In Grace Schwindt's 2015 sound piece 'Little Birds and a Demon', we hear a description of how contact with spilled oil on Shetland beaches turns seabirds into tiny oil tankers. Once on the feathers, the oil cannot be removed and it spreads unwaveringly through the skin and into the circulatory system, mixing with the blood to extinguish the bird's life. An object-oriented ontology here might discern the conjunction of entities – at varying molecular scales - which interact autonomously of human intention. Such a view would, evidently, occlude not only the social causality of the encounter between oil and bird, but how there came to be 'objects' in the first place such that the oil and the bird might be placed on the same ontological footing: that of domination by subjects who have, in an all-too-traditional metaphysical move, left the picture. Inasmuch as a prioritisation of 'objects' or of 'things' appears as a constant across the broad spectrum of the kinds of theoretical dispositions addressed by the moniker 'new materialisms', the question then pivots to the status of these 'things' as principally independent of human will and desire, albeit still thinkable as such by those humans, as well as the desires that animate this nominal divorce from the anthropic horizon. More pointedly, though not without a gesture to conceptual typology, the question of 'new materialisms' emphasizes another question – what would be 'old' or, dare we say, 'historical' materialism'?

This essay constitutes an attempt to open up of the question of materialism to its prescriptive register, with a specific attentiveness to how this operates in the space of artistic practice, both as an analytic and a productive logic. 'New materialisms' are often fascinated by 'materiality in itself', which is to say, they approach the material in a way that is at once saturated and impoverished, according to the classic schema of fetishism. In proceeding thus, there is a second fetishism at play, one which is perhaps most visibly reproduced in the most popularized among the tenets of the new materialisms: the thesis of the 'anthropocene'. This is notably the fetishism of the 'human'. Hence there is an urgency to re-inscribe a consideration of labour, language and power, that is, of social materiality, into the renewed lineaments of materialism that has recently been inflated in contemporary art discourse. Such a re-mapping of the relations between subjects, materials and experimentation could be summarized hastily as a transition between the 'so-called automatic subject' that Marx lampoons in Capital as the self-narrative of capital's generation of value and the subject of the 'experimental attitude' as outlined by Brecht in his 'Prospectus of the Diderot Society', which assesses material innovation through its relationship to, or rather, its imbrication with, social change.

The reference to Brecht, however brief and illustrative, imposes the necessity to execute at least a glancing detour through the relevant aspects of the 20th century debates on 'realism' and 'abstraction', insofar as these debates sought to develop motivated links between formal articulation and political tendency. In this context, the most salient hypothesis of that legacy is that social abstraction can only be realistically mediated by artistic forms that are themselves 'abstract' in the sense of non-narrative and non-figurative. That a materialist or progressive art can or should be non-naturalistic in its formal means was the gamble of the Western avant-garde, who validated this claim by referring to the constructivism and suprematisms of the Russian revolution. Paradoxically, this was shortly to be undercut by the promulgation of a state-sanctioned realism (albeit a much more diverse category than an established art historical narrative would have it) in the Soviet Union, and the easy assimilation of modernist abstraction to modernizing capitalist regimes worldwide.

With this historical sketch of the tensions and connections between social abstraction, materialism and artistic practice in the background, it is possible to move directly to a point of possible synthesis – or neuralgic repulsion – between a writer often situated in the 'new materialisms' trajectory, the theoretical physicist and queer theorist Karen Barad, and the chief proponent of the 'old' materialism of Marxian aesthetics, Theodor Adorno. In this collision, we will develop the stakes of what it means to locate social and ontological difference – or non-identity – within objects or matter 'itself', how such a move tends to counter or aligns the locating of such difference in a social relationship, and what that could mean for the status of materialism in current art. Said differently, it will be a glimpse at the tenability of putting the speculative dialectics of critical theory into relation with speculative materialisms to see if they produce a critical aesthetics of non-identity. This likewise adds a significant layer of complexity to an increasingly prevalent 'object-oriented' theorising, especially as it seeks to describe the agency of artworks. I will conclude with a diffusion of these hypotheses vis-a-vis some key artistic practices from now and the recent past which have not until now been discussed under the 'new materialisms' rubric but are exemplary as navigations of social form through the experimental deployment of (object-based) materiality.

The Veracity of Non-Encounter
With the apodicticity of phrasing and polyvalent signification characteristic of the writing in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno writes that 'rather than fleeing into concretion, the artwork must present through its own concretion the total nexus of abstraction and thereby resist it'. Leaving aside the question of the 'how' for the resistance imputed to the activity of the artwork, there is a provocative distinction made here between concretion as refuge (one providing an ersatz authenticity perhaps, in line with Adorno's thinking on the subject elsewhere) and concretion as a staging of abstraction, its foil or its platform. This is concretion as a dialectical image of abstraction – many artworks come to mind here, but German painting of the 1960s, K.P. Brehmer's charts, for example, seems like an effective instance of this. The conceptual milieu here is furnished by Hegel and Marx's dialectics of the abstract and concrete, with the concrete posed as the outcome of an interpretive process that approaches social abstraction as the primary unit of analysis. While 'social abstraction' can appear to denote any systematic entity that eludes individual comprehension or experience, thus denoting the ideological and practical mystifications native to any complex, hierarchical society - a society structured in domination – by the time Marx develops his account of the abstract and concrete, and the even later moment where renegade critical theorist Alfred Sohn-Rethel proposes the influential term 'real abstraction', it is clear that 'abstraction' refers specifically to the forms of money, value and labour operative in capitalist societies. Art is the outcome of the social division of labour reproduced in societies dominated by the rule of capital. This is a division organized by categorial dualisms that are not inflexible yet are structurally determinate to this mode of production; polarities such as free/unfree, waged/unwaged, mental and manual. Thus the artwork per se, or the sector of production where art happens that remains somewhat remote and anomalous from the laws of capitalist production in general, is powerless to offer an alternative, conceptually or practically, to those laws, here glossed as 'abstraction' – which, parenthetically, cannot simply be grasped as economic laws but are much more encompassing insofar as a naturalized or neutral space of the 'economy' is itself a symptom of the hegemonic effect of capitalist social relations. What it can do, or, more precisely, where its specific critical potential may lie, is the deployment of the uselessness and the material freedom afforded to art by its anomalous place in the relations of production to perform other conceptual modes and collective behaviours than the ones feasible within an organization of social life dominated by the form of capitalist (exchange and use) value, even if 'structurally' such alternatives or negations appear trivial at best, compensatory at worst. Importantly, it should be underlined that 'behaviour' or social relations' were never seen as the direct target of the otherwise Adorno projected onto art's critical capacity, for a number of reasons that can be explored at greater length. However, it will have to suffice to indicate that the re-structuring of global production no less than the 'de-territorialisation' of politics and the 'de-materialization' of art that has unfolded since Aesthetic Theory was published has long required a formal and ontological analysis of the collective and pedagogical aspects of artistic production, which I will chiefly approach below through the filter of labour. Additionally, it should be noted for the purposes of this discussion what would go without saying in a more general context, namely that the capacities imputed by Adorno to 'autonomous art' as outlined above seem ever less exclusively the preserve of the highly mediatised and commercialised (but also highly diversified) contemporary art industry, and must be considered in light of other self-organised and purposefully hermetic (sub)cultures no less than the flattening of distinctions between mainstream and avant-garde as a technical or critical distinction that has eventuated in the wake of 'the internet', with its explosion and granularization both of modes of expression and commodification.

But to turn back to the contemporary stakes and senses of materialism for art, we can move from the well-known if mutant form of historical materialist aesthetics exemplified by Adorno to how 'new materialism' has manifested as a debate in this field. The question this essay seeks to advance is whether historical materialism and new materialism can find a commonality in the space of aesthetics through the prism of 'non-identity' – the non-identity between subject and object, and between concepts and objects, which Adorno holds out as a bulwark against the full instrumentalization of thought in the project of domination. A sort of recalcitrance or autonomy of materiality, but one which can only be understood through a specific type of historical analysis, such as that pursued in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. For Adorno and Horkheimer, objects have no reality apart form the historical experience of domination and exploitation that renders the subject-object relation natural and legible, and this is, signally, an experience of abstraction – the erasure of particularity by the conquest of universal reason, itself overwhelmed by the unreason of power: '‘Abstraction, the tool of enlightenment, treats its objects as did fate, the notion of which it rejects: it liquidates them.' The materialist aesthetics of critical theory and the new materialisms both think out of the object, creating a productive ambiguity between a one-sided focus on the object as enlivened and generative of meanings but divorced from social implication, and a philosophical speculation that rejects empiricism entirely to focus on the epistemic premises of the object-subject divide. However, leaving formulations of the object in some of the work being done under the rubric of 'new materialisms' to the side, I would like to engage directly with the work of Karen Barad, since it is in her concept of 'diffraction' that I see the most generative conjunction with the Adornian concept of non-identity – and thus a common thread in the 'old' and 'new materialist' aesthetics centred on the resistance of the object, and thus a possible politics of materiality. That is to say, materiality in art can be constituted speculatively as a relational form open to temporal and social becoming, rather than confined to a traditional formalist analysis or to empiricist paradigms which bracket the social in favour of a putative concreteness of affect and matter.

'Diffraction', for Barad, is an extrapolation from Niels Bohr's particle/wave experiment with light, which established that light behaved as a particle or a wave depending on the design of the measuring instrument. This definitively refutes the possibility of scientific objectivity or the onto-epistemic difference between subject and object, knower and known.Barad uses the concept of diffraction, among others, to develop a feminist epistemology that troubles reductive but still-influential modernist notions of subject and object by locating agency in non-cognitive, non-linguistic and non-human entities and networks, that is, in 'matter' that is said to 'matter', in a procedure that she call 'agential realism'. The agency here is understood as enactment rather than an inherent property of individual entities, and which comes about as a result of 'intra-action' rather than being engendered by divisions such as object and subject which are somehow embedded in reality insofar as it 'matters' for us, in the Kantian sense. Which is not to say these divisions don't exist or do not matter, only that they function as 'cuts' in a more continuous entanglement, and are contingent and performative. As Barad has written in a recent interview (in an art magazine), '“Individuals” do not not exist, but are not individually determinate. Rather, “individuals” only exist within phenomena (particular materialized/ materializing relations) in their ongoing iteratively intra-active reconfiguring'.

For a thinker as rooted in feminist, queer-theoretical, deconstructive and empiricist frameworks as Barad, it may seem paradoxical to ally her ideas with the phenomenology of Hegel. Yet it should not be overlooked that there is in a certain sense a basic affinity between speculative philosophy and a philosophy of nature, and this affinity lay precisely in the postulation of an agency in matter. The link between these tendencies can be routed to the point when German Romanticism evolved in the two directions of Naturphilosophie and the speculative dialectic of Hegel as two competing propositions of the (recursive) externalisation of spirit in the impersonal modalities of matter and history. This has also left a legacy of two ways of overcoming the gap between subject and object. As Barad writes, matter can be said to possess agency through relational processes which are also processes of externalisation and differentiation: 'That is, intra-actions enact “agential separability”—the condition of exteriority-within-phenomena. So it is not that there are no separations or differentiations, but that they only exist within relations.' Adorno seems to be arguing for something like this, but from the other direction: dialectical negation continues to reproduce the existing unless it seriously confronts matter as resistant to logos, to the domination of the concept.

'Distortion. Never not a body':* What is Materiality for Practices of Art?
How can this philosophical apparatus allow us to develop a more fine-grained critical aesthetics that recognises some artistic approaches as excursions in non-identity at different scales? Some of these approaches enact non-identity in the resistance of materiality, although at first sight this resistance is ambiguous. Departing from Adorno's figuring of the resistant materiality of the artwork, this cannot be read off as any kind of immanently political or economic resistance, which would be prima facie derisory to attribute to most art objects or practices, no less the 'social' among them. Materiality as resistance should here be conceived more stringently as that quality of an object which is resistant to the inscription of value through the way it is constituted, that is to say, through the relations and mediations that makes it possible and that it makes possible in turn: the continuity between the material (formal) and the structural (social) that locates aesthetics within social critique, and sensuous cognition within the political. The hypothesis of a resistant or diffractive materiality discloses the relationship of sensible cognition to the contingency of matter. This is the contingency inscribed in matter by the social and the historical, and, conversely, the materiality that attenuates the determination of the social and historical over art. I would now like to embark on a concise survey of the work of Grace Schwindt a practice that notably transect concerns with form, social abstraction and the production of subjectivity by objectivity (historical, institutional) to elaborate the species of resistant materiality I've been exploring so far.

Schwindt's films 'Tenant' (2012) and 'Only a Free Individual Can Create a Free Society' (2014) can be read as history paintings, or, at minimum, tableaus. They are fantastically diagrammed transmutations of 20th century German history, as told through extended personal narratives Schwindt records with family members or friends, and placed into the highly choreographed speech and movements of dancers wearing bulky, lavish costumes as genuinely strange and futuristic as they are reminiscent of bygone futurisms like Oskar Schlemmer or Sun-Ra. The costumes also enjoin a certain range of movements, gradually making the garment, the dancer, the movements and the speech into segments folding out of one object. The artist has spoken of performance as a means for rendering a body into an image, and it is indeed a struggle between two and three dimensions, as well as the dimensions of past and present, retro-spection and document. Yet there is a paradox between flattening, the becoming-object experienced by the performer subjected both to the discipline of alien materiality and the meticulous codes of Schwindt's direction, and the planes, surfaces, textures and colours suddenly injected into the historical account – not only through garments but through sets, props, painted scenery and coloured lights, even occasionally through a shower of glitter or pantomime animals. The frivolity ebbs with the metronomic regularity of the dancers reciting the script, the often austere and ponderous quality of the text, and the opacity of their movements in relation to the dramatic substance of these tales. Materiality here thus behaves as an index of unresolved histories. It emerges as something intensely formalized, a series of 'blasted allegories' whose literal content is inseparable from an idiosyncratic, figural form. Here there are no autonomous objects – and it is perhaps Schwindt's choice of dance as the infrastructure for the singularizations she works with that marks her reluctance to dissociate objects from subjects as a precondition of the affective investment in objects which is one of the first principles of their status as art. The further choice of film/video over the liveness of performance – though she has done a number of performances, always involving herself – seems to be another step away from identification, in line with the tenets of post-modern dance, whose refusals, as we've seen since Yvonne Rainer, do not eschew spectacle so much as psychology. The affect, or even the feelings, prompted for the viewer by the work is rather how a complex materiality acts as a transformer for blocked historical energies – the RAF, the German communist movement of the 1920s – and a reflection on the wildness that emerges on the other side of hyperbolic discipline, but in a generative game with those constraints. Narrative is denatured of its emotional appeal, which is displaced onto arcanely costumed bodies moving meticulously through paradoxical spaces, where it is thwarted. The objectivity of history dissipates into the objecthood of image-bodies. The work bears a complex set of reflections on theatre, dance, sculpture, and, methodologically, to disclipines such as memory studies and micro-history, but its principal singularity lies in what can be described as a 'new materialist' attention to the opacity and incommunicability of objects. Yet the difference inscribed into matter is just as present in the object of history, that is, in the subjective practices of politics and their recollection, and these cannot be dissociated – subjectivity is expressed in objects, where it is sealed up. There is thus a discernible current of negation in Schwindt's work, of thwarting, stoppages, and numbness and automatism, running up against but also into the question of freedom posed in the title of the work and which is reiterated in the spoken dialogue: what has to take priority in emancipatory movements, the freedom of the individual or of the society? Despite worries about whether the question can be said to be posed 'correctly', it remains actual. Who the subject of emancipation, of revolutionary transformation can be if not one who has already somehow broken through to a freedom that is not yet general, yet which must be generalised to all those who are not yet free, but without whom no revolution will ever be made. Schwindt's explosively constrained tableaus seem to suggest that revolution is inconceivable without form, constraint, opacity, yet materiality – both social and textural – will continue in its forms, resisting the homogenization of abstraction through elaboration of forms. We can still hear Witold Gombrowicz, 'Oh, the power of Form! Nations die because of it. It is the cause of wars. It creates something in us that is not of us. If you make light of it you'll never understand stupidity nor evil nor crime. It governs our slightest impulses. It is at the base of our collective life.'

Following on from this, negation coupled with the speculative produces a model of critique fully open to contingency, and the inscription of this contingency in the material comprises the politics of the artwork. Negation, however, is a dimension which is either overlooked or programmatically disavowed by most varieties of 'speculative materialism', which are prone to the affirmation of the autonomy of objects and the unmediated identity between matter and thought. Rather than a speculative proposal reckoning with both their separation in capitalist, colonial modernity and the purported overcoming of this separation in present-day commodity logics, these affirmations take the identity (rather than the non-identity) between matter and thought as an operational principle, augmenting the force of these logics from the elevated perch of the theory industry. This has likewise been the case in art discourse over the last several years. The proposition of this essay has been a/that the unmediated, de-historicised collapse of subject into object, form into content, tends towards reaction and fetishism in the space of philosophy which disseminates to the analysis and production of artworks, albeit more complexly; and b/an itinerary through some counter-models that restore form to materialism, transforming it thereby.

 

 

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