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Abstract
In this paper we outline a theory that explicates the hypertrophy of the “political” in relation to contemporary art, literature, and culture. Beginning with a critique of Nicholas Bourriaud’s 2016 work The Exform, we interrogate Bourriaud’s engagement with contemporary art and Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology. We approach Bourriaud’s Althusserian source material through a consideration of its reappraisal by Warren Montag, Althusser’s own Lacanian influences, and through some surprising continuities with the thought of controversial German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt. Finally, we attempt to synthesize these discussions into our speculative theory of the “Ideological Aesthetic,” which addresses a conceptual gap in past theoretical discourse on ideology.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Stewart Martin has highlighted Bourriaud’s quasi-Adornian understanding of artistic autonomy already from the Relational Aesthetics era.
2 Arte Útil describes an international network of artists and artist groups centring on the idea of usefulness, or “usership.”
3 An interesting recent treatment of this phenomenon is Mark McGurl’s Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (Verso, 2021), which posits the proliferation of genre fiction as a consequence of the specific pressures exerted by Amazon’s self-publishing platform, which facilitates the complete subsumption of a literature to the commodity form, through an easily accessible and seamless style.
4 Almost all of the Western publishing industry is now run by huge conglomerates such as Bertelsmann, one German private family-owned corporation that controls Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, and 365 imprints across the world – in addition to rights companies, printing companies, television studios, and newspapers. These imprints, which are implausibly given to be editorially independent, cater to different target markets and ideological interests – but in the final analysis support an obscene monopoly that is self-evidently well served by aesthetic modes which reify a variety of prevailing social attitudes, but ultimately remain motivated only by the cynical imperatives of profitability.
5 See Claire Bishop’s scathing critique in “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” of 2004.
6 See Pfaller.
7 As Heinrich Meier has documented, it can be demonstrated that Schmitt amended his original formulation which posited the relative autonomy of the domains of the moral, aesthetic, and economic, and, more importantly, the political’s analogous relationship to those, spurred by Leo Strauss’s critique. Traces of this reassessment survive in the ambiguity whereby these problems are treated in the 1932 edition of The Concept of the Political. For instance, page 26 of George Schwab’s expanded edition of 2007 presents the political as “independent” but not as a “distinct new domain,” whereas on page 38, the concept of the political no longer “describe[s] its own substance, but only the intensity of an association or dissociation of human beings whose motives can be religious, national (in the ethnic or cultural sense), economic, or of another kind.” For a comprehensive discussion on the relationship between the two men, see Meier.
8 Schmitt clarifies this distinction between quantitative and qualitative total state in “Die Wendung zum Totalen Staat” (1931), “Weiterentwicklung des Totalen Staates in Deutschland” (1933), and “Starker Staat und Gesunde Wirtschaft” (1933).
9 The confluence of quantitative total state and liberal democracy may come off as a surprise, but it should be remembered that Schmitt’s own analysis was based on the Weimar Republic. It was Schmitt’s conviction that the hybridization of the democratic identity between governed–governing with principles of liberal pluralism creates the conditions for the colonization of society by “indirect powers,” that is, social organizations and interest groups which can enjoy the benefits of governing without any of its responsibilities. This new political environment subverted the Hobbesian balance between obedience and protection which Schmitt considered to be the core of political order. See Schmitt, Leviathan.
10 Further references given in brackets as “IISA.”
11 There are perhaps few contemporary examples that illustrate this phenomenon more lucidly than the recent resignification of racial and ethnic categories in the arena of party politics. Notably among them, the reframing of the concept of “political blackness” away from its 1970s use as a description of the socio-political experience of minorities in the UK into a rhetorical distinction between voters for the two main American parties – a distinction which attempts to separate voters into categories of “politically black” or “multi-racially white.”
12 In this passage, Althusser used Christian ideology as a demonstration of ideology’s rhetorical functioning. Althusser, in fact, asserted that Christianity could be replaced by any other form of ideology, since their formal structure is “always the same” (IISA 51).
13 It must be noted that Jünger’s later writing, as exemplified in post-Second War World works such as Uber die Linie and Die Waldgang which focused on the deleterious effects of technology, can be viewed in retrospect as part of a conservative tradition distinct from Fascism.