OVERVIEW

The Noisy Optimism of Immediate Action: Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy in Contemporary Art Author(s): Grant Kester Source: Art Journal, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Summer 2012), pp. 86-99 Published by: CAA Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43188543 Accessed: 16-01-2021 19:46 UTC

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Grant Kester

The Noisy Optimism of Immediate Action:

Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy in

Contemporary Art

Fatima Sbeih and Geoffrey Wiidanger, Rally, UC Davis, November 21, 2011, 2011 (photograph © Fatima Sbeih and Geoffrey

Wiidanger)

Those who compulsively shout down their objective despair with the noisy optimism of immediate action

in order to lighten their psychological burden are much more deluded.

- Theodor Adorno

Adorno aš an Institution Is Dead

In the summer of 1969 Theodor Adorno s "Introduction to Dialectical Thinking"

course at the University of Frankfurt was interrupted by heckling students associ-

ated with the Außerparlamentarische Opposition or APO. The APO

emerged from the German New Left student movement and sought

to challenge the right-wing domination of the Bundestag under Willy

Brandt's coalition government. It paralleled the broader international

movement of student-led demonstrations and occupations that

erupted in the United States, Europe, and Latin America over the

preceding five years. This was not Adorno s first interaction with

protesting students. Earlier that year he called in university police

to clear student activists who had occupied the Institute for Social

Research. In perhaps the most notorious of these encounters (the

Busenaktion or "breast action"), Adorno s lecture was disrupted by

three topless female sociology students who tossed rose petals over

his head and tried to kiss him on the cheek. In response Adorno fled

the lecture hall, shielded by his briefcase. At the time Adorno was one of the most

important intellectual figures in West Germany. These confrontations marked a

significant generational tension in post-World War II Europe, as New Left student

groups sought to establish a more engaged, less contemplative relationship to

social change. In May of 1969 Der Spiegel published an interview with Adorno, in

which he reflected on this tension and defended the autonomy of his intellectual

work in terms that remain surprisingly contemporary.

The past few years have witnessed a new wave of campus protests and occu-

pations as universities across the United States and Europe face the pressures of

neoliberal privatization, leading to dramatic increases in tuition or fees, the clo-

sure of departments, and faculty and staff layoffs. In the late 1960s and early 1970s

student activism constituted only one strand of a much broader network of oppo-

sitional projects, ranging from postcolonial struggles in Latin America, to new

social movements supporting the rights of women and people of color, to anti-

war protests. Today's student demonstrations are unfolding in a far different con-

text. While the enragés of 1968 sought to overthrow the capitalist system in its

entirety, many of today's protestors simply want the opportunity to attend college

or receive professional training without incurring crippling debt. However, the

current moment is not entirely reactive. While some protestors seek only to roll

back cuts to higher education, others have attempted to use these reductions to

catalyze a more general critique of neoliberalism among a new generation of stu-

dents. We can also identify a loose network of alternative educational projects,

many of them generated within the art world, which build on a tradition of alter-

native schooling pioneered by Joseph Beuys's Free International University in

Düsseldorf (e.g., Copenhagen Free University, the Public School, and others).

As we live through another moment of unrest in the academy, it is worth revisit-

ing Adorno 's encounters in Frankfurt, and the broader questions they raise

about the relationships between art, pedagogy, and activism.

The epigraph is from "Keine Angst vor dem

Elfenbeinturm," interview with Theodor Adorno

by the editors, Dieter Brumm and Ernst Elitz, Der

Spiegel 19 (May 5, 1969), rep. "Who's Afraid of the

Ivory Tower? A Conversation with Theodor W. Adorno," ed. and trans. Gerhard Richter,

Monatashefte für Deutschsprachige Literatur und

Kultur 94, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 10-23; 17. Citations of the interview are from this translation.

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Fatima Sbeih and Geoffrey Wildanger, Protest, UC Davis, November 21, 2011 , 2011 (photograph © Fatima Sbeih and Geoffrey

Wildanger)

1. Adorno, Spiegel interview, trans. Richter, 15.

In the course of the Spiegel interview, the authors (Dieter Brumm and Ernst

Elitz) press Adorno to explain his refusal to align himself with the student protes-

tors and his decision to turn the police against them. "Critical Theory does not

wish to keep conditions as they are," they point out. "The . . . students learned this

from you. You, Professor Adorno, now refuse practical action." In response Adorno

presents a defense of the necessary autonomy of theory based around its strong

correlation with art or aesthetic activity As he writes, "I have never offered a model

for any kind of action or for some specific campaign. I am a theoretical human

being who views theoretical thinking as lying extraordinarily close to his artistic

intentions." 1 As a result of this correlation, theory retains its revelatory power only

by remaining disengaged from the demands of practice. While the theorist can

"put into words" what he sees or thinks, according to Adorno, he can never predi-

cate his theoretical production "on what will be done with it or what will become

of it." Thus, it is not the theorist s task to determine how his insight might be

applied, or if it is even relevant to the ongoing process of resistance. Rather, the

theorist's only duty is to "relendessly analyze what is." Theory, like art, must remain

aloof and disengaged from immediate, tactical questions of practice or application.

"I believe that a theory is much more capable of having practical conse-

quences owing to the strength of its own objectivity," Adorno argues, "than if it

had subjected itself to praxis from the start." Theory that subjects itself to practice

remains mired in the exigencies of everyday struggle and is incapable of produc-

ing truly liberating insight into the constitution of social reality against which

struggle must be waged. When Adorno speaks of theory having "practical conse-

quences," he appears to mean that readers of his work may gain some knowledge

that will inform their subsequent action in the world. Theory's agency is defined

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Geoffrey Wildanger, Occupation ofDutton Hall, UC Davis, November 21, 2011 , 2011

(photograph © Geoffrey Wildanger)

2. Ibid., 16.

not by a reciprocal engagement with processes of collective action, but rather, by

a kind of singularized enlightenment. As he argues, "There have been coundess

instances in which precisely those works that pursued purely theoretical inten-

tions altered consciousness and, by extension, societal reality." 2 The goal of the-

ory is to communicate a properly "objective" analysis of the world in the hope

that a sufficient number of individual readers may eventually come together to

actualize its lessons in revolutionary practice.

Adorno s interactions with the APO, however, were more complicated than

this analysis suggests. As he makes clear in the interview, the tensions between

Adorno and the student protestors arose not simply because of his commitment

to theoretical disengagement, but because he openly attacked the specific form of

practice that they pursued ("I said in a television interview that, even though I had

established a theoretical model, I could not have foreseen that people would try to

implement it with Molotov cocktails."). Adorno clearly had a strong sense of what

form practice should, and should not, take. When pressed by Der Spiegel to explain

how he would proceed differendy, he retreats into a claim of aesthetic disinterest

that is made all the more puzzling by his readiness to offer theoretical pronounce-

ments on those forms of practice of which he does not approve. These judgments

are based on a very particular understanding of action and the forms of knowledge

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3. Ibid., 17.

4. Ibid., 16.

it produces. In Adorno 's analysis the protests and demonstrations of the APO were

evidence of the movement s reliance on "action-ism," or the naive belief that "if

only you change little things here and there, then perhaps everything will be bet-

ter." "Action-ism can essentially be traced back to despair," as Adorno observes,

"because people sense how little power they actually have to change society. But

I am equally convinced that these individual actions are predestined to fail."3

It is not action qua action that Adorno rejects, but rather, action that operates

at the local or situational level (changing "little things here and there"). This

implies a necessary contrast with a globally coordinated and theoretically

informed mode of political resistance that attacks the capitalist system in its

entirety Adorno s critique of action-ism raises a larger set of questions about the

nature of social change, and how insight is generated in and through the process

of resistance. For Adorno, theory possesses a quasi-transcendent objectivity that

allows it to float free of the parochial limitations of local or situational experi-

ence. Only theory is able to evoke the vast, interconnected gestalt of capitalism,

thereby revealing that which normally eludes our conscious awareness. This reve-

latory power, as noted above, is made possible precisely by its distance from prac-

tice or action. The debilitating corollary to this belief, however, is the assumption

that valid knowledge or insight can only come with distance, and that proximity,

interdependence, or engagement (with practice) leads, inevitably, to error and

confusion. In this view, the knowledge generated by practice or action is entirely

pragmatic, with no broader relevance and no capacity to generate forms of critical

reflection that can help orient future practice or reveal dimensions of "societal

totality" of which the theorist remains unaware.

While Adorno possessed the intellectual imagination to evoke, with the

greatest possible clarity, the multifarious forms of domination that are character-

istic of the late capitalist system, he was unable to envision how any individual

act or gesture could ever hope to disturb this implacable structure. "In our writ-

ings," Adorno observes, "the value of so-called individual actions is delimited by

an emphasis on societal totality." "But how," the interviewers ask, "would one

go about changing societal totality without individual action?" "That," Adorno

responds, "is asking too much of me."4 Even theory, then, has its limits. For

Adorno the scale of resistance involved in the university protests was simply

incommensurate with the enormity of the oppressive system that was arrayed

against them. Adorno s melancholia suggests a symptomatic impasse in which

only the theorist is capable of comprehending "societal totality" and properly

orienting action, while the activist, unguided by objective theory, remains indif-

ferent to its essential lessons and distracted by the spurious and fleeting satisfac-

tion of immediate action. Thus the only form of individual action that Adorno

approves involves detached, contemplative artistic or theoretical production.

Against the unforgiving societal totality of the present moment, we can

only hope to hold open a protected space of autonomous critique and creativity,

which may one day be actualized. What remains impossible to imagine, at least

for now, is any operational linkage between this individual action and our current

situation. Here again theory's essentially aesthetic condition reveals itself, as

Adorno speaks to a revolutionary moment yet to be. On the one hand individual

political action (the work of the student protestors, for example) is "predestined

to fail," and on the other, theory must remain a resolutely individual undertaking,

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5- Ibid., 15.

6. Immanuel Kant, "What Is Enlightenment?" The

Philosophy of Kant: Immanuel Kant's Moral and

Political Writings , ed. Karl J. Friedrich (New York:

Modern Library, 1977), 55.

insulated from the demands of practice and the conformity that is the inevitable

consequence of any collective action (Adorno warns of the "compulsive pressure

to deliver oneself, to join in," which he associates with the APO).5 It is, ultimately,

the sovereignty of theory, and of the theorist s singular consciousness of the

world, that must be preserved, and that constitutes the most reliable vehicle for

the preservation of an authentic revolutionary impulse.

Text and Action

As noted above, theory is "artistic" for Adorno because it claims a necessary

detachment from the social (the world of action or practice) that parallels the

distance provided by autonomous aesthetic experience. In fact, Adorno was in

the midst of finishing his magisterial study Aesthetic Theory when the Spiegel inter-

view was conducted in 1969. For Immanuel Kant, of course, aesthetic disinterest

possessed a redemptive, prefigurative dimension (allowing for the intuition of a

harmonious community yet to be, rather than a future moment of ideal revolu-

tionary praxis) . However, this aesthetic capacity is differentiated from a capacity

for enlightened political action, which will result from the gradual circulation

of ideas and commerce ("Bücher und Geld," as Kant writes). As opposed to a

"revolutionary" change, this diffusion of knowledge must proceed gradually,

according to Kant, as the "public can only achieve enlightenment slowly." The

process of enlightenment begins with the self-liberating actions of a small coterie

of advanced thinkers "who are capable of thinking for themselves despite the established authorities."6

We are presented here with a notion of political transformation via the viral

diffusion of progressive beliefs or ideas incubated by an advanced segment of

the intelligentsia, a notion with obvious parallels with the history of modern art.

Both seek to produce a new form of consciousness in the reader or viewer, a

subjectivity better equipped to meet the demands of modern, quasi-democratic

society, in which long-established social hierarchies have begun to erode. In his

influential notion of "aesthetic education," Friedrich Schiller modifies Kant's

concept of enlightenment in two important ways. First, Kant's handful of enlight-

ened subjects are reinvented as the artists and poets of Schiller's "aesthetic state."

Like the pamphleteer or the philosopher, the artist only enjoys sovereignty in the

realm of ideas and the imagination. As soon as he seeks to impart reality to these

ideas, to set in motion specific proposals that might produce actual transforma-

tions in the social order (to "subject theory to praxis," as Adorno might say), this

legitimacy is lost. Second, Schiller introduces a subtle but significant skepticism

about the capacity of the public to achieve a sufficient level of enlightenment

without assistance, taking the principle of deferral and temporal delay implicit

in Kant's analysis one step further.

For Schiller it requires a process of aesthetic education, distinct from and

prior to education per se, in order to reform the subjectivities of these new civic

subjects, before their formally political debates can be characterized as truly

enlightened. Rather than viewing civil society as a realm of debate in which con-

sciousness is formed and from which change can occur, Schiller argues that no

meaningful political change can occur until human consciousness (understood to

be intrinsically damaged and fragmented by the experience of modernity) has

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7. Adorno, 17.

8. Rosalind Krauss, "Poststructuralism and the

'Paraliterary,'" October 13 (Summer 1980): 39.

9. Ibid., 37.

been transformed by a process of aesthetic education. The aesthetic emerges as a

meta-ethical discourse that stands over and above normative political discourse.

Fully mature participation in the public sphere can occur only after we have been

exposed to the civilizing influence of aesthetic experience. This pedagogical drive

entails an essentially adjudicatory and custodial relationship between the artist

and the viewer. Thus, for Adorno, the "noisy optimism of immediate action"

evident among the student activists is an expression of weakness, a deluded

and futile effort to "lighten [their] psychological burden," rather than engage in

the hard, disciplined work of objective theoretical analysis.7

At the center of Adorno 's hermeneutic model lies the event of reading itself,

the generation of a textual provocation, brought forth by the thinker and dissemi-

nated to a reader in need of enlightenment. In his concept of a theoretical poesis

Adorno anticipated the increasingly symbiotic relationship between artistic prac-

tice and theoretical production that became a defining feature of contemporary

art during the 1980s. This relationship is evident as early as 1980, in Rosalind

Krauss s bellwether October essay on the virtues of the "paraliterary." Krauss

responds here to an attack on Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida published by

Morris Dickstein in Partisan Review. She admonishes Dickstein for his retrograde

belief that the critic s role is to reveal meaning hidden in the depths of a poem

or novel. As Krauss notes, in poststructuralist literary theory "nothing is buried

that must be 'extracted,' it is all part of the surface of the text." Instead, the critic's

task is to "isolate" the literary codes and conventions that produce the illusion

of semantic depth, "by applying a kind of spotlight to each instance of them, to

expose them."8 The paraliterary emerges as criticism itself takes on the provoca-

tive character of modernist literature, becoming entangled "in a dramatic web

of many voices, citations, asides, divigations" and transgressing the boundaries

between existing genres and categories of thought. The paraliterary opens up a

"space of debate, quotation, partisanship, betrayal, [and] reconciliation," accord-

ing to Krauss, in place of the "unity, coherence or resolution" that is characteris-

tic of conventional "humanist" scholarship.9 The presumed semantic linkage

between author and text becomes simply another in a series of signifying

relationships to be overturned, in order to free the (autonomous) signifier

from the leaden authority of the referent.

Krauss 's essay suggests the significant influence exercised by Barthes and

Derrida on art history and theory. During the 1980s and 1990s we encounter a

hybrid discourse in art criticism, which reconstitutes some of the generic fea-

tures of the long history of avant-garde art within the specific parameters of post-

structuralist literary theory. The effect was to consolidate a "textual" model of

artistic practice in which the work of art functions to destabilize fixed opposi-

tions via some form of conceptual or cognitive provocation. Semiotics allowed

for the initial consolidation of a textual paradigm in art practice and criticism,

as a body of theory designed to reveal the contingency of linguistic meaning was

transposed into discussions of visual art. Notwithstanding obligatory claims about

the death of the author in this new theoretical conjunction, it is more accurate to

describe a process of rearticulation, as the locus of authorial agency shifts from

the patrimonial positing of an originary meaning, to the facilitation of disruptive

encounters that seek to problematize normative conventions (generally, as Krauss

describes, through the exposure or revelation of various codes). Here the hidden

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Rei Te rad a, Protest, UC Irvine , November 9, 2011, 2011 (photographs © Rei Terada)

10. Steven G. Crowell, "Dialogue and Text: Re-marking the Difference," in The Interpretation

of Dialogue, ed. Tullio Maranhao (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 353.

meanings imbedded in the text by the conventional author are simply replaced by

hidden ideological mechanisms of which the reader remains unaware.

In his essay "Dialogue and Text: Re-marking the Difference," Steven Crowell

identifies an unexpected continuity between these two ostensibly opposed tra-

ditions: between the author as creator sui generis and the author who serves

merely to isolate codes and liberate the writerly text from its dependence on the

referent. Crowell contrasts the hermeneutic models of Hans-Georg Gadamer and

Derrida, focusing on the privileged status assigned by both to reading as a para-

digm for how we come to know the world. Gadamer bases his understanding

of hermeneutics on the concept of a dialogue or conversation between reader

and book, through which the "movement of question and answer is governed

neither by the purely individual interests of the partners, nor by the asymmetrical

authority relation of teacher to student, but by the 'thing' itself."10 In coming to

terms with some shared external object of discussion (die Sache) the reader and

the author work toward a "fusion of horizons" that insures that their dialogue is

authentic and uncoerced. The "truth" depends, then, on the guarantee provided

by an external referent, through which the interlocutors come at last to under- stand one another.

For Derrida, Gadamer s "fusion of horizons" serves only to mask a system of

logocentric domination in which spoken dialogue is privileged as the origin of

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11. Ibid., 351.

i2.lb¡<±, 348, 346.

truth and the plenitude of meaning, at the expense of textual inscription. Derrida

instead extols the text, and the act of reading, as the realm of the autonomous,

quasi-aesthetic play of the signifier. If Gadamer bases his argument on the onto-

logical truth claims of die Sache (some objective external object to which dialogue

refers) , Derrida sets out to undermine precisely the claim that any text can reli-

ably refer to any object in the world. Instead of positing a Gadamerian "unity of

meaning," deconstruction will reveal the contingency of all truths. However, as

Crowell points out, notwithstanding their ostensible differences, both Gadamer

and Derrida ignore the specificity of dialogue. Derrida, in his desire to avoid the

privileging of logos over text, ends up collapsing the difference between them,

reducing spoken language to its function within an ideological schema, in which

it operates as little more than a placeholder for a spurious metaphysical privilege.

As Crowell observes, Derrida "refuses to acknowledge any essential difference in

the interpretive Sinnvollzug of reading and dialogue."11

While Gadamer s hermeneutic model relies on the metaphor of a dialogue,

he nonetheless projects onto dialogue the specific conditions of reading, over-

looking the very real differences between the act of reading a book and the pro-

cess of intersubjective exchange in conversation. A book is a composed and

delimited object, characterized by a formal finitude. As a result, texts regulate

meaning in ways that dialogues do not. The knowledge that a book generates will

vary depending on each reader s horizons, but there is no way for the book itself

to be reciprocally transformed by or attuned to the individual reader. Thus, as

Crowell contends, "Texts, of whatever length, come to an end. ... In dialogue

on the other hand any actual conclusion to question and answer is utterly provi-

sional . . . there are always two horizons at risk." 12 The tendency of both Derrida

and Gadamer to collapse the distinction between (written) text and (spoken)

dialogue makes it difficult for either thinker to offer a compelling account of

intersubjective ethics. Rather, the ethical is collapsed entirely into questions con-

cerning the "ontology of language," as Crowell writes. For Gadamer, a "good"

dialogue is one that preserves the integrity of the relationship to an external

referent (the truth of die Sache) as a way to ground conversation and to achieve

the fusion of horizons necessary for proper understanding. For Derrida, ethics

involves the deliberate deconstruction of this same representational system, the

uncoupling of author and text, signifier and referent. This isn't to say that there

aren't legitimate ethical questions to be raised around textual presentation;

however, what is lost here is an ability to grasp the specificity of reciprocal,

intersubjective experience in the face-to-face encounter.

The Pedagogical (Re)Turn

As I've suggested above, modern aesthetic discourse has always entailed an ethical

orientation to the world. We might say that ethics begins with the social, and

with societal norms, and works toward the individual, while aesthetics begins

with the individual - individual sentiment, taste, and subjective experience -

and moves toward a hypothetical social context. The aesthetic is concerned with

whether we can come to feel the Tightness of an ethical orientation to the world,

rather than having it forced upon us by external coercion or internalized compul-

sion. For Kant, aesthetic experience has the capacity to evoke an ideal and har-

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13. Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster:

Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans.

Kristin Ross (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press),

6-7.

14. Ibid., 101-2.

15. Jacques Ranciere, "The Emancipated

Spectator," Artforum, March 2007, 278.

monious community yet to be. Schiller stresses the pedagogical function of the

aesthetic in preparing us to create or inhabit this ideal world. With the paraliter-

ary merging of theory and poetics, the complex articulation of ethics and aes-

thetics undergoes a further evolution. The aesthetic procedures of modernist

poetics (ostranenie, or defamiliarization) are transformed into the techniques of

deconstruction, which will awaken the somnolent viewer to the violence of logo-

centric reason. In contemporary art the civilizing influence of Schiller's poetry

has been replaced by cognitive destabilization and the "exposure" and "isolation"

of hidden codes. In each case, however, the aesthetic operates in an essentially

unilinear and prescriptive mode, with the artist variously guiding and transform-

ing the viewer s consciousness of the world. The reemergence of Schiller's Aesthetic

Education as a key text in contemporary art theory is emblematic of this deeper

continuity. We can also point to the recent "pedagogical turn" in art practice,

which has involved the use of workshops, archives, libraries, reading groups,

and a whole pedagogical apparatus that parallels the academic mise-en-scène in

nonacademic settings (typically, galleries, museums, or other art spaces).

Jacques Rancière 's recent work provides a useful vantage point for exploring

these concerns, and the broader set of aesthetic and pedagogical questions that

they raise. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster Rancière challenges the conventional model

of education that depends on "a world divided into knowing minds and ignorant

ones, ripe minds and immature ones . . . the intelligent and the stupid.'"3

Rancière contrasts this conventional pedagogical model with the work of the

early-nineteenth-century educational theorist Joseph Jacotot. Jacotot insists that

"all men have equal intelligence" and require only the confidence to pursue their

own self-education. Jacotot replaces the "stultification" produced by traditional

educational methods (in which the instructor seeks to replicate a preexisting

knowledge in the mind of the student) with "emancipation," in which students

create their own knowledge in response to their own needs. For Rancière, the

ideal schoolmaster is "ignorant," a kind of medium who disavows his pedagogical

authority and serves merely to liberate a capacity for learning already latent, but

unrealized, in each individual.

The problem is not to create scholars. It is to raise up those that believe

themselves inferior in intelligence, to make them leave the swamp where

they are stagnating - not the swamp of ignorance, but the swamp of self-

contempt, of contempt in and of itself for the reasonable creature. 14

The teacher doesn't impart a quantifiable knowledge, but awakens instead a kind

of self-esteem in the downtrodden. If Rancière is eager to do away with the hier-

archical distinction between teacher and student, he is less prepared to sacrifice

a spatialized concept of authority per se. Whether in the form of catalyst or con-

tent, agency must always be located somewhere else. Thus, the teacher is dis-

placed by the book. The book allows each student the freedom to produce his or

her own autonomous meaning via a process of creative "translation" ("It is the

power to translate in their own way what they are looking at").'5 Rather than

conveying a preexisting and fixed meaning, as the teacher does, the meaning

of the book is intrinsically fluid and available. Rancière discovers in Jacotot a

precedent for Barthes's writerly text a century and a half later.

Oral instruction, via the embodied teacher, is only ever authoritarian and

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16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., 303 1163.

logocentric.The book, the text, on the other hand, is more rather than less dia-

logical and reciprocal than another human being. Whether we realize it or not,

our interactions with each other are always mediated, by a given discursive sys-

tem, by social conventions or protocols, by differences of class, and so on. We

persist, however, in the naive belief that it is possible to somehow circumvent

this mediation and collapse the distance, achieving a closer or more integral rela-

tionship with each other, and with the world around us. The text, the "mediating

third" that both links and bifurcates author and reader, viewer and work, self and

other, is necessary to guard against the objectification and instrumentalization

that are the inevitable consequences of any attempt to achieve a more proximate

relationship to others (one mediated by spoken, rather than written language). In

the absence of the tutelage of the book, the reader will relapse into a naive faith

in referential meaning and lose sight of the productive indeterminancy of all

signifier s. This textual instantiation, or "spectacle," in Rancière s words, stands

between the "artists idea and the spectator s feeling and interpretation."

This spectacle is a third term, to which the other two can refer, but which

prevents any kind of "equal" or "undistorted" transmission. It is a mediation

between them and that mediation of a third term is crucial in the process of

intellectual emancipation. To prevent stultification there must be something

between the master and the student. . . . Jacotot posited the book as that in-

between thing. 16

Like the work of art, the book is a prosthetic device that simultaneously frees the

reader to construct her own "translation," insulates her from the violence of the

authoritarian teacher, and reminds her of the contingency of all meaning. But this

description already introduces a subtle but significant shift in Rancière s analysis.

Authority as such, as I already noted, is not challenged but displaced. In each case

(whether that of the stultifying master or the emancipatory book) the world

remains divided into those who compose texts and those who consume them,

those who fabricate spectacles and those who view them. While readers may not

be ignorant in Rancière s account, they are at the very least unconscious of their

own capacity for intelligence. It still remains the unique mission of the writer or

artist to "raise up" these subjects from the "swamp of self-contempt" (a formula-

tion that bears an unfortunate resemblance to neoconservative arguments that

poverty is the result of a lack of self-esteem among the poor and working-class) .

This accounts for the curious qualification Rancière introduces in an essay

titled "The Emancipated Spectator." In the essay, which revolves around a discus-

sion of theater, Rancière warns against a too hasty inversion of the intellectual

authority of the author or artist: "We don't need to turn spectators into actors,"

he writes, "We needn't turn the ignorant into the learned or, merely out of a

desire to overturn things, make the student or the ignorant person the master of

his masters." 17 Here, again, we encounter the division between the ignorant and

the learned, but this time they are presented as fixed rather than fluid categories.

While Rancière is prepared to question the status of a certain kind of mastery

(one that perceives the student as an ignorant and empty vessel, waiting to be

filled with knowledge) , he is less comfortable challenging the compositional

paradigm on which conventional authorship is based.

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Nick Lally, Blockade , Main Campus Entrance, UC Santa Cruz, March 4, 2010 , 2010 (photograph © Nick Lally)

18. Ibid., 280.

19. Ibid., 272.

The crossing of borders and the confusion of roles shouldn't lead to a kind

of "hyper-theater," turning spectatorship into activity by turning representa-

tion into presence. On the contrary, theater should question its privileging of

living presence and bring the stage back to a level of equality with the telling

of a story or the writing and reading of a book. 18

Rancière casts himself as the courageous champion of subversive modes of read-

ing and viewing against (unnamed) agents of reaction who would condemn them

as insufficiently participatory or critical, on behalf of a naive Platonic investment

in "presence" and community "Looking is a bad thing," Rancière suggests, "for two reasons."

First, looking is deemed the opposite of knowing. It means standing before

an appearance without knowing the conditions that produced that appear-

ance or the reality that lies behind it. Second, looking is deemed the oppo-

site of acting. He who looks at the spectacle remains motionless in his seat,

lacking any power of intervention. Being a spectator means being passive. 19

Rancière s valorization of the book or the text only retains its critical traction in

opposition to the ostensibly normative belief that viewing and reading are passive

or quiescent activities. Here they are reinvented as newly active and transforma-

tive events. While this contrast might have made sense two or three decades ago,

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20. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of

Man, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and

L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University

Press/Clarendon Press, 1987), 45.

it is hardly the case today, as the performative nature of the text and the genera-

tive nature of reception have become commonplaces of contemporary critical

theory and artistic practice. While nothing makes reading a book or viewing an

object any less active than any other form of mediated social interaction, neither

is there anything that makes it more active or more likely to encourage reflective

engagement. One need not subscribe to phonocentric notions of presence to

believe that forms of social interaction outside those mediated by authored texts,

crafted objects, or scripted events are subject to their own unique conditions and

capable of producing different experiential effects.

Teaching is "active" for Rancière to the extent that the book liberates a dor-

mant capacity for independent thought. Readers regain some nominal autonomy

and agency (they are no longer empty vessels, merely full vessels that think

they're empty) , but they remain dependent on their experience of the book to

bring them out of this deluded state. The decisive form of agency is no longer

creative in the traditional sense (the capacity, for example, to bring new forms

into existence) but, rather, the ability to provoke reflective insight. This insight

itself becomes the locus or content of creative practice. We have not traveled so

very far, then, from Schiller to the present. Rancière retains key elements of

Schiller's "aesthetic education," as the bringing-to-consciousness of the unen-

lightened by an advanced cadre of artists and poets. He naturalizes a composi-

tional system in which the artist guides the viewer, through the fabrication of

exemplary texts. The textual paradigm advocated by Rancière is defined by a

spatial concept of agency in which compositional and receptive roles are fixed.

Artistic production in this mode is both teleological (resolved in the creation

of a final, formally delimited object, text or, event) and mimetic (the work of art

functions as the physical manifestation of an idea first developed in the artist's

imagination) . Rancière thus forecloses the possibility that reflective mediation

might occur through less proprietary forms of compositional agency. That is,

rather than viewing (creative, pedagogical) agency as the unique property of

specific individuals, instead seeing it as fluid and transpositional over the course

of a given compositional process.

We encounter, in both Adorno and Rancière, an underlying ambivalence

about the experience of reciprocal exchange and the face-to-face encounter. This

ambivalence is rooted in a corollary uncertainty about our capacity for social

change, and about the forms of collective action necessary to effect such change.

We can trace this predisposition in aesthetic philosophy back to Schiller and his horrified reaction to the violence of the French Revolution. As he writes in

Aesthetic Education, "The strife of elements in moral man, the conflict of blind

impulses, has first to be appeased, and crude antagonisms first have ceased within

him, before we can take the risk of promoting diversity." 20 The deferral and dis-

placement that is characteristic of the early modern aesthetic is premised on a

necessary gap between (transformed) consciousness and subsequent action in

the world, and a failure to understand how action itself can generate reflective

consciousness and critical insight. It is this ambivalence around the dialogical encounter that accounts for the anxious reassertion of the artist or intellectual's

authorial prerogative in contemporary art criticism and theory. This insistence on

a static mode of authorial agency is all the more striking because the pedagogical

turn in contemporary art has been characterized by a range of collaborative prac-

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Grant Kester, Protest, UC San Diego, March 10, 2010 , 2010 (photographs © Grant Kester)

21. In response to the Busenaktion Adorno states:

"To think that they did this to me, of all people,

someone who has always opposed any kind of erotic repression and sexual taboo! To mock me and to loose three girls dressed up as hippies on

me! I found that repulsive." As he elaborates, "My

friends and I have the feeling that we have been

reduced to mere objects in precisely calculated

plans." Adorno, 18.

tices in which the norms of authorship have been openly thematized as a locus of creative intervention.

These questions bring us back to Adorno s 1969 lecture on dialectical think-

ing. The encounters that occurred between Adorno and the student activists of

the APO were marked by a fundamental misrecognition. Adorno could only see

the protestors as opportunistic parasites, trying to use his fame to gain some

public attention. "They suffer from the fear of being forgotten," he remarks in the

Speigel interview. "In this way they become slaves of their own publicity. A lecture

such as mine, which is attended by about 1000 people, is obviously a magnificent

forum for activist propaganda." His defensiveness may be rooted in the shock of

the theorist who is accustomed to claiming a position of critical mastery sud-

denly finding himself made into an object of critique.21 Adorno found it impos-

sible to imagine that he could learn from the practical experience of the student

activists, rather than simply judge it. For their part, the students could only see

Adorno s criticism as the voice of another parental authority figure chastising

them for their misbehavior. They responded with a theatrical form of ridicule

intended to reveal the bourgeois conservatism lurking beneath his ostensibly

transgressive theoretical pronouncements. Each sought to be the author of the

other s political enlightenment; each sought to instruct the other in the proper

relationship between thought and action. A dialogical model of theory and prac-

tice requires us to view practice as neither the unthinking application of an a pri-

ori theoretical principle or as the realm of originary authenticity. It also requires

a form of theory that understands practice not as a threat to its privileged critical

autonomy, or as a mere object of study to be judged and found wanting, but as an interlocutor.

Grant Kester is professor of art history in the visual arts department at the University of California,

San Diego. His books include Art, Activism, and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage (Duke, 1998),

Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (University of California, 2004), and

The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Duke, 2011).

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