The Catastrophes of Our Crisis

The present seems as an antisocial place not least because it bears the marks of its once more socially seeming modern past. A past, that conversely today seems to be diminished to leading to this very present. The lost hope for an immanent realization of modern ideals, has yet again collapsed into the practical brutalization of its inherent social hierarchies. And within that process social categories that seemed to have been relativized, socially worn out, and politically negated return once again as absolute, inescapable stigmata, subtended by their roles within the pervasive crisis of two arch-categories of modernity: the nation state and its capitalist reproduction. This is by no means modernity’s first catastrophic crisis, but it lays bare its foundational brutalisms as much as the lineages of deviation buried within it. The crisis resembles a different past than its overcoming. And so lineages of deviation seem more graspable right now, in the moment before the soon to recur straightening of our present towards yet another modern future – more graspable to those who were identified as the eventual subjects of this modern future and to those whose subjection has been entangled in its foundational brutalisms. And we are all both, however in largely different ratios. The momentary lifting of the respective ‘values’ of these identifications for the realization of said modern ideals, unearths the lineages of an antisocial socializations, possible avenues of a communal refutation of our functional identifications within yet another modern template of our lives.
In a small volume of essays entitled All This Burning Earth published in 2016 the poet Sean Bonney quotes a passage from Jean Genet’s writings on the George Jackson’s prison letters: “(T)heir voices are starker, more accusing and implacable, tearing out every reference to the cynical conjuring of the religious enterprise and its efforts to take over. They are more singular, and singular too in the way they all seem to engage a movement that converts the old discourses, in order to denounce the curse not of being black, but of being captive.”1
It is this sense of captivity that had been central also to Genet’s own earlier writings, paradigmatically laid out in Our Lady of the Flowers of 1943 already, in which exactly a lived state of incarceration turns into the formal register of a progressive desocialization. And here again it is this desocialization that gives way to an autonomy, an antisocial autonomy as a necessary space of art. This sense of being a captive of the society that one lives in lets – as Genet argues for Jackson’s prison letters – each word turns into poetry, because it builds on the denaturalization of all given social relations. All form becomes aesthetic, and, where acted out by the subject, artistic, because no form remains positively social, no form remains mundane, no form can be accepted as a given. But this artistic form, and this is why Bonney focuses on Genet’s political writings from the 1960s to the 1980s, establishes an antisocial aesthetic solidarity. One that is, with Genet, prone to fundamentally intensify its notion of form:
„And this must be noted if only to counter the obligatory misunderstanding of l’art pour l’art. For art’s sake was scarcely ever to be taken literally; it was almost always a flag under which sailed a cargo that could not be declared because it still lacked a name. This is the moment to embark on a work that would illuminate as has no other the crisis of the arts that we are witnessing: a history of esoteric poetry.”2
In Genet’s sense Jackson’s writing was art, not because it necessarily sought to be art, but because his embracing of the immiseration of language which the prison censorship forced upon him, negated the functional socialization of his language and gave rise to an art, an aesthetics that was not (yet) legible, positively identifiable within the captivity he was subjected to. It is the ratio of subjection and subjectivization that Genet arguably shifts in his reading of Jackson’s prison letter, as his subjection becomes his subjectivization. Genet establishes a position within which subjectivization rises from subjection alone, from the antisocial within the given society rises a socialization against it. Genet’s model of society as a state of captivity is thus not so much suggesting a model of aesthetic identification with the subjected but rather one of aesthetic solidarity out of subjection. History is rearranged via exemplary anti-social productions. Within such a model the antisocial capacities of vastly different, and previously detached, social roles become relevant exactly in their shared sense of captivity. However, and here the practical failure of Genet’s attempted political solidarization which Bonney notes becomes central: the negative social identification of one’s own aesthetic re-formation entails a conscious, a responsible relation to one’s own affirmative function within this society. The antisocial aesthetic is bound to the captivity in question. And unlike George Jackson, we do carry affirmative roles that cannot be aesthetically overpowered, only destabilized, utilized or possibly jeopardized. Our ratio needs to figure in order for the antisocial relation to not inadvertently inherit the hierarchies of the social ones.
And even if we keep to the narrow confinements of seeking out the aesthetic potential of an antisocial artistic practice today, this means not least that the question of its history becomes ineluctable. To seek out an anti-social art today implies what Genet calls “a history of esoteric poetry”, and which in our case would be “a history of esoteric art”. And art that is esoteric because it intensifies its bourgeois opposition to exoteric reason into an assault on it. An art that is esoteric because it employs “l’art pour l’art” to establish its means and ends from a perspective that renders all given relations de-naturalized and thus aesthetic. An art that is esoteric, because it does not comply with exoteric sense but denounces it rendering all sense arcane, obscure, abstruse, rarefied and perplexing. An art that is esoteric because it calls for an antisocial initiation into another aesthetic trajectory. It is thus exactly the inherently modern attribution of autonomy to art as a social space of aesthetic practice beyond the production of use value, and thus beyond the practical participation in modern society, that lets it return as Genet’s mode of operation: the autonomy of art is a state of captivity, with no social space to act upon. Genet’s version of “l’art pour l’art” renders this space as an antisocial expanse. An antisocial expanse which unites artistic propositions as diverse as French Symbolists of the late 19th century, Russian Futurists of the early 1910s, the more consequential Surrealists and Dadaists of the 1920s and 30s, the destruction artists of the late 1950s and 60s and sexed interventions into early contemporary art like those of Lee Lozano, General Idea or Tabea Blumenschein’s and Ulrike Ottinger’s, to name but a few.
In Ulrike Ottinger’s and Tabea Blumenschein’s 1979 Film Bildnis einer Trinkerin (Ticket of No Return)3 „She “ (Blumenschein) wanders through Berlin, drinking Cognac and Brandy until „She“ dissolves into her surroundings, into its reflections and cutting disks, until „she“ drinks herself away. Clad in evening gowns, stoles, satin gloves, pumps, with perfect make-up, fine-tuned hats „She“, with a strictly erect posture, reaches for cognac glasses, everywhere in Berlin, in Ku’Damm cafés, in dive bars, in hotel rooms, in her dreams. She is executing her own tourist map of drinking, travelling to the settings of female alcoholism, and in every scene her drinking remains a coordinated action, a grip, a raised arm, a 90 degree movement of the head, and … closure. And throughout the whole film, „She“ hardly speaks. Ottinger and Blumenschein did not aim at a personalized tragedy, but at the apersonal stereotyping, the social isolation of her lifeform, a female drinker. She also is a captive, and she too emits a ‘formalism’ of her own. Blumenschein and Ottinger worked together generating this (and other) characters in a desire to develop beauty from deformation, a beauty that does not aim at recognition, but at autonomization, in Genet’s terms a l’art pour l’art that establishes the bonds and solidarities of a social form yet to come. Bildnis einer Trinkerin is not a narration of failed bourgeois emancipation, „She“ does not become a drinker, “She” is a drinker and thus “She” does not speak but within the given society ‘is discussed’. Throughout the whole film three ladies in grey costumes inevitably populate the places „She“ frequents: they – the „Social Question“, the „Exact Statistics“ and the „Common Reason“ – are talking about the horrific alcoholism amongst housewives, about the impossibilities of exact statistic because those women are mostly confined to their bourgeois homes and about the social isolation of these women. All the while „She“ drinks. Within their measures “She” failed, but within her own she realized herself. That this realization implies her social and physical death does less testify to her failure than, within the consequence of the film, to the inevitable opposition to the given society which rejects her antisocial, her distinctively non-reproductive femininity. Bildnis einer Trinkerin is not about advancing this society, about employing art – in an emulation of Joseph Beuys and other gifted men – to heal society, to mend its brutalisms, or to project its future emancipated realization: the film establishes an aesthetic form, just like Genet’s, that is built on the fundamental refuting of this society, on considering one’s life a status of captivity within it. And so the antisociality Ottinger and Blumenschein open up in this and other films does – as in Genet’s case – figure as a brutalization only within the exoteric measures of the society it is held captive by, all the while establishing an aesthetic example of a communizing practice: An antisocial socialization based on a fundamental sense of alienation which does not register a rectifiable deviation but as the deviant aesthetic of a rightfully alienated life. In Ottinger’s case documentary and fiction are intertwined, exposing documentary as a form of fiction; and vice versa. Reality presents itself as a brutalist fiction in which antisocial structures can be documented that propagate an aesthetic solidarity.
And that, brings me back to our present in which, it seems, the state of crisis has entirely taken over the state of normalcy. As argued in the beginning we find ourselves in a historical moment in which modernity’s inherently de-socializing character has most widely driven back its earlier idealisms. In other words, contemporaneity is in crisis and it has been for quite some time. Even if we might remember times in which crisis did not seem to be the characterizing notion of the present the question retrospectively arises why that seemed to be the case. Because it looks like, for now, those times are not only over but in perceiving the past as leading to this very present they are also starting to deborder into it. Consequently, a state of prolonged crisis does not only engage the present, but it also weighs on the past: a universalization of crisis as form, its precipitating into all registers of life. So, if we, with Jean Genet, think of our society as a state of captivity, one question is if this current, this permanent form of crisis, does not, amongst other things, universalize such a perception of being a captive of this society, turning it into the normalized understanding of life in our present, and subjecting more and more into it who had been counting on their subject being within it. Genet supposes subjection to lie at the core of subjectivization, whereas our present has rendered subjectivization as a measure of subjection.
Moments of crisis have been a fundamental characteristic of capitalism from its very beginning. In the “Communist Manifesto” Karl Marx characterizes the development of bourgeois society as a permanent stream of crisis entangled in the “primitive accumulation” of capital. “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, the relations of production”, a process of breaking up “venerable conceptions and ideas (which) are dissoluted”, of “family ties (that) are torn apart”4. That was in 1848. Later in Capital Volume II, which was published by Friedrich Engels only after Marx’s death, went on to describe how actually not moments of crisis but rather temporary moments of stability are a mere contingency within capitalist development.5 But even though crisis is capitalist normalcy, it still marks a significant and distinguishable aspect of capitalism, namely the material appearance of its form: “Within crisis the antagonism between the commodity and its value form, money, is increased up to the point of absolute opposition”6. Capital creates a sociality built on an omnipresent antagonism, in the crisis of which social naturalization breaks down and the commodity and its value form resurface as antisocial entities. Ottinger’s aesthetic practices of antisociality cut through this sense of form specifically. Commodities are employed to negate their value forms, the evening gowns, the satin gloves, the pumps, they all become attributes of “her” antisocial life, they all become singular, exceptional, non-reproducible. Ottinger and Blumenschein as well as Genet have suggested in different registers to denounce the negative social bond that the permanent reproduction of capital and its political form, the modern nation state, forge around us. Today, however we seem to find ourselves within a situation in which this negative sociality itself seizes to exist. Because arguably, financialized capitalism does not produce a negative sociality, like the modernist industrialism did which led to it, but it produces an antisocial set up, a de-socialization of capital. As Maurizio Lazzarato has put it in 2011: “We have now entered a period of permanent crisis which we shall call ‘catastrophe’ to refer to the discontinuity of the concept of crisis itself.”7 The ideology of derivative surplus value, the assumption that surplus value cannot only be won from human labor, as Marx had famously argued, but also from (derivative) circulation refutes the role of labor as the (however abjected) core of social synthesis under capital and denounces it as a secondary phenomenon. Thus, the negative social bond between labor and what Marx called the bourgeoisie has been foreclosed, and value developed from a negative social relation into an antisocial relation. Capital turned form a crisis-ridden relation into a catastrophic one.
Such a confrontation of capitalism as crisis and catastrophe was, however, already established by Rosa Luxemburg, who characterized catastrophe as “capitalism’s vital principle”8. She proposed for the 1910s what Lazzarato proposed for the 2010s, that the concept of crisis no longer matches a present in which crisis’ other, normalcy, does not seem graspable. Already in Karl Marx’ own writing catastrophe had figured as the “regularly recurring”9 result of the “antagonistic character of capitalist accumulation”10. Catastrophe thus does not necessarily imply the downfall of capitalism, but rather, as the entry on “Catastrophe” in Wolfgang Fritz Haug’s Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus11 notes, it erodes the basis of any modern administrative sense of politics for good and for bad, because “the dialectics of long-term and short-term objective are immobilized.”12 Crisis is a process of overcoming and thus of becoming, it signifies the materialization of an antagonism that historically came into being and now reaches its climax, a climax that, by definition, will pass. Crisis is a progressive category whereas catastrophe marks the disintegration of a temporal order, a state of discontinuity. Crisis and catastrophe are thus by no means mutually exclusive – rather they are different vantage points of one and the same present. With Luxemburg, and, of course, with Walter Benjamin, such a notion of catastrophe can come to be understood as time’s materialization beyond mere progressivism. Catastrophe in other words can come to be understood as crisis’ antisocial other. Faced with the catastrophic triumph of national socialism Walter Benjamin in his eighth thesis “On the Concept of History” in 1940 argued that “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule”13 and that “it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency” to enable a revolutionary “leap into the open air”14. In Benjamin, it is thus not the demonstration of everyday life as a catastrophe that is deemed revolutionary, but the active and distinctive catastrophization of its specificities. And here Genet’s language of captivity and Ottinger’s documents of no return come back into view. The catastrophic, in other words needs to be historically specified, it needs to become ‘authored’, to be distinctly antisocial to entail spontaneity “a leap into open air”. Our crisis needs to become ‘our’ catastrophe in order to alienate ourselves from the bonds of its – instead of our – life.
Within Genet’s understanding of society as a correlation of incarceration as much as in Ottinger’s and Blumenschein’s urge to develop beauty from defacement antisocial art proposes an aesthetic practice of catastrophe. It holds on to, just as Benjamin argues, “real states of emergency” to rebuild a notion of life from there. It projects a “l’art pour l’art” that refutes to understand its aesthetic practices as a means to overcome a given crisis, that refutes to compensate brutalist politics (which anyway it can’t practically), rather seeking to expand aesthetic instances of catastrophe, to, in Benjamin’s words, allow for “leap into the open air”. Within a present that presents itself as the antisocial version of a negative social bond called capital a revived lineage of antisocial art maps out instances of catastrophic aesthetic solidarity, lineages of a l’art pour l’art the socialization of which is still to come. For now, the brutalized ideals of modern autonomy render our roles within this very heritage as states of incarceration that allow for no return. No return but an ongoing aesthetic qualification of our catastrophe, our shared catastrophe, our lived and living catastrophe. Our (antisocial) socialization to come.