Unnaming the System? Retrieving Postmodernism\'s Contemporaneity

ARTICLE

UNNAMING THE SYSTEM? RETRIEVING POSTMODERNISM’S CONTEMPORANEITY BILL ROBERTS

Concluding his 1991 volume Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson insisted that despite the insuperable difficulties confronting the attempt at “systematizing something that is resolutely unsystematic, and historicizing something that is resolutely ahistorical,” nevertheless “‘We have to name the system.’”1 That Jameson’s own work on postmodernism, in the decade or so prior to that book’s publication, amounted to the most sophisticated (and for many, the most sophistic) articulation of our world-historical condition yet to register under that name was an achievement not lost on the humanities in general. As Perry Anderson acknowledged in 1998, Jameson’s “capture of the postmodern . . . set the terms of subsequent debate.”2 And yet, whether the dwindling of postmodernism as a descriptor over the last two decades may be attributed more to its media banalization or to the acute contradictions of Jameson’s thesis itself, it is nonetheless the case that criticism in its wake has had trouble meeting his demand. In their attempts to capture art’s current condition, Anglophone art historians and theorists have in recent years provided among the most far-reaching attempts to conceive the present in the wake of 1 2

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 418. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998), 78.

© 2015 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

01-mitam08.ARTM_a_00116-Roberts-v1.indd 3

doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00116

3

4/2/15 2:26 PM

ARTMARGINS 4:2

Jameson’s effort. A sense of the current predicament may best be obtained, then, by turning again to just some of their many elaborations of the contemporary and by reconstructing the relations drawn therein between contemporary art and a substantive world-historical contemporaneity. To do this, I shall begin below with a discussion of the shift from postmodernism to contemporaneity, by way of a consideration of Peter Osborne and Terry Smith, before addressing in more detail important aspects first of theory, and then of art history under the new paradigm. The examples that I survey here by no means broach the full range of writing on the topic. Rather, I have selected for discussion prolific entrants in the debate from the fields of art history (Smith, Pamela Lee) and theory (Osborne, Susan Buck-Morss), each of whom offers a version of the salient periodizations of contemporaneity (gradual, ruptural, differential); together these suggest the contours of an emergent complex of historical, historiographical, and philosophical enquiry. By way of this corpus, my aim is to explore what I argue to be its most persistent lacunae. What follows, then, is the delineation of a problem—rather than an attempt at its solution—that consists in a general occlusion of Jameson’s historical-materialist challenge across much of this debate. My intention is not to characterize dominant or emergent aesthetic tendencies within contemporaneity, but rather to assess the degree to which current attempts to do so deliver on Jameson’s imperative to situate culture structurally within the capitalist totality. For this assessment, it is of no small significance that Marxian theoretical commitments remain crucial for these authors, and that Jameson himself stands, variously, as an important interlocutor and reference for each. Among the writers I shall discuss, only Jacques Rancière bucks this last trend. However, that the North American art world, in particular, should embrace an aesthetics already at some remove from Marxian materialism in the name of a resurgence of thinking around communism may in itself be read as indicative of this wider elision. Comparative analysis of this body of work on and around the contemporary uncovers key points of correspondence and variance among its authors. Across Smith, Lee, Rancière, and Osborne, there is a more or less tacit recovery of art’s cultural authority—its unique reflexivity and capacity to reveal the truth of the present—of the kind that postmodernism had placed in question for its near-total integration into commodity production in general. For Osborne and Rancière, art’s

4

01-mitam08.ARTM_a_00116-Roberts-v1.indd 4

4/2/15 2:26 PM

4 5

UNNAMING THE SYSTEM?

Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013), 27; Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of the Arts, trans. Zakir Paul (London: Verso, 2013), X. Terry Smith, “Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 4 (Summer 2006): 707. See, for example, Jameson, Postmodernism, 124, 172, 181.

|

3

ROBERTS

exceptionality is ontologically given. Art is “a privileged cultural carrier of contemporaneity” for Osborne, while for Rancière the rise of a singular “aesthetic art” over the last two centuries fixes art “as a separate world” and secures its autonomy on the paradoxical basis that “anything whatsoever can belong to it.”3 In Smith and Lee, by contrast, art’s authority is an effect, principally, of methodology—of a projection of the character of contemporary art onto that of contemporaneity generally. Here, a tendency to presume this authority emerges that mirrors equally questionable presumptions of its absolute disappearance within earlier thinking around postmodernism. Smith and Osborne also foreground (while Lee and Rancière intimate) the divergence of contemporary experiences of time, with dif­ fering implications for the task of historical periodization. However, although 1989 has only a relative significance for Osborne, he nonetheless shares with Buck-Morss an emphasis upon the geopolitical conjuncture signified by that date, marked by the collapse of the Soviet empire and Chinese intransigence following the June 4 massacre in Tiananmen Square, as a turning point in the emergence of the con­ temporary. Smith, perhaps the most articulate spokesperson for art’s contemporaneity, also argues that a pervasive sense of “permanentseeming aftermath” has emerged in the wake of the end of the Cold War.4 This triple sense of finality, fallout, and drift was also once thought to be the case for postmodernism itself, as the paradoxical supersession of the supersessive impulse of the modern. The result, back then, was a profound disorientation, and if the difficulties of temporal definition would seem aggravated for any notion of the absolutely contemporary, then Jameson’s occasional references to the postmodern as the “postcontemporary” had already uncovered the absurdity of the problem, preempting in the process what might otherwise have been a likely escape route for periodizing efforts of the not-too-distant future.5 Jameson’s postcontemporary was, as Osborne has noted, deployed as a rejoinder to whatever limited currency contemporary itself had amassed following the Second World War, as a “qualification” or

5

01-mitam08.ARTM_a_00116-Roberts-v1.indd 5

4/2/15 2:26 PM

­ itigation of the “ruptural futurity” of the modern within the “expanm sive present” of postwar renewal. 6 But only more recently has contemporary gathered steam as the periodizing term du jour. Of course, with sufficiently mounting consensus, any given periodization of the cultural present will become self-fulfilling. Jameson’s introduction to the 1991 book issued the disclaimer of a “Heisenberg principle of post­ modernism,” noting that even the lightest of hermeneutic touches upon the artifacts of postmodern culture were liable to turn these “texts” into the “works” that they were no longer supposed to be.7 But, as Jameson was always keenly aware, theory as a whole has its own Heisenberg principle; theory’s dialectic is such that it always leaves its traces on the “reality” that it seeks to articulate. 8 In its moment of productivity, this is an aspect of praxis; in its moment of failure, it is called reification. What, then, are the productivities and reifications of the contemporary, now that art, its commentary, and society itself have irreversibly become so? FROM POSTMODERNISM TO THE CONTEMPORARY

Responding, in 1989, to some of the philosophical and political objections raised at the historical-materialist thesis of postmodernism, Jameson alighted upon its final unfalsifiability.9 The theory’s signal feature is, of course, the destabilization and tendential “indifferentiation” of economic base and cultural superstructure (and, with this, the final collapse of the dialectic of high art and mass culture).10 On this basis, as “an ideology which is also a reality”—as the coincidence of culture and economy—postmodernism for Jameson is strictly identical with postmodernity.11 Dating its origins to the emergence of a multinational capitalism pioneered by the postwar United States and the expansion of 6 7 8

ARTMARGINS 4:2

9

10 11

Osborne, Anywhere, 16. Jameson, Postmodernism, xvii. As Jameson expresses it elsewhere, “The present is not yet a historical period: it ought not to be able to name itself and characterize its own originality. Yet it is precisely this unauthorized self-affirmation that will finally shape that new thing we call actuality.” Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso), 25. The conclusion to the 1991 book expands Jameson’s earlier reply, “Marxism and Postmodernism,” originally published as an afterword to the essays compiled in Douglas Kellner, ed., Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique (College Park, MD: Maisonneuve Press, 1989). Jameson, Postmodernism, 275. Ibid., 376. As Linda Hutcheon noted in 1989, “The slippage from postmodernity to postmodernism is constant and deliberate in Jameson’s work.” Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2002), 25.

6

01-mitam08.ARTM_a_00116-Roberts-v1.indd 6

4/2/15 2:26 PM

14

UNNAMING THE SYSTEM?

Jameson, Postmodernism, 376. Liam Gillick, “Contemporary Art Does Not Account for That Which Is Taking Place,” e-flux Journal, no. 21 (December 2010), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/contemporary-art -does-not-account-for-that-which-is-taking-place/. Pamela Lee, “Boundary Issues: The Art World under the Sign of Globalism,” Artforum 42, no. 3 (November 2003): 166.

|

12 13

ROBERTS

mass culture that gathered pace thereabouts, he argues that an underlying equivalence (the reign of exchange value) nowadays presents itself as absolute heterogeneity. Accordingly, while “the ‘postmodern’ cannot be disproved insofar as its fundamental feature is the radical separation of all the levels and voices whose recombination in their totality could alone disprove it,” neither, he concedes, may any given epiphenomenon of the postmodern be appealed to as its final confirmation.12 Still, as the term’s ubiquity began to drain its referential purchase on its already furtive object, the category of the postmodern eventually came, for many in the art world as elsewhere, to seem inadequate to the very task that its elaboration at the hands of Jameson had brought to light. But in the necessary absence of any resolution to its central problematic, this could be widely felt as relief. What had been the name both for today’s global capitalist “system,” as well as a substantive theoretical problem—the most persuasive and thoroughgoing attempt, in the (not yet) contemporary world, to think and confront the concealed identity coursing through the seemingly contingent and heterogeneous—was now to be cast off as a wholly enervated category. Good riddance to theory’s great impasse. Notwithstanding the significant problems attending Jameson’s thesis—indeed, precisely because it locates these centrally within the purview of its problematic—it is my contention that much of what he has to say about postmodernism remains valuable for a fuller understanding and politicization of contemporaneity. I would like, here, to suggest that the “excessive usefulness” of postmodernism’s successor—namely, a periodized contemporaneity marked, above all, by an ability to manage and defuse a multiplicity of shifting significations— is given to similar problems of representation and totalization as its forebear, but also that it tends to intensify these by occluding their clear visibility as problems.13 Surveying the fate of the term globalization in 2003, Lee noted the parallel with the art world’s handling of postmodernism twenty years earlier, in its “capacity to be generalized to the point of meaninglessness.”14 Contemporary cheats this fate, and seals its convenience, by beginning from the point of absolute capaciousness.

7

01-mitam08.ARTM_a_00116-Roberts-v1.indd 7

4/2/15 2:26 PM

ARTMARGINS 4:2

From the start, as the artist Liam Gillick observes, “it appears as a loose binding term that is always pointing away from itself.”15 Over the last decade or so, the contemporary has thus all-but-exorcized the ghost of a periodized postmodernism—postmodernity—by substituting for the latter’s inscrutability what appears as self-evidence. This last aspect, in particular, has allowed the designation contemporary to gain traction despite the widespread persistence of a postmodern and postcolonial suspicion of historicism, in the broad sense that the diverse phenomena of any given moment are in principle intelligible in their relatedness as constitutive parts of a historical situation—and, hence, of the enterprise of periodization itself.16 The two most sustained attempts to fathom the temporality of contemporaneity for and in contemporary art are those of Osborne and Smith, though they differ in significant ways. Forging some sense from the deluge of recent debates in his 2013 book Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Osborne argues that three underlying, competing periodizations of contemporaneity are at work within art history today, variously locating its onset at 1945, the 1960s, and 1989.17 These, he rightly contends, must not be conceived as strict ­alternatives that art historians might crudely settle for according to local interest; the contemporary does not simply begin at one or another of these moments within different artistic, political, or geographical arenas. Instead, Osborne argues, these dates should be seen as having together given rise to the contemporary as a “differential historical t­ emporality,” composed of “interpenetrating” art historical and geo­political “strata.”18 And yet—perhaps inevitably, given its relative closeness—1989 has lately weighed heaviest in the balance of Osborne’s constellation for art criticism and art history at large. Indeed, by proceeding to denote “the contemporary today” as being characterized by the increasing “integration of autonomous art into the culture industry” under the wing of the “globally transnational” form of the biennale after the fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989 becomes the salient marker in the triad for Osborne himself.19 For Osborne, the globaliza15 16

17 18 19

Gillick, “Contemporary Art.” For a critique of the suspicion of historicism in the work of subaltern-studies scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty, see Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013), 209–48. Osborne, Anywhere, 18–22. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 21.

8

01-mitam08.ARTM_a_00116-Roberts-v1.indd 8

4/2/15 2:26 PM

UNNAMING THE SYSTEM? |

20 For Osborne, the distributive unity of the “postconceptual” artwork is its existence “across the totality of its multiple material instantiations, at any particular time.” Ibid., 48. 21 Ibid., 26. 22 Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 55.

ROBERTS

tion of capital since the end of historical communism becomes the principal condition that artistic practice, criticism, and history must somehow become adequate to in order to qualify for true contemporaneity. In Osborne’s definition, then, contemporaneity is as much a qualitative as a temporal category. In fact, for Osborne, current artistic practice faces a further test of its contemporaneity, so that it must become adequate not only to its globalization, but also to the lessons of Conceptual art for the new “distributive unity” of the artwork. 20 It does not escape his notice that most artistic practice fails in both regards, a fact that can only limit the usefulness of Osborne’s category for any attempt to develop a more universal account of our actually existing contemporaneity. But it is also the case that, by and large, competing accounts of the contemporary within art history and theory tend, similarly, to fail to measure up to his elaboration of the differential historical temporality of the contemporary today precisely as “that of a tendentially global capital.”21 This has, it seems, been the principal casualty of the historiographical departure from Jameson and postmodernity. Despite, or because of, its reflex orientation around the master signifier of 1989, and on account of its apparent neutrality and generality, the category of contemporaneity, as it currently stands, tends only to update and augment the opacity of the postmodern. Indeed, the difficulties attending the historical capture of contemporaneity may be read precisely as what once would have been called a postmodern symptom, in the terms now long ago articulated by Jameson: a superstructural expression of an objective contradiction, in this case “an idea . . . whose conceptual limits and inadequacies stand as immediate figures or symptoms of the limits of the concrete social situation itself.”22 Far from the kind of breakthrough that might alleviate the historiographical problems of postmodernism, then, many among these last may in fact be revealed as enduring and intensifying at the heart of our current, contemporary condition. Ascribing a multiplicity—even an incommensurability— of global space-times to the present on the empirical basis of today’s unbridled cultural heterogeneity, the discourse on the contemporary

9

01-mitam08.ARTM_a_00116-Roberts-v1.indd 9

4/2/15 2:26 PM

tends to frustrate any systemic purchase on the “cultural logic” of today’s global capitalist world. In his 2010 survey article, “The State of Art History: Contemporary Art,” Smith articulates a nuanced correspondence between contemporary art and a socio-economic and geopolitical contemporaneity as a “nascent and emergent world condition.”23 Here and elsewhere, he argues for the latter as the “grounding condition of contemporary art,” while reclaiming a semiautonomy for art’s development, resisting any strict coincidence of art historical and world-historical epochs by asserting the “multiple temporalities” of our “incommensurable contemporaneity.”24 And yet, in the substance of his many analyses, contemporary art itself tends to read as the grounding condition of contemporaneity. Smith projects a cultural shift—a transition away from late modernism, via the waning of a fleeting “postmodern moment,” amid the globalization of the contemporary art world since the 1980s—onto a broader condition whose coordinates may be said to attest to the ongoing critical purchase of important elements within Jameson’s schema.25 In particular, and precisely in this projection, Smith’s account overlooks Jameson’s emphasis upon postmodernism’s threat to culture’s grasp of the present. During the 1980s and 1990s, Smith had operated under the conceptual spell of postmodernism and postmodernity as much as anyone, and despite his evolution away from it, there remains a clear echo of Jameson’s “perpetual present” in his characterization of “contemporaneousness” in its “immediacy, its presentness, its instantaneity, its prioritizing of the moment over the time.”26 Always foremost in Jameson’s

ARTMARGINS 4:2

23

Terry Smith, “The State of Art History: Contemporary Art,” Art Bulletin XCII, no. 4 (December 2010): 379. 24 Ibid., 379. Terry Smith, “Introduction: The Contemporaneity Question,” in Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee, eds., Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 5; Terry Smith, Contemporary Art: World Currents (London: Laurence King, 2011), 12. 25 Smith, Contemporary Art, 374. 26 Jameson, Postmodernism, 170; Terry Smith, “Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity,” 703. Postmodernity remains the conceptual horizon in, for example, Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). It also frames the contributions to Terry Smith, ed., Ideas of the University (Sydney: Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and Power Publications, 1996); and Terry Smith, ed., Impossible Presence: Surface and Screen in the Photogenic Era (Sydney: Power Publications, 2001), which opens with Smith’s question, “What has been the fate of the image in modernity, modern art, popular visual cultures, in postmodern art and in postmodernity?” (p. 1).

10

01-mitam08.ARTM_a_00116-Roberts-v1.indd 10

4/2/15 2:26 PM

analysis, however, were those “unifying forces” of postmodernism’s epochal shift toward a global multinational capitalism that were precisely “so omnipresent as to be invisible,” heralding a representational and authoritative crisis both for the arts and for social and cultural criticism.27 Smith instead tends to presuppose contemporary art’s unalloyed pertinence to contemporaneity. He thus quietly retrieves for art (as well as for art criticism and art history) the kind of cultural authority and proleptic grasp that is very precisely, and necessarily, brought into question by Postmodernism’s central thesis of a contraction of art’s critical distance. Not least, the contemporary’s attractions lie here.

|

27 Jameson, Postmodernism, 185. 28 “The Plunder of Eastern Europe” was the title of a 1995 volume of New Left Review, after the subject of its lead article, by Peter Gowan, “Neo-Liberal Theory and Practice for Eastern Europe,” New Left Review (1st series), no. 213 (September–October 1995): 3–60. 29 Harry Harootunian, “Remembering the Historical Present,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 472.

ROBERTS

A reductive version of postmodernism, shrunk to its identification with neoconservative proclamations of the final triumph of liberal democracy, was always ill-equipped to deal with phenomena as various and volatile as the neoliberal “plunder of Eastern Europe,”28 Islamist terrorism and America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the rise of a populist left in the Latin America of Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales, China’s emphatic challenge to US hegemony, and the Arab Spring, to say nothing of the World Wide Web and impending global environmental catastrophe. To a significant degree, then, where postmodernism has on this basis been found wanting, a substantive contemporaneity may be said to have impacted upon the cultural scene by default. From the start, however, the temporality of contemporaneity is at the very least doubled between the persistence of a postmodern presentism since the fall of the Berlin Wall—Smith’s “permanent” aftermath—and history’s keenly felt resurgence since the 1990s and redoubled vigor since 9/11. Writing in 2007, Harry Harootunian even argued that insofar as the War on Terror was inaugurated as an infinite, impossible campaign, it too marks an “indefinite deferral” of the future, on which basis there may be a doubled temporality—a presentism and a futurism—at the heart of 9/11 itself.29 The second moment, at least, is new: where contemporary had once moderated the futurity of the modern—as Osborne

UNNAMING THE SYSTEM?

BACK TO THE FUTURE

11

01-mitam08.ARTM_a_00116-Roberts-v1.indd 11

4/2/15 2:26 PM

ARTMARGINS 4:2

describes the postwar condition—it now returns futurity in the wake of the postmodern. For many, of course, this return includes that of the political horizon of communism, and it is within the context of this return in par­ ticular that Jacques Rancière’s substitution of the “aesthetic regime of the arts” for modernity’s longue durée must be appreciated. Rancière’s account of the nature of art’s autonomy, in The Politics of Aesthetics and elsewhere, has won him many acolytes and critics, but what might be his pertinence, and the significance of his recent visibility, to contemporaneity specifically?30 Rancière’s alternative cultural historiography is at once tangential to the debate on contemporaneity and attuned to it, insofar as its purported dismantling of modernity inevitably evacuates postmodernity, too. Aesthetics, here, has a general significance for Rancière as the sphere of successive regimes of “distribution of the sensible” that confer the conditions of visibility at any given historical conjuncture, subtending the very structures of intelligibility. The history of art, in turn, is closely identified with this developmental logic. In the “ethical regime,” whose archetype is Plato’s Republic, the arts are fully subordinated to the illustration of morality and truth. A limited autonomy for the arts emerges with the “representative regime” typified by European academicism, circumscribed by the demands of representation and imitation, and regulated by strict laws and hierarchies of genre, media, and subject matter. These laws are then exploded with the rise of the aesthetic regime from the end of the 18th century onward, marked by an “aesthetic art” that increasingly abandons all norms in order to unsettle, and thus call into question, fixed values and meanings of all kinds. Rancière’s identification of a “co-presence of heterogeneous temporalities” pertaining to the aesthetic regime would appear to tally with the (incommensurable) multiple and (in principle commensurable) differential temporalities of the contemporary cited, respectively, by Smith and Osborne.31 However, this cannot be of the order of incommensurability that Smith ascribes to today’s multiple temporalities, given that 30

31

See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004); and Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy,” New Left Review, no. 14 (March–April 2002): 133–51. Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 26.

12

01-mitam08.ARTM_a_00116-Roberts-v1.indd 12

4/2/15 2:26 PM

UNNAMING THE SYSTEM?

33 34 35

For clear expressions of Smith’s insistence upon the incommensurability of global ­c ultures and temporalities, see Terry Smith, “World Picturing in Contemporary Art: Iconogeographic Turning,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 6, no. 2 (2005) and 7, no. 1 (2006) (double issue): 24–46; and Terry Smith, “ ‘Our’ Contemporaneity?,” in Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson, eds., Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 17–27. Rancière, Aisthesis, XIV. Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 24. Jacques Rancière, in Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey, “Art of the Possible: Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey in Conversation with Jacques Rancière,” Artforum 45, no. 7 (March 2007): 257.

|

32

ROBERTS

the aesthetic regime is, finally, deployed by Rancière to perform the conventionally historicist task of explaining the specificity of art’s trajectory since the 18th century.32 In fact, across his writing on art and aesthetics, Rancière is largely indifferent to the kind of geospatial fragmentation that concerns Smith. Rather, temporal heterogeneity emerges here simply as the persistence of the antecedent ethical and representative regimes into the era of the aesthetic regime (as well as the prefiguration of the latter in the former), from which this last enacts its “unending break.”33 Accordingly, this heterogeneity comes to denote little more than the differential temporalities of the combined and uneven development of bourgeois culture since the fall of the ancien régime: the residuality of the ethical and representative regimes within a still-emergent aesthetic regime. As a process of equalization, the aesthetic regime even quite neatly dovetails with the emergence of the formal economic and juridical equalization of citizens in bourgeois society since that time. Rancière depicts a straw-man modernity as an “incoherent” linear historiography of absolute breaks with the old; modernity, he writes, “traces . . . a simple line of transition or rupture between the old and the new.”34 He then attempts to distinguish the novelty of the aesthetic regime from this, but there is, finally, little in his historiographical armory that cannot be accommodated by a fuller, orthodox Marxian account of this history, as the unfolding of a modernity that is irreducible to this caricature. Rancière has suggested that his great attraction for the art world lies in his having “create[d] a little breathing room with respect to the established division between modernity, the end of modernity, post­ modernity, and so on.”35 Yet the art world’s embrace of a theory that would erase any qualitative distinction of the conditions of art today from those of the time of the Romantics is odd, to say the least. Given this, as well as the more general failure of his historiography to

13

01-mitam08.ARTM_a_00116-Roberts-v1.indd 13

4/2/15 2:26 PM

ARTMARGINS 4:2

­ istinguish itself in any significant way from more thoroughgoing d accounts of modernity, it seems likely that a further attraction of Rancière’s aesthetics for the art world lies in its clear legitimization of that world, by way of its validation of aesthetics as both the site of politics and the prerogative of art. Certainly, he situates the visual centrally in the determination of his successive regimes of conditions of intelligibility through history; aesthetics becomes, as Rancière’s English translator Gabriel Rockhill summarizes, “the conceptual coordinates and modes of visibility operative in the political domain.”36 Never simply a figure for recognition in an abstract sense, visibility, in Rancière, thus becomes the sensible locus of political transformation itself, with art an exalted facet of this. Against the wholesale vilification of “spectacle,” then, Rancière talks of art’s power of “dissensus” as its provocation of an emancipatory “modification of the sensible” by way of “a spectacle or a tonality that replaces another.”37 His position thereby stands in sharp contrast to the famous “denigration of vision” in French thought over the past century, and it is a short step from here to the simple resumption of art’s epochal significance for culture as a whole.38 Indeed, the very continuity that Rancière draws between Romanticism and the arts of contemporaneity functions precisely to preclude any clear recognition of the precariousness of culture’s autonomy under the conditions of an advanced global capitalism. Moreover, the cultural centrality of art in Rancière is compounded by his revival of a futurity for the aesthetic under its regime, as the invention of “sensible forms and material structures for a life to come.”39 With Rancière, above all, “aesthetic art” is reinvested with a specific potentiality—the “redistribution of the sensible” as a political event—and returned with a vengeance as the site of utopian imagination. It is this that enables Rancière’s wide appeal today, as perhaps the closest thing currently available to a spirited modernist, a characterization he would no doubt refute. Any attempt to rise once again to Jameson’s challenge, to attempt to historicize the resounding popularity and strength of conviction of today’s “communist hypothesis,” would have to begin, as many have, by marking its distance from the end-of-history and end-of-art phantasms 36 37 38 39

Gabriel Rockhill, in Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 82, emphasis added. Rancière, “Art of the Possible,” 259. See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 29.

14

01-mitam08.ARTM_a_00116-Roberts-v1.indd 14

4/2/15 2:26 PM

| ROBERTS

40 See Alain Badiou, “The Communist Hypothesis,” New Left Review, no. 49 (January– February 2008): 29–42; and Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (London: Verso, 2010). 41 Badiou, “Communist Hypothesis,” 35. 42 Susan Buck-Morss, “The Second Time as Farce . . . Historical Pragmatics and the Untimely Present,” in Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, eds., The Idea of Communism (London: Verso, 2010), 80. 43 Susan Buck-Morss, “The Post-Soviet Condition,” in IRWIN, eds., East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe (London: Afterall, 2006), 494–99. 44 See Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010). 45 Buck-Morss, “Post-Soviet Condition,” 495. 46 Ibid., 496.

UNNAMING THE SYSTEM?

of 1980s postmodernism. 40 Alain Badiou’s 2008 article of that title reasserted the “hypothesis . . . that a different collective organization is practicable,” provoking considerable debate and inspiring a major conference in London in March 2009. 41 Susan Buck-Morss’s paper there castigated the left for languishing in the “comfort zone” of the Western philosophical canon, but it is in an earlier article, from 2006, that she alights upon the political conjuncture that, for her, compels a rethinking of theory from the ground up. 42 It is, she asserts, our global “postSoviet condition,” above all, that has put a decisive end to ends and that lies at the root of this novel potentiality. 43 Buck-Morss here captures something of the truth, and it is surely the case that for many cultural thinkers and workers today, the incessant disruptions of our global, post-Fordist capitalism are felt not merely as intensified alienation but also, in a conflicting moment, as an emergent sense of their provisionality, and an inchoate feeling, if not of “living in the end times” of capitalism itself, then at least of our living on after the decline of a certain high-postmodernist melancholy. 44 Something like this conflict may even be the index of today’s doubled temporality. Smith’s permanentseeming aftermath thus becomes a dizzying futurity in Buck-Morss’s illuminating discussion of the cultural predicament of the geopolitical present, in which “Europe and the West will cease to be the reference point beyond which theorists need to position themselves as post- or neo-.”45 Articulating this condition as one of simultaneous failure and liberating release for the practice of theory, Buck-Morss contends: “Attempts to describe the present transformation are bound to fail. The terms of description are themselves undergoing a transformation, and it is necessary from a left point of view that this be not merely allowed, but encouraged. Rigidity of the discourse of critical theory must be avoided at all costs.”46

15

01-mitam08.ARTM_a_00116-Roberts-v1.indd 15

4/2/15 2:26 PM

Cautioning against the reification of theory is one thing, and always salutary. However, pronouncing in advance the necessary failure of its categories as the inevitable consequence of the decline of Western hegemony—that is, presuming an automatic equation between Western geopolitical and economic “bankruptcy” and the “ruins of Western discourse” itself—seems more than a little peremptory. 47 Doubtless contrary to her intentions, and in spite of the determinism of the argument, Buck-Morss here risks conceding too much ground to the very “resistance to totalities” of critical theory’s principal object, namely, global capitalism itself. 48 This, indeed, was always at the very heart of the problematic of postmodernism for Jameson, who put the matter of our political injunction to totalization squarely: “We know that we are caught within these . . . complex global networks, because we palpably suffer the prolongations of corporate space everywhere in our daily lives. Yet we have no way of thinking about them, of modeling them, however abstractly, in our mind’s eye. This cognitive ‘problem’ is then the thing to be thought.”49 This is no less true, today, of what we may or may not wish to (and yet nevertheless must) call the contemporary. After all, how much of a liberation can failure really be? What is at stake, and at risk, in the absolutization of a post-Soviet epistemological break? Just what is it that makes the 1980s so distant, so misleading?

ARTMARGINS 4:2

CONTEMPORARY ART HISTORY’S CONTEMPORANEITY

Postmodernism could not be disproved, then, but for that very reason it bore an enhanced burden of proof. By contrast, like Poe’s purloined letter, contemporaneity has tended comparatively easily to disappear or retreat on account of its self-evidence, at least until its recent take-up. Where art history’s own accounts of the emergence of the contemporary have themselves insisted on a harder periodization, they have lately tended to turn on the third of Osborne’s moments, the world-­ historical conjuncture of 1989–91. This is perhaps inevitable, given the real fact of the global art world’s technologically expanded connectivity since that time. Exploration of the institutional features of this expansion is, for example, at the center of the international research initiatives Former West (2008–16) and Global Art and the Museum 47 Ibid., 496. 48 Jameson, Postmodernism, 399. 49 Ibid., 127.

16

01-mitam08.ARTM_a_00116-Roberts-v1.indd 16

4/2/15 2:26 PM

53 54 55 56 57

|

52

See www.formerwest.org and www.globalartmuseum.de. Hans Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate,” in Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg, eds., The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2009), 38–73. Alexander Alberro, “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’,” October, no. 130 (Fall 2009): 57, 55. Ibid., 55. On this market-institutional drive, see also Octavian Esanu, “What Was Contemporary Art?,” ARTMargins 1, no. 1 (February 2012): 7. Pamela Lee, New Games: Postmodernism after Contemporary Art (London: Routledge, 2013), 39. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 41.

ROBERTS

50 51

UNNAMING THE SYSTEM?

(2006–), both of which take 1989 as the historical starting point of their enquiries into the global condition of contemporary art.50 Surveying “Contemporary Art as Global Art” in an essay of that title, Hans Belting, codirector of the latter initiative, argues that curators and collectors have become the drivers of qualitatively “contemporary” change since that year, marked by the rise of a super-wealthy, superconnected global art elite that represent, he suggests, “a new stage in art’s exodus from the patronage of art history.”51 Amplifying Belting in his response to the journal October’s “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’,” Alexander Alberro similarly identifies the rise of collecting as “sheer speculation” and of “global exhibitions . . . as exploratory arms of the Western art market” as signal developments of the “years following 1989.”52 Despite their attempts to understand contemporary art as a key index of a “new historical period,” what Belting’s and Alberro’s discussions in fact reveal is the emergence of contemporaneity as a discursive and institutional shift within the art world above all.53 For her part, Lee’s healthy suspicions of both the 1989 thesis and contemporaneity more generally are premised on the fact that this shift has been primarily market-driven.54 Lee’s 2013 book, New Games: Postmodernism after Contemporary Art, thus argues for the ongoing importance of that body of theory and practice of the 1970s and 1980s that became known in Anglo-American circles as critical postmodernism, in the face of its “premature” forgetting in today’s art world.55 In particular, she asserts its continued relevance “for art history’s . . . engagement with globalization and neoliberalism.”56 Lee makes plain that she writes “well after the fact of its obsolescence,” but that in this very obsolescence, critical postmodernism might yet be mined for its resistant charge.57 However,

17

01-mitam08.ARTM_a_00116-Roberts-v1.indd 17

4/2/15 2:26 PM

ARTMARGINS 4:2

the triple resistance to periodization, historicism, and a “logic of totalization” that she locates in the thought of Craig Owens, Robert Smithson, and Jean-François Lyotard is what looms largest in her attempt to elicit that which endures in postmodernism as “a theory of contemporary art.”58 In this way, Lee’s emphasis upon a particular cultural-theoretical lineage of the North means that, despite nods toward Jameson, her rebooted postmodernism relinquishes his central motivation, and sits all too comfortably within the received terms of postmodernism’s definition according to the North American (read: New York) art world of the 1980s, as a culture of skepticism toward systematic historical and political thinking. Retrieving postmodernism for contem­ poraneity, Lee recenters it firmly within a North American milieu, a culture whose global penetration, hybridization, and inexorable decentering the discourse of postmodernism itself, as it stood under the impact of Jameson in the 1980s, had only begun to trace. By contrast, Smith’s extensive work stands as an exemplary account of the fully global condition of art’s contemporaneity, again marked by a commendable resistance to the idea of an absolute historical break at the turn of the 1990s. Across a number of articles and books written since the millennium, Smith has outlined with panoptic range and great synthetic skill the emergence in “EuroAmerica” of “contemporary” art from “late modern” art since the mid-20th century, plotting the acceleration of this transition since the 1980s, with the rise of what he now calls the “remodernist,” “retro-sensationalist,” and “spectacle art and architecture” of the global North, alongside (and complexly imbricated with) a broader “postcolonial turn” both there and elsewhere.59 In his 2011 book, Contemporary Art: World Currents, Smith maps the labored birth of contemporaneity from the slow decline of the modern, a transition amid which the postmodern signifies little more than a passing chapter of late 20th-century art history. In Smith’s view, and in what Smith judges to be the dominant view among today’s generation of “emerging artists,” the postmodern is revealed to have been nothing more than a conceptual stopgap, an “outmoded term . . . [and] a temporary placeholder that is no longer adequate to describe conditions that . . . have changed fundamentally.”60 58 59

Ibid., 121, 13. In addition to the works previously cited, see Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 60 Smith, World Currents, 11.

18

01-mitam08.ARTM_a_00116-Roberts-v1.indd 18

4/2/15 2:26 PM

61 Jameson, Postmodernism, 309. 62 Smith, “Contemporaneity Question,” 8; Jameson, Postmodernism, 413. 63 Smith, “Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity,” 704; Jameson, Postmodernism, 413.

UNNAMING THE SYSTEM? ROBERTS

|

Like Lee, and in accordance with Rancière’s repositioning of art as the nerve center of culture in general, Smith’s narrative is a little quick to appeal to art’s in-house tribunal for the demands of a broader cultural periodization. Broadly, it is to the credit of the discourse on the contemporary that, unlike many of the premature proclamations that went under the name of postmodernism, it does not willfully preclude art’s cultural authority. However, perhaps equally problematically, it tends instead to presume it wholesale, in defiance not only of a generation or more of deep skepticism in this regard, but in the face, no less, of today’s increased capitalization and instrumentalization of culture within global circuits. Among the key world-historical changes for Smith is the becoming contemporary of the entire world—that is, the definitive end of both the reality and ideology of a global division between modern and unmodern peoples (albeit within the frame of advancing inequality everywhere). Already, however, this was precisely the emergent reality of postmodernity for Jameson, for whom it was the disappearance of “the residue, the holdover, the archaic” against which modernist culture had long defined itself that marked postmodernism’s erasure of the past and of historicity. 61 If the virtue of Smith’s work is that he consequently insists upon “the diversity of present experiences of temporality,” then it must also be noted that Jameson’s 1991 volume was itself hardly blind to these heterogeneous temporalities as the effect of the “unimaginable decentering of global capital” in the present. 62 If a similar insistence upon, or at least a rhetorical echo of, what Smith now calls “altertemporality” may today be found everywhere—in Rancière, Buck-Morss, and beyond—then it is as well to recall Postmodernism once more: “our insertion as individual subjects into a multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities” expresses this plainly. 63 In sum, the balance sheet of gains and losses that the new paradigm of the contemporary has rendered for art history is so far less than altogether encouraging. Smith’s otherwise laudable resistance to the sharp delineation of a “new historical period” after 1989, and his sweeping survey of a slippage from the late modern into the contemporary that is as gradual and interruptive as it is, on these bases, imperceptible, comes of his conviction that “in contemporary conditions

19

01-mitam08.ARTM_a_00116-Roberts-v1.indd 19

4/2/15 2:26 PM

periodization is impossible.”64 Smith argues in Contemporary Art: World Currents that “diversity . . . [is] the key characteristic of contemporary art, as it is of contemporary life, in the world today.”65 But there is, in Smith’s contemporary, scarcely any attempt to try to think the hidden identity of diversity—or, rather, to think the problem of how to think this identity—and this because, he argues, “there is no longer any ­overarching explanatory totality that accurately accumulates and convincingly accounts for these proliferating differences.”66 This is an especially odd conclusion to draw from the consideration of a condition that, albeit revealed more clearly under its counterpart socio-economic appellation of globalization, is about nothing if not the advanced grip of capital everywhere. This is the one condition that has, assuredly, not “changed fundamentally,” but continues dramatically to intensify. The problematic of postmodernism and its unfalsifiability for Jameson was, precisely, that the universalization of capital does indeed convincingly account for the proliferation of cultural difference, even as its critique will necessarily fail accurately to accumulate and picture it. Smith correctly insists, more than once, that rising global inequality is a hallmark of the contemporary, yet still he concedes defeat in the face of Jameson’s challenge. Resituating art, straightforwardly, as the unique cultural barometer for the apparently incommensurable spatialities and temporalities of the present, Smith replaces totalization with weak tautology: “Art everywhere today is contemporary in every sense: contemporary in and of itself—in spirit, in the media it deploys, and in its direct engagement of its highly particular viewers.”67 Whether or not it belongs to the necessary failure of its categories, as per Buck-Morss, the resistance to history of Smith’s sui generis contemporaneity may amount to postmodernism’s ghostly victory.

ARTMARGINS 4:2

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Smith and Buck-Morss tend toward a reading of the vertigo of contemporaneity as unprecedented novelty, and Buck-Morss, in particular, ­presumes on this basis that the formidable resources of critical theory have lost their bearings. In turn, Rancière’s appeal, as he concedes, rests in part on a pervasive sense of exhaustion with some of theory’s 64 65 66 67

Smith, “Contemporaneity Question,” 9. Smith, World Currents, 8. Smith, “Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity,” 704. Smith, World Currents, 316.

20

01-mitam08.ARTM_a_00116-Roberts-v1.indd 20

4/2/15 2:26 PM

UNNAMING THE SYSTEM? |

68 See, for instance, Simon During, “Postmodernism or Postcolonialism Today,” Textual Practice 1, no. 1 (1987): 58–86; Kumkum Sangari, “The Politics of the Possible,” Cultural Critique, no. 7 (Fall 1987): 157–86; and Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’,” Social Text, no. 17 (Fall 1987): 3–25. 69 See Chibber, Postcolonial Theory, 239; and Vivek Chibber, “Capitalism, Class and Universalism: Escaping the Cul-de-Sac of Postcolonial Theory,” in Leo Panitch, Greg Albo, and Vivek Chibber, Socialist Register 2014: Registering Class (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013), 63–79. 70 Chibber, Postcolonial Theory, 244.

ROBERTS

hitherto central categories, and it may be precisely this sense that accounts for the tendency to defer instead to art’s authority not only in Rancière but also, to differing degrees, in Smith, Lee, and Osborne. What, then, is the evidence for theory’s defeat? For Jameson’s postcolonial critics, Postmodernism fails in its fatalistic preclusion of any sense of a world not only outside capital but also unassimilable to the Eurocentric terms of its critique. The universalizing pessimism of Jameson’s thesis is read here as intellectual imperialism, and as a dangerous foreclosure upon the possibility of a critical autonomy for the geopolitical and cultural postperipheries whose total integration into world capitalism, it is argued, has been wildly overstated. 68 This, in part, is what many of the authors emphasizing the global divergence of temporalities in contemporaneity wish to have learnt from postcolonial theory and which, on this basis, they attempt to mark. The matter, however, turns on precisely what this integration is to consist in. At base, capital need appropriate only that which is essential for its reproduction; its universalization is therefore far from incompatible with the persistence of local cultural and institutional diversities across the globe. 69 Moreover, the incessant search for and invention of new goods and markets that is capital’s impulse ensures that it has “difference-producing dynamics” all its own.70 However impossible it may be to picture, heterogeneity, finally, does not amount to incommensurability. In any case, apparent differentials of capitalist penetration between contexts—say, technological disparities or differing degrees of the submission of life and labor to capital’s accelerated temporality—offer no easy proof of a divergence of integration. To assert this on the basis of some empirically formed impression would be to belie the insistence of Jameson and many others on the invisi­ bility of a system that produces such global disparities structurally: underdevelopment in one part of the world is the negative corollary of intensified capital accumulation elsewhere. At the extreme, successive

21

01-mitam08.ARTM_a_00116-Roberts-v1.indd 21

4/2/15 2:26 PM

regimes of accumulation throughout the history of capitalism have rendered “entire communities, countries, even continents . . . superfluous to the changing economy of capital accumulation on a world scale.”71 Jamesonian postmodernism tried to hold in play the thought of this global system as an urgent problem for culture, broaching the very real question of the adequacy of art and criticism for such a task. Although the postcolonial reception of Postmodernism goes back to its early incarnation as the famous article of 1984,72 it was nevertheless the 1991 book’s historical ill fortune to arrive on the cusp of a geopolitical shift that has, with time, come to facilitate the casual dismissal of its argument as so much blinkered Americanism. Postmodernism itself may contain a degree of this, but it would in any case be a mistake to consider the book the last word on a cultural-economic system whose central reproductive dynamic is the incessant production of difference. Postmodernism’s obsolescence was, as it were, built-in; it was always, for Jameson, precisely on account of postmodernism’s mutable symptomatology, its expression of equivalence as endless differentiation, that “the concept . . . has to come at the end, and not at the beginning, of our discussions of it.”73 And yet, to be sure, whether as inventory of the present or as dark prophecy, the reifications of Jamesonian postmodernism as the coming to pass of Theodor Adorno’s projected “fully administered world” have been roundly debunked.74 Osborne, for one, argued in 1992 that to loosen the knot of culture and economy in Jameson swiftly unravels the entire theory.75 Either culture’s relative autonomy persists to a degree, or postmodernism prevails, but not both. Osborne’s criticism turned on the central matter of the supposed disappearance of critical distance in postmodernism. How to even conceive a late capitalism, or to narrate what Jameson would concede to be postmodernism’s continued emergence toward global hegemony as an ongoing historical process, if the perpetual present is all that may be known? To reopen even the slightest margin of critical distance, for Osborne, begs the question

ARTMARGINS 4:2

71 72 73 74 75

Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994), 330. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review (1st series), no. 146 (July–August 1984): 53–93. Jameson, Postmodernism, xxii. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997), 153. See Peter Osborne, “A Marxism for the Postmodern? Jameson’s Adorno,” New German Critique, no. 56 (Spring–Summer 1992): 171–92.

22

01-mitam08.ARTM_a_00116-Roberts-v1.indd 22

4/2/15 2:26 PM

n o t e   I thank the editorial team of ARTMargins as well as the two reviewers for their

generous suggestions for improvements to this article. My thanks also to the History of Art resources to complete this research during a postdoctoral fellowship in 2013–15.

76 Osborne, Anywhere, 27.

ROBERTS

|

Department of the University of Warwick for making available to me the time and

UNNAMING THE SYSTEM?

as to what could possibly make postmodernism in any sense qualitatively distinct from the modern, with its residual traces of a precommodified life. This criticism, since echoed by others, is indeed a fundamental blow to Postmodernism’s thesis, although it must also be noted that the readmittance of culture’s relative autonomy by no means automatically translates into the simple renewal of art’s singular significance for that culture. Even Osborne, who precisely defends art’s privileged contemporaneity, can do so only by radically delimiting the range of current art that might have any meaningful “claim on the present.”76 All the same, the task today cannot be to try to salvage post­ modernism minus its reifications. Were this even conceivable, any such tortuous resurrection would seem to be beside the point. Contemporaneity is not—at least, it is no longer—some neutral, empty form that may yet simply be filled with postmodernism’s content. The point, in other words, is that the contemporary has already done its discursive work. Its occlusions are ours to redress, none more pressing than its tendency to evade, or at least to defer, the question of how best to frame today’s intensified intimacy of culture and capital. At stake in Jameson’s imperative to periodize the present is the need to understand this as a structural and not merely contingent closeness, and thus to properly recognize, and to trace, culture’s historically novel place as an integral moment in capital’s reproduction. This, finally, was the problem that Postmodernism itself had attempted to name, and this is why, although Osborne’s challenge is profound, the significance of Jameson’s intervention is by no means exhausted; rather, its thought for the total system, and for the total system as a problem for thought, must today be retained and renewed. If it is nonetheless now too late for a refigured postmodernity to come at the end of present-day dis­ cussions of the contemporary, then, at the very least, the attendant problems of the postmodern must be considered, actively, as being far more than merely residual in our emergent contemporaneity.

23

01-mitam08.ARTM_a_00116-Roberts-v1.indd 23

4/2/15 2:26 PM