In response to a new post from Philosophe Sans Ouvre (you can either read the post there first, or read the post below as a stand alone post, though I recommend following the discussion over at Philosopher S... if you have time):


To PR and MT (thanking you first for your discussion. I mean not to trample on it, and I am sure my ideas may not go down too well with PR, but as a person sympathetic at the least to the left's desire for a more balanced and peaceful place to live in, I'd like to put forward these feelings on 'protest'):

Well, I'm with Adorno on this one, and one can indeed ruminate that if Adorno were around he'd be even more entrenched in his belief that Molotov's tend to 'backfire'.

That's just the point; Adorno didn't argue against change - as often stated by those who wish to cast him as a defender of the status quo - but rather wished to point out that change was not possible where force meets greater force, as this merely perpetuates a negative situation (and weakens the leftist cause with every defeat they suffer).

Activist politics re-emphasises what is wrong in the world, and, moreover, it often utilises wholly negative imagery and sloganeering in so doing. The public will never respond to aggressive imagery and words. Learn from those you oppose. The leftist movement is full of clever graphic designers and writers. Why do they not use themselves to better effect, instead of polemicising endlessly and gratuitously?

Anyone really wanting to change the world has to admit that activist methods are not working. Yet it seems that many well intentioned people somehow fetishize the activist role, its banners, its hairstyles and its manneriems.

We have a runaway capital system which has its own impetus. It makes advances that to the human intermediary are both positive and negative. An example of a positive consequence of capital is the proliferation of information, and the availability of faciltiies for its dispersal. The coming to light of the death of Ian Tomlinson was a consequence of this.

Over and above all the 'problem', when it is a problem, resides in a peculiar trait of human behaviour towards the stratification and containment of all things, and towards fighting against these things when they can't be contained.

Humans are police and activists and politicians, workers, bankers, scientists, artists, and they all make up, to be sure, a society that has its ugly aspects.

The trick is in trying to reduce those aspects without signalling a disdain for the second holiday homes of the monied classes.

'We have not come to take away your Bordeaux property portfolio', would be a more useful refrain than 'eat the rich'. For it is no suprise that those in power will do all they can to maintain power. Historically the usurped have never fared well and yet they are in a position to resist a fall into impoverished circumstances better than those, clearly, who already inhabit those conditions.

Moreover, individual freedoms seem so concatenated - and lost - within the runaway 'capitalist' model that one need retrieve even the shadow of their appearance before they can approach utilising those freedoms in order to improve man's lot.

This is the philosophical battle that need be fought - whilst a reasonable political interaction is aimed towards dialogue with the 'powers that be' - in order that individuals can conceive of their own selves, their own freedom; for it is senseless to proceed to construct a model of freedom within a system in which the subject is all but completely reified.

In my mind the possibility of a subject maintaining its 'self' in the face of an automoton objectifying society can only reside in that subject, individually, being able to construe itself as a subject through force of will alone. For an appeal by the subject to forces outside itself serves only to become contaminated by the subsumption of all things within the automoton-objectifying force that favours a stratification of experience, of which monetary value is but one aspect.

Only then can subjects come together with any hope of overturning the tit-for-tat squabble of leftist vs. capitalist politics, which the left seem doomed to fail at.

They (the left) have already been hollowed out, and carry on like hysterical marionettes.

To the extent that philosophers might desist from prattling on about the French Revolution, and the 60's student uprisings, the socially concerned individual need desist from parodying a worn-out form of praxis.

The G20 protest was not a success for the fact that it cost the government (the taxpayer) and the banks (the taxpayer) so much, as has been argued. It was a painful failure in which well meaning protesters were pitted against state employees in a repeat performance of a too-well rehearsed political drama for which the puppet master holds no resonsibility, for 'he' does not exist in accountable form.

Maintaining the view that such an activity was worthy is well intentioned, I know, and I thank a great many friends who were very involved in the protest, and who I am morally equal too in every respect, and no less of a sucker for the causes of equality, fairness, peace, etc, for 'keeping the dream alive'.

Yet the maintenance of this form of protest surely plays into the hands of the system which the left wishes to confront. The public have no heart for being 'kettled' for hours. A series of similar protests would dwindle in number over time and would see support sway in favour of the government, who even the most vacant of observers can see to be yet another mere player in this unaccountable automoton 'system'.

I have this post up at the Speculative Heresy/Inhumanities blog event page:

http://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/i-am-the-subject/

---I write this back in 2007 as part of a novella, since shelved. It stands alone as a short story/art theory hybrid.---


The botoxed minions have seized our state galleries. Paint flies and fur flies. Flesh flies. Titian babes, and Rembrandt babes begin to tire, their beaux-goddess complexions growing heavy with a human burden.

I face Down Death.

Nose to nose, I see the tears welling in my ducts projected onto skull cavity. A thin light refracting each drop and issuing two pin points of light centre of each bone burrow. Death’s presence, the suggestion thereof, makes my body feel as flesh appended to bone.
Can we not both inhabit a space somewhere between life and death?

Can I not exist on a sliver between me and everywhere?

I recall the voice of General Kurtz replayed on a tape recorder, recounting the journey of a snail as it slides along the edge of razor.1 I imagine at the end of its journey two snails held together by the razor.

I stand in face of the ‘Other’. I stand face to her chest, nose touching oil.

‘hErhm.

Then, footsteps of a Gallery attendant. Unsteady, hurried.

- Clip.Clip.Clip. Pause.

I jolt. Catching a ‘nik’ on my nose. Sharp tiny triangulation of oil paint. Little bit of blood. Tiniest streak I catch upon my finger, raised hand to my face.

- Clip.Clip.Clip.

I return nose to breast with this oil that is blood. I am eyeballing a grey-green splodge. I see it mirrored in my eyeball. I see my eyeball as not an eye, but a glutinous ‘ball’ of eye. Ball of ‘I’.

I recall, with Susie some five years ago: I imagined myself biting into those wonder-fuelled eyes of hers, in much the same way that I had once curiously bitten into an oyster. Glutinous, I had merely wanted to feel that gag reflex. I didn’t do it, even in fantasy, my front two teeth slid off her eyeball, making a squeaking sound. You cannot feel eternity in the presence of someone with eyeballs for eyes. You can love them, sure enough, but as to the experience of one’s knowing and breathing oblivion, for that I could only ever turn to art, from that point on.

Back here, now, this oil upon cotton duck constitutes my eyeball. There is nothing else. My eyeballs, glossy, little, offal; the mirrored globes that capture and give witness:

‘Mirror, mirror, on the floor, drop my drawers and tan my rear.’

Her voice tumults. Oil, surpassing oil, gambols over itself in order to constitute this figure, this regal marie-bell. Saucy and French, or indeed, that’s how I have wanted her to be. Her accent was indecipherable.2 ‘Painting’, she speaks a universal language, a kind of Esperanto admixed with pigment and linseed.

Though heavily layered her top is low cut, showing one inch of cleavage, suggesting a kind of tender abandonment. She looks into me, noting her reflection, and checking the quality of her material.

Surely it was a man that gave her form, his stare, and the busy working of his digits, scurrying, sausage-plant like. His excited fussiness belying his ‘self’ trying to escape its self.

I would, if I could, get closer to her, but we are already as close as two can get. As I stand here and cross over into her, I look back upon me, mirroring myself.

-Clip.Clip.Clip.

The Gallery attendant. This must stop. I return to myself, my balls of eye, ‘eye’ again.

I was enabled only short visits to see The Lady with the Fan, gallery convention disrupting the growing intensity of our relationship. For this to further develop I would need to take her with me, an impossibility that would risk permanently breaking us apart.
Only an outright consummation can temper my desire.

For consolation I return home and drink to forget.
…

Now, the following day: I turn to one of a few men who perhaps will listen, who has sought after and known art; Paul Cezanne.3

I speak to pictures.

Let me iterate: When I say that I speak to pictures, I must be very clear as to what I mean by this. The phrase ‘speaking to pictures’ is open to misinterpretation… I would not want to be written off as woolly and new age… Let it be clear that when I speak to these pictures it is not at all in a metaphorical sense… not as if the marks and forms suggest words to me… No, rather, these pictures open up upon themselves, their surfaces becoming a wide embouchure: A sort of mouth comprised of folds and sags of paint, from which art springs forth; a spirit, great genie of the oil lamp, or a Devil, if you like.

Art is born stubborn from this wound… bloody minded, and bleeding close to death…It’s birth an affront, as if kicking and screaming it chooses its own birth- date, constitutes itself entirely of itself, making the world appear with it and out of it; the flowers of future remembrance. The affront being in choosing to be born at all; in being born it is the mother that is aborted. And its mother – the artist – is cast out ghost-like from this oily embouchure…

I have come to the Courtauld Gallery to speak boldly with Cezanne’s paintings… their open gashes making present the scars of this serious and troubled master modernist. This most sensitive and most barbaric painter…

A character in Shakespeare’s ‘Timon of Athens’ says of painting that: ‘artificial life lives in these touches, livelier than life’…

I contest… Nay… tis’ real life… the paint made flesh… These apples, these bathing beauties are more apple than apple… more woman than woman… And what of the mind that shows us to ourselves, and shows us more than we thought we knew…? To the paintings that give parlance to this ugly and majestic spirit… giving birth to questions unanswered and answers to questions not yet asked…?

I ask tentatively at first:

‘What of Cezanne’s Painting? And then, what of Cezanne?’

Is it possible to truly own a painting without owning something of the artist?4 In order to own one of these paintings, with their gaping wounds… so many message of woe… in order to own one of these ‘pain things’, I will have to access that pained and mock-heroic man, the artist Paul Cezanne.

Much has been written about ‘Cezanne’s doubt’… his not quite knowing what to do next. The paintings certainly give parlance to this… no doubt they are as real as apples and trees themselves, yet they give the lie to life itself… On the far left of room one, opposite the huge windows ‘Pot of flowers and Pears’ gives voice to the moments when one could be unsure as to whether a flower is a flower, or whether a pear is a pear at all. Is there not something beyond, just back of the pretence flower/pear, that is somehow more real; the razor that holds us together and divides us from a union with our true self?

Cezanne’s doubt; his brush strokes wrested from a hand shaking under the strain of not only wondering ‘is this a pear’, but also ‘is this a hand… is this a brush, is this a painter.?’

‘Yes.’
‘No.’
‘Yes… and no.’
‘Yes, yes, no and yes.’
‘No, no and thrice no.’

The paintings speak at once, in disagreement. They are unsure if there is anything majestic and fundamental to be grasped at behind the thin veil of appearance… could one peel back the mask of reality, like oil from a canvas… would one find a realer ‘real’, or would they be left grasping insanely at flat, painted apples and trees? …is there something out back, behind all this oil… can I talk to Cézanne, or I am talking to so much oil, pigment and canvas?

A singular painting speaks to me…second from the far left, as I am facing the wall opposite the two large windows in room one, 1st floor. The farm in Normandy, 1882. It looks lonely, it wears on its face the greying pallor of one who has shunned people for too long, maybe a seer of great truths that has grown weary of lesser men. The painting opens up, its mouth strangely curled at the ends, in opposite directions… not the expression of lofty solitude, but that of a mind bent under the strain of what it knows, and what it knows it never will know:

‘I wanted,’ he began, the turgid expression cracking paint upon the canvas, ‘I wanted to paint the painting that would paint the world ‘right’ again… I wanted to paint the painting that could behold in itself the world entire…’

The voice, his voice, though projecting such a high ideal, falters and waivers, betraying an unease… do paintings cry tears of linseed oil…?

If I am to own a Cézanne – and by that I mean truly own a Cézanne, the man, the paint the landscape, people portrayed, and those that are hidden, I must better understand not this artistic genius (which is undisputed), but this miserable uncertainty and loneliness. I want to understand why, in this Normandy landscape, featuring a farm, there are no people… and why, more than this, in his portraits of people, there are also no people as such… least ways, never the person that is actually depicted!

The man, knowingly, has presented not a cipher of reality in his work, but rather a cipher for art. He has painted nothing but paint. He has thus redoubled arts presence in order to bring into effect a reality perhaps more real than that we inhabit (chitter-chatter and suicide bombers). This ‘excess of reality’, that even in the portrayal of others, betrays above all the lone artist.

I ask Cézanne: ‘What of friends, and what of Lovers?’ This excess of reality, this reaching for perfection beyond our human realm risks isolation.

The Normandy Farm speaks, the mould of a face appearing from beneath the green-oil grass like a Green Man: ‘There was,’ he said in pagan tones, ‘back then only ‘One’, me and her. All else appeared contained within.’

This ‘togetherness’, a coming together of one person and the Other, walled off, a perfect marriage, leaves an excess of perfection. It betrays the ultimate impossibility of such a union. And it is that that speaks to the viewer through art..5

Back in the gallery:

-Clip.Clip.Clip

However this remainder, as a remainder, is waste; it must always recede.

I leave the Courtauld, the illusion interrupted by the busying hustle of practical necessity, the clattering of yet more gallery personnel. Art like love is thwarted by the ‘mechanism’, the machine, the body, or in this case the artistic body. But all is fair in Love and Art, and what one cannot have they may seize, or make an attempt. If I could not bring Velaquez’ Lady with a Fan to me, I must step inside and take her out.

Back at the Wallace Collection…

On close inspection the loosely rendered paint marks that constitute the Lady of Chevreuse give way. Much like taking in the skin of a lover close up, mouth to cheek, eyeball to forehead, the flesh receding back to a cellular mass, you can see where our Lady ends and everything else begins. Velazquez has rendered something just back of the veil, a jot of the area where we all meld into one, a little death.

I am reminded of a hermit who lived in my childhood village in a decrepit old bungalow. It was said that crosses and crucifixes adorned the entire interior of his barely lit home. If, in the right light, you could see long enough through the grime of his street facing windows, he could be seen bowing and reciting in front of these icons.

The story Chinese-whispered around the village, yet denied by all the adults emphatically, despite their having probably propagated it, was that the old man was a disgraced priest who had been caught pleasuring himself with the aid of a statue of the Virgin Mary in his own Church. The ectoplasm, that had for the previous months been issuing from her mouth and eyes, declared by the priest to be the sign of a miracle, was perhaps nothing more than the misdirected miracle of life. Bribed by the cleaner who caught him he later fled in the night, recorded along the way as exclaiming ‘I had only wanted to get closer to God.’ Other versions of the story have involved the latter day saints and some candle wax, but the retelling of the former version at least affords some grace.

This defilement of a ‘cipher’ for absolute beauty/innocence was, perhaps, unforgivable. Had he been caught at it with a living breathing nun, the sin could have been forgiven somewhat more easily. In order to fulfill a simple sexual fetish he had, in deed, only needed to have bought Mary/innocence into the human realm. For every Virgin Mary there were tens of Mary Magdalene’s willing to play a part.

- Clip.Clip.Clip.

On to the National Gallery, this circular art dance sufficed to keep the momentum going. From National to Wallace Collection to Tate Britain one day. From Wallace Collection to National to home, and so on. Standing in front of the Rokeby Venus, amidst a throng I could steal away to a lesser known work hanging to her right: The ‘Female Figure (Sibyl6 with Tabula Rasa)’, Velazquez, (1648).7

‘Sibyl’: an ancient female seer, a kind of sister-saint born prior to Christendom. There is something wistful about her. On the lower right of the painting, the shadow that comes off her finger as it deciphers a blank page appears to make no sense. A sharp black painters stroke; completely excessive. It damn nearly choked me first time I saw it. She is a spiritual lady, her hair soft to the touch, straggles, and I feel her neck itch. The itch on the neck of an ancient female seer, and the black mark that belies the painters agitated excitement as he paints her dressing, lacy and very nearly see-through.

In a painting of a woman who is both apparently sexually and spiritually adept I see arts main premise betrayed. By sleight of hand Velazquez, grinning, I suspect, shows us to our inescapable physical selves (our desire for Sibyl), shows us arts transcendental capacity (Sibyl the seer) and fuses them together in that black shadow mark. The mark shows us that even through the painting, even when having caught a glimpse of the ‘Other’ we are returned to materiality: The very notion of the transcendent is comprised out of our base mortality. Spirit and matter two halves of the same snail, the square jawed painter, teeth gnashing, the razor along which it crawls.

I have decided in any case I cannot have her, I cannot make of art a woman for myself. Indeed, the best I may muster is to make of a woman ‘art’.

I make one last trip again to the Wallace Collection. I have dashed from day to day, from gallery to gallery, from mistress to mistress, so much this last few weeks that even the pigeons have begun to talk about me, in gobbles and squawks.

I play it cool upon arrival, taking time to look around some of the rest of the collection before casually strolling into the main room where the Lady hangs. In reality my ‘casual’ saunter is perhaps over affected. She grins affectionately as I catch her eye. ‘Daft old sod!’ she might have said, as I nearly lose my footing. My God, she so radiant; I shake as I detail her beauty with biro on paper. I note her appearance:

‘Black veil: Brown Silk top, farthingale, the large puffed up dresses, supported by a framework beneath by a framework of iron hoops (where was I to find one of these?!), a silver Rosary and blue lace bow…a cross trinket on a chain. Pale skin, good complexion (light foundation?), lips small round, breasts inviting, neck demure.’ And so on.

Oh… and the pertness. The ripeness. I will have to go far to find a living breathing one like her.

From now on every woman, every girl, of an age, becomes a potential Lady of Chevreuse.

I survey with a discriminating eye the passing girls from my vantage point sat at a café terrace in Covent Garden. My waitress is a late teen latino, almost certainly on heat. She gives me the ‘eye’. To do what with? I cannot take her here and now amidst tables and flying milk saucers. I forget to tip her.

The search takes me to one hundred pubs and parties. Walking down the street, standing in a queue for a lotto ticket, at the Doctors surgery, I swear I see her, carrying herself and her dress with such grace, despite the lowliness and unfamiliarity of her surroundings. I see her running down an alley hitching her gown high to avoid the wet pavement. Later I see her standing trying to hail traffic, wooden and dispossessed. Something in the uncertainty of her movements makes me yearn for her even more.

A week lapses and I find her again. Outside a late night club under amber streetlights. A black dress, dark hair, black leggings and white trainers. I could do away with the trainers. Leastways, she would no doubt take them off later. She steals off into the night in a London cab.

I take a nightbus, through a London unfamiliar, painted black. I pass her again a split second as she passes through a closing doorway, darting between door and frame vampire-like before it closes firmly shut. I picture her running up stairs to a regal affair.

Arriving home to the sound of the cat that says ‘hello’, I make away to bed. Waking I find myself inside Velazquez’s ‘Lady with a Fan’. She is more than willing. Lubricated from head to toe she spews forward oil upon oil. Amid absolute and exasperated squeaks and squeals (hers) and standing on a crossroad to orgasm I envisage our offspring.

In blind panic I break free, cum upon her nape, and flee. Waking, I find my sheets covered in cadmium red paint, thinned with linseed, issuing litre-by-litre from my penis. The perfect union of art (the perfect, the ideal) could give birth only to death. I had seen my offspring, loin-seed, as a complete dearth of existence.

All the while man tries to dominate and subsume art. Yet its total subsumption would leave us striving after ‘nothing’.

Heck. Heck-Heck, Ho-hum!

The next morning I turn straight to the National.

The picture of Rembrandt’s woman bathing at the National Gallery appears from a distance to be almost just a picture of a woman bathing. Nothing more. But there is something off kilter about this image (and all art), and to be fair, there is no mystery to it. The woman is being painted by an undeclared observer, two in fact: Rembrandt, and the viewer (in that instance me). There is little unusual in that, except that Rembrandts gaze supposes ownership. Stoffels, bathing, washing herself, is boxed upon a canvas, framed, and hung upon a wall. If you then look at the list of ownerships and claims to possession we have here, the list is endless… The National, the Framer, the audience, the painter, the line of owners from its first sale, we all have come to own Rembrandt’s mistress. And this is all not so sinister… the trick of taking something in with the eyes, and making it ones own is the trick of ‘seeing’. What is demonstrated so well here though, is that the closer you get, the further Hendrickje Stoffels departs, falling away, first into matter (paint), and then into a kind of ethereal mass… again we have witnessed an excess, but here an excess of ownership. The remainder in this case is nothingness (ethereal mass - the opposite of ownership), and again we dance with the ghosts – those that do not ‘own’… are completely dispossessed – and Rembrandt, of course, is dancing with.

How long can we dance with? Not long… this would be an excess in itself, and what looking at painting teaches us is that neither excess nor lack can ever truly dominate… we can be consumed within the painting, and we can ‘own’ the painting, but in both instances we will always return to the opposite polarity – for a bit. This all carries on until we eventually stop kicking. Thing is, we will keep playing this game, trying to get through to the other side of art, to a kind of perfection or Utopia, so long as we can never win at it. To win at it would be defeated – it would rob us of the opportunity to keep playing, to keep dancing.

Yet the minions, newly rich, stand at the gallery entrance like peasants in a parliamentary square. Yet they will not be machine gunned or run over by tanks, for only those who possess poetic conjencture, might save her now. There are no guns and no gases in this death camp, but the rapes in this rape camp are real enough.



copyright Mike Watson 2007.

“The longer I live, citizen. . .” — this is the way the great passage in Peguy begins, words I once loved to say (I had them almost memorized) — “The longer I live, citizen, the less I believe in the efficiency of sudden illuminations that are not accompanied or supported by serious work, the less I believe in the efficiency of conversion, extraordinary, sudden and serious, in the efficiency of sudden passions, and the more I believe in the efficiency of modest, slow, molecular, definitive work. The longer I live the less I believe in the efficiency of an extraordinary sudden social revolution, improvised, marvelous, with or without guns and impersonal dictatorship — and the more I believe in the efficiency of modest, slow, molecular, definitive work.” (pp. 13-14)Oliver E. Williamson’s The Mechanisms of Government


from: http://anthem-group.net/2009/11/24/translation-and-charles-peguy/#more-1299

Two, in fact.

- 'Work' and 'Love': the two things that Freud apparently said that we need to know how to do if we want to lead a happy life.

Neither in fact are at all workable without the other: Freud arguably meant that we need to love work and work at love.

What's probelmatic here is the way in which work has been consigned by leftist and anarchist groups over the years to imply being somehow subjugated, and by others as merely being a means to earn money, whereas work fundamentally means the process of deepening your understanding and ability in any given field, and need not entail financial reward or coercive force on the part of an employer.

And this muddying of the word 'work', by extension leads people to forego love altogether, or to expect it to be easy.

We need to get over the idea of work as a 'dirty' four letter word, as nothing of value, creatively speaking, ever fell from a tree. Dreaming whole tracts of a text you've been struggling to work upon in your waking hours does happen, but that is not to say that the time spent struggling when you were awake would have been better spent sleeping !

Thanks to Ian over at Uh-Oh/Psychic Attack blog. for the new gothic-esque font heading, in the style of flesh rotting, though I prefer 'bodies hanging on to life': Kind of appropriate for the subject matter of the blog, if you've followed so far, which is, broadly speaking, the seeking after of a life that 'lives' (i.e. is not reduced to mere 'dead' cellular interactions or monetised processes), but that does not need recourse to a God, gods, or other forces from 'on-high'.
It is hoped that 'art' can step in and fill in the role vacated by God as the Enlightenment project kicked in (what dreadful timing; it was when we needed 'him' most!). But not in a majestic way you understand... no we'd still effectively be mere matter working for peanut-matter wages, just we can rest happy at least that Scientists and money-counters can't take from us the last kernel of wholesome-ness; 'art', not so long as the very term evades definition!
Anyhow, so here's to a new look and further possible collaborations across the board.
LR

--- Writer comments... This piece was written in the week of the Venice Biennale's opening. It has been looking for a publisher since, though I have no excuses for not having found time to just post it up here before it's too late! Not a minute too soon - I think the Biennale is over - I give you 'Something Simple and Kind'.

Something more timely and still 'kind': News at the Frankfurt Book fair this year was that we have reached a tipping point: Digital Print will now fast become the norm. In that sense I'll give a quick mention to the excellent bookrix.de - the myspace of writing. Now to the article... ---


---

The Venice Biennale naturally has a remit that encourages inclusivity. How could it not when art is left to deal with the entire gambit of freedom and the individual right to expression as a kind of surrogate? Art kicks in where politics fails, whilst being unable to undo the latter's failings. Art's role is not dissimilar, in this respect, from that of the sporting gesture, sport having been hijacked for political gain, from Germany's 1936 Olympics to the boycotted 1976 and 1980 Games hosted, respectively, in Montreal and Moscow, to Ali's 'return' of his Olympic medal, projected into the Ohio river.

Of course, whilst art has its directly political moments, this, together with art's removal from society – its autonomy – constitutes art from the offset. Art is contrary; yet it is also ineffectual, which is what allows it to maintain its contrary freedom, as a force if not of change itself, of a 'hope' for change. The difference between the major art event and the major sporting event resides in the fact that at the moment that art genuinely becomes political, it would arguably cease to be 'art', whereas sport does not have as part of its grounding definition a necessity to remain autonomous from politics. Art's central programme is its aloofness, whereas sports central programme is 'competition'. Though here one must be careful not to draw a parallel between that 'sporting' competition and competition as borne out in the wider world. Doing so would appear glib in light of the extremes committed against individuals in the name of wider 'competition'. It is art's aloofness which makes it unsuitable as a tool for political intervention, resulting in poor art at best, soured politics at worst, rather than sports competitive streak marking sport out as complicit with politics.

To explicate this argument regarding art in full would be to return us to a mid Twentieth Century debate, that which took place between Adorno and his students, who, as students were wont to do in 1969, urged a revolution, only for Adorno to put the dampers on (or try to; it went ahead, but failed anyway). As Adorno would have it, a critique of society could only effectively happen from outside that society, via the truly Modern artwork, which, feigning autonomy, could cast its critique on an unfree social system. That which inhered in art as specifically 'art' was its aloofness from politics and the social sphere. And only art, in its detachment, could oppose the wrongs of that social sphere.

This line is sometimes cast as antiquated, for the fact that politics has apparently become so shrewd as to necessitate some kind of ground level concrete resistance, implying that art must either step up and become directly involved politically – and not just through its non-complicity with politics, and the special critical status that this confers – or must defer to activist politics completely.

However, one could rebut this counter-argument in that, firstly, whilst, for example, it would be possible to present a Molotov Cocktail as an artistic Readymade within a gallery context, the moment that the said 'artwork' stepped outside of the gallery it would become an offensive weapon: This, in accordance with the ethical status that the artist must maintain if s/he is to maintain autonomy. Indeed, the moment even the innocuous artwork is used to bludgeon or maim, to burn or cause damage, the artwork is shed of its autonomous status, as if being throw into the world 'proper'. The effects of human suffering are too real for art to withdraw from. It is is this first counter-rebuttal that allows for the second; art must remain apolitical if it is to cast an eye over politics in its various manifestations.

In this case, the Venice Biennale is under no injunction to represent 'everyone', being as such an injunction smacks of the political in itself; yet to exclude anyone would be to step beyond the remit of art. Such an exclusion may be read as politically motivated.

It is greatly significant then that whilst Palestine has a presence in Venice for the first time in the Biennale's 14 year history, Germany simultaneously becomes the first National Pavilion to show the work of an artist – British born Liam Gillick - not from, or even working in, the nation represented by the Pavilion.

These two conflicting trends raise eyebrows in opposing directions; one may wonder aloud how an international Biennale ever became so nationalistically stratified in the first place, with 30 nations occupying permanent pavilions whilst simultaneously bemoaning the fact that Palestine had been so long overlooked. Of course one imagines that the Palestinian people, who will be able to see parallel shows of artists works in Palestine itself for the duration of the Biennale would be immensely more happy if they were to field a team for the FIFA World Cup Finals. However, it does seem that the Biennale confers some form of legitimation upon the Palestinian State and one that is, thankfully, as unlikely to upset the Israeli State as it would the Israeli Pavilion, which houses works of the late painter Raffi Lavie (b.1937 d.2007), an artist who worked hard to have the values of Modern Art recognised in Israel during his lifetime. Palestine confront the present head on – an unsuprising mix of politically charged works, whereas Israel prefers to look back, thus conveying a message as political as it is apparently unconcerned.

If we throw into the mix of this discussion the existence of the 'East -West Divan' – otherwise titled 'It's Not You it's Me', an exhibit dedicated to artists from Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan, together with the separate displays hosted by Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, despite there also being a 'British' Pavilion, we are presented with a complex variety of responses to the notions of art, the political and nationality, as fertile for the reassessment of the value of the Biennale as for Art itself.1

The difficulty with defining art's value resides in its 'push me; pull you' nature. Contradictions inhere in its very being. To pin down Art as any one thing would be to rob it of the lack of purpose - essentially, its freedom – that inheres in it. Consequently it mirrors the already existent confusion of nationhood. Whilst we eradicate nations and centralise power in the hands of bigger international bodies, we devolve power to smaller communities. Palestine, jettisoned off Venice's main island in Giudecca, may have missed the boat in declaring itself as a going interest at the Biennale. Yet who is to say? Every conceivable nationality must be seen to have a right in declaring itself even after the passing of nationality itself.

This, indeed, goes to show how abstract the notion of the nation state is; the declaration of statehood is comparable to a grandoise art declaration, which perhaps accounts for the pomposity of the Giardini – Venice's permanent Biennale showground, home to the British, Israeli, Japanese, German and American pavilions , amongst others. Art must out-art itself if it is to even register in such illustrious settings, a point which may account for the almost unanimous bi-annual proclamation by the Biennale audience to the effect that the best art is to be seen outside the Giardini – in the Arsenale, or in the peripheral spaces, where nationhood is less often grand-standed.

Beyond the complexities that beset the artwork, politically speaking, resides a kind of dragon which remains every artists' duty, knowingly or not, to slay, if they are to truly make art at all; for art is damned if it assumes a political role, and damned if it does not. In the former case, as mentioned, art somehow becomes 'less art' for its political involvement. Yet, if, in the latter case, art does not become political, it becomes somehow inhumane, becoming allied with those political tendencies that serve to maintain the status quo through a kind of busied non-action.

Combining these problems we see the idealistic notion of the eradication of borders being met with the question 'At whose expense?', whilst the enshrining of borders on the say so of the artist frames the artwork within the real world realm of division and conflict. And in response to this a lonely voice resounds: 'Is it too much to ask that art be something simple and kind?'

In response to this question one might look towards the work of two very British artists, Mark Wallinger and Paul Sakoilsky who, arguably, somehow levitate themselves out of the problem that faces the political artwork, yet on completely 'concrete' terms. Sakoilsky's wry truism, that his sleeping in the makeshift press office at the 2007 Climate of Change show held in a near derelict office block in Southwark, whilst defacing found newspapers – his 'Dark Times' - was categorically 'not a performance' (he was between homes at the time), provides an alibi for Wallinger's 'State Britain', a piece that might otherwise seem to be a bourgeois reconstruction of one man's proletarian struggle. Installed in Tate Britain as a reconstruction of Brian Haw's anti-war demonstration, comprising of painted signs facing towards parliament, Wallinger's piece is art at its best, when it is simply not art. It is a literal reconstruction of Haw's protest, masquerading as art, and thus draws attention as much to the failings of art as those of politics. Sakoilsky's perpetual defacing of found newspapers with tragi-comic appropriations of headlines and images is similarly destined to a kind of cheerful-failure; it is surely this alone that compels the persistence of Sakoilsky's work.

As for the issue of nationality, it is worn as a yoke, with both the headlines and the policies providing the disdain which is the motor for art's failure as an autonomous discipline. Art can arguably no more oppose the state of things than become embroiled in them. One could in any case argue that Wallinger's piece, displayed within the safety of the gallery, chalks up the ineffectual nature of the work. For the protest that the work represented earned the protagonist, Brian Haw, both arrests and assaults (the latter coming both from the public and, allegedly, the Police). Any real affront to the British State is dealt with harshly, whereas State Britain was, like most art, calmly overlooked. So where State Britain fails as art, it also fails as politics, which is itself always doomed to a general failure of another kind – i.e. the failure to found equality.

Or, rather, art can't fail at politics – it is not deemed enough of a threat to meet with genuine political opposition – while at the same time failure is a prerequisite of the former. Ultimately, art often fails to be politics at all, except in those Nation States where creative free speech is harshly punished, and in these places art is a form of politics from the offset, that in actuality merely resembles art in form and physicality (i.e. paint is used to decorate banners, as paint is used to make 'paintings').

To revisit the comparison between art and sport at this point throws up an interesting asymmetry between the two disciplines: where sportsmen fail at politics they are seen as brave fools. Tommie Smith and John Carlos performed almost a caricature of what was politically possible at a sporting event when they silently clenched their black-gloved fists into Black Panther salutes on the winning podium after taking Gold and Bronze in the 1968 Olympic 200 metres. It was a drop in the ocean politically and one that surely made their careers difficult. Yet it could not be said to be a failure as sport. Whereas art must foresake everything – both politics and art - in stepping up to deliver a political message.

Yet there is a congruence between art and sport here, as, if the actions of Smith and Carlos were to mean anything, that meaning resided in the action itself, as a concrete moment of assertion. That this was categorically 'not a performance' meets with the central defence of the political artwork. The artwork may singularly fail in all of its aims, but it is, for the duration of its display, absolutely what it is – and thus holds no contingent or useful purpose. It is this utterly useless nature, its failing at everything, which enables it, uniquely, to be only what it is. Some kind of freedom.

For Smith and Carlos' gesture the same cannot be said – for on the left of the podium stood a white Australian bronze medal winner, who, in good humour, remained silent and still during what for him was very much a sports ceremony. The situation was thus framed. It had to be sport, for the inclusion on scene of a sportsman (one that wasn't foregoing their sportsman role for the role of activist). Whereas, artists can sometimes elevate out of the confines of art practice, suspending the notion of art, whilst preserving the uselessness of art to shield themselves from the dangers of politics, without the uncomfortable presence of someone on the periphery who might point out that what we are witnessing is art. The thing is, with art this just wouldn't matter, because we have come to expect art to masquerade as all things, not least as something entirely 'other' than art. This operates only on account of what art in fact is - a pretty useless charade. So, for example, Rancière’s belief that art is political in a very real sense – i.e. art's autonomy from the political sphere is its political gesture - sees in the impossibility of art's making an effective political statement, the possibility of it being remote enough to critique politics. Yet Ranciere's belief that art and politics are ultimately akin – with art's autonomy blending into a wider heteronomy, each being a condition of the other – fails to acknowledge art's radical difference from politics, or, indeed, sport, or religion, or cookery, or crochet. The radical alterity of art, even in light of its connection with wider society, has to be taken as real.

Returning to nationality, the inclusion of Palestine at the 53rd Venice Biennale, simultaneous to Liam Gillick exhibiting in the German pavilion plays on art's 'push me-pull you' designation, demonstrating that whatever is creatively declared will be negated elsewhere: The plurality of opinions and works at play within the art world is not an art performance, it is reflective of political failing in general, even if it, perhaps happily, cannot have the devastating impact of politics proper. Art is, in this sense, ruined from the offset, whether political or ostensibly autonomous; any real art, as completely free from society, would have to simply not exist: Adorno's preference for an abstract art, lest the discernibly figurative be subsumed within the world that it aims to yoke off, becomes a demand that art should somehow maintain its effect, as pertinent yet useless, whilst shedding its actual being.

In this sense the works of Sakoilsky, Wallinger and innumerable others are objects of contemplation around the notion of what art might be, if it could viably exist. That art might realise the transcendental capacity that it so perpetually seeks after is the ongoing promise, the utter failure of which guarantees its critical capacity.

There are some tens of art galleries worldwide that carry the name 'Joan of Art'. It is almost as if the replacing of that final 'C' with a 'T', whilst secularising one of Christianity's biggest contemporary mass appeal Saints, is not enough. A kitsch art shop must then be born to nullify the 'Art' aspect too!

See: http://www.joanofart.com/

Interestingly this attests to the problem of 'Art' itself, namely that the genre 'Art' cannot be done justice to in the objective realm. Galleries and artworks categorise and spoil the promise of Art. In this sense, it is to an ethereal 'Art Saint', an imagined figure who's non-existence in reality tallies with the imperative that Art must not be spoiled by its objectification, that we must look.

We could then declare the unreachable, the non-existent, 'Spirit' as 'Art', like an artistic Readymade, thus demonstrating that what especially inheres in the artwork, is never its objectivity, never the work itself. The work merely obfuscates what is unique about Art; its lack of use, lack of value, lack, indeed, of existence in a world where where a categorised use, a value and therefore a tangible 'existence' are deemed essential accrediting factors necessary for the idenitifcation, and homogenization of all objects.

Art's resistance - the residue of it that is still discernible - can then remain, in its status as utterly illusory. We must set aside the artwork, and hail Joan of Art, because she doesn't exist.

A dialogue conducted between Mike Watson and Paul Sakoilsky, on hope, art, the media, and the persistence of the 'apocalypse'.


‘Are We Living in The Dark Times: Or is it just the Persistent
Culture of Apocalypse?’

Rome/Hastings. Start Date/Time: 9.10.2008 - 10.44 PM.

MW: Paul Sakoilsky asks 'are we living in the dark times?', a question which entails some responsibility. To use a well-worn theoretical idea, it's a gamble. If Paul Sakoilsky were wrong - i.e. if we quite definitely are not living in the 'dark times', and it turned out to be noticeably so, he'd probably feel pretty accursed. I'm asking him now, what makes him so sure that of all the rhetorical questions that might be asked, he feels that this might be the most appropriate?
PS: Are we living in the dark times? It is always important to simultaneously pose its rider, 'or is it just the persistent culture of apocalypse?' That is to say, what, if anything, is special about our times? What is so special about us, that we assume, what? Stability? Homoeostasis? Has it always been the apocalypse? (That is, is the apocalypse always there, the end times, the dark times? As a figure standing before humanity?) Of course, this figure of darkness and its realities, dialectically, perhaps even ontologically, presupposes its opposite. As regards responsibility? This is a strange concept - or rather a problem - it lands me, us, humanity, in the face of ethics; or one hopes it does.
…[…]…
MW: I see a contradiction here: it's the Dark Times, but it's persistent, (re: your tag line): how would you equate something being dark, (i.e. darker than before) with the persistence of that state? That is, are we living in Dark Times, or is this (the apparent 'darkness', as you put it) just part and parcel of life? One of the attendant necessities of being 'alive': i.e. there is darkness because there is light? And as such, would one not be better off chalking up the light, instead of the darkness?
PS: That is, in fact, the question. One wonders. Personally, I don't know the answer. I do know, re. working with/against and playing with the media, that in this dispersed mediated 'world' of ours it is evident that - although when I started the project, apart from the constant terrible trickle, then pour of teenage killings in the UK, the ‘war’ on terror, climate change, etc.,– the headlines weren't so dark, as it were, but, over the last few months and more so, with the credit crunch etc, the 'darkness' , the majority of people now are speaking of hard times, dark times. As regards, chalking up the light, I actually think there is a lot of humour in the work, (albeit, of the dark variety - although sometimes just plain stupid in the best, positive sense) - and this is vital. Of course, on the other hand, some of this work has been made through a cloud of real tears and fears - so what can one say? 'HOPE'. Without that we are doomed - full stop. I find the propagation of doom and banality that the media mediates, to have a virus like quality. It is self propagating and self fulfilling.
MW: I agree, and it is unfortunately the case that we are used to reading disclaimers and warnings. Hence your 'dark times' seems in some sense to belong to a Modernist era, (no bad thing, as such), in that they don't have glaringly obvious, 'it's not so' or 'it need not be so' signs attached. ‘The Dark Times’ requires that the audience input some effort in order to think through the 'problem' posed themselves, without cues. Would you agree with that, and deflect the concomitant elitist charge that might come with this? Next, I would like to agree emphatically with your characterisation of 'hope'. Would you agree, that 'hope' only exists in the real presence of its opposite? i.e. - it's always 'hope' after what one hasn't got ?
PS: Firstly - as a premable to the answer. I was, and have been heartened by the fact that 'everyone' seems to 'get' the works, at least at the basic level. As you know, ‘the dark times: press office≠2’ was housed in the squatted ex-Mercedes Showroom in Finchley Road (London), where Mark Hammond and I ran the Climate 4 Change exhibition. Here a lot of people were living the 'alternative' life, as it were. I was also living there, as I had no other option at the time. It was an eye-opening experience. It was a very dark period for me, personally. But also, looking back, an intensely creative one. Having absolutely no other options, I worked and worked, and the act of making, brought with it the possibility of hope, art, life.
Re. ‘Modernist’ - I am just showing x, y, z without the subterfuge of irony, (although I am not so sure about your characterisation); the audience should have to work a bit. Firstly one gives them an image/text, a work. I don't think it is necessarily elitist - even if to really understand something, one has to have done a little work - of course, there will also, always be people who are naturally intelligent, visually/semantically. I am somewhat of a Nietzschean I guess, i.e. there will always be hierarchies. I would not presume to tell a mechanic his/her trade, and also, importantly, I would never condescend (how could one!) to presume that this is lower/higher, than what I/we do - it is simply a different field of expertise. Of course, my/our field is one that structurally one might say, involves a certain perversity, a going-beyond. So saying, with the dark times, I am dealing with a ‘common currency’: the newspapers. The starting point being images/texts, etc., that we all see and read.
I recently showed some new copies (Hastings editions) of the ‘papers’ to F-ISH gallery director Simon Hedges and we were somewhat drunk, and we were literally laughing our heads off looking at them. So maybe the dark times are a healthy antidote to the dark times that we live in?
It is the question of hope, hope in that darkness, hope where we call out to the gods, at the breaking point – that point of 'rupture'. So yes, 'hope' can only exist in light of its opposite, but then I don't know, really whether this is simply linguistic, or whether, (of course, it must be an admixture of all these things), ontological, structurally intrinsic to hope’s very concept/conceptualisation. And interestingly, 'hope', the light/dark, is something, evidently, entirely human. By this one means, it can not be pickled, surely, by/in the hard sciences, or by neurologists. It is one of the things that ties us to the world, to the Other, to ethics. Therefore, there is always already an ethical dimension in the art/thought, even if this is not always immediately apparent.

MW: Yes, I think hope must separated from the hard sciences, but that is so difficult. It must be  concomitant with our state of 'being', and if by dint of what we are, or because of exterior social forces, (i.e. science, and politics), we are reduced to the status of mere material beings - objects - that somehow register 'hope' as a factor in their material minds, even though that hope is merely an objective inscription, it is hard to see how 'hope' might really offer anything beyond its own illusion. But then, of course, it is still there, and thus still effective under the terms that we do exist. But then doesn't this all become semantic? 'Hope' and 'life' are terms that exist and are accorded relevance by those that 'speak language'. Does that make 'language' or 'art' (as communication) fundamental to life, or just appendages to our objective existence- that is, our existence as 'objects', with communication being a sideline interest of 'us objects'? Is the question over whether we are in the Dark Times as deeply tied in with these issues (that are fundamental life/death issues) as would seem  from your comments thus far?
PS: I think that the question of being, which is ineradicably linked, conjoined, combined, always already, with the question of hope/despair, the light/dark, is always linked with  EVERYTHING. Thus, of course, ( I say 'of course', but it is only through/within dialogue that i can come to say this), that The Dark Times are definitely linked, existentially, phenomenologically, totally, to such questions. We are; we are not. Life/Death. And all things in-between. In the end, as in the beginning, we are always at this point.
And, I am not lying, earlier, when I say, that some of my work, is literally painted/made through a veil of tears - but then, also, through roars of laughter.
MW: OK, then the statement you make has a metaphysical tone. In a sense it passes no political judgment, as you are, by you own admission, accounting for the duality of 'life' and 'death', 'subject' and 'object', and so on. How then, might you pass judgment on 'now' and call 'now' a 'dark time'? It's a pressing issue, as either you have a solid statement, or you have the rambling of a 'subject' that thinks it is an 'object'. Either you have made the point that we are flitting around helplessly as conglomerates of cells that think that they are persons, or you have made the point that things are 'dark', that they are bad, and that we can make things better... we can bridge the gap between object and living subject (so far as that term is perceived in the 'mind' of the former)... it all gets Nietzschean- striving to be somehow, somehow, 'Super', better as 'humans'.
PS: This is where it gets, potentially, interesting, and also very difficult to put into words. You see, on the one hand, there is discourse, on the other, there is the work itself (i,e, in this instance, The Dark Times and co.).
The world that we are currently living in is a scary place. I get frightened thinking/talking about it. I just hope my worst fears (some would call them conspiratorial) are not correct. Foucault's philosophy, re. panopticicism, surveillance/normalisation, was always brilliant, but seemed back then, and this was to take nothing from it, pretty hyperbolic. Now? It seems to be, in large extent, a simple, albeit complex, statement of facts. Especially as regards our 'fair, sceptered, Isle'. Why? What is all this present, and continuing, surveillance, for??! The current 'credit crunch' - how did this come about? Greed, it seems. And a great deal of structural and governmental, mismanagement, short termism, and downright idiocy. Who pays for this? Well, the little men/women - that is 'us'. As Jarvis Cocker's song so eloquently states, 'To be perfectly clear boys and girls/the cunts are still runnning the world'. Now, what are we, can we, do about this? These are serious questions. They are also questions, whose potential answers, even, if only answers posed at the theoretical/aesthetic level, can get us into trouble. Censorship is on the rise – the so-called 'PATRIOT act' in the states, and the Prevention of Terrorism Act (combined with the criminal justice bill), etc., in the UK… As human beings capable of , that is, at least potentially, more than mere empty longing, (mirroring the about-face of despair) - as agents capable of affecting change - we are potentially in serious trouble.... We are in danger of being eradicated - it is like a Philip K. Dick script/novel except it's for real.
…[…]…
MW: Well, it may be that it is a fact, but to state it is as fact would be to set it in stone. Can we afford to do that? If we had done that at any point in history (stated our complete lack of freedom) then we would indeed have had no freedom.
PS: Ok - by ‘fact’, I mean, it seems to be so - a fact in a socio-politico sense is surely, not a fact, in the sense of gravity? Therefore, I guess, hope still pertains. Let us call it, re. the dark times, a statement of a vision of the now, that is now not only a vision, but also a description - with understanding, facing things head on, at least comes the possibility of knowing where and how to start to change, or at the very least escape such a state of affairs... although, if the climate change contingency, esp. I mean, those who project the worst case scenarios, are even partially correct, we really going to be up against it ... thank God for 'Art', decency, laughter, tears, paint, wine, sex, love, heroics, dialectics, food, etc etc.. No?
…[…]…
MW: Perhaps change then is the substance of life, such that we could describe 'life'; and 'Art', when it is really Art is the cipher of change, and then of 'life'. Art is 'life' 'lived', the cipher of the present, and questions over what came first 'life' or 'art' are null (I think when it gets to this sort of point we can't really expand, it would be self defeating.)
PS: Not an expansion - but simply, a run-on: When one reaches a certain point - a point that is a decision, or a constant re-affirmation, stemming from a point of no-return, the divide, art/life, work/play, becomes, not meaningless, but dialectical, creative, something that creates and re-creates itself.


©Paul Sakoilsky/Mike Watson 2008/09.

Paul Sakoilsky presents: Mayday: The Dark Times (Editor's Choice ≠1)
Opening May 1st
Exhibition 2nd May - 12th June Wednesday - Sunday 11am - 6pm
Gallery- 45 Robertson Street, Hastings TN34 IHL - UK

May Day show: http://www.f-ish.co.uk/paul_sakoilsky_show_2.html
Paul Sakoilsky: http://web.mac.com/paulsakoilsky/iWeb

(l-r); Meillassoux, Drums and 'Hums'; Harman, Vocals, Electric Bass; Brassier, Rhythm Guitar (Chunky Riffs), Backing Vox; Hamilton-Grant, Lead Guitar, Noodles and Samples.

Yes, they're back and in good form, riffing on the twin ideas 'we don't exist' and 'we don't much mind'.

Tub-thumper Meillassoux is out, suffering perhaps from a Gardening related injury (actually, we have no idea why, we hope he's back soon).

A replacement comes in the form of the able Toscano, who will join original group members Brassier, Harman and Hamilton-Grant.

24th April 2009, UWE Bristol.

Be there or be a Post-Kant.

Speculative Track Listing:

Christ, Don't Mention God to Me
Aren't we 'Dead' Yet? - Yes, we're Not!
Bring me the Head of Logical Regression
Unchained Melody (Nihil Reprise)


For commemorative t-shirts of the above print, e-mail; logicalregression@gmail.com. 12.50 gbp (plus postage) payable by paypal.

Concept: Mike Watson
Design: Sam Cox
Original: http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/uploaded_images/IMG_7707-769965.JPG

(CC) Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved on Image. You have full rights to post to your own blog, to print and distribute, with acknowledgement of the artists, via link, or similar.

I suppose to simplify everything that has thus passed here (bar the blog post on the Birkbeck conference, which is another matter) I could simply say that where the Speculative Realists - and really I mean here one Speculative Realist (Brassier) and one Speculative Materialist (Meillassoux), no more a movement then than John Wayne and John Lennon are brothers!* - might, arguably, argue against the adage 'I think therefore I am', positing the mind as inessential to existence as such, I would argue:

I think that I am not therefore I AM not.

This crucial capitalised AM accounts for the essential difference I would accord to the human 'subject' over the 'object', the former being a series of objective impulses feigning a conscious personality, that can at least know 'itself' to be a series of objectified impulses, whilst the object cannot know that it is not.

I think that this crucial difference accounts for a lot, and it is this difference that for me characterises existence. Not to say that existence is born of the human mind, but simply that it is born witness by the human mind in a way that is surely defensible, as the single most curious development in existence known to humans, thus far! Without it, the rest (everything in the objective realm, 'the great outdoors') would be inconceivable. Surely this elevates the human status.

*In fairness Brassier and Meillassoux openly object to the moniker 'movement'; my point is that they are not even an '-ism', something that I don't suppose would upset any of the thinkers that go under these umbrella terms, but which is worth pointing out: They are valuable independent thinkers, no more, no less.

I'm overlooking Hegel a bit here. I think I'll have to resolve to include him somewhere in the debate between an object-oriented philosophy and some kind of viable alternative, at least as a nod towards his influence on Adorno, though in some ways I think Hegel may even have it more right than the latter.

Illustration Sam Cox

On 'On the Idea of Communism' - held March 13th, 14th, 15th, Birkbeck College. Illustration Sam Cox: 'Zizek and Friends':



“The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other. If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this Idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs, and let us stop talking about it. In this case, the rat-man is right, as is, by the way, the case with some ex-communists who are either avid of their rents or who lost courage. However, to hold on to the Idea, to the existence of this hypothesis, does not mean that we should retain its first form of presentation which was centered on property and State. In fact, what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself.” Alain Badiou

(http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/02/22/on-the-idea-of-communism-conference/) :Conference Blurb.

I would be interested to source the papers given at 'On the Idea of Communism'. I have, so far, this to go on:

http://pervegalit.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/ranciere-and-badiou-on-the-idea-of-communism/

A selection of videos from the conference, courtesy of Perverse Egalitarianism.

And this:

http://thecommune.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/report-of-conference-on-the-idea-of-communism/.

A conference report, courtesy of 'Commune', a self proclaimed 'Communist' blog, which is naturally critical of this convention of academic behemouth's, assembled apparently in their name, but with no intention of considering concrete issues surrounding the politics of the Left:

'The symposium will not deal with practico-political questions of how to analyze the latest economic, political, and military troubles, or how to organize a new political movement.'

That sounds to be an invitation to disaster, on anything up to an epic scale, both within the conference hall, and in the wider world.

Zizek apparently adding to this last statement that: 'more radical questioning is needed today – this is a meeting of philosophers who will deal with communism as a philosophical concept, advocating a precise and strong thesis: from Plato onwards, communism is the only political idea worthy of a philosopher.' (From http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/12/philosophy).

They will not deal with practical issues, but they are in agreement that we should maintain the 'communist hypothesis'. Hypothesis towards what? - Surely towards a practical realisation of Communism, otherwise there would be nothing to be hypothesized, hypotheses being, as they are, projections of real outcomes or actual existent realities; one cannot hypothesise a concept.

More radical questioning of an academic nature is apparently needed by the Left before they proceed. Yet Zizek acknowledges simultaneously that we have been questioning 'from Plato onwards'.

Indeed, if Communism is such a good idea, and has been from Plato onwards, why does it still need to be considered as an idea alone? Are we to gather that what is meant by Zizek is precisely that it is a good idea, good ideas being defined by their difference from good actual practical events: Good 'things'?

Good things come to those who wait: Good ideas are just mulled over for eternity!

What I'd most like to get to here, is the exaspersating notion that somehow, in Communism's failing - the triple failing of 1990 - 'the retreat of the social-democratic Welfare State politics in the developed First World, the disintegration of the Soviet-style Socialist states in the industrialized Second World, and the retreat of emancipatory movements in the Third World,' (this from the above mentioned conference blurb) - 'Capitalism' seemed to triumph, as 'Free market Globalisation', and yet in the apparent - temporary at the least - failing of the current model of Capitalism, a failing which had been evident since the conference was planned a year ago (and since long before, one could proffer), we must look back to 'Communism', and in a quite ineffectual way; much in the same way, in fact, as we always have.

Why would there not be another option? And, indeed, one that is not gauged as exactly half way between the two extremes - re; the 'Third Way' of Blair, Brown, Clinton, Sarkozy, et al. - as if pinning a tale on a donkey.

To be sure, Zizek, as can be seen immediately below, shows some considerable flexibility on the issue of Right vs. Left.



Ths Communist 'thing', he says - and I have to paraphrase here, so I won't quote as such - does not have to happen outside Capitalism: There is no 'outside Capitalism' (a point which Badiou also makes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oco4ZX1f11g). Such a sentiment is heartening, so long as it does not imply, along with so many news commentaries, that, due to the part nationalisation of the Banks in some countries, we now have a form of Communism sanctioned by Liberals, and bought in through the back door, against even their own wishes. This latter view is nothing short of naive: We have a State system propping up Capitalism, so scared that, left to its own devices, Free Market Globalism will not run its course as effortlessly as was once believed by that same Liberal State.

Where such a sentiment might otherwise be heartening is where it points to the need to collapse notions of both Capitalism and Communism, as, indeed, following the effective non-existence of Communism - if it 'died' it cannot be revived as it was - there can be no Capitalism per se, merely a world which we inhabit, which may be tweaked on a social level to facilitiate greater or lesser sharing amongst beings, should we want to (incidentally, follow the link to Perverse Egalitarianism for a video of Ranciere talking on the importance of 'sharing' as a notion central to the Left, aside from dogma).

In this case, and this is what I'm saying - here we have to leave Zizek, a prolific writer who speaks for himself - it is of the utmost importance that we do not slip back into a consideration of Communism, political or ideological (what good would the entertainment of the 'idea' do, if the 'thing' itself could not be seen to work?) as a term useful in facilitating a World in which wealth - or more especially food and access to essentials - is shared and not horded.

Yet the conference blurb has stated that:

'This defeat [the triple defeat of Communism] raises the question: is “Communism” still the name to be used to designate the horizon of radical emancipatory projects? In spite of their theoretical differences, the participants share the thesis that one should remain faithful to the name “Communism”: this name is potent to serve as the Idea which guides our activity, as well as the instrument which enables us to expose the catastrophes of the XXth century politics, those of the Left included.'

I cannot think of a notion more blind: how many names did the notion of 'sharing' go under before it settled with 'Communism'; doubtless very many - and more so if we consider variations in syntax and language ? Why keep a name which is divisive, which evokes the image of Stalin, amongst others, and which sets up again, as an enemy, the full force of 'Capitalism'?

It is suprising that with the full philosophical resources available to them ('since Plato') the participants of the conference did not consider another name, another option, another course ... Though I am going on snippets here. I would be interested to see what anyone who attended the conference thinks - especially those who were speaking!

Late thought: This all brings to mind attempts by many of the same assembled philosophers to consider Christianity from a secular purview - as in Zizek's 'The Fragile Absolute' and Badiou's 'Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism'. Is there a reticence to move onwards here? Perhaps that in itself would be cause for exploration.

This just in (17/03/09): Total Assault on Culture has posted extensive conference notes, having actually been at the conference. A useful resource, and one that makes it all the easier to critique the conference itself. Not sure if anything here makes me want to renege on what I have said re; the snippets of info I have based this post upon: http://totalassaultonculture.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/on-the-idea-of-communism/#comment-51.

Extract: 'If the artist were to try and institute meaning in life, by dint of the artists own saying so - a sort of Duchampian - 'this is art' - declaration meeting the raising of Lazarus - 'this is life', or 'this', humanity, 'is alive' - Brassier's text would always be there to remind us that, as dreams are wont to, our fly's waking nightmare has taken an artistic bent. All human artistic creation is but a phase within a fly's waking nightmare in which things get slightly skewered in a kind of funky art-school way. Anything is possible, reasons the fly: A sort of lacunae of implied meaning forms in a universe of nothingness, as if the fly ate cheddar before bed, and now is having a psychedelic bed-fit. Only, we must reason that the lacunae is as illusory as art itself is. The fly is but a fly.'

See:

http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/003/002/articles/mwatson/index.php

art: n Making meaning mean something.