Populism, Genre and the Blank Canvas

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes This paper was given at the one‐day conference ‘Populism and Genre’ held at Tate Britain in October 2006. The conference was organized by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, in collaboration with the Office for Contemporary Art Norway. The paper argues that the prevailing values given to the terms of the opposition ‘accessible, élitist’ should be inverted. All citations are translated by the author unless stated otherwise. 1. St. Augustine, Confessions, Book 11 (London: Heinemann, 1913), p.239. 2. Failing in their attempts to radicalize the peasantry, the Narodniki adopted terrorist tactics that culminated in the assassination of the Tzar in 1881. 3. Le Figaro, October 13, 1967, cited in the Le Petit Robert (Paris: SNL, 1978), p.619. 4. Andrew Tudor, Theories of Film (London: Secker & Warburg/BFI, 1974), p.135. 5. The English word ‘globalization’ first emerged in the late 1970s in the sociology departments and business schools of North American universities. It then entered the language of the business community before gaining the widespread use it has today. By ‘globalization’ I understand the expansionist activities and aspirations of transnational corporations, especially U.S.‐owned corporations, because of their close ties with government and the military. It is mainly in this sense of the word that we speak of the ‘effects of globalization’ in the world. There is of course another use of the term ‘globalization’ to refer the increased mutual awareness of geographically widely separated populations consequent upon the emergence of such global communication systems as satellite television and the internet, the reduced cost of air travel, and the increasing mobility of populations due to conflict or economic pressures – many of these latter, of course, a consequence of the first kind of globalization. The French word mondialisation is better adapted to signify this second meaning, as its connotations already include people – il y a du monde dans la mondialisation – whereas the English word has mainly spatial connotations. In cultural terms, ‘globalization’ means the diffusion throughout the world of the products of ‘First World’ entertainment industries: films, television shows, popular music, video games, and so on. Because of the dominant place of the U.S. in these ‘media’ industries, this has also meant the diffusion of the English language as a de facto lingua franca. To the extent that the ‘art world’ today is increasingly part of the fashion and entertainment industry it is an integral part of this process of cultural globalization. The process of cultural globalization has its corollary in the reciprocal action of subaltern cultures upon and within the hegemonic structures. 6. The Cuban artist René Francisco. 7. Jacques Rancière, Chroniques des Temps Consensuels (Paris: Seuil, 2005), p.198. 8. Jacques Rancière, ‘Interview for the English Edition’, in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), p.60. 9. Freud scrupulously distinguishes between the descriptive and the topological sense of the term ‘unconscious’. The former, more general, use covers all instances of representations not present to consciousness, and therefore includes ‘preconscious’ representations (thus Freud speaks of the ‘conscious‐preconscious system’). The latter, more restricted, sense of the term covers only those representations which are barred to consciousness by the mechanisms of defence. It is only in this latter sense that the term acquires its specifically psychoanalytic significance. Freud explicitly rejects the term ‘subconscious’. He writes: ‘If someone talks of sub‐consciousness, I cannot tell whether he means the term topographically – to indicate something lying in the mind beneath consciousness – or qualitatively – to indicate another consciousness, a subterranean one, as it were. He is probably not clear about any of it. The only trustworthy antithesis is between conscious and unconscious’. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’ [1926], in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1962), vol. 20, p.198. 10. Félix Guatarri, ‘The Three Ecologies’, New Formations, 8 (Summer 1989), p.138. 11. Bernard Stiegler, Philosopher par accident (Paris: Galilée, 2004), p.74. 12. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, p.65. 13. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, p.63. 14. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995), p.70. 15. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: logique de la sensation (Paris: Editions de la différence, 1981). 16. Philip Guston speaking on ‘The Philadelphia Panel’, It Is, 5 (Spring 1960), pp.36–8.