The Future to Be Born Will Start as a Narrative of an Artistic Gesture

The poor jesters fluttering gestures

stirs up a fierce cloud of red dust

blinding the courts

choking the sovereign

come headless kingdom

come jovial art

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

In two chapters of his Prison Notebooks – “Wave of Materialism” and “Crisis of Authority” – Antonio Gramsci describes a state of crisis determined by the fall of the leadership of the ruling class maintaining their dominance solely by coercive force leaving the masses in the process of ideological transformation.

Today we find ourselves in such an interregnum, a period of suspension where an old order is ending, and a possible succeeding reign cannot be born. At the end of decades of neoliberalism with a progressive face, designed to break socialist strongholds, what will come to replace it? On the one hand, we have the continuation of the old order, the authoritarian Janus face of neoliberalism, designed to protect capital accumulation at any cost. On the other, social movements demanding the abolition of a system detrimental to the social and the environment. A struggle between the self-determinacy of capital and the generalised rationality of spontaneous resistance. These recent years of authoritarian tendency with toxic masculinity on the throne combine the expansion of capital interests with further hierarchisation of societies, erosion of democracy and technologically induced fragmentation of the social.

In a situation where a frequent conception is that capitalism as a form of order structuring social relations independently of cultural context has become too big to fail, and where capitalist logic is not only defining the present but all possible imaginations of the future, the need is urgent for art and criticism open to the present to be affected. Given this scenario, what are the roles and the conditions for art production and art criticism? Available resources and infrastructures for progressive cultural production are threatened. Public funding for art institutions that can support a progressive and experimental program independently from state intervention or market interests are often only an election away from being cut or reformed to an unrecognisable state – and in an increasing amount of contexts, such as in Orban's Hungary, Duda's Polan, Bolsonar's Brazil and Putin's Russia, destructive cultural reforms have already been realised.

Even in the harshest conditions, art prevails as a social common in some form. This is a frequent argument provided by neoliberal apologetics eager to cut public art's funding or worse. Still, the future is always worth fighting for, as whatever has been won in terms of freedoms, rights and material conditions can be lost. Art, having always had a political significance through its many functions, can however become a simple instrument of power under authoritarian regimes. The authoritarian state fears no means to distract public attention from the increasing concentration of power. States, reduced to guardians of capital interests against their own populations, are maintained by populist distractions. Free artistic expression and critical discourse are common targets due to their capacity to reveal hypocrisy. Freedom of speech is reduced to being construed as a tool to excuse persecution and dehumanisation. Critical artistic expressions are miscredited for being part of a cultural establishment out of tune with popular demands and values, accompanied by attacks on public art institutions for being ideologically motivated and not maintaining political "neutrality". At a second stage, when political control has been consolidated, public institutions are instead used for direct ideological campaigning. This development has occurred in many countries, facilitated by the gradual collapse of the democratic opposition. For the past four decades, the left has accepted the inherently fascist political-economic premises of capitalism, afraid that there are no alternative economic policies feasible in public discourse, alas abandoning any progressive policies. The reality, however,  is that if capitalism is ever to be tamed, it will be when it is actively rejected.

Given this condition, let us speculate on the possibility of art and discussion on and around art that can resist the reductive aspects of the social under real subsumption along with the complete cultural internalisation of capitalist logic and forms. That is, what can social critique and, more specifically, art criticism entail when society has been equated with capitalism? Is there an art criticism that may develop and maintain sensitivities with fearless integrity countering the naturalisation of power? One that departs from a fierce engagement in those moments of commonality that resist and raise consciousness on how capital transforms social relations and modes of labour by its requirements. Art is an inherent aspect of social mediation and intellect. Transformative practices demand the acknowledgement of existing economic dependencies, as much as the desire for a reconfiguration of social relations that are open for other forms of sensing, thinking, being, beyond capitalist abstractions. Moreover, if the larger challenge today is to abolish capitalist self-valorisation in all its manifestations –– how is this valid for art and art criticism?

Art as an element of social production that leaks out and overflows despite real subsumption. Or is the possibility of art a futile attempt, knowing that the most radical critiques and struggles are appropriated and an inherent part of capitalist recombination? This process of real subsumption becomes quite apparent in the expansion of social production into art, which can be considered valuable, thus producing abstract value. This is also mirrored in how the most radical discourse is appropriated within institutional contexts with the result that any oppositional potential is neutralised by efficiently separating them from social relations unconditionally vested in the disassembly of power. Moreover, within art, critical emancipatory discourses are often mutated into instruments for selection and hierarchisation, rather than what they were originally intended for.

What can be done then through art, if fundamental change is not an option? Despite the absolute hold on society by capitalism, collective social intervention continues to be the most common form of resistance. Even though any attempt to do something through art is entangled in a web of indeterminate positions, to remain within art can provide some room for manoeuvre. On a very banal level, the relative disinterest with which authorities treat art provides occasional opportunities to move and act in situations that otherwise are highly sensitive and controlled. Despite art's symbolic use in conflicts, the artist is often underestimated as a public intellectual with a potential to cause damage or in other ways influence public opinion. Authoritarian governments' censorship of art is mainly based on suppression as a symbolic manifestation of power with hypersensitivity to antagonism in all its potential forms. Due to this common dynamic, art and artistic discourse are a perfect indicator on the general political temperament. Some authoritarian states allow for political horizons to be imagined, radical critiques can be expressed but, again, only on the premise that art is excluded as a legitimate source for political discourse.

Whether one then adopts the position more inclined towards aesthetic autonomy, promoting the internal relations of artwork as the primary object of interest, art’s autonomy is still conditioned by the mode of production, reproduction and circulation. Given that the artwork is mediated through authorship and property, it will be absorbed without much friction into one of many forms of financial speculation. Artworks might not have any direct use values in the ordinary sense but are well-functioning means for the realisation of financial speculation and popular objects of investment. Whenever the material conditions are put to the fore and one finds the urgency to change them, the question becomes to what extent this can be done from within the field of art – and through which means.

A common conception among artists and critics is that one should operate from where one stands, to remain within professional activity and not pretend to be, act or speak with any other voice. There are clear ethical arguments for remaining within one's role. For one, to avoid problematic situations such as pretending to speak for other people without sharing their experiences and struggles instead of creating a space for these very persons to speak for themselves. Another example is to reject a colonial gaze, the exotification of communities and subjects by self-righteously positioning one's authorship as a vehicle for emancipation. The division of power and resources is a common self-critical experiment within art but seldom achieves challenging or sustaining forms over time. Another example of a self-critical position is to reject appropriations of aesthetics and forms of movements altogether and reaffirm the need for the artwork to operate within its logic and not be reduced to simple placards of political gesturing.

These are established aesthetic and ethical norms within the art community, judgments that form tradition, the most conventional heteronomous positions on the relation between art and politics that still reproduce conventional binaries between instrumentalisation and aesthetic autonomy. As such, they perform a very dominant self-disciplining function, in part for good reasons. However, this policing also risks disrupting the possible engagement in social critiques that go beyond the sphere of art through critical engagements that could potentially challenge conditions of production. Thus, ethical sensitivity can become an uncritical convention, a form of structural self-censorship on those exact forms that could be the most appropriate in reflecting urgent political realities – automatically disregarding a multitude of possible practices due to their explicit political content or challenge to the foundational power structures of art. Social criticism within art needs to be conveyed in a certain way to be legitimate. It is these very conditions that also establish the limits of art’s political potential. Moreover, this self-imposed distancing and conservative stance cannot be other than convenient excuses not to undergo the difficult, troublesome and painful experience of actually exposing oneself to political and social contexts where the importance of art, artists and critics exists but is not central. Wouldn't it be wonderful to see art, for once, becoming an effective instrument for political ends beyond its self-asserted reality?

At the very end of his essay “The Author as Producer”, Walter Benjamin summarises this conundrum very well: “The intellectual who opposes fascism by trusting to his miraculous power will disappear. For the revolutionary struggle does not take place between capitalism and the intellect, but between capitalism and the proletariat.” In this essay, Benjamin rethinks the concept of the author, situating her in a condition defined by a specific mode of production where the author, consciously or not, always chooses sides in the class conflict. For the author to side with the proletariat, she must betray her class origins as intellectual. The goal is clear: combat the inherent fascist tendency in the capitalist modes of production and fight with the proletariat.

Written in 1934 as a lecture for the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris, yet never delivered, Benjamin's self-imposed distance to struggle is valid for both proponents, who believe their art to be in itself politically relevant, as much for the artists as for the critics. They would rather distance themselves from class struggle than smear themselves with unsophisticated political engagement. The political impotence of art thus becomes evident on yet another level, not only through its subsumption into capital but mainly through its self-displacement from social struggles. Moreover, if emancipatory projects are directed towards the abolition of capitalist social divisions through the recognition of self-determined difference, combined with commonization of social and material goods, how may an intellectual with any political ambitions towards emancipation then be self-sufficient in her realisation of a political-aesthetic analysis without any unmediated exposure to these struggles? If this relation is recognised, the question becomes to what extent one is willing to be in contact with and in service of those struggles, rather than priding oneself of being able to maintain an autonomous position through aesthetic standards.

A perhaps more meaningful exercise would be to study those moments in history where movements have been somewhat victorious in the rejection of capitalist realism albeit temporarily and with several inherent problems. The history of art and cultural production in the worker's movements of the 20th century is one of several examples where some autonomy and self-determination was made possible by the formation of collective political and cultural organisations, artistic autonomy by the relation to and service of a larger struggle. Art and cultural production, here understood in a broad sense as an inherent social need, were and are a part of the worker's movement, an integral part of the worker's political life. Thus, an immediate political field might stand to gain from a strategic differentiation and reabsorption into collective political subjectivities at a distance from hegemonic forms of commodification and neutralisation of cultural expression. This is a delicate matter in a time when the mechanisms of popularisation and appreciation are intimately linked to commercial distribution and mediation. Again, spaces and distribution channels that do not depend on logistical infrastructures or that can leak out from them exist in the commons and in moments of recognition of the excess of the social over capitalist subsumption.

In Sweden, as in many other places at the turn of the 20th century, unions and self-organised workers’ organisations formed parks and people's houses for recreation and holding assemblies, performing music and exhibiting art produced by and for the members of the community. The people's parks hosted cultural expressions that entailed the narration and retelling of strikes, struggles and other essential events in a history of the workers' movement, histories that were systematically ignored or misrepresented by the liberal press. These spaces for culture were essential as a social and political force, albeit secondary to strikes and other actions. Although the mediation of the political and social production necessary to assemble and organise was dependent on different forms of cultural expression, it managed to serve as means to form collective cohesion, share resources, memories and to pass on crucial information and tactics. This is where the general intellect of the workers’ communities’ spontaneous cultural expressions managed to transform the means of artistic production. Journals published by the movement often had cultural sections and commentaries on artistic interventions and musical events intertwining collective self-valorisation with aesthetic experimentation. Revisiting these documents and artworks today is an important task not only to examine history critically but to explore potentials and continuities into the present.

This gives rise to another question: is there then anything to learn and even reproduce from the workers' movements of the 20th century?  In the realm of art, an interesting challenge is to consider that the cultural policies of states are not the only determining force establishing the conditions for both art production and its discourse. As much potential the ability to form political alliances might have, a fundamental problem remains:t The division of labour, authorship and ownership are fundamental capitalist relations that are constantly reproduced and naturalised within art. Value, validation of the artistic quality and access to means of production are constantly being mediated through these relations and functions, supported by regulations and social practices that reproduce them into the fundamental fabric of artistic production. Even the very production of critique of these relations are embedded in the transaction of capital, in contracts and divisions. Furthermore, the relations that remain unmediated maintain a future potential for value extraction or are part of the reproductive, social labour – approximately half of all human labour done globally – that is never contracted or waged but remains a fundamental support for capitalist societies. This very text is produced within a formalised contractual relation. However, the social aspect always leaks out, and the emotional labour and reproductive labour invested by all parties are seldom recognised. These are relational dependencies that today are lacking political recognition. To change these conditions would require a wide acceptance to participate in organisations that might not immediately represent one's own personal interest. Nevertheless, such exchanges and interests beyond the objectives of one's own working conditions and queries are needed to gain an understanding of an overarching change in technical reconfigurations of labour and in the class composition to which everyone is subjected. Culture and art have proven efficient in narrating this new social and emotional condition under capitalism. The next step might be to dare recount forms of change and struggle.