1. science
2. computer science
3. artificial intelligence

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The
Tyranny
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Expert
A Reader
Firstdraft Presents
Around The Outside
The Tyranny of the Expert
A Reader
Contents
1. Art Workers’ Coalition: Statement of Demands 2. Jacques Rancière: An Intellectual Adventure (from The Ignorant
Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation)
3. Irit Rogoff: Free
4. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney: The University and the Undercommons
(from The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study)
5. Irit Rogoff: Turning
6. Krystof Wodiczk: Strategies of Public Address: Which Media, Which
Publics?
7. Dusan Barok and Claire Bishop: On Participatory Art: Interview with Claire
Bishop
8. Martha Rosler: Take the Money and Run? Can Political and Socio-critical
Art “Survive”?
9. Hito Steyerl: The Institution of Critique
An Intellectual Adventure
In 18 18 , Joseph Jacotot, a lecturer in French literature at the University of Louvain, had an intellectual adventure.
A long and eventful career should have made him immune to
surprises: he had celebrated his nineteenth birthday in 1789.
He was at that time teaching rhetoric at Dijon and preparing
for a career in law. In 1792, he served as an artilleryman in the
Republican armies. Then, under the Convention, he worked
successively as instructor for the Bureau of Gunpowder, secretary to the Minister of War, and substitute for the director of
the Ecole Polytechnique. When he returned to Dijon, he taught
analysis, ideology, ancient languages, pure mathematics, transcendent mathematics, and law. In March 18 15 , the esteem of
his countrymen made him a deputy in spite of himself. The return of the Bourbons forced him into exile, and by the generosity of the King of the Netherlands he obtained a position as
a professor at half-pay. Joseph Jacotot was acquainted with the
laws of hospitality and counted on spending some calm days in
Louvain.
Chance decided differently. The unassuming lecturers lessons were, in fact, highly appreciated by his students. Among
those who wanted to avail themselves of him were a good number of students who did not speak French; but Joseph Jacotot
knew no Flemish. There was thus no language in which he could
teach them what they sought from him. Yet he wanted to re-
spond to their wishes. To do so, the minimal link of a thing in
common had to be established between himself and them. At that
time, a bilingual edition of Télémaque was being published in
Brussels.* The thing in common had been found, and Telemachus made his way into the life of Joseph Jacotot. He had the
book delivered to the students and asked them, through an interpreter, to learn the French text with the help of the translation. When they had made it through the first half of the
book, he had them repeat what they had learned over and over,
and then told them to read through the rest of the book until
they could recite it. This was a fortunate solution, but it was
also, on a small scale, a philosophical experiment in the style of
the ones performed during the Age of Enlightenment. And Jo seph Jacotot, in 18 18 , remained a man of the preceding century.
But the experiment exceeded his expectations. He asked the
students who had prepared as instructed to write in French what
they thought about what they had read:
He expected horrendous barbarisms, or maybe a complete inability
to perform. How could these young people, deprived of explanation,
understand and resolve the difficulties of a language entirely new to
them? No matter! He had to find out where the route opened by
chance had taken them, what had been the results of that desperate
empiricism. And how surprised he was to discover that the students,
left to themselves, managed this difficult step as well as many French
could have done! Was wanting all that was necessary for doing? Were
all men virtually capable of understanding what others had done and
understood?1
Such was the revolution that this chance experiment unleashed in his mind. Until then, he had believed what all con*Fénelon’s didactic and utopian 24~volume novel, Télémaque (1699), recounts the peregrinations of Telemachus, accompanied by his spiritual g uide, Mentor, as he attempts to find his
father, Odysseus. In it, Fénelon proposes an “Art of Reigning” and invents an ideal city, Salente, whose peace-loving citizens show exemplary civic virtue. The book was extremely displeasing to Louis X IV , who saw him self in the portrait of Idomeneus. B ut it was much admired
by Enlightenment philosophers, who proclaimed Fénelon one of their most important precursors. Jn terms o f Jacotot’s adventure, the book could have been Télémaque or any other.
— T R AN S .
scientious professors believe: that the important business of the
master is to transmit his knowledge to his students so as to bring
them, by degrees, to his own level of expertise. Like all conscientious professors, he knew that teaching was not in the
slightest about cramming students with knowledge and having
them repeat it like parrots, but he knew equally well that students had to avoid the chance detours where minds still incapable of distinguishing the essential from the accessory, the
principle from the consequence, get lost. In short, the essential
act of the master was to explicate: to disengage the simple elements of learning, and to reconcile their simplicity in principle
with the factual simplicity that characterizes young and ignorant minds. To teach was to transmit learning and form minds
simultaneously, by leading those minds, according to an ordered progression, from the most simple to the most complex.
By the reasoned appropriation of knowledge and the formation
of judgment and taste, a student was thus elevated to as high a
level as his social destination demanded, and he was in this way
prepared to make the use of the knowledge appropriate to that
destination: to teach, to litigate, or to govern for the lettered
elite; to invent, design, or make instruments and machines for
the new avant-garde now hopefully to be drawn from the elite
of the common people; and, in the scientific careers, for the
minds gifted with this particular genius, to make new discoveries. Undoubtedly the procedures of these men of science
would diverge noticeably from the reasoned order of the pedagogues. But this was no grounds for an argument against that
order. On the contrary, one must first acquire a solid and methodical foundation before the singularities of genius could take
flight. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
This is how all conscientious professors reason. This was how
Joseph Jacotot, in his thirty years at the job, had reasoned and
acted. But now, by chance, a grain of sand had gotten into the
machine. He had given no explanation to his “ students” on the
first elements of the language. He had not explained spelling
or conjugations to them. They had looked for the French words
that corresponded to words they knew and the reasons for their
grammatical endings by themselves. They had learned to put
them together to make, in turn, French sentences by themselves: sentences whose spelling and grammar became more and
more exact as they progressed through the book; but, above all,
sentences o f writers and not of schoolchildren. Were the schoolmaster’s explications therefore superfluous? Or, if they weren’t,
to whom and for what were they useful?
The Explicative Order
Thus, in the mind of Joseph Jacotot, a sudden illumination
brutally highlighted what is blindly taken for granted in any
system of teaching: the necessity of explication. And yet why
shouldn’t it be taken for granted? No one truly knows anything
other than what he has understood. And for comprehension to
take place, one has to be given an explication, the words of the
master must shatter the silence of the taught material.
And yet that logic is not without certain obscurities. Consider, for example, a book in the hands of a student. The book
is made up of a series of reasonings designed to make a student
understand some material. But now the schoolmaster opens his
mouth to explain the book. He makes a series of reasonings in
order to explain the series of reasonings that constitute the
book. But why should the book need such help? Instead of paying for an explicator, couldn’t a father simply give the book to
his son and the child understand directly the reasonings of the
book? And if he doesn’t understand them, why would he be any
more likely to understand the reasonings that would explain to
him what he hasn’t understood? Are those reasonings of a different nature? And if so, wouldn’t it be necessary to explain the
way in which to understand them?
So the logic of explication calls for the principle of a regression ad infinitum: there is no reason for the redoubling of reasonings ever to stop. What brings an end to the regression and
gives the system its foundation is simply that the explicator is
the sole judge of the point when the explication is itself explicated. He is the sole judge of that, in itself, dizzying question:
has the student understood the reasonings that teach him to understand the reasonings? This is what the master has over the
father: how could the father be certain that the child has understood the book’s reasonings? What is missing for the father,
what will always be missing in the trio he forms with the child
and the book, is the singular art of the explicator: the art of
distance. The masters secret is to know how to recognize the
distance between the taught material and the person being instructed , the distance also between learning and understanding.
The explicator sets up and abolishes this distance— deploys it
and reabsorbs it in the fullness of his speech.
This privileged status of speech does not suppress the regression ad infinitum without instituting a paradoxical hierarchy.
In the explicative order, in fact, an oral explication is usually
necessary to explicate the written explication. This presupposes
that reasonings are clearer, are better imprinted on the mind of
the student, when they are conveyed by the speech of the master, which dissipates in an instant, than when conveyed by the
book, where they are inscribed forever in indelible characters.
How can we understand this paradoxical privilege of speech over
writing, of hearing over sight? What relationship thus exists
between the power of speech and the power of the master?
This paradox immediately gives rise to another: the words the
child learns best, those whose meaning he best fathoms, those
he best makes his own through his own usage, are those he
learns without a master explicator, well before any master explicator. According to the unequal returns of various intellectual apprenticeships, what all human children learn best is what
no master can explain: the mother tongue. We speak to them
and we speak around them. They hear and retain, imitate and
repeat, make mistakes and correct themselves, succeed by
chance and begin again methodically, and, at too young an age
for explicators to begin instructing them, they are almost all—
regardless of gender, social condition, and skin color— able to
understand and speak the language of their parents.
And only now does this child who learned to speak through
his own intelligence and through instructors who did not ex-
plain language to him— only now does his instruction, properly
speaking, begin. Now everything happens as though he could
no longer learn with Hie aid of the same intelligence he has used
up until now, as though the autonomous relationship between
apprenticeship and verification were, from this point on, alien
to him. Between one and the other an opacity has now set in.
It concerns understanding, and this word alone throws a veil over
everything: understanding is what the child cannot do without
the explanations of a master— later, of as many masters as there
are materials to understand, all presented in a certain progressive order. Not to mention the strange circumstance that since
the era of progress began, these explications have not ceased
being perfected in order better to explicate, to make more comprehensible, the better to learn to learn— without any discernible corresponding perfection of the said comprehension. Instead, a growing complaint begins to be heard: the explicative
system is losing effectiveness. This, of course, necessitates reworking the explications yet again to make them easier to understand by those who are failing to take them in.
The revelation that came to Joseph Jacotot amounts to this:
the logic of the explicative system had to be overturned. Explication is not necessary to remedy an incapacity to understand. On the contrary, that very incapacity provides the structuring fiction of the explicative conception of the world. It is
the explicator who needs the incapable and not the other way
around; it is he who constitutes the incapable as such. To explain
something to someone is first of all to show him he cannot understand it by himself. Before being the act of the pedagogue,
explication is the myth of pedagogy, the parable of a world divided into knowing minds and ignorant ones, ripe minds and
immature ones, the capable and the incapable, the intelligent
and the stupid. The explicator’s special trick consists of this
double inaugural gesture. On the one hand, he decrees the absolute beginning: it is only now that the act of learning will
begin. On the other, having thrown a veil of ignorance over
everything that is to be learned, he appoints himself to the task
of lifting it. Until he came along, the child has been groping
blindly, figuring out riddles. Now he will learn. He heard
words and repeated them. But now it is time to read, and he
will not understand words if he doesn’t understand syllables,
and he won’t understand syllables if he doesn’t understand letters that neither the book nor his parents can make him understand— only the master’s word. The pedagogical myth, we said,
divides the world into two. More precisely, it divides intelligence into two. It says that there is an inferior intelligence and
a superior one. The former registers perceptions by chance, retains them, interprets and repeats them empirically, within the
closed circle of habit and need. This is the intelligence of the
young child and the common man. The superior intelligence
knows things by reason, proceeds by method, from the simple
to the complex, from the part to the whole. It is this intelligence
that allows the master to transmit his knowledge by adapting
it to the intellectual capacities of the student and allows him to
verify that the student has satisfactorily understood what he
learned. Such is the principle of explication. From this point
on, for Jacotot, such will be the principle of enforced stultification.*
To understand this we must rid ourselves of received images.
The stulti fier is not an aged obtuse master who crams his students’ skulls full of poorly digested knowledge, or a malignant
character mouthing half-truths in order to shore up his power
and the social order. On the contrary, he is all the more efficacious because he is knowledgeable, enlightened, and of good
faith. The more he knows, the more evident to him is the distance between his knowledge and the ignorance of the ignorant
ones. The more he is enlightened, the more evident he finds the
difference between groping blindly and searching methodically,
the more he will insist on substituting the spirit for the letter,
the clarity of explications for the authority of the book. Above
#In the absence o f a precise English equivalent for the French term abrutir (to render stupid,
to treat like a brute), I’ve translated it as “stultify." Stultify carries the connotations of numbing
and deadening better than the word "stupefy,” which implies a sense of wonderment or amazement absent in the French.— TRANS.
all, he will say, the student must understand, and for that we
must explain even better. Such is the concern of the enlightened
pedagogue: does the little one understand? He doesn’t understand. I will find new ways to explain it to him, ways more rigorous in principle, more attractive in form— and I will verify
that he has understood.
A noble concern. Unfortunately, it is just this little word,
this slogan of the enlightened— understand— that causes all
the trouble. It is this word that brings a halt to the movement
of reason, that destroys its confidence in itself, that distracts it
by breaking the world of intelligence into two, by installing the
division between the groping animal and the learned little man,
between common sense and science. From the moment this slogan of duality is pronounced, all the perfecting of the ways of
making understood, that great preoccupation of men of methods
and progressives, is progress toward stultification. The child
who recites under the threat of the rod obeys the rod and that’s
all: he will apply his intelligence to something else. But the
child who is explained to will devote his intelligence to the work
of grieving: to understanding, that is to say, to understanding
that he doesn’t understand unless he is explained to. He is no
longer submitting to the rod, but rather to a hierarchical world
of intelligence. For the rest, like the other child, he doesn’t have
to worry: if the solution to the problem is too difficult to pursue,
he will have enough intelligence to open his eyes wide. The
master is vigilant and patient. He will see that the child isn’t
following him; he will put him back on track by explaining
things again. And thus the child acquires a new intelligence,
that of the master’s explications. Later he can be an explicator
in turn. He possesses the equipment. But he will perfect it: he
will be a man of progress.
Chance and W ill
So goes the world of the explicated explicators. So would it
have gone for Professor Jacotot if chance hadn’t put him in the
presence of a fact. And Joseph Jacotot believed that all reasoning should be based on facts and cede place to them. We
shouldn’t conclude from this that he was a materialist. On the
contrary, like Descartes, who proved movement by walking,
but also like his very royalist and very religious contemporary
Maine de Biran, he considered the fact of a mind at work, acting
and conscious of its activity, to be more certain than any material thing. And this was what it was all about: thefact was that
his students had learned to speak and to write in French without
the aid of explication. He had communicated nothing to them
about his science, no explications of the roots and flexions of the
French language. He hadn’t even proceeded in the fashion of
those reformer pedagogues who, like the preceptor in Rousseau’s Emile, mislead their students the better to guide them,
and who cunningly erect an obstacle course for the students to
learn to negotiate themselves. He had left them alone with the
text by Fénelon, a translation— not even interlinear like a
Schoolbook— and their will to learn French. He had only given
them the order to pass through a forest whose openings and
clearings he himself had not discovered. Necessity had constrained him to leave his intelligence entirely out of the picture— that mediating intelligence of the master that relays the
printed intelligence of written words to the apprentice’s. And,
in one fell swoop, he had suppressed the imaginary distance that
is the principle of pedagogical stultification. Everything had
perforce been played out between the intelligence of Fénelon
who had wanted to make a particular use of the French language, the intelligence of the translator who had wanted to give
a Flemish equivalent, and the intelligence of the apprentices
who wanted to learn French. And it had appeared that no other
intelligence was necessary. Without thinking about it, he had
made them discover this thing that he discovered with them:
that all sentences, and consequently all the intelligences that
produce them, are of the same nature. Understanding is never
more than translating, that is, giving the equivalent of a text,
but in no way its reason. There is nothing behind the written
page, no false bottom that necessitates the work of an other intelligence, that of the explicator; no language of the master, no
language of the language whose words and sentences are able to
speak the reason of the words and sentences of a text. The Flemish students had furnished the proof: to speak about Télémaque
they had at their disposition only the words of Télémaque. Fénelon’s sentences alone are necessary to understand Fénelons
sentences and to express what one has understood about them.
Learning and understanding are two ways of expressing the
same act of translation. There is nothing beyond texts except
the will to express, that is, to translate. If they had understood
the language by learning Fénelon, it wasn’t simply through the
gymnastics of comparing the page on the left with the page on
the right. It isn’t the aptitude for changing columns that
counts, but rather the capacity to say what one thinks in the
words of others. If they had learned this from Fénelon, that was
because the act of Fénelon the writer was itself one of translation: in order to translate a political lesson into a legendary narrative, Fénelon transformed into the French of his century Homer’s Greek, Vergil’s Latin, and the language, wise or naïve, of
a hundred other texts, from children’s stories to erudite history.
He had applied to this double translation the same intelligence
they employed in their turn to recount with the sentences of his
book what they thought about his book.
But the intelligence that had allowed them to learn the
French in Télémaque was the same they had used to learn their
mother tongue: by observing and retaining, repeating and verifying, by relating what they were trying to know to what they
already knew, by doing and reflecting about what they had
done. They moved along in a manner one shouldn’t move
along— the way children move, blindly, figuring out riddles.
And the question then became: wasn’t it necessary to overturn
the admissible order of intellectual values? Wasn’t that shameful method of the riddle the true movement of human intelligence taking possession of its own power? Didn’t its proscrip-
tion indicate above all the will to divide the world of intelligence into two? The advocates of method oppose the
nonmethod of chance to that of proceeding by reason. But what
they want to prove is given in advance. They suppose a little
animal who, bumping into things, explores a world that he isn’t
yet able to see and will only discern when they teach him to do
so. But the human child is first of all a speaking being. The
child who repeats the words he hears and the Flemish student
“ lost” in his Télémaque are not proceeding hit or miss. All their
effort, all their exploration, is strained toward this: someone has
addressed words to them that they want to recognize and respond to, not as students or as learned men, but as people; in
the way you respond to someone speaking to you and not to
someone examining you: under the sign of equality.
The fact was there: they had learned by themselves, without
a master explicator. What has happened once is thenceforth always possible. This discovery could, after all, overturn the principles of the professor Jacotot. But Jacotot the man was in a better position to recognize what great variety can be expected from
a human being. His father had been a butcher before keeping
the accounts of his grandfather, the carpenter who had sent his
grandson to college. He himself had been a professor of rhetoric
when he had answered the call to arms in 1792. His companions vote had made him an artillery captain, and he had showed
himself to be a remarkable artilleryman. In 1793, at the Bureau
of Powders, this Latinist became a chemistry instructor working toward the accelerated forming of workers being sent everywhere in the territory to apply Fourcroys discoveries. At Fourcroy’s own establishment, he had become acquainted with Vauquelin, the peasants son who had trained himself to be a
chemist without the knowledge of his boss. He had seen young
people arrive at the Ecole Polytechnique who had been selected
by improvised commissions on the dual basis of their liveliness
of mind and their patriotism. And he had seen them become
very good mathematicians, less through the calculations Monge
and Lagrange explained to them than through those that they
performed in front of them.* He himself had apparently profited from his administrative functions by gaining competence
as a mathematician— a competence he had exercised later at the
University of Dijon. Similarly, he had added Hebrew to the ancient languages he taught, and composed an Essay on Hebrew
Grammar. He believed, God knows why, that that language had
a future. And finally, he had gained for himself, reluctantly but
with the greatest firmness, a competence at being a representative of the people. In short, he knew what the will of individuals and the peril of the country could engender in the way
of unknown capacities, in circumstances where urgency demanded destroying the stages of explicative progression. He
thought that this exceptional state, dictated by the nation’s
need, was no different in principle from the urgency that dictates the exploration of the world by the child or from that other
urgency that constrains the singular path of learned men and
inventors. Through the experiment of the child, the learned
man, and the revolutionary, the method of chance so successfully
practiced by the Flemish students revealed its second secret.
The method of equality was above all a method of the will. One
could learn by oneself and without a master explicator when one
wanted to, propelled by one’s own desire or by the constraint of
the situation.
The Emancipatory Master
In this case, that constraint had taken the form of the command Jacotot had given. And it resulted in an important consequence, no longer for the students but for the master. The
students had learned without a master explicator, but not, for
all that, without a master. They didn’t know how before, and
* Antoine François Fourcroy ( 17 5 5 - 18 0 9 ) , chemist and politician, participated in the establishment o f a rational nomenclature in chemistry. The principal work o f the mathematician
Joseph Louis de Lagrange ( 1 7 3 6 - 1 8 1 3 ) was the Mécanique analytique (178 8 ). The mathematician Gaspard Monge ( 1 7 4 6 - 1 8 1 8 ) helped create the Ecole Normale and founded the Ecole
Polytechnique.— t r a n s .
now they knew how. Therefore, Jacotot had taught them something. And yet he had communicated nothing to them of his
science. So it wasn’t the masters science that the student
learned. His mastery lay in the command that had enclosed the
students in a closed circle from which they alone could break
out. By leaving his intelligence out of the picture, he had allowed their intelligence to grapple with that of the book. Thus,
the two functions that link the practice of the master explicator,
that of the savant and that of the master had been dissociated.
The two faculties in play during the act of learning, namely
intelligence and will, had therefore also been separated, liberated from each other. A pure relationship of will to will had
been established between master and student: a relationship
wherein the master’s domination resulted in an entirely liberated relationship between the intelligence of the student and
that of the book— the intelligence of the book that was also the
thing in common, the egalitarian intellectual link between
master and student. This device allowed the jumbled categories
of the pedagogical act to be sorted out, and explicative stultification to be precisely defined. There is stultification whenever
one intelligence is subordinated to another. A person— and a
child in particular— may need a master when his own will is
not strong enough to set him on track and keep him there. But
that subjection is purely one of will over will. It becomes stultification when it links an intelligence to another intelligence.
In the act of teaching and learning there are two wills and two
intelligences. We will call their coincidence stultification. In the
experimental situation Jacotot created, the student was linked
to a will, Jacotot’s, and to an intelligence, the book’s— the two
entirely distinct. We will call the known and maintained difference of the two relations— the act of an intelligence obeying
only itself even while the will obeys another will— emancipation.
This pedagogical experiment created a rupture with the logic
of all pedagogies. The pedagogues’ practice is based on the opposition between science and ignorance. The methods chosen to
render the ignorant person learned may differ: strict or gentle
methods, traditional or modern, active or passive; the efficiency
of these methods can be compared. From this point of view, we
could, at first glance, compare the speed of Jacotot’s students
with the slowness of traditional methods. But in reality there
was nothing to compare. The confrontation of methods presupposes a minimal agreement on the goals of the pedagogical act:
the transmission of the master’s knowledge to the students. But
Jacotot had transmitted nothing. He had not used any method.
The method was purely the student’s. And whether one learns
French more quickly or less quickly is in itself a matter of little
consequence. The comparison was no longer between methods
but rather between two uses of intelligence and two conceptions
of the intellectual order. The rapid route was not that of a better
pedagogy. It was another route, that of liberty— that route that
Jacotot had experimented with in the armies of Year II, the fabrication of powders or the founding of the Ecole Polytechnique,
the route of liberty responding to the urgency of the peril, but
just as much to a confidence in the intellectual capacity of any
human being. Beneath the pedagogical relation of ignorance to
science, the more fundamental philosophical relation of stultification to emancipation must be recognized. There were thus
not two but four terms in play. The act of learning could be
produced according to four variously combined determinations:
by an emancipatory master or by a stultifying one, by a learned
master or by an ignorant one.
The last proposition was the most difficult to accept. It goes
without saying that a scientist might do science without explicating it. But how can we admit that an ignorant person might
induce science in another? Even Jacotot s experiment was ambiguous because of his position as a professor of French. But
since it had at least shown that it wasn’t the master’s knowledge
that instructed the student, then nothing prevented the master
from teaching something other than his science, something he
didn’t know. Joseph Jacotot applied himself to varying the experiment, to repeating on purpose what chance had once produced. He began to teach two subjects at which he was notably
incompetent: painting and the piano. Law students would have
liked him to be given a vacant chair in their faculty. But the
University of Louvain was already worried about this extravagant lecturer, for whom students were deserting the magisterial
courses, in favor of coming, evenings, to crowd into a much too
small room, lit by only two candles, in order to hear: “I must
teach you that I have nothing to teach you.” 2The authority they
consulted thus responded that he saw no point in calling this
teaching. Jacotot was experimenting, precisely, with the gap
between accreditation and act. Rather than teaching a law
course in French, he taught the students to litigate in Flemish.
They litigated very well, but he still didn’t know Flemish.
The Circle of Power
The experiment seemed to him sufficient to shed light: one
can teach what one doesn’t know if the student is emancipated,
that is to say, if he is obliged to use his own intelligence. The
master is he who encloses an intelligence in the arbitrary circle
from which it can only break out by becoming necessary to itself. To emancipate an ignorant person, one must be, and one
need only be, emancipated oneself, that is to say, conscious of
the true power of the human mind. The ignorant person will
learn by himself what the master doesn’t know if the master
believes he can and obliges him to realize his capacity: a circle
of power homologous to the circle of powerlessness that ties the
student to the explicator of the old method (to be called from
now on, simply, the Old Master). But the relation of forces is
very particular. The circle of powerlessness is always already
there: it is the very workings of the social world, hidden in the
evident difference between ignorance and science. The circle of
power, on the other hand, can only take effect by being made
public. But it can only appear as a tautology or an absurdity.
How can the learned master ever understand that he can teach
what he doesn’t know as successfully as what he does know? He
cannot but take that increase in intellectual power as a deval-
uation of his science. And the ignorant one, on his side, doesn’t
believe himself capable of learning by himself, still less of
being able to teach another ignorant person. Those excluded
from the world of intelligence themselves subscribe to the verdict of their exclusion. In short, the circle of emancipation must
be begun.
Here lies the paradox. For if you think about it a little, the
“ method” he was proposing is the oldest in the world, and it
never stops being verified every day, in all the circumstances
where an individual must learn something without any means
of having it explained to him. There is no one on earth who
hasn’t learned something by himself and without a master explicator. Let’s call this way of learning “universal teaching” and
say of it: “ In reality, universal teaching has existed since the
beginning of the world, alongside all the explicative methods.
This teaching, by oneself, has, in reality, been what has formed
all great men.” But this is the strange part: “ Everyone has done
this experiment a thousand times in his life, and yet it has never
occurred to someone to say to someone else: I’ve learned many
things without explanations, I think that you can too. . . .
Neither I nor anyone in the world has ventured to draw on this
fact to teach others.” 3 To the intelligence sleeping in each of us,
it would suffice to say: age quod agis, continue to do what you
are doing, “ learn the fact, imitate it, know yourself, this is how.
nature works.”4 Methodically repeat the method of chance that
gave you the measure of your power. The same intelligence is
at work in all the acts of the human mind.
But this is the most difficult leap. This method is practiced
of necessity by everyone, but no one wants to recognize it, no
one wants to cope with the intellectual revolution it signifies.
The social circle, the order of things, prevents it from being
recognized for what it is: the true method by which everyone
learns and by which everyone can take the measure of his capacity. One must dare to recognize it and pursue the open verification of its power— otherwise, the method of powerlessness,
the Old Master, will last as long as the order of things.
Who would want to begin? In Jacotots day there were all
kinds of men of goodwill who were preoccupied with instructing the people: rulers wanted to elevate the people above their
brutal appetites, revolutionaries wanted to lead them to the
consciousness of their rights; progressives wished to narrow,
through instruction, the gap between the classes; industrialists
dreamed of giving, through instruction, the most intelligent
among the people the means of social promotion. All these good
intentions came up against an obstacle: the common man had
very little time and even less money to devote to acquiring this
instruction. Thus, what was sought was the economic means of
diffusing the minimum of instruction judged necessary for the
individual and sufficient for the amelioration of the laboring
population as a whple. Among progressives and industrialists
the favored method was mutual teaching. This allowed a great
number of students, assembled from a vast locale, to be divided
up into smaller groups headed by the more advanced among
them, who were promoted to the rank of monitors. In this way,
the masters orders and lessons radiated out, relayed by the monitors, into the whole population to be instructed. Friends of
progress liked what they saw: this was how science extended
from the summits to the most modest levels of intelligence.
Happiness and liberty would trickle down in its wake.
That sort of progress, for Jacotot, smelled of the bridle. ‘A
perfected riding-school,” he said. He had a different notion of
mutual teaching in mind: that each ignorant person could become for another ignorant person the master who would reveal
to him his intellectual power. More precisely, his problem
wasn’t the instruction of the people: one instructed the recruits
enrolled under one’s banner, subalterns who must be able to understand orders, the people one wanted to govern— in the progressive way, of course, without divine right and only according
to the hierarchy of capacities. His own problem was that of emancipation,: that every common person might conceive his human
dignity, take the measure of his intellectual capacity, and decide how to use it. The friends of Instruction were certain that
true liberty was conditioned on it. After all, they recognized
that they should give instruction to the people, even at the risk
of disputing among themselves which instruction they would
give. Jacotot did not see what kind of liberty for the people
could result from the dutifulness of their instructors. On the
contrary, he sensed in all this a new form of stultification.
Whoever teaches without emancipating stultifies. And whoever
emancipates doesn’t have to worry about what the emancipated
person learns. He will learn what he wants, nothing maybe. He
will know he can learn because the same intelligence is at work
in all the productions of the human mind, and a man can always
understand another man’s words. Jacotot’s printer had a retarded son. They had despaired of making something of him.
Jacotot taught him Hebrew. Later the child became an excellent
lithographer. It goes without saying that he never used the Hebrew for anything— except to know what more gifted and
learned minds never knew: it wasn't Hebrew.
The matter was thus clear. This was not a method for instructing the people; it was a benefit to be announced to the
poor: they could do everything any man could. It sufficed only
to announce it. Jacotot decided to devote himself to this. He proclaimed that one could teach what one didn’t know, and that a
poor and ignorant father could, if he was emancipated, conduct
the education of his children, without the aid of any master
explicator. And he indicated the way of that “ universal teaching”— to learn something and to relate to it a ll the rest by this principle: a ll men have equal intelligence.
People were affected in Louvain, in Brussels, and in La Haye;
they took the mail carriage from Paris and Lyon; they came from
England and Prussia to hear the news; it was proclaimed in Saint
Petersburg and New Orleans. The word reached as far as Rio de
Janeiro. For several years polemic raged, and the Republic of
knowledge was shaken at its very foundations.
All this because a learned man, a renowned man of science
and a virtuous family man, had gone crazy for not knowing
Flemish.
– Who wants to know?
– I want to know.
01/11
– What do you want to know?
– I don’t know!
Irit Rogoff
e-flux journal #14 — march 2010 Irit Rogoff
FREE
FREE
06.02.11 / 12:45:37 EDT
At some point last year I proposed within my
institution, Goldsmiths, University of London,
that we develop a free academy adjacent to our
institution and call it “Goldsmiths Free.” The
reactions to this proposal, when not amused
smirks at the apparently adolescent nature of
the proposal, were largely either puzzled – “What
would we get out of it? Why would we want to do
it?” – or horrified – “How would it finance itself?”
No one asked what might be taught or discussed
within it and how that might differ from the
intellectual work that is done within our
conventional fee-charging, degree-giving,
research-driven institution. And that of course
was the point, that it would be different, not just
in terms of redefining the point of entry into the
structure (free of fees and previous
qualifications) or the modus operandi of the work
(not degree-based, unexamined, not subject to
the state’s mechanisms of monitoring and
assessment), but also that the actual knowledge
would be differently situated within it. And that
is what I want to think about here, about the
difference in the knowledge itself, its nature, its
status, and its affect.
The kind of knowledge that interested me in
this proposal to the university was one that was
not framed by disciplinary and thematic orders, a
knowledge that would instead be presented in
relation to an urgent issue, and not an issue as
defined by knowledge conventions, but by the
pressures and struggles of contemporaneity.
When knowledge is unframed, it is less grounded
genealogically and can navigate forwards rather
than backwards. This kind of “unframed”
knowledge obviously had a great deal to do with
what I had acquired during my experiences in the
art world, largely a set of permissions with
regard to knowledge and a recognition of its
performative faculties – that knowledge does
rather than is. But the permissions I encountered
in the art world came with their own set of
limitations, a tendency to reduce the complex
operations of speculation to either illustration or
to a genre that would visually exemplify “study”
or “research.” Could there be, I wondered,
another mode in which knowledge might be set
free without having to perform such generic
mannerisms, without becoming an aesthetic
trope in the hands of curators hungry for the
latest “turn”?
Heads will surely be shaken! The notion of
“free” is currently so degraded in terms of the
free market, the dubious proposals of the new
Crowded streets of Vienna – 60,000 school students strike on April 24, 2009.
Student occupation of Vienna University AudiMax, “Free Student Places,” “Occupied,” October 2009.
06.02.11 / 12:45:37 EDT
06.02.11 / 12:45:37 EDT
03/11
and dignify the practices of epistemological
segregation by producing endless new
subcategories for inherited bodies of named and
contained knowledge.
There is a vexed relation between freedom,
individuality, and sovereignty that has a
particular relevance for the arena being
discussed here, as knowledge and education
have a foothold both in processes of
individuation and in processes of socialization.
Hannah Arendt expressed this succinctly when
she warned that
Politically, this identification of freedom
with sovereignty is perhaps the most
pernicious and dangerous consequence of
the philosophical equation of freedom and
free will. For it leads either to a denial of
human freedom – namely, if it is realized
that whatever men may be, they are never
sovereign – or to the insight that the
freedom of one man, or a group, or a body
politic, can only be purchased at the price
of the freedom, i.e. the sovereignty, of all
others. Within the conceptual framework of
traditional philosophy, it is indeed very
difficult to understand how freedom and
non-sovereignty can exist together or, to
put it another way, how freedom could have
been given to men under the conditions of
non-sovereignty.1
e-flux journal #14 — march 2010 Irit Rogoff
FREE
“free” economy of the internet, and the
historically false promises of individual freedom,
that it may be difficult to see what it might have
to offer beyond all these hollow slogans.
Nevertheless, the possibility of producing some
interrogative proximity between “knowledge” and
“free” seems both unavoidable and irresistible,
particularly in view of the present struggles over
the structures of education in Europe.
The actual drive towards knowledge and
therefore towards some form of expansion and
transformation seems far more important than
simply a discussion of the categories it operates
within. In order to attempt such a transition I
need to think about several relevant questions:
1. First and foremost, what is knowledge
when it is “free”?
2. Whether there are sites, such as the
spaces of art, in which knowledge might be more
“free” than in others?
3. What are the institutional implications of
housing knowledge that is “free”?
4. What are the economies of “free” that
might prove an alternative to the market- and
outcome-based and comparison-driven
economies of institutionally structured
knowledge at present?
Evidently, en route I need to think about the
struggles over education, its alternative sitings,
the types of emergent economies that might
have some purchase on its rethinking, and,
finally, how “education” might be perceived as an
alternative organizational mode, not of
information, of formal knowledges and their
concomitant marketing, but as other forms of
coming together not predetermined by outcomes
but by directions. Here I have in mind some
process of “knowledge singularization,” which I
will discuss further below.
Obviously it is not the romance of liberation
that I have in mind here in relation to “free.”
Knowledge cannot be “liberated,” it is endlessly
embedded in long lines of transformations that
link in inexplicable ways to produce new
conjunctions. Nor do I have in mind the romance
of “avant-garde” knowledge, with its
oppositional modes of “innovation” as departure
and breach. Nor am I particularly interested in
what has been termed “interdisciplinarity,”
which, with its intimations of movement and
“sharing” between disciplines, de facto leaves
intact those membranes of division and logics of
separation and containment. Nor, finally, and I
say this with some qualification, is my main aim
here to undo the disciplinary and professional
categories that have divided and isolated bodies
of knowledge from one another in order to
promote a heterogeneous field populated by
“bodies” of knowledge akin to the marketing
strategies that ensure choice and multiplicity
And in the final analysis it is my interest to get
around both concepts, freedom and sovereignty,
through the operations of “singularization.”
Perhaps it is knowledge de-individuated, deradicalized in the conventional sense of the
radical as breach, and yet operating within the
circuits of singularity – of “the new relational
mode of the subject” – that is preoccupying me
in this instance.
And so, the task at hand seems to me to be
not one of liberation from confinement, but
rather one of undoing the very possibilities of
containment.
While an unbounded circulation of capital,
goods, information, hegemonic alliances,
populist fears, newly globalized uniform
standards of excellence, and so forth, are some
of the hallmarks of the late neoliberal phase of
capitalism, we nevertheless can not simply
equate every form of the unbounded and judge
them all as equally insidious. “Free” in relation to
knowledge, it seems to me, has its power less in
its expansion than in an ultimately centripetal
movement, less in a process of penetrating and
colonizing everywhere and everything in the
relentless mode of capital, than in reaching
unexpected entities and then drawing them
back, mapping them onto the field of perception.
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04/11
Firstly, I tried to create a space to pause, to
hold on for a moment, to take a breath and
to think – to think about what kinds of
change might be possible; about how and
what we might wish to learn; and why that
which we wished to learn might be needed.
I guess, in this way, both Manoa Free
University and “reformpause” shared
similar goals – not simply to critique the
ongoing educational reforms and thereby
legitimize established structures, but
rather to actively engage in thinking about
alternate concepts and possible change.
Secondly, there is a long history of student
struggles and the question arises as to
whether or not these are still relevant today
and, if they are, how and why? The recent
student struggles did not simply originate
with the Bologna Declaration. The
genealogy of various school and university
protests and struggles over the past forty
years demonstrates that we live in an era of
educational reforms which, since the
1960s, have led to the construction of a
new political subjectivity, the “knowledge
worker.” This is not just a phenomenon of
the new millennium; furthermore, many
artistic practices from the 1960s and 1970s
relate to this re-ordering of knowledge
within Western societies. This is one of the
many reasons why we so readily relate to
these practices, as exemplified by
conceptualism and the various ways in
which conceptual artists engaged with
contemporary changes in the concepts of
information and communication.3
e-flux journal #14 — march 2010 Irit Rogoff
FREE
STRUGGLES
In spring and autumn of 2009 a series of
prolonged strikes erupted across Austria and
Germany, the two European countries whose
indigenous education systems have been hardest
hit by the reorganization of the Bologna Accord;
smaller strikes also took place in France, Italy,
and Belgium.2 At the center of the students’
protests were the massive cuts in education
budgets across the board and the revision of
state budgets within the current economic
climate, which made youth and the working class
bear the burden of support for failing financial
institutions.
The strikes were unified by common stands
on three issues:
1. against fees for higher education
2. against the increasing limitation of
access to selection in higher education
3. for re-democratization of the universities
and re-inclusion of students in decision-making
processes
Not only were these the largest and most
organized strikes to have been held by school
and university students since the 1980s, but they
also included teachers, whose pay had been
reduced and whose working hours had been
extended, which, after considerable pressure
from below, eventually moved the trade unions to
take a position.
The concerns here were largely structural
and procedural, and considering all that is at
stake in these reorganizations of the education
system, it is difficult to know what to privilege in
our concern: the reformulation of institutions
into regimented factories for packaged
knowledge that can easily be placed within the
marketplace; the processes of knowledge
acquisition that are reduced to the management
of formulaic outcomes that are comparable
across cultures and contexts; “training”
replacing “speculating”; the dictation of such
shifts from above and without any substantive
consultation or debate. All of these are
significant steps away from criticality in spaces
of education and towards the goal that all
knowledge have immediate, transparent,
predictable, and pragmatic application.
The long, substantive lines that connect
these struggles to their predecessors over the
past forty years or so, and which constitute
“education” as both an ongoing political platform
and the heart of many radical artistic practices,
are extremely well articulated in a conversation
between Marion von Osten and Eva Egermann, in
which von Osten says of her projects such as
“reformpause”:
All of this identifies hugely problematic and very
urgent issues, but we cannot lose sight of the
status of actual knowledge formations within
these. When knowledge is not geared towards
“production,” it has the possibility of posing
questions that combine the known and the
imagined, the analytical and the experiential,
and which keep stretching the terrain of
knowledge so that it is always just beyond the
border of what can be conceptualized.
These are questions in which the conditions
of knowledge are always internal to the concepts
it is entertaining, not as a context but as a limit
to be tested. The entire critical epistemology
developed by Foucault and by Derrida rested on
questions that always contain a perception of
their own impossibility, a consciousness of
thinking as a process of unthinking something
that is fully aware of its own status. The
structural, the techniques, and the apparatuses,
could never be separated from the critical
interrogation of concepts. As Giorgio Agamben
The proximity of this term to the theological
dispositio, as well as to Foucault's
apparatuses, is evident. What is common to
all these terms is that they refer back to
this oikonomia, that is, to a set of practices,
bodies of knowledge, measures, and
institutions that aim to manage, govern,
control, and orient – in a way that purports
to be useful – the behaviors, gestures, and
thoughts of human beings.4
05/11
says of Foucault’s concept of the apparatus:
My own intellectual and political life has
been marked by what I learned from the
appearance of drugs users’ groups claiming
that they were “citizens like everyone else,”
and fighting against laws that were
officially meant to “protect” them. The
efficacy of this new collective voice,
relegating to the past what had been the
authorized, consensual expertise
legitimating the “war on drugs,” convinced
me that such events were “political events”
par excellence, producing – as, I discovered
afterwards, Dewey had already emphasized
– both new political struggle and new
important knowledge. I even proposed that
what we call democracy could be evaluated
by its relation to those disrupting collective
productions. A “true” democracy would
demand the acceptance of the ongoing
challenge of such disruptions – would not
only accept them but also acknowledge
those events as something it depended
upon.6
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e-flux journal #14 — march 2010 Irit Rogoff
FREE
So the struggle facing education is precisely that
of separating thought from its structures, a
struggle constantly informed by tensions
between thought management and
subjectification – the frictions by which we turn
ourselves into subjects. As Foucault argued, this
is the difference between the production of
subjects in “power/knowledge” and those
processes of self-formation in which the person
is active. It would seem then that the struggle in
education arises from tensions between
conscious inscription into processes of selfformation and what Foucault, speaking of his
concerns with scientific classification,
articulated as the subsequent and necessary
“insurrection of subjugated knowledges,” in
which constant new voices appear claiming
themselves not as “identities,” but as events
within knowledge.5 The argument that Isabelle
Stengers makes about her own political
formation has convinced me that this is a
productive direction to follow in trying to map out
knowledge as struggle:
Knowledge as disruption, knowledge as countersubjugation, knowledge as constant exhortation
to its own, often uncomfortable implications, are
at the heart of “struggle.” The battle over
education as we are experiencing it now does not
find its origin in the desire to suppress these but
rather in efforts to regulate them so that they
work in tandem with the economies of cognitive
capitalism.
ECONOMIES
The economies of the world of knowledge have
shifted quite dramatically over the past ten to
fifteen years. What had been a fairly simple
subsidy model, with states covering the basic
expenses of teaching, subsidizing home
schooling on a per capita basis (along with
private entities incorporated in “not -for-profit”
structures); research councils and foundations
covering the support of research in the
humanities and pure sciences; and industry
supporting applied research, has changed quite
dramatically, as have the traditional outlets for
such knowledge: scholarly journals and books,
exhibitions, science-based industry, the military,
and public services such as agriculture and food
production. Knowledge, at present, is not only
enjoined to be “transferable” (to move easily
between paradigms so that its potential impact
will be transparent from the outset) and to invent
new and ever expanding outlets for itself, it must
also contend with the prevalent belief that it
should be obliged not only to seek out alternative
sources of funding but actually to produce these.
By producing the need for a particular type of
knowledge one is also setting up the means of its
excavation or invention – this is therefore a
“need-based” culture of knowledge that
produces the support and the market through
itself.
So, when I speak of a “free” academy, the
question has to be posed: if it is to meet all the
above requirements, namely, that it not be feecharging, not produce applied research, not
function within given fields of expertise, and not
consider itself in terms of applied “outcomes,”
how would it be funded?
In terms of the internet, the economic
model of “free” that has emerged over the past
decade initially seemed to be an intensification
or a contemporary perpetuation of what had
been called by economists, the “cross-subsidy”
model: you’d get one thing free if you bought
another, or you’d get a product free only if you
paid for a service. This primary model was then
expanded by the possibilities of ever increasing
access to the internet, married to constantly
lowered costs in the realm of digital
technologies.
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06/11
A second trend is simply that anything that
touches digital networks quickly feels the effect
of falling costs. And so it goes, too, for everything
from banking to gambling. The moment a
company’s primary expenses become things
based in silicon, free becomes not just an option
but also the inevitable destination.7 The cost of
actually circulating something within these
economies becomes lower and lower, until cost
is no longer the primary index of its value.
A third aspect of this emergent economic
model is perhaps the one most relevant to this
discussion of education. Here the emphasis is on
a shift from an exclusive focus on buyers and
sellers, producers and consumers, to a tripartite
model, in which the third element that enters
does so based on its interest in the exchange
taking place between the first two elements – an
interest to which it contributes financially. In the
traditional media model, a publisher provides a
product free (or nearly free) to consumers, and
advertisers pay to ride along. Radio is “free to
air,” and so is much of television. Likewise,
newspaper and magazine publishers don’t
charge readers anything close to the actual cost
of creating, printing, and distributing their
products. They're not selling papers and
magazines to readers, they’re selling readers to
advertisers. It’s a three-way market.
In a sense, what the Web represents is the
extension of the media business model to
industries of all sorts. This is not simply the
notion that advertising will pay for everything.
There are dozens of ways that media companies
make money around free content, from selling
information about consumers to brand licensing,
“value-added” subscriptions, and direct ecommerce. Now an entire ecosystem of Web
companies is growing up around the same set of
models.8
The question is whether this model of a
“free” economy is relevant to my proposal for a
free “academy,” given that in an economic model
the actual thing in circulation is not subject to
much attention except as it appeals to a large
public and their ostensible needs. Does this
model have any potential for criticality or for an
exchange that goes beyond consumption?
Novelist, activist, and technology commentator
Cory Doctorow claims that
there’s a pretty strong case to be made that
“free” has some inherent antipathy to
capitalism. That is, information that can be
freely reproduced at no marginal cost may
not want, need or benefit from markets as a
way of organizing them. . . . Indeed, there’s
something eerily Marxist in this
phenomenon, in that it mirrors Marx’s
Free International University event program for Documenta 7, June 1982. Pressebüro der Documenta GmbH Klaus Becker, Photo by
Dietmar Walberg, Bild-GFDL.
06.02.11 / 12:45:37 EDT
Contemporary societies therefore present
themselves as inert bodies going through
massive processes of desubjectification
without acknowledging any real
subjectification. Hence the eclipse of
politics, which used to presuppose the
existence of subjects and real identities
(the workers’ movement, the bourgeoisie,
etc.), and the triumph of the oikonomia,
that is to say, of a pure activity of
government that aims at nothing other than
its own replication.10
What then would be the sites of conscious
subjectification within this amalgam of
education and creative practices?
SITES
Over the past two decades we have seen a
proliferation of self-organized structures that
take the form, with regard to both their
investigations and effects, of sites of learning.11
These have, more than any other initiative,
collapsed the divisions between sites of formal
06.02.11 / 12:45:37 EDT
e-flux journal #14 — march 2010 Irit Rogoff
FREE
The appealing part of the economy of “free” for
debates about education is its unpredictability in
throwing up new spheres of interest and new
congregations around them. It has some small
potential for shifting the present fixation on the
direct relation between fees, training, applied
research, organization-as-management,
predictable outputs and outcomes, and the
immediate consumption of knowledge. This
however seems a very narrow notion of criticality
as it is limited to the production of a surplus
within knowledge and fails to take on the
problems of subjectification. And it is the agency
of subjectification and its contradictory
multiplicity that is at the heart of a
preoccupation with knowledge in education,
giving it its traction as it were, what Foucault
called “the lived multiplicity of positionings.” The
internet-based model of “free” does break the
direct relation between buyers and sellers, which
in the current climate of debates about
education, in the context of what Nick DyerWitheford has called “Academia Inc.,” is certainly
welcome. But it does not expand the trajectory of
participation substantively, merely reducing the
act of taking part in this economy of use and
exchange. The need to think of a “market” for the
disruption of paradigms emerges as an exercise
in futility and as politically debilitating. To think
again with Agamben:
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prediction of capitalism’s ability to create a
surplus of capacity that can subsequently
be freely shared without market forces’
brutality.9
academic education and those of creative
practice, display, performance, and activism. In
these spaces the previously clear boundaries
between universities, academies, museums,
galleries, performance spaces, NGOs, and
political organizations, lost much of their
visibility and efficaciousness. Of course, virtually
every European city still has at least one if not
several vast “entertainment machine”
institutions, traditional museums that see their
task as one of inviting the populace to partake of
“art” in the most conventional sense and
perceive “research” to be largely about
themselves (to consist, that is, in the seemingly
endless conferences that are held each year on
“the changing role of the museum”). These
institutions however no longer define the
parameters of the field and serve more as
indices of consumption, market proximities, and
scholastic inertia.
What does knowledge do when it circulates
in other sites such as the art world?
As Eva Egermann says:
Of course, the art field was seen as a place
in which things could happen, a field of
potential, a space of exchange between
different models and concepts and, in the
sense of learning and unlearning, a field of
agency and transfer between different
social and political fields and between
different positions and subjectivities. In a
way, the exhibition functioned as a pretext,
a defined place for communication and
action that would perhaps establish
impulses for further transformations. So,
the project functioned as an expanded field
of practice from which to organize and
network between many different groups,
but also to question and experiment with
methods of representation and distribution
for collective artistic research. We wanted
to disseminate our research for collective
usage through various means, such as the
study circle itself, a wiki, publications and
readers and through the model of a free
university.12
More than any other sphere, the spaces of
contemporary art that open themselves to this
kind of alternative activity of learning and
knowledge production, and see in it not an
occasional indulgence but their actual daily
business, have become the sites of some of the
most important redefinitions of knowledge that
circulate today.
As sites, they have marked the shift from
“Ivory Towers” of knowledge to spaces of
interlocution, with in between a short phase as
“laboratories.” As a dialogical practice based on
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questioning, on agitating the edges of paradigms
and on raising external points of view,
interlocution takes knowledge back to a Socratic
method but invests its operations with
acknowledged stakes and interests, rather than
being a set of formal proceedings. It gives a
performative dimension to the belief argued
earlier through the work of Foucault and Derrida,
that knowledge always has at its edges the
active process of its own limits and its own
invalidation.
In setting up knowledge production within
the spaces and sites of art, one also takes up a
set of permissions that are on offer. Recognizing
who is posing questions, where they are
speaking from, and from where they know what
they know, becomes central rather than, as is
typical, marginal qualifications often relegated
to footnotes. Permission is equally granted to
start in the middle without having to rehearse
the telos of an argument; to start from “right
here and right now” and embed issues in a
variety of contexts, expanding their urgency; to
bring to these arguments a host of validations,
interventions, asides, and exemplifications that
are not recognized as directly related or as
sustaining provable knowledge. And, perhaps
most importantly, “the curatorial,” not as a
profession but as an organizing and assembling
impulse, opens up a set of possibilities,
mediations perhaps, to formulate subjects that
may not be part of an agreed-upon canon of
“subjects” worthy of investigation. So knowledge
in the art world, through a set of permissions
that do not recognize the academic conventions
for how one arrives at a subject, can serve both
the purposes of reframing and producing
subjects in the world.
06.02.11 / 12:45:37 EDT
e-flux journal #14 — march 2010 Irit Rogoff
FREE
Former member of the Situationist International poet Peter Laugesen
talking at the CFU, 2003.
Finally, I would argue that knowledge in the
art world has allowed us to come to terms with
partiality – with the fact that our field of knowing
is always partially comprehensible, the problems
that populate it are partially visible, and our
arguments are only partially inhabiting a
recognizable logic. Under no illusions as to its
comprehensiveness, knowledge as it is built up
within the spaces of art makes relatively modest
claims for plotting out the entirety of a
problematic, accepting instead that it is entering
in the middle and illuminating some limited
aspects, all the while making clear its drives in
doing so.13
And it is here, in these spaces, that one can
ground the earlier argument that the task at
hand in thinking through “free” is not one of
liberation from confinement, but rather one of
undoing the very possibilities of containment. It
is necessary to understand that containment is
not censure but rather half acknowledges acts of
framing and territorializing.
VECTORS
In conjunction with the sites described above it
is also direction and circulation that help in
opening up “knowledge” to new perceptions of
its mobility.
How can we think of “education” as
circulations of knowledge and not as the topdown or down-up dynamics in which there is
always a given, dominant direction for the
movement of knowledge? The direction of the
knowledge determines its mode of
dissemination: if it is highly elevated and
canonized then it is structured in a particular,
hierarchical way, involving original texts and
commentaries on them; if it is experiential then
it takes the form of narrative and description in a
more lateral form; and if it is empirical then the
production of data categories, vertical and
horizontal, would dominate its argument
structures even when it is speculating on the
very experience of excavating and structuring
that knowledge.14
While thinking about this essay I happened
to hear a segment of a radio program called The
Bottom Line, a weekly BBC program about
business entrepreneurs I had never encountered
before. In it a businessman was talking about his
training; Geoff Quinn the chief executive of
clothing manufacturer T. M. Lewin said he had
not had much education and went into clothing
retailing at the age of sixteen, “but then I
discovered the stock room – putting things in
boxes, making lists, ordering the totality of the
operation.”15 He spoke of the stockroom, with a
certain sense of wonder, as the site in which
everything came together, where the bits
connected and made sense, less a repository
06.02.11 / 12:45:37 EDT
10/11
e-flux journal #14 — march 2010 Irit Rogoff
FREE
than a launch pad for a sartorial world of
possibilities. The idea that the “stockroom” could
be an epiphany, could be someone’s education,
was intriguing and I tried to think it out a bit . . .
part Foucauldian notion of scientific
classification and part Simondon’s pragmatic
transductive thought about operations rather
than meanings – the “stockroom” is clearly a
perspective, an early recognition of the systemic
and the interconnected, and a place from which
to see the “big picture.” While the “stockroom”
may be a rich and pleasing metaphor, it is also a
vector, along which a huge range of
manufacturing technologies, marketing
strategies, and advertising campaigns meet up
with labor histories and those of raw materials,
with print technologies and internet
disseminations, with the fantasmatic
investments in clothes and their potential to
renew us.
Therefore what if “education” – the complex
means by which knowledges are disseminated
and shared – could be thought of as a vector, as
a quantity (force or velocity, for example), made
up of both direction and magnitude? A powerful
horizontality that looks at the sites of education
as convergences of drives to knowledge that are
in themselves knowledge? Not in the sense of
formally inherited, archived, and transmitted
knowledges but in the sense that ambition
“knows” and curiosity “knows” and poverty
“knows” – they are modes of knowing the world
and their inclusion or their recognition as events
of knowledge within the sites of education make
up not the context of what goes on in the
classroom or in the space of cultural gathering,
but the content.
Keller Easterling in her exceptionally
interesting book Enduring Innocence builds on
Arjun Appadurai’s notion of “imagined worlds” as
“the multiple worlds that are constituted by the
historically situated imaginations of persons and
groups spread around the globe . . . these
mixtures create variegated scapes described as
“mediascapes and “ethnoscapes.” Which, says
Easterling, by “naturalizing the migration and
negotiation of traveling cultural forms allows
these thinkers [such as Appadurai] to avoid
impossible constructs about an authentic
locality.”16 From Easterling’s work I have learned
to understand such sites as located forms of
“intelligence” – both information and stealth
formation. To recognize the operations of “the
network” in relation to structures of knowledge
in which no linearity could exist and the direct
relation between who is in the spaces of
learning, the places to which they are connected,
the technologies that close the gaps in those
distances, the unexpected and unpredictable
points of entry that they might have, the fantasy
projections that might have brought them there –
all agglomerate as sites of knowledge.
We might be able to look at these sites and
spaces of education as ones in which long lines
of mobility, curiosity, epistemic hegemony,
colonial heritages, urban fantasies, projections
of phantom professionalization, new
technologies of both formal access and less
formal communication, a mutual sharing of
information, and modes of knowledge
organization, all come together in a heady mix –
that is the field of knowledge and from it we
would need to go outwards to combine all of
these as actual sites of knowledge and produce a
vector.
Having tried to deconstruct as many
discursive aspects of what “free” might mean in
relation to knowledge, in relation to my hopedfor-academy, I think that what has come about is
the understanding of “free” in a non-liberationist
vein, away from the binaries of confinement and
liberty, rather as the force and velocity by which
knowledge and our imbrication in it, move along.
That its comings-together are our comingstogether and not points in a curriculum, rather
along the lines of the operations of “singularity”
that enact the relation of “the human to a
specifiable horizon” through which meaning is
derived, as Jean-Luc Nancy says.17 Singularity
provides us with another model of thinking
relationality, not as external but as loyal to a
logic of its own self-organization. Selforganization links outwardly not as identity,
interest, or affiliation, but as a mode of
coexistence in space. To think “knowledge” as
the working of singularity is actually to decouple
it from the operational demands put on it, to
open it up to processes of multiplication and of
links to alternate and unexpected entities, to
animate it through something other than critique
or defiance – perhaps as “free.”
×
Irit Rogoff is a theorist, curator, and organizer who
writes at the intersections of the critical, the political,
and contemporary arts practices. Rogoff is a professor
at Goldsmiths College, London University, in the
department of Visual Cultures, which she founded in
2002.
11/11
1
Hannah Arendt, “What is
Freedom?” Chapter VI
“Revolution and Preservation” in
The Portable Hannah Arendt, (ed.
Peter R. Baehr) (Penguin,
London:, Penguin, 2000), 455.
2
See Dietrich Lemke’s “Mourning
Bologna” in this issue, http://eflux.com/journal/vi ew/123.
3
Marion von Osten and Eva
Egermann, “Twist and Shout,” in
Curating and the Educational
Turn: 2, eds. Paul O’Neill and
Mick Wilson (London: Open
Editions; Amsterdam: de Appel,
forthcoming).
4
Giorgio Agamben, “What is an
Apparatus?” in What is an
Apparatus? and Other Essays,
eds. and trans. David Kishik and
Stefan Pedatella (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2009),
12.
5
Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,”
in Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings,
1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon,
trans. Colin Gordon, Leo
Marshall, John Mepham, and
Kate Soper (London: Harvester,
1980), 81.
e-flux journal #14 — march 2010 Irit Rogoff
FREE
Mobilized Investigation,
http://manifestor.org/mi
Minciu Sodas,
http://www.ms.lt/, including
http://www.cyfranogi.com/,
http://groups.yahoo.com/grou
p/backtotheroot/, http://ww
w.onevillage.biz/
Pirate University,
http://www.pirate-university
.org/
Autonomous University of
Lancaster,
http://www.knowledgelab.org.
uk/wiki/AUL/Main_Page
Das Solidarische Netzwerk
für offene Bildung (s.n.o.b.),
Marburg (Germany),
http://www.snob-marburg.org/
The Free/Slow University of
Warsaw,
http://www.wuw2009.pl/
The University of Openness,
http://uo.twenteenthcentury.
com/
Manoa Free University,
http://www.manoafreeuniversi
ty.org/
6
Isabelle Stengers, “Experim
enting with Refrains:
Subjectivity and the Challenge of
Escaping Modern Dualism,” in
Subjectivity 22 (2008): 38–59.
L’université Tangente,
http://utangente. free.fr/
7
This is Chris Anderson’s
argument in Free: The Future of a
Radical Price (New York:
Random House, 2009).
13
See Irit Rogoff, “Smuggling – An
Embodied Criticality,” available
on the website of the European
Institute for Progressive Cultural
Policies,
http://eipcp.net/dlfiles/rog offsmuggling.
8
See http://www.wired.com/te
chbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_f
ree.
9
See Cory Doctorow, “Chris
Anderson's Free adds much to
The Long Tail, but falls short,”
Guardian (July 28, 2009),
http://www.guardian.co.uk/te
chnology/blog/2009/jul/28/co
ry-doctorow-free-chris-ander
son.
10
Agamben, “What is an
Apparatus?” 22.
11
See for example:
Copenhagen Free University,
http://www.copenhagenfreeuni
versity.dk/freeutv.html
Universidad Nómada,
http://www.sindominio.net/un
omada/
Facoltà di Fuga,
http://www.rekombinant.org/f
uga/index.php
The Independent Art School,
http://www.independent-art-s
chool.org.uk/
06.02.11 / 12:45:37 EDT
Informal University in
Foundation, http://www.jackieinhalt.net /
12
Von Osten and Egermann, “Twist
and Shout.”
14
See Lisa Adkins and Celia Lury,
“What is the Empirical?”
European Journal of Social
Theory 12, no. 1 (February 2009):
5–20.
15
Geoff Quinn, interview by Evan
Davis, The Bottom Line, BBC,
February 18, 2010, available
online at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/program
mes/b00qps85#synopsis.
16
Keller Easterling, Enduring
Innocence: Global Architecture
and its Masquerades
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
2005), 3.
17
Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular
Plural (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000), xi.
THE UNIVERSITY AND
THE UNDERCOMMONS
Philosophy thus traditionally practices a critique of
knowledge which is simultaneously a denegation of
knowledge (i.e., of the class struggle). Its position can
be described as an irony with regard to knowledge,
which it puts into question without ever touching its
foundations. The questioning of knowledge in philosophy always ends in its restoration: a movement great
philosophers consistently expose in each other.
Jacques Rancière, On the Theory of Ideology
– Althusser’s Politics
I am a black man number one, because I am against
what they have done and are still doing to us; and
number two, I have something to say about the new
society to be built because I have
a tremendous part in that which they have sought
to discredit.
C. L. R. James, C. L. R. James: His Life
and Work
THE UNI V ER SI TY A ND THE UN DERC OMM ONS
25
THE ONLY POSSIBLE RELATIONSHIP TO THE UNIVERSITY TODAY
IS A CRIMINAL ONE
“To the university I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal,” to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely borrow from us. This is
the only possible relationship to the American university today. This
may be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the
university in general. But certainly, this much is true in the United
States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and
it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment.
In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university
and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission,
to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of –
this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.
Worry about the university. This is the injunction today in the United
States, one with a long history. Call for its restoration like Harold
Bloom or Stanley Fish or Gerald Graff. Call for its reform like Derek
Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to you.
But for the subversive intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite
company, among the rational men. After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her
labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what
she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she
disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into the undercommons of
enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.
What is that work and what is its social capacity for both reproducing the university and producing fugitivity? If one were to say teaching, one would be performing the work of the university. Teaching is
merely a profession and an operation of that onto-/auto-encyclopedic
circle of the state” that Jacques Derrida calls the Universitas. But it is
useful to invoke this operation to glimpse the hole in the fence where
labor enters, to glimpse its hiring hall, its night quarters. The university needs teaching labor, despite itself, or as itself, self-identical with
26
T HE U N D E R C O MM ONS
and thereby erased by it. It is not teaching that holds this social capacity, but something that produces the not visible other side of teaching,
a thinking through the skin of teaching toward a collective orientation to the knowledge object as future project, and a commitment to
what we want to call the prophetic organization. But it is teaching
that brings us in. Before there are grants, research, conferences, books,
and journals there is the experience of being taught and of teaching.
Before the research post with no teaching, before the graduate students to mark the exams, before the string of sabbaticals, before the
permanent reduction in teaching load, the appointment to run the
Center, the consignment of pedagogy to a discipline called education,
before the course designed to be a new book, teaching happened.
The moment of teaching for food is therefore often mistakenly taken
to be a stage, as if eventually one should not teach for food. If the stage
persists, there is a social pathology in the university. But if the teaching is successfully passed on, the stage is surpassed, and teaching is
consigned to those who are known to remain in the stage, the sociopathological labor of the university. Kant interestingly calls such a stage
“self-incurred minority.” He tries to contrast it with having the “determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided
by another.” “Have the courage to use your own intelligence.” But what
would it mean if teaching or rather what we might call “the beyond
of teaching” is precisely what one is asked to get beyond, to stop taking sustenance? And what of those minorities who refuse, the tribe of
moles who will not come back from beyond (that which is beyond “the
beyond of teaching”), as if they will not be subjects, as if they want to
think as objects, as minority? Certainly, the perfect subjects of communication, those successfully beyond teaching, will see them as waste.
But their collective labor will always call into question who truly is taking the orders of the enlightenment. The waste lives for those moments
beyond teaching when you give away the unexpected beautiful phrase
– unexpected, no one has asked, beautiful, it will never come back. Is
being the biopower of the enlightenment truly better than this?
Perhaps the biopower of the enlightenment knows this, or perhaps it
is just reacting to the objecthood of this labor as it must. But even as
THE UNI V ER SI TY A ND THE UN DERC OMM ONS
27
it depends on these moles, these refugees, it will call them uncollegial, impractical, naive, unprofessional. And one may be given one last
chance to be pragmatic – why steal when one can have it all, they will
ask. But if one hides from this interpellation, neither agrees nor disagrees but goes with hands full into the underground of the university,
into the Undercommons – this will be regarded as theft, as a criminal
act. And it is at the same time, the only possible act.
In that undercommons of the university one can see that it is not a
matter of teaching versus research or even the beyond of teaching versus the individualisation of research. To enter this space is to inhabit
the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive
enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern,
on the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and
stolen back, where the commons give refuge, where the refuge gives
commons. What the beyond of teaching is really about is not finishing
oneself, not passing, not completing; it’s about allowing subjectivity to
be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such
that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the
kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood, and
one cannot initiate the auto-interpellative torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards. It is not so much the teaching as it is the
prophecy in the organization of the act of teaching. The prophecy that
predicts its own organization and has therefore passed, as commons,
and the prophecy that exceeds its own organization and therefore as
yet can only be organized. Against the prophetic organization of the
undercommons is arrayed its own deadening labor for the university,
and beyond that, the negligence of professionalization, and the professionalization of the critical academic. The undercommons is therefore
always an unsafe neighborhood.
As Fredric Jameson reminds us, the university depends upon “Enlightenment-type critiques and demystification of belief and committed ideology, in order to clear the ground for unobstructed planning
and ‘development.’” This is the weakness of the university, the lapse in
its homeland security. It needs labor power for this “enlightenmenttype critique,” but, somehow, labor always escapes.
28
T HE U N D E R C O MM ONS
The premature subjects of the undercommons took the call seriously,
or had to be serious about the call. They were not clear about planning, too mystical, too full of belief. And yet this labor force cannot
reproduce itself, it must be reproduced. The university works for the
day when it will be able to rid itself, like capital in general, of the
trouble of labor. It will then be able to reproduce a labor force that
understands itself as not only unnecessary but dangerous to the development of capitalism. Much pedagogy and scholarship is already
dedicated in this direction. Students must come to see themselves as
the problem, which, counter to the complaints of restorationist critics
of the university, is precisely what it means to be a customer, to take
on the burden of realisation and always necessarily be inadequate to
it. Later, these students will be able to see themselves properly as obstacles to society, or perhaps, with lifelong learning, students will return having successfully diagnosed themselves as the problem.
Still, the dream of an undifferentiated labor that knows itself as superfluous is interrupted precisely by the labor of clearing away the burning roadblocks of ideology. While it is better that this police function
be in the hands of the few, it still raises labor as difference, labor as the
development of other labor, and therefore labor as a source of wealth.
And although the enlightenment-type critique, as we suggest below,
informs on, kisses the cheek of, any autonomous development as a result of this difference in labor, there is a break in the wall here, a shallow place in the river, a place to land under the rocks. The university
still needs this clandestine labor to prepare this undifferentiated labor
force, whose increasing specialisation and managerialist tendencies,
again contra the restorationists, represent precisely the successful integration of the division of labor with the universe of exchange that
commands restorationist loyalty.
Introducing this labor upon labor, and providing the space for its development, creates risks. Like the colonial police force recruited unwittingly from guerrilla neighborhoods, university labor may harbor
refugees, fugitives, renegades, and castaways. But there are good reasons for the university to be confident that such elements will be exposed or forced underground. Precautions have been taken, book lists
THE UNI V ER SI TY A ND THE UN DERC OMM ONS
29
have been drawn up, teaching observations conducted, invitations to
contribute made. Yet against these precautions stands the immanence
of transcendence, the necessary deregulation and the possibilities of
criminality and fugitivity that labor upon labor requires. Maroon
communities of composition teachers, mentorless graduate students,
adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state
college ethnic studies departments, closed-down film programs, visaexpired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college
sociologists, and feminist engineers. And what will the university say
of them? It will say they are unprofessional. This is not an arbitrary
charge. It is the charge against the more than professional. How do
those who exceed the profession, who exceed and by exceeding escape, how do those maroons problematize themselves, problematize
the university, force the university to consider them a problem, a danger? The undercommons is not, in short, the kind of fanciful communities of whimsy invoked by Bill Readings at the end of his book.
The undercommons, its maroons, are always at war, always in hiding.
THERE IS NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE AMERICAN
UNIVERSITY AND PROFESSIONALIZATION
But surely if one can write something on the surface of the university, if one can write for instance in the university about singularities
– those events that refuse either the abstract or individual category of
the bourgeois subject – one cannot say that there is no space in the
university itself ? Surely there is some space here for a theory, a conference, a book, a school of thought? Surely the university also makes
thought possible? Is not the purpose of the university as Universitas,
as liberal arts, to make the commons, make the public, make the nation of democratic citizenry? Is it not therefore important to protect
this Universitas, whatever its impurities, from professionalization in
the university? But we would ask what is already not possible in this
talk in the hallways, among the buildings, in rooms of the university
about possibility? How is the thought of the outside, as Gayatri Spivak means it, already not possible in this complaint?
30
T HE U N D E R C O MM ONS
The maroons know something about possibility. They are the condition of possibility of the production of knowledge in the university
– the singularities against the writers of singularity, the writers who
write, publish, travel, and speak. It is not merely a matter of the secret
labor upon which such space is lifted, though of course such space is
lifted from collective labor and by it. It is rather that to be a critical
academic in the university is to be against the university, and to be
against the university is always to recognize it and be recognized by
it, and to institute the negligence of that internal outside, that unassimilated underground, a negligence of it that is precisely, we must
insist, the basis of the professions. And this act of being against always already excludes the unrecognized modes of politics, the beyond
of politics already in motion, the discredited criminal para-organization, what Robin Kelley might refer to as the infrapolitical field (and
its music). It is not just the labor of the maroons but their prophetic
organization that is negated by the idea of intellectual space in an
organization called the university. This is why the negligence of the
critical academic is always at the same time an assertion of bourgeois
individualism.
Such negligence is the essence of professionalization where it turns
out professionalization is not the opposite of negligence but its
mode of politics in the United States. It takes the form of a choice
that excludes the prophetic organization of the undercommons – to
be against, to put into question the knowledge object, let us say in
this case the university, not so much without touching its foundation, as without touching one’s own condition of possibility, without admitting the Undercommons and being admitted to it. From
this, a general negligence of condition is the only coherent position.
Not so much an antifoundationalism or foundationalism, as both
are used against each other to avoid contact with the undercommons. This always-negligent act is what leads us to say there is no
distinction between the university in the United States and professionalization. There is no point in trying to hold out the university
against its professionalization. They are the same. Yet the maroons
refuse to refuse professionalization, that is, to be against the university. The university will not recognize this indecision, and thus
THE UNI V ER SI TY A ND THE UN DERC OMM ONS
31
professionalization is shaped precisely by what it cannot acknowledge, its internal antagonism, its wayward labor, its surplus. Against
this wayward labor it sends the critical, sends its claim that what is
left beyond the critical is waste.
But in fact, critical education only attempts to perfect professional
education. The professions constitute themselves in an opposition to
the unregulated and the ignorant without acknowledging the unregulated, ignorant, unprofessional labor that goes on not opposite them
but within them. But if professional education ever slips in its labor,
ever reveals its condition of possibility to the professions it supports
and reconstitutes, critical education is there to pick it up, and to tell it,
never mind – it was just a bad dream, the ravings, the drawings of the
mad. Because critical education is precisely there to tell professional
education to rethink its relationship to its opposite – by which critical education means both itself and the unregulated, against which
professional education is deployed. In other words, critical education
arrives to support any faltering negligence, to be vigilant in its negligence, to be critically engaged in its negligence. It is more than an ally
of professional education, it is its attempted completion.
A professional education has become a critical education. But one
should not applaud this fact. It should be taken for what it is, not progress in the professional schools, not cohabitation with the Universitas, but counterinsurgency, the refounding terrorism of law, coming
for the discredited, coming for those who refuse to write off or write
up the undercommons.
The Universitas is always a state/State strategy. Perhaps it’s surprising to say professionalization – that which reproduces the professions
– is a state strategy. Certainly, critical academic professionals tend to
be regarded today as harmless intellectuals, malleable, perhaps capable of some modest intervention in the so-called public sphere. But
to see how this underestimates the presence of the state we can turn
to a bad reading of Derrida’s consideration of Hegel’s 1822 report to
the Prussian Minister of Education. Derrida notices the way that Hegel rivals the state in his ambition for education, wanting to put into
32
T HE U N D E R C O MM ONS
place a progressive pedagogy of philosophy designed to support Hegel’s worldview, to unfold as encyclopedic. This ambition both mirrors
the state’s ambition, because it, too, wants to control education and to
impose a worldview, and threatens it, because Hegel’s State exceeds
and thus localises the Prussian state, exposing its pretense to the encyclopedic. Derrida draws the following lesson from his reading: the
Universitas, as he generalizes the university (but specifies it, too, as
properly intellectual and not professional), always has the impulse of
State, or enlightenment, and the impulse of state, or its specific conditions of production and reproduction. Both have the ambition to
be, as Derrida says, onto- and auto-encyclopedic. It follows that to
be either for the Universitas or against it presents problems. To be
for the Universitas is to support this onto- and auto-encyclopedic
project of the State as enlightenment, or enlightenment as totality, to
use an old-fashioned word. To be too much against the Universitas,
however, creates the danger of specific elements in the state taking
steps to rid itself of the contradiction of the onto- and auto-encyclopedic project of the Universitas and replacing it with some other
form of social reproduction, the anti-enlightenment – the position,
for instance, of New Labour in Britain and of the states of New York
and California with their “teaching institutions.” But a bad reading
of Derrida will also yield our question again: what is lost in this undecidability? What is the price of refusing to be either for the Universitas or for professionalization, to be critical of both, and who pays
that price? Who makes it possible to reach the aporia of this reading?
Who works in the premature excess of totality, in the not not-ready
of negligence?
The mode of professionalization that is the American university is
precisely dedicated to promoting this consensual choice: an antifoundational critique of the University or a foundational critique of the
university. Taken as choices, or hedged as bets, one tempered with
the other, they are nonetheless always negligent. Professionalization
is built on this choice. It rolls out into ethics and efficiency, responsibility and science, and numerous other choices, all built upon the
theft, the conquest, the negligence of the outcast mass intellectuality
of the undercommons.
THE UNI V ER SI TY A ND THE UN DERC OMM ONS
33
It is therefore unwise to think of professionalization as a narrowing
and better to think of it as a circling, an encircling of war wagons
around the last camp of indigenous women and children. Think about
the way the American doctor or lawyer regard themselves as educated, enclosed in the circle of the state’s encyclopedia, though they may
know nothing of philosophy or history. What would be outside this
act of the conquest circle, what kind of ghostly labored world escapes
in the circling act, an act like a kind of broken phenomenology where
the brackets never come back off and what is experienced as knowledge is the absolute horizon of knowledge whose name is banned by
the banishment of the absolute. It is simply a horizon that does not
bother to make itself possible. No wonder that whatever their origins
or possibilities, it is theories of pragmatism in the United States and
critical realism in Britain that command the loyalty of critical intellectuals. Never having to confront the foundation, never having to
confront antifoundation out of faith in the unconfrontable foundation, critical intellectuals can float in the middle range. These loyalties
banish dialectics with its inconvenient interest in pushing the material and abstract, the table and its brain, as far as it can, unprofessional
behavior at its most obvious.
PROFESSIONALIZATION IS THE PRIVATIZATION OF
THE SOCIAL INDIVIDUAL THROUGH NEGLIGENCE
Surely professionalization brings with it the benefits of competence.
It may be the onto- and auto-encyclopedic circle of the university
particular to the American state, but is it not possible to recuperate
something from this knowledge for practical advances? Or, indeed, is
it not possible to embark on critical projects within its terrain, projects that would turn its competencies to more radical ends? No, we
would say, it is not. And saying so we prepare to part company with
American critical academics, to become unreliable, to be disloyal to
the public sphere, to be obstructive and shiftless, dumb with insolence
in the face of the call to critical thinking.
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T HE U N D E R C O MM ONS
Let us, as an example, act disloyally to the field of public administration and especially in masters of public administration programs,
including related programs in public health, environmental management, nonprofit and arts management, and the large menu of human
services courses, certificates, diplomas, and degrees that underpin this
disciplinary cluster. It is difficult not to sense that these programs exist against themselves, that they despise themselves. (Although later
one can see that as with all professionalization, it is the underlying
negligence that unsettles the surface of labor power.) The average lecture, in the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at
NYU for instance, may be more antistatist, more skeptical of government, more modest in its social policy goals than the average lecture
in the avowedly neoclassical economics or new right political science
departments at that same university. It would not be much different
at Syracuse University, or a dozen other prominent public administration schools. One might say that skepticism is an important part
of higher education, but this particular skepticism is not founded on
close study of the object in question. In fact, there is no state theory in public administration programs in the United States. Instead,
the state is regarded as the proverbial devil we know. And whether
it is understood in public administration as a necessary evil, or as a
good that is nonetheless of limited usefulness and availability, it is always entirely knowable as an object. Therefore it is not so much that
these programs are set against themselves. It is rather that they are
set against some students, and particularly those who come to public
administration with a sense of what Derrida has called a duty beyond
duty, or a passion.
To be skeptical of what one already knows is of course an absurd position. If one is skeptical of an object then one is already in the position of not knowing that object, and if one claims to know the object,
one cannot also claim to be skeptical of that object, which amounts to
being skeptical of one’s own claim. But this is the position of professionalization, and it is this position that confronts that student, however rare, who comes to public administration with a passion. Any
attempt at passion, at stepping out of this skepticism of the known
into an inadequate confrontation with what exceeds it and oneself,
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must be suppressed by this professionalization. This is not merely a
matter of administering the world, but of administering away the
world (and with it prophecy). Any other disposition is not only unprofessional but incompetent, unethical, and irresponsible, bordering
on the criminal. Again the discipline of public administration is particularly, though not uniquely, instructive, both in its pedagogy and
in its scholarship, and offers the chance to be disloyal, to smash and
grab what it locks up.
Public administration holds to the idea both in the lecture hall and
the professional journal that its categories are knowable. The state, the
economy, and civil society may change size or shape, labor may enter
or exit, and ethical consideration may vary, but these objects are both
positivistic and normative, standing in discrete, spatial arrangement
each to the other. Professionalization begins by accepting these categories precisely so competence can be invoked, a competence that
at the same time guards its own foundation (like Michael Dukakis
riding around in a tank phantasmatically patrolling his empty neighborhood). This responsibility for the preservation of objects becomes
precisely that Weberian site-specific ethics that has the effect, as Theodor Adorno recognized, of naturalizing the production of capitalist
sites. To question them thus becomes not only incompetent and unethical but the enactment of a security breach.
For instance, if one wanted to explore the possibility that public
administration might best be defined as the labor of the relentless
privatization of capitalist society, one could gain a number of unprofessional insights. It would help explain the inadequacy of the three
major strains in public administration scholarship in the United
States. The public ethos strain represented by projects like refounding public administration, and the journal Administration and Society;
the public competence strain represented in the debate between public administration and the new public management, and the journal
Public Administration Review; and the critical strain represented by
PAT-Net, the Public Administration Theory Network, and its journal Administrative Theory & Praxis. If public administration is the
competence to confront the socialisation thrown up continuously by
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T HE U N D E R C O MM ONS
capitalism and to take as much of that socialisation as possible and
reduce it either to something called the public or something called
the private, then immediately all three scholarly positions become
invalid. It is not possible to speak of a labor that is dedicated to the
reproduction of social dispossession as having an ethical dimension.
It is not possible to decide the efficiency or scope of such labor after
the fact of its expenditure in this operation by looking at it once it
has reproduced something called the public or something called the
private. And it is not possible to be critical and at the same time to
accept uncritically the foundation of public administrationist thought
in these spheres of the public and private, and to deny the labor that
goes on behind the backs of these categories, in the undercommons,
of, for instance, the republic of women who run Brooklyn.
But this is an unprofessional example. It does preserve the rules and
respect the terms of the debate, enter the speech community, by
knowing and dwelling in its (unapproachable) foundational objects.
It is also an incompetent example. It does not allow itself to be measured, applied, and improved, except to be found wanting. And it is an
unethical example. Suggesting the utter dominance of one category
over another – is this not fascism or communism? Finally, it is a passionate example full of prophecy not proof, a bad example of a weak
argument making no attempt to defend itself, given over to some
kind of sacrifice of the professional community emanating from the
undercommons. Such is the negligent opinion of professional public
administration scholars.
What, further, is the connection then between this professionalization as the onto- and auto-encyclopedia of the American state and
the spread of professionalization beyond the university or perhaps the
spread of the university beyond the university, and with the colonies
of the undercommons? A certain riot into which professionalization
stumbles – when the care of the social is confronted with its reaction,
enforced negligence – a riot erupts and the professional looks absurd,
like a recruiting booth at a carnival, professional services, personal
professional services, turning pro to pay for university. It is at this riotous moment that professionalization shows its desperate business,
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nothing less than to convert the social individual. Except perhaps,
something more, the ultimate goal of counterinsurgency everywhere:
to turn the insurgents into state agents.
CRITICAL ACADEMICS ARE THE PROFESSIONALS
PAR EXCELLENCE
The critical academic questions the university, questions the state,
questions art, politics, culture. But in the undercommons it is “no
questions asked.” It is unconditional – the door swings open for
refuge even though it may let in police agents and destruction. The
questions are superfluous in the undercommons. If you don’t know,
why ask? The only question left on the surface is what can it mean
to be critical when the professional defines himself or herself as one
who is critical of negligence, while negligence defines professionalization? Would it not mean that to be critical of the university would
make one the professional par excellence, more negligent than any
other? To distance oneself professionally through critique, is this
not the most active consent to privatize the social individual? The
undercommons might by contrast be understood as wary of critique,
weary of it, and at the same time dedicated to the collectivity of its
future, the collectivity that may come to be its future. The undercommons in some ways tries to escape from critique and its degradation as university-consciousness and self-consciousness about
university-consciousness, retreating, as Adrian Piper says, into the
external world.
This maroon community, if it exists, therefore also seeks to escape the fiat of the ends of man. The sovereign’s army of academic antihumanism will pursue this negative community into
the undercommons, seeking to conscript it, needing to conscript it. But as seductive as this critique may be, as provoked
as it may be, in the undercommons they know it is not love.
Between the fiat of the ends and the ethics of new beginnings, the
undercommons abides, and some find comfort in this. Comfort for
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the emigrants from conscription, not to be ready for humanity and
who must endure the return of humanity nonetheless, as it may be
endured by those who will or must endure it, as certainly those of
the undercommons endure it, always in the break, always the supplement of the general intellect and its source. When the critical academic who lives by fiat (of others) gets no answer, no commitment,
from the undercommons, well then certainly the conclusion will
come: they are not practical, not serious about change, not rigorous,
not productive.
Meanwhile, that critical academic in the university, in the circle of the
American state, questions the university. He claims to be critical of
the negligence of the university. But is he not the most accomplished
professional in his studied negligence? If the labor upon labor, the labor among labor of the unprofessionals in the university sparks revolt,
retreat, release, does the labor of the critical academic not involve a
mockery of this first labor, a performance that is finally in its lack of
concern for what it parodies, negligent? Does the questioning of the
critical academic not become a pacification? Or, to put it plainly, does
the critical academic not teach how to deny precisely what one produces with others, and is this not the lesson the professions return to
the university to learn again and again? Is the critical academic then
not dedicated to what Michael E. Brown termed the impoverishment, the immiseration, of society’s cooperative prospects? This is the
professional course of action. This enlightenment-type charade is utterly negligent in its critique, a negligence that disavows the possibility of a thought of an outside, a nonplace called the undercommons
– the nonplace that must be thought outside to be sensed inside, from
which the enlightenment-type charade has stolen everything for its
game.
But if the critical academic is merely a professional, why spend so
much time on him? Why not just steal his books one morning and
give them to deregistered students in a closed-down and beery student bar, where the seminar on burrowing and borrowing takes place.
Yet we must speak of these critical academics because negligence it
turns out is a major crime of state.
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INCARCERATION IS THE PRIVATIZATION OF THE SOCIAL
INDIVIDUAL THROUGH WAR
If one were to insist, the opposite of professionalization is that fugitive impulse to rely on the undercommons for protection, to rely on
the honor, and to insist on the honor of the fugitive community; if
one were to insist, the opposite of professionalization is that criminal
impulse to steal from professions, from the university, with neither
apologies nor malice, to steal the enlightenment for others, to steal
oneself with a certain blue music, a certain tragic optimism, to steal
away with mass intellectuality; if one were to do this, would this not
be to place criminality and negligence against each other? Would it
not place professionalization, would it not place the university, against
honor? And what then could be said for criminality?
Perhaps then it needs to be said that the crack dealer, terrorist, and
political prisoner share a commitment to war, and society responds
in kind with wars on crime, terror, drugs, communism. But “this war
on the commitment to war” crusades as a war against the asocial, that
is, those who live “without a concern for sociality.” Yet it cannot be
such a thing. After all, it is professionalization itself that is devoted
to the asocial, the university itself that reproduces the knowledge of
how to neglect sociality in its very concern for what it calls asociality.
No, this war against the commitment to war responds to this commitment to war as the threat that it is – not mere negligence or careless destruction but a commitment against the idea of society itself,
that is, against what Foucault called the conquest, the unspoken war
that founded, and with the force of law, refounds society. Not asocial
but against the social, this is the commitment to war, and this is what
disturbs and at the same time forms the undercommons against the
university.
Is this not the way to understand incarceration in the United States
today? And understanding it, can we not say that it is precisely the
fear that the criminal will rise to challenge the negligence that leads
to the need, in the context of the American state and its particularly
violent Universitas circle, to concentrate always on conquest denial?
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T HE U N D E R C O MM ONS
THE UNIVERSITY IS THE SITE OF THE SOCIAL REPRODUCTION
OF CONQUEST DENIAL
Here one comes face to face with the roots of professional and critical commitment to negligence, to the depths of the impulse to deny
the thought of the internal outside among critical intellectuals, and
the necessity for professionals to question without question. Whatever else they do, critical intellectuals who have found space in the
university are always already performing the denial of the new society
when they deny the undercommons, when they find that space on the
surface of the university, and when they join the conquest denial by
improving that space. Before they criticise the aesthetic and the Aesthetic, the state and the State, history and History, they have already
practiced the operation of denying what makes these categories possible in the underlabor of their social being as critical academics.
The slogan on the Left, then, “universities, not jails,” marks a choice
that may not be possible. In other words, perhaps more universities
promote more jails. Perhaps it is necessary finally to see that the university produces incarceration as the product of its negligence. Perhaps
there is another relation between the University and the Prison – beyond simple opposition or family resemblance – that the undercommons reserves as the object and inhabitation of another abolitionism.
What might appear as the professionalization of the American university, our starting point, now might better be understood as a certain intensification of method in the Universitas, a tightening of the
circle. Professionalization cannot take over the American university
– it is the critical approach of the university, its Universitas. And indeed, it appears now that this state with its peculiar violent hegemony
must deny what Foucault called in his 1975-76 lectures the race war.
War on the commitment to war breaks open the memory of the conquest. The new American studies should do this, too, if it is to be not
just a people’s history of the same country but a movement against the
possibility of a country, or any other; not just property justly distributed on the border but property unknown. And there are other spaces
situated between the Universitas and the undercommons, spaces that
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are characterized precisely by not having space. Thus the fire aimed
at black studies by everyone from William Bennett to Henry Louis
Gates Jr., and the proliferation of Centers without affiliation to the
memory of the conquest, to its living guardianship, to the protection
of its honor, to the nights of labor, in the undercommons.
The university, then, is not the opposite of the prison, since they are
both involved in their way with the reduction and command of the
social individual. And indeed, under the circumstances, more universities and fewer prisons would, it has to be concluded, mean the
memory of the war was being further lost, and living unconquered,
conquered labor abandoned to its lowdown fate. Instead, the undercommons takes the prison as a secret about the conquest, but a secret,
as Sara Ahmed says, whose growing secrecy is its power, its ability to
keep a distance between it and its revelation, a secret that calls into
being the prophetic, a secret held in common, organized as secret,
calling into being the prophetic organization.
THE UNDERCOMMONS OF THE UNIVERSITY IS A NONPLACE
OF ABOLITION
Ruth Wilson Gilmore: “Racism is the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group differentiated vulnerabilities to premature (social, civil and/or corporeal) death.” What is the
difference between this and slavery? What is, so to speak, the object
of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition
of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could
have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society. The object of
abolition then would have a resemblance to communism that would
be, to return to Spivak, uncanny. The uncanny that disturbs the critical going on above it, the professional going on without it, the uncanny that one can sense in prophecy, the strangely known moment,
the gathering content, of a cadence, and the uncanny that one can
sense in cooperation, the secret once called solidarity. The uncanny
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feeling we are left with is that something else is there in the undercommons. It is the prophetic organization that works for the red and
black abolition!
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Irit Rogoff
Turning
We have recently heard much about the
“educational turn in curating” among several
other “educational turns” affecting cultural
practices around us.1 Having participated in
several of the projects emerging from this
perceived “turn,” it seems pertinent to ask
whether this umbrella is actually descriptive of
the drives that have propelled this desired
transition.2
My questions here firstly concern what
constitutes a “turn” to begin with? Are we talking
about a “reading strategy” or an interpretative
model, as was the understanding of the
“linguistic turn” in the 1970s, with its intimations
of an underlying structure that could be read
across numerous cultural practices and
utterances? Are we talking about reading one
system – a pedagogical one – across another
system – one of display, exhibition, and
manifestation – so that they nudge one another
in ways that might open them up to other ways of
being? Or, are we talking instead about an active
movement – a generative moment in which a new
horizon emerges in the process – leaving behind
the practice that was its originating point?
Secondly, it seems pertinent to ask to what
extent the hardening of a “turn” into a series of
generic or stylistic tropes can be seen as capable
of resolving the urgencies that underwrote it in
the first place? In other words, does an
“educational turn in curating” address education
or curating at precisely the points at which it
urgently needs to be shaken up and made
uncomfortable?
John Palmesino and Anselm Franke, Think Tank , 2006. Image: Van
Abbemuseum.
Delving into these questions is made more
difficult by the degree of slippage that currently
takes place between notions of “knowledge
production,” “research,” “education,” “openended production,” and “self-organized
pedagogies,” when all these approaches seem to
have converged into a set of parameters for some
08.18.10 / 21:59:35 UTC
Education
It might be easiest to enter the fray of education
via what were for me the two projects which best
reflected my own engagement with “education”
within the arenas of display and of gathering.
The first of these was the Academy project
(2006) at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.4
Part of a series of exhibitions, projects, and
events that took place between a number of
institutions, this installment in the Netherlands
was a collaboration between 22 participants and
02/10
renewed facet of production.3 Although quite
different in their genesis, methodology, and
protocols, it appears that some perceived
proximity to “knowledge economies” has
rendered all of these terms part and parcel of a
certain liberalizing shift within the world of
contemporary art practices.
Concerned that these initiatives are in
danger of being cut off from their original
impetus and threaten to harden into a
recognizable “style,” I would like to invoke,
towards the end of this discussion, Foucault’s
notion of “parrhesia” – free, blatant public
speech – as perhaps a better model through
which to understand some kind of “educational
turn” in art.
the staff of the museum. The project as a whole
posed the question, “What can we learn from the
museum?” and referred to a form of learning that
could take place beyond that which the museum
sets out to show or teach.
Our initial question concerned whether an
idea of an “academy” (as a moment of learning
within the safe space of an academic institution)
was a metaphor for a moment of speculation,
expansion, and reflexivity without the constant
demand for proven results. If this was a space of
experimentation and exploration, then how might
we extract these vital principles and apply them
to the rest of our lives? How might we also
perhaps apply them to our institutions? Born of a
belief that the institutions we inhabit can
potentially be so much more than they are, these
questions ask how the museum, the university,
the art school, can surpass their current
functions.
Of course, we touched on this problematic
at the very moment a heated debate regarding
the Bologna Accord – the European so-called
reform of education – was erupting all around us.
Instead of hanging our heads and lamenting the
awfulness of these reforms, with their emphasis
on quantifiable and comparable outcomes, we
thought it might be productive to see if this
Susan Kelly, Janna Graham, Valeria Graziano, The Ambulator, 2006. Image: Van Abbemuseum.
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03/10
Edgar Schmitz and Liam Gillick, Inverted Research Tool, 2006. Image: Van Abbemuseum.
08.18.10 / 21:59:35 UTC
08.18.10 / 21:59:35 UTC
04/10
e-flux journal #0 — november 2008 Irit Rogoff
Turning
unexpected politicization of the discussion
around education might be an opportunity to see
how the principles we cherish in the education
process might be applied across a broader range
of institutional activities. This could be a way of
saying to the politicians: “You want to politicize
education? Let’s really politicize education. Let’s
make it a principle of actualization that really
does touch the institutions of culture – not by
producing perfectly trained, efficient, and
informed workers for the cultural sector, but by
thinking of the cultural sector as a market
economy, and bringing the principles of
education there to operate as forms of
actualization.”
When we say that these institutions of ours
could be so much more than they are, we don’t
imply that they should be larger, or more
efficient, or more progressive, or more fun
(though they certainly should be more fun).
Instead, we wish to say that their reach could be
wider, that they might provide sites for doing so
much more than they ever thought they could.
In asking what we can learn from the
museum beyond what it sets out to teach us, we
were not focused on the museum’s expertise,
what it owns and how it displays it, conserves it,
historicizes it. Our interests were in the
possibilities for the museum to open a place for
people to engage ideas differently – ideas from
outside its own walls. So the museum in our
thinking was the site of possibility, the site of
potentiality.
Academy wanted to stimulate reflections on
this potentiality within society. It situated itself
in the speculative tension between the question
of what one needs to know and that of what one
aspires to. Academies often focus on what it is
that people need to know in order to start
thinking and acting, but we chose to approach
the academy as a space that generates vital
principles and activities – activities and
principles you can take with you and which can
be applied beyond its walls to become a mode of
life-long learning. As such, Academy aimed to
develop a counterpoint to the
professionalization, technocratization, and
privatization of academies that result from the
Bologna reforms and to the monitoring and
outcome-based culture that characterize higher
education in Europe today.
In considering what we might have at our
disposal to counter such official assessments of
how learning can be evaluated and appreciated,
we focused on two terms: potentiality and
actualization.
By “potentiality” we meant a possibility to
act that is not limited to an ability. Since acting
can never be understood as being enabled simply
by a set of skills or opportunities, it must be
dependent on a will and a drive. More
importantly, it must always include within it an
element of fallibility – the possibility that acting
will end in failure. The other term we wanted to
mobilize in conjunction with “academy” was that
of “actualization,” which implies that certain
meanings and possibilities embedded within
objects, situations, actors, and spaces carry a
potential to be “liberated,” as it were. This points
to a condition in which we all function in a
complex system of embeddedness – one in
which social processes, bodies of learning,
individual subjectivities cannot be separated and
distinguished from one another.
Both these terms seem important for
mobilizing any re-evaluation of education, as
they allow us to expand the spaces and activities
that house such processes. Similarly, they allow
us to think of “learning” as taking place in
situations or sites that don’t necessarily intend
or prescribe such activity.
At Van Abbe, we envisaged an exhibition
project that brought together five teams of
different cultural practitioners who had access
to every aspect of the museum’s collection, staff,
and activities. Each of these teams pursued a
line of inquiry into what we could learn from the
museum beyond the objects on display and its
educational practices.
The access that was given was not aimed at
producing institutional critique or exposing the
true realities of the institution. Instead, it aimed
at eliciting the unseen and unmarked
possibilities that already exist within these
spaces – the people who are already working
there and who bring together unexpected life
experiences and connections, the visitors whose
interactions with the place are not gauged, the
collection which could be read in a variety of
ways far beyond splendid examples of key arthistorical moments, the paths outward which
extend beyond the museum, the spaces and
navigational vectors which are unexpectedly
plotted within it.
There were many questions circulating in
our spaces in the exhibition, with each room and
each group producing their own questions in
relation to the central one: “What can we learn
from the museum?”
There were questions regarding who
produces questioning: What are legitimate
questions, and under what conditions are they
produced? The seminar class, the think tank, the
government department, the statistician’s
bureau are sites for the production of questions,
but we were suggesting others born of fleeting,
arbitrary conversations between strangers, of
convivial loitering and of unexpected lines of
flight in and out of the museum as in the
Ambulator project (Susan Kelly, Janna Graham,
05/10
Valeria Graziano).
There were questions regarding the
relations between expertise and hope and
expertise and governance, knowledge that is
used to bolster hopeful fantasies and knowledge
that is used to impose dominant concerns, such
as in the Think Tank project (John Palmesino and
Anselm Franke).
There were questions regarding what kind of
modes of attention are paid in a context such as
a museum or a library. What could these modes
of attention be liberated for? Could they be made
use of in some other ways? Could they become
an instrument of liberation, as in the Inverted
Research Tool (Edgar Schmitz and Liam Gillick)?
There were questions regarding the very
nature of ownership of an image or an idea. How
does a simple object come to stand in for an
entire complex network of knowing, legitimating,
conserving, and “anointing with cultural status”
(all of which operate under the aegis of
ownership)? Imaginary Property (Florian
Schneider and Multitude e.V.) asked, “What does
it mean to own an image?”
There were questions regarding cultural
difference that asked whether a museum really
is an institution of representation, meant to
represent those outside its systems and
privileged audiences. If it is not, then maybe
those “outsiders” are not outside at all, but can
be recognized as already here and part of us, but
only if we listen – really listen to ourselves, as in
Sounding Difference (Irit Rogoff, Deepa Naik).
And there were other questions about the
museum’s knowledge vs. our own knowledge,
and about open forums for learning at the edges
of that which is acknowledged, as in I Like That
(Rob Stone and Jean-Paul Martinon).
Summit
That initial project within the spaces and
parameters set by the museum led several of us
to think about taking those questions into a less
regulated and prescribed space, one in which
institutional practices could encounter selforganized, activist initiatives. This led to SUMMIT
Non-Aligned Initiatives in Education Culture
(www.summit.kein.org), a forum which took
place in Berlin in May 2007.5
In a sense, we came together in the name of
“weak education,” a discourse on education that
is non-reactive, and does not seek to engage in
everything that we know fully well to be wrong
with education – its constant commoditization,
its over-bureaucratization, its ever-increasing
emphasis on predictable outcomes, etc. If
Florian Schneider and Multitude e.V., Imaginary Property, 2006. Image: Van Abbemuseum.
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education is forever reacting to the woes of the
world, we hoped to posit that education is in and
of the world – not a response to crisis, but part
of its ongoing complexity, not reacting to
realities, but producing them. Often these
practices end up being low-key, uncategorizable,
non-heroic, and certainly not uplifting, but
nevertheless immensely creative.
Why education and why at that particular
moment?
This focus on education provided a way to
counter the eternal lament of how bad things are
– how bureaucratized, how homogenized, how
understaffed and underfunded, how awful the
demands of the Bologna Accord are with its
homogenizing drives, how sad the loss of local
traditions is, etc. Though not without its
justifications, this voice of endless complaint
serves to box education into the confines of a
small community of students and education
professionals. How, then, to paraphrase Roger
Buergel, can education become more? How can it
be more than the site of shrinkage and
disappointment?
And why at this particular moment?
Because, with Bologna and all its discontents,
this moment is also seeing an unprecedented
number of self-organized forums emerging
Rob Stone and Jean-Paul Martinon, I Like That, 2006. Image: Van Abbemuseum.
08.18.10 / 21:59:35 UTC
outside institutions, as well as self-empowered
departures inside institutions. Propelled from
within rather than boxed in from outside,
education here becomes the site of a comingtogether of the odd and unexpected – shared
curiosities, shared subjectivities, shared
sufferings, and shared passions congregate
around the promise of a subject, an insight, a
creative possibility. Education is by definition
processual – involving a low-key transformative
process, it embodies duration and the
development of a contested common ground.
Here was perhaps one of the most
important leaps from Academy to Summit – an
understanding of “education” as a platform that
could signal a politics, a platform that could
bring together unexpected and momentary
conjunctions of academics, art world citizens,
union organizers, activists, and many others in
such a way that they could see themselves and
their activities reflected within the broadly
defined field of “education.”
At its best, education forms collectivities –
many fleeting collectivities that ebb and flow,
converge and fall apart. These are small
ontological communities propelled by desire and
curiosity, cemented together by the kind of
empowerment that comes from intellectual
07/10
challenge. The whole point in coming together
out of curiosity is to not have to come together
out of identity: we the readers of J. L. Nancy
encounter we the migrant or we the culturally
displaced or we the sexually dissenting – all of
these being one and the same we. So at this
moment in which we are so preoccupied with
how to participate and how to take part in the
limited space that remains open, education
signals rich possibilities of coming together and
participating in an arena not yet signaled.
Having liberated myself from the arena of
strong, redemptive, missionary education, I
would like to furnish the field with the following
terms:
Notions of potentiality and actualization
offer a capacity to replace the reorganization of
education with ideas concerning distribution and
dissemination. This speaks to an idea that there
might be endless possibilities within us that we
might never be able to bring to successful
fruition. “Academy” becomes the site of this
duality, of an understanding of “I can” as always,
already yoked to an eternal “I can’t.” If this
duality is not paralyzing, which I do not think it
is, then it has possibilities for an understanding
of what it is about an “academy” that can
actually become a model for “being in the world.”
Irit Rogoff, Deepa Naik, Sounding Difference, 2006. Image: Van Abbemuseum.
08.18.10 / 21:59:35 UTC
Perhaps there is an excitement in shifting our
perception of a place of education or training to
one which is not pure preparation, pure
resolution. “Academy” might instead encompass
fallibility, which can be understood as a form of
knowledge production rather than one of
disappointment.
Equally, I would suggest education to be the
site of a shift away from a culture of emergency
to one of urgency. Emergency is always reactive
to a set of state imperatives that produce an
endless chain of crises, mostly of our own
making. So many of us have taken part in
miserable panels about “the crisis in education.”
A notion of urgency presents the possibility of
producing an understanding of what the crucial
issues are, so that they may become driving
forces. The morning after George W. Bush was reelected president, my classroom moved swiftly
from amazement to a discussion about why
electoral forums were not the arena of political
participation, and what they might actually
represent instead – a move from an emergency
to an urgency.
Perhaps most importantly, I want to think
about education not through the endless
demands that are foisted on both culture and
education to be accessible, to provide a simple
Turn
Quite a long time ago, when I had just finished
my Ph.D. and was embarking on a postdoc and a
radical change of path towards critical theory, I
ran across my very first Art History professor on
the street. This was unexpected – my being in a
different country and city with the promise of
another life on the horizon were not conducive at
that moment to knowing how to deal elegantly
with that which I had left behind. Having asked
me what I was up to, he listened patiently as I
prattled away, full of all the new ideas and
possibilities that had just opened up to me. My
professor was a kind, humane, and generous
scholar of the old school. He may have been
somewhat patrician, but he had an intuitive
grasp of changes shaping the world around him.
08.18.10 / 21:59:35 UTC
08/10
e-flux journal #0 — november 2008 Irit Rogoff
Turning
entry point to complex ideas. The Tate Modern
comes to mind as an example of how a museum
can function as an entertainment machine that
celebrates “critique lite.” Instead, I want to think
of education in terms of the places to which we
have access. I understand this access as the
ability to formulate one’s own questions, as
opposed to simply answering those that are
posed to you in the name of an open and
participatory democratic process. After all, it is
very clear that those who formulate the
questions produce the playing field.
Finally, I would like to think of education as
the arena in which challenge is written into our
daily activity, where we learn and perform
critically informed challenges that don’t aim at
undermining or overtaking. When political
parties, courts of law, or any other authority
challenges a position, it is done with the aim of
delegitimizing with a better one, of establishing
absolute rights and wrongs. In education, when
we challenge an idea, we suggest that there is
room for imagining another way of thinking. By
doing so in a way that does not overcome the
original idea, we don’t expend energy forming
opposition, but reserve it for imagining
alternatives. At a conference I attended, Jaad
Isaac, a Palestinian geographer, produced
transportation maps of the Israeli occupation of
the West Bank that had an almost mind-blowing
clarity to them. It made me think of what
gargantuan energies had to be put into turning
the evil chaos of that occupation into the
crystalline clarity of those maps – energies that
were needed in order to invent Palestine. In their
pristine clarity, the maps performed a challenge
to the expenditure of energies as a response to
an awful situation. If education can release our
energies from what needs to be opposed to what
can be imagined, or at least perform some kind
of negotiation of that, then perhaps we have an
education that is more.
At the end of my excited recitative he looked at
me and said, “I do not agree with what you are
doing and I certainly don’t agree with how you are
going about it, but I am very proud of you for
doing this.” It is hard now to imagine my
confusion at hearing this, yet I realize with
hindsight that he was recognizing a “turn” in the
making, rather than expressing concern or
hostility for what it was rejecting or espousing.
Clearly this man, who had been a genuinely great
teacher of things I could no longer be excited by,
saw learning as a series of turns.
In a “turn,” we shift away from something or
towards or around something, and it is we who
are in movement, rather than it. Something is
activated in us, perhaps even actualized, as we
move. And so I am tempted to turn away from the
various emulations of an aesthetics of pedagogy
that have taken place in so many forums and
platforms around us in recent years, and towards
the very drive to turn.
So my question here is twofold, concerning
on the one hand the capacity for artistic and
curatorial practices to capture the dynamics of a
turn, and on the other, the kind of drive being
released in the process.
In the first instance, this might require that
we break somewhat with an equating logic that
claims that process-based work and open-ended
experimentation creates the speculation,
unpredictability, self-organization, and criticality
that characterize the understanding of education
within the art world. Many of us have worked
with this understanding quite consistently, and
while some of its premises have been quite
productive for much of our work, it nevertheless
lends itself far too easily to emulating the
institutions of art education, with its archives,
libraries, and research-based practices as
primary representational strategies. On the one
hand, moving these principles into sites of
contemporary art display signaled a shift away
from the structures of objects and markets and
dominant aesthetics towards an insistence on
the unchartable, processual nature of any
creative enterprise. Yet on the other hand, it has
led all too easily into the emergence of a mode of
“pedagogical aesthetics” in which a table in the
middle of the room, a set of empty bookshelves,
a growing archive of assembled bits and pieces,
a classroom or lecture scenario, or the promise
of a conversation have taken away the burden to
rethink and dislodge daily those dominant
burdens ourselves.6 Having myself generated
several of these modes, I am not sure that I want
to completely dispense with them, because the
drive that they made manifest – to force these
spaces to be more active, more questioning, less
insular, and more challenging – is one to which I
would like to stay faithful. In particular, I would
08.18.10 / 21:59:36 UTC
09/10
e-flux journal #0 — november 2008 Irit Rogoff
Turning
not wish to give up the notion of “conversation,”
which to my mind has been the most significant
shift within the art world over the past decade.
In the wake of Documenta X and Documenta
XI, it became clear that one of the most
significant contributions that the art world had
made to the culture at large has been the
emergence of a conversational mode hosted by
it.7 In part, this has had to do with the fact that
there already exists a certain amount of
infrastructure within the art world, where there
are available spaces, small budgets, existing
publicity machines, recognizable formats such
as exhibitions, gatherings, lecture series,
interviews, as well as a constant interested
audience made up of art students, cultural
activists, etc.8 As a result, a new set of
conversations between artists, scientists,
philosophers, critics, economists, architects,
planners, and so on, came into being and
engaged the issues of the day through a set of
highly attenuated prisms. By not being subject to
the twin authorities of governing institutions or
authoritative academic knowledge, these
conversations could in effect be opened up to a
speculative mode, and to the invention of
subjects as they emerged and were recognized.
And so the art world became the site of
extensive talking – talking emerged as a
practice, as a mode of gathering, as a way of
getting access to some knowledge and to some
questions, as networking and organizing and
articulating some necessary questions. But did
we put any value on what was actually being
said? Or, did we privilege the coming-together of
people in space and trust that formats and
substances would emerge from these?
Increasingly, it seems to me that the “turn”
we are talking about must result not only in new
formats, but also in another way of recognizing
when and why something important is being
said.
Foucault, in a lecture he once gave at
Berkeley, embarked upon a discussion of the
word “parrhesia,” a common term in GrecoRoman culture.9 He stated that it is generally
perceived as free speech, and that those who
practice it are perceived to be those who speak
the truth. The active components of parrhesia,
according to Foucault, are frankness (“to say
everything”), truth (“to tell the truth because he
knows it is true”), danger (“only if there is a risk
of danger in his telling the truth”), criticism (“not
to demonstrate the truth to someone else, but as
the function of criticism”) and duty (“telling the
truth is regarded as a duty”). In parrhesia,
Foucault tells us, we have “a verbal activity in
which the speaker expresses his personal
relation to truth, and risks his life because he
recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or
help other people (as well as himself). In
parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and
chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth
instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death
instead of life and security, criticism instead of
flattery and moral duty instead of self-interest
and moral apathy.”10
It is hard to imagine a more romantic or
idealistic agenda for invoking “turns” in the
educational field. And yet, I am drawn to these
with less embarrassment than you might think
one would have as a self-conscious critical
theorist working within the field of contemporary
art. Perhaps because nowhere in this analysis
are we told which truth, or to what ends it is
being deployed. Truth, it would seem, is not a
position, but a drive.
To add an even more active dimension to
Foucault’s discussion of parrhesia, we can also
establish that in Aramaic the term is invoked in
relation to such speech when it is stated “openly,
blatantly, in public.” So this truth, which is in no
one’s particular interest or to any particular end,
must be spoken in public, must have an
audience, and must take the form of an address.
Foucault called this “fearless speech,” and
at the end of his lecture series he says, “I would
say that the problematization of truth has two
sides, two major aspects…. One side is
concerned with ensuring that the process of
reasoning is correct in ensuring if a statement is
true. And the other side is concerned with the
question: what is the importance for the
individual and for the society of telling the truth,
of knowing the truth, of having people who tell
the truth, as well as knowing how to recognize
them?”11
Increasingly, I think “education” and the
“educational turn” might be just that: the
moment when we attend to the production and
articulation of truths – not truth as correct, as
provable, as fact, but truth as that which collects
around it subjectivities that are neither gathered
nor reflected by other utterances. Stating truths
in relation to the great arguments, issues, and
great institutions of the day is relatively easy, for
these dictate the terms by which such truths are
both arrived at and articulated. Telling truths in
the marginal and barely-formed spaces in which
the curious gather – this is another project
altogether: one’s personal relation to truth.
×
10/10
Irit Rogoff is a theorist, curator, and organizer who
writes at the intersections of the critical, the political,
and contemporary arts practices. Rogoff is a professor
at Goldsmiths College, London University, in the
department of Visual Cultures, which she founded in
2002. Her work across a series of new "think tank"
Ph.D. programs at Goldsmiths (Research Architecture,
Curatorial/Knowledge) is focusing on the possibility of
locating, moving, and exchanging knowledges across
professional practices, self-generated forums,
academic institutions, and individual enthusiasms.
Her publications include Museum Culture (1997), Terra
Infirma - Geography's Visual Culture (2001),
A.C.A.D.E.M.Y (2006), Unbounded - Limits Possibilities
(2008), and the forthcoming Looking Away Participating Singularities, Ontological
Communities (2009). Curatorial work includes DeRegulation with the work of Kutlug Ataman (20058), A.C.A.D.E.M.Y (2006), and Summit - Non Aligned
Initiatives in Education Culture (2007).
1
Documenta XI (2002, curated by
"Salon Discussion: 'You Talkin' to
Okwui Enwezor et al.). See
me? Why art is turning to
Documenta XI, exhibition
education,'" The Institute of
catalogue (Ostfildern-Ruit,
Contemporary Arts, London.
Germany: Hatje Kantz, 2002).
http://www.ica.org.uk/Salon%
20Discussion:%20'You%20Talki
n'%20to%20me%3F%20Why%20art%
20is%20turning%20to%20educat
ion'+17098.twl
8
Another key example is
2
unitednationsplaza, a project in
Among others; A.C.A.D.E.M.Y
Berlin in 2006-2007 (the
Hamburg, Antwerp, Eindhoven,
exhibition as art school), now
2006-7 , "Summit – Non Aligned
continued in New York as
Initatives in Education Culture,"
nightschool and in this
2007, "Faculties of Architecture,
reincarnation connected to
Dutch Pavillion, Venice
Mårten Spångberg’s project of
Architecture Biennale", 2008.
"Evening Classes" at the
The Ph.D. program
YourSpace.com section of the
"Curatorial/Knowledge" at
A.C.A.D.E.M.Y exhibition.
Goldsmiths College, London
University, co-directed with
9
Jean-Paul Martinon.
Michel Foucault, Fearless
Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson
3
(New York: Semiotext(e), 2001).
Mårten Spångberg,
"Researching Research, Some
10
reflections on the current status
Fearless Speech, 19-20.
of research in performing arts,"
International Festival.
11
http://www.international-fes
Fearless Speech, 170.
tival.org/node/28529
e-flux journal #0 — november 2008 Irit Rogoff
Turning
4
Initiated by Angelika Nollert,
then at the Siemens Art Fund,
A.C.A.D.E.M.Y was a collective
project between Hamburger
Kunstverein, MuKHA Antwerp,
Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven,
and the Department of Visual
Cultures, Goldsmiths, London
University. It took place in three
cities throughout 2006 and was
accompanied by a book
published by Revolver - Archiv
für aktuelle Kunst and edited by
A. Nollert and I. Rogoff et al.
http://vanabbemuseum.nl/en/b
rowse/?tx_vabdisplay_pi1%5Bp
type%5D=18&tx_vabdisplay_pi1%5Bproject%
5D=157&cHash=7d70173357
5
The project was organized by a
collective – Irit Rogoff (London),
Florian Schneider (Munich), Nora
Sternfeld (Vienna), Susanne
Lang (Berlin), Nicolas Siepen
(Berlin), Kodwo Eshun (London)
– and in collaboration with the
HAU theatres,
Unitednationsplaza, BootLab,
and the Bundeskulturstiftung,
all in Berlin.
6
I say all this with a certain
awkwardness, in light of my own
involvement with so many of
these initiatives. Exhibitions,
self-organized forums within the
art world, numerous
conversation platforms: all
shared the belief that turning to
"education" as an operating
model would allow us to reinvigorate the spaces of display
as sites of genuine
transformation.
7
I refer to the discussion forum
"100 days – 100 guests" at
Documenta X (1997, curated by
Catherine David), which hosted
100 talks during the exhibition,
and to the four Documenta
discussion platforms across the
globe prior to the opening of
08.18.10 / 21:59:36 UTC
On participatory art
Interview with Claire Bishop
Duˇsan Barok
29 July 2009
Interview was made after workshop Monument to Transformation1 organised by Tranzit
initiative in Prague in July 2009.2
Duˇ
san Barok: In recent years, many artists have been to a lesser or greater extent appropriating the roles of social workers, urban planners, or ombudsmen in order to question
and critique the dominant culture by channeling voices and activities of the ones who are
underrepresented, repressed or left out from political process. In your essay ‘The Social Turn:
Collaboration and Its Discontents’ whose updated version was also published in Czech you
very interestedly state that socially engaged art can easily fall in trap of overestimating ethical judgement over the aesthetical. Aesthetics is a rather complex matter. To put it roughly,
what exactly is wrong with using the art system for ‘social sake’ ?
Claire Bishop: Good question. Instrumentalisation isn’t in itself wrong; many good artists
succesfully instrumentalise their role for progressive social ends. The problem is that neoliberal governments also instrumentalise art for social ends, privileging participatory art as a
way to provide homeopathic solutions to problems that are systemic. Socially participatory
art often serves to fulfil these government agendas for ‘social inclusion’ (ie compulsory participation in a consumer society), even though its rhetoric is ostensibly oppositional. Both
camps spurn a framework for accounting for these gestures as art: the artists because they
tend to view artistic questions as elitist and synonymous with privilege; governments (ie
cultural policy makers) because it is easier to deal with art quantitatively (ie as a matter of
statistics - who participates, how many etc) than qualitatively.
When confronted by socially-engaged art projects of the type you describe above - projects
that aim to release the ‘creativity’ of (often disenfranchised) communities through photography, painting, theatre, cooking, or other workshops - it is often hard to respond to these
events with anything other than moral approval. The same can be said for art projects
1
http://cz.tranzit.org/en/lecture discussion/0/2009-07-10/workshop-monument-to-transformation-copy
Originally published on Multiplace theory mailing list at http://multiplace.org/pipermail/mtp-teoria/
2009-July/000165.html.
2
1
that directly research and/or criticise social policy, gentrification, globalisation, etc. These
projects are often praised for providing a ‘good model’, but on an aesthetic level they blindly
repeat tired formulae, while the results of research-as-art are invariably less useful than a
book or report on the subject. In short, such projects tend to be worthy, but dull. I am more
interested in socially-engaged art activities that are perverse, indirect, or antagonistic - too
singular, raw or idiosyncratic to be held up and instantiated as a ‘model’.
For me, the theoretical consequences of this are that we need to consider socially-engaged
projects as political and artistic operations, not simply as ethical gestures. Some of the most
powerful artistic projects of recent years have not taken a directly ameliorative approach to
social participation. They produce situations of conflict and unease, since the artist does
not pretend to be a facilitator of others, but is explicitly self-reflexive about his/her role
as motivator and manipulator. These works don’t just concern themselves with process
but also with the (conceptual) product of these gestures, with their meaning beyond the
satisfaction of their immediate participants. They marshall aesthesis to produce a strong
symbolic meaning, rather than short-term topicality. Importantly, this does not mean that
such works are unethical or pessimistic. They are just more indirect, using formats that
require more imagination and generosity from the viewer than a kneejerk reaction of moral
outrage at the careerist individualism of the artist.
DB: Interesting. There are many things to react on, let us focus on the aesthetical (and
political) implications of admitted manipulation. In engaging others in a creative process,
artists put themselves in situation when it is hard to communicate intentions to participants.
Social-sculpture artists often end up hiring people as uncredited cast to work in the alienated
and exploitative conditions for the sake of a good art project. Artists and theorists in
argument against these kind of projects say that in a choice of building the intentions bottomup with participants one can also read the political account, which in turn is forming the
ground for reexamination of what we consider the aesthetic, how do we approach the idea
of audience and how do we evaluate art. Do you think the conceptual product of a socially
engaged art project is compromised without admiting (or affirming) the gap, or distance,
between artist and participants? What is the nature of this distance?
CB: I’m not sure I fully understand this question, but I’ll try and respond to the main point,
which I understand to concern the gap between artists and participants. In the research I have
done, I would say that this gap is largely a fantasy projection on the part of the viewer who
is uncomfortable with being confronted by people of another class or race. The reality is that
no socially-engaged project would even happen without clear and exhaustive communication
between the artist and participants. Artists (both the strong ones and the lesser ones)
are, in my experience, incredibly engaged in the process of interviewing, explaining and
contextualising the project to the people they work with. Where exceptions occur - and the
performers are really ‘outsourced’ by a casting agent or the gallery (for example in the work
of Beecroft or Sierra) - then that distance is not without a point and aesthetic effect. Even
so, I have interviewed people who have performed in such works and the last thing they
feel is exploited; more usually they feel thrilled to be centre of attention. Simplistic critical
2
accusations exploitation don’t take into account the complex psychological motivations of
both artist and performer.
I really think that accusations of exploitation from over-solicitous viewers are completely
misguided - but as Zygmunt Bauman points out, it is always easier to focus on micro-ethics
rather than confront the macro-ethics of the society in which we’re implicated.
DB: How do you understand the concepts of participation and collaboration in how do they
differ and what do they have in common? And if that’s not too broad question, how do these
change the idea of authorship?
CB: The British critic Dave Beech has argued for a distinction between participation and
collaboration: participants are subject to the parameters of the artist’s project, while collaboration involves co-authorship and decisions over key structural features of the work3 . This
seems to me an accurate distinction. The problem is that it doesn’t readily translate into art
critical judgment. Good collaboration doesn’t necessarily mean good art (and here I disagree
with many people). In my view, manipulation and coercion do not invalidate a work of art
if it exists in critical dialogue with a larger social and political context, as can be seen, for
example, in the work of Artur Zmijewski or Christoph Schlingensief (both of whom were
included in an exhibition I co-curated last year at the ICA London which dealt with some of
these issues).
Do these strategies challenge the idea of authorship? Only slightly. The critically-correct
position today is to dismiss a singular model of authorship, which is understood to be complicit with privatised individualism and necessary for establishing market value. This is the
story of a romantic conception of the singular artist as outsider, whose singularity gradually
became determinate for establishing an object’s worth. But this association between single
authorship and capitalism is misleading, and can be challenged on a number of fronts.
For a start, we could observe that even the most collaborative types of contemporary art still
circulate as authored products (albeit ones with less market success than individual efforts).
This is not a moralistic point about who earns money and how, but a theoretical issue: each
work of art or project is a sovereign domain established by the artist. Even the most openended projects are still circumscribed by an artistic identity, and inscribed within a chain
of previous or similar co-authored projects. Even when artists make a point of including
participants names as co-authors, it is still the singular artist as motivator and facilitator
that provides the work’s identity. This is what differentiates collaborative projects in the
sphere of contemporary art from the more anonymous tradition of community arts.
3
Dave Beech, “Include Me Out”, Art Monthly, April 2008, pp.1-4: “the participant typically is not cast
as an agent of critique or subversion but rather as one who is invited to accept the parameters of the art
project [..] participation always involves a specific invitation and a specific formation of the participant’s
subjectivity, even when the artist ask them simply to be themselves. [..] Collaborators, however, are distinct
from participants insofar as they share authorial rights over the artwork that permit them, among other
things, to make fundamental decisions about the key structural features of the work. That is, collaborators
have rights that are withheld from participants.” (p.3)
3
We could also note that collaboration and participation are not new phenomena, but have
been essential to art throughout its history, be this on the level of technical assistance or
installation, and not always as secondary to artistic genius. During the Renaissance, for
example, bronzes were signed by the person who cast the object at the foundry, rather than
by the artist. We could also see votive objects in the middle ages - such as books, shrines
and relics - as participatory. We therefore need a more complex history of authorship than
the most recent one to which contemporary artists are responding; ideally I would like to
see authorship discussed in many shades of grey, rather than as a black/white opposition
between single and multiple authorship.
The challenge, as I see it, is to rethink individual authorship so that it is no longer synonymous
with capitalism but rather with what Guattari calls ‘resingularisation’, an individual or
collective struggle against the banalisation and homogenisation of institutional domains.
DB: You have been researching the participatory actions in Czechoslovakia from 1960s and
1970s. Is there anything which particularly interested you?
CB: I am currently writing a history and theory of the kind of art we have been discussing.
The aim is to show that the meaning of socially-engaged participatory art changes under
different ideological contexts, in order to complicate the frequently heard assumption that
participatory art is politically progressive and emancipatory in effect. I therefore have a
series of case studies looking at the artistic desire to work participatively with other people
in the 1960s, under military dictatorship, state socialism, and welfare state social democracy.
Many of these works look identical (black and white photos of people doing things in streets)
but their meanings and motivations are very different.
The artists I have been focusing on here are Milan Kn´ıˇz´ak and Alex Mlyn´arˇcik, but I have
also enjoyed learning about other figures (such as Vladim´ır Boudn´ık and J´an Budaj) that I
did not know before coming to Prague. In contrast to all the other examples in my book,
participatory art produced under socialism does not engage with an idea of public space or
‘marginal’ communities; instead, actions are undertaken with a close and trusted group of
friends, for obvious reasons. A second difference is that these projects are not articulated as
political (even though we wish to read them as such in retrospect), since the ‘political’ was at
that time perceived as synonymous with state interests, too omnipresent and overdetermined.
What was at stake for artists was existential rather than political, the desire to live a more
vivid, individual life. Today, the reverse seems to be the case. We live in ‘post-political’
times and so artists compete to be as political as possible. Individual existentialism is seen
as a private indulgence.
ˇ a has done several acclaimed projects in which
DB: Contemporary Czech artist Kateˇrina Sed´
she works with her family members or neighbours, in the village on the outskirts of Brno.
She tends to refuse taking part in projects that require short intervention in an environment
that is unfamiliar to her. What do you think of her work in the context of socially-engaged
art?
4
ˇ a’s work; I like some of the videos made with her
CB: I have only a limited knowledge of Sed´
family. One of the pieces you are referring to, called ‘There is Nothing There’ (2003), involved
getting everyone in the same village to follow a certain pattern of activities for a number of
days (shopping, eating, etc). It seems to me an update of the idea of social sculpture, and
reminds me of Kaprow’s later projects from the 1970s, in which everyday actions are scripted.
But I am struggling to find the kernel of its meaning. Everyone in the village agrees to do
what the artist says, in what effectively becomes a form of benign aesthetic totalitarianism.
ˇ a’s idea: an unrealised project by Elmgreen
(I am reminded of a more brutal version of Sed´
and Dragset for a Norwegian village, in which they wanted everyone to acquire the same
species of dog.)
ˇ a’s work is distinctive within the Czech art scene, and certainly one of the most interesting
Sed´
practices here, but from an outside perspective, it also seems a bit too gentle and eager to
please - at pains not to provoke anyone into doing anything too challenging. As an observer,
I would say that the strength of ‘There is Nothing There’ lies in the experience produced for
the participants rather than for its subsequent viewers. I prefer the type of invisible sculpture
made by Pawe#l Althamer, such as ‘Movie’ (2000), which operate for the viewer as well as
the participant. In this work, he positioned a number of actors around the main square in
Ljubljana, and for a certain period of time each day they performed the same actions as if on
a video loop. Viewers were thus completely uncertain whether or not they were seeing art or
just everyday life on the square. For me this is a very powerful piece even through hearsay.
DB: Let’s look at the online video ecosystem, which is emblematic for the recent boom of
creativity. Web services like Blip.tv or Nico Nico Douga (highly popular Japanese portal for
animated videos made collaboratively by large groups of users) present the works that are
accessible for immediate feedback and debate on a wide scale and attract massive attention.
Their authors rarely claim them being the works of art or seek a legitimacy from the art
world, even they often act anonymously.
Despite that, these works are accompanied by the rich aesthetic experience and expand
it dramatically. To illustrate, French philosopher Bernard Stiegler (after Simondon) talks
about the process of collective individuation (or transindividuation), when by sharing and
experiencing the (online) cultural content, interhuman relation is created, not by means
of what is identical in every human subject, but by means of the charge of preindividual
nature that is conserved with the individual being and that contains potentials and virtuality.
What is your take on the impact of networked technologies (eg. internet) on aesthetics of
collaborative practices?
CB: I have to confess that regarding new media I am a dinosaur. I much prefer the problems
of live presence in a theatre/performance art/gallery tradition, and their relationship to
questions of mediation. Despite this, I’ll try and answer your question.
Of course, the emancipatory potential of the web has often been discussed as a tool for
networking (eg anti-globalisation protests) and a source of amateur journalism (eg recent
events in Iran). But it is also the biggest imaginable repository of banality and aesthetic
5
homogeneity (as the photography site Flickr all too readily demonstrates). It exacerbates a
culture of self-focused consumption - providing endless sublimation via music videos, downloads, and online shopping - but also of self-centred exhibitionism (in social networking sites
and blogging). This problem brings us back to my previous answer. Participation is a term
that has been thoroughly co-opted by commerce, and no longer carries the automatically
radical connotations of ’68. An Atelier Populaire poster from Paris that year read “Je participe/tu participes/nous participons..ils profitent”. This could not be a truer statement of
the present day playground of online participation and reality television. These ‘democratic’
expressions of participation are completely standardised and privatised, with immediate aesthetic consequences. This is why I remain attached to art as a site for visual thinking, since
its boundaries are not delimited in advance, and because it demands a relationship to physical
presence rather than the merely virtual.
DB: In the talk at the workshop (devoted to transformation processes in the societies with
experience of repressive regime) just held at Prague’s Tranzitdisplay you were questioning the
notion of ‘everybody is an artist’ and Marx and Engels’ scenario of the art seen as the basic
creativity everyone has access to if freed from exploitation. You linked this stance, which has
being taken up by many artists critiquing the neoliberalism, with the recently formulated
policies of creative industries, that call for the unleashment of the creativity, promising to
produce the future generations of the creative workers. Can you elaborate on this? What is
at stake here?
CB: As you say, the workshop was dedicated to a comparative study of experiences of social
transformation in countries that have undergone revolution or ideological upheaval. Coming
from the UK and living in the US, my contribution to the workshop was necessarily oblique. I
spoke about a subtle form of transformation that has taken place in western culture since the
1960s. Namely, the idea that key terms that were the hallmarks of artistic and intellectual
critique circa 1968 (the demand for more authenticity, creativity, participation in society,
fulfillment at work etc) have today been realised in post-industrial societies, but in ways that
facilitate - rather than oppose - the march of global capital.
On the one hand, this can be seen in the rise of the ‘creative industries’ (fashion, music,
media, etc) as the replacement for traditional industry. Richard Florida has referred to the
workers in this sector as ‘the creative class’: people who engage in complex problem solving
that involves independent judgment, creativity and high levels of education or human capital
(his examples include artists, musicians, engineers and computer scientists). On the other
hand, it can been seen in employers taking positive steps to counter alienation by making
the workplace ‘creative’, socially fulfilling, and so on.
` Chiapello have referred to this contemporary assimilation of creativity
Luc Boltanski and Eve
as ‘the new spirit of capitalism’. The values of what they call the ‘artistic critique’ of 1968
have now been normalised (eg profit motive alone is not enough for successful business;
employees want to feel creatively fulfilled by, and identify with, the company they work for).
In the UK, this has extended to government intervention in the National Curriculum to
6
facilitate the development of creativity within schools as an equal to literacy and numeracy.
This aim of unleashing creativity, however, is not directed towards greater social happiness,
the realisation of authentic human potential, or the imagination of utopian alternatives - as
we might find in the project for ‘New Babylon’ by the utopian architect Constant in the
late 1950s. Rather, it is designed to accelerate the processes of neoliberalisation: in the
words of Angela McRobbie, it is aimed at producing “a future generation of socially diverse
creative workers who are brimming with ideas and whose skills need not only be channelled
into the fields of art and culture but will also be good for business. Most importantly these
will be self standing or self sufficient individuals whose efforts will not be hindered by the
administrations of the state.”
So what is at stake here is that the romantic connotations of the artist as a unique, creative
individual with a privileged place within society has been co-opted by the state (particularly
in the UK and Netherlands) as an economic tool. In many cases, its glamourous associations
are a cover for the increased precariousness of ‘creative’ (ie freelance) labour. The rhetoric of
‘everyone is creative’ is a euphemism for introducing yet more independence from the welfare
state. All this is important for contemporary art, because it means that certain terms that
it holds dear now need to be urgently recontextualised: creativity, but also community and
participation.
7
01/19
Martha Rosler
e-flux journal #12 — january 2010 Martha Rosler
Take the Money and Run? Can Political and Socio-critical Art “Survive”?
Take the Money
and Run? Can
Political and
Socio-critical
Art “Survive”?
Just a few months before the real estate market
brought down much of the world economy, taking
the art market with it, I was asked to respond to
the question whether “political and socio-critical
art” can survive in an overheated market
environment. Two years on, this may be a good
moment to revisit the parameters of such work
(now that the fascination with large-scale,
bravura, high wow-factor work, primarily in
painting and sculpture, has cooled – if only
temporarily).
Categories of criticality have evolved over
time, but their taxonomic history is short. The
naming process is itself frequently a method of
recuperation, importing expressions of critique
into the system being criticized, freezing into
academic formulas things that were put together
off the cuff. In considering the long history of
artistic production in human societies, the
question of “political” or “critical” art seems
almost bizarre; how shall we characterize the
ancient Greek plays, for example? Why did Plato
wish to ban music and poetry from his Republic?
What was to be understood from English nursery
rhymes, which we now see as benign jingles? A
strange look in the eye of a character in a
Renaissance scene? A portrait of a duke with a
vacant expression? A popular print with a
caricature of the king? The buzz around works of
art is surely less now than when art was not
competing with other forms of representation
and with a wide array of public narratives; calling
some art “political” reveals the role of particular
forms of thematic enunciation.1 Art, we may now
hear, is meant to speak past particular
understandings or narratives, and all the more so
across national borders or creedal lines.
Criticality that manifests as a subtle thread in
iconographic details is unlikely to be
apprehended by wide audiences across national
borders. The veiled criticality of art under
repressive regimes, generally manifesting as
allegory or symbolism, needs no explanation for
those who share that repression, but audiences
outside that policed universe will need a study
guide. In either case, it is not the general
audience but the educated castes and
professional artists or writers who are most
attuned to such hermeneutics. I expand a bit on
this below. But attending to the present moment,
the following question from an intelligent young
scenester may be taken as a tongue-in-cheek
provocation rooted in the zeitgeist, reminding us
that political and socio-critical art is at best a
niche production:
We were talking about whether choosing to
be an artist means aspiring to serve the
rich. . . . that seems to be the dominating
economic model for artists in this country.
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Let us pause to think about how art first became
characterized by a critical dimension. The history
of such work is often presented in a fragmented,
distorted fashion; art that exhibits an imperfect
allegiance to the ideological structures of social
elites has often been poorly received.2 Stepping
outside the ambit of patronage or received
opinion without losing one’s livelihood or, in
extreme situations, one’s life, became possible
for painters and sculptors only a couple of
hundred years ago, as the old political order
crumbled under the changes wrought by the
Industrial Revolution, and direct patronage and
commissions from the Church and aristocrats
declined.3
Members of the ascendant new class, the
bourgeoisie, as they gained economic and
political advantage over previous elites, also
sought to adopt their elevated cultural pursuits;
but these new adherents were more likely to be
customers than patrons.4 Artists working in a
variety of media and cultural registers, from high
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The most visible artists are very good at
serving the rich. . . . the ones who go to
Cologne to do business seem to do the
best. . . . She told me this is where Europe's
richest people go . . . .
to low, expressed positions on the political
ferment of the early Industrial Revolution. One
might find European artists exhibiting robust
support for revolutionary ideals or displaying
identification with provincial localism, with the
peasantry or with the urban working classes,
especially using fairly ephemeral forms (such as
the low-cost prints available in great numbers);
smiling bourgeois subjects were depicted as
disporting and bettering themselves while
decked out in the newest brushstrokes and
modes of visual representation. New forms of
subjectivity and sensibility were defined and
addressed in different modalities (the nineteenth
century saw the development of popular novels,
mass-market newspapers, popular prints,
theater, and art), even as censorship, sometimes
with severe penalties for transgression, was
sporadically imposed from above.
The development of these mass audiences
compelled certain artists to separate themselves
from mass taste, as Pierre Bourdieu has
suggested,5 or to waffle across the line. Artistic
autonomy, framed as a form of insurgency, came
to be identified by a military term, the avantgarde, or its derivative, the vanguard.6 In times of
revanchism and repression, of course, artists
assert independence from political ideologies
The Art Workers' Coalition (AWC) demonstration in front of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica at the MoMA in 1970.
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Vittore Carpaccio, Two Venetian Ladies, c. 1490. Oil on Panel, 37" × 25".
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Erich Salomon, Haya Conference, 1930.
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04/19
and political masters through ambiguous or
allegorical structures – critique by indirection.
Even manifestoes for the freeing of the poetical
Imagination, a potent element of the burgeoning
Romantic movements, might be traced to the
transformations within entrenched ideology and
of sensibility itself as an attribute of the
“cultivated” person. The expectation that
“advanced” or vanguard art would be
autonomous – independent of direct ideological
ties to patrons – created a predisposition toward
the privileging of its formal qualities. Drawing on
the traditions of Romanticism, it also underlined
its insistence on subjects both more personal
and more universal – but rooted in the
experiential world, not in churchly dogmas of
salvation.7 The poetic imagination was posited
as a form of knowing that vied with materialist,
rationalist, and “scientific” epistemologies – one
superior, moreover, in negotiating the utopian
reconception and reorganization of human life.8
The Impressionist painters, advancing the
professionalization of art beyond the bounds of
simple craft, developed stylistic approaches
based on interpretations of advanced optical
theory, while other routes to inspiration, such as
psychotropic drugs, remained common enough.
Artistic avant-gardes even at their most formal
retained a utopian horizon that kept their work
from being simply exercises in decor and
arrangement; disengagement from recognizable
narratives, in fact, was critical in advancing the
claims of art to speak of higher things from its
own vantage point or, more specifically, from the
original and unique point of view of individual,
named producers. Following John Fekete, we
may interpret the positive reception of extreme
aestheticism or “art for art’s sake” as a panicked
late-nineteenth-century bourgeois response to a
largely imaginary siege from the political left.9
But even such aestheticism, in its demand for
absolute disengagement, offered a possible
opening to an implied political critique, through
the abstract, Hegel-derived, social negativity
that was later a central element of the Frankfurt
School, as exemplified by Adorno’s insistence,
against Brecht and Walter Benjamin, that art in
order to be appropriately negative must remain
autonomous, above partisan political struggles.
The turn of the twentieth century, a time of
prodigious industrialization and capital
formation, witnessed population flows from the
impoverished European countryside to sites of
production and inspired millenarian conceits
that impelled artists and social critics of every
stripe to imagine the future. We may as well call
Paul Strand, Portrait - New York, 1916. Platinum print.
Photographic modernism in the United
States (stemming largely from Paul Strand, but
with something of a trailing English legacy),
08.18.10 / 21:55:33 UTC
05/19
this modernism. And we might observe, briefly,
that modernism (inextricably linked, needless to
say, to modernity) incorporates technological
optimism and its belief in progress, while
antimodernism sees the narrative of
technological change as a tale of broad
civilizational decline, and thus tends toward a
romantic view of nature.
Art history allows that in revolutionary
Russia many artists mobilized their skills to work
toward the socially transformative goals of
socialist revolution, adopting new art forms (film)
and adapting older ones (theater, poetry, popular
fiction, and traditional crafts such as sewing and
china decorating, but in mechanized production),
while others outside the Soviet Union expressed
solidarity with worldwide revolution. In the
United States and Europe, in perhaps a less
lauded – though increasingly documented –
history, there were proletarian and communist
painters, writers, philosophers, poets,
photographers . . .
married a documentary impulse to formal
innovation. It inevitably strayed into the territory
of Soviet and German photographic innovators,
many of whom had utopian socialist or
communist allegiances, although few of the
American photographic modernists aside from
Strand shared these political viewpoints. Proruralist sentiments were transformed from
backward-looking, romantic, pastoral longing to
a focus on labor (perhaps with a different sort of
romanticism) and on workers’ milieux, both
urban and rural.10
The turn of the century brought
developments in photography and printing (such
as the new photolithographic printing technology
of 1890 and the new small cameras, notably the
Leica in 1924) that gave birth to photojournalism
and facilitated political agitation. The “social
documentary” impulse is not, of course,
traceable to technology, and other camera
technologies, although more cumbersome, were
also employed.11 Many photographers were
eager to use photographs to inform and mobilize
political movements – primarily by publishing
their work in the form of journal and newspaper
articles and photo essays. In the early part of the
century, until the end of the 1930s, photography
was used to reveal the processes of State behind
closed doors (Erich Salomon); to offer public
exposés of urban poverty and degradation (Lewis
Hine, Paul Strand; German photographers like
Alfred Eisenstaedt or Felix Mann who were
working for the popular photo press); to provide a
dispassionate visual “anatomization” of social
structure (August Sander’s interpretation of
Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity); to serve
as a call to arms, both literally (the newly
possible war photography, such as that by Robert
Capa, Gerda Taro, David Seymour) and
figuratively (the activist photo and newsreel
groups in various countries, such as the Workers
Film and Photo leagues in various U.S. cities);
and to support government reforms (in the
United States, Roosevelt’s Farm Security
Administration). Photography, for these and
other reasons, is generally excluded from
standard art histories, which thoroughly skews
the question of political commitment or
critique.12 In the contemporary moment,
however, the history of photography is far more
respectable, since photography has become a
favored contemporary commodity and needs a
historical tail (which itself constitutes a new
market); but the proscription of politically
engaged topicality is still widespread.13
European-style avant-gardism made a fairly
late appearance in the United States, but its
formally inscribed social critique offered,
approximately from the 1930s through the late
1940s, an updated, legible version of the
06/19
antimaterialist, and eventually anticonsumerist,
critique previously offered by turn-of-thetwentieth-century antimodernism. Modernism
is, inter alia, a conversation about progress, the
prospects of utopia, and the fear, doubt, and
horror over its costs, especially as seen from the
vantage point of the members of the intellectual
class. One strand of modernism led to Futurism’s
catastrophic worship of the machine and war
(and eventually to political fascism) but also to
utopian urbanism and International Style
architecture.14
Modernism notoriously exhibited a kind of
ambiguity or existential angst – typical problems
of intellectuals, one imagines, whose
identification, if any, with workers, peasants, and
proletarianized farm workers is maintained
almost wholly by sheer force of conviction in the
midst of a very different way of life – perhaps
linked experientially by related, though very
different, forms of alienation. Such hesitancy,
suspicion, or indifference is a fair approximation
of independence – albeit “blessedly” wellbehaved in not screaming for revolution – but
modernism, as suggested earlier, was suffused
with a belief in the transformative power of (high)
art. What do (most) modern intellectual elites do
if not distance themselves from power and
Still from Guy Debord, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, 1978.
08.18.10 / 21:55:33 UTC
express suspicion, sometimes bordering on
despair, of the entire sphere of life and mass
cultural production (the ideological apparatuses,
to borrow a term from Althusser)?15
Enlightenment beliefs in the transformative
power of culture, having recovered from
disillusionment with the French Revolution,
which had led to the Terror, were again shattered
by the monstrosity of trench warfare and aerial
bombing in the First World War (as with the
millenarianism of the present century, that of the
turn of the twentieth century was smashed by
war). Utopian hopes for human progress were
revived along with the left-leaning universalism
of interwar Europe but were soon to be ground
under by the Second World War. The successive
“extra-institutional” European avant-garde
movements that had challenged dominant
culture and industrial exploitation between the
wars, notably Dada and Surrealism, with their
very different routes to resisting social
domination and bourgeois aestheticism, had
dissipated before the war began. Such dynamic
gestures and outbursts are perhaps
unsustainable as long-term movements, but they
have had continued resonance in modern
moments of criticality.
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07/19
Germany had seen itself as the pinnacle of
Enlightenment culture; its wartime barbarism,
including the Nazis’ perverse, cruel, totalitarian
re-imaginings of German history and culture, was
an especial blow to the belief in the
transcendent powers of culture. Postwar Europe
had plenty to be critical about, but it was also
staring into the abyss of existentialist angst and
the loneliness of Being and Nothingness (and
Year Zero). In Western(ized) cultures during the
postwar period, a world-historical moment
centering on nuclear catastrophism, communist
Armageddon, and postcoloniality (empire shift),
the art that seemed best equipped to carry the
modernist burden was abstract painting, with its
avoidance of incident in favor of formal
investigations and a continued search for the
sublime. In a word, it was painting by
professionals, communicating in codes known
only to the select few, in a conscious echo of
other professional elites, such as research
scientists (a favorite analogy among its
admirers). Abstract painting was both serious
and impeccably uninflected with political
imagery, unlike the social realism of much of
American interwar painting. As cultural
hegemony was passing from France to the United
States, critical culture was muted, taking place
mostly at the margins, among poets, musicians,
novelists, and a few photographers and social
philosophers, including the New York School
poets and painters, among them those who came
to be called Abstract Expressionists.
The moment was brief: the double-barreled
shotgun of popular recognition and financial
success brought Abstract Expressionism low.
Any art that depends on critical distance from
social elites – but especially an art associated
rhetorically with transcendence, which
presupposes, one should think, a search for
authenticity and the expectations of approaching
it – has trouble defending itself from charges of
capitulation to the prejudices of a clientele. For
Abstract Expressionism, with its necessary
trappings of authenticity, grand success was
untenable. Suddenly well capitalized, as well as
lionized, as a high-class export by sophisticated
government internationalists, and increasingly
“appreciated” by mass-culture outlets, the
Abstract Expressionist enclave, a bohemian
mixture of native-born and émigré artists, fizzled
into irrelevance, with many of its participants
prematurely dead.
Abstract Expressionism, like all modernist
high culture, was understood to be a critical art,
yet it appeared, against the backdrop of ebullient
Resistanbul protesters demonstrating on September 5, 2009.
Jesse Jones, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany, 2009. video still.
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e-flux journal #12 — january 2010 Martha Rosler
Take the Money and Run? Can Political and Socio-critical Art “Survive”?
democratic/consumer culture, as detached from
the concerns of the everyday. How can there be
poetry after Auschwitz, or, indeed, pace Adorno,
after television? Bohemia itself (that semiartistic, semi-intellectual subculture, voluntarily
impoverished, disaffected, and anti-bourgeois)
could not long survive the changed conditions of
cultural production and, indeed, the pattern of
daily life in the postwar West. Peter Bürger’s
canonical thesis on the failure of the European
avant-gardes in prewar Europe has exercised a
powerful grip on subsequent narratives of the
always-already-dead avant-gardes.16 As I have
written elsewhere, expressionism, Dada, and
Surrealism were intended to reach beyond the
art world to disrupt conventional social reality
and thereby become instruments of liberation.
As Bürger suggests, the avant-garde intended to
replace individualized production with a more
collectivized and anonymous practice and
simultaneously to evade the individualized
address and restricted reception of art.17 The art
world was not destroyed as a consequence – far
from it: as Bürger notes, the art world, in a
maneuver that has become familiar, swelled to
encompass the avant-gardes, and their
techniques of shock and transgression were
absorbed as the production of the new.18 Anti-art
became Art, to use the terms set in opposition by
Allan Kaprow in the early 1970s, in his (similarly
canonical) articles in ArtNews and Art in America
on “the education of the un-artist.”19
In the United States, at least, after the war
the search for authenticity was reinterpreted as
a search for privatized, personal self-realization,
and there was general impatience with
aestheticism and the sublime. By the end of the
1950s, dissatisfaction with life in McCarthyist,
“conformist” America – in segregated, maledominated America – rose from a whisper,
cloistered in little magazines and journals, to a
hubbub. More was demanded of criticality – and
a lot less.
Its fetishized concerns fallen by the
wayside, Abstract Expressionism was
superseded by Pop art, which – unlike its
predecessor – stepped onto the world stage as a
commercially viable mode of artistic endeavor,
unburdened by the need to be anything but
flamboyantly inauthentic, eschewing nature for
human-made (or, more properly, corporate)
“second nature.” Pop, as figured in the brilliant
persona of Andy Warhol – the Michael Jackson of
the 1960s – gained adulation from the masses by
appearing to flatter them while spurning them.
For buyers of Campbell Soup trash cans, posters
of Marilyn or Jackie multiples, and banana
decals, no insult was apprehended nor criticism
taken, just as the absurdist costumes of Britain’s
mods and rockers, or even, later, the clothing
fetishes of punks or hip-hop artists, or of surfers
or teen skateboarders, were soon enough taken
as cool fashion cues by many adult observers –
even those far from the capitals of fashion, in
small towns and suburban malls.20
The 1960s were a robust moment, if not of
outspoken criticality in art, then of artists’
unrest, while the culture at large, especially the
“civil rights / youth culture / counterculture /
antiwar movement,” was more than restive,
attempting to re-envision and remake the
cultural and political landscape. Whether they
abjured or expressed the critical attitudes that
were still powerfully dominant in intellectual
culture, artists were chafing against what they
perceived as a lack of autonomy, made plain by
the grip of the market, the tightening noose of
success (though still nothing in comparison to
the powerful market forces and institutional
professionalization at work in the current art
world). In the face of institutional and market
ebullience, the 1960s saw several forms of revolt
by artists against commodification, including
deflationary tactics against glorification. One
may argue about each of these efforts, but they
nevertheless asserted artistic autonomy from
dealers, museums, and markets, rather than,
say, producing fungible items in a signature
brand of object production. So-called
“dematerialization”: the production of lowpriced, often self-distributed multiples;
collaborations with scientists (a continued
insistence on the experimentalism of unfettered
artistic imagination); the development of
multimedia or intermedia and other ephemeral
forms such as smoke art or performances that
defied documentation; dance based on ordinary
movements; the intrusion or foregrounding of
language, violating a foundational modernist
taboo, and even the displacement of the image
by words in Wittgensteinian language games and
conceptual art; the use of mass-market
photography; sculpture made of industrial
elements; earth art; architectural
deconstructions and fascinations; the adoption
of cheap video formats; ecological explorations;
and, quite prominently, feminists’ overarching
critique . . . all these resisted the special
material valuation of the work of art above all
other elements of culture, while simultaneously
disregarding its critical voice and the ability of
artists to think rationally without the aid of
interpreters. These market-resistant forms
(which were also of course casting aside the
genre boundaries of Greenbergian high
modernism), an evasive relation to commodity
and professionalization (careers), carried
forward the questioning of craft. The insistence
on seeing culture (and, perhaps more widely,
human civilization) as primarily characterized by
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e-flux journal #12 — january 2010 Martha Rosler
Take the Money and Run? Can Political and Socio-critical Art “Survive”?
rational choice – see under conceptualism –
challenged isolated genius as an essential
characteristic of artists and furthered the
(imaginary) alignment with workers in other
fields. These were not arts of profoundly direct
criticality of the social order.
An exception is art world feminism, which,
beginning in the late 1960s, as part of a larger,
vigorously critical and political movement,
offered an overt critique of the received wisdom
about the characteristics of art and artists and
helped mount ultimately successful challenges
to the reigning paradigm by which artists were
ranked and interpretation controlled. Feminism’s
far-reaching critique was quite effective in
forcing all institutions, whether involved in
education, publicity, or exhibition, to rethink
what and who an artist is and might be, what
materials art might be made of, and what art
meant (whether that occurred by way of overt
signification or through meaning sedimented into
formal expectations), replacing this with far
broader, more heterodox, and dynamic
categories. Whether feminist work took the form
of trenchant social observation or re-envisioned
formal approaches such as pattern painting, no
one failed to understand critiques posed by
works still seen as embedded in their social
matrix (thus rekindling, however temporarily, a
wider apprehension of coded “subtexts” in even
non-narrative work).
Another exception to the prevailing reactive
gambits in 1960s art was presented by two
largely Paris-based neo-Dada, neo-Surrealist
avant-garde movements, Lettrism and the
Situationist International (SI), both of which
mounted direct critiques of domination in
everyday life. The SI eventually split, in good
measure over whether to cease all participation
in the art world, with founding member Guy
Debord, a filmmaker and writer, among those
who chose to abandon that milieu.21 Naturally,
this group of rejectionists is the SI group whose
appreciation in the art world was revived in the
1980s following a fresh look at Debord’s Society
of the Spectacle (1967). The book proposes to
explain, in an elegant series of numbered
statements or propositions, how the commodity
form has evolved into a spectacular world
picture; in the postwar world, domination of the
labor force (most of the world’s people) by
capitalist and state capitalist societies is
maintained by the constant construction and
maintenance of an essentially false picture of
the world retailed by all forms of media, but
particularly by movies, television, and the like.
The spectacle, he is at pains to explain, is a
relationship among people, not among images,
thus offering a materialist, Marxist
interpretation. Interest in Debord was
symptomatic of the general trend toward a new
theoretical preoccupation with (in particular)
media theory, in post-Beaux Arts, post-Bauhaus,
postmodern art education in the United States
beginning in the late 1970s. The new art
academicism nurtured criticality in art and other
forms of theory-driven production, since artists
were being officially trained to teach art as a
source of income to fund their production rather
than simply to find markets.22
There had been a general presumption
among postwar government elites and their
organs (including the Ford Foundation) that
nurturing “creativity” in whatever form was good
for the national brand; predispositions toward
original research in science and technology and
art unencumbered by prescribed messages were
potent symbols of American freedom (of thought,
of choice . . .), further troubling artists’ rather
frantic dance of disengagement from market and
ideological mechanisms throughout the sixties.
In the United States in the late 1960s, President
Johnson’s Great Society included an expansive
vision of public support for the arts. In addition
to direct grants to institutions, to critics, and to
artists, nonprofit, artist-initiated galleries and
related venues received Federal money. This led
to a great expansion of the seemingly
uncapitalizable arts like performance, and video,
whose main audience was other artists.
Throughout the 1970s, the ideological
apparatuses of media, museum, and commercial
gallery were deployed in attempts to limit artists’
autonomy, bring them back inside the
institutions, and recapitalize art.23 A small EuroAmerican group of dealers, at the end of the
decade, successfully imposed a new market
discipline by instituting a new regime of very
large, highly salable neo-expressionist painting,
just as Reaganism set out to cripple, if not
destroy, public support for art. Art educators
began slowly adopting the idea that they could
sell their departments and schools as effective
in helping their students find gallery
representation by producing a fresh new line of
work. The slow decline of “theoretical culture” –
in art school, at least – had begun.
The Right-Republican assault on relatively
autonomous symbolic expression that began in
the mid-1980s and extended into the 1990s
became known as the “culture wars”; it
continues, although with far less prominent
attacks on art than on other forms of cultural
expression.24 Right-wing elites managed to
stigmatize and to restrict public funding of
certain types of art. Efforts to brand some work
as “communist,” meaning politically engaged or
subversive of public order, no longer worked by
the 1980s. Instead, U.S. censorship campaigns
have mostly taken the form of moral panics
Art Basel Miami. Photo Bill Wisser.
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meant to mobilize authoritarian-minded religious
fundamentalists in the service of destroying the
narrative and the reality of the liberal welfare
state, of “community,” echoing the “degenerate
art” smear campaigns of the Nazis. Collectors
and some collecting institutions perceived the
éclat of such work – which thematized mostly
sex and sexual inequality (in what came to be
called “identity politics”) as opposed to, say,
questions of labor and governance, which were
the targets in earlier periods of cultural combat –
as a plus, with notoriety no impediment to
fortune.25 The most vilified artists in question
have not suffered in the marketplace; on the
contrary. But most public exhibiting institutions
felt stung and reacted accordingly – by shunning
criticality, since their funding and museum
employment were tied to public funding.
Subsequent generations of artists, divining that
“difficult” content might restrict their entry into
the success cycle, have engaged in selfcensorship. Somewhat perversely, the public
success of the censorship campaigns stems
partly from the myth of a classless, unitary
culture: the pretense that in the United States,
art and culture belong to all and that very little
specific knowledge or education is, or should be,
necessary for understanding art. But legibility
itself is generally a matter of education, which
addresses a relatively small audience already
equipped with appropriate tools of
decipherment, as I have claimed throughout the
present work and elsewhere.
But there is another dimension to this
struggle over symbolic capital. The art world has
expanded enormously over the past few decades
and unified to a great degree, although there are
still local markets. This market is “global” in
scope and occupied with questions very far from
whether its artistic practices are political or
critical. But thirty years of theory-driven art
production and critical reception – which
brought part of the discursive matrix of art inside
the academy, where it was both shielded from
and could appear to be un-implicated in the
market, thereby providing a cover for direct
advocacy – helped produce artists whose
practices were themselves swimming in a sea of
criticality and apparently anti-commodity
forms.26 The term “political art” reappeared after
art world commentators used it to ghettoize work
in the 1970s, with some hoping to grant such
work a modicum of respectability while others
wielded it dismissively, but for the most part its
valence was drifting toward positive. Even better
were other, better-behaved forms of “criticality,”
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e-flux journal #12 — january 2010 Martha Rosler
Take the Money and Run? Can Political and Socio-critical Art “Survive”?
such as the nicely bureaucratic-sounding
“institutional critique” and the slightly more
ominous “interventionism.” I will leave it to
others to explore the nuances of these (certainly
meaningful) distinctions, remarking only that the
former posits a location within the very
institutions that artists were attempting to
outwit in the 1960/70s, whereas the latter posits
its opposite, a motion outside the institution –
but also staged from within. These, then, are not
abandonments of art world participation but
acceptance that these institutions are the proper
– perhaps the only – platform for artists.27 A
further sign of such institutionality is the
emergence of a curatorial subgenre called “new
institutionalism” (borrowing a term from a wholly
unrelated branch of sociology) that encompasses
the work of sympathetic young curators wishing
to make these “engaged” practices intramural.
This suggests a broad consensus that the
art world, as it expands, is a special kind of subuniverse (or parallel universe) of discourses and
practices whose walls may seem transparent but
which floats in a sea of larger cultures. That may
be the means of coming to terms with the
overtaking of high-cultural meaning by mass
culture and its structures of celebrity, which had
sent 1960s artists into panic. Perhaps artists are
now self-described art workers, but they also
hope to be privileged members within their
particular sphere of culture, actually “working” –
like financial speculators – relatively little, while
depending on brain power and salesmanship to
score big gains. Seen in this context, categories
like political art, critical art, institutional
critique, and interventionism are ways of slicing
and dicing the offspring of art under the broad
rubric of conceptualism – some approaches
favor analyses and symbolic “interventions” into
the institutions in question, others more
externalized, publicly visible actions.
Perhaps a more general consideration of the
nature of work itself and of education is in order.
I have suggested that we are witnessing the
abandonment of the model of art education as a
search for meaning (and of the liberal model of
higher education in general) in favor of what has
come to be called the success model . . . “Down
with critical studies!” Many observers have
commented on the changing characteristics of
the international work force, with especial
attention to the “new flexible personality,” an
ideal worker type for a life without job security,
one who is able to construct a marketable
personality and to persuade employers of one’s
adaptability to the changing needs of the job
market. Commentators like Brian Holmes (many
of them based in Europe) have noted the
applicability of this model to art and
intellectuals.28 Bill Readings, until his death a
Canadian professor of comparative literature at
the Université de Montréal, in his posthumously
published book, The University in Ruins (1997),
observes that universities are no longer
“guardians of the national culture” but effectively
empty institutions that sell an abstract notion of
excellence.29 The university, Readings writes, is
“an autonomous bureaucratic corporation”
aimed at educating for “economic management”
rather than “cultural conflict.” The AngloAmerican urban geographer David Harvey,
reviewing Readings’ book in the Atlantic Monthly,
noted that the modern university “no longer
cares about values, specific ideologies, or even
such mundane matters as learning how to think.
It is simply a market for the production,
exchange, and consumption of useful
information – useful, that is, to corporations,
governments, and their prospective
employees.”30 In considering the “production of
subjectivity” in this context, Readings writes –
citing the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben –
that it is no longer a matter of either shop-floor
obedience or managerial rationality but rather
the much touted “flexibility,” “personal
responsibility,” “communication skills,” and other
similarly “abstract images of affliction.”31
Agamben has provocatively argued that
most of the world’s educated classes are now
part of the new planetary petite bourgeoisie,
which has dissolved all social classes, displacing
or joining the old petite bourgeoisie and the
urban proletariat and inheriting their economic
vulnerability. In this end to recognizable national
culture, Agamben sees a confrontation with
death out of which a new self-definition may be
born – or not. Another Italian philosopher, Paolo
Virno, is also concerned with the character of the
new global workforce in the present post-Fordist
moment, but his position takes a different tack
in works like The Grammar of the Multitude, a
slim book based on his lectures.32
The affinity between a pianist and a waiter,
which Marx had foreseen, finds an
unexpected confirmation in the epoch in
which all wage labor has something in
common with the “performing artist.” The
salient traits of post-Fordist experience
(servile virtuosity, exploitation of the very
faculty of language, unfailing relation to the
“presence of others,” etc.) postulate, as a
form of conflictual retaliation, nothing less
than a radically new form of democracy.33
Virno argues that the new forms of globalized
“flexible labor” allow for the creation of new
forms of democracy. The long-established dyads
of public/private and collective/individual no
longer have meaning, and collectivity is enacted
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in other ways. The multitude and immaterial
labor produce subjects who occupy “a middle
region between ‘individual and collective’” and so
have the possibility of engineering a different
relationship to society, state, and capital. It is
tempting to assign the new forms of
communication to this work of the creation of “a
radically new form of democracy.”
Let us tease out of these accounts of the
nature of modern labor – in an era in which
business types (like Richard Florida) describe the
desired work force, typically urban residents, as
“creatives” – some observations about artistsin-training: art students have by now learned to
focus not on an object-centered brand signature
so much as on a personality-centered one. The
cultivation of this personality is evidently seen by
some anxious school administrators – feeling
pressure to define “art” less by the adherence of
an artist’s practice to a highly restricted
discourse and more in the terms used for other
cultural objects – as hindered by critical studies
and only to be found behind a wall of craft. (Craft
here is not to be understood in the medieval
sense, as bound up in guild organization and the
protection of knowledge that thereby holds down
the number of practitioners, but as reinserted
into the context of individualized, bravura
production – commodity production in
particular.) Class and study time give way to
studio preparation and exposure to a train of
invited, and paid, reviewers/critics (with the
former smacking of boot camp, and the latter
sending up whiffs of corruption).
It might be assumed that we art world
denizens, too, have become neoliberals, finding
validation only within the commodity-driven
system of galleries, museums, foundations, and
magazines, and in effect competing across
borders (though some of us are equipped with
advantages apart from our artistic talents), a
position evoked at the start of this essay in the
question posed by an artist in his twenties
concerning whether it is standard practice for
ambitious artists to seek to sell themselves to
the rich in overseas venues.
But now consider the art world as a
community – in Benedict Anderson’s terms, an
imagined community – of the most powerful
kind, a postnational one kept in ever-closer
contact by emerging systems of publicity and
communication alongside other, more traditional
print journals, publicity releases, and informal
organs (although it does not quite achieve
imaginary nationhood, which is Anderson’s true
concern).34
Mark Lombardi, World Finance
Corporation, Miami, Florida, c.
1970-79 (6th Version), 1999,
Graphite and Colored Pencil
on Paper, 35.5 x 46.25", detail.
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e-flux journal #12 — january 2010 Martha Rosler
Take the Money and Run? Can Political and Socio-critical Art “Survive”?
The international art world (I am treating it
here as a system) is entering into the globalizing
moment of “flexible accumulation” – a term
preferred by some on the left to “(economic)
postmodernism” as a historical periodization.
After hesitating over the new global image game
(in which the main competition is mass culture),
the art world has responded by developing
several systems for regularizing standards and
markets. Let me now take a minute to look at this
newly evolving system itself.35
The art world had an earlier moment of
internationalization, especially in the interwar
period, in which International Style architecture,
design, and art helped unify the look of elite
cultural products and the built environment of
cities around the globe. Emergent nationalisms
modified this only somewhat, but International
Style lost favor in the latter half of the twentieth
century. In recent times, under the new “global”
imperative, three systemic developments have
raised art world visibility and power. First,
localities have sought to capitalize on their art
world holdings by commissioning buildings
designed by celebrity architects. But high-profile
architecture is a minor, small-scale maneuver,
attracting tourists, to be sure, but functioning
primarily as a symbolic assertion that that
particular urban locale is serious about being
viewed as a “player” in the world economic
system. The Bilbao effect is not always as
powerful as hoped. The era of blockbuster shows
– invented in the 1970s to draw in crowds, some
say by the recently deceased Thomas P. F. Hoving
in his tenure at New York’s Metropolitan Museum
of Art – may be drawing to a close, saving
museums from ever-rising expenditures on
collateral costs such as insurance; it is the
container more than the contents that is the
attractant.
More important have been the two other
temporary but recurrent, processual
developments. First came the hypostatizing
biennials of the 1990s. Their frantic proliferation
has elicited derision, but these international
exhibitions were a necessary moment in the
integration of the art system, allowing local
institutional players to put in their chips. The
biennials have served to insert an urban locale,
often of some national significance, into the
international circuit, offering a new physical site
attracting art and art world members, however
temporarily. That the local audience is educated
about new international style imperatives is a
secondary effect to the elevation of the local
venue itself to what might crudely be termed
“world class” status; for the biennials to be truly
effective, the important audience must arrive
from elsewhere. The biennial model provides not
only a physical circuit but also a regime of
production and normalization. In “peripheral”
venues it is not untypical for artists chosen to
represent the local culture to have moved to
artist enclaves in fully “metropolitan,” “first
world” cities (London, New York, Berlin, Paris –
regarded as portals to the global art
market/system), before returning to their
countries of origin to be “discovered.” The
airplane allows a continued relationship with the
homeland; expatriation can be prolonged,
punctuated by time back home. This condition, of
course, defines migrant and itinerant labor of all
varieties under current conditions, as it follows
the flow of capital.”36
I recently received a lengthy, manifestostyle e-mail, part of an “open letter to the
Istanbul Biennial,” that illustrates the critique of
biennials with pretensions to political art
(characteristic also of the past three iterations of
documenta – a “pentennial” or “quinquennial” if
you will, rather than a biennial – in Kassel,
Germany).37 It is signed by a group calling itself
the Resistanbul Commissariat of Culture:
We have to stop pretending that the
popularity of politically engaged art within
the museums and markets over the last few
years has anything to do with really
changing the world. We have to stop
pretending that taking risks in the space of
art, pushing boundaries of form, and
disobeying the conventions of culture,
making art about politics makes any
difference. We have to stop pretending that
art is a free space, autonomous from webs
of capital and power. . . .
We have long understood that the Istanbul
Biennial aims at being one of the most
politically engaged transnational art
events. . . . This year the Biennial is quoting
comrade Brecht, dropping notions such as
neoliberal hegemony, and riding high
against global capitalism. We kindly
appreciate the stance but we recognize
that art should have never existed as a
separate category from life. Therefore we
are writing you to stop collaborating with
arms dealers. . . .
The curators wonder whether Brecht’s
question “What Keeps Mankind Alive” is
equally urgent today for us living under the
neoliberal hegemony. We add the question:
“What Keeps Mankind Not-Alive?” We
acknowledge the urgency in these times
when we do not have the right to work, we
do not get free healthcare and education,
our right to our cities, our squares, and
streets are taken by corporations, our land,
15/19
our seeds and water are stolen, we are
driven into precarity and a life without
security, when we are killed crossing their
borders and left alone to live an uncertain
future with their potential crises. But we
fight. And we resist in the streets not in
corporate spaces reserved for tolerated
institutional critique so as to help them
clear their conscience. We fought when
they wanted to kick us out of our
neighborhoods …..
The curators also point out that one of the
crucial questions of this Biennial is “how to
‘set pleasure free,’ how to regain
revolutionary role of enjoyment.” We set
pleasure free in the streets, in our streets.
We were in Prague, Hong Kong, Athens,
Seattle, Heilegendamm [sic], Genoa,
Chiapas and Oaxaca, Washington, Gaza and
Istanbul!39 Revolutionary role of enjoyment
is out there and we cherish it everywhere
because we need to survive and we know
that we are changing the world with our
words, with our acts, with our laughter. And
our life itself is the source of all sorts of
pleasure.
The Resistanbul Commissariat of Culture
message ends as follows:
Join the resistance and the insurgence of
imagination! Evacuate corporate spaces,
liberate your works. Let’s prepare works
and visuals (poster, sticker, stencil etc.) for
the streets of the resistance days. Let’s
produce together, not within the white
cube, but in the streets and squares during
the resistance week! Creativity belongs to
each and every one of us and can’t be
sponsored.
Long live global insurrection!
This “open letter” underlines the criticism to
which biennials or any highly visible exhibitions
open themselves when they purport to take on
political themes, even if participants and visitors
are unlikely to receive such e-mailed
messages.40 As the letter implies, dissent and
dissidence that fall short of insurrection and
unruliness are quite regularly incorporated into
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Take the Money and Run? Can Political and Socio-critical Art “Survive”?
The message goes on to list specific struggles in
Turkey for housing, safety, job protections, and
so on, which space limitations constrain me to
omit.38 I was interested in the implied return of
the accusation that sociocritical/political work is
boring and negative, addressed further in this email:
exhibitions, as they are into institutions such as
universities in liberal societies; patronizing
attitudes, along the lines of “Isn’t she pretty
when she’s angry!” are effective – even President
Bush smilingly called protesters’ shouts a proof
of the robustness of “our” freedom of speech
while they were being hustled out of the hall
where he was speaking. But I suggest that the
undeniable criticisms expressed by Resistanbul
do not, finally, invalidate the efforts of
institutional reform, however provisional. All
movements against an institutional consensus
are dynamic, and provisional. (And see below.)
Accusations of purely symbolic display, of
hypocrisy, are easily evaded by turning to, finally,
the third method of global discipline, the art fair,
for fairs make no promises other than sales and
parties; there is no shortage of appeals to
pleasure. There has been a notable increase in
the number and locations of art fairs in a short
period, reflecting the art world’s rapid
monetization; art investors, patrons, and
clientele have shaken off the need for internal
processes of quality control in favor of speededup multiplication of financial and prestige value.
Some important fairs have set up satellite
branches elsewhere.41 Other important fairs are
satellites that outshine their original venues and
have gone from the periphery of the art world’s
vetting circuit to center stage. At art fairs,
artworks are scrutinized for financial-portfolio
suitability, while off-site fun (parties and
dinners), fabulousness (conspicuous
consumption), and non-art shopping are the
selling points for the best-attended fairs – those
in Miami, New York, and London (and of course
the original, Basel). Dealers pay quite a lot to
participate, however, and the success of the fair
as a business venture depends on the dealers’
ability to make decent sales and thus to want to
return in subsequent years.
No discursive matrix is required for
successful investments by municipal and
national hosts in this market. Yet art fairs have
delicately tried to pull a blanket of respectability
over the naked profit motive, by installing a
smattering of curated exhibitions among the
dealers’ booths and hosting on-site conferences
with invited intellectual luminaries. But perhaps
one should say that discursive matrices are
always required, even if they take the form of
books and magazines in publishers’ fair booths;
but intellectuals talking in rooms and halls and
stalking the floor – and being interviewed – can’t
hurt.
Predictions about the road to artistic
success in this scene are easy to make, because
ultimately shoppers are in for a quick fix (those
Russians!) and increasingly are unwilling to
spend quality time in galleries learning about
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Take the Money and Run? Can Political and Socio-critical Art “Survive”?
artists and their work: after all, why bother? The
art content of these containers and markets
should thus avoid being excessively arcane and
hard to grasp, love, and own; and to store or lend.
Many can literally be carried out under a
collector’s arm. The work should be painting, if
possible, for so many reasons, ranging from the
symbolic artisanal value of the handmade to the
continuity with traditional art historical
discourse and the avoidance of overly
particularistic political partisanship except if
highly idiosyncratic or expressionist. The look of
solemnity will trump depth and incisive
commentary every time; this goes for any form,
including museum-friendly video installations,
film, animation, computer installations, and
salable performance props (and conceptualismlite). Young artists (read: recent art-school
graduates) are a powerful attraction for buyers
banking on rising prices.
The self-described Resistanbul
Commissariat writes of “the popularity of
politically engaged art within the museums and
markets” – well, perhaps. The art world core of
cognoscenti who validate work on the basis of
criteria that set it apart from a broad audience
may favor art with a critical edge, though not
perhaps for the very best reasons. Work engaged
with real-world issues or exhibiting other forms
of criticality may offer a certain satisfaction and
flatters the viewer, provided it does not too
baldly implicate the class or subject position of
the viewer. Criticality can take many forms,
including highly abstract ones (what I have called
“critique in general,” which often, by implicating
large swathes of the world or of humankind,
tends to let everyone off the hook), and can
execute many artful dodges. Art history’s
genealogical dimension often leads to the
acceptance of “politico-critical” work from past
eras, and even of some contemporary work
descended from this, which cannot help but
underscore its exchange value. Simply put, to
some connoisseurs and collectors, and possibly
one or two museum collections, criticality is a
stringently attractive brand. Advising collectors
or museums to acquire critical work can have a
certain sadistic attraction, directed both toward
the artist and the work and toward the
advisee/collector.
A final common feature of this new global
art is a readily graspable multiculturalism that
creates a sort of United Nations of global voices
on the menu of art production. Multiculturalism,
born as an effort to bring difference out of the
negative column into the positive with regard to
qualities of citizens, long ago became also a
bureaucratic tool for social control, attempting
to render difference cosmetic. Difference was
long ago pegged as a marketing tool in
constructing taste classes; in a business book of
the 1980s on global taste, the apparently
universal desire for jeans and pizza (and later,
Mexican food) was the signal example: the
marketable is different but not too different. In
this context, there is indeed a certain bias
toward global corporate internationalism – that
is, neoliberalism – but that of course has nothing
to do with whether “content providers” identify
as politically left, right, independent, or not at
all. Political opinions, when they are manifested,
can become mannerist tropes.
But often the function of biennials and
contemporary art is also to make a geopolitical
situation visible to the audience, which means
that art continues to have a mapping and even
critical function in regard to geopolitical
realities. Artists have the capacity to condense,
anatomize, and represent symbolically complex
social and historical processes. In the context of
internationalism, this is perhaps where political
or critical art may have its best chance of being
seen and actually understood, for the critique
embodied in a work is not necessarily a critique
of the actual locale in which one stands (if it
describes a specific site, it may be a site
“elsewhere”). Here I ought provisionally to
suspend my criticism of “critique in general.” I
am additionally willing to suspend my critique of
work that might be classed under the rubric
“long ago or far away,” which in such a context
may also have useful educational and historical
functions – never forgetting, nonetheless, the
vulnerability to charges such as those made by
the Resistanbul group.
“Down with critical studies,” I wrote above,
and the present has indeed been seen as a postcritical moment, as any market-driven moment
must be . . . but criticality seems to be a modern
phoenix: even before the market froze over, there
had never been a greater demand on the part of
young art students for an entrée into critical
studies and concomitantly for an understanding
of predecessors and traditions of critical and
agitational work. I speculate that this is because
they are chafing under the command to succeed,
on market terms, and therefore to quit
experimenting for the sake of pleasure or
indefinable aims. Young people, as the hoary
cliché has it, often have idealistic responses to
received orthodoxy about humanity and wish to
repair the world, while some artists too have
direct experience of poverty and social negativity
and may wish to elevate others – a matter of
social justice. Young artists perennially reinvent
the idea of collaborative projects, which are the
norm in the rest of the world of work and
community and only artificially discouraged, for
the sake of artistic entrepreneurism and
“signature control,” in the art-market world.42
This essay began as a talk at the Shanghai Contemporary Art
Fair in September of 2009, on the symposium’s assigned
topic, “What is Contemporary Art?” – a perfectly impossible
question, in my opinion (although I could imagine beginning,
perhaps, by asking, “What makes contemporary art
contemporary?”). Nevertheless, talk I did. My efforts in
converting that talk, developed for a non-U.S. audience, with
unknown understandings of my art world, into the present
essay have led me to produce what strikes me as a work
written by a committee of one – me – writing at various times
and for various readers. I long ago decided to take to heart
Brecht’s ego-puncturing suggestion – to recruit my own
writing in the service of talking with other audiences,
entering other universes of discourses, to cannibalize it if
need be.
There are lines of argument in this essay that I have made use
of at earlier conferences (one of which lent it the title “Take
the Money and Run”), and there are other self-quotations or
paraphrases. I also found myself reformulating some things I
have written before, returning to the lineage and
development of artistic autonomy, commitment, alienation,
and resistance, and to the shape and conditions of artistic
reception and education.
I thank Alan Gilbert, Stephen Squibb, and Stephen Wright for
their excellent readerly help and insights as I tried to impose
clarity, coherence, and some degree of historical adequacy on
the work.
08.18.10 / 21:55:33 UTC
17/19
e-flux journal #12 — january 2010 Martha Rosler
Take the Money and Run? Can Political and Socio-critical Art “Survive”?
I return to the question posed above,
“whether choosing to be an artist means aspiring
to serve the rich . . .” Time was when art school
admonished students not to think this way, but
how long can the success academy hang on
while galleries are not to be had? (Perhaps the
answer is that scarcity only increases
desperation; the great pyramid of struggling
artists underpinning the few at the pinnacle
simply broadens at the base.) Nevertheless,
artists are stubborn. The “Resistanbul” writers
tell us they “resist in the streets not in corporate
spaces reserved for tolerated institutional
critique,” as some artists do in order to “help
them clear their conscience.” For sure. There are
always artworks, or art “actions,” that are
situated outside the art world or that “cross-list”
themselves in and outside the golden ghettos. I
am still not persuaded that we need to choose.
There is so far no end to art that adopts a critical
stance – although perhaps not always in the
market and success machine itself, where it is
always in danger of being seriously rewritten,
often in a process that just takes time. It is this
gap between the work’s production and its
absorption and neutralization that allows for its
proper reading and ability to speak to present
conditions.43 It is not the market alone, after all,
with its hordes of hucksters and advisers, and
bitter critics, that determines meaning and
resonance: there is also the community of artists
and the potential counterpublics they implicate.
×
Martha Rosler is an artist who works with multiple
media, including photography, sculpture, video, and
installation. Her interests are centered on the public
sphere and landscapes of everyday life – actual and
virtual – especially as they affect women. Related
projects focus on housing, on the one hand, and
systems of transportation, on the other. She has long
produced works on war and the “national security
climate,” connecting everyday experiences at home
with the conduct of war abroad. Other works, from bus
tours to sculptural recreations of architectural details,
are excavations of history.
2
I am confining my attention to
Western art history. It is helpful
to remember that the relatively
young discipline of art history
was developed as an aid to
connoisseurship and collection
and thus can be seen as au fond
a system of authentication.
3
By this I do not intend to ignore
the many complicating factors,
among them the
incommensurability of texts and
images, nor to assert that art, in
producing images to illustrate
and interpret prescribed
narratives, can remotely be
considered to have followed a
clear-cut doctrinal line without
interposing idiosyncratic,
critical, subversive, or partisan
messages, but the gaps between
ideas, interpretations, and
execution do not constitute a
nameable trend.
4
What has come to be known as
the “middle class” (or classes), if
this needs clarification,
comprised those whose
livelihoods derived from
ownership of businesses and
industries; they were situated in
the class structure between the
landed aristocracy which was
losing political power, and the
peasants, artisans, and newly
developing urban working class.
5
French sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu is the most prominent
theorist of symbolic capital and
the production and circulation of
symbolic goods; I am looking at
“The Market of Symbolic Goods,”
in The Field of Cultural
Production, ed. Randal Johnson
(New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993). This article, a bit
fixed in its categories, sketches
out the structural logic of
separation.
6
The first application of the term
7
Forms, rather than being empty
shapes, carry centuries of
Platonic baggage, most clearly
seen in architecture; formal
innovation in twentieth-century
high modernism, based on both
Kant and Hegel, was interpreted
as a search for another human
dimension.
18/19
to art is contested, some dating
it as late as the Salon des
Refusés of 1863.
9
John Fekete, The Critical
Twilight: Explorations in the
Ideology of Anglo-American
Literary Theory from Eliot to
McLuhan (New York: Routledge
& Keegan Paul, 1977). Especially
in Europe but also in the United
States, financial panics,
proletarian organizing, and
political unrest characterized
the latter half of the nineteenth
century.
10
Modernism in the other arts has
a similar trajectory without,
perhaps, the direct legacy or
influence of Sovietism or
workers’ movements.
11
The codification of social
observation in the nineteenth
century that included the birth
of sociology and anthropology
also spurred as-yet amateur
efforts to record social
difference and eventually to
document social inequality.
Before the development of the
Leica, which uses movie film,
other small, portable cameras
included the Ermanox, which
had a large lens but required
small glass plates for its
negatives; it was used, for
example, by the muckraking
lawyer Erich Salomon.
12
For example with regard to the
blurred line between
photography and commercial
applications, from home photos
to photojournalism (photography
for hire), a practice too close to
us in time to allow for a
reasoned comparison with the
long, indeed ancient, history of
commissioned paintings and
sculptures.
13
There is generally some tiny
space allotted to one or two
documentarians, above all for
those addressing dire conditions
in the global periphery.
14
Modernist linguistic
experiments are beyond my
scope here.
15
This is to overlook the role of
that major part of the
intellectual class directly
08.18.10 / 21:55:33 UTC
engaged in formulating the
ideological messages of ruling
elites. For one historical
perspective on the never-ending
debate over the role of
intellectuals vis-à-vis class and
culture, not to mention the
nation-state, see Julien Benda’s
1927 book La Trahison des Clercs
(The Betrayal of the Intellectuals;
literally: “The Treason of the
Learned”), once widely read but
now almost quaint.
16
See Peter Bürger, Theory of the
Avant-Garde (1974), trans.
Michael Shaw (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press,
1984), a work that has greatly
influenced other critics – in the
United States, notably Benjamin
Buchloh. On Bürger’s thesis, I
wrote, in “Video: Shedding the
Utopian Moment” (1983), that he
had described the activity of the
avant-garde as the self-criticism
of art as an institution, turning
against both “the distribution
apparatus on which the work of
art depends and the status of
art in bourgeois society as
defined by the concept of
autonomy.” I further quoted
Bürger: “the intention of the
avant-gardists may be defined
as the attempt to direct toward
the practical the aesthetic
experience (which rebels against
the praxis of life) that
Aestheticism developed. What
most strongly conflicts with the
means-end rationality of
bourgeois society is to become
life’s organizing principle.”
8
In his Biographia Literaria (1817),
the poet and theorist Samuel
Taylor Coleridge famously
distinguished between Fancy
and Imagination.
e-flux journal #12 — january 2010 Martha Rosler
Take the Money and Run? Can Political and Socio-critical Art “Survive”?
1
To belabor the point: if medieval
viewers read the symbolic
meaning of a painted lily in a
work with a Biblical theme, it
was because iconographic codes
were constantly relayed, while
religious stories were relatively
few. In certain late-nineteenthcentury Eng lish or French genre
paintings, as social histories of
the period recount, a
disheveled-looking peasant girl
with flowing locks and a jug from
which water pours unchecked
would be widely understood to
signify the sexual profligacy and
availability of attractive female
Others. Art has meanwhile freed
itself from the specifics of
stories (especially of history
painting), becoming more and
more abstract and formal in its
emphases and thus finally able
to appeal to a different
universality: not that of the
universal Church but of an
equally imaginary universal
culture (ultimately bourgeois
culture, but not in its mass
forms) and philosophy.
17
Ibid., 53.
18
Ibid., 53–54.
19
Allan Kaprow, “The Education of
the Un-Artist, Part I,” Art News,
February 1971; “The Education
of the Un-Artist, Part II,” Art
News, May 1972; “The Education
of the Un-Artist, Part III,” Art in
America, January 1974.
20
Nevertheless, in pop-related
subcultures, from punk to heavy
metal to their offshoots in
skateboarding culture,
authenticity is a dimension with
great meaning, a necessary
demand of any tight-knit group.
21
Debord was also a member, with
Isidore Isou, of the Lettrists,
which he similarly abandoned.
22
Thus the insistence of some
university art departments that
they were fine arts departments
and did not wish to offer, say,
graphic arts or other commercial
programs and courses (a battle
generally lost).
23
Again channeling Althusser.
24
The “culture wars” are
embedded in a broader attempt
to delegitimize and demonize
social identities, mores, and
behaviors whose public
expression was associated with
the social movements of the
1960s, especially in relation to
questions of difference.
25
This is not the place to argue the
importance of the new social
movements of the 1960s and
beyond, beyond my passing
attention to feminism, above;
rather, here I am simply pointing
to the ability of art institutions
and the market to strip work of
its resonance. As is easily
observable, the term “political
art” is reserved for work that is
seen to dwell on analysis or
critique of the state, wage labor,
economic relations, and so on,
with relations to sexuality and
sex work always excepted.
26
Recall my earlier remarks about
both the academicization of art
education and the function of art
history, a function now also
parceled out to art
reviewing/criticism.
27
A favorite slogan of the period
was “There is no outside.”
Another, more popularly
recognizable slogan might be
“Think different,” a slogan that
attempts to harness images of
powerful leaders of social
movements or “pioneers” of
scientific revolutions for the
service of commodity branding,
thus suggesting motion “outside
the box” while attempting never
to leave it. See the above
remarks on Bürger and the
theory of the avant-garde.
28
See Brian Holmes, “The Flexible
Personality: For a New Cultural
Critique” (2001),
http://theadventure.be/node/
253, or at
http://www.16beavergroup.org
/pdf/fp.pdf, and numerous other
sites; Holmes added a brief
forward to its publication at
eipcp (european institute for
progressive cultural policies),
http://transform.eipcp.net/t
ransversal/1106/holmes/en#re
dir.
29
Bill Readings, The University in
Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1997).
The relative invisibility of
Readings’ book seems traceable
to his sudden death just before
the book was released, making
him unavailable for book tours
and comment.
30
David Harvey, “University, Inc.,”
review of The University in Ruins,
by Bill Readings,” The Atlantic
(October 1998). Available online
at http://www.theatlantic.com/i
ssues/98oct/ruins.htm. Nothing
could be more indicative of the
post-Fordist conditions of
intellectual labor and the
readying of workers for the
knowledge industry than the
struggle over the U.S.’ premier
public university, the University
31
Readings, The University in
Ruins, 50.
32
Paulo Virno, A Grammar of the
Multitude: For an Analysis of
Contemporary Forms of Life,
trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James
Cascaito, and Andrea Casson
(Cambridge, Mass.:
Semiotext(e), 2003), also
available online at
http://www.generation-online
.org/c/fcmultitude3.htm. I have
imported this discussion of
Virno’s work from an online
essay of mine on left-leaning
political blogs in the United
States.
33
Ibid, 66–67.
34
See Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (New
York: Verso, 1983).
35
Here I will not take up the
question of museums’ curatorial
responses to this moment of
crisis in respect to their
definition and role in the twentyfirst century. I can only observe
that some elite museums have
apparently identified a need to
offer a more high-end set of
experiences, in order to set them
apart from the rest of our
burgeoning, highly corporatized
“experience economy.” At
present the main thrust of that
effort to regain primacy seems
to center on the elevation of the
most under-commodified form,
performance art, the form best
36
Since writing this, I have read
Chin-Tao Wu’s “Biennials
Without Borders?” – in New Left
Review 57 (May/June 2009):
107–115 – which has excellent
graphs and analyses supporting
similar points. Wu analyzes the
particular pattern of selection of
artists from countries on the
global “peripheries.”
19/19
positioned to provide museumgoers with embodied and
nonnarrative experiences (and
so far decidedly removed from
the world of the everyday or of
“politics” but situated firmly in
the realm of the aesthetic).
37
The 11th Istanbul Biennial ran
from September through
November, 2009, under the
curatorship of a Zagreb-based
collective known as What, How,
and for Whom (WHW), whose
members are Ivet Ćurlin, Ana
Dević, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina
Sabolović. Formed in 1999, the
group has run the city-owned
Gallery Nova since 2003. The
title of this biennial, drawn from
a song by Bertolt Brecht, is
“What Keeps Mankind Alive?”
38
The full version of the letter can
be found online at
http://etcistanbul.wordpress
.com/2009/09/02/open-letter/ .
39
Important sites of concerted
public demonstrations against
neoliberal economic
organizations and
internationally sanctioned state
domination and repression.
40
But they may well be offered
flyers.
41
The Shanghai Contemporary Art
Fair (where this paper was first
presented) is an outpost of the
Bologna Art Fair.
42
I experience some disquiet in the
realization that, as in so much
else, the return of the collective
has lingering over it not just the
workers’ councils of council
communism (not to mention
Freud’s primal horde) but the
quality circles of Toyota’s reengineering of car production in
the 1970s.
43
It is wise not to settle back into
the image-symbolic realm;
street actions and public
engagement are basic
requirements of contemporary
citizenship. If the interval
between the appearance of new
forms of resistance and
incorporation is growing ever
shorter, so is the cycle of
invention, and the pool of people
involved is manifestly much,
much larger.
08.18.10 / 21:55:33 UTC
e-flux journal #12 — january 2010 Martha Rosler
Take the Money and Run? Can Political and Socio-critical Art “Survive”?
of California system, the
birthplace of the “multiversity”
as envisioned by Clark Kerr in
the development of the UC
Master Plan at the start of the
1960s. State public universities,
it should be recalled, were
instituted to produce
homegrown professional elites;
but remarkably enough, as the
bellwether California system
was undergoing covert and overt
privatization and being
squeezed mightily by the state
government’s near insolvency,
the system’s president blithely
opined that higher education is a
twentieth-century issue,
whereas people today are more
interested in health care, and
humorously likened the
university to a cemetery
(Deborah Solomon, “Big Man on
Campus: Questions for Mark
Yudoff, New York Times
Magazine, September 24, 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/
09/27/magazine/27fob-q4-t.ht
ml?ref=magazine). The plan for
the California system seems to
be to reduce the number of
California residents attending in
favor of out-of-staters and
international students, whose
tuition costs are much higher.
For further comparison, it seems
that California now spends more
than any other state on
incarceration but is forty-eighth
in its expenditure on education.