Another Look at Social Dimension ( 3 of 8 )

Thus, Eagleton, speaking on the relationship between nationalism, colonialism and literature in the Irish context, remarks that "[t]he paradox or aporia of any transformative policy is that is demands, to be successful, a 'centered,' resolute, self-confident agent, but would not be necessary in the first place if such self-confidence were genuinely possible. Radical change is thus rendered highly vulnerable by what makes it necessary in the first place." ("Nationalism: irony and commitment," 1988.) Jameson reveals the limits of theory unstructured by history and historical change when he notes that "in the U.S. itself, we have come to think and to speak of the emergence of an internal Third World and of internal Third World voices, as in Black women's literature or chicano literature for example. When the other speaks, he or she becomes another subject: which must be consciously registered as a problem by the imperial or metropolitan subject - whence the turn of what are still largely Western theories of imperialism in a new direction, towards that other, and towards the structures of underdevelopment and dependency for which we are responsible." ("Modernism and imperialism," 1988.)

>From the position of the subject residing in the metropolitan center, anti-imperialist work during the 1970s meant the articulation of two separate moments in a singular trajectory of self-understanding: the realization of the demands placed on one's practice through the critical renegotiation, and eventual rejection, of Modernism's claims for the self-contained work of art. These rather abstract moments were made real in terms of the application of a widespread and stereotypical model of the Maoist "struggle session" held over from the Cultural Revolution; that is, the public enactment of the "dialectic" process of "criticism, self-criticism, criticism." It was also a convenient polemical style; writing in 1974, Andrew Menard, Preston Heller and myself noted that: "[f]or most of us in New York, confident of our social power as well as our audience, accepting our ideology presupposes nothing more difficult than understanding (learning about) our ideology. We rarely admit that there might be valid reasons for doubting modernism, that the "hick" from Ohio may find little or no resonance between his/her social experience, except as one more example of Cultural hegemony. We find it hard to believe that someone could understand (learn about) our Cultural values and still find them unacceptable. And who's to disagree? . . . With the gradual encroachment of modernism any doubts we may have about modernism are usually converted to doubts about ourselves, and our own scepticism becomes self-alienating rather than liberating."

This theme of the psychosocial binds of modernism was explored by Mel Ramsden in a contribution to the first issue of The Fox (Art & Language Press, 1975). Ramsden felt it necessary to deal with what he termed the "hydra-headed art-bureaucracy" and to do so by adopting as a heuristic a propagandizing mode of exposition. Ramsden attacked the "adventuristic art of the Seventies" as "insular", a "boring spectacle of fads, intoxications, diversions, [and] infatuations" under the "platitudinous guise of massive evidence of 'creativity' and 'artistic freedom.'" But none of this could become a reality without "the astonishing increase in art-world assessors: entrepreneurs, critics, curators, gallery staff, etc." In short, without a real challenge to the bureaucrats, who are "closer to the sources of control, are higher in the market hierarchy" than us, the artists. (By art world bureaucracy Ramsden means: the fact that "major cultural decisions (which for example determine fundamental things like the way we learn, the practical relations between people) lie out of our control and are now all basically directed through the impersonal operation of market institutions (e.g., commercial galleries) and private administrative control (e.g., here Artforum , the Museum of Modern Art, etc.) Our mode of existence is one where we have internalized "what the market defines as your talents." I am tempted to summarize the remainder of Ramden's lengthy and wide-ranging article by revisiting Eagleton's discussion of the revolutionary subject; that is, one who has "broken with an imposed political identity into a kind of nameless, subversive negativity, yet has a sense of his or her own autonomous powers and capacities which far outstrips that hazy, indeterminate awareness of ourselves as agents which we derive from routine social life." All of Ramsden's examples, then, are taken from attempts to clarify and solidify a new role for the "self-enlightened" anti-imperialist, critical artist. It goes without saying that Ramsden finds these various solutions to the problem of a search for a new political, artistic identity self-deluding and misguided. They are doomed to fail, principally because the standards of market intelligibility, that "tawdry substitute for reality," are never sufficiently challenged. With respect to Conceptual Art, Ramsden argues that its marketing as "international art" is precisely what prevents any sort of realism from entering into one's practice. In contrast, Ramsden advocated a "search" outside the art-bureaucracy, to "magnify certain difficulties in making our work public." This theme is reminiscent of the analysis adopted by T. J. Clark in "The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851. Indeed, Ramsden signals this by using as his epigraph the following quote from Clark: "That was the problem, in fact: to discover the point at which public and private intersect, and thus be able to attack one by depicting the other."


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