On the Borders Between Capitalism and Its Other

7/29/2019 On the Borders Between Capitalism and Its Other

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On the Borders Between Capital and Its Other: Mimicry and Anarchism in

Contemporary Art Practice

An inchoate resentment starts in people who cannot combat this palpabletransformation at the ground level.

Gayatri Spivak

Anita Dube art historian and critic turned artist presents us with an image of atranslatable and possibly subaltern form of subjection in her seriesAh A Sigh

from 2008 men lying prostrate on the ground before scattered leaves of money,

an ironic reflection on (a perhaps inadvertent) fealty to a spectral and here

materially embodied god - overlaid with a row of black wax candles which have

been burned and melted onto the image. Dube is careful to insist that she is not


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interested in the particularity of place portrayed by the picture: The point of the

work is that it could be referring to anywhere [emphasis mine]: UP, Jarkhand,

Meerut. Dube who, notably, was born in the former British colony of Lucknow

(site of many instances of now questionable and highly fetishistic cultural

exchange under the purview of the British in the 19th century) in the North ofIndia is an artist based in New Delhi; the series includes newspaper images from

which sculptural objects abut, creating a duality and implicit imbrication of the

viewer;

here, in another image from theAh A Sigh series, also from 2008, Dube has

affixed tree roots covered in black velvet on top of an archival image of Indian


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protestors, with the dialectical interplay between issues of (implied) oppression

and reconciliation, both on metaphorical, metonomyic, poetic and, most

significantly, palpably physical levels, are emphasized by the doubling of the

protestors outstretched arms with the physical projection of the tree roots, which

reach out to the spectator seemingly for active engagement with resistance toimplied forms of political domination the tree being an Indian symbol for the

Hindu cultural and religious tradition central to Indian society. In traditional

iconography the tree is inverted: roots reach to the sky while the branches are

buried in the ground.

Dube is a self-described feminist, or produces work in the feminist tradition, and

the coincidence even on an abstract level in her work between the discourses of

feminism, subaltern subjectivation, and critique of capital are evident. In the

course of this analysis I would like to tease out some of the critical linkages

between these discourses: and ask, in the context of this talk, a question that came

to my mind when I saw this image: what do we mimic?

The original impetus for this presentation came from Brian Holmes use of the

phrase unstable mimicry and its potential as a rhetorical figure and conceptual

strategy for art and social activism in the essay that we read . . . I am going to

avoid some of the uses of this concept and its various mediations in the tactical

media practices of artists such as the Critical Art Ensemble, the Yes Men, thesubRosa collective, and WochenKlausur (though especially in the case of the first

two the strategy of a critical mimicry is highly relevant) in order to examine the

larger theoretical issue implied by this use of the concept of mimicry. Alex

Galloway examines this strategy in relation to tactical media production with his

treatment of the cyberfeminist group the subRosa collective in his chapter on

cyberfeminism in Protocol.

My Indian friends (and Reinhold Martin in the architecture department) are

careful to note that art works such as Raads, and also the post-situationist

production of the Raqs Media Collective and the Sarai Group (who again can be

described more as interventionists than explicitly political) are designed almost

as an anticipation of the western market; the issue of legibility and literacy of

works that circulate and find currency within the western art market is telling for

politically-inflected art practices that originate outside of the West; this issue


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one of inter-cultural translatability is a key conceptual figure in the pre- and

post-millenial discourse on subalternity, where a sensitivity to a local and often

illiterate or differently literate population figures prominently.

Before I turn to an article written by Anna Gibbs for the just recently publishedcollection The Affect Theory Reader (Duke University Press, 2010) entitled

After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication, where she

analyzes the concept of mimetic communication and which is a primary source for

my final paper, I would like to rehearse some of the insights that Jacques Ranciere

offers in The Emancipated Spectator, most particularly in the chapter entitled The

Intolerable Image.

Regarding aesthetic responses to frameworks such as war, forced migration,

trauma, catastrophe, and sexual violence, Ranciere in his analysis privileges,

rather than what calls an explicit dialectical or pedagogical response which in

self-negating fashion employs the very forms of signification it wishes to critique

(which he sees ultimately as a strategic impasse), the production of more subtle or

contingent affects through the use of images. In effect this affective dimension of


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the image registers that which is always in excess of whatever discursive

frameworks which would be imposed upon them by the political realities

surrounding their production, and is essentially congruent with contemporary

discourses on autonomy, radical collectivity, and new institutionalism. I would

like at the outset to examine image practices in Rancieres model which effect asimilar metonymic displacement and provide a new regime of visibility for the

realities and responses depicted: whether they be curiosity, contemplation,

vulnerability, drift, trauma, attention, etc.

Critically, this model emphasizes and privileges a mode of translation the

translation of intimate or aesthetic experience through the image as a way of

blurring or disturbing a register of indignation or explicit political critique.

Often by creating an immersive, multi-layered sensory environment in which

political realities and experiences of catastrophe and political domination are

effectively singularized and displaced onto more contemplative modes, works that

reconfigure our idea of the political (an aesthetic, personal or intimate response

which simultaneously expands a larger political framework based on mastery,

virtuosity (employing Virnos term), competence, or the excesses of

domination) onto different discursive registers (slowness, the empathetic, the

vulnerability of the body, memory, an expanded or poetic field for the biological).

Here we could think of contemporary artists such as Walid Raad and the AtlasGroup Archive, in works such as We Can Make Rain But No One Came to Ask

from 2005,


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where the artist documents traces of explosion craters and bullet holes as part of a

constructed archive of the remnants of political violence in Beirut, reconfigured,

appropriated, we could say;

Rancieres own cited example of Sophie Ristelheuber, in works such asBeirut

(1984)


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andLair est tout le monde (II), roughly translatable as The Air is Everyone

from 2000;


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and Dihn Q. Les 2006 three-channel video installation The Farmers and the

Helicopters,

in which Le documents intimate, personal narratives of the fascination with the

machine (the helicopter) during the Vietnam War from the perspective of local

Vietnamese).

According to Ranciere, works that effect this transformation provide areconfigured paradigm and an alternate signifying register for a simple discursive

framework such as, say, capital, catastrophe, sexual violence, and war;

thus allowing for more poetic, intimate and polyvalent approaches and

highlighting an altered continuum between what we would define as aesthetics

and the political.

Here, an invocation of and focus on a feminist and queer/trans-gendered response

to political violence, and the conflation between sexual difference (or, more

radically, sexual equivalence or ambivalence, sexual violence and its

problematization) and political violence is presented in a number of contemporary

works that I would like to cite: (including most notably Amar Kanwars eight-

channel video installation The Lightening Testimonies from 2007,


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which depicts womens responses to sexual violence after the Indian Partition;

Leslie Thorntons video seriesLet Me Count the Ways (Minus 10 Minus 7)


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from 2004, a highly abstract and poetic documentary response to the Manhattan

Project, in which her father participated actively; and Tara Mateiks video piece

Operation Invert(from 2003)).

As a response to contemporary discursive practices which seek to provide

aesthetic paradigms for human rights (and the capacity of images to provide this

critical mediation, both through testimony, evidence, and narrative, but also

through more abstract modes), this paradigm critically invokes the idea of

capacity which is central to Rancieres model human capacities for the

empathetic as a counter-political response. The autonomy of individual perception

(and the autonomy of curatorial practice configured as critique) is thus

integrated into a larger framework for the political.

In this way, militancy (or to borrow Emily Apters phrase, an ethical

militancy) takes on the possibility of a new form the militancy of preserving

individual experience in the face of the massive excesses of capital, institutions,

their constraints, war, exploitation, and catastrophe.


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"Autonomy is not a fixed, essential state. Like gender, autonomy is

created through its performance, by doing/becoming; it is a political

practice. To become autonomous is to refuse authoritarian and

compulsory cultures of separation and hierarchy through embodied

practices of welcoming difference... Becoming autonomous is a politicalposition for it thwarts the exclusions of proprietary knowledge and

jealous hoarding of resources, and replaces the social and economic

hierarchies on which these depend with a politics of skill exchange,

welcome, and collaboration. Freely sharing these with others creates a

common wealth of knowledge and power that subverts the domination and

hegemony of the masters rule." - subRosa Collective

In the context of the present analysis I would like to privilege the figure of

autonomy as all you can hope to engage in a spectator. More broadly than the

figure of emancipation as theorized by Ranciere which is, arguably, merely a

plurality or polyvalence of meanings activated in the viewer by an artwork, a kind

of spectatorial semiosis, I would like to articulate a different conceptual figure,

one more in line with the tradition of autonomous Marxism and contemporary

anarchism such as Tiqquns seminal essay Introduction to Civil War which is

politically engaged, critical, and most importantly, repeatable.

Similar to Rancieres model the autonomous Marxist discourse as exemplified by

Antonio Negris short essayDominio e Sabotaggio (Domination and Sabotage) a

pamphlet written soon after the Italian Movement of 77 (and reprinted in

semiotext(e)sAutonomia Post-Political Politics in 2007) emphasizes the critical

notion ofseparation in relation to a definition of autonomy.

Separation is in a sense the opposite of the processes which Gibbs figures in her

essay of mimicry and mimetic communication: rather, following Deleuze and

Guattaris famous example of the wasp and orchid in Mille Plateaux and RogerCallois discussion of legendary psychaesthenia in his 1934 essay for Minotaure

Mimicry and Legendary Psychaesthenia, mimicry involves mutual symbiosis

and delicate osmoses.


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On the Borders Between Capitalism and Its Other