<nettime> Aesthetics of Crisis

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

[ On Tuesday, the French National Assembly passed a law granting the 
state sweeping powers of surveillance in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo 
massacre. On Wednesday, the city council of Chicago passed the first US 
law granting reparations to African Americans tortured by the city's own 
police force. I discuss the backgrounds of these two events in the 
article below, which was just published in the 20th anniversary edition 
of the Austrian art journal Springerin. But the scale I am really 
dealing with here is neither global nor national nor even metropolitan. 
It's intimate. The article asks what happens, in you, when the normative 
structures of justice break down entirely. ]

****

THE AESTHETICS OF CRISIS
Art in the Arrested Democracies

A large body of research in the social sciences shows that about once 
every forty years industrial capitalism is disrupted by a major crisis, 
in the course of which structural elements of the social order undergo 
slow but fundamental change. The 1930s were marked by that kind of 
crisis, like the 1970s. Today we are again experiencing a major crisis 
of capitalism.[1] There is much to be said about the present situation, 
but here I want to focus on the experience of crisis, or what I'll call 
the aesthetics of crisis. So I'm going to ask some very subjective 
questions. How does the crisis feel? What kinds of changes does it bring 
into one's orientation and sense of self? What kinds of affects does it 
generate, and how do they circulate among other people? How is the 
crisis expressed and transmitted? What are the cultural consequences of 
these expressions? These questions don't have right or wrong answers. 
They are ethical questions, requiring each of us to ask about the 
meaning of intimate experiences which are very different in each 
country, at each class level and for each person.

Now, to speak of aesthetics is to speak of art. Yet what I'm looking for 
can't be reduced to the art object. Instead, I'll refer to what Raymond 
Williams called "structures of feeling." By that phrase he meant an 
emergent set of attitudes, of likes and dislikes, enthusiasms and 
hesitations, insights and constitutive blindnesses that allow people to 
recognize each other as participating in a shared present, as being on 
the cusp of something that only they can fully grasp and bring into 
being. Williams writes: "We are talking about characteristic elements of 
impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of 
consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but 
thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a 
present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity."[2]

What he's talking about is something so subtle and uncertain that one 
can well imagine it takes an artwork to even point to such things, and 
to conjure them up in forms tangible enough to discuss. The aesthetics 
of crisis is therefore about the forms through which an emergent process 
of social change becomes perceptible and sensible. By knitting together 
a certain atmosphere, a range of images, a sequence of rhythms, a set of 
situations, presuppositions, conflicts and hopes, an artwork can evoke 
an incipient structure of feeling for a particular group at a particular 
moment, or for a whole generation.

Everyone knows the feeling of potential you can have before an artwork 
or a performance that seems to be expressing what's on the tip of your 
tongue. In Turkey recently, during the Gezi Park demonstrations, a 
structure of feeling was enacted by the performance artist Erdem GÃndÃz, 
who became known as the "standing man." After the violent repression of 
the protests, he just stood there in public, stopped still, arrested, 
unmoving. Everyone could sense the potential of resistance he embodied. 
Soon his performance was adopted and transformed by thousands of people, 
who stood in public, reading. Reading Kafka, for instance, under the 
gaze of the police.

So we're talking about aesthetics as a structure of feeling, for a group 
and especially for a generation. But I'm going to throw in a twist. I'm 
going to ask about the moments when structures of feeling break down, so 
that what we sense is not their presence but their absence, their 
emptiness, their futility. What's more, I want to suggest that there is 
a structure of the breakdown itself. This broken structure must somehow 
be given by the dysfunction or collapse of society's most overarching 
law. In the case of the capitalist democracies, that law is economic.

Strange as it may seem, there are people from other generations who have 
thought about exactly these issues. Like an American Marxist you 
probably never heard of, James O'Connor. He lived through the crisis of 
the welfare state in the 1970s and analyzed it as a collapse of 
legitimacy.[3] Then he went on to investigate some of the lasting 
consequences. His key insight was that capitalism - a system based on 
the production, sale and consumption of commodities - tends to make its 
subjects treat themselves as things, as ownable objects.

O'Connor's reasoning went something like this: If the ordinary commodity 
is a polished, expensive, shiny thing whose possession grants its owner 
prestige and social power in the eyes of others, then why not value 
one's own identity in precisely the same way? Why not invest in it, 
improve it, cherish it, display it like a prized possession? Why not 
expect from a fine identity a prestige and power like that of rolling up 
next to a friend in a shiny BMW sportscar? Why not reify yourself, in 
short? Why not treat yourself as a thing? In this case, the individual 
would always be driven by the secret anxiety that this reification is 
not good enough. The individual would continually strive to prove the 
self's value, to put the self's prestige to the test, in order to 
overcome the limits of that shiny but also somewhat tarnished thing. A 
crisis, for the individual, is the moment when this goal of perfect 
self-reification becomes clearly impossible to fulfill.

O'Connor did not have to invent these ideas of the reified self; they 
were already there in American society. In fact they were codified in 
the doctrines of the ad industry. The institution of advertising had 
analyzed the role of possessions in establishing the status hierarchy, 
and it was actively teaching people how to add value to themselves by 
the purchase of accessories (that's the message of the famous book by 
Ernst Dichter, Strategy of Desire). What O'Connor did was to retrace the 
failure of self-commodification during a crisis, when the price of one's 
assets suddenly plunges, and the economy that once brought you your cash 
value suddenly freezes. At such a moment your thing, that is, your self, 
suddenly loses its shine and starts to appear dull, ugly, flaccid, or 
even worthless, grotesque, abject. This was seen again recently in 
American society just before and during the Occupy movement: thousands 
and thousands of jobless people facing a crisis of personal worth. At 
the same time there is at least a chance for a critical reflection and a 
displacement or a reinvention of value, which encourages an 
understanding and a care for the relations of interdependency and 
reciprocity that can sustain a human being let down by the market. And 
at that point, a new structure of feeling can emerge. O'Connor expressed 
this process extraordinarily well, in a passage written some thirty 
years ago:

"The frenzy of accumulation; the fear that it will come to an end in a 
huge crash or an environmental or military catastrophe; the unbelievable 
excesses of late capitalism worldwide - these bear witness to the 
obsessive-compulsive quality of the inner soul of capital. If we could 
become its inner eye, if we could transport ourselves into its inner 
soul, if we could hear the relentless beat of accumulation, we could 
experience as well as know the madness of this obsessiveness - this 
world where capital and money are a religious and aesthetic experience, 
and where power is a moral category. When we examine ourselves, we find 
capital within our own souls. We too rush through the present; we race 
for some victory - or toward some unknown destination; we are governed 
by unlimited desire; we stumble and fall from identity into the abyss. 
We create our own personal crisis, as capital creates its own crisis."[4]

What's fascinating in this text is the parallel movement of self and 
society. While reading, we feel the way that a human personality can 
mirror itself in the growth of capital, so that abstract economic 
functions - automation, transnationalization, financialization - all 
become exterior reflections of an inner empire condemned to an 
ultimately suicidal process of expansion and conquest. Then comes the 
suggestion that the key to our own most intimate fate will be revealed 
by the examination, not of our own psychology, but instead, of precisely 
those abstract functions. This is the condition of heteronomy: the 
realization that we are under the control of something else, of another 
norm, another law. We are alienated: we do not even govern our own 
personality. Such a realization opens up a profoundly ambiguous 
possibility, which is the idea that like capital, we could create our 
own crisis. To say this possibility is ambiguous means that it could go 
at least two ways. Either we mimic and repeat the crisis of capital, or 
we seize the moment to create a fork in our own road. This ambiguity of 
the self-created crisis is the predicament of the individual in 
capitalist society.

Is there a chance for self-transformation, and above all, social 
transformation, in a crisis that is not suffered but co-created? Could a 
new and more promising structure of feeling emerge from the arrested 
disaster of the present? I think it could. But to know it could, one 
would have to touch the possibility, to encounter it concretely at work 
in the self and in society. One would have to participate in aesthetic 
experiences where the breakdown of the dominant economic norm opens up a 
pathway toward some kind of autonomy: a pathway of the self, or autos, 
creating its own law, or nomos. To displace or reinvent the value of 
one's own life in the midst of crisis, one would have participate in 
creating a new territory, a new norm and a new law, since these three 
things - territory, norm and law - are the basic ideas contained in the 
Greek word nomos. How can a collectivity become autonomous? How can we 
achieve a state of self-government? And how can we avoid being tricked 
by the simulacrum of self-government - which is what we have today in 
the capitalist democracies?

Let's work all this out with the concepts of a forgotten Franco-Greek 
philosopher, Cornelius Castoriadis. He was a central figure of May 1968, 
but today, few people bother to read him. Perhaps because he did not 
make ambiguous things easy. He tries to understand how the individual 
can have an effect on the society that created that individual. He tries 
to understand how the radical or instituting imaginary can cut through 
the existing system of norms, or what he calls the "imaginary 
institution of society." He realizes that human life is not merely about 
ideas or representations. It is also about affects, about feelings, and 
about the intentions or potentials for action that affects provoke. He 
situates existence within a socio-historical magma of received ideas, 
affects and intentions, and notes that the minimal requirement for any 
society to go on existing is that the individual psyche should be able 
to make meaning out of the emerged part of that vast socio-historical 
magma whose surface is present-day culture. Now you can almost touch the 
aesthetics of crisis. What kind of breakdown or revolt is likely to 
happen if we cannot fulfill the deepest ideas of our society amidst the 
surface conditions of our present historical moment? How does such a 
breakdown, or better, such a revolt occur?

Castoriadis says this: "It is only insofar as the radical imagination of 
the psyche seeps through the successive layers of the social armor, 
which cover and penetrate it up to an unfathomable limit-point, and 
which constitute the individual, that the singular human being can have, 
in return, an independent action on society."[5] Seepage versus armor: 
these are the terms of an intimate conflict between the psychic and the 
social imaginary. But when you consider the armor of society today, it 
sounds like an unequal combat.

What if the revolt just seeped into some dikes or channels or basins or 
rivers that were already prepared to receive it? What if the institution 
of society had already imagined the forms of revolt that might arise 
against it? What if heteronomy, or alienation, were continually ready to 
don the masks of autonomy, or liberation? Those are typically 
contemporary questions, the questions of the spectacle society, which 
Guy Debord might have asked Castoriadis had they run into each other 
once again, say, in the early 1990s. "Isn't this totally mediated 
pseudo-democracy one vast trap enclosing and defining what you call the 
individual psyche?" Debord would have asked. Castoriadis responds from a 
greater historical distance, pointing out the requisites of democratic 
revolution:

"Such an action is extremely rare and, at any rate, imperceptible 
wherever instituted heteronomy prevails - that is, in fact, in almost 
all known societies. In this case, apart from the bundle of predefined 
social roles, the only ascertainable ways in which the singular psyche 
can manifest itself are transgression and pathology. Things are 
different in the rare case of societies where the bursting of complete 
heteronomy makes a true individuation of the individual possible and 
thus allows the radical imagination of the singular psyche to find or 
create the social means of publicly expressÂing itself in an original 
manner and to contribute perceptibly to the self-alteration of the 
social world."[6]

What struck me first, when I read that complex passage, were the notions 
of transgression and pathology. It is precisely in this respect that 
highly abstract economic analysis and political philosophy become 
intensely personal. Who has not been accused of pathological 
transgression, when trying to resist the norms and laws of existing 
institutions? How many times have I myself been called a nut, a 
delinquent, a criminal? Yet at the same time it's clear that I merely 
seek to fulfill in my life some ideal that originally comes from the 
history and the society that made me. No doubt like yourself, dear 
reader, I seek to make meaning in a democratic society. What meaning can 
I make under present conditions? What meaning can you make under present 
conditions?

As I was considering all these things, events broke out in France. It 
was the Charlie Hebdo massacre, followed by the murder of four Jewish 
people in a supermarket. The brutal and chaotic wars that have been 
raging in the Middle East for over a decade exploded violently in Paris 
(which had been my second home for decades). A few days later, millions 
of people poured into the streets, carrying signs that read JE SUIS 
CHARLIE. Here was the combination of an intensely personal and an 
intensely social act, responding to a threat not only against personal 
safety, but also against the freedom of artistic expression. Did this 
moment allow "the radical imagination of the singular psyche to find or 
create the social means of publicly expressÂing itself in an original 
manner and to contribute perceptibly to the self-alteration of the 
social world"? Was this indeed a moment when "society and individuals 
alter themselves together," which is how Castoriadis characterizes a 
democratic revolution? In short, was this an upsurge of self-government?

As prime minister Manuel Valls began a series of statements culminating 
in the declaration of a French war on terror, I began looking  over the 
history of Charlie Hebdo. It's a satirical journal of the Sixties, 
originally called Hara-kiri, which was shut down in 1970 for lampooning 
Charles de Gaulle at the moment of his death. These cartoonists are 
transgressive heroes of May '68. What the journal does is to inject a 
provocative affective analysis into its specific political take on 
current situations. Shock the people you're against, for the pleasure of 
those whom you support: that's essentially the formula. I read the 
statements of one of the surviving cartoonists, Luz. He claims that 
Charlie Hebdo is entirely against symbolism. "Doves of peace and other 
metaphors of a world at war aren't our cup of tea. We work on details, 
specific points in correlation with French humor and our way of 
analyzing things à la franÃaise." He rejects the idea that "we have to 
be careful what we do in France as someone may react in Kuala Lumpur or 
somewhere else." And he says: "If people post our cartoons on Internet, 
if the media highlight certain of our cartoons, that's their 
responsibility. Not ours."[7]

Despite my sympathy for this man who had just lost a dozen close 
colleagues in a horrid and unjustifiable massacre, still I was amazed by 
these declarations. The press is a personal, irresponsible activity? 
Caricatures of the Prophet Mohamed are not symbolic? France, which sends 
its army and oil majors into countries around the world, is a 
hermetically sealed enclave for the exercise of humor à la franÃaise? 
Was this the public meaning - the structure of feeling - of JE SUIS CHARLIE?

I share the disgust felt by millions of people at brutal murders 
committed in the name of religion within the borders of what used to be 
understood as a secular country. I also think the massive display of 
solidarity with victims of violence can be a very positive thing - 
indeed, a public expression of democracy. Yet the principle statement of 
this demonstration was a narcissistic one, identifying the self with 
transgressive irresponsibility, and transforming that transgressive 
identification into a national gesture. In short, this was a perverse 
fulfillment of the '68 slogan, l'imagination au pouvoir. Now, that's 
surely not the message that everyone taking part in the demonstrations 
intended to project, and I am certain that many people are still working 
to give other meanings to JE SUIS CHARLIE. But there is definitely a 
symbolic paradox, and indeed a symbolic trap at work - Luz is absolutely 
right - when personal identification with transgressive political satire 
becomes a rallying cry for European racism and a "clash of 
civilizations." We have already seen the militarization of democracy 
under the guise of national patriotism and the protection of freedom in 
the United States. The psyche and the society may be altering themselves 
together, as Castoriadis would have it, but not in any way that expands 
the frontiers of democracy.

In the face of massive public failures to respond to the implacable 
unfolding of the present political and economic crisis, those of us who 
seek a missing democratic meaning are thrown back to our own aesthetic 
experiences, so different for each nationality, each class position, 
each individual. In the face of capital's crisis, you must create your own.

On December 16, 2014, I was invited to a five-mile march in Chicago, 
from the police headquarters to City Hall. The aim of this march was to 
seek reparations for the mostly African American victims of police 
torture in the city where I live. Between 1972 and 1992, forced 
confessions were extracted from some one hundred men by Vietnam war 
veteran Jon Burge and other officers. Burge was eventually fired, then 
finally sentenced to four years from which he has just been released. 
Meanwhile, innocent men that he and his cohorts tortured still remain in 
prison. The knowledge of such things takes the commodified sheen off a 
city. It makes ordinary life unbearable.

One of the co-organizers of the march was the Chicago Torture Justice 
Memorials collective, which in 2012 had launched an open call for 
proposals for speculative monuments dealing with the atrocity.[8] The 
idea of these artists was to create an exhibition by sharing among as 
many people as possible the act of searching, both visually and 
affectively, for the absent public meaning of justice in a city whose 
public administration had practiced torture. In 2012 they had succeeded 
in distributing the activity of actually producing the exhibition, so as 
to multiply the numbers of people who would get deeply involved. Now 
they wanted to go further. They wanted to actually change the law. They 
wanted the city to formally apologize, to pay compensation to the 
victims, to offer them psychological counseling as well as free 
education, and to call upon the police to provide exonerating evidence 
about the use of torture in obtaining the convictions of people who are 
still behind bars today - to name only the principal demands.

As we walked through the city, another of the convening organizations, 
called We Charge Genocide, led the entire group with chants. You could 
participate in the power of hip-hop by chanting these things. One was 
addressed to the massive police cordon surrounding us. We said: "Who do 
you serve? Who do you protect? Who do you torture? We'll never forget!" 
And then there was another, stranger one, chanted very fast, which 
expressed the feelings of activists, especially black activists, when 
confronted with the scorn of a society which reduces their expressions 
to mere foolishness, meaninglessness, even pathology. All together we 
chanted: "They say it's a joke / They say it's a game / They say it's a 
joke / They say it's a game / They say it's a joke / They say it's a 
game" and so on, through the opulent streets of Chicago's financial 
district.

Inside City Hall, the absence of justice was flagrant: the mayor was out 
to lunch, he could not receive our demands. Yet within the official 
setting, the convening organizations had prepared an elaborate 
choreography of speeches, testimony from victims and their families, 
visual displays and participatory rituals. What we were doing there was 
creating the image of the missing justice: creating an emergent 
structure of feeling, on a territory which we had made ourselves, with 
our own bodies, in direct confrontation with the existing order, amid 
the palpable collapse of public laws and norms. Suddenly word came: 
another alderman had joined our cause, and the City Council would be 
forced to vote on the proposal of reparations.

As in the 2012 exhibition, I thought to myself, this is tremendously 
meaningful. And as in the exhibition, I knew this feeling could only be 
generated through a kind of participatory theater. We needed to conjure 
up the crisis, within ourselves and in public, in order to start the 
emergent and incomplete process of making democratic meaning.

I don't think that under present conditions you can expect an entire 
city or an entire country to do such things. I don't think problems in 
the economy will lead us directly to social justice. What's today called 
democracy is a trap. That's the real crisis. To address it politically, 
in society, first we have to learn to create it aesthetically, in 
ourselves. Then we need to make that structure of feeling public. And 
nothing is going to make it easy.

I want to close with one more philosophical reflection. In the early 
Nineties, after the Soviet Union had fallen and Western capitalism was 
being hailed triumphant, Michel Serres opened his great book The Natural 
Contract with the analysis of a Goya painting. It shows two combatants 
locked together in mortal struggle - but at the same time, the two are 
sinking together into quicksand. "Let's make a wager," writes Michel 
Serres. "You put your stakes on the right; we've bet on the left. The 
fight's outcome is in doubt simply because there are two combatants, and 
once one of them wins there will be no more uncertainty. But we can 
identify a third position, outside their squabble: the marsh into which 
the struggle is sinking."[9]

The meaning of Serres' image should now be obvious. But I don't think it 
is. As the wars over oil continue in the Middle East, amidst the clamor 
of racism in Europe and North America, the sound and the fury of the 
combat drowns out the far more important debate about the burning of the 
oil itself, and the rising tide of climate change. While we debate the 
terms of capital's crisis, already our common world has begun sinking 
beneath the ocean. War today is the norm, racism is the law, and 
oblivion is the most widely shared existential territory. We live in 
arrested democracies. An aesthetics of crisis can only emerge from those 
grounds.

*
*
*

NOTES

1. See http://threecrises.org.
2. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford U.P., 1977), p. 132
3. James O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St Martin's 
Press, 1973).
4. O'Connor, The Meaning of Crisis (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 176.
5. Cornelius Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy (Oxford U.P. 
1991), p. 146.
6. Ibid.
7. Luz, "All eyes are on us, we've become a symbol," Les Inrockuptibles 
(10/01/2015), available at 
http://www.lesinrocks.com/2015/01/10/actualite/luz-eyes-us-weve-become-symbol-11545347.
8. See the documentation of "Opening the Black Box: The Charge is 
Torture," at http://chicagotorture.org/#event-opening-black-box-reception.
9. Michel Serres, The Natural Contract (Michigan U.P., 1995/1990), p. 1.


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