The mayonnaise doesn’t take, all these beautiful people are just getting together to ape a culture, to pretend. We live, without suspecting it I suppose, in a simulation of culture, fundamentally unreal - the illusion is total, but we only have the empty appearance of things, never the reality. Laurent-Michel Vacher, Dialogues en ruine (1996)
In Trou de mémoire (1968), Hubert Aquin has one of his characters write, “Québec is a poor troop of stuttering players afflicted with amnesia, who stare at each other with questioning looks.” This could be a description of the province’s Contemporary Art. It certainly seems like an apt description of how it was talked about by its apologists during the days of the doomed Triennales.
Doom and horror tend to hover around a fair amount of the city’s Contemporary Art. It is usually marketed less crudely than this would suggest. Certainly, you could make a reasonable case for the rise of horror aesthetics and thematism in Contemporary Art, both in line with the unique horror tradition of Canada (especially since the 1960s and encompassing everything from film to black metal) and even more so if this was broadened to a general concern with the fantastic, which is after all a central part of how “Native” or “Indigenous” sub-genres tend to operate.
On the level of content, this is all obvious, from David Altmejd to Jeff Wall, Brian Jungen and so on. This is also evident in a lot of the quasi-documentary work about the “Global South” that gets filtered through artist-run centres and which obsesses over haunted landscapes and the processes of “invisibilization.” A substantial portion of art exhibited in the city is social realist kitsch filtered through “neoliberal” style. But horror has a little more glamour to it. All this decay may put one in mind of the neo-baroque detailing that cropped up in one apocalyptic show from last year, or the various shows that imagine the decay of the world through the Anthropocene, or the recent imagining of a world without humanity, or one where humanity is locked away in a Condo World.
It is not simply a matter of the superficial aspects of horror that concern us and which would keep this all on the comparatively straightforward level of content. More important is the horror of art itself that runs through much of Contemporary Art and its discourses in a far more substantial way and which puts in question the existential stakes and reality of all that is in play. The point is probably better made if one examines the critiques that have been made of things like “the colonial museum” which was accused of abstracting objects from what anthropologists, activists, and others have fantasized as the “thickness” of existence, effectively stranding objects in an alien environment, segregated from their “sacred meaning” and the origin myth of their “social” function. This is when they are transformed from “culture” into “art” and become formal objects.
Culture, in another way it has typically been theorized, is that mixture of habit and habitus that becomes essentially unconscious and largely invisible. It is the zombie process that actually makes people functional as living creatures, a process, rather like biology itself (thus “culture” as a metaphor), which is fundamentally impersonal. But generally, when culture is advanced by the bureaucrats or “citizens” of the cultural sector or invoked in moral-political terms by cultural critics, it is as something rather different than that. It is usually an argument against forms of “zombification” that concern such actors, however difficult it may be to take their dialogue seriously. Culture is not protected by byzantine laws and government departments and administered as a disciplinary fantasy through the ideological state apparatus to safeguard an asubjective set of habits, the unlived experience of the world.
As the Canada Council’s Simon Brault explicitly stated, the function of “culture” and the role of the cultural sector in Canada is the cultivation and “enchantment” of a very particular type of subject for the expansion of government. Art is exploited as a tool in the economy of care that administers the pastoral programming of the state. This is, as Clive Robertson has shown, explicitly what the cult of the artist-run centres is. Some, especially the substantial administerial sections of the cultural sector, can be legitimately regarded as functional bureaucrats. Most artists who parasite on this system are better analogized to mercenaries.
It is not a matter of art being “co-opted” or “complicit” by some sanctified trope (capitalism, patriarchy, settler colonialism, etc.), especially since all of the corny “counter-culture” assumptions about identities and their relations that get recycled now are even more fake and performative than they already were in the 1960s. To paraphrase Deleuze, identity is only an effect of a simulation; it has no referent. The most generous thing that can be said about identity claims is that they are scams to manipulate stupid people, but most of the time they are probably just stupid people being stupid.
Although it is central to most of political and moral discourse, the notion that people can legitimately claim to have socio-cultural experiences and identities, or that these categories can be appealed to in order to plausibly describe anything are clearly non-starters. Since the nineteenth century social theorists at least tacitly acknowledged that their ostensible object was both empirically non-derivable and logically absurd (it is a superstition). As a sociologist once admitted, if the social could be real, no one would ever be able to know it. The massive output of social research in the twentieth century has not done much to assuage the vacuousness of the premise.
Following an even looser set of metaphysical speculations, the cultural hypostasis has always been in much worse shape. Even in the 1980s it was common to find scholars apologizing for resorting to what was clearly an unsound concept. As one professor of cultural studies admitted to me, no one in the field knows what the term means or if it refers to something real and no one cares. The point is that without it, none of their moral and political commitments would make sense, so you simply accept it. If you are an unbeliever, writing about art in Canada often feels like being an atheist trapped in the middle of arcane theological debates between Baptist splinter groups.
While claims about culture(s) do not have any substance, it is equally evident that a culture sector/industry does exist in Canada and it has an objective and mostly transparent history as a set of institutions and careers with specific political functions. Culture, in this very limited descriptive sense, is not simply an ideology – in the sense of a misrepresentation of relations and interpolation of “subjectivities” – but is a strategy and form of governance. That the Catholic Church exists is not a valid demonstration of the likelihood of the coming apocalypse or the possibility of virgin births. That the cultural sector exists does not indicate that the doctrine of a cultural humanity is valid. The irony of Contemporary Art has been that the formal logic it typically employs has objectively, if often unintentionally, demonstrated the vacuity of such a doctrine ad nauseum while also showing that maintaining stupidity about this requires a fair amount of effort or at least infrastructure.
The Canadian state itself is a rather bizarre monster. Technically it is a constitutional monarchy, but in practice, it is a soft totalitarian social democracy that is only trivially democratic and primarily ruled by a massive unelected bureaucracy, of which the cultural sector is a significant component. As Trudeau the First insisted, it is both constructed as a functionalist form and a spiritual one. And as Trudeau the Second uttered in one of his idiot-savant moments, it is essentially constructed around the paradoxical maintenance of entropy. As with many of the totalitarian states of the twentieth century, its essential mythos is kultur, which in the Canadian instance has been raised to its central moralizing principle.
The usually humorous disaster that is Canada (and this includes its little colony Montréal) is largely down to its central mythology - culture. And when you found a governmental order, which is what “Canada” is, on a claim about the world that is patently false (the existence of a cultural humanity and the moral sanctity of its expression), you unsurprisingly run into all kinds of problems and extraordinary amounts of idiocy. When you hear the word “culture” used, you can be almost certain that you are dealing with a fool or a fraud and sometimes both.
The totalitarianism of the reterritorialization that Contemporary Art constitutes in the country is marked by its enforced heterogeneity, its hybridism, its pluralism (in the sense of “cultures”), its hyper-moralization, its reliance on narratives, its dogmatic impurism, obsession with “the body” and rituality, group identities, bureaucratic structures, and general irrationalism (utopianism and “alternative knowledges”). It has all the signs of what Georges Bataille eccentrically (but accurately) termed “fascism.”
One of the great ironies of twentieth century art was that it revealed that artists were unnecessary if art was conceptualized culturally. At best, they simply became functionaries. The more obvious this became, the more they rallied around professionalization, something in evidence with the zombie walks for the maintenance of cultural funding that art associations put in the streets. The only way the cultural sector could be justified was by becoming a priestly class for governing authority (care). A central functional aspect of this has been the promotion of cultural identity.
Not “geniuses,” as in the Modernist period and which everyone from Rose-Marie Arbour to Yves Robillard to Guy Sioui Durand recognized was taboo by the 1970s, but part of a bureaucratized cult who would safeguard the aura and enchantment of “life.” This “progressive” position was both reactionary and deeply regressive, seen in the justification for the happenings given by Maurice Demers with their insistence on a return to the medieval religious function of art to the black Marxist insistence on a return to feudal modes as a futurist fantasy to escape from capitalism.
One of the charming things about Québec’s intellectual milieu or its cultural sector is how much it is trapped in the past. In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan (and for that matter, authors at Parti pris) argued that the province could leap into the neo-primitivism of the future more easily than others because it had so long been trapped in the eighteenth century while everyone else had moved on. Its historical dislocation from most of North America was one of its curious blessings. Instead, it settled into the late-1960s and never really left and its “revolutionary” period has long been revealed to be a series of vacant clichés to be endlessly reiterated (ecologism, feminism, Indigeneity, etc.).
The philosopher Christian Saint-Germain crystallized this with an image:
I’ve never understood Québec’s pride in the Révolution tranquille and its aftermath, school massification leading to illiteracy, the Olympic stadium, the CHUM, the polyvalentes and the rest of the expensive, dysfunctional monuments. The ‘Quiet Recreation’ is first and foremost the ‘concrete gospel,’ a real-estate unconsciousness that manages to manufacture windowless classrooms. Right-angled depressive spaces that breathe joie de vivre and celebrate the victory of the proletariat. Rooted in the minds of technocrats and originally at the entrance to the Berri-De Montigny metro station, the old labyrinth of the Université Populaire eventually leads to the CHUM, its demographic terminal.
Aesthetically, Montréal tends to feel like a mausoleum dedicated to this era. The cavernous metro testifies to this extensively. The campus of UQAM feels as much like a frozen-in-time tourist spectacle as Château Ramezay. As Durand mentions in passing, nothing represents the sclerosis of the province’s Contemporary Art more than an institution like Artexte, which is effectively its morgue. Artexte is a necrophiliac institution. Whenever I visit, I am put in mind of that gentleman who lived with the corpse of his wife for decades.
One of the curious features of Contemporary Art is how little it has to do with what is actually contemporary. It mostly seems to fall somewhere in a non-existent past or a non-existent future (the fantasies of the archive, narrative history, utopia, and apocalypse). The absolute affirmation of the present would be irreconcilable to what is in practice a quite utilitarian welfare regime for the manufacturing of its mystification. This is not to suggest that much of the rhetorical framing exploited to market this to its milieu does not fall in line with producing a “knowledge” of the present (knowledge being the subordination of being to the truth claims projected on an image of the past and the future).
It is, to use the parlance of its period of origin, Cold (static and therefore “involved”), even if its rhetoric is Hot (flux). It is entirely possible, after all, as some theologians, mystics, philosophers, and even a few anthropologists have suggested, that nothing ever changes; everything is eternal, everything is the same. Differences are a delusion and stasis is Real. This was the thematic implication of the 2008 Triennale, even if no one involved seemed willing to commit to it. History may not only be unnecessary, it may never have happened. While this may be what actually happens, what paradoxically is said to happen is quite the opposite and this fantasy of happening is one of the central tenets of faith of Contemporary Art, without which it would clearly be only a rigid traditionalism.
It is not clear to me that the deadness of the city’s art is a negative thing. One could argue that it is a good one. Certainly, it is a comforting one. At any rate, one should recognize that it is what overwhelms most of it and this is what its primary historical import seems to be. When I go out to look at this stuff every week I feel like I am trapped in a bad made for TV adaptation of a Poe story from the late 70s.
While the mummy has been mired in plot complexities, the most important of which is our confusion about the relationship between events in the distant past and what is now occurring between the restored corpse and his reincarnated love, the zombie myth seems flawed by its lack of complexity. The zombie is really a mummy in street clothes with no love life and a big appetite. Both are automatons; neither is cunning nor heroic. They simply lumber about… shuffling their feet like dateless high school students before the prom. [James B. Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror (1985)]
The spectre of living deadness has been a common notion in discourse on art. Art works tend to be regarded as possessing such a paradoxical presence, or at least of being objects onto which such presence can be projected. But there are other variants of this living deadness, for instance in the formula of Zombie Formalism. What critic Walter Robinson implied by the term was “‘Formalism’ because this art involves a straightforward, reductive, essentialist method of making a painting … and ‘Zombie’ because it brings back to life the discarded aesthetics of Clement Greenberg…”
This is misleading of course. The things that displaced “formalism” were, as was endlessly pointed out at the time, almost all “revivals” of formerly discarded strategies, and Zombie Formalism was not really any more or less vital than the majority of the art of the past seven decades has been. Contemporary Art in Canada, one should add, is not easily analogized to that of the United States. Its market is very different and, unlike in the south, far more controlled and profoundly tied to the government it is parasitic upon it. This is hardly historically controversial, but it is extraordinary how little its implications ever figure in the country’s art discourses.
Zombie Formalism became outmoded by the mid-teens and was soon replaced by “Zombie Figuration” (also sometimes termed “People” art) [1, 2] which seems to have lasted even longer. An essay in ARTnews by Alex Greenberger a few years ago located the emergence of such a thing in the origins of what was termed Bad Painting in the late 70s and which soon became overshadowed by talk of Neo-Expressionism and the ongoing absurd Pop-infused History painting of people like Peter Saul. Zombie Figuration relies on vague surrealist imagery, art history pastiche, a lot of plays on gendered imagery, political allusions, and some references to digital images thrown in. Kent Monkman is the pinup for this in Canada.
According to Greenberger “most of the practitioners of zombie figuration are good artists; their work is simply no longer moving things forward.” Moving things forward for the ARTnews critic meant moving away from formalism and self-referentiality and toward stuff that is more “haunting” examining “marginality” and using portraiture of a world “beyond” the canvas. While in terms of art historiography, the contrast is crude and naive, it is even more dubious because it possesses an even cruder and more naive notion of what history in general is. One might protest that these descriptions of art zombies, formal or figurative, miss what is crucial about the creature. The zombie is absolutely contemporary; it has no past, no future, only the now in which it consumes while having no purpose in consuming other than consuming. It carries along its dead past through sheer conformity, no more than a mobilized vat of “cultures” in a body without organs and no future.
As the poor cousin of the aristocratic vampire, the royal mummy, or the progressive monster of Frankenstein, the zombie figure is both “marginal” and ultra-democratic, a kind of revenge from within the empire, whether conducted by brain-dead consumers or the subaltern. The zombie has gone through different iterations from its early period in the folktales of the Caribbean to its various appropriations in very different waves of zombie films in Hollywood, Japan, Italy, and elsewhere, operating as cheap thrill or metaphysical fable.
Less as a figure than as a model it spreads beyond such fictions and appears elsewhere, not least of all within finance and law, within an academia which is ruled more than ever by zombie concepts, and by an art market with its share of zombie tendencies. Luckhurst suggests that it is “arguably the central Gothic figure for globalization itself. In 80 years, the zombie has ground down the bones of the opposition and lurched out of the shadows to become the dominant figure of the undead in the twenty-first century.” [Luckhurst, Zombies: A Cultural History (2015)]
Predictably, in what is otherwise a decent read, Luckhurst ends up following the generic “anthropologist” line that sees the zombie, or monster in general, as something that walks over and confuses cultural categories. And as he tracks the meandering localized meanings that these monsters receive, he never questions the essentially superstitious nature of imagining things in socio-cultural terms to begin with because the cross-cultural model is itself a zombie. Treated as a figure of historical narratives rather than an objective instance of the evacuation of narrative and the impersonality of immanence, the zombie is domesticated into a function of spectacle that can be symbolically redeemed as a means to index a work of art in a predetermined historical narrative.
So, as we have seen, there are two entirely different notions of the zombie: the zombie as the resurrection of the past and/or the return of the past in the future, and the zombie as the absence of both of these possibilities. The former, we can call the cultural zombie while the latter is something else entirely.
The cultural image of the human – whether that is conceived of as the impersonality of habit, the transcendent character of tradition, or the immanence of the production of subjectivity – is essentially the image of a spiritual zombie. Resurrected, animated, evidently a social horde, and walking in league with their ancestors; perfect functionaries, both waste and waste processing machines. If a zombie is mindless, they certainly have a “body” in the sense that Foucault and some of postcolonial theory understands the term. But for Foucault, at least, the escape of the body from the infection of the soul was what liberation or freedom amounted to. What most of Contemporary Art seems devoted to is the process of “ensouling” (or interpolating subjectivity/identity to) the body.
The horror of an automaton without a spirit has long been central to the formulation of most notions of culture. Against the purely exterior, often behaviourist notions of culture as automaticity, has been a counter-insistence on the spirituality of the automaton, on its continual resurrection through the maintenance of traditions, historical narratives, and so on. This has been central to both left and right wing notions of culture and is the guiding faith of anthropology and cultural studies. Indeed, most of what makes up notions as different as “oppression” and “decadence” rely on this. We saw an instance of the paradoxes that arise from this recently with Alexis Gros-Louis’ exhibition at Galerie B312, which was overtly cast as a political routine to safeguard “culture” from degenerating into “folklore” thanks to being objectified and de-sanctified. At last year’s biennial, was another exhibition on the rectification of the spiritual power of objects in order to reanimate their cultural power. Both of these are in keeping with the state’s ongoing commitment to a notion of the cultural as “the Good” and the policing of its transgression. This, what could be termed, “Good People Art” is part of what Isabelle Barbéris and others have nominated as the new academicism.
One of the underlying rhetorical positions that was rehearsed in the biennale exhibition, one so generic it hardly needed to be made explicit, was the old saw that the “cultures” from which these objects were “appropriated” did not have a concept of art like that of the Europeans (who barely had one like those that became common after the nineteenth century either). But this type of claim seems odd given that the argument is premised on the false claim that they had “cultures” or “societies” or “religions,” all even more incoherent and ahistorical concepts than art itself. To imagine it as a matter of socio-culturally mediated and constructed meaning or experience is already to dehistoricize and idealize the issue at hand. It is as art that things are rectified as history, not by being domesticated into a humanist/animist notion of culture.
Most museums tend to obscure the denudation process with things like wall texts and by hiring cultural mediators and other flunkies. Museum staff have developed a shame bordering on panic about such things. The notion of “Care” that has become central to museum debates about the status of objects, a term usually employed in the broadly therapeutic/phenomenological register of the culturalist fantasy, can be seen in both museum world and that of Contemporary Art. I recall working in research for a show at the Royal Ontario Museum years ago and suggested to a curator that they just put things on the wall without text. They practically started weeping before explaining that exposing things in such a fashion would be socially unacceptable. But the taboo on unmediated art has been the mainstay of Contemporary Art for a long time as well, testified to by the norms of textual supplementation, artist talks, round-tables, etc.
As Mel Bochner once put it regarding people who were bored by Serial Art, “their boredom may be the product of being forced to view things not as sacred but as they probably are – autonomous and indifferent.” [Serial Art, Systems, Solipsism] The problem with things like Serialism and Minimalism in general was that their practitioners did not seem to know how to be indifferent, they only knew how to look like they were being indifferent, which was not really indifferent at all. It is the horror of this autonomy and indifference that characterizes a great deal of Contemporary Art, even if it sometimes wears the appearance of Minimalism as a trophy, a superstitious appropriation of a negative power.
I agree wholeheartedly that the art history of the country has foundational theoretical and methodological issues. If anything, these are more profound than the authors suggest. But their readings of this and suggestions for change are about as wrong as it is possible to be. The textbook offers, in effect, a set of strategies for avoiding any difficult questions and facing the real complexity that art history poses to the legitimacy of the claims of representation and reference.
The book is part of the ongoing colonization of art history by visual cultural studies (paranoid metaphysical interpolation) that has been occurring over the past 40 years. Art history in Canada is not old (there was scarcely anything before the early 1970s) and post-de/colonial and feminist approaches have been dogmatically central to it and the discourses of the art press since the 1980s. That this is neither acknowledged nor the mutations within these models that resulted in their absurdist formulation within the text mapped out, is itself rather alarming.
While the text, an amalgam of bromides that are reiterated so constantly it reads like it could have been written by a clunky AI programme or chanted by a schizophrenic occasionally reaches the point of unintentional comedy, most of it is a mixture of the sappy and dreary, as they zombie walk through dubious claims that have been commonly made (often more complexly and intelligently) for nearly half a century.
The book is cast as a kind of sequel to the moderately less awful Negotiations in a Vacant Lot, which had taken its inspiration from Ian McKay’s intriguing (but mostly unsatisfying) liberal order framework and attempted to apply it to art historical practice. As many of his fellow historians have pointed out, little of the framework works well when confronted with empirical data. Not that it matters since little of the writing in that collection was able to come to grips with the implications of his argument anyway.
While McKay was right to recognize that the very loose and highly tangential liberalism(s) that existed in the country (largely because there really was no social world) effectively ceased to exist by the second world war, his treatment of data and assumptions of relationality left a lot to be desired (they were unsubstantiated), in no small part because they relied on the illegitimate interpolation of a set of dogmatic and historically dubious categories (the social, the subject, gender, violence, rights, etc.) to describe phenomena. A project that was intended as a “reconnaissance” of the history of actually existing liberalism(s), ended up being a series of presentist fantasies about the past.
If the essays in Vacant Lot tended to exacerbate the most indefensible aspects of McKay’s arguments, the arguments in Unsettling push their hypotheses past the point of anything that can be taken seriously. But it is important as a “symptomatic” document of a particular, whether earnest or cynical, performance of pseudo-intellectual obfuscation that is often expressed in even more dumbed-down form in Contemporary Art discourse. The real “situatedness” of the work is as a propagandizing device/disciplinary tool for the clerisy of the Canadian state and the functionary producers of its central mythology (culture(s)). As Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard has accurately argued in Le Schisme identitaire (2022), care is the governing logic of contemporary Liberal rule. The collected essays are best read as a set of horror fantasies about art.
The same basic critique of Vacant Lot applies and goes to a very basic historiographic point that the entire collection evades, erases, or, in their language “does violence to,” namely that it dogmatically – and speciously – takes for granted a host of ontological propositions that none of the evidence they provide can substantiate and which are theoretically vacuous. The basic point of horror in the essays is situated around “violence,” which tends to be identical to “neutrality” and any epistemic contradiction to the dogmatic claims of any of the authors. Against neutrality, there is an advocacy for “conspiracy” in the reformation of institutions and their practices. Relying on an almost purely instrumental use of art and an appeal to the spiritual/expressionist concept of culture that both reduplicate the ideological norms that they pretend to “unsettle,” the essays are an explicit attempt to interpolate and “reinscribe” “humanity” into art history (and history more generally) through the fantasizing of historical subjects and “positions” in a bid to “move into a concept of care in intellectual practice.” This goal is identified with “decolonization” and allied practices.
As we have seen, in practice, “decolonization” tends to mean producing luxury goods, preferably with homilies attached, when it is not merely the dogmatic enforcement of a set of doctrines by institutions. I have always wondered (but you do not need to wonder too hard) why “decolonization” means the vaunting of things like “craft” and “care” rather than of the practices of mutilation, torture, cannibalism, and enslavement. I am writing this with total amorality and neutrality; the notion that any of these things necessarily connote “violence” is metaphysically and historically questionable. To pretend that these are less artistic practices than quill work or matrilineally passed-down storytelling practices is historiographically ludicrous and points more to what is lucrative in the current market than to any serious engagement with rival notions of art. The taking of bodily trophies that was common to many tribes (globally, including the indigenous peoples of Europe) is what is parodically echoed in the practice of the colonial museum and the critique of the latter’s “desacralization” is more convincingly read either as cynicism and resentment or as an expression of the distance from one’s ancestors rather than continuity with them.
One could well argue that the “violent” colonial “appropriation” of the Indigens was a more respectful gesture than whatever the contemporary advocacy for “decolonization” is and one that was far more in keeping with the traditional logic of tribal art practices. You could make the argument that the appropriation of the Indigens is the becoming of the Indigens, and a becoming quite in league with that often practiced by numerous tribes. Following Michael Taussig, you could argue that the appropriation of Captain Cook as “Mana” and the subsequent taking on of British fashions and names that occurred in Polynesia was a famous example of this and an illustration that the “essence” of things was in their appearance and in what was consumed.
One should recall that central to the call to care and the reparative turn has been a desire to escape from the hermeneutics of suspicion and skepticism (while still relying on them to buttress their underlying moral-historical fantasies), in no small part because they demobilized the care of the self. Suspicious criticality could just as readily be employed against the claims of special interests. As Eric Hobsbawm (and others) have pointed out, the various Identitatrian counter-histories (whether of the “left” or “right”) that have become dominant in academia are at least as patently false as those that they displaced or “challenged.”
Care and reparation are both pathologizations of critical thinking. Suspicion, care, and reparation have been combined in recent years into a set of forms that have become normative in art historical (or, better, “cultural”) discourse, as exemplified by the book discussed above. Perhaps the easiest way to relate this is by re-reading an influential essay that points (rather unwillingly) to their general implosion. I will use an essay by Eve Sedgwick that crosses into this territory because it is much more complex than anything the authors of the Unsettling collection cite.
In “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” Sedgwick offered a critique and counter to what she, following Paul Ricoeur, termed the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” She sees suspicion, particularly paranoia, functioning as a central imperative of critical theory since the paranoiac “man of suspicion” is thought to undo the “false consciousness” imposed by regimes of “oppression.”
Referencing the work of Guy Hocquenghem, she notes his re-appropriation of the Freudian link between same-sex desire and paranoia to point to the idea that this paranoia would have reflected the actual repression of homosexuality. Paranoia thus became a privileged object, methodology and perspective of “antihomophobic theory” since it ostensibly provided an index for homophobia (the same, suffice it to say, can be said of “antiracist theory”). Sedgwick took the rapid spread of this notion as, in part, due to contagiousness being a central property of paranoia itself.
She noted that the paranoiac’s claims of access to self-evidence are both generic and limiting since they suggest that a non-paranoid attitude might entail a denial “of the reality or gravity of enmity or oppression.” However, even while paranoia may know some things “poorly,” she also stated that paranoia might provide “unique access to true knowledge.” Averse to surprise, paranoia’s anticipatory quality makes it future-oriented. Averse to the unknown, it is also mimetic, occupying both the position of knower and object of knowledge, in the process blotting out everything else.
For practical application, she cited Tomkins’ breakdown of the distinction between the paranoid thought of Freud and his patient, dropping the distinction between the affect theory of scientists and everyday experience. In practice, such affect theory is a selective scanning and amplification that risks becoming tautological and, therefore, self-validating. She points out that people do not read tautological arguments to discover truth but for their rhetorical prowess.The theatrical contagiousness of paranoia is “nothing if not teachable,” especially in the university, and its tautologies are often invisible to those who have been taught.
The “knowledge” made possible by paranoia takes the form of exposure of the hidden. It is “inescapably narrative” and so is entirely trusting of its capacity to sway a reader by demystification. “...it is only paranoid knowledge that has so thorough a practice of disavowing its affective motive and force and masquerading as the very stuff of truth.” And so, paradoxically for Sedgwick, the paranoid method, with its claim to unmask the lies and hypocrisies of the world, is also reliant upon masquerade. Now borrowing (very questionably) from Peter Sloterdijk, she gestures to how much visibility is openly used in oppression. Most people don’t require demystification, they are already cynical; the power of demystification therefore is not really in its relationship to knowledge. She suggests that the surprise avoided by paranoia is that there are other possibilities than its own reductiveness and she nominates the reparative as one key option.
As a counterbalance to the paranoid strategy, the reparative turns to Melanie Klein’s privileging of “positions” (over types or stages) because they are more flexible and relational rather than sheerly antagonistic.This would be a move to the privileging of affect over drive. Sedgwick situates her contrast between the paranoiac method and her own reparative one through rival readings of Camp. When paranoia goes Camp, it does so in reductive elegance and “conceptual economy” that revels in revealing that there is less than appearance suggests. When the reparative position goes Camp, it demonstrates plenitude and fears that its surrounding culture is inadequate to its expression. In other words, paranoia is cast as a negative and pessimistic position that functions through a predominately “intellectual” form of affective blackmail while demonstrating its cynical smartness. The reparative is cast as an optimistic positioning that functions through a sentimental form of affective blackmail and Camp naivety.
Although her critique of paranoia has value, the counter she makes to it is extraordinarily weak, perhaps deliberately and performatively so, considering how often she uses the term (vs. strong theory). She could be accused of making weakness both a theoretical and aesthetic virtue. Ultimately, her only justification for her counter is simply that it is a counter. But in regarding derision as deprivation and sentiment as plenitude, she betrays a subjective idealism that simply reduces the material surface of the allegedly objective world denuded by suspicion to the mirror reflections of narcissism, a matter explicitly acknowledged by the Kleinian theory she claims to be using. While admitting that the reparative position tends to be “sappy” “anti-intellectual, or reactionary” she offers little but sappy personal anecdotes to defend it and there is no evidence that it is not more rather than less reductive. That she clearly roots the reparative in a fear of deprivation alludes to an inherently conservative paranoia that is the first hint that the opposition she sets up barely holds.
There are other substantial problems with her argument. The insistence on “positions” is clearly an implicit polemic against universal or normative developmental stages (and their alleged failure to come to pass) but the term “position” – and its implied polarity – replaces this with a reconstitution of the field of the universal (while claiming otherwise) where a dialectical relation is made possible again. In other words, it reaffirms the metaphysics of the universal (and its morality) while hobbling faith in either progressive or transgressive passage. And this clear consequence is only buttressed by the inordinate laziness of her appropriation of Klein which largely underplays the implications of the schizoid pole in her thought, the fundamentally oppressive role of the mother and the crucial function of the death drive in the determination of the affectivity and positionality that she espouses.
The reparative position is implicitly sadistic, albeit in a highly sublimated (self-deluding) form, one that points to a return to the circle of the Oedipal family and subservience to the superego. This places care or reparation not in the position of being cynically sadistic but of being hypocritically so. Additionally, Sedgwick elides that the suspicion of the hermeneutics of suspicion is itself cast in a tautological narrative logic that is paranoid and fundamentally predicated on optimism if not outright utopianism (which is a way of erasing the reality of the content it supposedly cares for), a fact she distorts by casting it in a purely critical light. What she does parodically (or is it Campily?) in her general critique of her rival reiterates precisely the same thing she accuses it of, only with marginally different rhetorical finesse with a blind faith in its narrative plausibilty rather than a self-critical one. As a practice, care and reparation are a schizoid and purely performative self-victimization routine. The historians, curators, and mediators of the turn to care are, to keep in Sedgwick’s register, performing in drag.
In terms of their realpolitikal significance, all of these “positions” are legitimately reducible to a pathological and reactionary terror of “dehumanization” or “desacralization” (themselves humanist fetish fantasies about “religion”) which are compensated for through moral panic, nationalist fantasy (the critiques of nationalism and imaginary communities apply equally to Queerness, Indigeneity, etc.), and the construction of a pathetic image of history that falls easily within the categories and keywords of SSHRC funding and teachable platitudes. Certainly, the ways that museums and Contemporary Artists have responded to this has also been in this mode, with the occasional sardonic exception.
Film historian David Bordwell once pointed out that the reason that culturalist readings became dominant in the humanities was largely that they required the least thinking from students and the least effort from professors. No research, no substantive critical analysis, but plenty of rote formulas (or “lenses/frameworks”) to avoid having to think about art and to package it in the socially redeeming rhetoric (knowledge production) befitting the academy and the grants system. This is not to indict “theory” or “difficulty” (both of which are admirable) but to acknowledge that in practice appeals to such things in the artworld and academy tend to signal anything but intellectual complexity, rigour, or a challenge.
A significant amount of this can be put down to career self-interest masquerading as “representations” of the world (curricula, pedagogy, etc.). Academics in general are not especially cynical (the charge of cynicism suggests people are more rational than they likely are), but they tend to be idealistic to the point of stupidity. They also tend to be sanctimonious cowards who are in that world because it became familiar and shields them from reality. Few people are as heavily psychologically medicated as those in the educational industry. This explains a fair amount of what that industry is as well as what it does to its functionaries and to the unfortunates that fall under its tutelage.
In light of this situation, one may be tempted to interpret the history of Contemporary Art as a strategy of sustained retardation, a static form of perpetual adolescence, a state that is quite compatible with its role in the educational industry, which both deepens and extends artistic and intellectual dependency. The “Contemporary,” insofar as it is a content, seems to be this zombified institutionalized adolescence.
This is particularly sad given that by the nature of its object – objectification, formalization, territorialization – art history possesses the capacity to be the least moronic kind of history writing possible, and one that should set itself at a distance from social, political, and other forms of history writing rather than making it subservient to their modes of representation (which are only bad literature anyway). Unfortunately, the nature of the object, its “violent neutrality” tends to arouse the opposite sentiment. The appeals to the sacred in such debates can be rightly regarded not as signs of the recognition of the radical alterity of art – its irreconcilability to human intentionality, experience, or meaning – but as the mystification of art in the name of political self-interest and delusion. As Wilhelm Worringer once suggested of a particular era of Egyptian art, the severe religiosity associated with it actually seems more indicative of the absence of any actual spiritual content. The cult of care, that state-mandated mode of lovingly decontaminating art by infecting it with the soul, is something that should be resisted if you have any actual curiosity about reality. To the new clerisy, one might ask, as Audra Charles asked on The Young & the Restless the other day, “What if it just feels like love but is actually stupidity?”