[-empyre-] Complicity

[Saul Ostrow]

If all that presently supports the notion that art has a political and social function is the traditions and beliefs that extend form the mid 19th century, bourgeoisie's struggle to use culture to capture social power - then those who employ art as a means to critique the present disparity between need and aspiration, are merely seeking the fulfillment of emancipation and betterment  that the bourgeoisie promised. They see no intrinsic flaw in this vision, but purely duplicity.  Their stance is comparable to those  those Sci -Fi films  that tend to focus on the negative, the incidental, or the transformative by emphasizing local conditions rather than systemic ones. The unstated conclusion of such films is that a better and wiser bourgeoisie will eventually fulfill the promise(s) Capitalism as a system not only of production but a logic that orders all social relationships. Comparably, each project, which explores local economies, alternative life styles, or t identity idealistically re-enforces  both the view that by means of critical exposure the world will be set right -and that of the entrepreneurial spirit, whose scenario is one of overcoming adversity through innovation, personal fortitude, or technology. Both of these are at the mythological heart of capitalism. The storylin ; knowledge will set you free, also tends to comply with the logic of the very systems it would intervene in -which leaves the categorical logics of social knowledge, relationships and experience in tact.

Consequently, though the artist engaged in critique seems antithetical to that of the artist who wishes to merely express themselves based on the  intuitivon, both the critical agent and the traditional artist reproduce, replicates and perpetuates the same logics, conventions, and histories. From this perspective, to move beyond the tautology of complicity and ineffectiveness, a necessary component of critical practices would be an understanding of how an intuition becomes a subject and how that subject generates  intentions  which   while informing ones  practices, do not necessarily coincide with ones  objectives. This is because within the context of wanting to transform social relations, to merely inform: offering answers tends to be counter-productive - because they do not address causation but merely effect.  As such for us to begin to re-think  how we might self-reflexively determine our agency and being in the world  requires the developed of contingent positions  from which attempts to over-write the residual programs, and redraw the bounds (epistemes/habitus) of our cultural domain that continue to order and limit our abilities act as critical agents  in accord with the collective self-interests they share with their  audience.


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