AVANT-GARDE, THEORY AND CULTURAL PRAXIS

Today, cultural production is caught in a self-destructive loop: the ambition to re-politicize itself is plagued by the massive (self)demand for a new universally valid Leitbild on the basis of which it can act - something that off course ends up in an impossible task due to the democratic commonplace that society 'is not one'. Thus the only thing left for today's politically engaged cultural agent is to render visible the symptoms of society's democratic gap, the loci of disagreement, the victims of the state of exception, etc.

To counter this phantasy, confrontation of the cultural forces with their all too vague and implicit reference to the so-called theories of the political, is unavoidable. Yet, at the same time we have to face the question whether the 'truth content' of these theories of the political itself (often as vague and indefinite as their cultural translations) is not to be decided in its distortion/translation in the cultural domain.

Program

1. BAVO: Opening lecture: Utopian avant-garde or critical avant-garde? Yes, please!
2. Boris Buden: Avant-garde today: a re/translation project?
3. Marc De Kesel: Act without denial - Zizek on totalitarianism, revolution and political act
4. Oliver John Feltham: Naming the new

Respondents: Zafer Aracagök, Dominiek Hoens, Robrecht Vanderbeeken

Problematic

With regard to the massive re-politicization of cultural production today, it seems as if cultural forces have finally overcome the traumatic wounds inflicted on them in the 20th century because of their 'coming to close' to politics - either being ruthlessly exploited by the Party as propaganda machine, or sent to camps because of the incompatibility of their work with the Party's programme. Crucial for the evaluation of this political revival is the way cultural forces fully make use the discourse of the so-called theorists of the political (thinkers such as Lefort, Laclau/Mouffe, Agamben, Hardt/Negri, Rancière, etc.) Notions such as 'dissensus', 'state of exception' and 'democratic gap' have become standard instruments not merely for explaining cultural products from without, but operating at the heart of cultural production itself, functioning as the motor force behind the rethinking of the formal, a priori principles of cultural production. Did cultural forces not redefine their main objective into countering again and again the in-eradicable tendency of politics to reduce everything, including cultural production, to its own image? Is cultural production not actively occupying the gap in the system, leaving open the spaces of difference, focusing on the inconsistencies within the system, enacting heterotopia and so on? And is not their ultimate goal the attempt to prevent society from accomplishing its own psychotic, totalitarian closure?

However, cultural forces seem to pay a high price for this, often direct, translation of concepts and slogans from the theories of the political to the cultural sphere. It becomes more and more clear that it is exactly in the role of radical democratic spoilsport that cultural production is more than ever caught in the blackmail of the status-quo. On the one hand cultural production is allowed to critically assess every aspect of the ruling order, visualize its underlying ideological framework, lay bare the 'stuff' it has to exclude to maintain the illusion of its desirability, etc. On the other hand however, the very moment that a work too clearly finger-points one specific class, party or agent as responsible for the continuation of certain social antagonisms, cultural agents are condemned for speaking from a partial position and are thus easily set aside as the voluntary victim of an antidemocratic disorder.

The real problem however is not so much this external condemnation. More essential, is the way this obvious criticism 'reverberates from within'. It seems as if there is something in their reading and application of the theorems of the political itself that forces them to condemn themselves of undemocratic demagogy every time they become too politically active. Paradoxically, the affirmation of the political seems to engender a plague of remorses, doubts and inhibitions: every time the 'moment to conclude' arises - the moment that the injustices that cultural forces map, as well as the new forms of life occurring in the gaps of the system, demand a clear and unambiguous act (albeit symbolical) - they loose themselves in theoretical ruminations as to whether they are not on the verge of betraying their self-imposed 'ethics of the political'. Doing so, they seem to be afraid that their own enthusiasm will take over control and force them to 'decide' a certain issue and to take sides unconditionally. In these moments cultural productivity is blocked by deontological reservations such as: 'Are we not here ourselves switching to the register of totalitarian, normative politics?', 'Are we not denying the fundamental rule of democracy that it is always in its becoming?', etc.

We claim that this self-censorship renders visible how the recent cultural 'turn to the political' is actually the sign of its opposite: it actually serves as a sophisticated self-imposed defence mechanism that prevents them from really posing an act that disturbs the political-economical order, to save-guard them against the consequences of their own political desire, in short: 'to protect themselves from what they want'.

A first, obvious, step to 'unpack' this defence formation would consist in going back to 'the texts themselves', to reconstruct and fix what the theorists of the political themselves said or meant and, after this 'step backwards', to translate these rectified concepts back to the field of cultural production in a more correct way. The problem with this therapeutic step - that can easily be predicted - is off course that one will soon discover that the discourse of the political is 'in itself' plagued by the same misunderstandings as their so-called 'wrong' translation. So the problem is not so much that in the hands of cultural production the concepts of the political are applied in a reactionary way. Rather, theory should start with a thorough self-critique and see how a reactionary streak runs through the heart of the source-texts themselves. In this way, the cynical conclusions that have to be negated at all costs is that 'theory is right and cultural praxis is wrong' and that cultural praxis always necessarily 'misfires' in its subversive ambitions because - due to its specific, decentred position - it is always dependent of the same society it aims to subvert, etc. Instead we have to insist that the subversive core of the theory of the political itself - and thus its entire relevance and legitimacy - only truly comes to the fore in the act of its translation to the cultural field, to particular practical and concrete struggles.

So the real productive question is not so much what Agamben really meant by 'making the state of exception real', or what Badiou aims at with his 'politics of subtraction' and so on, but rather how its subversive potential can be released in a concrete translation to cultural action. This turns the usual register upside-down which states that theory has the advantage of having the possibility to confront society with 'open questions', while cultural production on the contrary is supposed to intervene in social reality and thus has to make compromises. We claim that rather than losing something in translating political notions back to reality, one has to see the act of cultural translation as a, albeit potentially, double gain: both pushing theory to its most subversive conclusions (eradicating all multilayered statements, open questions, deconstructive complications, etc.) while at the same time pushing cultural agencies to do 'the impossible', not only detecting and rendering visible the truth of a certain political-ideological constellation but also staying true to this event unconditionally.

The hardest 'nut to crack' will be to decide whether such a 'theory in action' or 'cultural praxis within the limits of theory alone' is at all possible without a shared utopia or common social imaginary that - as the commonplace states - could support, legitimize and hold together such a praxis? Or even more, whether the latter reasoning is not itself part of the problem since the lament about the lack of a universally valid Leitbild that can set in motion the society en large, seems itself to function as a phantasmatic construction that puts a stop on (the imagining of) any avant-garde cultural action? And thus the further question is whether today it is not necessary to go beyond the idea of a 'utopian avant-garde' and move towards the concept of a 'critical avant-garde'?