A worker’s critique
Michele Masucci (MM): If you think of the fact – the very material fact – that most people are dependent on wage labour to survive or on some form of work, informal or formal, globally there are many things that unite us.
When we look back to the workers’ movements in the 20th century, we see a lot of political organizations that include art and art production, in addition to a lot of publishing practices, of course, mostly centred around political commentary or journalism but which does include art critique as a form of unionizing or collectivizing struggles. That history is interesting to follow and still has a continuity into our days, it’s perhaps not the kind of art critique that you in today’s art critical debates but it’s definitely a sort of awareness of cultural and artistic and aesthetic productions within movements and within unions that we might have to look at more closely today to see where our history and our strength lies.
Of course, any form of connection to a workers’ history has to be informed by the important critiques of the identarian aspects of it; how workers’ movements have historically failed to include female proponents and agents, and structural racisms within different workers’ organization are important to acknowledge in this kind of re-invention of a workers’ critique.
I would say one of the most potent forms of critique within the workers’ movements is perhaps militant research. Even this conversation is a form of militant research, Frida, that you are initiating here. You are trying to ask us as writers of art and art criticism what the material conditions of our production are, and we’ve already heard some people here expressing, ”Well, this is not my primary form of income but it’s something I do”; ”I’m an academic” or ”I’m a lecturer” or ”I’m an artist and that is my main source of income, and then I sort of do art critique as well.” In many ways, this follows what you would see in any kind of political organization on the left: very precarious conditions of organizing politically – how do you organize after a long day, how do you organize after weeks and months and years of hard work, and then go into union activism or into political work despite these material conditions? That also translates into the precarious conditions within art.
And now that we also see how public funding is being threatened, we can envision that the conditions for our free and independent critical art production and critique of that art are being threatened. This forces us to think of new forms of organization and new forms of producing our writing and our getting together. That’s why this discussion is very important, and that is a workers’ critique in itself, I would say.
Frida Sandström (FS): Thank you so much, that’s a really nice way to read it, and I really hope this conversation can have that format. Is there anyone who would like to comment on Michele’s proposal? Perhaps Kim, since you have now initiated in Stockholm since it has been developing over a few years but mainly since the last year, it has been more stable ongoing with also an aim for the future, an autonomous research group called Agentur. Would you like to explain a little bit about how that work functions in relation to what was just said?
Kim West (KW): Yeah, I can try. Okay, I think this notion of a workers’ culture is a tricky concept. On the one hand, I would say that I’m personally deeply invested in a modern tradition of artistic, cultural diversity, that rejects the idea that there’s some kind of essential correlation between art and positions of social and economic privilege, some kind of natural connection between economic wealth, social privilege and access to the means of cultural production. Of course, rejecting such an idea also entails rejecting the social and the economic system, even the mode of production, that underpins and continually restores those correlations and naturalizes those connections.
So, more specifically, the research project that we’re working on within the group Agentur this year is called The Aesthetics of the Popular Fronts. Essentially, it’s an attempt from the perspective of the present to understand a certain history of cultural and leftist anti-fascist organization, looking at the “popular front” coalition projects in the 1930s, and the different cultural policy initiatives and modes of artistic, literary, etcetera production that they supported. We’re reading, we’re studying, we’re translating works by various authors and artists and so on. We’re reading Simone Weil’s factory journals, we’re reading the workers’ novels by Tillie Olsen and John Dos Passos, we’re looking at the montage experiments of the early period left-wing André Malraux. I’ve recently translated a beautiful short book by a French author called Marc Bernard, which is a sort of documentary account of the demonstrations in February 1934 that created the very idea of a popular front political organization and also opened or created the minor genre of popular front literature.
We’re also trying to form an idea of the early cultural policy initiatives of the period, the various publishing networks that were established, and the institutional experiments related to these movements and coalitions, in order to try and grasp in what sense they form a point of origin for what we could call a progressive tradition of radical cultural democratization, in the post-war period and beyond.
Anyway, all of these authors and these initiatives and so on are in different ways actively engaged with or identifying with working class concerns or are created in solidarity with the working class. A vast tradition of radically democratic experimentation emanates from these different initiatives. What we’re actively trying to assert, in an experimental or speculative way, is that this history is not over, that history is not over, that this is a tradition that can still be defended, even developed. So, in that very wide sense, I feel deeply committed to an idea of a workers’ culture.
On the other hand, I’d say that I’m also a bit suspicious of the term. I don’t think that there is a mode of cultural expression or production that is inherently connected to a certain social category. Affirming such a connection risks recreating the kind of hierarchies that precisely this radically democratic tradition worked very hard to reject and to abolish. So if you say that there’s a culture of the working class and one of the capitalist class, there’s a risk that you will soon be saying that there’s an art for the poor and an art for the rich, and then you’re close to saying that the poor are not really predisposed to comprehend, let’s say, the refined qualities of high art and so on. Then everything is lost.
One figure that has been very important to me and to all of us in the group here, is Peter Weiss, and his major novel The Aesthetics of Resistance, a work that, I think you could claim, seeks to understand the cultural conditions of anti-fascist organization. It’s an extremely ambitious work, which attempt somehow to enlist the totality of art history in support of the self-identification, the subjectivation of a new universal, anti-fascist, political subject. In all of this, the tradition of working class education and self-education is central. But for Weiss it’s never an issue of affirming the existence of a specific working class culture which would be inherently incompatible with some other kind of culture, an elitist culture or something such. Instead, the working class culture is ideally a universal culture, and for Weiss this idea is also attached to a certain ideal of a radical and universal democratization. Something like that.
Ana Teixeira Pinto (ATP): Yes. To me the concept of the worker is interesting but perhaps not so much in terms of how the worker is defined usually – as someone that enters into a wage relation – because in that sense I would be more interested in the wageless than in the ones that have access to a wage.
To me this is quite a fundamental question because you already mentioned the tension between Marxism and identity politics, it’s something that really forces us to also question the entire periodization of capitalist history. I always find that there’s a tension between understanding capitalism as the economical expression of white supremacy or understanding white supremacy as the political expression of capitalism. These two perspectives are hard to reconcile…
I also think this discussion intersects with the question of what work is and how we define it. I think we tend to always think about work as something that is remunerated, as something that has a relationship to a wage. To me, this is a bit quaint because the question of wagelessness is, I would say, the defining question of our times. The increasing amount of people that fall out of the wage relation is precisely the question that I find most important to address.
Also now, more pointedly – I know that you said that you wouldn’t like to talk about the corona crisis but, sorry, can I mention the elephant in the room? [laughing]
FS: [laughing] You can.
ATP: I was talking to a friend, artist Natascha Sadr Haghighian, who said that the corona crisis was like a contrast agent, something that suddenly makes everything that was hitherto hidden become visible. I thought this was a really interesting observation because it’s a bit like how I experience this, it’s a bit how we all experience this: everything that was concealed is now suddenly in your face. You can no longer pretend that you’re not seeing it. It’s obvious that in order for the EU bourgeoisie – and by this I mean us, we are all at home working on our laptops – to shelter-in-place, in order for the supply chain not to be disrupted, an enormous amount of Romanian labourers are being flown in to harvest all of the produce.
And of course, all of these people are working but you cannot call them “workers” because the social contract does not extend to them, they do not enjoy any social benefits, or labour rights. And here, one would have to discuss the role of the state.
To me, these questions hinge on how we define capitalism. I would define it as a symbolic quantification of power, meaning a differential logic that operates at several levels of concreteness and abstraction, whose function is to produce value via devaluation. Developing something here and under-developing something there. Needless to say, value is an inherently differential concept– in order for something to be valued, something else needs to be devalued.
This intersects with the necropolitical matrix that emerges out of these operations of valuation and devaluation, what Frank B. Wilderson III called a matrix that positions the subject, either within close proximity to death or the furthest away from it. In this situation, in the corona crisis, we here in Europe, in our apartments working from home, are the furthest away possible from death as one can be, whereas everyone that you’d call an essential worker is placed in close proximity to death. And of course, we could even go into much more complex geopolitical questions, for instance what’s happening to migrant workers in India or what’s happening in the favelas in Brazil or even what’s happening to the people who are detained by ICE. But anyway, sorry, I don’t want to, again, go off on a tangent…
FS: Thank you so much and what you say is essential, I think. Of course, the corona situation that we are all in is functioning almost like a litmus test, making present certain things that have been more or less unseen before and this is certainly also the case with migrant workers of several formats that are already being transported from Romania to Germany and already dying from corona, according to what I have read.
Hopefully, we can feed back to how we are looking at the formats for writing or the different circumstances that we’re in now. But without talking too much, I would like to ask you, Santiago, if you would like to continue?
Santiago Mostyn (SM): It’s an important point you make, Ana, and I guess it’s hard to come back around to the idea of writing a workers’ critique after opening it up. But following on what Kim has said, for me it’s important to understand that we have different anchors – cultural and geographic anchors – to place, and to think about how those traditional ideological categories of the working class and the bourgeoisie palimpsest with the economic reality of our societies today. So my question, more than anything, is: where does the criticality lies between the more traditional definition of workers’ art and the idea of the art worker – someone like myself, whose cultural capital has a certain value but beyond that makes a little real income from what I do. That bridge or that gap between the ideological and the reality of where we find ourselves is a tricky one.
Reactionary tendencies within art and art criticism
FS: Thank you. As I’ve said before, the notion of the worker-as-artist is very old and comes from a situation where the art institution was not the main goal or not the main aim for those practices. But now again we see several ways in which art is functioning as a mobilization, in Hong Kong for instance before the lockdown and all over the world actually. I do still think we can apply the same critique that you, Ana, were posing on the very simple logistic fact that the value given to certain things also demands their transportation and their contextualization, which often doesn’t include everyone behind. Perhaps logistically we are now encountering a situation where some of those established formats for transportation and vaporization and exchange, consumption and so on now have to be rethought. And what we have seen so far is that certain lives are being more valorized than others in terms of workforce.
The second point of this discussion was to also discuss actual threats that have been brought up in terms of budget and cultural funding but now also, as mentioned in my introduction, the populist tendencies that may be seen not only in the format of trolling but also actually within our field – writers, curators and artists that somehow have passed the test of a certain political correctness which we can also discuss and criticize. Within this context of art-as-institution, the discourse is slowly being pushed, to a certain degree, towards a generalization of certain reactionary tendencies. Every one of us has encountered this in different ways; it can be in a harsher liberal sense of ignorance towards working conditions but also older formats of fascism, even, which we are encountering aesthetically and in writing.
I don’t know if you, Ana, would like to start? Together with Kerstin Stakemeier but also on your own, you have been bringing up certain tendencies that you have been encountering in the arts, not only in Germany where you are based but also elsewhere, and this was countered by a pretty strong reaction. I wonder if you have any thoughts on what actually happened but also how you were dealing with it? How do we counter these things if they are going to continue to occur?
ATP: Indeed, I think that we all have this, I would say, somewhat misguided notion that artistic practices are by definition progressive or inherently aligned with a leftist project. I think we are losing touch with the fact that even within what you would call avant-garde or modernism, there are a lot of extremely reactionary strains.
I think that within the field of contemporary arts there’s a certain inability to understand, first of all, that there’s a clear contradiction between, one the one hand, the function of contemporary art, the economic function but also the institutional and social function and what artists think is the function of contemporary art or what they would wish that function to be.
At the level of aesthetics, there’s a kind of delusion that contemporary art is aligned with something like a progressive worldview. I have many doubts about whether this was the case in previous decades, but after the Trump election it became completely impossible not to notice that there was an affinity between a great many works that were being exhibited in contemporary art spaces and the aesthetic project of the so-called alt-right. There was also a theoretical alignment between the type of discourses the artworld lionizes and disseminates, for instance accelerationism, and, again, a white supremacist project that was exactly at the same time intersecting with the former in many of these online platforms.
To me the difficulty when talking about is that it seems that a lot of people in our field have a great deal of resistance towards actually addressing it or even just being able to see it. Paul Gilroy was the first theorist I heard saying that accelerationism was gateway to the far right. Many others will still defend it, even after white supremacist mass murderers claimed the mantle of “accelerationism.” I don’t know if I answered your question?
FS: That’s perfect, really. I wonder if you, Santiago, would like to take over from that, since I know you have things to say about this issue too
SM: For me, it’s a double bind. Obviously, there’s a contradiction that not many people working within the art world are willing to acknowledge, in terms of the gap between what art actually does, or how it functions, and what artists believe they can achieve. There seems to be a couple of artists who are working more infrastructurally on that level at the moment, like Cameron Rowland or Ima-Abasi Okon. But I suppose, on the one hand, my experience has been that of someone who has to deal with the bully in middle school. You know, to dislodge the bully from the top of the social pecking order, you have to address the toxic forces that got them there in the first place; you have to work on the culture as a whole, which is an effort. But, on the other hand, I really follow Toni Morrison – and it’s a classic refrain of hers – when she speaks about how important it is to know the function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.
I put on a survey exhibition at Moderna Museet which triggered a few quite conservative reactions in the press, and it really took me months to process and go through and try to understand those responses in a way that laid bare the power structures inherent in the Swedish art ecosystem – things which were perhaps not visible to the people operating within it. But it came at great expense on my part, psychologically and in terms of time. It’s a question of finding the balance between calling out every instance of bias, especially the bias from those who consider themselves progressive and liberal or, on the other hand, just getting on with your work and putting meaningful exhibitions together which, hopefully, shift a few perspectives or present a new view of a situation or scramble our assumed ideas of a lived reality.
FS: Thank you, that’s great. And of course, it’s not speaking about these things as a tendency or something that is upcoming, it also has always been there and naturalized, not only today but also historically. I guess it pops up in different circumstances that we need to deal with, although it’s not our first aim or focus, or we wish we didn’t have to do that.
Kim, you also mentioned that through the project of Agentur, you were looking into anti-fascist movements historically. Do you also discuss how they may apply today?
KW: In a way, but of course you have to be very mindful about the risks of bad anachronism when you’re dealing with these kinds of things because social and economic conditions and everything are wildly different. So it’s not as if we can take a mode of political organization or concept and just apply it to a different context; it’s more a question for us about seeing if there’s a tradition with which we can still identify to some extent and what that would demand of us.
There are certain ideals and certain models which emerged during this period which are undoubtedly progressive and productive, but at the same time there are numerous ways in which these historical movements were blind to massive kinds of dominance, such as the relation to the colonies, or such as, perhaps especially in the French context, an extreme kind of patriarchal model in everything. So if these progressive, productive models and ideals represent a promise that somehow remains to be realized, then that promise must be realized beyond the terms in which they were realized during the period when they emerged.
As to the question you are posing of populist tendencies in field we’re working in, I’d say that thankfully I have to a large extent been spared from personal experiences of harassment, trolling, etcetera. My experience of these tendencies has been of a rather more general nature, the experience of witnessing an aggressive rightwards shift of public discourse. If you look at, let’s say, the editorials in Dagens nyheter, a major Swedish newspaper today, I would describe it as McCarthyite [laughing]. It’s as if there was a full cold war going on. They devote far more energy to combatting the spectre of communism than anything else – which is absurd, considering where we are in terms of the political viability of the Left today. We’ve also seen the normalization of far-right positions. The fact that I’ve been spared from personal experiences of this kind is of course also a question of privilege, of male, white privilege.
As a critic, I think a reason that I have not really provoked troll attacks and that kind of thing is simply because I don’t really register [laughing]. I write for small circulation outlets, in a certain sense specialized ones, perhaps above all I stay off social media. I’ve never been on them. I’ve hated them since forever. So, I mean, one general point here would be that this new genre of harassment, trolling, and so on, is part of the business model of the contemporary major digital media platforms – they gain from it, it’s as simple as that. It’s not that these are unfortunate side-effects of the organization of contemporary media, which certain corporations happen to be able to profit from: these behaviours are actually, actively generated from out of the business models of these corporations.
This is not to say something new, but I think it’s a valid point. These platforms, these corporations deal in data gathering, of course, and they want to maximize eyeball time in order to be able to collect maximum feedback, which is then monetized in a myriad of different ways. And the most efficient way of maximizing such time is by affirming pre-existing beliefs and positions, by isolating them from critique from alternating positions, by aggressively pitting them against reductively defined others. Polarization as a business model, in short. Fundamentally this is an issue of the ownership of data, which is what has to be restructured, and the whole media system must be transformed accordingly. This is of course a vast political challenge, a challenge that can only be addressed at the most general political level.
SM: Can I just do a quick follow-up question for Kim? Speaking of social media and that sort of platform, what would you suggest as a means to counteract this? Would you recommend withdrawal from those kinds of platforms?
KW: In a way, yes, of course: Get off, for God’s sake! But I think we should try and find ways of articulating this as a political issue today and consider how we can find efficient means of pursuing an egalitarian politics within this field. Anything is valid here: generating opinion, trying to engage in a lobby-like think tank-like work, anything. But these problems, I think, can only be addressed at a very general and structural level.
SM: I was just wondering what the other options would be, beyond complete withdrawal. Obviously, we don’t want to replicate the rhizomatic spread of post-Internet and alt-right types of distribution systems, but…
KW: Yeah. Let’s see… Generally, I perceive my role as a critic as being someone who rejects naturalization of political systems, and so I don’t accept that the contemporary organization of media is somehow unavoidable. That would be a fatalist position. But the question is not ”should we shut down social media, should we restore the world as before?” That’s also bad anachronism, a false position, I believe. But how could the contemporary media complex be organized so as to promote, let’s say, autonomy and equality rather than the profit motive and radical polarization?
New encounters
FS: Perhaps this also brings us into our final question – we’re running out of time soon – about the possible ways of organizing thoughts or experiences from the editorial meeting or the collaborative meeting. This might also respond to your question, Kim: What new encounters or what methods and infrastructures that already exist can we emphasize even more today, starting from our respective positions in our field and from our different social and political contexts? I wonder if any of you have any thoughts on that?
ATP: Well, there’s also a question of scale. I can tell you what I personally found useful to me. When I first encountered all of these discussions some six or seven years ago, and I began talking about a new surge of Fascist policies or Fascist leaders, something I was often told was: “Oh, I don’t think you are using the word Fascism in an accurate way; this is not Fascism; Fascism is located in a specific historical context”. This led me to understand that the continuity between Fascism and colonialism is poorly understood and undertheorized. I think we have to challenge the way these histories, world history, is narrated and how periodization is conceptualized; how fascism is siloed; how certain terms are used, in order to create separate historical compartments, which in my view obscure these continuities, so all that would need to be rethought.
Art is completely imbricated in these questions of historicity, periodization and compartmentalization; we’re working with a conception of the aesthetic that is completely divorced from the social, from the economic, from the political, and this creates a great deal of difficulties. If we don’t rethink all of these questions, it will simply be impossible to depart from all these compromised categories. I don’t know if this felt really abstract.
SM: No, it makes sense.
FS: Yeah. Michele, do you have anything to say on the topic?
MM: Yeah, of course I agree very much with the things that have been said. Perhaps, if we start to think of what it’s possible to do, not only in terms of production of discourse and analysis but really, how do we connect with those social and political organizations that we in many ways have rejected, even, in this conversation as being old-fashioned or dead, in different senses? We could also find platforms where we do develop these new categories, new analytic forms, new forms of organization, new platforms.
In my experience it’s very much about the physical meeting, the assemblies, the conditions to organize, and of course these are limited now due to the coronavirus and that in many ways reflect our dependency on them. We used to complain about the incapacity or powerlessness of demonstrations and now we sort of miss demonstrations, very much miss meeting.
The Left in general, to generalize, has always been more powerful in the physical meeting, while the Right is powered by algorithms, as many of you already described; the algorithm fosters division. If we are to in some way counteract that with another form of being or living together and developing critical categories and critique together, that is through forms of meeting and building the infrastructure to do that.
I’m a bit tired also of this fact that we constantly reproduce or inscribe our privilege positioning, our viewpoint, and therefore end up in a sort of political apathy. It’s always messy to engage politically through our different practices and that requires us to see our possible connectivity and connection with different forms of being. Of course, we are inherently dependent and divided – that’s sort of the social-psychological experience of capitalism – and I would want to see forms of organizing where we include more experiences. I think that’s the only way through.
This really has to be an experimental process, following in the line of social and political organization that always has been very experimental and innovative. If the conditions of production are now very determined by these technical means, we cannot just leave them, we have to be inherently ingrained in them and find ways through them and beyond them. That’s the only way forward, I think.
ATP: To me, one thing that always strikes me as rather odd is that when people talk about art and politics (or even when the words ‘art’ and ‘political’ appear in the same sentence) they seem to believe that, in order for art to have some political valence, artists have to go somewhere exotic, find some people that work the fields, or some people that have some non-Western identity, in other words, engage in political tourism, go to some country somewhere, extract political content from someone else’s plight, and then create some sort of space where these discussions can that place. But crucially, these discussions remain marginal to the question of what art is and what art does. I always find this type of work patronizing, if not racist, not to mention a lot of other inherent problems.
When we talk about acting politically, we need to recognize theory as a political field. I already mentioned him today, but I was struck by something Frank B. Wilderson III said, when he was engaging with the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa he recounts asking fellow activists “What can I do to help your struggle?” “We need theory, write theory,” was the answer. I think that’s a really interesting retort and I thought… Yeah, that would be my position…but guess I also wouldn’t know what else to do…
MM: It’s a question about being informed and being in dialogue and not only isolating yourself as inaccessible or not in dialogue or not in a certain relation to different contexts, different subjectivities… I mean, of course you have to be informed when you do your theory, when you do your conferences, of course, that’s the basic. We speak from where we stand. But if there is a potential, if there is a moment of strength from the Left – especially in the anti-fascist sense – it is through the creation and the mobilization of the social, and not through the division and the reproduction of divisions.
FS: Yes, thanks to both of you. I think now we’re coming back to the starting point again: the editorial encounter or the meeting, the conference, the symposium, whatever we want to call it, the study group; how we can insist on that and develop it further, especially now in these times. I would like to insist on going back to what Ana just said: ”Okay, this is what I can do and this is how I do it.” That’s also what brought us together and I’m curious if we could think further on the potential of these gatherings that all of us seem to be part of in different ways. But before getting there, Santiago, you had something in mind before?
SM: I mean, I do have certain ways of thinking about how I can shift things with my particular skill set or point of view. One of them is – at this point it’s not voluntary – is to slow down. I think we’re living through what we could call ’thick time’. There aren’t as many planes in the sky, we’re forced to either – if we have the privilege of doing so – be in one place, with the people whom we live with, or operate at a speed which isn’t the break-neck pace that capitalism thrives on.
The next is, basically, trying to re-localize. I don’t mean this in terms of defining difference or creating a separation. I guess it’s more a question of building on the strengths of what is nearby in terms of cultural and agricultural and intellectual resources. I think about James Clifford’s proposal to imagine identity not as roots, in terms of tree roots or geographic origin, but more in terms of routes, or lines of travel.
In a sense, in these cultural geographies of encounter, we’re all diasporic in one way or another, and the ability to recognize that is an important step. We need to keep conscious of the fact that these singular perspectives that we exist within need to be disrupted, need to be pointed out in whatever ways possible.
FS: Thank you, that’s really a good point and also, yeah, perhaps also a good wrap-up of this conversation. But I wonder if there’s still among the rest of you, Ana, Michele and Kim – if you would like to say a final comment in terms of what Santiago just said?
KW: No, I think I perfectly agree both with you, Santiago, and Ana before. This was a very good quote that you brought up and it’s a very optimistic thing, to think of this time, as you describe it, as something that could allow us a moment of relocalization, remodelling, perhaps. That’s not really how it looks in my personal reality, but I wish I could have more confidence to take an even more comprehensive break from everything, I guess.
I also think that Ana’s point about not reaching beyond your area of competence is a very important point.
APT: Or area of incompetence [laughing]!
KW: Yeah. Not to affirm some kind of determinist notion that you should remain at your social station or some such thing. To have confidence in our abilities, in what we actually know how to do best. It’s from inside those knowledges and those positions that we’ve developed that we can try to change things in the most effective way, I believe. I wouldn’t have been doing what I do, writing criticism and engaging in the arts, without thinking that there was some kind of opening in this, that there were certain kinds of potential here that are not available elsewhere. So I think that’s an incredibly important point.
The issue after this becomes how do you map your possible sphere of influence onto the structural and political issues that need to be addressed? How do you define points of conflict, nodes of possible influence and transformation? That’s a properly critical issue. A problem for critique today.
FS: Thank you, Kim. I wonder if any of you has any thoughts on whether we can actually see some of our current situation as a kind of turning point; or how we can insist on this – emphasizing certain methods or strategies that are already in use, in relation to what you, Kim and Ana, just said. If any of you would like to comment on that? If the lockdown would allow for a rethinking of these things or an emphasis on these essential points?
MM: The lockdown will transform society in many different ways and has already transformed society. Not least will we have a strong financial crisis, and authoritarian states or authoritarian tendencies will be able to consolidate through different measures that have been taken with the virus and future viruses and pandemics as an excuse. From what I witness, it’s one very different thing to sit in this situation where, I guess, most of us have a salary or have some sort of income, and we have the technology to sit and have Zoom meetings in our apartments in different cities and generate discourse, and another thing for the many people who don’t have the choice and have to work with the risk of being exposed to the virus, working in totally different conditions.
Of course, we have a responsibility to be informed by these different conditions and to try to think through critically how the state is operating in this moment and what kind of implication it will have, not only for us but for many different people. And that’s what we also have to do in terms of using the potential that these moments bring. Not least, it has made us aware of what we have lost, in different ways, through social distancing and lockdowns, but also what we risk and what it is actually possible to do. That’s important in any kind of critical engagement.
FS: Yeah, thank you. Anyone else?
ATP: Well, you know, I have been reading Douglas Crimp with my students and there’s a really interesting text from ’87 in which he argues that AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it and respond to it, and he says specifically that we only know AIDS in and through those practices. I think that we could say the same about the current pandemic: We only know Covid-19 through the practices that conceptualize it, represent it and respond to it. I think it’s a bit too soon to say what world will emerge after the pandemic, but I’m very often bemused by all these theorists putting out texts that claim that Covid-19 killed capitalism, or killed neo-liberalism, or killed the current world order. I’m afraid I’m very sceptical about this.
I don’t think that the virus (or any virus) will kill capitalism because this kind of argument presupposes that there’s some kind of structural cohesion to capitalism and that its integrity can only be threatened by extrinsic factors. I would strongly disagree with this because I don’t think that is the case. Capitalism is a social system perfectly able to reconstruct and restructure itself, and I’m sure it will be able to reconstitute itself after the crisis and probably not for the better. I’m not very optimistic about the outcome of this crisis. I don’t think it will usher in an era of progressive policies like most people seem to believe it will – like a New Deal, or something of that sort.
To tie this back to the question of art/aesthetics and the Left – this is a very important point that Frida kept bringing up – and the question of world-making: What is the potential for world-making when it comes to art and aesthetics? This is severely lacking in the contemporary artworld; there’s a lack of world-making capacity. This is a point where I would totally concede, I would concede that the alt-right and all of these new far-right movements do have this capacity; they have the capacity to engender a captivating, exuberant aesthetics that really has some kind of mass appeal. This is why a lot of people would argue that “you just have to mimic it,” “they seem to be winning so we must engage in the same aesthetic strategies, then we would probably manage to wrestle control out of their hands.” The problem is that the content of this aesthetics is sadism, that’s what people enjoy… It’s a bit like Jean Genet’s old saying: ”if you behave like the other side, you become the other side.”
Clearly, I don’t have a positive answer, but I would recognize that socially progressive movements in Europe lack the capacity to world, aesthetically, and I think this is the case because they also lack the capacity to world politically…
FS: Thank you. Hopefully this conversation can continue and elaborate on that, also, in other formats and in new writings, although I think we will need to wrap it up for now.
Thanks to all of you for taking part and for all your thoughts. It was a discussion that I think we could have continued for quite a while. This will be published together with individual essays. The idea was this conversation would trigger also people who listen and take part in the discussion too also, perhaps, write. That will be on a delay for now because only we are here! But, yeah, it was really helpful for me to take part in this conversation, and I hope for you too and that we will be able to continue it in various formats.
So, thanks!