Gabriel Peluffo Linari
“Man becomes more mediocre to the extent that, lacking the will to interpret things, and without the poetry and activity of a critical imagination, the soul becomes a mirror, not of nature but of the moral miseries around us”.
Allan Bloom
1
A peculiar notion of pluralism that oversees the scope of post-modernity, from the indefinable diversity of contemporary art to the relativism of neo-liberal utopia, is the result of a false equanimity that is not founded on an actual moral conviction of tolerance of what’s different, but on a vision that can only be satisfied by self-realization of individuals. Charles Taylor 1 suggests that individualism in “authenticity” and “self-realization” have expanded within western societies leading to an uncritical relativism based on the respect for the will of others for the own will to be respected (tolerance would be the price of self-indulgence). Also, the fact that it is only possible to read small excerpts from realities impossible of being covered and this leads to an epistemological nearsightedness of our time that comes along with a lack of axiological categories occupying, today the place of dialectics and critical theory derived from Illustration.
The idea of social balance in the intelligence of early Illustration was based on the doctrine of free rational covenant between all parties, in agreement and the power of argumentative reasoning for mutual convincing. The illustrated critique of the 19th and 20th centuries was in a way the continuity of the frustrated Utopia of a dialogue between those who were “different”, which in the past century acquired the profile of a critic towards the ideology amidst the battle between classes. Argumentative reasoning was slowly transformed into naïve reasoning, incapable or persuading and without actual consistency to face the super power of instrumental reasoning. But at the same time, critical reasoning of the ideology formed during such transit arrives in our time in very bad conditions, because, as I will refer to later, it seems to have been less realistic than the false conscience that it intended to reveal.
When in the mid 80s Hal Foster wrote his denouncement “against pluralism”, his statement confronted the ideology of the end of ideologies and a situation of “anything goes” administered from the plenipotentiary power of markets. But that was a radical statement that was still too included in the Marxian tradition of critical theory because it was not clearly severed from the necessary plural condition of the new cultural and political scenarios, and of the relative and non-critical condition induced in certain intellectuals and in society in general by the market’s expansive strategies.
The value granted to pluralism in the new democracies of Latin America originated in the 80s is to be implemented from the respective political contexts, because that version of pluralism does not necessarily has to be taken as a synonym of the “anything goes” or of the neutralizing relativism. Opposed to that, it is common for pluralist scenarios to bring along a counter-power aimed at the creation of new guidelines for citizenship and new main roles for minorities that dismantled hegemonic discourse. Pluralism in Latin America has not been the synonym of indifference of indiscriminate approval of differences but rather a conceptual tool against discriminatory (and eliminatory) power of military dictatorships, and a banner of social inclusion, and most of all of the dialectal inclusion of social memory that was fractured and taken out of not only history but of political and cultural practices of society.
Perhaps Foster’s opposition to pluralism as a synonym of non-critical relativism is in a way still in force in the Anglo-Saxon scene of cultural studies of the 80s and the 90s, as a questioning of Richard Rorty’s liberal Utopia, where he seems to have rescued the principles of moral individualism at the service of an unpolluted social dialogue, like the ones proposed by early Illustration to “naively” apply them to the current scenario of savage capitalism.
The modern idea of impartiality (or the “liberalism of neutrality”) is set forth as an exercise of tolerance for allowing social coexistence. Taylor is against this impartiality that relates to pluralism, but on the other hand his proposal does not allow for modifications of subjectivity when in contact with other subjectivities. That is to say that not admit individuals who subject their own identity to radical criticism for “understanding one another”. Instead, it proposes the incorruptible continuance of process of fidelity to values on which it was originally formed as a subject. This is an ethical proposal that accompanies the political proposal of a democracy based on a balanced aggregate of “authentic” individualities, according to Rorty’s way of thinking.
Contemporary art has been used in various ways in this ideological struggle of the 90s, and it has obviously justified also the neutral field in debate underlying the “end of ideologies”. For some it would be a kind of “free zone” for pacifying and condescending, where the most drastic social tensions could be reconverted into consumption goods for leisure time and industry. This Spencerian idea of art (the art as solace) is back with the great strategies of the international show business circuits of a transnationalized cultural market, the main stimulus of “light art” and the main promoter of skepticism relative to the condition as remover and the critical potential of contemporary artistic practices. Further ahead I shall refer to the scope of cultural critique in such practices, but now I am interested in pointing out the fact that both the failure of liberal Utopia – that witnessed how its “dialogue without frontiers” acquired the actual form of a worldwide ethnic, economic and military war beyond boundaries -, and the crisis of the critical Utopia in Marxian tradition – which was forced to take its classical paradigm from the field of social relations in production to that of social relations in representation, based on the new power located upon the manipulation of signs- took art and philosophy to a field of allegorical interpretations mainly subsidiaries of language, in a process somewhat similar to the formulation of the eleventh Marxist thesis on Feuerbach: when thinkers and creators only apply themselves to understanding the world, it is because all hope of changing it have been lost 2.
This relation of reciprocity between construction and failure could explain, to a great extent, the global over saturation of theories for construing which today marvel us in the windows of bookshops and prevent us from being bibliographically updated due to excess, while the philosophy of praxis, the theory of political action and strategies critical of art appear powerless before the blind processes that destroy the planet and the ways of human coexistence.
2.
In this sense, we could wonder whether contemporary art could end up becoming one of the last redoubts for individuals to retain certain faith on the power of seduction and poetic conviction of visual language, in the search for the “other” through the origin, as in the Utopia of early Illustration. If that were the case, art could promise to be a field where the free exercise of moral thinking would be allowed. If preserving the illusion of an incorruptible dialogue in freedom can become one of the last fictions in philosophy, then it can also be one of art’s last longings. In this case it would be the place to preserve the scope of that Illustration Utopia intact, in the only realistic way to do it: by means of a cynical critic of post-modern cynicism.
There seem to be more than one circumstance supporting this last hypothesis. At least the notion of pluralism sustained by Hal Foster in the 80s is founded, among others, on the fact that “generalized cynical reasoning originates in the sensing that the world has become problematic in such a way that nothing can be subject to discernment or critique: it does not matter” 3. According to this posture, self-renounce to criticism and its transformation into cynical discourse comes about when dazed thinking is hindered from covering the complex totality of what’s problematic. This assertion implies acknowledging the defeat of ideology by critique, maybe because this thinking has evolved historically at a lower speed than the conscience –or the false conscience– that it intended to unveil. It’s like saying that “reality slipped from the hands of” critical theory.
Nevertheless, one of the interesting things in exploring is seeing to what extent contemporary art, supposing it previously undertakes such capacity, is capable of developing a new critical strategy against instrumental reasoning, no longer based on the argumentative reasoning of allegory or on the ars poética of pure metaphor, but on the cynical reasoning of signs. This means admitting a degree of discursive authority in the power of irony, sarcasm and parody, and in the power of resistance and transgression4 carried out, paradoxically, with the same symbolic instruments of instrumental reasoning, but against it. In such case, cynicism would become a critical strategy in itself, instead of the discourse of a self-renouncement of critique.
This line of though is applicable to the review of the supposed reciprocity between construction practices and the conscience of failure mentioned before, because this could lead to severe mistakes when we refer to contemporary art. From the moment that the latter is becoming less of an “aesthetics and metaphysical aspect of tangible forms” and more of a political strategy for actions and signs, it is also increasingly – along with its application as factual practice – a practice for construing contexts. This is how the challenge has been presented in terms of its critical metaphor being empowered by the interpretation contained in it, for now it is not a matter of willing to radically change the world but of contravening the order of signs to expand the doubt and to produce fractures to destabilize, as part of the passive conformism of the information and consumption society. It is about introducing questions in a space blocked by the premature saturation of answers.
This is the basis of what I prefer to call “critical indetermination” of contemporary art, to the extent that it is not an ideological determinism that takes art and ideology as the same thing by leaving aside criticizing the latter, but the poetics of indetermination instead, a poiesis for free interpretation, capable of introducing critique in a oblique, cynical, subliminal way, no longer as an explicit conflicting discourse, but through a secret call to a transgressor astonishment and a silent intimate mobilization of all demystifying guidelines of the daily universe.
“Every critique –says Sloterdijk- is the work of pioneers in epochal pain and an exemplary piece for curing” 5. The link that connects this idea of critique as a “cure” with the idea of social “cure” through art, as exemplified by Beuys among others, proves symptomatic. To this we could add, by way of peculiar terminology, the extended use of the term “curer” to refer to those who cure by turning their construction of art into an authorial narrative; and also the use of the expression “art clinic”, very much applied in the River Plate, to refer to the debating arenas where the discourse of theoretical researchers are confronted to those of artists. The Manifesta International Foundation Manifesta and the Liverpool Biennial seem to be quite less alarmist in what relates to the objective of such debates, calling them by a name that reflects a practical spirit and the sense of leisure in Calvin’s tradition. For 2006 they organized a series of workshops called ‘Tea time and Coffee time’, with the purpose of discussing, reflecting upon and exchanging ideas on contemporary social, political and artistic contexts.
Anyway, all these forms show an underlying need for curative action, which would imply a supposedly sick art, particularly ill with diversity; an art saturated with theory-less practices and theories without the possibility of changing the world, and this would call for the help of a clinical-critical treatment, in other words: an “exemplary cure”. But I recommend going back on that concept of “epochal pain” towards which critical cure is aimed. That pain is nothing but the product of a paralyzing closeness among individuals, as well as the closeness between them and things. A closeness that hinders all critical distance and therefore prevents the critique from putting a distance, with the only possibility left of carrying out a curing task to virtually recompose the missing distance and soften the pathological effects of cultural nearsightedness. This (cynical) relation between critique and epochal pain would be the justifying cause of the great market of show business, an art whose potential cutting edge becomes a curative dressing, an art as the instrument for reconciling amidst an irreconcilable world.
3.
The second circumstance that contributes with a thinking, skeptical from the critical point of view, to support the existence of a passive cynicism in certain forms of contemporary art is given by the fact that artistic products and practices are not free from the scope of economic power that has turned the field of culture into a top level resource for market strategies and for specific political purposes in the relationships among States.6
In general, in all fundamental and objective texts submitted by the multiple international events of contemporary art currently spread through the globe, there is a declaration of intent shared by all, that highlight aspects like the search for understanding differences or cultural solidarity between countries and ethnic groups from different parts of the world. This is how contemporary art is presented as a vehicle for cultural inclusion to facilitate coexistence in an “area of grace”, as a surface exempt from conflict and therefore capable of establishing al link between cultural polysemy, international friendship, and good economic dividends for the show business industry.
That is to say that, from its very conception, many of these mega-events cannot avoid their own market carnivalization and cannot hide their character for celebrating the power of transnational and trans-urban capitals, even when their programmatic proposals include the idea of providing a place for “political art”. Upon recent statements by Manifesta International Foundation (responsible for creating the European Biennial of Contemporary Art in 2000) about its purposes within the “Tri-polis” project, it recently declared being in search of “providing a base for exchange and a transnational agreement for establishing how contemporary art engagements in public areas can become a tool for urban socio-economic development”.
It is then a matter about projects whose main function contributes to the political and economic visibility of cities where they have a place. Biennials on their part are usually seen as structures for receiving great shows of international artists – windows exposed to collectioning and to the network of galleries and museums – that try to avoid tensions caused between the local and the global, allowing the creation of market sub-circuits that take the blame away from hegemonic policies in their attempt to position the city at the back of their contexts and facing global economy.
However, and considering that the battlefield of social antagonisms has changed its focus from the “battle of classes” and the domain of production media to the battle for self-representation of the various groups and their domain of sign codes ruling it, it is possible to think that this field is where contemporary art will have to battle. The problem lies in the difficulty of creating new codes within the dominant allegoric systems in the images market, which privilege what is scarcely different among what alike, since that essential “alikeness” in media and techno-advertising images is the one setting the codes, even when it’s part of the universe of differences and feeds on it. On the contrary, unveiling what alike from among the ample spectrum of what’s different was the dominant problem in the human and universal imaginary of Illustration, something already too pestered by the overwhelming conflicts of diversity, by the dispersion of ethnic-religious wars, both geographical and symbolic, and by the breakup of old iconic structures within media and migratory flows that dismantle and build up new imaginaries.
This implies admitting a certain dose of confidence in the existence of a margin for operations for contemporary art critique. Therefore, we are not trying here to demonize the obvious use made by the transnational political and economic structures, for it is an unavoidable fact that the cultural articulation mechanisms created by such use are a factor for dynamizing local economies and may also be benefited from by an art with independent ethics and independent critique, even in a framework of strict ideological restrictions.
But it should be noted that the final purpose of putting together an “international artistic scene”, when it has been manipulated by agents of the great transnational economic and financial corporations, seems to be the creation of a global cultural field to act as a backdrop for festive dissuasion, and for celebrating differences, in a theater where the hidden scene includes the most flagrant violations of human rights and the most violent confrontations of powers.
There is a trend to free the problematic implied in the critical dimension of art and to take it to a neutral professionalistic field, subject to specific competences with foreseeable results, in a totally innocuous context unrelated to the conflicts underlying political, economic and military decisions of the new global order. And this happens in the paradox that the allegorical game that characterizes contemporary aesthetic practices between individual poetics and social contexts, continues to be especially apt for developing challenging activities that question the system within the public sphere.
4.
At present the field of fine arts seems quite conditioned by academic and political thinking relative to globalization issues and massive migrations worldwide. Beyond the actual conflicts caused by national boundaries in relation to such migratory flows and beyond the human vicissitude implied in crossing the Gibraltar Strait on board a raft or attempting to evade border guards at the US-Mexican border, there is an academic discourse that gets feedback from certain artistic practices and revolves around the fantasy of traveling and the myths of inter-cultural encounters. This bibliography insists on the fascination of transiting, the eulogy of the endless traveler as the image of the “new man”, the multi-cultural individual and the paradigm of the future global middle class. Such views usually have something in common: a dose of anthropological optimism, excessive in my opinion, regarding the internationalism of globalization and its consequences relative to uprooting and exclusion.
In such a context, and by opposition to theoretical speculation, it is a fact that the most powerful nations have opened their doors wide open to the transit of financial capitals and new technologies, as their doors are increasingly closed to the transit of people migrating who carry with them cultural “otherness” and the potential conflicts within the receiving societies.
Under the apparent advances of cultural diversity and ethnic tolerance lies a severe segregation put to practice directly on the individuals and groups that bring with them stories, habits and values considered dangerous for the necessary local and regional stabilities of the new global order.
It must be noted then that this situation has led to a radical differentiation between the culture of those who migrate – understood as the “other” culture, a polluting ethnic by-product – and the “real” (or harmless) culture, understood as a productive agent in the global economic system. In terms of artistic practices, mention would have to be made of an invisible art of resistance alienated in large cities, and an art of high visibility that is free to transit with the international passport obtained from the alliance between the spectacle and the great capital. This is the main difference between contemporary art at the service of international scenarios, and contemporary “contextual” art, at the service of a sound critical transformation of social imaginary and group identities subject to changing local situations. It is an essential difference, since its terms are not defined upon the basis of aesthetic or stylistic differences (in the debatable supposition that there is an international hegemonic style as a frank language), but on the basis of an art understood as a resource of the show-business industry and of the “common market” or world diplomacy in one case, and on the basis of a dialectal art – practiced as a resource for “curing” and as a symbolic existential project of a specific social fabric in the other case.
Without leaving aside critical thinking, art would then be a key figure in curing the pain of different periods of time. The ethical sense of contemporary art lies precisely in its capacity for creating space. The task of sedentary or migrating artists is to turn their context into language, that is: act in accordance with a strategy for appropriation and construction of the space by means of the spoken word.
If we accept this, we could add to the above-referred hypothesis – the one about art being capable of functioning as the last refuge of “free dialogue” founded on the Illustration- the possibility of it being also one of the few redoubts left for it to generate moral conscience suitable for man to live in. Today, more than even, art could be the natural carrier of transmigration and a fertilizer for ideas.
The word “ethics” comes from the Greek “ethos” a word that Heidegger translates not so much in the sense of the characteristic of man, but as man’s dwelling and the characteristics of the place where one lives”.7 There is a semantic parallelism in the practice of certain forms of contemporary art, which in fact allow for building a new moral geography (both territorial and virtual) on the map of economic flows and of the neo-colonial forms of domination.
Notas
1. Charles Taylor “La ética de la autenticidad” (The Ethics of Authenticity). Paidós. Barcelona. 1994
2. José Luis Pardo. Preface to Guy Debord in “La sociedad del espectáculo” (The spectacle society). Pre-texts. Valencia 1999.
3. Peter Sloterdijk. “Crítica de la razón cínica” (A criticism of cynical reasoning). Siruela Essay Library. Spain . 2003. pg. 21.
4. About this concept neo-Gramscian resistance concept or “interference”, see Hal Foster “Recodificaciones: hacia una noción de lo político en el arte contemporáneo” (Re-codifications: towards the notion of politics in contemporary art), in Blanco, Carrillo, Claramonte and Expósito (compil.) “Modos de hacer” (Ways to do). University of Salamanca Editions. 2001.
5. Peter Sloterdijk. Op. Cit. pg. 28.
6. George Yúdice “El recurso de la cultura” (The resource of culture). Gedisa Publishers. 2002. Barcelona.
7. Pier Aldo Rovatti. In Alessandro dal Lago and Pier A. Rovatti, “Elogio del pudore” (Praise to Modesty). Milano. Feltrinelli, 1990. pg.39. Iain Chambers “Migración, Cultura, Identidad” (Migration, Cultura and Identity). Amorrortu. pg. 131.
Editor’s note: With the exception of certain differences due to changes introduced for this version made for the Portal of the Ministry of Education and Culture, the above texts were Publisher in the catalogue of the 2006 Valencia Biennial, and the following year in the AICA Bulletin in Asunción, Paraguay.
