Category: Essay

The term Workerism (English translation of the Italian word Operaismo) refers to a political and cultural tradition that can be traced back to political and theoretical practices emerging in Italy in the early 1960s. Workerism is nowadays a globally well-known current of thought. The publication of prominent works such as Empire (2001), Multitude (2005), Commonwealth (2011), and Assembly (2017) by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri has contributed tremendously to it. Moreover, the publication and translation into English and other languages of seminal works by other workerists such as Christian Marazzi, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Mariarosa dalla Costa, and Silvia Federici, to name only a few, has established workerism on an international scale. Workerism is not a unitary political theory; it does not refer to a school of thought or to a single political subject. It is rather the encounter of multiple and diversified pathways in which we can recognize some common roots. Workerism pays specific attention to the function of subjectivity; it describes political and social processes as intrinsically ambivalent and considers the ideas of conflict, dissent, or transformation as crucial elements for interpreting the changes of our contemporary societies.

The attention workerists (operaisti) pay to the dimension of subjectivity can be traced back to the primary importance they have attributed to the notion of class composition since the beginning of the movement. This dimension was already important in the Italian workerism of the early 1900s. This was a kind of workerism imbued with the anarcho-syndicalist positions of Georges Sorel and the experience of the newspaper “Ordine nuovo” co-edited by Antonio Gramsci. It referred to the subjective figure of the professional worker, in which the handcrafted skill with its know-how still played an important role, although this professional worker was about to be integrated in the factory.

When the term workerism is employed today, one immediately thinks of the kind of political and theoretical experience which emerged in the Post-War years, or more precisely, in Italy in the early 1960s. Crucial works such as Workers and Capital by Mario Tronti, and the political work around the Italian journal Quaderni Rossi, which counted among its founders Raniero Panzieri, Romano Alquati, and Danilo Montaldi, can be considered as the pillars of the initial experience of workerism. If, on the one hand, the question of class composition and of subjectivity were still crucial in the new form of workerism of the 1960s, on the other the new workerism broke with the previous form since it introduced a new concept and practice centered on the idea of the refusal of work. In the workerism of the early 1900s there was still an idea of the pride of producers towards their own activity. This pride could not but disappear with the theorization of the refusal of work. This refusal was not only a political theorization, but the acknowledgement that the working class refused the work discipline imposed in the factories. Through political interventions in the factories, based on the method of “con-ricerca” (co-research, collaborative research), workerists could show that workers hated their work and refused their condition as workers. This refusal of work functioned as an impulse for political and social transformation. In this connection workerism was breaking with an ideology based on an ethics of work that has been the ideological cement of all socialist and communist traditions.

Workerists paid special attention to the great transformation of the capitalistic mode of production. In the 1960s and throughout the 1970s there were important changes of the mode of organization of work in the factories. A new class composition and a new subjective figure was about to emerge. The traditional figure of the professional worker was disappearing, since automated processes centered on the employment of machines were replacing it. The assembly line, a pillar of the Fordist mode of production, did not require a professional worker anymore, but rather an unskilled worker, who could perform repetitive, alienated and standardized tasks. This new figure of the worker, which emerged in this so-called Fordist stage of capitalism, was centered on the figure of the mass-worker, as the workerists called it.

While the transformation of the reality of capitalism was not at the center of the interest of the classical left wing political organizations, it was, in contrast, the main interest of groups of intellectuals, activists and researchers who conducted their first inquiries in the factories. These experiences contributed to the emergence of the current of Operaismo. The workerists looked at new forms of struggles that were invisible to traditional working-class organizations. Being unable to see the new forms of resistance, of alliances, of active struggle, the classical socialist and communist organizations could assume that struggles were simply not taking place, or that the working class was slumbering. On the contrary, the workerists were able to bring to light the multiplicity of new forms of struggle: refusal of work, sabotage, individual and collective resistance to the organization of the factory discipline. A new microphysical landscape of resistance was emerging. It was this new landscape that the irruption of 1968 couldn’t but enlarge. In fact, 1968 was the irruption of a new cycle of struggles, which were no longer based only on the opposition between the working class and capital, but also on conflicts involving several other issues: culture, imagination, language, forms of life, reproduction.

Until 1968, while analyzing the form of class composition, workerists had focused on the figure of the mass-worker. Mass-workers were migrants mainly coming from the South. The cultural stereotype, still persisting today, consisted in depicting them as “poor guys”, victims of modernity and of under-development. But the inquiries of the workerists produced a completely different account of the situation. To be sure, workerists also described the suffering and the state of deprivation of the migrants. But they also drew attention to the fact that these migrants were forced to move in the search for new forms of life, by desires, needs and curiosity, that gave them the power to flee from the misery of the peasant condition, even though this flight could also assume the guise of an illusory search for mass consumerism. These new subjects were not politicized and did not enter the classical political organizations. Reactionary forces as well as socialist and classical communist organizations targeted them as lazybones, opportunists, and reactionary subjects. In contrast, the workerists understood that behind these forms of “opportunism” there was a refusal of the work and its ethics, and also a refusal of the political and trade-union representation.

As a result, workerism was overturning a picture that had dominated the whole socialist and communist tradition. If the working class has always been presented as a victim, as a passive subject on which the development of capital imposes its own laws, if it has been reduced to an exploited labor force, the operaists were overturning this thesis by showing that capitalist development is subordinated to the working-class struggle. The logic is reversed. Movements, individual and collective resistance oblige capital to resist, to invent new forms of exploitation and new forms of organization of labor in order to bridle the force of living labor.

The mass-worker was a figure on the edge of a structural passage of capitalism. It was a thread stretched  between two processes: if the professional worker had been replaced by the mass-worker through the processes which brought about the factory, the introduction of automated processes, the decentralization of factories, and the diffusion of production in the whole of society were contributing to the disappearance of the figure of the mass-worker and to its replacement through the figure of the social-worker, i.e. the worker who no longer works  (or not only) in the factory, but is employed in different fields in the whole of society. This is what was at issue in several political interventions by Antonio Negri in the 1970s. In particular his long interview on workerism (Dall’operaio Massa all’operaio Sociale), published in 1979, brilliantly sums up the thesis. However, this new figure needed to be better defined. We could say that workerism becomes post-workerism when it starts reflecting on the passage from the social-worker to the definition of a new subject, a new class composition centered on the idea of the cognitive worker or cognitive labor. Post-workerism elaborated on this definition, involving the new characterization of labor activity as centered on cognitive labor. In this connection post-workerism starts analyzing the capitalist passage towards a post-Fordist society. To some extent post-workerism was fueled by the Italian community in exile in Paris, which gave birth, among other projects, to the political experience of the French journal Futur antérieur starting in the early 1990s, which also converged with many other intellectual experiences coming from French philosophical and political discussion.

Post-Fordism appears as the age of capitalism which was able to metabolize the critique and the antagonistic charge of the movements which struggled against Fordist society: the critique of wage-labor, the flight from the factory-prison and from the assembly line, “flexibility” as a keystone of the critique practiced by political movements in the 1970s, were assumed and reversed by the capitalistic counter revolution which started in the 1980s and which brought with itself new forms of exploitation. If flexibility in the 1970s signified the possibility to conquer new spaces of freedom, to liberate oneself from the slavery of the factory regime, then in the 1980s it became a new regime of exploitation that took the form of precarity, a political attack on the conditions of life of people. The passage from Fordism to post-Fordism was orchestrated by the capitalist counterrevolution; but it was orchestrated as an answer to the struggles of the political and social movements.

If the mass-worker was the political subject who determined the crisis of the Fordist society, post-workerism is nowadays struggling in order to define the new political subject who will be able to determine the crisis of the post-Fordist system.

 

“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”

Of the many colorful concepts and metaphors Marx used to articulate as vividly as possible the monstrous nature of capitalism, the vampire has remained one of the most frequently cited, especially as this stubbornly undead figure grew increasingly dominant in 20^th-century popular culture. While a seemingly endless torrent of films, plays, novels, comic books, TV series, and video games fueled the vampire’s ubiquitous presence in pop culture, in the academic world an unrelenting series of monographs, edited collections, special journal issues, and conferences has testified to this particular horror trope’s resilience, and more particularly to the public’s ongoing interest in defining its social, cultural, and economic symbolism.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the vampire has remained so deeply embedded in capitalist narratives. Even to this day, it remains difficult to imagine a single figure that more perfectly encapsulates the most basic contradiction of our imagined relationship to capital. From early stage versions of Bram Stoker’s Dracula via movie stars like Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee all the way up to more recent vampire heart-throbs like Robert Pattinson and Alexander Skarsgård, the vampire represents a thoroughly decadent, depraved, and immoral parasite who is nevertheless thoroughly irresistible to middle-class audiences with their eternal dreams of upward social mobility. So even if Mark Fisher was certainly more accurate when he compared capitalism’s true nature to the disgusting alien in The Thing (1982), constantly mutating while absorbing everything it touches, the guilty attraction we almost inevitably feel for the vampire better captures our fundamental ambivalence about the workings of capital. With capitalism, as with vampires, our awareness of the mortal danger it poses doesn’t exactly make us better equipped to resist its tempting call.

The way in which these fantasies are informed and defined by questions of class becomes all the more obvious when we consider the vampire alongside its dialectical counterpart: the zombie. While both are supernatural beings caught in a perpetual state of “living death,” the vampire is traditionally connected to the most obvious signifiers of wealth, aristocracy, and individualism. The zombie, on the other hand, uncannily articulates modern fears of an uneducated, mob-like urban proletariat. The tension between these two archetypal horror tropes of the modern age illustrates vividly how our shared fantasies and fears are over-determined by more mundane and material questions of class and labor. Clearly, our guilty but unshakeable dream is to be invited some day to join the vampires’ privileged members-only club, while our nightmare is that we will be absorbed by the lower-class zombies’ monstrous horde. Or, to put it more bluntly: while nobody in their right mind would kiss a zombie, most of us would gladly fuck a vampire.

Beside the ham-fisted obviousness of this allegorical representation of imagined class identities, the vampire/zombie dialectic also illustrates another key weakness in capitalist narrative culture: its insistent focus on individualism. Originally a quite solitary being passing his time in exotic and remote castles, the 21^st-century vampire has tended to be at least somewhat more sociable. In the massively popular Twilight franchise, for instance, vampires are even portrayed as functional members of a loyal and loving family group. Nevertheless, the vampire remains grounded in its basic form as an exceptional and identifiable individual, with consistent human traits and a compelling (and appealingly tragic) back-story. This helpfully allows us to understand the very capitalists we both jealously abhor and secretly admire as sympathetic characters who are themselves also victimized by their own infection.

Zombies, on the other hand, are consistently presented to us as thoroughly abject, in the first place because their loss of individuality has made them part of a nameless collective. While we may be tempted to perceive the zombies’ state of living death as a traumatic loss of individual agency, its most horrific aspect is the zombie’s sudden inability to claim ownership of private property. Whereas the vampire not only comes to claim ownership of whomever he or she carefully chooses to infect, the zombie horde consumes indiscriminately, and—most importantly—without any conception of individual ownership. Through this clear juxtaposition, the vampire/zombie dialectic symbolically connects individualism to capitalist conceptions of private property, while the zombie’s inherently collective nature is rendered grossly appalling through its very lack of any such concept. After all, what is more terrifying to the individual capitalist than the loss of those very consumer choices that shape one’s precious identity?

Thus, even as shared conceptions of class identity have become more and more difficult to recognize for many in the era of global capitalism, Marx’s use of the vampire has remained profoundly useful for understanding and expressing capitalist culture’s continuing investment in narrative fantasies that remain grounded in traditional conceptions of class identity. So while neither vampire nor zombie offers the most nuanced expression of the workings of contemporary neoliberalism, they remain vital tools for recognising popular narrative tropes as ideological expressions of capitalism’s most basic cultural logic.

In Capital, Marx suggests that labour-power, like all other commodities, has a value determined by the socially necessary labour-time required for its production and reproduction. Yet labour-power is a peculiar kind of commodity, which is inseparable from the living person who bears it, and so “the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner” (1867 [1976], 274). Such maintenance goes beyond mere subsistence: if a worker receives only the value of their “physically indispensable means of subsistence” then the price of labour-power “falls below its value”, and “can be maintained and developed only in a crippled state” (1867 [1976], 277). Moreover, it is one of Capital’s key insights that capitalist exploitation does not, in general, rely on paying less than labour’s value. Rather, labour-power is bought at value, in a “very Eden of the rights of man”, (1867 [1976], 280) and it is only when it is put to work that exploitation begins.

What, then, are we to make of the existence of a substantial group of people who sell their labour-power, yet do not receive from it sufficient means to maintain and reproduce themselves and their families? This is the group labelled by the term Working Poor, an old concept, but one that has made a dramatic return to public discourse in recent years. Broadly defined, it refers to those classified as in work but falling below the poverty-line. More specifically, in the European Union it refers to those living in households with at least one person in work but who earn less than 60% of the national median wage. In the UK, a 2017 report by Cardiff University academics suggested 60% of those in poverty were in work (Hick & Lanau, 2017), while a Manchester charity recently established a hostel specifically for the working homeless. While the British government insists that work is the best way out of poverty, tacitly denying that working poverty is even possible, its critics identify the working poor as a particularly urgent and egregious pathology.

What could Marx say about this group’s existence and the contemporary fixation on it? It is tempting to say: ‘not much’. If it is possible for labour to be sold at less than its value, even less than the basic subsistence which he describes as its minimum limit, then perhaps this shows the paucity of his approach. Indeed, the assumption that the value of labour-power is a fixed constant, a “known datum”, is part of what Michael Lebowitz (2003) calls the one-sidedness of Capital, a simplification that should (and perhaps would) have been abandoned in an adequate study of wage-labour. Yet, as Lebowitz insists, this one-sidedness does not mean that Marxism is completely blind to such questions. Crucially, Marx’s emphasis is on the social determination of the value of labour-power, that it “contains a historical and moral element” depending “on the conditions in which, and consequently on the habits and expectations with which the class of free workers has been formed” (1867 [1976], 275). Such habits and expectations are not static, and, Lebowitz argues, cannot be easily held in check. Capitalism creates a world of new needs and desires in workers, which can only be met through demanding, and struggling for, higher wages. As Tithi Bhattacharya puts it (2017, 82), the worker is “always-already produced as lacking in what she needs.” In this sense, all workers under capitalism are poor, or at least poorer than they believe they should be, and could be.

This should not, though, distract from the specific phenomenon of those for whom wages fall to, or even below, a basic minimum, but a focus on the reproduction of labour-power might help here too. The report cited above made three substantive recommendations for addressing working poverty: tackling high rents, reversing cuts to in-work benefits, and improving the availability of free or affordable childcare to enable more than one parent to work. The third of these is particularly striking, since it points directly to the contradictions Nancy Fraser (2017) has identified in the latest manifestation of capitalist production’s tendency towards crises of reproduction. Capitalist production, she argues (2017, 24), both depends on, and systematically undermines, the reproduction of labour-power, which it approaches with a relation of “separation-cum-dependence-cum-disavowal”. In the contemporary period, social reproduction has been “commodified for those who can pay for it and privatised for those who cannot” while the ideal of the “family wage” has given way to that of the “two-earner family”. In recognising that this ideal is only sustainable in the context of subsidised or cheaply available childcare, the report acknowledges that this is merely deferring a deeper crisis, not merely of care, but of social reproduction. The working poor, then, are one symptom of this crisis, and public concern about them a hazy recognition of it.

Fraser’s work is part of a series of sustained attempts to renew and extend Marxism through a focus on social reproduction. In placing at the centre of analysis the question of how labour-power is reproduced, it allows for a rethinking of central questions of labour, class, and class struggle. First, understanding class struggle as involving first and foremost the struggle of workers to survive and reproduce themselves allows for a recognition that class struggle does not happen merely over wages. Access to healthcare, housing, and social benefits – precisely the things that make the working poor poor – are also significant arenas of struggle. Second, highlighting the importance of reproductive labour shines light on kinds of work that are not directly waged, and thus not officially recognised as such. This might also undermine one of the faulty premises of discussions of the working poor – that there is such a thing as a non-working poor.

A focus on struggle also reveals another important element in forming the working poor. The Cardiff report does not recommend, perhaps unsurprisingly, the strengthening of working-class organisation, consciousness, and solidarity as a solution. Yet if the value of labour is in part determined by the habits and expectations of a working class, then the working poor’s existence must also be seen in the context of defeats and decline that have lowered these expectations. In this sense, the notion of greater numbers of people falling below a poverty-line seems double-edged. On the one hand, it suggests a high watermark which more and more struggle to reach, an acceptance that there is a line beneath which people should not expect to live, but nonetheless do. On the other hand, that we can still see it might suggest horizons have not yet fallen so far. And such horizons can be expanded.

 

 

 

There is no doubt about the current relevance of Marxist thought – as a form of analysis, interpretation and action – in light of the global processes of expansive commodification of all aspects of life and the environment. Without it, it would be impossible to understand the exploitation, dispossession and extermination that the neoliberal model administrates, and to think of possible routes of transformation. However, Marx’s thought has also been limited by its own historical and epistemic margins demarcated by coloniality, Eurocentrism and modernity. Modern ideals of science, progress, development of the productive forces, industrialism, and truth and happiness through abundance – all shared with the capitalist mode of production and way of life – have been fundamental to Marx’s thought (Lander, 2014, 22).

In general, we can say that such beliefs within Marxist thought have led to the reproduction of undemocratic hierarchical structures on several occasions, which destroy the potential for self-determination, organization, decision-making, and action of individuals and the community from above. Marxist thought has projected a vision of a supposedly unique, true, necessary and desirable direction of historical development and transformation that goes hand in hand with an unsustainable relation to, or domination of, nature. Particularly in Latin America, this position has bypassed multiple racialized and hierarchized subjects and communities that together with their self-determined forms of life do not fit into the revolutionary categories of conventional Marxist thought. These other sectors of society, together with their ways of thinking-feeling, living-relating, organizing and resisting intra-, inter- and transnational colonialism for more than 525 years (Pablo González Casanova 2014), have been discarded, or at least underestimated, as political agents for a long time.

This is why Zapatismo is today very useful for updating the meaning of Marxist thought from the perspective of other geographies. I cannot, and I will not, intend to speak for the Zapatistas, as they speak clearly and powerfully for themselves. As a person born and raised in Mexico – male, middle class, urban and “mestizo”² – I acknowledge the indigenous and colonial histories that precede me, and the erasures, violences and logics that coloniality has imposed among our communities. From that complex and non-fixed position, I look at and listen to the indigenous communities seeking to find ways to overcome the historical, material, and symbolic partitions imposed upon us.

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) is one of the anti-capitalist and anti-systemic movements that have contributed the most to building, from below, something materially and politically “different”: “a world where many worlds fit”³. Remarkably, this has been carried out by mostly indigenous people in very adverse situations, including a masked low-intensity warfare, in a country where the capitalist war – in all its colonial, patriarchal, and racist dimensions – unfolds with extreme violence: Mexico⁴. Through its demands⁵ and the ways in which they have been proposed, Zapatismo has developed its universal, deep, lasting and anticipatory character, and at the same time, established a valid international agenda of struggle (Carlos Aguirre Rojas, 2015).

Moreover, the Zapatista movement has been building its own forms of political and material autonomy outside the state and the logics of capital (Gilberto López and Rivas 2011: 103-15, Gustavo Esteva 2011: 117-43, Raúl Zibechi 2017; Pablo González Casanova 2015; Jérôme Baschet 2015), creating its own autonomous municipalities and Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Boards of Good Government). This has also allowed the movement to develop alternative systems of education, health, justice, production, information, and communication, and so on. Autonomy, in Zapatista terms, is not a matter restricted to politics, but rather a matter that operates in all areas of social life. This is expressed in the General Women’s Law published by the EZLN in 1993, and more clearly in the active presence of indigenous women in the ranks of the EZLN since its origin, and the fact that their participation in reproductive, logistical and military work has been fundamental to the movement (Guiomar Rovira 2012). The forms of resistance of Zapatista women have directly influenced, according to researcher María Isabel Pérez Enríquez (2008), the forms of resistance exercised by both the indigenous and non-indigenous of the overall civil society. Moreover, EZLN has contributed to both internationally legitimize the political participation of women, and to include the anti-capitalist fight into the feminist agenda (Sylvia Marcos 2017).

Objectively, the strategy of EZLN has focused on the mobilization of civil society. This became evident the moment when the EZLN underwent a transformation from being an army to becoming a social movement. Examples that testify to this transformation are, among others, the Other Campaign (La Otra Campaña), – together with the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle – and in particular its recent joint project with the National Indigenous Congress (CNI)⁶. The Other Campaign consisted of many meetings between EZLN and different resistance groups in Mexico in order to create a national anti-capitalist movement.⁷

The recent EZLN and CNI joint project sought to participate in the next Mexican presidential elections in 2018 through the creation of the Indigenous Governing Council (CIG), with spokeswoman María de Jesús Patricio Martínez ‘Marichuy’ as candidate. Here the purpose was not to win or seize power, but rather to use the elections, that are seen by the Zapatista movement as a bargaining process between political parties and private interests, as a platform to make visible the effects of the capitalist war on indigenous communities and the entire country. A platform, moreover, to denounce the political class in power as responsible for extreme violence, corruption and its own impunity, and, fundamentally, the creation of a gathering of the national, international indigenous and non-indigenous organizations. For this project, the CIG and ‘Marichuy’ realized a national tour – with minimum resources and no state funding, resembling The Other Campaign – in order to both meet with and listen to the different indigenous and non-indigenous communities and their problems; and to share the CIG collective voice. Their project is based on the Zapatista experience of building autonomy, and the EZLN’s seven principles that go by the name of the “rule by obeying”.⁸ Most importantly, CNI proposes a government from below, where “the people rule and the government obeys”. CIG defines its proposal in a similar way as an anti-capitalist, anti-racist and anti-patriarchal call to organize ourselves. By the end of the pre-campaign period, on 19th February 2018, CNI did not achieve to gather the total number of signatures requested by the state as a prerequisite to register a presidential candidate – a process complicated by several institutional, economic and social barriers.⁹ But the main goals of the project were met: the situation and problems of the indigenous communities, together with a strong critique of the capitalist system, are brought back to national attention; both CNI, as well as the non-indigenous support networks, grew stronger. Today the project continues to consolidate the CIG and a national anti-capitalist movement and its agenda.¹⁰

The thought of Marx is still present in the Zapatista movement and the CNI, but in a constant process of appropriation, decolonization and re-elaboration. Marx’s “objective” and impersonal thought, which is embedded in the coloniality of knowledge (Anibal Quijano, 2000: 209-46), has been contextualized and adapted by the Zapatistas to local needs without missing its global perspective. The development of the movement during its clandestine years, and its subsequent evolution into an international public since 1994, shows the way in which the movement was and is forced to overcome the limits of Marxist thought, and categories marked by eurocentrism and colonial modernity. The conditions that made such development possible are not located in European thought or its margins. Rather, they can be found in the multiple communities –– with their embodied experience, knowledge, and forms of organization – that have resisted the colonial, racist and patriarchal capitalist war and its neoliberal, extractivist, necro- and narco-political versions for more than 525 years.

In 1983, the first EZLN camp was officially settled clandestinely. A few years before that, a group of mestizos with Marxist-Leninist ideas had ventured into the jungle of Chiapas with the intention of forming a revolutionary army to fight against the conditions of extreme poverty, injustice, neglect, exclusion, exploitation, violence, and dispossession in indigenous communities. The first years (1983-1994) of clandestine infrapolitical work (James Scott, 2004), in which the EZLN tried to gain the trust of the indigenous people and build a revolutionary army, served to challenge their urban and mestizo beliefs of being a revolutionary vanguard, and allowed the development of new forms of thought and organization, realities and needs. This is how Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos describes what they experienced:

We really suffered a process of reeducation, of remodeling, as if we had been unarmed, as if we had lost all the elements we had –Marxism, Leninism, socialism, urban culture, poetry, literature– everything that was part of us, and also things that we did not know that we had. They disarmed us and put us together again, but in a different way, and that was the only way to survive (Le Bot & Yvone 1997, 151).

Carrying Marxist thought with it, EZLN is therefore part of a long tradition of indigenous struggles and organizing processes in continuous movement: from the Spanish invasion and colonization, through the struggle for Mexican independence and revolution, to more recent revolutionary movements and the theology of the liberation (González Casanova 2015, 265-92).

 

 This process ingrained Marxism in bodies, histories and territories of collective living with their own forms of thought and organization which escape the regime of coloniality and modernity. It was necessary, then, to put aside any form of a Marxist revolutionary blueprint for seizing power from above, and to develop the capacity to look and listen to different ways¹¹ in order to begin building “from below and to the left” “a world where many worlds fit”.

 

The gaze. Toward where and from where. That is what separates us.

You believe that you are the only ones, we know that we are just one of many.

You look above, we look below.

You look for ways to make yourselves comfortable; we look for ways to serve.

You look for ways to lead, we look for ways to accompany.

You look at how much you earn, we at how much is lost.

You look for what is, we, for what could be.

You see numbers, we see people.

You calculate statistics, we, histories.

You speak, we listen.

You look at how you look, we look at the gaze.

You look at us and demand to know where we were when your calendar marked your “historic” urgency. We look at you and don’t ask where you’ve been during these more than 500 years of history.

You look to see how you can take advantage of the current conjuncture, we look to see how we can create it.

You concern yourselves with the broken windows, we concern ourselves with the rage that broke it.

You look at the many, we at the few.

You see impassable walls, we see the cracks.

You look at possibilities, we look at what was impossible until the eve of its possibility.

You search for mirrors, we for windows.

You and us are not the same.

 

Ejército de Liberación Nacional a través del Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos y del Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés. 2013, 92-3.

 

 

 

Introduction

‘New!’ ‘Improved recipe!’ ‘Now better than ever!’ This much is clear: if you want to sell something, you have to emphasize its novelty. The driving force of history is innovation, constant progress and improvement. That is at least what we are made to believe; the dominant ideology of our times. This ideology was once most forcefully voiced and promoted by nineteenth-century artists and art theorists. Make it new! said Ezra Pound. Il faut etre absolument moderne, said Arthur Rimbaud. ‘And plunge to depths of Heaven or Hell, / To fathom the Unknown and find the new!’ said Charles Baudelaire. After God, morality and even beauty had ceased to function as credible criteria for evaluating the arts, all that remained were novelty and originality. The shock of the new, as Australian art critic Robert Hughes later called it, became the primary characteristic of modern art, the first as well as the final criterion for its valuation.

In the 1980s and 1990s, however, theorists of the postmodern argued that this final criterion now too failed us. In his essay ‘The Sublime and the Avant-garde’ (1984) Jean Francois Lyotard scorned ‘the cheap thrill, the profitable pathos, that accompanies an innovation’ (106), Fredric Jameson in his seminal essay ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ (1983) argued that ‘the writers and artists of the present day will no longer be able to invent new styles and worlds’ (7), and American art critic Rosalind Krauss published a book titled The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths (1986). In his essay ‘Comrades of Time’ (2009) Boris Groys writes:

The present as such was mostly seen in the context of modernity as something negative, as something that should be overcome in the name of the future […] Today, we are stuck in the present as it reproduces itself without leading to any future. […] One can say that we now live in a time of indecision, of delay—a boring time.

This boredom characterizes contemporary art, in Groys’ view. The contemporary artist for him is like Sisyphus, who in the same repetitive and senseless act has to keep rolling the boulder up the mountain. The modernist artist was facing the glorious horizon of the future, but the contemporary artist swims in a sea of contemplation and confusion. For Groys this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does raise questions on the nature and function of ‘artistic innovation’ today.

These were questions that he already dealt with in his book Über das Neue (On the new), which was published 25 years ago in 1992, in the context of aforementioned debates on art and theory.[1] According to Groys, something peculiar was happening with regard to the new: on the one hand, and in line with the theorists mentioned above, no one ‘believed’ in the new any longer; but on the other hand, everyone still expected to see or hear something new, upon entering the museum, going to concerts or theatre plays, or when reading novels, poems, philosophical books etc. For Groys, this meant that we had to start looking for a new understanding of the new.

In order to do that, Groys first stripped the new from its – mostly modernist – connotations of concepts such as utopia, historical progress, creativity and authenticity. Referring back to Nietzsche, he defines innovation instead as the revaluation of values:

Innovation does not consist in the emergence of something previously hidden, but in the fact that the value of something always already seen and known is re-valued. The revaluation of values is the general form of innovation: here the true or the refined that is regarded as valuable is devalorized, while that which was formerly considered profane, alien, primitive, or vulgar, and therefore valueless, is valorized. (10)

The exemplary work of art, to which Groys would return again and again throughout his oeuvre, is Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917). What Duchamp did, after all, was not to invent something that was not there before, but to place something from the domain of the profane in the domain of the sacred. In retrospect, argues Groys, this was what art and artists have always done. Duchamp, by stripping the act of artistic transformation down to almost nothing, shows us what innovation comes down to: cultural revaluation.

For Groys this meant that the answer to the question of innovation was to be found in a specific place: the collection or archive. To collect something, whether it concerns the library, the collection of immortal souls, or the museum of modern art, means to grant it importance, that is, to sanctify it. Hence, Über das Neue can be considered as the starting point of Groys’ reflections on the function and status of the museum in our contemporary society, which he later developed in books such as Logik der Sammlung (1997) and Topologie der Kunst (2003). As the subtitle of Logik der Sammlung makes clear – Am Ende des musealen Zeitalter, ‘at the end of the museum age’ – Groys was already well aware of the waning influence and importance of the traditional museum, in the face not only of societal developments such as the suspicion of a supposedly elitist culture and the increasing power of private collectors, but also of artistic movements, which in several waves of so called ‘institutional critique’ tried to break out of, or emancipate themselves from, the museum. Still, as Groys emphasizes again in the interview below, without the museum, there can be no innovation.

Groys distinguishes the new from modernist ‘myths’ of historical progress and utopia, but also from contemporary myths such as creativity and the ‘Other’. With regard to the latter, he has always been critical towards the idea of the art world having to be a ‘reflection’ of society. In Art Power (2008), for instance, he writes:

When art relinquishes its autonomous ability to artificially produce its own differences, it also loses the ability to subject society, as it is, to a radical critique. All that remains for art is to illustrate a critique that society has already leveled at or manufactured for itself. To demand that art be practiced in the name of existing social differences is actually to demand the affirmation of the existing structure of society in the guise of social critique (113).

However, this does not mean, for Groys, that art is apolitical. On the contrary, as he argues below, the revaluation of values which is the general form of innovation, i.e. to value something that was not valued before, or to devalue something that was valued, is the political act per se. Scenes from everyday life, the dream, rituals, household equipment, advertisement and popular culture – all these things were considered too base or banal for art, but were included in the cultural realm by innovative artists, in much the same way as voices that are not heard in the political realm strive to be heard, and as entities that were not previously represented in politics and law gained rights.[2]

Born in East Berlin in 1947, Groys began his academic career in Leningrad and Moscow, where he was also active in the unofficial art scene. In 1981 he moved to West Germany where he later received his PhD at the University of Münster. Today he is Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, and travels around the globe as a lecturer and curator at art institutes, biennials, conferences, etc. His experiences of both sides of the Iron Curtain proved to be crucial for his thinking, which is always thought-provoking, sometimes puzzling, and which occasionally leads to controversial or even questionable statements. He has a way of thinking through a certain statement up to its most extreme and seemingly bizarre consequences, such as in Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin (1988) in which he argues that Stalin completed the utopian project of Russian avant-garde artists like Malevich or Mayakovsky, and even understood it better than they themselves did; or in Das kommunistische Postskriptum (2006), where he argued that the Soviet Union was the realization of the linguistic turn in the political realm.

Another aspect of his work and style that makes him both a fascinating and provocative thinker is his apparent nihilism. In this interview as well as in any of his other writings, he resolutely refuses to be nostalgic or moralistic. He registers the differences between, and historical developments of, the modern and the postmodern, between the East and the West, or between the museum and the supermarket, but he nowhere speaks of decline. Rather than passing value-judgments, Groys seems to be more interested in analyzing what has actually changed, and how this change allows or forces us to reframe our concepts and practices.

On the occasion of the 25^th anniversary of Über das Neue, as well as, as it happens, that of the 100^th anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, Krisis asked Groys to reflect on the legacy of this book, on the contemporary meaning of notions such as creativity, originality and novelty, and on the future of the new.

I. On the New, 25 years ago

Thijs Lijster: Could you tell something about the time in which the book was written? What was the situation in the art world, and why did you think it was important to write a book on the category of the new back then?

Boris Groys: That was the time of postmodern discourses: everywhere everybody was speaking about the impossibility of the new. That was a core belief of the postmodern mind-frame. At the same time, it was quite clear to me – I was teaching at the university and I was also, as a curator, participating in artistic activities – the factual criteria of the new were still valid. For example, imagine someone who has to write a doctoral thesis, saying: I don’t say anything new, because we live in postmodern times and the new is impossible, so let me only repeat what was said before. It would not be possible for him to make his doctorate. So, to make the doctorate, he would have to prove that he said something new. It was the same in the case of selection of artworks at an exhibition, especially contemporary overviews of the state of the art world. Here again, the first question was still: is the art work a new phenomenon, did this artist do something new or not?

So, there was a kind of duplicity in culture that I experienced at that point: on a theoretical level, everybody said that the new was impossible, but in cultural practice this requirement of the new was still valid. The goal of the book Über das Neue was to try to reconstruct and to describe the hidden, implicit presuppositions of this requirement. So: what does it mean to require something new after the new became impossible? What is the context in which the new is still possible? My book was an attempt to reconstruct the theoretical, and in a certain way also pragmatic, presuppositions of the new, against the background of this cultural duplicity.

TL: In order to do that, you rid the concept of the new from all kinds of ideological connotations, like ‘utopia’ and ‘progress’. You start out by giving a series of negative definitions of the new: “The New is not just the Other”, “The New is not utopian”, “The New is not a product of human freedom”, etc. Could one say you try to ‘rescue’ the category of the new, by detaching it from all these other categories?

BG: I wouldn’t say I tried to rescue it, and I wouldn’t say I tried to negate all the other concepts. I merely responded to the situation I just described. I saw that all these connections, between the new and progress, utopia and so on, became obsolete, if we would take the postmodern discourse seriously. All the while, the new hadn’t become obsolete; it remained operative in our culture. So, it’s not like I tried to do something – to disengage the new from all these associations, it is what happened in culture. That was the situation. I was not the author of this situation; I just tried to phenomenologically describe it.

TL: The new was, as you said, separated from utopia and progress, and with that also from its temporal dimension. You write: “The new stands in opposition to the future as much as to the past” (2014, 41). Innovation, in your view, is what happens when an object is transferred from everyday life into cultural tradition. Still, is it possible to detach the new from its temporal dimension? After all, isn’t the new what happens after the old?

BG: Again, I didn’t detach it; it was detached de facto. So, I asked myself: What is the function of the new in this context? It became clear to me that the new, in the context of art, is related to what is already in our archives. Our culture is structured in the following way: we have the archives, and the world outside of the archives. The archives exist in the here and now, and the world outside of the archives also exists now, it is not the world of the future or the past; both worlds – that of the archives and the outside world – are contemporary to each other and to our own experience.

But what is their relation? My idea was that it is in the intersection between these two worlds that the new emerges. If I write a doctorate and I want to show that the doctorate is new I do not compare what I said to all possible opinions in the world I’m living in, because it can happen that some of these opinions actually are part of my world. I begin to compare this text, my own text, with the archives, with what is already accepted as valid in a certain discipline. So, I take some opinions or knowledge – my own opinions and those of my friends – from outside of the archives, compare them to what is already in the archives and precisely if some of these opinions are not in the archives I present them as new. The artist does the same. That is something already described very well by Baudelaire, in his famous essay on ‘The Painter of Modern Life’. Baudelaire speaks about an artist who looks at the classical ideal of beauty and at the same time at what happens around him, and then what he tries to do is to combine them. The same can be said about the avant-garde. The avant-garde never ever indicated any future. If we look at the avant-garde writings, their programs and manifestoes, they tell you all the same: we have the museums, filled with ancient Apollos and so on, and outside of the museums and around us we have tanks, trains, airplanes, explosions and killings, industrial machines, and mathematics and geometry. Some kind of new order; these things are not precisely the things of the future, they are already around.

TL: All they did was implement them into the cultural realm?

BG: Precisely. That’s it, and only that. The avant-garde never went an inch into the future. The avant-garde always only wanted to transport and transpose certain experiences that the people in their contemporary life had into the museum space, into the space of the cultural archives. And the power of the avant-garde was precisely its ability to cross this border and to bring the lived experience into the cultural space. It was not concerned with some idle projection of the future, or some senseless utopia, but with the lived experience of everyday life in an industrial civilisation. It is the same with Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and so on. Duchamp doesn’t invent anything. He takes a urinal and places it in the museum. Now imagine that you bring to the museum another urinal, and say: this is a different one, because it has a different form. No museum would take it, because they would say: it is irrelevant, because it is not new enough. What does that mean, not new enough? It means that it might be different in form, but does not engage in the difference between art and life, between the cultural and the profane realm, between the archives and everyday existence. So, I would say that the notion of the new, and the effect of the new, is something that has its place on the border of the cultural archive and contemporary life.

TL: If the new is detached from the aforementioned categories like utopia, progress and human freedom, doesn’t that also imply a depoliticization of the new? In Über das Neue, also in Logik der Sammlung, you point to the many failed liaisons between artistic and political avant-gardes. However, if the idea of innovation is detached from the idea of a better world, what is then still the value of the new? 

BG: First of all, I consider my own theory of the new as a total politicization of the new. The decision to take something from everyday life or everyday experience and to put it into the archive is an eminently political decision. In a certain way, it is the actual political decision. It’s what Kierkegaard said with regard to Jesus Christ: believing he was not just a normal man but the son of God is simply a decision. To ascribe value to something that up till then had no value, to put it in a valuable context, is the Urform of political decision-making. Actual politics functions according to the same pattern. For example: up to a certain point in history the workers had no value in the system of representation. It takes a political decision to change this value, after which they are represented.

In the Second Surrealist Manifesto, Breton asks: What is an authentic surrealist artwork? And he answers: to go into the crowd with a revolver and randomly shooting into it. So, you take this action, a terrorist deed, and put it into another context, the context of art. In the same way, Marinetti speaks of the metallization of the human body, the wonderful effect of exploding African villages, and so on. If you look at those examples, you see immediately that what I describe is eminently political. Utopias are not by nature political, they are literary fictions. Whether they have any political value has to be decided politically. In other words: utopias are not a source of politics, but an object of politics. I have to make the decision, and this decision cannot be delegated to any theory or any utopian vision. That means that the value of my political decision cannot be deduced from utopia itself.

TL: The politics of the new, then, is that in the same way as people that were not politically represented get a vote and get representation, something that was outside of the cultural realm gets inserted.

BG: Yes. And with regard to politics, not only people, but maybe even lions or plants. There has emerged a new ecological consciousness that believes that also certain animals or plants should be represented in our culture, which means they should be protected. The question what should be represented is the crucial question of our society, because our society knows only two modes of relating to things and people: to let them perish, or to protect them. That is the basic political decision. If you decide to include something into the system of representation, this means that you are interested in how this thing – object, human being, animal or whatever – will be translated into the future. The museum, the archive in general, is a futurist institution, because it keeps things for the future. Futurism was never about the future, innovation is not about the future, but it relates to the future in so far as it gives us a promise of protection and preservation.

TL: So what is new now will be included in the collection and preserved for the future.

BG: Yes, precisely. Being included, it will not be discarded. That is the promise on which our culture is based. This basis is so fundamental that it is often neglected. For example, Nietzsche said: my writings will only be understood after three hundred years. It meant that he firmly believed that mankind, without actually understanding his writings, would be reproducing them, putting them in libraries, distributing them, for three hundred years. If you want to speak about utopia, this is a true utopia. There is an almost automatic and unconscious reliance on the institutions of protection in our culture. People writing books, producing art works, have an instinctive trust in the possibility of their survival. This faith is precisely what gives the basic energy to the effort to make something new, so that it would be safeguarded, protected, translated into the future. And that is precisely what I was and still am interested in.

II. The new, then and now

TL: What, in your view, is the main difference between the situation in the art world 25 years ago and now?

BG: The main differences have to do with the emergence of the Internet, as an electronic archive. These differences manifest themselves in the two following ways. First, if you think of the traditional role of the writer, philosopher and artist, it was precisely to mediate between the archive and everyday life, that is, to provide artistic (or theoretical) expression and representation of everyday life. But the Internet gives to everybody the immediate possibility to present oneself on the global stage – everybody makes selfies, videos, writes blogs, and so on. We no longer have a mass culture of consumers – the situation that was described by Adorno – but a situation of mass cultural production, where everybody is an artist, everybody is a writer, and a philosopher. We no longer need mediators, so we no longer need writers, philosophers, or artists.

The second difference, however, is that the Internet still does not produce the stability, security and protection that the traditional archives had. We often think this is an institutional question, or a technological one, but in fact it is an economic one. Internet platforms are privately driven, so they have to make profit. And that means that on the Internet there is no place for the museum, or an archive in any form. I’m quite sceptical about whether this will change. Basically, today, if you want to have an archive on the Internet, it should be based on already existing archives. Only institutions like the MoMA and Tate can establish something like an Internet archive, partially also because they are able to pay for this. In the EU, if you want to establish an Internet archive, you get a guarantee of protection of maximum 30 years. So it will cost a lot of money, and there is still a lot of insecurity.

What does it mean if you take these two points together? It means that in the contemporary global framework, you have total representation, but from a future perspective, it is all garbage. What is interesting is that the Silicon Valley people know this very well; they all create secret museums, libraries, documentation centres, etc. but these are not traditional archives in the sense I describe in my book, since they are not publicly supported and accessible for the public. There have been many attempts to create electronic archives, but de facto none of these attempts were really successful, precisely because of the general structure of the Internet and its relations of property.

It is the classical Marxist situation of collective use and private property. That analysis, if there is any place to use it, very much applies here. Everybody uses these Internet platforms, but they belong to only a few companies. There is a tension between the interests of the users and the interests of the companies, but this tension is hidden and not thematized, because people believe that the Internet is a means of communication. If we would start to think the Internet as a means of archiving, then this tension would be obvious. It is possible, however, that people would give up the archive in general, that people will be only interested in communication and no longer in archiving. That would mean indeed that they would not be interested in the future, and then the role of the archives would be decreasing. Partially we already are in this situation: the museums are poor; they cannot compete with private collections. Private collections are based partially on the current situation in the art world, but being private they are based very much on the collector’s taste, which cannot be collectivized. These private collections do not of course constitute the framework for protection that I was describing. The same can be said about libraries and so on. We more and more experience them as too expensive, taking up too much space.

It seems to me that today we are in a period of transition. On the one hand, the structures I described in my book – in academia, in museums, in the art world – are still existing and function in the same way. Parallel to that we have Instagram, virtual reality, viral videos, and so on. I don’t say we have to make a choice; I only want to say that there is a factor of uncertainty and a lack of clarity about their relationship, and I think that is a factor that emerged only after the book was written.

TL: You say that people are no longer interested in the archival function, but at the same time there is a lot of anxiety about the preservation of tradition, in the shape of ‘cultural heritage’ and so forth. In Über das Neue you write: “[T]he new ceases to represent a danger and becomes a positive demand only after the identity of tradition has been preserved” (2014, 21). Might one say that the contemporary anxiety emerges from a lack of historical orientation? In other words: since we cannot make sense of the present, or determine our direction for the future, we do not know what is historically meaningful and meaningless. And what would this mean for the category of the new?

BG: Indeed, we can no longer rely on the tradition. And again, I think this is related to digital media: we are confronted with everything at the same time, and everyone globalized him or herself. At the same time, we’re not sure what the archive still means under this new condition. But as long as there are archives, it makes no difference for the category of the new. There would only be a difference if the archives would dissolve completely. If that happens, then we no longer have the new, but then we also no longer have philosophy, literature, and art. Probably we’ll still have politics, but I’m not sure about it. All these phenomena relate to the archives, so if the archives dissolve, then all the other things dissolve as well.

TL: Is that a real threat?

BG: Maybe it is a threat, maybe a relief. I think a lot of people would see it as liberation. It is difficult to say. I think it is a mixture between threat and liberation, in the same way that every utopia is also a dystopia. But I think the fact is that many people welcome this development; that the feeling of liberation prevails, the feeling of being liberated from the archive, but also from literature, art and philosophy.

In a sense it would be another step in the history of secularization. European culture has a complex relation to its religious heritage. You still have the names of the saints, ideals of sovereignty and creativity, and an institutional long-term memory, which all together show that it is really a secularized version of a feudal or religious order. In one of my early texts, written at the same time as Über das Neue, I wrote that I would not be surprised if after a new revolution curators would be hanged on lampposts in the same way the French aristocracy was, because they incorporate the same feudal order. It is possible that we go through a new wave of liberation, which started in the 1960s, found its medium in the Internet, and now rids itself of the final traces of the feudal order.

TL: And would this also mean the end of the new?

BG: Yes. The problem is that the new itself, in European culture, has of course its origin in the New Testament. So what is the new? The New Testament is new in relation to the Old Testament. If you don’t have the Old Testament, you can’t have a New Testament. That’s only logic. Now, if we have an anti-testamentarian movement, as we have now, almost already full-fledged, then it is all over. There is no old, no new, there’s no culture. And I tell you: people experience that as liberation. I see that a young generation is very happy about it. And I’m not against it.

TL: In your book, you discuss the issue of representation, and also the struggle of minorities or socially oppressed groups that want to be represented in the collection or archive. This seems to be a highly topical issue (not only with regard to the museum, but for instance also with regard to popular culture, e.g. Hollywood that is considered to be too masculine, too white, etc.). However, you are quite sceptical of the way this debate is usually framed. You write: “Even if an artist or theoretician utilizes things and signs of the social class from which she comes, she has always already detached herself from this class and acquired a capacity for observing it from without.” (2014, 169). But isn’t it also the question from which direction the innovation is supposed to come? In other words: whether it is from the perspective of the collection that something appears as new (as you argued in your book), or that something from the outside demands access to the collection? In the latter case, you might say that claims to just representation or, in Honneth’s terms, cultural recognition, are in fact highly important.

BG: They are relevant. But first of all: if there is a pressure from the outside, a struggle to enter the collection, this struggle is almost always successful. Why is that? It is always successful because, as I try to show, it corresponds to a certain kind of inner logic of the collection itself. It wants to expand. When the collections are confronted with something they overlooked they are eager to absorb it.

However, as I tried to discuss in Über das Neue, the question of minority representation involves two problems. In my view, this whole issue has an American background. When I went to America some years ago, it was an interesting discovery for me that I had to fill in ‘race’ in many forms. I suddenly belonged to the cultural majority, because I am a white male. There are 1.5 million Russians living only in New York City, many don’t speak English, but they are supposed to belong to the majority culture of the US. So first of all, the problem is: what counts as a minority and what is the majority? These categories are always problematic.

The second problem is that the individual artist, writer or philosopher never really represents his or her culture of origin. Could we say that Baudelaire is typical French, that Huysmans is, or who is typical German or Dutch? After all, these artists represent only themselves. The idea that they represent a bigger group is, I would say, a very American idea.

TL: But even if you say that the individual artist doesn’t represent a group, you still might say that the museum represents a certain western white male culture, rather than other cultures, which are present geographically speaking but aren’t represented in the museum’s collection.

BG: I agree with that. We have a complicated structure of protest and domestication. To become a famous French poet you first have to hate everything French, to break with the tradition. Like Rimbaud who said: I want to become black, I hate France; or Breton who said: when I see a French flag I vomit, and so on. If you are really and typical French, you will never get into a French museum, and you will never be a French poet of genius, because you will be average French. You will have to break all the rules, hate France, committing some crimes is always helpful – think of Genet – and only then you get the status of being a great French artist.

The problem with the contemporary struggles is that people want to get access to the collection, but without putting into question yourself and your own tradition. You are not obliged or expected to make this detour, not obliged to become other to yourself, which is, actually, the meaning of the word ‘other’. As French philosophy crossed the Atlantic it changed in many ways, but the crucial change was in the word ‘other’. In the French tradition, the ‘other’ is either God, or the subconscious, but in any case, it is something living in you that is not you, that can possess you, destroy you, take over. You are struggling against it, put it under control or otherwise it controls you. It is an old story, and eventually leads to Bataille, Foucault and Derrida, for whom the other is writing: it is not you who write, but something in you and through you. But then, after this French philosophy crossed the Atlantic Ocean, the ‘other’ become simply: the other guy. People think they are already the other, because they are the other guy. This secularization or banalization of otherness is actually what constitutes the major part of contemporary discourse.

I don’t say it’s a wrong development, because secularization is at the core of our modern consciousness. I just wanted to point out that, in relation to the concept of the new, something changed. My relation to my identity changed. Instead of trying to destroy my identity, becoming other to myself and in this way gain access to the cultural tradition (as was always the case), now I simply reassert my identity and raise a claim to be accepted to the cultural archives, without any kind of suffering or inner struggle.

TL: Today, even more than when you wrote the book, innovation seems to be applauded throughout society, especially with regard to economic production. Think of Richard Florida’s praise of the creative class and the creative city, everyone has to be creative, think outside the box, every product has to be innovative, etc. How do you regard this imperative of creativity in the sphere of economic production?

BG: I think creativity is nonsense, total nonsense. The notion of creativity is a Christian notion per se, it is a residue of religion. I think that, if you are not a Catholic, and all these people probably are, you cannot believe in creativity. Mankind cannot be creative. It’s the worst form of religious naivety. The only form of human productivity is combining, putting things together. The Internet was modelled after an elementary Turing machine, and that was actually a full description of what a human mind can do. After all it is just copy and paste. We cannot do anything ontologically new; that is the principle of human activity. So creativity is divine privilege.

TL: You argue in your book that it is impossible to distinguish authentic from inauthentic newness. But don’t you think that newness/novelty means something different, or is used in a different way, in different spheres? For instance, the new iPhone that one needs to have every couple of years; is it the same kind of newness as an innovation in the art world?

BG: A new iPhone is not an innovation. It is repetition. The structural condition of innovation is the archive. We have two models in our civilization: the supermarket, and the museum. What is the difference? One model, the museum, allows for innovation, because it keeps all the old productions, and so you can compare the old with the new. If I introduce a new product in the supermarket, it is simply part of the offer. You don’t see what is not offered. Assyrian Gods, for instance, are not offered in the supermarket. What is not produced here and now is removed from the supermarket, and so we can’t see it. And because you can’t see it, you can’t compare it, and because you can’t compare it, you are in the same situation as you were before. Maybe you can remember what was in the supermarket two months ago, if you have a good memory, but not for very much longer. So if you are not in the archive but in the real world, there is no real change, because every moment is like the other moment. As long as you don’t think teleologically – so if you don’t think there is an origin, and don’t believe there is an end – you cannot differentiate between one moment and another, since you cannot determine their distance from the beginning or the end. If you believe in the second coming of Christ, you can calculate the distance of a particular moment from the first and the second coming, but if there is no such promise, whatever it is, then it is like if you’re running on a treadmill: you are running, but you remain in the same place.

When I came to America, there was the Obama campaign, with the posters “Change”, and “Yes we can”. I always told my students: changing is the only thing we can. There is change today, and change tomorrow. The only real change would be a change from change to no change – that is utopia.

TL: But social institutions can change. Replacing the feudal order with a democratic system is an actual change, isn’t it?

BG: Yes, that was a historical change. But after that, and if there is no longer a hierarchy, then you don’t have any change. The problem of our social institutions today is rather that they change all the time. You can never find the same person in the same place. I don’t think democracy has anything to do with it. What happened is that ever since the industrial revolution, there is constant technological development, and we as humans tried to accommodate to changing situations. Every day, all our effort is concentrated on how to survive this day under different conditions. I cannot send e-mails because my mail program is obsolete; I can’t install a new program, because my computer is obsolete; I cannot buy a new one, because I don’t have Internet connection, etc. I spend day after day just trying to accommodate to these changes. Today we are witnessing the disappearance of the division of labour: you have to do everything yourself on the Internet, become your own doctor, taxi driver, and so on. What our civilization is about is basically the sheer material survival of mankind.

The protection of human beings is very closely related to the protection of artworks. Actually, the museum was installed at the same time and by the same people who thought of human rights. Human rights are actually the rights of the artwork: there is this body that has to be protected, and so you cannot use it, you cannot mistreat it, etc. All you can do is look at it, and speak about it. And that is precisely what is established in the museum: you look at art, you speak about it, but you cannot use it. Human rights are basically art rights.

Now it seems to me that human beings are more and more left to themselves. We feel like Mowgli, or Tarzan, so that we have to look for ourselves what is dangerous, how we can improve our chances, and so on. Children are raised this way, with a very cautious and frightened attitude. If I remember my own young years, I was absolutely not frightened, but today my own students are scared to death. They have the feeling that if they lose, they’ll simply perish; it is sheer fear for survival. They no longer believe in the social conditions for survival. It is an interesting period in human history. But there’s no place to think of innovation, only of survival.

III. Innovation and acceleration

TL: A more recent plea for societal innovation and progress has been accelerationism, as explained in Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ much-discussed #Accelerate Manifesto from 2013. They argue that capitalism has become a source of stasis rather than of innovation. Rather than working against the accelerating powers of capitalism – as in the different slow-movements, or romanticizing localism and authenticity – we should speed up even further, so as to let capitalism crash against its own limits and go beyond it. How do you consider this proposal, or how in general would you describe the relationship between acceleration and innovation?

BG: There is no acceleration, there is just more pressure. Moreover, you are not the subject of this movement. The problem of accelerationism is the belief that you can appropriate this movement and steer it. That is impossible. Even our friend Deleuze didn’t believe that. He believed we can enjoy acceleration, but he didn’t believe that we could control it, or appropriate it.

TL: In their recent book Inventing the Future. Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015), Srnicek and Williams further argue that left politics has abandoned the idea of progress and modernization, leaving them in the hands of neoliberalism, while retreating to a localized and romanticized ‘folk politics’, as they call it. In their view, the left should reclaim the future, and the category of the new is the instrument to do so. They write: ‘If the supplanting of capitalism is impossible from the standpoint of one or even many defensive stances, it is because any form of prospective politics must set out to construct the new.’ (75) How would you respond to this?

BG: I think that the moment we are experiencing now creates illusions of this type in the minds of young people. They believe that they are something like living start-ups. It’s a new neoliberal illusion. Our whole development will lead to stagnation. First of all, the globe itself is a symbol of stagnation: it circulates, while progress is linear. Today we speak not about universalism, but about globalization. But globalization is circulation and that means that we already reached the point of stagnation. The stagnation is not obvious for most people, because there is still a middle class, with its traditional institutions: the universities, the museums, etc. But as soon as these collapse, the middle class will also collapse. I sometimes tell my students that every day they spent at the university makes them poorer, because the people who have money, from Madonna to Bill Gates, never went to school. So, we will come to a very traditional situation of poor and rich, and this will produce the return of left ideas. Because, as long as you think that you can individually cross the bridge between poor and rich, as long as there is still a bridge to cross, you will always be neoliberal. You can think what you want, but you will try to do so. But if the gap is too wide, like in the 1920s and 1930s, like in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, then the only answer will be left ideas.

TL: What will these left ideas produce, then? A new middle class?

BG: We will see, we don’t know that. I am like Marx: never predict what that revolution will produce. He was always against French utopianism. But I think it will produce a new Soviet Union. Not precisely in the same way, but to the extent that the Soviet Union was basically the administration of stagnation. In the contemporary competitive world, it was difficult to keep it. But if the whole world becomes stagnating, then the question of world revolution can come again, the question of international socialism can come again, the question of world administration and world state can come again, all the Hegelian/Marxist/Kojevian line will come again. Right now, it is suppressed by this running to nowhere. The feeling of that may be exciting, but it is a certain period of time, and it will not last very long.

TL: So, if I understand you correctly, you say that the left doesn’t need new ideas, because these ideas are already there.

BG: Yes. In many ways we are back in the nineteenth century, and that is the rhythm of the European culture: the seventeenth century was reactionary, the eighteenth century was progressive, the nineteenth reactionary, the twentieth century progressive, etc. If you look at the reaction of the nineteenth century to the French Revolution, first of all, everybody believed that the Republican democratic regime collapsed because they could not succeed structurally, and secondly everybody believed the revolutionaries were morally evil because they killed children and young women on the guillotine. Both this moralization and the disbelief in the capacity of survival were general throughout the nineteenth century, but at the end everybody was democratic. Now you know how history works, there’s nothing new: now the Soviet Union is totalitarian, terrible repression, women and children killed, and it was impossible, it could not survive. But in 70 or 80 years it will be completely reversed. So, we should simply relax and wait, for in time we will be disappointed by neoliberal illusions and utopias, look at the reality of life, which is miserable, and then look at the models, not of the better life, but how to organize miserable life.

TL: Like in the saying of Brecht, that communism isn’t the equal distribution of wealth, but of poverty.

BG: Of course. And it is as bad as any other social system, but it has at least one advantage, that I understood when I went to the West. You really didn’t have Angst, this prominent insecurity, and this sheer fear of not surviving the next day. On this very basic level people felt themselves totally secure and protected. And I believe this desire for stability, protection, and security will emerge again.

Today you see it on the right. Why is that? The West believes it has won the Cold War against socialism and communism. But who exactly are the winners? It is neoliberalism and religiously coloured nationalism. Now they are fighting each other. But they will try to find a compromise, because they have a common feature, and that is competition. Neoliberalism believes in the competition of everybody against everybody, and the other in the competition of one ethnic group against the other. Both hate universalism, and both hate the ideas of solidarity and cooperation. They honestly believe that what is best should be defined by competition, and if you don’t arrange a harsh competition you won’t know what is the best, or who is capable of winning. The problem is that, as I believe, man isn’t capable of anything at all. The problem of nationalism and neoliberalism, then, is still the illusion of humanism, that humans can be creative, competitive, determine their own lives, can be responsible for themselves, and so on. They believe there is this kind of potential in human beings to deal with and manage any burden, going through any difficulty and making it: the American Dream. But it’s all a huge lie, and the challenge is to see it as a huge lie that was only invented to terrorize people. To say to them: why are you poor, you have to make an effort, you have to struggle, you have to constantly improve and update yourself. Somehow, and at a certain point in time, we have to be relieved from this blackmail.

When I was a child and responsive to these things, I was always fascinated by these Russian posters, saying: let us reach the level of the current day. This presupposed that we are somehow always behind. Stalin, who was a good thinker and much more honest than everybody else, said: when we really understand Marxism and Leninism, we should accept that our situation is always a bit ahead of our ability to reflect on it. So, our thinking is behind our real situation. And that is precisely what connects capitalism and socialism, this belief in the powers that are faster than we can think.

IV. The future of the new

TL: Let’s return once more to the concept of the new in relation to the art world. In the Dutch book of essays on your work, Dirk van Bastelaere argues that the concept ‘entropy’ you use in Logik der Sammlung (according to which the collection constantly extends and absorbs that which it is not) should – in line with your own economic jargon – be replaced by the concept ‘inflation’, which is less neutral. Inflation would then mean that the increase in artistic innovations (and hence the culturalization of profane domains) implies at the same time a decrease in value of these innovations. (Bastelaere et al. 2013, 85). Do you agree with that diagnosis?

BG: If we follow our earlier line of thinking, that is if the whole system of selection and representation collapses, then the new will have no value at all. It only makes sense if you have the archives and institution – and the critique of institutions is part of it. Without the institutions, the critique of institutions obviously makes no sense. Art that leaves the museum [e.g. street art, land art, performance art, community art, TL] always has to return to the museum in the shape of documentation. So, whatever you do outside of the museum, also in contemporary art, has cultural value only if it is afterwards represented in the museum in the form of documentation.

TL: In an interview I did with Luc Boltanski (Celikates and Lijster 2015) he argued, following Isabelle Graw, that the economic valuation of art works can never persist without the aesthetic valuation by critics, curators, artists, etc. If the two merge this is also destructive for the economic valuation. Do you agree with this analysis, and should this reassure us that market forces could never take over the art world completely?

BG: I think that art becomes more and more like a luxury product, like china or perfume. Everyone can make art, but not everybody makes a living from art. But if you don’t make a living from art, it doesn’t mean that you’re not an artist. If you speak about professional art, you speak about making a living from art. Then it becomes simply a segment of the general market, and it’s the same as Armani design and so on. If you look at creative districts in China, you see design, cutlery stores, fashion, art galleries, all together. But then it has nothing to do with general society.

TL: Is that so different from seventeenth century Holland, when art was also a luxury product?

BG: The institution of the museum, as you know, was created after the French Revolution. The revolutionaries took the objects of use from the aristocracy and instead of destroying them, they disenfranchised them and exhibited them, but forbid their use. It was a decision in between iconoclasm and iconophilia. What Duchamp later did was a repetition of this gesture – it is the same gesture.

This museum is a public space. Privatization recreates the situation as it was before the French Revolution, but then we can no longer speak of public institutions and we lose historical consciousness. So the problem is not if Isabelle Graw or someone else finds some painting beautiful, according to a certain aesthetic theory. The question is: Is a certain artwork historically representative, so that it can be put in the museum? For a private collector, this question has no relevance, because it is his taste that matters, and not the archival importance. After writing Über das Neue, I was invited to Switzerland, where they organize schools for leading European collectors. I told them I considered these collections as installations and not as museums, because the installation is the assemblage of objects according to a certain taste. At the moment you privatize, you get involved in private passions and relationships that have nothing to do with an archive.

I tend to think that the model I proposed is probably a model for secularized culture that started with the French Revolution and ended with the end of communism. Now this system of culture in general collapses – it still survives of course, this process of collapsing takes very long, and maybe the archives survive in another way. The first libraries were private collections, the first art collections were in the pyramids, and they survived. So maybe they will survive in a certain way, in so far as they survive the current model.

Introduction

At times, it feels that reality is only trying to catch up with fiction. ‘What will happen when America has a dictator?’ it reads on the cover of my edition of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. Published in 1935 the book describes the election of Buzz Windrip as President of the United States by provoking fear and promising drastic economic and social reforms while promoting a return to patriotism and traditional values. Once in the White House, Windrip takes complete control of the government and institutes an American version of fascism (Lewis 1935). Who never had the intuition that fiction and reality are actually more intertwined than we want to admit? It is very difficult, however, to clarify the complex ways in which the political domain and the nexus of images, stories and narratives are indeed interrelated.

Chiara Bottici’s work is precisely an attempt to build up a philosophical framework for thinking about the role of images and narratives in politics. Her book A Philosophy of Political Myth develops a philosophy that makes it possible to view political myth as more significant than being merely true or false. Her point of departure takes Blumenberg’s view of myth as not presenting a given once and for all, but as being a process of continual reworking (Bottici 2007). According to him a narrative must always answer a need for significance in a specific period and context in order to function as a myth (Blumenberg 1979). Bottici recognizes this and argues that myths indeed should be seen as re-appropriations and as the maintenance of images, symbols, stories and narratives that give significance to people’s lives and worlds. As such, people play an active role in the working of myth and are not merely persuaded by them. This also means that there is no clear distinction between truth and unreality.

The discussion between fact and fiction, reality and imagination, truth and un-truth has revived again these days. In America and England post-truth was elected as word of the year in 2016 and the Society for the German Language nominated a similar word, Postfaktisch’ (Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache 2016). The entry in the Oxford Dictionaries describes post-truth as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ (Oxford Dictionaries 2016). It seems common sense that people’s opinions, choices and actions are shaped not merely by objective fact but also depend on feelings and mores that give significance to their life and the world they live in. It seems undeniable, however, that these are also conditioned by a prescriptive view of how one would wish human beings to be.

In political thought, for example, the view that we needed more rationality in politics has been dominant in the twentieth century, especially since the 1990s, after ‘the end of ideology’. The works of John Rawls (e.g. 1993) and Jürgen Habermas (e.g. 1992) – the successor of Horkheimer and Adorno in the Frankfurt School’s critical theory – are of primary importance in this current of political thought. They presuppose the possibility of rational choices once the structures and processes of decision-making were to be made fair. The underlying belief of their views, however, is that conflicts can be solved through an improvement of civilization and social organization, and settled through peaceful deliberation by way of amicable compromise. Even though their theories are suggested as models for everyday politics however, they could only really be put into effect in a world that, as yet, does not exist.

It is precisely through a recognition of the particular and changing character of politics today that Bottici proposes a new direction in critical theory in her latest book Imaginal Politics: Images beyond Imagination and the Imaginary (2014). To anyone who uses Facebook, Twitter or just follows the news these days, it seems harder than ever to figure out what is real and what is not. Mediatization has changed politics in a drastic way, becoming inseparable from images whose omnipresence works on our imagination. Images have to be continually worked on and maintained to secure their reality through sedimentation in everyday thoughts, language, and acts. Yet we also all have the capacity to do the imagining ourselves, to produce images of both existing and non-existent objects, Bottici argues (2014).

In Imaginal Politics Bottici analyses the relationship between politics and our imaginative capacities as well as the transformation this connection is undergoing today. According to her ‘we live in a society of spectacles that rests on the commodification of the imaginal, within which we are all socialized’ (Bottici 2014, 192). The book is about what she refers to as the imaginal. This concept enables her to maneuver through the philosophical impasse between imagination seen as an individual faculty and the imaginary understood as our social context. In her view, the imaginal makes space for that which precedes the division between real and unreal as well as that between the individual and the social.

Various authors of the Frankfurt School, such as Adorno, have pointed to the political disposition of imagination by emphasizing the role that society as a whole exercises in the creation of compliant subjects (e.g. Adorno & Horkheimer 1969). These works emphasize the supposed heterogeneity of imagination, but even in the work of Marcuse, where imagination seems to unfold the possibility of freedom, it represents that which does not yet exist and as such remains linked with utopia (e.g. 1980, 1991). Bottici however departs from the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, for whom imagination was the condition for the possibility of reality (Castoriadis 1975). In his view, the imaginary is a field of the undetermined creation of figures, which create the possibility of there being objects. What Bottici calls the imaginal is such a space where figures of the possible emerge. The social functioning of the imaginary, however, is confined by its own symbolic resources, history, and nature. Thus, it is not a space of free imagination but rather the act of imagining a different distribution of the edifice of the social. As such the imaginary is a social practice – a common struggle.

Out of the tension that arises from this struggle between the already instituted social imaginary and the instituting power of collective self-making emerges the real, according to Castoriadis (1975). Rather than a staging of political ideas, work on the social imaginary seems to be an ongoing process of production. To come back to images, one might see it as a post-production factory, a practice of continuously erasing, adding, re-appropriating and re-associating. In this way, the imaginal is seen by Bottici as a field of possibilities wherein these images of the social are animate. Once “out there” images also start to live their own life. Here Bottici follows Mitchell’s view of pictures, understood as complex assemblages of virtual, material, and symbolic elements. Rather than questioning the intentions and views of the maker of the picture, he argues that we should ask what pictures actually ‘want from us’ (Mitchell 2005). Images thus have an undecided nature, they ‘can be either alienating or liberating according to the different contexts’ (Bottici 2014, 70). The question of their reality, then, is contingent upon the way we act upon them.

We seem to have forgotten that the political field can actually be changed in unexpected ways and that the rational choice is not always the political choice. For Bottici ‘this political world that is full of images seems to lack imagination’ (Bottici 2014, 108). In such a constellation, there appears to be no space for imagination, understood as the radical capacity to envisage things differently and to construct alternative political projects. Those who argue that ‘another world is possible’ are characterized as unrealistic, if not fanatical, and in this way are excluded from the spectrum of viable political options.

If we are to understand politics as whatever pertains to the life we have in common, politics is imaginal because we need an image of the public to make it exist, according to Bottici. Indeed, the relevance of the struggle for people’s imagination seems to increase in comparison to the traditional view of politics as a struggle for the distribution of power and the use of legitimate coercion. The link between politics, and what Bottici has named the imaginal, has been tightened in the technical transformations of contemporary capitalism. Recognizing that the imaginal is elemental to the political enables us to better understand contemporary politics and its manifestations through images, simply because persuasion of- and through people’s imagination is recognized as part of politics. It is because of the disqualification of the imaginal as a valid domain of struggle by liberal political theory, and the focus on the center as a “reasonable utopia” by the Left, that the terrain has been left open for experimentation by neofascism. Developing counter-practices of imaginal interventions would be a way to repopulate the imaginal again as a political struggle for a life in common. We cannot ignore it anymore: images no longer simply mediate our doing politics, but now risk doing politics in our stead.

Interview

Rob Ritzen: It struck me that while your book Imaginal Politics: Images beyond imagination and the imaginary is about a world of spectacle and speed, your method of research seems to be out of step with that very world you describe. Can you tell us about your way of working?

Chiara Bottici: I am definitely out of step with the world we live in. Philology, Ancient Greek, Latin, Psychoanalysis: they are all dead languages. Yet, precisely for that reason, they can give you a perspective on current life. My method has always been in-between critical theory and history of philosophy. I think that the two of them, critical theory and history of philosophy, are actually two sides of the same coin; whenever we tell a story about the past, we always tell it from the standpoint of the present, but if we want to understand the present, we have to understand how we actually got here, which other roads we missed on the way, and thus, also, possibly whether we can get off this path. That’s the reason why I am obsessed with genealogies. The philosophical move both in Imaginal Politics and in A Philosophy of Political Myth consists of asking: what do we say when we say this or that? And most importantly: how did we come to such a situation where one can say this and that? Why can we say, for instance, “this is the fruit of your imagination” in order to say that something is unreal, if it is true that in Ancient Greek one could say something similar in order to convey exactly the opposite, that is, that something is real? What do we mean when we say, “this is purely imaginary”? Both theories of imagination and theories of the imaginary, despite their burgeoning, are currently stuck in a philosophical impasse. In order to move forward, we first need to grasp how we got there, what were the material interests that produced such a genealogy, and thus, also identify the potential resources for moving beyond them.

RR: Can you further explain what you mean by genealogy? Is it a history, a reconstruction of the past?

CB: The genealogical method that I use is not meant to provide a history with a capital H. I am not interested in reconstructing a linear path, and thus freeze a concept into a particular history. My aim is to do exactly the opposite, which is to show the contingency of conceptual formation. This can be done in different ways. One may, for example, try to jump outside the current concept of imagination and start using it to mean something else – let us say, “apple.” This can be more or less successful depending on one’s position on hegemony and power. Some writers actually have the capacity to do this. Another way of intervening is to build up a creative re-appropriation of a word through a genealogical investigation of its roots. I think this gives you more of a grasp of the constellation at stake, because you build on the contingency of its genealogy. For instance: there are passages of De Caelo where Aristotle used the term phantasia to mean true vision: how can it be that the corresponding term ‘fantasy’ now means exactly the opposite? By showing the contingency of conceptual constellations, we are in a better position to transform them. In this sense, the genealogical method is not meant to reconstruct continuity but to emphasize breaks, and thus open alternative roads.

RR: You pointed out that there seems to be an impasse in philosophy created by the alternative between the concepts of imagination and the imaginary. Could you explain the difference between these concepts and the tension that arises from them?

CB: It is more than a tension; I would say it is a dilemma. The concept of imagination, as it has been developed in our Western tradition, is imbued with what some people call the philosophy of the subject. That is to say, it is imbued with the idea that we are individuals, subjects endowed with a series of faculties; among the latter, on the one hand, we have reason, which is a faculty to produce abstract laws and concepts; and on the other, we have imagination, understood as the faculty to perform ‘all sorts of capricious and illegal marriages,’ to use Francis Bacon’s expression. The concept of the imaginary has been introduced in philosophy precisely as an attempt to go beyond this understanding. Yet, this attempt to go beyond the individualistic philosophy of the subject has at times turned into an equally problematic metaphysics of context. In short, whereas imagination is the individual faculty that we possess, the imaginary is the social context that possesses us. This is a dilemma, rather than a tension or even a contradiction, in the sense that both horns of the dilemma can be true: that is, it can well be the case that we imagine both individually and collectively.

RR: How does your concept of the imaginal overcome this dilemma?

CB: The imaginal is a space that can be both individual and social. Developing the concept of the imaginal means moving away from the idea that, on the one hand, you have individuals, understood as containers with their faculties, and, on the other, you have contexts, which, in turn, contain individuals. I want to move beyond both these views by including what they each have to say while at the same time taking into account the space in-between. This space in-between is the place images inhabit, independently of who produces them — socially or individually. The imaginal is a move towards this space which is neither totally individual nor totally social, but which is both individual and social. It is also a space that can be both real and unreal. The idea is to point to a kind of suspension of our presuppositions, so that we can approach this space without a priori assumptions about status of reality of images as well as about their social or individual nature.

RR: What do you mean when you say that the imaginal is made of images in the sense of pictorial representations?

CB: First of all, I mean that they are (re)presentations, that is, representations that are also presences in themselves. When we say re-presentation we usually mean that an image re-presents an external reality that is outside of the image itself. By speaking about (re)-presentations, I am trying to distance myself from that view. Even in psychoanalysis, there is often a tendency to think of images as signs of another, deeper reality for which the representation stands — for instance, dreams that stand for deeper unconscious conflicts. Now, the invitation of the imaginal is precisely to suspend this search for something “deeper” and “beyond” images themselves and take images as presences in themselves. This is in general my definition of images. But, for the purpose of my argument in the book Imaginal Politics, I decided to focus particularly on pictorial (re)presentations. In that context, I emphasized the visual side of images, although I acknowledged that there are other types of images, such as acoustic, olfactory, and tactile images. And I did so, because in that context I wanted to emphasize the primacy of sight in contemporary politics, with the consequent transformation of the visual that accompanies it in our late capitalist conditions. This is why, even though I maintain a broad definition of images, as both representations and presences in themselves, when it comes to politics, we should pay special attention to the primacy it accords to the pictorial and to the visual side of our capacity to imagine.

RR: What is then the relation between images and language in your view?

CB: It is very significant that you raise this question. We can hardly speak about images without bringing language in. After the so-called linguistic turn, and under the influence of people like Heidegger in Germany and structuralists in France, there has been an emphasis on the primacy of language for philosophical research. The crucial idea is that we inhabit a world that is made of and through language. Even in psychoanalysis, which is a movement that began with the study of dreams and images that cannot be reduced to simple linguistic descriptions, we have witnessed the growing influence of the linguistic turn. To combat such a trend, I have tried to point to a dimension of images that comes before language. In this sense, I refer to Jungian psychoanalysts who argue that the image is primordial, in the same way in which the unconscious is: what is the unconscious, if not, and foremost, a stream of images?

RR: Is this interest in psychoanalysis and its political usages something that you derived from the Frankfurt School?

CB: Yes, but Imaginal Politics was also a way to position myself in the field. My first job was in Frankfurt, which for me was first and foremost the city of “the school”: books by authors such as Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse have been crucial interlocutors of my formative years. After the Habermasian turn in critical theory, there has been an emphasis on discursive rationality, that is to say, on the a priori structures of language that mediate doing politics, which is not my primary focus of analysis. In Imaginal Politics, I try to look at what is before language and at the role that this “before” plays in politics. To give you an example: take the dispute around the Mohammed cartoons, the image of the prophet, with a bomb in his turban. This cartoon appeared first in a Danish newspaper, therefore in a language notoriously impossible to learn. If instead of a cartoon, this had been an essay or an article, nobody would have cared about it. The whole polemic (and the deaths it provoked) was triggered by the power of images to travel outside of language and outside of language boundaries. This is what I mean by the primacy of the image.

RR: Do you think then that images have nothing to do with language? 

CB: I think there are images that can be reduced to linguistic descriptions and there are even images that you can visualize only through languages, such as the example of a polygon with infinite sides. Yet, I think we went too far with language. There are people who think that images are just language. But they do so because they transpose onto them linguistic structures; they say this is a metonym, this is a metaphor, thereby projecting onto images literary categories invented to understand words. Instead, I am trying to point to what is always not-yet-linguistic in images. If you look at children’s evolution, it is pretty clear that they communicate through images well before communicating with words. It is striking how quickly we forget that. Even in psychoanalysis, with all its emphasis on infantile years, there is an almost exclusive focus on the post-oedipal, post-language phase, with very little work being done on the pre-oedipal. In a way, developing the philosophy of the imaginal means going back to the pre-oedipal stage and asking: what happened before we actually learned linguistic rules? What was the power of images then – and thus, what is left of that power in our adult lives?

RR: Let us go back to politics then. The view that politics has always mirrored theological concepts and motives is very widespread in political theory today. Instead, you claim that politics has always been imaginal; could you explain this shift?

CB: A Philosophy of Political Myth was already an attempt to criticize the increasing influence of political theology. There is the tendency today to consider political theology as the only alternative to a purely rational approach to politics. Those who say that rationalism is not enough and that, therefore, we need some form of political theology commit the mistake of excluding precisely all that is between the two. In the work on myth, I propose considering mythical narratives as one of those things in-between. Sure, we need stories, but not all stories need to be religious stories; not all stories need to depict the world in terms of good and evil, nor do they need to embody questions of life and death — the general strike, for example, Sorel’s idea that in order to mobilize working-class people you need a big myth such as the general strike. The myth of the general strike tells the story: “if you don’t strike, it is going to be a catastrophe for the working class.” This narrative is a myth, but it is a secular one. The example of the general strike also tells us something about the way in which myth works. A common opinion is that this myth failed. Yet, in New York City, during the Occupy movement, a lot of activists, beginning with many New School students, were occupying the main university building and protesting with posters that called for a general strike, using exactly the same terms and narratives. The slogan they were using was ‘we are all in the same boat and the boat is sinking’; this is just a variant of the narrative Sorel was referring to. This is to say that I am really critical of a political theology revival and of the false alternative between rationalism and political theology that it presupposes: it seems to me that this alternative hides more than it illuminates, and what it hides is precisely a most interesting space for our political choices. By depicting all that is not rationality as part of this big melting pot of “political theology,” we end up in a night where all cows look equally grey, so you cannot distinguish between things. In this way, the general strike becomes as much of a political theology as does the Messianism of ISIS and the caliphate. What do we have to gain by assimilating all these different things? There are narratives that are more deleterious than others, some which already smell of death from the very beginning.

RR: How do you bring together the notions that there is always already a world we enter and therefore a context that shapes us and the possibility of creativity of those who inhabit it?

CB: This is a crucial question. How can we be both shaped by the social imaginary we live in and yet be free? The answer is both phenomenological and ontological. Phenomenologically speaking, I argue that precisely in this capacity to produce images that come before the language we learn through socialization, we experience our freedom. One may then ask where is this creativity ultimately coming from? And then we need to provide a more ontological answer, which, in the book, draws inspiration from Hannah Arendt’s statement that natality is the basis of our capacity for action (and remember here that for her, “action” means bringing about the new). Natality constantly brings new bodies, new lives into being, and thus grounds the possibility to initiate something completely new. But maybe we have to take a step back to explain why this banal fact is so important. Do you know why philosophers like political theology so much? It is because they are obsessed with death. There is a tendency in the West to look at death as the defining moment of our existence, and therefore as the moment that is politically most salient. In the Hobbesian paradigm, for instance, we are told that we have to subject ourselves to a sovereign power otherwise we will end up killing each other. Within this perspective, even phenomena such as nationalism become good because the persistence of a nation beyond our death gives us the illusion of immortality. Way too many philosophers, from Hobbes to Heidegger, have been looking at human beings as fundamentally beings-toward-death. In this way, they tend to forget, but also make us oblivious of, the fact that we can die only because we are born. You can understand why this happens; psychologically speaking, it is almost impossible to remember one’s own birth. Most of the time, we remember it only in the form of trauma. Yet, we can actually constantly witness the phenomenon of other people’s birth. This brings me to another point: death is also a truly individual business, because even if you commit collective suicide, you are still going to die alone, in a very bodily sense of the term. Birth, on the contrary, is always something you cannot choose, and most importantly, it is something that you cannot give yourself: it has to occur in the company of somebody else. This is perhaps the ultimate reason why philosophers like to focus on death much more than on birth: because we control our own individual death much more than we could ever control our own individual birth. But it is also the reason why, following Arendt, I argue that birth should be at the center of our political thinking.

RR: There seems to be tension between the constituted power, understood as the sovereign power to inflict death, and constituent power, understood as the power of life to start something new. How do you resolve this?

CB: From the point of view of the imaginal, this is the difference between what Castoriadis calls the instituting and the instituted dimension of our capacity to imagine. In fact, as I mentioned before, the reason why I embarked on the enterprise of writing the book Imaginal Politics was that I had been obsessed for a long time with the question: “where is the new coming from?” If we are always born in a context that institutes us, where is the space for the new? Where is, if you want, the truly constituent power coming from? I wanted to understand whether there is a possibility of escape. In order to have the possibility of escaping, you need to be able to find a moment when the mechanisms of domination break down and the new breaks in. The imaginal is precisely this dimension where such a break can happen. This can be described by pointing towards phenomena such as art movements and vanguards – even though vanguards no longer exist because avant-gardism became a dominant ideology. But, more in general, we can phenomenologically point to moments of ruptures generated by the unconscious. Yet, as I mentioned before, in order to understand how this can potentially take place, we have to go back, ontologically, to birth. There are constantly new births on Earth, new human beings who arrive in unexpected ways; they have their own individuality, their own voice, their own faces, their own bodies, and they are different each time. Maybe we will get to a point where this will get completely lost and we will have only clones. But we are not yet there, so there is still space for hope.

RR: Could you relate this to the mode of image production today? What are the consequences and possibilities opened to us when the image becomes as pervasive as it is today?

CB: In the book, I focus on the capitalist transformation within the current post-Fordist mode of production. Within the latter, imagination is not only a moment in the consumption of commodities (what Marx called commodity fetishism), but rather a crucial moment of the production process itself. We all have to be creative: participative management, multiple jobs, renewable skills are just a few examples. In the 1960s, people could still say “all power to the imagination” and think it would be liberating. But what is to be done now that imagination has taken all the power and capitalism has subsumed this imperative of creativity within itself? This really is what makes the question of where the new is coming from particularly crucial. In the book, I point towards what I call homeopathic strategy that is a strategy of creative re-appropriation that takes pieces of the spectacle and uses it against the spectacle itself. In another context, for a short piece I wrote for the New School Public Seminar, I even spoke of an aesthetic of recycling based on such a homeopathic recipe (Bottici, 2016).

RR: Does this mean there is no more original or no more outside of the spectacle as a possible strategy for critique? Is this the basis of the homeopathic strategy you describe in your Imaginal Politics?

CB: Yes. In homeopathy, you take a small amount of the substance that causes the sickness, and you use it against the sickness itself. This also means that you have to take the same poisonous substances in order to cure what is poisoning you: but in a very small amount and, in particular, through a form adapted to the patient at stake each time. So every homeopathic remedy has to be adapted to the particular person under treatment. It is not that if we each have a sore throat, then we all get the same substance to cure it. If you have a sore throat, it means something particular to your body specifically, so we have to find the remedy that is most adapted to you.

RR: Recent social movements, for example, apart from their use of image re-appropriation, also use the physical occupation of a spatial entity; be it in New York, Tahir Square, or Istanbul. The strategy of recycling seems to be played out at the level of images, whereas the homeopathic strategy seems to bring a bodily aspect with it. Is there a role for something as elementary as having a body in imaginal politics?

CB: Yes. Our body is also an image: how do you distinguish between my own body and that of the woman sitting over there, at the reception of the hotel, if not through an image, or perhaps a set of images? Vice versa: I also think that images in their turn are also bodies. To speak about images as something opposed to, or even separate from, bodies, means assuming a form of metaphysical dualism that opposes the mental and the material, the bodily and the spiritual. But when it comes to ontology, I am a Spinozist: for me, there is one unique substance that expresses itself through an infinity of modes. So I think of the Occupy movement or the Arab revolts or the more recent No Border movements as both imaginal and bodily: what are the activists doing, if not occupying a space with their bodily presence and thus also triggering a new image of society?