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The Fear of Heteronomy

Gail Day

To cite this article: Gail Day (2009) The Fear of Heteronomy, Third Text, 23:4, 393-406, DOI:
10.1080/09528820903007677

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1. Dmitry Vilensky, ‘You
Can’t Anticipate
Explosions: Jacques
Rancière in Conversation
with Chto delat’, Chto
delat?, 17, August 2007,
unpaginated; accessible at:
http://www.chtodelat.org/
index.php
Third Text, Vol. 23, Issue 4, July, 2009, 393–406
The Fear of Heteronomy
Gail Day
…both art and emancipatory politics always have a surplus.1
Not so long ago, discussion of politics in art was something that had to
be treated indirectly or approached by way of ruses. The search for
‘seeds of time’ (Fredric Jameson) or identification of ‘placeholders’ for
the critical spirit (J M Bernstein) that once preoccupied the discussions of
left aesthetics have subsided. No one seems to believe any more that crit-
ical distance is under threat in the same way – that is, terminally or onto-
logically – crushed by capital’s powers of penetration. Those powers are
fully recognised, of course, especially in a period that is seeing their
further and grotesque extension through the remaining commons, but
what has altered is that there is a growing sense that these developments
must and can be resisted. Emancipatory aesthetic discourse is no longer
dominated by the fear that the last flicker of critical thought might be
about to be extinguished because it burns in our daily life and because
we are exercising it. Debates in art have been driven in directions that
are increasingly radical, concrete and explicitly (and, often, unapologeti-
cally) ‘committed’, and it is often remarked that there has not been so
much political art since the 1960s or even the 1930s. Talk now is
peppered with a new (or renewed) vocabulary: alongside analyses of
‘empire’ and awareness of ‘precariousness’, there has been growing
attention to the ‘coming community’, ‘event’, ‘singularity’, ‘potentia’,
‘multitude’, ‘exodus’, ‘commons’, ‘contretemps’, ‘actuality’, ‘praxis’.
While most of these terms have been around for some time, they have
recently gained a more consistent presence. Within this matrix of ideas,
the rearticulation of the relationship of ‘aesthetics and politics’ and the
notion of the ‘avant-garde’ – maligned and declared redundant for the
past twenty years or so – has returned to the fore of serious consider-
ation. Even back in 2000 – already in the wake of Seattle but still prior
to the destruction of the World Trade Center (that is, at the moment so
often deemed a high point in the ascendency of ‘the movement of move-
ments’) – John Roberts, a theorist not known for shying from the idea of
avant-gardism, was rather cautious in the way he described its relevance.
Challenging those who would ‘confuse the demise of the historic avant-
garde with the would-be cessation of art’s labour of negation’, Roberts
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © Third Text (2009)
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DOI: 10.1080/09528820903007677
394
2. John Roberts, ‘On
Autonomy and the Avant-
Garde’, Radical
Philosophy, no 103,
September/October 2000,
pp 25–8. More recently,
Roberts has returned to the
question of the avant-garde
and ‘event’ in ‘Avant-
gardes After Avant-
Gardism’, Chto delat, 17,
August 2007; available
online at http://
www.chtodelat.org/
index.php
3. Jennifer Roche, ‘Socially
Engaged Art, Critics and
Discontents: An Interview
with Claire Bishop’,
Community Arts Network
Reading Room, July 2006,
available online at http://
www.communityarts.net/
readingroom/archivefiles/
2006/07/
socially_engage.php
4. Claire Bishop, ‘The Social
Turn: Collaboration and
its Discontents’, Artforum,
February 2006
noted that ‘the former may have ended – for now – as a historical possi-
bility, but the latter continues inexorably to exert its demands and
responsibilities’.2 The situation, it seems, has moved on.
Below the surface of this new politicised language of art, however,
can be found some widely different responses. It is striking just how
often commentators find the need to urge caution about the presence of
explicit social impulses in current art; we are repeatedly warned about
the dangers of risking art’s autonomy and reminded of the threats
presented to art when its ambitions become ‘too’ political. There is a fear
of art’s reduction to social servitude and the instrumentalities believed to
characterise committed practices. In a recent interview, for example,
Claire Bishop – a critic who has gauged the current mood – states that ‘it
is crucial for art practices to tread a careful line between social interven-
tion and autonomy’.3 Discussing the recent wave of engaged art practices
in Artforum, she argues that the most successful address the ‘contradic-
tory pull between autonomy and social intervention, and reflect on this
antinomy both in the structure of the work and in the conditions of its
reception’. The apparent balance presented by this statement, however, is
belied by her concerns that art is being overtaken by ethical criteria and
her call for a ‘commitment to the aesthetic’. To underline and qualify her
point, she appeals to the work of Jacques Rancière: ‘the aesthetic’, she
asserts, ‘doesn’t need to be sacrificed at the altar of social change’.4
Stances such as this – and Bishop’s is just one of the more carefully posed
observations among those arguing that art must not be ‘reduced’ to poli-
tics – result, one suspects, more from what have become the accepted
routine reflexes of professional critical art discourse and pedagogy than
from a thoroughgoing critical reflection on the situation. The alleged
‘risk’ to art today is vastly overstated. Indeed, most so-called ‘political
art’ remains thoroughly autonomous in its mode, institutional function
and discursive situation (even if not necessarily in the desires of, or terms
of self-presentation used by, the artists). This is the case even with those
post-relational works where aesthetic ‘form’ seems to have dissolved
totally into the social matrix; they nevertheless remain completely and,
for the moment, irrevocably grounded by autonomy as an institution.
Despite sharing many surface characteristics, there is still a world of
difference between the situation of a jobbing community artist and the
most full-on post-relational activities. Whatever their overlaps – the
crossing of institutional spaces or even of personnel – they clearly emerge
from, and are sustained by, different parts of the social division of labour
within which art under capitalism has attained its unique placing(s). The
anxiety over defending autonomy expressed by some commentators even
when – especially when – in the act of championing some form of politi-
cal practice is wildly misplaced. ‘Autonomy’ is not remotely under threat
just because some artistic collaborations have accessed funding or venues
by trading on their ‘social relevance’, nor because a number of articulate
artists have committed themselves to the anti-capitalist movement. The
unease might be more justified – and matters might be considerably more
interesting – were this in fact the case.
To be sure, there is much confusion over ‘autonomy’ and ‘heteron-
omy’, with the terms being used in multiple and conflicting ways. For
instance, Pierre Bourdieu argued that ‘the field of cultural production’
should be understood as a site of struggle shaped by the double hierarchy

5. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Field
of Cultural Production’,
The Field of Cultural
Production, ed Randal
Johnson, Polity Press,
Cambridge, 1993
395
of heteronomous and autonomous principles.5 Nothing especially
unusual there, we might say, except that Bourdieu identified heteronomy
as the official, dominant and recognised practices of ‘bourgeois art’, and
saw autonomy as art’s aspiration to total freedom from market laws and
to its own internally focused legitimisation. Today’s debates, in contrast,
are far more likely to treat heteronomy as politically orientated practices
which explicitly challenge the social framework of capitalism and seek
freedom from the market, even if not necessarily from the contemporary
institutions of ‘bourgeois art’ (and here one might think of Documenta or
the biennials). Bourdieu’s focus was on the nineteenth century, which
may help account for the dislocations in the use of these terms. In his
schema, those orientated towards the autonomous principle include not
only the more conservative advocates of l’art pour l’art but also an emer-
gent avant-garde (which he understood as Impressionism, etc). In this
sense (and in this alone), Bourdieu’s schema could be compared with
Clement Greenberg’s account of modernism, the difference being that the
latter was a dedicated partisan of the autonomous ‘Manet and after’
tradition who located heteronomy not only with the middle-brow market
of Western capitalism but also with political propaganda and realist
aesthetics. Many of Greenberg’s critics from the 1960s to the present have
tended to treat autonomy and heteronomy (often further narrowed into
the opposition of formalism and anti-formalism) as if they represented
types of art practice between which artists made ideological choices.
From such perspectives, autonomy is disliked because it is thought to
represent institutional power and because it claims its aesthetic to be
(indeed, claims that the aesthetic per se is) above and beyond politics.
Already sketched out here is an array of conflicting meanings and
values attached to the terms autonomy and heteronomy. Further
complexity has been contributed by accounts emanating from the Frank-
furt School and their repeated rearticulation in discussion over the
conjuncture of ‘aesthetics and politics’. Such approaches consider the
dialectic between autonomy and heteronomy as a socio-aesthetic profile
associated in some form (the exact relations being much debated) with
the rise of capitalism. Combining a theory of alienation drawn from
Marx and Hegel with the Weberian account of the separation of the
spheres of experience (scientific, moral, aesthetic), the point about auton-
omy here is its constitutive role for ‘art’ as such. Thus, irrespective of
whether an artist identifies his/her practice politically or ideologically as
autonomous or as anti-autonomous, it will nevertheless be conditioned
by the prevailing condition of art’s (social) autonomy. Those compla-
cently satisfied with their autonomous status – those who live inside
what was once known as ‘aesthetic ideology’ – proceed in self-delusion
or in bad faith, ignorant of their own social and historical specificity, and
putting at risk art’s very hold on, and ability to sustain, relevance. In
short, autonomy is predicated on heteronomy, heteronomy on auton-
omy. Whether assessing one particular instance or generating an over-
arching theory appropriate to an entire historical phase, or whether
giving the problem a more philosophical or more sociological emphasis,
what is central for this tradition of thinking is how the dialectic is
calibrated and its internal tensions weighed.
Today, the frameworks for understanding autonomy and heteron-
omy outlined above are frequently combined in an eclectic manner. Few
396
6. Stewart Martin, ‘Critique
of Relational Aesthetics’,
Third Text, 21:4, July
2007, pp 369–86
(originally published in
2006).
7. See Vilensky and Rancière
in ‘You Can’t Anticipate
Explosions’, op cit.
8. Rancière, The Politics of
Aesthetics: The
Distribution of the
Sensible, trans Gabriel
Rockhill, Continuum
Books, London–New
York, 2004 (original
French edition, Le Partage
du sensible: Esthétique et
politique, La Fabrique-
Editions, 2000). The
question of autonomy and
heteronomy, however, is
most focused, and his
discussion most sustained,
in his essay ‘The Aesthetic
Revolution and its
Outcomes: Emplotments of
Autonomy and
Heteronomy’, New Left
Review, 14, March/April
2002, pp 133–51. As The
Politics of Aesthetics has
been accused of being an
overly allusive (and, for
some, evasive) text, the
essay for NLR has proved
clearer for drawing out the
politics of ‘the politics of
aesthetics’. For criticism of
The Politics of Aesthetics,
see Stewart Martin, ‘Culs-
de-sac’, Radical
Philosophy, 131, May/June
2005, pp 39–44.
9. Rancière, ‘The Aesthetic
Revolution and its
Outcomes’, op cit, p 136, p
134. The discussion of
Schiller receives more
cursory treatment in The
Politics of Aesthetics, p 27
and pp 43–44, and the
‘aesthetic regime’ is
addressed on p 22.
are prepared to appeal to autonomy in its Greenbergian mode. On the
contrary, most commentators are happy to see, indeed, are invigorated
by, art that has some social and political oomph … but only so far.
There is something distinctive about the drift and tone of discussions
where the contemporary heteronomous impulse must be kept at bay.
The worries expressed over the ‘dangers’ of going ‘too far’ seem to
employ a concept of autonomy that hybridises a more standard ideology
of asserting art’s uniqueness with the Adornian concern to preserve criti-
cal distance from the identity modes characteristic of the culture indus-
try. What is striking is how the appeal to, say, T W Adorno’s defence of
autonomy seems to be made in terms which render the issue one of
preserving at all costs autonomy per se – qua autonomy – in ways which
flatten and thereby short-circuit the dialectic. The politics of contempo-
rary practices add some frisson, and some much-welcomed claim on
‘relevance’, but, so the argument goes, art must nevertheless ‘tread a
careful line’ lest it degenerate into mere propaganda or become servile to
government-led agendas. In a situation where autonomy is not remotely
under threat by current artistic strategies – when, as Stewart Martin has
so well put it, autonomy now secures its relevance precisely by its appeal
to the social – what might such unease represent?6 Martin uses the term
‘social autonomy’. While acceptable in a general sense, at our current
juncture especially, the term ‘social autonomy’ potentially confuses
discussion by introducing (inadvertently in Martin’s case) both the post-
operaist/and post-autonomist concept of (worker) autonomy and that
advanced as ‘the autonomy of social movements’ or ‘the autonomy of
the social’. Indeed, Dmitry Vilensky has made precisely this connection
between aesthetic autonomy in the Adornian sense and post-operaist
political autonomy; responding to him, Jacques Rancière was adamant
his own concept of autonomy should not be confused with that derived
from Italian debates.7
Today, it is as – or more – likely to be Rancière’s writing on the
subject of autonomy and heteronomy, rather than Adorno’s, that is
assumed as the defining point of reference. Indeed, so over-familiar has it
become by way of references, quotations and epigraphs that it is worth
returning to some of the key points in his argument on le partage du
sensible.8 Addressing the writing of Friedrich Schiller, Rancière explores
the initiation of the ‘aesthetic regime’ – the regime which, he argues,
succeeded the ethical and the representational ones – and which created
a specific ‘sensorium, a new partition of the perceptible’. Schiller’s
aesthetic promised a reciprocal interlocking of autonomy and heteron-
omy in which the claims to aesthetic autonomy (understood as its free-
dom from social constraint) were entwined with ‘the very idea of a new
life’ (that is, with the project for social freedom). This double project,
Rancière argues, has subsequently shaped various emplotments of
aesthetic theory. If, for much of the twentieth century, aesthetic debates
have posed the narratives of autonomy and heteronomy as mutually
exclusive, for Rancière, in contrast, they should be understood as
together constituting a meta-narrative which repeatedly invokes the
ambitions of the Schillerian ‘original scene’. The ‘autonomy of art’ and
the ‘promise of politics’ are not in (simple) opposition; rather, it is their
very conjuncture which grounds both the artistic autonomy and the
project to change life.9 At the same time, this conjuncture also produces

10. Rancière, ‘The Aesthetic
Revolution and its
Outcomes’, op cit, p 150
11. Ibid, p 137
12. Ibid, p 149. As Rancière
sees it, Lyotard’s aesthetics
of the sublime is an
argument that devises ‘a
way of blocking the
originary path from
aesthetics to politics’,
imposing a detour to
ethics, in which art
witnesses the
‘unrepresentable’. Lyotard
does this, despite his anti-
Hegelianism, by drawing
on Hegel’s description of
the sublime as the
impossible adequation
between thought and its
sensible presentation, not
because there is something
unrepresentable, but
because ‘it fulfills the desire
that there be something
unrepresentable, something
unavailable, in order to
inscribe in the practice of
art the necessity of the
ethical detour’, p 150.
Rancière also advances his
critique of Lyotard in
‘What aesthetics can
mean’, trans Brian Holmes,
From an Aesthetic Point of
View: Philosophy, Art and
the Senses, ed Peter
Osborne, Serpent’s Tail,
London, 2000, pp 13–33.
13. Ibid, p 143. These qualities
can also be found
articulated in On the
Shores of Politics, Verso,
London–New York, 1995
(originally published
1992).
14. Begg and Vilensky, ‘On the
possibility of avant-garde
composition in
contemporary art’, Chto
delat, 17, August 2007,
unpaginated (emphasis
added); available online at
http://www.chtodelat.org/
index.php
397
‘two vanishing points’: the danger of art’s reduction to mere life and that
of its reduction to mere art (both of which have already been rehearsed
above).10 The contradictions and oppositions that we repeatedly encoun-
ter in debates on modern culture (art/life, high/popular, art/non-art, etc),
then, are taken as symptoms of this deeper contradiction, namely that
‘art is art to the extent that it is something else than art. It is always
“aestheticized”, meaning that it is always posed as a “form of life”’.11
Rancière’s purpose in ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes’ is
to challenge the dominant plot of autonomy, especially that provided in
Jean-François Lyotard’s reading of Kant (although Rancière notes that
Kant’s writings do not fit the ‘Kantian’ frame set out by Lyotard).12 His
argument also challenges binarist models that baldly counterpose ‘art’
and ‘life’, and those single-track ‘entropic’ narratives that, in the late
twentieth century, often accompanied discussions of the ‘end of art’.
Emphasising the ongoing force of the ‘heterogeneous sensible’, Rancière
resists the silencing of the Schillerian promise and the suppression of
the aesthetic’s heteronomous dimensions. Rancière certainly acknowl-
edges the aporetic consequences of various scenarios unleashed by the
aesthetic regime, but, unlike many accounts describing aporia, his
concern is with maintaining both a politics and an aesthetic character-
ised by openness and possibility. Resisting straightforward narratives of
progress (or regress), and emphasising the mutual permeability of art
and life, he sets out a social concept of the aesthetic. It is easy to see why
Rancière’s writing has had a wide appeal: he asserts the ‘life’ of art
against its ‘death’; he promotes potentiality against historical foreclo-
sure; he gives the aesthetic a central place, not just for art but also for
our understanding of how social emancipation was formulated; and he
dismisses as ‘beside the point’ those who would seek to remove politics
from art. In short, his argument has a dialectical mobility which by
emphasising ‘scenarios of latency and reactualisation’ indicates poten-
tials for and of transformation.13
It should not be surprising, then, to find that the emphasis on the
politics of aesthetics in Rancière’s work has opened onto debates over
the avant-garde which have again resurfaced with the wave of politically
orientated practices in recent years. There have been a number of artists
and theorists who have identified the rise of a new avant-gardism. An
edition of Chto delat?, which includes a long interview with Rancière,
has been specifically devoted to the question. In one article, Zanny Begg
and Dmitry Vilensky argue for the need to take current avant-gardist
strategies seriously, and outline what they take to be their different
internal tendencies. As they put it: ‘we believe that some of the essential
content of the avant-garde is crucial for an understanding of contempo-
rary art’.14 Rejecting concepts of the avant-garde based on formal or
stylistic innovation, on a direct identity with radical politics or on the
association with ‘vanguardism’, they instead draw on Rancière to point
to the avant-garde’s ‘poietic force’, that is, ‘its ability to question and
destabilise the very notion of the political, social, cultural and artistic’.
The concept of the avant-garde, they argue, turns on ‘the political
understanding of the aesthetic … confrontational approaches towards
the culture industry’ and direct interaction with activists who, and insti-
tutions which, question ‘the established order of what art is’, and they
call for a:
398
15. Begg and Vilensky, op cit
16. Rancière , ‘You Can’t
Anticipate Explosions’, op
cit. He treats the autonomy
of aesthetic experience as
the first or prior issue for
the aesthetic regime.
17. Rancière, The Politics of
Aesthetics, op cit, p 45.
Elsewhere, Rancière has
spoken of the democratic
experience as ‘a particular
aesthetic of politics’ and
the demos as ‘the
autonomous power to
separate from the ochlos’,
On the Shores of Politics,
op cit, pp 51 and 32.
Aesthetics has been
described as ‘the originary
knot that ties a sense of art
to an idea of thought and
an idea of the community’
in ‘What aesthetics can
mean’, op cit, p 33.
18. Rancière, ‘You Can’t
Anticipate Explosions’,
op cit
19. One can compare
Rancière’s earlier writing
on the processes of
aspiration born of the
meeting of classes and the
type of political,
intellectual and aesthetic
projects developed – and
the processes of mutual
self-transformation
occurring within such
spaces. (See, for example,
The Nights of Labor: The
Workers’ Dream in
Nineteenth-Century
France, Temple University
Press, Philadelphia, 1989).
The connection with his
writings on worker
intellectuals and utopian
socialism is made explicitly
in The Politics of
Aesthetics: ‘It is this
paradigm of aesthetic
autonomy that became the
new paradigm for
revolution, and it
subsequently allowed for
the brief but decisive
encounter between the
artisans of the Marxist
revolution and the artisans
of forms for a new way of
life’ (p 27); see also his
reference to The Nights of
Labor, p 40.
20. Rancière, ‘You Can’t
Anticipate Explosions’,
op cit
… return to a discussion of the avantgarde but through a different read-
ing of its composition: a reading which not only locates the political
potential of art within the autonomy of the aesthetic experience but also
within the autonomy of art as rooted within the political context.15
It may not be immediately apparent what is at stake here. Rancière has
increasingly emphasised – a point that comes out especially forcefully in
his conversation with Chto delat? – that his discussion of autonomy
concerns not that of art (or the artwork) but the autonomy of ‘aesthetic
experience’.16 The inauguration of the aesthetic regime was the moment
when this specific form of experience could be appealed to, deriving its
force precisely because it lay outside any direct social function. This defi-
nition of aesthetic experience, of course, goes well beyond the idea of
the appreciation of art (a point that Rancière had already made in The
Politics of Aesthetics).17 Accordingly, ‘the potential of aesthetic experi-
ence qua autonomous experience’ was the basis for art’s political
claims.18 In one of the most insightful parts of Rancière’s account, this
potential pertains equally to the way the idea of social emancipation
could be construed by the emergent movements of radical workers.19
There was a sense in which, in addition to art’s own political claims,
modern forms of political radicalisation were also connected to the
emergence of the ‘“autonomisation” of aesthetic experience from the
ethical adequation between art and life’ that had previously prevailed.20
Rancière is correct, I think, to maintain his distance from those who
would extend this insight into the bald claim which would see aesthetics
as supplanting politics, or who would fail to recognise the different
modes of dissensuality at work in art and political practice;21 his point is
more subtle and its implications more convincingly squared with history.
Nevertheless, whether this autonomised faculty that he describes is
solely reducible to aesthetic experience is surely questionable. In a sense,
what is being described comes close to the recognition of the transforma-
tion concepts taking place at this time, many of which wrought a deci-
sive change in content (from ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ to ‘art’, ‘aesthetics’
and ‘politics’) and set the course for the emergence of their modern
usage.22 This is what has long been known within Marxism and the
social sciences as the historicisation of categories which makes attempts
to deploy such terms as if they were neutral to history fraught with prob-
lems.23 Rancière is knowledgeable enough to know this, but he is
inclined to be selective regarding which terms, categories and projects he
subjects to the historical perspective.
While his emphasis on ‘the aesthetic mode of thought’ enlightens
important aspects of the historical transformation represented by the
aesthetic regime, Rancière’s insistence on keeping at bay the question of
art’s autonomy fails fundamentally to address the accompanying history
of autonomy’s social institutionalisation.24 It is at this point that Begg
and Vilensky try to go beyond Rancière (or, to put it another way, to
return his account to an earlier moment where the distinction between
art’s autonomy and the autonomy of aesthetic experience was less rigidly
posed). They not only wish to follow him in locating ‘the political poten-
tial of art within the autonomy of the aesthetic experience’, they also aim
to explore how that potential emerges ‘within the autonomy of art as
rooted within the political context’. I think they point not only to an

21. Rancière interviewed by
Christian Höller, ‘The
Abandonment of
Democracy: An Interview
with Jacques Rancière’,
Springerin, 3, 2007,
unpaginated; available
online at http://
www.springerin.at/en
22. Raymond Williams’s
Keywords remains the
classic exposition.
23. Rancière himself pays close
attention to the shifting
‘conceptual status of the
sensible’ and aisthesis in
‘What aesthetics can mean’,
op cit. Interestingly, this
problem of categorial
historicisation features
frequently within efforts to
conceptualise the avant-
garde, autonomy and
heteronomy. See for
example, Peter Bürger, on
‘The Historicity of Aesthetic
Categories’, in Theory of
the Avant-Garde, trans
Michael Shaw, University of
Manchester Press/
University of Minnesota
Press, 1984; Pierre
Bourdieu, ‘The Field of
Cultural Production’,
op cit.
24. Rancière, The Politics of
Aesthetics, op cit, p 45
25. John Roberts cited by Begg
and Vilensky, op cit
26. Rancière, ‘The
Abandonment of
Democracy’, op cit
27. Harold Rosenberg,
‘Toward an Unanxious
Profession’, in The
Anxious Object, University
of Chicago Press, Chicago–
London, 1982 (originally
published as collection in
1966), pp 13–20, and ‘On
the De-definition of Art’,
The De-Definition of Art,
University of Chicago
Press, Chicago–London,
1983 (originally published
as a collection in 1972),
pp 11–14; Clement
Greenberg, ‘The
Recentness of Sculpture’,
The Collected Essays and
Criticism, vol 4, ed John
O’Brian, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago
and London, 1993,
pp 250–6 (the essay was
399
important elision in Rancière’s approach, but, without developing their
argument, also to something crucial for their understanding of the avant-
garde’s ‘essential content’. Bringing together Adorno’s notion of the
‘new’ (understood as ‘the possibility of keeping alive art’s non-identity in
the face of its own institutionalisation and, as such, in the face of the
means–ends rationality of capitalist exchange value’25) with Alain
Badiou’s ‘event’, Begg and Vilensky argue for a mediated understanding
of art in both its social and its autonomous aspects.
Rancière justifies his dismissal of the notion of art’s autonomy with
reference to the problem of ‘aesthetic indistinction’. The autonomy of
aesthetic experience, he argues:
… is not tantamount to the ‘autonomy’ of the artwork, since this separa-
tion of a sphere of experience goes along with the loss of any determined
criterion of difference between what belongs to art and what belongs to
nonartistic life.26
While it is true that the criteria for distinguishing artistic from nonartistic
life in capitalist modernity cannot be fixed in an absolute way, it is surely
incorrect to say that parameters and boundaries are lost, and still more
erroneous to conclude from this situation that one can no longer speak of
art’s institutional autonomy. On the contrary, there have been ongoing
struggles over what might, or should, be admitted to ‘art’; this seems to
be the substance of much of the critical debate through the twentieth
century. Almost fifty years ago, Harold Rosenberg referred to this very
phenomenon as ‘the anxiety of art’, and Greenberg found much contem-
porary art wanting because he detected its elision with ‘nonart’; Michael
Fried, famously, worried that Minimalist works were becoming ‘theatre’;
development in conceptual art further challenged the defenders of what
were then ‘art’s’ borders.27 Concerns with art’s lack of categorial distinc-
tion with commodification have rumbled on since Pop, and, despite a
period in which he feared that contemporary art had lost its coordinates,
Hal Foster has since expressed concerns about how art borders ‘design’.28
There may have been a pluralisation of artistic media and modes (from
the admission of documents to that of ‘post-relational’ events within art’s
field), not to mention much post-Jamesonian theoretical touting of the
postmodern collapse of determinations. However, it could be argued
that, at the same time as so-called ‘aesthetic indistinction’ has expanded
(the claim, I think, is superficially derived and overblown), the categorial
borders of artistic activity have been both strengthened and shored up
institutionally. Indeed, much of the unease being expressed in the face of
the current wave of ‘political art’ (including some from Rancière himself)
– the concerns to protect art’s autonomy, the efforts to reel back where
art might go without losing its identity – represents yet another moment
in this long debate. Anything but indistinction, one might conclude.
Contestations may challenge and relativise aesthetic values, but this does
not amount to claiming that determinate criteria are erased (unless the
term ‘determined criteria’ is to be taken, falsely, in the most statically – or
formally – conceived manner); relativisation, after all, is itself a determi-
nate process, both determined and determining.
Rancière rejects the longstanding distinction of modernism (autono-
mous) and the avant-garde (art/life). This is handled most fully in The
400
published on three
occasions in 1967–1968);
Michael Fried, ‘Art and
Objecthood’, Art and
Objecthood: Essays and
Reviews, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago–
London, 1998, pp 148–72
(originally published in
Artforum 5, June 1967,
pp 12–23).
28. Hal Foster, Design and
Crime (and Other
Diatribes), Verso, London–
New York, 2002
29. Rancière, The Politics of
Aesthetics, op cit, p 26, p 29
30. Rancière, ‘You Can’t
Anticipate Explosions’, op
cit, The Politics of
Aesthetics, p 30. Rancière
qualifies even this schema,
noting several artists who,
while attempting to fuse art
and life, simply wanted art
to fit with the qualities of
modern life but lacked
‘political’ avant-gardist
commitments.
31. Rancière, The Politics of
Aesthetics, op cit, p 29
32. It is useful to compare
Rancière’s own points on
the political subject which
he advances especially
clearly in the interview for
Springerin, op cit. Here, he
argues that political people
only existed in its action
and ‘as the construction of
its own space’.
Democracy’s ‘people’, he
argues, is not to be
understood as the
positivistic conception of a
social body, but ‘is created
by forms of
subjectivisation, by the
configuration of dissensual
scenes’.
Politics of Aesthetics, where he outlines ‘two major variants on the
discourse of “modernity”’ and ‘two ideas of the avant-garde’.29 In the
Chto delat interview, however, he appeals to the complex heterogeneity
of examples, a tactic which is used to deflect the arguments of others but
which also has a tendency to rebound across the core of his own thesis.
(It would be possible make the same case against the theoretical arma-
ture that Rancière is prepared to admit, not least his ‘regimes of art’;
history was, after all, so much more complex.) However, dissolving into
the infinite regress of appeals to particularities – effectively hiding
behind the multifariousness of material history or the irreducibility of
the concrete world – is not particularly helpful. Without doubt, the
opposition of a modernist autonomy to the anti-autonomy avant-garde
has been treated in overly simplistic terms, and Rancière correctly identi-
fies some of the problems in seeing the art-into-life project too straight-
forwardly. As he argues: ‘the idea of the avant-garde entails … two
different ideas of the connection between the artistic and the political’:
on the one hand, those who try to merge art and politics, ‘to create a
new fabric of sensible life’ and ‘new forms of collective experience’ (he
cites the Russian futurists and constructivists) and, on the other, those
who sought the ‘creation of a new sensorium’ and ‘aesthetic break’ (for
which Joyce and Pollock are the examples).30 This broadly corresponds
to the two ideas of the avant-garde presented in The Politics of Aesthet-
ics, but there is something deeply unconvincing about the separation he
makes: ‘If the concept of the avant-garde has any meaning in the
aesthetic regime of the arts, it is … not on the side of the advanced
detachments of artistic innovation but on the side of the invention of
sensible forms and material structures for a life to come.’31 This separa-
tion between two concepts of the avant-garde, one understood in terms
of a ‘strategic conception’ (associated with the military and vanguardist
metaphor), the other in terms of an ‘aesthetic conception’ (Schiller’s
aesthetic anticipation of the future), is totally artificial, ignoring the
fluidity of social process and the mutability of political subject formation
under determinate situations. (Try accounting historically for the politi-
cal and aesthetic choices made at different moments by Tzara, Hülsen-
beck, Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Richter, Aragon, Péret, Naville, Breton,
Brik, Kemény, Ehrenburg, Cahun, Modotti, May, Stam, Meyer, Teige,
Deren, etc, etc – hardly side-shows on avant-gardist history, except, that
is, on its most clichéd ‘art-driven’ and conservative versions.) The prob-
lem is further compounded by Rancière’s elevation of the aesthetic
conception as avant-gardism’s privileged meaning.32
Interestingly, for Peter Bürger, author of Theory of the Avant-Garde,
the failure to distinguish between modernism and the avant-garde – a
problem he identifies specifically with Adorno and Habermas – produces
more than just a categorial problem. Bürger’s theory of the avant-garde –
strictly, the ‘historical avant-garde’ – has suffered from its widespread
reduction to some familiar sound-bites. Bürger’s extended methodologi-
cal precursus, however, is concerned to explore the historicisation of
aesthetic categories and to elaborate how these serve to help or hinder
our grasp of historical transformations in art. Certainly, his account is
not above criticism: Bürger’s theory was subject to extensive scrutiny
when first published in Germany, and – due to its evasion of political
developments, especially the Bolshevik Revolution, and his limited

33. Focusing on the case of
German literature, Christa
Bürger shows how the
emergence of ‘bourgeois-
autonomy’ involved the
repression of the
‘Enlightenment-bourgeois’
model. Christa Bürger,
‘Human Misery or Heaven
on Earth? The Novel
Between Enlightenment
and the Autonomy of Art’,
in The Institutions of Art:
Essays by Peter Bürger and
Christa Bürger, trans
Loren Kruger, University
of Nebraska Press,
Lincoln–London, 1992,
p 110
34. Bürger, ‘The Significance
of the Avant-Garde for
Contemporary Aesthetics:
A Reply to Jürgen
Habermas’, New German
Critique, no 22, Winter
1981, p 22. He goes even
further, claiming that the
achievement of the
historical avant-garde
provided the preconditions
for Habermas’s (and also
Wellmer’s) reclamation of
certain Enlightenment
values – art with cognitive
and moral aspects, which
seems rather more far-
fetched.
35. Bürger, Theory of the
Avant-Garde, op cit,
pp 90–1
401
engagement with Soviet avant-garde experience – Theory of the Avant-
Garde has, justifiably, been accused of being ‘bloodless’. Nevertheless, as
a serious attempt to reflect on art at a level of historical theorisation
(albeit one that is now thirty-five years old), it usefully compares with
Rancière’s. Both chart the passage of art’s historical transformations,
Bürger’s ‘sacral’, ‘courtly’ and ‘bourgeois’ periodisation contrasting with
Rancière’s designation of ‘ethical’, ‘representational’ and ‘aesthetic’
regimes of art; both give Schiller a central place in their accounts. If
Rancière approaches his topic as a historically informed philosopher
(and one-time philosophical social historian), Bürger does so as a philo-
sophically informed cultural and literary historian: that is, we might
expect to find some productive confluences as well as instructive diver-
gences between their approaches. The specific conceptual condensations
and distributions each deploys might profitably be explored as a way to
develop the historical debates on ‘aesthetics and politics’; here there is
only space to hint at one aspect.
Adorno and Habermas, Bürger argues, were unable to differentiate
the specific features of the historical avant-garde from those of modern-
ism in general because they avoided consideration of art at the level of
its institutionalisation. One virtue of Bürger’s approach, which was
developed further in the project he conducted with Christa Bürger, is its
attempt to track historically the emergence of artistic autonomy as a
social institution; by attending to the process of ‘functional transforma-
tion’, it is able to draw out the associated practices, discourse and ideol-
ogies of this form of institutionalisation, and to demonstrate the
exercises of power and vested interests in autonomising positions, in
contrast, for example, to ‘alternative institutionalisations’ that could
have emerged;33 it also tries to keep to the fore how central categories
(such as ‘art’, ‘artist’ and ‘audience’) were being shaped into their
modern forms. Rancière becomes caught in much the same difficulty as
Adorno and Habermas, in part, it would seem, due to his insistence on
autonomy as pertaining to aesthetic experience alone and his sidestep-
ping the problem of institutionalisation, and in part because of the mode
of argumentation he adopts. The points introduced by Bürger go well
beyond the mere problem of categorial ‘definitions’ and their drawbacks
in capturing historical complexity. The elision between ‘avant-garde’
and ‘modernism’, he argues, obscures the avant-garde’s historical
achievements; the ‘event’ of the avant-garde’s challenge to art’s auton-
omy, he argues, ‘has provided us with the possibility for overcoming
[its] … limitations’.34 Bürger also argues that one of the ‘momentous
consequences’ of the historical avant-garde was that, by removing the
demand for organic totality, it fundamentally altered the parameters of –
and, to an extent, abolished – the longstanding opposition of ‘pure’ and
‘engaged’ (‘political’) art.35
Faced with questions over the legacy of the early twentieth-century
avant-garde for today’s artists, Rancière responds that the project of
‘art into life’ was not unique to this period; the same ambition, he
argues, can also be found in the ethical regime. His point is not with-
out validity, but only in the most general of terms; it begs the central
question of how ‘art’, not to mention ‘life’, would be constituted in
these different contexts, and how ‘art into life’ under the ethical regime
differed from the understanding of the ‘same’ project in the 1920s – or
402

even in the twenty-first century. What is interesting here is the parame-

ters taken by the discussion. Admittedly, the course of an interview
shapes the argument of the interviewee; qualifying what is presented to
him by his interlocutors, the directions taken by Rancière and empha-
ses that he puts on his dialectic are produced and orientated dialogi-
cally. Still, the specific discursive production should not go unnoticed:
his argument is repeatedly shaped around the historical and logical
privileging of autonomy. (And not just the autonomy of aesthetic expe-
rience: while explicitly evading the idea of art’s institutional autonomy,
its presence is nevertheless sustained through the discussion.) While
finding little more than echoes of Plato in the avant-garde’s heterono-
mous tendencies – and his claim for the singularity of the aesthetic
regime notwithstanding36 – he seems not to identify any earlier lineages
for autonomy. Implicitly, he produces a progressivist model of history,
in which heteronomy is always primarily, and essentially, characteristic
of other regimes; heteronomous tendencies are forever condemned to
being, at best, ‘nothing new’ or, at worst, posited as simply retrograde.
Presumably, this meta-discursive uni-directionality is not what Rancière
wants from his account, but it is a problem that comes to the fore
when he encounters questions posed from today’s would-be left avant-
garde. This problem is not only elicited by the nature of a particular
interview discussion; it is also produced by limitations within his argu-
ment. Rancière is among the most historically and artistically aware of
philosophers, yet his account is subject to a certain dehistoricisation
that follows from the rigid separation he makes between the autonomy
of aesthetic experience and autonomy within historical and institution-
alised social practices. Peter Bürger and Christa Bürger note the pres-
ence of autonomous tendencies within the social formation preceding
autonomy’s modern ascendancy (so it too could be said to be nothing
new). They also show how art was separated from moral purpose and
political utility, not only as part of a general shift from ‘courtly’ to
‘bourgeois’ periods, but also as part of an inner struggle within the
‘bourgeois’ period itself. Furthermore, they suggest that far from leav-
ing behind the relation of art to ethics, the transition to modern artistic
autonomy was achieved, paradoxically, on the basis of a meta-moralis-
tic claim about art’s moral purpose (that is, its purposelessness). It
could be argued that Rancière accepts the results of this meta-moralis-
tic claim rather too uncritically.
It is impossible to isolate art from politics, Rancière argues, qualify-
ing the autonomous drive with heteronomy. Addressing the issue from
the other perspective, he notes the contradiction facing the avant-garde:
in trying ‘to create a new sensorium of common life’ it must simulta-
neously work against its grounding in autonomy, as he puts it, ‘to stop
precisely this separation’.37 Thus, since art ‘promises a political accom-
plishment that it cannot satisfy’, the desire to fulfil the promise of a new
36. Rancière, The Politics of life invariably ends, in his account, in disappointment.38 The sense of
Aesthetics, op cit, p 23
agency and praxis that accompanies the avant-garde’s heteronomous
37. Rancière, ‘You Can’t impulse is not only played down, but such praxis is condemned, avant la
Anticipate Explosions’,
op cit lettre, to melancholy. The dialectic of autonomy and heteronomy is
neutralised and one-sidedly weighted. There is something horribly quiet-
38. Rancière, ‘The Aesthetic
Revolution and its istic about the meta-conclusions to Rancière’s meta-narrative, which
Outcomes’, op cit, p 151 seems utterly out of kilter with those currents in recent art that would

39. Ibid
40. Bürger’s conclusion to
Theory of the Avant-Garde
also returns to autonomy:
the avant-garde, he argues,
wanted not to dissolve the
emphasis on means–ends in
the projects of art into life,
but to refigure life on art’s
terms (the Romantic
legacy).
41. Jack Straw interviewed on
‘Today’, BBC Radio 4, 23
September 2008
42. Rancière, ‘The Aesthetic
Revolution and its
Outcomes’, op cit, p 148
403
seek to exceed their accepted place of fiddling with sensoria while the
world burns. They would be, on this account, in a state of being always
already defeated, their actions perennially self-defeating.
It seems that what is of crucial importance to Rancière’s ‘politics of
aesthetics’ is not only his articulation of aesthetic autonomy’s dialectic
with heteronomy but rather his desire to emphasise the ambiguity or
undecidability induced in the shuttling between the aesthetic regime’s
two vanishing points. 39 Rancière’s account has internal motility, which
is part of its attraction, but its dynamism is circumscribed by the essen-
tial stasis of an overarching aporia in which any moments of heterono-
mous transitivity are repeatedly curtailed.40 Interestingly, Rancière’s
readers divide into those who all-too-readily accept the quietistic impli-
cations of the argument, extending them even to places at which
Rancière might baulk, essentially a sanitised notion of autonomy decked
out with a few political accessories, and, on the other hand, those who
cannot disavow the meaning of the heteronomous power and who
would try to press through the desire for political accomplishment.
Faced with enthusiastic enquiries about a contemporary avant-gardism
from his some of his readers, it is unfortunate that Rancière has tended
to retreat to a magisterial position which sees in their ambitions little
more than just the latest race of the shuttle towards the heteronomous
scenario. Thus the constant ‘shuttling between’ scenarios of autonomy
and heteronomy, which Rancière describes as the ‘life of art’, is repro-
duced at the level of his own meta-account. It is impossible to isolate art
from politics; absolutely true, but dissensual practice, whether in art or
politics, has to accede to determinate points and decisions (and also to
partisanship) if it is not to be drained of content.
Rancière himself refuses to be lured into second-guessing, or acting as
a guide for, the future. This is probably wise, but one consequence of his
avoidance of even tentative articulation is that the presentation of the
dilemmas and paradoxes of the aesthetic regime develops a centripetal
force from which there is no escape. For those desiring ‘political accom-
plishment’ (of both art’s promise and social emancipation), the aesthetic
regime has to be thought of not as prognosis, as a future shaped by an
eternal present, but as itself – at least potentially – transient. Few would
venture to predict the historical and temporal scale of aesthetic or social
transience (although, on 23 September 2008, Jack Straw, the Lord High
Chancellor of Great Britain and Secretary of State for Justice – and he was
not alone – did suggest that the collapse of capitalism had almost occurred
‘last Wednesday’).41 However, if the promise is to have any meaning (if it
is not to be merely a gesture internal to the aporia), the conception of
temporality has to project beyond aporetic logics. And this is what had
begun to change, and – all cautions and qualifications due – is what makes
it reasonable to speak again of avant-gardes. Mobilising around
Rancière’s theory, they pursue his point that if it is to retain the promise
of the aesthetic scene, advanced art ‘has to stress more and more the
power of heteronomy that underpins its autonomy’.42 The great strength
of today’s emergent avant-gardists is that, after decades in the doldrums,
they want to exercise art’s heteronomous impulse, not just to recollect the
Schillerian promise, but to break open the aporetic condition itself.
The argument offered by Begg and Vilensky starts to run in excess
not only of Rancière’s articulation of the politics of the aesthetic; they
404
43. Hal Foster, ‘Arty Party’,
London Review of Books,
vol 25, no 23, 4 December
2003, pp 21–2
44. Nicolas Bourriaud,
Relational Aesthetics, trans
Simon Pleasance and
Fronza Woods, Les presses
du réel, Dijon, 2002, p 36
(French edition, 1998). The
formulation of fluctuating
over the real comes from
Manfredo Tafuri’s account
of Gris’s cubism. For
Tafuri, it conveyed the
limitations of Gris’s
practice (it merely
fluctuated and did not
touch the real). I use it here
with a different emphasis –
one more appropriate to
our, often too
complacently,
‘disillusioned’ times – to
stress the tensions set in
play by the striving
towards social immediacy.
Manfredo Tafuri and
Francesco Dal Cò, Modern
Architecture, 2 vols, trans
Robert Erich Wolf, Faber
& Faber, London, 1976
(Italian edition, 1976),
vol. 1, p 105.
45. Begg and Vilensky, op cit
46. Alain Badiou, ‘The
Communist Hypothesis’,
New Left Review, 49,
January/February 2008,
pp 38–9
also read Adorno, if not exactly against the grain, then certainly by
attending to specific moves in Aesthetic Theory from which a more mili-
tant edge might be constructed. A similar excessive reading could be seen
to have been construed from Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics: the
strong social and dialogical emphases on process; the appeal to the social
potential of microtopias; an argument, in contrast to the prevailing art-
world Deleuze-fest, advancing a specifically Guattarian militancy; the
assertion of art’s political nature and, especially, his defense of the idea
of an avant-garde. Whatever the drawbacks of Bourriaud’s thesis (the
inadequacy of the thesis to the artworks addressed, or the art to the
thesis, or the danger of confusing mimetic adaptation to contemporary
managerial techniques and marketing strategies with emancipatory
potential), the critical engagement with this project has propelled discus-
sion and action leftwards. The explicit concern with transitivity, articu-
lated in Bourriaud at a microtopic and relatively abstract level, has been
pushed and extended in an effort to break precisely his account’s limita-
tions. The point about the microtopias of Relational Aesthetics is not so
much that they are little more than an ‘arty party’ (a judgement that
poses as sophisticated critique while being little more than a banal stat-
ing of the obvious), but that even in ideal terms they fail to live up to the
ambitions unleashed by their own promise.43 The transitive understood
simply as an inter-subjective dialogic – and confined to a metaphoric,
and sometimes metonymic, invocation of the social – has been increas-
ingly transformed into projects framed by the ambitions for social trans-
formation. The microtopic claim of Relational Aesthetics to ‘fill in the
cracks in the social bond’ tips over into the project to address its causes –
echoing the historical avant-garde’s own fluctuations over the real, from
its attempts to dispense with metaphor and make language direct
through to the preparedness of some of its members to risk, or even
abandon, their attachment to, and identification with, ‘art’ itself.44
In seizing on the language of Alain Badiou, Begg and Vilensky are
among many who have positioned Seattle as ‘event’ (which they specifi-
cally ally to Seattle’s transformative effect on the understanding of
‘subjectivity and potentiality’45). Yet, a demonstration – however signifi-
cant (and Seattle certainly rates highly on that score) – cannot constitute
an ‘event’ in Badiou’s sense; even the événements of May 1968 do not
accede to that status, only the social revolutions of 1789 and 1917 (and,
for one of Badiou’s political background, perhaps also Mao’s Cultural
Revolution). Nevertheless, the desire to draw together Seattle and ‘event’
is understandable. What such references do is try to posit – and more, to
enact, construct or start to live out – a beginning, or a beginning of a
beginning, that can be understood to be built and shared collectively.
Badiou himself has recently made claims for the importance of ‘a perfor-
mative unity’. In the context of a discussion concerning how we might
mobilise around the phrase ‘there is only one world’ and challenge global-
isation’s sham unity, he argues that we should declare another unity (‘the
single world is precisely the place where an unlimited set of differences
exist’). Through this declaration and enactment, he argues, we ‘make a
unity’ which actually counters the false one offered by the neoliberal
market economy; we ‘reverse the dominant idea of a world united by
objects and signs, to make a unity in terms of living, acting beings, here
and now’ and, in doing so, ‘we are deciding that this is how it is for us’.46

47. Ibid, p 41
48. The essay is a reflection of
the disarray of the French
left (and most especially
the Socialist Party) in the
wake of Sarkozy’s electoral
victory in 2007; ‘waiting’,
Badiou believes, will
exacerbate the negative
choice between
disillusioned social
pessimism and political
renegacy. The theme of
refusing to wait (for the
election, for the revolution,
for control of the state) can
also be found in John
Holloway: ‘we cannot
wait’, we must refuse and
break capitalism’s time
(‘Power and the State’,
Holloway’s speech to the
European Social Forum in
London 2004, republished
in Take the Power to
Change the World:
Globalisation and the
Debate on Power, ed Phil
Hearse, Socialist Resistance
and the International
Institute for Research and
Education, 2007, p 42)
49. Badiou, op cit, p 37
50. It is interesting to contrast,
from the same issue,
Rossana Rossanda’s
concluding statements on
the need for a mass party
(‘The Comrade from
Milan’, New Left Review,
49, January/February 2008,
p 99). Rossanda’s point,
which it would be facile to
dismiss as no more than
nostalgia, is echoed by one
of her associates from the Il
Manifesto group: Lucio
Magri, ‘The Tailor of Ulm’,
New Left Review, 51, May/
June 2008, pp 47–62. Both
pieces, striking for their
first-person narratives,
belong to the growing body
of work on communist
memory.
51. Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm:
Reading Walter Benjamin’s
‘On the Concept of
History’, trans Chris
Turner, Verso, London–
New York, 2005, p 112
(original French edition
2001)
52. Daniel Bensaïd, Marx for
Our Times: Adventures
and Misadventures of a
Critique, trans Gregory
405
Badiou appeals to the Left to ‘connect to another order of time’ and to
adopt ‘a different durée to that imposed by the law of the world’. The
heroicism that faces impossibility directly but only momentarily – and as
‘posture’ – needs to be replaced with ‘courage as a virtue’, which, he
suggests, ‘constructs itself through endurance’.47 This should not be
confused with the demand that we ‘wait’, which Badiou takes to be an
acceptance rather than a refusal of the dominant temporality.48 Important
at a number of points in his argument is the same idea: that of a collective
self-construction as the precondition of (and activity that must be
performed to unleash) social transformation.
However, Badiou does not take the current situation to be one of
fighting for the victory of the ‘communist hypothesis’ given by his
essay’s title. Written in the aftermath of Sarkozy’s electoral victory in
2007, Badiou argues that we are in a ‘reactionary interlude’ where our
task is to defend the very ‘conditions of its [the communist hypothesis’]
existence’. Anticipating an upturn in struggle (premised, it should be
said, on a rather dubious theory of forty-year cycles), he sees the next
historical phase as one in which we might formulate those conditions.
He takes a modish line in rejecting ‘the statist principle’ and ‘the inade-
quacy of the party’, characteristics of the previous ‘sequence’ of the
communist hypothesis (1914–1976). He seems happy, however, to
retain other aspects of that same sequence, namely, what was ‘prefig-
ured in the expression “cultural revolution”’ or the ‘revolution of the
mind’. Interestingly, he conceives the experiences of cultural revolution
and ’68, unlike those earlier in the century, as ‘ambiguous’ (and thus not
to be condemned as ‘bad’).49 Accordingly, the coming sequence ‘will
involve a new relation between the political movement and the level of
the ideological’ – a conclusion that is certainly ambiguous.50
Begg and Vilensky’s ‘event’ may not strictly conform to Badiou’s defi-
nition, but it is a heightened conception of the word as used by other
political philosophers who also, although in different ways, emphasise a
reconception of time and stress the importance of enactment. Drawing
on the writings of Marx and Walter Benjamin, Michael Löwy challenges
the progressivist notion of history. The emancipatory project, he argues,
necessarily figures a ‘utopian excess’ over the present state of things.51
Daniel Bensaïd also addresses what he calls a ‘new appreciation of time’.
Opposing the type of historical fetishisation characterised by the ‘dicta-
torship of the fait accompli’ and a ‘bureaucratic culture of resignation’,
he contrasts Marx’s ‘syncopated history’ (‘punctuated anachrony’ is
another term used) that is an open process harbouring lost potentials
and deploys the ‘stake of the event’.52 The Benjaminian model of antici-
pation is distanced from the Heideggerian version: Bensaïd reads the
latter’s Being-towards-death as a form of passive certainty and appeals
instead to a ‘political (strategic) anticipation’ which is alive to the possi-
bility of shaping a different history.53 A directly political voice such as
Marx’s, Bensaïd argues, is ‘always excessive’ because ‘excess is its only
measure’ and ‘is intimately bound up with the practical subversion of the
existing order’.54
Even before the current systemic global economic crisis, the tempo-
rality of thinking and the thinking of temporality shifted gear; paralysis
gave way to a conception of transitivity and the conceptual field began
to be recast. Bensaïd’s contribution dates back to the mid-1990s, prior
406

to the wave of resistance and industrial unrest in France, although

subsequent to the Zapatista uprisings in Chiapas that have become
important points of reference for the history of the anti-capitalist move-
ment. Giorgio Agamben’s ‘community to come’ was formulated as long
ago as the early 1990s. It has since passed from the status of allegorical
preservation of the very idea of an alternative, an exercise in recalcitrant
will to puncture the capital’s confident and triumphant moment of
global ascendancy, to something that, if not quite approaching practical
politics, then certainly speaks to an imaginaire that has become conceiv-
able again. It is not just that narratives of retreat gave way to those of
excess; rather, the very notion of excess is being transformed from an
allegorical expression of utopian desire to one that is increasingly under-
stood as construction of, and through, lived reality. It is this that brings
Elliott, Verso, London– us closer to the core content of the avant-garde. It may not characterise
New York, 2002, p 35,
pp 88–9 (original French
every single ‘avant-garde’ artist described in the history books, but the
edition 1995) ‘essential content’ of the avant-garde is not only its being true to the
53. Ibid, p 85
Schillerian promise, its desire to exceed the institutional category of ‘art’
or modernity’s aporia, nor simply the commitment to social transitivity,
54. Ibid, p 2. Here Bensaïd
draws the point from but its preparedness to wager on the social excess of the heteronomous
Maurice Blanchot. embrace.