Modern Times by Jacques Ranciere

Author:Jacques Ranciere
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

This ‘discovery’, ‘disconcerting’ for anyone who seeks to reduce the movements of dance and those of industry to a single principle, makes identifying free movement, industry and communism even more problematic. The conflict of modernities then becomes a conflict of communisms. On the one hand, the non-differentiation between means and ends, specific to free movement, seems to define communism as Marx conceived it in the 1844 Manuscripts: communism is a form of society where the generic activity of human beings – labour – has become an end in itself, rather than a mere means of survival. This is the sort of communism realized in the common movement that unites them by the gestures of cigarette factory workers, typists, telephone exchange employees, the manicurist or film editor, which is symbolized by the movements of the three dancers. But communism in motion has a condition: that each of these actions is disconnected from its particular temporality and from the particular ends it pursues. The communist industrial symphony pursues no end; it produces nothing but itself. In this, obviously, it is quite contrary to the strategic vision of the communist apparatus. For the latter, the communist identity of ends and means is a goal to be attained; and it is, first of all, necessary to establish its material conditions. Factory machines, workers’ gestures and artistic performances are not equivalent expressions of free movement. They are tools which, in their various ways, serve to create the conditions for the communism of the future.

This opposition has readily been regarded as a manifestation of the eternal conflict between freedom of artistic creation and political authority. It is more accurate to see it as the conflict between two communisms, between two ways of constructing the very temporality of communism. From the standpoint of the party-state, communism cannot be anticipated. It can only exist as a result whose conditions must first be established. Pitted against this is an aesthetic communism for which, on the contrary, communism can exist only if it has first been anticipated in the construction of a common sensorium of equality. We know how this conflict ended up being resolved. The builders of ‘real’ – that is, state – communism urged artists to abandon the pretension to forge the sensible forms of the new community. For them, there could be but a single time – that of the before and the after, of means and ends, of work and rest. The task of Soviet artists was to assist the party’s strategy by representing the workers’ exertions, and entertaining them after their exertions. In short, they had to follow the logic of the representative regime of the arts and the hierarchy of temporalities on which it rested.

State repression of the modernist project paved the way for its ideological and artistic repression, which has, ironically, assumed the name of modernism. What is striking in Clement Greenberg’s analysis is the way that he erases the dramaturgy of temporalities at the heart of the historical modernist project, to leave

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