Interpassivity: The Aesthetics of Delegated Enjoyment by Robert Pfaller

Author:Robert Pfaller [Pfaller, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, General
ISBN: 9781474422956
Google: rjZYDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2017-06-02T01:12:00.966000+00:00

5

Against Participation

1 Participation: A Spontaneous Philosophy of Art that Blocks Art Production

Participation is on the agenda – perhaps even more than ever before. But its pervasive presence may possibly be the harbinger of its impending disappearance. Participation is being talked about not only in art, but also in everyday culture. It has even been introduced into the manifestos of political parties regarding how representative democracy should work. In all of these areas, there is hardly another term that better serves to describe current emancipatory claims. However, it is questionable whether a term such as this, which is used in such an inflationary and ambiguous way and is fraught with desires and hopes, is in a position to provide solutions – including solutions for the many various problems for which it is likewise called in: problems related to the lack of co-determination in public matters, problems related to access to an increasingly monopolised media public, problems related to how art deals with its public, etc.

What is worse, it may also be that on a theoretical level, like all hollow phrases, this term merely serves to feign solutions where problems first have to be precisely formulated in order to become soluble, and that on a practical level it creates a trap, to the extent that it passes off precisely that which is in truth the problem itself as solution and liberation – namely, a form of the affirmative commissioning of individuals under the conditions of postmodern ideology.

If with regard to art I consequently assemble objections to the term ‘participation’, it is not to deny the entire genre of participatory art its right to exist. That would be unreasonable, since first, every genre of art succeeds in producing interesting works, even when the genre as a whole may appear to be questionable. And secondly, that sort of thing is in general not theory’s responsibility: theory does not need to tell art what it should do. Art learns very well from its own experiences – its successes, its misfortunes and its necessary, from time to time very fruitful, failed experiments. But theory may tell art what it does not need to think. It can help art to rid itself of theoretical cumbersomeness and sentimental attachments, which as hip zeitgeist watchwords or words of hope may have had for a while an encouraging effect, but which as descriptions of that which art actually achieves and can achieve are more of an obstacle to artistic practice.

It occurs time after time not only in art but also in the sciences and in philosophy that – as Louis Althusser showed – self-reflection on these practices produces misleading ‘spontaneous philosophies’. These supply a distorted image – for the most part formulated in a fashionable ‘borrowed language’ (borrowed, for example, from curators and other prompters) – of what has succeeded in the respective practice. However, this kind of self-image reacts upon the respective practice; it moulds it according to its own image and thus poses an enormous danger to its future success.

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