Radical History and the Politics of Art

Gabriel Rockhill

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780231527781
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

Gabriel Rockhill opens new space for rethinking the relationship between art and politics. Rather than understanding the two spheres as separated by an insurmountable divide or linked by a privileged bridge, Rockhill demonstrates that art and politics are not fixed entities with a singular relation but rather dynamically negotiated, sociohistorical practices with shifting and imprecise borders.

Radical History and the Politics of Art proposes a significant departure from extant debates on what is commonly called "art" and "politics," and the result is an impressive foray into the force field of history, in which cultural practices are meticulously analyzed in their social and temporal dynamism without assuming a conceptual unity behind them. Rockhill thereby develops an alternative logic of history and historical change, as well as a novel account of social practices and a multidimensional theory of agency. Engaging with a diverse array of intellectual, artistic, and political constellations, this tour de force diligently maps the various interactions between different dimensions of aesthetic and political practices as they intertwine and sometimes merge in precise fields of struggle.

PART I

HISTORICAL ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN ART AND POLITICS

1

FOR A RADICAL HISTORICIST ANALYTIC OF AESTHETIC AND POLITICAL PRACTICES

IMMANENT, TRANSCENDENT, AND INTERVENTIONIST CONCEPTS

But if the colors in the original merge without a hint of any outline won’t it become a hopeless task to draw a sharp picture corresponding to the blurred one? … This is the position you are in if you look for definitions corresponding to our concepts in aesthetics or ethics.

—LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

There is no such thing as art and politics in general. They do not exist as natural entities, cultural invariants, universal concepts, or strictly unified practices. There are only variable theoretical configurations and constellations of practices that are identified as artistic or political within variegated societies at diverse points in time. However, the naturalization of these terms and a lack of ethnographic distance from our own cultural practices tend to foster the ontological illusion, or the mistaken assumption that there is—or even must be—a ‘being’ of art and politics, which can be identified once and for all. This illusion has guided many a thinker in their quest for a theoretical El Dorado in which conceptual elements would be forever present in their most pristine form. It has led, for instance, to the motley kinds of retrospective or archeological teleology by which thinkers myopically project the end point of history back onto its beginning as if art and politics as they exist today had always existed. It is equally at the origin of the ethnocentric projection of one’s own cultural forms onto the sundry societies that have inhabited the planet. Finally, it is the primary source of the seemingly endless attempts to discover the privileged link between these hypostatized elements, as if there were a single, natural relation between art and politics that could be determined once and for all.

Relativist blackmail is one of the strongest deterrents to the full-scale rejection of the ontological illusion: we are told that if there are no stable entities or fixed concepts, then everything will be swept into an abysmal vortex of chaotic flux and relativist pandemonium. In countering this blackmail and the simplistic choice between universalism and relativism, we can take our cue from the work of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein:

What is the meaning of a word? … The questions “What is length?,” “What is meaning?,” “What is the number one?” etc., produce in us a mental cramp. We feel that we can’t point to anything in reply to them and yet ought to point to something. (We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it.)¹

The existence of terms such as art and politics immediately suggests that there must be some thing that corresponds to them. In fact, if we are unable to detail the common property at the core of such words, it is often assumed that we have not grasped their true meaning. However, this is precisely where Wittgenstein intervenes in order to break with an extremely widespread but misguided conception of the pragmatics of language:

The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him to understand the usage of the general term. When Socrates asks the question, “what is knowledge?” he does not even regard it as a preliminary answer to enumerate cases of knowledge.²

Wittgenstein adeptly points out that problems only arise when we try to transcend the actual use of terms in order to establish conceptual generalities. There is, in fact, no problem at the level of pragmatic function. In many ways, he thereby takes sides with Socrates’s interlocutors, who describe the use of terms rather than trying to abstract from them in order to isolate a supposedly essential feature. Taking the example of Socrates’s question “what is knowledge?” he declares: “We should reply: ‘There is no one exact usage of the word ‘knowledge’; but we can make up several such usages, which will more or less agree with the ways the word is actually used.’”³ The same could be said of terms like art and politics: there is no definitive conceptual feature unifying all of their uses. Therefore, it is a methodological mistake to search for an exact usage or a single, essential property.

This does not, however, mean that such general terms thereby fall prey to sheer relativism. On Wittgenstein’s account, family resemblances link various uses together without reducing them to a common property:

We are inclined to think that there must be something in common to all games, say, and that this common property is the justification for applying the general term “game” to the various games; whereas games form a family the members of which have family likenesses. Some of them have the same nose, others the same eyebrows and others again the same way of walking; and these likenesses overlap.⁴

The abandonment of the misguided search for common properties does not, therefore, condemn him to a form of linguistic relativism in which terminological and conceptual use endlessly fluctuates. On the contrary, he insists on the praxeological status of language and the role of the immanent normativity of social usage: rather than being a purified semantic order based on strictly defined rules and firm definitions, language is properly speaking a practice whose variable forms are mediated by cultural customs and social norms.⁵ Devoid of common properties, terms nonetheless function according to family resemblances within general fields of socially accepted usage. The fact that these fields do not have clearly delimited borders does not inhibit them from functioning (on the contrary):

For remember that in general we don’t use language according to strict rules—it hasn’t been taught us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus proceeding according to exact rules. This is a very one-sided way of looking at language. In practice we very rarely use language as such a calculus. For not only do we not think of the rules of usage—of definitions, etc.—while using language, but when we are asked to give such rules, in most cases we aren’t able to do so. We are unable clearly to circumscribe the concepts we use; not because we don’t know their real definition, but because there is no real “definition” to them. To suppose that there must be would be like supposing that whenever children play with a ball they play a game according to strict rules.⁶

One of the drawbacks to Wittgenstein’s methodological orientation is that he sometimes writes as if it were sufficient to simply describe the present state of a particular language, and he regularly appeals to a rather homogenous form of linguistic common sense based on what we would say in a particular instance (as if there were a generic das Man serving as the universal arbiter for linguistic use). Fortunately, there are, however, a number of important passages where he clearly distances himself from this ahistorical and partially extra-social account of language. In The Blue Book, for instance, he touches on the temporal process of language acquisition and correlates language games with “the forms of language with which a child begins to make use of words.”⁷ In the Philosophical Investigations, he also appeals to the importance of inquiring into the genetic process by which we learn the meaning of particular words. Moreover, he emphasizes, on at least a few occasions, the historicity of language itself, as in his description of language as an ancient city and his assertion that “new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence and others become obsolete and get forgotten.”⁸

This theme is important to Wittgenstein’s posthumously published lectures on aesthetics. He begins by asserting that “the subject (Aesthetics) is very big and entirely misunderstood as far as I can see.”⁹ He then appeals to the genetic methodology just mentioned: “One thing we always do when discussing a word is to ask how we were taught it.”¹⁰ It is against the backdrop of these introductory remarks that he affirms that language games change with history as well as with the social and cultural context. For instance, he not only makes reference to historical changes in language, but he claims that “what we now call a cultured taste perhaps didn’t exist in the Middle Ages. An entirely different game is played in different ages.”¹¹ He also evinces an interest in sociocultural differences, clearly suggesting that language games can radically diverge from culture to culture: “Imagine an entirely different civilization. Here there is something you might call music, since it has notes. They treat music like this: certain music makes them walk like this.”¹² Finally, he hints in passing at the ways in which individuals within the same culture can have divergent social trajectories that lead them to use words in different ways.¹³

Although it is ultimately true that Wittgenstein only provided rudimentary tools for thinking the historicity and cultural variability of linguistic practices, he nonetheless formulated a compelling critique of the ‘craving for generality’ and adumbrated a praxeological account of language that begins with social use rather than with the supposed calculus of common properties, essential meanings, and strict semantic rules. His praxeology can therefore serve as a helpful reference point for developing a heuristic distinction between three different conceptual registers, which are always part of specific practices: transcendent ideas, immanent notions, and interventionist concepts. Transcendent ideas, to begin with, emerge out of the pretension to have grasped the common property of general terms, which are thereby defined once and for all. Insofar as they seek to transcend the sociohistorical world or, at the very least, synthesize all social use at one point in time, they are ultimately rooted in the illusion of transcendence, or the mistaken assumption that a general term has a single meaning based on a common conceptual property. For this assumption to hold, signification would have had to be established transcendently, and there would need to be some form of external, more or less metaphysical guarantee to meaning. “Let’s not forget,” Wittgenstein adeptly proclaims, “that a word hasn’t got a meaning given to it, as it were, by a power independent of us, so that there could be a kind of scientific investigation into what the word really means. A word has the meaning someone has given to it.”¹⁴

Unlike transcendent ideas, immanent notions are part and parcel of specific sociohistorical practices within a particular conjuncture. Since they emerge in unique fields of activity, they are bound up with distinctive cultural matrices, which themselves are dynamically negotiated and renegotiated between various forms and levels of agency. Moreover, insofar as they are social phenomena, immanent notions are not univocal. Within the same sociohistorical juncture there can be, and often are, motley and rival accounts of general concepts such as art and politics. Against the tendency of transcendent conceptuality to ignore or bracket the social dimension of thought, it is crucial to insist on the ways in which concepts are part of social practices. It should therefore be no cause for dismay that there are no strict limits to immanent notions. As Wittgenstein regularly explains, general terms do not need to be clearly delimited in order to function in social discourse. In discussing the word game, for instance, he writes: “how is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a game and what no longer does? Can you give the boundary [Grenzen]? No. You can draw one; for none has so far been drawn. (But that never troubled you before when you used the word ‘game.’)”¹⁵ It is, of course, possible to give precise definitions in particular instances. However, these are by no means necessary, nor do they automatically hold for all other uses of the term: “we can draw a boundary—for a special purpose. Does it take that to make the concept usable? Not at all! (Except for that special purpose.) No more than it took the definition: I pace = 75 cm. to make the measure of length ‘one pace’ usable.”¹⁶

There are no strict limits, in part, because immanent notions have a polyvocal social life. Various uses are proposed, corroborated or contested in the social sphere, and there are no predefined borders or strict guidelines for linguistic practice (although there are, of course, embodied norms concerning common use as well as ex post facto grammatical rules). In spite of the fact that there is oftentimes a socially produced illusion of fixity, which is partially due to the operative timescale of human beings and a relative blindness to long-term historical transformations and social variability, the field of immanent conceptuality is dynamic. This is not only due to ongoing social struggles (which are sometimes masked by their institutionalized results), but as well to the interaction between diverse cultural matrices, which themselves are devoid of rigid borders. To foreground the dynamism of immanent notions and the fact that a purely given or stable immanence is an abstraction, it is worth proposing a working distinction between three forms of cultural transition: transit, transfer, and transplant.¹⁷ Transit, to begin with, records the movement of objects—including texts, works of art, and other material traces of theoretical and cultural nexuses—over time and across social space. Human beings as well as their practices can, of course, transit between different cultural conjunctures, thereby serving as transformative vehicles in the ongoing reconfigurations of an immanent field. Transfer refers to the displacement of a system of meaning and value from one juncture to another due to the transit of historical phenomena manifesting an alternative immanent conceptuality. The transit of Aristotle’s Poetics from Ancient Greece to seventeenth-century France, for instance, contributed to a cultural transfer in which Aristotle’s work both was reconstituted and helped reconstitute a different sociohistorical conjuncture. Transplant indexes the importation or exportation of an entire theoretical and practical matrix, such as the spread of the modern European concept and practice of art around the world through the globalization of the art market. All three of these phenomena can intertwine in diverse ways, and they take place, of course, in a larger realm of interaction, since they do not necessarily dominate the entire field of cultural activity. They contribute in various ways to what we might call the transition of immanent fields of cultural practice.

In the case of keywords like art and politics, immanent notions actually function as veritable concepts in struggle, or nodal points in a social battle bereft of a final arbiter. This does not, however, mean that individual speakers can arbitrarily define all of their terms in any way that they choose, or that they can capriciously skip between cultural contexts as in a game of anthropological hopscotch (in part because cultures do not function like secure, static boxes). On the contrary, since language is a collective practice, the use of terms contributes to the formation of a social archive. Indeed, the gradual sedimentation of social use produces what we might call, by appropriating and modifying Jean-Paul Sartre’s vocabulary, a linguistic or conceptual practico-inert: a sedimented series of past pract...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Art and Politics in the Time of Radical History
• Part I: Historical Encounters Between Art and Politics
• Part II: Visions of the Avant-Garde
• Part III: The Politics of Aesthetics
• Part IV: The Social Politicity of Aesthetic Practices
• Conclusion: Radical Art and Politics—No End in Sight
• Notes
• Index