Link to downloadable version
Communization
is a theory of revolution primarily developed out of the French ultra-left
during the mid-1970s. It poses the necessity for revolution as the immediate
process of communist measures – communization – without transition. Here I want
to talk about the aesthetics of communization in two senses. The first is to
probe the kinds of aesthetic figures, tropes, and forms that communization
theory uses to construct its own particular ‘problematic’. This is not, to be
clear, to dismiss communization as ‘merely’ an aesthetic politics. Instead it
is a way to grasp the form of communization, including the diversity of those
forms. There are, as we will see, different communizations and different ways
of posing the problem of communization. One way to grasp this plurality is to
trace different aesthetic emphases and choices in the deployment and use of the
key figures and tropes of communization. The second sense of the aesthetics of
communization I will explore concerns the implications of communization theory
for aesthetics and the contemporary practice of art. What would art after
communization look (or sound, or read) like? Again, consideration of this sense
will bring out tensions and differences in the forms of communization. Can we
practice a communizing art? Is art impossible in the horizon of capital? If
that’s the case can we practice the impossibility of art?
Figures of
Communisation
The
refiguration of communism as communization suggests the centrality of the
figure of activity and process. ‘Communism’ is, precisely, an
‘ism’, a suffix forming the name of a system or school of thought, while
‘ization’ is a suffix denoting the act, process, or result of doing something.
This activity or process is one that is apparently tautological: communization
is the production of communism by communization: ‘[T]he communist production of communism’ (Anon 2011: 6); or ‘Communisation
is not the struggle for communism; it
is communism that constitutes itself
against capital.’ (B.L. 2011: 148). There are no non-communist ways to
communism; hence communization is communism is communization. We make communism
by making communism. If this is the conditioning trope, I want to explore the
tautological process of communization in the linked figures of immediacy, immanence, acceleration,
and dispersion. In terms of their
destination in a common fluidity it will be no surprise that we find these
figures merging and flowing into each other.
The activity or process of
communization is also immediate. While a process or activity suggests something
which takes time, the time that communization takes can only be the immediate production of communist
relations: ‘The revolution is communisation; communism is not its project or
result.’ (Anon 2011: 6) There is no figure or problem of transition from
capitalism to communism via socialism or, if we are more sceptical, we could
say that transition is displaced or refused. So, there is no transition to a
new communist state, but rather ‘the simultaneous disappearance of the social
classes’ (de Mattis 2011: 24). If there is no need to build or make communism,
then why is communization an activity? It is an immediate activity in the
process of revolution itself, which refuses any non-communist measures (such as
the seizure of the state, the retention of money, maintaining armies or other
capitalist institutions, etc.). The qualitative leap to revolution (Hic Rhodus, hic Salta!) is the leap into
communization.
This immediacy is linked with the
trope of acceleration (which I will discuss separately later): ‘The revolution
will be both geographic and without fronts: the starting points of
communisation will always be local and undergo immediate and very rapid
expansion, like the start of a fire.’ (B.L. 2011: 154; my italics) It used to
be a ‘single spark’ that would start a ‘prairie fire’ and we don’t seem so far
from this Maoist figure, except we now have the refusal of any slowing down in
this incendiary process.
Of course the deferred question is when does this immediate process begin,
or has it already begun? Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee, who make
occasional use of the term (there are some brief mentions of communization in This is Not a Program (2011: 68), and at
greater length in the Call), imply
that communization has begun now with forms-of-life and communes that escape the
net(work) of imperial capital. On the other hand, Theorié Communiste (TC)
insist that it can only begin in the revolution and hence all that we can have
is a negative prefiguration of the limits of capitalism and glimpses of this
future moment. This also suggests how activity and immediacy interact: our
activity is making communism immediately, but this can’t be done simply
immediately. It will take time: either the time of struggles from now into
communism, or the time of the revolution itself as we hit the limits of
capitalism.
If the temporal figure is immediate we
might say the ‘spatial’ figuration is immanence.
We are drowning is the waters of capitalism and the advice, as in Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900), is not to struggle out
of the water, which is to drown for sure, but to immerse in the destructive element. There is no outside, no
cobblestones beneath the beach; we are subsumed by capitalist social relations
horizontally, across the planet, and vertically, down into the very
building-blocks of life. In Gilles Dauvé’s amusing characterization TC are
accused of producing a ‘proletarian structuralism’ (Dauvé 2008: 93), in which
capitalism dominates all. This characterization of immanence carries different
inflections: from the extreme position of TC – in which capitalism is totality,
but contradictory totality – to Tiqqun’s emphasis on forms-of-life that can
traverse capitalism on its own ground, or to Dauvé and Nesic’s assertion of
invariant communist struggle.
It is at these points of the
inscription of struggle that we encounter the figure of acceleration. We have
already seen how immediacy is linked to acceleration: ‘communisation will
always be local and undergo immediate
and very rapid expansion, like the
start of a fire.’ The dominance of capitalism at all points implies the acceleration
of struggle at all points: ‘[E]verything depends on the struggle against
capital, which either deepens and extends itself or loses pace and perishes quickly.’ (B.L. 2011: 148; my italics) If
‘the movement [of communisation] decelerates’ (B.L. 2011: 150), then we fall
back from communisation and into socialisation (a more ‘traditional’ process of
the socialisation of the means of production). To force the immediate
production of communization requires the speed to outpace the forces of
reaction, which are seen as implanted largely within the process of revolution
(another contention that could be debated[1]).
This acceleration also relies on a
dispersion of points of struggle, thanks to the loss of compactness of the
proletarian condition. The end of what TC call ‘programmatism’ – the
traditional forms of workers’ identity, affirmed in unions, parties, and states
– produces a dispersion of the proletarian condition. Rather than dispersion
indicating a weakening of energies, instead it is taken by communization as
suggesting a pluralisation that requires no condenser (to borrow from Trotsky’s
image of the party as piston and the proletariat as steam). These dispersed
energies recompose, for TC, a new figure of the proletariat without party and
formal organization. For Tiqqun they indicate a pluralisation of the struggles
of forms-of-life which don’t simply cohere into the ‘proletarian’ as
classically conceived.
These are all figures of fluidity: ‘Human activity as a flux is the only
presupposition of its collective, that is to say individual, pursuit.’
(B.L. 2011: 152) This fluidity predicates on constant expansion: ‘communisation
can only exist in a dynamic of endless enlargement.’ (de Mattis 2011: 25) This
figural context, in which prefiguration lies unstably on either side, both
here-and-now and in the process of revolution, seems to me the tension
communization bequeaths to contemporary practice, and contemporary artistic
practice. Do we have simply a negative prefiguration, which I’ll discuss
shortly, or can something emerge that indicates a possible future?
The End of
Programmatism
In
terms of our second sense of the aesthetics of communization – what are the
implications of communisation for the practice of art today? – I want to
suggest we can draw on the notion of the end of programmatism proposed by TC,
and the general agreement by communizers of all stripes that ‘traditional’
forms of workers’ organization are finished or empty. If we take the parallel
Alain Badiou (2007) draws between the political avant-garde of the Leninist
Party and the artistic avant-garde of the 1920s in The Century, we could suggest that both forms have been
hollowed-out. The end of programmatism is also, we could say, the end of the
programme of the avant-garde – attached to small groups, privileged artists,
the manifesto, etc. Badiou, elsewhere, concludes on the need for a post-party
politics, and so we could also suggest a ‘post-avant-garde art’. Of course,
declaration of the death of the avant-garde and calls for reinvention of the
avant-garde are commonplace to the point of banality; even the proposals of ‘relational’
or ‘post-production’ art by Nicholas Bourriaud, borrow this trope. What kind of
precision, if any, can communization bring to this situation?
One way to answer this question is to
consider the reflections of TC on the ‘avant-garde’ practice of the
Situationists. Guy Debord, de facto ‘leader’ of the SI, was acutely conscious
of the finitude of the avant-garde. In his last film In girum imus nocte et consimimur igni (1978) Debord stated that:
‘Avant-gardes have only one time; and the best thing that can happen to them is
to have enlivened their time without outliving it.’ (2003: 182) Although
they display this awareness TC argue that the SI remains in an equivocal
position on the cusp of the end of programmatism, both artistically and
politically. On the one hand, they are able to trace out the end of art and the
end of work, the impossibility of proceeding in terms set even by an ultra-left
programme. On the other hand, they have nothing to replace this programme with
and so fall back on nostalgia or practices which invoke the old models they
have ruled out.
While the SI aimed at a dialectical
supersession of art through its suppression and realization in revolutionary
practice they tended to remain split between the aesthetic, with most artists
expelled in 1962, on the one hand, and the political termination of art, on the
other, with art returning in nostalgia for past adventures and possibilities. In
the first aesthetic moment the ‘constructed situations’ of the early SI presage
revolution in the forms of enclaves or moments within the reign of the spectacle. They are affirmative
counter-possibilities, and this belief in a counter-art remains close to the
belief in an affirmative proletarian identity found in council communism by the
SI. The aesthetic SI continues to make art as they continue to make revolution.
For Roland Simon it is the penetration
of real subsumption – the dominance of capitalism that reworks the production
process to capitalist ends – that signals the end of this possibility, along
with the end of an alternative ‘working class’ identity; any such ‘moments’ or
artworks cannot be realized under the dominance of capital. In contrast,
following through on the rigorous negativity of revolution, Simon (2009) argues
that the suppression of art and the ‘politicization’ of the SI indicates a
recognition that ‘art’ can only take place within the revolutionary process –
within communization. Therefore, ‘constructed situations’ might better describe
the process of revolution – qua communization
– than the pre-revolutionary and prefigurative process of ‘triggering’
revolution.
The rigorously negative formulation
keeps dropping back into ambiguous gestures in the case of the SI. The
so-called ‘pessimism’ of the later Debord can be seen as a sign of the
difficulty in holding to this rigorous negative gesture and overcoming the
desire for a ‘positive’ form of art now. This can be seen in his tendency to
project back a nostalgic perception of the possibilities of the past that have
become ‘lost’ in the present; whether a lost Paris, lost comrades, or the
decline of the quality of alcohol, moments of the aesthetic recede into the
past. Debord remains within, to use Marx’s words, ‘world-historical necromancy’
rather than the ‘poetry of the future’.
Burning Down the
Gallery
The
communizing position implies that with the evacuation of ‘proletarian identity’
and the ‘avant-garde’, and the
evacuation of the potential fusion of both in some ‘passion for the real’, we must
abandon any aestheticizing model of revolution and any aesthetic prefiguration
of revolution. In these terms the ‘positive’ vision of the SI as regards
aesthetics is not merely outdated but, strictly speaking, impossible. This bears some resemblance to the thesis of the ‘death
of the avant-gardes’, but it does not imply a welcoming of this death as the
opportunity for some new modes of practice or reinvention – from the relational
to the reconfigurative, we might say. Instead, the TC critique implies, I
think, the futility and necessary nullity of any affirmative revolutionary art.
All that we can have is the rift that exists at the limit.
In the case of workers’ struggles this
rift is indicated in suicidal struggles which register the limit that class
identity forms. The result is the burning down of factories, attempts to claim
as high a redundancy payment as possible, and other ‘exits’ from work (R.S.
2011: 119). Crashing against the limit that capitalism itself can no longer
sustain the worker’s identity, the tragedy and possibility of struggle today
lies in a rift from this identity and the confrontation with class as an
exteriority. In this moment there can be a fleeting ‘de-essentialization’ of
labour, and it is this negative moment that is prefigurative of a communizing
process (R.S. 2011: 120). If I risk transferring these terms into art, we could
say the identity of the avant-garde is the limit. Today, to continue to be an
artist is the problem, an unsustainable identity. The rift would lie here with
the ‘de-essentialization’ of art, posed as a limit we can no longer practice.
To take one, controversial, example we
could say that this situation is already implicit in the practice of Andy
Warhol. On the one hand, his work belongs to the moment of programmatism, with
the discourse of the ‘Factory’ and the proliferating model of industrial and
media proliferation and production. This renewed and estranged discourse of
alienated labour is doubled by the nihilism that inhabits the practice of art
as impossible. In his essay ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, from 1970, Foucault
registers this equivocally subversive function:
This
is the greatness of Warhol with his canned foods, senseless accidents, and his
series of advertising smiles: the oral and nutritional equivalence of those
half-open lips, teeth, tomato sauce, that hygiene based on detergents; the
equivalence of death in the cavity of an eviscerated car, at the top of a
telephone pole and at the end of a wire, and between the glistening, steel blue
arms of the electric chair. ‘It’s the same either way,’ stupidity says, while
sinking into itself and infinitely extending its nature with the things it says
of itself; ‘Here or there, it’s always the same thing; what difference if the
colors vary, if they’re darker or lighter. It’s all so senseless-life, women,
death! How stupid this stupidity!’ But, in concentrating on this boundless
monotony, we find the sudden illumination of multiplicity itself – with nothing
at its center, at its highest point, or beyond it – a flickering of light that
travels even faster than the eyes and successively lights up the moving labels
and the captive snapshots that refer to each other to eternity, without ever
saying anything: suddenly, arising from the background of the old inertia of
equivalences, the zebra stripe of the event tears through the darkness, and the
eternal phantasm informs that soup can, that singular and depthless face.
Warhol’s
stupidity registers the moment of exhaustion of the programme in advance and
from within – a hollowing-out that would emerge in the 1970s and 1980s.
This ‘prefigurative’ negativity of the
earlier ‘avant-garde’, or artists of the period of programmatism, seems to
imply an odd temporality. Why should such negative gestures come in advance of
the moment of the end of programmatism? Why should the most resonant artistic
experiments in regard to communization (The Artists Placement Group, Duchamp,
Warhol, etc.) come at the ‘wrong time’? We could hazard an
interpretation from within the communzing problematic. While these ruptures
with the regime of art and the artistic are chosen
gestures, the end of programmatism might be said to make them necessary. If the end of art was an act,
such as Duchamp’s giving-up of art for chess (equivocal as that was), now the
artist faces the necessity of such gestures as they cannot self-reproduce as an
artist. This does not, however, explain why all or most art of the present
moment doesn’t seem to take this ‘negative’ form. In fact, as we will see, the
present moment seems more dominated by the desire to turn the negative into new
forms of ‘positivity’ – most notably new ‘objects’ and new ‘materialities’.
The emptying out of art, in its truly
negative form, is, however, also registered by another strand of contemporary communization, which is pursued by
the post-Tiqqun milieu. In ‘A Fine Hell’ (2013), ‘build the party’ argue that:
‘Aesthetics, therefore, is imperial neutralization, whenever direct recourse to the police is not
possible.’ They unequivocally condemn aesthetics as originating as a
counter-revolutionary strategy in Schiller, and they have no time for any
‘artistic communism’ out of the early Marx or the ‘Oldest Programme of German
Idealism’. Instead aesthetics is synonymous with the aesthetic regime of
Empire, with the aesthetic performing an ‘infernal synthesis’ on any
antagonism. In common with their Agambenian roots, they regard aesthetics as a
house to be burned down (Man without
Content 115); or, in the case of Claire Fontaine, an art gallery to be
burned down.
The alternative to the aesthetic is
‘the materialist obviousness of
forms-of-life.’ The only art is the art of inhabiting our determinations rather
than trying to escape them. In this traversal we must practice ‘an
apprenticeship in the art of tying
and unbinding.’ Art is impossible. Installation art can only make ‘little
portable hell[s]’. Instead we have an (anti-) political practice that considers
art as technique to form and find the dispersion or chaos of forms-of-life.
This is a collective elaboration, a sharing or force they call ‘communism’.
Here art seems to coincide with political practice as an unworking of the
various imperial identities, including the identity of the artist.
Of course these are, more or less,
rigorously negative programmes. The difficulty, which seems to me to afflict
communization generally, is the uncomfortable tracing of limits and rifts.
These rifts are at once prefigurative, but also not. In the case of TC the only
prefiguration is negative. The crashing into the limit of class identity is all
there is, and so the artist could only crash into the identity of ‘artist’ as
well. For Tiqqun and others there is something of a traversal within these
determinations that promises a reformulation of forms-of-life. This vitalist
interpretation suggests an excess encrypted within and against (this is the
modelling of communization recently proposed by Stephen Zepke).
Expressive Negations
What
does this clarify about our situation? To return to the story of the SI one of
the ironies is that this story is often told today as an aesthetic story. Communization suggests the necessary termination
of this story, so why should it persist? Why, to use a phrase of Johanna
Isaacson (2011), do we think the legacy of the SI has been thought in terms of
‘lineages of expressive negation’? That is to say, the SI has tended to be
mined for aesthetic gestures of negation that would somehow express, here and
now, precisely a sense of revolutionary possibility. An exhaustive account
would be beyond the limits of time and patience. What I would suggest is that
these ‘the lineages of expressive negation’ have dominated many of the
receptions of the SI: from Greil Marcus’s Lipstick
Traces (1989), with its lineage of negation from the SI to punk, to
McKenzie Wark’s The Beach Beneath the
Street (2011), with its recovery of the ‘artistic SI’, the tendency has
gone precisely in the other direction to that indicated by communization.
The difficulty then remains: how do we
account for the ‘error’ of these readings? If Debord and the SI couldn’t hold
on to a negative reading and persisted in nostalgia, we might say the limit of
reading today turns the SI itself into an object of nostalgia. Marx’s ‘poetry
of the future’ seems as distant as ever. We could argue that this is one sign
of the current limit of class identity and the blockage which forces us back
into nostalgia for ‘expressive negation’ at a moment that is, to say the least,
unconducive to such forms. The additional irony is that such ‘negations’ are
often justified and retained precisely because of their positive forms. It is the fact that they seem existent
possibilities, rather the austere path of the resolutely negative, that lends
them a certain heft in the ‘weightless’ experience of capitalism. I would
suggest that it is precisely the paradoxical ‘positivity’ of these ‘expressive
negations’ that exerts attraction and fascination in the present moment. In
this way, and here I have some sympathy with the communizing critique, the risk
is of a consolatory function of the
aesthetic.
Making it with
Communization
Can
we then make anything out of communization? In a response to a questionnaire on
Occupy sent by the journal October,
Jaleh Mansoor, Daniel Marcus, and Daniel Spaulding argue that: ‘Art’s
usefulness in these times is a matter less of its prefiguring a coming order,
or even negating the present one, than of its openness to the materiality of
our social existence and the means of proving for it.’ (2012: 48) This is a
useful attempt to flesh out what art might do within the context of communization
that suggests the absence of affirmative practice. Here it is a matter of the
‘materials’ we have to work with (and against), rather than some kind of
guaranteed practice.
They go on to unpack this statement to
argue that art registers the falsity of the capitalist universe and insist that
bodies and things cannot be captured. The difficulty for me here is the
modelling of capitalism as capture and the evasion of capital as totality. This
‘beneath’ the state of things, their metaphor, seems in danger of returning to
the problematic metaphor of ‘beneath the cobblestones, the beach’. There is a
tension of lurking vitalism, I find, which seems to fall away from the probing
of art and labour, including the failure of labour.[2]
Perhaps this vitalism emerges from the very rigour of the negative, as its
flipside and ‘affirmative’ moment. This returns us to the tensions and problems
of the SI and suggests that the ‘end of programmatism’ or the cusp of that
‘end’, remains less clear cut than we might imagine.
I say this not to assert superiority,
but rather to assess the difficult problematic communization poses to us. The
rigour of its negative formulations leave us in what may seem the
unsatisfactory position of merely exploring negative prefigurations: limits,
ruptures, suicidal activities, identifications with capital, and aesthetic
regressions. Of course working with negativity is one of the definitional
traits of the avant-garde, so this is not so unfamiliar. That said, and in
perhaps ironically Wittgensteinian fashion, I’d say the problematic of
communization might be useful as a kind of therapy for our prefigurative and
ruptural desires. Therapy is, or should be, painful; in Freud’s famous
formulation we hope to pass from hysterical misery to everyday unhappiness. In
the context of communization we could rework this to suggest moving from an
oscillation of hysterical misery and elation to everyday misery. That’s to say,
to begin from where we are.
Bibliography
Angioma,
Cherry (2012), ‘Communisation theory and the question of fascism’, libcom.org,
Anon., ‘Editorial’ (2011), SIC: International Journal for Communization 1 (2011): 5-10.
Badiou, Alain [2005] (2007), The Century, trans., with commentary and notes, A. Toscano,
Cambridge: Polity.
B.L. (2011), ‘The Suspended Step of Communisation’, SIC: International Journal for Communization
1 (2011): 147-169.
Build the Party (2013), ‘A Fine Hell’, build the party blog,
Dauvé, Gilles (2008), ‘Human, All too Human?’ [2000],
Endnotes 1: 90-102.
Debord, Guy (2003), Complete Cinematic Works,
trans. and ed. Ken Knabb, Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Foucault, Michel (1970), ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, generation-online:
Invisible Committee (2004), Call
Isaacson, Johanna (2011), ‘From Riot Grrrl toCrimethInc: A Lineage of Expressive Negation in Feminist Punk and Queercore’, Liminalities:
A Journal of Performance Studies 7.4:
Mansoor, Jaleh, Daniel Marcus, and Daniel Spaulding
(2012), ‘Response to Occupy’, October
142: 48-50.
de Mattis, Leon (2011), ‘What is Communisation?’, SIC: International Journal for Communization
1 (2011): 11-28.
R.S. (2011), ‘The Present Moment’, SIC: International Journal for Communization
1 (2011): 95-144.
Simon, R. et collectif (2009), Histoire critique de l’ultragauche: Trajectoire d’une balle dans le
pied. Avignon: Editions Senonevero.
Tiqqun
(2011), This is Not a Program, trans.
Joshua David Jordan, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
No comments:
Post a Comment