boredom is always counter-revolutionary

Recently, I’ve been trying to spend less time idling on the internet, and I’ve been quite successful. I don’t have a television and whilst I read newspapers I have spent too long on media studies courses to become outraged or even particularly interested by much of their content, sensitive to the multitude of discrepancies between event and representation, and then between transmission and reception. The result of these efforts to retract myself from media saturation? Nothing to blog about!

I could bore you all with more research cast-offs (I’m working on a chapter on Alex Trocchi at the moment), and this will happen, but mostly I want this blog to provide me with a break from the day job, so to speak (this is where any of my friends laugh at the implication of my having a day job). There is also a problem in reporting and reviewing ‘real-life’ events, as the reader is reliant in the first instance on my representation of the event, and I am nothing if not biased. With that caveat in mind, I’d like to say a couple of things about the SWP’s recent Marxism 2009 event, and specifically their treatment of cultural and artistic matters.

One talk – sorry, meeting – that I was particularly looking forward to attending was John Molyneux’s ‘How do socialists look at art?’, mostly due to that intriguing title (although I am quite aware of the trick of using a provocative title to disguise a less-than-provocative talk). I was rather disappointed, then, when John began by saying that he wasn’t out to tell socialists how to look at art; and as the talk progressed it became apparent that John didn’t really have much to say other than the assertion that, historically, a lot of art has had some revolutionary significance. I was also disappointed by John’s initial dismissal of Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God as evidence that contemporary art is made by and for the super-rich. In material terms, John is probably correct here, but there is more to it than that one-dimensional reading. Briefly: Hirst’s piece is a skull, an emblem of death; and it is called ‘For the Love of God’, which is something you say when exasperated – this is clearly a piece that takes the piss out of its very buyers! I don’t consider that to be a particularly subtle or difficult message (perhaps it should have been more covert, as I don’t believe the piece has yet sold outright); meanwhile, a Banksy image is praised as a ‘fantastic political statement’.

Whether a piece of art is deemed politically effective for the Left or not, it seems to me, is really a moot point, as contemporary art exists in a vortex of commodification, recuperation and irony. Art with a capital A has been commodified: no shit. Nor is the issue to determine how the Left should look back at the artwork, or what the Left’s art should look like.  I found it incredible that in the discussion following John’s talk, people – sorry, comrades – were asking what should be the socialist view of art, or how a socialist art could be arrived at prior to the overthrow of capitalism. That Trotsky’s opinion was peddled out was rather less surprising – the problematic ‘dictatorship of the proletariat in politics/ anarchy in art’ – but that the prioritisation of politics over art needed emphasising seemed absurd, not because that hierarchy should be taken for granted, but that art and politics can be considered as such hermetic categories. ‘We’ll do some politics now, and this evening we’ll do some art’.

My other main gripe with the conference was that Terry Eagleton was put into the IoE’s Jeffery Hall to speak about ‘Socialism and Culture’ whilst Martin Smith’s ‘How do we stop the BNP today?’ was in the larger Logan Hall. I tried to attend the former, and upon finding the hall full, attended the latter, where the hall was a third empty. I guess that’s a good demonstration of prioritising politics over art, though.

Just so this post isn’t all whinging, and to try to offer my own opinions regarding some of these issues, I should just mention what I did enjoy about the conference. The answer: David Harvey, whose explanation of the current financial crisis at times evades me, yet whose conceptions for ‘what we should do’ (the SWP say that a lot) seem realistic, reasonable and without dogma. At one point, although speaking principally about economics, Harvey said something along the lines of art’s function being to proffer alternative ways of living, which, Harvey argued, is precisely what needs to happen regarding urbanism and moving beyond capitalism. This is a deceptively instrumental approach to art, as the theatre of experimentation for future living. The point is similar to Jacques Ranciѐre’s notion of art distributing the sensible: art’s potential is to reveal subjectivities elsewhere obscured. Harvey, on this issue and more generally regarding resistance to capitalism and to neoliberal responses to the financial crisis, clashed (gently) with more orthodox SWP members, who were insistent that working class solidarity should always come first and foremost. Harvey doesn’t deny the importance of solidarity, but his configurations of art and economics nicely downplay such a reliance on ideology: he draws heavily from Marx, certainly, but he doesn’t ask that we come together under the name of Marx, or Lenin, or Trotsky, or whoever. The social revolution of the twenty first century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future.