[-empyre-] forward from Marc Leger : Queer Relational : Against the Invasion of the Mind Snatchers

[Christina McPhee]

hi list,



I am forwarding this for Marc as I am not sure that the mailman  
software has sent it out to you.  It is on the archive server at https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2009-July/001755.html



Marc Leger writes:



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 Octoberessay "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.comboom.  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, inPostproduction 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