Art & Politics

We discussed the relation between art and politics in our reading group, and afterwards I tried to sum up my thoughts thusly:


I believe that art is inherently political, because of two basic aspects of it:

• Art is an empowering activity. By making manifest use of one's own creativity one moves from being a passive receiver (of sensory stimula, of entertainment, of norms and expectations) to being an active agent, thereby enhancing one's own freedom, and in an ideal world, the freedom of others. This has rich political potential, especially in a society where culture has been all but completely reduced to entertainment, where ideological battle has been smoothed over and where the feeling of powerlessness in face of global problems is spreading.

• Art is a social activity. As the cliché states; art is born in the eyes of the beholder. I’d add that it’s also born in the preparatory talks and the post-exhibition discussions, but even the most ardent cultivator of the solitary genius myth must have his/her work seen by an audience for it to become art. Otherwise it simply falls outside my definition of art. Again, our current paradigm of individualism is challenged by a socially inclusive action that has nothing to gain from competition.

That definition of art, as an empowering and social activity, makes it, in relation to our world, a transformative action; and that is my very definition of politics. I believe that a lot of statements made against art being political are based on the common misconception and narrow interpretation of the word politics as including only subjects already on an official or informal political agenda. Rather, for me, the real political action is at the very origin of societal change, not in the laws or demonstrations that confirm and regulate that change. And that is also where art is one of the most effective tools; to propose a new perspective, to question an uncontended aspect of society, or just to bring people together around a creative action that is not a controlled part of the production system.

So I think art can be private, abstract, even attempting to be void of meaning, and still have political implications. Yet I wish more art would consciously address social issues, and I admire most those artists who recognize and cultivate the connection between the personal and the societal.

But this is also where it becomes difficult for me. The acute awareness of a problem often risks inhibiting creativity. One thinks one step too far, and finds oneself in front of a staggering rise of society’s ills, in face of which art seems an insufficient answer. Once again, this has to be a mistaken view. Art, like any truly political action, does not need to alone breach that wall, but only to be the fertilized soil in front of it, in which change can grow. Art should be the question that beckons an answer, it should never provide the answer.

For in some way I agree with the decriers of political art, in that the art they define as political is most often bad art. But what makes it bad as art also makes it less political than good art. That is, art that takes an opinionated stand, no matter how sympathetic, reduces its problematizing capacity, and thus becomes part of a mainstream culture that serves answers and opinions without inviting its audience to a discussion. In other words, an artwork consisting of painted skulls on the american flag to protest imperialism might be an empowering act for the artist, and it might express an opinion which we agree with, but it has all but completely lost its socially empowering aspect, since it does not open up to complex interpretation.

I think that one way to avoid this is to look inwards, and always strive to put oneself in one’s art. Detaching oneself from a problem and looking at it from ”over here”, one cannot help but form some kind of judgement and thus fall into the trap of opinionated art. Art that is born solely out of anger and frustration with the world often turns into bad political art. But as soon as one realizes one’s own part in the problem, and sees society’s missteps reiterated in one's own actions, anger and fingerpointing are replaced by investigation. Then, art will most likely come out as a question that it’s up to an audience to search for an answer to. This is why I love this quote from Ana Mendieta with which I will end these reflections:

It is only with a real and long enough awakening that a person becomes present to himself, and it is only with this presence that a person begins to live like a human being. To know oneself is to know the world, and it is also paradoxically a form of exile from the world. I know that it is this presence of myself, this self-knowledge which causes me to dialogue with the world around me by making art. (Mendieta, 2003: 1065)

References:
Ana Mendieta, 'Art and Politics' in Art In Theory, 1900-2000, 2nd ed. (Blackwell Publishing, 2003) pp. 1064-1065

be|long

Reflections on an exhibition


I have decided to write down a few reflections on my own recent exhibition; be|long. This might well turn out a very self-centered and priggish text, but I feel I had not had all the discussions I hoped for and there’s aspects left that I need to pin down and clarify for myself. Read it at your own peril, then.

I want to take as a starting point the titles in the exhibition, since they have turned out to be far more revelatory than I expected when I first named the works. First off, the title of the whole exhibition, which was designed to be read in three different but interlocking ways. Belong, read as one word, represents what turned out to be perhaps the main theme of the show (slightly more concerned with the individual human than I first pictured). The universal desire to belong to a whole and the frustrating inability to find and hold on to that sense of belonging seems to stem from the common (mis-?)conception that it is something we once had, that we lost, and that we might somehow hope to return to. Then dawns the crushing realization that in this world of constant flux, the idea of a return is an impossible utopia. And so with spatial belonging thus shown a vain prospect; we cannot belong in anything but time. Which leads to the second way to read the title; as the phrase be long, referring to longevity. Uncapable of grasping the intersection of past and future that is the present, and find any kind of solace in our linear time perspective, we try instead to extend our place in time; to live longer, either biologically or in the structures, the buildings, the monuments, we create in our name. Posterity becomes the battleground. In our failure to belong, we try to be long.

And thirdly; isn’t it wonderful how the word belong breaks up into the two verbs; to be and to long? With the risk of turning entirely portentous; don’t these words pretty much define human existence? We are, but we always want to be someone, something, or somewhere else. This constant dissatisfaction separates us (I would suppose) from other lifeforms, and is at its core of course tragic. But isn’t it also what drives creativity, science, progress and history? Maybe this state of perpetual and futile search is where we actually belong.

Trying to avoid further grand statements, I now turn to the works in the exhibition. The clay wall was intended as the central piece of the show; it posed most challenges to me, and it connected most obviously to my readings and discussions during the process. Curiously it turned out to be the least obviously formative of the main theme that I’ve described above. Most people I’ve talked to simply read the exhibition more as a personal space than as dealing with architecture and the city, and thus the clay wall turned into an atmospheric backdrop to the room. I don’t want to decry or deny this, but it is one of the things that have prompted me to write this text, and I still think the connections and implications between the personal and the societal become strong with this work. Once again, its title – Re: Building – was designed to be read in several ways. Two grammatically different, with two shades of meaning within each. Disregarding the colon and reading it as one word poses the question of what is being rebuilt? The clay wall does not try to imitate something that was once there, but rather it attempts to reimagine the space as a whole (one effect I was happy about was how it drew attention to the size of the wall and the height of the ceiling, something a lot of people made surprised comments about). So rebuilding in this sense comes closer to repositioning rather than recreating; again emphasizing the impossibility of return and the inevitability of change. But there is yet another nuance of the word rebuilding, which is its relation to the word recycling. This is echoed in the clay itself. Taken from the site of the new motorway in southside Glasgow, it is waste material from underneath the city used by me to build a new structure within the gallery space. In my way of seeing things, this reusing of material, together with the above described ”rebuilding” of the room, muddles the distinction between construction and destruction, and in a way mocks the idea of human creation, or of an individual claim to posterity. We are after all only endlessly rebuilding the earth, without ever adding anything new, or making any truly lasting modifications.

The grammatically different way of reading this title is noticing how it emulates an e-mail subject line. In this case the Re: stands for reply, meaning the work is a reply to building. But this could both be a reply to a building, and a reply to building as an activity. In the former case, the building in question is of course the Vic gallery. The work replies to the building it’s been placed in both in a strictly physical sense – the way the gridsize answers to the windowpanes, playing with 3D perceptions, the way it restricts and changes the light in the room, the way it uncomfortably incorporates the outshoots from the wall behind it – and in a symbolical sense – it is a visibly withering, temporal wall ”desperately” built in an old space that will itself be torn down together with its surrounding building within a year.

Building as a broader human activity is better represented by the roadwork-source of the material. Compared to the M74 project, my clay wall is a very different sort of building. While the construction of the new motorway aims for permanence, or at least the illusion of permanence, I aim for cracks and ephemerality. While the structures put in place on the southside exchange and cover the unruly nature with concrete and asphalt, I have hid a solid white wall behind a layer of muck. While a new road is built with a modern view of the future in mind, a wall of clay gives the space a tint of age and monumental time. In these ways I hope that my wall works less as one architectural structure among others than as a reply to building as the manifestation of expansion, progress and linear time perspectives.

In the gallery corner there was a TV, showing a still image of a plowed field, with a soundtrack of birds, and a mound of earth in front of it. This work was called Return; a much more concise and less ambigious title it would seem. But this is also the work in the exhibition which I am least resolved about. During the long time it has spent in my sketchbook it has taken on several different meanings and references, and the title Return which I gave it quite early on, prompts me now to try and relate it in different ways to the theme of the show. One of the more obvious associations perhaps is one of a ”return to nature”, a concept I do not believe in, but that I often find myself veering dangerously close to in both art and argument. Because while I really do not want to advocate any Rousseau-inspired illusion of a blissful natural state, and I maintain the impossibility of a return, especially to a utopia that has never existed, I also aim to fundamentally criticize our society’s antagonistic relation with nature. While my impulse is that we need to preserve the rural landscape and retain our direct contact with the earth, I rationally deplore any form of conservatism and backwards-striving. So in some ways this work seems to mock my own tendency for nostalgia and romanticism.

A related way to read the work regards its concern with the form of art; the difference between representation and illusion on one side, and the ”real” on the other. From this perspective the earth represents the ”return” of the concrete material from the image, overturning the passive consumtion of a mediated representation of the world. While this is one form of return that I wholeheartedly agree with, the work doesn’t completely bend to this interpretation. The earth has not broken out of the confines of the TV-monitor, it’s been placed there by me. The illusion of it having come out of the screen is just that; an obvious and quite unconvincing illusion. So instead of conquering illusion have I just replaced it with another illusion? Is it possible to make people react and interact with art as a physical reality, or will they always rather, as many did in my show, sit down and watch a screen, waiting for the slightest bit of movement (and in some cases even convince themselves they saw the still image move), since we’re all by now weaned to a world constructed of images?

I have now written about the impossibility of a return as though it is something I am absolutely sure of. It’s not. Because I realize that this assumption is very much embedded with a typical western linear time perspective. The greatly appealing theory of cyclical time is instead completely based on the prospect of return, and the work Return relates very clearly to this. Not only does the image of a rural field bring to mind the cyclical activity of sowing, reaping and continually reusing/revitalizing the earth, but its soundtrack (which is of course also looped) enhances this relation. The sounds of skylarks and cranes were chosen partly because they are both natural inhabitors of this place (the field in the image is situated a few hours outside Gothenburg and I have personally seen both these bird-species in this location), but also because they are migrant birds; i.e. their lifecycle is characterized by a constant leaving and returning. But – as always there is a But – both these bird populations are, together with the whole rural landscape, increasingly threatened by urbanism, industrialism and environmental change. So, the linear competes with the cyclical; the idea of human progress seems completely incompatible with cyclical thinking and any kind of return. Touching on this is also the image’s obvious references to Anselm Kiefer’s field paintings. In his work, the plowed field symbolizes history. Is this then a return to or of history? Or is the fact that the ordered and plowed field on screen contrasts with a raw mound of earth in front of it signalling that any grand linear narrative belongs in the world of illusions?

Lastly I return to the theme of belonging with the work simply titled Belong. The associations are simple; the human form within the element which it, according to myth, was created from; earth. A peaceful, even inviting, image of an imagined belonging. The problem is that there is no human body there, only the empty space – the trace – after one. It is a mold one could imagine returning to, but that would of course crumble and be ruined if one tried. Furthermore, it, again, speaks of cyclical time in a problematic way: The imprint is made in a fetal position, but it is also easily likened to that of south american mummies – the bed of compost is both womb- and gravelike. The fact that the imprint is one of a young adult (me), to me gives it a sort of desperate character in all its stillness. A clinging to the idea of in pulverim reverteris, if you so will.

But Belong is also very much a bed; made by the standard measurements of double-size beds. In this it ties with the rest of the exhibition – the old-fashioned TV and the comfy chair, the wall with its window spaces – in creating a slightly distorted, but above all deserted, personal space. Is this a room that’s been forever left empty, or is it waiting for a return? Is it a picture of a bygone past, or of a possible future? As I mentioned in the beginning, I thought the show was gonna be more about architecture and society, but I am now very happy about how it became more personal, without turning overtly self-referential. It is to me about man’s wish to belong and become one with time, in a world that seems to be hopelessly engaged in a battle against time.

Kapitel

i en kronologiskt omkullkastad roman i fiktiv dagboksform


Nu är hon här igen. Utan förvarning dök hon upp i morse. Slyet på den illa efterhållna grusvägen gav vika medan jag satt till frukost, och strax efteråt smällde hon igen bildörren och kramade om mig på förstukvisten. Hon hade saknat mig påstod hon, och jag fick tillstå motsvarande känslor.

Att hon helt sonika tagit för givet att finna mig på samma plats som för tre veckor sedan och inte ens brytt sig om att ringa i förväg, fick mig att inse hur statiskt mitt liv blivit. Förutom promenaderna upp till sjön och måndagsturerna till lanthandeln har jag knappt rört mig utanför tomten.

Så i skrivande stund sitter jag här i bara mässingen på en köksstol och betraktar hennes rygg där hon naken sover eftermiddagslur. Hon har världens vackraste nacke. Ett pekoralt påstående, som skulle kunna följas av en mängd lika subjektiva överdrifter, bara det att det här faktiskt råkade kännas sant precis nu. Jag har svårt att tänka mig något som skulle kunna göra en nacke mer perfekt än den i mitt blickfång. Hela rummet fångas upp i de mjuka kurvorna ner mot axlarna och den knappt märkbara fördjupningen kring nackkotorna.

Jag vet att det är dumt att sitta här och skriva, istället för att ligga där och känna. Men jag känner ett tvångsmässigt behov att spara detta. Jag vill minnas detta nu. Just nu, då det bara är ögonblick sedan det hände. Man vet aldrig när senildemensen sätter in.

The End of History / the End of Art

Essay for Historical & Critical studies


Ever since first getting acquainted with Francis Fukuyama while studying International Relations, the idea of the end of history has intrigued and annoyed me. Over the years I have realized that there are more sides to it than simply an arrogant neo-liberal self-aggrandizement, and some of these aspects have become important themes in my creative work. Hence, I will take this essay as an opportunity to dig more deeply into the theories and try to sort out the relevant parts of them.

The first point to make is that these theories are rarely as dystopic as the most superficial interpretation of the term might suggest. It’s not about the end of time, the end of the world or the end of humanity (except in the case of Lyotard’s Inhuman, but given that it is presented as a vision of the future rather than an analysis of our present situation I allow myself to exclude it). Not even the most radical of these philosophers raise any claim that events will stop taking place, that conflict will be abolished or that change will cease. It is rather to do with a contemporary feeling that we’ve lost our direction; that the sense of progress and of a coherent past is slipping out of our hands. Or, as Niethammer puts it: ”The problematic of posthistory is not the end of the world, but the end of meaning”(Niethammer, 1993: 3) It seems to me that, as so often is the case in philosophy, it is partly a case of semantics; of defining the words. What is history? And what can be implied by claiming the end of it?

A quick look on wiktionary gives us no less than three slightly differing definitions that will be relevant for this essay: ”History as the aggregate of past events”; ”History as a record or narrative description of past events”; and ”History as the branch of knowledge that studies the past”. I will come back to the difference between the first and the second definition, but now, hopefully needing no further explanation, I deduce from these definitions that the end of history could mean both an endpoint in history, and an end of history as a concept. Although the line between can be argued to be blurred (as for example in the case of Hegel) I do think there is an important difference, and will try to deal with the theories according to this.


A final stage?
Theories of an endpoint in history rests on reading it as a progressive development; that there is a reachable goal to history. Once that goal is reached events may have impact on individuals, but they will no longer be part of history, as indeed the very definition of history in this case is that development whose endpoint has been reached:

What I suggested had come to an end was not the occurrence of events, even large and grave events, but History: that is, history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process, when taking into account the experience of all peoples in all times. (Fukuyama, 1992: xii)

The two most explicit examples in this category are Karl Marx and Francis Fukuyama. Marx, to begin with, introduced the materialist conception of history, whereby he meant that all of history is to be read in the tension between forces of production and relations of production, and takes the form of class struggle. In this view, communism, which will abolish the class society and install the perfect harmony between forces and relations, represents the final stage of this development and thus the end of history (although Marx himself preferred to talk about this as pre-history, lending him more credit in my coming argument). While brilliantly analyzing history, his predictions of the future can be said to have proved wrong with the collapse of communist regimes in the 20th century, although it could of course be argued that his analysis of capitalism as the penultimate stage still holds and that past communist revolutions were simply premature. That however, is not the question here.

Francis Fukuyama, while building on the same theoretical framework as Marx, shortcuts it, substitutes class with ideology and asserts that the end of history is the death of major ideological battle. While also a materialist, his emphasis on the development of the market rather than the mode of production leads him to call capitalism (that which in Marx’ theory was the necessary but highly problematic last step before communism) the final stage and liberal democracy the final form of human government. Furthermore he contrasts with Marx in claiming that this end is not only imminent, but with the end of the Cold War and the globalization of neo-liberalism, it’s already upon us. What makes this theory even more problematic than marxism to me, is not only that the age of the great ideologies started as late as the 18th century and therefor must be secondary to other forces in driving a great narrative history, or that arguing the end of ideology is itself an ideological act as Derrida points out (Sim, 2001: 18), but also that it represents a very one-dimensional view of conflict and development. In simply ignoring Marx’ other great concept – dialectics, Fukuyama fails to recognize internal conflict. While I agree that globalization, in making the world into one, deeply interwoven system, represents a geographical end of history that can hardly be reversed (Jameson, 1998: 90-92), I can see no valid argument for claiming that that system would not carry the seeds for its own transformation.
So, while it’s easy to see that, as philosophers with political agendas, both Marx and Fukuyama would be prone to overestimate the present (what Jameson calls ”epochality”(Jameson, 1998: 90)), the main question is not whether or not their particular predictions would turn out to be correct, but whether it is at all fruitful to think of history as one big progressive development with a possible endpoint. Does history have to be progressive? Does it have to be a singular history with capital H? To get closer to such problems I first have to get past Hegel; whom both the former thinkers base their philosophies on.

Indeed Hegel can be said to represent the very blueprint of such narratives, with his Geist going through several stages of ”dialectical revelation of consciousness to itself” (Danto, 2005: 15), with the merging of subject and object in philosophy as the final stage and end of history. Both Marx and Fukuyama have interpreted that endpoint as a concrete, temporal one, and Hegel himself seems to have been convinced that he was living in that very final stage back in the early 1800s. Still, from my very superficial reading of Hegel in secondary sources, I sense that there is another lesson to be drawn, probably contrary to Hegel’s own conclusions, from his ideas. That is; what if the insight that consciousness of consciousness represents an end is not applicable to History, but rather is a way to understand the development of any histories? Which, I believe, brings us to postmodernism.


Metanarratives
I cannot believe in an endpoint in history such as described above, simply because change is the only constant and as Derrida says ”we have no option but to extend history” (Sim, 2001: 63). My sense of loss of direction is not my disbelief in progress from now on but a fundamental scepticism towards developmental progress as a coherent narrative. Thus it has less to do with an arrival at a ”perpetual present” (Jameson, 1998: 20), than the realization that in a sense we’ve aways lived in one. The height of modernism would seem as directionless as our contemporary situation for a truly postmodern thinker. The paradox is of course, as Arthur C. Danto points out, that these very thoughts could not have been thought before our time (Danto, 2005: 105). So, there must be a history in some sense; an order in which, if nothing else, our thoughts evolve.

To go back to semantics: what we have more or less discarded is ”History as a record or narrative description of past events”, or to quote Lyotard: we have equipped ourselves with ”incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard, 2003: 1122). What we still have left however is ”History as the aggregate of past events”, and since we are aware of those past events also ”History as the branch of knowledge that studies the past”. Truly; one of the characteristics of our time is that the past is available to us in an unprecedented degree. It’s just that under our scrutinizing gaze it has lost the uniform character that used to point towards a certain future. Or to in a way agree with Hegel; by becoming aware of itself, history as one big progressive development has met an end. But that constitutes only ”the end of a certain concept of history” (Sim, 2001: 44).

With the risk of overloading this essay with different thinkers the final push to the sum must be to add the point of Oswald Spengler; breaking up our linear perspective of history into different epochs, each with its own definition of progress that could not have been thought of in the preceding epoch. In other words; we are dealing with several histories, not one History.


The end of art?
In few subjects is the loss of historical direction as evident as within art. It is expressed both in a feeling that ”nothing new can be done” which is commented on by various artists who, ironically or not, recycle art history (the Chapman brothers reimagining Goya prints or Ben Kelly exhibiting a parody of Duchamp’s fountain) and in the view that nothing nowadays distinguishes art from non-art; in the case of it becoming part of a broader visual and commercial culture (see Andy Warhols pop art and today’s ”superflat” art of Takashi Murakami) and in the case of calling anything art, even distinctively anti-artistic works such as Maurizio Cattelan taping a gallerist to the wall, stealing another artist’s exhibition or showing the rubble of a destroyed museum in a gallery. Again a distinction may be made between an endpoint in the history of art, and an end of art (or art history) as a concept.

Looking for grand narratives similar to Marx or Fukuyama within art first of course brings us to the history of art as representation of nature, mimesis, which has been more or less taken for granted for centuries. That history, as Danto observes, has an at least theoretically possible end in the perfect imitation of all aspects of the object. However, that definition of art has with the emergence of modernism more or less been abolished. For modernism’s sense of progress instead one of the most important readings must be that of Clement Greenberg who sees the history of art as the strive towards pure form. That is, the emancipation of art from representation of the outside; its final stage being the unmeddled embodiment of its different mediums. In that way, to speak of only one of these mediums, the work of Mondrian with his primary colours and geometry, Pollock with his expressive mark freed from mimesis, and Malevich with his Black Square, could all be said to represent steps of such a purification of painting.

Danto, on the other hand, believes that this preoccupation with the medium of art is but a step towards philosophical self-definition (Danto, 1998: 123). So it’s not a question of neither perfecting nor exhausting a medium but

The ”end of art” instead is a theory of consciousness – of how a developmental sequence terminates in the consciousness of that sequence as a whole. (Danto, 1998: 137)

Danto sees that end of art in Duchamp’s invention of the ready-made: the demonstration that art is defined in it being interpreted as art (Danto, 2005: 39). So Danto sees the current state of art as post-historical, including a pluralism of expressions, of which none implies a direction for art as a whole. I can agree with that analysis, but once again there’s the difference of interpreting this as an arrival at a perpetual present or to attack the concept of art history by claiming that in fact there never was one coherent story of development. Since basing his theory on Hegel, who saw art as one of the stages leading up to the end of History in philosophy, Danto must fit his analysis into this metanarrative, claiming that art once again has to be disenfranchised from philosophy.

But by noting that for example the history of art as representation of nature began much earlier (with cave paintings) than the history of art as a concept (which could be said to begin with Kant), I think it is once more shown that history is not one long narrative, but the overlapping of several histories. In his later writings and his replies to reactions against his theory, Danto acknowledges that he merely ”meant to declare the end of a certain story” (Danto, 1998: 119) and also that ”the future is what we cannot imagine until it is present” (Danto, 1998: 140).

So, there is no death of art, and neither is there a definite endpoint in the History of art, but simply the end of one history of art. It seems to me, that in leaving metanarratives behind, the subject of history could not be about anything else than the aggregate of past events, which, at any given point in time, can be interpreted in regards to several narratives, some not having been possible before. That one of these narratives meets an end through cognition in the Hegelian sense, does not mean that another has won or that the subject (in this case, art) dies. It simply means an opening up of new possibilities.


References:
Burgin, V., 1986, The End of Art Theory, London: Macmillan Press Ltd.

Danto, A.C., 1998, ’Art After the End of Art’ in The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy and the Ends of Taste, Amsterdam: G + B Arts International, pp. 115-128

Danto, A.C., 1998, ’The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense’ in History and Theory, vol 37, No. 4, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University, pp. 127-143

Danto, A.C., 2005, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, New York: Columbia University Press

Elliott, G., 2008, Ends In Sight, London: Pluto Press

Fukuyama, F., 1992, The End of History and the Last Man, New York: The Free Press

Jameson, F., 1998, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, London: Verso

Kojève, A., 1980, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, London: Cornell University Press

Lillegard, N., 2003, ’Spirit and the End of Art’ published 2003-02-25 at Eurozine
URL: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2003-02-25-lillegard-en.html

Lyotard, J.F., 2003, ’Introduction to The Postmodern Condition’ in Art In Theory 1900-2000, 2nd ed, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 1122-1123

Niethammer, L., 1993, Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End?, London: Verso

Sim, S., 2001, Derrida and the End of History, Royston: Icon Books Ltd.

Kapitel

i en kronologiskt oordnad roman i fiktiv dagboksform


Jag lever ensam nu, och skogen omger min lilla värld. Allt är hanterbart här inom stengärdsgården. Jag bor i en stuga så liten och oansenlig att naturen runtomkring valt att nonchalera min existens. Fåglarna har byggt bo på förstukvisten och rådjuren väcker mig ibland med våta mular då jag slumrat till med ryggen mot min flagnande husvägg.

Man kan nog säga att jag åldrades i förväg. Jag är inte mer än 31, men har de senaste åren tänkt så intensivt på förgängligheten att jag inte längre förmår eller kan med att känna mig ung. Jag hamnade på efterkälken när det gällde det mesta, men jag är nog den första i min generation att bli lastgammal.

Käpp och glasögon har redan länge varit naturliga accessoarer för mig. Inte så att jag rent medicinskt egentligen behöver någotdera – käppen svänger jag ofta nonchalant och låter knappt nudda vid marken, medan glasögonens glas har en endast minimal slipning. Men jag trivs så bra när jag bär dem. Och för varje dag jag går med käpp tycker jag mig känna tydligare och tydligare aningar av gikt och reumatism.

Jag ägnar mig ofta åt att minnas tider då jag inte levde. Särskilt förra sekelskiftet gillar jag att fokusera min nostalgi på. Eller 1920-talet. Det var tider det. Vilket liv jag levde då. Inte.

Det står en gisten ek på min vanskötta och av skogen invaderade tomt. Den är stor och ståtlig, men från ungefär två meter över markytan delar den sig i en frisk, rak stam, och en helt död, mot jorden böjd del. I den levande halvan har jag klättrat högt upp och fäst en stor trädgunga. I den döda halvan växer mossor, insektsbon och till och med en och annan blomma i de multna sprickorna. När jag går ut på kvällen för att andas in ett förråd frisk luft inför nattens sömn blir jag ofta stående med handen mot ekens stam. Jag känner barkens tusen små raviner och jag känner en samhörighet och stor beundran inför detta långsamma uråldriga liv. När jag var liten såg jag upp till musiker och filmhjältar. Nu är eken min enda idol. Den enda som verkar stå för verkligt trots.

Passing Through

A short impression from the weight of years


Time had passed, I noticed as I entered the little stone cabin where I had once lived. Time had passed through these rooms and left a faint trace of dust and spiderwebs in its wake. Its footsteps were cracks in the floor where tiny ferns peeked through. Its fingerprints were large flakes of paint peeling off the walls. Sunlight filtered through a metal mesh outside the cracked window and fell onto the floor, inviting the sensation of a movement, but nothing moved in its way. Where once there had been life and change there was now only static air. Insects lay dead on the floor and even the hovering dust particles were so still they seemed frozen in flight. Time had been here, but it was not here anymore.

Time had passed by, and I had somehow failed to notice it. Had I looked in the wrong direction? Had I been blind to its appearance? Where had my head been during all these years that had taken on such a solid conserved form here? I had always thought myself acutely aware of past, present and future, and the changes there within, but perhaps I had been too busy theorizing about them to truly experience them while they happened.

Time had passed by me. But I had not felt it. Even now, standing in the middle of my old kitchen, fully taking in the detriment its passing had left my former surroundings in, I myself felt curiously untouched by time. My hands showed no scars, my senses sent the same experiences through the same nerves, and my mind kept stumbling in the same circles. Age had not changed me. Time had passed me by.

Demokrati och Dissensus

Ett argument för motstånd


Det är dagar kvar till val i Sverige och jag vill försöka kanalisera all den motvilja och frustration som valrörelsen orsakat i mig till en liten text om vårt demokratiska system. Demokratibegreppet är vårt sekulära samhälles motsvarighet till äldre tiders gudsbegrepp. Ett ord man kan ta till som en oemotsäglig sanning i en diskussion. Ett begrepp som inte får ifrågasättas, och inte tål att analyseras. Ett rättesnöre som alla måste bekänna sig till, även om man innerst inne kanske anar att det inte är så endimensionellt och självklart som man låtsas. Men nej, jag tänker inte diskutera huruvida demokrati verkligen är det bästa tänkbara styrelsesättet (en av Graffiti-reportrarna i GP tog det lasset). Jag planerar inte heller egentligen ifrågasätta den västerländska representationsdemokratins tvivelaktiga monopol på begreppet och därigenom göra mig till enkel måltavla för anklagelser om naiva direktdemokratiska ideal. Jag tänker istället ta den kanske något fegare, abstrakta vägen och ta avstamp i ett påstående ur en förtjusande liten bok jag läste i somras: Infinitely Demanding – Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. Författaren och filosofen Simon Critchley skriver där:

Democracy is a political process, the movement of democratization. [...] Democratization consists in the manifestation of dissensus (Critchley, 2008: 129-130)

Demokrati är dissensus. Jag vill argumentera för att ett grundläggande misstag i vårt demokratibegrepp och vårt demokratiska system är att det är allt för konsensusbaserat. Blockpolitik, en dassig politisk gråskala, personfokus, de är alla symptom på detta misstag; på en rädsla för att sätta båten i alltför kraftig gungning; på en ängslig reträtt till kompromisser och skendebatter. Missförstå mig inte; jag vill inte att riksdagspolitiker ska sluta förhandla och hitta gemensamma lösningar. Men det där är vad som händer efter den demokratiska processen. Efter att någon, vem som helst, vågat sätta ner foten och på allvar ta ställning emot en rådande ordning.


Blockpolitik vs. värderingar
Det är därför blockpolitiken är så usel och i grunden odemokratisk; den fullkomligt neutraliserar eller fryser ute alla sådana ställningstaganden från den storpolitiska arenan. Allt som diskuteras är detaljfrågor; budgetskillnader, burkaförbud, skattesänkningar/-höjningar. Och så fort någon försöker ta upp grundläggande systemkritik på dagordningen, antingen det handlar om den patriarkala maktordningen, den ohållbara tillväxtdogmen eller marknadsfundamentalismen, så förlöjligas och förvrängs deras åsikter. Gudrun Schyman är en rabiat manshaterska, miljöpartister är naiva hippietomtar och Lars Ohly är diktaturtörstande kommunist (en anklagelse som i all sin idéhistoriska okunskap kanske säger mer än något annat om vårt ideologifattiga system. Hur mycket jag än har att invända mot auktoritär socialism så är det skrämmande att inte ens ledande politiker förstår att göra skillnad på Marx - en av förra århundradets viktigaste filosofer, och Stalin - en av dess värsta diktatorer). Ingen vill diskutera ideologi, allra minst de borgerliga partierna. Varför skulle de? De gamla ideologierna dog, kvar står neoliberalismen som global segrare, vi har nått slutet på historien! Halleluja! Återstår att överlåta åt de bredast leende, pålitligaste politikerna att radera spåren av gamla ideal och finjustera ett vinnande system.

Nej! Vi måste våga ställa grundläggande frågor. Vi måste fortsätta tvivla. De stora klassiska ideologierna må vara döda, men de ideologiska idéerna är inte döda. Det finns fortfarande och kommer alltid att finnas möjliga alternativ. Skillnaden mot förr är på sin höjd att dessa alternativ inte längre kan appliceras utifrån väldefinierade och till synes externa mallar, utan gror inuti, i våra värderingar, om vi vågar stå för dem. Detta är en positiv skillnad.


Personpolitik vs. folkligt engagemang
Jag råkade höra Moderaternas inslag i den politiska radioteater som P1 sände i somras, vilket gjorde mig nästan illamående av frustration. Inte främst för att den var pinsamt dåligt skriven, eller ens för att det var Moderaterna, utan för att man konsekvent undvek att tala inte bara om ideologi utan faktiskt om politiska frågor över huvudtaget. Det handlade uteslutande om politikerna som personer och Fredrik Reinfeldt som en mänsklig men kompetent man, och huvudbudskapet var utan några vidare krumbukter att vi borde lita på honom.

Detta är inte demokrati! Inte ens om man älskar och vurmar för vår specifika form av representationsdemokrati är det såhär den är tänkt att fungera. Vi väljer politiker eller parti efter vilka som bäst representerar våra grundläggande värderingar, inte efter vilka vi tror är duktigast på att vara politiker och kan tala om för oss vad som är rätt och fel. Moderaterna är självklart inte ensamma om denna fokusförskjutning. I takt med att sakfrågorna tar över debatten på bekostnad av värderingarna, i takt med att blockpolitiken cementeras och partierna blir svårare att skilja åt, så blir personpolitiken mer framträdande. Detta är ytterligare en komponent i den onda spiral som undergräver verklig demokrati, verkligt politiskt initiativ. Vi luras att tro att politik är för komplext för vanliga människor att sätta sig in i, att tron på verklig förändring och alternativa samhällsbyggen är naiv eftersom de politiker vi uppmanas lita på inte delar den. Inte sant! Expertkunskap om politisk förvaltning är inte detsamma som upphöjd visdom vad gäller allas bästa. Snarare ofta tvärtom. Jag är ingen expert på varken statsbudgetar eller lagstiftning, men jag är lika kvalificerad som någon att se när något är sjukt i samhället och därmed inse att vi inte lever i den bästa av tänkbara världar. Och det är min skyldighet att stå upp för denna insikt. Politiker är demokratins verktyg; inte dess upphov.


Utopier vs. levande förändring
”Så vad är din lösning då? Revolution och planekonomi?” Det andra klassiska sättet att diskvalificera systemkritik. Kan man inte komma med ett konstruktivt och färdiguttänkt alternativ förtjänar man enligt detta sätt att tänka inte att tas på allvar. Jag tycker inte att detta är ett giltigt motargument. Jag varken kan eller vill ställa mig bakom någon heltäckande teori för hur vi ska lösa världens problem. Precis som de klassiska ideologiernas tid är förbi, så är också den klassiska idén om revolution och de universella utopierna hopplöst daterade. Att hoppas på en global revolution som övernatt skulle införa ett nytt samhälle enligt någon gammal filosofs modell är varken realistiskt eller önskvärt. Men detta får inte hindra mig från att tycka att något är rejält fel i vårt nuvarande system. Vi måste tillåta oss att tvivla och ta ställning mot det rådande utan att ha en färdig alternativ lösning till hands. Visst förstår jag att detta ses som den stora svagheten hos postmodern kritik överallt, inte bara vad gäller politiken – att den är uteslutande destruktiv och saknar positiva visioner. Men hur mycket det än må låta som en dålig ursäkt, så tror jag verkligen inte att detta är en svaghet, och att se det som en sådan visar på en oförmåga att se tvivlet och motståndet som den positiva kraft de faktiskt utgör. Tillåt mig illustrera med just två klassiska revolutioner:

Till att börja med den omhuldade franska. I de flesta historieskrivningar den politiska händelse som i mångt och mycket födde vårt moderna samhälle, formade de stora ideologierna och på allvar introducerade de demokratiska idealen i Europa. En revolution som till och med de mest konservativa av dagens politiker menar förde något gott med sig. Men rent konkret och direkt, vad hände 1789 och åren därefter? I själva verket ett rätt kaotiskt upplopp som snart urartade i näst intill planlöst avrättande och så småningom Napoleanskt envälde. Bakom grundläggande principer om frihet, jämlikhet och broderskap fanns få praktiska idéer om hur dessa skulle impliceras och det nya samhället skulle utformas. Det dröjde till exempel drygt 100-150 år i de flesta länder innan allmän rösträtt blev en aktualitet. Men ändå; den franska revolutionen var en stor framgång. Inte främst för vad den lyckades införa, utan för vad den lyckades avskaffa. Det var genom uppgörelsen med oacceptabla privilegier och orättvisor som groende idéer från både Amerika och Europa fick växtrum och så småningom ledde till en något mer demokratisk och jämlik värld.

Ett hopp 129 år framåt leder oss till den ryska revolutionen, som liksom den franska startade i utbrett folkligt uppror mot extrema orättvisor, och till en början tog sig en mängd olika, oordnade uttryck. T.ex. så var Marx långtifrån den enda intellektuella inspirationen, utan en rad sovjeter inrättade till en början anarkistiska eller syndikalistiska kollektiv efter influens från Proudhon, Bakunin och Kropotkin. Men en viktig skillnad mot den franska föregångaren inträdde då bolsjevikerna mer eller mindre kidnappade revolutionen i oktober. Lenin hade nämligen en mycket tydlig, i kommunismen grundad, plan för hur det nya samhället skulle se ut och hur det skulle åstadkommas. I sina ansträngningar att implementera denna plan slog han ned och amputerade förändringen, och när Stalin tillträdde hade Sovjetunionen blivit raka motsatsen till ett revolutionärt demokratiskt samhälle; nämligen ett samhälle där inga alternativa idéer; ingen dissensus, tilläts växa.

Mitt syfte är inte att diskutera fördelar/nackdelar med olika former av revolutioner. Mitt syfte är att visa att det inte är de utstuderade framtidsplanerna som föder framsteg – i den mån utopier är försvarbara och önskvärda så ligger de implicerade men outvecklade i våra värderingar – utan motståndet mot det ruttna i samtiden. Demokratins främsta fördel framför andra system är att den lämnar så stort utrymme, och rentav bygger på, detta motstånd mot det rådande; denna dissensus.


Rösta för att förändra
Så för att återvända till söndagens val. Demokrati varken föds eller kulminerar i allmänna val, men visst ska vi gå och rösta! Men vi ska rösta med värderingar och grundläggande idéer i åtanke, inte blockstrategier eller personer. Gå inte på alliansens retorik om ”Framåt eller bakåt” på den enda vägen. Man kan alltid svänga av, och vi behöver inte luta oss mot stora ideologier eller detaljerade förslag för att göra det ställningstagandet. Vi måste våga göra motstånd i det lilla. På olika fronter. I olika sammanslutningar. Framtidens samhälle kommer i en form vi varken kan förutse eller förutbestämma, men för att det ska komma måste vi utnyttja demokratins potential att säga ifrån; att göra motstånd.

If the activity of government continually risks pacification, order, security and what Rancière refers to as the ’idyll of consensus’, then politics consists in the manifestation of a dissensus that disturbs the order by which government wishes to depoliticize society. [...] Thus, democracy is not a fixed political form of society, but rather the deformation of society from itself through the act of material political manifestation. (Critchley, 2008: 129)

Referens:
Critchley, S., 2008, Infinitely Demanding – Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, London: Verso.