The Postconceptual Condition: Critical Essays

The Postconceptual Condition

The Postconceptual Condition

Critical Essays

Peter Osborne

First published by Verso 2018

© Peter Osborne 2018

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-420-7

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-490-0 (LIBRARY)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-422-1 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-421-4 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Osborne, Peter, 1958– author.

Title: The postconceptual condition : critical essays / Peter Osborne.

Description: Brooklyn : Verso, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017050552 | ISBN 9781786634207 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Art, Modern – 20th century – Philosophy. | Art, Modern – 21st century – Philosophy. | Conceptual art. | BISAC: ART / Conceptual. | PHILOSOPHY / Criticism.

Classification: LCC N6490 .O7334 2018 | DDC 709.04/075 – dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050552

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Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

For Stella

Contents

Preface

Part I. Time of the Present

1. The Postconceptual Condition: Or, the Cultural Logic of High Capitalism Today

2. Global Modernity and the Contemporary: Two Categories of the Philosophy of Historical Time

3. Temporalization as Transcendental Aesthetics: Avant-Garde, Modern, Contemporary

Part II. Art and Politics

4. Theorem 4. Autonomy: Can It Be True of Art and Politics at the Same Time?

5. Disguised as a Dog: Cynical Occupy?

Part III. Institutions

6. October and the Problem of Formalism

7. Existential Urgency: Contemporaneity, Biennials and Social Form

8. Archive as Afterlife and Life of Art

Part IV. Art and Image

9. The Distributed Image

10. Information, Story, Image: Akram Zaatari’s Historical Constructivism

11. Dialectical Ontology of Art: Xavier Le Roy’s Retrospective in/as Contemporary Art

12. The Kabakov Effect: ‘Moscow Conceptualism’ in the History of Contemporary Art

13. The Terminology is in Crisis: Postconceptual Art and New Music

14. The Image is the Subject: Once More on the Temporalities of Image and Act

Notes

Acknowledgements

Image Credits

Index

Preface

If as Walter Benjamin maintained, ‘it is the function of artistic form … to make historical content into a philosophical truth’,¹ then it is the function of criticism to recover and try to complete that truth. Never has this been more necessary or more difficult than with respect to contemporary art. The word of criticism, of course, is never final. Indeed, it is the passing, historical character of art and criticism alike – their ‘necessary abandonment’, as Roland Barthes once put it² – as much as their immanent suspension of that passing character (in criticism, by writing) that places them into relation with such truth; relations that must thus be constantly renewed.

Today, it is the relations constituting the space of a global capitalist modernity, overdetermining other social relations with an insistent yet disjunctive and crisis-ridden contemporaneity, that must first be understood, as a condition of the renewal of a criticism that is to be at once both historical and emphatic (related to truth), and hence negative in relation to the world as it is. It is in the gap between the passing historical meaning and the truth of a work that the ‘untruth’ of the present appears.

Contemporary art is a point of condensation of a vast array of social and historical forces, economic and political forms, and technologies of image-production, which it treats as artistic materials and subjects to technical procedures in order to wrest these forces, forms and technologies from their everyday functions and re-present them anew. To comprehend such art, one must pass through the many different layers of mediation that are embedded in its materials and encompassed within its forms. Systematically, this would require a fluid process of transdisciplinary reflection and concept construction, which is methodologically complicated and empirically far-reaching, the product of necessarily collective rather than merely individual research.³ That is a process which, for all the intellectual materials available, scattered across the disciplines, has hardly begun. At the level of criticism, however, one can exploit particular instances and occasions, in order to render the contingent emblematic, a part of the whole, through the more concrete conceptualizations associated with the essay form. This is what I try to do here, in different ways, and at different levels of abstraction, in essays that are very much a part of the afterlife of this book’s precursor, Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art.

These essays are located at that imaginary crossroads where the discourse of the university meets the speech of the artworld in the hope that the former might acquire greater actuality, while the latter may find a more lasting, critical and theoretical form. All but the first two, more theoretically wide-ranging, essays were initially written for talks at art institutions or as essays for art journals, in Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, Russia, Spain and Sweden. They aspire to keep open a critical space within the transnationally proliferating discourses of contemporary art: a space that is summed up here by the terminologically difficult idea of a postconceptual condition, which is expounded in Chapter 1. Each essay sets out from a position broadly outlined in Anywhere or Not At All and develops it further by exploring its application to a particular occasion, institutional situation or body of artistic work; or by counter-posing it to competing theoretical positions.⁴

The essays move from philosophical debates about the ‘Time of the Present’ – the attempt to give historical definition to ‘contemporaneity’ and its relations to other modes of temporalization, such as modernity and avant-garde – to interpretations of particular works of contemporary art (‘Art and Image’), via reflections on cultural-political and institutional forms: in particular, issues of autonomy and activism, in the art–politics relation, and the changing character of art-institutional spaces. There is thus a general – but non-systematic – movement within the book ‘from the abstract to the concrete’. The movement through Chapters 8 to 10, for example, charts a single argumentative development, at different levels. In each chapter throughout the book, it is what Hegel called ‘the whole’ that is the ultimate, determining object of the analyses, yet the whole necessarily appears in each instance only negatively, via different levels of abstraction and mediation.

The texts have been revised to remove a few purely occasional remarks, along with some recapitulations of theoretical content. However, thematic overlaps have been retained, and in some cases developed farther, to maintain that rhythm of allusion and variation characteristic of the essay form; indeed, of form as such. As for the judgements that are inevitably bound up with such analyses: as Lukács famously remarked, the ‘value-determining thing’ about judgement ‘is not the verdict … but the process of judging’.⁵ Which does not mean that the verdict is otiose.

London, February 2017

PART I

Time of the Present

1

The Postconceptual Condition: Or, The Cultural Logic of High Capitalism Today

Those with long enough memories will no doubt recognize the crossed syntax of my title. It mimics, first, a text that, while in historical terms still recent, is nonetheless already antiquated, though perhaps not yet sufficiently to have acquired those ‘revolutionary energies’ that André Breton (and after him, Walter Benjamin) sought in such objects: Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. It is approaching forty years since the first publication of that ‘seemingly neutral review of a vast body of material on contemporary science and problems of knowledge or information’, which proved to be (in Fredric Jameson’s phrase) ‘a kind of crossroads’.¹ Those, like Jameson, who took the road called postmodernism have long since had to retrace their steps (surreptitiously or otherwise) or accustom themselves to life in a historical and intellectual cul-de-sac. The postmodern episode, as we might call it, an episode in the history of criticism, enlivened theoretical debates for little more than twenty years (1979–99) and, retrospectively, its fate as a periodizing category had already been sealed by the time of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe ten years previously (‘1989’) and the turn to theories of globalization that followed – before Jameson’s 1991 magnum opus, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (the source of my second borrowing) had even appeared.²

Periodizing Capitalism (Contra Jameson)

How very late, it now seems, still to have been periodizing capitalism as ‘late’ in 1991, at the very moment of its most powerful renewal. In using the term ‘late capitalism’, Jameson was in part alluding to Adorno’s use of it, best known from his 1968 address to the Congress of German Sociology, ‘Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?’ (Spätkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft?), where the emphasis falls more heavily on the retention of the concept of capitalism than on its internal periodization. In the meantime, Ernest Mandel’s 1972 Late Capitalism had provoked a broader revival of the term, originally coined by Werner Sombart as early as 1902 in his Modern Capitalism. It is important to remember that capitalism was first declared ‘late’ quite so long ago – although it was the 1916 edition of Sombart’s book that was more influential in this respect, taking the onset of the First World War as its periodizing break between ‘high capitalism’ (Hochkapitalismus) and ‘late capitalism’. Mandel would move that break forward again, to the end of the Second World War. By the late 1990s, struggling with the literature on globalization, Jameson would attempt to backdate globalization to 1945, in order to maintain periodizing consistency with Mandel. However, the effective logic of his discussion suggests that ‘late capitalism’ should have been shifted forwards, yet again, in line with the emergence of the post-communist capitalist ‘globalization’ that was gearing up in the late 1980s. To acknowledge this, though, would have been to acknowledge the passing of the postmodern, as previously conceived.³

Jameson had called his 1990 book on Adorno Late Marxism, with perhaps more irony than he was aware. But then even as liberal a Marxist as Jürgen Habermas was comfortable using the term ‘late capitalism’ in the 1970s, in the title of Legitimationprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (1973), for example – a usage that was effaced by its translation into English three years later, in a manoeuvre presumably designed to avoid frightening the sociological horses, with which Habermas’s work was at that time being corralled.⁴ Today, apart from in Jameson’s work, Sombart’s periodizing categories continue to resonate mainly through Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire (A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism), reinforcing the association of the ‘high’ with European capitalism in its mid-nineteenth-century bourgeois form.⁵

Yet Baudelaire’s writings resonate as much with life in Hong Kong and Shanghai today as they do with the Paris of the 1850s. In fact, there are good reasons for reviving the term ‘high capitalism’ as a description of the present, in which capitalism appears far from entering a phase that could usefully be described as ‘late’, let alone turning into a form of communism all of its own – the so-called ‘communism of capital’ of which some currently dream. The term ‘high’ has the virtue of conveying the hubris of a certain peak and hence the imminence of a fall (like a speculative peak in the financial markets), if only a cyclical one, while ‘late capitalism’ struggles to rid itself of the progressivist illusion of an approaching natural death, along with the ennobling aesthetic connotation of ‘late style’ (Spätstil) – its source as a historical term, dating back to Winckelmann. This is exacerbated in its English usage by the combination of its German sense with that of Altersstil (individual old-age style).⁶ Jameson drew on these associations in his book on Adorno, trading on Adorno’s own well-known interpretation of late Beethoven, but he neglected their implications for his own periodization of capitalism as having entered its ‘late’ period long ago – a periodization that directly conflicts with Benjamin’s recognition, from the 1930s, ‘that capitalism will not die a natural death’.⁷

It is interesting to see how, in the last decade, the notion of late capitalism (with its presumption of an imminent end) has been supplanted by debates about the instantiation via a globalized financialization of ‘pure’ (Balibar) or ‘absolute’ capitalism (Berardi, Rancière), ‘which does not have to deal constantly with heterogeneous social forces that it must either incorporate or repress, or with which it must strike some sort of compromise’, but is ‘free to deal only with the effects of its own logic of accumulation and with those things necessary for its own reproduction’.⁸ However, it should not be presumed that ‘its own logic of accumulation’ and ‘those things necessary for its own reproduction’ exclude heterogeneous social forces, in either its European or, especially, its non-European dominions.⁹

The naturalistic connotations of late capitalism allowed the prefix of Jameson’s ‘postmodernism’ surreptitiously to anticipate a post-capitalism (that was not to come), at the same time as it functioned as the cultural marker of the end of the social-democratic welfare state and the purported rise of ‘a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world’ in the 1980s. The short-lived last gasp of US imperialism, perhaps. This intimation of an end to come was ultimately to be its redeeming, now-utopian feature: that little bit of utopia tucked away in the superstructure of the dystopian capitalism of ‘blood, torture, death and horror’. Jameson himself would use it to exit postmodernism (equally surreptitiously), back to a relatively orthodox form of Utopia Studies.¹⁰

A revival, deepening, multiplication and complication of discourses of the modern – with ‘multiple’, ‘alternative’ and ‘postcolonial’ modernities at the fore – accompanied and followed the decline of the category of the postmodern, from the mid-1990s onwards.¹¹ Yet, revitalizing and illuminating as this process has been in various respects, effectively replacing the concept of postmodernity with that of a singular, complexly internally differentiated global modernity,¹² the renewal of discourses of the modern has not been sufficient, alone, to grasp the most distinctive cultural features (that is, the lived novelty) of the/our historical present. The equivocation here is crucial: the/our are two terms whose referents narrative logic dictates be the same, but whose meanings are most definitely not. Indeed, it is here, in the movement of the difference between these two terms (the ‘the’ and the ‘our’) – the objective and the subjective sides of the concept of history, or narrative and discourse, to use Benveniste’s terms – that the problem of history as a category of modernity resides. ‘History’, one might say, simply is the movement of this difference.¹³

How best, then, after the dissipation of the postmodern illusion, to characterize the cultural form of this condition, the/our historical present, or the cultural logic of high capitalism today?

From Knowledge to Art (Postmodern to Contemporary)

Here, I propose a double displacement of the cultural standpoint of Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition: from the ‘postmodern’ to the ‘contemporary’ and from ‘knowledge’ to ‘art’ – taken together, from postmodern knowledge to contemporary art – to accompany the displacement of Jameson’s periodizing perspective, from ‘late’ back to a ‘high’ capitalism, in which we are perhaps only just beginning to understand the depth of the mutations of social being that capitalism as a social form involves. This shift of focus from knowledge to art does not involve any general claim regarding the relative cultural significances of art and knowledge, or the transformations in their relations and practices – although the so-called ‘knowledge economy’ undoubtedly involves such changes. The transcendental constitution of ‘art’ and ‘knowledge’ as separate ‘value-spheres’, epitomized in Habermas’s Weberian sociologization of neo-Kantianism, appears increasingly historically naive. Rather, it is a question of the standpoint from which to view the whole. There is a greater historical and conceptual intimacy between ‘art’, in its modern European (post-eighteenth-century) philosophical and institutional sense, and the problems of historical temporality, historical periodization and historical diagnosis – ultimately all ‘cultural’ problems, insofar as they involve temporal structures of subjectivity – than there is between these problems and ‘knowledge’ in its main institutionalized, scientific and pedagogical forms, with their tendency to naturalize, if not necessarily history itself, then at least the progress of knowledge. It is an intimacy derived from art’s place within the historical culture of Enlightenment, its historico-philosophical association with the affective structure of subjectivity (‘aesthetic’) and the subjective reflective experience of pure temporal form (‘modernity’, in its Baudelairean construal).

It has always been a function of literary and art-historical periodization, upon which the intelligibility of works of art depends, to provide models – ancient and modern, classical and romantic (naive and sentimental), neoclassical and avant-garde – for the theorization of broader historical processes of spirit (Geist), social forms or subject-formations, of which art itself is only a small yet nonetheless emblematic part. In being generalized in this way, such periodizing categories are transformed, reflect back upon their more narrowly art-historical meanings and change them in turn. In this respect, postmodern and contemporary have similar critical origins and could, hypothetically, be similarly opposed:

One has only to align the categories like this (in a crude and tendentious manner) for the political meanings of their temporal roles in the philosophy of history to jump out as ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ (from left to right), respectively. This does not mean that these pairs of terms are not dialectically imbricated in any particular instance or that the historical relations between the core critical-temporal meanings of each term are not considerably more complicated than their serial presentation suggests, reading downwards from the past towards the present. In historical terms, the lineages might perhaps be better represented as in Figs 1.1 and 1.2.

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 1.2

As the semantic range of these terms indicates, the connections between art as historical-cultural form and historical temporalizations of the present more generally are neither historically nor conceptually arbitrary; and nor is the proposed critical displacement of the postmodern by the contemporary as at once a periodizing category and, more fundamentally, a form of historical time.¹⁴ For what ‘contemporaneity’ signifies most deeply is a new form of historical time. A ‘report on art’ (to continue the Lyotardian conceit) may thus have more to tell us about the changing structure of historical experience than might be supposed.

The displacement of the postmodern by the contemporary as the fundamental category of the historical present follows not merely from the discrediting of the postmodern as a temporal and critical concept – and the need to fill the conceptual space it vacated – but, more importantly, from the globalization of the resurgent concept of modernity in response to the actual historical process that underlay postmodernism’s critical demise: namely, world capitalism after 1989. In a nutshell, if modernity is the temporal culture of capital (as Jameson discerned), within its current form, contemporaneity is the temporal structure that articulates the unity of global modernity.¹⁵ Here, I shall expound this speculative idea in a compressed serial form through summaries of: (1) globalization as the movement of the difference between globe and world; (2) contemporaneity as the historical temporality of the worlding of the global; (3) postconceptuality as the culturally symptomatic condition of contemporary art.

Globe and World

What is called ‘globalization’ is primarily the effect of the relative global deregulation of capital markets, or, more specifically, the relative denationalization of the regulation of markets in finance capital (at least as important, at this moment, it would seem, as the mobility of variable capital – migration – that drove postwar accumulation), after the passing of historical communism. This process has been grounded on the destruction of the geopolitical conditions that underpinned previous notions of the world-historical present (those of the Cold War). The notion of ‘globalization’ has come to articulate debates about the meaning of the historical present in their place. The term ‘globalization’ thus occupies a conceptual space for which there is no available social occupant, insofar as the subject position that unifies the process of globalization (that of a globally mobile capital) is not that of a possible socially actual agent, or subject of action.¹⁶ Hence the sober negativity of Gayatri Spivak’s judgement: ‘Globalization takes place only in capital and data. Everything else is damage control.’¹⁷

There are numerous, extremely rich accounts of globalization focused upon and making competing claims about various different aspects of the process: economic, technological, cultural, political, legal, geographical and so on. Yet, as Giacomo Marramao among others has argued, the term ‘globalization’ does not yet stand for anything like an adequately theorized concept, capable of unifying the objects of the various discourses in which the term is found.¹⁸ This lack of conceptual unity is apparent in Jameson’s attempt to demonstrate the ‘ultimate cohesion’ of ‘five levels’ of globalization in his ‘Globalization and Political Strategy’. This takes the simple form of a posited ‘dedifferentiation’ of the levels, which, it is claimed, ‘characterizes postmodernity and lends a fundamental structure to globalization’. It is doubtful, though, that such a vaguely generalized dedifferentiation can provide anything as definite as a ‘fundamental structure’.¹⁹ A more basic theorization is required. And it is on the terrain of