Class Composition & Its Discontents: Interview with Stevphen Shukaitis
on Art, Politics, and Strategy
Jens Kastner
English: http://transversal.at/blog/Class-Composition-And-Its-Discontents
German:
http://transversal.at/blog/Class-Composition-And-Its-Discontents?lid=Das-Unbehagen-an-der-Klassenzusammensetzung
Jens Kastner: You are author of a book on autonomy and
self-Organization, and you recently organized an exhibition and a book
on Gee Vaucher, who’s best known as the main visual artist for the
anarchist punk-Band Crass. Then we can assume you are also familiar with
history and theory of anarchism. In your latest book The Composition of
Movements to Come, you are re-reading some artistic avant-gardes from an
autonomist standpoint. A central notion of this re-reading is
“strategy”. If I should characterize an anarchist perspective on any
subject, I would choose “strategy” as one of the last. It seems
contradictory to the anarchist radical moralism of acting here & now. So
what does strategy mean for you?
Stevphen Shukaitis: When there is an area of political discussion or a
concept that seemingly cannot be discussed it is often useful to start
from there, or at the very least to investigate why this is the case.
That would seem to be an important way step out of any ‘radical
moralism’ – even if holding on to a sense of ethics at the same time.
This particular book started coming out of experiences of the
anti-globalization or global justice movement of the 1990s and early
2000s. In particular it starts from ideas around employing a diversity
of tactics, which was quite useful in terms of bringing together quite
different often disparate approaches for common protests and projects.
But for me that also raised the question of how one would even go about
thinking or working through strategic directions for movement organizing.
I’m not so sure that there are not always already discussions of
strategy occurring in anarchist and autonomous politics. It’s just that
they often times don’t present themselves that way – in large part
because of the negative connotations often associated with strategic
thought as being a top down, hierarchical orientation to politics. And
that is often the case. But my approach was to look at different ways
that avant-garde and experimental arts, including the Situationists, the
Art Strike, and Neue Slowenische Kunst function to create collective
spaces that functioned as forms of collective strategizing. You might
call it exploring strategy by other means, aesthetic in this case.
JK: For example, you’re arguing that the practices and ideas of Guy
Debord and the Situationist Internationale should not be understood
“only as artistic-political interventions, but also as methods of
articulating strategies of collective subjectification through these
practices” (26). Would that be valid for every avant-garde movement or
even for all of these you have investigated?
SS: I would hesitate at arguing that this would be the case for every
avant-garde movement or practice. But it would certainly seem the case
that avant-garde artistic practice, as it embraces the idea that it is
attempting to radically change the nature of art, politics, and social
life in general, would contain some notion of reorienting collective
subjectification. The Situationists, for example, claimed that they did
not want lead or act in a vanguardist manner but rather to ‘organize the
detonation,’ which for them became finding practices and creating
situations in which new social subjects could emerge from and act
collectively. Indeed, this might not always be clearly expressed, and
remain implicit. And in those cases there is more work needed to tease
out what notions and practices of subjectification are contained within.
It’s like Gee Vaucher says that all art is political, all aesthetics is
political – the question is how you draw the line. I would suggest that
artistic avant-gardes need to have some approach to where and how that
line is drawn. And this will be less readily apparent for movement that
are more or perhaps even exclusively contained within the institutional
‘art world’ – such as was argued by Peter Burger (amongst others) about
the so-called ‘neo-avant-gardes’ of the 1960s. But even there you could
find approaches to subjectification, just less explicit and not as
developed.
JK: One of your thesis is that the avant-garde “has not died” (72). Does
that does mean that all of their strategies could be practiced today in
the same way as during the 1960s? There still seems to be an
emancipatory potential in art practices. On the other hand you are also
stating that the utopian potential of being an artist has collapsed
because in contemporary societies it “has been realized perversely in
existing forms of diffuse cultural production. ‘Everyone is an artist’
as a utopian possibility is realized just as ‘everyone is a worker’.”
(72) How would you mediate these positions?
SS: It would be absurd to just fall back on repeating ideas or practices
from the avant-garde today hoping that they would have the same politics
or resonance that they did originally. Of course they wouldn’t. To the
degree that any political or artistic practice can claim to be radical
it’s only in relationship with the composition of the situation it finds
itself in. And that’s part of why I’m trying to further expand the
autonomist notion of class composition, using the concepts of political
and technical composition in a broader sense to analyse social,
cultural, and artistic practices. This follows from how Bifo describes
this expanded sense of an autonomist Marxist framework as ‘compositionism.’
I don’t think it’s my role to mediate the possibilities of artistic or
cultural production. Rather what I tend to do is to observe (and
participate in sometimes) practices that are already happen – and then
to look at what they produce for those who are involved in them. This is
along the lines of what John Clammer has described as developing not
just a new sociology of art, but sociology from art. And in that sense
the belief in the utopian potential, the liberatory aspect, of being an
artist has not collapsed today. You can see that when you talk to people
who embark in trying to develop their career or life as an artist, or as
a cultural producer more generally, because of the freedom they believe
that will bring them. That’s a very powerful, and still seductive idea.
And perhaps that was never really the case – it was always a form of
autonomy that was proclaimed and compromised at the same time. But what
does the belief in those potentials of artistic and cultural practice do
for those who believe in it? And yes, there are still dynamics of
elitism existing within the combined and unevenly developed art worlds
out there. But sometimes even when that elitism has been eliminated or
reduced the idea of it persists as something to be railed against
through railing against it, or making of populist gestures. I’m more
interested in teasing out what that psychological and social investment
in artistic and cultural practices does for the people involved in them,
more so than developing an abstract analysis of them.
JK: Coming back to the “strategic-compositional reading of the
avant-garde” (141). Your point is, in short, only if we are looking in a
certain way, we will see certain realities: For example, the rupture of
the everyday-life in the history of the avant-gardes instead of their
contribution to the art history. But does this sort of investigation not
tend to fade out realities that are not suitable? For example, the
aspect of reproduction of an elitist circle in which every art as art is
perceived, or the aspect of artists as role-models for cultural
entrepreneurship. What about failure?
SS: There certainly are aspects of failure to consider, and not always
in a negative manner. Here I’m thinking of how that was explored in the
book Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices that the
Journal of Aesthetics & Politics released a few years ago. Failure is
often productive in the sense that it does something for those who are
involved in whatever practice is in question, even if they did not
attain the stated goals and is not considered successful. If anything I
think there is too much of a focus on the failures of the avant-garde.
And this fixation on failure is not helpful precisely because of the way
it seems to block off looking at what is actually produced for those
involved. And that’s part of why I would say it can be helpful, and has
been helpful, for the framing to have shifted away from the idea of
avant-garde practices to experimental practice. Because when you talk
about experimental practice it’s less a case of being so worried about
if the way is being led and more about what is produced.
A few years ago I was talking with Alan W. Moore about an exhibition
about art and squatting that has taken place in London. It was a
wonderful exhibition and experiment showing all the great things that
squatting had made possible by making more space for cultural
production. And I asked Alan why refer to it as an exhibition at all –
what was the importance of that? His response was that calling it an
exhibition allowed for stepping outside of the realm of political
calculation or sole focus on success. You might say that’s almost
putting the Kantian notion of purposeless purpose to a decidedly
politically purpose. And I find that quite useful.
JK: The possibility for failure or the possibility of remaining without
any effect on social and political life of a society seems absent to me
in the writings of many post-Operaist theoreticians. Antonio Negri
characterizes art as multitude, Paolo Virno says avant-garde art is “a
lot like communism”. What about criteria for success concerning the
politics of art?
SS: I probably just backed myself into a rather unpleasant Königsberg
alley by mentioning Kant, but I don’t think you’re going to get anything
like universal criteria for success. I’m more interested in taking a
more sociological approach and drawing from the criteria that people
involved in various forms of artistic and cultural production give
themselves, whether explicitly or implicitly. And those will vary
widely, from attempting to move and influence people, to propagate
ideas, or to further develop practices of expression or deepen meaning.
The broad development of success metrics and KPIs can be left to the art
bureaucrats – and surely they have for too many. If anything I’d argue
for an approach that avoids being taken hostage to notions and criteria
of success, whatever they may be. Or at least I’d suggest developing a
more flexible relationship with notions of success and failure as well
as remembering that both change the conditions of the possible. And the
main question always remains engaging with those conditions.
JK: But not to speak about art all the time: The title of your book
refers to the autonomist tradition. The term “composition” there was an
analytic tool to investigate the changes which capitalist developments
caused in the social and political mixture/ composition of the working
class. The notion then also worked as normative bracket to identify
certain processes, compositional processes of a struggling,
self-organizing working class. In my view, the problem in this tradition
of using the term – from Mario Tronti to John Holloway – is that the
really important questions could not be asked. The answer is always
already there: The working class is struggling for liberation. But what,
if the people are not struggling, or struggling for the wrong reasons
and dubious goals? With Pierre Bourdieu, I would agree that social
analysis has to be focussed on struggles. But the results of these
struggles should always considered open. Otherwise, you could not
explain why so many working class members are voting for ultra-right
wing parties. Do you think there is a usable – maybe strategical –
anarchist/ autonomist approach to explain right wing populism?
Honestly I’m not the best person to ask about populism, right wing or
otherwise. But my basic inclination in how to approach that question
would be to look at ways that the desires and aspirations expressed in
congealed into those kinds of politics are the frustrations and thwarted
demands that were either abandoned by the Left, or that were stolen from
it. So you can look at the way that someone like Trump addresses himself
to those who feel abandoned and screwed over the neoliberal trade deals,
or the way that the Brexit campaign resonated with those who very much
felt that they left out of the benefits of neoliberal globalization. And
you combine that truncated sense of class consciousness with a
convenient scapegoat, whether in terms of racialized politics, or
through heightened fears around migration and refugees. That’s my first
thought there.
I know I just said a minute ago that there was too much emphasis on
failure in the art historical framing of the avant-garde, but I would
suggest the autonomist tradition has had perhaps the opposite problem,
where there has not been nearly enough consideration of failure, or more
conceptually not enough attention paid to the dynamics of class
decomposition. There’s an interesting question about conflating
strategic and analytical dimensions in autonomist thought. I would
broadly agree that is often the case, sometimes productively, but not
always. You can also find figures whose work is more useful in thinking
that through – such as Bifo and Silvia Federici. That was a key aspect
of my first book was putting the concepts of recuperation and class
decomposition, at the centre of an autonomist analysis. And that’s
important not because of wanting to develop a fixation or fetish of
failure, but because the grounds of political recomposition will be
found in finding ways to counter and undermine existing dynamics of
class decomposition. In that sense your question about right wing
populism is very pressing indeed – and that’s something that very much
would be good to consider. A very fruitful way to start thinking about
that can be found through the writing of Alberto Asor Rosa, who was both
a key influence in early Italian Operaismo, and a key commentator on
literature and culture. And in that spirit I will leave you with a quote
from his recently translated book The Writer and the People:
How to create a profound and organic relation between intellectual
enquiry and vast popular needs has been the dominant question of all
those thinkers and movements that have sought a serious strategy for the
various uprisings for independence or national renewal. How to create
such a relation today, after past bourgeois failures, is the dominant
question of a workers’ movement that aspires to escape from the narrow
horizons into which reformist leaders have forced it for decades. The
problem of the relation: hence, intellectuals/people is only one aspect
of a much vaster vision of class struggle.
--
Stevphen Shukaitis
Autonomedia Editorial Collective
http://www.autonomedia.org
http://www.minorcompositions.info
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