@e_flux wrote:
Continuing the discussion from STRIKE ART, Question 1: Let's talk about Yates McKee's 2016 book on art, activism & Occupy:
![]()
Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition
by Yates McKee, London & NYC: Verso Books, 2016(Read a snapshot of the book here: STRIKE ART EXCERPT)
Question 2: Occupy and 21st Century Left politics? OWS: a prefigurative aesthetics of resistance?
What do we make of the undeniable and explicit organizing function that artists and cultural workers have assumed within various Left movements since at least the mid-1980s, though most explicitly within Occupy and its afterlife? Yates McKee vividly documents this tendency throughout Strike Art (136), but he also goes a step further by suggesting that an indispensable “artistic ethos” is at work within the “prefigurative” Left politics of the early 21st century (62). If this analysis is correct, then it requires a much smaller conceptual leap to suggest that this same artistic ethos could be deployed as common ground drawing together very diverse extra-parliamentary Left movements and organizations. But does art offer the emancipatory Left a long-lost “enabling fiction” or ontological imaginary sufficient to do battle in the messy reality of contemporary neoliberal society? Or is it the “mytho-poetic” (132) imaginary of prefigurative politics that is now informing contemporary art practice? After all, many of us know just how difficult it is to get even a few artists to work together on a project. But is the question at a deeper level, perhaps involving an underlying ethos or even ontological condition unique to contemporary society and neoliberal capitalism? Or is this an example of an ideological "méconnaissance" at play?
BACKGROUND TO QUESTION:
In my reading of Strike Art, McKee somewhat cautiously proposes a solution to a very challenging political conundrum. How does one articulate a common political thread shared by diverse extra-parliamentary movements that make up much of the Left today? Notably, these sundry activisms do not have a common political platform, nor do they even resemble the socialist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, or anti-colonial movements of past decades. The common enemy of what Bosteels calls the Speculative Left may indeed be racism and a flagrantly unjust economic system, but with few exceptions such as Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, or the Broad Front in Uruguay, these US activisms share only partially overlapping ideological, socio-economic or ethnic positions and vary in focus from environmental justice and Black Lives Matter, to anti-gentrification activism and debt relief campaigns. McKee’s Strike Art suggests that this multivalent Left activism might be more coherent than it appears. Occupy is his prime example because of the affinity developed between these diverse activist threads around three shared features. The first of these include anarcho-communist notions of autonomous self-organization and an unreserved investment in the transgressive tactics of civil disobedience. But it is the third characteristic of these anti-party political formations that is central to our discussion: the so-called “prefigurative politics” of OWS. McKee first draws our attention to David Graeber’s description of prefigurative politics in which the process of visualizing a non-alienated society heralds its future actualization. Graeber writes
“Surely there must be a link between the actual experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into being, individually or collectively, and the ability to envision social alternatives”
McKee then does something striking. He links Graeber’s notion of prefigurative politics with avant-garde art aesthetics, pointing out that:
“Graeber drives home the ethnographic surrealist dimension of his thought when he emphasizes the interplay between artists and indigenous people in the practice of what he calls “prefigurative politics … Graeber’s text is an essential point of reference in tracking the political and artistic ethos that would inform Occupy, an ethos that, as we have seen, developed in relative autonomy from the art world itself even while drawing nonacademically on the discourses of avant-garde art such as Dada, surrealism, and the Situationists.” (61-62).
McKee’s argument about the aesthetic dimension of pre-figurative politics is reinforced throughout Strike Art including for example when he references the late 1960s street theater of the San Francisco Diggers (28), or when he cites the integral creative practices of ACT UP in which artists were essential “not merely as decorators or designers, but rather as organizers and tacticians in their own right.” (41). And perhaps most emphatically he argues that Occupy might be considered a work of art itself:
“Occupy as a totality—rather than just this or that phenomena within it—can itself arguably be considered an artistic project in its own right, assuming we reimagine our sense of what art is or can be.” (27)
Posts: 7
Participants: 5