That may sound like a dis to some people. I don’t mean it that way.
In a recent post I mentioned that a friend made me start thinking about how our orientation is primarily toward things that don’t fit into monetary equivalences. This same friend is the one who first pointed out to me and pushed me about the fact that our political perspective shares a lot with insurrectionary anarchism, as I tried to layout in this talk.
I was slow to come around, due in part to some disagreements but due at least as much for aesthetic reasons. I had a hunch that that milieu was in part an aesthetic milieu, though I initially thought of that as an objection. It’s not, or doesn’t have to be. More on this in a moment.
My friend mentioned as well that this quality of unease over equivalences, I mean particularly the equivalences bound up with commodificaiton, and an emphasis on experiences that don’t fit neatly into equivalences, these are things we share with insurrectionary anarchists.
Anyway, insurrectionary anarchism and aesthetics: it’s in part an aesthetic milieu. It shares sets of styles and vocabularies. It also orients toward sorts of experiences, as I mentioned, that my close comrades and I are also oriented toward, despite some differences. I have a hunch that there are two things about this that tie to aesthetics. One, I think that currently aesthetic representations of these experiences are better developed than theoretical treatment of these experiences. Furthermore, the theoretical work that deals with these tends to have more literary than analytic quality.
Two, I think there’s some measure of affinity here between these sorts of experiences and aesthetics. I want to think more about all of this.
Getting back to my titular opening question, the less interesting thing about insurrectionary anarchism and punk is that a lot of people have moved from one in to the other (I think mostly from the latter to the former). The more interesting thing, I think, is that both are milieus of intellectual and aesthetic production by people at least some of whom are not assigned the roles of people who make ideas and art. They are or include combative aesthetic cultures and practices, which include I think both a desire for something else and anger at the forces that limit people’s options.
(I will eventually get back to these notes as well, and I think I’m may be coming around just a little, after a very long time, to ideas of connections between aesthetics and politics. My notes on PNAB1 are related as well.)
I am leery of a direct correlation between aesthetics and politics, I think that simplistic linkages can do more harm than good. For example, it is often repeated to me that art works are political (often based on a content or appearance): i.e. the painting / novel / film deals with a political subject or historical event which is of political significance. Rather I would say that our collective thinking and action based on that sensory experience maybe have a political side to it but not always. So watching the film is not a political act, but if that film changes they way we think as a group than that experience (that of collective thinking, not aesthetic experience) constitutes the political.
What does this have to do with your point about ‘insurrectionary’ anarchism and puck rock, you may ask? Well both have a aesthetic (that is individualistic) experience that is highly developed, but this does not always mean that this is accompanied by a political experience.* Combative aesthetic cultures and practices are not necessary political because they can be done on an individualistic horizon, and not brought into collective thought and action. I think this is far clearer in puck rock, that people listen to the combative aesthetic and interpellate a subjectivity from that experience; that this subjectivity based on a ‘rejection’ of normality, is not necessary political or part of a collective process of negation of that normality, since the aesthetic combative experience is depended on having that normality keep safe as to provide a point of departure or reference. Punk rockers need preppy kids to make then different, see how punk rock kids’ speech have changed since the popularization / cooptation of their aesthetic since the nineties. You can see this in the ‘insurrectionary’ practice of dumpster diving: that that subjectivity is dependent on the ‘normal’ consumer to both ideologically and material prop up the ‘ex-worker’ subjectivity. But this is not the case with all ‘insurrectionary’ practices, confrontational or militant confrontations can be (and often are) based on a collective thinking and acting (which is based off a experience-in-common, i.e. police brutality, bosses treating workers like shit, or feeling helpless in the face of environmental destruction). These practices have little to do with an individualistic experience or have an aesthetical element of subjectivity to them. Rather they are not constructed by opposition to a normality (or what Nietzsche would call slave morality) because they directly attempt to negate that which would be the normal. There is no ‘good’ cop which can be based on the ‘evil’ cop, but just a problematic conception of ‘any’ cop; or there is no good boss based on our ‘evil’ boss, all bosses are ‘bad’ or not an affirmation of the working class. So, I don’t really think the appearance of a “combative aesthetic culture and practices” is attached to the political experiences of the ‘sub-cultures’. Rather often punk rock shares an aesthetic subjectivity based on an individualistic experience (or I would say an aesthetic truth procedure) with some forms of insurrectionary anarchism, but that this is completely unconnected to the political subjectivity of insurrectionary anarchism based on its collective experience (or political truth procedure).
Do you get what I am poorly throwing down?
* I am not trying to imply that the ‘insurrectionary’ political experience is not theoretically developed, because I think it is. It is just that I do not agree with a lot of the political theory which they present.
hi Brendan,
Sorry for the delayed reply and thanks for this. I share your skepticism about claims to political contents of/results from cultural products. I agree when you say that “Combative aesthetic cultures and practices are not necessary political”, absolutely, and I think that there’s a real confusion about this sometimes. This is reductive and unfair but I sometimes think some people think being abrasive has a political content. And at least some combative aesthetic practices (or at the very least some aesthetic practices experienced as very combative) can be pretty easily commodified. I also think you’re right about the relationship between perspectives that enjoy marginality and those things which they;re on the margins of.
All of that said… you mention an aesthetic truth procedure, which I assume is a Badiou allusion, can you unpack that for me? I know some Badiou and have become quite interested but have never read any of his stuff on aesthetics (I also like most of what I’ve read by Ranciere very much but have not really read any of his stuff on aesthetics). You seem to be equating in your comment aeshetic with individual or with individualism, I don’t see why that’s so. I guess it’s arguable that there’s irreducibly individual quality to aesthetic experiences but that’s true for all experiences, and at least for some art forms collectivity is a key component. Like with punk and live performance — it’s all about the right group playing to the right size and character of audience, when that mix is perfect it’s amazing and it declines rapidly the further from perfect that mix gets. In all of that the collectiveness matters a lot I think.
I should also say, this is linked to issues in this post –
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2011/01/10/do-we-want/
which by the way our mutual friend Nick is the person I was talking with that kicked that off…
I think the point I was trying to get at in this post with the punk comparison is that I think these qualities, the orientation here, is currently better expressed by artists than by theorists and in work by theorists it’s currently more their artistic components like imagery and metaphor that gets at all this, more than an analytical grasp. To put it another way, it seems to me like this is stuff that people are better at expressing than they are presenting analytically or understanding. I also think that there’s some quality to the sorts of experiences I’m talking about that has an affinity with aesthetics or which is an aesthetic quality – the hum in the air and in the bones, so to speak. We can analyze it and its sources, and we should, but there’s a use (beyond recreation) to trying also depict it.
This doesn’t feel very clear but it’s the best I can do.
take care,
Nate
ps- consider this a reminder that we should talk about reviewing the stuff written on organizaitonal dualism.
Well, this response is even later than yours.
Yes, ‘truth procedure’ is an obvious way of talking about Badiou without talking about Badiou. And, yes, you are right, I should do some unpacking. Well first to start, what do truth procedures do?
They structure (or more specifically it ‘subjegates’) the ways we can be in relation to what he would call philosophical conditions (I think discourse might be another way of saying this, but it brings unwanted baguage with it . . . maybe Ranciere’s understand of regimes would work here too). And he outlines the four conditions that truth procedures can operate in (or the four discourse that we can philosophize about): Politics, Art, Science, and Love. I disagree with the last one, but that is not the point.
So the singular truth procedure is given by an ‘event’ with in a condition and then all thinking (and be extension being) in that condition is in relation to that. So lets take his political example: the truth procedure of politics is currently communism. He claims that the ‘event’ of 1917 produces the truth procedure of communism (I, personally, think the event is the Paris Commune, and the truth procedure is socialism, but again that is not the point). Everyone thinking or being, in relation to politics, is subjugated by this truth. So a subject could be ‘faithful’ and believe in that truth and try to engage with it; they could be ‘reactive’ and that they acknowledge that truth but refuse to participate in the ‘present’ or world that that truth would create; they could be ‘obscure’ and that they deny the existence of the event (and truth) and actively engage in destroying that ‘present’. Well that is a little crude, but it should do the trick. So a faithful subject of communism would be the militants that engage with communism; the reactive subject would be Maoist like, what he calls, nouveaux philosophes or other Marxist that claim ‘yes communism is a truth but it is unrealizable;’ the obscure subject would be fascist and political Islamists because they deny that communism is a truth and actively work to undermine it. In all of these cases, the politics of these subjects are based on a reference to the original truth procedure of communism.*
OK, so while there can only be one truth in a condition at a time (that then structures all thinking beings around this truth), this does not mean that there is only one truth. Actually there is four truths at a time, one for each of the conditions. So an individual may be faithful to a truth of Science and one of Love, and this does not create a contradiction since they are thinking two truths about different parts of our society.
So for Badiou, politics must be a truth procedure that is thought by a collective or a multiplicity. For the other three, he claims that they are aristocratic truth procedures, and can be thought be an individual. So the truth of love only needs at minimum of two to think it (but I would say this idea is conditioned by the current bourgeois truth of love, that it occurs between two people), or that art needs a minimum of one to think it (the artist, since they are creating art in being or thinking it). While there are a few problematic notions here it brings out something important: that an individual can think a truth procedure (in art, love and science) only because these conditions are still structured by the bourgeoisie truth procedures that give rise to thinking.
What do I mean by this is as individuals we can participate in the condition of art (for example) as individuals because we are still thinking in relation to truth procedure that claims that we can participate as individuals. This is what I was trying to get at when I said punk rock is an aesthetical (individual) experience . . . that thinking about the confrontation in punk rock is by necessary an individualistic (and capitalist) manner of thinking. Or that there has not been an event (like that of 1917) that has produced another truth procedure in condition of Art. I guess you could make a case for the event of _________, which says the viewer is just as much as the being of art as the artist, but I would have to think about this more (since I do not have a actual event or name/nomination of this truth procedure).
OK to the point: the aesthetical experience of watching a live show in groups is still not a collective truth procedure because it does not subjugate us as a collective but as individuals. The notion of individual expression, in punk rock, is a symptom of this subjugation. Or that when a punk rocker is asked why they dress, talk, or act in a way, the response it a reference to them as an individual, not as a reference to them as a group (“Cause it shows how I think for myself and you are a fuck’n sheep” rather than “Cause it shows how we can experience music and live as a group which is not dictated by the man”). These internal references to the bourgeoisie truth procedure might make a punker an obscure subject of Art but not a revolutionary subject of a new truth procedure (one that is acting to create the conditions of another event**).
*note: Badiou would deny the idea that a capitalist is a subject in this way, since they do not think in relation to communism hence do not think politics and hence are not political beings (but maybe beings of another condition).
**note: this is not Badiou’s idea, this is mine, since he does not talk about what subjects do between events and I find this the major limitation in his thought.