Art and Democracy

Can artistic practices still play a critical role in a society where the difference between art and advertising have become blurred and where artists and cultural workers have become a necessary part of capitalist production? Scrutinizing the ‘new spirit of capitalism’, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have shown how the demands for autonomy of the new movements of the 1960s had been harnessed in the development of the post-Fordist networked economy and transformed into new forms of control.1  The aesthetic strategies of the counterculture: the search for authenticity, the ideal of self-management, the anti-hierarchical exigency, are now used in order to promote the conditions required by the current mode of capitalist regulation, replacing the disciplinary framework characteristic of the Fordist period. Nowadays, artistic and cultural production play a central role in the process of capital valorisation and, through ‘neo-management’, artistic critique has become an important element of capitalist productivity.

This has led some people to claim that art had lost its critical power because any form of critique is automatically recuperated and neutralized by capitalism. Others, however, offer a different view and see the new situation as opening the way for different strategies of opposition. Such a view is supported by insights from Andre Gorz: ‘When self-exploitation acquires a central role in the process of valorisation, the production of subjectivity becomes a terrain of the central conflict . . . Social relations that elude the grasp of value, competitive individualism and market exchange make the latter appear by contrast in their political dimension, as extensions of the power of capital. A front of total resistance to this power is made possible. It necessarily overflows the terrain of production of knowledge towards new practices of living, consuming and collective appropriation of common spaces and everyday culture.2 Certainly, the modernist idea of the avant-garde has to be abandoned, but that does not mean that any form of critique has become impossible. What is needed to widen the field of artistic intervention, by intervening directly in a multiplicity of social spaces in order to oppose the programme of total social mobilization of capitalism. The objective should be to undermine the imaginary environment necessary for its reproduction. As Brian Holmes puts it: ‘Art can offer a chance for society to collectively reflect on the imaginary figures it depends upon for its very consistency, its self-understanding.3

I personally think that artistic practices can play a role in the struggle against capitalist domination, but to envisage how an effective intervention can be made requires understanding of the dynamics of democratic politics; an understanding which I contend can only be obtained by acknowledging the political in its antagonistic dimension as well as the contingent nature of any type of social order. It is only within such a perspective that one can grasp the hegemonic struggle which characterizes democratic politics, the hegemonic struggle in which artistic practices can play a crucial role.

Every order is therefore political and based on some form of exclusion. There are always other possibilities that have been repressed and that can be reactivated. The articulatory practices through which a certain order is established and the meaning of social institutions is fixed are ‘hegemonic practices’. Every hegemonic order is susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices – practices that will attempt to disarticulate the existing order so as to install another form of hegemony.

Once those theoretical points have been acknowledged, it is possible to understand the nature of what I call the ‘agonistic’ struggle, which I see as the core of a vibrant democracy.4 What is at stake in the agonistic struggle is the very configuration of power relations around which a given society is structured. It is a struggle between opposing hegemonic projects which can never be reconciled rationally. An agonistic conception of democracy requires coming to terms with the contingent character of the hegemonic politicoeconomic articulations which determine the specific configuration of a society at a given moment. They are precarious and pragmatic constructions which can be disarticulated and transformed as a result of the agonistic struggle among the adversaries. Contrary to the various liberal models, the agonistic approach that I am advocating recognizes that society is always politically instituted and never forgets that the terrain in which hegemonic interventions take place is always the outcome of previous hegemonic practices and that it is never a neutral one. This is why it denies the possibility of a non-adversarial democratic politics and criticizes those who, by ignoring the dimension of ‘the political’, reduce politics to a set of supposedly technical moves and neutral procedures.

My approach is therefore clearly very different from the one defended by Jürgen Habermas, who, when he envisages the political public space (which he calls the ‘public sphere’), presents it as the place where deliberation aimed at a rational consensus takes place. To be sure, Habermas now accepts that it is improbable, given the limitations of social life, that such a consensus could effectively be reached and he sees his ideal situation of communication as a ‘regulative idea’. However, according to the perspective that I am advocating, the impediments to the Habermasian ideal speech situation are not empirical but ontological and the rational consensus that he presents as a regulative idea is in fact a conceptual impossibility. Indeed, this would require the availability of a consensus without exclusion, which is precisely what the agonistic approach reveals to be impossible.

I also want indicate that, despite the similar terminology, my conception of the agonistic public space also differs from that of Hannah Arendt, which has become so popular recently. In my view the main problem with the Arendtian understanding of ‘agonism’, is, to put it in a nutshell, that it is an ‘agonism without antagonism’. What I mean is that, while Arendt puts great emphasis on human plurality and insists that politics deals with the community and reciprocity of human beings which are different, she never acknowledges that this plurality is at the origin of antagonistic conflicts. According to her to think politically is to develop the ability to see things from a multiplicity of perspectives. As her reference to Kant and his idea of ‘enlarged thought’ testifies, her pluralism is not fundamentally different from the liberal one, because it is inscribed in the horizon of an inter-subjective agreement. Indeed, what she looks for in Kant’s doctrine of the aesthetic judgment is a procedure for ascertaining inter-subjective agreement in the public space. Despite significant differences between their respective approaches, Arendt, like Habermas, ends up envisaging the public space in a consensual way. It is true, as Linda Zerilli has pointed out, that in her case the consensus results from the exchange of voices and opinions (in the Greek sense of doxa) not from a rational Diskurs like in Habermas.5 While for Habermas consensus emerges through what Kant calls disputieren, an exchange of arguments constrained by logical rules, for Arendt it is a question of streiten, where agreement is produced through persuasion, not irrefutable proofs. However, neither of them is able to acknowledge the hegemonic nature of every form of consensus and the ineradicability of antagonism, the moment of Wiederstreit, what Lyotard refers to as ‘the differend’. It is symptomatic that, despite finding their inspiration in different aspects of Kant’s philosophy, both Arendt and Habermas have in common that they privilege the aspect of the beautiful in Kant’s aesthetic and ignore his reflection on the sublime. This is no doubt related to their avoidance of ‘the differend’.

The real issue concerns the possible forms of critical art, the different ways in which artistic practices can contribute to questioning the dominant hegemony. Once we accept that identities are never pre-given but that they are always the result of processes of identification, that they are discursively constructed, the question that arises is the type of identity that critical artistic practices should aim at fostering. Clearly those who advocate the creation of agonistic public spaces, where the objective is to unveil all that is repressed by the dominant consensus, are going to envisage the relation between artistic practices and their public in a very different way than those whose objective is the creation of consensus, even if this consensus is seen as a critical one. According to the agonistic approach, critical art is art that foments dissensus, that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate. It is constituted by a manifold of artistic practices aiming at giving a voice to all those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony.

In my view, this agonistic approach is particularly suited to grasp the nature of the new forms of artistic activism that have emerged recently and that, in a great variety of ways, aim at challenging the existing consensus. Those artistico-activist practices are of very different types, from a variety of new urban struggles like ‘Reclaim the Streets’ in Britain or the ‘Tute Bianche’ in Italy to the ‘Stop Advertising’ campaigns in France and the ‘Nike Ground-Rethinking Space’ in Austria. We can find another example in the strategy of ‘identity correction’ of the Yes Men who appearing under different identities – for instance as representatives of the World Trade Organization – develop a very effective satire of neoliberal ideology.6 Their aim is to target institutions fostering neoliberalism at the expense of people’s wellbeing and to assume their identities in order to offer correctives. For instance the following text appeared in 1999 in a parody of the wto website: ‘The World Trade Organization is a giant international bureaucracy whose goal is to help businesses by enforcing ‘free trade’: the freedom of transnationals to do business however they see fit. The wto places this freedom above all other freedoms, including the freedom to eat, drink water, not eat certain things, treat the sick, protect the environment, grow your own crops, organize a trade union, maintain social services, govern, have a foreign policy. Al those freedoms are under attack by huge corporations working under the veil of “free trade”, that mysterious right that we are told must trump all others.7 Some people mistook this false website for the real one and the Yes Men even managed to appear as wto representatives in several international conferences where one of their satirical interventions consisted of proposing a telematic worker-surveillance device in the shape of a yard-long golden phallus.

Of course those forms of artistic activism represent only one possible form of political intervention for artists and there are many other ways in which artists can play a critical role. Following Richard Noble we can distinguish four distinct ways of making critical art. There is the kind of work that more or less directly engages critically with political reality, such as that of Barbara Kruger, Hans Haacke or Santiago Sierra. Then there are artworks exploring subject positions or identities defined by otherness, marginality, oppression or victimization. This has been the dominant mode of making critical art in recent years: feminist art, queer art, art made by ethnic or religious minorities. But one should also include here the work of Kryzstof Wodiczko. Thirdly, there is the type of critical art which investigates its own political condition of production and circulation such as that of Andrea Fraser, Christian Phillipp Mueller or Mark Dion. We can also distinguish art as utopian experimentation, attempts to imagine alternative ways of living: societies or communities built around values in opposition to the ethos of late capitalism. Here we find for instance the names of Thomas Hirschhorn (Bataille Monument), Jeremy Deller (Battle of Orgreaves) or Antony Gormley (Asian Field).8

What makes all of these very diverse artistic practices critical ones is that, albeit in different ways, they can be seen as agonistic interventions in the public space. To be sure, their aim is not making a total break with the existing state of affairs in order to create something absolutely new. Today artists can no longer pretend to constitute an avant-garde offering a radical critique, but this is not a reason to proclaim that their political role has ended. What needs to be relinquished is precisely the idea that to be political means to offer such a radical critique. This is why some people claim that today it is not possible any more for art to play a critical role because it is always recuperated and neutralized. We find a similar mistake among those who believe that radicality means transgression and that the more transgressive practices are the more radical they are. Then when they realize that there is no transgression that cannot be recuperated, they also conclude that art can no longer play a critical political role. There are also those who envisage critical art in moralistic terms and see its role as one of moral condemnation. In fact, given that we find ourselves today in what Danto calls the ‘condition of pluralism’, lacking generally agreed criteria by which to judge art productions, there is a marked tendency to replace aesthetic judgments by moral ones, pretending that those moral judgments are also political ones. In my view all those approaches are in fact anti-political because they are unable to grasp the specificity of the political. On the contrary, once political struggle is envisaged according to the hegemonic approach that I have been delineating it becomes possible to understand the crucial place of the cultural dimension in the establishment of a hegemony and to see why artists can play an important role in subverting the dominant hegemony. In our post-democracies where a post-political consensus is being celebrated as a great advance for democracy, critical artistic practices can disrupt the smooth image that corporate capitalism is trying to spread, bringing to the fore its repressive character. And, in many ways, they can also contribute to the construction of new subjectivities. This is why I see them as a crucial dimension of the radical democratic project.