The Ideological Aesthetic: the ‘Political’ as inevitable and Epiphenomenal PART 1: The Exform, by Udith Dematagoda & Christos Asomatos

Why is everything an 'aesthetic'? Two writers explain... Part 1 of 3

Intro

This essay will begin by addressing a brief theoretical text published in the last few years that was deserving of more attention than it was given at the time. The Exform (2016) by the French curator and art critic Nicholas Bourriaud is a slight and speculative work, and presents in some ways an opportunity to revisit, and at times recant, some of the views expressed in his own highly influential Relational Aesthetics (1998). Perhaps inevitably, The Exform was obscured by a miasma of other works, primarily journalistic but also academic, that focused on responding immediately, and thus incoherently, to the absurdist political theatre of the Trump era. The work itself, rather unfashionably as Bourriaud admits, owes much to the work of Louis Althusser. Despite the fact that Althusser ‘hardly meets the requirements of the contemporary jet set of philosophy’ (Bourriaud 13), Bourriaud concedes that an engagement with the philosopher’s work is inescapable if one seeks to ‘problematize relations between aesthetics and politics, form and theory, and ideology and praxis’ (Bourriaud xii). The Exform is used here as a means through which to approach its Althusserian source material. We do so primarily to emphasize its continued relevance to contemporary theoretical discussions; and secondly, to contrast some of its positions (and surprising continuities) with those of the German jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt. Finally, we attempt to utilize these discussions towards our own tentative and speculative theory of the Ideological Aesthetic, which we propose as a lacuna of past theoretical discourse on the subject of ideology. 

The Exform addresses the perennial problematic of aesthetics and politics, a topic which, although rather out of favour in mainstream scholarship in recent years, may well come to define this current period in history. It is a theoretical discourse that is simultaneously (though reluctantly) acknowledged as important in making sense of the chaotic technological paradigm which we inhabit, whilst at the same time precluded or held at a distance because of its purportedly rarefied lexicon and terminology. Yet the aesthetic sphere has rapidly become one of the primary means through which ideology is disseminated in our over-saturated digital cultures, having untold effects not only on the perception, reception and production of a variety of cultural forms, but also on our everyday political discourse. In the mouths of the true digital natives, those who cannot remember a time without the internet, the aesthetic is used (often in an adjectival form) in a manner much removed from the theory of disinterestedness proposed by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgement (1790). Instead, the aesthetic has become inextricably bound up in the perceptual foundations which were its etymological origins; it eschews the contemplative, and, because of the sheer volume of judgements demanded by an oversaturated digital quotidian, has become a form of practical endeavour once more. This essay will outline a theory which seeks to provide the basis for an engagement with the various ways in which ideology becomes indistinguishable from its aesthetic effects; the conditions in which aesthetics and ideology become equivalent to (and interchangeable with) each other, and finally, the possible implications of these phenomena.

Part I - The Exform

Despite technological capitalism’s attempts to usher in a seamless world without friction, we are, as Bourriaud maintains, living in an ‘overfull world’ of refuse, surrounded by things and phenomena. For Bourriaud, this is exemplified in such telling images and nomenclature as ‘junk bonds’ and ‘toxic assets’ which capital uses to anxiously refer to its own repressed waste. The ‘real of globalism’, the writer posits, is ‘haunted by the spectre of what is unproductive or unprofitable’ (Bourriaud viii). Beginning with a perhaps overly inclusive definition of a new proletariat of precarity (‘no longer only found in factories’), Bourriaud extrapolates further to include those deprived of experience and compelled by consumerism to replace ontological certainty with the possession of commodities. He then proceeds to offer a pious nod towards the plight of undocumented immigrants, refugees and the homeless as harbingers of the new proletariat par excellence, who have apparently taken the place of Marx’s proletarian within the collective imagination. 

One field where this redefinition of the ‘repressed and unwanted’ as potential revolutionary  subject gains valence, Bourriaud suggests, is that of contemporary art, calling thus for a new examination of the relations between art and politics. This forms the basis for a working definition of what the writer describes as the ‘exformal’: ‘the site where border negotiations unfold between what is rejected and what is admitted, products and waste’ (Bourriaud x). By assigning the conflict between what is ‘rejected’ and ‘admitted’ such a central role in his political theory of art, Bourriaud seeks, at a first level, to expand the critical significance of art’s devalued matter — which has proven historically indispensable to the evolution of modernist aesthetics across various mediums — beyond the field of art. Art’s ‘devalued matter’ parallels, thus, politically, the new precariat, and psychoanalytically, the concept of repression. 

Naturally, an art theory which elevates the interplay or opposition between the rejected and culturally admitted as a driving mechanism for cultural production cannot lay claim to novelty. In truth, Bourriaud’s premise echoes Boris Groys’s spheres of the ‘sacred and profane’ in On the New (2014), and perhaps even Theodor Adorno’s intricate system of a perpetually self-transgressing modernist autonomy. Nevertheless, Bourriaud carves out a niche for himself by enlisting Louis Althusser, whose philosophy he interprets as traversing exactly the distance between the psychoanalytic and the political, as Althusser’s own noted definition of ideology to some extent did. Yet, as we shall later discover, Althusser’s conception of ideology – which is central to Bourriaud’s project in The Exform – is more complex and mutable than it first appears.

It is perhaps Bourriaud’s introduction of the ‘constellation motif’ (Bourriaud 48) as a process in contemporary art production which most explicitly evokes Althusser’s work on the relationship between the unconscious and history, as outlined in the philosopher’s posthumous essay The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter. As contemporary mental displacement materializes in reticular art forms – which Bourriaud identifies in the work of artists such as Sarah Sze, Jason Rhoades, and Mike Kelley among others – the constellation motif emerges as the internet-era embodiment of the logic of the psychoanalytic symptom and its revelation of repressed meaning. The histories echoed in the constellation motif, composed of the relegated and expunged material of an overfull world of refuse, emerge within art as reconstructions of assumedly defeated timelines, thereby underlining the aleatory nature of the historical and its multifarious and infinite contingency.

Bourriaud thus interprets the constellation motif as a visualization of Althusser’s aleatory understanding of history, that is, his perception of history as a site with no beginning or end predictable through recourse to dialectical or mechanistic processes, a history which becomes perceptible through the chance collision of disparate elements only materialized through their encounter. This understanding of history presents a key aporia to human agency and action. Just as it technically liberates the subject from the shackles of the predetermined by underlining the illusion of inevitability, it also exposes it to a realm of freedom that can only be grasped after the acceptance of politics as a void. The “constellation motif”, the art critic maintains, responds to this problem positively, escaping the “sense of emptiness” which relegates the subject to a state of political irresponsibility (Bourriaud 35). Nevertheless, Bourriaud’s election of the ‘void’ as the basis of art history appears to be more of an abstract observation on the infinite number of theoretical directions that could be followed as opposed to a definitive philosophical alignment. Interestingly, it is also a formulation at odds with many of Bourriaud’s artistic examples, which correspond to rather intelligible institutional genealogies. Indeed, Bourriaud appears to use the ‘void’ as the ex-nihilo reaction between basic elements which sets off history, yet overlooks Althusser’s key precondition: this fundamental reaction between random elements does not equate a chaotic and infinite chain of events symbolically defying the vae victis of history, but survives and evolves only insofar as every encounter that endures and takes hold produces a structure that has primacy over its various elements (Althusser, The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter 191).

In a similar vein, Bourriaud appears to qualify an ‘eventual’ interpretation of the relationship between art and history. After Alain Badiou, the writer posits that great works of art form a ‘crucible of the event’ (Bourriaud 30), thereby modifying both the (artistic and political) past and the future – a process that is distinct from the more conventional understanding of art as a reflection of the historical context from which it emerges:

Contrary to what the majority of ‘radical’ theorists today claims (sic), form is not subordinate to discourse either; for instance, the pictorial system Jacques-Louis David set up influenced the politics of his time just as much as politics influenced his art. (Bourriaud 29)

This assertion is, however, not made in a compelling nor definitive way – and the claim to modify the past quickly gives way to the mere production of retroactive genealogies. Furthermore, it does not lead to an examination of the significance of modes of interpretation within this process. We could, for example, propose that seminal works of art modify the past by introducing certain parameters which were not conceived during the creation of past works, invariably thus altering their interpretation. 

These problems notwithstanding, Bourriaud’s cursory examinations of art, politics and history succeed in revealing the core of his project: the production of a political theory of art which problematizes agency, action and history away from the simplistic recourse to denouncing “mechanisms of authority and repression” (Bourriaud x). And this is perhaps the crux of the Exform: an attempt to steer what we understand as critical artistic activity away from the facile and overt political positioning of recent years, which has left discourse unable to separate authorial intention from artistic merit.

On the contrary, the political function of contemporary art lies, for Bourriaud, in its ‘bringing the world into a precarious state’ (Bourriaud 43). The purpose of this function is to expose what he describes as the “transitory and circumstantial nature of the institutions that structure social life” (Bourriaud 43). Furthermore, this function is opposed to the semblance (appearance) of definitiveness produced by the various ideological state apparatuses within capitalism. Affirming the precarity of the world keeps alive the notion of the possibility of intervention. This formulation is clearly related to the highly speculative response which Althusser provided to André Daspre in his Letter on Art (1966), that authentic art provides no knowledge of the reality of the world, but instead “makes us see” (nous donner á voir), “makes us perceive”, “makes us feel”, something which “alludes to reality” (Althusser, Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre, 174). He continues:

What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of ‘seeing’, ‘perceiving’ and ‘feeling’ (which is not the form of knowing), is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes. (LoA: 174) 

Yet Althusser’s delineation of the realms of the ideological (an ‘imaginary representation’) and the aesthetic (visual, perceptual, affective) is a great deal more protean than this letter suggested. Indeed, as we shall presently be forced to confront, more recent readings of Althusser have revealed that the mechanisms which produce the ‘aesthetic effect’ (Althusser, LoA 179) of art are similar to the mechanisms which produce ideology itself.

In this particular vein, it is useful to turn to one specific section of The Exform which contains an interesting comment made in passing. According to Bourriaud, contemporary art is

Haunted by its inability to think about the way things are, it evinces boundless nostalgia for modernism: a discourse calling for ideas and action, criticism and engagement. Indeed, we would be at great pains to quantify the effects of art on society. According to the prevailing ideology of ‘pragmatism’, which recognizes only numbers and tangible effects, this is enough to disqualify art’s political pretensions. Art, the very site where ideology is laid bare, has become the space where politics is deployed, where it becomes a matter of display value, pure and simple. The positions artists take are all the more extreme because no one believes that they can have the slightest effect on the real, which is cemented by ideology. (Bourriaud 68)

Overlooking the rather idiosyncratic conflation of modernism at large and the historical avant-garde — a conflation that the writer has indulged in all the way back to his Relational Aesthetics of 1998 — this assertion is not developed beyond an observational level. Given the otherwise committed readings of Althusser which this work contains, it remains surprising that Bourriaud makes no attempt to link this succinct observation with an interrogation of the very terms with which it is concerned. The so called ‘nostalgia’ for modernism, much like the purported ‘pastiches’ of so called ‘post-modernism’, are in fact recrudescences of modernist aesthetics modulated through what Mark Fisher (via Derrida in Spectres of Marx) would have referred to as an hauntological prism. Yet beyond this well noted (and au courant) designation, there remains another unexplored possibility initiated by the compulsory ‘pragmatism’ which Bourriaud has identified - one which forecloses the demystifying function of these aesthetic artefacts. 

Bourriaud underlines that the predominant ideology of our times dictates the separation of politics and economics — a separation concomitant with the barring of politics from the sphere of impactfulness and the naturalisation of economics as the domain of the inevitable. Indeed, no real surprise can follow this observation; effectively, the process which Bourriaud outlines as the enshrinement of every meaningful decision in the economic dogma of pragmatism amounts to a very common critique of capitalist depoliticization. Interestingly, in terms of the inscription of this phenomenon in art production, Bourriaud locates the explicitly engagé character of many contemporary practices precisely in the spirit of pragmatism which anchors social life in conditions of depoliticization. There are indeed ample reasons to cultivate this suspicion, especially with regards to programmatic socially ameliorative tendencies in contemporary art practice. 

There are few artistic mission statements which cast this correlation between artistic activity and efficiency as sharply as the contemporary Arte Útil movement, and its leader Tania Bruguera’s proclamation that “[f]or Arte Útil, failure is not a possibility, if the project fails, it is not Arte Útil.” (Gogarty 124). The triumphalist rhetoric of such assertions should not divert from what exactly is on display here: a conceptualisation of the social character of contemporary art which cannot be coherently articulated as distinct from other types of social work. One of the earliest formulations of the philosophy of Arte Útil, Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International starting in 2011, saw the artist move away from the original intention to run art workshops in the Corona neighbourhood of Queens, NY, to focus on the more immediate needs of the immigrant population, such as English lessons. Faced with what was perceived as failure in the form of absence of engagement, the artist thus reframed and repurposed the project towards the pursuit of pure, practical impact. The explicit association of artistic practice with the binary logic of success-failure, itself peculiar to the administration of tasks consisting of specific steps and outcomes, and its subsequent judgement against criteria of this kind presupposes, without doubt, a profoundly instrumentalized conceptualization of art. This type of instrumentalization, however, does not simply subvert the old, oppressive Kantian doxa of art’s purposive purposelessness. Rather, it illustrates a line of thinking that ultimately leaves these practices unable to justify a unique role and value as distinct from the action of various social welfare programmes and NGOs, beyond, perhaps, the vanity of artists attached to the idea of being useful. 

The imperative of efficiency is itself a consequence of a relatively recent and wide structural transformation of arts funding networks. As George Yúdice has argued, the deregulatory orthodoxy of neoliberal economic policy has created adequate incentives for artists and art bodies to safeguard their standing through the adoption of social functions well outside the role of art in traditional cultural contexts (Yúdice 11-13). Projecting a character of public service by pivoting to social and pedagogic programmes is one avenue art institutions are often forced to explore amid massive cuts in arts and culture budgets. At the same time, attaching oneself onto the socially useful tendencies in cultural production allows many artists to carve out a new social role away from the navel-gazing, exhausted manipulation of intradisciplinary tropes and signs.

While the medium unspecificity of contemporary art has allowed it to assume the directly efficient structure of activism, literary production has pursued a similar goal in different ways. Indeed, a parallel but comparable process has taken place in the publishing industry within the past twenty years. Motivated by dwindling profits, the disappearance of pricing protections, the emergence of Amazon as a retail giant and self-publishing platform, the publishing industry has adopted its own program of pragmatism/efficiency towards the genre of literary fiction by imposing onto it a putatively social ameliorative function. To take a specific example, minority authors of literary fiction have in recent years been increasingly instrumentalized by publishers in a quasi-revolutionary drive towards ‘representation’ as a reified form of activism. In more general terms, the publishing industry swiftly reflects and responds to the transient demands of political scandal, identitarianism and the undulations of public outrage. Individual authorship within this context has ceased to be the primary factor in a work’s ‘literariness’, since the nuances of individual style are subsumed by a homogenising lexicon dictated by market pressures. 

It is this nexus of idealism, economic compulsion, and a calculated over eagerness to adapt to political expedience that underlies what Bourriaud describes as the quantifiable, effective politics of contemporary artistic production. Nevertheless, Bourriaud does not seem content with limiting the logic of efficiency/pragmatism solely to outright socially ameliorative practices. In fact, he extends it, in an admittedly elliptical manner, to also encompass aspects of artistic activity regularly understood in a more adversarial light. Alluding thus to the discourse on artistic antagonism that followed his Relational Aesthetics, wherein writers such as Claire Bishop counterposed the provocation of artists such as Santiago Sierra to his own more convivial proclamations, Bourriaud appears to insinuate that there is, indeed, a convergence between amelioration and oppositionality as political orientations of cultural production - a convergence which lies in their spectacular participation in a now depoliticized political sphere. The picture that Bourriaud is thus painting is one permeated by processes of de-differentiation between the cultural and the political, expressed primarily in the expansion of the sphere of the political (or the expansion of the dependency of the cultural on the political) which unfolds in parallel to the diminishing of the impact of political decision. However, the implications of this double movement of expansion and disempowerment cannot be covered adequately only through vague references to ideology, and far surpass the acknowledgment of the self-evident limits of contemporary art’s political power which, after all, often haunts discourse as a refutation of an ‘illusion without owner,’ to borrow Robert Pfaller’s term. 

READ PART 2 HERE
READ PART 3 HERE

NOTE: This article is the ‘Author Original’ (AO) - the final ‘Version of Record’ (VoR) was published in Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 28, Issue 5

CITATIONS
[1] Stewart Martin has highlighted Bourriaud’s quasi-Adornian understanding of artistic autonomy already from the Relational Aesthetics era. Martin, Stewart (2007) 'Critique of Relational Aesthetics', Third Text, 21:4, 369 - 386
[2[ Louis Althusser, ‘Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre’, in On Ideology, trans. by Ben Brewster, (Verso: 2008), p.174. Further references in brackets as ‘LoA’.
[3[ Arte Útil describes an international network of artists and artist groups centring on the idea of usefulness, or “usership.” 
[4] An interesting recent treatment of this phenomenon is Mark McGurl’s Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (Verso: 2021) which posits the proliferation of genre fiction as consequence of the specific pressures exerted Amazon’s self-publishing platform, which facilitates the complete subsumption of a literature to the commodity form, through an easily accessible and seamless style. 
[5]  Almost all of the Western publishing industry is now run by huge conglomerates such as Bertelsmann, one German private family-owned corporation that controls Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, and 365 imprints across the world - in addition to rights companies, printing companies, television studios and newspapers. These imprints, which are implausibly given to be editorially independent, cater to different target markets and ideological interests – but in the final analysis support an obscene monopoly that is self-evidently well served by aesthetic modes which reify a variety of prevailing social attitudes, but ultimately remain motivated only by the cynical imperatives of profitability.
[6] See Claire Bishop’s scathing critique in “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” of 2004. Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October, vol. 110, 2004, pp. 51–79

ILLUSTRATIONS
[1] Jason Rhoades
[2] Mike Kelley