The readings this past week, both for Tuesday and Thursday, left me thinking about the concept of political art. As was mentioned in class on Thursday, “But what does it do?” is of course often not the right question to ask of an artwork, but I do think (as someone interested in studying artworks in historical perspective, and in particular the conditions of their production, reception, and circulation) that it’s an interesting one. It’s also one that’s suggested by the pieces we’ve read this week, if we take them on their own terms. Alexander Galloway looks forward to “the counter gaming movement . . . realizing its true potential as a political and cultural avant-garde.” (“Countergaming,” 126)[1] What does this mean? And how can we critically evaluate the claims implicit in it?
Many European artists and intellectuals of the early 20th century were deeply concerned with the relationship of "the avant-garde" to political change. (The 2007 collection “Aesthetics and Politics,” which consists of work by Bloch, Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno, plus a retrospective essay by Frederic Jameson, provides a fascinating and useful window into some of the debates that were taking place on this question in the interwar period specifically.)[2] But we might say that the label "avant-garde” begs the question. A vanguard can only be correctly identified as such in retrospect, when an army—real or metaphorical—is seen to follow. Much of the discussion in “Aesthetics and Politics” is concerned with identifying a correlation, either positive or negative, between formal experimentation in art—e.g. as practiced by Expressionists, as opposed to Socialist Realists—and the usefulness of art as part of revolutionary program of political and social transformation. This remained an unresolved question for the writers, as did the future of political art. Would it coalesce around a tendency toward experimentation or Popular Front realism?
In evaluating contemporary artworks, Galloway’s four-part schema outlined in “The Unworkable Interface” (47)[3] seems more useful to me than the principles outlined in Wollen’s theses on countercinema. In equating—at least implicitly, in Galloway’s gloss—art that uses “the more experimental techniques practiced in art film” ("Countergaming," 110) with art that is politically radical, Wollen seems to take for granted the correlation that was the subject of so much earlier debate. Countercinema, like Heidegger, like Silicon Valley, seems to valorize disruption as such, and display outsize confidence in disruption's necessarily being something positive and generative. Galloway’s schema, on the other hand, usefully points out that aesthetic disruption—“incoherent aesthetics,” in his terms—can be paired either with a coherent or an incoherent politics, and the specific content of that politics is likewise indeterminate (i.e. it would be a mistake to say, he writes, “that for any ideological formation there exists a specific, natural association between the aesthetic and the political” ("Unworkable Interface," 48).
Raley’s introduction to Tactical Media, and the artworks described therein, seem to be equally fixated for somewhat different reasons on the category of the “aesthetically incoherent” (again in Galloway’s terms) as uniquely and perhaps necessarily politically generative.[4] The use of the label “political” seems central to the text, and to the artists mentioned, but they also display a completely fascinating and thoroughgoing ambivalence toward politics. Raley describes “belief in the possibility of visible and permanent social change” as “embarrassing” (1), a sentiment that (like Galloway’s apologetics for his use of Marx and Freud) seems very much of its moment, and alien to the political and cultural climate of 2018, which has (to different degrees in different fields and social milieux, to be sure) seen a rehabilitation of both Marx and general political unembarrassedness in the wake of the events of 2016, first and foremost, but also 2014, 2011, 2008, etc. In any case, the instances of tactical media Raley describes could arguably belong to Galloway’s category of the “ethical” (i.e. incoherent aesthetics combined with coherent politics) ("Unworkable Interface," 51), in that they tend to marry an aesthetics “tending to unravel neat masses” ("Unworkable Interface," 46) with relatively clear and specific political points. But one could also argue that they belong in Galloway’s fourth category, which he leaves largely undescribed: “truth,” or the combination of an incoherent aesthetics with an incoherent politics. ("Unworkable Interface," 51) The insistent refusal of larger, older, more constructive (in a descriptive, not normative sense) political narratives in favor of “avant-garde artistic experimentation that shuns the manifesto . . ., lacks a big picture, and refuses strategy” (Raley, 9) certainly sounds more like (intentional) political incoherence than coherence.
All of the art and criticism discussed thus far seems to be united by a concern with claiming and delineating the political but not by a clear definition of it. Should we be looking for the political in the intent of the artist? In effects on an audience? In explicit expressions of political ideas in the artwork itself? Or in formal innovations that may be taken by a critic to express the political in a way independent of any of the above? I think Galloway’s use of "World of Warcraft" is an interesting instantiation of the last of these approaches. He sees "World of Warcraft" as “promoting a particularly coherent politics” ("Unworkable Interface," 49) independent of any claim that its creators intended it to do so, its players experience it as doing so, or its content in any overt way does so. But given (to circle back to the beginning) my interest in asking what artworks do, I think it’s worth asking whether "World of Warcraft" performs the functions one would expect it to perform given its grouping with Brecht in Galloway’s schema. Brecht (who was certainly deeply concerned with the reception of his theatrical works in practice as well as in theory), famously described the Verfremdungseffekt and its utility for (politically) influencing audiences. The general idea of course is that creating emotional distance between the audience and diegetic content of the work facilitates more engagement with the work at a rational, intellectual level. [5] Galloway’s concept of interfaces that “work” or “don’t work” seems to draw on Brecht and also on Heidegger, with his distinction between the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand. World of Warcraft certainly shares certain formal features with works intentionally employing the Verfrendungseffekt. But surely it also “works”? In class, we discussed the well-known outlines of the way games like World of Warcraft seem to be consumed in practice. They tend to be narcotic, all-consuming, immersive rather alienating. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s hard to imagine a cultural product less likely to, say, call its consumers out of an inauthentic relation with das Man.[6]
Does this mean that a work that’s immersive rather than alienating can’t be political? On the contrary, I tend to agree with a final, different point made by Galloway, this time in his chapter on “Countergaming,” in thinking that there may be more potential for a “political and cultural avant-garde” in art that “works” than art that “doesn’t work.” When he calls for “countergaming” that’s playable rather than merely a disruption of games (126), it suggests to me the necessity of reevaluating the long 20th century’s valorization of “aesthetically incoherent” art as of necessity the most artistically, intellectually, and politically serious. If nothing else, the past century has shown that Godard's "aesthetically incoherent" films are just as capable of being appropriated as an item of bourgeois cultural capital as any others (if not more so), and that a very possible effect of tactical media is that “capital is delighted, and thanks the tactical media outfit or nerd-modder for the home imporvement.” (Raley, 28) In imagining a future avant-garde, I suspect that looking to the experimental forms of circulation (instantaneous, mass, continuous), creation (collaborative, nonprofessional, anonymous), and consumption (free, outside of gatekeeping cultural institutions) made possible by digital media will be as important as looking to formal innovation at the level of the individual artwork.
Image Source:
“Still of a Soviet Cinetrain from Chris Marker's The Train Rolls On (1973).” Walker, walkerart.org.
1. Galloway, Alexander R. “Countergaming.” Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
2. Bloch, Ernst, et al. Aesthetics and Politics: Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukacs, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno. Verso, 2002.
3. Galloway, Alexander R. “The Unworkable Interface.” The Interface Effect, Polity, 2012.
4. Raley, Rita. “Introduction.” Tactical Media, University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
5. See e.g. “Distancing Effect.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 3 Oct. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distancing_effect.
6. See e.g. Heidegger, Martin, et al. “Being-in-the-World as Being-With and Being-One's-Self. The ‘They.’” Being and Time, HarperPerennial/Modern Thought, 2008, pp. 149–168.
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