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Introduction: The Concatenation of Art and
Revolution
Gerald Raunig
The preconditions could hardly be more different,
and yet the two texts converge in several paradigmatic aspects due to
specific biographic as well as to structural similarities in the cultural-political
strategies of the two very different authors. In the years around 1848,
under the vague influence of the ideas of Proudhon, Feuerbach and Bakunin,
Wagner included diffuse revolutionary tones beyond his tight, mostly musical
theory radius of reflection. Lunacharsky’s attitude developed in
attempting to bridge the gap between the utilization of art already brought
up by Lenin on the one hand, and the radical left-wing experiments of
the leftist Proletkult wing on the other, into a strangely conservative
position, which blocked not only socialist innovation, but also placed
itself vehemently before the cultural heritage of bourgeois society. Against
this backdrop of the ambivalence, volatility and diffusiveness of both
positions, it is understandable that there is a certain degree of congruence
in the two very different texts, especially where they are most relevant
for our considerations here. Wagner wrote “Art and the Revolution”
in 1849, the year of his exile in Zurich following the failure of the
Dresden Revolt, in which he had played a certain role, not only as a writer.
Starting from the “lament of our modern artists and their hatred
for the revolution,” the essay was intended to provide “a
brief survey of the outstanding moments of European art history,”
and despite the defeat in Dresden Wagner still clung to ideas and the
concept of the revolution. In 1848/49, however, a certain oscillation
in his position was already noticeable: Wagner’s stance, which was
even in revolutionary times clearly focussed on the conditions of art
production and on reforming the administration and financing of art, ranged
from radical democratic demands on the one hand to more moderate visions
of restoration and reconciliation with the German princes on the other. According to Wagner, the “thousand-year
long revolution of humanity,” which he said also crushed the Greek
tragedy together with the Athenian state, had now, at the time of writing
his essay on revolution, created a situation that first made the artwork
of the future possible. According to Wagner, art was to be understood
as “social product,” and more precisely as a “faithful
mirror image” of the “dominant spirit of the public.”
Accordingly, the dissolution of the Athenian state corresponds to the
downfall of the “great gesamtkunstwerk of the tragedy.”
An artwork, which would be able to encompass “the spirit of free
humanity beyond all limitations of nationalities,” could not emerge
from contemporary society and art as an “industrial institution.”
The drama as perfect art work could only be reborn from revolution: “True
art can only rise up from its state of civilized barbarism to its dignity
on the shoulders of our great social movement.” Wagner’s attitude,
swaying between cultural pessimism and revolutionary pathos, although
not yet ultimately decided in its tendency toward totality and authoritarianism,
already moved him to grand pronouncements in 1849: “Only the great
revolution of humanity, the beginning of which once crushed the
Greek tragedy, can attain for us this art work, because only the revolution
can newly and more beautifully, nobly, generally give birth from its greatest
depths to that, which it snatched from the conservative spirit
of an earlier period of more beautiful—but limited—education,
and devoured.” Anatoly Lunacharsky wrote his article “Revolution
and Art” in two steps, the first part in 1920 as a newspaper article,
the second as an interview on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of
the October Revolution. This means that the text was produced in a period
that was no longer permeated by the fresh energy of the Russian Revolution,
but in which the terminology and programs of this initial phase continued
to be characteristic. For Lunacharsky, in the conventional diction of
the revolutionary context, bourgeois art is initially denigrated as formalistic,
as having “advanced merely a whimsical and absurd eclecticism.”
Revolution, on the other hand, “is bringing ideas of remarkable
breadth and depth.” For this reason—and Lunacharsky is still
writing futuristically here in 1920—the highest cultural politician
of the Soviet Union anticipates “a great deal from the influence
of the Revolution on art, to put it simply: I expect art to be saved from
the worst forms of decadence and from pure formalism.” Conversely,
art is defined as a means of revolution, particularly because of its function
in agitating the masses and as the appropriate form of the expression
of revolutionary policies: “If revolution can give art its soul,
then art can give revolution its mouthpiece.” Lunacharsky and Wagner thus begin their analyses
from extremely different experiences, standpoints and even concepts of
revolution, yet surprising points of congruence are recognizable. Most
of all, there are two figures that they have in common, which not only
come up in both texts, but generally represent dubious twins in the different
conceptualizations of the relationship between art and revolution. For texts propagating the concept of “revolution”
in their titles, the first figure consists unexpectedly profanely in the
question of the function and financing of art, which characterizes
both texts as belonging to the genre of art policies. Contrary
to the general tendency of his essay, namely that only revolution engenders
the art of the future, Wagner proposes, especially toward the end of his
text, recognizing a sense of art production even in bad reality, that
real art is revolutionary precisely because it “exists only in opposition
to valid generality.” Instead of being anchored in the “public
consciousness,” it exists specifically in opposition to this, only
in the consciousness of the individual: “The real artist, who has
even now taken the correct stance, is thus even now capable of working
on this art work of the future, as this stance is indeed truly eternally
present.” The artist, indeed the “real artist,” thus
seems for Wagner to represent the medium of the transition from the bad
status quo to future aspirations. Since Soviet society after the revolution regarded
itself altogether as a society of transition, it might be expected that
something similar to Wagner’s idea of art would have to apply to
this society as a whole, that art on the other hand would be affirmed
as “conservative” or simply become obsolete. Yet in his article
Lunacharsky describes how art is still needed in the transition to socialist
society, in order to animate and promote revolutionary contents. The state
needs art, he maintains, for agitation, because its form has the advantage
of quasi synaesthetic effects over other forms: “Agitation can be
distinguished from propaganda by the fact that it excites the feelings
of the audience and readers and has a direct influence on their will.
It, so to say, brings the whole content of propaganda to white heat and
makes it glow in all colors.” This kind of foundation for the social significance
of art both before (Wagner) and after the revolution
(Lunacharsky) prepares the ground for the somewhat more trivial question
of resources for art production. Even though Wagner rejects the complaint
that artists have ended up impoverished particularly due to the revolution,
just as he describes future art as self-sustaining (“this
art does not follow money!”), once art practice has become
established as socially relevant—and what could be more relevant
than the revolution?—calls for its material support can be put forth
in the next step. “Let us begin . . . with the liberation of public
art, because, as I suggested above, an incredibly high task, a tremendously
important activity in our social movement is assigned especially to art.”
The goal of this kind of “liberation”—as Wagner unceremoniously
explains—would be most quickly reached by “liberating”
art from “the necessity of industrial speculation,” and if
the state and communality would decide to “recompense the artists
for their achievements as a whole, not as individuals.” Similarly Lunacharsky regrets the cultural-political
effects of the turn in Lenin’s economic policies strategy, the New
Economic Policy, which led in 1921 to the situation that the state “virtually
ceased buying and ordering” art, “and in fact, we can see,
almost side by side with the complete disappearance of the agitational
theater, the emergence of a corruptive theater, the emergence of the obscene
drinking place, which is one of the poisons of the bourgeois world.”
This kind of perennially contemporary-sounding criticism of the “return
to a miserable once-upon-a-time,” however, also according to Wagner
could be prevented by support by the state: “If you upright statesmen
are truly concerned to instill the turnover of society that you pursue
. . . with a vital pledge for a future, a most beautiful civilization,
then help us with all your powers. . . .” And as though this topos
were a universal one transcending the boundaries of bourgeois and socialist
society, Lunacharsky also affirms the desire toward the state: “If
our calculations are correct, and they are, then will the state, like
a capitalist, with its heavy industry and vast trusts in other branches
of industry, with its tax support, with its power over issue of currency,
and above all, with its vast ideological content—will the state
not prove ultimately to be far stronger than any private capitalists,
big or small? Will it not draw unto itself all that is vital in art, like
a grand Maecenas, truly cultured and truly noble?” Both positions, that of the “leftist right-winger”
Wagner and that of the “right-wing leftist” Lunacharsky, are
not without a certain peculiarity: whereas Wagner, after a failed revolution
and flight, paradoxically applies to the heads of state by the roundabout
way of art for the means for a new revolution, as a high-ranking member
of the government Lunacharsky seeks impotently to invoke the state as
a patron of the arts. In the framework of writing to legitimize art policies
it is not unusual that “cultural” particular interests (enriched
with the pathos of revolution) present themselves as universal, but Wagner
and Lunacharsky are early and striking high points here. Beyond narrowing the relationship between art
and revolution to financial issues, there is a second, almost contrary
figure in Wagner’s and Lunacharsky’s texts, which also frequently
recurs all the way up to the present: the topos of the totalizing
confusion of art and life. The spread of art to the streets, to the
masses, into life, slogans like “everyone is an artist,” “art
for everyone” and “from everyone,” transgressing the
boundaries of art into the social field and the political field—none
of these are the invention of the avant-garde of the 20th century, of
Beuys’ generation or of the cultural policies of the 1970s, but
they are instead, so to speak, trans-historical patterns of art practice
and politics: Tragedies would become celebrations of humanity, asserts
Wagner, education in a free society must become a purely artistic education,
“. . . and every man will become in some respect truly an artist.”
For Lunacharsky, in mass celebrations encircling all arts, art becomes
“the expression of national ideas and feelings.” In art-political
fantasies of totality, as both authors tend to propound, not only the
merging of all art genres into a total gesamtkunstwerk is called
for, but the integration of “the masses of the people”—still
within a cultural framework to begin with—is also tested. Contrary
to the contemporaneous experiments of the left-wing Proletkult to politicize
the theater—from the Theater of Attractions to the relocation of
the performances to the factories—the aestheticization of the political
is echoed in Lunacharsky’s enthusiasm for the “overall action”
of the mass spectacle, which necessarily produces effects of hierarchization,
structuralization and totalization. At an early stage and in a striking formulation,
Walter Benjamin pointed out not only this instrumental relation between
the aesthetical and the political, but in the first version of the “Art
Work” essay he had already called attention to the fascist attempts
at aesthetical mass organization and stressed that especially the mass
reproduction of the reproduction of masses particularly accommodates the
fascist strategy of aestheticizing political life: fascism gives these
masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. This is precisely what is at stake when “integrating”
the masses by means of art, not just from Riefenstahl to contemporary
mass productions, but already in Wagner and Lunacharsky’s concepts.
This kind of integrative conjunction of masses and art does not engender
assemblages of singularities, nor organizational concatenations seeking
to change production circumstances. Instead it deletes differences, territorializes,
segments and striates space, achieving a uniformity of the masses through
the means of art. In his essay, Lunacharsky even expresses his enthusiasm
for this kind of unification endeavor in the spirit of world peace: “And
just think what character our festive occasions will take on when, by
means of General Military Instruction, we create rhythmically moving masses
embracing thousands and tens of thousands of people—and not just
a crowd, but a strictly regulated, collective, peaceful army sincerely
possessed by one definite idea.” Some ten years later,
particularly against the background of the success of fascist mass events,
Benjamin wrote tersely: “All efforts to render politics aesthetic
culminate in one thing: war.” And Wagner’s idea of a totalizing
confusion of art and life takes exactly that track—also as a precursor
of later totalitarian concepts: “The tragedies will become celebrations
of humanity; freed from every convention and etiquette, the free, strong
and beautiful human being will celebrate the delights and the pains of
his love in them, carrying out the great sacrifice of love with his death
in dignity and sublimeness.” Contrary to models of totally diffusing and confusing
art and life, this book investigates other practices, those emerging in
neighboring zones, in which transitions, overlaps and concatenations of
art and revolution become possible for a limited time, but without synthesis
and identification. In the course of investigating exemplary practices,
which differ not only from the figure of diffusion but also from that
of synthesis, we find models of the sequence, the hierarchy and the unconnected
juxtaposition of art and revolution. These kinds of sequential
practices, from Gustave Courbet’s stormy metamorphosis from artist
to (art) politician in the Paris Commune to the continuous passage of
the Situationist International from the art field into the political field,
can already be taken as plans that are contrary to the pattern of art/life
synthesis. The same is true for the presumed subordination, the hierarchy
of revolution and art in the Soviet Proletkult, or the incommensurable
juxtaposition of art and revolution, as it occurred in the collision
between the Viennese Actionists and the student activists in 1968 as a
negative concatenation. Yet, what is beyond these kinds of sequences,
hierarchies and juxtapositions are the temporary overlaps, micropolitical
attempts at the transversal concatenation of art machines and
revolutionary machines, in which both overlap, not to incorporate one
another, but rather to enter into a concrete exchange relationship for
a limited time. The way and the extent to which revolutionary machines
and art machines work as parts, cogs of one another is the most important
subject of investigation in this book. The aspects of overlapping, as
examined in the chapters on the basis of historical examples, refer to
a tendency, a virtuality, a more-or-less, yet without dispersing into
the fields of fiction and utopia. The concatenation of revolutionary machines
and art machines is actualized in more or less well developed forms in
the practices that are analyzed here. In some cases the overlapping remains
murky or fragmentary, sometimes it is only a potentiality. Yet even where
the rapprochement of art and revolution fails, traces of the overlap can
still be recognized. This persistent element of failure is due to difficult
conditions at different levels. Artistic activism and activist art are
not only directly persecuted by repressive state apparatuses because they
operate in the neighboring zones of art and revolution, they are also
marginalized by structural conservatisms in historiography and the art
world. As a consequence of the reductive parameters of these conservatisms,
such as rigid canons, fixation on objects and absolute field demarcations,
activist practices are not even included in the narratives and archives
of political history and art theory, as long as they are not purged of
their radical aspects, appropriated and coopted into the machines of the
spectacle. In order to break through mechanisms of exclusion like these,
the as yet missing theorization of activist art practices not only has
to avoid codification inside and outside the conventional canon, it also
has to develop new concept clusters in the course of its emergence and
undertake to connect contexts not previously noticed in the respective
disciplines. For this philosophical and historiographical project
of analyzing and problematizing the concatenation of revolutionary machines
and art machines, a (dis-) continuity could be imagined, which persistently
eludes every narrative of an origin. This is certainly a history of currents
and bridges, outside the realm of flat notions of linear progress
or a movement from one point to another. As the overlaps of art and revolution
can not at all be described as a linear learning process, but have always
engendered new attempts (and often similar “aberrations” as
well) in new situations, the exposition of these attempts is in no way
indebted to a historical philosophical concept of linear progress. The
aim is to break open the constructed continuum of a homogeneous time,
not to compound the catastrophes—as which the progressive accumulation
of the rubble of the past appeared to Benjamin’s “Angel of
History”—with the reiteration of violence that makes up the
methods of historicist, objectivistic historiography. Neither filling
an empty, homogeneous time with objective facts nor a pure theory of emergence
are to be promoted here; instead the present becomings of revolutionary
machines are to be associated with a suitable singular “tiger’s
leap into the past” “in the open air of history.” Since pragmatic reasons nevertheless suggest providing
this investigation with a beginning and an end, I decided to utilize an
operative periodization, which I would like to call the “long 20th
century.” Although the majority of historians have characterized
this century as “short,” due to massive ruptures in the 1910s
(World War I and the October Revolution) and the erosion of socialist
societies in the 1980s and 90s, from the perspective of a poststructuralist
theory of revolutionary micropolitics it is evident that, on the contrary,
this century virtually bursts its temporality. Positing the “long
20th century,” however, also involves ruptures, which have specifically
not fixed this century exclusively as one of the battle between fascism
and communism, between capitalist and socialist forms of society, ultimately
as a teleology of the capitalist victory. It does not revolve around the
major key facts between two molar powers, but rather the molecularity
and singularity of events, which have produced various phenomena of the
approximation, referencing and overlapping of aesthetic and political
strategies. The long 20th century of specific concatenations
of art and revolution covers 130 years. It begins—as posited in
this book—with the struggles of the Paris Commune of 1871 and ends—provisionally
and mainly operatively from the perspective of the investigation—in
the turbulent summer of 2001 and the counter-globalization protests against
the G8 summit in Genoa. As with all delimiting definitions of processual
phenomena, it is just as easy to argue about the issues selected here
as about the choice of art practices that are discussed, to which other
authors might add different practices. With the molecules of my book,
however, I would like to focus on specific lines, of which the singular
specificity and their more or less explicit conjunctions and similarities
should become evident in the course of the text. Even though the search
for successful concatenations of art and revolution is inherent to these
lines, this is by no means intended to pave the way for revolutionary
romanticism or heroic legends of artists. No history of revolutionary
transgression can compensate for Gustave Courbet’s lonely end in
Switzerland or Franz Pfemfert’s in Mexican exile, for the execution
of Sergei Tretyakov in a Siberian gulag, for the criminalization and media
persecution of the participants in the action “Art and Revolution”
in Vienna, for the death of the Italian activist Carlo Giuliani and the
mistreatment not only of members of the PublixTheatreCaravan in prisons
around Genoa, for the women of the Paris Commune who were raped, sentenced
to death or deported by the tribunals of the counter-revolution, not to
mention the ten thousand dead in the Bloody Week of Paris. Examining the neighboring zones of revolutionary
machines and art machines can thus not be undertaken without reference
to the recurring figures of more or less tragic failure and unequivocal
disaster. Nor can it overlook the constantly immanent possibility of the
“revolutionary schizoid flows” tipping into “fascist
paranoid formations.” Richard Wagner’s ambivalence as a revolutionary
and anti-Semitic propagandist may be an example here, another is the turn
of a considerable number of German radical leftists after 1968 to various
right-wing and radical right-wing niches. In their appendix to Anti-Oedipe
Deleuze and Guattari particularly stress the two extreme poles of the
desiring-machine between revolution and fascism and the difficulty of
disentangling these extremes. Regarding the forms of exchange and connections
between revolutionary machines and art machines, Deleuze/Guattari examine
this problem on the basis of the most important avant-garde currents of
the 1910s, specifically by proposing a distinction between four attitudes
to machines exemplifying possible concatenations of art and revolution
and their various types of failure in marginalization or political perversion. According to this approach, Italian Futurism focuses
on the machine to increase national productive forces and create the national
new human being. Whereas what is new about this “new human being”
is primarily determined by a radically affirmative relationship to the
machine as a mechanism, the machine as a social assemblage is largely
ignored (or determined by sexism, chauvinism, nationalism, bellicism).
Indifference to all content seemed to make Italian Futurism open for every
possible ideology; nevertheless, due to a certain omission, namely the
non-problematization of production conditions, which remained just as
external to the technical machines as to the fantasized “a-human,”
“mechanized man,” Futurist practices created organizational
conditions for a fascist desiring-machine, as well as for nationalist
and militarist lines of argumentation among the (pseudo-) left-wing. According to Deleuze/Guattari, humanist anti-machinism
includes Surrealism (counter to Dadaism) and Charlie Chaplin (counter
to Buster Keaton); in the present investigation this current is covered
by Kurt Hiller’s post-expressionist “Activism/Spiritism.”
Humanist anti-machinism seeks to salvage desire in the midst of a mesh
of alienation felt to be total, and to turn this against the
machine. In the process, however, it largely remains caught in the pathos
of the spectacular representation of revolutionary ideas and revolutionary
tendencies without taking technology and its own position in the production
conditions into consideration. Roughly speaking, it thus opposes the a-human
formalist ambitions of Italian Futurism with a fixation on content or
with psychologism, but as its mirror image. At the same time, it supplies
the capitalist production apparatus with desire, but without changing
its form. In comparison, Russian Futurism, Constructivism
and Productivism address the conditions of production and envision the
machine in the context of new production conditions determined by collective
appropriation. However, the extent to which production conditions continue
to remain external to the machine here as well (as Deleuze and Guattari
allege, although I disagree), only becomes evident in a more precise analysis
of post-revolutionary art practices in the early Soviet Union. Between
the Cubist and Suprematist works, the early variations of Socialist Realism
and the Production Art of the leftist Proletkult wing, there is a broad
field of very different strategies, also in terms of overcoming the mechanisms
of the art field and various methods of becoming-machine on the part of
the recipients. Intensive attempts to organize the participants and involve
the audience in the production of the art machine distinguish at least
the radical leftist protagonists of the Proletkult, who later dropped
out of both Soviet and “western” art history, from earlier
avant-gardes. Especially the Agit-Theater of Attractions investigated
new links of human-machine, technical machines and social machines. With
all its utilitarian ambitions and all the technicism of a “Theater
of the Scientific Age,” here the production conditions are understood
as being immanent to the machine. Since the theater people subordinated
(had to subordinate) the machine to the Soviet state apparatus, however,
it was—and here I follow Deleuze/Guattari again—successively
appropriated, controlled and crushed by this apparatus. The molecular Dadaist machine, finally, subjected
production conditions to an examination with the desiring-machine, igniting
a cheerful deterritorialization beyond all territorialities of nation
and party with its anti-militarist, internationalist, anarchic practice.
As long as it undertook this risk within the framework of the strongest
attacks on art and under threat of beatings or forced labor for artists
specifically within the manageable and limited spaces of art, it remained
successful. Yet when it attempted to transgress the boundaries into the
political field, it failed, because “politics is not the strongest
facet of the Dadaists.” Following this problematization of the various machine qualities of the four most important avant-garde currents of the 1910s by Deleuze and Guattari, one could assume that it is easier to find connections between art and revolution on the side of “fascist paranoid formations.” Against this background—and on the basis of structurally founded lacunae and omissions in art historiography with regard to political aspects—there is a strong need for interweaving political aesthetics and a post-structuralist theory of revolution and for illuminating the other pole: to examine the endeavors more closely, which in one way or another could be called, in Deleuze/Guattari’s sense, “revolutionary flows.”
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