woocommerce-shipping-per-product domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131complianz-gdpr domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131In its modern enlightenment version, art was thought to help nurture a reasoning subject who could express humanity as a project rather than a fatal superstition. Despite their very different conceptions, what all of the modernist art movements had in common was the background of Western liberal capitalism and bourgeois ideology. Since postmodernism, we have been telling ourselves a different story. History has ended, and so aesthetic resistance to bourgeois capitalism has also ended. Mark Fisher defines this sense that capitalism is now the only viable socio-economic system as \u201ccapitalist realism.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? <\/em>(Winchester: O Books, 2009).<\/span> We could say that much of the art produced today is capitalist realist art. Given that most of the art movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were critical of bourgeois ideology, contemporary art finds itself in a strange situation with regard to the legacy of modernity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The postmodern condition has led, one might argue, to two contrasting viewpoints with regard to democracy and culture. The first view, based on the writings of Claude Lefort and Chantal Mouffe, argues that the seat of power is empty and that democracy is an endless game of agonism among different formations involved in hegemonic struggle.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - See, for example, Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory <\/em>(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), and Chantal Mouffe, \u201cArtistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,\u201d Art & Research <\/em>1, no. 2 (Summer 2007), <bit.ly\/1iTtJIb>.<\/span> One might associate this view with a number of intellectual currents, from identity politics and intersectionism to radical democracy and neo-anarchism. Because none of these formations is a major threat to global capitalism, each receives a fair amount of support in academia, the mainstream media, and the art world. According to Ellen Meiksins Wood, however, capitalism not only relies on racism and gender discrimination as a basis for exploitation, it also manipulates struggles against oppression for similar capitalist purposes. The trends on the left toward difference and diversity, she argues, have not only opened up spaces for emancipatory struggle, but have at the same time become excuses for political retreat and threaten to function as alibis for capitalism.3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism <\/em>(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 238.<\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n One question for the art world, then, is how to combat the drift of democracy toward the extreme right and rethink the postmodernist rejection of universality and class struggle.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n A contrasting view, based on the \u201cpost-Marxist\u201d writings of people like Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, Alain Badiou, and Franco Berardi, is that the seat of power is never empty, but is occupied, and has been occupied for a long time, by global capitalism.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - See, for example, Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, \u201cClass Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please!\u201d in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left <\/em>(London: Verso, 2000) 90\u200a\u2014\u200a135; Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism<\/em>, trans. Ray Brassier(Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1997] 2003); LaborinArt, \u201cRunning Along the Disaster: A Conversation with Franco \u2018Bifo\u2019 Berardi,\u201d e-flux Journal <\/em>56(June 2014), <bit.ly\/2hPHTN2>.<\/span> Today\u2019s hegemony contests, whether identitarian or nationalistic, are in fact conditioned and generated by the crises and contradictions of contemporary biocapitalism. Whereas industrial capitalism was concerned with the extraction of surplus from labour through the extension of the working day, the reduction of wages, and the increase of the speed of work, biocapitalism compensates for the loss of surplus value by looking to new areas of capitalization, such as education, culture, and leisure, but also the entirety of social life, social identity, and even our biogenetic substance. In this regard, postmodern identity struggles can be considered part of the cultural logic of late capitalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Borrowing \u017di\u017eek\u2019s terminology, we could refer to the first viewpoint as the \u201cculturalization of politics\u201d and to the second as the \u201cpoliticization of culture.\u201d In this respect, one might say that the kind of \u201cstrike art\u201d produced in the context of Occupy Wall Street and the Printemps \u00e9rable <\/em>represents a politicization of culture; in contrast, the culturalization of politics produces phenomena such as the call-outs against artists Kenneth Goldsmith and Dana Schutz, or the toppling of Confederate statues.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - See Yates McKee, Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition <\/em>(London: Verso, 2016).<\/span> Both of these variants of progressive politics give art and culture a prominent role in democratic social change, and both are aware of the function of art in societies that are regulated by post-Fordist regimes of flexible accumulation and precarious labour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When considering the possibilities for the politicization of culture, we are struck by the persistence of neoliberalism, with its market logic and state regulation. As the debacle of the Greek referendum demonstrated, neoliberal policies make any pretence to popular democracy through parliamentary politics a somewhat deceptive chimera. Politics seem to vacillate between neoliberalism with a human, multicultural face (the Justin Trudeau, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton variety), and neoliberalism with more authoritarian and repressive features (the Stephen Harper and Donald Trump variety).<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the wave of protests associated with anti-globalization and the movement of the squares in Greece, Spain, Egypt, Turkey, Brazil, and the United States, we have been beset with right-wing counter-movements associated either with far-right political parties or with \u201ccountercultural\u201d versions referred to as the \u201calt-right.\u201d As cultural theorist Angela Nagle bravely proposes in her recent book, Kill All Normies <\/em>(2017), the cultural conservatives who fought on the wrong side of the culture wars from the 1960s to 1990s have been replaced by a \u201cvanguard,\u201d as she calls it, of teenage gamers, anime lovers, South Park <\/em>conservatives, anti-feminist pranksters, and Internet trolls.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right <\/em>(Winchester: Zero Books, 2017) eBook, 11.<\/span> According to Nagle, the love of transgression for its own sake makes it difficult to know the politics of people who prefer \u201cthe lulz\u201d to political correctness, and whose only sense of politics is the belief that they are somehow against the mainstream. This combination of anti-establish\u00adment attitude and political confusion helps to account for the success of politicians such as Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen. Nagle\u2019s thesis goes beyond the alt-right, however, and proposes that the progressive aspects of countercultural subversion and postmodern irony have come home to roost, with confused and precarious millennials on both the left and the right siding against any kind of seriousness, thus allowing genuinely sinister developments to emerge. The tired debates between cultural conservatism and cultural studies meet life online, where people today feel more democratically empowered by their Twitter and Facebook accounts than by their local representatives.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n According to \u017di\u017eek, we will soon feel the pain caused by neoliberal governance. One thinks of the recent hurricanes and forest fires. In the United States, most decent-paying jobs are under threat, along with public education and the remnants of Social Security and Medicare. Canada, on the other hand, has been pressured by the United States to double its military spending in support of a NATO build-up on the Russian border and in the South China Sea. Let us hope we will not soon be confronting the consequences of nuclear war. \u017di\u017eek argues that if we want to redeem what is worthwhile in liberal democracy, we need to establish a new left based on international agreements, the control of banks, ecological standards, workers\u2019 rights, universal healthcare, and protections for minorities. For this to happen, he says, today\u2019s left-liberals need to focus on their own shortcomings, much as liberal capitalism did when it was faced with the challenge of the international socialist movement.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, \u201cWe Must Rise from the Ashes of Liberal Democracy,\u201d In These Times <\/em>(March 3, 2017), <bit.ly\/2mCPMJQ>.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n In the case of the United States, \u017di\u017eek\u2019s argument is best exemplified by Thomas Frank, who, in his recent book, Listen, Liberal<\/em> (2016), explains how for the last four decades the Democratic Party has abandoned the middle class (read: working class) in favour of capital and the interests of billionaires.8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal, or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? <\/em>(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016).<\/span> Not unlike Nagle, Frank points out how civil-rights achievements, such as gay marriage, the removal of Confederate flags, and the election of a Black president, all received the support of corporate America and were celebrated in the mainstream press as Democratic Party policy triumphs that won the approval of young people, minorities, and middle-class professionals. How is it then that the same Democrats have lost control of the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court? Is it appropriate to blame, as some do, the white working class? According to Frank, although the Democrats have been courageous on diversity issues, they do not believe they can do anything when it comes to major social issues and economic democracy. They have ceased to be concerned with the interests of working people and have instead dedicated themselves to the concerns of the upper-middle-class meritocracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How, then, is the art world affected by such politics?<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n The sociology of class polarization and its rightist side effects is not an altogether new field of research. One thinks of Siegfried Kracauer\u2019s The Salaried Masses <\/em>(1930), C. Wright Mills\u2019 White Collar <\/em>(1951), and Nicos Poulantzas\u2019 Classes in Contemporary Capitalism<\/em> (1973). More recently, Bill Readings\u2019 The University in Ruins <\/em>(1997) alerted us to the twilight of the social function of university education in the context of a neoliberalization that indexes all knowledge production to gross domestic product. A similar class analysis has been applied to cultural production in the age of creative industries policy.9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - See, for instance, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism<\/em>, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, [1999] 2005).<\/span> In this context, I argue, two factions of the same global petty bourgeois class vie for hegemony. One faction is what Frank refers to as the knowledge class, which we could also refer to as the \u201ccreative class,\u201d after the writings of Richard Florida. The other large grouping is an activist class, which we could associate with new social movements, NGOs, and world social forums. In his book Distinction <\/em>(1979), sociologist Pierre Bourdieu outlined the different cultural tastes and social dispositions of the French population.10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste<\/em>, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, [1979] 1984).<\/span> What Bourdieu once defined as the \u201cpetty bourgeois\u201d disposition is today the dominant disposition of a global creative and activist class of people who no longer identify in class terms and instead demonstrate a \u201cpost-political\u201d commitment to lifestyle choice, anti-hierarchy, anti-authority, the taste for the new, the fun ethic, and distance from market forces.11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - See Marc James L\u00e9ger. \u201cWelcome to the Cultural Goodwill Revolution,\u201d in Brave New Avant Garde: Essays on Contemporary Art and Politics <\/em>(Winchester: Zero Books, 2012), 82\u200a\u2014\u200a99. See also Tony Bennett, \u201cHabitus Cliv\u00e9<\/em>: Aesthetics and Politics in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu,\u201d New Literary History <\/em>38, no. 1 (2007): 201\u200a\u2014\u200a28.<\/span> The hegemonic status of the petty bourgeois disposition has accompanied the deregulated conditions of knowledge and cultural production in the age of precarity and social networks.12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - See, for instance, Lane Relyea, Your Everyday Art World<\/em> (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n The function of art in today\u2019s biocapitalism, then, is to produce and reproduce the new forms of non-ideological politics within the ranks of the global petty bourgeois class, with its competing activist and professional factions. The assumption of this \u201cend of ideology\u201d post-politics is that the history of class struggle has come to an end and liberal capitalism is the only remaining option. Any hope for social change will come from a break with this order of intra-class conflict and involve the totality of the social space. Such a break will require actual vanguards. An art that breaks with the conditions that call it into being is not an art of transgression but an art of negation.13<\/sup> Art\u2019s reflection on its conditions of possibility includes the critiques of capitalist democracy that have come from the artistic and political avant-gardes. This includes a critique of the category of art. Such an avant-garde revolutionary culture might not be definitionally democratic in its difference from political correctness and in its anti-anti-art communism. Although we cannot yet know what lies beyond the current neoliberal hegemony, we can propose that future events in art and politics will be those that do not rely on existing norms and assignable causes\u200a\u2014\u200aa democracy without guarantees. \u2022<\/p>\n