Artists and the Crisis of Solidarity

Dave Beech

Artists do not have a great reputation for solidarity. The mythic image of the isolated
individual in the studio contrasts perfectly with the tropes of solidarity: picketing strikers,
anti-war marchers, the encampments of Greenham Common and Occupy. Recent theoretical
and activist challenges to what Caroline Jones called the “romance of the studio” has
disclosed the scale and variety of interchanges necessary for the production and circulation of
art and the army of unheralded non-artist art workers and therefore resulted in an extension of
solidarity between artists and the art workforce more generally. This is unusual. More
typically, artists establish relations with non-artists without making appeals to solidarity. For
instance, art’s social turn was understood mainly as a project to socialise the artist through
methods of convivial and agonistic participation not networks of solidarity. What would it
take for art to become an infrastructure of solidarity?

The age of rightwing populisms that set people against one another, and the age of multiple
overlapping privileges and micro-aggressions, is not the epoch of solidarity. If solidarity is
needed more than ever during the period of its crisis, we can say that solidarity today is at
once among the most urgent political projects and among the least likely to succeed. The
current crisis of solidarity has been articulated best by those critical movements that emerged
after 1968 which shattered the anti-capitalist hegemony of the white working class. However,
it is wrong to blame the absence of solidarity on identity politics because the institutions,
ways of life and resources of the workers movement collapsed under the weight of the
rightwing backlash against the post-war settlement, not because a wider spectrum of voices
made themselves heard.

It is more difficult to imagine art as a site of solidarity when political solidarities are in retreat
and the political theory of solidarity has been out of favour for so long. The liberal tradition
has always scrupulously administered a blindspot towards solidarity. In 1989 Richard Rorty’s
“liberal utopia” of contingent solidarity, or solidarity without commonality, is as close as it
gets. Solidarity is strongest, he claimed, “when those with whom solidarity is expressed are
thought of a ‘one of us’, where ‘us’ means something smaller and more local than the human
race”. Ten years later, even this half-baked definition of solidarity appeared starry-eyed. In
his final contribution to Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, in dialogue with Butler and
Laclau, Zizek characterised the difference between the right-wing intellectual and its left-
wing counterpart in the years immediately after the the collapse of the communism in terms
of their attitude to solidarity. The former, he said, “rejected all forms of social solidarity as
counterproductive sentimentalism” whereas the latter was a “deconstructionist cultural critic”
who subverted the existing order, including ideas about solidarity, and therefore “served as a
supplement” to the project of the right.

But seriously, it is fair to say that while neoconservatism and neoliberalism set about
patiently to dismantle the legal, economic and cultural prerequisites of left-wing solidarity,
political theorists on the left consciously displaced the established discourses of solidarity
with more philosophically robust discussions of hegemony, identity, placed-based politics,
community, the counter-public sphere, agonism and intersectionality, among other things.
Critics can be suspicious of solidarity as a method for establishing allegiances to power.
Judith Butler, for instance, observed how the demand for solidarity within political
movements has “forced people to sacrifice their sense of self for the sake of the group”. More
generally, it is fair to say, as Jodi Dean does in her book Solidarity of Strangers, that “the
identity politics debate has exposed the problems of essentialism and exclusion, problems
which have been misinterpreted as caused by the very goal of solidarity”.

Both of these points were fully articulated by bell hooks in her pathbreaking essay on
‘sisterhood’ in the mid-1980s. Here hooks said “black women were quick to react to the
feminist call for Sisterhood by pointing to the contradiction that we should join with women
who exploit us to help liberate them. The call for Sisterhood was heard by many black
women as a plea for help and support for a movement that did not address us”. If the problem
with sisterhood exposed by hooks corresponds exactly to the critique of solidarity from
identity politics, for hooks the problem was a lack of solidarity in the feminist movement.
“Women do not need to eradicate difference to feel solidarity”, she said, adding “Solidarity is
not the same as support. To experience solidarity, we must have a community of interests,
shared beliefs and goals around which to unite, to build Sisterhood. Support can be
occasional. It can be given and just as easily withdrawn; Solidarity requires sustained,
ongoing commitment”.

Although hooks builds a powerful case for the political merits of solidarity, it is Jodi Dean
who has done most to theorise solidarity. Dean distinguishes between different political
conceptions of solidarity. She identifies three main conceptions: “conventional solidarity”,
which arises out of common interests; “affectional solidarity”, which is a narrower form of
support based on feelings of mutual care and concern limited to friends; and “reflective
solidarity” to name that kind of solidarity that is formed through discursive interconnections
in which differences emerge through processes of recognition and response, discussion and
questioning, and, openness and accountability. Conventional and affective solidarities are
inherently exclusive. Affective solidarities are not extended beyond an intimate network,
while conventional solidarities “respond to the value pluralism of contemporary multicultural
societies by increasing the demands made on group members, by rigidifying identity
categories”. Dean’s concept of reflective solidarity is formulated precisely to overcome these
difficulties.

The principal difference between conventional solidarity and reflective solidarity for Dean
turns on the function of dissent within a group. “In contrast to conventional solidarity in
which dissent always carries with it the potential for disruption, reflective solidarity builds
from ties created by dissent”. Solidarity based on debate is harder to imagine than solidarity
based on identity in the epoch of fragmented solidarities, conditional alliances and specified
communities in which we live. Solidarity, we can say, has become narrower not weaker
insofar as specific splintered social groups possibly obtain the highest intensity of solidarity
but they pose a threat to any kind of solidarity that might be formed not only across divisions
within a specific group but also between such groupings. Rather than solidarity being
something that can be assumed between people suffering from the same system of prejudice
or exploitation, it needs to be built through common practices. This is why it is so important
for Dean to stress that “Solidarity itself has to be understood as an accomplishment”.

When groups, including art organisations, assert the primacy of practical action over theory,
they are, in part at least, prejudicing their style of solidarity in favour of assumed shared
interests and blocking the possibility of developing and extending solidarity through
disagreement and dissent. However, while the differences between affectional, conventional
and reflective solidarity are conceptually enriching, there is no reason to assume that they are
practically incommensurable. The point is not to assert that there is only one true social form
of solidarity but to overcome the misconception that solidarity is the politics of a narrow,
exclusive club identity. Different groups, organisations and institutions foster different
combinations of congeniality, cooperation and critique. This sense of the interweaving of
modes of solidarity was missing from the debates on art’s social turn which treated
conviviality, agonism and conversation as rival models of sociality rather than components of
an integrated, dynamic and expansive form of solidarity. And this goes some way to
explaining why the 1990s debates on the social turn now appear so dated and diluted.

All politically engaged art or political engagements within art that have emerged since the
social turn have shifted the pattern of organisation in art away from sociality towards
solidarity. The tendency to boycott museums and biennales, particularly since 2014, for
instance, is driven by the solidarity of artists, critics, curators and others who express or
establish solidarities with migrants, prisoners, the victims of war and occupation, and so on,
as well as expressing solidarity with broader struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia,
colonialism, and so forth. Ecological activism in art also encourages forms of solidarity rather
than sociality in art, as do campaigns for the decolonisation of art’s institutions and demands
for reforms to alleviate the precarity of artists and art workers. It is the viability of such
solidarities that determine whether the art boycott is a technique for hoarding political agency
by a minority of art professionals or a method for demonstrating that every political struggle
must also be a cultural struggle.