[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 56, Issue 3: Robert Summers Undone by Julie Tolentino

[Robert Summers]

Hi Christina,

Here is one story, one example or demonstration (or monstration) of a
techne that worked -- and is still working on and in me ...

I have witnessed -- and by that I mean in the way Agamben, Derrida,
and others have theorized it -- the work of Julie Tolentino
(http://web.mac.com/thejulietolentino/Tolentino_Projects/Welcome.html)
in the summer of 2008, and I witnessed her work again in spring of
2009 at a series of performances, workshops, and talks by various
performance and body artists that was organized by Jennifer Doyle
(http://ieyoubelongtome.blogspot.com/).
Tolentino does performance and body art, which entirely un-does -- in
order to re-do, one may even say "queer" -- the spectator.  For
example, in one art piece, titled *The Sky Remains the Same,* she
(queerly) archives Ron Athey's body art piece  *Resonate/Obliterate.*
She re-enacts his performance while he is doing it; thus, she does a
repertoire and makes an archive of a body art piece at once, which is
inscribed on (and in?) her body.  I think her archiving practice, such
as the one just mentioned, is extremely ethical to performance and
body art: it does not turn the performative into a constative, a
description.  Also in this particular embodied practice, she gives
herself over to stigmata, as a stigma -- but without shame: she is
shameless.  The performance, I would argue, highlights how certain
artworks (literally) mark us (psychically), which to say that it
changes us, and I think that this is one of the roles in art's work,
if you will.
Tolentino also performed a body art piece titled "Stringhead," in
which her face was entirely covered by a coarse, think rope.  She
softly, erratically, and also elegantly undoes the rope from around
her face as she undulates across the room, and the, at the end her
face is revealed.  But this gives us no more knowledge of Tolentino;
this is faithful, I would argue, to a Levinasian ethics -- where the
face is straightaway ethical and must not be reduced to mere datum.
In a paper I am writing on her, specifically about "Stringhead," I
argue that her work highlights the intertwining of politics,
aesthetics, and ethics, and it can be understood (actually both of her
works I have mentioned) as a modality of "queer relationality" and
"queer subjectivity" -- indeed, her artwork is relational and
participatory, in that the audience, the spectators are drawn into the
work.  And, it is work such as Tolentino's that needs to be reckoned
with because such work refuses and resists commodification and
absorption into the gallery circuit (circus) and art history, proper.
Work such as Tolentino's cannot be watered down for easy absorption.
It is thick, dense, dangerous ...
Indeed, I am still moved by what I witnessed, and it has forced me to
re-think a great many things.

I hope I have answered your question, and I look forward to this
continual dialog.

All my best, Robert


Robert Summers, PhD/ABD



On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 5:23 PM, <empyre-request at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> wrote:
> Send empyre mailing list submissions to empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/empyre or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to empyre-request at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au You can reach the person managing the list at empyre-owner at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of empyre digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Re: Queer Relationally -- Queer Aesthetics of Exsistence (naxsmash) 2. tesserae hot pink cali aqueduct (naxsmash) 3. Fwd: a soft-skinned call? (naxsmash) 4. a beginning... (lotu5 at resist.ca) 5. queer relational (Marc Leger) 6. forward from Marc Leger : Queer Relational : Against the Invasion of the Mind Snatchers (Christina McPhee) 7. queer relational (Marc Leger) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:19:45 -0700 From: naxsmash Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Queer Relationally -- Queer Aesthetics of Exsistence To: soft_skinned_space Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed; delsp=yes Robert I would be interested in any stories you might have about particular perfomance artists and events that you 've witnessed , wriiten about.. Specific moments when you noticed this kind of heightened or intense techne. Sent from my iPhone On Jul 2, 2009, at 6:49 PM, Robert Summers wrote: > Homosexuality is a historic occasion to reopen affective and > relational virtualities, not so much through the intrinsic qualities > of the homosexual but because the 'slantwise' position of the latter, > as it were, the diagonal lines [s/]he can lay out in the social fabric > allow these virtualities to come to light. - Foucault > > [Foucault argued in his late work for] inventing new possibilities of > life. Existing not as a subject but as a work of art -- and the last > phrase presents thought as artistry. - Deleuze > > Aesthetic experiences should be considered no better or worse -- no > higher or lower -- than sexual ones. - Dean > > I start off with these three quotes in order to gesture toward other > modes of life and art practices and productions, which would be an > "aesthetics of existence" (Foucault), and which are not at all related > to what we currently find in galleries and museums. I think we have > to re-think art's placement in the social-sphere and daily life, and > rethink it as a techne, and also what constitutes art today -- by > which I mean art that is awarded prizes, galley shows, etc. I think > that such a re-thinking will surface an art (relational to be sure) > that foregrounds the intertwining of aesthetics, politics, and ethics; > for example, the art of the cruise, the art of the fuck, the art of > living an existence that resists the State apparatus. I think that by > following the late work of both Foucault and Tim Dean we can develop > new forms of (embodied) art practices and (queer) relationships and > realtionalities, and ironically (?) these are only to be found in > non-normative sexual "communities." > > - Robert Summers, PhD/ABD > _______________________________________________ > empyre forum > empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > http://www.subtle.net/empyre ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:32:10 -0700 From: naxsmash Subject: [-empyre-] tesserae hot pink cali aqueduct To: soft_skinned_space Cc: Jessica Silverman Message-ID: <12E1BF1D-2F6D-44D2-BD05-D684994CDE49 at mac.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes well my partner just saw this clip from my new video montage work on vimeo and over polenta and salad had this to say on the fly: http://www.vimeo.com/5303813 about Tesserae Hot Pink Cali Aqueduct quote it's not going to stop the production of carbon same as Piss Christ didn't stop the Church nonetheless Piss Christ was terribly important to do treating the carbon production with lipstick vamping it, it makes the production of carbon more precious by glamourizing it speciously it points to the cultural valorization of carbon, its production it takes a fetishized form and invisible product and one which results from an imaginary even unimaginable source and that source is what provides the substance of this project the source is formalized rather than being allowed to remain a process it's formalized as a fetishisation much as the culture is apt to enact or to worship what it cannot access, ie the reality of carbon accumulation akin to the event-productions of traditions of queer performance it's attempting to paint the process via its producers much like las vegas paints its ladies, as if they were producers of pleasure The intention is to explore the disagreeable through the superimposition of the conditions of the fetish. The project comes from a queer tradition wherein the artist is at the margins. It is an incredibly non-conforming position because the world view of the artist insists on integrating a sexual fetizisation with political moves. it's over the topness that makes it arresting, it is not trying to be part of the tradition of Spiral Jetty, it is not part of a meditative or contemplative tradition. This is much more connected to a queer relational aesthetic. The hot pink is a circus act, a cirque de Venus in the midst of the hypermasculine power plants. Something magical is happening, the water is turning into dyed chrome, so postnatural. The rage against the rape of the earth turns everything hot pink, so sexy. unquote (Terry Hargrave 070109) http://www.vimeo.com/5303813 naxsmash naxsmash at mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net ------------------------------ Message: 3 Date: Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:37:12 -0700 From: naxsmash Subject: [-empyre-] Fwd: a soft-skinned call? To: soft_skinned_space Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Here is a note from an artist who just saw our -empyre- announcement on Rhizome. He writes: Begin forwarded message: > From: S?rgio.LT Filho > Date: July 2, 2009 9:00:51 PM PDT > To: naxsmash at mac.com > Subject: a soft-skinned call? > > > Hello Christina, > > I've seen your announcement at Rhizome, and I was interested in this > topic of queer artworks. > > I've been working as a media artist for a while, I have my own > website with installations, videoart, blogs and ergodic literature (www.neocronica.org > ). > > I've made an installation regarding the "male bonding" universe, > which quite doesn't fit any category so far, in my opinion - my > interest would be the boundaries of heterosexuality, which I believe > are somewhat permeable, ethereal, hard to define. > > The artwork is at http://etherealand.blogspot.com . I'd like to put > it in touch with artists/curators that would be interested in it - I > believe it captures the ethereal aspect of these relations between > young men, often called as friendship, bromance (to use a word of > the moment) and other adjacent feelings of this terrain. Could you > help me with that with a piece of advice? > > Thanks in advance. > > Yours faithfully, > > Sergio > > neocronica.org > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20090702/028642bf/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 4 Date: Fri, 3 Jul 2009 01:40:11 -0700 (PDT) From: lotu5 at resist.ca Subject: [-empyre-] a beginning... To: "soft_skinned_space" Cc: Jessica Silverman Message-ID: <051ec46ac43b6fbef44e240f3aafad1b.squirrel at mail.resist.ca> Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1 hi all, i'm excited to join this month's discussion. i feel honored to be an "invited" guest this month, but i also feel like my subversive position as outside commenter has been somewhat usurped and i've been feeling surprisingly shy about posting! so i'll just dive in... I'm curious about asking what we mean by queer and by relational. I decided to look back at Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics for this discussion, and I think that I would even claim that relational aesthetics has a certain queerness about it, or an affinity with queer world building, or a statement like michael warner's saying in Publics and Counterpublics that "by queer culture we mean a world making project". Bourriaud states "before long, it will not be possible to maintain relationships between people outside these trading areas... You are looking for shared warmth, and the comforting feeling of well being for two? So try our coffee... The relationship between people, as symbolised by goods or replaced by them, and signposted by logos, has to take on extreme and clandestine forms, if it is to didge the empire of predictability... Herein lies the most burning issue to do with art today: is it still possible to generate relationships with the world"? In this initial gesture of relational aesthetics, I actually see a queer gesture, in that if the relation is the form of the artwork, then the role of the artist is to invite new forms of relation. (although later Bourriaud tosses newness aside as a criteria for relational aesthetics) Admittedly, I have a lot to learn about relational aesthetics and am looking forward to learning from you all this month... Yet, if global capital offers heteronormative couplings around a cup of starbucks coffee (and this leaves aside a discussion of quer cooptation for later...), than the move by artists to create new spaces to reimagine relationality can be seen as a move outside of the heteronormative structures of biopower. Here I am reminded of a quote from Myron Kreuger that "the only aesthetic concern should be the quality of the interaction." My own work has been in the new media trajectory, which can be seen as in a trajectory with the interactive environments of Myron Kreuger. In Becoming Dragon, I sought to explore the subject in transition, in a way creating a space of relation between the audience and a subject who's state of being-in-transition or becoming is foregrounded. The performance coincided with the beginning of my hormone therapy, so it was also a meditation on the resonances between a physical becoming or transformation and a digital becoming avatar, becoming mythopoetic and becoming the body-in-transmission. I definitely can see this as a queer relational piece, between genders as well as between spaces, the physical space and the space of second life. Which brings me back to an opening the question of queer. I appreciated the quote from Foucault about homosexuality, but do we see queer in this discussion as an active blurring of binaries, or of boundaries and categories themselves? My own conception of queer began with my experience in the alter-globalization and No Borders movements, in which I regularly organized and struggled with people who had notions of creating their own gender outside of male/female binary restrictions, and these notions energized and were energized by anarchist and world-building political strategies. Ok, that's enough for now. I just wanted to get out some of what I was thinking about... micha ------------------------------ Message: 5 Date: Fri, 3 Jul 2009 18:04:24 -0400 From: Marc Leger Subject: [-empyre-] queer relational To: Christina McPhee , empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" 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 arri?re-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'esth?tique 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 Ranci?re, 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'?tat*, 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* *d?sengag? *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 *po?te 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 Universit? du Qu?bec ? Montr?al 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20090703/caa62ebe/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 6 Date: Fri, 3 Jul 2009 16:01:59 -0700 From: Christina McPhee Subject: [-empyre-] forward from Marc Leger : Queer Relational : Against the Invasion of the Mind Snatchers To: soft_skinned_space Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=WINDOWS-1252; format=flowed; delsp=yes 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 arri?re-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'esth?tique 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 Ranci?re, 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'?tat, 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 d?sengag? 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 po?te 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 Universit? du Qu?bec ? Montr?al 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 ------------------------------ Message: 7 Date: Fri, 3 Jul 2009 20:10:18 -0400 From: Marc Leger Subject: [-empyre-] queer relational To: empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" Hi all. If this conversation is as Christina says, a dinner conversation, then I will obviously win at having the worst manners. 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. * * *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 arri?re-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'esth?tique 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 Ranci?re, 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 the 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'?tat*, 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* *d?sengag? *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 *po?te 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 Universit? du Qu?bec ? Montr?al 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 in this piece). 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, an 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*. 03/07/2009 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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