Chris Gilbert: A Discontinuous History. The 'Jetztzeit' of Art & Language in the 1970s
I conceive of this paper as having three parts. In the first part I want to look at the general historical backdrop to Art & Language's practice in the 1970s, especially the work on The Fox by the New York City-based group, making use – perhaps fast and loose use – of Walter Benjamin's conception of a discontinuous historiography. I don't pretend to fully command Benjamin's sophisticated texts on history, yet I want to point to connections between the "now-time" of Art & Language in the 1970s and our "now-time" today. Most especially, I want to point to emphasize how, at the moment of neoliberalism's crumbing or being traversed by other logics such as neo-conservative one (the moment of today) and at its inception in the 1970s (the moment of the fiscal crisis of New York City and the removal by force of Salvador Allende in Chile) there are important points of contact, important resonances.
So to begin. In this first part of the paper I propose to talk about the time of Art & Language in the 1970s: I want to speak about its present through the lens of our present, hence in an obvious, and I hope not too off the mark manner, referencing Benjamin's On the Concept of History (often called the Theses on the Philosophy of History) and in particularly the nexus of thought that comes together around his term "jetztzeit" in the fourteenth of these Theses. What is the present moment, seen from the perspective of its dangers, from the perspective of the dangers that face the working class? What of that possible leap into history by the historian, separating out a moment and arresting it from the time-of-succession?
Today we face the crisis of neoliberalism, which I believe has become such a common thought (that is, not common in the good sense of shared, but bland) that we must realize, as Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez contends, that the crisis of neoliberalism is really the crisis of capitalism, since the former is but a late stage of the later. We are in a time of war, of tottering desperate attempts to salvage capitalism from its crises of over-accumulation, including the absurd idea that one might do so by opening a market in Iraq. (David Harvey has recently mentioned Matthew Arnold's "Freedom is a great horse to ride it, but to ride somewhere" in reference to the idea of "liberating" Iraq. I don't think much consideration at all was given to with whom and how Iraq might trade – since presumably it was Iraq's market above all that was to be liberated – but of course it is not in the nature of free market fundamentalism to want to ask such questions.) 1 Concerning Art & Language in the 1970s, the time of my own research, in its broadest strokes we could talk about the taking shape of the neo-liberal ideology at that time, against the background of the fiscal crisis of New York City, which was also the immediate geographic and temporal background of The Fox's publication. All of this was also in the context of the Vietnam War and the early 1970s oil crises and resulted in a series of desperate attempts to find fiscal solutions and later cultural measures to fix capitalism's latest crisis. Benjamin's concept of "jetztzeit" is useful because it provides a way of discussing history as discontinuous and opens the possibility of a revolutionary history. One could say, in fact, that the discovery or opening of a "now-time" wrested from the lineages and continuities of bourgeois historiography is equivalent to the constitution of a revolutionary moment.
This is by no means to say that the two times, 1975 and 2005, the two "jetztzeits" – understood in time's ordinary conceptions – are the same. If at that time, in 1975, we saw the formation of the neoliberal "solution" and restoration of class power that followed hard on its heels under the "leadership" of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Deng Xiaoping, by contrast the present time is distinguished by neoliberalism being traversed, limited, and challenged by a new breed of neoconservative militarism. Yet what both times have in common is a profound crisis, a crisis that from the perspective of Benjamin's historiography can be understood in way that eludes subsumption into the then popular theoretical framework of Kuhnian paradigm shifts (basically, as some Fox writers understood, an attempt to tame the crises of capitalism).
In developing this argument I wish to rely on the now widely accepted claim that in the past 30 years of the "cultural turn" there has been an overemphasis on culture at the expense of considerations of hard politics. This turn is all the more surprising given that the emphasis on culture's agency was often carried out under the banner of Gramscian theory at the Birmingham School, all the while ignoring Gramsci's warning in the Modern Prince (1933) about the dangers of political problems becoming cultural ones. 2 The latter is most appropriate to consider at present. The role that the artworld had in the 1970s in giving a new "cultural" face or facelift to the "New New York" was perhaps quite evident during the "now-time" of Art & Language of the 1970s, as their many debunking analyses of that artworld in The Fox indicate, because that brave new world was then both more new and more shabby.
To say something more about the similarities of the times. If you recall New York City went into fiscal crisis (bankruptcy) in the early 1970s. In 1975, in strange but what turned out to be definitive twist of recent political history, the merchant banker Felix Rohatyn worked out a deal with a cabal of New York investment bankers whereby their loans would be paid off and in turn social programs sharply curtailed in a kind of structural adjustments plan for the urban United States. 3 This happened despite the fact that traditional lending logic would argue that bankers had hazarded the dept, and lost. Somewhat earlier, in 1973, in way that would have been shocking at the time but recent history has made familiar, the United States government was preparing to invade Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to extract oil from those countries in a friendly and forcible manner.
This was the economic and political backdrop against which, in face of a new austerity in social programs and public services, a "new" New York City emerged. This "remade" city was one in which culture and art had a particular and central role. In my view, in the treacherous way highlighted by Gramsci, the artworld provided a cultural mask to economic problems. I quote David Harvey from A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism about New York City's new character in the 1970s:
The ruling elites moved, often fractiously, to support the opening of the cultural field to all manner of diverse cosmopolitan currents. The narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality, and identity became the leitmotif of bourgeois urban culture. Artistic freedom and artistic license, promoted by the city's powerful cultural institutions, led in effect to the neoliberalisation of culture. "Delirious New York" … erased the memory of democratic New York. 4
Now this was the world not only in which Art & Language New York was operating at the time, but I would argue, has defined the world of contemporary art since. A "narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality, and identity" amounting to "the neoliberalization of culture" more or less sums up the whole of its operating logic: from the entire Chelsea spectacle and the spectacle of Brit Art, to Artforum.com's recent online diary, appropriately called "Scene and Herd." The virtue of the Art & Language New York group was, at the moment of this world's incipience, to have had a rather clear view of it. In particular they had a clear view – which has been clouded in most critical perspectives since – of the class stakes at play. For what the neoliberalization of culture, which covers nearly the whole of contemporary art, has amounted is in effect the cultural arm of a restoration of class power. Contemporary art had been elitist in the 1930s through the 1950s, but that had been an intellectual elitism. By contrast, contemporary art of the past 30 years has evolved as a massive organizational entity, with extremely well attended "public" institutions that reflect the financial interests and tastes of a bourgeois class that controls them.
The class-nature of these institutions and their role in generating distracting "micro-political" concerns or the "narcissistic explorations of self" to obscure maneuvers on the macropolitical terrain was not lost on Art & Language at the time. From the early analysis of the artworld to the discussion of culture in mediating the globalization of Australian contemporary art and the examination of the role of business interests in the National Endowment for the Arts in the last Fox issue (Fox 3), these macropolitical issues were always in view. 5 As an aside, I would like to add that this explains the "embarrassment" of The Fox authors and to lesser extent Art & Language as a whole during the past 25 years. It is an embarrassment that I very much felt when I began my research some eight years ago: How vulgar to be concerned about such issues? Why not think about something potentially complex and sophisticated like a topic in identity politics? I would argue that the "vulgarity" of Art & Language at that time is now its strength, for these same macropolitical issues are once again on the table. Evidently almost the whole of contemporary art in the Global North is not only inadequate to deal with them. In fact, contemporary art, I would argue is in a large measure engineered to obscure such macropolitical issues.
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So much for the first part of the paper. In it, I wish to have pointed out how at the other end of the so-called cultural turn we, today, have important points to learn from the moment in which Art & Language of the early to mid-1970s was operating, when this cultural turn was just taking shape. In both moments there is a transparency of the macropolitical that is obscured in the middle ground. In the second part of this paper, I want to examine, as promised, the analytic project of Art & Language, again keeping my focus on their work in the 1970s in New York City. I shall concentrate on the group's analysis of its own situation – the strength of that analysis – before turning to what I perceive to be the inadequacies and limitations of its positive project at the time.
In this examination, I want to single out a couple of points, the most important being the centrality of economic and political base to Art & Language's consideration of the role of art and culture: that is, the clear view the group had of the dependent nature of culture. The group looked very closely at the mechanics, especially the hard economic and political basis, of the emerging "neoliberal" art world (a term which I feel fairly comfortably in retroactively applying). Hence, opening The Fox, in the first issue, we find articles like Sarah Charlesworth's "Declaration of Dependence," albeit at a low level of political consciousness, proclaiming that art and artists are products of their economic and social context, as well as ideology. 6 At the other end of the spectrum we have Ian Burn's rather hard-headed Marxian analysis "Pricing Works of Art." 7 Somewhere in between are Andrew Menard's "Are You Not Doing What You're Doing While You're Doing What You Are," 8 which takes a cold look at the economics of the art world, and Mel Ramsden's fascinating "On Practice." 9 It is the latter I want to focus on now.
Ramsden's essay proposes, according to some editorial directive, to address the art world bureaucracy. The essay merits close attention, though many of its concerns, including its concern with bureaucracy, are reflected in other essays. For example, an emphasis on dialog and conversation – albeit made into a fetish at times – runs through all issues of The Fox, but especially the early ones, before we get to Fox 3 in which the intra-group dialogue becomes fraught or rather explosive. This essay, as one might be led to anticipate given the framework I have laid out at the beginning of this talk, is especially acute in its assessment of the neoliberal world that has taken shape in New York City and its close ties with the emergent cosmopolitan art world that had simultaneously emerged there (the cultural "fix" or distraction from Capital's crises of over-accumulation, as Harvey would have it). For example, Ramsden has a few eviscerating lines near the middle of the essay about that art world that strike me as particularly applicable today:
Anyway "art and politics" becomes one more thing subsumed as part of Modern art's internal complexity. One of the best ways to maintain a system's internal self-preservation is to continually try and increase its internal complexity hence its steering capacity, while decreasing the complexity of its environment…10
This could not have been more true then than it is today. The statement is followed hard on its heels by a perspicacious comment about lifestyle and a nod to the tremendous growth of culture and glamour as the smokescreen for economic disaster. The quote echoes Harvey's comment on lifestyle:
Anyway the vested interests are enormous since a trip with money linked with glamourous narcissism can coerce most of us. If the French made art domestic then Americans have made it a business – the art market is reputedly the tenth largest industry in New York. 11
It is the comment about the trip with money, perhaps to Miami Art Basel, that strikes me as more or less reaching to the core of the art world today. Finally, there is the statement – a nod to base and superstructure – that I wish to use as an epigraph for an upcoming series of exhibitions:
To say human actions or culture are determined largely by politico-economic factors or to explain in a formula (as Lenin and others did) consciousness in terms of existence and not conversely is not to deny the role of the individual, of course, but rather the contrary, to see that individual in dialectical relation to underlying forces. Such an approach is based entirely on the assumption that this is the most pointed way to free that individual from being an unwitting functionary of these forces. 12
There is much to be said about this statement including Ramsden's choice of the word "functionary" to describe the agent of these forces. Is the functionary an empowered bureaucrat? Does Ramsden see bureaucrats as controlled or controlling? I think that close analysis would reveal some theoretical slippage between these ideas. This is something I wish to return to later. For now, let us acknowledge that for Ramsden "bureaucracy" or "management," as he sometimes calls it, of the art world's "middle-life" are figures for a totalizing, even totalitarian system. "Totalitarian" is not my word but one that he uses in the essay. His assessment of the system as totalizing sets up a difficult situation, a genuine impasse: For what is the outside to such as a system? What kind of agency can exceed its totalizing grasp? Ramsden, to his credit in 1975, recognizes the theoretical inadequacy of the Kuhn's theorization of a paradigm shifts, as a deos ex machina leap out of a totalizing "conceptual scheme" (another word that like Kuhn's "paradigm" got a lot of play at the time). He writes:
The trouble with Kuhn's paradigm shift is that it seems to imply we "rationally" move from one institution to another. … A couple of years ago it was said that we need a paradigm shift not to but a paradigm shift from… However the logics of Kuhn's paradigm shifts are still too binary at this stage. I'm not going to end up swapping one monolith for another. 13
Ramsden will soon turn to the theme of dialectics – Kuhn is not dialectical enough, he says – in an effort to posit another "way out of the totalitarian system."
This is not a totalitarianism of human dictators but one where institutions tenuously and self-correctively rule. However notwithstanding this I still have some hope. Perhaps paradoxically there may now be opportunity for oppositional alternatives. 14
He then tries to lay out what these oppositional alternatives might be, and this could be the story of The Fox:
… any sort of oppositional or "subversive" activity does not leave me pure, unscathed and free. Quite the reverse: if I accept the problems of this society as not just something going on in the background, but as my own problems, then reflexive theory becomes (maybe) something externally aggressive as well as individually therapeutic… so long as you can connect it all up dialectically. (This kind of contradiction is loosely related to the way the capitalist brings workers together to exploit them but also creates the conditions for unionization. 15
Now this is the kind of statement can be easily made fun of because much of its language is out of fashion: for example, notions such as "therapy" and turns of phrase such as "accepting problems." This is not my intention. The last sentence about conditions for exploitation creating conditions for counter-organization is, in fact, right on the mark. But the penultimate sentence confuses, in my view, two ideas, and this confusion reaches right to the heart of the activities of The Fox. Ramsden's writes, "dialectically"; he is referring to the how to treat problems and employing the word that is Hegel's and Marx's, but what he means – as is evident not only in what follows but more importantly in the entire practice of Art & Language New York in the 1970s – is not anything so structured as the Hegelian machinery of dialectics but a loose conversational activity that in an early formulation was called "blurting" while in a somewhat later moment it was depicted in the figure of the shouting man. You could contend – speaking very loosely – that the impossible situation of The Fox was to be engaged in a kind of conversational work, a social labor not at all distinctive of the art world but in fact a key point of contact of the artworld's practices with the larger field of post-industrial productive relations, and to have perceived the "common site" of conversation correctly (Ramsden says this) as potentially having the role of the factory in industrial resistance – as a locus of exploitation that creates the conditions for its own overcoming – but ironically not to be able to theorize this overcoming because the group saw its conversational activity as dialectics.
There is much more to be said here, including how "dialectics" blew up in the last Fox issue and after. 16 One could ask whether if Art & Language New York had not been seeing "dialogue" in part through the lenses of Hegelian machinery, and perhaps more importantly not as something particular to the artworld but of a piece with other forms of immaterial labor emergent at the time (such as the work of public relations men that is often referred to in The Fox), would this blow-up have happened? Was it the expectation of a progressive and deterministic process, rather than mere conversational labor, that contributed to the warming up and explosion of these debates in 1975-76? I am referring to the "Lumpen-Headache" arguments in which, really at the summit of Fox dialogues, a fiery debate took place that resulted in the exclusion of Sarah Charlesworth and Joseph Kosuth from the group and the subsequent paring down of Art & Language to the three or four who work in it today.
There is also much more to be said for how these ideas play out among other Fox authors. The ideas are, I believe, common in the best sense. For example, the base-superstructure theme gets a lot of play in Ian Burn's writing, in his speculations about the pricing of art works, to which Adrian Piper responded in the second Fox issue. Then there are Menard's reflections, parallel to Ramsden's, on the role of conversation but from a different direction. Both worked with a conversational writing style, replete with rhetorical questions, and often deployed highly informal language that drew on a wide range of literary and critical sources. 17 There is also to be found in Fox issues some other interesting experimentation with "dialogic" genres including the invented interview and something which I have not seen elsewhere: a one-sided "interview" – in this case addressed to Donald Judd in the second person. Finally, there is a vast sub-theme in Menard, Ramsden, David Rushton and Paul Wood's essays of the academy.
This latter theme deserves special attention – and I will dwell on it briefly before closing – for its relation to the question of conversation and its connections to the conception of immaterial labor that I believe was inadequately theorized, or at least only emergent in The Fox, during the "jetztzeit" of Art & Language of 1970s. For I would argue that once immaterial labor becomes hegemonic, then the university or the academy in its function of knowledge production no longer operates as a privileged or even distinctive site in the larger field of productive relations – the "head" to the factories "hand" – but instead becomes in some ways the figure for the whole of the productive field. This, of course, has explosive effects on the university. 18 Interestingly, Art & Language was deeply engaged with questions of pedagogy well before The Fox. As early as the last 1960s with such courses as "Art Theory" that Michael Baldwin taught at Coventry College of Art and the later indexical works (the key turning point being the 1972 Documenta Index), Art &Language was fairly obsessed with questions about how knowledge is transmitted and produced. This obsession led through the Blurting project of 1974, into The Fox articles already mentioned, and later studies of the British education system by David Rushton and Paul Wood.
I believe that this vast body of projects dealing with education and information has to be understood against the broader changes in labor taking place at the time. It is quite common to see Art & Language's work of this period as anticipating cybernetic networks and hypertext, but what is often missed is how these projects, on the one hand, reveal much about the condition of immaterial labor in a way the affirmative character of later cybernetic theorizations tends to obscure, and on the other hand how these projects are connected with what I have called Art & Language's double game concerning dialectics and dialogue.
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Surely this is a subject for another study. Let me now summarize and say something about the theoretical underpinnings of this paper, while acknowledging its own limitation and a possible weakness. I have so far suggested that there are interesting connections between Art & Language's time and ours. I wished to leap between the two, making (fast and loose) use of Benjamin's conception of "jetztzeit" to suggest that the time of neoliberalism's eminent crumbling today – or so one may hope – has interesting connections to the "jetztzeit" of Art & Language of the 1970s. Of particular interest is Art & Language's analysis of their situation then, including their clear awareness of the primacy of economic base over the cultural superstructure. The group had a clear view of the art world's epiphenomenal character vis-a-vis economic and political activity – which must be reformed or revolutionized if it is to be reformed or revolutionized – as well as an intuition about the primacy of market relations in life or existence in conditions that Marx would describe as "real subsumption." Real subsumption creates conditions that are totalizing but are also, for the very reason that they reach into the totality of life, become uncontrollable and hence also hold emancipatory potential.
I have further argued that Art &Language of the 1970s only partly theorized this last point, largely because they did not have an adequate theorization of subversive subjectivity. That would be a theory of how, in the conditions of immaterial labor, communicative or cooperative activity brings people together in ways that create conditions for their autonomous self-management or self-direction that can also feed into subversive activity. Now, of course, this is a page from the work of Toni Negri, Micheal Hardt, and Maurizio Lazzarato. One cannot posit it at present without raising the question of how accurately the figure of immaterial labor describes the field of productive relations today? What does it mean to call immaterial labor hegemonic? How widely accessibly is that kind of labor and whatever emancipatory possibilities it holds out? 19 Just as important: what actually are the mechanisms for social connection or community formation that are to come out of this activity of communicative labor even assuming that it is widespread? Finally, to end on point where perhaps we could take some instruction from Art & Language at the time, with their concerns with factories and unions: how would these struggles connect with the very important ones of labor over the last century?
In ending, I want to suggest three trajectories leading away from this paper that might constitute bases for future research. The first of these concerns the role of self-organized education: its centrality as a critical art practice today. In a recent project of mine called "Counter-Campus," I argued for self-organized education's centrality as a critical art practice today, based in part on immaterial labor's claim to hegemony. If you accept this kind of argument, then self-organization around knowledge (a.k.a. self-organized education) becomes not just one form of organization work among others but in some ways also the hegemonic form of resistant organization (if one can be permitted to twist the term hegemony a bit). Not only did Art & Language make early and significant forays into this area in the 1960s and 1970s, as I have indicated, but since their forays were carried out before the hype of knowledge economies got under way, they can supply a useful corrective or critical perspective on more recent work along these lines.
The second trajectory also connects with questions of immaterial labor but in a different way. Throughout the above discussion I have given emphasis to the limitations put on the practice of Art & Language in the 1970s by their inability to theorize a resistant subjectivity. I have emphasized how, without a concept of their work as the non-dialectical communicative activity of immaterial labor, the group was led to misperceive these activities (as dialectics) and hold mistaken expectations about their progress. One feature of this, which I only hinted at, was how such a conception is not only central to understanding how such a process might unfold (namely in a non-deterministic manner), but it is also key to understanding how the work of artists has points of contact with other forms of social labor and especially flexible labor. In a fascinating essay in Fox 2, Micheal Corris almost touches upon this theme. 20 He circles around the question of the lateral connections between art workers and other kinds of flexible workers, but there is also clearly a theoretical lacuna and an inability to make certain connections. Here access to the relatively recent offshoot of the discourse of immaterial labor, the discourse of the precarait, would have been extremely useful in making these connections. Without it, Fox writers inevitably found themselves "trapped" in their profession, seeing it as an aberrant, isolated, even obsolete form of production. This led to exoticisms such as talk of "Kamikaze artists," "artistic suicide," and "the artist out of work." I would argue that access to the discourse of the precariat would have allowed Art & Language to see connections, forms of social solidarity, between their work and the vast body of flex workers that were then becoming central to the United States' and European economies.
Finally, as the third trajectory, I want to return to a very simple perception of mine. Sometimes, however, simple impressions are the most useful, especially in opening a direction for future research. I am referring to my sense of the absolute currency of The Fox: the sense that many of its sentences could or should have been written this morning. Of course, this impression is implied in my title and the overall theoretical framing of the paper. However, I should like to highlight how immediately relevant the critique developed in the The Fox seems to today's art world. Eight years ago I might have considered this critique "below the belt" and too focused on the underside of the art world, its seedy mechanics. Now that the art world has become its own seedy underside this helps us to understand the role of "undersides" more generally. It has become relevant to invoke once again what Marx said of Hegel's dialectics, that he found it standing on its head. With our methodology righted – standing on its feet – we recognize the importance of the roots for the branches. There is nothing odd about looking at these roots; it is they that must change, and the change must be total.
In the second part of the paper I want to show, or really sample, how Art & Language responded to the conditions of its time. I want to keep in view how, in the three issues of The Fox (1975-76), which are the main touchstones of my research, Art & Language had in view the importance of the economic and political base. In particular, the group had in view how art was "dependent on" or "reflected" this base – both terms that were used in their publications. I believe that kind of reflection is particularly important today, when we are operating at the end of some three decades of a "cultural turn" in which there has been an overemphasis on culture and its emancipatory agency and potential. Today, this well-worn materialist idea needs to be recovered. It formed a key part of Art & Language New York's analysis of its situation, which took into careful consideration how the art market functioned (for example, in essays by Ian Burn and Adrian Piper); the way schools worked to reproduce the art industry (essays by David Rushton, Paul Wood, Andrew Menard, Preston Heller); and the role of the so-called art bureaucracy (Mel Ramsden).
When Art & Language turned to the question of formulating a response to these conditions – and this will constitute the third part of the paper – I believe the group had some key "intuitions." Speaking loosely, they intuited that their response to this situation would have to involve a new sociality, and that this new sociality would be primarily linguistic. I want to argue – in a way that will be polemical because it constitutes a traverse reading of their work – that Art & Language in the 1970s was limited by the theoretical tools they had available. Their frameworks for analyzing power were largely inherited from the Frankfurt School with its picture of a totalizing, integrated "system" of consumer capitalism. Art & Language "knew," and more important acted in practice as if they knew that this system was not totalizing. But they could not reconcile this vision of a totalizing system with an account of how a viable counter-power could take shape. If there were no outside to the consciousness industry – which is the view of the Frankfurt School (I am being vastly reductive) – where would resistance take shape? I would argue that without the Spinozistic line of thought that emerged in Gilles Deleuze, Toni Negri and others, unsurprisingly Art & Language was unable to recognize how this counter-power (basically linguistic, communicative, based on a new cooperative sociality – they were right about all this) could take shape in the heart of power. As mentioned, this part of my paper will be controversial because it constitutes a traverse reading, applying a set of ideas that would have seemed and perhaps still seems exogenous to Art & Language's practice in a crude, perhaps catachrestic manner.
So to begin. In this first part of the paper I propose to talk about the time of Art & Language in the 1970s: I want to speak about its present through the lens of our present, hence in an obvious, and I hope not too off the mark manner, referencing Benjamin's On the Concept of History (often called the Theses on the Philosophy of History) and in particularly the nexus of thought that comes together around his term "jetztzeit" in the fourteenth of these Theses. What is the present moment, seen from the perspective of its dangers, from the perspective of the dangers that face the working class? What of that possible leap into history by the historian, separating out a moment and arresting it from the time-of-succession?
Today we face the crisis of neoliberalism, which I believe has become such a common thought (that is, not common in the good sense of shared, but bland) that we must realize, as Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez contends, that the crisis of neoliberalism is really the crisis of capitalism, since the former is but a late stage of the later. We are in a time of war, of tottering desperate attempts to salvage capitalism from its crises of over-accumulation, including the absurd idea that one might do so by opening a market in Iraq. (David Harvey has recently mentioned Matthew Arnold's "Freedom is a great horse to ride it, but to ride somewhere" in reference to the idea of "liberating" Iraq. I don't think much consideration at all was given to with whom and how Iraq might trade – since presumably it was Iraq's market above all that was to be liberated – but of course it is not in the nature of free market fundamentalism to want to ask such questions.) 1 Concerning Art & Language in the 1970s, the time of my own research, in its broadest strokes we could talk about the taking shape of the neo-liberal ideology at that time, against the background of the fiscal crisis of New York City, which was also the immediate geographic and temporal background of The Fox's publication. All of this was also in the context of the Vietnam War and the early 1970s oil crises and resulted in a series of desperate attempts to find fiscal solutions and later cultural measures to fix capitalism's latest crisis. Benjamin's concept of "jetztzeit" is useful because it provides a way of discussing history as discontinuous and opens the possibility of a revolutionary history. One could say, in fact, that the discovery or opening of a "now-time" wrested from the lineages and continuities of bourgeois historiography is equivalent to the constitution of a revolutionary moment.
This is by no means to say that the two times, 1975 and 2005, the two "jetztzeits" – understood in time's ordinary conceptions – are the same. If at that time, in 1975, we saw the formation of the neoliberal "solution" and restoration of class power that followed hard on its heels under the "leadership" of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Deng Xiaoping, by contrast the present time is distinguished by neoliberalism being traversed, limited, and challenged by a new breed of neoconservative militarism. Yet what both times have in common is a profound crisis, a crisis that from the perspective of Benjamin's historiography can be understood in way that eludes subsumption into the then popular theoretical framework of Kuhnian paradigm shifts (basically, as some Fox writers understood, an attempt to tame the crises of capitalism).
In developing this argument I wish to rely on the now widely accepted claim that in the past 30 years of the "cultural turn" there has been an overemphasis on culture at the expense of considerations of hard politics. This turn is all the more surprising given that the emphasis on culture's agency was often carried out under the banner of Gramscian theory at the Birmingham School, all the while ignoring Gramsci's warning in the Modern Prince (1933) about the dangers of political problems becoming cultural ones. 2 The latter is most appropriate to consider at present. The role that the artworld had in the 1970s in giving a new "cultural" face or facelift to the "New New York" was perhaps quite evident during the "now-time" of Art & Language of the 1970s, as their many debunking analyses of that artworld in The Fox indicate, because that brave new world was then both more new and more shabby.
To say something more about the similarities of the times. If you recall New York City went into fiscal crisis (bankruptcy) in the early 1970s. In 1975, in strange but what turned out to be definitive twist of recent political history, the merchant banker Felix Rohatyn worked out a deal with a cabal of New York investment bankers whereby their loans would be paid off and in turn social programs sharply curtailed in a kind of structural adjustments plan for the urban United States. 3 This happened despite the fact that traditional lending logic would argue that bankers had hazarded the dept, and lost. Somewhat earlier, in 1973, in way that would have been shocking at the time but recent history has made familiar, the United States government was preparing to invade Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to extract oil from those countries in a friendly and forcible manner.
This was the economic and political backdrop against which, in face of a new austerity in social programs and public services, a "new" New York City emerged. This "remade" city was one in which culture and art had a particular and central role. In my view, in the treacherous way highlighted by Gramsci, the artworld provided a cultural mask to economic problems. I quote David Harvey from A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism about New York City's new character in the 1970s:
The ruling elites moved, often fractiously, to support the opening of the cultural field to all manner of diverse cosmopolitan currents. The narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality, and identity became the leitmotif of bourgeois urban culture. Artistic freedom and artistic license, promoted by the city's powerful cultural institutions, led in effect to the neoliberalisation of culture. "Delirious New York" … erased the memory of democratic New York. 4
Now this was the world not only in which Art & Language New York was operating at the time, but I would argue, has defined the world of contemporary art since. A "narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality, and identity" amounting to "the neoliberalization of culture" more or less sums up the whole of its operating logic: from the entire Chelsea spectacle and the spectacle of Brit Art, to Artforum.com's recent online diary, appropriately called "Scene and Herd." The virtue of the Art & Language New York group was, at the moment of this world's incipience, to have had a rather clear view of it. In particular they had a clear view – which has been clouded in most critical perspectives since – of the class stakes at play. For what the neoliberalization of culture, which covers nearly the whole of contemporary art, has amounted is in effect the cultural arm of a restoration of class power. Contemporary art had been elitist in the 1930s through the 1950s, but that had been an intellectual elitism. By contrast, contemporary art of the past 30 years has evolved as a massive organizational entity, with extremely well attended "public" institutions that reflect the financial interests and tastes of a bourgeois class that controls them.
The class-nature of these institutions and their role in generating distracting "micro-political" concerns or the "narcissistic explorations of self" to obscure maneuvers on the macropolitical terrain was not lost on Art & Language at the time. From the early analysis of the artworld to the discussion of culture in mediating the globalization of Australian contemporary art and the examination of the role of business interests in the National Endowment for the Arts in the last Fox issue (Fox 3), these macropolitical issues were always in view. 5 As an aside, I would like to add that this explains the "embarrassment" of The Fox authors and to lesser extent Art & Language as a whole during the past 25 years. It is an embarrassment that I very much felt when I began my research some eight years ago: How vulgar to be concerned about such issues? Why not think about something potentially complex and sophisticated like a topic in identity politics? I would argue that the "vulgarity" of Art & Language at that time is now its strength, for these same macropolitical issues are once again on the table. Evidently almost the whole of contemporary art in the Global North is not only inadequate to deal with them. In fact, contemporary art, I would argue is in a large measure engineered to obscure such macropolitical issues.
∗ ∗ ∗
So much for the first part of the paper. In it, I wish to have pointed out how at the other end of the so-called cultural turn we, today, have important points to learn from the moment in which Art & Language of the early to mid-1970s was operating, when this cultural turn was just taking shape. In both moments there is a transparency of the macropolitical that is obscured in the middle ground. In the second part of this paper, I want to examine, as promised, the analytic project of Art & Language, again keeping my focus on their work in the 1970s in New York City. I shall concentrate on the group's analysis of its own situation – the strength of that analysis – before turning to what I perceive to be the inadequacies and limitations of its positive project at the time.
In this examination, I want to single out a couple of points, the most important being the centrality of economic and political base to Art & Language's consideration of the role of art and culture: that is, the clear view the group had of the dependent nature of culture. The group looked very closely at the mechanics, especially the hard economic and political basis, of the emerging "neoliberal" art world (a term which I feel fairly comfortably in retroactively applying). Hence, opening The Fox, in the first issue, we find articles like Sarah Charlesworth's "Declaration of Dependence," albeit at a low level of political consciousness, proclaiming that art and artists are products of their economic and social context, as well as ideology. 6 At the other end of the spectrum we have Ian Burn's rather hard-headed Marxian analysis "Pricing Works of Art." 7 Somewhere in between are Andrew Menard's "Are You Not Doing What You're Doing While You're Doing What You Are," 8 which takes a cold look at the economics of the art world, and Mel Ramsden's fascinating "On Practice." 9 It is the latter I want to focus on now.
Ramsden's essay proposes, according to some editorial directive, to address the art world bureaucracy. The essay merits close attention, though many of its concerns, including its concern with bureaucracy, are reflected in other essays. For example, an emphasis on dialog and conversation – albeit made into a fetish at times – runs through all issues of The Fox, but especially the early ones, before we get to Fox 3 in which the intra-group dialogue becomes fraught or rather explosive. This essay, as one might be led to anticipate given the framework I have laid out at the beginning of this talk, is especially acute in its assessment of the neoliberal world that has taken shape in New York City and its close ties with the emergent cosmopolitan art world that had simultaneously emerged there (the cultural "fix" or distraction from Capital's crises of over-accumulation, as Harvey would have it). For example, Ramsden has a few eviscerating lines near the middle of the essay about that art world that strike me as particularly applicable today:
Anyway "art and politics" becomes one more thing subsumed as part of Modern art's internal complexity. One of the best ways to maintain a system's internal self-preservation is to continually try and increase its internal complexity hence its steering capacity, while decreasing the complexity of its environment…10
This could not have been more true then than it is today. The statement is followed hard on its heels by a perspicacious comment about lifestyle and a nod to the tremendous growth of culture and glamour as the smokescreen for economic disaster. The quote echoes Harvey's comment on lifestyle:
Anyway the vested interests are enormous since a trip with money linked with glamourous narcissism can coerce most of us. If the French made art domestic then Americans have made it a business – the art market is reputedly the tenth largest industry in New York. 11
It is the comment about the trip with money, perhaps to Miami Art Basel, that strikes me as more or less reaching to the core of the art world today. Finally, there is the statement – a nod to base and superstructure – that I wish to use as an epigraph for an upcoming series of exhibitions:
To say human actions or culture are determined largely by politico-economic factors or to explain in a formula (as Lenin and others did) consciousness in terms of existence and not conversely is not to deny the role of the individual, of course, but rather the contrary, to see that individual in dialectical relation to underlying forces. Such an approach is based entirely on the assumption that this is the most pointed way to free that individual from being an unwitting functionary of these forces. 12
There is much to be said about this statement including Ramsden's choice of the word "functionary" to describe the agent of these forces. Is the functionary an empowered bureaucrat? Does Ramsden see bureaucrats as controlled or controlling? I think that close analysis would reveal some theoretical slippage between these ideas. This is something I wish to return to later. For now, let us acknowledge that for Ramsden "bureaucracy" or "management," as he sometimes calls it, of the art world's "middle-life" are figures for a totalizing, even totalitarian system. "Totalitarian" is not my word but one that he uses in the essay. His assessment of the system as totalizing sets up a difficult situation, a genuine impasse: For what is the outside to such as a system? What kind of agency can exceed its totalizing grasp? Ramsden, to his credit in 1975, recognizes the theoretical inadequacy of the Kuhn's theorization of a paradigm shifts, as a deos ex machina leap out of a totalizing "conceptual scheme" (another word that like Kuhn's "paradigm" got a lot of play at the time). He writes:
The trouble with Kuhn's paradigm shift is that it seems to imply we "rationally" move from one institution to another. … A couple of years ago it was said that we need a paradigm shift not to but a paradigm shift from… However the logics of Kuhn's paradigm shifts are still too binary at this stage. I'm not going to end up swapping one monolith for another. 13
Ramsden will soon turn to the theme of dialectics – Kuhn is not dialectical enough, he says – in an effort to posit another "way out of the totalitarian system."
This is not a totalitarianism of human dictators but one where institutions tenuously and self-correctively rule. However notwithstanding this I still have some hope. Perhaps paradoxically there may now be opportunity for oppositional alternatives. 14
He then tries to lay out what these oppositional alternatives might be, and this could be the story of The Fox:
… any sort of oppositional or "subversive" activity does not leave me pure, unscathed and free. Quite the reverse: if I accept the problems of this society as not just something going on in the background, but as my own problems, then reflexive theory becomes (maybe) something externally aggressive as well as individually therapeutic… so long as you can connect it all up dialectically. (This kind of contradiction is loosely related to the way the capitalist brings workers together to exploit them but also creates the conditions for unionization. 15
Now this is the kind of statement can be easily made fun of because much of its language is out of fashion: for example, notions such as "therapy" and turns of phrase such as "accepting problems." This is not my intention. The last sentence about conditions for exploitation creating conditions for counter-organization is, in fact, right on the mark. But the penultimate sentence confuses, in my view, two ideas, and this confusion reaches right to the heart of the activities of The Fox. Ramsden's writes, "dialectically"; he is referring to the how to treat problems and employing the word that is Hegel's and Marx's, but what he means – as is evident not only in what follows but more importantly in the entire practice of Art & Language New York in the 1970s – is not anything so structured as the Hegelian machinery of dialectics but a loose conversational activity that in an early formulation was called "blurting" while in a somewhat later moment it was depicted in the figure of the shouting man. You could contend – speaking very loosely – that the impossible situation of The Fox was to be engaged in a kind of conversational work, a social labor not at all distinctive of the art world but in fact a key point of contact of the artworld's practices with the larger field of post-industrial productive relations, and to have perceived the "common site" of conversation correctly (Ramsden says this) as potentially having the role of the factory in industrial resistance – as a locus of exploitation that creates the conditions for its own overcoming – but ironically not to be able to theorize this overcoming because the group saw its conversational activity as dialectics.
There is much more to be said here, including how "dialectics" blew up in the last Fox issue and after. 16 One could ask whether if Art & Language New York had not been seeing "dialogue" in part through the lenses of Hegelian machinery, and perhaps more importantly not as something particular to the artworld but of a piece with other forms of immaterial labor emergent at the time (such as the work of public relations men that is often referred to in The Fox), would this blow-up have happened? Was it the expectation of a progressive and deterministic process, rather than mere conversational labor, that contributed to the warming up and explosion of these debates in 1975-76? I am referring to the "Lumpen-Headache" arguments in which, really at the summit of Fox dialogues, a fiery debate took place that resulted in the exclusion of Sarah Charlesworth and Joseph Kosuth from the group and the subsequent paring down of Art & Language to the three or four who work in it today.
There is also much more to be said for how these ideas play out among other Fox authors. The ideas are, I believe, common in the best sense. For example, the base-superstructure theme gets a lot of play in Ian Burn's writing, in his speculations about the pricing of art works, to which Adrian Piper responded in the second Fox issue. Then there are Menard's reflections, parallel to Ramsden's, on the role of conversation but from a different direction. Both worked with a conversational writing style, replete with rhetorical questions, and often deployed highly informal language that drew on a wide range of literary and critical sources. 17 There is also to be found in Fox issues some other interesting experimentation with "dialogic" genres including the invented interview and something which I have not seen elsewhere: a one-sided "interview" – in this case addressed to Donald Judd in the second person. Finally, there is a vast sub-theme in Menard, Ramsden, David Rushton and Paul Wood's essays of the academy.
This latter theme deserves special attention – and I will dwell on it briefly before closing – for its relation to the question of conversation and its connections to the conception of immaterial labor that I believe was inadequately theorized, or at least only emergent in The Fox, during the "jetztzeit" of Art & Language of 1970s. For I would argue that once immaterial labor becomes hegemonic, then the university or the academy in its function of knowledge production no longer operates as a privileged or even distinctive site in the larger field of productive relations – the "head" to the factories "hand" – but instead becomes in some ways the figure for the whole of the productive field. This, of course, has explosive effects on the university. 18 Interestingly, Art & Language was deeply engaged with questions of pedagogy well before The Fox. As early as the last 1960s with such courses as "Art Theory" that Michael Baldwin taught at Coventry College of Art and the later indexical works (the key turning point being the 1972 Documenta Index), Art &Language was fairly obsessed with questions about how knowledge is transmitted and produced. This obsession led through the Blurting project of 1974, into The Fox articles already mentioned, and later studies of the British education system by David Rushton and Paul Wood.
I believe that this vast body of projects dealing with education and information has to be understood against the broader changes in labor taking place at the time. It is quite common to see Art & Language's work of this period as anticipating cybernetic networks and hypertext, but what is often missed is how these projects, on the one hand, reveal much about the condition of immaterial labor in a way the affirmative character of later cybernetic theorizations tends to obscure, and on the other hand how these projects are connected with what I have called Art & Language's double game concerning dialectics and dialogue.
∗ ∗ ∗
Surely this is a subject for another study. Let me now summarize and say something about the theoretical underpinnings of this paper, while acknowledging its own limitation and a possible weakness. I have so far suggested that there are interesting connections between Art & Language's time and ours. I wished to leap between the two, making (fast and loose) use of Benjamin's conception of "jetztzeit" to suggest that the time of neoliberalism's eminent crumbling today – or so one may hope – has interesting connections to the "jetztzeit" of Art & Language of the 1970s. Of particular interest is Art & Language's analysis of their situation then, including their clear awareness of the primacy of economic base over the cultural superstructure. The group had a clear view of the art world's epiphenomenal character vis-a-vis economic and political activity – which must be reformed or revolutionized if it is to be reformed or revolutionized – as well as an intuition about the primacy of market relations in life or existence in conditions that Marx would describe as "real subsumption." Real subsumption creates conditions that are totalizing but are also, for the very reason that they reach into the totality of life, become uncontrollable and hence also hold emancipatory potential.
I have further argued that Art &Language of the 1970s only partly theorized this last point, largely because they did not have an adequate theorization of subversive subjectivity. That would be a theory of how, in the conditions of immaterial labor, communicative or cooperative activity brings people together in ways that create conditions for their autonomous self-management or self-direction that can also feed into subversive activity. Now, of course, this is a page from the work of Toni Negri, Micheal Hardt, and Maurizio Lazzarato. One cannot posit it at present without raising the question of how accurately the figure of immaterial labor describes the field of productive relations today? What does it mean to call immaterial labor hegemonic? How widely accessibly is that kind of labor and whatever emancipatory possibilities it holds out? 19 Just as important: what actually are the mechanisms for social connection or community formation that are to come out of this activity of communicative labor even assuming that it is widespread? Finally, to end on point where perhaps we could take some instruction from Art & Language at the time, with their concerns with factories and unions: how would these struggles connect with the very important ones of labor over the last century?
In ending, I want to suggest three trajectories leading away from this paper that might constitute bases for future research. The first of these concerns the role of self-organized education: its centrality as a critical art practice today. In a recent project of mine called "Counter-Campus," I argued for self-organized education's centrality as a critical art practice today, based in part on immaterial labor's claim to hegemony. If you accept this kind of argument, then self-organization around knowledge (a.k.a. self-organized education) becomes not just one form of organization work among others but in some ways also the hegemonic form of resistant organization (if one can be permitted to twist the term hegemony a bit). Not only did Art & Language make early and significant forays into this area in the 1960s and 1970s, as I have indicated, but since their forays were carried out before the hype of knowledge economies got under way, they can supply a useful corrective or critical perspective on more recent work along these lines.
The second trajectory also connects with questions of immaterial labor but in a different way. Throughout the above discussion I have given emphasis to the limitations put on the practice of Art & Language in the 1970s by their inability to theorize a resistant subjectivity. I have emphasized how, without a concept of their work as the non-dialectical communicative activity of immaterial labor, the group was led to misperceive these activities (as dialectics) and hold mistaken expectations about their progress. One feature of this, which I only hinted at, was how such a conception is not only central to understanding how such a process might unfold (namely in a non-deterministic manner), but it is also key to understanding how the work of artists has points of contact with other forms of social labor and especially flexible labor. In a fascinating essay in Fox 2, Micheal Corris almost touches upon this theme. 20 He circles around the question of the lateral connections between art workers and other kinds of flexible workers, but there is also clearly a theoretical lacuna and an inability to make certain connections. Here access to the relatively recent offshoot of the discourse of immaterial labor, the discourse of the precarait, would have been extremely useful in making these connections. Without it, Fox writers inevitably found themselves "trapped" in their profession, seeing it as an aberrant, isolated, even obsolete form of production. This led to exoticisms such as talk of "Kamikaze artists," "artistic suicide," and "the artist out of work." I would argue that access to the discourse of the precariat would have allowed Art & Language to see connections, forms of social solidarity, between their work and the vast body of flex workers that were then becoming central to the United States' and European economies.
Finally, as the third trajectory, I want to return to a very simple perception of mine. Sometimes, however, simple impressions are the most useful, especially in opening a direction for future research. I am referring to my sense of the absolute currency of The Fox: the sense that many of its sentences could or should have been written this morning. Of course, this impression is implied in my title and the overall theoretical framing of the paper. However, I should like to highlight how immediately relevant the critique developed in the The Fox seems to today's art world. Eight years ago I might have considered this critique "below the belt" and too focused on the underside of the art world, its seedy mechanics. Now that the art world has become its own seedy underside this helps us to understand the role of "undersides" more generally. It has become relevant to invoke once again what Marx said of Hegel's dialectics, that he found it standing on its head. With our methodology righted – standing on its feet – we recognize the importance of the roots for the branches. There is nothing odd about looking at these roots; it is they that must change, and the change must be total.
1 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 6 ^
2 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishhart, 1971), p. 149. ^
3 David Harvey, op. cit., p. 46. ^
4 David Harvey, op. cit., p. 47. ^
5 Michael Corris, Preseton Heller, and Andrew Menard, "The Organization of Culture Under Monopoly Capitalism," Fox 3, pp.121-154. ^
6 Sarah Charlesworth, "A Declaration of Dependence," Fox 1 ^
7 Ian Burn, "Pricing Works of Art," Fox 1, 1975 ^
8 Andrew Menard, "Are You Not Doing What You’re Doing When You’re Doing What You Are," Fox 1, pp. 31-48. ^
9 Sarah Charlesworth, "A Declaration of Dependence" Fox 1, pp. 1-7; Ian Burn, "Pricing Works of Art," ibid, pp. 53-9; Andrew Menard, "Are You Not Doing What You’re Doing while You’re Doing What You Are," ibid, pp. 31-48; Mel Ramsden, "On Practice," ibid, pp. 66-83. ^
10 Mel Ramsden, "On Practice," Fox 1, p. 64. ^
11 Ibid, p. 68. ^
12 Ibid, p. 69 ^
13 Ibid, 75. ^
14 Ibid, 72. ^
15 Ibid, 72. ^
16 Chris Gilbert, "Art & Language, New York, Discusses its Social Relations in 'The Lumpen-Headache'" in Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ed. Michael Corris. ^
17 ^
18 Chris Gilbert, "Introduction to '04 Counter-Campus'" in Cram Sessions 04: Counter-Campus, exhibition brochure, 2005. ^
19 See Brian Holmes, "Continental Drift, of the Other Side of Neoliberal Globalization," Unleashing Collective Phantoms (Autonomedia, forthcoming). ^
20 Michael Corris, "Yet Another Palace Revolt in the Banana Republic?," Fox 2, pp. 143-153. ^