The Exform
Verso Futures
The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy.
– Theodor Adorno
Verso Futures is a series of essay-length philosophical and political interventions by both emerging and established writers and thinkers from around the world. Each title in the series addresses the outer limits of political and social possibility.
Also available in Verso Futures:
The Future by Marc Augé
Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi
The State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious by Isabell Lorey
Déjà Vu and the End of History by Paolo Virno
The Exform
Nicolas Bourriaud
Translated by Erik Butler
First published in the English language by Verso 2016
Translation © Erik Butler 2016
Originally published as La Exforma © Adriana Hidalgo Editora,
Buenos Aires, 2015
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
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ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-380-8 (PB)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-379-2 (HB)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-381-5 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-382-2 (US EBK)
Names: Bourriaud, Nicolas, author.
Title: The exform / Nicolas Bourriaud ; Translated by Erik Butler.
Description: Brooklyn, NY : Verso, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016002300 (print) | LCCN 2016008503 (ebook) | ISBN 9781784783808 (paperback) | ISBN 9781784783792 (hardback) | ISBN 9781784783822 (Ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Art – Philosophy. | Ideology. |
BISAC: PHILOSOPHY / Political.
Classification: LCC N66 .B68 2016 (print) | LCC
N66 (ebook) | DDC 700.1 – dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002300
Typeset in Sabon by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh, Scotland
Printed in the US by Maple Press
Contents
The Exform
I. The Proletarian Unconscious
II. The Angel of the Masses
III. The Realist Project
Notes
Index
The Exform
Things and phenomena used to surround us. Today it seems they threaten us in ghostly form, as unruly scraps that refuse to go away or persist even after vanishing into the air. Some maintain that the solution would be to forge a new contract with the planet, inaugurating an era in which things, animals and human beings stand on an equal footing. Until then, we inhabit an overfull world, living in archives ready to burst, among more and more perishable products, junk food and bottlenecks. All the while, capitalism boldly dreams its dream of ‘frictionless’ exchange: a universe where commodities – beings and objects alike – circulate without encountering the slightest obstacle. Yet ours is also an epoch of squandered energy: nuclear waste that won’t go away, hulking stockpiles of unused goods, and domino effects triggered by industrial emissions polluting the atmosphere and oceans.
The most striking image of refuse and discharge occurs in the economic sphere: junk bonds with toxic assets; it’s as if dangerous materials buried away in the balance sheets of obscure subsidiaries and mutualized portfolios had invaded the financial universe. The matter plainly reveals the real of globalism: a world haunted by the spectre of what is unproductive or unprofitable, waging war against all that is not already at work or in the process of becoming so. We have witnessed the realm of waste assume vast dimensions. Now it encompasses whatever resists assimilation – the banished, the unusable and the useless … Waste, according to the dictionary, refers to what is cast off when something is made. The proletariat – the social class that capital has at its full disposal – is no longer found only in factories. It runs through the whole of the social body and comprises a people of the abandoned; its emblematic figures are the immigrant, the illegal and the homeless. Once upon a time, ‘proletarian’ referred to a worker who had been dispossessed of his labour. Our age has expanded the definition; it now includes all who have been stripped of experience (whatever it might be) and forced to replace being with having in their everyday lives. The delocalization of industrial production, massive ‘downsizing’, mounting political disregard for social welfare, as well as increasingly harsh immigration laws, have led to the emergence of grey zones where surplus human beings vegetate – whether as undocumented workers or as the chronically unemployed. At the same time, an ‘economy of impurity’ exists in plain view: people who process fish, clean buildings, move houses, and dispose of diseased livestock – social categories covered by the caste of ‘untouchables’ in India.
It would appear that the ‘spectral dance’ Marx describes in Capital has assumed a new form today. This book proposes to analyze, by way of the optical machinery afforded by contemporary art, the effects of this mutation on our modes of thinking and feeling.
One catches sight of the characteristic dance of a given epoch through relations between art and politics. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, both spheres have been fashioned by the centrifugal force created by the Industrial Revolution: on one hand, a movement of social exclusion; on the other, the categorical rejection of certain signs, objects and images. Here, the model of thermodynamics holds. Social energy produces waste; it generates zones of exclusion where the proletariat, popular culture, the squalid and the immoral pile up in a jumble – the devalued ensemble of what one cannot bear to see. The ‘spectral dance’, in other words, is the phantasmagoria specific to an epoch. It follows from the orchestration of regulated exchanges between centre and periphery – the organization governing what is official and what is rejected, what is dominant and what is dominated – which make the borders between realms into the dynamic site fuelling History. From the nineteenth century on, the political and artistic avant-gardes have made it their task to help the excluded accede to power, whether by stealth or in plain view – that is, to reverse the thermodynamic machine, to capitalize on what capital has repressed, to recycle putative waste and make it a source of energy. In the process, centrifugal movement is supposed to change course, bring the proletariat back to the centre, restore the dropout to culture, and introduce what has been demeaned into works of art. But now, two centuries later, does this dynamic still produce any energy?
Ideology, psychoanalysis and art represent the principal fields of battle for realist thinking; in their respective domains, Marx, Freud and Courbet laid the foundations. All three refuted the hierarchies their society advanced in the name of its Ideal, questioned the presuppositions underlying its mechanisms of exclusion, and sought procedures for unveiling them. Today, this realist strategy seems best suited for founding a political theory of art capable of moving beyond what is merely ‘politically correct’ and simple denunciations of mechanisms of authority or repression. Accordingly, what is qualified as realist in the following is art that resists this operation of triage; likewise, realist describes works that lift the ideological veils which apparatuses of power drape over the mechanism of expulsion and its refuse, whether material or not.
This is the realm the exformal: the site where border negotiations unfold between what is rejected and what is admitted, products and waste. Exform designates a point of contact, a ‘socket’ or ‘plug’, in the process of exclusion and inclusion – a sign that switches between centre and periphery, floating between dissidence and power.
Gestures of exp
ulsion and the waste it entails, the point where the exform emerges, constitute an authentically organic link between the aesthetic and the political. Their parallel evolution over the last two centuries may be summarized as a series of inclusive and exclusive movements: on the one hand, the ever-renewed separation of the significant from the insignificant in art; on the other, the ideological frontiers drawn by biopolitics – the governance of human bodies – at the heart of a given society. Since the beginning of modernity – at least since Gustave Courbet, although one could go back to Caravaggio – motifs of the depreciated and devalued have constituted the primal and privileged matter in works of art: bundles of asparagus or ladies of easy virtue appear and outrage grand paintings of History; this is the famous ‘end of eloquence’ (flowery, nineteenth-century elegance), whose death throes Georges Bataille described apropos of Manet. In the political sphere, rejection yields the class of the excluded: the proletariat – a term that referred, in Roman antiquity, to those whose only wealth was their children (proles). Today, the proletarian seems to stand at a great remove from the status Marx granted him as the subject of History. Even in the collective imaginary, the illegal immigrant has taken his place. In turn, psychoanalysis developed the concept of repression – the operation through which the subject evacuates, into the unconscious, all representations it cannot reconcile with the ego ideal. Exclusion from the polis, repression outside the realm of consciousness, and the devalued matter that the artist takes up attest to the presence of a mechanism of expulsion.
What does progressive politics mean if not the taking-into-account of the excluded? What is a psychoanalyst if not a practitioner whose field is the repressed? Finally, what is an artist if not someone who deems that anything at all – including the foulest refuse – is capable of acquiring aesthetic value? All that is hidden, evacuated or banished derives from this centrifugal logic, which consigns beings and things to the world of waste and holds them there in the name of the Ideal. And so, figures of exclusion traverse the unconscious, ideology, art and History. They constitute a filigraned motif linking together the ‘ragpicker of History’ described by Walter Benjamin, Bataille’s heterology, Althusser’s theses on ideology, the programme of cultural studies, and materialist thinking in contemporary art.
That said, it would be simplistic to content oneself with protesting rejection in the name of egalitarianism; nor is it enough to recuperate filth in order to be a great artist. The absolute uniformity arising from a world that had banished all separation – a landscape of infinite storehouses where nothing is discarded – would soon turn into a nightmare. Denouncing the process of triage per se means promoting idealism in reverse. Materialism is not the reversal or the inversion of idealist discourse. It does not propose centrifugal motion as the remedy for centripetal motion; instead, it substitutes the movement of a generalized decentring for both: the disorientation of compasses, now stripped of their normative ‘magnetic north’ …
To write this book, I began with a vague idea and confronted it with clear images: in Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, this watchword sprawls across the apartment wall of a group of students miming Mao’s cultural revolution. Instead of offering an account of contemporary artistic practice in order to deduce a theory, as in previous works, the book at hand steers the opposite course. If invoking Benjamin and Bataille represents something familiar to readers, the prominent place granted to Louis Althusser – a singular figure in twentieth-century thought – may come as a surprise. Yet if one seeks to problematize relations between aesthetics and politics, form and theory, and ideology and praxis, engagement with Althusser’s writings proves inescapable. Moreover, when evaluating the positions of Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou or Slavoj Žižek, it is necessary to refer to the man who taught the first two and exercised a decisive influence on the third (Žižek’s doctoral adviser – and later, analyst – was Jacques-Alain Miller, who also studied under Althusser). That said, if his thought echoes in their works, one cannot fail to note that they hardly signal as much.
Why is Althusser, this ‘philosophers’ philosopher’, quoted so little in contemporary theoretical debates? To begin with, most of his students broke with the path charted in May 1968. In Althusser’s Lesson, which appeared in 1973, Rancière denounced his teacher’s archaic Stalinism; in her study of Antonio Gramsci, Chantal Mouffe set out to find the fresh air she deemed lacking in Althusser’s confining dogmatism; others, such as Jacques-Alain Miller and Jean-Claude Milner, simply left for the Lacanian camp. Secondly, Althusser was an apparatchik of the French Communist Party and a notorious psychotic, institutionalized on many occasions; he wound up killing his partner, Hélène Rytman, before vanishing under an immense cloak of silence. In other words, he hardly meets the requirements of the contemporary jet set of philosophy. In more than one way, then, Althusser is an embarrassing figure, an elephant in the plush lounge of contemporary thought. It is a riddle for the ages how this pachyderm managed to unite such rigour of thought and clarity of exposition (occasionally didactic ad nauseam) with the manic-depressive psychosis that bedevilled him.
Notwithstanding the resurgence of Marxism – which was augmented when the semblance of financial propriety collapsed in autumn 2008, during the crisis of so-called subprime lending – what interest does Althusser hold today? For one, his writings are far from obsolete; historical context has charged them with new significance. The texts written during the philosopher’s years of public silence (1980–90), especially the remarkable ‘Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’ and Sur la philosophie – as well as other posthumous (or semi-posthumous) publications such as his course on Machiavelli and Writings on Psychoanalysis, to say nothing of typewritten texts he shared with friends – present Althusser in a wholly different light than the one suggested by the last pamphlet to appear before the ‘drama’: the off-putting Ce qui ne peut plus durer dans le parti communiste (What Can No Longer Stand in the Communist Party). Althusser’s philosophy offers a surprising web of connections between Marxism of the most scientific stripe and a strange obsession with emptiness, chaos, the carnivalesque and imposture; still more, it presents an unsettlingly dreamlike vision of ideology. These aspects lend his work a singular intensity at a time when philosophy and art have made fashionable a form of Marxism that proves all the more radical for no longer occupying a position on the chessboard of global politics – Marxism all the purer, that is, because it waves stumps where it once had hands. Rereading Althusser in light of twenty-first-century cultural debates allows us to see the complex relations between art and politics with fresh eyes and discern what escapes the naïve formulations to which they are so often reduced.
My generation awakened to intellectual life in the 1980s. I discovered Althusser through his posthumous writings. Initially, my view was just as unfavourable as it was poorly documented: Althusser seemed to be a dogmatic bureaucrat, a vestige of the Brezhnev era. In contrast, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Lacan immediately struck me – and my peers – as contemporaries who furnished conceptual tools for decoding our own times. What could interminable exegeses of Marx have to offer compared to A Thousand Plateaus or Discipline and Punish? Such studies seemed to have been written by a philosopher at odds with events – a hardcore structuralist in the age of postmodernism, a strictly observant Leninist during perestroika. La pensée Althusser, as it was known in the philosopher’s glory days, had been relegated to the attic of history, along with Afghan coats, bell-bottom pants and Jefferson Airplane records … In a word, Althusser – the official representative of a gigantic continent in the course of sinking – had become completely inaudible by the mid-1980s.
This held all the more because a passion for the minor, continuing the ‘counterculture’ of the 1960s and 1970s at another frequency, gripped my generation. Postcolonial theory and cultural studies, while still in their infancy, were largely prepared by later
al moves away from ‘official’ culture – what has come to be called mainstream. Yet in theorizing ‘minor literature’, Deleuze and Guattari initiated a quest for singularities and insularities that was clearly incompatible with the land masses of intellectual history, including orthodox Marxism. Our natural milieu was the cultural underground; our aesthetic breviary consisted of obscure finde-siècle authors and the outsiders of art history. In relatively systematic fashion, we went looking for dissident writers, philosophers pushed off the high roads of intellectual history, and cultural mavericks. We granted priority to what the immense Marxist and modernist continent had crushed. We made pilgrimages to Trieste, Lisbon, Prague or Buenos Aires, which had become literary capitals par excellence. Individuals were rediscovered whose eccentricity had held them distant from manifestos and programmes: Fernando Pessoa, Jorge Luis Borges, Eva Hesse or Gordon Matta-Clark – thinkers too subtle, or irredentist, for the radical collectivism of the twentieth century.
To appreciate the nature of the intellectual moment, it warrants mention that the modernist debacle left behind a landscape in tatters. For anyone young in the 1980s, nothing seemed more exhilarating than the ‘weak thought’ advocated by Gianni Vattimo, Baudrillard’s ‘simulacra’ or Paul Virilio’s Aesthetics of Disappearance. Nothing could be more productive than to move what had been derived from the vertical dimension of History onto the geographical plane of a pure present. Global suspicion towards the theories and manifestos of the preceding decades collided headlong with ‘classical’ Marxism. It reached its climax in 1989, when the Iron Curtain collapsed on the short twentieth century’ and inaugurated the era of globalization.
At the time, we failed to recognize that the seductive motif of minority – that is, the principle of pulverization it introduced to philosophy, the points opening onto dissident narratives that had been kept in the shadows – camouflaged a demolition enterprise much larger in scope. What we had viewed as the melting of the ideological ice caps, the rupture of continental plates restricting thought, actually covered up – and quite discreetly – a process of political liquidation: the ensuing flood carried off multiple blocks of resistance, and their disappearance facilitated progressive amnesia, resignation and powerlessness. When class struggle gave way to localized struggles and engagement, when the notorious reality principle took the place of economic utopia, when the avant-garde vanished in a cloud of synchronous propositions, we were left with no choice but to start from scratch. This book seeks to participate in this new beginning – even as it refuses to return to anything at all.
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