Book Review: Isabelle Barbéris' L'Art du politiquement correct: Sur le nouvel académisme anticulturel
You could fill a small library with books on every side of the “culture war” over the past fifty years, most of which are pretty depressing. I have never been sold on the term, but it generally has something to do with “values,” how these are expressed in works of art, and how these things are legislated and bureaucratically managed. That “culture” may be one of the most perniciously idiotic pseudo-concepts in intellectual history does not help any of this. To her credit, Isabelle Barbéris' 2018 book L’Art du politiquement correct: Sur le nouvel académisme anticulturel does at least introduce some potentially productive directions in thinking through this.
It is a book of two parts. The first sixty percent is a rather broad overview of the theme. The last chunk of it shifts around through a few more specific aesthetic issues. While the first aspect is pretty clear, the second is more “dialectical” so it gets rather muddled in spots. It is relevant to the broader discussions on this site because the bureaucratic structure and history of the Canadian artworld shares some strong affinities with that of France, and has done so as a matter of conscious modelling since the 1960s, and also because Barbéris occasionally mentions the work of Robert Lepage and his associates, François Ricard’s withering work on the province’s political and artistic avant-garde, as well as nominating sitting Prime Minister Trudeau and the country’s artworld as extreme variants of what she is discussing. Trudeau is depicted as a perfect figuration of the PC elite that defends their privileges in the name of “love.” [Barbéris, 64] Beyond that, most of what she outlines clearly echoes the various histories of the evolution of the country’s Contemporary Art that I have examined (I, II, III, IV).
It is a nice break from the almost inherently redundant Bourdieu-style sociology of the art world that I have never found particularly meaningful. Often theatrical in imagination, stressing “scenes” and creating character types, Barbéris positions herself as part of the anti-authoritarian Left, a field in which she includes members of the Frankfurt School, Lyotard, Arendt, and Annie Lebrun among others. She shares the penchant for hyperbole and polemic common to these writers. She argues that the anti-authoritarian Left position is opposed to both the multicultural Left and the conservative Right on the same grounds since both would subvert the national and democratic for the sake of the supranational. [22] Both are part of a totalitarian tradition of attempting to engineer “the Good” through the liquidation of the real.
What she terms the “New Academecism” is a genre with its own criteria for legitimation and demands conformity to its canons. In method, it crudely reduces art to the mirror of “reality,” albeit a “reality” that is unique to a specific quadrant of the Left and irreconcilable to that of the Right (and, for that matter, the centre). [18]
The centre of her historical argument is that following the “linguistic turn” and the reduction of the world to language and forms of fictionalization (especially autofiction and theory-fiction) has been the performative turn which destroys mimesis and raises performance as the absolute artistic value. [136] Art has become about augmentation rather than making sense. [137] The cult of the text gives way to the cult of the pre-text. Rather than the dialogism of text, you get monstration (visibilization, performance): the human zoo. [190] There has been a death of metalanguage, that double world of representation. [138] The hyperrealism that emerged in the wake of the denigration of mimesis by formalist purification included a stress on anti-theatricality, within the ambit of which “performance” (in terms of Austin’s linguistics and performance art) emerged. [140] If formalism had rejected bids to fuse art and life, the new cultural mode that evolved repudiated this autonomization and insisted on fusion.
The result is total spectacle, a spectacle that evacuates mimesis (which is dialectical) while presenting a false unity or holism. [141-142] Spectacle destroys the possibility of “exteriority” and transforms life and urban space into a museum spectacle for consumption. [142] This is the aesthetic of soft power. It is also what was central to Situationism, the rise of happenings, Global Realism, and so on, all of which, and despite appeals to vapid notions like “social constructionism,” end up relying on a naive naturalism (the body, intuition, affect, etc.). All of this has coincided with the growth of a new institutional morality and related epistemology.
The term political correctness originated in the United States in 1793 around the ratification of the 11th amendment and had the positive connotations of legal uprightness. By the end of the Cold War, its implication was more sardonic. It became identified with demagoguery, clientism, and other forms of political manipulation. [25] It also came to signify a split within the Left between more orthodox Marxists and libertarians and those who advanced “identity politics.” [27] The latter developed from decolonizing/postcolonizing ideologies with their racialization of society and sociologization of biology. In France, these turns came with the re-importing of “French Theory” (esp. Foucault and Derrida) once it had been “metabolized” and placed within the normative claims of American Leftist ideology. [29] Ironically, they came to function as a form of soft American imperialism. “French Theory” had been exploited less for the sake of American minorities than for its capacity to undermine European intellectual authority. [30] In turn, PC was a revamping of the French tradition of the bien-pensant (or parvenu, petit bourgeois, conformist, divine gauche). [36] The bien-pensant is an actor in the bureaucratic and administrative state that conforms to their political entropy. [40]
For this new class that emerged in the 1960s and 70s, the balkanization of opinion is a central aspect of their careers. An anti-normative discourse is normative for these moral entrepreneurs in their bid to engineer and dominate the symbolic. “Culture” becomes a regime for controlling syntax. [33] PC works through euphemization, litote, psychologization, and the inhibition of dialectical reason, all tools to prevent the possibility of offense. [121] All that does not reflect the ideal self (moi) is deemed oppressive. [176] Mimesis is displaced by “authorized representation” and the mirage of authenticity. [176] PC eliminates language’s contact with reality as much as possible through its new normative language. This marks a shift from mimesis as imitation to mimesis as transformation. [179-180]
“Consent” becomes equivalent to enforced conformity to approved sentiment and the penalization of any potential form of intersubjective “violence.” [122] Ritualization (etiquette, etc.) and democratic debate had once been effective means of retaining relative social stability, one where transgression had an essentially homeostatic function. But with PC, transgression cannot be tolerated and debate is demeaned because counter-positions are disqualified on morally puritanical grounds. [123] PC is a mechanism for evacuating agonistic tension and for a general, repressive inhibition. [125] New Academic Art is the perfect form of what Marcuse termed “repressive desublimation.” [191] If one trait of modernity had been the attempt to abolish shame, PC has inverted this and relies on naming and shaming as essential tasks in its bid to remake the world. [133]
PC actors operate in clientist/bureaucratic terms, and within this context, individual and minority rights triumph over class struggle. The lawfare ideology of intersectionality, in particular, is a perfect mode of bureaucratic obfuscation which dogmatically naturalizes one set of categories (race, sexuality, gender) while marginalizing and obscuring the function of economics and actual politics. [57] Intersectionality assures the triumph of the market over any actual community. [71] “This phenomenology of the plural subject proclaims simultaneously the triumph of identity and the death of the subject.” [72]
PC is an administrative language of cleansing. It seeks out the figure of the Art Man Without Prejudice while simultaneously relying on pseudo-science to produce more categories of prejudiced men. [76] Truth, from such a perspective, is not a result of reason, but of purity. Art’s instrumental function as a “counter-power” (a tool of purity) is a very new one, and the insistence on its social functionality ties it to regimes of funding. Art subsidies become in part contingent on playing this role as a “counter-power,” however clearly fake it may be. Criticism of public service and funding is treated as tantamount to blasphemy.
Contemporary Art is best figured by the dandy or Bohemian-Bureaucrat, a self-destructive figure for whom nihilism functions as a mode of PR. They take a rebellious or aggressive pose, spouting off about relativism and pluralism. This allows them to performatively advocate for an anti-universalism that ends up being a new form of hierarchization predicated on victimhood and the epistemological undermining of the ability to question authority. [131] Their own position is never actually relativized. The kitsch figure of the “engaged” artist plays their part as the potential incarnation of “goodness” and performative repudiator of “nihilism.” [74] The artist is the utopian creator of a counter-society (or the counter-spectacle dear to Situationism). The artist was positioned as most capable of reinventing the real, of making the impossible possible, their messianic role assumed to be something that could be accomplished with the changing of language. [152, 174]
The explanation and justifications of work in terms of biographical claims and the performative identities of artists that operate within an echo chamber becomes a norm. This is reinforced by ethnic quotas and advocacy for notions like the “right to appear” that subjects the imaginary to judicial oversight and pathologization. The visible is treated as what ought to be the pure and good, something that needs to be continually cleansed of ambiguity and retain clearly defined referents. “Visibilization” is a form of social control. [72] The inflated value of “intentionality” comes through the overcoding of artworks in terms of ancillary statements and the PR machinery of artists, gallerists, museums, etc. All of this is again bound to funding. [80] It is also a way of stressing the artwork as necessarily incomplete, as a constructed lack that needs to be fulfilled through interpretation (decrypting and translation, the make-work projects of the cultural bureaucracy). Through this, it is reparative in the psychosocial sense (as therapy and participation), but also in stressing the artwork as a utilitarian object with an essentially conservative social function. [82] This follows a more general tendency, detectable in Bourriand and Rancière, of reducing art to aesthetics, that is, to use and spectacle. [87]
Spectacle tends to imply a form of “situatedness” that reinforces an ideology of presentism and its moral experience, notably in appeals to “intuition” that supposedly has access to a magical hidden world. [89] This mirrors the role of the artist as the revealer of an imaginary world and the inverter of common sense. This generic function of the avant-garde, she points out with some irony, has usually been cast as the attempt to shock the elite when clearly it was the avant-garde who were reacting to how scandalized they were by them. [110]
Since 1980, there have been increasing restrictions on free speech. Legislation and lawfare are forms of evangelical crusade. [69] “Cultural mediation” is a social engineering enterprise where art takes on a therapeutic role. [70] Self-reporting, especially regarding key cliches like “domination,” is central and serves as part of the return to stigmatization. [70]
“Oppression” is not enough to be “a people” and “opposition” is mostly just a lobbying tactic for “super-inclusion” which does not so much change as expand what it ostensibly opposes. [43] This serves perfectly for the pyramid structure of the cultural bureaucracy. Within this system, there is an easy capitalization on “causes” through the spectacularization of “phobias,” and the denunciations of “systems” and “binaries” while relying on an overproduction of categories and a retrenchment of dualisms. [65] This allows for the liquidity and functionality of victimhood figures and their market maximization in ways that conform to the soft power of American imperialism. [66] There is a “negative solidarity” between such elitist nihilism and that of Hollywood. [112] In a period that has probably produced more ugliness than any other, the world comes to appear as a pure spectacle of negativity. [113]
This type of politics relies on a reductive anthropology and a rote set of moral dualisms (racism, sexism, speciesism, capitalism, etc.). These are given the gloss of a “humanitarianism” which is actually a narcissistic and repressive humanism that operates through shame and exhibitionism. Identification is a play that allows for the detestation of the wicked. [101-102] Identity tends to function as an extension of the cult of the New Person that has been generic to the more utopian side of revolutions. This demands a liquidation of the symbolic and its replacement, something that she casts as an “infantile” act of rebellion against anything that could escape managerial control. [103] Other examples of this are phenomena like Pan-Africanism, which sets itself against actually existing historical tradition to posit an artificial “Esperanto” culture.
Ultimately, the New People are figured by notions like transhumanism, which she paints as an anti-rational and anti-humanist ideology at pains to transcend to the Man Without Prejudice and made possible by presumptions of radical plasticity. [189] “Transhumanism describes the death of the real in the name of the body and relations to be infinitely recomposed because they conform to individual desires.” [190]
The image of a purified new world relies on a re-imagining of history. The spectre of decadence hangs over this to be attacked. Romantic fantasies of an Edenic past in a pre-democratic era and possible future are called upon to cleanse the corrupt world through the destruction of “the system.” History becomes a hyper-moralized narrative that needs to be exhibited and subject to examination for any sign of contamination. There is a crude tendency toward “nazification,” the projection of a Hitlerian shadow over whatever image of the past is being exploited, whether that is the absurd conflation of national socialism with capitalism or colonialism. [105] With the cleansing of history through such forms of narrativization, any common symbolic system is replaced by a cult of singularities, which are just generic caricatures like the noble savage or the authentic self. [111]
The stress on identity is part of this realism, as though there could be anything like a socio-cultural, ethnic, or gendered experience or subject. These appeals, coupled with mystifications like the appeal to the “authentic” or “embodied self” or “lived experience,” are part of the general privatization of representation. [182] This is what she deems authoritarianism.
While aspects of her arguments are rooted in the work of contemporary sociologists like Jonathan Haidt and the late work of Christopher Lasch, it is an appeal to Adorno’s negative dialectics that tends to provide the meat of her critical stance. For her, Contemporary Art morality is a degraded and corrupt version of what had developed in the post-war era with Adorno and colleagues. [77] From Adorno, she takes a stress on the application of dialectics to mimesis, but one which is forever complicating itself. Its “reconciliations” are never final, and its “recognitions” do more to unmoor the claims of identity than to shore them up. But this kind of grinding dialectical play of inversions and transformations is what is evacuated in the new Academic Art. While there is some superficial resemblance, what occurs within its “fetishized politicization” is the destruction of the dialectic and its replacement with a series of simplistic dualisms, humiliation rituals, idolatry, and demonization, all of which is hermetically sealed and denies contradiction. [83] Socially Virtuous Art puts a moratorium on dialectics, substituting it for an ideology of inclusivity -- the competition for market saleability -- in a game of moral conformism. [84] This moralization, expressed in bromides like each to their truth (or “living your truth” as one Anglo cliche goes), is a negation of complexity and the possibility of truth. [85]
If you wanted to be ungenerous to Barbéris, you could point out that her book rehearses pretty standard claims about the therapeutic/managerial class. One can detect comparable arguments in a disillusioned but more or less traditional Leftist like Lasch, in John and Barbara Ehrenreich’s revisionist arguments about the rise of the professional managerial class in the 1960s, and in the work of a paleoconservative like Paul Gottfried. On the political front, they have each argued much the same basic points, and much more rigorously, taking them in fairly different directions. That the discourses she attacks have become more idiotic and commonplace can be explained both by the role they have had in an expanding educational market and in the rise of social media. Likewise, much of the general tenor of her argument about the collapse of representation was made more eloquently by Baudrillard a quarter of a century ago. The difference is that she wants to avoid what she sees as his nihilism and anchor the analysis back into a political dialectic (which begs some questions about the problem of conflicting “realisms” that she opens up but never pushes far enough). Her focus tends to be on a more instrumental issue like performativity, which lends itself to practice-based analysis quite easily.
On a positive note, this focus is probably the strongest potential aspect of the book, but it remains underdeveloped, in no small part because it is a polemic rather than a rigorous theoretical and empirical probing. The stress on performativity likely does not go far enough, which is surprising given how easily it could be dialectically weaponized to foundationally attack the claims of reference that are at issue. What it does best is highlight the degree to which “culture” and its mediation are essentially empty notions and identities have no real referents, something which is already implied in the theory of performativity but never taken to any of its logical conclusions by its advocates. Indeed, as is the case with Judith Butler, they often rely on an appeal to dialectics in order to accomplish this obfuscation.
There is a basic confusion around the term nihilism. It can be used to designate skepticism, faith, or even pragmatism. Nietzsche’s curse was that he broke down any serious distinction between the three. The art phenomena that Barbéris describes are, in effect, only instrumentally “nihilistic;” it is a performative and functional strategy. In a real sense, because it is performative and functionary, it does not matter if it is earnest or not, if it has a referent or not. I think the regression to dialectics that she appeals to as a way of sidelining this is a mistake and it ends up pointing away from what is actually interesting, namely the hollowing out that is put into motion and which should be pushed further in order to simply reach a degree of plausibility. In this respect, Barbéris falters in the way that most culture war discourse does by keeping things on the level of moralizations.
Certainly, one can draw analogies to puritanism, witch-hunting, millenialism and so on. I have done this, as have many others, and there is a degree of truth that there is something that appears like a religious delirium that runs through Contemporary Art, not simply in the art (where it is usually unconvincing) but, more significantly, in its bureaucratization. It is more plausible in terms of ecclesiastical models than models of faith per se. However, I am not convinced that regarding it as a religion or cult is sufficient since both of these things tend to be substantially more rational and coherent. They also make better art. The religion analogy (to the extent that it is one) also does not really break from the more foundational problem, which is the conceptualization of all of this in terms of “culture” to begin with. Such analogies still tend to rely on culturalist models of religion, which are essentially absurd forms of pseudo-theology.
Viewing all of this in terms of what is generically termed “politics” does not help much either. The political is only credible as a concept if limited to careerism and moral entrepreneurialism. Outside of that, it quickly crumbles into nonsense. A broad historical perspective on the “political” over the past two hundred years destroys any substantive distinction between Left and Right as anything other than career conflict and the exploitation, cynical or not, of local idiocy.
The anti-authoritarian Left, as she puts it, have long been hostile to various strains of the New Left (social democrats, ecologists, feminists, gay liberationists, decolonialists, ethno-nationalists, etc.), or the “red fascists,” “fascists of the Left” and so on. What unites them with fascism is their penchant for socialist utopianism, anti-rationalism, vitalism, animistic beliefs, bizarre health fantasies, passion for pseudo-science, obsession with notions like racial memory and trauma, victimhood narratives, cultural and epistemological relativism, and so on. All of this is best exemplified in profoundly stupid ideas like “embodiment.” As the anarchist George Woodcock said of the Canadian New Left, especially as they emerged in Montréal during the 60s, they were not quite fascists because fascism actually posed a meaningful threat to capitalism and imperialism. They were far too corrupt, too stupid, and too much the tools of what they ostensibly opposed to be real fascists. (Northrop Frye said approximately the same thing and, even more hilariously, so did the city’s Maoists). This is not simply a matter of comic “intellectual” history and an example of how stagnant it has tended to be. Many of these New Left activists and mutations of the ideas that they shared have become integral parts of the city’s art institutions (academic and otherwise) and are still very much present in ever more ridiculous formulations, often operating as basic elements of their framing.
There are other interesting bits she picks up and fails to run down to their logical conclusion. For instance, she brings up blackface as an instance of mimesis, a relatively sophisticated play on appearance. This form of representation (spectacular stereotyping) becomes taboo because it conflicts with an authoritarian model (performative anti-stereotyping and naive realism), which is no less false but moralized as authentic. The minstrel show gives way to the refurbished human zoo of “identity art” the claims of which are substantially more reductive, dogmatic, and mystifying than those it displaced.
One might also argue that her stress on the appeals to “transparency” (in terms of a dogmatically codified reference) actually suggests something very different to what Baudrillard drives this toward, namely the obscene. For the obscene is not so much about transparent representation as it is about the problem of referentiality. The real power of the obscene -- as that which cannot be socially redeemed -- rests on the fact that its transparency evinces the inexistence of the social referent.
One result of the whole text is that the problem of “reality” ends up being rather indeterminate. It may be, after all, that there are just a series of atomic singularities that have little to do with each other beyond their economic networking. What unity she gives to this still feels excessively psychological (although being a Hegelo-Freudian at least is a step up from being a Lacanian-Marxist). This also begs the questions: From a dialectical perspective, were the inversions in Left-wing ideology that she outlines inevitable and predictable? Hasn’t what’s occurred been a fairly obvious permutation of the dialectical model itself? If so, is this really where the solution is likely to be?
* I have used images from Optica's site and social media accounts since their mandate and curation over the past half century encapsulates many of the themes she discusses.