There is no “aesthetics of communization.” Indeed to claim as much suggests that the inquiry has been posed at the wrong level, as if communization were a thing to which aesthetics might be attached – a predicate added to a subject. Communization is not a subject; it is, rather, a process that abolishes existing relations. The question then is whether a process (moreover, a process that has never yet truly occurred) can in fact possess an aesthetics. If we take “aesthetics” broadly to mean sensuous appearance, then yes, communization will necessarily have its modes of appearance; there will be movements of matter, form, affect, and so forth that will neither look nor sound nor smell nor taste nor feel like the world mediated by capital. However, if we take seriously communization theory’s basic contention that revolution in the current phase of capitalism cannot proceed as the affirmation of an existing position within class society, but only as a break with the reproduction of the totality of capitalist relations, then there is today no standpoint from which to elaborate a positive aesthetics adequate to communism. From the perspective of communization we cannot possibly speak of an ascendant proletarian art in the same way as we can speak of the historical ascendance of bourgeois art, because communization takes the form of the immediate abolition of class society rather than the affirmation and universalization of a class that might possess its own particular representational structures.
Hence the “aesthetics of communization” can
only be designated as a placeholder for the forms that are, or will be, immanent
to the practice of negating existing forms of appearance (the real abstractions
of capitalist society). From our current standpoint there can be no
counter-aesthetics opposed to the commodity-form, for instance, but only an
aesthetics of the commodity-form’s contradictions and, perhaps, of the material
practice by which that form may eventually be abolished. The same goes for any
hypothetical counter-aesthetics of, say, free giving as opposed to exchange, or
of immediately social individuality as opposed to the reifications of gender.
To the extent that this is a positive aesthetics, however, it is not an “aesthetics
of communization” but rather something else, perhaps worth analyzing in its own
right (art in this guise may be the object of the disciplines of art history,
aesthetics properly speaking, and so forth, but not communization theory). On
the other hand, to the extent this aesthetics is only negative it is perhaps
not an aesthetics at all but a practice. Hence Benjamin Noys is quite right to point
to a double-bind: for communization, there is no aesthetics but in practice, but
if there is “aesthetics” there is no practice. To describe the “aesthetics of
communization” is to describe something that cannot exist except potentially
and in contradictory form, and that would also cease to exist if it were to be
realized, given that “art” as we know it is also a category of capitalist
society.
Unless I am mistaken, however, Noys is not
responding to an existing positive aesthetics of communization per se but is
rather attempting to describe, first of all, the aesthetics of communization theory, and second, the implications of
this body of theory for artistic practice.
Thus his critique is posed at the level of representation, as a meta-critique.
I believe this equivocation between practice and text explains many of the
paradoxes of his essay. Noys observes a contradiction between the “figures, tropes,
and forms” of the communization literature – namely, “immediacy, immanence, acceleration, and dispersion” – on the one hand, and the persistence of artistic
practice, on the other. He also superimposes this contradiction onto the
polarization within communization theory between groups that affirm the
possibility of elaborating “forms of life” in the present as opposed to those
who deny any prefigurative politics. The question he asks is: How is
communization theory able to reconcile its allegiance to purely negative
practice 1) with the continued existence of particularized artistic practice as
opposed to generic social practice, and 2) with its own existence during non-revolutionary
periods? I take his implication to be that communization theory does not reconcile these problems: it is a
contradictory formation. It therefore seems reasonable to interpret Noys as
offering preliminaries for a symptomatic reading of the structural contradictions
of communization discourse – of its political unconscious, perhaps. In the
process, however, “communization” comes to name a text rather than a practice.
It seems to me that Noys’s reading of
communization in terms of essentially literary categories misapprehends the
relation between theory, practice, and representation, at least at this historical
conjuncture and as elaborated in the communization texts under consideration. The
problem is that Noys can seem to collapse the temporality of theory with that
of the historical limit or horizon itself. (I should be clear that I am now
speaking primarily of communization theory in its non-voluntarist articulation;
Noys’s criticisms may indeed apply to certain ideas grouped under the label,
but the tactic of identifying a tension within “communization theory” already
presumes the field’s coherence – its difference, for example, from
insurrectionary anarchism – when this in fact remains to be argued.) Communization
theory may then be reduced to a fetishization of the utmost break, rather than a
reflection on the structure of the social totality that produces the break. Consequently the persistence of other things
besides revolution itself is taken as a problem for the theory rather than as an
element of what it in fact predicts. What yet remains to be done (communization)
is then identified as what is supposed to be happening now; what is supposed to
be happening then calls for an aesthetics (since aesthetics above all refers to
present appearances); what is now
happening in reality is then found inadequate to the (distorted) image of the
theory; and finally the “aesthetic” element is found to be contradictory due to
the collapse of one temporality into the other. Such a perspective ultimately attributes
communization theory to a normative or utopian standpoint as opposed to recognizing
the theory as conditioned by possibilities immanent to processes that are
already occurring but which do not yet constitute a revolutionary situation.
To ward off this line of reasoning it is
necessary to insist on the uneven temporality of present struggles. While it is
possible to say that accumulation of surplus capital alongside surplus labor,
the weakening of the wage as the dominant form of social mediation, the
destruction of unions and the left, and so on, increasingly point to
communization as the logic of proletarian struggle in the present moment, it
would clearly be absurd to claim that none of the elements of the
“programmatist” era survive into the post-1960s period. Nor are these forms
present merely as archaisms, to be swept away before the millenarian revolution: they are exactly what remain to
be overcome in struggle. The reading of communization theory as
“accelerationist” in a pejorative sense may then result from eliding structural
analysis of a revolutionary sequence possible (but by no means certain to
transpire) under current or imminent conditions with the literal time of the
present. The fact that many texts in this corpus argue that communization must
be rapid and contagious is strictly speaking another issue; these texts do not
necessarily argue that the “prairie fire” will break out tomorrow, nor that it
will escape being extinguished, but rather suggest what will be necessary for the reproduction of non-capitalist life. A
critique of this particular aspect of communization theory would have to be offered
in terms of the feasibility of other strategies in a given (if hypothetical)
revolutionary conjuncture, rather than lodged against an undifferentiated
“accelerationism.”
What remains, now, is to draw conclusions for
current practice – both political and artistic, though it is the latter that
concerns us at the moment. Let me repeat that there is no aesthetics of
communization. This is not, however, to say that we cannot “make it with
communization.” Even for an analysis that accepts the thesis of real
subsumption, the totality of capitalism remains contradictory: indeed this
analysis, as opposed to the pessimistic conclusions of Debord and the later
Frankfurt School, has no greater purpose than to indicate that the dialectic of
capital’s expansion leads to the destruction of its own conditions of
reproduction. Hence the ruptures from which a practice may be elaborated are
not positive/normative positions external to capitalism but are rather immanent
to capitalism’s structure as the “moving contradiction.” In turn, the appeal to
a “beneath” of the state of things that Noys questions as a form of “lurking
vitalism” does not necessarily call forth an ontology of capture and escape, but
rather indicates that the forms of appearance presented as true in capitalism
are in fact only one side of a contradiction. The point here is not that real
abstraction is mere illusion – to be dispelled, perhaps, with the aid of art –
but rather that each instance of abstraction (value, abstract labor) has as its
reverse an instance of the concrete or particular (use-value, concrete labor).
These instances of the particular are subsumed to the totality but are nonetheless
in contradiction with it. Indeed both
the general and the particular as they exist for us are within capitalism;
communization is not the affirmation of one pole (use-value, concrete labor) at
the expense of the other but the abolition of both, and hence also of the
totality. The persistence of contradictory forms is then simply the material
with which art has to do today. If art has a function in anticapitalist
practice it may now be to hold open the non-identity or gap at the heart of the
capitalist value-form, not so much as a defensive maneuver against the
universality of bad life, but rather as a material practice conditioned by the
real movement of negation.
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Affirmation Aesthetics
Positive Affirmation Art
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