[-empyre-] queer relational

[Marc Leger]

If this conversation is, as Christina says, sort of like a dinner
conversation, then I will obviously win at having the worst manners and be
expected to leave even before I arrive.  So here is my short 300 word
opener, followed by a longer – all you can eat – smorgasborg of ideas.  Sorry
if this seems like intimidating conceptual laboratory jargon from the 60s.  My
only regret is that I could not include images.  I promise to be
conversational after this initial volley.

Marc

QUEER RELATIONAL (short version): Against the Invasion of the Mind Snatchers


Relational Aesthetics, whether derived from Nicolas Bourriaud's formulation
or not, came on the heels of a number of neo-avant-garde impasses having to
do with contemporary art's critical relevance to social and political
change.  At the limits of institutional critique, critical public art,
community art and art activism became some of the more prominent
manifestations of the avant-garde critique of art, seeking some kind of
direct involvement with audiences and social issues and internally, as
collective self-management operating against the ideological pressures that
predominated in cultural and educational institutions in the 80s and 90s.

Relational Aesthetics sought to combine some of the theoretical
sophistication of post-structural thought with this new situation in which
artists found themselves – beholden to capitalist patronage (including state
patronage) but seeking a minimal difference (often at the zero degree) to
retain, first, a measure of recognisability as art, and second, working the
soft and blurry edge of aesthetic autonomy.  In many ways relational
aesthetics could and does function as the aesthetic ideologization of the
theory of immaterial labour – a being together in which, despite the
divisions of labour and the economic logic that sustains both production and
nonproductive symbolic manipulation, believes that the processes of
communication and cooperation are in itself and already communistic social
relations.  Technology and the "general intellect" are here the key terms
that allow relational aesthetics to pass from an institutionally bankrupt
aesthetic activity to what Gerald Raunig defines as transversal activism.

Against this arrière-avant-gardism, however laudatory its content, we could
say that relational aesthetics operates forms of blackmail, forms that were
at least made apparent in Hans Haacke and Stephen Willats' social
systems.  Relational
aesthetics has proven largely unable to distinguish itself from behaviourist
and formalist systems theory and this is largely due to its *faith* in the
aesthetic – the primary reason why so much of its appears to coincide with
"everyday" reality.  Its social nature it thus implicit; it does not seem to
require the antagonistic element of politicization.  The sort of "everyday"
it implies is essentially an aesthetic notion of the everyday and less a
politicized one, as was the case with Cubism, Dada and Constructivism.

Queer practice, as an art of the impoverished, above all gives us some
indication of how to experience a work of relational aesthetics.  While on
the outside we submit to the normalizing conditions that inhere, on the
inside, we refuse to do icky things with our minds.  Queer theory, a theory
of the body in revolt, links with the psychoanalytic theory of the subject's
incorporation of the symptom, transformed through a sort of internal
transferential relation with the godhead, a conversion of social reality
through sinthomeopathic identification with the symptom.  Already,
relational aesthetics, like the reality shows mentality it fed upon, has
begun to appear pointless in comparison with the organizational impulse of
the anti-capitalist movement.  The fact that this was not obvious at an
earlier moment is only apparent.

5/5/09

*QUEER REALTIONAL (long version): Pour en finir avec l'esthétique
relationelle *

After this 300 word morcel, requested by Christina, let me please continue
with a rather longish and boorish expansion of what I mean by this.  This
will allow you to at least ask me some real questions and never mind the
chit chat.  My focus for queer relational is first of all Nicolas Bourriaud,
the mastermind behind the successful formula.  After talking about his
ideas, I then want to ask some questions about the usefulness of so-called
relational work for queer praxis.

I can say that as an artist – and I say this modestly, I am somewhat of an
intentionally amateur artist – I produced works in the 90s and early 2000s
whose features included elements that could be associated with relational
art.  However, my concerns at that time were completely different, and I
myself never make that association – not even in retrospect.  I say this to
first state that when I talk about Bourriaud and relational aesthetics, I am
not conflating his ideas and the works or even the kind of works that he
describes.  So, as a starter, I make no apologies to Tiravanija, Parreno,
Huyghe and company.  Also, as a quick flash on the subject, I should mention
that I recently walked into a queer relational project at Oboro Gallery in
Montreal in the Spring of 2009.  There, a tall man greets you in this new
age-ish entrance and offers to give you some simple-looking greeting cards
to celebrate the gallery's 20th anniversary.  Another man, in a room filled
with plants and the sound of running water (very John Cage zen feeling)
invites you to sit with him and have some tea.  My response was immediately,
"Oh my god, gay relational art; just please let me look at the works in the
gallery and nevermind the bullocks."  As these men noticed my "no thanks"
withdrawal they became more pushy and more adamant, in that way that only
gay men can pull off.  The point is you're not supposed to say no, just as,
from a queer perspective, you can't simply say, "no thanks, I'm not
gay."  This,
for me, is perhaps the biggest mistake of relational art – the inability to
factor in the non-adherence of audiences as well as factoring in the kinds
of theory and criticism that dispute relational art.  Witness for instance
the preposterous reaction by Liam Gillick to Claire Bisop's *October *essay
"Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics" (Fall 2004).

My sense is that if Bourriaud did not represent so many blue chip artists,
his work as a critic would go largely unnoticed.  In many ways I see him as
a latter day Achille Bonito Oliva, a critic whose relevance has less to do
with his writing than with his putting the proper spin on the relatively
unconvincing aspects on the new experimental art of the times.  My sense is
that he may become, or is already, the Mary Jane Jacob of today's
conversation – the successful critic whose ideas are ripe for the times but
don't pass theoretical muster.  So then, what do our times offer as an
alternative?

In an essay titled "The Future is Here" [November 2006, on the website of
the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, issue on Critique
of Creative Industries; http://eipcp.net/policies/cci/lind/en], the curator
and critic Maria Lind offers a critique of the instrumentalization of art
through public and private funding, in particular, with a view towards the
production of the European Cultural Policies 2015 report.  She mentions how
the deregulated ecomony and its interest in creative labour as part of a
flexible, self-motivated and self-regulating (biopolitical) workforce has
its cultural equivalent in, for example, the British government's view that
art galleries and museums are "centres for social change."  Art, is a source
of value added production – as our social democratic leader here in Canada,
Jack Layton, says, "you more more return for your money" with the arts than
any other sector of the economy – so why should the government not treat it
like any sector of the economy?  The point of the creative industries
process, as Aras Ozgun has shown in his research, is to, through capital
accumulation and investment, convert artists from being anti-commercial
small businesses to workers involved in large-scale economic projects
modeled on the dot.com boom.  In Canada, among the many summer festivals,
the Conservative Government has supported one such neoliberal initiative
called the Canada Prize, which takes public funding away from cultural
institutions and gives it to business to manage spectacular arts awards and
competitions.  To give you an idea of how these machinations are received by
the so-called art community, the editor of *Fuse *magazine, supposed to be
one of the leading sources of discussion on art and politics, has thoroughly
supported the project.  In more complicated terms, what theories like
relational aesthetics do is not directly lend its support to such
undertakings but mask the contradictions, making it more difficult to even
imagine a contestatory position.  What you end up with is what Lind seems to
propose in her essay, which, at best, is an intra-institutional distinction
between good critical art and a mainstream uncritical art that is maybe good
enough for the Venice Biennale but not Documenta.  Let me cite Lind more
directly:

"The picture that emerges from *European Cultural Policies 2015*, and which
is already discernible today, shows a tendency toward radical division in
the art world.  On the one hand we have a commercially viable art, often
entertaining and/or "shocking," with populist elements, adapted to the
public institutions, particularly the large ones, that increasingly function
as mass media.  On the other hand, we have "difficult" and "uncomfortable"
art with critical ambitions, which opposes being incorporated into these
patterns.  The former produces high visitor figures and copious media
coverage, but lacks serious, long-term production of new ideas.  It tends to
be superficial and to be implicated in the creative industries.  The latter
generates lots of new ideas and excels in sophisticated discourse, but
preaches to a small group of the already converted.  Although this division
has existed before, channels of communication between the different branches
have nevertheless existed.  Today these channels are rare, and if we are to
believe the authors of the report, they will hardly exist at all in
2015.  Whereas
support for opening up art – and intellectual activities in general for that
matter – to popular culture and to deconstruction of all kinds of power
hierarchies has been strong in critical circles over the last 40 years, the
doors are now closing.  But again, this is for strategic reasons rather than
a belief in essentialism.  Decades of theoretical defense of ideas of the
productive nature of hybridity as in Homi Bhabah, the constructed nature of
power relations of all categories as in Michel Foucault, and not least of
all the emancipatory potential of fluidity and leakage as in Deleuze and
Guattari now have to give some way to more separatist thinking.  Which means
that we will probably see more quotes from people like Gayatri Spivak and
Hal Foster in the near future."

I cite this passage because it is loaded with a dizzying array implications
and full of ideological presuppositions having to do not only with the
perpetuation of the "game of art" as a capitalist game (with all of the
received wisdom about what vanguard art can do within this paradigm), but
also what to do about it – what's imaginable as an alternative.  Notice that
she did not mention the names of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Jacques
Rancière, some thinkers whose work challenges not only neoliberal market
imperatives for cultural production, but the critical pieties associated
with names like Deleuze, Bhabha, Foucault and Butler.  Let's be frank, while
curators like Maria Lind and Nina Montmann recognize the official political
situation, they are far less convincing as radicals.  There are economic
reasons for the withdrawal of the welfare state that go beyond ideological
justifications and obfuscations.  If these problems are to be addresses
directly, we need to get past the surface level discussions.  It is the same
way with cultural production.  If the avant-garde critique of the
"institution art" means anything today, it is the almost complete
depoliticization of debate in today's neoliberal institutions.  Are we to
assume then that once the ideological obstacles are overcome, once the
recession is over and the ecological problem is tackled, we will get back to
the more sophisticated, "non-separatist" ideas of Foucault and Deleuze?

What intrigues me in Lind's phrasing of her argument is what she seems to be
saying to cultural administrators: "expect more Marxism in the years ahead."
Whether you're a generous reader or not, it seems to say that this is a
necessary evil, an unfortunate inevitability.  We could say that this sort
of "critical insider" or "critical complicity" position might be helpful to
the cause of emancipatory politics if only there wasn't so much of it in
so-called post-structural circles.  It also, unfortunately, gives credence
to the argument made by Rainer Rochlitz that political relevance has been
used by twentieth-century avant-gardes as a way to maintain standards of
institutional quality in the absence of properly aesthetic criteria.  (Which,
by the way, is not a bad summary of Claire Bishop's position.)

What bothers me about Lind's statement, like so much of today's talk around
art activism and community art is that it has the features of what Zizek
calls an empty gesture.  As he puts it: "the system is compelled to allow
for possibilities of choices which must never actually take place, since
their occurrence would cause the system to disintegrate, and the function of
the unwritten rules is precisely to prevent the actualization of these
choices formally allowed by the system."  [Plague of Fantasies, 28]  Every
time I read this argument, which Zizek makes in different books, I
immediately think of my days as a graduate student in Visual & Cultural
Studies at the University of Rochester in the late 1990s.  The state of the
art in VCS, we were told, is post-structuralism.  Queer theorists can hate
Deleuzians, Foucauldians can be opposed to Kristeva, semiotics can be placed
in contrast to deconstruction, but whatever you do, don't think that Marxism
has anything to say to anyone any longer.  Marxism is off limits.  What the
market economy model of academic critical theory points to is not only the
problem of choice, but the very question of what is a revolutionary subject.
We all know, because we hear it so often, that the working class is no
longer the revolutionary subject, who, as a product of the internal
contradictions of capitalism, will lead the masses to the socialist stage of
the eventual withering of the state.  So what we then do is throw class
analysis out the window and replace it with the subject in a state of
becoming.  We turn to questions of transculturalism, hybridity, queer
performativity and so on.  The problem here, I would argue, is that
emancipation begins to function as a by-product of the dominant symbolic
order and no longer as its critique.  It is in this sense that relational
aesthetics, with all of its talk of intersubjectivity, conviviality, etc,
operates as part of the doxa of hegemonic social relations.  I call it a
kind of neoliberal roller derby: you will have tea with us, or, as Heidi
Klum says on Project Runway: auf vedersein.  This is the true modus operandi
of today's post-structuralist culture, which in the end, is little more than
a depoliticized or less politicized sector of the elite "middle" class
(meaning mostly petty bourgeois in the contemporary sense).

Contrast to Lind's remarks a not-so-subtle quote from the website of Mister
Trippy, who happens to be Stuart Home.  I would have taken a citation from
Hal Foster but then I would have fallen not only into Lind's trap, but also
Bourriaud, who, in *Postproduction* refers to suchlike critics as "The
Perfect American Soft Marxist."  If I'm not mistaken, this is the same
Stuart Home who published the 1991 text, *The Assault on Culture: Utopian
Currents from Lettrism to Class War*.  In a review of Bourriaud's
"Altermodern" exhibition at the Tate Gallery, Home writes:

"The recent trend for curators to view themselves as the "real" "heroes" of
the art world continues with the Parisian fashion-poodle Nicolas Bourriaud
(AKA Boring Ass) using "Altermodern", the 2009 Tate Triennial, to promote
himself over and above anything he's actually included in this aesthetic
disaster.  The selection of works for "Altermodern" struck me as remarkably
similar to the last "big" show I'd seen curated by Bourriaud, the Lyon
Biennial in 2005.  The art itself doesn't really matter, it is there to
illustrate a thesis.  The thesis doesn't matter either since it exists to
facilitate Bourriaud's career; and Bourriaud certainly doesn't matter
because he is simply yet another dim-witted cultural bureaucrat thrown up by
the institution of art."

Ok, so better perhaps to be thrown up than thrown out.  This brings me to my
next point.  He may be thrown up by the institution of art, but what do we,
those of us who believe that we can't do without the important mediating
role of institutions, do with him and his ideas?

In the second of his four volume study *De L'État*, the French philosopher
Henri Lefebvre made the interesting remark that around 1968 Marxian
dialectics was asked by Western capitalism to show it its passport.  However,
it was asked to do this not so that it could be accepted as official
ideology but for the benefits it could bring to the struggles of mostly (at
that time) students, feminists, and later, sexual minorities.  It seems that
today, now that post-structuralism has proven its intellectual
sophistication, materialist dialectics is out.  From here, almost the entire
Left has begun to renounce dialectics. In this, Bourriaud is therefore
hardly an exception.  And so, when criticizing Bourriaud, we should think to
cast our nets as widely as possible since he, like almost anyone involved in
what Johanne Lamoureux calls the "avant-garde gambit," makes the usual
criticisms of commercialism, reification, the division of labour,
specialisation, the spectacle, automatic cash machines, and so on, but
without providing any serious political substance when it comes to the
institution of art in the age of the creative industries and global petty
bourgeois ideology.  The watchword for this intellectual bankrupting is *
teleology*.  Bourriaud's *Relational Aesthetics*, based on essays written in
the early 90s and first published in* *1998, is almost entirely dependent in
its critique of the political socialism of the historical avant-gardes, on
this question of historical progress.  We could say that like neoliberal
economics, Bourriaud's model of Deleuzian connectivity is a *growth* model
of art production.

Artistic activity is a game, we are told, in which aesthetic judgement plays
no part.  Nor does newness and the Baudelairean idea of the modern act as a
criterion.  Instead, contemporary practices are about types of behaviour,
often irrational and spontaneous, that are opposed to authoritarian forces
and its abuse of reason to create more sophisticated forms of
subjugation.  Avant-garde
resistance has fallen along with the modern project.  If true, how this came
to be, and the ways in which it was codified in postmodern theory, is
conveniently forgotten.  We are assured that modernity cannot be though of
in terms of a rationalist teleology nor in terms of political messianism
[Relational Aesthetics, p.12].  The ideologies of progress that fueled the
imaginations of the avant-gardes, he argues, are now bankrupted by the
history of totalitarianism.  Today's avant-garde is reformed on the basis of
different cultural and philosophical presuppositions.  We could say, in his
stead, that they are formed by the cultural and philosophical
presuppositions of *difference*, could we not, to echo Cornel West's
"cultural politics of difference" as well as Laclau and Mouffe's radical
democracy?  At best, and this is a contention that we could debate
elsewhere, this shifts the political articulation from the level of the
state to that of civil society.  However, this nevertheless leaves the state
conveniently out of the discussion, limiting it to an oppressive role, as
expressed by Althusser.  Erring on the side of caution, Bourriaud tells us
that today's participatory avant-garde comes up with models by mixing and
borrowing equally and indiscriminately from Marx and Proudhon, the Dadaists
and Mondrian.  In some ways this is true.  "If opinion is striving to
acknowledge the legitimacy and interest of these experiments," he writes,
"this is because they are no longer presented like the precursory phenomena
of an inevitable historical evolution." [RA, 12/13]  Today's art carries on
the vanguard struggle with the fight for experimentation and new models that
are no longer tied to an inevitable historical evolution.  Art doesn't
announce future worlds.  Instead, it offers us possible universes and better
ways of living and getting along.

Bourriaud's presupposition therefore is that relational aesthetics does not
work with pre-conceived ideas about a better world.  For the slogan "another
world is possible," we could just as well snip and paste segments of the
daytime TV soap opera Another World and call it a day.  This not knowing in
advance and not knowing where we are going is not only useless for a social
universe predicting major ecological catastrophes (among other intractable
difficulties directly related to humanity's new productive capacities), it
is the *sine qua non* of today's Fukuyaman post-politics in which no
alternatives to capitalist hegemony are deemed possible.  In this way,
Bourriaud's idea of the avant-garde completely dispenses with Marxist
theorization, which I argue, is foundational to much of what Peter Burger
defined as the historical avant-gardes and what this implies for the
neo-avant-gardes.  On these questions, we should be clear, Bourriaud has
nothing to say, let alone to contribute.  His work, although marked by real
academic qualification, is in the end an eclectic theoretical pastiche which
altogether disregards the incompatibility of the historical references and
theories that he cites.

 On issue that we should immediately address is the primacy of politics over
economics in relational aesthetics.  This confuses matters not just a
little.  Why?  Because it fails to distinguish economics from art, which
would then allow us to consider some of the determinations of his politics.
Does the avant-garde artist, inspired by revolutionary ideals, act as an
instrument of economic necessity and complete determination – i.e. according
to the mechanistic model of historical materialism?  No, he does not.  He
acts, as Zizek argues, against the "spontaneous" economic necessity imposed
by "reality" and imposes instead his vision of a better world.  In this
sense, the lesson of Hegelian concrete universality is rather that universal
necessity is not a teleological force, guaranteeing happy outcomes, but
retroactive, emerging out of contingent processes and signaling the moment
of the contingency's overcoming.  [In Defense of Lost Causes, 179]  That is
the importance for us of the avant-gardes – the fact that they managed to
change the game, against which all postmodern efforts to bypass the
implications of the lessons learned are so much institutionally imposed
ignorance and bad faith.  We need to insist on this, lest our critics accuse
us, as usual, of economism.  The fact that dialectical materialism speaks of
economic determination, with the variations on base and superstructure, is
not a guarantee of teleological outcomes but rather emphasizes and insists
on the non-determination of human destiny.  This allows us to even begin to
think in terms of ideology and to use phrases like "socially
constructed."  Perhaps
this is why Bourriaud cannot but appear ridiculous as he scrambles to locate
today's art: now it's modern, now it's postmodern, it is neither modern nor
postmodern, it's altogether new.  I can almost hear the words from the
mockumentary Spinal Tap: "Eleven is louder than ten.  It's louder."

What relational artists know implicitly and what Bourriaud fails to
articulate is what Zizek describes as capitalism's "concrete universality,"
the way it adapts to new circumstances, which is today the very essence of a
capitalist post-politics that retroactively legitimizes itself as the
successor of the failed efforts of revolutionary socialism and the
international proletariat to lead us to the moment when we can begin to
imagine the transition from socialism to communist society.  My own sense is
that the critique of teleology that comes from post-structuralist circles
typically, and often as part of an anarchist-inspired politics, ignores the
function of the state as well as the ideological hegemony of contemporary
petty bourgeois modes of self-deception, which we can elaborate with models
like Bourdieu's allodoxia, Zizek's "post-enlightenment schizo-cynicism" or
Peter Sloterdijk's "pretense misrecognition."  What is certain is that the
critical variants of psychoanalysis and sociology can be of some immediate
benefit, though Badiou's astounding use of set theory, like Stephen Jay
Gould's work in the natural sciences, reminds us that we never know from
where some of our best ideas will emerge.

By now I hope it is clear that what I am suggesting is that is the hype
about conviviality is little more than a new mode of aesthetic transgression
that otherwise masks the *deus ex machina*, which is the state.  The kind of
*intellectuel* *désengagé *that is Bourriaud should at least cause us to be
suspicious about retreating to the grounds of the nineteenth-century
bohemian avant-gardes who, like dogs, fed off of the scraps of the
bourgeoisie.  Today the bourgeois is no longer an idiot who wants a painting
of his farm but a technocrat – the administrator who decides if you will
receive a grant, your colleagues in the department, the editor who decides
if your work is publishable, etc.  What technocrats can offer us, unlike the
bourgeoisie that Baudelaire excoriated, is, basically, Baudelaire, in other
words, the role of the *poète maudit *who has nothing if not blind faith in
the pursuit of life itself as a form of art.  This is in direct contrast to
the avant-garde mode of living your life as art, understood as a way to
interrupt the hype of institutionally-promoted transgression.

What we need today, which becomes increasingly difficult, is art that
reveals the rules of the game, which includes the suppression of dialectical
materialism.  Symbolic interactionism, I'm afraid, doesn't cut it.  It
simply is not able to address the macropolitical rules of biocapitalism.  This
will lead me later to the question of what kind of subjectivity, then,
enacts the substantial (non-essential) political articulation of the
contradictions of our times.  We should keep in mind that the critique of
Marxist teleology, the beyond "left and right" moral economy of academic
post-structuralism directly attacks not only the populism of the
neoconservatives, as they used to be called, but also the true imaginary
enemy: the sexist, homophobic and xenophobic working class.  No wonder that
Bourriaud baits left critics more than any one else.  Bourriaud does not
fear the let.  He represents its critics as old 60s deadwood, ineffectual
and outmoded.  Too bad his critiques of capitalism never do more than parody
counter-cultural posturing, with perhaps the exception of a well-placed
transcription of some ideas by Guattari.  I think that the reason for this
is simply that Bourriaud is at home in the world of art galleries and
museums.  These spaces are for him actual micro-utopias, bubbles of a happy
humanity and models for living.  The fact that this tells us nothing about
what Fredric Jameson terms the "world system" is only a problem for
leftists, apparently.  To go with the museums' Maxfield Parrish and Norman
Rockwell exhibitions, finessed under the banner of visual culture,
contemporary art gives us designer experiences and the attempt to master
castration in the name of power.

Relational aesthetics is obviously a failed attempt to maintain any of the
consequences of avant-garde critique.  Rather than provide conditions for
interactivity, it generates a kind of interpassivity with regard to
institutions – the kind, I would argue, that Maria Lind's criticism also
points to.  My argument is that class struggle is not only not irrelevant to
the success of Bourriaud's work but is essential to its understanding.
 Bourriaud's
own concepts serve as a useful starting point.  Consider his idea of the new
art as "social interstice."  Artwork as social interstice implies, he
argues, human interactions and its social context.  Unlike television or
literature, relational work opens up attitudes in the form of lived time,
like a discussion that elaborates meaning collectively of produces empathy
through linkage.  This social interstice, which is part of the overall
economic system, is compared to the trading communities described by Marx,
which elude capitalist economic contexts by removing exchange from the law
of profit.  [RA, 16]  Related to this, Bourriaud distinguishes art from
relational art.  Whereas the former describes a set of objects as part of
the narrative of art history, the latter consists of "producing
relationships with the world through the help of signs, forms, actions,
objects." [RA 9]

If we ignore what we know from Bourdieu about cultural and symbolic capital,
the problem here is simply that these are not early capitalist forms of
trade.  Class struggle, as Adorno, argued, is immanent to culture.  In other
words, from the Marxist point of view at least, culture does not elude
capitalism, but is directly involved in and is an outcome of capitalist
social struggle.  If culture attempts to elude the laws of surplus value, it
of necessity does this because not only of the relative autonomy of the
superstructure, but also because it is made possible by productive labour,
which allows profit to be accumulated elsewhere.  Moreover, we should touch
on the element of fantasy that is involved in this kind of argument.  As
Zizek puts it: "The sociopolitical fantasy *par excellence*, of course, is
the myth of 'primordial accumulation': the narrative of accumulation and
investing, which provides the myth of the 'origins of capitalism',
obfuscating the violences of its actual genealogy (...) with all the traumas
properly integrated." [PofF, p.10]  So what then is on offer?  The basic
elements of his [neocapitalist] argument are simply those of objects versus
relations.  The problem with intersubjectivity is that it is not what it
appears to be.  The other is not, as Zizek argues, a full partner in the
communication but remains an object, a Thing that gives body to an excess of
jouissance.  [PofF, 10]  The fantasy narrative of relational aesthetics is
what precedes intersubjectivity – the pre-symbolic relation with the other
which gives the other (in particular, the working class) a proper place in
the subject's own imaginary universe.

In this sense I think we can bridge the gap between Bourriaud's relational
aesthetics and his later book, *Postproduction*. [Nicolas Bourriaud,
*Postproduction.
Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World*. trans. Jeanine Herman
(New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002)]  Are not the key concepts of this book,
the *use *of cultural artefacts, from toasting to recycling, cutting,
playlisting, do-it-yourselfing, colliding and mashing, etc, not the same
modalities as those that are applied to people in relational works?  In this
sense the micro-utopias that are envisioned are indeed utopian projections
that are experienced not relationally, as in real life, with all of its
traumatic contingencies and unexpected encounters, but at a meta level that
is detached.  As in a Tiravanija encounter, we observe ourselves being
convivial, as if from the outside.  Like ravers on ecstasy what we want is
not connection but managed disconnection with the right kind of crowd, the
right kind of music, disconnected from ourselves and our cares.  Isn't this
an indication not that "art is definitely developing a political project"
[RA 16] but rather a sign of dysfunction, a kind of sophisticated
micro-political version of Celebration, Florida?  Or, to put it more
directly, a kind of gated interactionism that is fully complicit with
behavioural science despite the fact that the scientists have all gone home?


If the artist must assume the symbolic models he shows, as Bourriaud also
argues, does this not point to a kind of foreclosure of the social?  Doesn't
the psychoanalytic theory of subjectivity explain to us instead the
inability of any subject to fully assume their symbolic mandate?  Queer in
this sense, especially when we understand it in relation to Judith Butler's
idea of gender as performativity, is profoundly nonrelational.  Does this
mean that we should attempt to grab the bull by the horns and act in
intentionally dysfunctional ways?  This solution is no better than the first
and both reduce us to the level of primitive instincts, a new fantasy game
called web 1.0 – the sort of thing that some US teens have tried out with
magic cards, with all of the ridiculously catastrophic results that took
place when the game was taken seriously.  To put is succinctly, the problem
with relational aesthetics is that it pretends to give us what it cannot.  As
a form of interactivity it is far more coercive than the usual everyday
exchanges.  Serious art, and serious criticism, I would argue, takes a
distance from this kind of utopian fantasy by dealing directly with the
symbolic supports of social relations.

A work which was recently exhibited at the art gallery of the Université du
Québec à Montréal provides an indication of what is to be done about
relational aesthetics.  This is somewhat ironic since Bourriaud's ideas are
very popular in the art department of this school, and with the young art
students in particular, who are anxious about their future careers.  The
work was by the Beligian artist Wim Delviya, who invented a machine that
mimics the digestive capacities of the human body and produces excrement,
which he has branded with the name "claoca."  This literal embodiment of
what Arthur Kroker long ago defined as "excremental culture in
hyper-aesthetics" has an odd connection to relational aesthetics.  As part
of the presentation of the machine, and as its cultural justification you
could say, people gather in a convivial atmosphere and feed the machine.  It
then poops out what looks like and smells like shit, and in the tradition of
Pinot-Gallizio and Manzoni, the poop is packaged and distributed.  While the
artist likes to emphasize the humanist themes that come from our exploration
of the ideas produced – well, isn't this just a scale model of the artworld,
which pumps out shit all the time – the circularity of the project is more
cynical than enlightening.

The first thing I thought of when I heard of this work by Delviya was my
initial reaction to a video clip I saw of one of Rikrit Tiravanija's thai
soup events.  The sense I had was that the work begins with the artist's
intention, and ends, one day later, with the unintentional trip to the
washroom.  My concern today, however, is rather how does one intentionally
dispose of relational aesthetics?  How do we get rid of it now that we all
had to suffer through it?

In this I'm inspired by, again, Zizek's discussion of European toilets and
the way that toilets reflect the different attitudes that Europeans have
about excremental excess, which for our purposes we could replace with
fashionabe art.  We could distinguish these not according to nationalities,
as he does, but according to four variants of contemporary attitudes toward
art production that overlap with Lacan's famous "Four Discourses" (which I
will not seek to explain here).

The first of these is the position of the Discourse of the Master, which I
wish to rename as the Discourse of the State.  Here, relational aesthetics,
as Hal Foster argued in his essay "Chat Rooms" [See the Claire Bishop
anthology *Participation *(Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2006)] works as an
artworld version of what takes places elsewhere in society – a kind of
schizophrenic roller derby social practice where one minute you have to be
nice, the next you have to be firm, etc., which actually is now instituted
in new management practices that mix the relaxation of surveillance
techniques one day with ungrounded and unexpected disciplinary measures the
next – a kind of bad parenting strategy that creates confusion and tighter
controls in a world where schizoid workers won't stand for strict discipline
or obvious coercion.  The discourse of the state simply funds and studies
relational art, especially if it promises to lead to investment
opportunities and exports.  This comes close to what Nick Cohen, writing in
the *Guardian *newspaper refers to as Bourriaud's curating of
"state-sponsored radicalism at taxpayers' expense."  At this level,
post-political goodwill and technocratic mediation promote mediocrity
instead of radicality.  The name of this game, as the net critic Geert
Lovink puts it, is refresh.  As long as the work is fresh and has the
appropriate slickness with enough theoretical awareness, it does not have to
relate to critical models from the past.  Through the discourse of the
master state, successful art becomes the victim of its success; it becomes
irrelevant because it subscribes too closely to the rules of the game.

The second way of discharging one's guilty relations can be characterized as
the Discourse of the University.  In this optic I would place an initiative
like "queer relational" which attempts to salvage the model by hybridizing
it.  This, in ideological terms, is also the position of the "normal
subject," the subject who wants things to go well and who does not want to
disturb the dominant symbolic injunctions.  In a separate vein we should ask
ourselves why would we seek to salvage relational aesthetics.  Is this not
similar to the way that both feminism today and gay politics have become
disconnected from anything we could call a mass social movement, especially
a radical one?  No wonder then that Sarah Palin appeared to many Americans
as a genuine feminist, more so than Hillary Clinton.  No wonder that one of
the most significant feminist actions recently was CODEPINK's foray into
Gaza in order to asses the carnage wrought by Israeli forces and later to
hand President Obama a letter of invitation to visit Gaza on behalf of
Hamas.  No wonder too that the organizers of the recent Gay Pride event in
Toronto (June 28, 2009) were debating whether or not to allow Queers Against
Israeli Apartheid to demonstrate as part of Pride (after B'Nai Brith and
others had attempted to intervene).  What these kinds of linkages, gay and
anti-global, feminist and ecological, etc, point to is not the strength of
affinity movements but a deeper crisis about political organisation and the
prospects of radical social and cultural change.  This in some ways is not
so different from the real difficulty of trying to get a clear understanding
of what has been going on in Iran after the re-election of Ahmadinejad.  Within
the institution of art itself, we find an analog to this inability to think
critically in the scrambling of roles.  How often are we presented with
projects where the artist acts as a curator, the curator as theorist, the
audience as artist, and so on?  My point here is not to dismiss these
strategies and experiments, but merely to argue that the discourse of the
university will not prevent any of these undertakings from operating as art
(just as newspapers won't prevent confused gibberish from being printed),
and so as transgressions of the formal codes of art, which do not represent
significant changes to the conditions of art's production and
consumption.  This
mode of discharge is of the post-structuralist sort in which you can have
your cloaca and eat it too.

Thirdly, we have the Discourse of the Hysteric, that of the jealous artist
who wants in on the game.  If "queer relational" has any meaning, it
represents a rejection of this desire to be included in the game.  In
ideological terms, this comes close to the position of the activist, the
person who follows the rules of the game so closely as to in some ways
betray and undermine it (though unwittingly).  On the cynical side, people
like Simon Ford and Anthony Davies, and also theorists like Stephan
Dillemuth, provide ideological ammunition for the bad faith of artists who
seek to get in on the corporate money and who imitate the "potlatch"
strategies of wealthy philanthropists, though from a position of great
disadvantage unless, like the Neo-Geo artist Ashley Bickerton, they strike
it rich.  For these artists, destined to a life of cynical despair, all we
can say is "good luck!"  For the rest of us, the collective BAVO has done
everyone a big favour by identifying the new community art activism as
embedded NGO art.  For example, in their essay on social housing reform,
BAVO have reinvented the old critique of "artists as the shock troops of
gentrification" with new terms appropriate for our times.  Today's cultural
activism, they argue, operates a kind of socio-economic cleasing through a
false "welcome in my back yard" openness that simulates dialogue and demands
that participants be open to processes that they may in actuality be
against.  They are expected to accept the nomadic, fluid nature of identity,
an ideology of adaptation that works in tandem with neoliberalization,
since, one of the first things one must do if relational art is to have any
validity on its own terms, is renounce politicization as the precondition of
democractization.  Conformist attitudes are thus presented as utopian
opportunities to live better.  Aesthetics comes to compensate for the vacuum
left by deregulation policies and economic globalization.  Moreover,
capitalism subverts its own competitive logic in order to survive, promising
social change through culturally mediated innovation and creativity. [See
BAVO, "From the Post-Socialist Dutch City to the Retro-Socialist City... and
Back!  Or, how to subvert today's imperative to re-stage non-capitalist
social relations in this so-called post-utopian age? (2008); available at
http://www.bavo.biz/texts/view/15]  How does queer theory and practice
relate to this "idealist conformism" which merges the fluidity of openness
with social activism?  What is its relation to avant-garde contestation?  How
does the bureaucratization of affect connect to the new imperatives of petty
bourgeois fatalism?  This gives us an idea about the mode of dischange: it
happens through class polarization.  The more people get in on the game, the
more that the zero sum game of cultural consecration will effect a
liquidation of all of its prominent signifying elements.  The artist
discovers that they were nothing but an outside participant all along and
all they did was help themselves to a bad situation.

Lastly, the Discourse of the Analyst points to the possibility of getting
rid of relational aesthetics in style.  This is the role of the dissident
artist who not only has strategies and tactics, but politics.  Like the
Hysteric, the analyst also operates with the scrambling of roles, but unlike
the hysteric, the analyst does not seek to confuse but to help the
situation.  The analyst is not only the subject supposed to know, but who
doesn't really know the subject's relation to their symptom, but also the
subject whose practice is presupposed by knowledge of their field of action.
The discourse of the dissident analyst, the inverted mirror that leads
toward radical organization, the "traversal of the fantasy" of
micropolitical utopias, cannot proceed without an analysis of subjectivity.

We could look here for a critical articulation of perversion that subverts
commonplace strategies of (artistic) transgression, which have the obvious
function of social reproduction.  In this I follow some aspects of queer
theory in my disregard of specific sex acts as markers of a kind of sexual
class distinction or sex aristocracy, which unfortuantely has a good deal of
appeal to both gay chauvinists (which Foucault's late work unfortunately
encouraged) and egalitarian culturalists.  What concerns me is rather the
articulation of perversion in terms of the Lacanian view that a) there is no
sexual relationship, and b) perversion represents a variant of the symbolic
injunction to enjoy.  In other words, if "queer relational" is to have any
critical sense it is not in the promotion of an ideal form of cathexis, but
rather in the understanding of the dialectics of subject and other.

This understanding might find a variant in Alain Badiou's critique of
"puerile vitalism," which, he argues, "presupposes the consensual nature of
the very norm [of art] that needs to be examined and established, to wit,
that movement is superior to immobility, life superior to the concept, time
to space, affirmation to negation, difference to identity, and so on."

(Which happens to resemble Zizek's criticism of what we could call
"frictionless art."  Today's neoliberal communists, like Bill Gates and
George Soros, are against authority and parochialism.  For them, as for most
CEOs, "Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralised
bureaucracy; believing in dialogue and co-operation as against central
authority; in flexibility as against routine and autopoesis as against fixed
hierarchy." [Zizek, "Nobody has to be vile," London Review of Books (6 April
2006); available at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/zize01_.html])

Badiou continues with the following: "In these latent 'certainties' ...
there is a kind of speculative demagogy whose entire strength lies in
addressing itself to each an everyone that makes us scurry about blindly on
the desolate surface of the earth."

[Alain Badiou, *Theoretical Writings*. edited and translated by Ray Brassier
and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2004) 70.]  Relating this to
mathematics and set theory, he states that the set is contained in the
actuality of its own determination and is indifferent to the duality of open
and closed, finite and infinite.  Today's effort to save qualitative
singularity and vital power produces its opposite.  An event, which Badiou
describes as a way of exiting the condition of animal wretchedness,
represents multiplicity wrested from inclusion, and act that subtracts from
the void of being, where these is disappearance of the undecidable and where
the event releases its power of anticipation in the field of enlightened
knowledge.  "The universality that respects particularities," he tells us,
"is fatally tautological".  Like the pre-symbolic fantasy narrative that
structures relational aesthetics, it is the "counterpart to a protocol that
wants to eradicate genuinely particular particularities, that freezes the
predicates of particularities into identitarian combinations". [TW,
147]   Emancipation,
as Lacan asserts, is the singularity that subtracts itself from identitarian
politics, the event where *il n'y a pas de relation*.

03/07/09
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