In dialogue with

Dress Code

by the artist Carla Della Beffa

It is almost ten years since the Guardian newspaper published a small article by Slavoj Žižek wherein he broadly reflects upon how Capitalism, at the level of consumption, has integrated the legacy of ’68—that is, the critique of alienated consumption—through the development of what Jeremy Rifkin calls “Cultural capitalism.”¹ Žižek uses the Lacanian/psychoanalytic distinction between pleasure and enjoyment (jouissance) to characterize how today’s utilitarian, permissive society (we should add “liberal” here) tames and exploits this “deadly excess” beyond pleasure.² He argues that it is this operative distinction which facilitates the commodification of our “authentic” experiences today—that is, the experience of the contemporary liberal subject that cares for herself, her health, the wider global environmental impact made though her consumer choices. She is the subject vested in articulating “new” and “creative” ways to address her concern for the contemporary constellation of crises, namely the global pandemic, the ecological crisis, and the racist/political crisis.

© Carla Della Beffa Dress Code, 2016

This contemporary subject is engaged in the art industries, art institutions, and cultural events in an unprecedented way, in line with the capitalist logic and liberal ideology of freedom of choice, grounded in the notion of the subject endowed with propensities he or she strives to realize creatively—uncovering their true potential in the very place of increasing insecurities and market forces that operate to undermine social and career securities in the name of freedom. Liberated from the constraints of a secure job, the subject is told that this is in fact an opportunity to reinvent herself—again and again.

In today’s global crises—both elided and articulated though capital—the distinction between action and thinking is crucial if we are to better grasp the operations of apparent contradiction, where people vote against their own self-interest, where “private truths” operate indiscriminately in localized fields, articulated on the terrain of verifiable facts, where art and education are determined though finance, and the left systematically fails to articulate a coherent and viable position despite the often catastrophic effects of right-wing policies. Following Žižek, we should consider the “crisis of today” as an inter-related unity rather than distinct crises articulating incompatible domains where the issue, as such, to be addressed is primarily the collaborative functioning of a system rather than particular parts of that system. He clarifies this in his discussion with Laclau and Butler:

[t]he class-and-commodity structure of capitalism is not just a phenomenon limited to the particular domain of the economy, but the structuring principle that overdetermines the social totality, from politics to art and religion.…³

Enjoyment (jouissance) is articulated succinctly by Jacques Lacan in Seminar XX as the radicalization of the Freudian superego—as that which forces the subject to enjoy.⁴ How does this excess of life, this superabundant vitality, structure the field of concern that articulates our global crisis today? Or, seen another way, how do we approach the concept of care today within a field of concern that has largely been articulated and (mis)understood under systems of power, notably within Art and cultural institutions, where various and often reductive interpretations of Foucault’s genealogical project have become broadly accepted? Is not the focus on power itself as the direct political capacity of Art missing the crucial point of the real operation of power through institutions? We should remember here the observation of Searle, who argues that within the composition of the institution, there is something which makes it impossible for us to think beyond it, whether that institution assumes the form of language, the economy or, one might add, art.⁵  

This point might also be read though Lacan’s concept of The Big Other, that which bestows a certain symbolic dignity to the subject through a recognition embodied by the gaze of the “absolute,” and is registered within the symbolic armature of the institution. This is where the cultured, enlightened art connoisseur, or post-ideological artist/subject, identifies herself though the flows of a privileged recognition ,and is bestowed with access to prestige, exclusive previews, mailing lists, etc. The Big Other—particularized for each subject—cannot be assimilated through direct identification. That is, I cannot experience myself as who I think I am without recourse to my inscription, which is already within the symbolic network. But should we seek to particularize authority as a way of engagement in art that can operate against our “background unity” of crises? Foucault, whose work has become very influential over the past few decades, does not, we should recall, focus on isolatable points, but always on a relation. But is this enough?

In her essay “Who Cares? Understanding The Role Of The Curator Today,” published in Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating (2007), Kate Fowle, the head of MoMA PS1, argues for the need to “… expand the field… to complicate the dialectics and acknowledge the diversity of practices that continue to develop around artists and their ideas.”⁶ She presents a division between independent and institutional curatorial camps. Leaning on Rosalind Krauss, she advocates for an expanded notion of Art that extends its spatial parameters into conceptual and virtual realms, citing possible examples such as twenty-six days of live and Web-streamed radio broadcasts; artworks that can be touched, used, and taken from the display; a human-scale live jungle installed alongside a laughing-gas chamber; mobile units, performances, outdoor museums, and film screenings situated in the desert.⁷ Drawing on Szeemann’s work, she positions the role of the independent curator as distinct from the academic or bureaucratic role of the traditional curator, with the independent curator facilitating a shifted role from a governing position that presides over taste and ideas to one that lies amongst art (or objects), space, and audience.⁸ She argues that by engaging with the artist “on the level of the artist” to take more risks, etc., this new independent curator is better placed to address the historicization of or within art. By way of conclusion, she once again leans on Krauss by calling for an expanded field of sculpture/exhibition that would act as some form of defense or strategy against “ruptures” that would otherwise be historicized through categories we might otherwise understand as “symptom(s) of the breakdown within changing cultural conditions of the logic of the original definition.”⁹

Fowle uses Foucault to characterize the operations of a public gallery or museum which “could historically be understood to be as much about the administration and governing of culture as about a concern for its preservation and presentation.”¹⁰ The care of the self, or self-cultivation, would be important for the curator whose role is as a propagator of taste and knowledge for the public good: “… however from the 1950’s the function of the curator was potentially released from these charitable responsibilities and the service of power.”¹¹ Open to reinterpretation, the role became more flexible and therefore also more vulnerable.

In light of her prescriptive analysis of curatorial practice, it might be reasonable to question how well—or indeed how much—Fowle has actually read Foucault, notwithstanding the strong Foucaudian influence which has permeated contemporary art and cultural institutions. However, this Foucaudian position is characteristic, not so much of what Fowle specifically associates with him, but is characteristic of her revised notion of the curator amongst art, with the focus on “active engagement,” supporting dialogues, and forming and reforming opinions.

Is this not, in fact, the position that is held more and more by galleries and institutions which operate more and more efficiently within the relations of power they continually examine through exhibitions, performances, events, etc.? The question here would be the same as that succinctly posed to Foucault by Joan Copjec, in Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. The question posed is of the mode of power:

[It is] the notion of immanence, this conception of a cause that is immanent within the field of its effects [that is at issue]… despite the fact that [Foucault] realizes the necessity of conceiving the mode of a regime of power’s institution, he cannot [do so]….¹²

Todd McGowan puts it well when he says that Foucault—and by extension here, we suggest a body of thought that informs, consciously or subconsciously, the basis of a great deal of contemporary art-theoretical discourse— operates on the assumption of the de facto, given, value and desirability of life as such, without examining the mechanism of its production and circulation. This is why Copjec sees Foucault’s project as compromised by an inherent historicism—that is, the reduction of society to its indwelling network of relations of power and knowledge.¹³ Power is analyzed and “deconstructed” endlessly, in exhibition after exhibition. Would this then not cast that the position that Fowle is adopting as ideological tout court?

 By way of imposing a division within curatorial practice, Fowle neatly provides the system of the independent curator with an “outside” and negates the very cause of this unavoidable distortion (cause of division)—the real of the deadlock to which we react in our projects and engagements.¹⁴ Operating through the “expanded field,” the curator is at once amongst art, independent, and risk-taking because of what is “excluded”—the institutional. And because of this newfound vulnerability of the curator, Fowle argues that what is required is a creative “maintenance,” as opposed to Foucault’s “care,” as it involves supporting the seeds of ideas, sustaining dialogues, forming and reforming opinions, etc.

There is therefore, she argues, a more expansive, creative idea of the curator and exhibition that is more grounded in practice and engagement. However, should we not ask ourselves here whether this is the depth of some prescriptive analysis for the appearance or otherwise legibility of something like a “de-historicizing art process” or, more specifically, the location of the space of art as curatorial practice within the field of today’s global crises constituted through particular forms, as forms, given under the conditions of this division of practice? Is her basic position not fundamentally ideological in the distinction she makes between independent and institutional, without recognizing that such a distinction is  always already operative and inscribed within her thought? And at the level of power, is she not overlooking the very aesthetic constitution of the subject in Foucault’s later work regarding the Greek epimeleia heautou as ethics of care? Is this not Foucault’s very point when he says that the “space” of the subject is constantly filled up not only trough bio-political normalization, but through self-creation?

[…] in the course of their history men had never ceased constructing themselves, that is to shift continuously the level of their subjectivity, to constitute themselves in an infinite and multiple series of different subjectivities that would never reach an end and would never place us in the presence of something that would be“man.”¹⁵

For Foucault, the subject is invented in various modes within the movement of power relations—as well as inventing itself. Foucault states that “the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a more autonomous way, through practices of liberation, or liberty on the basis of rules, styles, inventions to be found in the cultural environment.”¹⁶ Let us quickly turn to Foucault’s Ethics Of Care, as it has had such a broad impact on the humanities.

He gives us a succinct definition of his understanding of “care of the self” at the very beginning of his seminar on The Hermeneutics Of The Subject.¹⁷ Firstly, “care of the self” is “a certain way of considering things and having relations with other people.” It is an “attitude towards the self, others, and the world.”¹⁸ Secondly, it is a “form of attention, of looking… a certain way of attending to what we think and what takes place in our thought.”¹⁹ And thirdly it is a series of actions—or practices—that are “exercised by the self on the self” and “by which one takes responsibility for oneself and by which one changes, purifies, transforms, and transfigures oneself.”²⁰ The “care of the self” is something like a mode of attention and a particular practice, or set of practices.

This is partly what Fowle refers to as the position of the “connoisseur curator.” However, despite the concerns raised by Rorty in relation to its capacity for actionable solidarity, the ethics of care is, as Foucault insisted, a political concern. As the Foucault scholar Frédéric Gros points out:

[w]hat interests Foucault in the care of the self is the manner by which it is integrated in the social fabric and constitutes a motor for political action. Care of the self was exercised in a largely communal and institutional framework. […] It is not a matter of renouncing the world and others, but of an alternative modulation of this relation to the other by care of the self.²¹

Is this not what Fowle gestures toward when she speaks of the role she envisions for the new “independent” curator—that of supporting the seeds of ideas, sustaining dialogues, forming and reforming opinions? Is she not in fact advocating for the orthodox understanding of the Foucaudian position of a genealogical program of constant de-structuring of power relations, but still under the operation of the subject as “independent curator”? Would this “independent curator” not also fall directly into this logic of power—a power that structures the “expanded field” that she seeks to address by re-staging or re-articulating evolutionary, historicized “ruptures”? Perhaps Fowle would not see this as a problem.

However, we are today immersed in an ever-expanding, unprecedented art/culture industry that operates perfectly within our constellation of global crises ( often operating in tandem). These crises are subjectivized in an exemplary and well known fashion by the Trump supporter, who actively pursues what is against her own self-interest—is this the subject of solidarity? In other words, despite the possibilities of alternative relations exercised through the practice or ethics of care as outlined by Foucault (above) in its basic sense, we suggest that the expanded field of art described by Fowle functions to propagate a form of repetition that precludes the possibility of “accessing” as such the field of subjectivization proper to the “unity of crises.”

What Fowle advocates for—an “independent” curatorial practice (notwithstanding her position as head of MoMA PS1)—is still a practice articulated through the logic of institutions, the institution of Art as operative within symbolic identification. We should remember here the logic of identity within capitalism—that you should remain yourself even if you have to change all the time.²² This capitalist identity, as Žizek discusses in his interview with Michael Hauser, is a plastic, individualist identity, performatively engaged, performatively constructed, and so the movements of revolt are aimed toward the rejection of the “old patriarchal ideology.” This movement of continuous change facilitates the unchanging underlying structure, which is articulated in the problem of universality as such. It is therefore not the dynamic plasticity of identity that we should consider in the context of de-historicizing art or re-articulating or re-staging ruptures within the context of art, but rather an ontological shift toward a redefinition of identity itself. Yet when Fowle speaks about the expanded de-historicizing field beyond the contingent, institutional, given historical space, she is in Lacanian Psychoanalytic terms also repeating the traumatic/ catastrophic insertion into the symbolic order as subject and this is always already where art is situated by way of its nothingness.

This brings us back to Fat Free Chocolate and the commodification of our authentic experiences. There is a growing demand for purchasing life experiences, where Foucault’s notion of turning one’s self into a work of art gets an unexpected confirmation: I purchase my fitness and health with consumer health products for assessing my heart and blood pressure, and by going to the gym regularly. (Is this not the supplement proper to the regime of power, where the eroticization of life must be reintroduced via the scrupulous focus on health products as well as the spectacle of death? See Todd McGowan, “The Eroticization Of Power.”)²³ As Žižek points out, I also purchase my spiritual enlightenment by way of enrolling in courses on transcendental meditation, and I can buy my public persona by way of going to the restaurants visited by people I want to be associated with.²⁴ This is the subject of pleasure, let us say the liberal subject—who, when talking with a Trump supporter, would say “But you know that he has not built the wall?,” only to be confounded in this statement of verifiable fact by an unfathomable denial. This subject is unable to see that Trump’s lies increase and subject enjoyment—as it forces the subject to give up their very attachment to truth—by transgressing the limit, which is the fundamental reason for investment in such a figure. It is because of the lies, not despite them, that such a figure gains popularity. This is also why Hillary Clinton could not find the same rapport. Being seen as a technocrat, she is the antithesis of the exceptional rule-breaking figure of obscene enjoyment.

In the 2019 report for the Hansard Society, 54 percent of people said that Britain needed a strong leader who was willing to break the rules.²⁵ And while it would be easy to descend into cynicism upon reading this, such a descent would simply lead us toward the danger of a post-ideological trap. Hal Foster takes a lead here from Sloterdijk:

… cynical reason is “enlightened false consciousness.” The cynic knows his beliefs to be false or ideological, but he holds to them nonetheless for the sake of self- protection, as a way to negotiate the contradictory demands placed upon him. This duplicity recalls the ambivalence of the fetishist in Freud: a subject who recognizes the reality of castration or trauma […] but who disavows it. Yet the cynic does not disavow this reality so much as he ignores it, and this structure renders him almost impervious to ideology critique, for he is already demystified, already enlightened about his ideological relation to the world (this allows the cynic to feel superior to ideology critics as well). Thus ideological and enlightened at once, the cynic is “reflexively buffered”: his very splitting armours him, his very ambivalence renders him immune.²⁶

As Matt McBride puts it, cynicism is a protection one gets after absenting themselves from ideology. Cynicism is a way of dis-identifying, of dissociating. It is a gesture whose message is “Though I do this, I am not this.”²⁷ The fallacy of this gesture is that our lived experience fundamentally cannot be dissociated from ideology.²⁸ 

Ideology is an unconscious formation attached to the fundamental fantasy of the subject, and so also to the way this fundamental fantasy organizes the enjoyment (jouissance) of the subject. The independent curator looking for an expanded field to address/re-stage/re-articulate historicized rupture(s) is positioned, then, like the lack/constitutive absence occupied by the photographer inscribed within each photograph.

We should conclude, then, with the difference between historicism and historicity. Historicism is the project of writing history after the encounter (with the Real), while Historicity is the continuing return of the kernel of the real, or the threat of such a return, which unseats the potential for any Ur-narrative. As such, the Ruptures that Fowle speaks of would be, rather than micro-narratives which require re-staging, the repetition of a fantasmatic spectre whose presence guarantees the very consistency of our symbolic edifice.

References

¹Žižek, Slavoj, “Fat Free Chocolate And Absolutely No Smoking: Why Our Guilt About Consumption Is All-Consuming,” The Guardian, May 21, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/21/prix-pictet-photography-prize-consumption-slavoj-zizek

²Ibid.

³Butler, J., Laclau, E., Žižek, S., Contingency, Hedgemony, Universality, London: Verso, 2000, p. 96.

⁴Lacan, Jacques, On Feminine Sexuality: The Seminar, Book XX, New York: Norton, 1998, p. 3

⁵Balzer, Wolfgang, “Searle On Social Institutions: A Critique,” Dialectica, Wiley Online Library, Vol. 56, Issue 2, 2002. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1746-8361.2002.tb00239.x

⁶Fowle, Kate. “Who Cares: Understanding The Role Of The Curator Today,” Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating, 2007. https://curatorsintl.org/images/assets/Fowle_Kate.pdf

⁷Ibid.

⁸Ibid.

⁹Ibid.

¹⁰Ibid.

¹¹Ibid.

¹²Copjec, Joan, Read My Desire: Lacan Against The Historicists, New York: Verso, 2015.

¹³Ibid.

¹⁴Žižek, Slavoj, The Year Of Dreaming Dangerously, New York: Verso, 2012.

¹⁵Foucault, Michel, Discipline And Punish: The Birth Of A Prison, trans. A. Sheridan, London: Penguin, 1991.

¹⁶Nica, Daniel, “The Aesthetics Of Existence In Late Foucault,” in Viorel Vizureanu, ed., Re-thinking The Political In Contemporary Society, Bucharest: Pro Universitaria, 2015, pp. 39-62.

¹⁷Foucault, Michel, The Hermeneutics Of The Subject: Lectures At The Collège de France 1981-1982, trans. Graham Burchell. Frederic Gros, ed.. New York: Picador, 2005.

¹⁸Ibid.

¹⁹Ibid.

²⁰Ibid.

²¹Gros, Frédéric, “Course Context,” in M. Foucault, The Hermeneutics Of The Subject: Lectures At The Collège de France 1981-1982, pp. 507-550.

²²Žižek, Slavoj, “Fat Free Chocolate And Absolutely No Smoking: Why Our Guilt About Consumption Is All-Consuming,” The Guardian, May 21, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/21/prix-pictet-photography-prize-consumption-slavoj-zizek

²³McGowan, Todd, “The Eroticization Of Power,” in On Psychoanalysis and Violence: Contemporary Lacanian Perspectives, New York: Routledge, 2018.

²⁴Žižek, Slavoj, “Fat Free Chocolate And Absolutely No Smoking: Why Our Guilt About Consumption Is All-Consuming,” The Guardian, May 21, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/21/prix-pictet-photography-prize-consumption-slavoj-zizek

²⁵Hansard Society, Audit Of Political Engagement 16: The 2019 Report:  https://assets.ctfassets.net/rdwvqctnt75b/7iQEHtrkIbLcrUkduGmo9b/cb429a657e97cad61e61853c05c8c4d1/Hansard-Society__Audit-of-Political-Engagement-16__2019-report.pdf

²⁶Foster, H., The Return Of The Real, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1966.

_²⁷McBride, Matt, “Diane Arbus And Albert Oehlen: Some Notes Towards A Dialectical Conception Of Art,” International Journal Of Žižek Studies: http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/IJZS/search/search?simpleQuery=art&searchField=query

²⁸Ibid.