Plausible Artworlds

Thanks for posting this, Aharon. I think it’s a fair outline of our conversation. I suppose to be even more clear about this, from my perspective at least, I’d like to propose four basic sets of questions (perhaps these could be the beginnings of a Skype dinner party menu of topics, if we are giving that format another go, that is):

1. What is this show going to be? What are we working towards? A number of collaborative projects? A group show? Are there protocols here for how projects are established and realized, how they relate to one another?

2. Who is part of this from the initial planning group? Have people dropped out of the project? Should there perhaps be options making it possible to take part in the project in a kind of ‘remote’ sense but not in the organizational or planning group itself? How can we establish a decision making process in the group, and between the different collaboration that may emerge out of the larger structure?

3. How are we articulating whatever happens between us, etc. – forum, mailing lists, etc. – avoid circuits of communication to be established amongst different small groups with no communication at all taking place within the larger structure.

4. Are we inviting other people to take part in the collaborative frameworks we are establishing, if indeed that is what we’re doing?

Of course, I’m personally into this project and would like to take part in this in any capacity I can, but I do agree with you, Aharon, in terms of your comments regarding individual or existing work, notions of group shows, etc. The interesting potential here, as far as I’m concerned, is the possible collaborative frameworks and initiatives that could emerge out of this wider structure. Perhaps the current events and developments around the ICA show in January will offer an opportunity to develop some ‘games’, or forms of ‘play’ together to clarify someof these issues, as will perhaps the PAW events we hope to host here in London in July (I’ll post more details about this later on).

One thing though: If the game – notions of play, etc. – become the output of this project, rather than a means towards producing an output, then this begs a number of question regarding how these games are established (again, coming back to collaborative frameworks, decision-making processes, etc.) as well as how they are archived. Often with these sorts of projects, the archive kind of become an object-in-place-of-THE-object, a kind of meta-project that cannot be seen as ‘innocent’ or ‘objective’ but that in every sense produces points of views on the activities taking place, angles, knowledges, focal points, nexi, etc. Perhaps this is something to think about, perhaps not...

Now, as for the second part of your post, I read the Mouffe text, which I found very interesting. I’ve got some notes and comments from reading it which I thought I’d post here, in case somebody else is interested.

AN ETHICO-POLITICAL TRAJECTORY AGAINST FORMALISM

It is an interesting article, and although I have some fundamental problems with her arguments, in some respects I do agree with her - mainly in her criticism of some of the main discourses that seem to influence parliamentary and more mainstream neo-liberalist political practice (what she refers to as ‘aggregative’ and ‘deliberative’ perspectives). Her insistence that what we should be dealing with is not so much procedures of communication – form – but the kind of subjectivities that generate and take part in those procedures, and what the conditions and modes of the production of those subjectivities are seems crucial to me, as does her call for a critical perspective on what she refers to in passing as ‘the conditions of existence of the democratic subject’. This, to me, seems be a call for a kind of ethico-political trajectory against political formalism, a kind of opening up to dissention as a form or mode of life (the ethical production of subjectivity) against capitalist and parliamentary forms of socio-political organization.

See for instance, page 10, where she writes the following:

What is really at stake in the allegiance to democratic institutions is the constitution of an ensemble of practices that make the constitution of democratic citizens possible. This is not a matter of rational justification but of availability of democratic forms of individuality and subjectivity. By privileging rationality, both the deliberative and aggregative perspectives leave aside a central element, which is the crucial role, played by passions and emotions in securing allegiance to democratic values. (p. 10)

She also, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, puts Wittgenstein to good use here:

For him [Wittgenstein], procedures exist only as a complex ensemble of practices. Those practices constitute specific forms of individuality, which makes possible the allegiance to procedures. […] Procedures always involve substantial ethical commitments and there can never be such thing as purely neutral procedures. (p. 12)

However, to locate politics not in the form of democracy but in the ethico-political trajectories of democratic life is certainly not something new under the sun and it is certainly not something that necessarily generates a radical ethico-political project. Much rather, it seems to be a trajectory that runs through modern form of political life, including also capitalism. After all, capitalism too produces subjectivity – capitalist subjectivities, etc. – and capitalism too incorporates ethico-political trajectories and formations of collectivity. Even the most competitive kind of profit-driven subjectivity will find itself bound to a sense of collective desire within which abstract profit and competition are valued qualities not only economically, but socially, politically, culturally, even ontologically (the free competition of free individuals in free markets being the natural condition or even modality of life).

Similarly, and for much the same reasons, we find the notion of ethico-politics firmly in place in early modern political theory. It is, for instance, one of the founding principles of Spinoza’s Political Treatise and more recently one of the most significant aspects both of Guattari’s idea of ‘ethico-aesthetics’ and Negri and Hardt’s idea of the multitude. To Guattari, for instance, politics is staged and played out as ‘veritable wars’ between different modes of the production of subjectivity – that, for instance, of a social-democratic (Menshevik) kind of subjectivity and a revolutionary (Bolshevik) kind of subjectivity in Russia in 1917 – and what is central to political organization is to operate along aesthetic (experimental) vectors that allow subjectivities, also in the collective sense, to be produced ‘differently’ and outside of repressive/institutional paradigms. To Negri, and Hardt, also, a democratic politics seems to involve a kind of actualization of desire into forms of collective life, the production of singularities on collective ground, as it were, and not a pre-established form of communicative procedure supposedly assuring the continuance of democracy through static forms that are supposedly inherently and aprioristically democratic.

What I’m trying to suggest, I suppose, is that although this point seems to be extremely relevant, what we need to do is not simply to assert that politics is played out on the level of ethics, but to look at what kind of ethical trajectories tend to generate capitalist, or worse, fascist formations of collectivity and what kind of ethical trajectories tend to open up to a radical and collective political project replacing both capitalism and dogmatic or redundant version of communism and/or socialism. Chantal Mouffe rightly raises some of these concerns in the text by suggesting that under current forms of political organization the production of collective forms of subjectivity is at risk both from reactionary forms of collectivization and from extreme individualism. See for instance, page 11 of the text:

Extreme forms of individualism have become widespread which threaten the very social fabric. On the side, deprived of the possibility of identifying with valuable conceptions of citizenship, many people are increasingly searching for other forms of collective identification, which can very often put into jeopardy the civic bond that should unite a democratic political association.

A FORMALISM AGAINST ETHICO-POLITICAL POTENTIAL AND COMMONALITY

Having said that, and despite the acute observations outlined above, to me Mouffe fails to provide an alternative model of radical political organization. Or rather perhaps, it is not that she doesn’t come up with an alternative form of democratic organization, as the title suggests she is presenting us with a set of concepts and notions that supposedly outlines a form of democracy much more beneficial than the two models she began by declaring redundant (the ‘aggregative’ and ‘deliberative’ perspectives), but the alternative she outlines remains stuck in a kind of quasi-democratic parliamentary paradigm. In fact, it seems to me that in the latter part of the paper, she is turning on her own argument and re-introduces a kind of formalist emphasis disguised as a form of management politics based on an aprioristic distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’.

By the “political”, I refer to the dimension of antagonism that is inherent in human relations, antagonism that can take many forms and emerge in different type of social relations. “Politics”, on the other hand, indicates the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions which seek to establish a certain order and organize human coexistence in conditions that are always potentially conflictual because they are affected by the dimension of “the political”. I consider that it is only when we acknowledge the dimension of “the political” and understand that “politics” consists domesticating hostility and in trying to defuse the potential antagonism that exists in human relations, that we can pose what I take to be the central question for democratic politics. The question, pace the rationalists, is not how to arrive at a consensus without exclusion, since this would imply the eradication of the political. Politics aims at the creation of unity in a context of conflict and diversity; it is always concerned with the creation of an “us” by the determination of a “them”. The novelty of democratic politics is not the overcoming of this us/them opposition – which is an impossibility – but the different ways in which it is established. The crucial issue is to establish us/them discrimination in a way that is compatible with pluralist democracy. (p. 15)

The central point here, for Mouffe, seems to be to assign to the political the irreducible qualities of difference as antagonism. Individuals are different and antagonistic, unless they are organized and managed into groups; groups are different from one another and antagonistic, unless they are managed and organized into reciprocal relations that allows them to define themselves as entities consistent of reciprocal relations by which they can define themselves as larger groups; and so on and so forth. And the practice of this kind of management – the management, that is, of antagonisms into agonisms – is, according to Mouffe, what we call politics. Its ethical dimension, at best, echoes of a kind of Levinasian notion of ‘the face of the other’ – ultimately also a notion of managing an irreducible otherness to a system where a certain acceptance of the other can be maintained on the basis of an exclusion of collectivization through a either commonality as (something shared beyond difference, antagonism, othering) or the desire for the other (a kind of becoming-other played out through and on such common ground).

Now, I have a couple of problems with this conception of an ontological and aprioristic antagonism, and another couple of problems with the notion of politics as management.

(1)

Coming to terms withy the constitutive nature of power implies relinquishing the idea of democratic society as the realization of a perfect harmony or transparency. The democratic character of a society can only be based on the fact that no limited social actor can attribute to herself the representation of the totality and claim to have the “mastery” of the foundation. (p. 14)

This is a tempting proposition, to get rid of the ‘mastery of the foundation’, any possible totality, these bedrocks of the modern period. It is a sense of politics that echoes of a post-structuralist notion of a play with and between irreducible differences. There can be no claim to totalities – be it on the level of nation, state, empire, race, reason; there can be no overriding teleology justifying a totalizing politics of ‘the same’ or ‘the shared’ or ‘the common’ in any shape or form. However, the process whereby Mouffe makes ‘antagonism’ and the governing of ‘antagonisms’ into ‘agonisms’ an ontological and aprioristic question (a question of human nature, a kind of postulate upon which her subsequent theses rest) is lodged within a significant exclusion – the exclusion of univocity, commonality, a shared common ground through all of us in and as the processes by which we are differentiated from one another. What seems, here, to be a fundamentally ‘open’ position –recognizing difference – is masking the exclusion of this much more significant ethico-political component. If there is no shared common ground upon which a sense of collectivity, collective capacity and affirmation can be wrested, then any political project becomes a question of relative negation, control, subservience to forms and procedures of difference-management.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that commonality means that all antagonism can be eliminated. At least that’s not the way I understand it. What it does mean, however, is that there is a virtual potential that is shared and that we can practice towards; that there is a kind of horizon or edge that is never static difference (we will always be different, in difference from one another, this is the horizon of though tand practice), but that continuously shifts, becomes difference precisely through the actualization of different degrees of commonality, through the actualization of something that is shared. Deleuze once spoke about this in terms of an indefinite number of different drops of water for one shared ocean, or better perhaps, arguing that you can through a dice a thousand different times and get varied results, but the dice-throw, the act of throwing, will be the same for each of them. In other words, things are different, we are different from one another, but there is something in life that is shared, the echoes or resonates in all of us, in and through the processes by which we are constantly and continuously differentiated. And the task of an ethics and a politics, rather than working towards the management of existing differences, is to actualize new, other, orders of difference through this commonality we share, through our collective and common capacities. This doesn’t mean that commonality will be actualized in full, but that desires overflows, exceeds actual conditions (antagonisms, etc.) and that politics must be based not on the control of antagonism (into agonism) – a negative task, a kind of enforcement – but on the affirmative task of establishing an ethical relation to power, capacity, etc.; that is, in other words, to establish common ground, common notions, commonality between us that allow us to think an other through an affirmation of a shared desire rather than constant negotiation.

(2)

Furthermore, the notion of politics as management, far from indicating a movement away from political formalism, seems to me to reintroduce a notion of formalistic protocol or procedure. The question Mouffe seems to be posing is the following: given the conflicting desires, passions and positions that constitute a larger social body, how can we establish forms of management, procedures of dialogue that reduces the risk for the social contract or bond to be entirely dissolved. This is a formalism, thinly disguised as dialogue-politics. And as with all formalism, it begs the question: Who is setting the rules of the game in which we are meant to take part? Who is defining the parameters of the social contract? Who is determining the nature of the so-called dialogical bond between us? Who, in other words, is doing the managing here, and who is being managed? Who has agency?

Or to phrase it in terms that seem very pertinent to this forum: Who decides on the game and who do we expect to be playing? Who collaborates, who participates; who is the audience, who the referee, who does what one is told?

Although she successfully outlines some problems with the current state of socio-political organization in western societies, what she fails to recognize is that these forms of collectivities (including the competitive collectivies of corporate capitalism) are themselves desired, and involve a particular form of the production of subjectivity that doesn’t change or shift until they can be exceeded by forms of collectivity in which we feel more actualized. Capitalism produces a kind of subjectivity that tends to accept authority implicitly, and situations where one tends to at worst become a spectator of one’s own life, or at best participate in its mode of production of subjectivity, but that militates against any kind of collaborative efforts towards generating other, future collective capacities. In other words, capitalism is actualizing and articulating a certain flow of desire into a corrupted real; it is not repression as complete negativity, but a particular formation of desire and power into a perversely proto-fascistic structure; i.e. a form, a formalism with real desiring subjects, real agents and a real sense of acceptance of political agency and authority. To replace this form of structure with another form of management politics doesn’t displace the kind of desire that is invested in this form (competitive subjects on the free market, a desire for authority, etc.), it merely expresses and articulates these desires in a different forms where hierarchy and authority function less explicitly. In other words, as a form of economical and socio-political organization capitalism is not going to be changed through more careful management of existing differences or antagonisms, but by new forms of collectivization that actualizes capacities that exceed those of the capitalist mode of production. What we need, it seems to me, is not forms of management but collective ethical projects that seeks to move beyond what is presented to us as given (including our given difference, our given antagonism, our given individualities), and play towards a common horizon of communitarian life.

(3)

Finally, and this point follows closely upon the two previous ones, the central problem of Mouffe’s text seems to me to be entirely lodged in her (relative) acceptance of and play with existing entities and differences. Hers is not a radical project; it doesn’t seek to generate or make possible a radical break with/within or shift away from capitalism and its mode of economical, socio-political and cultural organization; it seeks to modify and control life, manage existing differences between given entities whose properties, qualities and relations are defined as given aprioristically by human nature.

On page 12 of the text, for instance, she writes that ‘taking pluralism seriously requires that we give up the dream of a rational consensus, which entails the fantasy that we could escape from our human form of life’. But perhaps a radical political project will have to be lodged precisely in something that doesn’t seem human. Perhaps we need to look at politics precisely in terms of overcoming the conditions that bind our collective social life to pseudo-ontological figures of ‘the human’. In other words, a radical project doesn’t necessarily have all that much to do with looking at existing forms of human life (our individualities, differences, negotiations) and certainly not with the negotiation and negation of desire, but rather with what kind of capacities we can wrest from our given conditions, what kind of futures we are capable of, what kind of processes of collectivization we can muster, what kind of mutations we can make possible/plausible, what forms of dissention we can generate, what ethico-political prototypes we are capable of producing. It is always staged upon the ruins of the given, upon a refusal to take the given for granted, a refusal of aprioristic assertions of incapacity (our incapacity to overcome ourselves and our irreducible difference, our alienation and otherness). Or to put it even more bluntly and crudely, if politics has to do only with what we are, with our being as it is, it will always be negative, repressive, managerial, the property of someone that is not ‘us’. Politics is not about what we are, but about what we can become.

What does this mean in terms of artistic collaboration generally speaking, plausible future collaborations and forms of collectivity, plausible art workds? A non-exclusive approach and an affirmation of emerging forms of collectivity over the exchange of opinions! If we can expand and generate common ground between us, we should do so, as it increases our collective and affirmative capacity to act and self-organize through common notions, through a shared commonality. To produce or generate such intensities, such common ground, between singular positions – rather than govern animosities and antagonisms – is the task of a radical political, ethical and aesthetic project. We must always remember that dissention is simultaneously a form of criticality and an affirmation of an alternative forms of organization that liberates our collective and common capacities.