Contemporary Art, the Contemporary and Late Capitalism | C.J. W.-L. Wee
Abstract
Jodi Dean’s The Communist Horizon is both a jeremiad and an exhortation: fundamentally, an anti-capitalist jeremiad in favour of ‘the unrealized potentials of … collective struggle’ (2012: 17); and an exhortation to leave behind what she describes as a postmodern pluralist approach’ (3) to politics, an approach including ‘general inclusion, momentary calls for broad awareness, and lifestyle changes [as political strategies]’ (12). For politics, she prefers, instead, a move ‘toward militant opposition, tight organizational forms (party, council, working group, cell), and the sovereignty of the people over the economy’ (12).
Dean champions the reclamation of communism as the form of ‘revolutionary universal egalitarianism’ (19) for a world in which proletarianisation calls to mind less a social class—a key Marxist component of course—but now more names ‘a process of exploitation, dispossession, and immiseration that produces the very rich as the privileged class that lives off the rest of us’ (18).
The working class as the historical agent that will facilitate the change of capitalism into communism is dispensed with. In place, she offers the idea of the people as the rest of us: it is ‘an alternative to some of the other names for the subject of communism—proletariat, multitude, part-of-no-part’ (18–19). For Dean, the party and even the state are not dated vehicles for contemporary politics, as ‘a partisan sense of collectivity’ needs to be fostered, and some sort of organisation—the party—is required to help cultivate the desire for collectivity (12). The party, though, is not quite the instrument by which History’s iron laws are carried out, but becomes the experimental organisational form through which politics can truly be politics. What are we to make of Dean’s argument?
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Adorno, Theodor W. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991)
Bell, Daniel. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1996; 1976).
Clarke, John, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, and Brian Roberts. ‘Subcultures, Cultures and Class’, in Stuart Hall
and Tony Jefferson (eds.) Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2006; 1976), 9–74.
Dean, Jodi. The Communist Horizon (London: Verso, 2012).
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994;
.
Eyal, Jonathan, ‘IMF, World Bank, and now BRICS bank led by China?’, Straits Times (Singapore), 4 August
, A25.
Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
Flores, Patrick. Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (Singapore: National University of Singapore
Museum, 2008).
Hartley, John. ‘Creative Industries’, in John Hartley (ed.), Creative Industries (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005),
–40.
Hirst, Paul, and Grahame Thompson. Globalization in Question (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996).
Kee, Joan (ed.). Special issue on ‘Intersections: Issues in Contemporary Art’, positions: east asia cultures
critique 12.3 (Winter 2004): 599–788.
Khachaturian, Rafael. ‘Reading The Communist Horizon’, Paths to Utopia, 21 January 2013. http://pathstoutopia.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/the-communist-horizon/
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).
Lu, Xun. ‘The Divergence of Art and Politics’, in Kirk Denton (ed.), Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 328–334.
Marcuse, Herbert. An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). Available at https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/download/attachments/73535007/an_essay_on_liberation.pdf
McKenzie, Jon, Heike Roms, and C. J. W.-L. Wee (eds.). Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Ooi, Can-Seng. ‘Subjugated in the Creative Industries: The Fine Arts in Singapore’, Culture Unbound: Journal
of Current Cultural Research 3 (2011): 119–137.
Ooi, Can-Seng, and Birgit Stöber, ‘Creativity Unbound – Policies, Government and the Creative Industries’,
Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research 3 (2011): 113–117.
Smith, Terry, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee (eds.). Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity,
Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; Part I 1959, Part II 1964). Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Anchor Books Double Day, 1986; 1966). Tay, Jinna. ‘Creative Cities’, in John Hartley (ed.), Creative Industries (Malden. Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 220–
Wee, C. J. W.-L. ‘Creating High Culture in the Globalized “Cultural Desert” of Singapore’, TDR: The Drama
Review 47.4 (T180) (Winter 2003): 84–97.
Wee, C. J. W.-L. ‘“We Asians”?: Modernity, Visual Art Exhibitions, and East Asia’, boundary 2 37.1 (Spring
: 91–126.
Williams, Raymond. ‘Retrospect and Prospect, 1975’, in Communications, 3rd edition (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1976).
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.