Art, Capitalism, Local Struggle: Jon Roffe What follow are a number of propositions that link the work of art up with political struggle and a consideration of the political role of art in resisting capitalism. These propositions are drawn more or less directly from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. The problem, as we often discover, is somewhere else - not in a direct confrontation with a universal agent of homogeneity (the well-known 'Global Capitalism'), but always in a struggle with the local structural configurations that facilitate the corrosive and hallucinatory anti-systemic movement of capitalism. If art has any political value in and of itself, it cannot be in engaging directly with capitalism, but with these local 'modes of realisation.'[1] In other words, the following propositions claim to give an account of the basic tools necessary for the analysis of the contemporary social, political and cultural, from a Deleuzean point of view. First proposition: the initial enemy of art is the clichéFor Deleuze, the initial enemy of art is the cliché: first of all, as the threshold of the average, the conservative and the territorial. An artwork is a cliché in this sense - in both form and content - insofar as it is a product of the dominant territorial codes, the structure of our particular societies. These codes are already there, and it is primarily in relation to them that art must first work. In his study of Francis Bacon, Deleuze discusses some of the manual techniques Bacon uses to break with the cliché, and the links between the cliché and representation and narrative in painting. Some of these consist of 'pre-pictoral' acts - like the non-representative marks made on the canvas before the work of painting the Figure begins - the whole process which Deleuze entitles 'diagramming'.[3] Others take the form of the 'asignifying traits' and scrubbed zones that Bacon applies to the nascent Figure itself.[4] The goal of these actions is to break with the gravity of the cliché. We can see something similar in the later work of JMW Turner: on the day devoted to varnishing art works for their subsequent exhibition, Turner would in fact paint on the canvas again , adding paint to the already 'finished' work. These auxiliary marks play an analogous role to the manual treatments of Bacon - interrupting a narrative or representative clichéd function of a painting, and creating a very different kind of art, an art of force and movement through color, rather than cliché.[5] However, there is another register to which the cliché belongs - a more problematic one. Even once an artwork breaks free of the gravity of the territorial cliché, there remains the other subversive movement: that of capitalism, the great equalizer, which threatens to strip the artwork of its distinctiveness in order to submit it to the commodity form. So, art is threatened on the one hand by the fall into the orbit of the society in which it is produced, and which precedes it (which are 'always already there'), and also by the movement of capitalism which strips away the distinctive force of the work and makes it circulate in the cosmos of the commodity. The two registers of the cliché, or its two faces, are those of the State and of capitalism.[6] There is nothing to guarantee that escaping one of these registers will imply the same in the other - to the contrary. We know the unforgiving judgement of parody Deleuze offers in the course of his commentaries on Spinoza: it cannot provide any real ground for creating new and more affirmative ways of living.[8] However, his remark about the milieu of the cliché is more important for us here. Unless art attains to something beyond the cliché, there are no further questions to be posed in terms of the relations between art and capitalism. There are two reasons for this: first, because the clichéd art-work is already a commodity, a ready-made product, offering no resistance to the capitalist socio-economic state of affairs; second, since the network or quilt of clichés that populate the white canvas, the 'silence' before the music, and the blank page are always already a part of the social context in which the art work is to be created - that is, capitalist society. Despite appearances, the canvas is literally a piece of its contemporary social life. The first challenge for the work of art is the need to break with the cliché - but this break cannot take place at once, as if in one movement. And the fact that it is not a simple act, a choice, is what makes art a type of work. Art needs to work because it is always a struggle with the multifarious levels of cliché that subsist throughout the creation of the work. This mistaken idea, that the break with cliché can be accomplished at once, as if by an act of a concerted will on the part of the Artist, is a part of the same set of beliefs as the claim that art is by nature revolutionary. This latter naïve and romantic claim itself fails to provide any resistance to the actual mechanism of the negative aspects of capitalist social forms. Clearly, in contrast, what is necessary is a political realism. Deleuze and Guattari: 'We hold in the first place that art and science have a revolutionary potential, and nothing more.'[9] Again, however, to stop at this point is to leave unexamined a further unjustified optimism. Second proposition: both art and capitalism operate, in the first instance, in precisely the same wayDeleuze and Guattari's analysis of capitalism proceeds on the basis of a small number of concepts. First of all, any particular society is defined in terms of the flows that constitute it, and the ways in which they are restricted or segmented - that is, coded. Flows of capital, information, traffic and language, flows of water, opinion, expertise, flows of people. 'Flows of women and children, flows of herds and of seed, flows of shit, menstrual flows: nothing must escape coding.'[10] In all of these cases, a society can be understood as the various coding mechanisms that regulate and distribute the flows that constitute it. 'In short, the general theory of society is a generalised theory of flows.'[11] What is essential is to note that neither state of affairs - that is, the flows or the codes that structure them - could exist independently. Flows totally free of structure would leave us with nothing, total anarchy, a loss of determinate existence. This is figured, in one respect, as schizophrenia , the absolute limit of any society.[12] On the other hand, the total dominance of the coding regime that is society would be itself undermined by the absolute stultification of flows that would result. This would be death itself. Deleuze and Guattari will always insist, in a number of registers, that neither of these two states of flows, totally decoded and totally overcoded, is possible. The discussion of society as a regime of coding reaches its peak in the treatment of the nature of the State: the most elaborate, the most profound, the most dominant coding regime. What characterizes the State in particular is its despotic character, the way in which the flows of State society are coded in the register of the universal or global. Pre-State society is characterized by the localized, patchwork nature of coding regimes, but State society imposes a structural global or universal layer on social organization - hence Deleuze and Guattari's use of the term overcoding to describe the manner in which State society organizes the movements that it governs. The great exception to this definition of society is provided by capitalism. Instead of coding flows, capitalism actively decodes them, and in place of coding engages with the flows according to an immanent set of axiomatic structures. 'Capitalism is the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form of money.'[13] As Deleuze and Guattari put it elsewhere: 'Everything in the system is insane: this is because the capitalist machine thrives on decoded and deterritorialized flows; it decodes and deterritorializes them still more, but while causing them to pass into an axiomatic apparatus that combines them.'[14] Many noteworthy aspects of the axiomatics of capitalism are investigated by Deleuze and Guattari, but the central matter that concerns us here is that, in contrast to the qualitative differences imposed by the various regimes of coding, the process of axiomatisation reduces all differences to quantitative ones. Social and cultural values are dissolved into a radical equality of amounts. In the case of the work of art, what matters is the relative ability for an artwork to mobilize the movement of capital instead of the force that the work - as a work - can convey. In short, the capitalist axiomatic renders everything the same in order to establish a universal or global system of exchange. The point of these preceding analyses emerges for us here when we come to define art and the work of the artist. Initially, as we have seen, the obstacle to be dealt with is the cliché, which takes two forms: the moribund State form, which is the result of the work being overcoded, and the capitalist form, which dissolves the work of art, divests it of its qualitative characteristics. But how can this attempt to evade cliché on the first (State) level, be accomplished? Above all, by decoding the structure of cliché a flow is created and something new happens. So, in the first instance, we must recognize that art and capitalism at least attempt the same activity: the permanent decoding of flows. This would consist of achieving of a state of regulation beyond the State, in the direction of schizophrenia and chaos. The threats engendered by such a state of affairs are clear: that art either remains in the coded cliché, or contributes directly to the process of capitalism; that art is, at best, politically useless. Should these threats lead us to advocate a conservative art practice for political reasons? We are not there yet. This is only the first movement involved in the creation of an art work, and this is only a superficial account of the relation between the code and the axiom. Third proposition: there is no global capitalist StateIn order to proceed, a further point about the State regime of coding must be made: there could never be a global society or state. All societies - social formations - exist by reference to a certain territory, the relative limits of the code. This in turn means that there are always flows which escape the coding apparatuses that constitute societies - and, more to the point, which are in fact created by the very apparatuses that they escape. Deleuze and Guattari in relation to State society: 'What counts is that in one way or another the apparatus of overcoding gives rise to flows that are themselves decoded - flows of money, labor, property . . . These flows are the correlate of the apparatus.'[15] Now, this aspect of social organization assumes a paradoxical character in State society, since, as we have seen, the overcoding imposed by the state operates from a global, centralist, perspective. The ethical values of a particular modern state society, for example, are always posed in universal - which is to say moral - ways. However, the actual reach of a coding regime (even when posed in a universal sense) is always limited to a territory, to the threshold which marks the end of the relevance of this regime. The movement of capitalism vastly exceeds the territoriality of State societies. So, not only does it operate by freeing the flows from the codes that governed them in the state in order to make them available as commodities, but the capitalist movement also brings about an incredible movement of deterritorialization, extending the reach of the axiom beyond the limits of the State overcoding apparatuses. All these points can be further specified in the terms offered by Deleuze and Guattari in some pages of real importance contained in Plateau 14 - '7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture' - of A Thousand Plateaus .[16] This is one of the central texts in the contemporary attempt to come to grips with capitalism. The spectre that we are confronted with at this juncture is the crypto-apocalyptic but nonetheless very familiar global capitalist society or State, which Deleuze and Guattari characterise in the following way: It is this threatening visage that we are confronted with by the majority of liberal political commentators today: the precarious contemporary situation, and our relative individual powerlessness in the face of this ephemeral headless leviathan. Deleuze and Guattari continue, noting that at first blush But this picture is, by itself, presumptuous and misleading: this is only 'one very partial aspect of capital.'[19] The first form of this presumption is the belief in a real political level of organization that oversees and would overcode the entire world. Deleuze and Guattari again: 'It is an absurdity to postulate a world supergovernment that makes the final decisions.'[20] It is an absurdity, a veritable impossibility because of the very nature of capitalism itself, and the weakness of any political structure in the face of this superior decoding and deterritorializing force. The very raison d'être of capitalism (and already this phrase is mistaken for the same reason) is to decode and deterritorialize every coding regime that stands in its way. Further, if we were to insist that some international level of government did in fact exist, it too would be powerless in the face of capitalism in any case. In contrast, however, it would be equally false to assume that capitalist society could be understood completely in terms of the decoding and deterritorializing movement of the axiomatic. While, 'it seems that there is no longer a need for a State, for distinct juridical and political domination,' it would be a mistake to think that capitalism can indeed function in the total absence of coding regimes.[21] What we confront here is the real limit of capitalism itself, which Deleuze and Guattari here align with schizophrenia, and later (in What is Philosophy? ) chaos.[22] While the movement of the axiomatic - and hence of capitalism - moves continually towards absolute deterritorialisation and the decoding of all flows, this is strictly speaking impossible. More to the point, it would be useless for capitalism to attain such a state (if we can call it this) since it would destroy the ground of capitalism itself. So, the effects of capitalism are precisely to attempt to render everything a commodity, to apply axioms to reduce all qualitative differences to quantitative ones, and as a result to make them universally exchangeable. The means by which this is effected, however, could never be axiomatic per se . The solution to this conundrum is to be found by understanding what happened to the State (and coding regimes in general) after the development of capitalism. As we all well know, it would be a mistake to say that coding apparatuses - the government, taste makers, financial regulations, manners, and so forth - no longer have any relevance. Aside from a gross empirical oversight, such a view would be - as we have just seen - to misunderstand the nature and limits of capitalism. For Deleuze and Guattari, what we must realize is that in capitalism, the State is still present, while playing a different role and assuming a different form. The State, no longer supervening over social life, takes the role of a 'modes of realisation,' of the capitalist axiomatic.[23] This role is essentially two-fold. On the one hand, it is a matter of these modes of realzation functioning as regulatory and facilitating structures for the dual movement of decoding and axiomatization. The fact that copies of Van Gogh's various paintings of sunflowers adorn everything from office cubicles to toilet paper should not evoke the pitiful and nostalgic mourning a past in which art was revered religiously. This state of affairs cannot be accounted for on the basis of the commodification of art alone . What needs to be examined is the particular interface between the capitalist commodification of art and the local systems of regulation which engage the axiomatic with art in this way. On the other, in real-izing the axiomatic, the State gives local and concrete form to the reduction of quality to quantity, of values (in the most general sense) to commodities, and so forth. As expressions of the axiomatic, capitalist states are the local forms of the both the worst and the best results of this movement. In fact, as Deleuze and Guattari go on to state, this latter - and really threatening - aspect of contemporary social politics in capitalist society is the manner in which States, which realize the capitalist axiom in particular concrete situations, can exceed the power of the axioms in question. This leads towards new levels of domination, new ways to submit the members of these - our - societies to historically unprecedented kinds of oppression. Like any virus, capitalism only survives on the basis of the relative health of the host - but this does not render it harmless. In passing, parenthetically, we read: 'It will be necessary to try to determine the nature of this power [the power of the State under capitalism], why we so often think of it in apocalyptic terms, what conflicts it spawns, what slim chances it leaves us . . .'[24] Precisely - and this is part of what we are doing here. Fourth proposition: all political resistance is localIt is often said that we need to struggle against capitalism 'locally', 'at the grass roots level.' Such claims are met with either the resignation of the exhausted, worn out in the struggle for certain ideals in the face of a supposed global enemy, or with the scorn of the activist, for whom local intervention will never change the more fundamental system - considered to be global - that prolongs the injustices that they wish to oppose. Neither response is justified. In fact, if we follow Deleuze and Guattari, we have very good grounds for insisting on the local quality of political resistance, given what has been said so far. If capitalism, as a general movement of decoding/axiomatization, can only work over flows in the context of a limited and localised set of regulative apparatuses, then it is always at this point that resistance becomes meaningful. The criticisms levelled at this kind of claim by ardent activists should give us pause nonetheless. Even more so, the fact that certain local activities do seem to have a wider impact draws attention to the peculiar nature of the relation between local and global. In fact, what remains problematic in the call to a local resistance to capitalism is a poorly formulated idea of locality. Fifth proposition: the 'local' is a non-limited, unbounded state of affairsDeleuze and Guattari, in the infamous plateau discussing the war machine in A Thousand Plateaus engage in an extremely useful discussion on this topic, by opposing the concepts relative global and local absolute .[25] The first is a correlate of the State, which imposes a global view of the world from a particular point of view. As we saw earlier, the State overcoding apparatuses work by imposing a social structure according to a central, global perspective which is nonetheless embodied in a particular and relative fashion. As universal as the form of the codes are, the territory to which they are applicable is limited. The second concept of the local absolute is connected by Deleuze and Guattari to the forces of deterritorialization (they are dealing specifically with the figure of the nomad), and hence aptly describes the relationship between the capitalist axiomatic and its modes of realization: 'an absolute that is manifested locally, and engendered in a series of local operations of varying orientations.'[26] This quite precisely reflects what we have already seen: that capitalism is realized through a series of particular concrete coding apparatuses. The discussion continues by defining the local in keeping with this opposition: The peculiar coupling of the local and the absolute in terms of political activity reveals itself in this way: while particular acts of resistance are engaged with particular concrete circumstances, this does not mean that their effects are limited to this locality. Locality - the locality of the realization of capitalism and hence the locality of struggle against this mode of realization - must not be construed in terms of a closed, independent field. Particular localities are connected directly to other localities. What happens in a particular context is not and cannot be restricted to that context. The great strength of this account of locality, then, is that it insists on the sole importance of local resistance to capitalism without giving up on the broader intended consequences of these actions; it is an extremely powerful political concept. To sum up: the central goal of political activism, on Deleuze and Guattari's model, is to contest the realisation of capitalism at its point of contact with the concrete world. In doing so, local acts of resistance contest the expression of capitalism at work and create ruptures in the multiplicitous network of localities, tremors in other localities that lie along fault lines created through this effort. Sixth proposition: the political potential of art is to attain to singular creations, and thus to create new ways of existing The preceding analysis may seem to vindicate local struggle as the singular forum for political resistance, but art and the work of artists has yet to be accounted for. In the fight against the two fronts of the cliché, art finds itself caught between two deaths: the quiet death as a coded piece of the modern capitalist State, and the schizophrenic capitalist death, the death of dissolution into the circulation of the commodity. The fragility of art is revealed in the continual double threat of the moribund State and the deterritorialising and chaotic movement of capitalism itself.[28] However, more needs to be said about art than confronting it with its two potential fates. The work of art is not just about creating flows per se . This is certainly the first step, the break with the State regime of the cliché, and without this nothing takes place. But there is also the work itself, the work of art - this cannot simply be reduced to a flow. What further must be said? And how can a work of art be a political act? More precisely, first we must ask: what is a work of art itself? Deleuze offers a very simple answer: a creation composed of sensations - that is, affects and percepts. Affects, percepts - sensations in turn must be considered in their own right. They are not the affects or perceptions of a particular person, for example the artist, but are themselves the creations. For Deleuze, art is literally the creation of ways of experiencing.[29] The great theme that Deleuze takes from Paul Klée - that the audience for the work of art is lacking - is revealing here. The work of art does not represent (or distort) the familiar world for the benefit of a pre-existing audience. Instead, in creating new ways of experiencing and living, the artwork calls out for a people of the future, those people who would experience and live in these new ways. What Deleuze and Guattari say of philosophy we can also say of art: It is the concept of utopia - of an unbound open future - that links art with the concrete realization of capitalism in a given time and place (its 'present milieu'), and it is this utopian aspect of artistic practice that uniquely gives us the right to use the phrase political art , in which we can hear fragments of ways of living to come. Again, the utopian orientation of art emerges when it is concerned with creating works which engage us in new ways of living. Art doesn't describe a utopia ('this is what the world would look like . . .'), but literally creates new ways of experiencing the world.[30] Again, what Deleuze and Guattari say of the concept - the product of philosophy - can be said of the artwork: Art, no longer a clichéd product of the society it wishes to exceed, acts on the coded flows of everyday life and experience, notably the local modes of realisation of capitalism - the artwork is full of a critical, political thought of freedom. So, on a schematic level, there are two moments in the creation of a work of art. There is the breaking of the gravity of the cliché, and the composition of the work which expresses these new ways of living and experiencing. In his study of Bacon, which we discussed above in passing, Deleuze identifies these two moments as the break with the cliché already present in the canvas, the studio and the head of the artist; and then the construction of the Figure, that compound of sensations that expresses new ways of living and experiencing. Art goes beyond the clichés that are a piece with the structure of our society, our capitalist society that realises the glacial movement of the axioms, and in the face of these composes works which resist this movement. And art works literally create new ways of living by expressing life in a form that exceeds the State cliché and yet resists the axiom. Above all, art goes beyond the abstract universality of the cliché, the 'Everybody knows that . . .', which governs vast tracts of political discourse, and provides a point of resistance whose cry is rather 'but there are other ways to live!' These six propositions, and the view of the artwork and society that they propound, allow us to come to terms with the 'revolutionary potential' of art - and some of the dangers that it faces - in the face of contemporary capitalism. Properly understood, art as the creation of new ways of living, and local resistance as an unbounded activity, form the basis of any progressive political theory of art. [1] Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus , trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press,1987) 436.
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