This ‘philosophy for Marxism’ that Althusser sought to produce – aleatory materialism amounting to a war machine against ‘disguised forms of idealism’ – brings to the fore a school of thought that has been neglected, to say the least. Nominalism is not merely ‘the antechamber of materialism’, as Marx contended; it is ‘materialism itself’. Althusser finds an emblematic formulation in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: ‘Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist’ – in other words, and as he translated it, ‘the world is everything that happens’, or, more literally, ‘the world is everything that befalls us’. Yet another rendition exists, from the school of Bertrand Russell: ‘The world is everything that is the case.’5 Brought to bear on twentieth-century aesthetic debates, the world of art constitutes the field of nominalism par excellence, if not its purest expression: it consists entirely of particular cases, constantly redrawing borders by wearing away at defining categories and the norms on which they rest. Does any other sphere of knowledge correspond so fully to the description of nominalism – that is, a world ‘consist[ing] exclusively of singular, unique objects, each with its own specific name and singular properties’?6 Moreover, Althusser observes, language (le verbe) already constitutes an abstraction: ‘We would have to be able to speak without words, that is, to show. This indicates the primacy of the gesture over the word, of the material trace over the sign.’7 As such, artistic practice represents spontaneous nominalism; its expressive register, which accords greater and greater significance to gestures and ‘material traces’, matches Althusser’s and Benjamin’s visions of History completely.
From the perspective of Althusserian materialism, the world as it stands arises from innumerable collisions occasioned by the ‘infinitesimal deviation’ of atoms on parallel trajectories: in essence, it is accidental. It forms a climate (conjoncture) – that is, a unique disposition of elements and events in space and time. In his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Benjamin, drawing inspiration from Paul Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus, sketches the portrait of what this figure embodies: the Angel of History. ‘His face is turned toward the past’, he writes. ‘Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.’8 A cloud bursts and carries off the angel: ‘This storm’, Benjamin concludes, ‘is what we call progress.’ All by itself, the image sums up the materialist conception of History: a succession of collisions and chance assemblages, wreckage left by the struggles of yesterday, fragments whose legibility must now be assured. Stuart Hall also views Marxism from this catastrophic perspective: it strikes him as absurd to think, as Marx did, that ‘capitalism evolved organically from within its own transformations’; he explains: ‘I came from a society where the profound integument of capitalist society, economy, and culture had been imposed by conquest and colonization.’9 Today, European history can be written starting with the ruins left by colonial wars; the economic stakes of Golden Age Dutch painting, for instance, are most readily discerned from the standpoint of the contemporary culture industry. Tomorrow, who knows what point of view will offer the best way to revisit the ruins of the world today?
Paradoxically, Slavoj Žižek endorses Althusser’s position by way of commentary on Hegel – whose historical idealism stands at the antipodes of this aleatory vision of the world a priori. Historical necessity, he affirms, is posterior to chance: ‘necessity is always retroactive. Of course there is a necessity at work, but this necessity always arises at the end, as contingent.’10 In other words, History is aleatory; we discover meaning in it as it unfolds, or after the fact. Althusser correctly maintains that ‘every process is governed by its end’.11 As such, it is pointless to try to determine where the ‘objective tendency’ of History stands in order to contribute to its realization – as Marx sought to do. On the contrary, ‘through our actions we construct the necessity that will determine us retroactively’.12 Through this lens, every work of art affects both the past and the future: a site of temporal bifurcation, it opens paths that other artists will walk down and, at the same time, offers a perspective for rereading the past. Jorge Luis Borges expresses the same idea when he evokes ‘Kafka’s precursors’: every great oeuvre invents its own genealogy and creates a new history of literature in reverse. In other words – and to use the term devised by OULIPO (Ouvroir de Littérature potentielle) – artistic and literary history consists of innumerable ‘plagiarists by anticipation’. The work of art operates on both directions of time: turning towards the future, it generates its own causal chain; plunging into the past, it modifies the form and content of History. Every work, then, constitutes a bifurcation: as in Borges’s short stories, its present is undecidable, tracing lines of flight from one pole of chronology to the other.
The history of art, then, may be read either from left to right or from right to left. Far from exhibiting idealism or mysticism of any sort, its timeless character reaches in both directions extending from the present. The undecidable character of the work of art renders all teleology null and void: assigning any historical finality at all to art means denying the idea of movement and replacing it with a scenario scripted in advance. Assigning an origin involves a similar negation, for art’s historical foundations are in perpetual movement, too; archaeology yields only infinite excavation – just as risky, uncertain and complex as the paths of the future. ‘As flowers turn toward the sun,’ Benjamin wrote, ‘what has been strives to turn – by dint of a secret heliotropism – toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history.’13 This is why Stuart Hall can read the history of capitalism in light of a new ‘sun’: postcolonialist thought.
Althusser notes a striking formula in the first version of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy: ‘The anatomy of the ape does not explain that of man, rather human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape.’ The statement commands his attention for two reasons:
first, because it precludes in advance any teleological interpretation of an evolutionist conception of history. In the second place, it literally anticipates, though clearly in different circumstances, Freud’s theory of deferred action, whereby the significance of an earlier affect is recognised only in and via a subsequent one.14
Via this notion of belatedness, the writing of History and psychoanalysis meet up in the realm of art. Not only is the past incessantly reactivated by the present – moreover, the very nature of ‘necessity’ (which is supposed to steer it) is subject to the vagaries of the present. The work of art does not offer formal content alone; it also presents a corresponding interpretive and historical context: that is, it produces genealogies as well as outlooks. For any artist at all, then, situating oneself in a political space signifies, first and foremost, choosing the historical narrative within which she or he positions and deploys his or her work.
It is generally agreed that no particular style dominates our age. This impression may follow from the voluminous quantity of contemporary artistic productions – which only enhances its heteroclite allure. Perhaps the incipient twenty-first century will be recognized a posteriori as having been traversed by stylistic figures, motifs and representations that, while spontaneous, are sufficiently defined to present a vision of space and time just as consistent as quattrocento geometries or the ethereal volutes of eighteenth-century France. If one duly observes artistic production today, it is clear that human societies do not appear as organic totalities so much as disparate ensembles of structures, institutions and social practices detachable from each other – and which, most commonly, qualify as specific to different ‘cultures’. The corollary of this atomized vision of the social sphere is the evolution of yesterday’s unitary political struggle (revolutionary Marxism) towards multiple combats in discrete sectors and communities. Indeed, the nation-state no longer counts as a totality to be reworked from top to bottom – the potential object of a revolutionary tabula rasa. Like atmospheric pollution, the flow of capital refuses to ac
knowledge political borders.
As much is plain not just in works of art, but in Hollywood cinema. What is customarily called ‘reality’ has no more consistency than a montage. Starting from this observation, one may view artistic practice as a kind of software permitting action to be performed on communal reality in order to produce alternative versions of the same. That is, contemporary art post-produces social reality: by formal means, it illuminates the montages constituting it – which are formal, too. Thus, one of the essential elements of contemporary art’s political programme is that of bringing the world into a precarious state – in other words, constantly affirming the transitory and circumstantial nature of the institutions that structure social life, the rules governing individual and collective behaviour. After all, the ideological apparatuses of capitalism proclaim the very opposite. They declare the political and economic framework in which we are living to be immutable and definitive: a scenario in which the décor and props undergo perpetual (and superficial) transformation – but nothing else changes. The central political task of contemporary art does not involve denouncing any current ‘political’ fact in particular. Instead, the point is to bring precarity to mind: to keep the notion alive that intervention in the world is possible, to propagate the creative potential of human existence in all its forms. It is because social reality constitutes an artifact through and through that we can imagine changing it. Art exposes the world’s non-definitive character. It dislocates, disassembles and hands things over to disorder and poetry. By producing representations and counter-models that underscore the intrinsic fragility of the standing order, art bears the standard of a political project that is much more efficient (in the sense of generating concrete effects) and much more ambitious (inasmuch as it concerns all aspects of political reality) than it would be if it simply relayed a watchword or ideology.
Thus, inasmuch as our world is nothing but a pure construction – an ideological arrangement (or ‘phantasmagoria’, in Benjamin’s terms) – it stands as the theatre for a struggle between different narratives and fictions. Jacques Rancière seems to draw an analogous conclusion when he writes that ‘the relationship between art and politics [is] not a passage from fiction to reality, but a relationship between two ways of making a fiction’.15 Althusser made this question the very cornerstone of ideology. When he defines ideology as a ‘representation of the real’ that is ‘distorted, … biased, and tendentious’ inasmuch as it aims to ‘keep individuals in the place determined by class domination’,16 he foregrounds that a given social fiction exists only through its actors’ participation, the regulated movement of extras; ideology is a screenplay that ‘interpellates’ characters without end. For Althusser, the repressive fiction undergirding the social scenario is relayed by an immense network of instruments he calls ‘ideological state apparatuses’ (ISA) – to distinguish them from state power as such, which is inherently and immediately identifiable. ISAs have no need for armed force because they ‘function by ideology’:17 they are religious, scholastic, familial, cultural, juridical and informational … In a word – given that the state, in ‘bourgeois’ societies, ‘is the precondition for any distinction between public and private’18 – they are all instances of power. These apparatuses have the objective of ‘reproducing relations of production’ as they stand. Hence the pre-eminence Althusser grants the educational apparatus, the heart of ideological fabrication.19 What he meant to demonstrate – the idea that now provides the theoretical foundation for cultural studies – is that ideology possesses ‘material existence’.20 In other words, ideas occurring to an individual are actualized by behaviours; ideology is reflected in practice: the ‘material rituals’ that structure our social and cultural life by lending concrete form to the collective screenplay. A given society is shaped through a narrative that yields scripts and casts roles in a vast array of scenes.
Heterochronies
How does this aleatory vision of History translate into the sphere of artistic composition? Rosalind Krauss has observed that Renaissance perspective was ‘the visual correlate of causality’ inasmuch as ‘one thing follows the next in space according to rule’. But if modernist painting did away with a centred, monocular perspective and affirmed the flatness of pictorial space, it also, and above all, replaced it with ‘a temporal perspective, i.e., history’.21 Essentially historical – ordered by the idea of social and artistic progress – modernist painting simply transposed, into time, the mental, logical and rational order through which Renaissance humanism had assured its mastery of the physical world; it is based on a historical narrative that situates works at determinate locations, ‘the ones behind the others’. Here, the notion of history is synonymous with perspective; it amounts to its translation onto a temporal plane. In the age of the internet, communication occurring in real time, and global hypermobility, it seems only logical that new modes of perceiving and representing space and time have emerged, prompting artists to weave the one into the other: as visual Moebius strips – semiotic chains combining the features of different media and formats – made possible by computer technology. Immersed in a universe of permanent ‘visual shocks’, whose premises Benjamin articulated long ago, the sensibility of the twenty-first-century individual is evolving towards an imaginary of multiplicity and reticulation.22 To be sure, it would be excessive to pretend that a specific form dominates contemporary art, given its formal and conceptual profusion. All the same, the presence of the network-structure and its derivatives pervades artistic production too much to amount to a mere ‘tendency’. The horizon of the present, both conceptually and visually, seems to be dominated by pulverization, scattering and links. Clusters, clouds, tree structures, constellations, webs, archipelagos … All these forms evoke pixels – as if to signal the decomposable structure of the universe and the precarious nature of our political systems.
The primary concern for contemporary aesthetics, its central problematic, is organizing multiplicity: relations outweigh objects, branches points, and passages presence; paths prove more significant than the stations along the way. And so, inasmuch as they are caught up in dynamic contexts, forms naturally tend to exude (secréter) narratives: concerning first their production, then their diffusion. As such, works present themselves as complex structures capable of generating forms before, during and after their realization. The predominance of multiplicity has the corollary of a heterochronic conception of time: beyond the ‘pure presence’ and momentariness that distinguish the modernist work as a world-unto-itself, contemporary art postulates multiple temporalities – a representation of time evoking the constellation. In like fashion, a supernova we see in the sky turns out to have been dead for millions of years – the light that is visible proves to be just a remainder; we are contemplating time more than space. The constellation’s specificity is its heterochronic character: it comprises an ensemble of stars, whose rays seem close enough to be connected by imaginary lines yielding figures. But if the stars constituting the constellation seem to be close, in fact they lie light years apart in three-dimensional space. A constellation – an ‘asterism’ – is a figure constructed through formal analogy, an arbitrary object given shape by connecting scattered elements, a folding of space and time. In the process, motifs emerge, which then receive titles such as ‘Orion’, ‘Leo’, or ‘Ursa Major’; for all that, they are coups de force the imagination performs on reality. Such work is semionautic – a term I have used to describe dynamic articulation: an artistic gesture, to realize a form, linking a multiplicity of scattered signs or the actions constituting a pattern of behaviour.23
The ubiquity of reticular forms in contemporary art – and, more particularly, the constellation-motif and its derivates – stems from technological advances, especially modes of reading and mental displacement brought about by the internet. However, the causes are also sociological – indeed, civilizational.24 From Andreas Gursky’s Photoshopped pictures, saturated with detail, to pullulating installations by
Sarah Sze, Jason Rhoades, Jim Shaw and Mike Kelley that draw on proliferating archives and displays of objects and images – not to mention the clouds of information and data that painters such as Franz Ackermann and Julie Mehretu use when composing their works – the heterogeneous has come to govern the current regime of visibility. The same is even more apparent in music, where the dominant mode of composition involves grafting together elements that belong to different epochs or cultures. Above all, this enduring trend is due to the saturation of consumer space: hyper-production, combined with hyper-archiving, sets the individual adrift in a warehouse which assumes the form of a labyrinth.
Panicked by the profusion of cultural offerings and the colossal dimensions of all that is to be surveyed, we focus less on the space we happen to occupy than on any thread of Ariadne that seems to promise a way out. Hence the importance, in contemporary culture, of links, charts, guides and navigational narratives. Likewise, this accounts for the prominence of agents of orientation and checking (récolement): DJs, programmers, curators, compilers, iconographers, ‘buyers’ and editors – a veritable universe of professionals who establish relations between things and engineer experience.25 In a sociocultural context marked by super-production and infinite archiving, the trajectory – as a lived experience offered to a public – has come to constitute an artistic form in its own right. I have attempted to describe this family of trajectory-forms – albeit from the overly reductive perspective of voyage and displacement – in my essay Radicant. Here, I refer to the general viatorization of cultural signals that emerged as a counterpoint to economic globalization in the 2000s and planted the seed for forms exiled beyond the limits of the ascendant cultural Empire; indeed, it has come to provide the mental threshold for a nascent planetary modernity one might call ‘altermodern’.
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