‘(self)-valorization methodologies in arts&politics’, Center for Drama

Art (CDU), Zagreb (16 June 2011)

The Art of Capital:

Artistic Identity and the Paradox of

Valorisation

Benjamin Noys (2011)

I

What I want to consider here is the paradox of valorisation for the

artist and for artistic practice. This paradox is simply stated: on the

one hand, the artist is the most capitalist subject, the one who

subjects themselves to value extraction willingly and creatively, who

prefigures the dominant trend lines of contemporary capitalism:

precarity, flexibility, mobility, and fluidity. The artist is the figure of

contemporary labour – the most extreme instantiation of the

present – and hence the one who’s self-valorisation is most plugged

into capitalism’s self-valorisation. On the other hand, the artist is the

least capitalist subject, the one who resists value extraction through

an alternative and excessive self-valorisation that can never be

contained by capitalism. In their work they prefigure non-capitalist

relations of the refusal of work, creativity, and play – ‘to do one

1

thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in

the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise [or make art] after

dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter,

fisherman, herdsman or critic [or an artist]’, in Marx’s well-known

words.1 The artist is the de-coupling of valorisation from capital, the

figure of another form of wealth detached from the dictates of

commodification.

The classical resolution of such a paradox, derived from

Marx’s analysis of the position of the proletariat, is to argue that the

most capitalist subject is the least capitalist at the same time: the

one most subjected to capitalism is in the position of the one who

prefigures the exit from capitalism. Again, to use the language Marx

uses to refer to the proletariat, those with ‘radical chains’ are the

dissolution of class society because they suffer a ‘general wrong’,

and so also suffer ‘the complete loss of man … [that can] hence can

win itself only through the complete re-winning of man.’2 Rancière

remarks that this inscription of emancipation in a logic of

development predicates it on the subject’s ‘impotence’ and

‘disempowerment’, and also implies ‘a culture of distrust based on a

presupposition of incompetence.’3 For this reason, and for others,

notably its historical failure, this way of settling the paradox – via

1Notes? Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845), Marxist Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm.

2

historical ‘necessity’ – is no longer widely held (except perhaps in

Negri’s thought), for both the proletariat and the artist. The alliance

of the artistic avant-garde with the proletariat, as complex and often

imaginary as this was, now seems definitively ruptured on both

sides. We witness a broken dialectic and the dominant trend

appears to be that the artist as proto-communist subject, as one

half of the path to an ‘artistic communism’, in Stewart Martin’s

phrase,4 has strayed off onto the path of ‘artistic capitalism’,5 with

little means for resistance.

This, I would say, is the story today, at least in contemporary

theorisations of artistic identity and artistic practice. It is this story I

want to tell, to probe the contradictions and tensions of this

narrative, and to consider more precisely the problem of valorisation

and self-valorisation that runs like a red thread through it. I am

certainly not supposing or proposing a resolution to the paradox of

valorisation in regards to the artist, but rather interested in

considering what we might call the aesthetic and political figuration

of this problem and the possibility of grasping or assessing the limits

of such figurations.

2 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ Introduction (1843), Marxist Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm. 3 Jacques Rancière, ‘Communists without Communism?’, in Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek (eds.) The Idea of Communism (London: Verso, 2010), pp.167-177, p.171, p.172.4 Stewart Martin, ‘Artistic communism – a sketch’, Third Text 23.4 (2009): 481-494.5 Ibid., p.482.

3

II

In one of his Letters on Art, written 1 December 1988, Antonio Negri

remarks that ‘Art has always anticipated the determinations of

valorization. So it became abstract by traversing a real

development, by creating a new world through abstraction.’6 What

Negri economically indicates is the equivocation of valorisation and

the complex role of art within and against the unwinding of

valorisation. In this case he suggests that the plunge of art into

abstraction during high modernism anticipated new forms of

capitalist valorisation – the determination of production through the

‘deepening’ of real abstractions. The paradox of this position of the

artist is that they run ahead of capitalism, but only to prefigure it, to

capture it in advance, at the level of art. In this way the self-

valorisation of the artist, their act of creation, anticipates new

modes of capitalism’s self-valorisation as ‘automatic subject’.

This could lead to the well-worn path of anxieties concerning

recuperation, or even the trope that Christopher Connery calls

‘always-already cooptation’,7 in which any critical move against

capitalism is pre-empted and contained to serve capitalism. In this

case the artist’s self-valorisation is absorbed into capitalism, and so

rather than their being any tension between the artist and

6 Antonio Negri, Art and Multitude, trans. Ed Emery (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), p.4.7 Christopher Leigh Connery, ‘The World Sixties’, in The Worlding Project:Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, eds. Rob Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery (Santa Cruz, CA: New Pacific Press. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2007), pp. 77–107, p.87

4

capitalism we find a collapsing of functions – ‘aesthetic capitalism’.

This is the thrust of Boltanski and Chiapello’s argument that

‘aesthetic critique’ has fallen prey to capitalism, has been

internalised by it as its modus operandi.8 In fact, the work of Thomas

Frank, notably his Conquest of Cool (1998),9 had already traced a

disturbing narrative in which so-called counter-cultural tropes of

artistic self-expression, liberation, and play (broadly Romantic

notions), were already being deployed by American advertising and

business in the 1950s and early 1960s. Here it is not so much a

matter of recuperation and cooption, but a parallel discourse, in

which advertising men behave like artists, long before this was

supposed to be the norm.

In this case artistic self-valorisation collapses, or become no

more than another sign of the emergent neo-liberal tropes of the

self as ‘enterprise machine’.10 In Negri’s hands this kind of dialectic

does not take place. Rather, he is concerned with competing forms

of valorisation, and already traces the intimate link between any

kind of self-valorising labour and capitalism. Working out of the

‘tradition’ of Italian operaismo and autonomia, he holds that

capitalist valorisation is always dependent on living labour as the

generator of value, and so the worker can exceed this sucking out of

8 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 2007).9 Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998).10 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), pp.224-5.

5

value through their own proletarian self-valorisation. What emerges

is a conflictual schema as the self-valorisation of capitalism finds

itself parasitically dependent on the working class, which can then

develop its own excessive self-valorisation as a rupture with the

value-form. Transferred to the domain of art, we find that art

anticipates new modes of capitalist self-valorisation, but this does

not simply mean that art is merely anticipatory, a kind of laboratory

for capitalism that always recuperates this inventiveness, rather, art

also promises a traversal, an excess, and a rupture with the

schemas of valorisation through a kind of super-valorisation.

While Negri concedes to the usual tropes of the 1980s as a

time of the dominance of capitalist real subsumption, the increase

of real abstraction, and the falling away of use-value, found in a

number of thinkers, and especially thinkers on art,11 he does not

simple concede to pessimism. Rather, the artist can reveal ‘a truth

of abstraction’,12 and he argues ‘We have to live this dead reality,

this mad transition, in the same way as we lived prison, as a strange

and ferocious way of reaffirming life.’13 So, we do not simply have

the situation in which capitalist valorisation parasites artistic

valorisation, but rather a possibility of traversal or excess, as artistic

valorisation is one the side of the excessive self-valorisation of

labour-power that capitalism parasites on, but cannot exhaust.

11 See Gail Day, Dialectical Passions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), pp.182-229 for a critical analysis of this narrative in the work of Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Fredric Jameson.12 Negri, Art and Multitude, p.5.13 Negri, Art and Multitude, p.9.

6

This process operates, according to Negri, through an uncanny

reversal: ‘There where the abstract subsumed life, life has

subsumed the abstract.’14 Art’s rendering of life as abstract

anticipates the capitalist real subsumption of life into the abstract,

eliminating the possibility to ‘find spaces where poetic self-

valorization might preserve a corner of freedom for itself’.15 But

rather than this loss of a little ‘corner’ of freedom being a defeat,

the penetration of capitalist abstraction to all realms of life

generalises life in abstract, creates, or relies upon, an excess that

the great works of abstract art also prefigured. In a sense then the

prefigurative function of art captures both sides of the paradox: the

emergent forces of capitalist abstraction and the possibility of

exceeding or developing those forces beyond the ‘fetters’ of

capitalist control. In aesthetic terms the artist of the present can

harness and engage with these mutational and monstrous powers of

the abstract that have become the property of the multitude. Taking

the argument that capitalism generates a ‘general intellect’, the

productive powers of communication and cognition, we could add,

for Negri, that capitalism develops the ‘general artist’.

If this would be the later argument of Negri, in his 1980s texts

he suggests, cognisant more strongly of the experience of defeat,

that the role of the artist is tracing the ‘truth of abstraction’, and in

particular (in an oddly Lukácsian register), the possibility of a

‘realism of the abstract’.16 In fact Negri will go so far as to argue for

14 Negri, Art and Multitude, pp.78-9.15 Negri, Art and Multitude, pp.67-8.

7

‘a punk constructive realism’.17 This rather fascinating possibility is

later sacrificed at the altar of the powers of the multitude, but I

think, and I will return to this, that it perhaps offers something to

think with that the reversibility solution to the paradox of

valorisation that Negri more usually proposes.

III

I have previously remarked that despite the well-attested to and

continuing hostility between Negri and Alain Badiou they are

something like ‘secret sharers’ in terms of common diagnosis,

starting points, and aims.18 In terms of their analysis of art we could

say this is particularly clear in the sense of their common

‘affirmationism’ (to use Badiou’s term) – the stress on the powers

and inventiveness of art – and their acceptance of the power of

capitalism to ‘capture’ or control this inventiveness. The difference,

of course, is that Badiou rejects completely Negri’s contention that

the powers of capitalism are merely the powers of the multitude

‘displaced’, or ‘misplaced’, a position Badiou regards as a ‘dreamy

hallucination’.19 In fact, in Logics of Worlds (2006), Badiou singles

out Negri’s analysis of art as the site of his embrace of the

ideological logic of contemporary capitalism, what Badiou calls

‘democratic materialism’ – that there are only ‘bodies and

16 Negri, Art and Multitude, p.54.17 Negri, Art and Multitude, p.56.

8

languages’.20 It is the concern of Negri to fight on the terrain of

capitalism, and notably its effects of real abstraction, that, for

Badiou, turns his theorisation into an ideological apologia for

capitalism. In fact, we could add, and I don’t think Badiou would

disagree, that Negri’s modelling of vital and excessive powers

flatters capitalism’s self-image, not least at its moment of

devalorisation and crisis.

What we can see is a shared narrative of the power of

capitalism, but very different conclusions drawn when it comes to

the role of the artist and art within that horizon. Badiou, again like

Negri, valorises the moment of high modernism as a moment of

invention, but unlike Negri he does not coordinate this with a

prefigurative function. Instead, in a highly-contestable

amalgamation, he runs together the aesthetic and political projects

of high modernism into a common bloc that attests to the powers of

‘monumental construction’.21 It is the power, he claims, which has

been lost in the embrace of ‘the delights of the margin, of

obliqueness, of infinite deconstruction, of the fragment, of the

exhibition trembling with mortality, of finitude and of the body’.22 It

is this option that Badiou identifies with Negrian postmodernism,

18 Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p.134.19 Alain Badiou, ‘Beyond Formalisation: An Interview’, Angelaki 8.2 (2003): 111-136, p.126.20 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), p.2.21 Alain Badiou, ‘Third Sketch of a Manifesto of Affirmationist Art’, in Polemics, trans. and intro. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006).22 Alain Badiou, ‘Third Sketch of a Manifesto of Affirmationist Art’, p. 133.

9

omitting to note the similarity in their conception of the constructive

powers of art.

If we align this analysis with the schema that Badiou develops

in The Century we can argue that we have passed into the

saturation of the avant-garde and revolutionary sequence of the

‘passion for the real’ that dominated the short revolutionary 20th

century (1914-1989). At that moment a common vitalism,

emphasising the heroic powers of the will and the body, contested

the value-regime of capitalism. Although Badiou does not draw this

conclusion I would suggest that the saturation of this sequence is its

dispersal into what he calls ‘democratic materialism’.23 Whereas the

passion for the real animated the collective bodies of the avant-

garde and political vanguards (and, of course, beyond), we could

say that a figuratively ‘degraded’ passion for the real now finds its

locus in the suffering of the individual body. This involution of the

passion for the real is not, for Badiou, to be valorised as the site of

reversibility into a recaptured collective power of the multitude, but

must be resisted through a subtraction from the coordination of the

contemporary actuality of capitalist power with any dialectic of

reversibility.

In terms of the artist and art the operation of subtraction

requires the finding or construction of ‘an independent affirmation’

(my emphasis).24 Unable to rely on the encrypted powers of

23 See my discussions in ‘‘Monumental Construction’: Badiou and the Politics of Aesthetics’, Third Text 23.4 (2009): 383-392, and ‘Either / Or: Badiou / Kierkegaard’, MonoKl: International Alain Badiou issue (Turkish / English) (Forthcoming 2011).

10

liberation secreted within actuality, á la Negri, instead the artist

must refuse the horizon of the present to break the dialectic of

valorisation. This working of subtraction still takes its inspiration

from high modernism, but a high modernism split into two. We have

to break off from the passion for the real animated by destruction

and the bad infinity of the relentless attempt to track the ‘Real’

outside of representation, and trade this for the subtractive ascesis

evident in a work like Malevich’s ‘White on White’ (1918), which

figures subtraction as the tracing of a pure ‘minimal difference’ –

rather than the maximal drive of extracting the Real itself.25 The

difficulty is, however, recapturing and reworking this moment in the

present. It is the very power of capitalism that seems to debase any

‘monumental construction’ almost in advance, and Badiou has very

little to offer in the way of examples or instances of contemporary

art or artists who measure up to the criteria of probing a subtractive

‘minimal difference’.

If, for Negri, we are all artists, then we might say for Badiou,

no-one is, or should be. The last thesis of his ‘Third Sketch of a

Manifesto of Affirmationist Art’ is: ‘it is better to do nothing than to

work formally toward making visible what the West declares to

exist’.26 Not necessarily bad advice in a time of the hyper-production

of art, nor in the increasing integration of art and art practice in the

circuits of the market and state, not least through the integration of

24 Badiou, ‘Third Manifesto’, p.143.25 Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p.56.26 Badiou, ‘Third Manifesto’, p.148.

11

so-called ‘creative’ practices in education, but it does seem to leave

‘monumental construction’ as firmly a thing of the past. Such a risk

is further reinforced by Badiou’s own theorisation of contemporary

capitalism in the form of the ideology of ‘democratic materialism’.

His contention in Logics of Worlds that we live in an ‘atonal world’

seems to leave the purchase of any subtractive orientation moot. As

he puts it: ‘Empirically, it is clear that atonic worlds are simply

worlds which are so ramified and nuanced – or so quiescent and

homogeneous – that no instance of the Two, and consequently no

figure of decision, is capable of evaluating them.’27 This lack

condemns us to an effect of disorientation or, if we take Badiou’s

remarks on subtractive politics as a model for thinking art, stuck

with trying to construct ‘enclaves’ that are somehow resistant to the

overweening powers of capitalism, or performing what Badiou

describes as an ‘originary subtraction capable of creating a new

space of independence and autonomy from the dominant laws of

the situation’.28

The point of tension, or even failure, in Badiou’s theorisation

appears symmetrical to that of Negri’s. Whereas Negri seeks

redemption in the reversible power of capitalism that for him is

merely the displaced power of the multitude, and so risks merely

confirming that power, Badiou seeks redemption from this power

27 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, p.420.28 Alain Badiou, ‘“We Need a Popular Discipline”: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative’. Interview by Filippo Del Lucchese and Jason Smith. Critical Inquiry 34 (Summer 2008): 645–59, p.653.

12

through subtraction, and yet cannot clearly identify this possibility.

In both cases power is at stake, and yet it everywhere seems

lacking. The very dominance of ‘artistic capitalism’ seems to be the

sign of art’s prospective power, but it never seems able to take that

next step into ‘artistic communism’.

IV

It is just these kinds of narratives of increasing abstraction, of real

subsumption, of the dominance of the society of the spectacle, and

of the erasure of use-value at the expense of exchange-value, that

Jacques Rancière has been keen to dispute. He wants nothing of the

alternative Negri poses between ‘preserving a corner of freedom’

and embracing the monstrous mututational powers of capital as our

own, or Badiou’s nostalgic invocation of a purified modernism –

Rancière prefers ‘twisted modernism’29 – as model for a subtractive

practice without examples. Instead Rancière’s contention is that if

we break with the narrative of real abstraction or real subsumption

as totalising domination we also break with the false political

alternatives that terminate in either hyper-optimism or hyper-

pessimism. In staking this claim Rancière wants to pose more room

for manoeuvre for the artist, who is not simply trapped in the

dialectic of valorisation, which may also suggest at least one reason

for his popularity as a theorist amongst artists.

29 Jacques Rancière, ‘Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-Aesthetics’ in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward (London: Continuum, 2004), pp 218–31.

13

For Rancière, his thinking is designed ‘to contrast so-called

historical necessity with a topography of the configuration of

possibilities, a perception of the multiple alterations and

displacements that make up forms of political subjectivization and

artistic invention.’30 Therefore, no historical necessity simply

dictates the fate of the artist, and the philosophical construction of

an endlessly dominating capitalism serves an agenda that flatters

the ‘freedom’ of the philosopher at the expense of the rest of us

dupes. Politics has not been eliminated by an atonal capitalism, or

left to the workings of the Spinozist practice of the multitude, but is

an art, precisely an aesthetic, of dissensus that attempts the

deliberate disruption of accepted roles, social stratifications and

arrangements, ‘a way of reconstructing the relationship between

places and identities, spectacles and gazes, proximities and

distances.’31 It is, to use the telling title of the interview I am quoting

from, an ‘art of the possible’.

In this way we see in Rancière a re-working of scale –

capitalism is scaled down from all-encompassing monstrous

mechanism of capture, but also the demands of political art for the

fusion of art and life are scaled down as well. Instead, the art of the

possible works between these ‘fusionary’ locutions to create a

necessary distancing and tension that is the site of the political. We

might note, unfortunately, certain echoes of Cold War tropes of the

30 Jacques Rancière, ‘Art of the Possible’: Fluvia Carnevale and John Kelsey in Conversation with Jacques Rancière, Artforum (March 2007): 256-259, 261-264, 266-267, 269, p.257.31 Rancière, ‘Art of the Possible’, p.261.

14

rejection of the totalitarian for the ‘freedom’ of non-political art, to

recent Latourian valorisations of the reticular as site in-between

grand abstractions, and on to the celebration of the modest minor

‘freedoms’ of relational art, in this kind of formulation. Rancière,

notably, adopts the pervasive contemporary trope of rejecting

critique as necessary or effective: ‘If there is a circulation that

should be stopped at this point, it’s this circulation of stereotypes

that critique stereotypes, giant stuffed animals that denounce our

infantilization, media images that denounce the media, spectacular

installations that denounce the spectacle, etc.’32

While amusing enough, Rancière’s point seems to blunt the

general question of critique by dismissing it en bloc and then

constraining the true merit of ‘critical’ art to the role of refiguration,

which functions as a stand-in for critique, but is rather thinly

specified. In his formulation the aim of the artist and art is ‘[t]o

discover how to produce forms for the presentation of objects, forms

for the organization of spaces, that thwart expectations.’33 Here,

again, we witness the scaling down of the role of art and the artist,

from any full-blown critique, but, at the same time, a scaling up of

possibilities. In Rancière’s dissensus model artistic valorisation finds

its power in disruption, re-arrangement, and the thwarting of

‘political’ expectations – whether these come from existing power

arrangements or the formulation of ‘counter-powers’. Resisting what

32 Rancière, ‘Art of the Possible’, p.266; for a parallel see Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–48.33 Rancière, ‘Art of the Possible’, p.263.

15

he sees as the automaticity of Negri’s dialectic, and the pessimism

of Badiou’s condemnation of capitalist nihilism, Rancière retains

qualified faith in the possibility of the artist or art work prefiguring

the disruption that is socially characteristic of communist

‘moments’.

And yet again, there is actually more in common between

Rancière and his antagonists than might first be supposed. While

the underlying narratives of capitalism strongly differ the conception

of the role of the artist and art bears certain similarities to that of

Negri and Badiou. In all three we can see a dissatisfaction with any

pedagogic hyper-political art, which is often couched in a critique or

historicising distance from the avant-gardes of the 1920s, but

perhaps might reflect a more local rejection of the re-invention of

such projects in the 1960s and 1970s. A certain wariness vis-à-vis

the Situationists, for example, is symptomatic of this. What we

witness is a waning belief in the political power or necessity of art,

although coupled in Rancière’s case to the reinvention of an art of

reconfiguration.

Therefore while appearing more hopeful or even, to use that

dread word ‘empowering’, Rancière’s thinking falls again within a

certain degree of pessimism or wariness concerning the paradox of

valorisation and the power of the artist. In fact, Rancière turns the

screw by suggesting the valorisation of critique itself as consonant

with capitalism, thereby taking onboard a Situationist analysis of

recuperation but then arguing that this is simply a problem to be

16

faced rather than to be avoided by a hyper-purism – as in Badiou’s

subtractive refusal. In the case of Rancière we appear to gain

power, but that power is drastically limited and, at the same time,

the ‘horizon’ of capitalism is left largely untheorised and

undetermined.

V

I’ve canvassed these different theoretical ‘solutions’ to the paradox

of valorisation, while indicating my own scepticism with each. And

yet, each points to or re-formulates the problem, and it would be

unwise to claim any solution – dialectical or otherwise. That is not

what I intend to do here. I do want to consider a little more the

posing of the problem of valorisation. In a sense I would take from

Rancière the point that our narrative of capitalism, or our

conceptual / political understanding of capitalism, is crucial to our

figuration of the problem of valorisation. The difficulty I find with

Rancière is that this problem seems to be elided by his longue durée

characterisation of art in terms of an aesthetic regime constituted in

the late 18th / early 19th centuries (what is usually regarded as the

period of Romanticism). While we could spend a long time debating

Negri’s periodisation of capitalism and art in terms of real

subsumption,34 or Badiou’s periodisation of the short 20th century,

we can say that they at least present a more fine-grained attempt to

34 See Alberto Toscano, ‘The Sensuous Religion of the Multitude: Art and Abstraction in Negri’, Third Text 23.4 (2009): 369-382, pp.374-76.

17

grasp mutational shifts in capitalism and art. In the case of

Rancière, it seems, capitalism tends to drop out altogether, in

favour of a model of the political qua dissensus as continuous

possibility.

At least Rancière’s deflationary approach recognises the

reality that artists might require actual employment within

capitalism. That said, Rancière persists, I would argue, in

misframing the operations of capital qua transcendental horizon, to

inflate political and artistic capacities. In a sense, Badiou’s fraught

articulation of subtraction, which all-too-often risks coinciding with

the usual consolations of enclave theory, recognises the delimiting

effect of capitalism on the possibilities of praxis. In fact, despite its

problematic reliance on a quasi-Christian model of transfiguration,35

Negri’s immersive model – thinking of Conrad’s ‘in the destructive

element immerse’ – at least figures a constructive or critical

engagement with the real abstractions of capitalism. Despite the

seeming ‘magical thinking’ of reversal, Negri’s ‘punk realism’,

unelaborated as it is, tries to configure a necessity, in our continuing

moment of defeat, that has not passed; as Alberto Toscano

summarises: ‘The quandary of art in the postmodern would thus lie

for Negri in the invention of an unprecedented realism, a non-

representational realism, capable of rearticulating the present into

something other than a system of global indifference.’36 Of course,

the question then is: what would that look like?

35 See Toscano, p.377.36 Toscano, p.378.

18

What is crucial to note is the paradox that although these

theorists all qualify or contest the ‘pedagogic’ avant-garde and call

for alternatives – mutation (Negri), subtraction (Badiou), and

dissensus (Rancière) – within contemporary art practice there has

been more appreciation of the pedagogic avant-garde as an option

still open, if requiring re-invention. The response to the ‘quandary’

Negri poses, and which in different ways haunt Rancière and Badiou,

has been through the avant-garde and on to a ‘realism’ not

regarded as antagonistic to that legacy (for example, in the work of

Allan Sekula, which integrates Brechtian montage with Lukácsian

realism37). Therefore, there has been an historical engagement with

the experience of abstraction and of defeat, that may be less heroic

but is, perhaps, more patient, in terms of the possibilities that

operate in the present. This is not to say that the temptation to

valorise the revolutionary value of art is not still present in

problematic fashions. In a sense, some of the ‘realism’ that might be

regarded as necessary requires also an engagement with the

constraints and limits of the present, and the guarantee of political

bona fides should not be sought in the referencing of the past

avant-garde as if that solved our problems,

Of course, advice to artists is a perilous, although popular,

genre. Here I prefer to think more about the way in which the

37 See the discussion in Gail Day, ‘Realism, Totality and the Militant Citoyen: Or, What Does Lukács Have to Do with Contemporary Art?’, in Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall (eds.) Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence (London: Continuum, 2011), pp.203-220.

19

problem of value might be posed and the necessity for us to

confront and think this situation. That said, especially considering

the function of the abstract, I can’t help but quote a remark by

Adorno: ‘Those who create works which are truly concrete and

indissoluble, truly antagonistic to the sway of culture industry and

calculative manipulation, are those who think most severely and

intransigently in terms of technical consistency.’38 Again, this is an

open formulation, if we leave aside Adorno’s own aesthetic choices

and recommendations. What I think is useful is that it engages with

what something like what Negri calls a ‘punk realism’ might be

(despite the fact this phrase would be anathema to Adorno and the

word ‘punk’ carries a problematically nostalgic ring for me). While it

might be read as simply suggesting the path to the concrete is

attention to the ‘concrete’ of technical means, I think that this is too

simple a reading, far simpler than Adorno’s own reflection. Instead,

it means that the ‘concrete’ cannot simply be reached ‘as is’ but

only through a process of mediation and engagement with

abstraction.

Adorno poses this problem in terms of philosophy: ‘Because

concreteness has vanished in a society whose law condemns all

human relations to abstractness, philosophy wants desperately to

evoke concretion, without conceding the meaninglessness of

existence but also without being fully absorbed into it.’39 Whereas

38 Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature volume two, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p.296.39 Ibid., p.330.

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Adorno had in mind phenomenology, one doesn’t have to look far

today, consider merely the ‘object’ and its recent adventures, to see

this desire to evoke concretion at work. In fact, the relative success

of such a philosophy in terms of art, which is of course often

‘composed’ of objects, indicates, I think, the problem of the jumping

too fast without mediation to the ‘concrete’. This only ever results in

another abstraction, and Adorno, reflecting on Benjamin, notes his

adding of the ‘materialist salt’ that the object is inherently socially

mediated. It is here, in this ‘realism of the abstract’, that I think a

critical engagement with the paradox of valorisation lies – not least

because such a paradox is rooted in the paradox of abstract labour.

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