{"id":955,"date":"2010-10-26T00:00:05","date_gmt":"2010-10-26T05:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=955"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:58:35","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:58:35","slug":"an-incomplete-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=955","title":{"rendered":"An incomplete project? Art and politics after postmodernism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chris Cutrone<\/h2>\n

Presented at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, October 26, 2010. Originally published<\/a> in <\/em>491<\/strong> #2 (November 2010).
\n<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What was postmodernism? \u2014 Habermas\u2019s critique<\/h2>\n

Postmodernism challenged the institutionalized modernism of the mid-20th century, offering more radical forms of social discontents and cultural practice. It meant unmasking the values of progress as involving ideologies of the political status-quo, the problems of which were manifest to a new generation in the 1960s. But, more recently, postmodernism itself has begun to age, and reveal its own concerns as those of the post-1960s situation of global capitalism rather than an emancipated End of History.<\/p>\n

In 1980, J\u00fcrgen Habermas, on the occasion of receiving the Adorno prize in Frankfurt, predicted the exhaustion of postmodernism, characterizing its conservative tendencies. Habermas called this situation the \u201cincomplete project\u201d of modernity, a set of unresolved problems that have meant the eventual return of history, if not the return of \u201cmodernism.\u201d How does Habermas\u2019s note of dissent, from the moment of highest vitality of postmodernism, help us situate the concerns of contemporary art in light of society and politics today?<\/p>\n

In his Adorno prize talk, Habermas emphasized the question of the \u201caesthetic experience .\u00a0.\u00a0. drawn into individual life history and .\u00a0.\u00a0. ordinary life,\u201d and \u201cnot [already] framed by experts\u2019 critical judgments\u201d (12\u201313). Habermas thinks that such aesthetic experience \u201cdoes justice to .\u00a0.\u00a0. Brecht\u2019s and Benjamin\u2019s interests in how artworks, having lost their aura, could yet be received in illuminating ways,\u201d a \u201cproject [that] aims at a differentiated re-linking of modern culture with an everyday praxis that [would be impoverished by mere traditionalism][, a] new connection [that] that can only be established on condition that societal modernization will also be steered in a different direction [than capitalism].\u201d (13). Habermas admitted that \u201cthe chances for this today are not very good\u201d (13).<\/p>\n

Instead, Habermas points out at that, \u201cThe disillusionment with the very failures of those programs that called for the negation of art and philosophy has come to serve as a pretense for conservative positions\u201d (13\u201314). This is how Habermas characterized postmodernism, an anti-modernism that was an ideology of the \u201cyoung conservatives,\u201d namely Foucault and Derrida (among others).<\/p>\n

Habermas drew a parallel of the postmodernism of Derrida and Foucault to the \u201cneo-conservatives,\u201d for which he took the Frankfurt School critical theorists Horkheimer and Adorno\u2019s former secretary, in their time of exile in the U.S. during WWII, Daniel Bell, as representative. Bell had described the \u201ccultural contradictions of capitalism\u201d as resulting in what he called \u201cantinomian culture,\u201d which produced a nihilistic \u201cculturati<\/em>\u201d in a \u201ccounterfeit\u201d high culture of \u201cmultiples,\u201d hedonism for the middle class, and a \u201cpornotopia for the masses.\u201d What Bell, as a self-styled \u201cconservative,\u201d deplored, such as the \u201cconformism\u201d of a liberal \u201cheterodoxy\u201d that became a \u201cprescription in its confusions,\u201d postmodernists celebrated. But they agreed on what Habermas called the destructive aspects of the \u201cnegation of art and philosophy,\u201d against which various \u201chopeless\u201d \u201cSurrealist revolts\u201d had been mounted, as an inevitable result of modernity. Whereas Bell, for instance, explicitly called for the return of religion as a way of staving off the nihilism of modernity, the postmodernists implicitly agreed with the conservative diagnosis of such nihilism, for they explicitly abandoned what Habermas called modernity\u2019s \u201cincomplete project\u201d of enlightenment and emancipation. Postmodernism was a form of anti-modernity.<\/p>\n

Critical art, liquidated<\/h2>\n

So, how does art figure in such a project of enlightened emancipation? The scholar of Benjamin and Adorno\u2019s work Susan Buck-Morss wrote, in response to the postmodernist art journal October<\/em>\u2019s 1996 Visual Culture Questionnaire, that, \u201c[Artists\u2019] work is to sustain the critical moment of aesthetic experience. Our work as critics is to recognize it.\u201d Buck-Morss protested against what she called the \u201cliquidation\u201d of art in the move of \u201cattacking the museum,\u201d \u201cproducing subjects for the next stage of global capitalism\u201d by replacing concern with the \u201ccritical moment of aesthetic experience\u201d with a discourse that \u201clegitimates culture.\u201d In so doing, Buck-Morss pointed out that failing to properly grasp the social stakes of aesthetic experience resulted in the \u201cvirtuality of representation,\u201d ignoring how, for Benjamin and the Surrealists he critically championed \u201cimages in the mind motivate the will\u201d and thus have \u201ceffect in the realm of deeds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, prominent October <\/em>journal writer Hal Foster had, in the 1982 essay \u201cRe: Post,\u201d gone so far as to call for going \u201cbeyond critique,\u201d really, abandoning it, for in critique Foster found precisely the motor of (deplorable) \u201cmodernism,\u201d which he characterized as consciousness of \u201chistorical moment\u201d that \u201cadvanced a dialectic.\u201d Foster stated unequivocally that critical \u201cself-reflexivity\u201d needed to be abandoned because it (supposedly) \u201cenforces closure.\u201d Foster called the Brechtian terms \u201cdefamiliarization\u201d and \u201cestrangement\u201d \u201cquintessentially modernist.\u201d But Foster remained equivocal regarding the matter of art\u2019s potential to \u201cinitiate new ways of seeing,\u201d even if he stayed suspicious of \u201cthe old imperative of the avant-garde and its language of crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n

The crisis of criticism \u2014 driving art underground<\/h2>\n

But the concern, for Foster, as with the other leading October<\/em> writers (such as Rosalind Krauss and Douglas Crimp), was reduced, from social problems, to problematizing art<\/em>: (in Crimp\u2019s words) \u201con the museum\u2019s ruins.\u201d But the museum is still standing. The question is whether it still houses art. As Buck-Morss pointed out, the museum is the \u201cvery institution that sustains the illusion that art exists.\u201d What this means is that, disenchanted with art, the \u201crealm of deeds,\u201d in which \u201cimages in the mind motivate the will,\u201d abandoned by the critics, is ceded instead to the \u201cadvertising industry.\u201d The museum, lacking a critical response, is not overcome as an institution of invidious power, but, instead of sustaining the socially necessary \u201cillusion\u201d that \u201cart exists,\u201d however domesticated, becomes an embodiment of the power of kitsch<\/em>, that is, predigested and denatured aesthetic experience, to affirm the status-quo: high-class trash. Art becomes precisely what the postmodernists thought it was. The museum has not faced the crisis of meaning the postmodernists wished of it, only the meaning has become shallower. In Adorno\u2019s terms, the museum has become an advertising for itself, but the use of its experience has become occulted, in favor of its exchange-value: the feeling of the worth of the price of the ticket. But the experience of art is still (potentially) there, if unrecognized.<\/p>\n

For Buck-Morss, there is indeed a crisis \u2014 of (lack of) recognition. Criticism, and hence consciousness of aesthetic experience objectified in artistic practices, was in crisis in postmodernism. Critical theory ceased to be critical \u2014 and thus became affirmative, even if it was confused about this. This was the result, in Habermas\u2019s terms, of the \u201cpostmodernist\u201d turning away from the \u201cincomplete project\u201d of modern art\u2019s critical response to social modernity: a conservative result, by default, even if under the \u201cpretense\u201d that it was progressive or even radical.<\/p>\n

Against such postmodernist abdication and thus affirmation of existing \u201cculture,\u201d Buck-Morss called for approaching art \u201cemblematically and symptomatically, in terms of the most fundamental questions of social life,\u201d \u201cbringing to consciousness what was before only dimly perceived, so that it becomes available for critical reflection.\u201d Otherwise, Buck-Morss warned that \u201ctomorrow\u2019s artists may opt to go underground,\u201d and \u201cdo their work esoterically, while employed as producers of visual culture.\u201d We might also say that there is the option of continuing to make \u201cart,\u201d but without recognition of its stakes by critics, impaired by a discourse of \u201cvisual culture\u201d and supposed \u201cinstitutional\u201d critique or opposition \u2014 that is, an institutionalized opposition to the institution (such as effected by the October<\/em> writers, who have since entered the canon of academicism, for instance in the academic art of the postmodernist art school). This outcome represses, or drives \u201cunderground,\u201d the concerns of artists regarding aesthetic experience, which, according to Habermas and Buck-Morss, following Benjamin and Brecht, are potentially \u201cvital\u201d and \u201cfundamental\u201d to \u201cquestions of social life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cRelational\u201d aesthetics<\/h2>\n

The question of the more recent phenomenon of \u201crelational aesthetics\u201d needs to be addressed in such terms, for \u201crelational aesthetics\u201d claims to be about mobilizing attention to the aesthetic experience of the social for critical ends, in society as well as art.<\/p>\n

Several important critical accounts of relational aesthetics have been attempted. Claire Bishop has addressed the problem of relational aesthetics raising the social at the expense of recognition of social antagonisms. Stewart Martin has questioned the relational aesthetics opposition of the social to the (autonomous) art object of traditional (modernist) aesthetics. But Martin has also interrogated the hypostatization of the social, whether considered either as a relatively unproblematic value in itself or as a zone of antagonism, as in Bishop\u2019s criticism. Additionally, Martin has addressed shared problems of the late paradigmatic but opposed attempts on the Left to politicize aesthetics by Jacques Ranci\u00e8re and Alain Badiou. Martin has deployed a sophisticated understanding of Marx and Adorno on the commodity form towards these ends. Thus it becomes possible for Martin to address relational aesthetics practices\u2019 \u201cna\u00efve mimesis or aestheticization of novel forms of capitalist exploitation,\u201d in treating art as a \u201cform of social exchange\u201d that advocates an \u201cinter-subjective art of conviviality\u201d (370\u2013371), as well as address the potential political stakes of various approaches to art. \u2014 Conversely, it becomes possible for Martin to address what he calls the otherwise naturalized \u201ccommodity form of the political\u201d (372).<\/p>\n

Martin is concerned to be able to preserve a social-critical approach to what he calls the \u201carty non-art of late capitalist culture.\u201d It is necessary, according to Martin, to avoid the \u201cHegelian trap\u201d of \u201charmonious rapprochement,\u201d through a dialectic of \u201canti-art and pure art,\u201d resulting in an \u201cartification of the world\u201d that however \u201cbreaks\u201d with attempts to \u201ccritique bourgeois culture.\u201d Instead, Martin recalls Adorno\u2019s recognition that art\u2019s \u201cautonomy,\u201d its simultaneously \u201canti-social\u201d and \u201cnon-subjective\u201d or \u201cobjective\u201d aspect, was inherent both in its commodity character and in its \u201cresistance to commodification,\u201d through \u201cimmanent critique or self-criticism\u201d (373). It is this aspect of art, common to both \u201canti-art\u201d and \u201cpure art,\u201d that, for Martin, \u201crelational\u201d aesthetics, with its emphasis on the supposedly \u201cinter-subjective\u201d character of the social, occludes.<\/p>\n

Historical temporality of artworks not linear succession<\/h2>\n

John Roberts, in his recovery of Adorno, has focused as well on the \u201casocial\u201d aspect of art as the potential source of its critical value. Roberts recovers the key idea, from Benjamin and Adorno, of artworks\u2019 \u201cpre-history\u201d and \u201cafter-life\u201d in history, in order to introduce the problem of the historical temporality of the experience of works of art, which is not reducible to their immediate aesthetic experience or the thoughts and feelings of the artists who produced them. Works of art are \u201cobjective\u201d in that they are non-identical with themselves, in the sense of non-identity in time. In Adorno\u2019s terms, artworks have a \u201chistorical nucleus,\u201d a \u201ctruth-content\u201d revealed only as a function of transformations in history. According to Benjamin, this is how artworks can gain stature and power with time.<\/p>\n

The example Roberts uses is the late, delayed reception of early 20th century avant-garde artworks in the 1960s, which inspired artists. This is a very different account from the notion, common in postmodernist criticism, of artists rebelling against the preceding styles and art criticism and historical discourses of abstract expressionism. Artists may have remained innocent of the cloistered disputes of the art critics and historians, though their works were used as evidence in these disputes; and they may have remained more sympathetic to abstract expressionism as art than the postmodernist critics were. The pendulum-swing or grandfather-rule accounts of the vicissitudes of history are inadequate to the non-linear temporality Roberts highlights.<\/p>\n

Roberts discusses works of art as forms of \u201cdeferred action\u201d in history, with which artists and viewers engage in new forms of art production and reception, which belie notions of successions of styles traditional to art history. This allows works of art to be understood as embodiments of objectified experience that change as a function of historical transformations, as potentially informing a proliferation of experiences unfolding in history, rather than, as Foster, for example, feared, forms of \u201cclosure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Neo-avant garde or neo-modernist?<\/h2>\n

It is important that neither Habermas (nor Bell) nor Buck-Morss accepted the idea that gained traction in the 1970s of a division between modernist and avant-garde art. For neither did Benjamin or Adorno. (Peter B\u00fcrger\u2019s influential study, Theory of the Avant-Garde<\/em>, was, importantly, a critique of Adorno\u2019s Aesthetic Theory<\/em> on this score.)<\/p>\n

What Martin calls the \u201cdialectic\u201d of \u201canti-art\u201d and \u201cpure art\u201d has continued, though not necessarily in terms of opposed camps, but rather in what Adorno recognized as the necessary element of the non-artistic in artworks. Now that postmodernism has been exhausted as a trend in criticism (as seen by significant reversals on the part of its standard-bearers such as Foster), it becomes possible to recognize how postmodernism reacted inadequately and problematically to this dialectic, conflating realms of art and social life, and thus repressed it, obscuring its operations from proper recognition.<\/p>\n

The emergence of \u201crelational\u201d aesthetics in the 1990s marked the exhaustion of postmodernism, as both its culmination and its negation (it is significant that Foster was hostile, calling it a mere \u201carty party\u201d), but also a terminal phase of the recrudescence of the problem of the social and of politics, long wandering lost through the postmodernist desert of the 1970s and \u201980s, during which Adorno, for example, could only be received as an old-fashioned modernist. But, since the 1990s, critics and theorists have found it increasingly necessary to reconsider Adorno.<\/p>\n

Today, which may be considered a post-postmodernist moment, art practices can be broadly grouped into two seemingly unrelated tendencies, neo-avant garde (such as in relational aesthetics) and neo-modernist (in the revival of the traditional plastic arts of objects such as painting and sculpture). The task would be to understand what these apparently independent tendencies in art have in common as phenomena of history, the society and politics with which art practices are bound up. Postmodernist art criticism has made it impossible to properly grasp such shared history of the present, hence its exhaustion today, leaving current art unrecognized.<\/p>\n

But, in the midst of the high era of postmodernist criticism, Habermas sounded an important note of dissent and warning against this trend, reminding of what postmodernism left aside in terms of society and politics. For it is with respect to society and political ideology that art remained potentially vital and necessary, if under-recognized as such. In his Adorno prize talk, Habermas raised the problem of art as an exemplary task for the \u201ccritical intellectual.\u201d This is because, as more recent critics such as Bishop, Martin and Roberts have noted, art, in its dialectical transformations, allows for the recognition of history<\/em>, the present as historical, revealing not only the history of art, but of modern capitalist society and its unfulfilled forms of discontent, as registered in aesthetic experience. | \u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

Sources<\/h4>\n

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory<\/em> (1970), trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997).<\/p>\n

Daniel Bell, “Foreword: 1978,” The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism<\/em> (New York: Basic Books, 1978), xi\u2013xxix.<\/p>\n

Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” Illuminations<\/em> (New York: Schocken, 1969), 69\u201382.<\/p>\n

Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October<\/em> 110 (Fall 2004), 51\u201379.<\/p>\n

Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” Artforum<\/em> (February 2006), 179\u2013185.<\/p>\n

Susan Buck-Morss, Response to the Visual Culture Questionnaire, October<\/em> 77 (Summer 1996), 29\u201331.<\/p>\n

Hal Foster, “Re:Post,” Art after Modernism<\/em>, ed. Brian Wallis (Boston: David R. Godine, 1992), 189\u2013201.<\/p>\n

J\u00fcrgen Habermas, “Modernity \u2014<\/strong><\/strong> An Incomplete Project,” The Anti-Aesthetic<\/em>, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 3\u201315.<\/p>\n

Stewart Martin, “Critique of Relational Aesthetics,” Third Text<\/em> 21.4 (July 2007), 369\u2013386.<\/p>\n

John Roberts, “Avant-gardes after Avant-gardism<\/a>,” Chto Delat?<\/em> \/ What is to be Done?<\/em> 17 (August 2007).<\/p>\n

John Roberts, “Art after Deskilling,” Historical Materialism<\/em> 18.2 (2010), 77\u201396.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chris Cutrone Presented at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, October 26, 2010. Originally published in 491 #2 (November 2010). What was postmodernism? \u2014 Habermas\u2019s critique Postmodernism challenged the institutionalized modernism of the mid-20th century, offering more radical forms of social discontents and cultural practice. It meant unmasking the values of progress as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[10,18,27,28,7,21],"class_list":["post-955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentations","tag-10","tag-adorno","tag-art","tag-benjamin","tag-lectures","tag-postmodernism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=955"}],"version-history":[{"count":50,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3224,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955\/revisions\/3224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}