The worst thing about the two dominant and intellectually popular conceptions of the future – either as pure capitalist utopia where private property and technology deliver us from politics or pure communist utopia in which the fall of capitalism and the emergence of communism is inevitable – is that they have engendered lethargy in regards to either thinking critically about either cases or act to shape their inevitability. In his seminal work, Historical Grammar of Visual Arts (New York: Zone, 2004), the late 19th century art historian Alois Riegl suggests that all of human history, from the linear perspective of time, can be classified in three large and successive periods – namely Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the fall of Byzantium and the resulting start of the Renaissance period was the end of the so called Middle Ages, through the pull of financial, science, cultural energy from today’s turkish geographies towards Italy the Renaissance time could start and has influenced all parts of Europe) and the Modern Times. In this respect, the global social, cultural, and economic transformations including the movement of people and resources that took place after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the emergence of the post-9/11 world order can then be interpreted as the final decline of Modernity (itself subdivided into early modern, modern and post-modern) and the beginning of a new and perhaps unknown epoch.
Since these periods are neither pure and linear nor begin and end one after one other, it is possible to speculate about the material history that is produced within their overlaps as one era emerges and the other declines. For example, Riegl regarded Matisse, Picasso, and other developments in French painting as the signs of the decline of the Modern age, which had begun in the mid 16th century. He regarded abstraction as the crisis of a Modernity in decline. Riegl’s insight was an early warning if we superimpose that timeline with three other historical trajectories of political economy, natural history, and the evolution of technology. It is more temporally precise to think of the beginning of the 21st century as the end of modernity and reconsider the emergence of abstraction in art as a form of premature birth. Modernity truly ends with our knowledge of the Anthropocene’s irreversibility, the rise of machinic intelligence, and the decline of national democracies and their corresponding Westphalian world system.
The central questions which arise out of this proposition are:
1- Is the political crisis engulfing the world since Brexit, the election of Donald Trump in USA, Johnson in England England, Erdogan in Turkey, Bolsonaro in Brasil, Salivini in Italy, Modi in India etc and the rise of “neonationalisms” worldwide indicative of a routine shift between successive political orders, a brand new stage of capitalist political economy, a harbinger of a longer-term shift between liberalism proper and its incipient authoritarian tendencies? Or instead, the current political crises are suggestive of a much broader shift, one we have not experienced since the dawn of the European Enlightenment and the rise of humanism and industrial and scientific revolutions.
2- What does this seemingly obvious U-turn might mean for thinking, organizing, and acting in the years to come? Can we overlap this teleological proposition with theoretical, political, virtual and electoral action as four distinct yet interconnected activities that might fuel the engine of social progress and emancipatory politics?
These questions address part of the more specific debate framed by the exhibition “Born in Purple” as a cultural expression of the city of Berlin:
- Who has the right to stay?
- Who has the right to govern?
- Who has the right for future shelter?
My brief text reflects back on five years of thoughts regarding history, technology, art, philosophy and politics which I have often expressed on social media as a performative practice. These thoughts originated on the oral presentation I was fortunate to give together with Kasra Rahmanian as part of Porphyra Club, the public program for Viron Erol Vert’s solo exhibition “Born in the Purple” at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien.
The idea of Poryphora Club comes from Erol Vert’s wish to give all visitors, themes and contents a place of sharing and more importantly, for all these entities as a place to “be.” The Byzantinian Empire in general and the Poryphora chamber in particular both have strong historical links to the western world. The Poryphora chamber was located in the old byzantinian Boukeleon palace directly across from the coast of the Golden Horn at the entrance to the Bosphorus. Being in Poryphora meant that like the emperor’s children everything and everyone had the right to be the next in line of throne as a result of being born in this chamber. This palace was previously named the Hormizd Palace. Hormizd (in Persian: Hormoz) was a Sassanid Persian prince, the third son of King Hormizd II After being imprisoned by his brother-in-law of King Shapur II, he was freed by his wife in 323 and escaped to Constantinople, where Roman Emperor Constantine I helped him and gave him a palace near the shore of the Marmara Sea. This palace became an important toponym of the city and its neighborhood (where the mosque of Little Hagia Sophia still stands) was known in Byzantine times as “near the houses of Hormisdas”. After Hormizd, the palace became the private residence of Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, before his accession to the throne. Later on, two marble statues of an ox and lion were added to the Boukoleon palace’s water entrance. The Poryphora chamber was built near to this entrance especially to stabilize the claim by Justinian I and his family to the throne. Thus it is easy to see how the palace, built and used in moments of crisis relate to our current global situation.
1. I recently said somewhere that perhaps art is not the answer to politics. Perhaps it is politics that is the answer to art. Now that I think about it, I must have been thinking of the Medicis and their contributions to the Renaissance period. They were the first that infused art into their concept to power. According to some historians, the concepts of capital and capitalism emerged during this in Florence and spread to Europe and later to the whole world. At the same time the Medicis separated the concept of art from religion, as historically, art was produced and shown mainly within the frame of religion.
2. After a major ebb and flow with the Bush and Obama years, “the West” is dropping its long-term commitment to humanism as well as multiculturalism as humanism’s logical extension for a globalized world. Thanks to Trump and Bannon, Carl Schmidt is now operational within the US internal politics (not just implicitly as it was during Bush years – a ploy in geopolitics via neocons). Without liberal humanist multicultural standards, and without a major metropolis claiming to be the center of this project, we will witness the rise of white supremacy and direct colonialism on the world stage, aided by third world leaders who are both ideologically and economically enslave their people to white power.
3. Not only journalism is in trouble, but also the whole “traditional media” is experiencing a big crisis. Post-truth should be renamed post-news. People still care about truth or facts, but increasingly they do not care for receiving it via objective journalism and “news” because their own and their aggregated “newsfeed” is now more significant in shaping their reality. It’s all about new forms of intersubjectivity and how they interfere or interact with politics in its classic sense. There is also another dimension to this. Subjects feel that they themselves are news via their social media posts. And perhaps this is why Trump is the president of this Zeitgeist. The impetus is to turn life into a certain kind of atmosphere or let’s say even a collage as it was itself originally invented by artists around the crisis-ridden time of WWII as a new form of producing art and subjectivity.
4. Our resistance is important regardless of its success. However, if “left” is losing the battleground of mainstream politics, soon “respectable” conservatives will be the new “liberals” and alt-right neofascists will be viewed as the society’s new “communist radicals”. Whatever was right of centre would then become what we consider today left of centre. #WakeupPeople.
5. Bill Clinton used human rights to crack the international order, George Bush dismantled the international order after 9/11 but kept the human rights arguments around for extra impact when it served his regime change plans. Obama continued on Bush’s legacy nothing added but more drones and surveillance. Trump now is in the process of dismantling the human rights arguments altogether. The real resistance to the new American Empire is to repurpose both the international order and Human rights against present and future developments.
6. Why so much interest in de-coloniality while ignoring the very contemporary reality of imperialism? Because colonialism has more of a cultural-political rather than economic-political interface. At times it seems that a lot of people think that there is way to deduct colonialism from imperialism and live with the rest of it.
7. The 1990s integrated capitalist world Antonio Negri and Michael Hart describe in their Empire shifted after 9/11. This new world required an artificial outside built into its immanence. This wasn’t another Deleuzian deterritorialization or re-territorialization but a post-territorialization in which new outsideness and new outsides are permanently erected in and around the world as physical/digital infrastructures needed for keeping the empire intact and its relations unchangeable.
8. The No Fly Zone and sanction on Iraq in the 1990s by Bill Clinton was already white supremacy, the idea that our concerns for the possibility of Saddam developing WMD can legitimize us starving millions of Iraqi children to death, so was our freaking out about 3000 people dying in NYC on 9/11, as if thousands had not already died elsewhere as a result of the US and the western world’s racist policies. Add to the list of this form of geopolitical white supremacy the Afghan war, the Iraq war, the Iran sanctions etc, etc etc. Why are you freaking out now only when the chickens are coming home to roost? What did you think? That the West can be fascist globally but democratic and sensitive to the minorities and the queer and transgender communities internally, forever? You really thought this shit would not catch up at home?
9. Within the liberal-leftist consensual counter epistemology, every white person is a potential racist, every non Jew a potential anti-Semite, every man a potential sexist, every non homosexual a potential homophobe, every non transexual a potential transphobe; every “healthy” person an ableist; the world majority constantly running around with a heavy baggage of guilt doubting their existence in order to qualify for emancipatory politics. To save ourselves from this insanity, with which many of our comrades are afflicted, we refuse the label left and suffice to be called democratic socialists. We fight all the above injustices together and within the universalist frame of class struggle which demands economic emancipation as the ultimate prerequisite for all other forms of freedoms from oppressions and injustices.
10. Identity politics has poisoned everything these days to the point that currently being a socialist itself is viewed by non socialists and even a lot of socialists alike as an identity and not the technology of class struggle.
11. “Liberal democracy is proving no match for the lies and hatred spread by social media,” cries Simon Jenkins, an old baby boomer journalist whose editorial works at Evening Standard and Times date back to the late 1970s. I totally disagree. Instead, liberal democracy’s reliance on first wave and centralized cybernetic media is no match for the New Right’s ability to utilize the potentials of social media. Liberal democrats no longer have the monopoly on forming narratives and distorting truth using their secure and centralized sources of carefully selected and curated information released for public. The New Rright is able to circumvent liberal democract’s media (television, radio, mainstream media and their web outlets) and appeal directly to the masses. But being at ease with the political economy and the aesthetics of new (social) media is not only bypassing the old media but the entire notion of the opposition party. The New Right has been hugely successful in ignoring the mediating role of not just the media but the opposition party by appealing directly to the masses. The difference between Trump and George Bush is that Bush still performed his political practice both for the media (CNN, etc.) as well as house and senate democrats. These institutions were his limit, these were the people he had to lie to. With Trump and his minions in Philippine, Brazil etc. what we get is politicians who neither need the mass media nor the whole oppositional party structure. If as Jenkin contends, “Social media – once hailed as an agent of global concord – has become the purveyor of falsity, anger and hatred. Its algorithms polarise opinion. Its pseudo-information drives argument to the extremes,” it is because social media’s powers and capabilities have been utilized by the New Right into a far larger plan which the left cannot even fathom, let alone try to replicate. If we are doomed it is mostly because of leftist/liberal lethargy and their inability to understand and act upon these potentials which opened and broadened mostly in this decade.
12. Modern liberalism which was a one-part political, one-part philosophical and one-part aesthetic compromise between communism and fascism is coming to an end. This, of course, doesn’t mean capitalism will stop its morphogenesis but to make its deep transformations palatable, it will need new clothes on its surface to shape and identify a new manifest image. People like Membe (high culture) and Eno (pop culture) like to only see the dark side of this process and prescribe a return to rigorous liberalism. I am afraid this is impossible. The good news is that returning to pure fascism (alt-right) or communism (you name it) are also impossible. The emperor needs not only new fashion designers but also new designs and textiles.
13. We are going from the fear of a broken European Union to an EU dominated by nationalist and right-wing governments. What the new Europe after the fall of Communism needed more than central banking and investment was a set of ideals and virtues shared by all nations coming together to form the new continent. But unfortunately American capitalists, including George Soros who now is being pushed out of some European countries for being a leftist were the architects of today’s problems in Europe, by dismantling the existing socialist political and social infrastructures and replacing them with their own networks of NGOs and charities, thy paved the way for the emergence of even more neoliberal and scary alternatives. But it’s not too late, we need to imagine a new Europe, one that finally shed not only the division between its eastern and western members but one that also accepts migrants and other nomads as part of its makeup. This cultural shift can only happen by those committed not to any specific European ide
14. The main frustration I have with boycotting, cancelling and de-platforming individuals in the art world is not necessarily the actions as such, but the confusions and duplicities they involve. For example, and only as an example, What would prompt Michael Rakowitz to pull out of Whitney Biennale while gladly showing work, for example, in Sharjah Biennale, an institution funded and operated under an autocratic, pro-Trump and right-wing/neoreactionary state (UAE) engaged in an inhuman war in Yemen lasting many years causing so much death, starvation and damage to people? (I do not need to get into the details of what is the negative role of the UAE government in fomenting crisis in the region, particularly its brutal military adventure in Yemen) So my question from Rakowitz and other artists who are carefully and selectively “woke” is: If the UAE/Sharjah money is clean, what makes the Whitney money dirty? Now do not get me wrong. I am against most forms of boycott, canceling and de-platforming in general. Many of my good friends and colleagues (people we all know and respect) work at or work for (i.e. showed work at) American, European or Middle Eastern institutions with questionable funding or under tyrannical authoritative political situations. In my opinion, so long as we, as precarious artists and art professionals – even when we are seemingly in a full-time position, are aware of the limits set on our work and try to transcend them, so long as we are able to effectively address the political/ethical problems as we see fit (even when our stances are quickly subsumed by the institution), I find it absolutely fine to receive support from places like Whitney or Sharjah Foundation. However, those who really owe us an explanation are artists and practitioners like Rakowitz and others (let’s not name more but we surely can) who constantly moralize art and sanctify their practice in one context while having no problem remaining silent in other contexts. This hypocrisy only reinforces the suspicion that the ethical and moral gestures taken in one context and not the other is nothing but a publicity stunt for accumulating more cultural capital, or sheer ignorance of geopolitics and its relation to art-making in the 21st century.
15. Unlike “Contemporary Art” which is (hopefully) on its dying bed, Hip Hop’s longevity as an art form has everything to do with its refusal to become “politically correct” and succumb to liberal identity politics while addressing some of the most important political developments in America that have to do with black identity.
16. The real crisis of contemporary art is philosophical irrelevancy, not just political ineptitude – even though the latter is undoubtedly the symptom of the former as well as the obvious sign of the decline of humanity/humanism as a force capable of a proper and consequential [Riegleian] contestation with nature and its modern and contemporary offsprings (second and third nature). Those who reduce this crisis to a political struggle are not doing anyone a favor by pretending that fixing art’s political problem will save it from its growing philosophical and, consequently, political irrelevancy.
17. Like Christianity before it, contemporary art is a belief system in the process of being handed down by institutional missionaries to the global south as it’s slowly being doubted as a faith in the global orth. This not only requires a new form of secularism which separates beliefs from actual art and artmaking but a kind of art atheism which rejects altogether any belief in the transformative or redemptive powers of art as the ultimate decolonial agenda in cultural production.
18. One of the most fascinating things on earth right now is the Democratic primaries where for the first time in post-war US history, a range of ideas and idealisms from the firebrand revolutionary discourse of Sanders and the radical gradualism of Warren all the way to Biden’s trusted business as usual, plus all the others, are competing for the nomination! When was the last time we ever saw such a diverse competition, from determined socialism to experienced neoliberalism? Regardless of how it will turn out, we are witnessing American, world, and human histories.
19. We also need good actual politics at the same time that we need good art. We do not need more “political” art. We need better art, art that is challenging, critical and uncomfortable, art that provokes instead of soothes. We need to drain the swamp and reevaluate our field. We have a choice: will we continue to impotently champion a social and political reality that has failed us time and again? Or will we dare to imagine something, anything, different.
20. Just because science often gives bad people good ideas and technology provides them with effective tools doesn’t mean we have to embrace techno-socio-political nihilists (Heideggerians in leftist disguise). The science and technology which desperately need acceleration and updating are political science and political technologies; they are stuck in a never-ending cycle between the 15th-20th centuries. To liberate science and technology, in general, we need to first work on politics proper, until then they will more often than not benefit bad people.
21. The long trajectory of technological evolution can be served as the evidence that what we fashionably call the Anthropocene ought to be renamed as technopocene. Let’s be even more posthuman than those who invented this neologism.
* This piece was first delivered as a lecture performance as part of the public program around Viron El Vert’s exhibition “Born in the purple,” co-curated by Melina Gersteman and Didem Yazici at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg in 2017. Composed as a collage of the author’s social media posts, it has been taken with permission from the exhibition catalog.