In Sogni d’Oro, Nanni Moretti revisits his militant years. The film includes a sequence that explicitly refers to this ‘mass line’. Various people tell the director that ‘the Abruzzo shepherd, the Treviso housewife, and the Lucanian worker’ will never understand a single word he says – consequently, his film holds no interest. However, one of the final scenes shows these figures of the people take the stage as actual characters; they board a train for Rome, burst into the projection booth, and declare that they love the movie. Individuals, Moretti affirms, are always in the right against those who assimilate them to a ‘mass’: ideology only seeks to transform a group, whatever it may be, into an instrumentalizable entity.
Contemporary artists, when they manipulate popular culture from a hermeneutic and critical perspective, ultimately inherit this ‘mass line’. Cultural production offers an immense constellation of signs from heterogeneous spaces and times – or, to use another metaphorical register, a heap of rubble. Classifications and hierarchies belong to another universe: a world of norms, precalibrated formats and categories – in other words, all that stems from the fixative power of ideology. Since the 1970s, artistic and literary canons have counted as key battlefields for political correctness, feminism and postcolonialism. First dismembered and then reassembled, they reflect the advance of a ‘mass line’ whose principle has been inverted; now, minorities have replaced the working class as the motor of History, whose interests are at stake in political activism.
The mastery of the collective narrative stands at issue. In its name, Althusser barged into the meeting room at the PLM Saint-Jacques – to proclaim the forgotten kinship between the ‘mass of analysands’ and the proletariat. Also in its name, Foucault traced the genealogy of madness, starting with the ‘great confinement’ through which the mentally ill (individuals ‘without history’) wound up in asylums. Finally, in its name, Benjamin assigned the historian the task of ‘rescue’, whereby s/he endeavours to reconstitute, on the basis of the wreckage of the past, the morphology of ideas that majoritarian concepts have defeated, crushed and buried. These accounts – which run counter to origins affirmed by instances of power – all advance a vision of History starting from singular points, or accidents. That is, they twist the neck of the Ideal.
Everyone knows the Lacanian formula: ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’. Because human societies are also unconscious productions (in part) – that is, because they emit, receive and transform signs – they are structured like a language, too. Cultural studies attests to the fact that each human society represents a way of telling things in the language of reality, articulating a position with respect to the world, and producing a group subject subordinate to four levels of the unthought: phantasmagoria, ideology, culture, the unconscious. The reality surrounding us is a fact of language, which artists must learn to master and articulate, along with all its symbols, metonymies, metaphors and repetitions. In particular, they must employ what ‘falls out’ in the process of enunciation, that is, its waste. Reading Joyce’s Ulysses, Lacan devised a singular concept: the sinthome. This mental object comes into view as a detached piece; it separates from the rest of the brain and exists in a state of dysfunction, having no purpose other than to impede individual functions. In other words, it operates as a psychoanalytic exform …
Let us recall the feature shared by the philosopher and the paranoiac: for both, meaning lies hidden beneath the disorder of life. Truly paranoid thought is inseparable from this inaugural division, a selective screening it needs to meet its ends. In order to lay hold of his object, the paranoiac thinker excludes what encumbers him; he relegates sources of trouble to the realm of insignificance and casts into the shadows those elements that perturb his perspective and obstruct the arrival of the ‘revelation’ that promises to fulfil his desire. Such a dogged quest for meaning always entails a chiaroscuro dramaturgy, a world of contrast fuelled by exclusion. Accordingly, the paranoiac’s passion for classification attests to an indifference to, if not hatred for, chaos – a panicked fear of the void. Needless to say, the world today seems to be teeming with people of this kind; they grow more and more active the more chaotic the universe that they inhabit becomes. In consequence, denying the chaos of culture begins when one identifies a corpus, a restricted canon that generates its counterpart automatically: a grey zone inhabited by ‘insignificant’ objects. Whatever principles attended its formation, the expulsion-machine is now up and running, hunting down exforms. From its beginnings under the sign of the nineteenth-century social and moral Ideal, it perpetuated itself over the course of the following age – first and foremost in an exacerbated fashion that culminated in degenerate art, before, in an attenuated manner, simply rejecting the ‘insignificant’, ‘ugly’ or ‘subaltern’.
II
The Angel of the Masses
It is readily granted that art does not have the task of illustrating. But can art make history? If it weighs on human mentalities at all, art should count as an actor in History. Picasso did not think it enough to document the bombing of Guernica; rather, he translated a sense of indignation into form. The gesture that seeks to inscribe itself in History and the position the author assumes when confronting the latter should not be confused. Evaluating relations between money and politics means, first and foremost, defining the connection between event and form. Contrary to what the majority of ‘radical’ theorists today claims, form is not subordinate to discourse either; for instance, the pictorial system Jacques-Louis David set up influenced the politics of his times just as much as politics influenced his art. In 1913, Marcel Duchamp exhibited his first readymade; in 1917, Kazimir Malevich painted White on White. To be sure, these works were products of historical circumstances; equally, however, they were events that irreversibly modified what followed. Although they started out as consequences, they became first causes and brought forth manifold effects in other artists and works; in turn, these effects spread and came to be part of the atmosphere of a general sensibility. Accordingly, we will confront two entirely divergent versions of art history in the following. The first insists on discourse and claims that artistic forms represent the product of the social and political context in which they emerge. The second emphasizes form, affirming that each great work forms a ‘crucible of the event’ (Alain Badiou); when one examines it in context, a particular chain of collisions becomes evident. In this perspective, the fundamental relation between art and History proves a matter of ongoing interaction extending in two directions at once: Duchampian readymades and Malevich’s painting, like all works of art, modify past and future alike.
The present is uncertain by nature – forever flashing and oscillating between the traces left by History and the potential they contain. Art lends such incertitude a positive charge: underscoring the precarity of the historical moment, it induces a state of active lucidity in the observer, which proves inseparable from political action. The permanent rereading of hierarchies and values conducted in the framework of cultural studies – which seeks to extract social significance from mass production or popular artistic expressions – participates in the permanent struggle against reification. Such perpetual movement – which acts on our vision of History, artistic practices and relation to the polis – incarnates a new messenger to be called, following Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’, the Angel of the Masses. Arising from the abstract systems that surround us and descending from the leaden clouds of ideology overhead, this messenger brings news of a non-massive world: a historical record comprising accidents, grains of sand and singularities. In a universe of crowded statistics, computerized clouds and treks through chaos, the Angel of the Masses circulates between works of art in the form of circuits and networks; incarnating transcoding and translation, it roams everywhere that a renewed relationship between art and politics is manifest under the aegis of the aleatory and the accidental.
History and Accident
By portraying the actors of the French Revolution
as if they were mythological heroes, Jacques-Louis David fastened the nascent Republic to the moral values and visual imaginary of ancient Rome. He thereby contributed to revolutionary ideology in decisive fashion by translating the very form of its politics, making it declamatory, oratorical, marmoreal, and fixed like ancient statuary. In most of David’s paintings, the event contains its own monument: it stands before History, and sometimes even proves to have already been historicized, i.e., legendary. Michel Thévoz has observed that the revolutionary bourgeoisie, in contrast to the aristocracy or proletariat,
has no legitimacy before or after itself; it is irrevocably the transitory class … If it wishes to perpetuate itself, then, it must recur to contraceptive measures. It can only save itself by frigidity or sterility. Hence this fascination for marble, lifeless stone, funereal matter that freezes time and sculpts immortality. First of all, Woman, the embodiment of desire and the threat of life, must be transformed into a statue.1
Such is the paradigm of the bourgeois in art: to give life’s disorder the thick consistency of the mineral, to paint what stands with a varnish of eternity on which its power – the power of idealization, above all – will then rest. This quality still holds in our own day; one can easily distinguish, in contemporary artistic practice, between works that present the world as it is and works that depict it in its ideal form – that is, covered with an ideology aiming to make the present state of things tolerable.
According to psychoanalysis, the way we fashion an account of our life depends, at a primary level, on so-called identity, that is, on the image we forge of ourselves – our ego ideal. Psychoanalysis permits one to reorganize this narrative on the basis of associations between unforeseen ideas. The past is reread not in light of a preconceived image – which commonly starts with our ‘origins’ – but in terms of the ‘real’ of experience, in the Lacanian sense: what offers resistance and cannot be grasped directly; it involves visiting the shadowy realms the unconscious harbours and learning its peculiar linguistics, its grammatical logic. Significantly, the same holds for collective narratives – above all, for any vision of History. History may vary enormously from one country to the next inasmuch as it is oriented on the political interests of the moment and the founding myths of a given community. Like the scenario of our individual lives, History offers both a map, a representation drawn in keeping with information gathered, and a montage – here, one must ask who has been authorized to make the ‘final cut’. Orson Welles may well have filmed all the shots in The Magnificent Ambersons, but RKO Studios, which held the legal rights, distorted their arrangement to such an extent that the director finally repudiated the work. Who signs for the final montage of our existence – and for the narrative of History?
‘Historical idealism’ names the idea that an exterior instance, of whatever kind, has the right to make this final cut – and even if it occurs to the detriment of the individuals or groups over which its authority extends. When this happens, History is endowed with a precise meaning. Such a teleology may be more or less disguised, but it aims to legitimate a political strategy. In the Eastern Bloc, a veritable screenplay accompanied historical montage: the working class, playing the protagonist, would ultimately triumph when a truly egalitarian society arrived – perfected communism, which always lay somewhere in the distant future. The screenplay applied to modern art, too. Here, the same teleology extended to the domain of forms – e.g., Clement Greenberg’s narrative, which describes how painting progresses towards a fuller and fuller realization of its intrinsic properties. Other critics have oriented the narrative on the ‘end of art’: when life, liberated from the division of labour, absorbs it entirely. Modernism – and the twentieth century in general – is characterized by the (paranoid) idea that the present belongs to a global screenplay assuring its ‘meaning’. Such belief in the ‘anteriority of meaning’ vis-à-vis the real as it is lived (to employ Althusser’s expression) amounts, alternatively, to an authoritarian phantasm or to a quest in vain. Either way, it involves searching for origins and ends to justify the present. ‘As Walter Benjamin judiciously observes’, Siegfried Kracauer wrote, ‘the idea of a progress of humanity is untenable mainly for the reason that it is insolubly bound up with the idea of chronological time as the matrix of a meaningful process’.2 If History is determined by some kind of necessity – if it amounts to a global screenplay in which every actor must play a part – then art can enter the picture only in a reflective capacity, as an illustration.
Art’s historical function – and therefore its political function, too – has substance only on a stage open to purely contingent human history; at very least, it requires the productive aporia of chance and necessity meeting in opposition. In his essay on ‘the materialism of the encounter’, Althusser enlists the Epicurean theory of falling atoms (clinamen) for his vision of History. The void represents the very condition for political action; accordingly, he rereads Marx’s works in order to ‘invent’ the philosophy the latter ‘did not have the time to write’. A gap opens up between the ‘young Marx’, whose thought was still shaped by Hegelian dialectics, and the Marx of later years, whose Capital inaugurated a ‘science of History’. Althusser seeks to fill it by situating Marxist thought in what he calls the ‘underground current of the materialism of the encounter’, or aleatory materialism. In the process, he sets himself in opposition to dialectical materialism, which, he claims, merely amounts to idealism in disguise. Althusser’s term follows the ‘line of Democritus’: History as a series of collisions and accidents, some of which constitute embryonic links of causality, while others have no lasting consequence.
One of the most representative authors of this aleatory current is Machiavelli, who conceived politics in terms of encounters that may occur – or may not:
It is in the political void that the encounter must come about, and that national unity must ‘take hold’. But this political void is first a philosophical void. No Cause that precedes its effects is to be found in it … One reasons here not in terms of the Necessity of the accomplished fact, but in terms of the contingency of the fact to be accomplished.3
History occurs as a succession of conjunctions and disjunctions without origin or end. For Machiavelli, political action occupies a desert, the perpetual site of ‘beginnings’. Thus, in the film of the same name, the ‘Matrix’, in which the simulacra governing human life are generated hails the protagonist Neo with the words: ‘Welcome to the desert of the real’. This is what defines the void in our age: society is a simulacrum, decisions are made in a vague elsewhere, all political action seems in vain … The subject at the centre of contemporary history is politically irresponsible, stripped of the potential to influence the world and caught up in a sense of emptiness which – contra Althusser’s claim – cannot be identified as the site of ‘beginnings’. To be able to act, then, one must view the real as a void. All political action starts here, in a dead zone.
But if all action occurs in vain, if the Empire defies contestation, and if nothing can alter the order of things, it becomes all the more urgent to seek to transform it here and now. Just as Machiavelli’s Prince declared that Italy could be unified starting from nothing, Althusser claims that a revolutionary party can win power by setting out with just an arsenal of ideas. Philosophy represents a ‘Kampfplatz’, a battleground where thinking transforms into wartime strategy: ‘it has no absolute beginning; in consequence, it can – indeed, should – begin with anything at all’. Suddenly, then, philosophy lacks an object, properly speaking. It is nothing but the modulation of the eternal conflict between two tendencies: materialism and idealism. And if ‘philosophical objects’ exist after all, they entertain no relation with real objects; instead, they resonate with two fields that provide philosophical thinking its sole index in reality: science and politics. One might also add art and love – as Alain Badiou would later do.
To oppose a system, one must first conceive its nature as precarious. Doing so implies wak
ing from a kind of hypnosis, breaking through the marmoreal representations imposed by the conservative bourgeoisie, and seeing the operative system as a fragile installation – a spectacle that ideology has transformed into a reality. The components of capitalism, Althusser explains, exist ‘in a “floating” state prior to their “accumulation” and “combination”, each being the product of its own history, and none being the teleological product of the others or their history’.4 Consequently, adherents of the ‘line of Democritus’ see only what results from the encounter between ‘the owner of money’, who has capital at his disposal, and the ‘proletarian stripped of everything’, who accepts lending the force of his labour in exchange for remuneration. What ensues is simply a chain reaction.
Fittingly, innumerable science fiction films portray the present as a laboratory experiment gone wrong; the story of capitalism, like that of the Soviet Union, could be told in the manner of Twelve Monkeys. Here, we see a political struggle between representations: on the one hand, the state of things appears as a swarm of tiny accidents in perpetual instability, subject to the regime of the aleatory; on the other hand, the standing order seems to be eternal or simply ‘the way things are’, and nothing, evidently, can shake it. From the standpoint of power, the historical narrative will always be marmoreal; it has been sculpted with a will to idealize past and present alike. Nothing can unsettle this power more than the display of ruins, scattered debris, and images of fragility which contemporary artists extract from the archives: their provocation takes aim at the defensive illusionism proclaiming the order of things stems from ineluctable fatality.
The Exform Page 4