Lazzarato’s Political Onto- Aesthetics (original) (raw)
Related papers
Lazzarato and the Micro-Politics of Invention
Theory, Culture & Society, 2014
Drawing from the writings of Deleuze and Foucault, various forms of political vitalism have emerged as one of the most dominant approaches to radical politics today. However, there has been considerable disagreement over the terms on which a debate over vitalism’s perceived utility should be carried out. This has allowed for a great confusion over what is at stake in the vitalist controversy. This article argues that an analysis of the most recent works of Maurizio Lazzarato, one of the most prominent contemporary political vitalists, assists in clarifying the terms of the debate and provides a rebuttal of several of the most common criticisms of political vitalist thought. Through his engagement with the work of French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, Lazzarato has developed a distinct variety of neo-monadology that analyses the world in terms of micro-psychic forces. On the basis of this ontology, Lazzarato constructs a politics of multiplicity consisting of open strategies of experimentation and creation, which he argues offers the best form of resistance to neo-liberal capitalism. It is argued that Lazzarato is able to provide an answer to the three common charges that vitalism is a mysticism, suffers from a lack of normative foundations, and has an incoherent political programme. The article concludes with a reflection on the extent to which political vitalism is still haunted by a failure to give an account of and come to terms with the role of negativity in politics.
The Art of the Real: Visual Studies and New Materialisms
Art of the Real is devoted to registering the materialist turn of contemporary theory in visual studies. For many years, visual studies was dominated by post-structuralist theory and its attendant nominalism. More recently, however, the materialism of Slavoj Žižek, the realism of Gilles Deleuze, especially as imputed by Manuel de Landa, and Alain Badiou has disrupted this status quo. Today, we are more likely to take for granted the relevance of biology and the natural sciences, while the return of Marx has been more serious than countenanced by Derrida or Foucault. This book considers visual studies and the questions that have led to the new materialism, its ontology and its relation to contemporary politics. While a good deal of work has promoted a materialist agenda at the same time that scholars in art history and visual studies have felt liberated by the call to attend to objects, materials and “materiality,” no publication has yet treated this move for its meta-theoretical commitments. This volume does this by addressing the conditions that have brought about the turn to materiality, the ontological commitments that follow on from new materialist metaphysics, and the political implications wrought by these commitments.
Against Marxist Aesthetics (2017)
Historical Materialism, New York , 2017
to Zizek, the most influential Marxist aestheticians have tended to assume the legitimacy of an analytic outlook in which art shows up as noteworthy primarily as a bearer of sensuously enformed cognitive or semantic significance-roughly, what Arthur Danto has called "embodied meaning." Disagreements among these theorists (which are numerous and often bitter) tend to center on whether this or that artwork has significance that is utopian, critical, revolutionary, reactionary, or whatever. But underlying these disagreements is the shared presupposition that art's meaning is what's centrally at issue, and that, moreover, this meaning is least partly latent or veiled, and thus awaits disclosure by a penetrating critic and due appreciation by a duly enlightened audience. Let "Marxist hermeneutics" serve as a label for this broad current. Our aim is to demonstrate some of the inherent limitations of form-, content-, and reception-centered (broadly: meaning-based or "semanticist") Marxist hermeneutics by arguing against the importance, relative to Marxism's defining emancipatory aims, of art-as-enformed-meaning. Dethroning hermeneutics as the core of Marxist art theory is necessary if we are to attain a clearer understanding of both the role of art in revolutionary practice and the role of revolutionary practice in the development of humanity's artistic powers. We focus here on music. In this sphere, Marxist hermeneutics is something of an exegetical carnival. Adorno demonstrates how serial music is an index of totalitarian rational administration; Bloch teaches us to hear utopia singing to us in the tonal masterworks of the western canon; Zizek defends the experience of the "Wagnerian Sublime," an experience in which, allegedly, "We BECOME (identify with) the OBJECT which we were deprived of, so that our subjective identity is a repository of the traces of our lost objects"; and practitioners of Cultural Studies have deciphered the manner which the sub-cultural politics of representation is operative on the sonic surface of punk rock. The sheer variety and inconsistency of widely-circulated claims about musical meanings (and, characteristically, about the impact these meanings have on something called our "subjectivity") is bewildering. Worries about meaning occasion much hand-wringing. Is jazz reactionary/regressive (as Adorno thinks) or progressive/liberatory (as many members of the Birmingham school of cultural studies think)? We are made to think that much hinges on the answer to this question. Before rushing to take sides in these Marxist family feuds, we should pause to consider the commitment to which all the feuding parties subscribe: the view that the semiotic and referential relationships in which a given artwork participates are to be taken as the primary factors by which to situate the artwork in a normative framework that is authoritative in, and regulative of, the society that produced it. For example, to cite another of Adorno's celebrated theses, popular songs are enmeshed in the normative framework of commodity production
Do participatory art forms and relational aesthetics constitute a background for the growingly interactive culture of today? Do they express the same ideals or are they different ideologies? Why is modern and contemporary culture so concerned with the spectator, be it the art lover, TV audiences, or internet users? Why, in spite of their different scopes, are media (art included) so interested in the activation and mobilization of the receiver? Mass media culture secretly dreamed of the full presence and commitment of the spectator, boldly proclaimed as partner by modern and contemporary art and finally given effective participatory tools by digital culture. Are we truly becoming a society of producers and creators? Or rather a different type of consumers? What is the role of art in the era of the new culture economy, where creativity equals capital?
The cinematic mode of production: towards a political economy of the postmodern
Culture, Theory and Critique, 2003
Cinema marks a profound shift in the relation between image and text-indeed it is the watershed of the subjugation of language by image. Cinema as an innovative shift in both industrial capitalism and cultural practice marks, therefore, the restructuring of language function in accord with the changing protocols of techno-capitalism. The 'talking cure', otherwise known as psychoanalysis, is itself a symptom of cinema. As a precursor for TV and computing and Internet, cinema transacts value transfer across the image utilising a production process that can be grasped as founded under the rubric of what I call 'the attention theory of value'. The deterritorialised factory that is the contemporary image, is an essential component of globalisation, neo-imperialism, and militarisation, organising, as it were, the consent (ignorance of) and indeed desire for these latter processes. Thus 'cinema', as a paradigm for image-mediated social production, implies a cultural turn for political economics. It also implies that it is the interstitial, informal activities that transpire across the entire surface of the socius as well as in the vicissitudes of the psyche and experience that are the new (untheorised) production sites for global capital-and therefore among the significant sites for the waging of the next revolution. But all the story of the night told over, And their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancies images, And grows to something of great constancy; But, howsoever, strange and admirable. (A Midsummer Night's Dream (the movie)) The Cinematic Mode of Production The term 'Cinematic Mode of Production' (CMP) suggests that cinema and its succeeding, if still simultaneous, formations, particularly television, video, computers and Internet, are deterritorialised factories in which spectators work, that is, in which they perform value-productive labour. In the cinematic image and its legacy, that gossamer imaginary arising out of a matrix of sociopsycho-material relations, we make our lives. This claim suggests that not only do we confront the image at the scene of the screen, but we confront the logistics of the image wherever we turn-imaginal functions are today