Re/aktion: Democracy's a good idea

text by Morten Goll and Jesper Goll
Democracy’s a good idea

On political art and activism, idealism and pragmatics

Pragmatics (from Gr. Pragmati’kos skilled, experienced, active, political, from ’pragma
deed, active, matter of state) relating to matters of fact; within semiology, a discipline that studies communicative media, semiotic systems as related to human beings, examining the contexts of linguistic acts in the broadest sense (the situation of utterance, the particular circumstances of the speakers and their interlocutors, their intentions, their social origins, their mutual relations, etc.); in politics: factually grounded, practical and realistic politics.
<i>
Source: Gyldendals Fremmedordbog, [Gyldendal’s Dictionary of Foreign Terms] 11th edition, 3rd impression, Nordisk Forlag, Copenhagen, 1993.</i>

How do we know what contemporary art looks like? We don’t. We know that it’s a critique of the culture, that it seeks to shatter the moulds that constrain both itself and the regnant explanatory model – which is to say philosophical discourse and the identity models we deploy to describe the world and ourselves, both globally and on the local political plane as well as at the individual level.

For want of something better, we rely on our experience when we have to determine whether something is art, a critique or an example of skilled craftwork. Which is to say that we judge the artwork with reference to historical models that relate to how art used to look. But what qualified as art fifty years ago isn’t necessarily art today since its form and content no longer propose a critical alternative to the prevailing explanatory model. Stripped of its critical dimension, art reduces to skilled craftwork. When we define contemporary art against the template of the art of the past much skilled craftwork is mistaken for art and cultural criticism.

How do we recognize a critique as such? We don’t. Logic allows us to extrapolate that the form and burden of a critique should be a function of what is being criticized. At best, the critique takes a form that constitutes a constructive demonstration of an alternative to the object of criticism. But more often than not, the form amounts to a recycling of approaches that have proved successful in the past.

Political activists and progressive artists inhabit parallel universes. When the activist decides to protest against an undemocratic, compliant and anti-social government, she does precisely what the artist does in seeking to create an artwork: she takes a retrospective look at the protests of earlier times and does likewise. But how do we know what resistance looks like today? How do we know how a demonstrator behaves?

What we are looking for in the past is an identity model: a model that defines patterns of agency as a function of the world-view we share. Modernism was one such. The modernist utopia was a fantastic vision of an ideal world.

The modern ideal: that the human person, aided by science, is able to cast an objective eye upon the world. Subjecting it to a gaze that requires that the viewer adopt a perspective that is external to the world and that he, qua spectator, exerts no influence on what is seen. This dualist partitioning of the world is all pervasive in the West, freezing personal identity into an I and a you, a them and an us. Dualism likewise informs the West’s idealistic faith in progress, orchestrated through technological and political revolutions which will bring us ever closer to the modern utopia. Western scientists lead the way along with the revolutionary avant-garde. Both, in virtue of their positions – in the laboratory or as part of the political elite – are immune to pressures from “the natives” they control. The myth of the artist-genius is also part of the legacy of the modernist identity model. The male artist-ego sequestered in his studio, extracting from the uniqueness of his inner being the truth about the world.

The modern idealist’s worst nightmare is political pragmatists.

The pragmatist’s world picture is built around a quest for consensus. Rather than cultivating the cleavage between “them” and “us”, utopia and realities, pragmatists seek to bridge differences in the hope of arriving at practical political solutions. Pragmatic power politics have produced some of the most absurd states of affairs seen in recent world history. An example is USA’s ever-changing relations to Osama Bin Laden.

However, modernism’s political idealism, anarchism, socialism and communism, once seen as alternatives to capitalism, have suffered the one abysmal defeat after the other over the past 20 years. As an explanatory model for artists, modernism has proved similarly inadequate.

Artists talk a lot about “postmodernism” as a new explanatory model but few have managed to set up templates for identity that don’t hark back to the history of modernism. It is tempting to conclude that the only novelty ushered in by postmodernism is the loss of the modernist utopia. Thus bereft of ideal and purpose we carry on in the manner of headless chickens – plunging forward in the same direction as before. So do demonstrators dress up to look like demonstrators, lining up in front of the police in conformity with the designated extra-parliamentary role accorded them by the powers that be.

And yet: if art remains cultural critique and if political activism is or should be ever one, answering the question of where critical potential lies today becomes crucial. The answer to it might be found in a closer demarcation of how, quite concretely, modernism came to outlive its usefulness – for in an anatomy of the collapse of modernism resides, first, the key to understanding what collapsed and how, and second, what the premises are for moving forward.

Modernist thought is critical, and critical of the culture: but it exhibits a feature which would seem to be closely bound up with its current demise. Its critical thrust often, and increasingly as the twentieth century progressed, became grounded in an abstract negativity. Which is to say that the interest in critical activity gradually shifted its focus from the target of critique and what the critique might mean to us, to the fact that critical activity is taking place. What becomes intrinsically interesting is the process of negation as such, rather than its possible epistemic purport.

What motivated this negative turn in modernism was the aim to attack all forms of fundamentalism. In line with Derrida, modernism recognizes no “privileged concept” beyond the critical stance itself – and the means for disposing of privileges is to criticize every approach to anything resembling en entrenched position. But since every positive statement, by its very nature (which is to say, by the nature of language) would seem to represent a species of fixity, modernism ends up unable to do other than remonstrate “no!”

The collapse of this critical project leaves but two ways open.

The one way consists in turning the abstract-negative critique onto modernism itself, landing us either in a postmodernist nihilism – where the critical stance is itself negated and everything becomes indifferent (validity is nullified) – or in a “yes”, that is as abstract as modernism’s “no”, constituting a regression into a fundamentalism which would otherwise have been relegated to the past. Each of these two positions, fundamentalism and postmodernism, is in reality the mirror image of the other.

The other way consists (here helping ourselves to an item of Hegel’s stock in trade) in making the critique concrete – by letting it grow out of modernism’s history as a lived experience that needs to be worked up again and used, rather than making it a springboard for fresh exercises in abstract dissociation. Modernist experience has already gone into self-destruct mode – culturally in terms of nihilism, politically in terms of fundamentalism – so what is called for is an anti-critique which criticizes the critique’s deficient understanding of pluralist values and contexts, its ever-escalating level of abstraction and its routinely unfriendly approach to its subject.

Whereas the modernist critique is standardly fuelled by the idea of pulling the rug out from under something or other – and thereby reducing the function of critique to a ritual – anti-critique is critical in the original sense of the word, which is to say that it makes an incursion into an area to open it up, pose new questions and explore neglected connections. Such was (also) the approach of modernist criticism at the outset, but a hundred years of ritualization have rendered it currently unusable.

Anti-critique turns the old-time critique on its head by asserting the rights of every perspective and thus urging consensus, compromise, dialogue. So doing is a consequence of the concrete starting point: if the brief is to understand and probe the criticizable phenomenon, the critic has to risk learning something from it, exposing his own position every bit as much as he does his opponent’s. Anti-critique, then, means plummeting from modernism’s rarefied upper airs down to the messier but hopefully more fertile morass of antithetical interests and perspectives.

In light of the extreme situation into which the bankruptcy of modernism has plunged us, such “friendliness” is in itself a critical feature with the power to open up well-worn concepts – democracy, dialogue, compromise – to fresh reflection. Which in, say, Heidegger, is the very purpose of art: to preserve the conceptual tools of the language by revitalizing and plumbing their meanings. Heidegger saw literature as pivotal to this movement: in German, the word for literature is Dichtung – which also means “sealing”.

However, the relation between critique and anti-critique too eludes capture when the one is opted for at the expense of the other. Indeed, both critical concepts lose their content (as in modernism) if not clinched together in thought. Any cultural or social critique worthy of the epithet “radical” must be opposed to every ritualization of thought – of modernism’s abstract negativity, certainly, but also of the ritualization that would elevate compromise and consensus to a new ritual. Any such critique must utterly recoil from programmatic declarations while at the same time continuing to articulate them. This is pragmatic, paradoxical, intractable – possessed of the internal contradictions of Buddhism.

Modernism’s ritual insistence on critique as pure abstract negativity is the culmination of a long insistent trajectory in the cultural history of the West. But precisely because it has now reached a terminus it is time for a new poetry, a new “sealing” – and since all the old idols have been overthrown (and for that reason!) we perforce find ourselves on pragmatism’s territory. The trick is to devise a trap, an ambush that can open the mind to pragmatism as an option – since the only alternative would seem to be a regression to nihilism or medieval fundamentalism, of Arab or American pedigree.

It is time to evolve a new identity model which can invest both art and activism with new meaning and resonance. Modernism’s dualism, which makes the entrenched ego possible is, in social contexts, closer to fascism than to democracy: talking, refusing to listen, seeking to dominate.

The task for this new identity model is nothing less than a defence of one of modernism’s most impossible ideals, democracy. It is the remit of art and political activism to create an identity model which both methodologically and in terms of its message articulates a democratic alternative to the lie that is presented by a government abetted by the media and bedazzled by the allure of neo-liberalism.

Democracy is a fragile vision that has been in hibernation for 2500 years, an ideal constantly threatened by economic, political and military powers. Democracy is impossible in a capitalist economy where pragmatic power politics places economic freedom above personal freedom. Democracy is impossible where pragmatic power politics sacrifices human rights to cheap oil. Democracy is impossible without democratic mass media. Democracy has never existed. But it’s a good idea.

Democracy’s method is social interaction, communication, debate, respect for those who think differently to oneself, consensus, pragmatics. The struggle for democracy should be conducted by the same means. But that doesn’t mean that we should adopt current definitions of “pragmatic”. Rather, we should explore and develop the potential of pragmatics as an ethically accountable artistic and political method. We need to mine the dynamic intersection where critique and anti-critique meet.

A pragmatic model of identity must build on concepts such as collaboration, conversation, mutable identities, and above all focus on encounters in social space where the democratic processes are conducted. All communication requires a sender, a receiver and a medium to convey information. Meaningful communication requires that those party to it exchange not simply information but also identities - are listeners as well as speakers. A pragmatic cultural critique must home in on the art of disseminating information, on the role of the mass media, on the reclaiming and upgrading of the name of democracy. We need to find ways of demonstrating that democracy is a good idea: methods that reveal how its name can be misused.

Being a fellow-citizen is not a profession. It is a responsibility that falls to amateurs.

Morten Goll, artist
Jesper Goll, philosopher