[9a] ‘Art for Society?’ Art-Language, Vol. 4 No. 4, June, 1980, pp. 1-23.

The following is an amended version of a paper read at the Whitechapel Art Gallery on 30th May 1978 in connection with the exhibition ‘Art for Society’. While it contains some observations on that exhibition, the paper was an attempt to mise some more general questions in the locale of the ‘Art-into-Society’, ‘Political Art’, ‘Art-for-Whom?’ delusion.

It is hard to make sense of the avalanche of ‘committed’ art, the self-righteous hand-wringing, the idealist worker-worship. The well-entrenched ‘Marxist’ culture theory (Benjamin et al, Althusser et al) is in many respects inadequate to the critical tasks lmplied. It is often ‘soft’, in an art-loving way, on venality, opportunism and sheer adventitious nonsense. It is often pessimistic. It is often idealistic. These tendencies have been echoed in the work of lesser cultural epigones, some of whom are (the less repulsive) earnests of committed art.

One thing that’s needed is a workable, explicit distinction between the curatonal sphere of legitimation and the dialectical process of developing competence in the course of the class struggle. Without such a distinction the gougeing of careerists can be launched as progressive activity. Although we do not agree with all of Mr. del Renzio’s article in the ‘Art for Society’ catalogue, we can echo the greater part of his conclusion.

What is wanted is the prolonged and deliberate attempt to alienate the bourgeois ideological and productive apparatuses from the ruling class and its agents, and this can only be achieved by the technical transformation of those apparatuses. You cannot sell socialism like soap with posters of Che Guevara. To change an apparatus of production means breaking down the barriers and surmounting the contradictions that confine intellectual production within the constraints prescribed by the bourgeoisie. (‘Art is Modern, Bourgeois, Conceptual and Marginal’, p. 28.)

The extent to which we do not agree with his final statement should be obvious in what follows. We think that his is the only intelligible contribution to the catalogue. It is also the only contribution which is not flawed with the brutal, venal half-truth (untruth) of ‘socialist’ executive-ese. These flaws have an artistic counterpart in the self-regarding conventional artist who has trotted out a specious socialist theme (in the manner of those who used to trot out Marilyn Monroe paintings for Marilyn Monroe exhibitions). The same flaws are reflected in anyone who, in his managerial or opportunist blather, pins his ‘solidarity’ on an idealisation of the working class abstracted from the real proletarian struggle. They are also reflected in a lot of apparently left-wing cultural practices in which the proletariat makes only a marginal or eschatological appearance. They are reflected  the ‘Art for Society’ catalogue, in the paeans to William Morris, the rediscovery of Walter Crane, the fawning over Trades Union Banners, Murals, Photographers-of-Working-Class-Life, etc., etc.

A lot of artists reproduce left-wing themes. These are usually arbitrary. Artists and their themes and pseudo-projects are highly defeasible, insofar as the real conditions of their production are capable of being exposed; but art management can prevent defeat. Left-wing type art management shares with other managements a set of concrete interests in accordance with which it assigns value, ratifies. These real interests are invariably hidden by a legitimatory blather which proclaims maximal or optimal social goals, e.g.:

‘Art for Whom’ should be seen as a touchstone for the aspirations of every artist who refuses to settle for a function as marginal as those which dominate today. The art of the future must not obsess itself with questions of idioms, cliques or particular media: all that partisan lumber ought to be cleared away, in order to make a breathing-space for the non-divisive exploration of how a comprehensive people’s art might best be evolved. (Richard Cork, Art for Whom catalogue, p.6.)

If artists are to exhibit in pubs, factories and community centres, they they will have to be able to say something meaningful to the people who go there. Beauty for its own sake is an issue for ordinary people but much more urgent are the problems associated with the way they live. It is with these problems that the artists at the Whitechapel are beginning to grapple. (D. Logan, ‘Art, Politics and Social Change’, in Art for Society catalogue, p. 36.)

The ratification of a highly defeasible ‘art work’, etc. as a curator’s object involves a disastrous (or wonderful) transformation. It is now insulated from defeat or historical reification (abandonment?) by the cocoon of the bourgeois miscreation. Some artists are self-curating; some curators etc. Most curators are, at best, selfish liberal-utilitarian monsters. There may be some (e. g.) Marxists among some of the artists – if there be any who are not entirely self-curating. The mistakes of the curators are obvious, blatant. The mistakes of the artists are also obvious. In the following, we will be referring sometimes to liars and fools, sometimes to those under a misapprehension, sometimes to both (i.e., criticism may overlap them). This should not result in too much unclarity.

Art is marginal, to say the least, to active politics. It is not paradoxical, however, to say that the prospect of some art capable of sustaining a match with reality, which is a unity of theory and practice, can only be a function of a developing active politics. (‘Active politics’ is opaque and ambiguous. It will include, however, many activities consequent upon, or which will find a match in, Mr. del Renzio’s concluding strictures. A rather less interesting point is that it may well encompass some highly superstructural activities, demystifications, etc.; such things as this article even.)

It is of some interest that endemic to the art world – and that includes the left-wing art world – is the pretence of perfect self-certifying knowledge in respect of any ‘new’ position, ‘development’, etc. This charade is important in the defence of executive and managerial territory, in support of the hegemonial self-image. A dispassionate objection here to the effect that the art world doesn’t really make the pretence, that it purports to have no more than what is adequate to be going-on with, can be disregarded. The pragmatism of the art world, its venality left and right, necessitates that its ‘new’ fashions be insulated from substantive criticism or refutation. In pursuit of its partial and limited pragmatic goals, it therefore instantiates a pale paranoid reflection of classical scepticism; viz. that if there is no perfect self-certifying knowledge in a given connection, then there is no more-or-less adequate knowledge or theory to be getting-on with. Absurd parody as this manifestly is, it nevertheless accurately represents the ‘philosophical’ basis of many of those pseudo-activities which (e. g.) pass for art-teaching. For most, art-world and art-school activity amounts to no more than an insulated afflicting of others with their own self-esteem.

An epistemological mystification more particularly (more embarassingly) associated with the left-wing curator-manager and his artist-client-cum-producer is that in his progressivist volunteering, consciousness and a unity of theory and practice are given; there are no gaps in his knowledge or practice which are necessitated by the bourgeois parody, only gaps which are contingent. Insofar as these gaps are contingent, he is sure that his position, his role or function must remain intact throughout the coming social transformation. (1)

We take practice (roughly, and uncontroversially) to be people’s more-or-less active self-conscious social conduct in relation to the satisfaction of their needs or in pursuit of their interests. Both mountebank and mis-guided should note, however, that fully self-conscious class practice is not given. It is approached – in a sense it is to be grasped – through organisation and concrete struggle. The problems of the unity of practice and knowledge are well known. (N.B. We do not take ‘knowledge’ as theory – not immediately anyway.)

It is clear that no unity of practice and knowledge is at present possible. It might be thought that this absence of possibility would be experienced as a pervasive and pervasively distressing condition of (pre-transformational) existence, but there are many who have heaved sighs of relief on being told of the impossibility and who have then gone off to make ‘ideological’ or ‘theoretical’ pronouncements, atomistically and (in a pejorative sense) harmlessly. Those who do not know of the impossibility (many cultural managers, etc.) are afflicted with the same or related idealist prejudices and with concomitant misconceptions about the nature of (their own) agency.

The possibility of a unity of knowledge and practice cannot continue being conceived in the normal idealist-empiricist way. For empiricism, knowledge and practice are concepts constituted and based in their alleged distinctness from one another. If anyone tries to have a dialectical unity of knowledge and practice with these constituents conceived empiricistically (or?), lie ends up with a nasty tacky mess. (2) It is too easy, however, to object to the unity of knowledge and practice just because you are assuming that the ‘normal’ notions of these things are what everyone has got to be talking about. What is needed is an objectivism which treats practice as in some sense determining the nature of knowledge. That we don’t have such an objectivism by reform, and a fortiori that it will not be got by reform of culture, should be obvions.

‘Art theorists’ are always going on about ‘reflections’ and ‘reflections of reflections’, etc. This is not always wrong, if you are trying to deal with the varieties of representation and description in art, (3) but it is sometimes unhelpful if you are trying to carry-on in the knowledge that ‘art’ is as Mr. del Renzio’s title suggests. Mr. Rip Bulkeley has suggested (in ‘A Reply to R. Norman’, written for Radical Philosophy, Summer 1978) (4) that the metaphor of ‘matching’ is more helpful than that of ‘reflection’ if you are trying to imite the notion of knowledge as a social human activity (and, by implication, some possible art as at least in the margins of that activity), with the requirement that knowledge be a veridical correspondence between some parts of reality which are people (beliefs?) and other ontologically independent parts of reality. In matching, one can unite a moment of correspondence with a moment of activity or practice. ‘Matching’ is associated with repeated adjustment and transformation or change in the continually renewed relationship between people (objective knowing and feeling subjects) and the world. It expresses the notion of correspondence in a manner appropriate to a conception of the world in terms of powers, processes and change; whereas ‘reflection’ expresses that same fundamental notion for the empiricist conception of the world in terms of completed abstract things and states.

An ontologically independent reality is necessary for any adequate cenception of activity. Activity is real, not pure action. If some verbal statements or theories or representations can’t with any intuitive felicity be thought to reflect reality as (some?) pictures are (usually erroneously) thought to do, then an alternative metaphor such as ‘matching’ might indeed be expedient. We can, in fact, emphasise the powerful analogousness of, or the equivalence of all representations, pictorial or verbal. (5) This is to say little more than that a notion of the mere passive reflection of reality or ‘real appearances’ is perhaps tied to a notion of the non-equivalence of representations. (It is not to say, however, that ‘representation’ has been particularly significant in art lately.) (6)

The dialectical preservation of a materialist or sometimes ‘realist’ account of the relation between representations and reality involves a notion like ‘matching’, and implies the possibility that all representations are in some sense epistemologically equivalent. Both the notion of matching, and its corollary equivalence, may have come considerable implications for the hierarchy of ‘reflections’, etc. associated with some culture theory or art theory. It is not at all clear what these implications might be like. We do not say that art is equivalent to knowledge. We do say that the picture is muddy. We do not say that science and epistemiology are not, or cannot be objective. We do say that the notion of ‘matching’ and some corollary notions aggravates or mediates certain structural or epistemiological difficulties which may be encountered if representations are thought to have some transformational or dialectical relation (within or) with bourgeois art. These notions do not deny that objectivist science is the best way to get things done.

It is a platitudinous claim that we are all alienated, we are all under the sway of capitalism. It is a comfort to greedy self-contemplating artists, curators, etc., who need (want?) a pregressivist self-image. Real critical practice, experience in the class struggle – if you like, transformatory understanding – is possible for all under capitalism. But let the earnest sociologist-curater/artist and the art-at-the-service-of-the-people opportunist take no comfort from this. ‘For all’ is to be understeed as standing in the most ‘bloodless’ abstract context. Artists and their managements are at the quantificational limits of ‘for all’ when they are considered in relation to the actuality of the class struggle. The voluntaristic ‘solidarity with the workers’, so often vaunted in art-into-society exhibitions, is a delusion a priori.

There are many oppositions in words and many practices which must be thought of as fractures, dysfunctions within the absurdity of community and communication to which most of us are subject. These dysfunctions and deformities can only be got rid of in getting rid of the structure. They are that structure. Examples in the Kunstwelt are not hard to find. A not particularly good one is the leftist who rails against the modernist-formalist hegemony in the certainty that he is part of the new hegemony. There are many better examples, some of them easy, some difficult. Those who manifest the dysfunctions and deformities are characterised by a real reliance upon pluralism – the necessity that the structure should stay intact so that they may remain oppositional.

What many of the sociological lookers-down, helpers, volunteers, model-makers, informers-in-respect-of-mystification-by-advertising, (7) etc. miss is that members of the working class are often already and persistently engaged in practices or things in the world which are transformatory, membership of the ‘proper’ revolutionary organisations notwithstanding. It is never, as many ‘Marxist’ ideologists think, a matter of people (a favourite class) first coming to an understanding (e. g., realising the implications of a class society) and then engaging in practical activity – doing something about their situation or aspects of their situation. Everyone is engaged in a practice, an activity, and this is an important constituent of their knowledge and their experience. Experience is had and knowledge is produced socially, to activity; but this is not to say that experience and knowledge exist only by convention, or by the grace of hegemonic ‘social’ objectives which must first be explicitly understood before anything can be done. It is worth pointing out to the earnest illuminator of the benighted class that the sense in which it is true that understanding or horror-shock can precede commitment is also the sense in which that understanding is malformed and incomplete, a function of the bourgeois parody. (8)

The voluntarist-empiricist order of ‘understanding’ and action isn’t rational by virtue of being well-entrenched. It is historically blind. It is irrational. It is pervasive. The pseudo-transitional pragmatists embrace the irrationality wlth great enthusiasm.

The artists is the Whitechapel Gallery are fighting back vigorously and creating counter-images which are capable of making people stop and think critically. (D. Logan, ‘Art, Politics and Social Change’, in Art for Society catalogue, p. 35.)

We can try to think a unity of activity or practice and knowledge. We can’t live it. Even the effort to think it is able to systemically determined failure. But this is not a sophisticated way of saying that nothing is to be done. We had rather thrash about within a contradiction that’s real than settle down to our careers with some sterile (but apparently efficient) ‘consistency’ such as that espoused even by many who see their tasks as ‘transitional’.

Discussion and debate are possible, art projects of any type are possible to the same extent that experience is ‘had’ socially. But to say ‘to the same extent’ is to imply real if fluctuating limits. It may be that we are just not assiduous enough, or sincere enough, but we simply do not know of anyone who has shown that artists’ projects (leftist or whatever) are not either outside or very close to the limits of sociality in respect of any favoured ‘art for society’ constituency.

No verbal exchange, no horror-shock art work, no imitation of Heartfield, and a fortiori no smug managerial distribution of culture to the people will substitute for historical processes. Whether it is knowledge or not (it is not), art of any extant variety is no more a substitute for historical process than is philosophy. It may help or hinder in organisation and struggle. It cannot pronounce that state of organisation and struggle of itself. It cannot work monolithically. There is good reason to demonstrate within the apparent ‘space’ of art the absurdity and perniciousness of ruling-class culture in all its guises, and occasionally to utilise a competence in another practical circumstance. But many of those who may believe that this is what they are doing are achieving no more than an insignificant legitimation of that culture’s favourable mutations.

The varieties of worker-worship, masses-mawkishness, the fatuous ‘sociological art’, etc. fail to locate the real conditions of social change. The consequence of this is that the cultural extra-proletarian (bourgeois) lacks a real body to have his solidarity with; and what is the moral force of proclamations of solidarity with fictional participants in class struggle? Worker-worship, worker-loving-through-art-loving, etc., etc. invariably reduces to bourgeois hegemony and to the only superficially paradoxical assumption that the workers are doing nothing.

So far we have dealt with ‘errors’ rather than ‘offences’. It is the offence of the curatorial clique that signification, meaning, content, etc. have come to reside in the effects of culture as they can be measured by management.

This amounts to the formalisation of old-fashioned art-lover’s appreciation. This is, of course, an inversion of practice and a frontal attack on the possibility of practice. It is a corollary of bureaucratisation, where control passes from the hands of the producers into the hands of the managers. (9) Anyone familiar with it will recognise the dynamic of modernism here. It is, of course, simply the dynamic of capital itself. Capital doesn’t like real historical activity, it likes to control images of real historical activity.

There have recently been several exhibitions which modernists might find ‘awful’ or embarassing. We are thinking of ‘Towards another Picture’ (December 1977-January 1978, Nottingham Castle Museum), ‘Art for Whom’ (Spring 1978, Serpentine Gallery), ‘Art into Society’ (May-June 1978, Whitechapel Art Gallery). It is obvious to every medianik that capital requires and encourages images of its own diversity and plurality. This is not practice but its denial. The ratification of reality in consumption is the denial of its volatility at all points of production; the denial of history, goals and functions of concrete activity. Left-wing art can (some might say must) end up as opportunistically anti-people, anti-understanding, and, just like abstract art, as an excuse for thin research into new curatorial categories.

The fact is that a retired miner’s painting of miners and a John Hoyland abstract can be hung ‘revealingly’ next to each other. The trouble comes when we try to find ways to make sense of this (and of other even more daring feats of curatorial juxtaposition). Such juxtaposition, the conflation of everything with anything, simply equals a role or a career for a cultural observer. That is, it is the function of such a juxtaposition to legitimate the position and status of the detached observer who can ‘make sense’ of such a juxtaposition, in consumption. The dummy power of the consumer over culture (and the dummy power to learn culture as a consumer) is offered as a substitute for the fact that the propagation of a culture which is not hegemonial is only feasible as a consequence of social revolution. Not only does this excuse the role of culture observer, it encourages others to consider such a role. Are such treats as ‘Art for Society’ indications that art management to catching up? That is, is this present show the result of inexorable pressure from a body of ‘socially concerned work’, or is it a question of art management renewing its domain of legitimation?

The mediocrity and corruption of the English art world, its absurdity, selfdeception, ersatz thinking and intellectual cowardice are in part due to the enormous number of individuals within it who are doing one thing while in fact ‘thinking’ they are doing another.

Britain is full of teachers pretending to be ‘artists’, ‘Artists’ pretending to be French Philosophers, curators pretending to be revolutionaries, etc., etc. Now bourgeois art teachers pretend they are socialist artists – feeble work gets a righteous theme and is churned out monotonously by dullards. It is the same recurring problem: the historical conditions they are really in are ignored in favour of the historical conditions they want, need, believe, feel intimidated into supporting, feel as though they ought to be in. Recently there has been a crop of offensive volunteers to be experts, who will enable the people to appreciate lefty’s art. That such obvious agents of bourgeois legitimation should be able to get away with this is evidence of how easy it is to intimidate the British with art and of how bogus the English art world is.

Art teachers may achieve quite a lot qua art teachers, but not while they are pretending they are Artists, somehow determined in art history, not as society’s alternative ideologists, ‘imagists’, determined by the bureaucratic restrictions of their jobs. The same goes for students. Exhibitions of art-for-people, love-the-people curators and help-the-people critics must be seen essentially as revitalisers of bourgeois subjectivist or idealist ‘disciplines’. For instance, the organisers and ‘researchers’ of ‘Art for Society’, according to the preface to the catalogue, have learned nothing from their endeavours except how to make more exhibitions of socially radical art. Their support for art into society is to make exhibitions and therefore effectively to remove art from a ‘society’ which even they would recognise as such. The result of socially progressive art ought to be less not more exhibitions, less not more experts on socially progressive art. The point is this: among the first tasks for anybody who wishes to see the back of the capitalist parody of community and communication is to determine what sort of real historical conditions and interests are at work among his ‘peers’ and collaborators, and then to make these clear in arguments, polemics, drawings, squibs, etc.

‘Left-wing art’ is, in general, not ‘difficult to understand’. In a superficial sense it often seems ‘easy’ and ‘accessible’ like some popular art and advertising. Unlike these, it is never spontaneous or festive in any sense that’s useful. It is, you know, just ‘understandable’. Might it be that this is because this work is opportunist and dreary, resting on the half-baked expectations of art makers (manufacturers?) cossetted by Modernism? ‘Left-wing art’ is tendentiously equivalent to ‘political art’ at the moment. There isn’t much explicit right-wing art about. But Art is bourgeois. It respects the system, and that includes political hegemony. Left-wing art (in liberal democracies) thinks art is ever so important, is the shrine of ‘human values’, etc. It is, at best, culturalist; at worst, structurally purblind. It will not admit its marginality and the possible necessity of this.

It has been said, not very coherently, that Fascism aestheticises politics and that Communism politicises art. The Fascist turns the unspeakable into a quest for purification (therein lies the aesthetic); some ‘Communists’ are enjoined to use past modes to express a vision of the future (therein lies the politics). Lying uncomfortably between these dummy extremes is ‘political art’, perhaps. The ‘extremes’ don’t look quite so much like dummies if you think of one as the Volkische, the other in terms of paintings of Dictator Brezhnev in his medals.

One tiresome thing about a lot of recent relevant art is a certain hysteria over art’s ‘audience’.

WE are increasingly dissatisfied with the failure of so much contemporary art to communicate with anyone outside a small circle of initiates.

WE refuse to accept that art today must inevitably be regarded as a marginal, mercantile and misunderstood activity, alienated from most members of its potential audience. (From the collective statement by the selectors and exhibitors of ‘Art for Whom’, catalogue, p.3.)

‘Art for Whom?’ is not merely a rhetorical question. It is the central and most urgent challenge confronting artists in our time. All other problems, however pressing they may be, must take a subsidiary place in relation to this one crucial issue. (Richard Cork, ibid, p.5.)

And the belief is growing, especially among younger artists with no vested interests of either a commercial or a careerist nature at risk, that they are involved in a ludicrously marginal activity of scant pertinence to the mass audience they should be trying – if they hold out ambitious hope for art at all – to reach. (Richard Cork, ‘Art for Society’s Sake’, Art for Society catalogue, p.47.)

This priggish blather is a direct outcome of a movement away from the dialectical problem of reflections of or matches with productive competences, to ratification in consumption – obsession with effect. It is a mystification by those for whom the object of the whole thing is that they be seen as serious and important or saintly. Asking ‘for whom’ presupposes that artists have a discrete relation to reality and to all other people and can pick and choose whom they want to work for or with. It presupposes, under the guise of progressive theme, just that which makes art and artists reactionary and often snobbish: that they have nothing to do but drift about in an hiatus worrying themselves silly about what is virtuous.

‘Society’, ‘the masses’, ‘the public audience’, ‘the working class’ are all quantifications. No amount of guessing and grovelling as to who it is the artist works for will make an idealist quantification not an idealist quantification. Like exhibitions of art into society, art-for-the-people-and-the-public is in fact the removal of real people. It is a defensible assertion that this art is more absurdly idealistic than certain so-called minority art. The panic over art’s lack of a mass audience is the same panic as that of TV and advertising executives. As mass manipulators, they seek to protect their interests. The central assumption that such people make is that their interests are on centre stage front, and that ‘the audience’ sits about and listens. The left-wing artist on centre stage front educates the audience. But this is an image of society controlled from the top down, and if that isn’t elitist, what is?

There were 25, 000 visitors to ‘Towards Another Picture’, but that is only about half the audience that turns out regularly every Saturday to watch a football match. (L. Morris, ‘Towards Another Picture’, Nottingham Quarterly, n°.1, Spring 1978.)

This panic about audience and effect discloses the mentality of the gaffer - involves a rationalisation quite regardless of the inherent ‘virtue’ of the artist’s or curator’s theme. This is the continuation of bourgeois reality and a mechanism of class domination. It is also the demonstration par excellence of the practical pusillanimity of virtuous themes. (10)

Should we ask what art can do? Nothing, without confronting the real mechanisms of domination. Realism versus Modernism, figurative art versus abstract art are all oticose (yes) choices. It doesn’t matter whether one does abstract art or not; the real problem is that artists are educated to have nothing to do except agonise over the amazing virtue of their own cultured ‘choices’, their dummy agency in fake reality.

Mr.T. del Renzio remarks in the catalogue of ‘Art for Society’ that what is required is a technical transformation, (11) that Che Guevara posters won’t do. It can be suggested that it is not the relation of fine art to its audience that brings about such a transformation, or even the confrontation of art with its management. It can join in, it can participate, but only if it ceases to be management. The real problem is not how to make art which is pre-working-class and antibureaucratic but how to be pre-working-class and antibureaucratic. Fine art has no real history. It is propped up by metaphysics. Love-the-people left-wing fine art is just the same. It has no way of being a technical transformation of the apparatus of ruling-class control. (12)

None of this is addressed to the revitalisation of fine art; rather, it invites the recognition that fine art will disappear only when the metaphysicians and legitimators of management disappear, and when the grip has been loosened even of those who cling to the possibility of metaphysical sophistication in fine art as consolation for a lack of community sincerely lamented. The artist thinks of himself on the centre of the stage, because that is where his management (or he himself as management) has to have him.

It is true that there are many people who have no say in the propagation of the dominant ‘culture’. These people are not identical with a benighted mass audience, or with a proletariat anxious to receive the hand-wringing pseudo-deference of those who wish to depict some idealised extremity of its life. The benighted mass and the anxious proletariat are mythological – ahistorical. They don’t exist.

We do not seek an audience. It must be that we seek and have sought comrades with whom common action may be pursued. A lot of our activity has been organisational and, analytically, anti-management; that is, not subject to discrete contemplation and measurement. It doesn’t matter if such activities take place with the working class (although they may), as long as certain production competences are aggressive to the legislation and legitimation of the bourgeoisie and its agents. Treating someone as a quantifiable unit rather than a real subject with real understanding is not what we had in mind. (13) There is some work that is not a product of cultural history, that is itself history which opens production up to the vitality of discussion, laughter and ridicule. For these are historically powerful – more so than discrete connoisseurship, fake research and idle speculation. This work may be sardonic, ironic, vulgar, active, anti-hegemonic, hard work. It is not Revolutionary Art, nor is it Mass Art; these are the delusions (or worse, the mystifications) of the cultural opportunist, whose most pious hope is the legitimation of bourgeois democratic domination.

In art for society and its relatives, self-promotion comes so far before self-criticism that one is left to wonder if even the trivial adjustment of cultural directives (which is its best hope) will be noticeably accomplished. We are nothing unless we are trying to change ourselves as parts of the whole. There are many adepts at using their power to change (or seem to change) bits of the world in order to prevent other bits (themselves) from being changed. These are the ruling class and its agents, knowing or not.



Notes



(1) ‘For the semiology artist (by no means the worst of the artists for society), his ‘unpacking of codes’, his demystification of the signs with which our society is replete, acknowledges no real ontological gap. The ontological difficulty presupposed in representational activity and reflective work is abstracted into epistemological privilege. Most importantly, the disimbricators themselves run no ontological risk.

This general observation attracts some lemmas. The ‘interest’ that semiology-infested art pratique has shown in photography is not all wrong. But among its errors are: a) the sort of ultramodern mediafication of representation as ‘signification’; b) the trivialisation of the problem of representation in terms of models based on ‘empirical’ conjunctions; c) the failure to recognise the non-transcendental character of its own higher-order ‘representations’.

The existence of an ontological gap – or the recognition of its existence – has some bearing on the problem of realism of or in a representational practice. What’s interesting about going around asking, ‘Does that which this represents exist?’ can be dealt with fairly simply. On the one hand, people have somewhat Gombrich-like spectacles glued to their eyes, and the conditions for resemblance probably derive from those or from related ones. On the other, pictures are caused; they are linked to the world not only in virtue of denoting it or referring to it.

Points worth considering are: (1) the extent to which those two statements overlap; (ii) the degree to which the questions you can ask in those connections seem to signal genuine ontological splits in the world (as opposed to more simple-mindedly ideological differences between people’s motives and reasons for doing things); and (iii) a question of the type, ‘To what extent is there a means of producing artistic things which do not paper over that spilt, rather than producing pieces of supra-ideological criticism of the things people do?’ If pictures are generated by more than what they denote, what is thought to do the generating has got to be able to do it.

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(2) The tacky mess is sometimes generated by another mess masquerading as an antithesis.

The idea that (or the argument that) the world is either a function of our representations, or else our representations are a function of it, is bogus. Many ‘anti-idealists’ are confused with respect to the authenticity of this ‘antithesis’. It has none. The ‘contrast’ between the two enthusiasms is bogus. (Some?) representations are real. This reality is not to be confused with the reality of objects (nor with thought?). Representations change without objects changing and presumably objects change without representations changing. (This is a restriction on representation as ‘correspondence’-ruled in a crude metaphysics.) It’s not odd, however, to expect that representations often ought to change if their objects do. Artistic representations are representations not simply of things, but of things under particular descriptions. Descriptions are produced socially and – within that process – cognitively.

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(3) There is something interesting about trying to find a non-idealist connection between the conditions of production and the conditions of interpretation in a practice which is neither scientific nor sociological, but which is nevertheless representational and epistemologically non-vacuous. There is a sense in which one can discuss what people think and do in terms of possible connections between the two sets of conditions. It might be that realistic representational art had something to do with the fact that the conditions of production and the conditions of interpretation are commensurable or that they match; and that idealistic art occurs where such conditions are not commensurable or matching, but absurd.

If somebody in the laboratory opens his bank statement and communicates his horror to a colleague during a classical physical experiment, neither his bank statement nor his horror nor his ‘real’ life are conditions of the production of the experimental sequence: although the experiment produces a sequence, it is a closed sequence. This is not to say that the system which the experiment helps us inquire about is closed. The ‘genetic sciences’ characteristically involve open systems and no possibility of experimental-type closures. The ‘genetic sciences’ of modern art often seem disgustingly neat and closed – while in fact unable to adduce any significant conditions of closure. Explanation in the art world relies on art-world closures. It is determined by a set of interests, a set of social, historical stances. In other words, where the ruling class closes the genetic sequence in producing an explanation of an art work is not where the working class closes it. Many people outside artistic or art-consuming pseudo-communities introduce the desire for money into genetic accounts of Carl Andre’s bricks. If you asked most people in the pub who knew about the bricks, they would account for it in terms of money for old rope. A Saatchi of Saatchi and Saatchi (who owns a work by Carl Andre) wouldn’t say that it was done for money. The ruling class has a genetic explanatory ‘language’ for art. This is the language in which they explain its production. The implied closures are usually of supernatural origin.

Now the issue of representation brings to consideration of the relations between production and interpretation another sort of causal chain, that instanced by the tea cup and the picture of the tea cup. This causal chain can be introduced as a sort of closure. It is necessary. It creates an intelligible cognitivity problem – a kind of criterion of relevance – vis-à-vis the rest of the ideas you might have about the circumstances of production. Consider a ‘naive’ argument (i) about a picture, (ii) about a Carl Andre: ‘if you had a picture p of a cup and the cup stood in front of it, one of the immediate factors in any consideratlon of the conditions of production would be that the artist had looked at the cup. This operates some sort of closure on the causal chain within which the picture may be seen as having been produced. Somehow the cup is involved both in the productive and in the interpretative chain.’ In the face of a Carl Andre q, the place where you close the causal chain is more or less arbitrary. Where you close it depends on an external interest. There is no powerfully intelligible criterion Linked to the work and to the world for stopping that chain at any particular location. ‘Money’ is just as good an explanation as the delight in zinc, copper or aluminium or flatness or whatever.’

Is there anything good to be recovered from this argument? Somehow, in representing a cup, one is trying to shift the critical, the interpretative or the experiential away from an arbitrary closure with respect to a much more intractable interest. Or, if the picture is seen as representing an interest, it can nevertheless still be indexed to the world in some independent way; the interest is ‘declared’ rather than discovered; the producer and the spectator are working within a statement rather than a Tower of Babel. If you paint knights in armour standing in Teutonic landscapes, at a certain level your work will be hard to misinterpret. (Though at another level we might want to say that Teutonic knights might be just as ‘abstract’ or just as formal as Carl Andres. To be Volkisch is to make a set of (ultimately dogmatic) assumptions about the world.)

The issue is not one that could be explained in terms of the difference between hyper-realism and Georges Matthieu. At a certain level of interpretation they are the same. Carl Andre’s work is not representational. The correspondence problems Carl Andre has are subject to reification rather than interpretation. It is hard to see how his works are to be defended against reduction to financial interest or something like it. In a limited way, some work with a representational aim can be defended against such reduction.

This doesn’t mean that all representational work is transparent, to be understood, that is, as a perfectly well-formed formula; rather that, in endeavouring to understand it, one is addressed to the problem of its cognitive significance, of its being some picture of the world, and not to some more or less arbitrary interest-infested selection of where it is that the closure is to be made on consideration of circumstances of its production. (It’s perhaps worth noting again that it’s harder to defend abstract art against charges of idealism insofar as question of of do not come up naturelly in epistemologically relevant circumstances. It might be contented that this is why the art world is full of people willing to perform arbitrary epistemological feats.) Abstract art marries the conditions of production with the conditions of interpretation by flat, by legislation, whereas work that is addressed to the question of picturing cannot be insulated from the possibility of there being a fracture between the circumstances of its production and the circumstances of its intepretation. The ‘natural’ coincidence of those two circumstances results in the production of something relatively good – albeit in a very simplistic sense.

Someone might recapitulate the foregoing as follows: we have the superannuated conjecture (i) that an important consideration for representation must be the relative independence at some level of that representation from some structuralist legislation or rules; and that (ii) the satisfaction of some conditions of representation (in certain relations) is necessary so as to prevent the fatal assimilation of all conditions of interpretation into conditions of production, viz. the vacuity of all non-genetic descriptions; and, at the same time, that (iii) failure of these conditions results in a situation whose best apologetic theory is Kuhn-loss, viz. a theory which suggeste that ‘there is no “discursive intelligence”, no transformation,’ ‘but an archetypal intuitive understanding constructing its world in a single synthetic act.’ (R. Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, Harvester Press, Sussex, 1978, p. 258 & p. 258 (n).)

It is experimentation that provides closures in science. There are few (if any) experiments (there are, no doubt, quasi-experiments) in art or art history. There is consequently very little in the philosophical and critical discourses of art or in art practices like painting to require much scrupulousness in the matter of weighing instrumental (etc.) aims and interests against observed or known or knowable structures. Art discurse gives the appearance of having performed its closures ineffably or else arbitrarily in the pursuit of incredibly myopic (and anti-social) instrumental interests. Question: what if these closures really were performed inneffably?

Bourgeois aestheticians are constantly celebrating the idea that because art works are particulars, they are ineffable. (This let alone what is done to them.) We think that there must be something wrong with this notion of a particular. More particularly, we think that the idea that the ineffability of some art works qua art works flows from their particularity is captured and condemned as a monster of the bourgeois miscreation, aggravated when it acts as or results in a restriction on inquiry rather than on logical truism (cf. Merleau-Ponty or even Gombrich (?)).

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(4) Rip Bulkeley, ‘On On Practice III, A Reply to R. Norman’, from which much of the foregoing and following is derived, Radical Philosophy, Number 22, Summer 1979.

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(5) On the ‘equivalence’ of representations see B. Barnes, Interests and the Growth of Knowledge, Routledge Direct Editions, London, 1997.

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(6) Homework problem: what is to be done with seeminly anti-materialist but ‘realist’ (and not necessarily not socialist) observations like the following? (Some way of living with them must be found lest they drive one into the arms of Althisser.)

a) Much of the talk indulged to by ‘Marxixts’ about the recovery of ‘truth’ an about '‘knoledge’ is ill-founded for many reasons. Among these is their serious lack of analytical, epistemological and practical detail.
b) As no boubt many left-wing worthies would agree, it does seem important to try to talk about knoledge and truth if only as a cognative effort against modernism and the type of ideological condition it signals.
c) But such motives are by no means of singular importance.
d) The epistemological, sociological – if you like philosophical – problems of ‘art’ outside the mass circulation and production of images is properly focussed on the problems of representation.
e) The ludicrous coquetries of semiology are no actual and little virtual help.
f) The problems of representation are mostly located at the level of the actual rather than the real.
g) The claims to artistically produced knowledge are circumscribed by experience – i.e., it could only be knowledge of and in experience.
h) All or most representations in art are ‘of’ transitive and not intransitive objects.
i) There are only attempted real definitions in artistic representations – as representations in a process. All such definitions are ultimately ad hoc. The same goes for the notion of artistic ‘truth’, etc. But it may be that the same does not go for ‘art-historical’ truth.

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(7) There are some whose notion of ‘effectivity’ (we presume they mean ‘effectiveness’) is couched in the language of institutional change, etc. There are some artists who pin the hopes of their ‘effectivity’ on some sort of participation in some sort of ‘base’. (Of society...? Do they mean talking with workers...?)

The demystification of advertising is no doubt worthy and good. There are many theoritical objections to the idea that semiology (and, a fortiori, semiological art) is the tool with which to do it. There are also some sociologically grounded practical objections to the demystifier’s sense of his or her effectiveness. If some section of the intelligentsia uses what it takes to be its knowledge in an attack on institutions it wants to demystify or weaken, then a corresponding’ defensive activity will be produced by those whose interests are served by so doing. Obviously, the grip of various institutions can be weakened discursively or quasi- discursively. But it is almost immobilisingly clear that it will be the power of the various interests engaged in intellectual conflict that will determine their representation in it. Very powerful interests will be represented powerfully in intellectual debates and struggles. There is no evidence at all that any intellectual or artistic effort at disimbrication can produce ‘any change in the institutional arrangements so as to dislocates them from the social contingencies they normally reflect’ (B. Barnes, Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory, RKP, 1974.) It may be argued by some that the practical skills of the semio-artists are marshalled in the defense of institutional arrangments which will perpetuate the illusion of the practical power of demystificatory charity.

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(8) This ‘precedence’ must occur to some extent for everyone. There are some who make it worse.

There are many artists and critics who are interested in ‘intervening’ with one kind of exposée or disimbrication or other. They are usually Structuralism’s lumpens (vide Art-Language, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1977). Their disimbrications are exceedingly inflated. The extent to which semiological work of any kind can be pursued beyond an idealist triviality is a matter of conjecture. The drift of the semiological self-image has been towards the view that there is hardly any limit to the world-amenable-to-Semiology. In fact, what Semiology tries to do is to treat non-linguistic culturally realised entitles in the same way as structural linguistics treats language. This means that Semiology often provides metaphors. But Semiology started to take itself literally and then to get more imperialistic. It has become a denial of material life and history. Semio-art the more so – since it (quite naturally) conscripts the egregious Althusser as its philosophical mentor, and just learns his lines.

The grounds of semio-art can be shown to be shaky without anything but the most oblique reference to its intellectual masters.

1) The Semiologists’ claim that we are surrounded (etc.) by signs does not imply that we are all ‘ideologically’ transfixed by them, and even if we were, it would not follow that we were affected in the same way or as constituents of class monoliths.
2) Semio-art underestimates the complexity and discursivity of the practice of its thematically favoured class.
3) It is very hard to find a way to dissociate the Semiologist and the semio-artist from the belief that people don’t make history.
4) As a consequence of 1)-3) it is hard to see how semio-art, etc. can defend itself against the charge that it is anti-working class.
5) As a consequence (etc.) it is hard to see how semio-art is not grotesquely idealistic.
6) As a consequence of 1)-5) it is hard to see how its ‘interventions’ are not on the side of the ruling class.
7) It is anyway hard to see its ‘interventions’ as anything but opportunist and carreerist.
There are many more corollaries and lemmas. It is hard not to get tired of trying to enumerate them.

Lumpens are venal. Semiologists are lumpen idealists. This ‘pair’ is not as strange as it might seem. Semio-artists contribute very little to knowledge. Their work is attached to the world ‘somehow’. Something will have to be said about its genesis. But what do we talk about?

Alison Assiter’s paper ‘Philosophical Materialism or the Materialist Conception of History’ (read at the British Sociological Association conference in April 1978 and printed in Radical Philosophy, No. 23, Winter 1979) sorts out some of the problems suggested in its title. Roughly, she points out that Marx was not primarily concerned with materialism as philosophical theory but as intrinsic to historical materialism. And historical materialism is not conspicuously ontological theory nor clearly epistemological theory. (Althusser has Marx producing the science of history and then, wonderfully, Lenin cranking out the philosophy. Marx’s materialism is not to be found in the philosophical tradition of materialism. Lenin’s was a vulgarisation of Marx’s materialism into the philosophical materialist tradition.)

If artistic realism must be compatible with materialism, if must be with historical materialism and not with Lenin’s vulgarisation or with Althusser’s at best half-true (untrue) and confusing claims on behalf of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.

Some people have ‘taken’ the historical-materialist point in a well-known, silly, self-refuting way. The result is that they have said that because all ideas (Art, etc.) are determined by the economic base, all ideas are ideo-logical and (by sleight of modus ponens) false.

It can be argued (pace Assister, loc. cit.) that Art, etc., may be determined by the base, etc. – causally generated by the means of subsistence – but this doesn’t mean that we can’t look at it some independently of these causal determination. Does this need justifiyng? Assister sets about coping with apparent contradictions in Marx’s work: it has been argued that ‘conscious existence’ and ‘mode of production’ are equivalent when they occur in connection with a description of an individual. They both refer to or pick out producers in the productive process. It has also been argued that the ‘productive life’ determines ‘consciousness’ – that ‘consciousness’ is not equivalent to ‘productive life’ or, etc. ‘The gougeing careerist with a show at X now’ refers to the same individual as ‘the artist who has disimbricated publicity by such and such a means’. The same individual can be picked out by both descriptions, but that will not necessarily prohibit the circumstance such that the life of the goueing careerist will determine the ideas of the artist. Historical materialism doesn’t reduce to something silly simply because of the imputation of an opaque context’.

‘Scott’ must have been ‘a writer working in such and such a way to live’ as the author of Waverley. Scott’s consciousness can have been determined by his subsistence practice even though ‘Scott’s consciousness’ and ‘Scott’s subsistence practice’ denote the same individual in the process of production. (There are other ways of looking at this ‘dilemma’ – and no doubt the apparent lack of extensionality is a problem for some. This apparent lack is perhaps not so keenly felt when it is remembered that the matter is historical materialism.)

We might accept that there is an interpretation of historical materialism with no tendency to reduce ‘artist’ to ‘producer’. It does seem fairly obvious. Rick Rio-Tinto-Zinc-Sharebolder could churn out ‘left-wing’ ideas, quote Marx or Scripture and make ‘true’ statements (though only as oratio obliqua perhaps). The epistemological credentials of this work may well seem to be impeccable. But how intelligible would these ‘themes’ be? Remember that while there is no tendency to reduce ‘artist’ (apparently ¹ producer) to ‘producer’ (or gouger for that matter), this producer determines or conditions the artist. The producer’s life (practice) determines how the artist and his work are produced. The genetic link that the artist’s ideas or pictures have with the world is distinguished from the iconic or descriptive link (see the following essay). This is not to say that the genetic link will not have some explanatory power in relation to the iconic or descriptive ones. Artist’s do not, for example, passively pick out space-occupying matter. Things are singled out actively, under descriptions. The perceptions are active. But they can be of something that exists or that ‘is the case’ or they can be hallucination or illusion and in particular pictures can be explained or accounted for by reference to why they in fact describe or stand for (as metaphor or, etc.), or they can (or must) be accounted for genetically with reference to something else – something other than that which they may be thought to describe.

The fact that historical materialism does not tend (or can be made not to tend) to reduce ‘artist’ to ‘producer’ does not remove the dialectical tension between them.

Consider an artist who is also managing director and major shareholder of a company specialising in the manufacture and sale of police truncheons and riot gear. We would have to give some genetic (i. e., epistemological) weight to his non-artistic work in trying to deal with and explain his ‘art’. This would not necessarily allow us to reduce his actions qua artist to his actions qua managing director, etc. But we must ask how he got his artist’s ideas, what determined his artistic actions, on pain of idealising him as artist in terms of what his apparent ‘ideas’ are. Remember, his ideas will be referred to by reference to what they are of – and what they are of is how they are got as well as what they refer to. If what they describe (or involve description of) plays a significant part in how they are got, then carry on regardless. If it does not, what sort of questions do you ask?

We are not saying that a picture is ‘true’ or ‘realist’ exclusively in virtue of the social credentials of the producer. We are saying that the absence of a significant and intelligible coincidence between the genetic and descriptive features of a picture will lead to a hiatus in critical practice. This hiatus will be resolved in the production of something like ‘an informal fallacy’ – in fact an unavoidable contextualisation of the ‘descriptive’ content of the picture in respect of what can be defended as its real determining conditions.

Bearing in mind what a picture is genetically connected to is a powerful way of referring to the commitments which ground the producing of pictures. A picture is a ‘moment’ in relation to a material base – it is only secondarily a creator of relationships. The significant coincidence between genetic and descriptive features prevents a picture from becoming a reification independent of the labour power which enters into its production.

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(9) Much of this producer vs. manager talk could be considered as incantation. However consider a reminder of its possible methodological potential: ‘The mode of production of material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life.’ ‘To determine’ can mean to be causal-influential. It can also mean to settle or decide by an authoritative or conclusive decision; it can mean to fix possibilities; to conclude or ascertain; to fix the position of, to give direction or tendency to, to impel, to limit. The mode of production of material life ‘determines’ not because it necessarily causes but because it frames possibilities which accept the constraints of the material mode of production. Avineri claims that the distinction between ‘material base’ and ‘superstructure’ is not a matter of a distinction between ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ but between conscious human activity aimed at the preservation of the conditions of human life, and human consciousness which furnishes rationalisations and modes of legitimation and justification for the specific form that activity takes. (See Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, Cambridge University Press, 1968.)

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(10) New pictures are produced from old ones. The particular significance accroded to the various links a picture can have with reality will depend on antecedent social activity. This is not to imply however that realist theory must be limited to considerations of the semiological or ’descriptive’ potential of pictures. (Indeed, the preservation of the conditions wherein the semio-lumpen and his Althusserian masters may flourish is a social activity inimical to realism and historical materialism.) The culturel form of the realisation of pictures and aspects of pictures is no indication of the epistemiological adequacy of trying to treat them in the same way as structuralist linguists treat language. The anti-historical, ahistorical moment of sifnifiers and signifieds is idealistic excess. The vulgarity of correspondence theories and the recognition that the world is structured and differentiated are too easily made the conditions of amnesia with respect to the epistemological and historiographical ramifications of historical materialism. The limitedsess of art with respect to reality should not be a cause to celebrate its vacuity. If there is (or if there can be) any realistic art, then it wil have to draw its credentials form the world structured and differentiated as it is into objects, subjects, facts, practices and processes.

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(11) One of the possibilities facing anyone who wants art to ‘recover the truth’ is the recovery of falsehood. This possibility is not just ‘epistemological’. ‘To recover truth’, art would have to able to treat falsehood as it ought to be treated. To this extent the recovery of truth is a social recovery of rationality. Now a man dressed as a philosopher dressed as Ernst Gombrich comes in and says that, of course, pictures are neither true nor false. Pictures are not sufficiently discursive, etc., etc. But pictures generate and are generated by discourses and other pictures. They can be read as representations rather than as ‘iconic’ images. This means that they can be representations. And that means they can be linked to reality in ways not exhausted by the description of middle-sized spatio-temporal continuants. A full technical transformation must await social revolution.

The bourgeois consumption (= propagation) of art militates against this recovery of falsehood and calumny. An intemperate (phonetically mad) conjecture that makes the above into a homework problem is that Structuralisrn’s functionalism is the best thing anti-realism ever had or at least since Principia Ethica.

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(12) This apparatus of control exerts its power in often subtle ways.

A watchword for some modernist art practice has been ‘the rapid elimination of features extraneous to art itself.’ But the realisation of this dream only coincided with a growth in the art-administrative apparatus. Modernism was adventuristic but could only be so by shifting the responsibility for its own sense to other people – to critical support, etc. It is the nature of art administration to concoct a Mandarin culture: to install itself as a paradigm of virtuous and legitimating authority. Its ideal is one object, one meaning for everyone, everywhere. It thus devalues tacit, representational, indexical or context-dependent meanings. A relatively situation-free discourse is not just easier to control; it is also conducive to cosmopolitanism. Obviously modernist administrators and bureaucrats must resist representations with their localised subjects and context-dependent meanings. A good example of this is to be found in the attitudes of the modernist teacher, for whom art history, the art world, ‘great art’, etc. are frequently crutches whereby he may be transported in imagination by the socially acceptable upward mobility of cosmopolitanism. Any historical materialist criticism attempting to deal with the institutional character of art education is dismissed as ‘lacking artistic universality’ (see ‘Issue vs. Carruthers’, Art Monthly, N°. 30, October 1979, p. 31).

Abstract art – as a set of conventions stretched or abbreviated – serves to unify. As such it is boundary-establishing. This makes for the special solidarity of professionalism, making it easier for members to ‘communicate’ with one another at the cost of excluding the non-technical views of people who do not share the conventions; the benighted know nothing. Abstract-art-Modernism is dogmatic, not discursive. It has to have a legitimising support structure or it isn’t anything. Outside of abstract art’s boundaries is a void. Outside of its authority is a void.

Concept art was another indication of the conditions of the professional art world. It was seen to be iconoclastic. In some cases it could better be described as suicidal. It put its hands arounds its own throat to see how hard it could squeeze. It was (and is) the lawlessness not of anarchy but of the unending regress: the lawlessness peculiar to a sort of ‘professionalism’.

The ‘critical anti-modernist’, Art for Society, has grabbed an administrative opportunity. It is, in the old-fashioned Richard Cork Ayatollah form, just a vehicle for opportunism – empty of all but arrivist exigency. His sentimental opportunism is what is universal about it. The ‘theoretical’ semiological stuff has its own imperialist cosmopolitan material – theory. It would be to affirm the consequent to say that these last two are therefore ‘like’ modernism. But they are in a certain respect. It is not altogether unilluminating to work out how.

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(13) The superbly educated semio-lumpen ‘participates in the base’ (sic), Gets to Grips with the Working Class only by confiscating its historical identity. His or her practice is ‘…marked by a very heavy emphasis upon the ineluctable weight of ideological modes of domination – domination which destroys every space for the initiative ... of the mass of the people – a domination from which only the enlightened minority of intellectuals can struggle’ (E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, Merlin Press, London, 1978, p. 377.)

The semio-lumpen can disimbricate and intervene without risk of changing himself – or, if there is some slight risk, its genesis is ineffable. The merciful thing is that the theoretical practice of the semio-artist and semiocurator is trivial. But let’s not be too smug about that. Trivial anti-working-class work reflects, perhaps, in a callow spotty way a more persistent and dangerous tendency. Thompson describes the tendency in the grown-up Mandarin semio-artist. ‘It is actively reinforcing and reproducing the effective passivity before “structure”? which holds us all prisoner. It is enforcing a rupture between theory and practice.’ (Thompson, op. cit., p. 378-379; our emphasis.)

The semio-praxisist doesn’t get hungry; he is not of this world. The odd thing is that the only way we can explain his work is in terms of his hunger or something like it.