Roy sums it up succinctly: “[W]hat Botz-Bornstein shows is that everything is kitsch—from art to ethics and knowledge; everything is but a hazardous recomposition of signifiers that refers only back to itself and the spectator’s gaze, and the spectator only looks for that which he or she has already found: narcissistic evidence.” [Roy in Botz-Bornstein, ix] This is the evidence of authority, identity, pseudo-scientism, and self-referentiality.
Both books are basically wrong since they refuse to leave the plantation of cultural fantasy for better pastures, but this does not mean that they do not contain some valuable insight and intriguing arguments. In the case of Botz-Bornstein, these tend to be hamstrung by so much equivocation and perspective shifting that it sucks the life out of its points, which are ultimately just polemical claims anyway. Roy is harsher so his book amounts to something a bit more adventurous. That is why I will concentrate more on it.
One gets the sense from each author that they are trying to spin silk out of Baudrillard’s dust. For both of them, we live in an age following the dissolution of “reality”, defined in this instance as local, indigenous, organic culture. “Globalization” means standardization or normalization through commercialization (capital and its twin migration) and socialization (Roy tends to avoid discussing the latter since it muddles things more but Botz-Bornstein shies away from it less).
For Roy, “We are not in the midst of a cultural transition but a crisis over the very notion of culture. One symptom is the crisis of utopias; another, the extension of normative systems.” [Roy, 10] What is “culture,” that endlessly elastic term? According to him, “Culture in the anthropological sense creates habitus, implicit rules of the game, a sort of self-evidence, a ‘normal’ state. From this implicitness, every culture attempts to clarify itself through language, to account for itself.” [Roy, 33]
Roy defines culture as the implicit norms of localized imaginative practices. With the advance of many types of relatively new technology, the globalization of capital, and of religious fundamentalisms and various governing structures, the local has to a large degree ceased to exist in the organic way it once supposedly did. Because “humans” cannot exist without culture and an imaginary [Roy, 68], “culture” largely takes the form of “subcultures” which are untethered from any organic locality and float around the world like capital. [Roy, 32] New cultures in the other sense do not arise from this. Globalism promotes, and in strategic ways relies upon, the lionization of “subcultural” identities and their geographic fluidity. Dubai is nominated by Botz-Bornstein as a pure kitsch city, although surely this is as true of Toronto or New York and likely always has been. In fact, it is hard to regard “the urban” in its metropolitan model as anything other than the monolithic form of kitsch.
The crisis of culture is of course linked to the crisis in the social bond and the disconnect between shared imaginaries and social life. Desocialisation, individualisation and deterritorialisation are the three key elements. The sociological foundation required for a culture to exist is in crisis. It has not disappeared; there are still nations, societies, social classes, socio-occupational groups, ethnic groups, tribes, villages, neighbourhoods and so on. But these sociological affiliations are increasingly dissociated from forms of virtual sociability that have developed through the use of the internet. [Roy, 37]
While these things have become part of everyday life for many, this new norm leaves the anthropologically-minded with something of a conundrum. As Roy puts it, “We cannot live without culture. We cannot live without an imaginary. The crisis in the loci of production of high culture does not mean the end of cultural consumption. [p] So what remains of what we call ‘culture’?” [Roy, 68]
Well, it is no longer a matter of implicitness. Instead, everything becomes explicit and keenly bound by rules. A loosely enforced (when at all) normativity is replaced by a highly codified one. One result of this is that “the transformation of ‘cultures’ into explicitly coded systems destroys the notion of culture itself. What I call ‘coding’ is any system designed to make all forms of human communication and relationship unequivocal and linear. The reference to values in this case does not refer to a culture or to an ideal of life, but to the calibration of behaviours according to a vague and muddled reference to normative objectives...” [Roy, 11]
So, according to Roy, the world has become much more like a Sade novel (Sade is the bête noire of cultural theory, embraced by Foucault and treated as the signature of cultural collapse by Adorno and Horkheimer). In the same way that everything has become kitsch, everything has also become pornified. The world is an orgy, but it is one whose libertinage is expressed in a set of contingent norms and regulations that then play out in elaborate and often deadly tableaux. Everything is set, almost mathematically so, and explicit. This is the case not only in something like hardcore pornography, but also in the basic claims of sexual identities (what Foucault called “morbid police pornography”) and the moral panic around legal fictions like “consent” and “violence.” The more set something becomes, the easier it can be funneled into exchange and institutionalization. This is even true of things like “emotions” and the therapies associated with them as well as the legal demands for their recognition and rewards or punishment for their display. [Roy, 21] While the imaginary realm of secularism relies on myths like “contract” and “consent,” the decline of culture means the decline of general myths to the benefit of specific cults. [Roy, 70] Subcultures are sects, fandoms, conspiracy theories, bureaucratic structures, moral panics, etc., all of which are detached from broader historical reality, their fragile barriers set against it in need of continual policing. In these cults “penitence” has been “replaced by ‘reconciliation’,” that favored model of normalizing arbitration. [Roy, 107]
In the absence of an implicitly normalized global image of the human, a despotic overcoding becomes the way to maintain norms and discipline. There may be no shared imagination, but there are common images. This is what Roy sees as lacking in “depth” or “context” and this applies not only to the rise of things like NFTs, memes, and emojis, but to the new types of knowledge that are being produced in the university that rival the entrenched norms of the cultural fantasy of the human.
On the other hand, with the clear erosion of humanist models, there is the complementary obsession with normalization in order to stead the drift. This reactionary drive is present explicitly in the rise of doctrines like “sexuality” that came from the “revolutions” of the 1960s and 70s. “I use the word revolution because, far from being confined to hippies and protesters, the culture of the desiring individual has become dominant.” [Roy, 14] To the degree that there has been a “backlash” (the anti-porn and #MeToo moral hysteria, etc.) against this “revolution,” it has been from within the more puritanical sector of its own acolytes. [Roy, 18]
This sort of extreme neurosis also takes on a more general form: autism. While once conceived as a disorder that resulted in solipsistic detachment from social order, it has progressively expanded to become the norm of codified sociability and its policing. The implicitness of culture and the severe ambiguity of signs has given way to their regimented and explicit formalization. What had once been the barrier against sociability has become an essential and practical tool in a new authoritarian mode of sociability created by a mixture of globalized traffic in populations, virtualization of subjectivity through tech, and the biopolitics of contemporary regimes of care. The autist suffers from a complete dread of the deterritorialized and needs compulsive codification and rituality to cope with it. [Roy, 99-102] Autism marks the total incapacity to cope with “otherness,” whether that is expressed as racism, anti-racism, or the dread of (specifically male) sexual desire (homo or hetero).
In the same way that Isabelle Barbéris correctly identified the Canadian cultural industry as the reductio ad absurdem of authoritarianism, Roy and Botz-Bornstein could have recognized it as the most symptomatic instance of the things they describe. Multiculturalism, after all, is the purest form of kitsch. “Globalised culture is by definition a kitsch culture. These mash-ups open up a new, alternative, “uchronic” imaginary space that is atemporal and deterritorialised.” [Roy, 71] But it is, as Barbéris argued, these potential drifts that authoritariansim tends to clamp down on. If “nihilism” is performatively deployed as part of the will to power of such actors, an immediate re-codification is then set in place to armour the territory that is colonized.
There is a good distinction to be made between Deleuze and Guattari’s deterritorialized schizophrenia and the reterritorializing autism (hyper-codification) that Roy’s account describes. It is primarily the latter that has dominated the way that the cultural sector (its discourses, actors, and modes of governance) have operated. As I have argued repeatedly on this site, far from Contemporary Art marking a threshold toward expansive deterritorialization, its history in Canada suggests exactly the opposite. In other words, there is a more despotic kind of signification or reterritoritialization at play than before. A recent exhibition at Optica, Educating Our Desires, equity-deserving action within artist-led spaces, would provide a near-perfect case study in this.
This is all pretty accurate, but it is also in light of these implications that Roy’s arguments tend to get sloppy. As with Botz-Bornstein, Roy’s arguments are as much concerned with aesthetic form as sociology. To take one of Roy’s more concrete examples: memes. According to him, they are symptomatic of the drift into deculturation. He argues, “Such decontextualisation of elements subsequently recomposed— which enables a segment to circulate untethered in random contexts, revamped depending on each person’s fantasy and pleasure—is also characteristic of the use of ‘memes,’ vignettes (short scene, figure, object) that are stuck at random in different context…” [Roy, 74-75]
However, the direction Roy takes this strikes me as faulty. Memes, after all, point to the extreme contextual contingency of meaning. It is not “context” that has been lost (quite the opposite), it is that significance, implicit or explicit, is so fluid and weak as a marker. But to mistake this as “decontextualization” is to place elements into a narrative of continuity which is no less a decontextualization than their revamping as a meme. This also points to an extreme weakness in normalization (of the imaginary, implicit, or explicit) and a triumph of formalization as primary over the imaginative.
Cultural history writing, like its antecedent cultural anthropology, emerged in part as a (often explicitly) moralizing corrective to formalism, insisting on the presentation of data in a “holistic” manner. In its heyday, culture histories were adamant in recognizing the severe aesthetic mediation of “experience” and “history” and their lack of “naturalness” but tended to botch taking this to any plausible conclusion by naturalizing the notion of the cultural and social, usually to index these artistic effects to some alleged historical reality like the “colonial subject.” But even if you read Frantz Fanon, it is clear that “colonial history” is a libidinal fantasy with a questionable (or unreal) “object” and that liberation and oppression are both utopian fantasies that ultimately point to the absence of any real subject or culture in the historical process. Yet, even if the “social” is being “desocialized” as much as culture, Roy still relies on appeals to it to bump up the idea of the subcultural. It is this “sub” that has become dominant and globalized. The sub is fluid, pragmatically adaptable. This scenario has played out relentlessly in the human sciences. As even Roy points out:
Folklore emerged in the late nineteenth century as a by-product of anthropological approaches applied to European rural societies at a time when they were on the verge of disappearing. There is hence no urban folklore (but there are subcultures). ‘Indigenous’ cultures joined them later in the living museums constituted by dance, music and sacred art festivals that have proliferated since the 1980s, in which bits and pieces of different cultures that supposedly resonate with each other are brought together with a view to recreating, by their juxtaposition, a common denominator catering to the audience’s taste. [Roy, 79]
In art, one could add, the first of these involved a fetish for the primitive (European or otherwise), the second was integral to the emergence of Pop, and the last has been central to the “decolonization” fetish. The first and last of these phenomena (Pop is a little more ambiguous), were essentially carrying out a nineteenth-century idealist fantasy about the existence of “culture” and social identities. Pop, like surrealism (but unlike Dada) was a more skeptical or agnostic exploitation of their surface aspects that lacked the moronic faith in the existence of the anthropological subject that is essential to cultural theory. This faith has, like other sorts of religious fundamentalism (which Roy and Botz-Bornstein’s critiques are in many ways complicit with due to their naturalization of culture), tended toward fantasies of identity, which are ultimately not the organic type of unconscious identity associated with culture before, but more a fantasy of choice and property.
The result has been the most foundationless variant of the “human” in history. As Marx (among others) recognized, “capitalism” essentially denuded the delusion of the human and its false spirituality and revealed the amoral and inorganic nature of the world. Unable to cope with this, Marx and his subsequent by-products (whether fascist, anarchist, ecologist, feminist, anti-racist, Queer, decolonialist, etc.), constructed (and continue to construct) fantasies about history and the social even more ludicrous than the ones that they critiqued. It is from within this gumbo of idiocy that most of the clichés of Contemporary Art are drawn as well as most of academic discourse. An appeal to the narrative fantasy of the organic as an actual historical phenomenon sits at the back of both Roy and Botz-Bornstein’s general arguments.
None of these things are new, they are trivial re-packagings of things that are well over a century old at this point. The rot was always there, it is just deeper and harder to ignore, which is why there is such aggression by culture industry actors in applying the theoretical equivalent of faux finishes on top of it in a desperate bid to cash in one last time. (It will not be the last time.) To return to Roy’s original point, what appears here is the crisis of utopia, but he doesn’t recognize that both the notion of crisis and utopia are essentially kitsch. Indeed, you could make a strong historicist or genealogical argument that the fantasy of “culture” and “subcultural identities” have both been symptomatic of the “autistic” horror of reality that he outlines.
This also runs to the heart of Botz-Bornstein’s general argument about kitsch. For him, kitsch is akin to bullshit, both of which are not lies but “alternative truths” (combinations of partial truths that are nonsubstantial and, ultimately, largely absurd) that flourish in instances of “deculturation.” [Botz-Bornstein, 44, 51] Liberalism, since it assumes ostensible pluralism (and/or relativism), is basically a mode of deculturation, no less extreme than that of the Soviet or other “Year Zero” experiments. For him, something like “religion” slips into bullshit when it ceases to be embedded in a concrete culture. “Culture is negated and replaced with ‘absolute’ forms of knowledge provided by pseudo-science and religion.” [Botz-Bornstein, 45] But this can as readily be seen in neoliberalism, conservatism, communism, progressivism, fascism, and so on (as Kundera contended, politics are kitsch), but probably nowhere more pervasively and absurdly than in “countercultures” or “subcultures.” [Botz-Bornstein, 47] Everything tends to be “overdone” and affectivity tends to be performative and/or spectatorial (but no less “authentic” for that). All of this is not false, according to Botz-Bornstein, but a fetishization of simplification. [Botz-Bornstein, 53]
To take an obvious and topical example, Trump is a bullshit artist, in Harry Frankfurt’s sense of the term (as taken up by Botz-Bornstein): a spinner of highly aestheticized half-truths. Surrounding himself with C-list celebrities, deliberately crude rhetoric that consistently spins into satirical hyperbole, and continual allusions to a vague and barely remembered media past that rivals the work of the best Vaporwave artists. Mixing the hypnagogic with the hyperstititional, Trump has reterritorialized the performative nature of politics in the aesthetics of the golden age of professional wrestling. He and his supporters for the most part understand this. People who think MSNBC, The New Yorker, or Vanity Fair and that neoliberal kitsch epistemology like “fact-checking” have any viable relationship to reality are not as aesthetically sophisticated as the average (or, in Bidenese, “garbage”) Trump supporter. Compared to its opponents, Trumpism is sophisticated kitsch.
One thing that is tacitly implied, if never acknowledged let alone taken to its logical conclusion, in both Roy and Botz-Bornstein’s arguments is that neither the social nor the cultural are necessary (they stop short of acknowledging that they are just bad metaphors mistaken for concepts). If they ever existed, they were historically contingent phenomena and cannot be mistaken for deep structural aspects of the world. As an anthropologist once said to me, if you do not take these categories as necessities, the notion of the human (at least in its secular sense) makes no sense and a writing of history in secular terms even less so. On a generous reading, the best you can say is that these categories are certainly now (and likely always were) irrelevant and incompetent ways of trying to ascertain any truth about the world. As McLuhan once quipped, if something has become an area of academic study, you can be sure it has ceased to exist.
It is clear that nothing like a socio-cultural sphere has ever existed, and that this illusion has mostly been the product of faulty scholarly practices within a dubious knowledge economy. It was always a terrible metaphysical bullshit act, as Mark Hobart among other critics of the cultural hypothesis have argued. Likewise, it is clear that claims of identity - whether naive, cynical, or pathological - have always been vapid at best. The notion that there were ever any cultures or that “identities” have valid referents has always been bullshit and the fields that have constructed these chimera can clearly be read in the rhetorical terms that Botz-Bornstein outlines but does not apply to his own foundational assumptions.
As much lip service as the two authors give to religion, they spend extraordinarily little energy engaging with theology and its aesthetics. You could contrast their ahistorical fantasy of “historical cultures,” for instance, with aspects of some Hindu aesthetic theory which argued effectively the opposite, that the “thick” existence fetishized by anthropologists and phenomenologists is a delusion and the real is diagrammed in image-devices. The notion of culture that both authors espouse would appear to be merely a set of prejudices and fetishes around objects. This gets us back to the heart of the art problem.
Daniel Cottom’s Unhuman Culture (2006) was one of the better books written about art in the past twenty years, even if it ultimately fails to take its insights to their logical conclusions and keeps everything on the level of equivocal platitudes. Unfortunately, not a lot of people seem to have read it, which is a shame since it succinctly summarizes what the problem of art is. He does this by analyzing it in terms of “misanthropy” across a range of philosophical, visual, literary and theoretical works. The result is a sweeping, general view of the world and its figurative shadows. To take one example of this technique: “For Timon in the second century as for Dorian Gray in the late nineteenth, the misanthrope is a figure of art defined through a recognition of humanity as the aesthetic species. Humanity is the species betrayed by art, in both senses of that word: the species at once revealed and undone through the agency of art.” [Cottom, 150]
Art is frustrating because it makes typically human categories into absurdities. As the notion of genius made explicit, art has never really had anything to do with human agency, meaning, or communication. It makes a mockery of anthropological understanding just as it does of morality and ethics. It undermines the seriousness of politics and of any notion of progress, social or otherwise. It denaturalizes not only the notion of nature, but culture, and unsettles the supposition that there was or could be any humanity at all. As such, art is committed to a peculiar type of misanthropy insofar as it vitiates the sense of the commons, whether in terms of sense or society. Art stands, as Wyndham Lewis used to say, as the great outside, as the exteriority that mocks and ridicules all notions of interiority, whether that is conceived of as a personal or collective subjectivity.
Art cannot be reduced to anachronism (although it may often appear as such) because it operates as that which is beyond or disturbing to aesthetic judgment. Art is the heresy of misanthropy as the sovereign non-belief in the human. This is not to suggest there is anything negative about it. Quite the opposite. It is the definition of the human that is negative and reactive. Any “identity” is parasitic on this reactionary position. “Humanity would not be itself were it not also unhuman and thus truly recognizable only in art, as opposed to so-called human life.” [Cottom, 150]
The problem is that there was never anything very plausible about the idea that people were cultural to begin with. What is historically occurring is the erosion of this illusion. It is this light that must be turned on statements such as Roy's, “The crisis of religion mirrors the crisis of culture in general.” [Roy, 70] If, as both he and Botz-Bornstein argue, the crisis of religion has largely resulted in kitsch, the same is true of culture (which was only ever a kitsch religion in denial). Both books, in effect, and rather late in the day, involve attempts to reckon with what was already obvious to avant-garde artists a century ago, something they reference consistently in their allusions to Duchamp and surrealism, but which they fail to come to terms with.
