Illiberal Arts

“If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we'll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy”.

In recent years a great many artists and art institutions have rallied around the defence of ‘artistic freedom’ and ‘free speech’, allegedly imperilled by the moralistic creep of ‘identity politics’ or what is colloquially known as ‘cancel culture’. Diverse as they may be – and I am here thinking for instance of the controversy surrounding Dalston’s LD50 gallery, which in 2017 was boycotted for organizing symposia with far-right ideologues like Brett Stevens (Amerika), Peter Brimelow (VDare), Mark Citadel (Return of Kings), or Nick Land (XenoSystems); the exhibition featuring Boyd Rice in Greenspon Gallery (2018); the 6th Athens Biennial (2018), titled “Anti,” accusing one of the invited artists of attempted censorship for denouncing the harassment he was subjected to by a posse of artists who had previously been informally involved with LD50; or the recent panel entitled ‘Cancel Culture: A Roundtable Discussion with Krist Gruijthuijsen, Mathieu Malouf, and Nina Power’, which took place at Spike magazine in Berlin in May 2019, where the discussion was centred around Mathieu Malouf’s ‘Tankie meme’, a sculpture trafficking on anti-Semitic imagery, as well as their subsequentsummer issue on ‘Immorality’. There is a twofold thread running through all of these controversies: 1) the insistence that far-right idioms, memes and tropes be read as aesthetic material, at a remove from the sphere of the political; 2) the idea that (mostly) white artists appropriating far right imagery subtracts from the far-right surge rather than adding to it.

There are, in my view, many problems with this approach, the first of which would be the adoption of a vocabulary (i.e. the adoption of terms such as ‘cancel culture’; ‘social justice warriors’; ‘political correctness gone mad’) and the arguments that truck with it, all of which were lionized by the far-right to attack LGBT and, most saliently, transgender students. The myth of a free speech crisis on campus has been manufactured as part of a broader culture war waged by the populist right against those who seek to root out oppression. The function of the term ‘cancel culture’ is to delegitimize those who organize themselves collectively to protest political positions – for instance the students and activists who picketed LD50 – by lumping them together with forms of mobbing that inhere in social media. In an era when the global far right has been in the ascendancy, ‘freedom of speech’ and its proxies, ‘academic freedom’ and ‘artistic freedom’, became part of an ideological arsenal via which those who are trying to widen the discussion around topics of gender and race are demonized for “shutting down debate.” The recent ‘A Letter on Justice and Open Debate’ published by Harper’s magazine on July 7, 2020, perfectly illustrates this point. Written against the backdrop of the BLM protests and an epidemic that laid bare the structural racism of western societies, the authors seek to “uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters”. That these protections do not extend to pro-Palestinian activists or supporters of the BDS movement is made glaringly obvious by the great number of the undersigned who actively campaigned to oust Muslim scholars from American academia. This is not a minor detail or an ad hominem attack, this is a structuring question – it points to the content of ‘free speech’, and indeed to its policies. What follows is my attempt to unpack this question by means of a few points I feel are worth considering.

Caustic Counter Speech

Freedom of speech is, juridically speaking, not an absolute right, hence the concept of hate speech which is not legally protected free speech in Europe for instance. It is however not the purpose of this article to engage in comparative law analysis. Rather, I would like to ask: what does it mean to advocate for a plurality of individual voices whose freedom is – paradoxically – predicated on popularizing positions inimical to collective diversity?

The concept of ‘free speech’ is, in all the above-mentioned examples, intimately tied to the freedom to, if need be, offend others. In order to be truly free, one must be able to transgress social norms – how else would freedom assert its autonomy? In a great many passionate defences of free speech, as Keston Sutherland argues, the conjunction between these two elements – freedom on the one hand, transgression on the other – “is presented as a parenthetical addition that however must imperatively be insisted on: we cannot say what free speech is without right away adding that giving offence is or may be essential to it”. Typically this giving offence is portrayed as an unsought, yet unavoidable, side effect of ‘saying it like it is’. From this perspective it is easy to see how, to paraphrase Sutherland, it might be, under certain circumstances, seen as one’s moral and historical duty to hurt other people in order for speech to free itself from the constraints of civility. Watching a Jewish friend struggling to hold back tears as she stared at ‘Tankie meme’ in disbelief, the logic of this argument hit me in its brutal concreteness: if the measure of freedom is transgression, the measure of transgression is the amount of pain one inflicts. As writer Morgan Quaintance put it, the “re-presentation of aesthetics of oppression (however indirect or cryptic) for impact and affect” does not further or broaden the ‘conversation’, rather, it furthers and broadens the narrative that oppression is inevitable.

It would be trivial to point out that complaints about political correctness are also too eager to brush off the pervasive oppression that unchecked microaggressions can inflict. Rather, I would argue that appeals to liberty in this narrow sense can (and often do) clash with a desire for freedom in a broader sense, contributing to political unfreedom. In other words, the conflict between ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘identity politics’ is not a conflict between freedom and unfreedom but a conflict between two divergent conceptions of freedom, namely freedom to harm and freedom from harm. Those who argue for the enjoyment of disinhibitions, predicated on inhibiting others, argue for a professional milieu able to secure their individual freedom to disenfranchise, to exploit, to demean, to delegitimize, and ultimately to silence any form of critique.

Rather than discussing free speech, or the lack thereof, I am thus interested in examining the conditions, under which the pain of others can become the measure of our freedom. I am interested in ongoing attempts to render aesthetic experience a direct extension of moral outrage. In other words, I am interested in sadistic cathexis, and the social function it performs. I am interested in the circumstances under which cruelty can mask as a principled stance and recruit the rhetoric of morals – the defence of freedom – to buttress an utterly immoral edifice. Finally, I am interested in how the defence of liberal values can acquire a use-value for those with an illiberal agenda.

Possessive Individualism

Principles, as Donald Kinder and Tali Mendelberg argue, are best understood in how they are ‘put to use’, how they are employed and for what ends. Arguments for freedom of ‘speech’ tend to place the whole normative weight on the value of the individual and his/her liberties, and essentially no emphasis on social obligations. The term that best describes this position is ‘possessive individualism’, a term coined by C.B. Macpherson to refer to the conception of the individual as the sole proprietor of his own capacities, owing nothing to society for them. The human essence, to paraphrase Macpherson, is freedom from dependence on the wills of others, and freedom is a function of self-possession. The relation of ownership, entails a very specific conception of the individual and his/her roles in the social world which consists of nothing but exchange between proprietors. Capitalist market society is the social world this ideology engenders. In turn, this market mediation structures a set of assumptions that is ill-suited to recognizing the structural dimension of racial and gender inequality. As a result, “today prejudice is expressed primarily in the language of individualism” such that it is “virtually impossible to invoke individualism” – and by extension, individual freedoms – “without race also being implicated in the conversation”. Prejudice is always expressed in a language white Americans and white Europeans find familiar and compelling; in other words, racial animosity is always expressed in the language of principle. This is why the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten’s controversial publication of 12 cartoons depicting Muhammad in 2005 was understood as a legitimate exercise of free speech rather than an expression of animosity towards Muslim minorities in Europe. This is also why the public debate about the Muhammad cartoons was adjacent to a surge of fantasies of reverse colonisation involving the subjugation of white people. Individualism is, at once, the way race is experienced and the way race is occluded. Individualism also allows one to acknowledge that inequality exists without accepting it exists as the result of historical injustice, thereby focusing on questions of ‘temperament’ and ‘culture’ to explain the lack of commitment to ‘humanist values’. The cartoons function like a Rorschach test: if you feel humiliated or offended by something done with the deliberate intent to humiliate and offend, you lack the type of temperament that would enable you to live in a Western liberal society.

Aesthetic judgement

The term ‘aesthetics’ – introduced into the philosophical lexicon during the eighteenth century – is predicated on a discontinuity; the aesthetic experience is in some way severed from sensory experience. From Kant onwards, and here I am mostly paraphrasing Jacques Rancière, detachment becomes the hallmark of the aesthetic. This entails a double negation: its object is neither an object of knowledge nor an object of desire. It is this sleight of hand that allows one to think about an aesthetic value as a universal value. But by introducing the notion of disinterest, Kant also brought the concept of taste into opposition with the concept of morality. At the beginning of his Critique of Judgement, he illustrates his reasoning with the example of a palace in which the aesthetic judgement isolates the form alone, disinterested in knowing whether a mass of the working poor had toiled under the harshest of conditions in order to build it. The human toll, Kant says, must be ignored in order to aesthetically appreciate an artwork. Clearly this is not a descriptive discourse, it is a prescriptive one. The aesthetic, as David Lloyd argues, functions as a “regulative discourse of the human” on which not only the political but most importantly, “the racial order of modernity rests”. The modern, liberal subject submits the objects he encounters to his aesthetic judgement. He never collapses into the object, he does not give in to emotionalism.

But the neat division which the aesthetic regime institutes between subject and object hides another, racial, division so that the distinction between subject and object is in fact a distinction between subject and subject. The mark of the liberal subject is his detachment or disinterest, in brief, his autonomy. To become such an autonomous subject, as Lloyd sustains, is “the precondition for participation in the public sphere”. Conversely the inability to exert an autonomous, disinterested judgement becomes the criterion for judgement. If you are offended by a cartoon, you are failing to meet the bar for inclusion. Last but not least, because the aesthetic judgement is not predicated on subjective, personal taste, it can stake a claim to ‘reason’ and by extension, universality. The aesthetic judgement sets in motion a distribution of predicates that distinguish the universal, rational, autonomous subject from the partial, non-autonomous or pathological one, unable to free himself from his particular drives, needs or desires. This is why Kant,the great enlightenment philosopher, was in favour of slavery: it is not wrong to enslave those who are incapable of autonomy; they are, as it were, already unfree, already living in a condition of enslavement to their animal nature, subjected to need, fear, or superstition. Insofar as the racialized subject is defined by this state of necessity, to quote Lloyd, the aesthetic regime remains “not contingently but immanently a racial schema”.

Artistic autonomy

In its strict meaning, as Peter Bürger notes, the term ‘artistic autonomy’ is an ideological category that blends together an element of truth (the praxis of art is not totally assimilated to social praxis) with an element of untruth (the hypostatization of this fact, the result of an historical process, is misrecognized as the ‘essence’ of art). The category ‘art’ in Western modernity could be thus construed as designating the alienation of artistic labor from other forms of labor. While labour as an alienation of experience is opposed to art as a totalization of experience, the artwork, first defetishized, is refetishized as exemplary product. This appeal to a value beyond monetary value is that which guarantees the artworks market value, at once a priceless and pricey commodity.

In this conception, to quote Nicole Demby, “the formal progression of Western art is both teleological and divorced from history, the product of Oedipal overcoming or individual psychological reaction or the whim of genius”. Contemporary art, lionized as an unassailable realm of cultural expression, functions, by virtue of its manufactured ahistoricity, as a container for this concept of absolute freedom: “a realm of abstract representation in which new subjectivities can hypothetically be imagined”, allegedly able to break free from the constraints of capitalist hegemony;as a “domain of creativity and imagination in which we enjoy the freedom denied to us in the actual world of domination” which, through its compensatory qualities, naturalises forms of life lived under the rule of property.

The ongoing boundary disputes and attendant panic rocking the art world evacuate the notion of artistic autonomy. But heteronomy is, to quote Andrew Wiener, extremely “difficult to negotiate because it radically impacts not just the form and content of art, but its definition, indeed its very ontology”.

Ironic nihilism

In his essay on laughter, Le Rire: Essay sur la signification du comique, French philosopher Henri Bergson asks “why do we laugh at black people?”. This is a rhetorical question. Bergson assumes everyone finds black skin funny because it looks like white skin covered in soot, unwashed (mal lavé), if you will. I am not mentioning this because I intend to shame Bergson or because I wish to comment on the racism of blackface but because laughter is often wielded as a tool of ridicule. In spite of the fact that humour, irony or satire have been associated with the left in a postwar context, neither are politically aligned. Central to laughter is rather the “thingification” or “reduction of the human to an object” which has the “dual function of othering” those targeted, while establishing an affinity between those who are in on the joke. Identification is here predicated on absence of empathy, the process of defining community is predicated on an attendant process of exclusion from the community. Laughter is a form of freedom, yet this freedom is often a measure of violence.

Ironic nihilism is the (official) existential philosophy of the alt-right. But there is wider cultural convergence between theory, lifestyle and an attitude of scornful or jaded negativity in the genre known as ‘post-irony’ which arches back to what Mark Greif termed ‘the white hipster’, which in his words “fetishized the violence, instinctiveness, and rebelliousness of lower-middle-class ‘white trash’”, signaling that “whiteness and capital were flowing back into the formerly impoverished city”. Figures like Vice founder Gavin McInnes – who told a Times journalist in 2003, “I love being white, and I think it’s something to be proud of” or hoaxer Sam Hyde, whose show Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace opened on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim with Hyde in blackface – stand at the intersection between stoner, nerd, and white supremacist.

Like any other cultural modality of expression, irony is context-specific. Contemporary irony must be understood as part and parcel of a wider historical trajectory in which market capitalism as world ecology transmogrified from weak utopia to strong dystopia. As David Foster Wallace argued, the attachment to irony reflects a shift from the conceptualization of art as a creative instantiation of real values to the conceptualization of art as a creative deviance from bogus values. But this self-congratulatory celebration of one’s capacity to see through deception and hypocrisy does not necessarily serve an exclusively negative function. Anyone asking an ironist what s/he really means, as Foster Wallace put it, will “end up looking like a hysteric or a prig”. The muddling of intent is also what allows the magazine Jungle World to call “Tankie meme” anti-anti-Semitic artwork, or what allows shoppers wearing masks with Nazi swastikas emblazoned on them to claim to be opposing rather than espousing Nazi ideology.

Irony’s ability to derail ethical questions also facilitates the reversal of its social function, from authority-challenging to authority-affirming. By evacuating the political, irony affirms the ideology it claims to devalue or disregard via a negation of any potential or putative alternatives and, to return to Quaintance’s argument, furthers the perception that oppression is unavoidable. Dilute and malign, this form of irony also serves an individuating function which forecloses collectivity by eroding investment in community-building while maximizing the subject’s (individual) self-contentment and sense of superiority.

Friedrich Nietzsche understood nihilism as a question of valuation, a backhanded compliment to conviction and truth. Geopolitically speaking, the present moment could be defined by a process of de-Westernization — the West is rapidly losing its position of dominance –– and by the emergence of China as the probable victor in the ongoing dispute over control of the colonial extraction matrix. As pressures on white privilege mount, and old values are challenged and revalued, ironic nihilism preaches the devaluation of everything. Not only are all values devalued but also the standards by which values are weighed is upended. In its place, ironic nihilism imposes itself as the new principle of valuation, recovering the totalizing dimension of white eschatology, now simply negativized. From this perspective, the ongoing ‘cultural wars’ could be seen as a proxy for a greater battle around de-Westernization, imperialism and white hegemony.

Transgression

Though often associated with the theme of conflict with the social order which defines the counterculture, the desire to subvert or transgress moral codes does not necessarily have a politics; it is, rather, contingent to the current consensus. Whereas the traditional usage of the term ‘alternative’ signals a position that is skeptical of, and in a great many ways incompatible with power, the ‘alternative’ in alt-right largely unmoored from the politics of transgression traditionally aligned with a progressive project. Instead it points towards a counterculture that yearns for tradition, or, in other words, a libertarian resistance with an authoritarian program — a trend that is now known as the alt-light. The typical alt-light stick, has been to flirt with racist idioms and tropes ironically, in order to claim plausible deniability and dodge responsibility for one’s choices, aesthetic and otherwise. This strategy hinges on what Gregory Bateson called a more complex form of play: “For a game to be a game the participants have to agree on the protocols that frame their interaction”. So-called edgelords, to quote John Durham Peters, like to “claim the prerogative to define an interaction as play when their conduct makes that frame completely unclear”. Their ‘game’ is constructed not upon the premise ‘this is play’ but rather around the question ‘is this play?’” –– a type of interaction that finds its ritual forms in hazing or initiation practices. Privilege denotes the prerogative to define and control the frame of interaction: “When a troll bites, he always claims it is a play bite, even if the victim bleeds”. Semiotic violence is violence regardless of its putative nexus to real, material violence. Occluding violence is a violent act – howbeit one that does not often appear as such, because the institutional weight falls on its side.Hence the insistence chauvinistic epistemes be read as irony, no matter how hurtful or distressing others might experience them to be. Hence the insistence on freedom of speech and freedom of expression as the threshold demarking those who are reasonable and civil, from those irrational, uncivil others, in brief, demarking the savages from the settlers.

Overidentification, Pastiche, Affirmation, Mimicry

The movement which became known as the alt-right – which, despite ongoing attempts to forge alliances with the traditional far right, still remains intensely supra-structural – was fuelled by its aesthetics rather than by its politics. The contemporary art milieu proved particularly susceptible to this far-right creep because several of its conventions of plasticity and meaning production devices – like irony, transgression, over-identification, affirmation and pastiche – by virtue of their ambivalent nature lend themselves to appropriation, hence have a use-value for the alt-right. Vaporwave, for instance, a genre brimming with selective nostalgia, began as a form of postmodern pastiche. As the ethos of the tech industry transmogrified, shifting from the market-besotted optimism championed by Bill Gates to the digital feudalism represented by Bay Area neoreactionaries and cybermonarchists, vaporwave transmogrified along with it, spawning two white ethno-nationalist subgenres: fashwave and Trumpwave. Though Fashwave has an ominous feel, most of its constitutive elements are already present in the retro-futuristic imaginary of vaporwave – ‘the Whitest style ever’ according to Andrew Anglin, the founder of the Daily Stormer – in the way it combined images of Greco-Roman marbles with Tron-like grids, pastel colours and palm trees, tying the mythical origin of white civilisation to the American Dream and the joyful promises of the early internet years. Drawing heavily from internet imageboard culture, the post-internet style could be construed as a global visual idiom that conflates the vectors of Silicon Valley commodity space with the strategy space of the US empire.

If a great many contemporary artists can, at present, oscillate between the positions of Andy Warhol and Arno Breker, it is because art audiences have been trained to recognise affirmation as a critical gesture ever since Pop was marketed as a significant conceptual turn. As a result their works can play two dissonant registers at once, in a back and forth dance that could also be described as the – wholly undialectical – relation between law-making and law-breaking in the social media’s carnival.

Contemporary art hasn’t been able to think through the contradictions between what it purports to do and what it inadvertently does because its means and modes of ideation are particularly ill-suited for this task. As Lauren Berlant has argued, the same attachments that help reproduce what is damaging in the world are at the same time that which holds the world together as coherent representation. Giving up one’s attachments, however cruel or toxic, would mean giving up the world and one’s position in it. As Naoki Sakai argues: “The West must represent the moment of the universal under which particulars are subsumed. Indeed, the West is particular in itself, but it also constitutes the universal point of reference in relation to which others recognize themselves as particularities”. And, in doing so, the West believes it embodies universalism. From this perspective ‘freedom of speech’ can perhaps be best understood as the expression of a wounded narcissism, unable to divest from the pleasurable investment in the (increasingly besieged) notion of its own universality.