Drive in Cinema: Essays on Film, Theory and Politics

By Marc James Léger

Drive in Cinema offers Žižek-influenced studies of films made by some of the most engaging and influential filmmakers of our time, from avant-garde directors Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Vera Chytilová, to independent filmmakers William Klein, Oliver Ressler, Hal Hartley, Olivier Assayas, Vincent Gallo, Jim Jarmusch and Harmony Korine. These essays in critical cultural theory present interdisciplinary perspectives on the relations between art, film and politics. How does filmic symbolization mediate intersubjective social exchange? What are the possibilities for avant-gardism today and how does this correspond to what we know about cultural production after capitalism’s real subsumption of labour? How have various filmmakers communicated radical ideas through film as a popular medium? Drive in Cinema pursues Lacanian ethics to avenues beyond the academic obsession with cultural representation and cinematic technique. It will be of interest to anyone who is concerned with film’s potential as an emancipatory force.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jan 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781783204861

Marc James Léger

Marc James Léger is a Marxist cultural theorist living in Montreal. He is the author of Too Black to Fail: The Obama Portraits and the Politics of Post-Representation (Red Quill Books, 2022), Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (Brill, 2022) and editor of Identity Trumps Socialism: The Class and Identity Debate after Neoliberalism (Routledge, 2023).

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Introduction

1 + 1 + a

Drive in Cinema proposes that one might be able to screen the history and actuality of radical experimental cinema as a means to account for what I have described in Brave New Avant Garde as the ‘avant garde hypothesis’ – the Alain Badiou-derived idea that the event of the avant garde represents not only the multiplicity of becoming, not only the reality of today’s neoliberal world situation, but a cut in the continuum of the world.¹ Subjectivity for Badiou is precisely the consequence of this event, this new process, and the kind of subjectivity that we could say is faithful to the event of the avant garde. We might refer to this subject as a militant. Insofar as Badiou’s Handbook of Inaesthetics distinguishes between the didactic tendencies of twentieth-century materialism and what he defines as an artistic truth procedure, which I will refer to here as the event of the avant garde, how does the militant subject carry forward the task of psychoanalysis? That is to say, how does avant-garde film frame and reframe the ‘blockage of the symbolic by the Real’ and the ‘extimacy of the objet petit a’ in the Imaginary?² From Dada to Surrealism and Situationism, or, from Sergei Eisenstein to Luis Buñuel and Guy Debord, such was certainly a task that went beyond the poietic mandate of art to be the guardian of openness and indeterminacy and was rather a ‘didactic schema,’ as Badiou puts it, that wished to put an end to art as a form of alienation. The question, then, is whether art as a truth procedure is significantly different from the avant-garde projects of the twentieth century.

Certainly the quandary for thinking about the encounter between the ‘avant garde hypothesis’ and the cinema has to do with the ‘collapse of the ideal of the historico-political revolution.’³ For Badiou, this means thinking the political outside of state power. The link between philosophy and politics for him is the category of truth, the only basis to a democratic universality that goes beyond relativism. Badiou asserts that the truths of art are those that are immanent to art itself. But if art is irreducible to political truths, does the notion then that art is itself the Real and not the effect or reflection of reality serve the philosopher more than the militant? Badiou adds to this by saying that an artwork is neither in itself an event nor a truth. Very specifically, ‘a truth is an artistic procedure initiated by an event’ and is ‘not manifested in any given work.’⁴ The work, then, belongs to the procedure as a ‘situated inquiry,’ the post-evental dimension that configures its truth. It is possible, I would argue, to conceive the artistic configuration of the avant garde as an evental rupture that renders both prior and contemporaneous configurations obsolete. In this way the avant garde, both past and present, can be linked to the notion of drive. With Badiou, drive in cinema refers to the infinite artistic configuration of the event of the avant garde.

While the truths of art are immanent to art, the avant garde configuration in film cannot be limited to the distinct elements of cinema – to editing and framing and to the passage of time. For Badiou, the ‘eternal’ idea is not incarnated in the sensible form of the idea. In his view, the cinema does not give priority to the ‘indistinct’ effects of acting, scenography, cinematography or plot, nor to authorial intention and critical review, and not to the forgetfulness of enjoyment, but to the overall stylistic quality from which it is possible to trace an artistic configuration. The truth of film therefore defies intersubjective belief in the facticity of film as symbolic inscription. Criticism does not designate art but designates artistic ideology. True art, Badiou argues, pierces a hole in ideology – not only in the ideology of modernism or the ideology of the commodity, but in the ideology of the eternal idea of art as such.⁵ Here then, once again, is where we locate drive in cinema and I define this work of militant artistic production as sinthomeopathic practice.

For Jacques Lacan, writing in the mid-1970s, the orders of the Imaginary, the Real and the Symbolic are distinct from a fourth order, which he refers to as the order of the symptom.⁶ The symptom is situated in a particular configuration of these three orders, beyond equivocation. In terms of set theory, it is situated between one and two. The film, we could say with regard to Lacan’s seminar on the sinthome, is the support for what borders on the empty set. In Badiou, this refers to the notion that the (avant-garde) film does not merely materialize the idea but operates on the other arts as well as on non-art. In Lacan, the canonical notion of the artwork would refer to S1, the Master Signifier or the One, in relation to which the film exists but in no way can be said to consist. The truth of any filmic or artistic configuration is represented by Lacan in a topological figure like the Borromean knot, in an enigmatic – rather than miraculous – link that supposes the ex-sistence of the sinthome. The sinthome, then, refers to a particular configuration of Imaginary, Real and Symbolic.⁷ The ‘sin’ in sinthome, which Lacan refers to as Eve’s use of language, or simply to sense, represents the part of meaning that lies between the Imaginary and the Symbolic but which excludes the effects of the Real. This is typically what film criticism attempts to describe. We might refer to this as the phenomenological or hermeneutic aspect of the film. The Real, however, intervenes in two places in the knot, as imaginary enjoyment in its locus between the Real and the Imaginary, excluding the Symbolic, and as phallic enjoyment in its locus between the Real and the Symbolic, excluding the Imaginary (with both exclusions, however, falling within the knot of the IRS). This duality of enjoyment implies that the film text as such, as Thing or as Master Signifier, is inherently nonsensical, meaningless – a cut in the continuum of the world. One might consider as an example of this the order of the commodity form under capitalist rule. In this schema, the psychoanalytic notion of the drive appears at the moment of reversal of infinite becoming, when the notional determination – the idea – short-circuits a particular into a concrete universal, for which Absolute Knowing represents not an open field, but a lack in the Other, or, as Lacan puts it otherwise, simultaneously the lack in the objet a and the lack that is the objet a. Drive in Cinema is, in this sense, concerned to examine the different ways in which films show the inconsistency of reality: film as lack, inscribed in the structure of fantasy.

In the sinthomatic space between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, the eternal idea no longer serves reality but stands on its own as realized reflexivity. Here we turn to Slavoj Žižek, who argues in his recent book on Hegel that we should look beyond the classic materialist emphasis on determination and consider as well the work of the Real, without which reality itself would disintegrate.⁸ The work of the Real is what I refer to in the title essay of this book as the drive. With regard to the space of cinematic inscription – this fiction that is supposed to know but does not, which is always foreclosed – drive in cinema references the subject’s objectal counterpoint, as defined in the Lacanian formula for fantasy ($<>a), between determination and Absolute – a dialectical-materialist passage from Being to mediation, the consciousness of the filmic frame as itself a loss that the viewer must work through, opening up the space for the emergence of the pure drive beyond the fantasy frame.⁹ Drive refigures the contours of the avant garde hypothesis as sinthomeopathic action, as movement within an artistic procedure that is in conflict with the alienations of ideology, aesthetic and otherwise. Drive, therefore, also refers to creation. As Lacan puts it, ‘a knot can be made.’ How then to think of the action of avant-garde production in this twenty-first century?

The Negation of the Avant Garde as Symptom

Since the rise of the anti-globalization movement in the late 1990s, cultural production has undergone a renewed interest in leftist political theorization. Postmodernism is seen by many today as little more than an aestheticist after-effect of the contradictions of modernism, unable to deal a final coup de grâce to realist and Marxist modes of analysis. Despite the success of various formulations of political art in contemporary practice, in particular that of ‘socially engaged art,’ the concept and name of the avant garde is better able to capture the radical ambitions of anti-capitalist forces. Evan Mauro is correct to note that the term ‘avant garde’ is typically perceived as belated. He cites Badiou, who notes that while the whole of twentieth-century art claimed avant-garde functions, the fact that the term is routinely admonished suggests that ‘we are in the presence of a major symptom.’¹⁰ Witness to the displacement of academic cultural studies, and in contrast to the far more vital interest in radical anarchism and communism, cultural theorists today react to the threat of what Nicos Hadjinicolaou long ago termed ‘the ideology of avant-gardism.’¹¹ While theorists have only begun to draw the alternate genealogies of avant-gardism that Mauro calls for, some have tried to pre-empt the political effects of this rethinking by emphasizing the relation of the artistic avant gardes to the party and state politics of the Leninist vanguard, tying the fate of both to the traumatic experience of Stalinism. We are all anti-foundationalists now, post-political postmodernists tell us, and so there is no point in attempting to define the new composition of a leftist political front. In only one of several such formulations, the ethical turn of today’s relational and community art transforms the art of revolution into an ‘endured catastrophe,’ thereby reducing art to ‘ethical witnessing’ and avoiding any notion of emancipation as a radical collective project.¹²

What if we added to such aversion to artistic avant-gardism the notion that the current critique and dismissal of revolutionary political vanguardism is likewise a major symptom? As with any other symptom, interpretation should not be to limited to awareness of a repressed content, but should address the form of the symptom as itself a significant factor in its possible dissolution. The form that is given to the political vanguard in much of today’s discussion is that of an abject remainder of the real political struggle. As Žižek states in his essay on ‘The Dream-Work of Political Representation,’ the fact of class antagonism itself explains the impossibility of pure representation. The social in militant art is therefore barred, a not-All that obscures radical political articulation. The creation of a political class whose function would be to supplement this impossible class antagonism is therefore foreclosed from contemporary democratic discourse and proscribed as authoritarian hierarchy. As Žižek puts it:

The standard way of disavowing an antagonism and presenting one’s own position as the representation of the All is to project the cause of the antagonism onto a foreign intruder who stands for the threat to society as such, for the anti-social element, for its excremental excess. This is why anti-Semitism is not just one among many ideologies; it is ideology as such, kat’exohen. It embodies the zero-level (or the pure form) of ideology, establishing its elementary coordinates: the social antagonism (‘class struggle’) is mystified or displaced so that its cause can be projected onto the external intruder. Lacan’s formula ‘1 + 1 + a’ is best exemplified by the class struggle: the two classes plus the excess of the ‘Jew,’ the objet a, the supplement to the antagonistic couple. The function of this supplementary element is double. It involves a fetishistic disavowal of class antagonism, and yet, precisely as such, it stands for this antagonism, forever preventing ‘class peace.’ In other words, were there only the two classes, 1 + 1, without the supplement, then we would not have ‘pure’ class antagonism but, on the contrary, class peace: the two classes complementing each other in a harmonious Whole. The paradox is thus that the very element that blurs or displaces the ‘purity’ of the class struggle also serves as its motivating force.¹³

As he mentions also in Less Than Nothing, the official antagonism is always reflexive, supplemented by a remainder that is foreclosed, which means that ‘the true antagonism is not between liberal multiculturalism and fundamentalism, but between the very field of their opposition and the excluded Third (radical emancipatory politics).’¹⁴ Žižek’s view that the culture war is a class war in a displaced mode therefore has an uncanny and unexpected supplement in radical cultural theorizing. Whereas most cultural studies would want us to see the variously oppressed Others as the excluded a – the immigrant, the foreigner or the various other marginalized identities, nationalities and so on – today’s neoliberal control of populations as a biopolitical ‘destituent power’ leads to the kind of class struggle that prohibits the formation of a radical political class.¹⁵ Instead, a ‘politicized’ anti-capitalist petty-bourgeois class of activists and non-governmental forces competes with the post-ideological class of technocratic experts and middle-class managers who are directly opposed to politicization. What these have in common, however, is their mutual aversion to the political vanguard. In contemporary biocapitalism, the figure of the Jew is therefore replaced by the figure of the vanguard. The vanguard becomes the objet a, the supplement that prevents the class struggle from taking the shape of socialist politics and so the relation of labour and capital is operationalized as post-political post-ideology. Within biocapitalism what is rejected is not the specific figure who disturbs the harmony of the organic community, or the figure who controls capital, but the organization of society in such a way as to bring the production of surplus under social control. Instead of the communist party or the socialist bureaucracy, or any other form of leftist organization, the neoliberal order continues to hold to the idea of the anonymous rule of the free market. One might further note how this context of technocratic depoliticization is not surprisingly accompanied by the rise of extreme right political forces, as seen most recently in U.S. support for the al-Nusra front and al-Qaeda in Syria in 2012–13, in U.S. and E.U. collusion with the fascist Right Sector and Svoboda party in Ukraine, and by the success of the neo-fascist candidates in the E.U. elections of spring 2014.

In terms of contemporary avant-garde praxis, it has long been a truism that no radical cultural force can have a lasting effect without the coordination of a revolutionary social movement. Whereas the art critic Claire Bishop tells us that socially engaged ethical and participatory art ‘forms what avant-garde we have today,’ she is most heartening when she mentions that in the early years of the Soviet Union there were thousands of agitprop collectives, and that whatever the predictability of the message of Proletkult theatre, vanguard aesthetics radically broke with the nineteenth-century invention of culture as formal innovation.¹⁶ Short of a revolutionary project, it is this break with innovation for the sake of innovation that characterizes the avant-garde nature of today’s militant art. For John Roberts, the term ‘avant garde’ denotes the Hegelian understanding of art as ‘general social technique.’¹⁷ Art’s self-conception as realized reflexivity is not a stylistic phenomenon, he argues, but an evental process that concerns the following: art as a process determined by social and political conditions of possibility; art as driven by theory and making sense of its conditions of possibility; art as theory embedded in social struggles; art as an always collective, interdisciplinary and processual enterprise; art as the outcome of the process of general social technique; and art as incorporating advanced relations of production.

Conflicting Temporalities

One cannot adequately begin a discussion of the idea of a political vanguard without first acknowledging the importance of the term ‘avant garde’ in nineteenth-century France. Hadjinicolaou makes the valuable observation that the meaning of the avant garde shifts radically throughout the nineteenth century, appearing first in the 1820s as a Saint-Simonian concept concerning the role of artists as the avant garde that will, alongside the Scientist and the Industrialist, ‘rouse society for its own good […] inflame the imagination and expand the consciousness […] of the human species.’¹⁸ This socially defined function of art is not equivalent to an ideology of art, to an artistic avant garde, but considers art as such, sui generis, to be the avant garde of society. This notion was advanced by the Fouriérist Gabriel-Désiré Laverdant, who, in 1845, considered that art, at its best, expressed ‘the most advanced social tendencies.’¹⁹ Hadjinicolaou emphasizes how for Laverdant the avant garde expresses advanced social tendencies rather than aesthetic tendencies. The restriction of the idea of the avant garde to art criticism, representing a distinctly artistic avant garde, he argues, appears only at the beginning of the twentieth century. This shift relativizes the term, moving it away from the socio-political avant garde, and leading to a competition between left-wing and right-wing currents of avant-gardism, the former defined by its politically revolutionary tendency, and the latter defined through its apolitical tendency, with its criteria of innovation and antagonism towards politically committed artists, unless they be conservative nationalists. In the shift from Gustave Courbet to Édouard Manet we notice the transformation from a socio-political to an artistic avant garde, with the latter, according to Hadjinicolaou, being ‘more like a detachment of the political avant-garde working in the artistic field.’²⁰ In both cases, however, along with the rise of socialism, the working class and its associated political organizations become the agents of an anti-bourgeois avant garde.

With this distinction between left-wing and right-wing avant garde in mind, it is possible to approach the work of Susan Buck-Morss, who is one of the most prominent North American historians and theorists of western Marxism. In ‘Vanguard/Avant-Garde,’ Buck-Morss seeks to salvage what is useful in the radical cultural tradition from what has been degraded, the ‘dreamworld’ of vanguard artistic imaginings from the ‘catastrophes’ of Stalinist reaction and official dialectical materialist dogma.²¹ Her essay examines the period from 1902, the date of Vladimir Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?, to the late 1920s, when Russian avant-garde artists started to come under attack. Her main thesis is that the political vanguard and the artistic avant garde have different and conflicting temporalities. Short of blaming leaders like Lenin and Leon Trotsky for seeking to merge these two fields, Buck-Morss discovers that it was artists themselves, who, in the mid-1920s, demanded that art support a specifically proletarian transition in art, insisting on class vigilance and therefore heeding Lenin’s notion that the party is the vanguard that is in advance of the working class, ‘the avant-garde of the revolutionary forces of our time.’²² One should bear in mind that Lenin’s purpose was to build an oppositional party that could counter the betrayal of the revolution.

Viewed retrospectively, after the Stalinist catastrophe, it is possible to see how state socialism and the consolidation of Soviet power was incompatible with the artistic notion of the avant garde: how utopian projects like Konstantin Melnikov’s Green City could have been but were not supported by state industrialization. To explain this Buck-Morss provides definitions of the properly aesthetic and the improperly political. The political problem, as she sees it, emerges at the time of the crackdown on anarchist intellectuals and artists in the spring of 1918. After that, anything that was not supporting the historical progress of the party was considered counter-revolutionary – including Suprematism and Futurism. This notion of telos is what Buck-Morss refers to and defines as the ‘cosmological time of the political vanguard.’²³ In lockstep with the party, the proletarian artist celebrates its successes, stages affirmative representations of socialist life and abandons its imaginative strivings: dialectics turns into myth. The point that Buck-Morss makes here is consistent with Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), which is one of the most incisive of the early critiques of teleology and determinism in historical and dialectical materialism. As it happens, Benjamin’s theses were written at the same time that visionary Russian artists were coming under the pressure of state police.

In terms of aesthetics, Buck-Morss seeks to retrieve an ahistorical ‘truth’ of avant-gardism that can be salvaged from historical events. What if artists had not moved into the orbit of political power and had preserved what she refers to as art’s ‘rightful place within the historical continuum of art,’ defined later as the avant garde philosophically understood: ‘a temporal structure of experience, a cognitive category’ of ‘perception through feeling’ that must demonstrate its avant-garde quality within its own historical concept.²⁴ In this sense, she adds, artworks and not artists are avant-garde, conveyed as they are by means of illusionism and aesthetic experience, an ability to ‘arrest the flow of history’ and therefore open time up to history’s changing course.²⁵ Such ‘critical negativity’ and ‘utopian representation’ is separate from the question of medium and rather has a social function to teach, shock and take society to task for the lack of imagination that characterizes cultural production.²⁶

One problem with Buck-Morss’ theory is that it potentially depoliticizes the avant garde precisely at the moment that Stalinism was depoliticizing politics. It provides a definition of the artwork as wish image, ostensibly freed from mimetic functions other than those of active witness to the disasters of history and creator of visionary projects. In this regard Buck-Morss’ theory privileges the space of art over that of politics. Art’s congruence with anti-foundationalism voids the revolutionary ambitions of art in favour of something similar to what Jacques Rancière refers to as art’s suspension of the ‘normal coordinates of sensory experience.’²⁷ It achieves this, however, by means of a purity – call it the cosmology of aesthetics – that it simply does not possess. In this regard we need to square Benjamin’s theses on history with his call to politicize aesthetics. As Hal Foster has said concerning Rancière’s aesthetics: in the context of today’s creative industries, art’s utopian aspiration to a separate reality is little more than wishful thinking, an ‘opiate of the art world left.’²⁸

There is, moreover, the need to distinguish teleology from cosmology. There are certain presumptions about telos that we should salvage from vanguardist Leninism. In Revolution at the Gates, Žižek describes how in his 1917 writings, Lenin criticized those who searched for guarantees for the revolution. For Lenin there were no iron laws of history that determined the revolution as Necessity. Lenin ran the risk of seizing state power, Žižek says, in accordance with the Lacanian notion that an authentic act is not covered by the big Other and ne s’autorise que d’elle même. ‘The basic lesson of the psychoanalytic notion of temporality,’ Žižek writes:

[I]s that there are things one has to do in order to learn that they are superfluous: in the course of the treatment, one loses months on false moves before ‘it clicks’ and one finds the right formula – although they retroactively appear superfluous, these detours were necessary. And does the same not go also for the revolution? What, then, happened when, in his last years, Lenin became fully aware of the limitations of Bolshevik power? It is here that we should oppose Lenin and Stalin: from Lenin’s very last writings, long after he renounced the utopia of his State and Revolution, we can discern the contours of a modest ‘realistic’ project of what Bolshevik power should do.²⁹

If the revolution has no proper time, then perhaps we should approach the artistic avant garde with the same modesty. Rather than nostalgically holding on to the good utopian Prouns of Lissitzky and the futurist Architectonism of Malevich, we should repeat Lenin’s gesture of suspending the existing post-ideological understandings of the avant garde in the terms of liberal ideology. The avant garde project today, therefore, is to be linked to a collective political project in which art supplements and directs a social formation that has no determinate shape and that programmatically misperceives itself. In this sense, the cultural avant garde can continue to have a vanguard political function, even if and especially since the big Other appears to us today as neoliberal governmentality rather than historical necessity.

Creative Destruction

One of the key theorists of contemporary engaged art, Grant Kester, happens to also be one of the most adamant critics of the avant garde. In The One and the Many, Kester challenges the model of avant-garde art that is based on shock, rupture, defamiliarization and disorientation – a model he says that remains pervasive in contemporary art – and details instead a theory of dialogical aesthetics that could challenge this violent, ‘modernist’ paradigm.³⁰ Kester’s dialogical model of art practice avoids the ‘hereditary’ avant-garde tendencies of detachment, provocation and agonism, avoids presuming appropriate meanings and reactions from the audience, and instead seeks to respond sensibly to specific social contexts, creating affiliations and interconnections with art’s co-participants. In this sense he opposes the kind of avant-garde art and theory that proceeds by means of radical exteriority and autonomy.³¹ In the postwar 60s and 70s, he argues, the political vanguards decamped to the fields of education and culture, where transgressive forms of writing were opposed to the instrumentality of bourgeois language. The engagement in language and culture led to a defensive fear of community as naively essentialist. The consequence, he argues, is that the impossibility of social cohesion became the leitmotif of post-structuralist thought, a globalized theoretical lingua franca directed against coherent systems of belief, agency and identity, and that forecloses the possibility of both social interaction and political engagement.³²

In a set of essays from 2011 and 2012, titled ‘The Sound of Breaking Glass,’ Kester turns his attention away from avant-garde theory – Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Gayatri Spivak – towards vanguard politics, seeking to delve into the influence of early twentieth-century politics on later intellectual production.³³ The essays therefore work to buttress his theory of dialogical aesthetics by tracing the source tendencies of contemporary critical theory back to the context of the Bolshevik Revolution. In contrast to Buck-Morss, Kester finds something to be questioned in both communist and anarchist streams, as represented by Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? (1902) and the Russian anarchist Voline’s The Unknown Revolution (1917–21). Both of these political vanguards rely on a similar ‘model of consciousness,’ Kester says, in which workers would need to be made aware of the conditions of oppression. The means to do so is for the vanguard to exaggerate and increase social inequality and therefore solicit state repression!³⁴ While Kester is certainly no apologist of capitalist imperialism, his aim at an impure politics discounts the possibility of exposing contradictions through a theory of totality and therefore abandons realism for pragmatism.³⁵ He reserves his criticism, instead, for the division of labour between the professional revolutionary and the masses. This division, to be clear, runs for Kester from the early nineteenth century to the present: from the creation of the notion of the proletariat to that of the multitude and precariat. In this contemporary phase, the political vanguard is described as a ‘cognitive entrepreneur’ and Marxism as a ‘motivational heuristic system.’³⁶ The link between vanguard politics and critical theory is thus brought to date. Whereas the early twentieth-century revolutionary had to tackle the ‘scientific principles’ of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Mikhail Bakunin, the contemporary radical must be able to handle Deleuze and Guattari, raising the workers’ movement to the level of its programme. The historical parallels are also political: whereas thinkers such as Žižek and Badiou warn, like Lenin, against the democratic form of contemporary political thought, thinkers like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and movements like Occupy Wall Street, echo Voline in their warnings against new forms of coercion and the limitations of state projects. Kester’s objection to both is that political theory cannot precede social engagement, but can only arise in action and practice, where the act of resistance finds its active ingredients, new insights and forms of representation. Here Kester seems himself to echo post-structuralist anti-foundationalism and even post-Marxism, not ‘knowing in advance’ what either aesthetics or politics will deliver. The avant-garde artist in this case cannot serve as a catalyst since the situation is radically open.

Alexander Kluge, News From Ideological Antiquity: Marx – Eisenstein – Das Kapital, Germany, 2008. Courtesy of dctp Info & Archiv.

One problem with Kester’s theory, I would argue, is that it fails to provide a theory of the alienations of capitalism and rather projects these onto those agents who seek to do something about it: the revolutionary avant garde, or, as I am arguing here, the vanguard as objet a. In Lacanian terms, Kester has no way to account for alienation as part of the dialectics and division of the subject. He ignores how it is that social subjects make sense of the world through an alienated experience of symbolic structures that is further supplemented by ideology. Kester’s approach to political theory is somewhat backhanded insofar as he would seek to blame theorists like Lacan and his followers for imposing alienation onto otherwise perfectly happy individuals. In this regard, he makes an interesting remark vis-à-vis Buck-Morss. He writes: ‘Buck-Morss’ defense of lived temporality over the heedless indifference of teleological thinking to the here-and-now is well taken. However, lived temporality unfolds in many ways outside those defined in terms of interruption, estrangement, and arrest.’³⁷ Kester’s theory of social change would seem to be consistent with a materialist theory of consciousness, with its focus on culture, aesthetics and language. However, without an adequate theory of rupture and of the incompleteness of social formation, he is unable to dissociate dialogical aesthetics from either relativist historicism or political pragmatism. He argues that in vanguard practices that make use of psychoanalysis, ‘the consciousness of the master theorist [a Derrida or a Lacan] becomes the normative model of political enlightenment.’³⁸ However, for psychoanalysis, no such master exists. What Kester’s philosophical idealism seeks to avoid are the double binds of language through which social subjects are never simply themselves. The argument that I would make, instead, is that the avant-garde artist functions in the manner of the analyst for the simple reason that psychoanalysis, in Žižek’s words, ‘does not show an individual the way to accommodate him- or herself to the demands of social reality; instead it explains how something like ‘reality’ constitutes itself in the first place.’³⁹ It is quite difficult then for either the revolutionary or the dialogical artist to help the ‘unenlightened viewer’ know their desire since this desire is primordially repressed. Unlike capitalism, with its readymade and personalized formulas, avant-garde cinema speaks to this unsatisfied desire of the subject.

A Non-Alienated Vanguard

The success of new social movements since the 1980s and of ‘neo-anarchism’ since the late 1990s has given Italian autonomist thinkers like Antonio Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato, Christian Marazzi and Franco Berardi a leading role in contemporary cultural theory. One of the few North American anarchist theorists to have garnered a similar reputation is the anthropologist David Graeber.⁴⁰ In a lecture delivered in 2001, ‘The Twilight of Vanguardism,’ Graeber presented a reading of the avant garde that reflects, to a great extent, the understanding of political vanguardism among today’s activist artists.⁴¹ His purpose, at the outset, is to critique the division of labour between theory and practice that has come to characterize the difference between Marxist and anarchist ‘schools.’ Whereas Marxist schools have authors and theorists, they consequently have revolutionary strategies that bear the mark of intellectual and sectarian organization: Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, Trotskyism, Althusserianism, etc. Anarchism, in contrast, is based on consensus modes of decision-making and socio-political principles such as autonomy, voluntary association, self-organization, mutual aid and direct democracy. Consequently, anarchist schools have emerged, he says, from organizational principles rather than intellectual figureheads: anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-communism, council communism, libertarianism, etc. Despite this, Graeber concedes, there are sometimes Marxist groups that are more openly organized and anarchist schools that are patently dogmatic.

The question of vanguardism for Graeber has to do with the role of intellectuals, which he takes back to the nineteenth-century influence of Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier. As we have already seen, the Saint-Simonians considered the role of the avant garde to be spiritual in its ability to influence not only the public but scientists and industrialists. The significance of Saint-Simon for Graeber is that he had foreseen the disappearance of the state, a political form that had thwarted the progressive aims of the French Revolution. Consequently, nineteenth-century avant garde circles most often held anarchist sympathies, exploring less alienated modes of life in marginal bohemian communities where voluntary poverty was only one way to mark one’s hatred of bourgeois materialism. Graeber argues that the bohemian rejection of bourgeois values was transformed by Marx, who introduced the notion of the proletariat as the true revolutionary class and who otherwise dismissed the petty-bourgeois politics of independent small producers like artists and artisans. Adopting both Marxist and Leninist theories, the early twentieth-century avant gardes organized themselves into vanguardist revolutionary sects: Futurists, Dadaists, Constructivists and Surrealists, up to and including the Situationist International. Graeber makes much of Peter Bürger’s claim that these movements sought to dissolve art into life. What is significant here, in contrast to Kester, is the importance of theory to practice. Theory, Graeber says, offers radical movements a means of disalienation that helps to bring them closer to those that are most oppressed. ‘This is less elitist a formula than it might sound,’ he writes, ‘because it also seems to be the case that actual revolutions tend to occur when these two categories [of intellectual producers and the oppressed masses] come to overlap.’⁴² For Graeber, regardless, it is the oppressed, whether peasants or indigenous peoples, who, when they form coalitions and take a leading role, become the political vanguard, and not the intellectuals. By definition, only the masses can make a revolution. Such an ethnography of revolution would provide the kind of analysis that avant-garde artists and intellectuals require.

Radical Autonomy

I would like at this point to propose a schematic table of the way that vanguard politics intersect with avant-garde aesthetics in a post-art situation. It should be said that these categories are porous and inconsistent and should be used as an aid to analysis rather than as means to legitimate certain artworks against others. My goal here is not to reiterate the clash of bourgeois and proletarian science but I do seek to reinstate a use of class analysis that allows contemporary theory to interact with the radical materialist legacy. The left section of the graph is the category of anti-art, which is concerned primarily with social content and seeks to dissolve art into life, transgressing the protocols of aesthetic discourse in an exodus not only from