It Has Never Happened Yet — Further Thoughts on An Art Utopia

Recently, my mind has rattled on a few somewhat related but not entirely connected thoughts (most of them thought in a hospital bed), which I will now attempt to connect haphazardly through text.

The first of those is the interplay between Steven Shaviro-Mark Fisher-Slavoj Zizek on their opinions on the movies 300 and V For Vendetta. It was a debate I am positioned far in Shaviro’s camp, as I think V For Vendetta is a fine piece (as a movie, even more so as comic) and I’m much bothered by the love of the subjective destitution presented in Zizek’s piece on 300. In his response to K-Punk’s “Dis-Identity Politics”, Shaviro writes :

“I don’t really disagree with k-punk’s dismissal of the political value of V for Vendetta; though I liked the movie more than he did, I think he does point up its limitations as an “object to think with.” The only part of the movie that k-punk finds valuable is the sequence about Evey’s “subjective destitution.” This is a section I found more troubling than k-punk does. But not because of the starkness of the process itself: I think that the film does a lot to convey how the sort of subjective transformation that is necessary for there to be a political transformation involves a lot of pain and difficulty. It isn’t a mere matter of changing one’s mind the way one chooses items on a restaurant menu, or a computer menu (I use the metaphor of menu deliberately, because it is the ne plus ultra of consumerist logic, a metaphor often favored by the “rational choice” so-called political theorists themselves).

But what bothered me was the way in which V. himself administered the process of incarceration and torture that was the motor of Evey’s subjective destitution. In the rest of the movie, as k-punk notes, V. is a sort of populist fantasy figure, enlightening the masses so that they can revolt, with the hidden assumption, therefore, that they could never do so for themselves. But the scenes of Evey’s imprisonment seem to embody the reverse (and therefore entirely mirroring) situation: that of a Leninist party elite re-educating the masses in order to overcome their “false consciousness.” This is what I meant, in the earlier thread, with my discomfort about V.’s authority to do what he does. We seem to be caught, not only in the dilemma about populism (k-punk’s critique of which, here, here, and here, seems right on target to me), but also in the sterile old argument between anarchist spontaneism (represented today by Hardt and Negri’s multitude) and Leninist conspiratorial organization (represented today, in theoretical argument at least, by Zizek). Neither of these seem at all satisfactory to me; I find Zizek’s Leninism as much of a fantasy as the spontaneous uprising of the multitude.”

I have a very non-confrontational nature. Though i will assert my opinion, and i don’t like it when i can’t do that, i do not live for the shock in the way that Fisher and Zizek love to (in my latest big essay work, i was afraid that everyone i mentioned would have a bone to pick with me). So Shaviro calling attention to how he does not think V’s torturing of Evie is sound political praxis (commentary, maybe, but not praxis) is one I have a lot of fondness for. But, an interesting position he raises is how said point is not any more realistic than the populist uprising in the ending of the movie. When he says “it seems to me that Zizek is doing exactly what he accuses his opponents of doing: covering over an unbearable, traumatic antagonism in the Real with an imaginary solution.” a part of me sighs with relief that I’m not the only one who thinks much of the more supremacist, rigid positions within our view of revolution are weak not because they are too violent, but because they generate the same kind of escapism that they often denounce. I remember the series of protests in Rio during the Dilma years and how eventually the initial very specific demands of the protests (which was directed at the rise in bus fares) turned into a far looser and generic “against corruption” position. That showed that, more than wanting change, people wanted an escape, and the protests proved a very “fun” few months, with joking picket signs, people dressed as superheroes, etc. But, what in retrospect we realized is that the general, somewhat aimless public anger at the political state would be one of the things that set the stage for the rise of Bolsonaro (not without a helping hand from North American capital in their involvement on the Lava-Jato Operation, but American money funding right wing Brazilian movements is hardly cause for shock). My position, in theory, is not dissimilar to aspects of Zizek’s own position on the London Riots, which he talked about in his Pervert’s Guide On Ideology.

But I do not believe the solution is the strictness brought about by Subjective Destitution or Nihilation (to use a term Zizek uses and one that Fisher does), because it just plain sounds “too easy”. I’m not bothered by the violence or the shock they prescribe (it is not my cup of tea, but i’m an art’s history graduate and an anarcho-syndicalist so i doubt they would ever be), but by how similar they are to thought well over on my side of the pond. I am attracted to Anarchist theory not precisely because they present good praxis, but because I don’t actually care for praxis that much, I just think the language is empowering and the mode of thought is fun to follow along. It is, in a sense, a sort of “escapism”, or more accurately, it is a kind of theory that fulfills some of my desires. And i believe that people on the more Marxist-Leninist-Maoist point on one level do have some desire that is fulfilled by the adoption of those labels (i certainly have taken much honest to god pleasure in reading Class Struggle In France or Black Skin White Masks, past the possible theoretical and revolutionary ammunition they may give me : i think they are plain well written books). So why do I so often see such a dismissal of pleasure, of desire and such? I would not claim to have the answers (i’m not really a political writer, even less so a psychoanalyst: i may be using these words all wrong), but if i may go to my field, i want to point to Adorno.

I’m going to have to make a strong effort to not devolve into vulgarian ramblings over my thoughts on Adorno, but suffice it to say that I do not enjoy his mode of thinking. I don’t like his dismissal of improvisation and I do not think his critique of the culture industry holds up in the modern age (at the very least, not without the freedom to retool it). But especially, I feel like his critique of Modernity lacks in looking backwards so much. That is certainly a more emotional, atmospheric critique of his work (because again, i don’t want to bog myself down in my incoherent thoughts on someone whose work i do not like reading). Though one of Marx’s great strengths in my opinion is his strive to move forward, it seems to me that adorno would like us to get a lot of thoughts together in antiquity before moving forward, in a way that feels more than anything too bothered with a past than with a possible future. That is certainly an atmosphere I think writers like Fredric Jameson picked up in his critiques of parody vs pastiche or Fisher’s remembrance of the post-punk era.

I would like to posit that nostalgia is not actually “bad” in theory (in the sense that it is a natural reaction we have as our actual memory fades and our emotional memory takes place), but it is a dangerous territory if left unaccompanied. So i will say : the existence of parody in antiquity or of post-punk in the 80s did not “stop” the rise of “late stage capitalism” with its pastiche or of 21st century neo-liberalism and its “hauntological” atmosphere. And sure, one could say that these products were never meant to save us, that they were stuck in a myriad of other political, technological and societal changes that exist independently of the art produced in it. And I do not disagree. But i believe the sleight of hand between giving art its weight when it does not seem to be doing its job right (as if it is wasting time or, at worst, helping out the enemy) and taking it away once it was actually in its most interesting form something that coincides with the emotional memory that nostalgia plays with. I am not accusing either writer of nostalgia (as if that’s something one could accuse anyone of, we are all going to go through it, sooner or later), but i think it is something to be aware of.

I don’t want to sound like I’m saying art has power or that it does not have power. I think the same way that if you force a hard line conservative to read Capital, he won’t magically come out at the end as a communist, i don’t think the right or wrong art in and of itself has power equaling +1, -1 or =0, art is just a thing humans do and have done since time immemorial. It is, decontextualized, a reflection of “something”. That “something” can range from a romantic relationship, a good night of sex, political anger, how much you love a restaurant, how pretty some stranger is, anything. Art did not create sex, romance or the food you ate, it was a reflection or an aspiration of it. Which is why I think escapism is, well, inescapable. That is, if we are being uncharitable with the term.

In his amazing book Pop Music & Hip Ennui: A Sonic Fiction of Capitalist Realism, Macon Holt lays down the ways in which Adorno gets the concept of a revolutionary art right, but also the ways in which his thought may need some retooling or context to work in the modern age. He presents the Adorno quote

“As a musical composition compresses time, and as a painting folds spaces into one another, so the possibility is concretized that the world could be other than it is. Space, time, and causality are maintained, their power is not denied, but they are divested of their compulsiveness.“

To which Holt says :

This is the whole thing. The “why” of “why bother with art?” The possibility that the world could be otherwise is manifest in the artwork and this is a pretty powerful thing to have access to on the wall of a gallery or in impenetrable prose, let alone shimmering through your earbuds.

What Adorno doesn’t seem to get, however, is that this is something super ambivalent. Thus he spends page-long paragraph after page-long paragraph, trying to outline why it is that only artworks that he considers to have truth content — which is to say that gesture in some way toward the possibility of emancipatory communism — concretize the possibility that the world can be other than it is. And the thing is, he’s not wrong about some of this. If you read Kafka, you can’t help but be overcome by the alienation emanating from the page. Embedded in the structure of each exchange the narrator (Gregor, K., Joseph K., and so on) engages in is the totalizing logic of capital; represented in such a way that it denatures this reality by, at the level of content, exceeding the confines of its form of expression . The horrifying nature of such a depiction of the world does create a tension, the resolution of which would be to move beyond the material conditions and social relations that produced such horror. And, in the case of Kafka, I would guess that would be something like communism. But the other side of this, that artworks that don’t point to the possibility of communism do not concretize the possibility that the world could be “other than it is,” doesn’t follow. There is a lot more to “other” than just communism.

After a very poignant analysis of the Black Eyed Peas smash-hit I Gotta Feeling as an example of a piece of music that fulfills the points designated by Adorno for “true content”, of a world that could be other than it is, Holt says the phenomenal phrase “The trouble isn’t that these materials don’t let us dream big enough. It is that the dreams they provide are all we feel we need”. Again, sounds an awful lot like the kind of liberatory “escape valve” expression I find in those old protests in Brazil.

It may sound like i am going back and forth between praising desire and rejecting desire, but that is merely my attempt at understanding desire (especially my own desire : as i’ve said, i am writing this text in an attempt to connect loose troubling thoughts i had in the past few weeks), because i do not believe we can ever get rid of it. I don’t believe a nihilatory process is strategically sound nor even quite feasible (and even if it was, would not a wish for it be also a process of desire? would an anti-desiring process be truly void of desire like that?). I believe we need to be upfront about very barebones, simple likings and dislikings in art, with less of moral strategizing or things such as. Honesty shall be the best praxis.

It may just as well sound like i go back and forth between rejecting the past and embracing it, like i am criticizing many thinkers for taking power from history while i myself seek it for my own gains. What i want to put down (especially as we move forward) is that the piece of art itself has the say in the whole mathematic equation we are stuck into. I don’t actually believe originality or derivativeness has a play in my problematic: both capitalism and anti-capitalism take power in seeking the new and in returning nostalgically to the past, i believe it is silly to say one is better than the other, just as much as i believe it is silly to assume capitalism has a monopoly on desire and that we should thus reject that (again, the problem with capitalism as it relates to art, the imaginary and desire “isn’t that these materials don’t let us dream big enough. It is that the dreams they provide are all we feel we need”. By playing hard and fast manicheism, we play the capitalist ballet all the same)

I have, over the past few months, become enamored with the writings of Jacques Ranciere, and a passage from his book The Emancipated Spectator feels very poignant here. In presenting us with a passage from the 19th century revolutionary magazine Le Tocsin which describes a letter written by a woodworker of him musing (seemingly apolitically) about living, if only for a moment, in his boss’ house. Ranciere writes (and i apologize for translating this passage from my Brazilian copy of the book):

“The possibility of a collective proletariat voice passes through this aesthetic rupture, through this dissociation of the proletariat manners of being. Because for the dominated the question has never been finding out about the mechanisms of domination, but of creating a body turned towards something else besides said domination. As this woodworker indicates, it is not about acquiring knowledge of his situation, but of the ‘passions’ that are inappropriate to said situation. What produces these passions, these subversions in the disposition of bodies is not this or that work of art, but the ways of looking corresponding to the new forms of exposition of the works, the forms of its separated existence. What forms a revolutionary body is not the revolutionary painting, be it revolutionary in the sense of David or in the sense of Delacroix. It is way more the possibility of said works being seen on a neutral space of the museum or on the reproductions of the enciclopedias by a modest price, where they are equivalent to what yesterday counted only on the power of the kings, the glory of olden cities or the mysteries of the faith”

One of the first essays i’ve ever read by Adorno, recommended by a teacher of mine, was Valery-Proust Museum, an essay in which he presents the conflicting positions between Paul Valery (who considered museums a place of barbarism) and Marcel Proust (who considered the chaos of the museum and the overexposure of art something desirable). In his attempt to present both on equal footing, he nonetheless puts Valery on a higher pedestal (again, atmospheric critiques, but that’s what happens when you literally call Proust “pathetic”). My negative relationship with Adorno may have started there, because i am also on the same track as Proust : Yes, artworks should populate everywhere from museums to train stations. Yes, I do believe that the fleeting nature of art is part of its charm. Yes, I do believe that “inferior music” is cool, in that it’s easier nature to digest gets preserved in your memory, thus giving it second life. And I believe Ranciere posits, once again, the revolutionary power of creating a second body, much like Proust advocated for a second life. And so, it is not the work of art itself that is the important part of the problem, but the equation it is introduced into: the system, the context that distributes it.

(I would like to go on a tangent about George Didi-Huberman’s phenomenal book Atlas, Or The Anxious Gay Science, and what it says about atlases and encyclopedias and how they tie back into this whole point, but i’ll leave with one of the quotes i love from the very beginning of the book.)

“I imagine that, upon opening this book, my reader already knows what an atlas is, practically speaking. He probably has one on the bookshelf. But has he “read” it? Probably not. You don’t “read” an atlas in the same way you read a novel, a history book, or a philosophical essay, from the first page to the last. Moreover, an atlas often begins — we will soon be able to verify this — in an arbitrary or problematic way, which is quite unlike the beginning of a story or the premise of an argument; and as for the end, it often reveals the emergence of a new country, a new zone of knowledge to be explored, to the extent that an atlas almost never has what we might call a definitive form. Furthermore, an atlas is hardly made up of “pages” in the usual sense of the term, but rather of tables, or of plates on which images are arranged, plates that we consult with a particular aim, or that we leaf through at leisure, letting our “will to knowledge” wander from image to image and from plate to plate. Experience shows that, more often than not, we use an atlas in a way that combines those two ap- parently dissimilar gestures: We open it, first, to look for precise in- formation. But once we find that information, we do not necessarily put the atlas down; rather, we follow different pathways this way and that. We do not close the collection of plates until we have wandered a while, erratically, with no particular intention, through its forest, its labyrinth, its treasure. Until the next time, which will be just as fruitful or useless.”

My previous essay i believe dives deeper into it, on the topics of community and curatorial work, so i’d highly recommend going over that, but in short, i believe that the revolutionary power in art will probably never exist, so long as we think we need to make better, more poignant art. It will certainly not come about by returning to some previous mode of thought, aesthetic or attitude as it relates to the creation of the art itself (be it punk, post punk, twelve tone serialism or anything like that) because the modes in which art has been distributed have never actually worked towards a revolutionary goal. I say to my friends all the time that we cannot let the job of redeeming “pop music” as something to be done “after the revolution”, that the revolutionary art job will be found in widely accessible piracy, in more involved curatorial work, in making the thought of discussing and thinking about art not something posh, stuffy and pretentious, but something everyone does, like it or not. And, above all, we must encourage that everyone *can* do art if they so *desire*.

For example, where one may look at the cavalcade of “nostalgia-pandering” that artists like The Arctic Monkeys, Dua Lipa or Bruno Mars engage in, i see the problem in how society does not stimulate drawing the line between the “original” and the “derivative” in a way that is not rose tinted and loving. That is not the fault of those artists or the art they create: let me take for one example Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner. He was born in 1985, grew up supposedly listening to The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin and The Eagles. Why shouldn’t his music sound like boomer rock nostalgia, if that was the music he grew up loving in the first place, and without which, he may not have started making music himself? I don’t want to pretend like music that is derivative is “secretly very original” but i believe that in a better system, a derivative musician would be tied to its origins lovingly and creatively: What do they change, what do they keep the same, where does the style of one of his influences ties back into the larger whole. It may sound like the kind of “Psychedelic Fascism” that Fisher warned against so often, a world in which the only mode of innovation is in constant recombination of previous parts. As for that, I would love to point to the rising hyperpop scene.

I’ve gone on and on about hyperpop on my latest essay and in previous texts, but here i’d like to draw attention to how, in the music of someone like That Kid, SOPHIE or GFOTY, you could take a snapshot of the elements at play and claim they are purely derivative of Britney, Aguilera, Tropical House or what have you. But, within their music, there exists an undeniable alien aura gluing it all together, with definite outsider, DIY and left-field sounds and influences. So, if within a single artist, a single album, a single song there can exist a recombinatory fantasy along with pure innovative power, why can’t these also coexist in a system that is honest and kind to its moving parts? If i am to return to the original example of V For Vendetta, the original comic book series started in March 1982. In the same very month you had long running anthology series named after Hitchcock and Asimov, the seventh issue of newcomer team All-Star Squadron, comics like 2000AD that were in its thousands and a totally new series like Captain Carrot. Conan The Barbarian had two different series, one that has been hanging on since 1970 and one that had just started in 1980. You had a myriad of innovative, strange new ideas mixed with old staples of canon. One did not detract from the other’s existence or merit.

Incidentally, my hottest claim is that, at its best moments in history, comic books of all things had the closest to the best idea of a revolutionary mode of distribution. I can’t quite go into it without devolving into another barely related ramble, but id like to linger on a quote from the magician himself Alan Moore, during one of his (admittedly very hard to watch) tirades against the modern comic book industry and its status in modern culture. But notice how he doesnt go against the works themselves, but the distribution :

“I’m not so interested in comics anymore, I don’t want anything to do with them.

I had been doing comics for 40-something years when I finally retired. When I entered the comics industry, the big attraction was that this was a medium that was vulgar, it had been created to entertain working class people, particularly children. The way that the industry has changed, it’s ‘graphic novels’ now, it’s entirely priced for an audience of middle class people. I have nothing against middle class people but it wasn’t meant to be a medium for middle aged hobbyists. It was meant to be a medium for people who haven’t got much money.”

There are parts of this interview i do not agree with (which frankly, are better expounded upon by Leah Moore on her twitter thread on her father), but it is undeniable that, before this appeal to middle class colectionism, comics were as close as we had to something cheap, quick, dirty, easily exchangeable that could create worlds of interconnective tissue within themselves, which stimulates a more tight knit, kind community, quick to muse and discuss. I am not claiming that we need to go back to that mode of distribution, the same way i believe going back to post-punk or back to parody is neither desirable nor possible, but i do believe that at one point, comics were the closest we had gotten to what i’m attempting to describe. What I am describing won’t happen while capitalism is still a thing that is able to take our power and misdirect our efforts, and we should never lose sight that it is a joint effort between community building in the arts and in the real world that will, together, push through. We can’t point fingers or mourn the past, “There is no outside, the only way is through” and “You can never go home again” and “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons” and all attitudes i believe are necessary: take power from the past and use it to move forward rather than sit idly in your isolation chamber.

One of my favorite books is Kodwo Eshun More Brilliant Than The Sun, not only for its absolutely phenomenal breakdowns of so many of my favorite artists, but for the general force that drives the book : productivity. And not in the capitalistic sense, but in the sense of creativity. In a phenomenal interview with Mediamatic, he says, of the original concept of the book :

“So me and Steve Beard (co-editor of I-D magazine and author of Logic Bomb Eds.) started noticing this omission, this blind spot when it comes to music. Music was this point where science fiction apparently could not go, where it breaks down in a certain way. We realised that when you really wanted to analyse the science-fictional components of music you had to do it with this immanent analysis. You had to start from what producers were already theorising about music. That’s when I realised that producers were already theorising about their music quite well. Science fiction contrasted so drastically with, say, some of the things that Holger Czukay and Can were doing. I had collected a whole series of their statements and realised that they were so science-fictional about their music. Holger Czukay would say things like, I was in the studio with David Sylvian and in order to attain the right atmosphere for this record I’d put the whole studio under perfume. And he meant that he put a shortwave radio in the corner of the studio, just filtering out sound throughout the entire studio so that the recording process was under this tint of sound. Such a brilliant way of thinking about sound. Then there was this interview in The Wire where Czukay was talking about Jaki Liebezeit, who started as a free jazz drummer and gradually wanted to take away the complexity of free jazz drumming. He kept reducing his drumming into simpler and simpler polyrhythms all the time. Czukay said that as Liebezeit’s drumming became simpler, he started drumming like the first man who ever drummed, like a stone age man. And the more simple he got, the more he started to sound like a machine. I was really amazed by this, because it conjured up this image of a drum machine in the Palaeolithic age. Suddenly you start imagining 2001, and instead of this monolith you see this 808 drum machine with no surface, this impalpable surface, landing, and these ape men start touching it…

So through this idea of Jurassic drumming, it suddenly seemed to me that producers had a much clearer idea of the science fiction capacities of their music. Suddenly it was evident that ‘sonic fiction’, as I proposed it, was already being practised by producers, musicians and composers. All I had to do was extract what was already there and materialise it. All the ideas seemed to rush towards this — sonic fiction seemed to be an attractor — and all the terms just moved towards it and it was the easiest thing in the world to extract them and plug them all into each other. But yeah, science fiction in itself, in its strict terms, for whatever reason seems to be mainly just generational, I think.”

He calls his process a “Sonology of history, not a historical contextualization of sound” during the interview, which to me brings to mind D&G’s amazing sentence “Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly”. To me, both phrases can be unintentional riffs on the old maxim “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”, which then claims “well, why can’t i?”. The revolutionary art has not happened yet because no one thinks they can (or rather, should) dance about architecture.

So, i believe in short that the weight and critique put on “derivative” art, or “nostalgia pandering”, or “non-revolutionary” art is an extreme and dangerous misplacing of the actual problem, and for as long as we dont realize this, we will be trapped in the hellscape that is modern art thought. Never lose sight of the fact that the first people to flare up against music that is unwholesome and may indoctrinate weaker minds towards evil are conservatives, puritans and such types. That does not mean we can’t critique the work of art individually, that is a part of desire after all, desire can be angry, negative and destructive. But we must never fall in the trap that the art itself is in fault as it regards to the system (which id like to clarify, is not a claim Fisher has made, at least not one i believe he made in all my readings of his : he may be grumpy, and i may disagree with him often, but i do think he put that pretty well and clear in his texts. His followers intent of turning his thought into the most boring version of itself, now that’s another story), but that the system is at fault for you not being able to find the art that fulfills your desires. It is not that we must uplift or propagate the right kind of art, but that we must create a space in which propagating any kind of art, from the most derivative to the most experimental, is met with honesty, earnestness and creativity (as in, a hunger for more).