Papers

Redistributing the sensible: The culture

industry under the sign of post-fordism.
Sybren Renema

Post-fordism and the distribution of the sensible

The Ford model and the model hit song are all of a piece Th. W. Adorno[1]
This quote might very well be both the ultimate warning Adorno ever gave us and the
best way to assess what damage intellectual standardization can do. What Adorno
called the culture industry has gained such a momentum that what is nowadays
considered culture is inalienably linked to this mode of production, even when trying to
resist its grasp. He concluded that the oppression that the culture industry creates is
based on the schemes it proposes and affirms: The schema of mass culture now
prevails as a canon of synthetically produced models of behavior[2]. Sixty years after
this diagnosis, it would be foolish for anyone to claim not to be complicit in this system,
because it has so thoroughly permeated all layers of society and has shown great
flexible qualities. It might even be said it has irrevocably succeeded.
An example: When one thinks of all the drop-outs and counter-cultures the world has
known, it is impossible not to ponder the appropriation by the culture industry of their
outward sign of resistance. Just think, for instance, of multinationals selling flowerpower t-shirts or of multi-million movies depicting life over the edge? If anything, these
blockbusters and hip clothes function to keep us all in place. Those who dare to stray
from the flock, who truly live a different life, irrevocable become vilified as the other:
mad, eccentric, a junky or a criminal.
If anything, the culture industry creates a society that is conservative and self-

referential, accepting only the schemes of behavior, but not the intellectual freedom to
choose from these schemes and to reject its ideology. According to Adorno it misuses
its concern for the masses in order to duplicate, reinforce and strengthen their
mentality, which it presumes is given and unchangeable. How this mentality might be
changed is given and unchangeable. The masses are not the measure but the
ideology of the culture industry, even though the culture industry itself could scarcely
exist without adapting the masses.[3]
A further analysis of this hypothesis is made in Baudrillards In the Shadow of the
Silent Majorities, roughly three decades later. The author argues that social sciences,
the social and the masses have to be radically reexamined, as McLuhans statement
that the medium is the message leads to a situation in which talking about the social is
the only way to maintain and continue its existence. What results from this is a
simulation of the social that is only maintained by politics. The political silence of the
masses, in spite of the fact that they are being surveyed to death, topples the social
and the political into the hyperreality that we associate it with. So in fact, there is,
according to Baudrillard, no longer a clear social but only a simulation of the social in a
society in which politics has become a simulacrum of itself.[4]
What freedom such a society does grant its inhabitants is minimal and focused on
details, insignificances and the superfluous. Baudrillard, in his System of Objects
(1968), claimed that what he calls man as interior designer is tricked into believing
that he doesnt need the objects he gathers, but can in an original way construct his
life. The technical society implies practical computation and conceptualization on the
basis of a total abstraction: the notion of a world no longer given but instead produced
mastered, manipulated, inventoried, controlled: a world, in short, which has to be
constructed.[5] Man as an interior designer can own all the luxuries society has given,
knows they are not vital, but takes pride in the consumption of these materials because
they grant him success and the simulacrum of freedom, or at least of free time.
Yet this freedom to construct is very relative. Its boundaries lie at the point where the
private space meets the public space, where individual becomes multitude. Here man
as interior designer is subject to all the conventions and tastes and the group mentality
that the culture industry proposes. The systems beyond these boundaries are
modeled by a collective history, society and the conventions those imply. It is virtually
impossible to tinker with anything fundamental in these and that impossibility is
masked by the apparent freedom we have to design, but not change, our surroundings.
Jacques Rancire, a thinker heavily indebted to both the Marxist and the poststructuralist traditions of Adorno and Baudrillard, calls the root of this situation the
distribution of the sensible[6] (sometimes translated as the partition of the sensible),
which he describes as the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that
simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations
that define the respective parts and positions within it.[7] (The sensible here is to be
understood as that which we are capable of apprehending via the senses, not as a
moral sort of sensibility.) This leads to an apportionment of parts that is based on a
distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in
which something common lends itself to participation and in that way various
individuals have a part in this distribution. In other words: the distribution of the
sensible is the bracketing and dividing of the social and political order and a
mechanism that ultimately works as a way of handing power and influence to those
who need it to maintain that order.
A divide Ranciere is particularly interested in, is that between art and politics. This
divide is shaped by the manner in which both feed off each other. This border causes
both to more and more resemble one another. He argues that the arts as we practice
them today are a result of a phase in the history of art that he calls the aesthetic
regime of the arts, a regime that strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from
any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres. This it
does by destroying the mimetic barrier that distinguished ways of doing and making
affiliated with art from other ways of doing and making, a barrier that separated its
rules from the order of social occupations. In other words: as art becomes more free
to interfere with other social activities, such as politics, the divide becomes more
blurred and in return, those orders can take on artistic functions. As such, it can be
claimed, according to Ranciere, that the aesthetic regime asserts the absolute
singularity of art and, at the same time, destroys any pragmatic criterion for isolating
this singularity. It might be said art is dissolving into politics and politics into art.[8]
In a recent (2009) response to Rancieres analysis, Michael Hardt provides a critical
reappraisal of Rancieres ideas.[9] Here, Hardt introduces several things that the art
world should take to heart. First of all, he insists that the common, those who are both
subject and object in the distribution of the sensible, are not quasi-natural or given.
[10] It is instead something artificial, that can be produced through a wide variety of
social circuits and encounters. If this is the case, Hardt argues, we must also discuss
the economical realm when discussing this distribution of the sensible, because it is
the third element in the equation of how art and the rest of society, or the sensible
interact.
This third element in the equation leads us to one of the most important problems
when thinking about an art of resistance: the (economical) modes of production. In his
book Empire, co-written by Antonio Negri, Hardt argues that industry is gradually
being replaced in the dominant position by what we call immaterial or biopolitical
production.[11] This form of production deals with information, ideas, knowledge,
languages, communication, images, codes and affects.
The influence of economy on the distribution of the sensible does affect the artist in two
ways. The first is the least interesting, but most clearly described by Hardt: the arts
have become a prestige-project for the corporate world. Through the use of Biennales,
art fairs and the self-created creative industry, the business world tries to capitalize on
art, without having any investment in the subject matter, apart from a financial one. The
artist is tolerated as a business model, but not as a representative of the humanities,
because the humanities in themselves have no commercial use. This can be seen in

many of the formerly progressive countries in Europe, such as the UK, Sweden and
the Netherlands, where massive cuts are being made to budgets for healthy art
scenes, on the base that they should operate in a more successful manner, or simply
because they are leftist hobbies[12]. Success here is often defined as being
profitable, as the appearance of professionalism and as being as little elitist as
possible, though how neoconservative governments and the supporters of free
enterprise seem to interpret the last two notions, notions seems to be excluded
throughout.[13] [14]
The second challenge caused by the inclusion of economics into the distribution of the
sensible that Hardt mentions, though only in passing, is even more severe when
perceived from the position of the artist. It could be simply defined as the artistic
practice losing its exclusiveness, not only as the aura of the work has faded, but also
because what Hardt calls biopolitical production, seems to annex the exclusive position
the artist had in society as the creator of works of art under special conditions that
were the exclusive domain of the artist. As the post-fordist model, which champions
creativity, uniqueness, flexibility and own initiative in its workers in order to make more
money, becomes the dominant mode of production, these values become largely void.
After all, true creativity, flexibility, uniqueness and so on can often only take place when
conventions are broken and boundaries transgressed, which is exactly what the
representative of any power structure would like to prevent. Thinking outside the box
still requires the framework of a box. A simulacrum of creativity is what the workers in
post-fordist society are left with. This has its repercussions on the art world: what once
was its main domain, creativity, seems to have been sucked dry by the vampire bat of
capitalism. Not only has art lost this power over creativity, it has also lost its dominant
position as the creator of culture, with the culture industry appropriating what it can use
and rendering everything else useless. These two factors make the position of art
potentially bleaker than ever.
If Ranciere is right, and the aesthetic regime of the arts makes the line between art and
politics ever more transparent, we need to assess what the art world can do in order to
maintain a political and cultural relevance and a believable alternative to the status quo
of neoconservative power and the dominion of the culture industry. A solution should
be found that acknowledges these matters and at the same time appropriates and
subverts the all-absorbing potential of capitalism. It is in the best interest of the art
world to ponder these questions as Hardt points them out, even more so because he
shies from providing any answers: my brief analysis of the parallel relations among
aesthetics, the political and the economical allows me to pose these questions but
does not yet arrive at any responses. I suspect that artists are more qualified than I to
respond and I imagine that in their work they are already discovering answers to these
questions. In the rest of this essay, we shall focus on such answers, mainly by looking
at two forms of institutional critique.
Punk jeans and folklore
But before we do so, we must first define if it is still possible to resist. This is of course
mostly a matter of political stand-point. How we perceive the culture industry under the
sign of post-fordism is at the core of how feasible resistance seems. It is here that the
views of Hardt and Negri on one side and Baudrillard on the other side collide. For
Baudrillard, and indeed many of the more pessimistic thinkers, we have reached a
point of no return. If we take the position of man as interior designer to the most
extreme, we end up in a situation in which exchange value and use value approach
one another, only to be eclipsed by a third form of value that is even more remote from
the origin of the object and thus of reality. This third value is what Baudrillard called
sign value and can be understood as a symptom of capitalism as we experience it. We
could use the example of a pre-made pair of punk jeans, complete with holes and
stains, to clarify this. These jeans might look like they are soon-to-be waste products,
but are actually designed that way. The person who purchases these is more
interested in what they signify than in how well they function as jeans and is prepared
to spend considerable money on them. Their true value is their sign value: what they
signify to others as signs of punkness, or whatever identity. How well they hold up as
pieces of clothing is secondary to this.[15]
It is this sign value that the culture industry maintains over its subjects. It leads to a
mass of people that signifies a lot, but is representing nothing. Useful forms of counterculture become assimilated through this mechanism and with it their critiques on the
social status quo. What we are left with is their hollow image, their simulacrum. For
Baudrillard, our identities are mostly assigned to us and we are no longer in a position
to fight this.
For Hardt and Negri, such a view on things excludes the possibility of resistance. Their
main object of study, the multitude, can only exist in its most diverse and
heterogeneous way. The multitude is different from this compared to what they call the
people, which is the homogeneous people of the nation state. For them, the concept of
multitude introduces us to a completely new world, inside a revolution in process.[16]
This process is based on the idea that the exact process that Baudrillard describes is
actually inverse. The multitude is not a homogeneous thing, held in place by the culture
industry, but has a potential for great uprising that takes place at the base and needs
little guidance from the superstructure of the powers that be. Negri contrasts the
multitude with the people, understood here as the homogeneous the people as they
often appear in the politicians speeches:
Once we define the name of the multitude against the concept of the people,
bearing in mind that the multitude is a whole of singularities, we must translate
that name in the perspective of the body and clarify the dispositif of a multitude of
bodies. When we consider bodies, we not only perceive that we are faced with a
multitude of bodies, but we also understand that each body is a multitude.
Intersecting the multitude, crossing multitude with multitude, bodies become
blended, mongrel, hybrid, transformed; they are like sea waves, in perennial
movement and reciprocal transformation.[17]
In other words: the constituent parts of the multitude are always in motion and cant be

pinned down. The above quote seems to suggest that what the multitude needs to do
is re-appropriate the outward and inward signs of the revolutionary project. They have
to buy those pre-made punk jeans and turn them against the people that made them
and the culture industry as a whole. There is still the possibility for uprising.
The results of these uprisings, however, are not always as we would hope, as the next
example proves. In 2008, Netherlands-based artists Annette Krauss and Petra Bauer
were working on a piece that was to be part of a two-year series of events, lectures
and presentations around Dutch identity held at the Van Abbe Museum, called
Be(com)ing Dutch. Many of the artists invited were foreigners. Some, like Krauss, had
settled in the Netherlands years ago, but others, like Bauer, were complete outsiders.
Be(com)ing Dutch was intended to spark debate over the national identity of the
Netherlands. Since the early 2000s the Netherlands have undergone a dramatic shift
in political vision, partially due to two political murders. In this light, many of the
countrys most well-known characteristics, such as tolerance, multiculturalism and
freedom of speech have had to be questioned quite a bit. Be(com)ing Dutch intended
to do just that.
For their particular work, Bauer and Krauss decided to investigate the countrys most
well-known celebration, Sinterklaas, which includes white people in blackface as
servants of St Nicolas. Though they are said to be Italian chimney sweepers, pagan
devils or simply not negroid, the Surinamese, African and Antillean immigrants in the
Netherlands take offense. In their performance Read the masks. Tradition is not
given, Krauss and Bauer wanted to give these multicultural, post-colonial dissidents
the platform of the museum and the artistic act in order to question national
conventions. They wanted, so to say, to mobilize the multitude against the oppression
of a tradition that they felt was racist and functioned to endorse antiquated patterns of
behavior without questioning their origins.
The work Krauss and Bauer supposed would consist of a protest march through
Eindhoven, where the Van Abbe is based. The protesters would hold signs that
paraphrased Dutch protest slogans from the eighties, when more than a million people
protested against the positioning of nuclear weapons in the Netherlands, an event that
is still fondly remembered as the most successful protest in the country. Their whole
performance would have been dressed in a rather cheerful style. However, the idea of
two foreigners touching on one of the most taboo subjects in the Netherlands caused
such an outcry that both artists and the museum received (death)threats and the
march had to be canceled. In a way, the media coverage seemed like a great result,
because it lead to exposure for the black people who felt misrepresented. However, the
debate deflected from this and soon the backlash was enormous.
Particularly aggressive was the response by the same politicians and press who claim
art to be a left-wing hobby, mainly representatives of the crypto-fascist Freedom Party
(PVV)[18] and right-wing populist weblog GeenStijl. The arguments these people gave
did not go far beyond the banal observation that previous Teutonic interference in the
Netherlands had not been very beneficial.[19] In this very cramped debate, the artists
had lost before they started. Their national identity, political activism and artistic
methods were all ammunition for their critics, who managed to lure the debate further
and further away from Zwarte Piet and into the more vague terms of us and them.
In an essay dealing with the strained cultural relations in the Netherlands, Sven
Ltticken sharply observes that these populists were the true winners in this debate
because of this. They managed to create an other to agitate against, sustaining the
myth of a monolithic national culture under attack from a sinister coalition of
outsiders.[20] This coalition of course existed of the elite, intellectuals, the left and
the sponges of subsidy[21] that are the artists, museums and their supporters.
This social turmoil should not surprise us. With the rise of the concept of avant-gardes,
the art world has long had to validate itself against the conservative forces in society.
The biggest difference between now and seventy years ago is that with the sheer
amount of interference from the mass media, the availability of the internet and the
success of the culture industry, the overlap between art and politics is increasingly
difficult to map. As politics become more aesthetic, as we saw Ranciere claim, the
political understanding of what constitutes culture has to change as well. This is
particularly true for those forces that do not find any intrinsic value in the progressive
potential of art. As Ltticken says when explaining the mechanism populism uses in
order to manifest itself against the dangers of art:
In a reversal of Carl Andres dictum that art is what we do and culture is what is
done to us, the contemporary populist imagination regards art as what is done to
us while culture is what we do, or rather: what we simply are. Strictly speaking,
this means that culture would need to be defined without having recourse to art at
all. In fact, it is usually not that art as such is opposed to culture, only
contemporary art: the good art lies in the safe and idealized past, in the golden
age.[22]
When we examine this statement in relation to the performance, we find that Read the
masks. Tradition is not given touched exactly on an ossified idea of the national
identity upheld by the conservative elements in society. This national identity is the
result of an even more solid national culture that the arts should, according to rightwing populists and conservatives, not tamper with. The we in the above quote of
course excludes the artists, because they are cast as the other against which the
culture of society maintains itself.
The walls of the museum
Even when the critical artist aims his arrows at forces within the art world, as
institutional critique does, instead of a large-scale cultural phenomenon like
Sinterklaas, there is often only a limited space to maneuver before he or she finds a
wall of resistance that seems to be there to mask what should stay hidden. As we saw
Hardt point out earlier, corporate interest in the art world is more often than not based
on how the art world can be profitable or beneficial for a particular enterprise. Interest
in the arts in that case is little more than a form of public relations. This means that the

pretense of any truly moral reason for supporting the arts, such as the fact that art is
good for social cohesion, is often only there as a facade to hide the ugliness of the
company that supports the Biennale or museum.[23]
On the other side of the deal, the compromised institute loses quite a bit of freedom
and credibility. Any political engagement from the museum, or engaged art shown in
the museum, seems to function as very little more than a mask, or at most the joke of a
court jester, which might be slightly stingy to the powers that be, but is ultimately
harmless because we all know the jester is only there to hide the total power of its
ruler. Given that it is only the officially appointed fool who criticizes, and not someone
that needs to be feared, all can be ignored and nothing really has to change. It is
exactly this mechanism that makes critical art within the official institutional art world a
very difficult thing.
A second problem when thinking about the museum as a space of resistance, is that
the idea of institutional critique has been thoroughly internalized. One might say that
even when an institute is completely clear of social wrongs, the act of institutional
critique has been institutionalized itself and has thus been petrified. However, there are
some instances when this sort of work can still be very tumultuous and effective. A
recent example took place at the Tate Modern in 2010. The Laboratory of
Insurrectionary Imagination (Lab of ii) was invited to set up a workshop on art activism
inside the museum. Just before the workshop was to take place, the limits of its scope
were strictly set by the museum:
Ultimately, it is also important to be aware that we cannot host any activism
directed against Tate and its sponsors, however we very much welcome and
encourage a debate and reflection on the relationship between art and activism.
[24]

True to the spirit of activism, this refusal worked as an invitation and as material to
work with. Much as the Tate tried, the participants in the project targeted the museum
and its main sponsor, the much discredited BP. The result, a text made by the
participants in the Lab ii workshop saying art not oil, seemed to sum up quite well the
impasse this wrongly motivated form of corporate interest has lead to: a group of
companies that claim a moral imperative through manipulating the art world on one
side and a vast majority of artists, audiences and institutions that become implied in
what they wanted to oppose.
The Lab ii workshop was one of those rare instances, just like the project of Krauss
and Bauer, where the stirrings in the art world were felt until far outside the normal
reaches of this art world. That the Lab ii project was successful (there is talk of trying to
get BP out of sponsoring Tate Modern all together[25]), is mainly thanks to the fact that
the process of creating this project was too embarrassing for all the parties involved in
the initial censoring to oppose. Also, by directly handing over power to the participants
in the workshop and telling them to create what they want, the Lab ii could not be
directly held responsible for the artistic results. As such, any sort of response from the
corporate world could not be targeted at the art world as a conspiracy of outsiders, but
would have been directed at the participants, who are exactly the sort of common
man that BP needs in order to maintain its power. As such, this project was a very
good way of shuffling the deck and redistributing the sensible, as Ranciere would have
it, away from the corporation and towards the people.
As a matter of fact, Lab iis success lay exactly in the fact that the people involved were
representatives of the world outside the two poles of art and politics that define this
conflict of interests: they were the real people, the audience, the subjects and the
multitude of Hardt and Negri. Whereas Krauss and Bauer were directly affiliated with
political pressure groups and activists, Lab ii took the real people as their
collaborators. This is an important lesson for those that are looking for an art of
resistance. Perhaps we need to hear them more and not forget that empowering the
people can be a very useful and valid way of creating an art that tries to resist and
redefine what society is and should be.
This process of empowering neednt necessarily be a direct political empowering. It is
also possible to make works of art that simply function as agents of a more subversive
thought and less as direct political statements. We should not forget, however, that it is
important that this empowering should be an act of free will and not something
imposed by the powers that be. The moment it becomes that, an art of resistance
becomes exactly what it aims to oppose.
Rejection and acknowledgement

One way of doing this is by simply bypassing the power of the institutionalized art
world. Whether it is through busking, self-released music or home-based galleries, the
individual can definitely oppose those forces that are infinitely larger than him- or
herself. As the smallest possible social unit the individual is by far the most difficult one
for the reactionary forces of the culture industry or conservatism to compromise,
because the individual is (as the term suggests) indivisible, yet at the same time an
amorphous, intangible, free-floating constellation of influences (the mongrel in Negris
understanding the multitude). If the culture industry provides us with pre-made models
of behavior, these models only work when they are models for group conformity. As we
saw earlier, those who do not follow the rules of conformity are rendered other, the
them that the us of mass culture needs in order to maintain itself. The protagonist of
such cultural defiance, according to Baudrillard, is always in a suicidal position, but it
is a triumphant suicide: it is by the destruction of value, the destruction of meaning
(ones own, their own) that the other is forced into a never equivalent, ever-escalating
response[26] By accepting and embracing this, those who do not confirm find
incredible freedom, something akin to life after mass-cultural death.
What those dissidents need to remember is that they are no homogeneous group or
avant-garde movement, as the culture industry would like them to be. Any avant-garde

movement, inevitably turns what the Germans call salonfhig. In order for this not to
happen, it is important to acknowledge that any effective action should be just as
hyperventilative as the political status quo of the culture industry: always fleeting,
always moving, always imploding. This can be achieved by moving close to the
borders of the distribution of the sensible between art and politics and, like the culture
industry, try to suck what is beyond the border in like a vampire bat. Whether it is the
direct production of the social (relational art) or a redistributing of social power
(institutional critique or guerrila gardening)[27], these works are just on the other side
of the divide and think of ways invading the hostile territories of the culture industry.
But there is a fundamental difference between these works and what they mirror.
Because the culture industry tries to sell elements of prefabricated identities to the
people it subjects, it needs to understand the world in compartments, such as music,
internet, film, fashion and politics, that can be distributed to these subjects. Such
easy brackets are exactly what a socially relevant art tries to evade. Lyotard, in his
postscript to What is postmodernism?, states that eclecticism is the degree zero of
contemporary general culture[28] and that to him, this condition extends to all forms of
human interest, including science and technology, because to believe otherwise would
be to entertain an excessively humanistic notion of the mephistophelian functionalism
of sciences and technologies[29]. We generally mix and match what capitalism offers
us, but do not really leave its boundaries, because we understand the world by them.
Art seems to function in a similar way, but with one important difference, being that the
artists designs the rules of his practice post modo. Such a practise undermines all the
prefabricated categories that the culture industry thrives on. This in turn makes it
possible to make those compartments implode into a singularity that is ours to occupy.
Taking pride in being the mongrels Negri mentions when discussing the multitude is an
important second prerequisite for conquering the void of these brackets, not only in
culture, but also in science and other fields of human interest and knowledge[30].
Purposely transgressing them is an important way to reclaim power from a system that
speculates on the very particular specialisms of its subjects, as postfordism does. The
amateur, the dilettante and the fanatic are sometimes just as interesting as the
professional, because they fuel the discourse with things that are difficult to assimilate
for their inability to be neatly packed away in a pre-made social category and thus call
for curiosity and bewilderment. Their compliance in creating a culture for ourselves
should not be understood as the fifteen minutes of fame, or the freak show that the
culture industry forces upon us through tv shows as Big Brother or the X-factor, but
rather as a more subversive and less spectacular attempt at personal, unauthorized
discovery through immediate action. Above all, their share in the project should be
regarded with sincerity.
I disagree with Baudrillard when he wrote that beyond meaning, there is fascination,
which results from the neutralization and implosion of meaning.[31] It seems as if the
causality should be reversed. Fascination, if anything, leads to the implosion of socially
accepted meaning, because it transposes our minds to places and situations we have
not been. Working with a highly subjective and speculative fascination should thus
always be at the core of opposing a postfordist culture industry that benefits from its
subjects being highly specialized in its own, very well-monitored ways, because the
speculative cant be monitored. It just appears.
This omnipresence of the passive in postfordism is one of the true reasons why art
struggles so much to validate itself. In a society in which real poverty is a virtual
unknown, the first and most important objective of socialism, creating good labor
conditions for the masses, has been achieved. Second is fighting the complacency of
the working class. The simulacrae of flexibility and creativity cant hide that the real
divide in modern society is not that between the haves and the have-nots, but between
those who are chronically bored and those who arent. Postfordist labor conditions do
not hide the fact that most (post-)mechanized labor is still incredibly tedious, repetative
and mentally unfulfilling. However, it generates the wealth we need to see after all
financial needs, which is of course a source of comfort and thus a reason not to rebel
against all that is wrong.
In this respect postfordist labour is very different from all human activity that is born out
of fascination, such as the creation of art or the pursuing of science. This involvement
through fascination is why often the arts are being portrayed as awkward, decadent or
useless. It seems that by the mechanizations of capitalism, the working class is
alienated from the idea that human activity should be born out of that which fascinates
the individual in order to be fulfilling. For those who need the thumbs-up of the mass in
order to maintain their power base, it is easy to vent such frustrations, because it
creates the division between an us and a them that power thrives on. However, with
politics and art getting closer and closer and the boundaries between them blurring
ever more, it is also the extermination of a rival system that might hold an alternative
key to improvement.
All art can do to withstand this twisted logic is to activate the multitude and directly
engage in projects that redistribute the sensible, for better or worse. If it wishes to
oppose the culture industry in a relevant way, art needs to understand itself not as a
homogeneous system, but as a constellation of incongruous elements that cant be
forced into a whole and instead thrives on chaos, free fall and insecurity.
[1] Th. Adorno, The Culture Industry, page 79, Routledge Classics, New York 2010
edition
[2] Idem, page 91
[3] Idem, page 99
[4] Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadows of the Silent Majorities, page 54., Semiotexte,
2007 edition.
[5] the System of Objects, page 28
[6] J. Rancire: The Politics of Aesthetics, Continuum, London, 2010 edition

[7] The Politics of Aesthetics, page 12

[8] However, this aesthetization of politics has nothing in common with that envisaged
by Walther Benjamin, Ranciere claims, as it does not come from an urge to a perverse
commandeering of politics by a will to art but from an understanding of the aesthetic
as a system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.
The Politics of Aesthetics, page 13. See also page 32-34
[9] Being an artist in Post-Fordist Times, NAI Press, Rotterdam, 2009
[10] Same, page 47
[11] Same, page 48
[12] The Dutch populist, cryptofascist Freedom Party (PVV) claims this.
[13] For the debate on the Dutch culture cuts, see the NRC Handelsblad archive, for
instance. A very disturbing interview with Culture Secretary Halbe Zijlstra , entitled Van
Gogh did not get any subsidy either can be read in the edition of Vrij Nederland, 15th
of January 2011. Here, in a dazzling sweep of arrogance, Zijlstra first claims to be an
expert on culture and then claims not to go to openings, theater productions and
concerts much, as he does not want to be too invested in the subject of his office,
because he wants to make effective cuts on culture. These things are mutually
exclusive and even more awkward than having a vegetarian preside over the
production of steaks.
[14] For an thought-provoking, analysis of the state of contemporary art as a form of
insider trading, I suggest Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, Semiotexte,
London, 2005
[15] For more on sign value (here written as sing/value), see for instance: In the
Shadow of the Silent Majorities, page 64
[16] Tony Negri, Towards an Ontological Definition of the Multitude, from:
http://makeworlds.org/
[17] same
[18] Rob Riemen: de eeuwige terugkeer van het fascisme, 2010
[19] http://www.geenstijl.nl/mt/archieven/2008/11/fitna_the_zwarte_piet_edition.html
[20] Sven Ltticken: A Heteronomous Hobby: Report from the Netherlands. E-flux
Journal 22. 01/2011, from www.eflux.com
[21] http://www.geenstijl.nl/mt/archieven/2008/11/fitna_the_zwarte_piet_edition.html
[22] A Heteronomous Hobby
[23] Much of the early institutional critique of people like, Hans Haacke is based around
this, such as his seminal work Social Grease. However, we shall look into more
contemporary examples of similar practices.
[24] John Jordan, On refusing to pretend to do politics in a museum, 2010.Art Monthly
334: March 2010.
[25] same
[26] In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, page 82.
[27] How far this is still possible in contemporary society depends on whether one
follows those akin to Baudrillard or those in line with Hardt and Negri.
[28] Art in Theory, 1900-1990, page 1008-1015, Harrison & Wood (ed.), Blackwell
Publishers, Oxford, 1996 edition. Original essay by Lyotard published in 1984.
[29] same
[30] (cf. Lyotard)
[31] In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, page 105