Without Exception

The creative economy (and its synonyms such as ‘cognitive capitalism’ or ‘immaterial labour’) has not so much shifted art towards the centre of capital accumulation, but rather appropriated its modus operandi: art is effectively superseded by the creative economy and is now exiled at its outer margins. Art qua art is at best a niche among others. ‘Art’ is but one of the many composite private/public circuits that constitute neoliberal society (and that have come to replace ‘the social fabric’). Consequently, it is doubtful whether art, as such, is powerful enough to change its own exorbitant position under neoliberalism in any significant way. Let alone that it may claim its, politically vanguardist, ‘exceptional universalism’. This is not to say that art cannot, and even less: should not act politically; however, in our current context, we will have to be very specific about art’s political radius (and where to put the emphasis in the notion of ‘political art’). As we will see, the voluntarist deadlock into which a large part of the debate driven by contemporary conceptions of ‘autonomy’ (at least in the Netherlands) has manoeuvred itself, does not allow this radius to be addressed.

In this context, both sides of the debate concerning the cuts in the art world in the Netherlands seem rather anachronistic. State Secretary for Culture Halbe Zijlstra intriguingly disregards the reality of the art market and its intertwining with contemporary capital accumulation by inciting artists to become ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ who need to give up their ‘addiction’ to government subsidies as their supposed only lifeline.9 The rationale behind Zijlstra’s policy is that art, in recent decades, sided with the wrong kind of economism: still too Keynesian (too much state-sponsored valorization, rather than immediate valorization), and too much emphasis on Third Way social-democracy for his taste. This explains why the current policies attack the educational and institutional infrastructure, which now needs to be subjected to the regime of immediate value-extraction. At the same time, we see how the Dutch art world reacts with a similar disregard for the real significance of art’s autonomy today. We hear the mantra of art’s fundamental ‘valuelessness’, of art’s autonomy opposing principles of exchange, valorization and commodification, when in reality this relation is at best ambiguous. Although the energies that went into the protests against the indeed unprecedented cuts in the arts in the Netherlands should by no means be underestimated, these perhaps also display a peculiar misreading of the developments within the art world over the past 30 years and seem to fall back on an absolute (all too romantic and pre-Adornian) notion of autonomy that is, even more worryingly, effectively translated as dependency on the state, without taking into account the extent to which that state has redesigned itself along neoliberal lines.

‘Autonomy’ is assumed to be a self-evident attribute that correlatively turns both the art work and the artist into fiercely independent subjects – who inevitably get in the way of any meaningful rethinking of ‘autonomy’ within today’s political economy. Because art seems bereft of any effective positioning concerning its autonomy (or lack thereof) in relation to neoliberal modes of capital accumulation, artists and other defenders of art’s cause have lapsed into an anachronistic voluntarism. To give but what is probably the most outspoken example of this tendency: Dutch artist Jonas Staal’s neo-Beuyssian call for ‘creative man’ as the antipode of the neoliberal homo oeconomicus.10 Remarkably, in Staal’s appeal, the generic aspect of Beuys’s Jeder Mensch ein Kunstler – its address to unleash undefined potentiality – is immediately muted by the fact that the emphasis is very much on ‘every man an artist’: it presupposes a subject whose autonomy, as the guarantor of creativity, is always already considered a given (and whose historically limited agency, for example under neoliberal rule, thus remains unquestioned; its historical situatedness becomes a burden that can simply be shrugged off). Staal’s détournement of Beuys’s call to arms implies that before producing anything else, man must produce himself. Here, autonomy paradoxically becomes the timeless attribute of an equally timeless subject that acts as the guardian of its own potentiality, thus forbidding time to impede its autonomy. Consequently, Beuys’s generic appeal is transformed in a productivist and thus subjective project, which is, practically, expressed in quasi-Leninist terms of an artistic-political avant-garde that needs to bring about ‘creative man’.11 The microcosm of the artistic event is projected onto the macrocosm of society, implying that the microcosm of art somehow directly influences the public sphere – an idea that conveniently remains unproblematized because of its voluntarist assumptions. Staal’s proposals start from the voluntarist assumption of an autonomous subject that is then seamlessly equated with a political and artistic vanguard that, paradoxically, is presented as both self-organizing and as a model for a truly democratic society. This stance is at the root of what Boris Buden calls ‘the new robinsonades’ that haunt many contemporary theories of political and artistic autonomy.12 Buden denounces the tendency for ‘self-proclaimed autonomy that believes it is able to arm itself with positive contents from its own sources and thus challenge neoliberal capitalism. . . . It needs a pre-historic and pre-political – and thus also a universalistic – identity to be able to become a political subject at all.’13 At best, this leads to moralistic denunciations of the ‘collaborating’ neoliberal art institution (leaning heavily on Schmittian notions of enmity), to the moralistic denunciation of the art world’s ‘elites’, and to inevitable appeals for an avant-garde of the righteous.

Such conceptions of autonomy take as a given that the alternative to neoliberal capitalism is somehow to be designed, and more importantly, that art and politics are somehow on a par since both are in the business of designing things. As Jacques Rancière, whose work often serves as a reference for justifying such correspondences, reminds us: there is a relation of resemblance between art and politics that is not a relation of equivalence.14 In examples such as Staal’s, this relation collapses into equivalence, which leaves curiously unchallenged notions of artisthood and art’s relation to capital accumulation. We witness a similar confusion of resemblance and equivalence in current strategies of hyper-identifying art as labour, in particular as precarious labour.15 The rationale behind this identification is that, if labour is increasingly flexible, if cognitive capitalism has recourse to the immaterial labour of communication, creativity and affect, then the artist is no longer the exception to the rule of labour, but becomes, as we have seen, if not the new model worker, at least a metonymic working subject. Indeed, the notion of ‘precarity’ has effectively been used as a rallying cry attempting to politically align artists and other members of the creative class with the ‘precariat’,16 and to provide the former with a renewed, if not guiding political role. However, these alliances and identifications are problematic: if, under cognitive capitalism, the worker’s greatest asset becomes her symbolic, communicative and affective capital, than obviously the creative class is in a much better position than, say, cleaners and postmen; it is questionable whether the assertion of fairly allegorical relations between types of immaterial labour, based on affective proximities, can serve as an impetus for social and political mobilization.17 As Franco Berardi shows: the generalization of precarity among the workforce is foremost an attempt to dis-identify working subjects from their labour (among other things ‘precarity’ means being perpetually in and out of work).18 Today, it is therefore at best questionable whether labour still serves as a privileged site for emancipatory political mobilization. Structurally, the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism, from productive capital accumulation to unproductive capital accumulation, has resulted in a generalized dis-identification with labour. We might even say that, ironically, the only places where one still is allowed to identify as a worker are the supposed ivory towers of the art world and the world of academic critical theory. Unproductive capital accumulation turns workers into debtors: being in debt is an isolated, passive position; a position of dependency that predates bourgeois or proletarian subjectivity. It is unlikely that we will see labour’s replacements, debt and rent, act as an impetus for sociopolitical mobilization.19 Against this background, artists perform roles that make any identification as a traditional working subject virtually impossible. For Isabell Lorey, artists act ‘simultaneously as service providers, producers and entrepreneurs of themselves’20 – they constitute a fragmented working subject; this fragmentation is accentuated by the ever increasing degree of abstraction of artistic activity: the artist, from producer, is increasingly becoming a mediator for assembling and transmitting knowledge and information; artist, researcher and curator are becoming more and more indistinguishable. This makes for a feeble mobilizing force indeed, which makes any recourse to an unproblematized notion of ‘autonomy’, or the idea of a mobilizing vanguard, obsolete. More often than not, the identification of art and (precarious) labour results in the aesthetization of precarity and informality, reinforcing the notion that precarity is a state of being rather than a socioeconomic condition to be overcome by means of collective engagement.

In this context, autonomy as self-proclamation in the public sphere is a highly problematic conception. It effectively bypasses any analysis of the actual conditions of that public sphere, which, to start with, is always already partly privatized under neoliberalism. The reaction against liberal populism is oddly regressive: although it, to a large extent, relies on the strategies and results of, for example, institutional critique and many other twentieth-century criticisms of the alleged public accessibility and political significance of art and its institutions, it seems reluctant when it comes to acknowledging its own significance within the liberal-populist sociopolitical consensus. In particular under the aegis of theories of cognitive capitalism and immaterial labour, art is perhaps more politicized than ever, yet this politicization, paradoxically, often seems to amount to merely denouncing and discarding the political economy these theories bring to light. Simply dreaming up a counter-hegemony of the commons and the affective against the politics of privatization and nationalist sentiment might not be the most favourable strategy. Fundamentally, the liberal-populist consensus discards the (remnants) of bourgeois and social-democratic culture, of which the public accessibility of art and knowledge was an essential component. Even the most virulent anti-bourgeois art of the twentieth century still proceeded from the public status conferred to art by bourgeois ideology, and its supposed role in such things as democratic and participatory citizenship. Post-Fordist societies are also post-democratic societies, and this has vital consequences for any political role that art might envision. The liberal-populist consensus precisely says that there is no such thing as the common, unless the common is defined in purely negative terms: we have to protect the remnants of the welfare state as long as they serve our private interests (we want health care, albeit as an insurance of sorts for healthy people, and most of all, we desire the police). It thus comes as no surprise that 70 per cent of the Dutch electorate are in favour of the cuts;24 it is unlikely that they will get even a glimpse of the amount of militant mobilization within the Dutch art world today . . .

If conceptions of ‘autonomy’ today mostly hinge on art’s self-legislated agency in the public sphere, it is all the more surprising to see that the architecture of that ‘public sphere’ remains merely an object of denunciation. The liberal-populist consensus endorses the politics of privatization, not just in economic but in sociocultural terms as well. The fragmentation or nichefication of the commons, the replacement of the labouring subject by the hardworking individual, national and local politics becoming more and more a depository for populist resentment (that is: precisely these levels of policymaking art has to deal with): all of these developments cannot be merely rejected as obstacles on the path to radical self-organization, but need to effectively be taken into account in any critical assessment of ‘autonomy’ today. Even more worryingly, it seems that the relative ease with which a certain philosophical lexicon of radical democracy has been picked up by the art world obscures its sociopolitical situatedness and, consequently, political radius rather than enlightens it. It appears as if the rhetoric of demos and event is projected onto the segment of the art world that is not entirely market driven, and that therefore is closely associated with government policies, and that is now championed as the locus of radical democracy. Event-based and relational art that previously acted as the restorer of the social tissue or as spearhead of the creative economy is now wishfully turned into a model for radical emancipatory politics. In reality, however, it is precisely this type of artistic practice that is now under liberal-populist fire and threatens to lose its central place in government policies; a precarious situation that invalidates the radical claims made at the very moment these are uttered.

Therefore, any rethinking of ‘autonomy’ today has to take into account its profound ambivalences, in particular autonomy’s relation to a neoliberal capitalism that, as Paolo Virno argues, produces nothing but ambivalent subjects.25 What characterizes today’s capitalist societies, as well as their critiques, is the absence of a reassuring third term:26 little to nothing stands between individual lives and the processes of capital accumulation. There are no ontological, libidinal or anthropological safe havens. We can no longer be assured of the inherently emancipatory nature of creativity or desire, and therefore these can no longer act as the prerequisites for autonomy. In this context, the voluntarist conception of autonomy makes little sense; in this context, autonomy, as it was in Adorno’s case, is in a sense always composite. Maybe, today, ‘autonomy’ as the conditio sine qua non for whatever radical politics or whatever counter-hegemony to neoliberalism simply makes too little sense to still act as a political and practical catalyst. What if ‘autonomy’ keeps us inevitably stuck in a rather tedious narrative of good news/bad news in which, as the critic Jan Verwoert writes, the good news is invariably that ‘the inherent theatricality of politics puts us [artists, intellectuals and cultural producers] in a position of power’ and the bad news is invariably that, in truth, ‘the potential of art to make a sense that would politicize the crowds is minute and negligible’.27 If invoking ‘autonomy’ becomes repetitive moralistic denunciation, if tackling the inevitable relation between art and capital becomes obsessing about appropriation, and criticism consists of allegories of enslavement, maybe it is time to change the record.