Art and Emancipation in the Gaze of Political Eschatology

This essay explores a systemic contradiction in contemporary art, which reveals itself most acutely in art’s present post-conceptual condition. Having denied the sensuous treatment of reality and craft (techne), art after modernism sublated its own aesthetically oriented paradigm. This enabled art to function “under the gaze of theory” (Groys) and turn into a conceptual inspection of its own institutional premises.

One of the consequences of this was that the social critique of reality in modernist art was turned into a nihilistic play with concepts. Contemporary art’s prioritization of cognitive parameters over “disinterested aesthetic pleasure” (Kant), sensuous empathy, and engagement with reality was experienced as the trauma of the loss of the world (Adorno). However, with the recent transition towards post-conceptual practice, artists have forgotten about the loss that art has experienced since modernism; they demonstrate an exhaustion with negativity and art’s conceptually oriented practice in their search for affectivity, empathy, craft, spectacle, and soulful and spiritualized performance. As a consequence, art practitioners find themselves in at impasse: they introduce their practice as shifting to empathy, care, or social betterment, but their poetics remain confined to a quasi-modernist conceptual lexicon, devoid of sensuous expression and prone to theory and abstraction.

1. On Art’s Vicious Self-Sublation

Adorno believed that if art is unable to concern itself with truth (and in the pre-modernist period, it did so through the parameters of sensuousness), then it must courageously face such inability and occupy itself with the absence of truth. Since romanticism, art activity has presupposed the radical loss of truth. In this new condition brought about by modernism, art distanced itself from aesthetic experience and moved closer to concepts, speculation, and theory—but it did not become philosophy or theory per se. Ultimately, with modernism, and further with the experiments of the avant-garde (both in the 1920s and the 1960s), art tended to sublate itself and to historicize this act of sublation, having reestablished itself in this self-emptying act.

Although the self-sublation of art, each time it occurred, was a revolutionary act, it managed to simultaneously function as a bureaucratic procedure. A bureaucratic gesture is not merely external to a concrete artistic event that takes place internally in the artist’s imagination; the artist’s activity itself becomes an act that aims to institute validity for something that was hitherto devoid of that validity. This is why contemporary art’s institutional justification often resides in pseudo-bureaucratic means that an artist applies to legitimate the relevance of their work within the institutions of art. This means that, due to its self-sublated condition, art operates in the gaze of its own end, but it reestablishes itself institutionally as a form of such negativity.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the sublation of art revealed itself differently in capitalist and postcapitalist societies. Capitalist conditions inevitably lead to the utmost autonomy of art, so that even social engagement spins around the realm of art and its self-reflection. In the early revolutionary conditions of the Soviet socialist state, before and after 1917, the sublation of art implied both an expanded socialization of art practice and a constructive convergence of life, labor, culture, and science.

Futuristic drawing of Aleksei Gastev by Tolkachev, 1924.

In the first (capitalist) case, art evolved as radical negativity, often verging on nihilism: it discarded previous forms, rejected historical continuity, theorized itself, deserted the sensuous realm, and abstained from social engagement—from being openly accessible and easily perceived as art by audiences. In the second case, conversely, art’s sublation was intended to give rise to a collaboration between artists and the masses, in a joint creative project of rebuilding sociality; this radical disentanglement from aesthetics was seen as futuruological collective production, erasing the boundaries that demarcated professional art as an exceptional practice. In revolutionary conditions, the conceptualization and abstraction of art did not serve to detach art from the social realm, but conversely to offer it as a platform for social engineering. Abstract structure was used as a constructivist tool and as a device for cognitive inclusiveness. The legacy of leading avant-garde theorists, artists, and activists like Boris Arvatov (1896–1940), Sergey Tretyakov (1892–1937), and Alexey Gastev (1882–1939) confirms this. For these avant-garde activists, the material to work with and transform was no longer an artistic medium but the social environment itself. The reason why this broad socialization, undertaken by avant-garde artists, was possible precisely in noncapitalist conditions was that works of art did not strive to negate alienated sociality, or fixate on the methodological critique of past art; rather, they sought to expand into the infrastructure of various forms of mutual social work. Numerous artists and theorists of that time—from members of the LEF (Left Front of the Arts) to Andrey Platonov (1899–1951)1—discussed the redundancy of art as an exclusive aesthetic practice in a society understood in its totality as a creative, life-building project.

Sol LeWitt, Wall Floor Piece (Three Squares), 1966.

Meanwhile, under the conditions of an alienated capitalist economy, the counter-aesthetics, abstraction, conceptualization, and nullification of artistic sensuousness functioned otherwise. Abstraction and the zero-degree of aesthetics became not merely a method but a self-destructive move, where art gradually turned into an epistemological “institution” of art’s sublation, until ultimately, in conceptualism, art articulated the goal of such a negative genealogy by inventing the bureaucratic rendering of why and how it nullifies itself. Duchampian ready-made aesthetics, Joseph Kosuth’s and Sol Lewitt’s writings on their method, and Lucy Lippard’s documentation of conceptualist practice2 attest to this process. In 1989, in his seminal paper “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” Benjamin Buchloh offered an elaborate mapping of how art’s self-sublation was administered in such a way that it was turned into a set of provisions for constructing art institution as their own permanent self-critique. Art remained alienated in its methods, form, and content in an alienated society, and did not tend to conceal this condition. Even though, with the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s, art’s social aspirations became more vivid and tangible—as in projects like Guy Debord’s dérive—the social impact of this shift was confined to the cultural and institutional sphere, unlike the life-building projects of the early socialist avant-garde, which, due to the revolutionary refashioning of political economy, acquired governmental power.

2. Art’s Systemic Contradiction

Thus the main systemic controversy in the art of contemporaneity resided in its two incompatible, overlapping premises, as mentioned above: negativist self-referentiality, and a belief in art’s impact on social transformation. Aiming at two goals which contradict each other—the self-sufficient autonomy of art and its pretension to social impact—generated a crisis, which was further enhanced in contemporary post-conceptual (or so called meta-modernist3) activities. What was this crisis about?

LEF: Journal of the Left Front of the Arts, by Aleksandr Rodchenko from 1927 to 1928.

On the level of the rhetoric of resistance and critical discourse, socially engaged art (still within the conceptual paradigm) claimed affirmative emancipatory sociality and direct democracy. But when it came to validating artistic achievement, the counter-aesthetic aspects of socially engaged art were evaluated not by their sociopolitical impact but by the extent of the art’s self-sublation. The examples are numerous: The entire 7th Berlin Biennale (2012), curated by Arthur Žmievsky and Joanna Warsza, rejected the format of the exhibition in favor of a political occupation of art institutions, and yet this self-annihilation of art by its agents was inscribed in art’s historization as a conceptual gesture rather than a political act resulting in a concrete social agenda. Jonas Staal’s “The New World Summit” (2012) brought together leaders of unacknowledged states for a self-organized summit, intervening into an art venue with a political ready-made. Yet the action remained a performance rather than a political initiative; it gained acclaim on the territory of art by positing a political event as the zero-degree of art in an art institution, rather than by figuring a political act. Achieving political change would require a continuous engagement with the procedural aspects of art production, whereas artists, even after identifying certain political problems, have to shift to a new piece to remain legible. Such projects draw attention to social problems but can hardly find political levers to solve them; nor can they become artists’ life occupation.  

In other words, such political agendas do not truly encourage the desertion of the territory of art in favor of real political work. Political impact is valorized as the coefficient of art’s bureaucratic power to validate a social gesture (“nonart”) as “art.” This kind of socially engaged art, in terms of validation by art’s bureaucratic apparatus, turns out to be closer to conceptual art than real social engagement. The aspiration for this art to have social impact and to be comprehensible to a broader public often remains wishful thinking. As an result, art discourse follows two incompatible paths: it doubts its capacity for democracy—as it departs from art’s negativist (nihilist) modernist genealogy—and, at the same time, it pretends to incorporate public aspirations as an embodiment of direct, non-parliamentary democracy.

Pixadores, Politics of the poor, The 7th Berlin Biennale, 2012.

Thus, the art of modernism, the avant-garde, and conceptual practice inherently demonstrate awareness that art sublates itself for the sake of counter-aesthetic reconsideration. Such self-destruction is viewed as an inevitable turning point in social history. However, post-conceptual contemporary practice forgets about that turn and often makes no effort to specify why its nonartistic practices should reconfirm themselves on the territory of art.

In other words, conceptual art (including its socially oriented branches) has always had to state why it rejects being art while paradoxically reestablishing itself as “art” in this rejection. Meanwhile, recent post-conceptual practices, which are dominated by three tendencies—(1) techno-cybernetic (post-human), (2) decolonial, and (3) pop-performative—tend to forget the negativist background of art’s self-sublation, operating as if this background never existed. Techno-cybernetic trends abound in projects about the post-human condition and the Anthropocene, as well as in quasi-scientific research offering both apologias for technology and critiques of surveillance (see works by Zach Blas and Trevor Paglen). Undoubtedly, present post-conceptual practices inherit the legacy that formed itself through art’s detachment from pre-modernist aesthetics as well as from the realm of popular creativity. However, now that they reveal an exhaustion with art’s negativist rigidity and theory-based speculation, and try to return to the realm of fine art, popular science, pop performance, ethnography, and care practices, they do so without heeding either art’s negativist Dadaist heritage—full of épatage, radical a-sociality, and self-critique—or the avant-garde project of life-building and social engineering.4 As a result, post-conceptual practices—when they tell stories of their own or somebody else’s subjugation (whether based on gender, ethnicity, or forms of life)—tend to straightforwardly affirm and protect these oppressed subjectivities rather than deconstruct or ironically play with them. Today one rarely mocks one’s own deprivation—something that the protagonists of modernism, by contrast, often did. Moreover, when one tells somebody’s story, one does it with empathy for the subjugated or on behalf of them—without self-deconstructive play. The problem with the claim for empathy and solidarity, however, is that in art, an emancipatory perspective requires more than just abstract judgment. It requires sensuous involvement in the fates of the oppressed when telling their story or revealing their voice. One cannot desert the path of negativity without restoring the pre-modernist capacity for sensuousness, which modernism rejected. While post-conceptual practices have abandoned modernist negativity, they have not yet regained a sensuous approach to reality.

Zach Blas, Face Cages, 2014-16.

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Hegel emphasized that, in art, when sensuous means wither away and truthfulness starts to be defined cognitively and theoretically, then art ends too. For Hegel, the rise of conceptual and cognitive parameters in art presupposes its end. This is why he announced that philosophy (theory) rather than art should be the means of approaching truth. Conceptual art practices are grounded in the refusal of pre-modernist poetics; hence they abstain from expressing empathy and emotions, as well as from aesthetic pleasure. Post-conceptual practices, conversely, ignore the epistemic turn realized by modernism and provoke a dilemma for art: if art forgets its theoretical and conceptual background—in which art is an activity after and instead of theory and philosophy, as Kosuth shrewdly stated—it might end up joining the creative industries, ethnography, or popular culture.

Adorno was among the few who articulated how the failures of modernity and metaphysics were expressed in art and led inevitably to the decline of modernity’s previous vocabularies. This implied not simply a shift in certain aesthetic methods but the transposition of art activity onto new terrains. In this novel condition, a rejection of the past became art’s fatal choice. Epistemologically, art developed the understanding that under the conditions of contemporaneity, it can exist only in the shadow of its own end and can function only in this eschatological dimension—meaning that art constantly retains awareness of its own self-sublation. In his book Philosophy of New Music, Adorno described the formal devices that art used to express the emptiness and void that it found itself in.5

Indeed, Adorno’s approach redirected aesthetics towards epistemology. Adorno studied the modernist syndrome of revolutionizing method, which cancels content in favor of form. And yet Adorno did not envision the direction in which contemporary art would develop, after it survived the exhaustion of styles and methods. He could imagine why and how previous methodologies had to be rejected, but the scope of his analysis did not include the possibility that concepts would be played with as if they were gimmicks, or that artistic gestures would be incorporated into bureaucratic institutions, or that curating would come to play an outsized role in art.

3. Eschatology and Modernist Negativity

Even though art’s sublated condition is its historical status quo, the above-mentioned eschatological dimension (i.e., viewing art in the light of the end that it underwent) has not been sufficiently acknowledged in contemporary writing on art. Modernist negativity is viewed more as a tool of cultural and social critique than as a new ontological condition. For example, Jameson and Badiou, who have written prolifically on modernism, claim that this period was art’s affirmative and emancipatory golden age. In their work modernism is typically counterposed to postmodern relativity.6 The eschatological dimension, however, allows us to discern that, from the beginning, modernism “flirted” with alienation and evil—while demonstrating a courageous awareness of such a stance and conceptualizing it institutionally.

One of the main difficulties of contemporary art is that its genealogy has often been so radical and a-social that it is difficult to combine its negativity with the affirmative and constructive agendas of public engagement, the rhetoric of human rights, and the “real” politics of democracy. This is why we see controversy in curatorial discourse, art institutions, and artistic practice itself, which try to combine these two incompatible agendas—negativity (radical autonomy) and productive public engagement. Art’s contemporary rules of recognition, both institutionally and commercially (especially when art itself mocked those rules), have in fact been part and parcel of that negativity.

Negativity has often revealed itself as utter nihilism. However, in art theory, art’s negativist aspects are often passed off as emancipatory potential. For example, Jacques Rancière insists that contemporary artworks that evade conventional properties of visual, optical, or audial perception nonetheless retain transcendental and aesthetic qualities; that is, he does not see any epistemic difference between the art of modernity before 1900 and after it.7 Tom Holert argues that the main focus of contemporary art of the last twenty years has been cognitive inquiry—although this theoretical and epistemological turn unfolded alongside conceptual playfulness.8 Diedrich Diederichsen tries to show that the inflated prices of art are relatively justified when taking into account the necessity of long-term education for artists, and the fact that artworks require living labor.9 In “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” Jameson expresses his resentment for the sarcasm and cynicism of artists who package their visual games in theory, while their work is nothing but a gimmick or a spectacle of uncanny estrangement, divorced from historic continuity.10 Jameson’s irritation with contemporary art is rooted in his distinction between progressive modernism and regressive postmodernism. He mentions Damien Hirst, Tom McCarthy, and Xu Bing as postmodernist cynics. But playful, aestheticized alienation and nihilism were already present in modernism, even when art tried to stand for various forms of emancipation.

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Adorno, Groys, and Lyotard are among those authors who emphasized art’s eschatological aspects. While acknowledging art’s pretension to social emancipation, they remain aware of the capitalist social conditions that prevent a broader socialization of art akin to that advocated by the pre- and postrevolutionary avant-garde. For these thinkers, modernism introduced an irreversible cultural turn which, under capitalism, could no longer restore continuity with the previous stages of history. Hence eschatology.

In his seminal paper “Under the Gaze of Theory,” Groys confirms Kosuth’s claim that the art of contemporaneity takes the place of theory: indeed, contemporary art has turned its awareness of self-sublation into a quasi-theoretical conceptual game. But Groys adds more. The eschatological perspective he brings to art allows us to see that not only has art turned into theory, but theory itself has become performative—something that critical theorists have rarely emphasized. This vision of art no longer posits it as an eternal value, but as something that must refurbish, reshuffle, and revolutionize reality “now,” “at this moment.” A conceptual artwork, or a ready-made, is a sort of semiological happening, abruptly revealing itself in a kairos—a defining moment. It acquires its status as an artwork not through transcendental contemplation that takes time, but in a “happy” moment of guesswork or gimmickry. Artworks no longer have the capacity to be artistic in terms of aesthetics—demonstrating that art has ended, and that whatever remains exercises its quasi-bureaucratic arrogance, its new institutional power, through ironic conceptual maneuvers. This condition—when art turns into playing with theory—is a consequence of a paradigmatic cultural shift that recodes artistic practice in nihilist terms.

In “Under the Gaze of Theory,” Groys cites a scene from Lars von Trier’s movie Melancholia (2011) in which the main protagonist becomes aware of the impending apocalyptic destruction of the world.11 But instead of feeling paralysis or fear, she is intrigued by this uncanny fate. Here we see the eschatological dimension: instead of expecting to be saved from the end times, the protagonist turns the urgency and lack of time into a performance. Trier’s Melancholia is indeed the manifesto of a belated modernist artist confronting an alienated and perishing world—an artist for whom negativity is a fate. In other words, within this eschatological perspective, there is no way to be saved. This situation, however, would not paralyze a contemporary artist. Groys argues that art applies theory ironically and humorously, allowing artists to play performatively with ideas, concepts, and entire institutions. This negative play is what has been most valuable about critical theory and post-structuralist thought since the 1960s. The novelty of contemporary art is thus its capacity to perform theory. Theory itself is a kind of avant-garde activity, allowing a certain degree of anarchy. This is not an affirmative state of affairs, however; it is a condition of post-eschatological despair, with a Dadaist grin.12 This is why all other art forms except contemporary art—be it cinema, theater, dance, or literature—merely apply theory or can be theoretically described; it is only contemporary art that represents a body of theory itself, no matter what object or theme it explores.

What Groys unravels is that in art, institutional bureaucracy itself, or even the “quasi-bureaucratic” realization of an artistic concept by the artist, is a performance. An artist “curates” their subversive performance with “impossible” aesthetic objects; in other words, an artist is a curator of their own “bad” art, as Groys put it in Art Power.13 The problem arises when the nihilist subversiveness inherent in contemporary art is not only concealed but forgotten. This happens when artists as “curators” of their own art—for example Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Martin Kippenberger, Marcel Broodthaers, Andrey Monastyrsky, and Ilya Kabakov—are replaced by institutionally affiliated curators who, despite their conceptual vision, have in the last ten to fifteen years been forced to comply with the demands of the culture industry to package art in more friendly and digestible ways for the public. Art’s institutional problem lies not only in being alienated from the public, but in the fact that art never definitively decided whether it wanted to continue playing with alienation or serve the common good. Thus art of the last twenty years has tried to do both; it is de facto alienated from society yet pretends to influence social life.

To repeat: modernism, and consequently contemporary art, was based on a rejection of the entire culture of the modern era between 1300 and 1900. However, writes Groys, the modernist and avant-garde denial of culture nonetheless preserved phantom memories of this rupture, intensifying the despair over that loss.14 It is this awareness of the loss of cultural continuity that post-conceptual art lacks today.

4. Aporias of the Post-Conceptual Turn in Art

For the aforementioned post-conceptual, meta-modern15 tendencies (i.e., techno-cybernetic / post-humanist, decolonial, and pop-performative), even when artworks embody social and public agendas they tend to remain remote from public comprehension or interest due to their theory-based rhetoric, but also due to the abstracted and alienated methods of representation inherent in contemporary art production. Unlike conceptual artists, post-conceptual artists eschew self-awareness about art’s negative genealogy and represent their theorized works as if they were comprehensible to a broader public. In post-conceptual works, certain forms of revolt, subversion, and provocation, which function as regulative and symbolic critique, are confused with the urgent social needs and general emancipatory goals of the common good. Certain forms of anarchic disobedience or subversive revolt even contradict public demands for social rights. In other words, these modes of anarchic disobedience are negative, much like Bataillean or Nietzschean revolt against an alienated society, enacting revenge on the world but taking the side of uncanny monstrosity against banal injustice. Such were the activities of the Lettrists, for example.16 A more recent example of nihilist revolt is the film Joker (2019). This kind of revolt targets social injustice but is more destructive than constructive. Holding up such revolt as exemplary, art tends to privilege the type of revolt that is not socializable for the majority of citizens.

Joker, directed by Todd Phillips, 2019

One of the consequences of art’s modernist self-sublation was an indifference to the reaction of the audience, as well as an openness to being negative, critical, derogatory, or sarcastic towards oneself. Philosophy and theory have relied on such self-critique since Nietzsche denied metaphysics and the Enlightenment, and Freud undermined bourgeois consciousness. Although negativity in art was practiced within the framework of Western democracies, it functioned relatively autonomously from democratic politics; it was more anarchic than democratic. Thus art, as one of the most influential cultural forms within European postwar democracy, was paradoxically rooted in nondemocratic discourse. In other words, art practice, while not democratic itself, existed within democracies and was therefore not censored like it was in autocratic states. Although democracy allows radical critique and thereby integrates art’s negativity, art has historically stayed somewhat remote from popular interest. It has also evaded mingling with the creative industries, show business, and capitalist sociality. It strives to remain alien, indigestible, weird, and unfriendly.

The antisocial, nondemocratic agenda of art that I am trying to describe here is rooted in the incomprehensibility of art to the broader public. Art asserts anti- or post-humanist values that are alien or unacceptable to the broader public. It speaks theoretical jargon that is foreign to the majority of cultural consumers and disenfranchised groups. It provokes in a way that does not always serve social betterment. It often regards the indolence and indulgence of bohemian life as social emancipation. However, artistic initiatives cannot straightforwardly proclaim a negative, antisocial agenda due to the shift from artistic and curatorial responsibility to institutional responsibility, and to the tacit demand for the public dissemination of art. In other words, even when a nihilist agenda is inherent in an artwork, the public rhetoric that mediates that highly theorized, transgressive, or abstract art for a social milieu has to be wrapped in quasi-democratic, affirmative, emancipatory language. Hence the contradiction: something that does not contribute to the common good or a democratic agenda has to be disseminated as if it fulfills the public expectation for democratically oriented art. When a modernist artist provoked an audience, they were aware of the gap between their transgressive behavior and the social order. They did not pretend this gesture was a model of social emancipation. They also tended to be offensive and ironic towards themselves . Artists today insist on subversive behavior but present it as a public good, because they feel obligated to champion justice and emancipation from discrimination. To repeat: The paradox of post-conceptual art production is that it claims to advance emancipation, and it is therefore framed by institutions as an embodiment of direct democracy. But it is often subversive, abstract, highbrow, and incomprehensible. Since this subversive content has to be disguised as a social good, the subversion and nihilistic play become obscured too.

Often nowadays, the negative genealogy of art is ignored in a way that preserves its poetics of abstraction and sensuous un-involvement, but pretends to be socially affirmative and efficacious. Artists and institutions coordinate to cloak artworks in the rhetoric of democracy; negativity dissolves, ensuring that the artist’s radical gesture is neither truly democratic nor truly subversive. This makes the episteme of contemporary art look superficial, especially compared to the period after modernism, when art had come to accept alienation and obscenity, even incorporating it into its critique. The viciousness and negativity of modernist art and theory reflected the viciousness and mercilessness of modern capitalism. Therefore, since the 1960s, critical theory and art have abstained from participating in real politics and engaging with government institutions, because the latter, even when standing for social democracy, have had to inevitably remain within the interests of capitalist ownership. According to both the Frankfurt School and post-structuralist authors, it was preferable to stay autonomous and independent from governmental activity and to exercise free thought and artistry rather than pretend that art under capitalism could acquire a viable noncapitalist function and emancipate the “masses.” Precisely due to skepticism towards parliamentary democracy, art remained detached from broader sociality, exercising social engagement through critical discourse and cultural institutions. As a consequence, official politics happens to be closer to the lexicon of regular citizens than that of cultural theory and art discourse. The latter claim to pursue the radical transformation of society but do not engage with the “people” they claim to emancipate.

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In the mid-1990s, the artistic underground followed the path of institutionalization. This was to a considerable extent due to the expansion of the agency of curators and institutions at the expense of artists. This shift conflated anti-capitalist, former-socialist, liberal, and social-democratic narratives and generated the above-mentioned double bind in which art had to retain provocative and negative markers, but at the same time pass itself off as an emancipatory social good. As a result, art had to rely on its own archive of autonomous negativity, which was often antisocial; simultaneously it had to insist that this negativist archive could carry out affirmative, democratic, and publicly viable emancipatory work and bring concrete benefits to society.

Consequently, art reached an impasse. Its resistant nihilist agenda came into conflict with bureaucratic institutions that appropriate the legacy of nihilist resistance while simultaneously concealing it. In today’s post-conceptual context, this impasse consists of three mutually exclusive conditions: (1) art retains its negativist modernist legacy; (2) art institutions try to evade focusing on this negativist modernist legacy, so they present contemporary art as a tool of social transformation, wrapping antisocial content in public-friendly rhetoric; (3) despite the rhetoric of social engagement, the cultural left and post-conceptual artists reject participation in institutional politics.

Art institutions rely on the legacy of radical, subversive art that mocks capitalist democracy for its hostility to true emancipation. At the same time, they present “nihilist” practices as if they embodied shared democratic values. Art’s epistemic function could be viewed as exploring the tentative areas of critical theory, if art institutions remained faithful to experiments without flirting with public engagement. For example, if a surrealist artist or post-structuralist thinker said, “I am an animal or an insect,” they could play with this statement ironically and turn it into a hypothetical inquiry. But after the post-conceptual turn, artists and theorists treat experimental statements as generally accepted doctrine.

Hence, the aporia: the cultural left criticizes capitalism, but it mistakenly views antidiscrimination discourse as inherently anti-capitalist. In reality, fundamental politico-economic transformation, including the abolition of the logic of surplus value, has rarely been on the agenda. Moreover, a genuine end to capitalist production cannot be imagined without studying the cultural and politico-economic archive of the former socialist states. However, few people grant importance to the noncapitalist narratives found in the former socialist archive. If the experience of historical socialism is not of interest, what remains as already-existing counter-capitalist potentiality is social democracy and its parliamentary levers. But these are looked down on by left-liberal representatives of culture and art. They automatically identify the imaginaries of post-humanism, cyber-feminism, post-secular ritual, care, and gender discourses with anti-capitalism.

5. Groys on Social Emancipation

In his seminal book The Communist Postscript and his recent paper “Changing Topologies of the Class Struggle,” Boris Groys examines the inconsistency between the anti-capitalist agenda and antidiscrimination practices. He emphasizes that the cultural left underestimates Marx’s political economy and is therefore unable to heed the demands of economic hardship both in theory and practice. Groys states that despite the tremendous failure of historical socialism and its totalitarian distortions, it is precisely this experience of anti-capitalism that history provides, and if the anti-capitalist horizon remains at stake, it is within this experience that one has to “separate the wheat from the chaff” and draw from it yet-unpracticed potentialities.17

Groys asserts that the vertical mobility of identity politics is not able to solve the issue of horizontal class solidarity and interconnection between communities. For Groys, identitarian solidarity is not sufficient to handle class struggle, or even to set goals in that direction. It does not sufficiently articulate taking the side of the poor against the rich, even though this is the class construction that had traditionally been ascribed to the left.18

Groys views the principal emancipatory tool of socialism as its shift from competition to collaboration. It is the focus on competition that, according to Groys, unifies liberal globalist and nationalist conservative politics.19 Moreover, the rejection of socialism as an obsolete and discredited mode of political economy made both liberal and social democracies weaker, as it was the socialist horizon that bolstered the agency of democracy in capitalist conditions. In fact, the dismissal of socialism shifted the discourse of civic welfare to the right. It was the reluctance of liberals to discuss economic justice, as well the unwillingness of the cultural left to engage in electoral politics that allowed neofascist forces to enter the parliamentary arena.

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At a time when a Marxist program seems impossible to implement, it’s important to recognize that, since modernism, art has exhibited a sober awareness that it is part and parcel of capitalist production. Contemporary art was fundamentally shaped by quasi-philosophical irony and quasi-theoretical play. Negativity, the rejection of sensuousness, and self-sublation have been part of its episteme, even its DNA. The claim that these features defined art years ago but can now be replaced by something less conceptual and self-reflexive overlooks the fact that sensuousness (Sinnlichkeit), banished from art since modernism, cannot magically be restored to it.

If Walter Benjamin’s prewar writing of the late 1920s exhibits an enthusiasm and affinity for the project of socializing art (advocated by the leaders of the revolutionary Soviet avant-garde, such Sergey Tretyakov and Boris Arvatov), in Adorno’s postwar writing such hopes have vanished. Marx’s analysis of capitalist production and political economy demonstrates that capitalist logic cannot be ameliorated by goodwill, ancestral rituals, or social care. Care is important existential work, like love and friendship. However, broader social transformation and emancipation require more than care. The fact that care has acquired such a big role in post-conceptual art reveals that art and the agents of critical theory and emancipatory thought are reluctant to participate in the real politics of social democracy. They prefer to remain in a liminal zone; they want to enjoy democratic liberties and advocate for democracy formally and gesturally, but when it comes to content they remain wedded to modernism’s negativist legacy, presenting it as a form of emancipation. 

Interestingly, it is through care that Groys emphasizes the political role of the eschatological perspective. Amidst the general tendency to treat care as an all-encompassing emancipatory framework, Groys makes a distinction between being cared for as an object, and the act of caring as a subject.20 He emphasizes that care can also be understood as subjugation, confining one’s existence to the clinical management of vulnerabilities. Groys argues that in conditions where private property reigns, the emancipatory potential of care in art and culture should rather be framed as a practice of radical ownership of the self—as “self-care.” “Self-care” implies the utmost form of negativity, forbidding any appropriation of one’s time, body, desire, or creative capacity; by this token it surpasses the clinical maintenance of the vulnerable body. This could describe a modernist artist. The protagonists of Groys’s book—Alexandre Kojève, Georges Bataille, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Roger Caillois, among others—are either adepts of radical negativity, or political sceptics like Hannah Arendt and Alexander Bogdanov. They all doubt that care can fulfill the role of social emancipation or exceed in its social efficacy personal agency or clinical maintenance. Although it alleviates the vulnerability of the body, care is not sufficient to develop the horizon of the common good. Self-care, conversely, as Groys contends, introduces an eschatological dimension, which leaves room for creative sovereignty, even when this involves a nihilistic stance in the absence of the horizon of the common good.