[-empyre-] "what is to be done?" Lenin's words--forward from Claudia Reiche

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

this is a forward from Claudia--


The third leitmotif for documenta 12 by ist artistic director Roger  
M. Buergel is posited in the form of a question. („After all, we  
create an exhibition in order to find something out.“ Buergel in his  
artistic statement).

 He will not by chance have chosen „What is to be done?“ as a  
quotation of V. I. Lenin’s famous book from 1902 with the subtitle  
„Burning questions to our movement.“

Let’s read Buergel’s statement as a comment on Lenin’s text, if not a  
formula of how to trump Lenin’s theoretical and practical notion of a  
proletarian revolution, as today’s world’s order seems to have proven  
Lenin wrong.

When Buergel writes:“ Artists educate themselves by working through  
form and subject matter; audiences educate themselves by experiencing  
things aesthetically,“ doesn’t this optimism regarding the abilities  
of artistic and aesthetic approaches to ‚things’, ‚forms’ and  
‚subject matters’  echo Lenin’s way of freeing the approach to  
‚things’ as ‚forms’ and ‚subject matters’ in philosophical  
scientific, and political ways by generalized  application of the  
self education of the working class? When Buergel concludes, (already  
having found the answer to his third question): „Today, education  
seems to offer one viable alternative to the devil (didacticism,  
academia) and the deep blue sea (commodity fetishism),“ one can’t  
withhold the suspicion any longer that maybe Lenin’s project is meant  
to be finally fulfilled, with a simple switch from revolution to  
education.

When Lenin promised the awakening of the worker’s class, he already  
relied on self training, on education by the ‚things’ themselves: „Or  
do you think that our movement  cannot produce leaders like those of  
the seventies? If so, why  do you think so? Because we lack training?  
But we are training  ourselves, we will go on training ourselves, and  
we will be  trained! […]The time has come when Russian  
revolutionaries,  guided by a genuinely revolutionary theory, relying  
upon the  genuinely revolutionary and spontaneously awakening class,  
can  at last – at long last! – rise to full stature in all their   
giant strength. […]And we will achieve that, rest assured,   
gentlemen!“ (What is to  be done?, Chapter iv, The Primitiveness of  
the Economists  and the Organization of the Revolutionaries)


Only that Buergel’s contribution on a new  and viable historical and  
dialectical materialism does not credit didacticism (the ‚devil’) and  
commodity fetishism (the ‚deep blue sea’) as true constituents  
(‚Bildner’) for his own articulation of ‚education’ as such,  
(dialectically speaking and more).

The commodity fetishism then returns as personal trade mark as the  
‚great educator’, which is revealed by a phrase that has been partly  
omitted in the English translation of the third leitmotif for the  
documenta: „To educate/constitute an audience does […] mean […]  
indeed to provide for a public sphere.“ Didacticism in the sense of  
mass media’s compatible style perfectly allows an understanding of  
education as conservation of values or if preferred as justice  
finally done to the particularity of ‚things’.

Why not posit „Education is empty like a mathematical set can be“ as  
an alternative to the third documenta  leitmotif, freeing it from the  
empty promise of a possible general knowledge, accessible at least to  
the artistic director  and author? What is to be done...


Claudia Reiche