Prolapsarian

A Letter to Goldsmiths art students on capitalism, art and pseudo-critique

Dear Goldsmiths Art Students,

I attended your MFA show two nights ago. I apologise to an extent: with so many artworks on
display it was difficult to digest any of them. That situation was exacerbated by the fact that so
few of the works seemed to have it in them to behave destructively towards the others. Maybe
this is where I can begin: that the type of co-operation between artworks, their intellectual co-
ordination, is something I find troubling. It didnt seem to me to be the co-operation of a school
thinking together, but instead the co-ordination of the school uniform, of a discipline that had
been so fully internalised that all of the artworks, under its authority, might comfortably
coalesce. That made those artworks difficult to be with.

I want to write to you about a single gesture that was performed by a great majority of the
artworks in the show (although there were some important exceptions). It is a gesture that claims
to determine a relation between artworks and capitalism. It is of no surprise that under the
contemporary situation of global capital, undergoing its most profound crisis in eighty years
creating conditions not only of mass destitution but also of mass resistance and protest that the
relation between art and capital would present itself more explicitly in the new works of art than
has been the case in the last decades. But the expression of this relation of art and capital in the
work displayed at your show was not only predictable, but questionable on both political and
aesthetic grounds. The gesture that I refer to is that of artworks that attempt to parody capitalism,
and in this parody hope to effect a critical irony through the apparent distance between the
artwork (and its social situation) and the forms of commodity or capital that it parodies. In this
gesture the artwork proclaims a radicalism, a dissatisfaction with the actually existing. It
proclaims that the object of this dissatisfaction is capitalism. The modes of making explicit the
structure of parody are plural: some take up the bathetic disjunction through a fully instrumental
comparison with some hazy far-away classicism or humanism; others exaggerate the shoddiness
of capitals products; others rely on a revelatory mode whereby it is claimed something of
capitals seamy underbelly is exposed; while others are just bits of fixed capital most often
employing the high technologies of marketing transposed into the gallery-space. But the
gesture of this parody common to all of them will, I imagine, be familiar to you.

That mention of marketing is important, because the attack that each of these artworks claims to
make on capital is against the semblance-character (Scheincharakter) of its products. Or to put it
in a trendier way, the claim is that the artwork performs, through this ironising parody, a critique
of capitalist spectacle. But maybe before we jump wholeheartedly into claiming that level of
actual critique for those artworks, we might examine what is actually going on in them a little
more carefully. This gesture, as I understand it, stands upon its lofty artistic plinth, high above
the world of capital, labour and production, in order to come to some conclusions: the products
of capitalism are a bit rubbish or glitchy or the activities that capitalism make humans perform
are a bit stupid and pointless. or capitalism makes images everywhere an theres something a
bit fake about them. What seemed strange to me, or rather, disconcerting and upsetting, was the
refusal of any of these works that made this gesture to follow it through: there was in each an
absolute resistance to making the dialectical leap (or rather a dialectical pigeon-step as a friend
commented to me) into identifying that all of this rubbish that capitalism makes is composed
finely of human lives forced by capitalism into endless labour and misery until death. There is no
recognition that all of that capitalist trash contains within it the relentless destruction of all that
each of us holds closest to us and loves most dearly. There is no understanding that the violence
of the abstractions that capitalism imposes on humanity are materially particular, intervening in
the particularities of our lives. To refuse to engage with that particularity is, it seems to me, to
stand in solidarity with the forces of capital. The question of what it would mean for the artwork
to attempt such an expression of the destruction of things and people loved, the historical weight
of that process, is never asked; the self-satisfaction of being dissatisfied with commodities is
instead transformed itself into the internal harmony of the artwork. Without accounting for these
antagonisms there is no tension, no dissonance. The gesture is a thinning out of the artwork such
that they may congregate as a marquetry of veneers, but becoming a veneer and pointing to the
thinness of life today shifts into the mere declamation that this is how the world is.

The pseudo-critical stance of these artworks makes a mistake in terms of the object of its
critique: again and again, what is called into question is capitalism, which is taken to be some
conceptual whole, plucked from the heaven of ideas, and imported directly into the artwork as an
object of ridicule. The type of capitalism that is the object of critique is seemingly a wholly
abstract thing. Capitalism exists for these artworks not as an historical process, a dynamic
governing relations between people, and between people and nature, but instead merely as a
critical concept, pristine from the theory tool-box. It is not the capitalism that might be known
from the experience of exploitation, the submission of humans to the laws of value. It isnt a
capitalism that holds within it technical determinations, not one that leaves historical traces of
the destruction it wrought, not one that weighs more heavily on us with that every life it crushed.
Instead, it is a capitalism borrowed from the pages of the latest offerings of Semiotext(e) or
ZeroBooks. Those artworks wilfully mistake the abstractions performed by capitalism the
violent processing of human activity into value for a wholly abstract capitalism. It is a
convenient slippage as it preserves the height of that plinth from which the judgment of
capitalism might be made; critique, where it claims to exist in these artworks, need not sully
itself in the muck of the billions of corpses, the works need not work to empathise with or
express the visceral human suffering of those subjected to labour until they die because their
critique can be made from a comfortable distance and the concept of capitalism which
becomes the object of the critique never did include all of that death and suffering. It is here that
these artworks find their true affinity with capitalism: all of that non-identical stuff, the suffering
worthless and silenced that could never be sold, all the disjecta membra of humanity need never
return. The concept of capitalism for these artworks is like a machine that doesnt quite work:
why it doesnt work and how it came to be is not of concern. Furthermore, these artworks
apparently need not be reflexive, for their elevated position guarantees that really theyre not that
involved at all that theyre just social commentary (the old doctrine of lart pour lart comes in
handy like the final defiant cry of the old aristocrat Don Juan that he is not responsible before
being sucked into hell.) These artworks refuse to recognise the labour congealed in them; work is
not something to be suffered, but instead just a daft extravagance. Work is always external to
them, like it is for all workers brutally alienated into compliance.

These artworks see capital with the eye of a luxury consumer. They refuse to acknowledge
necessity under capitalism. Capitalism for them is a bad choice, not something that youre is
compelled to reproduce because youre hungry. It complains about capitalism just as it might
about a scratched DVD being delivered from Amazon, only to cling to the scratch because at
least it proves the thesis, just as the consumer clings to evidence in order to validate an insurance
claim. But just like all insurance, all that is secured is the continuance of the present state of
things. Critique is exchanged for dissatisfaction. For these works, capitalism would be fine if it
worked better. Precisely because of this feeling that capitalism might work better, each of these
works shies from expressing anything of the most forceful antagonisms that drive capitalist
history; none of them hold within themselves the promise of anything different or other to
capitalism, but instead rest happily on the maxim of progressive improvement and expediency.

The insurance-structure of these artworks might allow us to begin to place them in a historical
contour that has brought us to their situation. The history of art in the late 19th and early 20th
century, from the articulations of an art that could create wholly new totalities of semblance out
of the developments of industrial capitalism (one thinks, for example, of Wagner), through to the
modernist rejection of semblance in artworks as a resistance to appearing as the commodity
world is significant here: those strategies of the modernists fragmentation and the refusal of
completion, tension without resolution, eruptions of explicit and arbitrary violence, the
regression to the childish or animalistic all of these intended towards the abolition of the way
things are. Those artworks never did abolish the world, that is, their promises never fulfilled, but
that they could have is felt in complacency with which Kafka or Tzara is read today, or in the
sponsorship on the next Klee exhibition. It is in the late 20th century return to an art whose
subject is the semblance-character of commodities that your artworks exist. Your works claim to
make that same gesture of fragmentation or brokenness that the modernists made, somehow
without carrying the historical weight their work did: every broken body for you can be
compared to a technical glitch, as though it werent inevitable, constantly reproduced under
compulsion. Instead it is analogous to accidental clinamen of the machine that is grotesque not
because of what it does but because it doesnt do it well enough. Every broken thing here, every
rift and crevice, indigent and distorted (as it appears every day by the illuminated on the screen
of an ipad) carries no longer the potential to break everything, but instead carries the worldly
insurance that one day everything will be fixed. If the modernists truly attempted to abolish the
semblance-character inherent to the capitalism of their time, your artworks calculate as actuaries
and hedge against the moment that this might actually happen. That modernist fragmentation has
become alien to your work: you find it in the commodity world (of which your artworks claim
not to be a part) in order to import it into your artworks which, in their lofty standpoints of
critique take the form of truly complete, perfect, non-fragmentary commodities.

I might try to put this another way: Adorno once wrote that the theological heritage of art is the
secularisation of revelation, which defines the ideal and limit of every work. The contamination
of art with revelation would amount to the unreflective repetition of its fetish character on the
level of theory. The eradication of every trace of revelation from art would, however, degrade it
to the undifferentiated repetition of the status quo. Your work, or at least this gesture in your
work, refuses to engage in this antagonism. Instead, your artworks perform something like a
false revelation (as I have suggested earlier, the revelation not that capitalism is built on the
continuation of a history of immeasurable human suffering, but just that its commodities just
dont work very well.) In this false revelation and at times it seems like a self-consciously,
cynically planted false revelation the faulty fetish-character of the commodity is exchanged for
the perfect fetish-character of the artwork; the status quo is repeated, because the claim made by
the artworks that they stand outside or above that status quo in order to repeat it with a haughty
sneer is entirely false. I have an image from Ernst Blochs The Spirit of Utopia in my head (a
really interesting book on many of these questions, whose title is currently being ripped off for
some idiotic show at The Whitechapel Gallery) of the dance around the golden calf, or better,
just the calf-skin with nothing underneath. Your artworks, in their avoidance of having any
interiority, any formal-immanent dynamic that would be required to express anything of the
antagonisms of the world in which they must reside, offer a claim to truth in the revelation that
the artwork is a better commodity than the commodity itself.

These artworks therefore do not invite interpretation. Instead, they invite their audience to stand
with them, for a moment, on that plinth and to share in bemoan the current state of the
commodity-world. Their gesture of making themselves thin, of claiming no internal or formal
dynamic, demands that we believe for a moment that this is actually what capitalism is like, and
that beneath its appearance is not a set of antagonisms in which humans are engaged but instead
an abyssal nothing. The success of these artworks would be the inculcation of smugness, and the
moment of release when in an instant the viewer claims non-complicity with capitalism. It is not
unnoticed that the claim of non-complicity is identical the manoeuvre performed by capitalists
every day: they are just business people and managers who claim even in maintaining the most
detestable conditions for their workers that they are doing them a favour, doing them some good
by providing them with a job. But where that manoeuvre wears thin, this bourgeoisie might find
solace in your art.

Perhaps you disagree with my point of view I can understand that you might be entirely
resigned to the notion that capitalism will never be overcome. Maybe you have moved beyond
this resignation into a full-blown cynicism. The impression you as artists give is often that
everything has already been recuperated, that all radicalism is produced broken, that all
resistance is already integrated into the capitalist whole. Your works often make the claim of
regretting this, but it is a false claim insofar as it is a process to which they happily contribute.
Clearly, few of you are actually interested in a critique of capitalism (but a pseudo-critique that
sells will have to do), but for those of us who care about art, for those of us who think that arts
critical capacities have not been exhausted and extinguished, for those of us for whom the
abolition of capitalism is not a choice but a necessity, you are the enemy.