Afterall is a semi-annual
critical journal of art,
context and enquiry that aims to give prominence to the work
of artists and its effect on a wider
cultural and political debate. Charles Esche, co-editor of
Afterall, has turned Issue #7 of the journal into an exhibition.
The issue and the show pivot around the conceptual
possibilities of the gothic as an aesthetic, political and
social proposition. Below is a call from the curator to "imagine
resistance" through such means.
If the mind, while
imagining non-existent things as present to it, is at the
same time conscious
that they do not really exist, this power of imagination
must be set down to the efficacy of its nature, and not to
a fault,
especially if this faculty of imagination depend solely on
its own nature – that is if this faculty of imagination
be free. – Benedict de Spinoza1
I want to imagine a
life without structural, instrumental, political fear. I
want to change the system I see around
me because it doesn't give priority to the things I
find of human value. I want to join others in this resistance – and
I want to know how I can. But, at this moment of constructive
longing, I have to admit that my desire for change suddenly
hits a wall of impossibility. Democratic politics, as currently
conducted, offers less than nothing. Revolution(ism) has
shown itself to be tragically inadequate. Liberalism is compromise
by another name.
So, before I (before we?) plan how to resist… before
we consider how to begin to act…I think we have simply
to deal with how to think. What happens if we ask Lenin's
old question (or is it a statement?) "What is
to be Done?" in
the same spirit but in the light of today. Self evidently,
much has changed. We cannot take for granted the very things – trade
unions, class solidarity and political possibility – that
Lenin built his argument upon. Instead, what we may require
of ourselves is, rather than a program of action, a way to
imagine Spinoza's "non-existent things as present" in
the qualified space for freedom of the imagination that is
still available to us.
The default victory of capitalism,
a tragedy waiting to happen for 30 years at least, threw
class-consciousness to the wolves.
Historical determinism and dialectical materialism happened
in topsy-turvy fashion. The past became the future. Except
we already knew, even before 1989, that the future we had
imagined was locked into the mass labor experience of factory
work and
trade union organization that had given it birth. In contrast,
the present looks a lot more like the dark and exploitative
underside of our own dreams of internationalism and free,
non-alienated labor – dreams that we
had long since relegated to a utopian neverland of imaginary
world revolution.
So, what ways are there to think resistance when there
is no "organization
of professional revolutionaries?"2 Even the active
public space for discourse (the museum, for instance) has
abandoned
its foundational purpose to a privatized capitalist system
that denies the public sphere while subsuming all private
social activity into itself. As ever, the question is much
easier
to formulate than the answer – though let us understand
the fact that for those who see the contradictions of capitalism
in the wars it wages and the “third world” labor
it employs, to have broad agreement that this is the question
is an advance for emancipatory desire. The problem is that,
however strongly desired, there is no existing political
force or structure that could yet be imagined to articulate
an answer.
Or I cannot see one even on the horizon.
Instead of looking at the political realm then, for me,
some of the best responses have been from
certain artists. There are often overtly and unquestionably
political works that tell us things about our fearful situation.
But looking beyond the surface, another approach to the political
becomes possible - an approach that adopts and adapts the
aberrant, the obsessive, the darkness of the gothic to make
its point about how an
individual can put up some resistance to conformity and take
a position
in the world.
The artists I refer to, some of whom are present
in this show, keep themselves clear of manifestos, homilies
or instructions. What they tell us in the end is the horrible,
depressing, unconscionable truth that it is we (the collective
of individuals, the multitude, the intellectual, immaterial
laborers) who must try to shape the new forms of resistance
or even ask the question "why?" To do this we
have one imperious, uncontrollable tool – our imagination
of "non-existent things." We can imagine our
own resistances through the one
product of humanity that privileges imagination – art.
Art (of a certain kind) becomes the tool with which to imagine,
and imagination becomes the tool to resist.
Alain Badiou
says "emancipatory politics always consists in making seem
possible precisely that which, from within
the situation, is declared to be impossible."3 He is
right, of course, but that
impossibility, that is made to seem possible, can only come
about through an act of free imagination and, as Spinoza
teaches us, the truly free imagination is an act of deliberate
self-deception.
So, imagination, which is the thing upon which art has the
greatest purchase, is finally delusional. To imagine resistance,
which is what we now require, is to deceive ourselves knowingly,
to choose to understand what may be decoration or decadence
at other times as profoundly resistant of our
current economic control system and political aggression.
And the greatest benefit of all is that in that delusion,
resistance
again becomes possible and we can, in classic The Matrix
vein, fight the monsters even when they are inside our heads.4
Only
art can do this today, it seems to me, because only art has
the permission to imagine without ridicule.
The challenge,
issued equally to artists as constructors and viewers as
reconstructors, is to choose to imagine resistance
through a picturing of something other than what is and to
make use of those images in our lives -- in our intimate,
specific,
personal and public behaviors and choices. The mass media
and the current democratic forums can’t help us get
there. Probably they will be needed some day, if only to
announce
their abolition, but not now. What could be useful, perhaps,
is the power of the imagination and art’s unique purchase
on how it may operate in each one of us.
Charles Esche
©
2005
1. Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, Prop. 17, http://www.msu.org/
e&r/content_e&r/texts/spinoza/ethics_part2.html#text18.
2. V.I. Lenin, What is to be Done, 1902.
3. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An essay on the understanding
of evil, Verso, London, 2001.
4. The Matrix, 1999. Directed by Andy Wachowski and Larry
Wachowski.
Charles Esche is the Director of Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven,
Netherlands and is a co-editor
of Afterall along with Mark Lewis and Thomas Lawson.
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