[-empyre-] "what is to be done" - Lenin's words

[claudia reiche <office@claudia-reiche.net>]

Greetings from Hamburg! - stormy weather and high tides these days...

What is to be done? –(education)
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 Leinin 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 constituants 
(‚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