The anti-capitalist photomontages of Josep Renau

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About a month ago, I stumbled across Valencian avant-garde artist Josep Renau’s series of photomontages from the 1950s called The American Way of Life. I was (and continue to be) struck by how timely and relevant the anti-capitalist critique is. The global economic crisis of 2008 coincided with the 100^th anniversary of his death. Many retrospectives commented on the visionary content of his work. To be sure, the excesses of consumer society and Wall Street are no longer solely American, but global.

The Post-political Context and the Role of the Artist

Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar’s public intervention titled “Questions, Questions” (Barcelona, 2009).

Autonomist Marxists refer to our present situation as post-political (e.g., Lotringer, Marazzi and Bowman). Within this post-political context, Santiago López Petit, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona, argues that the often repeated question “who has the right to the city?” (Lefebvre 1968: reformulated in Mitchell 2003) no longer makes sense:

[…] en la medida en que la afirmación “el espacio es político” se hace problemática…la propia lucha en el marco del derecho—en nuestro caso “el derecho a la ciudad”—se hace también problemática. (“Espacio público o espacios del anonimato”)

[[…] in the extent to which the assertion “space is political” becomes problematic…the very struggle within the framework of rights—in our case “the right to the city”—also becomes problematic.]

The urban movements that attempt to fight for certain rights in the public space of cognitive capitalism, like the fight for the right to decent housing in Barcelona, no longer are able to give their collective speech public meaning because their speech constantly passes through mediating institutions (state and corporate forms).

Against this particular state of society, Brian Holmes, in his book Escape the Overcode, argues that the role of the artist is “to mark a possible or real shift with respect to the laws, the customs, the measures, the mores, the technical and organizational devices that define how we must behave and how we may relate to each other at a given time and in a given place” (13-14). Critical Art Ensemble, a U.S. collective that explores the relationships between art and political activism, agrees and adds that “sign manipulation with the purpose of keeping the interpretive field open is the primary critical function of the cultural worker” (The Electronic Disturbance 139). Paris-based sociologist and social theorist Mauricio Lazzarato takes the position that “the activist is simply someone who introduces a discontinuity in what exists. She creates a bifurcation in the flow of words, of desires, of images, to put them at the service of the multiplicity’s power of articulation…” All three describe how creativity can be used as a line of flight from neoliberal control.

Works cited

The Electronic Disturbance. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1994.

Lazzarato, Maurizio. “Créer des mondes: Capitalisme contemporain et guerres ‘esthétiques’.”Multitudes 15 2004.

López Petit, Santiago. “Espacio público o espacios del anonimato.” Barcelona Metropolis: Revista de información y pensamiento urbanos.

Lotringer, Sylvère, Christian Marazzi, and Betsy Bowman. Autonomia: Post-political Politics. New York: Columbia University, 1980.

Mitchell, Don. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York:Guilford Press, 2003.

Does the Symbolic Have Material Consequences?

The visual poetry of Catalan Joan Brossa (1919-1998) provides some insight.

Creativity in Real Time

Karl Marx views society through the lens of dialectics in which social fields are organized according to the binary opposition base/superstructure or the material/the symbolic. For Marx, economic changes produce transformations in the fields of art, philosophy, morality, science and religion, and not vice versa. Deleuze and Guattari’s social fields (which they refer to as assemblages) also consist of material modifications and symbolic metamorphoses. However, there are several key differences. First, Deleuze and Guattari exchange the terms “base” and “superstructure” for “content” and “expression.” Second, they disagree with Marx that the material moving forces of society are the tools of production. For Deleuze and Guattari, the “intermingling of bodies in a society” (A Thousand Plateaus 90) takes precedence over tools and goods. Borrowing from the Stoics, Deleuze and Guattari understand content to be the actions and passions of bodies “using the word ‘body’ in the broadest sense, as applying to any formed content” (86). Third, they challenge Marx’s contention that the relation between content and expression is dialectical. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari argue that there is a “continual passage from one to the other” (87) made possible by the independence of each form. The independence of content and expression does not mean that there is no relation between the two, just that the relation is not causal. The Stoic notion that the expressed of statements “apply to bodies, and only to bodies” (86) is what links expression to content. In other words, expression can only relate to content and nothing else. Fourth, the form of expression cannot be reduced to a linguistic system in which linguistic factors are treated as constants and considered independently of nonlinguistic factors because, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “if the external pragmatics of nonlinguistic factors must be taken into consideration, it is because linguistics itself is inseparable from an internal pragmatics involving its own factors” (italics in original, 91). That is, if the notion that language as system of constants is called into question, it is impossible to distinguish the variables of expression from the variables of content.

What does that mean for us? Creativity in real time can move bodies to action. Living the image, as Spanish activist Leónidas Martín would say, can disrupt the capitalist system. In this highly entertaining video (in English), Leónidas Martín describes several examples of creative activism in Barcelona that have linked content and expression with material and social consequences.

Works cited

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Print.