status, only the social revolutions of 1789 and 1917 (and, for one of Badious political background, perhaps also Maos Cultural Revolution). Nevertheless, the desire to draw together Seattle and event is understandable. What such references do is try to posit and more, to enact, construct or start to live out a beginning, or a beginning of a beginning, that can be understood to be built and shared collectively. Badiou himself has recently made claims for the importance of a performative unity. In the context of a discussion concerning how we might mobilise around the phrase there is only one world and challenge globalisations sham unity, he argues that we should declare another unity (the single world is precisely the place where an unlimited set of differences exist). Through this declaration and enactment, he argues, we make a unity which actually counters the false one offered by the neoliberal market economy; we reverse the dominant idea of a world united by objects and signs, to make a unity in terms of living, acting beings, here and now and, in doing so, we are deciding that this is how it is for us.46

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47. Ibid, p 41 48. The essay is a reflection of the disarray of the French left (and most especially the Socialist Party) in the wake of Sarkozys electoral victory in 2007; waiting, Badiou believes, will exacerbate the negative choice between disillusioned social pessimism and political renegacy. The theme of refusing to wait (for the election, for the revolution, for control of the state) can also be found in John Holloway: we cannot wait, we must refuse and break capitalisms time (Power and the State, Holloways speech to the European Social Forum in London 2004, republished in Take the Power to Change the World: Globalisation and the Debate on Power, ed Phil Hearse, Socialist Resistance and the International Institute for Research and Education, 2007, p 42) 49. Badiou, op cit, p 37 50. It is interesting to contrast, from the same issue, Rossana Rossandas concluding statements on the need for a mass party (The Comrade from Milan, New Left Review, 49, January/February 2008, p 99). Rossandas point, which it would be facile to dismiss as no more than nostalgia, is echoed by one of her associates from the Il Manifesto group: Lucio Magri, The Tailor of Ulm, New Left Review, 51, May/ June 2008, pp 4762. Both pieces, striking for their first-person narratives, belong to the growing body of work on communist memory. 51. Michael Lwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamins On the Concept of History, trans Chris Turner, Verso, London New York, 2005, p 112 (original French edition 2001) 52. Daniel Bensad, Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique, trans Gregory

Badiou appeals to the Left to connect to another order of time and to adopt a different dure to that imposed by the law of the world. The heroicism that faces impossibility directly but only momentarily and as posture needs to be replaced with courage as a virtue, which, he suggests, constructs itself through endurance.47 This should not be confused with the demand that we wait, which Badiou takes to be an acceptance rather than a refusal of the dominant temporality.48 Important at a number of points in his argument is the same idea: that of a collective self-construction as the precondition of (and activity that must be performed to unleash) social transformation. However, Badiou does not take the current situation to be one of fighting for the victory of the communist hypothesis given by his essays title. Written in the aftermath of Sarkozys electoral victory in 2007, Badiou argues that we are in a reactionary interlude where our task is to defend the very conditions of its [the communist hypothesis] existence. Anticipating an upturn in struggle (premised, it should be said, on a rather dubious theory of forty-year cycles), he sees the next historical phase as one in which we might formulate those conditions. He takes a modish line in rejecting the statist principle and the inadequacy of the party, characteristics of the previous sequence of the communist hypothesis (19141976). He seems happy, however, to retain other aspects of that same sequence, namely, what was prefigured in the expression cultural revolution or the revolution of the mind. Interestingly, he conceives the experiences of cultural revolution and 68, unlike those earlier in the century, as ambiguous (and thus not to be condemned as bad).49 Accordingly, the coming sequence will involve a new relation between the political movement and the level of the ideological a conclusion that is certainly ambiguous.50 Begg and Vilenskys event may not strictly conform to Badious definition, but it is a heightened conception of the word as used by other political philosophers who also, although in different ways, emphasise a reconception of time and stress the importance of enactment. Drawing on the writings of Marx and Walter Benjamin, Michael Lwy challenges the progressivist notion of history. The emancipatory project, he argues, necessarily figures a utopian excess over the present state of things.51 Daniel Bensad also addresses what he calls a new appreciation of time. Opposing the type of historical fetishisation characterised by the dictatorship of the fait accompli and a bureaucratic culture of resignation, he contrasts Marxs syncopated history (punctuated anachrony is another term used) that is an open process harbouring lost potentials and deploys the stake of the event.52 The Benjaminian model of anticipation is distanced from the Heideggerian version: Bensad reads the latters Being-towards-death as a form of passive certainty and appeals instead to a political (strategic) anticipation which is alive to the possibility of shaping a different history.53 A directly political voice such as Marxs, Bensad argues, is always excessive because excess is its only measure and is intimately bound up with the practical subversion of the existing order.54 Even before the current systemic global economic crisis, the temporality of thinking and the thinking of temporality shifted gear; paralysis gave way to a conception of transitivity and the conceptual field began to be recast. Bensads contribution dates back to the mid-1990s, prior

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Elliott, Verso, London New York, 2002, p 35, pp 889 (original French edition 1995) 53. Ibid, p 85 54. Ibid, p 2. Here Bensad draws the point from Maurice Blanchot.

to the wave of resistance and industrial unrest in France, although subsequent to the Zapatista uprisings in Chiapas that have become important points of reference for the history of the anti-capitalist movement. Giorgio Agambens community to come was formulated as long ago as the early 1990s. It has since passed from the status of allegorical preservation of the very idea of an alternative, an exercise in recalcitrant will to puncture the capitals confident and triumphant moment of global ascendancy, to something that, if not quite approaching practical politics, then certainly speaks to an imaginaire that has become conceivable again. It is not just that narratives of retreat gave way to those of excess; rather, the very notion of excess is being transformed from an allegorical expression of utopian desire to one that is increasingly understood as construction of, and through, lived reality. It is this that brings us closer to the core content of the avant-garde. It may not characterise every single avant-garde artist described in the history books, but the essential content of the avant-garde is not only its being true to the Schillerian promise, its desire to exceed the institutional category of art or modernitys aporia, nor simply the commitment to social transitivity, but its preparedness to wager on the social excess of the heteronomous embrace.