Oliver Marchart - Conflictual Aesthetics - Artistic Activism and The Public Sphere

Conflictual Aesthetics
Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere
PO -A F
NF-ST
UC-HE
TU- Tl
AL-CS Oliver Marchart
Artistic Activism and the
Public Sphere
Oliver M archart
Public Sphere
SternhergPress
Contents
I. Positions
p9 1. Being Agitated—
Agitated Being
Art and Activism in T imes
of Perennial Protest
II. The Stage, the Street,

and the Institution
p51 2. Staging the Political

(Counter) publics and the
Theatricality of Acting
p75 3. Dancing Politics

Political Reflections on
Choreography, Dance,
and Protest
plOl 4. Art. Space, and the
Public Spherefs)
On Public Art, Urbanism,
and Political Theory
pl43 5. The Curatorial Function

Organizing the Ex/position
pl55 6. The Globalization of

Art and the “Biennials
of Resistance”
A History of the Biennials
from the Periphery
pl75 Time Loops

A Postscript on
Pre-enactments
*¥"*11 • i •
Positions
Being Agitated
—Agitated Being
Art and Activism in Times of
Perennial Protest
Echoes of a Revolution
When we hear “1968” we tend to think of street fighting in the

Latin Quarter in Paris the month of May. Yet what came to be
symbolically condensed into the magic cipher of 1968 was, in fact,
a vast wave of protests running from the mid-1960s to the late
1970s. Rather than just taking place over one or two months, the
protests spread over one and a half decades. Similarly, it would be
a grave error to think of these protests as being confined to the
Latin Quarter. They spanned a geographical continuum from Euro
pean countries to the United States, and to parts of Latin America
and Asia. As is sometimes argued, 1968 constituted nothing short
of a second world revolution (with the events of 1848 constituting
the first). If this view is correct, would it not be feasible to see in
the revolts and revolutions that we witnessed around 2011—with
occupations emerging all over the globe, from Cairo to New York,
from Barcelona to Istanbul, from Tel Aviv to Santiago de Chile—
nothing short of a third, radically democratic world revolution? A
claim such as this might appear to overreach; but the fact that, in
many aspects, these revolutions failed in the short term—which
made them indistinguishable, for the time being, from “mere re
volts”—does not mean that they will be ineffective in the long term.
Considering the revolutions of 1848, it is true that they initially
failed (with the exception of Switzerland, of all places). And yet the
real significance of 1848 only came into full effect decades later
with the formation of democracies across Europe, and over a cen
tury later with the success of independence movements in former
colonies. Similarly, many social democratic parties emerging from
the 1848 movements had managed to dominate the political land
scape by the 1970s—before they eventually converted into neo
liberal parties.1Looking at 1968, a similar pattern emerges: while
the short-term effects were less than impressive, it became increas
ingly clear that, more than a political revolution, ’68 was a cultural
revolution that had begun to modify our whole way of life.
10 POSITIONS
What we can learn from these observations is simply that popular
uprisings do not end when most people think they end. Struggles
continue on a latent, subterranean plane, and it is impossible to
foretell their long-term effects. So when it comes to the occupa
tions of 2011 and 2012, it again appears at first sight that they utterly
failed. Not that they collapsed for lack of determination: they were
actively suppressed by police violence, camps were evacuated,
and new laws were passed that made it increasingly difficult to
occupy public places. However, it is sufficient to tu rn our eyes
toward the Nuit debout protests of 2016 and the “yellow vests”
movement birthed in 2018 in France, or the protests that unfolded
in the United States in the wake of Donald T rum p’s election, to
realize that we are continuing to live in the historical moment of
2011. After all, 1968 did not end in ’68 either. In Italy, for instance,
the movement reached its peak in the second half of the 1970s,
before it was eventually suppressed by state counterterrorism. The
spirit of ’68 invigorated the existing anti-Vietnam War movement
with enough momentum to undermine the US government’s will
to continue the bloodshed. And some effects were even longer
lasting: the feminist movement of the 70s and today’s LGBTQ
movement would have been unthinkable without the priming of
’68; the environmental movement, which at the time was effectively
a niche sect of activists, has become so ubiquitous in the decades
that followed that its views have become common opinion. So why
should the events of 2011 pass without a trace?
It is not entirely clear, of course, what trace 2011 might leave on

the future. Nor is it even clear whether it will be the—economically
and politically dubious—critique of finance capitalism, so promi
nent in contemporary discourse, that will turn out to be the move
ment’s lasting contribution.2It could well be an unexpected issue,
such as the struggle against evictions and for affordable housing,
which today appears as marginal as environmentalism did in the
1970s, that turns into the germ of a much larger political force in
BEING AGITATED—AGITATED BEING 11

the future. In any case, there are many reasons to believe that the
phenomenon of global protest we have witnessed since 2011 will
send shockwaves into the future, which may trigger all sorts of
unforeseen developments. What 2011 stands for condenses a whole
series of heterogeneous struggles that radiate in many directions.
Its echoes are felt within a multiplicity of social fields, and one of
these fields is art.
From the Spontaneous Ideology of the Art Field

to the Activist Turn in Art
There can be no doubt that as a consequence of 2011 debates on

activist and political art practices have resurfaced in the art field.3
However, seen from the vantage point of the political field, these
debates tend to leave a strange impression, as they illustrate the
somewhat surreal character that political discussions frequently
assume within the art world. That activist art has a bad reputation
within the art field is a consequence of the fact that, in the eyes
of its “functionaries,” every turn toward political activism is seen
as a disturbance to the smooth functioning of the field.4And not
without reason—w herever the political breaks in, a space of
contingency (i.e., a space for m aneuver) opens up within the
institutional framework of a given field.5 Suddenly, there becomes
an awareness that things can be changed, that they may function
differently, or that they may not function at all—a terrifying pros
pect, in the functionary’s mind. In order to preserve itself against
such a radical opening, a peculiar ideology developed in the field—
one that has proved m ost effective in gentrifying political art
practices, or rather, in denying them any reason to exist. This
ideology is structured around a paradoxical trope: not that art,
according to its functionaries, is nonpolitical. It is political, but it
is political, we are told, precisely in being not political Art’s true
politics resides in its complexity, obliqueness, and rem oteness
from every political practice in the strict sense. The less art is
12 POSJTIONS
explicitly political, we are led to conclude from this, the more
political it actually is. For this peculiar reason, we do not need
explicitly political art.
This trope, paradoxical as it sounds, has become common wisdom

in the a rt field. W henever consensus is threatened by political
events or claims that are hard to digest from the perspective of a
functionary, this wisdom is summoned up to defend the function
ality of the field against potential disturbances. So, whenever it is
demanded, as in a highly politicized situation, that artists trans
form their practice into political action proper, the counterclaim
will be advanced from within the art field that politicization is
unnecessary, since art is, in and of itself, already political. This
unfounded claim of a rt’s primordial politicality—according to
which a rt is always political, therefore we do not need political
a rt—lies at the h e a rt of what I propose to call the spontaneous
ideology o f the art field? It is spontaneous in the sense that it
immediately comes to the mind of every functionary when con
fronted with activist practices. It is ideological, as will become
clear in due course, not because certain truths about reality are
concealed by it, but because the conflictual nature of the field in
which art operates is concealed. The unrivaled master of this ide
ology is the French philosopher Jacques Ranciere, who provides
the spontaneous ideology of the art field with philosophical legiti
macy. According to Ranciere, art, already by virtue of being art,
contributes to w hat he calls a “redistribution of the sensible”
wherein art’s “true politics” resides: “The specificity of art consists
in bringing about a reframing of material and symbolic space. And
it is in this way that a rt bears upon politics.”7 K this is the case,
there is no need for explicitly political a rt anymore—let alone
activist art. Every artistic practice reframes material and symbolic
space; ergo, every art bears upon politics.8Consequently, Ranciere
regularly expresses skepticism with regard to what he perceives
to be overly politicized artworks.
BEING AGITATED— AGITATED BEING 13

Although Ranciere’s theory is widely read as a new approach to
political aesthetics, it is actually antipolitical, as it provides the art
field with ideological arguments against any explicit politicization.
This appeal's to be the reason for the unrivaled success of his
theory within the a rt field, as it allows antipolitical artists and
curators to claim that what they produce or exhibit is political,
even though it is entirely detached from any concrete project that
would threaten art’s autonomy.9 In this way, one can capitalize on
the symbolic value of “political art” while at the same time making
the politicization of art impossible.
There is good reason to believe that this trope of art being political
by being nonpolitical serves as a cover-up for the antipolitical ideology
of the proponents of the art field who have come under pressure to
defend “business as usual” against political factions within their own
field. While the antipolitical worldview might be dominant in the field,
its hegemony is nonetheless contested. For what we have witnessed
over the last years is a return of real politics or, more precisely, a
’‘turning toward” real politics among many artists. This turn is not
without consequences, however: a truly political art practice cannot
be kept within the borders of a genre such as “political art” or “criti
cal art,” nor can it be kept within the walls of art institutions. Activist
art practices are geared toward the political practices of organization,
agitation, and propaganda—practices, that is, of immersing oneself
into the muddy waters of social struggle. Therefore, what contem
porary artists and activists implicity claim runs counter to the spon
taneous ideology of the art field. Their claim is very simple: the less
art is political, the less it is political. If one wants to increase art’s
politicality, one has to forge a passage toward politics. Not toward the
representation or mimicry of politics, but toward politics as a social
practice with its own protocols that are not, and cannot be, entirely
congruent with art as defined by the functionaries of the art field.
Activist practices within the art field teach us this simple lesson: Art
is political when it is political. It is not when it is not.
14 POSITIONS
The T urn toward Activism as a Perennial Turn:
The Long Davidian Moment
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ t
It is hardly surprising that dissatisfaction with the antipolitical bias

of the a rt world peaks in m oments of social crisis and political
uproar. Without a doubt, a new wave of activist institutional critique
has em erged with groups like Occupy M useum s and Liberate
Tate. Calls to boycott corporate a rt events—from Manifesta 10 in
Saint Petersburg to the 2014 Biennale of Sydney—are spreading.
As dissatisfaction with the art business increases, recent protests
have caused many artists to turn toward more direct forms of
action against or beyond a rt institutions. On closer inspection,
however, it is hard not to realize that activist practices have been
around much longer in the art field. Even though much artistic
activism has gained visibility in the course of the uprisings and
occupations since 2011, there is nothing particularly new about
i t 101 submit that activist art practices have always been there as
a—sometimes more visible, sometimes less—undercurrent of art
in general. In the 1980s and ’90s some of these practices made
their way into the canon of contemporary art history under head
ings such as “socially engaged art,” “participatory art,” or “public
art.”11 Groups associated with this historical moment include the
Guerrilla Girls, Gran Fury, Group Material, and Women’s Action
Coalition. Yet these practices did not emerge from nowhere; they
were built on the experiences of the highly politicized 1960s and
70s, of counterculture, of feminist artists exploring the social func
tion of gendered labor, of the A rt Workers’ Coalition struggling
over labor conditions in the New York art world, and of highly
politicized practices in, for instance, Argentina—of which Tucumdn
Arde (1968) has become the canonical exemplar.12
Even though we tend to think of the ’60s and 70s as the glorious
decades of politicized art practices, it is also clear that in the first
half of the twentieth century art was no less politicized. These

were the decades when many artists were associated with labor
movements, when “Dada turned Red/’13 and when, for instance,
the Workers Dance League declared dance to be “a weapon in the
revolutionary class struggle.” The modernist penchant for politi
cal radicalism is well known, yet the phenomenon of artists siding
with revolutionaries did not start in the twentieth century, either.
The nineteenth century had already w itnessed a plethora of
activist artists and writers. Perhaps one of the m ost sublime
moments, if not the high point of “artistic” activism was reached
when the Realist painter Gustave Courbet and his comrades in
the Paris Commune tore down the Vendome Column. Courbet’s
concept of revolutionary activism was modeled upon the example
of the revolutionary art of 1789 and after its most prominent expo
nent, Jacques-Louis David, who had crossed the line between art
and politics by becoming a member of the Jacobins and a political
deputy under Robespierre. In a sense, this Davidian moment—
when the passage was forged from art to politics proper for the
first time—repeats itself whenever artists cross the line separating
art from politics and use their skills in the service of a common
cause. “L’art au service du peuple” was the slogan on one of the
famous posters of the Parisian May ’68—the letters L, A, R, and
T arranged in the form of a hammer.
If the Davidian moment repeats itself with every instance of artistic

activism, it would not be wise to think of them as isolated incidents.
As I have tried to illustrate, practices of artistic activism are not
confined to a so-called political decade or period such as the 1970s.
Activist art is indeed as old as the modern idea of art, which came
to life with the bourgeois revolution, and must be carefully distin
guished from heteronomous art produced for the courts and the
church in earlier times. From this revolutionary moment onward—
the moment that Claude Lefort, drawing on Alexis de Tocqueville,
called the “democratic invention"—a long historical lineage of
activist practices, cutting through the conventional and common-
16 POSITIONS
sensical distinction between art and politics, unfolded. Not that I
would wish to deny the differences between historical cases of re
bellious and revolutionary art, but I want to direct attention to the
longue dune of artistic activism, the permanence of its differentiated
practices. If we were to embark on the truly gigantic task of writing
a history of political art, this history would have to be conceived of
as a political history of a rt It would have to be political for the simple
reason that the art practices in question are, by virtue of being
activist practices, essentially political ones. If, as I said, the Davidian
moment repeats itself constantly, then it repeats itself as a political
moment (or rather, as we will see, a moment of the political).
This political moment is certainly as continuous as the moment of

artistic activism, for the endless stream of activist art is hooked onto
an endless stream of protest As I tried to argue at the beginning—and
with reference to the work of Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K Hopkins,
and Immanuel Wallerstein—it would be wrong to assume that nothing
political happened in between those grandiose events of protest sym
bolically condensed into magical numbers such as 1789,1848,1871,
1917,1956,1968,1999 (if we think of the WTO protests in Seattle), or
2011. Social protest never disappears; instead, it moves in cycles
between “manifest'’ and “latent” (i.e., more and less visible phases).
To merely focus on grandiose historical events would be misleading.
We therefore have to qualify our initial observation as to the “world
revolution” of 2011. Visible events such as these are just condensations
of larger and much more protracted struggles. The occupations of
2011, for this reason, can be read as a second cycle of the global justice
movement whose manifest phase lasted from the mid-1990s to the
post-9/11 crackdown. Even though a latent phase ensued, this in no
sense implies that the movement had disappeared. Meetings were
held, networks were built, and protest formats developed that would
reappear in the occupations of 2011. The continuity of activist practices
is punctuated by broadly visible events, but it is this continuity of
practices that allows for the organization of these events.

Making Things Readable:
Propaganda and Complex Simplicity
Let us now take a closer look at the structural features of activist

art practices. Most people would agree that the more complex,
sophisticated, and refined, the higher the quality of an artistic
position; analogously, artistic positions that are, or seem to be,
directly accessible and easy to decipher are perceived as more
remote from art’s “essence.” What we expect, after all, from a work
of art is some aura of the indecipherable (which is why many artists
abstain from commenting on their own work), some mysterious
distance between the work and the audience, some unbridgeable
gap between art and interpretation. An artwork whose message
appears immediately readable to everyone is considered a bad work
by common standards. Yet historically these standards have not
always been in place; they are upheld, reproduced, and dissemi
nated by art institutions and their functionaries, who adhere to the
spontaneous ideology of their field. Given the value hierarchies of
this field, it comes as no surprise that the positions of explicitly
political art are regularly denounced from within the a rt field as
mere propaganda.14But is propaganda, we may ask ourselves, really
such a terrible thing? It is not, if we accept that political protocols
will always be, and m ust always be, geared toward the reduction of
complexity if a given struggle is to be successful. Just imagine an
election campaign in which who is running for what on which plat
form is totally obfuscated. Such a campaign will at best attract short
term attention, but in politics, at some point, one would have to
present a solution to the riddle and make clear the identity and
political position of the candidate. The same applies to other forms
of political mobilization: if it remains unclear what it is all about, a
political manifestation may be easily confused with a flash mob.
Propaganda, before anything else, is a way of making things po

litically readable by way of simplification. Even though simplifi
18 POSITIONS
cation may be a no-go within sophisticated art circles, it is a neces
sary strategy of political articulation. For, at the end of the day,
every political articulation puts a demand on us, it confronts us
with the exigency of a decision: Which side are you on? Are you
Red or White, progressive or reactionary, pro or con? Are you part
of the 1% or the 99%, the state or the people, the problem or the
solution? In short: Do you want to belong to us or to them? A stark
choice to be confronted with, and not always a pleasant one. But
at the bottom line every political act is premised on this funda
mental choice, a decision as to which side you are on. There can
not be politics without lines of demarcation being drawn,15 and
propaganda is w hat one may think of as the arch technique of
rhetorically drawing lines; hence, there is no politics without a
certain degree of propaganda involved. Without a doubt, the fol
lowing question arises: how does one escape the danger of “deci-
sionism”?16 One obvious way out would lead us to the search for
a normative foundation for our decisions, but I would propose
another path: the complication of simplicity. Here, the danger of
a stark decisionism is perhaps not entirely averted (I will later
propose a second consideration that may help to undermine de
cisionism), but it is significantly reduced as soon as we come to
recognize that in politics one rarely draws a single line of demar
cation; rather, we move between a multiplicity of lines crisscross
ing each other. So whenever we stumble across a line, a demand
is issued for us to take a position, even though this position will
interfere with or contradict other positions taken up in confron
tation with other lines of demarcation, which in turn further rela-
tivize the initial demand.
An example of an artistic performance may help to illustrate this

point. In the appropriately titled Positions (2012), Israeli performance
collective Public Movement enacts this multifaceted terrain of politi
cal subjectification. The setting is the most minimal imaginable: a
rope stretched across a public square. A member of Public Movement

announces a series of binaries: Left/Right, male/female, Israel/
Palestine, and so on. And the participants are supposed to take a
side, that is, to move, according to their choice, to one or the other
side of the rope. This framework, in the eyes of someone immersed
in the value system of the art world, may appear simplistic, but it
is the very simplicity of the performance that is indicative of the
simplifying mechanism of the political. Nevertheless, one should
not be deceived by the exposure of simplicity, as political practice
engenders its very own complexity: that of the intersecting lines
of antagonism. So while politics is always premised on an under
lying logic of simplification, it will seldom remain a simple affair,
as one is rarely confronted—in political reality—with a choice be
tween only two options. As in the case of the Public Movement
performance, it turns out that one’s own positions (in the plural)
are far from consistent. One may be constantly forced to move back
and forth between the two sides of the rope. Some of those who
have previously moved onto the side of the Left, for instance, might
subsequently move to the side of Israel, whereas others move to
the side of Palestine. They will thus have to divide, shift positions,
and confront the possibility of a more intertwined, contorted, and
contradictory political terrain; hence, for the participants in this
performance, that moment of hesitation constantly reoccurs. Rarely
is a point reached where it is already clear which side one is on. It
depends on the particular situation: one’s readiness to expose one’s
political views publicly, one’s response to group pressure, and one’s
willingness to adopt a particular political interpellation in the first
place, rather than ignore it.
The “simplicity” of the political terrain is, for this reason, a com
plex simplicity; conversely, the “complexity” upheld by the art
field is a simplistic complexity, devoid of any real internal contra
dictions and conflicts. In this amorphous complexity, as a rule,
everything becomes interchangeable, every so-called artistic
position is without consequences and comes without any risk
20 POSITIONS
because it can always be placed next to another “position” on the
walls of a m useum or in the gallery booth at an a rt fair. In this
respect, the art field is ruled by the law of minimal differences,
which ultimately amounts to a variety of interchangeable trademarks.
It is not ruled, as politics is, by the law of eventually incompatible,
mutually exclusive decisions premised upon actual conflicts. For
this reason, the complexity of the autonomous artwork, praised
by its defenders, is a fake complexity.
This will become evident if we compare such fake complexity with

the kind of complexity produced by intersecting lines of conflict
and political positioning. T he case of radical-feminist collective
Femen, likely the m ost prom inent example of current artistic
activism, illustrates not only a massively successful formula of
rather straight, in-your-face propaganda (there never remains any
doubt as to what their message is); it also illustrates that whoever
enters the field of politics enters a minefield in which every attempt
to reduce complexity is risky and may come at the price of pro
ducing new contradictions. So while, on the one hand, Femen’s
proclamations remind us of the essentialist binaries of second-
wave feminism (women versus patriarchy), the agitational strategy
employed—what Femen calls “sextremism”—appears to be deeply
postfeminist. But this contradiction, emerging from the uneasy
fusion of second-wave feminism and postfeminism, again comes
at the price of ignoring the struggles of third-wave feminism and
the queer movement, which critique gender categorization with
out falling into the trap of postfem inist counter sexism. It is
important to understand that the terrain on which all this is being
negotiated, to the extent that it is a political terrain, is not struc
tured along the spectrum of binarism versus complexity, but is
a terrain of many intersecting confrontations where different
alliances—for instance, between the seemingly incompatible po
sitions of second-wave feminism and postfeminism—are tested
out against others. We are thus never (or only in the most extreme

case) confronted with an existential life-and-death decision, but
we will have to negotiate between contradicting choices that will,
in turn, be based upon contingent political judgments rather than
suprapolitical normative grounds.
We encounter the same phenomenon even when zooming in on

a revolutionary situation apparently organized around the most
simple us/them confrontation. The fact that ideological lines shift
and that a given position is open for reappropriation is what the
Egyptian graffiti artist Ganzeer experienced when he started mak
ing his political murals in the streets of Cairo in 2011. His initial
motivation was “to leave some kind of m ark in the area,” in the
sense of counterpropaganda. But it soon turned out that this mark
became a moving target, as in the case of his famous image of a
tank moving toward a lone biker. Ganzeer recounts:
A few months after I painted it, protesters were attacked by

the military in front of the television center. So another artist
updated my work by drawing a lot of demonstrators in front
of the tank, some of them being run over by it Once again,
other people came and painted over everything, except the
tank itself, which now stood completely alone. They wrote
something next to it, along the lines of “The people and the
army hand in hand,” thus turning it into a promilitary work.
Shortly after that, some other artists came along and painted
a big military monster eating people right next to the tank—
so it switched back to being an antimilitary piece again.17
What one can learn from this story is that the ability or task of
fixing a political position once and for all does not lie in our hands.
Aline of demarcation can be redefined, a position may shift back
and forth, because the terrain of politics—to the extent that it is
governed by actual contradictions—is a deeply unstable terrain,
shaken by real antagonisms.
22 POSITIONS
Toward a Conflictual Aesthetics
It is at this point that my position on this matter differs to some

extent from political philosopher Chantal Mouffe’s recent account of
artistic practice in the spirit of what she calls “agonistic pluralism.”
Let me thus take a short detour into Mouffe’s ideas about “artivism”
before I return to the question of propaganda; this will allow us
to develop a better idea of what I mean by complex simplicity. And
it will also sketch some of the contours of a conflictual aesthetics—
an aesthetics that is conflictual in a double sense: it conflicts with
the aesthetics of the spontaneous ideologists of the art field (the
aesthetics of simplistic complexity), and it seeks to work out the
political implications of conflictual artistic practice. It is, in this
double sense, both a conflicting aesthetics and an aesthetics of
conflict
Mouffe has engaged with the political role of art in her more recent
work, where she tends to differentiate between three dimensions
of art's politicality. The first has to do with art’s overall politicality;
art and politics should not be seen as separate fields, since “artis
tic practices play a role in the constitution and maintenance of a
given symbolic order, or in challenging it, and this is why they
necessarily have a political dimension.”18This follows from her
reading of Antonio Gramsci and his concept of hegemony. By
hegemony, we speak here of the political construction in a given
society, of general consent and deliberate consensus with regard
to the ruling or hegemonic formation. To the extent that this also
implies that hegemony has to be achieved over the minds of the
people—what Gramsci called their “common sense”—symbolic
practices such as a rt should be seen as an important terrain of
hegemonic struggle. In this sense, Mouffe believes “it is not use
ful to make a distinction between political and non-political art.”19
So, while art can be said to be political in general, the second di
mension of politicality concerns the criticality of a r t All a rt is

political in that it contributes to the symbolic structure of society,
but this does not mean that every artistic practice is necessarily
critical. Only those practices that bring to the fore alternatives to
the contemporary neoliberal order can be considered critical; in
other words, they are critical with respect to a particular hege
mony—the postpolitical hegemony of late capitalism. If we stick
to this definition, then critical art could very well be found within
gallery spaces and art institutions. Critical artists may use these
institutions as platforms for intervening into hegemonic common
sense. They would not necessarily have to leave the art field or
employ nonconventional artistic media in order to do this. And
this brings us to the third dimension: artistic activism. Practices
of “artivism” may seek to achieve the same hegemonic shifts as
critical practices do. However, in contradistinction to said critical
practices, they will change or abandon conventional media, leave
art institutions behind, and employ strategies of political activism:
“By putting artistic forms at the service of political activism, these
‘artivisf practices represent an important dimension of radical
politics. They can be seen as counterhegemonic moves against
the capitalist appropriation of aesthetics and its goal of securing
and expanding the valorization process.”20We can conclude that
for Mouffe all art is political, but only some art is critical, and only
some critical art is activist art.
These differentiations are helpful to avoid confusion; nonetheless,

I want to voice some reservations. There is no reason to deny that
art plays a role in the symbolic construction of a given hegemonic
worldview for a given society, but I would add that this does not
distinguish art from any other cultural practice. Consumer culture,
sports, education, media, popular entertainment, social customs,
and so on—these are no less involved in the symbolic struggle
over hegemony. Taken together, the most diverse practices make
up the terrain of what Foucault m ight have called the pow er/
resistance nexus. So, while it is certainly true that art participates
24 POSITIONS
in the overall politically of social practices, this claim does not
lead very far, as the same could be said about everything else.
The disadvantage of presenting such a claim, correct as it is, in
debates on art should be obvious: it is bound to be interpreted as
just another proof for the spontaneous ideology of the art field.
For if all art is political in nature, then, as the functionaries of the
field will conclude, we do not need explicitly political a r t And this
is precisely the conclusion we wanted to avoid.
Fortunately, Mouffe refrains from such a conclusion. She does,

indeed, argue for explicitly politicized art, in the two modes of
criticality and artistic activism. W hat is her main reason for sup
porting critical art? It has to do with h er hegemony theory ap
proach. Critical art, as I said, takes place within a rt institutions,
and it would be a mistake to abandon these institutions. They are
battlegrounds, she claims, where bourgeois hegemony is both
defended and contested, and “museums can become privileged
places for escaping from the dominance of the m arket.”21 She
focuses on institutions such as the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana
and the Barcelona M useum of Contem porary A rt (MACBA),
which would have been discussed under the label of New Institu
tionalism in the mid-2000s and are now frequently used by Claire
Bishop, without a single reference to these earlier discussions, as
examples of “radical museology.”221 would concur with Mouffe
and push the argument even further. As I have analyzed in detail
in my study of documenta and the international complex of biennials,
it is not only smaller or “peripheral” art institutions that can become
venues for the construction of counterhegemony.23 Hegemonic
shifts—or canon shifts—can be brought about even more effec
tively by institutions and exhibitions in and of the center. Okwui
Enwezors documenta 11 in 2002 is a case in point With this edi
tion of documenta, the postcolonial condition was brought to the
center of the Western art world for the first time (see chapter 6).
It is true that museums, exhibition spaces, and biennials are what

I have called powerful “hegemonic machines,” but this also means
that they are potentially powerful counterhegemonic machines
whose symbolic efficacy m ust not be underestimated.
I thus agree that it would be unwise for artist-activists to entirely

abandon institutional struggle. However, I am slightly less con
vinced when it comes to Mouffe’s depiction of the nature of their
practice. In her eyes, artivist practices are exemplary of what
she calls agonistic pluralism. What should we understand this to
mean? Originally, the Greek word agon refers to a regulated form
of strife or gamelike competition, as in the Olympic Games.
Mouffe’s claim is that democracies thrive on agonistic forms
of conflict; the problem is that in today’s postpolitical regim es
agonism is increasingly neglected and subordinated to an over
arching consensus. But this does not mean that conflict disappears
forever. It may very well return, though more violently, under the
sign of racism, xenophobia, and right-wing populism. For this
reason it is important, she claims, to keep in mind the ever-present
possibility of antagonism: the relation, in the sense used by Carl
Schmitt, between us and them, where the latter is seen as an
enemy to be destroyed. While in its purest form antagonism
homogenizes the political terrain around a single friend/enemy
relation, agonistic pluralism accepts the fact that there will be
many divergent views from many different actors, each of whom
should be seen as adversaries whose opinions—as much as one
dislikes them or disagrees—are legitimate. Democratic institu
tions “tame” antagonism by calling upon us to accept the legiti
macy of adversarial opinions.
My suggestion of a conflictual aesthetics shares its starting point

with Mouffe’s argument: the theory of antagonism as outlined in
her seminal book, coauthored with Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy (1985). Yet, as might be clear from my initial hint
at the complex simplicity of antagonism, I prefer to take a different
26 POSITIONS
route by clinging to the radical potential of the concept.24My rea
son for this is to avoid a peculiar imbalance between the two tropes
of conflict—agonism and antagonism—in Mouffe’s argument. In
all her texts, Mouffe seems to privilege the passage from antag
onism to agonism. This might be the result of her interest in de
mocracy theory. With regard to democracy, it does make sense
to define as democratic the sublimation of inimical relations into
adversarial ones. Mouffe, however, never advocates a process of
desublimation—I'm tempted to speak of progressive desublima
tion—that is, of reantagonizing agonisms. Grant Kester, in an
article that is otherwise full of misreadings of Laclau and Mouffe,
has clearly perceived the problematic aspects of underrating the
necessity of antagonization:
In fact, substantive political change during the m odern

period has routinely involved episodes of violence, physical
occupation, armed insurrection, and systemic forms of re
fusal (e.g., general strikes, riots, sit-ins, passive disobedience,
and boycotts). It is precisely through the intersection of
conventional political participation (voting, “agonistic” de
bate and opinion formation in the public sphere, and so
forth) and these decidedly “antagonistic” forms of extra-
parliamentary action, that real changes in the distribution
of wealth, power, and authority have been achieved. Thus,
the “taming” of conflict advocated by Mouffe on behalf of
anagonistic pluralism entails a misleading and incomplete
view of societal transformation.25
In theory, Mouffe would go along with most of this account but

reply that agonistic pluralism was never m eant to be the m ost
efficient way of achieving social transformation. The concept was
meant to describe the functioning of democratic institutions that
would allow for regulated conflictuality. Even in this case, however,
it is not clear how struggles for the democratization of democ

racy—that is, for radical democracy—could succeed without pro
moting antagonism (at the expense of agonistic pluralism). In the
fight for liberation and democratization, it is not always advisable
to accept the legitimacy of one’s counterpart. There will be cases,
as Kester is correct in pointing out, when certain power structures
will have to be attacked violently—just think of the struggle to
abolish slavery in the United States, which took a full-blown civil
war to succeed. And there will be many other cases in which the
views of certain political actors will have to be denounced as ille
gitimate and pushed out of the agonistic playing field.
In this sense, I believe that antagonism does have to play a role

in political activism. Not every opponent should be considered a
legitimate adversary within the democratic game. Some players
should be pushed out of the game of agonistic pluralism through
political means. Conversely, there is no reason why activists should
demonstrate agonistic respect toward, for instance, racist or
anti-Semitic populists (who, for their part, show no respect for
anybody anyway). But activists could tem per their approach as
soon as it is understood that one is rarely confronted with a single
opponent. The political game is complex, but not in the sense of
a banal, simplistic pseudocomplexity. It is complex because we
are confronted with contradictory and perhaps mutually exclusive
decisions between which we must navigate.26This is why I propose
to conceive of the political game along the lines of Public Move
ment’s Positions, that is, of the complex simplicity of antagonisms.
It is this notion of antagonism, rather than the concept of agonism,
that should inform our conflictual aesthetics.
There is one more reason why antagonism, rather than agonism,

should be made the cornerstone of a conflictual aesthetics. The
concept, as originally developed by Laclau and Mouffe, points to
something much more radical than a friend/enemy relation (us vs.
them). Antagonism in this radical or ontological sense points to
28 POSITIONS
the condition for the possibility of all political acting. In this sense,
it cannot simply be a product of political acting. As political actors
we do not produce, out of pure will, a conflictual situation; we are
produced by a conflictual situation—by the emergence, that is, of
antagonism. This is, precisely, the moment when a public sphere
opens up and is carved out of the routine practices of social insti
tutions.
I outline this logic in chapter 4, where I also discuss its implica

tions for urbanism and public a r t When it was first published—
quite a few years ago, in 1998—I took my lead from Rosalyn Deutsche,
who had applied Laclau and Mouffe’s concept of antagonism to
questions of a rt theory and urbanism two years earlier. Yet the
concept of antagonism came to prominence in the art field only
in 2004, with Claire Bishop’s widely read article in October.27Bishop’s
aim was to criticize the relational aesthetics championed by Nicolas
Bourriaud by pointing out the obvious: there was hardly any space
for conflict in the convivial artistic practices he championed.28Yet
Bishop’s alternative call for a “relational antagonism” was based
on a fundam ental m isunderstanding of Laclau and M ouffe’s
concept of antagonism. It was the typical misreading of a function
ary deeply invested in the spontaneous ideology of her field. As
Kester observed, it is ironic that Bishop adheres to Laclau and
Mouffe’s views on hegemonic struggle while herself defending
the autonomy of aesthetic criteria against what she denounces as
“ethical criteria”—that is, what m ost others would describe as
clearly political criteria. However, there is an obvious difference
between provoking irritation and annoyance, a la Santiago Sierra,
one of Bishop’s favorites, and artistic activism. The latter predomi
nantly follows the protocols of political action—it is, as we will see,
collective, strategic, organized, and conflictual—rather than the
individualistic protocols of avant-garde provocation within the arts.
And I would add a theoretical point: antagonism, by definition,
cannot be relational. It precedes the relational sphere of the social

by simultaneously grounding and degrounding social relations.
It is an asubjective force of pure negativity that cannot be brought
about by pure will. But this also leaves room for artistic rehearsals,
test cases and “pre-enactments” of political situations, which will
nonetheless need to be adjusted to the protocols of the political;
I will come back to this in the postscript.
Setting Things Straight:

Propaganda and Protrepsis
Let us return to the question of art as propaganda and see how it

fits into a conflictual aesthetics—an aesthetics, that is, oipropa
gating, agitating, and organizing as three interconnected ways
of rehearsing antagonism. Compared to the complexity of inter
secting lines of conflict in the political field, the fake complexity
of the spontaneous ideology of the art field is where the ideologi
cal dimension of a rt is encapsulated. Generally speaking, the
operation of ideology does not so much consist in the concealment
of a particular “truth,” securable by scientific means, about our
social reality (and to think of ideology in this way means adhering
to a worn-out and unfounded version of ideology critique). What
makes a discourse ideological is, in fact, its concealment of the
conflictual nature of the social.29This brings me to the second
misconception regarding the notion of propaganda: the idea that
propaganda is essentially about manipulation—an idea deeply
rooted in the paradigm of conventional ideology critique. While
Jonas Staal, in his e-flux journal article on art and propaganda, has
clearly perceived that there is something ideological in subsuming
political art practices under the disqualifying verdict of propaganda,
he still clings to the conventional idea of propaganda as manipu
lation of particular facts—in his view, the unchallenged domination
of democratism.30This approach resembles traditional ideology
critique a la Horkheimer and Adorno, who denounced the culture
industry’s function of advertising the status quo. Similarly, Staal
30 posmoNS
is critical of art’s role in advertising “actually existing democracy"
as our status quo. Yet in both cases the propaganda effect of cul
ture or art supposedly consists in manipulating the observer into
a distorted conception of the true nature of sociopolitical reality.
A quite different picture emerges when we start appreciating that

propaganda has not always been a pejorative term synonymous
with deception. One should rem em ber that communist parties
used this term in the affirmative. The communists, contrary to
: Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda, did not intend to fool people
into a manipulated view of reality with their propaganda. Propa
ganda, as a technical term, straightforwardly referred to the dis
semination of the correct view of reality as approved by the party
and scientifically guaranteed by the historical doctrine of Marxist
economics and dialectical materialism. This straightforward sense
of propaganda—understood not as a manipulated view of reality,
but as the only correct one—can be traced back to the very moment
when the term came to life in 1622, with the pope’s foundation of
the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide: a committee of car
dinals charged, as the name says, with the propagation of the faith,
particularly in non-Catholic countries.
It goes without saying that the church was deeply convinced of

the superior truth of its doctrine—as much as communist parties
have been of theirs. Nonetheless, that a propaganda committee
was deemed necessary in the first place attests to the fact that
truth does not transmit itself automatically. It has to enter a con
tested space where rival faiths and discourses may be equally
propagated. The same holds for today’s artistic practices that aim
to make a dissensual political point. No matter whether they con
sider themselves to be in possession of a correct view of reality or
take a more self-critical stance, they will have to propagate their
view against competing forces, some of which will be hegemonic.
Therefore, the terrain that they enter will already be formed and

dominated—but not necessarily manipulated—by some kind of
Congregatio de Propaganda Fide. To engage with hegemonic views
may necessitate the construction of a counterhegemonic political
project and, consequently the propagation of counterpropaganda,
understood as a particular kind of—dissensual and minoritadan—
propaganda that is directed against the doxa defended by the hege
monic forces of propaganda fide.
One of the clearest examples of democratic counterpropaganda

by “artivists” is Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir. At
first glance, the Elvis-like figure of Billy Talen appears to engage in
typical right-wing preaching. Yet when he and the Stop Shopping
Choir start performing in a bank lobby, a shopping mall, a Starbucks
coffeehouse, or in support of Occupy Wall Street, it soon becomes
clear that the goal is not propaganda fide, but counterpropaganda
in the service of an anticapitalist and environmentalist position
(Reverend Billy was even backed by the Green Party to run for
mayor of New York City in 2009). Strategies like these seem to
test out not only the solidity of the hegemonic bloc, but also the
very existence of a public sphere worth the name. The dominant
ideology of free speech, often violated by the very forces that claim
to protect it, has been repeatedly challenged by Reverend Billy
with his “First Amendment Song.” Here, the literal content of
street protest is simply the constitutionally guaranteed right to
street protest. One just has to imagine the puzzlement of police
officers trying to arrest someone for publicly preaching the First
Amendment, the constitutional clause by which freedom of speech
and the right to assemble were guaranteed in the first place. In a
case like this, the hegemonic interpretation of public space—as a
space for traffic and not for protest—is folded back onto itself to
the point where its cracks and self-contradictions become visible.
A similar strategy has been used by Liberate Tate, a group founded

during a Tate workshop on art and activism in 2010 that turned
32 POSITIONS
into a propaganda action against Tate. The activists protested oil
conglomerate BP’s sponsorship of the Tate museums, a partnership
they saw as a form of “artwashing”—whereby BP, as a corporation
involved in the worldwide exploitation of labor and ecological pol
lution, is able to present itself as a noble donor to the arts while
obscuring its less noble business practices. What the activists of
Liberate Tate criticize, however, is not so much that oil companies
support the arts, but that the arts support the lies of the oil com
panies. To this end, they have pushed Tate officials to cut ties with
their sponsor; and they have been ostensibly successful, with the
partnership ending in 2017.31 Throughout their six-year protest
campaign, the activists countered BPs strategy of artwashing with
their own strategy of “blackwashing,” which consisted in spoiling
not only Tate’s image, but also—literally—its gallery floor. In June
2010, as the Tate was celebrating twenty years of BP sponsorship,
they poured liters of black molasses onto the doorsteps of the Tate
Britain.
Of course, examples abound of artists and/or activists—of which

the Yes Men and Femen are perhaps the most famous exponents—
involved in similar “image spoiling” campaigns. In most of these
cases, various strategies of ad-busting and culture jamming are
employed. An interesting though less typical example of such a
strategy is a 2012 branding campaign by Public Movement, which
was not aimed at spoiling an existing (corporate) image, but rather
sought to construct a new one by way of counterbranding.
Their project Rebranding European Muslims, developed for steirischer

herbst 2012, was based on previous research into national brand
ing strategies. Indeed, branding is no longer the exclusive domain
of corporate business. Nowadays, in a political landscape where
even a government can be run like a corporation, revamping the
global image of a given nation-state might be accomplished by
outsourcing the task to either professional agencies or more “demo

cratic” committees made up of stakeholders from business, gov
ernment, and civil society. While the very idea of turning states
into corporations is sickening, the results of this endeavor are less
spectacular than one would expect (Austria as a “nation brand,” it
turns out, is supposed to rely on its cultural heritage, Finland on
clean water, etc.). Public Movement appropriated this strategy,
starting from Angela Merkel’s pronouncement that “multicultural-
ism has failed, completely failed,” and turned it into a campaign
for rebranding the image of European Muslims. They more or
less hijacked the opening gala of steirischer herbst, turning it—in
collaboration with local Muslim groups—into an event where the
appropriate advertisement campaign was to be chosen out of three
options by a surprised audience. T he whole project was widely
covered by the media and sparked a discussion about not only
multiculturalism but also the very absurdity of trying to “rebrand”
a minority social group.
So far, I have presented these practices as examples of (counter)

propaganda, yet it is important to point out an additional dimension
observable in many of these cases: the strategy of agitation, which
in revolutionary Russia was already considered a necessary sup
plement to propaganda. The function of agitation was not to pro
mote the correct view of reality, but to stir up unrest, to unsettle
certainties and wake people from their dogmatic slumber. In this
sense, to agitate means to actively work to disaffiliate people from
the realm of doxa—the taken-for-granted assumptions of common-
sensical ideology. Therefore, the precondition for successful propa
ganda is successful agitation. If propaganda is, in essence, about
connecting people with the correct view of reality, then agitation is
about disconnecting them from doxa.32In political art, such moments
of agitation are often present. Policemen are disoriented when they
try to arrest an Elvis impersonator shouting the First Amendment
at them through a megaphone. Not to mention the even more direct
agitation a la Femen, the political graffiti painted on the walls of
34 POSITIONS
Cairo by Ganzeer, or the punk performers of Pussy Riot, who, as a
result of their persecution, became nemeses of Vladimir Putin.
Agitational strategies like these, without a doubt, have many prede

cessors in the history of political art, waiting to be recounted by a
political history of art. Yet my sense is that the very concept of agi
tation is historically more ancient, and is likewise not restricted to
the realm of politics. It derives, as far as I can see, from the ancient
rhetorical strategy of protrepsis. This is the strategy by which phi
losophers tried to pull their would-be pupils out of the realm of
everyday doxa, to unplug them, as it were, from common sense—
something that will never be achieved by simply confronting them
with the “true” nature of reality (which is not convincing by itself).
There is a dear dimension of dissuasion present in protrepsis, which
is why it plays a role in rhetoric, as rhetorical skills are needed in
order to bring to the fore and make people aware of the inner incon
sistencies of their beliefs (which is the whole point of the Socratic
dialogues). Only when this point is reached does it begin to make
sense to confront them straightforwardly with the teachings of a
philosopher. Accordingly, the ultimate protreptic goal is conversion.
People have to convert from common opinion (doxa) in order to
become eligible—through the path of logos—to enter the halls of
knowledge (episteme). For this reason, protrepsis was considered
an exoteric form of teaching directed at those who were not yet in
the know, while the straightforward transmission of esoteric knowl
edge was restricted to those who had already embarked on the path
to philosophy. By this logic, exoteric teaching stands to esoteric
teaching as agitation stands to propaganda. To put it another way,
the rhetorical function of agitation is precisely protrepsis: the method
of disrupting ideological and dogmatic opinion through strategies
of surprise, shock, dissuasion, and estrangement, with the intention
of bringing to the fore facts, information, analysis, and critique.
It facilitates the propagation of a perhaps more “correct” view of
social reality.33

The Triple Method of Activist Art:
Disrupting, Expanding, Instituting
Given what has been said so far, we m ust not be afraid of the term
“propaganda,” even though it is given a bad reputation by the
functionaries of the a rt field. Every piece of knowledge we can
gain, every truth and every correct worldview we may achieve in
politics will have to be propagated against rival truths and world
views. The fact that every political position will have to be propa
gated by a hegem onic project—hegem ony being defined by
Ernesto Laclau as the process whereby a partial force assumes
the (ultimately impossible) role of a universal actor34—becomes
immediately clear if we consider the etymology of the word “propa
ganda.” Originally, to propagate meant to procreate, to broaden,
to enlarge. In this sense, it is possible, for instance, to speak of
the “propagation” of a dominion, which simply means to extend
a given domain of political rule. And this is also what hegemony
is about: the extension of a particular position to an apparently
universal one.
How is this to be done? The Russian artist-activist collective Chto

Delat? (What is to be done?), reflecting on what it means to run a
newspaper as an a rt project, quotes from Lenin’s 1901 article
“Where to Begin.” For Lenin, it was clear that a newspaper “is not
only a collective propagandist and collective agitator, but also a
collective organizer.”35It is here that we eventually have the com
plete triad of Soviet revolutionary activity: agitating, propagating,
organizing. Or, as I would translate: disrupting, expanding, insti
tuting. Dmitry Vilensky of Chto Delat? leaves no doubt that the
last term of the triad—the dimension of organization or institu
tion—is of key importance. A newspaper is a means of construct
ing a collectivity around instituting practices, of organizing not
only an editorial collective but also a whole network of people,
practices, and debates. According to Vilensky, the activity of pub
36 POSITIONS
lishing a newspaper has to be “em bedded in an array of other
mediums and productions.” Otherwise, the power of the news
paper “m ay be limited to a rather simple gesture, impotent to
represent anything but itself.”36
These considerations are substantial enough to lead us to the

following conclusion: a position in which art connects to politics
must be informed by the triple strategy of agitation, propaganda,
and organization. W ithout prior disruption of common opinion,
the chances of propaganda succeeding are small. But without the
propagation (i.e., expansion) of a particular position to a m ore
hegemonic one, no sustainable effect will be produced through
agitation. A given artistic-activist performance, much like a flash
mob, can disappear in a second. And without the dimension of
organization, the propagation of a particular position will not be
sustainable either. Debates and practices have to be organized in
order to survive over time; they m ust be, to some extent, institu
tionalized.
Being Agitated—Agitated Being
This triple method of activist art, if we now come to some of its

philosophical implications, gets at the core of what it means to be
a subject. Individuals are made into subjects via hegemonic pat
terns; to speak with the language of Louis Althusser, they are
interpellated by “ideological state apparatuses” while they also
rearticulate the conditions of their own subjection at the same
time. The subject defined as such thereby escapes the traditional
dichotomy between active and passive.37For this reason, we must
think of activism in a less voluntarist sense than we may be accus
tomed to (which is the second consideration that underm ines
every stark decisionism in the realm of political acting). It is true
that when speaking about agitating, propagating, and organizing
we speak about “activities”—which presupposes an “active” agent

behind them. In some sense, it is impossible to escape this pre
supposition. We need to think of ourselves as the agents of our
own actions, otherwise we would simply stay at home as couch
potatoes or morph into the frequently misinterpreted figure of
Bartleby the scrivener, who sought increasingly to abandon the
idea of activity per se. Concordantly, we need to think of the targets
of our agitation as agents of their own actions; otherwise it would
make no sense to try and draw them over to “our side,” thereby
activating them into activism. As much as we may execrate them
as passive bystanders, we will implicitly have to attribute to them
the status of agents equipped with a capacity to act—if not, we
would not set out to agitate them in the first place.
It does not make much difference whether these assumptions are

counterfactual—that is, whether or not human actors are, in actual
fact, equipped with a faculty of volition. This capacity both to act
and to be activated is simply a working assumption without which
it would make no sense to speak about political acting in the first
place. Yet, to repeat, this fact should not be hypostasized into a
voluntarist ideology. The political cannot be brought to life by an
act of pure will. It would be a mistake to assume that by way of
propaganda, agitation, and organization we can construct a politi
cal situation in the same way that a car or a house can be con
structed. It is a well-known fact of experience that the successful
organization of, for instance, a street manifestation is far from
being a matter of pure will. Those who think so will most likely
end up standing alone at a street corner; something additional
must happen. A political situation cannot simply be constructed,
it must also be encountered—we might say, There is a political
situation (“there is” in the very sense of Heidegger’s es gibt, or the
il y a of the French Heideggerians, understood as shorthand for
an asubjective “event,” or Ereignis). A political situation emerges
from the event of the political—an event that, by virtue of being
one, cannot be constructed through an act of will.
38 POSITIONS
With this concept of the political, we have reached the ontological
grounds of politics, including the politics of propaganda, agitation,
and organization. If a political situation is encountered, then it is
because it was brought about not by us, but by the asubjective
force of the political, for which the most appropriate name is antag
onism. As I have indicated above, speaking about antagonism (in
the singular) means speaking about an ontological condition that
must not be confused with the ontic realm of empirical and always
plural conflicts (which are closer to what Mouffe would describe
as agonism). Antagonism is a philosophical term for the agitated
nature—the agitated Being—of the social. The social world can
not, as Laclau and Mouffe have famously put it, be totalized into
"society,” because it is partially underm ined and partially con
structed by its negative outside (i.e., antagonism).38
The fact that the ground of our politics has to be prepared by this
asubjective and anobjective force of the political—which is based,
in turn, upon nothing other than the abyss of antagonism—may
serve as an explanation for the agitating force (or impotence) of
our own attempts at agitating others. One may try, as I have said,
to act politically time and again. But as long as our actions do not
pass through the ontological register of antagonism, the emer
gence of which is not in our hands, it will remain impossible for
us to mobilize anybody. However, whenever our individuality,
or the individuality of someone else, is touched by antagonism,
it is agitated; as a result, social conflicts will be actualized. Such
an understanding of agitation is not as abstract as one may think.
It actually comes close to the use that we make of the word “agita
tion” in everyday language. Remember that we speak of our mind
being agitated when torm ented by problems, panic attacks, or
fixed ideas; we speak of our agitated body when we toss and turn
sleeplessly, tremble nervously, or burst out hysterically; we speak
of land being agitated in a similar sense, that is, rocked and shaken
by trem ors. Being agitated m eans that something of the order

of an event occurs to us. It means being affected by something
that deeply unsettles our state of mind and our bodily comfort
zone. Yet in the field of politics, being agitated—the condition of
transform ing an individual into a political subject—is in itself
conditioned on agitated Being, that is, on the social as being under
mined by the event of the political.39
Testing It Out
From this we may conclude that being agitated into activism is

contingent upon being touched by the experience of antagonism.
We have thus determined the latter as the ontological cause of
agitation (in both the active and the passive sense of the term).
Without the emergence of antagonism, nothing would occur in
the field of politics: no political situation would unfold, no activists
would set themselves in motion, nothing would be agitated, noth
ing propagated, and nothing organized. Without the emergence
of antagonism, an art practice would never become an agitational
one, and an artistic position would never turn into a political one.
We would remain trapped within the pseudopolitical, pseudocon-
flictual spontaneous ideology of the art field.
However, it will be asked, and not without reason, whether from

such a perspective we are not condemned to some sort of higher-
order passivism? If it is not in our hands to bring it about by an act
of will, must we simply wait for the event of the political to occur?
Is such a view not a recipe for political quietism, for a wait-and-see
policy of attentisme rather than activism? I do not think this is the
only possibility to consider. For in order to determine whether or
not the situation we find ourselves in counts as a political situation,
one has to “give it a shot”—as this can only be determined practi
cally. Protest and direct action are precisely attempts to test out the
antagonistic quality of a given situation. Without testing the situation
out, there is no chance that an antagonism will ever be actualized;
40 POSITIONS
it will remain latent So agitation does have an essential political role
to play in bringing to the fore the antagonistic quality of a given
situation. If the experiment works, the public space of traffic will
be transformed into a public sphere of protest. This is the moment,
if you wish, of transubstantiation: the moment when a mundane
thing such as a public square appears in an entirely different light
as a sphere of assembly, debate, and political struggle.
But one thing should immediately be added: it would be a mistake

to think that a political event can only be sparked from within the
terrain of conventional politics. It may be tested out everywhere.
Even the art field may potentially contribute to this collective ex
periment—and many artists have been contributing to it for a long
time with their activist practices. Insofar as art proves to be respon
sive to the triple exigency of agitating, propagating, and organizing,
it may easily turn into politics—more easily and more frequently,
in any case, than the functionaries of the art field will admit
•k * *
I have selected and assembled the essays that follow for a simple
reason: all are concerned with questions of how the passage from
art to politics proper can be forged, and what the precise condi
tions are under which art turns into activism. They were originally
published over a time span of quite a few years, and to collect them
here is also to demonstrate that the “activist turn” is in no way the
latest fad that is bound to vanish soon. It is, indeed, a perennial
turn, and artistic activists will be accompanying us as long as
people are engaged in art and politics.
An earlier and significantly shorter version of chapter 1, “Being

Agitated—Agitated Being,” was published in Transformations
of Democracy: Crisis, Protest and Legitimation, edited by Robin
Celikates, Regina Kreide, andTilo Wesche (Rowman & Littlefield,

2015). The following texts have been republished here in their
newly edited form: “Staging the Political” in Publicum: Theorien
der Offentlichkeit, edited by Gerald Raunig and Ulf W uggenig
(Turia + Kant, 2005). “Dancing Politics” in Communications:
Dance, Politics, and Co-immunity, edited by Gerald Siegmund and
Stefan Holscher (diaphanes, 2013). “Art, Space, and the Public
Sphere (s)” in Stadtmotiv, edited by Andreas Lechner and Petra
Maier (edition selene, 1999). “The Curatorial Function” in Curating
Critique, edited by Marianne Eigenheer, Dorothee Richter, and
Barnaby Drabble (Revolver, 2007). “T he Globalization of Art” was
translated from the G erm an by E rika D oucette and Sam
Osborne; it was prepublished as CuMMA Papers #7 by Aalto
University, Helsinki, and later published in World A r t 4, no. 2
(2014). “Time Loops” is based on an unpublished paper presented
as a SODA lecture at the Inter-university Center for Dance Berlin
(HZT), on July 9,2014.
42 POSITIONS
Notes
1 This point was convincingly made by Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins,

and Immanuel Wallerstein in Antisystemic Movements (London: Verso, 1989),
where they also describe the protests of 1968 as a “world revolution.” In The
Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), Alain Badiou recounts the history of left-wing
struggles in the twentieth century not as a series of defeats, but as a series of
victories. In light of the Mexican, Russian, and Chinese revolutions, and the
many anti-colonial revolutions of the postwar period, he could be somewhat
correct—with the proviso, of course, that victories and defeats alternate and
easily intermingle.
2 It remains dubious as long as it is based upon the problematic distinction between

a supposedly "productive” capital and a “parasitic” finance capital—a distinction
that historically derives from anti-Semitic critiques of capitalism.
3 I say the debate “resurfaced” because it had never really disappeared. In fact,
such discourse was largely suppressed by many mainstream art institutions
and journals.
4 It illustrates the typical reaction of a functionary of the art field when confronted
with the “activist turn.’’The term “functionary” might sound harsh, but it is
not meant to be understood in a merely derogative sense. Rather, a functionary
is someone with a professional interest in the undisturbed functioning of the
institutions and networks of her field. For this reason, the functionary tends
to filter out or suppress whatever might be perceived as a threat to “business
as usual.” In this sense, they operate in accordance with a single imperative:
“T he show must go on!”
5 This “contingency concept’ of the political is rather common among contem

porary political theorists; I have discussed it in detail in Oliver Marchart, Post-
foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou
and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
6 The term is derived from Althusser’s notion of the “spontaneous philosophy

of the scientists”; see Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous
Philosophy o f the Scientists and Other Essays, ed. Gregory Elliott (London:
Verso, 1990).
7 Jacques Ranciere, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran

(Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 24.
8 This might well be the case, with the only proviso that the same can be said
of everything else. Every symbolic activity, and every cultural activity from
shopping to driving, is partly symbolic and thus has a bearing on politics.
But this is not the kind of politics that the spontaneous ideology of the art field
is aimed at.

9 Of course, Ranciere’s argument is slightly more delicate, claiming that we
have to maintain the tension between autonomy and heteronomy although he
is clearly biased, defending autonomy and delegifimating heteronomy. The
spontaneous ideology of the art field, with its leading philosopher
Ranciere, has no place for a position that would not pacify, gentrify, or
delegitimate heteronomous art practices.
10 For an initial overview, see Will Bradley and Charles Esche, eds., A rt and
Social Change: A Critical Reader (London: Tate Publishing, 2007); Grant H.
Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative A rt in a Global
Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Nato Thompson, ed.,
Living as Form: Socially Engaged A rt from 1991-2011 (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2012); Peter Weibel, ed., Global Activism: A rt and Conflict in the
21st Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015); Nato Thompson, Seeing
Power: A rt and Activism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Melville
House, 2015); and Maurily DeLaure and Moritz Fink, eds., Culture Jamming:
Activism and the A rt of Cultural Resistance (New York: New York University
Press, 2017).
11 For an early critical engagement with this trend, see Miwon Kwon, One Place
after Another: Site-Specific A rt and Locational Identity (Cambridge, M A
MIT Press, 2002).
12 See Francis Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the A rt Left in Sixties
America (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). For more on
political art in Argentina, see Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman, Del Di
Telia a ‘Tucumdn Arde": Vanguardia artistica y poltfica en el 68 argentino
(Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2008).
13 See Helena Lewis, Dada Turns Red: Politics of Surrealism (Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 1990).
14 As Jonas Staal has observed, “T here is something deeply propagandists in the

disappearance of the notion of propaganda from artistic discourse. The word
only resurfaces bluntly to dismiss certain practices as one-dimensional, as
pamphletisra, or as ideological and doctrinal.” Jonas Staal, “A rt Democratism.
Propaganda.,” e-flux journal, no. 52 (February 2014), http://www.e-flux.com
/journal/art-democratism-propaganda/
15 This argument, as will become obvious in a moment, is largely based upon

Laclau and Mouffe’s concept of antagonism and on Mouffe’s subsequent work
on the “adversarial” model of agonistic politics. For their initial formulation,
see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:
Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).
16 The term "decisionism,” rarely used in English, is derived from the German
concept Dezisionismus. The term implies that a legal or political decision is
based not on a normative foundation but solely on the actual power to deride
in itself.
17 Ganzeer, “Street Discourse," in Truth Is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic

Strategies in Real Politics, ed. steirischer herbst and Florian Malzacher
(Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), 239.
44 POSITIONS
18 Chantal Mouffe, Agonistks: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso,
2013), 91.
19 Mouffe, 91.
20 Mouffe, 98-99.
21 Mouffe, 101.
22 Claire Bishop, Radical Museology, or, What’s ‘Contemporary" in Museums

of Contemporary Art? (London: Koenig Books, 2013). On New Institutionalism,
see, among others, A r t and Its Institutions: Current Conflicts, Critique and
Collaborations (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2006). A rt institutions in
the Netherlands and Scandinavia were often cited as examples of New
Institutionalism: above all, the Rooseum in Mahno, under the direction of
Charles Esche (2000-2005); Office for Contemporary A rt Norway, under
the direction of Ute Meta Bauer (2002-5), and M useet for Samtidskunst,
both in Oslo; Contemporary A rt Centre in Vilnius; Kunsthalle Helsinki;
x-room in Copenhagen; and NIFCAin Rotterdam. Also mentioned are
Kunstverein Miinchen, with Maria Lind as artistic director (2002-4); MACBA
in Barcelona; and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, under the direction of Nicolas
Bourriaud and Jerome Sans (1999-2006). Some of these experiments have
been discontinued, or else continued under different conditions or with
other institutional hosts.
23 Oliver Marchart, Hegemonie im Kunstfeld: Die documenta-Ausstellungen

dX, D ll, d l2 und die Politik der Biennalisierung(Cologne: Verlag der
Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2008). See also Oliver Marchart, “Hegemonic
Shifts in the Politics of Biennialization: The Case of Documents,” in The
Biennial Reader: An Anthology on Large-Scale Exhibitions of Contemporary
Art, ed. Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Ovsteba (Ostfildern:
Hatje Cantz, 2010), 466-90,
24 I present a fully developed political ontology of antagonism in Oliver Marchart,

Thinking Antagonism: Political Ontology after Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2018).
25 Grant H. Kester, "The Sound of Breaking Glass, Part II: Agonism and the
Taming of Dissent,” e-flux journal, no. 31 (January 2012), http://www.e-flux
.com/journal/31/68221/the-sound-of-breaking-glass-part-ii'agomsm-and
-the-taming-of-dissent/,
26 Mouffe’s term “pluralism” does not fully capture the phenomenon of

intersecting lines of antagonism because pluralism is located at the level
of democratic institutions. Put differently: pluralism is, already, a self-
reflexive relation toward the ontological fact of intersecting antagonisms;
it is a way of coping with the disturbing radicality of conflict by consciously
taming enmity and taking the edge out of confrontations. Agonistic pluralism
is thus located on a metastatus, the level of a democratic—I would say
ethical—relation toward antagonisms. I have no objections to an ethical
relation of self-reflexivity vis-a-vis exclusions produced by one’s own
political decisions, I would just add that many other ways of relating to
antagonism are conceivable, and sometimes less ethical and self-reflexive
ones will be necessary to expand the democratic horizon of freedom,

equality, and solidarity, I expand on this argument in Oliver Marchart,
Post-foundational Theories of Democracy: Reclaiming Freedom, Equality,
Solidarity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).
27 Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October, no. 110

(Fall 2004): 51-79. See also Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: A rt and Spatial
Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); and Markus Miessen and
Chantal Mouffe, The Space o/Agonism, Critical Spatial Practice 2 (Berlin:
Sternberg Press, 2012).
28 Nicolas Bourriaud, of course, coined the term with his well-known book
on the subject, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Les presses du reel, 2002).
29 This includes the conflictual nature (i,e„ the political function) of art—
for instance, as a symbolic instrument of class distinction.
30 Staal, “A rt Democratism. Propaganda.”
31 See Nick Clark, “BP to End Controversial Sponsorship of Tate in 2017,”

Independent, March 11, 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts
-enter tainm ent/ar t/new s/bp-t o-end-con troversial-spons or ship-of-tate-in
-2017-a6923471.html. Tate representatives maintain they were not
influenced by the activists’ demands; rather, it was a “business decision.”
32 If for this reason, as we will see, agitation has a desubjectifying effect (with
regard to doxa or ideology), propaganda has a resubjectifying one (with
regard to episteme or political correctness). Perhaps it makes sense to think
of these two movements, one of queering things up (agitation) and the other
of setting things straight (propaganda), as two movements that are in many
cases entirely intertwined within the very same practice (just as queering
things up may very well mean setting them straight, and setting things
straight may necessitate queering them up).
33 I am of course not claiming that an entirely correct view, in a scientific sense,

can ever be reached. Every “correct” perspective on social reality will be
transformed and contorted by the very struggles that are fought to enforce
it against resilient patterns of ideology. Any “correct” view will always be
less than entirely correct: it will be a partial view that has managed to claim
hegemony. In the realm of politics, we therefore will never be able to gain
access to “truth,” but we will be able to institute some sort of political
correctness (in a wide sense of the term)—a form of correctness that will
result from hegemonic struggles. T he task of transmitting such politically
correct knowledge is the task of propaganda-
34 Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996).
35 Vladimir Lenin, quoted in Dmitry Vilen sky, “Newspapers,” in steirischer

herbst and Makacher, Truth Is Concrete, 249.
36 Vilensky, 250.
37 Judith Butler has proposed a comparable argument, largely based on Foucault,

in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1997).
46 POSITIONS
38 T he locus classicus of Laclau and Mouffe’s argument is Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy. For an overview of “political ontologies,” see Oliver
Marchart, “The Absence at the Heart of Presence: Radical Democracy
and the ‘Ontology of Lack,’” in On Radical Democracy: Politics between
Abundance and Lack, ed. Lars Tonder and Lasse Thoraassen (Manchester:
M anchester University Press, 2005), 17-31.
39 On the social as a field of sedimented practices based upon an instituting

moment of the political, which can in turn be reactivated through the
(re)emergence of antagonism, see Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on
the Revolution of Our Time, trans. Jon Barnes (London: Verso, 1990).
BEING AGITATED— AGITATED BEING 47

“
I The Stage,
IIw
II
if';
the Street, and

1 the Institution
IIS
mi
mszmm
Staging the
* | ® j • "I
Political m
1
('Counter)publics and the

Theatricality of Acting
“Etudiants, l’Gdeonest ouvert.”
On May 15,1968, a crowd of students and artists storm ed the

Theatre de l’Odeon in Paris. It was 11:00 p.m. and the audience of
that night’s performance had just left the theater. The students
poured into the building, informing the director Jean-Louis Barrault,
a theater legend and friend of Artaud, that from now on his insti
tution was occupied, as it represented an elitist and bourgeois idea
of culture and would have to be turned into a center of revolution.
For one month, the Odeon occupation was a focal point of the
student revolt There was no theatrical action anymore, not even
alternative forms, as the theater was entirely transformed into a
place for political action—political action in form of speech: the
Odeon turned into a forum, an agora. It became a public space in
which the fourth wall separating “actors” from “spectators” was
torn down. Instead, everybody was allowed to speak freely: “Non
stop,” as Barrault noted, “7 x 24 = 168 hours a week.”1And in a
communique issued by the Comite daction revolutionnaire, a sort
of central committee of the squatters, it was pronounced that this
action was not directed against any particular person or repertoire,
but against bourgeois culture in general. For an indefinite time
span, the theater (having ceased to be a theater) was supposed to
become an undisturbed meeting place for perm anent revolution,
namely, the uninterrupted, revolutionary flow of speech.2The
theater turned into a more or less structured space for endless
deliberation, a tribune open for anyone who decided to climb on it.
Michel de Certeau spoke about May ’68 as “une revolution de la
parole”: a revolution of speech in which the people, by way of an
exemplary action, would claim their right to speak—what Certeau
called prendre la parole, or the “capture of speech.”3
52 THE STAGE, THE STREET, AND THE INSTITUTION

While the “event” o f’68, and of the Odeon in particular, was surely
about the conquest of speech, the occupation of the Odeon was
not only about talking; it was also taken back to the streets. There
were instances of carnival and transgression, particularly when
theater costumes were “confiscated” by the occupants who, taking
to the streets, would confront the police force in these costumes.
As Richard Neville rem em bers: “T he w ardrobe departm ent
was ransacked and dozens faced the tear gas dressed as centuri
ons, pirates and princesses. The Theatre came into the streets.”4
But even more important from a political point of view, the streets
came into the theater. This m etaphor of the chiasmatic inter
twining of theater and street, between the literary-dramaturgical
public sphere and the political public sphere, was far from original.
It was not invented in ’68; it belongs to the metaphorical arsenal
of revolution. And in ’68, more than a concept, it was a slogan—
the mot d’ordre—that had informed the occupation of the Odeon
theater.
In fact, the people who were instrumental in identifying the target

and then planning and carrying out the occupation in the first
place w ere artists and actors, among them the painter Jean-
Jacques Lebel, who at that time organized Happenings in France,
and Julian Beck, cofounder of the New York-based Living Theatre.
On 16 May, Julian [Beck] and Judith [Malina] led the

insurrectionary crowd of insurgent students, workers, and
actors singing the “Internationale” and waving black anar
chist flags. This throng managed to transform the venerable
building into what Julian called “a place of live theatre in
which anyone could become an actor.” The entire theatre
stage becam e a stage for twenty-four hour periods of
confrontation and debate in which anyone could freely par
ticipate. [...] In an atmosphere of tremendous ferment and
intensity, rem iniscent of the French Revolution in which
STAGING THE POLITICAL 53

citizens of all classes seized power and determined the fate
of the state, students and workers spoke, and were answered
by others. Julian believed that what he saw at the Odeon
provided the “greatest theatre IVe ever seen.” As in Paradise
Now, the “architecture of elitism and separatism,” the “bar
riers between art and life” that only falsified conventional
theatre, had been broken, and the result had brought “the
atre into the streets and the street into the theatre.”5
So, even though theatrical action completely stopped as soon as

the theater was transformed into a political public space, we en
counter at the beginning of this enterprise a certain illusion regard
ing the possible harmonious merging of art and life, theater and
politics. When Barrault spotted Beck among the crowd streaming
into the theater, he shouted, “What a wonderful happening, Julian!”6
Well, it turned out to be less wonderful for him: one month later,
after the evacuation of the theater by the police, Barrault was
sacked by France’s minister of cultural affairs, Andre Malraux. The
movement itself also quickly began to show signs of disintegration
during its one-month lifetime, and in the end would give up the
building without any resistance. However, notwithstanding Beck’s
fantasy about “the greatest theatre” he had ever seen, this disinte
gration was precisely a political disintegration. It was an effect of
the political, not the artistic, nature of the squatting action. Faction
alism abounded, so a core group was established; said group was
accused of hegemonizing the project, not to mention the other
political schisms within the group itself, and eventually the remain
ing members decided to leave the building. But the artists, among
them Lebel and Beck, had already left a m ere two days into the
occupation, after which the political activists had taken over
for good. At no point was there any artistic activity (in the strict
sense) involved in the Odeon occupation. W hen politics took
over the Odeon theater in the form of endless debate, art was of
no use anymore.

In this chapter, I am less interested in the moment at which the
artists leave than in the moment they return. As we have seen,
even when it does not correspond to reality, one of the peculiarities
of public space lies in the obvious fact that it is frequently concep
tualized as theatrical space. There seems to be a secret or not-so-
secret metaphorical complicity between public acting and theatrical
acting, between public space and the space of theater—a complicity
that has been observed since the French Revolution. The Odeon
affair is an obvious example of an actual theater space turned into
a political forum for public debate. Here, culture (or the arts) is
transformed into politics. Yet this is only part of the story, because
we do not know the source of this politicization. I submit that what
opens and grounds this sort of deliberative public space—which
we also encounter in Hannah A rendf s model of public space—
is the m ore fundamental conflict that can be term ed, following
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, antagonism: the ontological
category of the political. Without the students’ rebellion, without
the general strike and the barricades in the Latin Quarter, there
would be no capture of speech and no squatting of the Odeon
theater. Antagonism, in term s of social ontology, comes first. And
the moment it occurs and the political takes over, the artistic dis
appears and the artists leave the building.
When I say that this chapter will be concerned with the moment
of the artists’ return, I refer to a rather striking phenomenon that
can be observed in the afterm ath of revolutionary upheaval.
Through this phenomenon we see that, in a second step, public
space turns back into theatrical space again, and the initial and
founding antagonism is publicly restaged—as, for instance, in the
Bolsheviks’ restaging of the storming of the W inter Palace, to
which I will return in a moment. Thus, the main claim underlying
my argum ent will be that while the political as such cannot be
staged—because the founding event of antagonism always escapes
representation—it nevertheless must be staged in order to become

visible at all. In other words, every staging of the political comes
late, it is always an a posteriori staging of something that has already
occurred (or, who knows, could occur again at any point). This
“something” is the true cause of every public: an absent cause to
which political representation will then try to give a name. The
very theatricality of acting—its rhetoricity, but also the melo
dramatic pathos involved to some degree in all form s of truly
political acting—is precisely the symptom of this cause.
The Political Aesthetics of the Sublime
To substantiate these rather broad and perhaps still too abstract

claims, let us start from the constitutive moment of modern politics:
the French Revolution. Given what I said about the unrepresent-
ability of radical antagonism, the fact that the French Revolution
has been historically experienced in accordance with the aesthetics
of the sublime might be more than incidental. The whole meta
phorical arsenal of the sublime (what Kant calls the dynamic sub
lime)—descriptions of the revolution as storm, hurricane, mael
strom, landslide, earthquake, volcanic eruption—can be found in
the reports from visitors (“revolutionary tourists”) to the events of
1789 and onward, and do still belong to our present-day vocabulary
when it comes to political upheavals. All these metaphors belong
to the discourse of the sublime, because they indicate from within
the field of representation (i.e., within discourse) an event that
breaks into and dislocates this very field of representation: an event
whose cause is not at our disposal and, in this sense, lies beyond
representation.
If we define “the sublime” in a more general way, rather than as

a concept belonging to a particular historical theory of aesthetics,
as the representation of something that m ust always remain un
representable, then political discourse theory, as developed by
Laclau, may help us in understanding the close and necessary

relationship between the rhetorics of the sublime, the instance of
revolution, and the very logic of political discourse. In Laclau’s
discourse theory, the question of representation and represent-
ability is intrinsically connected to the concept of antagonism. For
him, the systematicity of any signifying system—and in order to
have meaning we need a certain degree of systematicity—can
only be established vis-a-vis a radical “outside” to this system, a
limit that he and Mouffe name antagonism. At the ground of all
social (i.e., discursive) systems there lies a purely negative in
stance that stabilizes and, at the same time, threatens the stability
of the system: “If the systematicity of the system is a direct result
of the exclusionary limit [antagonism], it is only that exclusion
that grounds the system as such. The point is essential because
it results from it that the system cannot have a positive ground
and that, as a result, it cannot signify itself in terms of any positive
signified.”7 In other words, the limit of the system, while it is
constitutive for the system, cannot be represented directly, other
wise it would be already part of the system—that is, there is no
positive signified corresponding to it. But what can happen, on
the other hand, is that the outside or the limit of the system shows
itself through the interruption or breakdown of the very process
of signification. So if “we are trying to signify the limits of signifi
cation—the real, if you want, in the Lacanian sense,” Laclau says,
“there is no direct way of doing so except through the subversion
of the process of signification itself. We know, through psycho
analysis, how what is not directly representable—the uncon
scious—can only find as a means of representation the subversion
of the signifying process.”8
In politics the name for this unrepresentable instance is, as I have

said, antagonism—a founding moment and a clash between incom
mensurable representations. As Laclau says, ‘T h e antagonistic
moment of collision between the various representations is itself
unrepresentable. It is therefore mere event.”9But, again, the fact

that it cannot be directly represented does not mean that it has
no effect. On the contrary, antagonism, as we have said, is the
constituting moment of the social (i.e., of any signifying system).
This implies that at the root of all social meaning and all order
there is a constitutive system of exclusion that was eventually
forgotten and naturalized. By drawing a line, by defining a limit
something always falls outside the system. But as soon as those
naturalized and sedimented social relations are once again reac
tivated by antagonism, the founding exclusion—and with it the
very contingency at the ground of every system, the fact that
things could be otherwise—becomes apparent. Laclau therefore
speaks about the revelatory function of antagonism: “The moment
of original institution of the social is the point at which its contin
gency is revealed, since that institution, as we have seen, is only
possible through the repression of options that were equally open.
To reveal the original meaning of an act, then, is to reveal the
moment of its radical contingency—in other words, to reinsert it
in the system of real historical options that were discarded.” This
system is the terrain “of the power relation through which that
instituting act took place.”10Therefore, “the moment of antagonism
where the undecidable nature of the alternatives and their reso
lution through power relations becomes fully visible constitutes
the field of the ‘political.’”11
And, I would add, this is precisely the moment in which a public

sphere is opened that renders visible and brings to light things
that were not visible before. Public sphere is the name for the locus
in which contingency is revealed by antagonism.
If we come back to the rhetoric of the sublime, then we might use

it as a discursive device to speak about a moment that as such
remains unrepresentable. Or as Slavoj Zizek puts it, ‘T h e paradox
of the Sublime [...] is the conversion of the impossibility of pre
sentation into presentation of impossibility.”12In the political sphere

this becomes most obvious in the case of revolutions. If that which
is “represented” by the sublime is the unrepresentable, then what
is “represented” in the case of a revolution is not one or the other
specific demands but the entirely empty concept of a new order
that is opposed to the old one, the ancien regime. A revolution in
the strict sense does not have any precise location in the field of
representation, as it happens within the very antagonistic time gap
between the old and the new. And insofar as the future new order
to which revolution points must be diametrically opposed to the
existing and all-too-familiar old order, it cannot have (in the moment
of revolution) any content or object either. For as soon as we are
in a position to sufficiently describe what the new thing actually is,
it is not new anymore; it is already part of the known, the “old.” In
this sense, the signifier “revolution” points to the outside of sig
nification, and so becomes what Laclau calls an empty signifier.
Now, obviously, revolutionary discourse will have to cope with this

structural impossibility by dividing a single political space into two
opposed fields. For instance, during the French Revolution, the
splitting of French society into a new nation and an old regime was
the core target of revolutionary articulation. In order to achieve
this, signifiers that happened to sound royalist or had become
associated with the ancien regime were eradicated, a new calendar
was inaugurated, personal names somehow identified with the
ancien regime were often replaced by Greek or Roman names of
classical heroes, new dress codes were invented, and so on.13
In the remaining part of this chapter, I would like to discuss two

theatrical possibilities for coping with the paradox of revolution,
that is, the impossibility and the necessity of representing antag
onism. I will call these the mimetic and the melodramatic aspects
of sublime representation. As I am concerned with theatricality
and public space, I will concentrate on theatrical restagings of the
founding moment of antagonism. Again, such mise-en-scenes of

the unrepresentable of course attempt the impossible; neverthe
less, if we look at the historical instances, there seems to be an
urgent need to do this, to reinscribe the constituting event—
a moment outside linear time—into the calendrical time of the
new regim e and to subm it it to repetitive rituals. In short, to
replace the public of the event with the public of representation.
The Second Storming of the Winter Palace
My example for what I call a mimetic reenactment of revolution is

the 1920 mass spectacle celebrating the third anniversary of the
storming of the W inter Palace during the October Revolution. It
was directed by Nikolai Evreinov, whose main ambition as a direc
tor, like Julian Beck, was to merge theater into life. But this mass
spectacle would go beyond the scope of all previous revolutionary
festivities, involving five hundred musicians in the orchestra, eight
thousand “actors,” and one hundred thousand “spectators” who,
as the audience, would in a sense also be participating by playing
themselves: the revolutionary masses. Even the Winter Palace itself
was to be involved as a gigantic actor and emotional character in
the play. So how can we imagine the whole spectacle? Let me quote
an article from November 30,1920:
Towards evening the rain died down and the inhabitants

of St Petersburg arrived, perhaps not in the num ber that
had been expected, but none the less, at an approximate
estimate, at least thirty thousand. And this whole mass of
people, who had streamed in from all sides of the city, stood
with its back to the W inter Palace, facing the arch of the
General Headquarters, where a huge stage had been con
structed, consisting of two platforms—a white and a red—
connected by a bridge and filled with structures and scen
ery... representing factories and enterprises on the red
platform and a ‘throne room’ on the white platform.

At 10 o’clock a gun boomed and the commander’s
platform attached to Alexander’s Column gave the signal to
sta rt The arched bridge flashed and eight trumpeters gave
an introductory fanfare. Then they vanished again into the
darkness. In the silence Litolf s “Robespierre,” performed
by the symphony orchestra of the Political Administration
of the Petrograd Military District, sounded splendid. And
the show began.
It proceeded alternately on the white platform, the
red or on the bridge between them.
The characters on the white platform were Kerensky,
the provisional Government, dignitaries and grandees of
the old regime, the women’s batallion, the junkers, bankers
and merchants, front-line soldiers, cripples and invalids,
enthusiastic ladies and gentlemen of a conciliatory type.
The red platform was more “impersonal.” There it
was the mass that reigned, first drab, foolish and unorgan
ised, but then increasingly active, orderly and powerful.
Roused by “militias,” it turned into the Red Guard, made
fast with crimson banners.
The action was built on the struggle between the
two platforms. It began with the Bolshevik June uprising
and ended with the square on which the fate of the power
less ministers was decided.
The bridge between the two worlds was the arena
of their clashes. This is where people fought and killed,
here people triumphed and from here they retreated.
The first light that illuminated the whites showed
their trium ph in caricatured form. To the strains of the
“Marseillaise,” arranged as a Polonaise, Kerensky appeared
before the expectant ladies and gentlemen. The actor who
played Kerensky, dressed in the characteristic khaki, cap
tured the premier’s gestures very well and provoked par
ticular attention among the crow d...
STAGING THE POLITICAL €1

But meanwhile the revolution continued... The red
platform became more organized after suffering losses;
troops went over to the side of the “Leninists.” And the
m inisters sitting at a table peacefully in their top hats,
rocked amusingly in their seats, like little Chinese idols.
Then came the moment of escape and vehicles started
rumbling near the steps leading down from the white plat
form to the wooden pavement.
There they rushed, caught by the beam of a search
light, and artillery roared. The air resounded with the vol
leys fired from the Aurora, anchored on the Nevy, the
rattle of rifles and machine guns.
Then the action transferred to the W inter Palace.
Light would flash on in the windows of the sleeping giant
and the figures of the people fighting would be visible. The
attack ended. The Palace was captured. The banner of the
victors appeared deep purple out of the darkness above the
palace. Five red stars lit up on the pedim ent Then rockets
went up and diamond-like stars lit up the sky, and waterfalls
of fireworks gushed down in a rain of sparks.
The “Internationale” sounded and the parade of the
victors began, illuminated by the searchlight and fireworks...
This is a general outline of what the spectators gathered
on Uritsky Square witnessed in the course of an hour and a
quarter.14
The spectacle unfolded on Uritsky Square in front of the Winter

Palace, but was there in any way a public space emerging—public
in the strict political sense? Another contemporary observer did
express this hope by saying that perhaps it was “the beginning of
a new road, a road which will lead across the square to the theatre
of the future, and which may lead us back to the long forgotten
Greek agora"15But he hoped in vain, for if the public, in the radi
cal sense, is a public established by the event of antagonism, then

a mere “representation” or restaging of that founding moment will
not do the trick; the reason for this being, as simple as it may
sound, that the dramatization of the storming is not the storming.
And what is even more important, the staging of antagonism is
not antagonism, as antagonism itself is, as we saw in Laclau, sim
ply “unstageable,” unrepresentable. Rather, we encounter a quasi-
mimetic representation of antagonistic conflict, represented by
the struggle between the red stage and the white stage, and a
mimicry of the public—that is to say, a quasi public.
The closest we get to a public in Evreinov’s arrangement—in the

radical, antagonistic sense—is the bridge that simultaneously sepa
rates and connects the two opposing forces. But as a bridge it still
remains within the field of representation, and as a representational
device it can be translated easily from theater into different artis
tic genres: For instance, into sculpture, as in Nikolai Kolli’s Red
Wedge Cleaving the White Block (1918), exhibited on Moscow’s
Revolution Square on the occasion of the first anniversary of the
October Revolution. Or into other media, like El Lissitzky’s famous
1919 poster for the Western Front, bearing the slogan “Beat the
Whites with the Red Wedge!” Abstract as this may be, it is still
representational—symbolizing the civil war between the White
and Red Armies—and its meaning is more than clear.
Melodrama
The new dramatic genre corresponding to all this is melodrama. It

emerged within an abounding mood of theatricality andtheairical-
ization within this sublime conjuncture, with a whole host of new
plays being set onstage. Whereas before the revolution in 1789 we
can find only a handful of premieres, in the decade that followed
1,500 new theatrical plays emerged. And the most important aspect
of this theatrical mood, which we can also find in the political sphere,
was that the revolution was accompanied by a new dramatic genre:

melodrama. What is it about melodrama that so perfectly fit the
revolutionary context, to the extent that it became a central genre
for the Paris Commune nearly a century later, and then again during
the Bolshevik revolution? Obviously, there is a certain analogy to
be made between melodrama and revolutionary speech. As Peter
Brooks puts it, “Saying that melodrama was the artistic genre of the
Revolution is nearly a truism, since revolutionary public speech itself
[...] is already melodramatic.”16
But the most obvious similarities, as Brooks specifies, are clearly

to be found in performativity. Let’s take the most famous revolu
tionary melodrama, Sylvain M arechal’s Le jugement dernier des
rois (1793). The plot is not particularly sophisticated: it assembles
all the European kings on an island and kills them off at the end
of the play with a volcanic eruption. T his volcanic eruption is
obviously a m etaphor for revolution as the dynamic sublime.
Brooks argues that the rhetoric of this play is performative and
can be put into the following formula: “Le jugement dernier des rois
in effect says: ‘Be it enacted that there are no more kings/”17And,
he adds, “melodrama is the genre, and the speech, of revolution
ary moralism: the way it states, enacts, and imposes its moral
m essages, in clear, unambiguous words and signs.”18 But this
clearness and unambiguousness is not simply given, it has to be
produced: all ambiguities have to be synthesized into a Mani-
chean division between an “us” and a “them,” between the friends
of the people and the counterrevolutionaries. And the mechanism
by which this works is precisely that of melodrama—which is why
it is the political genre par excellence.
In order to substantiate this claim, let us consult Robert B. Heilman,

who, in order to distinguish between tragedy and melodrama,
introduced the highly influential concept of monopathy as a sense
of quasi wholeness: “By monopathy I mean the singleness of feel
ing that gives one the sense of wholeness.”19This is typical for the

melodramatic character: “In the structure of melodrama man is
essentially ‘whole/" meaning “there is an absence of the basic
inner conflict” that one finds instead in the tragic character, who
is torn apart by different conflicting forces, like passions and
duties or freedom and fate.20The difference, according to Heilman,
is that in “tragedy the conflict is within man, in melodrama it is
between men,"21 Or as James L. Smith, commenting on Heilman,
puts it, “It is the total dependence upon external adversaries which
finally separates melodrama from all other serious dramatic forms”:
enemies such as “an evil man, a social group, a hostile ideology,
a natural force, an accident or chance, an obdurate fate or malign
deity.”22In melodrama, the question is not what kind of sentiment
is produced within the spectator—be it courage, enthusiasm, hap
piness, triumph, despair, hopelessness. The only important matter
is that it is only a single sentiment that is produced—which is the
reason why Heilman speaks of monopathy.
So if in m elodram a inner “dividedness is replaced by a quasi

wholeness,”23and monopathy thus assumes an ordering function,
then this unification of the inner self can only be established
against an outside, against the other. In Laclau’s words, a limit and
an antagonism has to be erected if some stability and systemati-
city is to be achieved. Not surprisingly, Heilman himself draws
this parallel when he remarks that “melodrama has affinities with
politics, tragedy with religion.”24 He explains further,
In the competition for public power that is pragmatic poli

tics, one conquers or is conquered: the public stance of
every party, the operating “platform” of every contestant,
is that w hat is going on is a conflict betw een right and
wrong [...1 “Our side” is the “good man,” and “they” are
the “flaw”; the Aristotelian tragic hero is broken up into
two separate competitors, whose combat is the pubic form
of political activity as we know i t Unlike the tragic hero,

the political hero is a part of the human whole doing duty
for the whole, that is, representing this or that crystalliza
tion of feeling or desire that is identified with “the good,”
and striving to put opposing forces out of business.25
The point here is, while the tragic subject could be called a paralyzed
spectator of his or her own inner turmoil, the melodramatic subject is
definitely an actor. The passage from dispersion to homogeneity and
from dividedness to wholeness is also a passage from the spectator
to the actor. Such production of a single feeling within the spectator
in order to transform her into an actor is precisely what lies behind
the idea of agitprop and of all those nearly one hundred subgenres
and sub-subgenres of agitprop found by Daniel Gerould in the
repertory index of the USSR of 1929: agit-etude, hygienic-agit,
agit-grotesque, atheistic satire, agit-trial, or Red Army performance
pieces.26All of these genres are inheritors of classical melodrama,
an important genre in Russian revolutionary theater in its own right
And, as James L. Smith argues, it remained so in 1960s and 70s
protest theater: “Protest theatre has many aims: to stimulate political
awareness, question established values, expose injustice, champion
reform, fuel arguments on ways and means and sometimes to incite
direct support for bloody revolution. The result may be a satire,
homily, cartoon, revue, or straight-play-with-a-message, but under
neath the fashionable trimmings the essential form is melodrama.”27
Why melodrama? So far, Fve mentioned a couple of reasons. Melodrama

is agitational; it sets people in motion by setting them in emotion. It is
political because it is a drama between actors, not a tragedy within
actors: These other actors act as my antagonists, thus they give a sense
of unity to my very own identity, even though they threaten my iden
tity at the same time. Let me, by way of ending, add a further reason:
The melodramatic form of enactment offers a solution to the problem
of the revolutionary sublime, that is, to the radical break with the past,
to radical antagonism as that which cannot be represented eo ipso.

So what is the solution proposed by the melodramatic actor con
fronted with the impossible task of representing the unrepresent
able? The solution is not given in speech or verbal language; rather,
it is given on the somatic level of action, in form of the hysteri-
cization o f the melodramatic body. As Peter Brooks has shown, the
hystericized bodies of melodrama behave in a way that evokes the
psychoanalytical concept of “acting o u t” It is in this sense that
they enact something—antagonism, the revolution, the new order
—which as such escapes representation.28The inability to verbal
ize the experience of something that lies beyond verbalization (the
revolutionary sublime) leads to the hystericization of the body,
that is, to somatic enacting, or rather acting out. For Brooks, by
the way, this is also the reason why pantomime plays such an
important role in revolutionary melodrama. Heilman, concerning
such bodily action, speaks of a melodramatic “catharsis” arising
out of the “exercising” of certain impulses; “Where I use the term,
I would give it the sense of ‘working o ff or ‘working out’ or simply
‘working.’”29W hat is “working out” if not an analogue of the melo
dramatic “acting out” observed by Brooks.
In order to fully understand this, it might be fruitful to refer back

to the psychoanalytic origin of the term “acting o u t” In psycho
analysis, acting out is a form of transference: an attempt to break
the frame of analysis in a nonverbal way, for instance, by consis
tently arriving late to the session. A fortiori, it can also be a form of
repetition compulsion that symptomatically reflects, on the basis
of an unconscious fantasy, some previous traumatic experience.30
In our case (the political case), it is the inability to verbalize, reflect
on, and work through the “traumatic” event of antagonism and
radical rupture that leads to forms of acting out. Seen from this
angle, antagonism—as that which cannot be represented directly
—is nevertheless symptomatically reflected in the form of a melo
dramatic acting out that is not “conscious” in the same way as the
(always inadequate) artistic representations of antagonism that I

have previously described. It is not a representation; it is a somatic
and compulsive effect triggered by an absent cause. This could
then explain the physical convulsion or cartoonlike “deformation”
that always accompanies revolutionary speech (but also the revo
lutionary journee and its carnivalesque aspects); the “prise de
parole” is a somatic enactment of something that eo ipso cannot
be verbalized and escapes “speech” as such.
As we said in the beginning, that which cannot be signified directly

shows itself only through the very breakdown of signification.
Peter Brooks’s point is that the hysterical somatic “enactment,”
so typical of melodrama, m ust be understood precisely as the
symptom of such breakdown. Our point is that every political
action does have a moment of acting out to the extent that it relates
to antagonism as something that as such is not representable and
therefore cannot be verbalized.
The whole argument of this chapter can thus be condensed in the

claim that we do not have access to antagonism in the strict onto
logical sense. Yet this does not mean that the ontological category
of antagonism is useless, nor does it mean that radical antagonism
does not exist. Why? The theoretical-ontological notion of antag
onism is useful because it provides us with a limit concept that
outlines the possibility and impossibility of “actually existing”
antagonism s and conflicts in the plural as well as of “public
spheres” in the plural. And because it does exist, namely, in form
of its dislocatory effects in reality.
Jumping
To end this chapter, let me now claim the exact opposite of what
I just said: there is indeed a way to gain direct access to radical
antagonism (if only an exceptional way). This is indicated in psycho
analysis by a further concept that must be carefully distinguished

from acting out: the concept of “passage a l’acte ” W here is the
difference? As Jacques-Alain Miller made clear, acting out—as in
melodrama—always happens in a scene, especially on a stage,
under the gaze of the other. So, according to Miller, one can only
speak about acting out as soon as there is a scene in which the
subject starts acting in front of an audience.31However, in the case
of a passage a 1’acte, which is concerned not with acting but with
the Act in the radical sense, there is no stage anymore. Any such
real Act—that is to say, any act worth this name—is, for Miller,
the transgression of a code, of law, of a symbolic whole. It risks
leaving the other behind, it escapes any dialectics, any ambivalence
of thinking, of the word, of language. It is, in his words, an em
phatic “no” shouted at the other. The only way to do this is by
jumping out of the scene, by leaving the theater, as it were. But
since the subject can never leap far enough and therefore never
reaches the other side, she or he falls into an abyss. Every real
Act is transgressive, but real transgression is impossible (and this
is where my model differs significantly from Deleuze or Bakhtin,
who would subscribe to the first part of the sentence but renounce
the second part). It is impossible, except in one case: suicide.
Applying this to the field of politics, we must ask whether revolution,

if it is taken seriously, isn’t just a name for such a suicidal rupture.
It was Louis Antoine de Saint-Just who said, that which constitutes
the republic is the total destruction of everything that is opposed
to it. At some point this turned out to include the revolutionaries
themselves. It is this suicidal logic of revolutions—based on the
aim to enact antagonism in the purest form—that explains to some
extent the progressive self-eradication of the French revolutionaries.
This act of transgression toward a limit—something to which we
have no access—was motivated by the drive to create Antagonism
with a capital A, to enact a total break with the past, a radical rupture,
and of completely leaving the old and entering the new. But a direct
enactment of antagonism and of radical rupture can only be suicidal.

Antagonism may be put on stage in a vain effort of representation,
but this will never be the real thing. It will always be a sublimated,
dramatized, representational, second-order version of antagonism.
Jumping into the real thing means jumping from the roof.32
For this very reason psychoanalysis, as well as politics, must aban

don this fantasy of a radical rupture, of an existential leap into the
political, and restrict itself more or less to a passage toward an
always partial and necessarily unsuccessful act—at least, insofar as
the analyst does not intend to kill the patient. The name for such a
politics would not be revolution, but it could be radical democracy.
But how would this politics relate to theater? As Janelle Reinelt

puts it in “Notes for a Radical Democratic Theater,” this implies
“a theatrical space patronized by a consensual community of
citizen-spectators who come together at stagings of the social
imaginary in order to consider and experience affirmation, con
testation, and a reworking of various material and discursive prac
tices pertinent to the constitution of a democratic society.” And it
implies moving “to a truly radical form of civic spectatorship [that]
involves negotiation and contestation, and a fundamental trans
formation of the traditional ‘spectator’ function from consumer to
agent”33If such a radical-democratic theater could still be enacted
on a stage, it would only be on the stage of the political.

Notes
1 Jean-Louis Barrault, quoted in Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, “Die Pkantasie an die

Macht”: M ai 68 in Frankreich (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 441.
2 Paul-Louis Mignon, Jean-Louis Barrault: Le tkedtre total (Monaco: Editions

du Eocher, 1999), 286.
3 “An Event: The Capture of Speech. Last May speech was taken the way, in
1789, the Bastille was taken. The stronghold that was assailed is a knowledge
held by the dispensers of culture, a knowledge meant to integrate or enclose
student workers and wage earners in a system of assigned duties. From
the taking of the Bastille to the taking of the Sorbonne, between these two
symbols, an essential difference characterizes the event of May 13,1968:
today, it is imprisoned speech that was freed.” Michel de Certeau, “Capturing
Speech” in The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings, ed. Luce Giard,
trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 11.
4 Kichard Neville, quoted in Baz Kershaw, The Radical in Performance:

Between Brecht and Baudrillard (London: Routledge, 1999), 100.
5 John Tytell, The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage (New York: Grove,
1995), 232-33.
6 Mignon, Jean-Louis Barrault, 285.
7 Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation (s) (London: Yerso, 1996), 38.
8 Laclau, 39.
9 Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution o f Our Time, trans. Jon
Barnes (London: Verso, 1990), 82.
10 Laclau, 34.
11 Laclau, 35.
12 Slavoj Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political
Factor (London: Verso, 1991), 144.
13 See Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
14 Quoted in Vladimir Tolstoy, Irina Bibikova, and Catherine Cooke, eds.,

Street A r t of the Revolution: Festivals and Celebrations in Russia 1918~33
(London: Thames & Hudson, 1990).
15 Quoted in Robert Leach, Revolutionary Theatre (London: Routledge, 1994),

49.

16 Peter Brooks, “Melodrama, Body, Revolution,” in Melodrama: Stage, Picture,
Screen, ed. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (London: British
Film Institute, 1994), 16. T he first thing that comes to mind in this respect
is the obvious tension between the tendentially nonverbal, bodily enactment
of melodrama and the rhetorical maneuvers of revolutionary public speech.
The main characteristic of the revolutionary years under Robespierre was
—according to Claude Lefort—that the terror was not silent at all. Quite the
contrary: the terror speaks, and since it is a democratic terror, it constantly
has to justify itself. If Lefort is right, then what we encounter in this speech
act of revolutionary “terroristic" rhetorics is a strange chiasmus between
terror and virtue, between enactment and justification. And if it is true that
terror has to be verbally justified in terms of virtue, then it is equally true
that virtue has to he enacted by means of terror. The two stages-—the stage
for justification the stage for justification (the parliament) and the stage for
decapitation (the guifiotme)-“intrmsica]ly belong together. See Claude Lefort,
Essais sur le politique; XlXe-XXe siedes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986).
17 Brooks, 17.
18 Brooks, 16.
19 Robert B. Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions o f Experience (Seattle:

University of Washington Press, 1968), 85.
20 Heilman, 79.
21 Heilman, 81.
22 James L. Smith, Melodrama (London: Methuen, 1973), 8.
23 Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama, 86.
24 Heilman, 90.
25 Heilman, 91.
26 See, e.g,, Daniel Gerould, “Melodrama and Revolution,” in Bratton et al.,

Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, 185-98.
27 Smith, Melodrama, 37.
28 On the other hand, the revolution has to be staged incessantly in order to

make sure it actually happens.
29 Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama, 84.
30 Lacan differentiates between the symptom and acting out; for reasons of
space, however, I treat both aspects as synonymous here.
31 Jacques-Alain Miller, “Jacques Lacan: Remarques sur son concept de passage

a l’acte,” Mental, no. 17 (April 2006): 17-28.

32 However, this does not do away with the necessity of radical antagonism (or the
radical Act) as a limit concept, To put the argument in deconstructive terms,
we may assume that the passage a 1’acte is the condition of (impossibility
of acting. Just as the constitutive outside of signification is (impossibility
of signification. On the other hand, we can speak of gradual acting out,
because a successful passage a l’acte would be impossible. There can be
“acting” because the Act, with a capital A, never succeeds (and Act can be
read in the Lacanian sense of sexual act as well, in the sense of sex as Real,
of something impossible that never succeeds either), at least not without
destroying its own conditions of possibility.
33 Janelle Reinelt, “Notes for a Radical Democratic Theater: Productive Crises

and the Challenge of Indeterminacy,” in Staging Resistance: Essays on
Political Theater, ed, Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S, Spencer (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1998), 286.

3
Dancing Politics
Political Reflections on
Choreography. Dance, and Protest
What is the political lesson to be drawn from dance? I will approach
this question through an understanding of dance as a genre of
performance not exclusive to the fine arts. Of course, as an art
form, dance has always been articulated with politics: from the
initial moments of ballet in the court of Louis XIV, where it was
an intrinsic element of what Jurgen Habermas called the repre
sentational public sphere of the court and a central elem ent in
constructing the grandiose public persona of the sovereign; to the
New York Workers Dance League with their intriguing slogan,
“Dance is a weapon in the revolutionary class struggle”; to the
innumerable dance events today driven by more or less radical
political intentions. W hile it would be fascinating to present a
political history of dance, this is not my concern here. To begin,
I would like to approach the question from the opposite angle:
from the perspective of politics and the role dance plays within
political practice. In other words, this chapter will be concerned
less with whatever is political in dance as a cultural or artistic
genre, than what m ight be dance-like in political acting. W hat
happens, we will ask, when today’s sovereign, the people, start
dancing publicly for reasons of protest? Only after this question
has been clarified will I return to two examples of dancing politi
cally that originated in the art field: East Side Story by the Croatian
artist Igor Grubic, and How Long Is Now? by the Israeli perfor
mance collective Public Movement.
The Politics of Frivolity
Let us take the following observation as a starting point: In the

course of the protest cycle defined by the actions of the global
justice movement, and more recently, Occupy and other radical-
democratic movements, dancing has become an intrinsic and indeed
ubiquitous part of protest. It is inseparable from the protest reper
toire. W here protests occur, as a rule, there will be trucks with
sound systems and a crowd of dancing people following them, there

will be samba bands or percussion groups such as Rhythms of
Resistance, there will be radical cheerleaders of whatever gender
exercising and waving their pom-poms, perhaps there will be sol
diers of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army marching
and pantomiming. In other words, there are all sorts of performative
pomp and circumstance involved in today's political protest. But
hasn’t this always been the case?
The most famous rhetorical conjunction of politics with dance is

attributed, as everyone knows, to the anarchist and feminist Emma
Goldman: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolu
tion.” This slogan has become protest folklore, endlessly quoted
and printed on T-shirts, posters, leaflets, and buttons. The appeal of
the slogan is all the more remarkable because, of course, Goldman
never said this. In fact, it is possible to trace back the creation of
the slogan to the early 1970s. As the feminist writer and activist
Alix Kates Shulman, author of a Goldman biography, recounts,
she was asked in 1973 by an activist from the anarchist center on
Lafayette Street in Lower M anhattan for a quotable slogan by
Emma Goldman.1His intention was to print Goldman T-shirts for
an upcoming festival in Central Park, where the end of the Vietnam
War was to be celebrated. Shulman did not provide him with a
slogan but referred him to the following passage in Goldman’s
autobiography, Living My Life:
At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest.

One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman],
a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were
about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whis
pered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance.
Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was
undignified for one who was on the way to become a force
in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt
the Cause.
DANCING POLITICS 77
I grew furious at the impudent interference of the
boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of
having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not
believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for
anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and
prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I in
sisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun
and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister.
If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right
to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant
things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in
spite of the whole world—prisons, persecution, everything.2
There is certainly no literal trace of the slogan to be found in this

excerpt, but one m ust concede that the slogan neatly wraps up
Goldman’s main message as a dancing revolutionary. Contrary to
the young comrade’s opinion, frivolity—or what is taken to be
frivolous, such as excessive dancing—does not “h urt the cause.”
Furtherm ore, a cause that doesn’t accommodate “everybody’s
right to beautiful, radiant things” is not worth fighting for. Half a
century later, the anarchist from Lafayette Street seemed to have
understood this and condensed the passage from Goldman’s auto
biography into a slogan that spread like a virus.
The Gap between Cause and Goal
This is a nice story from the good old days of 70s anarchism and
anti-Vietnam War protests. Yet it does not in itself provide us with
answers to a far-reaching set of questions: Why was the apocryphal
quote so successful? Why did it obviously touch the very core of
contemporary activists’ self-understanding? Why, in general, do
people seem to long for the articulation of politics with dance? In
short: Why is there such a need for m ore than a politics of
dance—a wish to dance politically?

There can be no simple answer to these questions, but it appears
that the slogan describes som ething rooted in the very logic
of political mobilization. For what is conjured up by the slogan is
a particular supplem ent or excessive elem ent that is added to
a concrete demand or cause. The same logic can be detected in
“Bread and Roses,” another apocryphal slogan that is commonly
attributed to the workers, mostly women, on strike against the
textile industry in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912. Even though
it is impossible to verify whether or not such a phrase was actually
used in the Lawrence strike, the slogan was highly successful as an
imaginary focus point for later protests. As with the Goldman
slogan, something excessive and nonutilitarian is demanded, even
though it remains unclear what, precisely, these “roses” or “beau
tiful, radiant things” actually are. As supplements to a concrete
demand, these sublime objects seem to remind us that no pro
test—perhaps nothing in the world—is motivated by solely utili
tarian considerations. Certainly, there is always a cause of protest,
which can be more or less concrete (a particular grievance, the
lowering of wages, for instance), or m ore or less abstract (like
exploitation, or alienation in general), and goals or objectives will
be form ulated to overcome these grievances. But if the goal,
should it eventually be attained, does not entirely fill out the lack
initially experienced as a cause of action, there will remain a gap
between the cause of the protest and the object attained.3
It is the discrepancy between cause and objective that calls for

and opens up a space for imaginary supplements to the concrete
ness of a particular suffering and a particular remedy. This sup
plement, to the extent that it is by nature excessive—as in the
deliberately exorbitant slogan “We want the whole world”—can
certainly take on different forms. One of these forms is violence,
like when a protest transforms into something of the order of a
pogrom, or into terror, as in the case of the French Revolution.
A nother form m ight be anxiety, if the gap between cause and
DANCING POLITICS 79
objective is experienced as an unbridgeable abyss. But a more
sympathetic form of excess is precisely what Goldman described
as “beautiful, radiant things”: In short, dance assumes the role of
a supplement to revolution. The subtext of the Goldman phrase
can thus be deciphered as follows: W ithout excess there is no
revolution—and instead of terror, violence, or anxiety, I, Emma
Goldman, opt for dancing.4So far, her theory of dance seems pretty
clear, but perhaps not radical enough. Having determined dancing
as a ubiquitous phenomenon of protest, we m ight want to push
the argument even further. What if dancing, and whatever it stands
for in the Goldman case, is not merely a supplement to revolution
ary politics, what if something like dance was inscribed into the
very structure of political acting? In other words: W hat if political
acting had the same structure as dance? W hat if political acting
was not so much about “doing politics” but about, as it were, dancing
politics? This m ight sound like a rather eccentric idea, but not
unheard of. It is an intrinsic element of Arendt’s concept of politi
cal acting.
Acting as Dancing: The Joyous Ground of Politics
Let us, for a moment, revisit Hannah Arendfs highly original and,
I would claim, subversive account of political acting that runs
counter to most aspects of today's commonsensical notion of poli
tics (politics as a boring if not dirty business, politicians as a cor
rupt caste of untouchables hated by everyone, etc.). According to
Arendt, the idea that doing politics is a burden rather than some
thing exciting only came into the world with Christianity. While
she agrees that nobody would want to spend his or her whole life
in the “light of the public,” a life spent in what she calls the dark
ness of the private—a life without politics—would be equally de
ficient. On the contrary, political acting gives a particular quality
to life. She therefore comes up with a claim that flies in the face
of our accustomed understanding of politics. As she says in an

interview about the student protesters of May ’68, these students
have experienced som ething always found in true politics: it
turned out for them that acting is fun.5
Nothing, as I said, could be further away from our commonsensi-

cal notion of today's politics, but if we consider the significant
degree of fun involved in contemporary forms of protest, and add
Goldman’s defense of frivolity and dance, then Arendt’s claim
starts to sound less eccentric. Of course, so far the category of
“fun” hasn’t made it into political thought (which might be correla
tive to our sense that theory and philosophy have nothing to do
with fun either), nor is our habitual notion of the political equipped
to accommodate it. In a more elevated or sublimated sense, this
affect was at least present in the demand for “public happiness”
during the American Revolution, as Arendt reminds us. Even so,
the public character of this demand got lost in the course of the
revolution, and was degenerated into the pursuit of individual hap
piness. Yet it is the publicness of happiness that every hum an
being, according to her, should experience at least once in his or
her life. But what exactly is the source of such happiness, or how
do we have to understand what for her constitutes the public char
acter of acting? At least three criteria can be discerned.
First, happiness em erges from the fact that we can only act to
gether, that there is a certain communality involved in all political
acting; a communality, though, which at the same time retains the
plurality of the political world. This is very close to what Jean-Luc
Nancy calls “social Being” or “being-with”—being singular plural.6
Second, Arendt compares the affect of public happiness to the hap

piness with which we greet a newborn; hence the existential con
dition of natality at the root of happiness. Yet we should be careful
not to interpret this condition in a biological sense; what she refers
to with the notion of natality is something more abstract that has
DANCING POLITICS 81
the structure of a quasi-transcendental condition of possibility for
acting. Acting is premised upon our ability to start something new,
upon the condition, as Kant would have said, of spontaneity. And
we are able to begin because we are, existentially speaking, begin
ners; we ourselves were thrown into the world as a new beginning.
Revolution is, of course, the political event par excellence in which
we actualize our capacity to begin. What the revolutionaries expe
rience in the very happiness of their acting is nothing other than
their actualized capacity to begin something new.
Third—and with this point we reapproach the conjuncture of poli

tics and dance—acting takes place on the stage of the public, there
fore Arendt compares it, in The Human Condition, to theatrical
acting—an idea for which she draws, of course, on Greek antiquity.
For Arendt, the space of acting is “a space of appearance in the
widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others
as others appear to me, w here men exist not merely like other
living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.”7
While public space only comes into being wherever men act to
gether, it disappears as soon as they stop acting. For this reason,
the space of appearance, the stage of the public, is a precarious
and fleeting thing as it only emerges during the moments of acting.
These m oments m ight not endure, since political acting is not
stable, nor does it produce anything stable. Arendt stresses the
futility, boundlessness, and uncertainty of its outcome. Acting, in
contrast to the activity of making or fabricating, is not concerned
with a particular product or oeuvre. If we think of the arts, then a
political actor does not play the role of a sculptor who would carve
a distinctive work out of stone. Rather, the work of acting, as
Arendt puts it, “is imbedded in [...] the performance.”8 And be
cause it is an end in itself, the true value of acting can only stem
from the virtuosity with which we actualize our capacity to act in
concert and start som ething new, not in the goal we seek to
achieve through action.

At this point of her argument Arendt compares political acting to
dancing: "As in the performance of the dancer or play-actor, the
'product’ is identical with the performing act itself.” In modern
societies, the historical idea of the preeminence of the performa
tive arts, which is Aristotelian in particular, disappeared, and the
Greek value system was inverted. Adam Smith, she observes,
"classifies all occupations which rest essentially on perfor
mance—such as the military profession, 'churchmen, lawyers,
physicians and opera-singers’ [...] the lowest and m ost unpro
ductive ‘labour.’” But, she insists, in concluding the argument,
that “it was precisely these occupations—healing, flute-playing,
play-acting—which furnished ancient thinking with examples of
the highest and greatest activities of man.”9Here, in the concluding
sentence, the example of dance is not taken up again. However,
in Vita activa, Arendt’s own translation of The Human Condition
into German (which is slightly more sophisticated than the English
original), the same sentence is significantly expanded and dancing
is reintroduced into the list: "In diesem von der m odernen Ge-
sellschaft urspriinglich so tief verachteten Virtuosentum, in den
‘brotlosen’ Kiinsten des Flotenspielen oder des Tanzens oder des
Theaterspielens, hatte antikes Denken einmal die Beispiele und
Illustrationen gefunden, an denen es sich die hochsten und
groBten Moglichkeiten des M enschen vergegenwartigte.”10
From Flute Playing to Lap Dancing
Let me recapitulate: the third criterion of public happiness, of joy

or fun in politics, springs from the public display of one’s own
virtuosity, in a performance whose end lies in itself. This is why
political acting, for Arendt, is structurally the same as dancing.11
One might ask whether this is a realistic account of politics, but
we m ust rem ember that for her realism implies that we confront
and phenomenologically describe what she, a pupil of Heidegger,
considers an existential dimension of acting. Her account is real
DANCING POLITICS 83
istic in the sense that it captures an affective dimension we all
experience when acting together in public. Yet I do think that
Arendt’s description of joyful acting, as much as it is validated by
the frivolities of contemporary protest, is far from being exhaus
tive. There are other aspects or dimensions of protest imposing
themselves precisely where we find them intrinsically articulated
with dancing and frivolity. Let us take as an example a particular
instance of dancing protest that occurred at the demonstrations
against the G20 summit in Toronto, in the sum m er of 2010. In
term s of the dancing “genres” performed, there was a lap dance
by two half-naked men with the riot police as their target. This lap
dance was accompanied by the collective chant “You’re sexy,
you’re cute, take off your riot suit.” Although this incident was not
all too spectacular, it was spectacular enough to make it into CNN’s
coverage of the protests.12
This is certainly a case of dancing politics; but even though the

protesters seemed to be having a lot of fun, and even though at
least one of the protesters displayed a certain degree of virtuosity
in lap dancing, it does not quite fit the Arendtian account of public
happiness. To be sure, there is fun involved, and togetherness or
commonality, but the situation, queer as it is, is confrontational as
well. I would go as far as claiming that the lap dance, even if it is
considered funny, involves a moment of symbolic violence. This
violence may amount to next to nothing, compared to the physical
violence unleashed should some authority decide to let loose the
RoboCops. And one may even defend this dance as a legitimate
response to police brutality in the form of symbolic counter
violence. But it is hard to deny that pure and innocent happiness
looks different. Dancing, in this case, is inscribed into the protest
vocabulary as a form not simply of frivolity, but of tactical frivolity
—a particular form of protest that first received attention with the
emergence of the so-called pink and silver blocs at the demonstra
tion against the 2000 World Bank and IMF meeting in Prague.

The Minimal Conditions of Dancing Politically
We will have to come to term s with the fact that in order to talk
about real-life politics we have to supplement the supplement; that
is to say, to the Arendtian category of public happiness we must
add further categories, whether we like them or not, that allow
for a more precise and comprehensive understanding of political
acting. In a quasi-transcendental sense one may speak about the
minimal conditions of politics, conditions that allow us to discern
a political form of dance from its communal form—for example,
a lap dance confronting the riot police versus a Milonga in the
streets of Buenos Aires. Even though there is no space here to
develop a more extensive argument, which I have tried to work
out elsewhere, some of these minimal conditions can be detected
phenomenologically in the most modest of political activities.13As
illustrated by the lap-dancing example, a couple of minimal con
ditions are met that allow us to use the term “politics,” even though
it will be politics on a very minor scale.
As a first condition, which I already hinted at, these actors do not

act out of pure spontaneity (even though, again, actors might think
of themselves as highly spontaneous): they act in a tactically and
perhaps even strategically concerted and organized way. This is
a necessary condition simply because every political act will face
resistance from other political actors, and every actor will act on
a terrain entrenched by dissymmetries of power and subordina
tion. Confronting these relations, or finding one's way around
them, necessitates a strategic approach. This, among others, is
what tactical frivolity is about. For the same reason, political ac
tivism does have goals, contrary to what Arendt—for whom the
end of political acting lies in acting itself—says about the difference
between acting and fabricating, where the former is supposed to
have its end in itself. Nobody would ever start acting politically if
it was only for the sake of acting. This is not to contradict every
DANCING POLITICS 85
thing Arendt said about public happiness but to supplement her
account. There is no acting that does not entail, in Arendtian terms,
aspects of making or fabricating (i.e., tactics and strategy).
Second condition: The political actor is never an individual, it is a

collective that assembles to stage a protest. A person dancing alone
in darkness and in private does not stage a protest.14 Conversely,
dancing politically means dancing together. But the community
established in this way as heterogeneous as it might be, will never
consist of a pure dispersion of singular pluralities, as in Arendt’s
conception of acting together or Nancy’s being singular plural.
The reason for this, and our third condition, is simply that a com
munity of protest can only be established through confrontational
means. These means do not have to imply physical violence, but
there will always be an aspect of symbolic violence involved. This
aspect of symbolic violence is im plicated in the v ery logic
of antagonism as famously developed by Laclau and Mouffe.15
Dispersed discursive elements (as in my simplistic example, dis
persed individuals aspiring to stage a collective protest) that do
not share any positive feature can only be assembled into a chain
of equivalence, Laclau and Mouffe claim, if they share at least a
negative feature: a constitutive though negative outside, something
that is taken to constitute a threat to the identity of each and every
one of these elements. In this sense, the policemen in their riot
gear symbolize a much larger threat—eventually ascribed to the
state or to global capitalism—that constitutes a precarious unity
among groups that, on other accounts and in terms of their positive
demands, may not come to much agreement.
It is through this process of antagonism or antagonization, per

formed through the strategic construction of a collectivity vis-a-vis
a negative outside, that a public space is carved out of the social.
We may still accept Arendt’s seminal point, concerning the perfor-

mativity of political acting, that such a public sphere emerges only
where people start acting together and disappears when they stop
acting. But if we supplement the Arendtian account with the cate
gory of antagonism as a necessary condition for the establishment
of every political togetherness, then it follows that antagonism will
also be a necessary condition for the emergence of a public sphere.
A public sphere opens wherever the routines, institutions, and
identities of our social world are touched by antagonism. Again,
by saying antagonism we don’t have to think of outright civil war.
Antagonism can be performed through peaceful dancing. We may
just think of the case of Reclaim the Streets, a successful inter
national protest format, particularly in the 1990s, with roots in the
free party scene and anti-road protests in the United Kingdom. The
initial idea was to turn areas reserved for traffic into communal
public spaces by staging dance events on the streets. There was
sometimes a rather regressive communitarian undercurrent (en
capsulated in the fantasy of ruralizing the urban sphere of the city),
which, in my view, also undermined the political edge of the move
ment. However, in other cases the format was used to stage a
clearly political or progressive protest, as in the case of the Viennese
Volxtanz network and their effort, as they called it, toward Sound-
politisierung, the politicization of sound, with which they demon
strated against the inclusion, in 2000, of Jorg Haider’s right-wing
Freedom Party in the Austrian government. This format was taken
up again upon the formation of another coalition between conser
vatives and the Freedom Party in 2018.
Across all these diverse cases, a similar logic can be determined.

A tem porary public sphere is created performatively by way of
obstructing the sphere of circulation. Every staging of antagonism
involves such a blockage, and very similar to the case of a labor
strike, w here the circulation of goods and services is blocked
within the economic sphere (or a consumer boycott where the
consumption of goods is blocked), in the case of street protest it
DANCING POLITICS 87
is the circulation of traffic that is blocked through, in this case,
dancing. The blockade effect enacted here is our fourth condition
for the emergence of public space: creating a space of confronta
tion where before there was only the space of urban traffic.
Embodied Protest and Protest Choreographies
So far I have outlined four conditions that eventually turn out to be

conditions for the creation of every public sphere through protest:
strategy, collectivity, conflictuality, and the blockade of circulation.
I would like to add a fifth condition, which is of particular impor
tance for street protest even though it may appear self-evident,
perhaps even trivial: In street protest, antagonism is enacted and
circulation is blocked by human bodies. The human body is the
most important medium through which a public space is carved
out of the social. Of course, this does not always have to occur in
the form of a militarized collective marching in sync through the
streets. Very often it is precisely the vulnerability of bodies that is
used as a performative medium of protest (up to the extreme point
where people decide to make a “passage a Facte” and publicly set
themselves on fire). Taking this word of caution into account, we
may define street protest as the collective and embodied activity
of blocking stream s of circulation whereby a line of conflict is
drawn through social space. And it is only along such a line of
conflict that a public, in the true sense of the word, emerges.
Isn’t this line, drawn by the bodies of demonstrators across a given

(in most cases urban) space, the trace of a more or less consciously
elaborated choreography? One may just think of the carefully
planned routes of street demonstrations (and of deviations from
these routes due to police intervention). We therefore have to
differentiate between two dimensions of public protest: the larger
protest choreography by which urban space is refigured through
demonstration practices, and the protest politics incorporated by

individuals and inscribed into their bodies. These two dimensions
of choreographed movement and bodily “dance” always go hand
in hand and can only be differentiated analytically.16
Dancing Violence: Igor Grubics East Side Story
Let us try to apply the conceptual apparatus developed above to

two particular examples, which I see as illustrative of dancing
politics, rather than political dance. Igor Grubic’s East Side Story
(2006-8) grew out of the deep distress the Croatian artist experi
enced when confronted with video material from the gay pride
parades in Belgrade in 2001 and in Zagreb in 2002. At these pa
rades, demonstrators faced not only the most vulgar verbal insults
by passersby, they were even exposed to the physical violence of
organized neofascists. Even today, pride parades have been im
mensely contentious in some Eastern European countries. Sometimes
they are simply prohibited by the authorities, in other instances
they are violently attacked by those who perceive themselves to
be members of a homogeneous, “healthy,” and doubtlessly hetero
sexual public. In the West, though, these parades, from the very
moment of their invention, have been famous for integrating dance
into the repertoire of their carnivalesque protest In doing so, they
have managed to recapture public visibility in their own nonviolent
ways. And even though some have criticized the increasing com
mercialization and the loss of political engagem ent (as it is the
case with Berlin’s Christopher Street Day parade), it cannot be
denied that, as political demonstrations, pride parades have been
immensely successful.
It is at this point—the function of dancing politically—that Grubic

intervenes. As a visual artist himself, he set out to collaborate with
dancers and choreographers in order to restage the original pro
test events. Curator Dejan Sretenovic described the work resulting
from this collaboration: “In a primitive community that brutally
DANCING POLITICS 89
reacts to differences, a small group of creative people, resembling
a resistance movement, will try to change people’s consciousness
through a dance ritual.”17In the two-channel video installation first
shown in the Belgrade Museum of Contemporary Art, one sees
on one side of the room the televised footage of the original events,
while footage of the dancers are projected on an adjacent wall.
They are not simply imitating the bodily movements of violent
protest; they have dissected the movements and translated the
resulting elements into a choreography. A single dancer may in
corporate gestures from both sides, sometimes within a single
movement or series of gestures. Then all four dancers reassemble
and, in a more obvious or recognizable way, stage bodily move
ments that bring to mind the original clashes, if only remotely.
Some might object that this work has nothing to do with art or
performance in public space, as it is clearly situated intra muros
—within the walls of an art institution. Nevertheless, East Side
Story remains of interest for two reasons. First, it should not be
seen so much as a political intervention in its own right than a
reflection upon the conditions of protest within a violently anti-gay
environment. In this sense, it is quite telling that Grubic approaches
the events through the very format that was obviously lacking in
the original event (even though one would have expected it in the
case of pride parades): dancing in the “fun” or carnivalesque sense.
Of course, it is clear why dance was lacking—there was no reason
to dance while under physical attack. But Grubic decided to re-
stage the events precisely by means of that which had remained
symptomatically absent. However, by being reintroduced into the
picture, dance takes on a completely different meaning. It becomes
an expression not of tactical frivolity, but of terroristic violence.
As I have said, the supplement of protest can take on many differ
ent forms, and perhaps there is no political protest without such
an affective and bodily supplement. Here it is the violence of the
counterprotesters that serves as an obscene surplus to their cause

(of denying homosexuals public visibility)—a violence sublimated,
or deconstructed, by Grubic and the dancers into an artistic form.
Therefore, it is more than appropriate that the title of the work,
East Side Story, refers to the musical West Side Story (1957), cele
brated for its dance scenes in which acts of violence between street
gangs, in particular, were sublimated into grandiose choreography.
Second, Grubic’s quasi “resistance movement” returned to the
public sites where the original events had occurred. Not only was
the video shot on the streets of Zagreb and Belgrade, but Grubic
also decided to hold all rehearsals on-site. Stretching over a period
of two months, the choreography was developed right there in
public space. The passersby would thus be confronted with a “tem
porary monument” intended to stir up memories of the TV broad
casts.18 So East Side Story, to some degree, was a performative
intervention into public space. But did it create a public in the
political sense?
It goes without saying that a reenactment is not, and cannot be,

the “real thing”; at best, it can initiate a process of reflection which
then m ight again turn into political activation. In this case, the
performances in the streets of Zagreb and Belgrade did not fully
m eet the criteria necessary for a public space in the political sense
to emerge: It did not block the circulation of traffic; perhaps it
slightly distracted it No conflict emerged from the performance—
at least no coUectivizable conflict. Whenever a real conflict occurs,
it tends to spread for some time as it can be collectivized; more
and more people start affiliating themselves with the cause. The
dancers, insofar as they remained individual dancers even while
dancing together, did not generate a collective, bu t rather a
singular plural body (as we will see in the next example, there is
also the possibility of a more collectivist dancing body). They acted
“in concert,” as Arendt would have put it, but they did not act as
or within a political collective.19 For this reason, the artists did
not—and didn’t need to—develop a larger and longer-term strat
DANCING POLITICS 91
egy, which, nevertheless, would be necessary to achieve the goals
a protest movem ent wishes to achieve. So, subtract all these
political dimensions from the performance (strategy, collectivity,
conflict, and blockade), and what remains is pure embodiment:
the bodily reenactment of a political event from the past. But as
reenactment pure and simple, it is not political in itself because it
lacks the additional criteria necessary in order to meaningfully
speak about politics in the first place.20
Pre-enacting Protest:
Public Movement's How Long Is Now?
Let us move to the second example in order to see what it takes for
an artistic intervention to actually make the passage into politics.
The double dimension of dancing politics through protest—chore
ography and dance—is reactivated in most performances of the
Israeli collective Public Movement, founded in 2006 by dancer and
choreographer Dana Yahalomi and visual artist Omer Krieger (and
led by Yahalomi alone since 2011). The name of the group refers,
on the one hand, to the ritualized choreographies of a nation-state
“public” and, on the other, to the political or protest movements of
a potential counterpublic—in other words, to state choreographies
and to protest choreographies. W hat is of importance is the fact
that these choreographies will always be inscribed into the bodily
knowledge of individuals. As Yahalomi puts it, “Politics exists within
our bodies, as an often dormant knowledge.”21In their performan
ces, these unconscious incorporations of the state are very often
reassembled into dreamlike choreographic sequences.
For instance, in their performance Also Thus! (2009), the group

staged a fictitious state ritual in front of the fascist architecture of
Berlin’s Olympic Stadium. This ritual, which included mock vio
lence and a car crash—a possible terrorist attack against a car of
the type used to transport German politicians—ended with an

Israeli folk dance and the audience joining in. In this performance,
as in some others by Public Movement, a quasi-Zionist occupation
takes place in an anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic historical setting, a
so rt of overwriting that nevertheless leaves visible the back
ground. However, Public Movement do not take an explicit politi
cal position, not even a Zionist one. Perhaps it is more appropriate
to speak of their deconstruction of Zionism as the dominant state
choreography of Israel. As in the original Derridean sense, this
deconstruction involves both an element of destruction and an
element of (reconstruction. With obvious reference to the con
structive dimension, Yahalomi has described the performances
of Public Movement as “pre-enactments,” which I will return to
in the postscript of this book. They are not m eant to imitate an
actual event in the past, but engage in the paradoxical enterprise
of restaging an event that has not yet occurred, for instance, a
future state that will have implemented the rituals “pre-formed”
by Public Movement.
In some cases, these “pre-formances,” as one may call them, can

assum e a disruptive rather than a ceremonial quality. In these
cases, what is announced by the intervention is not a future state
but, perhaps, a future protest. In their 2006 guerrilla performance
How Long Is Now?, the group blocked intersections in Israeli cities
by performing a circle dance to a popular song from the 1970s,
“Od lo ahavti dai” (the same song that ended the Also Thus! ritual).
After having blocked traffic for two and a half minutes, the dancers
disappear and traffic can continue circulating. To understand this
intervention, one m ust know that Israeli folk dance does not in
the slightest emerge from a particular tradition. Circle dances be
long to the cultural heritage of the M editerranean region and
southeast Europe, but modern Israeli folk dance has its roots in
the 1940s, when Israelis were forced to create a new, synthetic
common culture for heterogeneous groups of immigrants. For
this purpose Israeli folk dance did not only integrate choreographic
DANCING POLITICS 93
elements of highly diverse traditions, it also became very much
part of popular music production. Even now, new Israeli pop hits
are immediately outfitted with choreographies that are widely
taught in dance classes. Thus, folk dance in Israel has nothing to
do with what is referred to in German as Brauchtum, an appalling
term for age-old folk tradition, but is better described as an enor
mous multiplication of fashion dances.
Among these hundreds of songs, “Od lo ahavti dai,” with its rela
tively simple choreography by Yankele Levy, has proved to be one
of the most popular ones. It is probably because every Israeli child
learns the choreography in kindergarten that Public Movement
chose the song. In this sense, Israel’s state choreography is ex
pressed through communal dancing and registered by the bodily
knowledge of its citizens. Because it is universal (and also individ
ual) knowledge, passersby can potentially join in and become part
of the circle. By using this dance in order to block the crossroad,
a dance symbolizing the communitarian closure of society (but
also, of course, the attempt to gain courage and solidarity within
a fundamentally hostile environment) is reappropriated and used
to disturb the public order of this very society.
The Passage toward Politics
Most of the criteria developed above are thus met: How Long Is
Now? is a collective and collectivizable action by which a public
in the strong sense is carved out of urban space. This is achieved
through blocking the circulation of traffic with dancing bodies.
Yet the passage to politics in the strict sense does not occur. With
out a doubt, the irritation produced by the event has the potential
to remind passersby of the micropolitical inscription of state cho
reographies in their own individual bodies. Such reactivation of
bodily knowledge can be something political, but more in a critical
or analytical sense than in the sense of protest politics. And to the

extent that it remains an art performance, the meaning and the
goal of the intervention can very well remain in the dark for most
of its witnesses. In fact, Public Movement explicitly say that they
do not adhere to a for/against paradigm—and this is exactly the
point where we realize that a decisive element is missing: an actual
conflict that would force everyone to position themselves on this
or the other side of a political antagonism.
In sum m er 2011 such an antagonism broke out in Israel when

tents were planted in the center of Tel Aviv and other cities. Start
ing with the call of a single student, social protests against high
living and housing expenses grew to the point w here Israel
witnessed the largest political demonstration in its history. In the
course of the protests, Public Movement took up their intervention
and offered this format to the protesters. Repeatedly, dozens of
activists would assemble on different intersections, blocking traf
fic for two and a half minutes to dance to the music of “Od lo ahavti
dai.” In so doing, they actualized a conflict m uch wider than a
simple clash with angry car drivers. Such clashes occurred, but
they now referred to the wider line of political conflict drawn by
the social protesters all over Israel. By offering the demonstrators
a new and easily collectivizable protest format, Public Movement
turned their original guerilla performance from an artistic inter
vention into a political one. T he latter actualized what was an
nounced as only a future possibility by the former “pre-enactment”
of 2006. Or, to put it differently, How Long Is Now? as danced by
the protesters in 2011 was not an artistic reenactment of a political
event, as Grubic’s East Side Story was. It was, inversely, apolitical
reenactm ent of an artistic event.
Of course, this only became possible on the condition that a larger

antagonism emerged in society—which was not in the hands of
Public M ovement. We should think of this antagonism as an
“objective condition" of protest, not as something that can be pro
DANCING POLITICS 95
duced intentionally.22And yet, these objective conditions have to
be m et by activist practices in order for a conflict to pass from the
latent to the manifest. If this worked out so well in the case of How
Long Is Now?, it is because the emancipatory potential of Zionist
culture, created long ago in the kibbutzim and watered down to
pop-cultural folk dance, was re-created in contem porary street
protest. And if people joined in, they did so because an essential
dimension of political acting was being addressed: the joyous expe
rience resulting from the virtuosity of the performance as such.
As Arendt argued, “Acting is fun.” In a 2011 interview with the
Jerusalem Post, a member of Public Movement declared, “We’re
going to do some folk dancing, which, first of all, is really fun. And
it creates some automatic solidarity between people. Just standing
in a circle, holding hands, is the basic gesture of solidarity.”23 One
should not underestim ate these m oments of joy present when
demonstrating in solidarity. Today’s forms of radical-democratic
protest can hardly be enacted without such joy—a joy that opposes
the despair of a political reality without an alternative. It is in the
dancing of the demonstrators that some of the jouissance of em
bodied democratic action expresses itself.

'
Notes
1 Alix Kates Shulman, “Women of the PEN: Dances with Feminists,” Women’s
Review of Books 9, no. 3 (December 1991): 13.
2 Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Knopf, 1934); quoted in Shulman.
3 Just as when the 2008 US presidential campaign to elect Barack Obama

succeeded, the eventual disappointment was already programmed in: he
was never going to be able to remove all grievances and live up to the
outsized expectations of voters. Of course, the same—from the other side
of the political spectrum—holds for Donald Trump.
4 Let me Just mention that, this stands in stark contrast to some of today's
theories of the political, rather successful ones, that display a sort of
juvenile, or rather masculinist fascination not with dancing hut with terror
and violence; I am thinking in particular of the work of Slavoj 2izek.
5 I have discussed Arendf s assertion extensively in Oliver Mar chart, ‘“Acting

Is Fun’: Aktualitat und Ambivalenz im Werk Hannah Arendts,” in Hannah
Arendt: Verborgene Tradition— UnzeitgemMe Aktualitat?, ed. Heinrich-
Boll-Stiftung, Deutsche Zeitschrift fur Philosophic Sonderbande 16 (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 2007): 349-58.
6 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and

Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford, CA Stanford University Press, 2000).
7 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1958), 198-99.
8 Arendt, 206.
9 Arendt, 207.
10 Hannah Arendt, Vita activa, oder Vom tdtigen Leben, 7th ed. (Munich:
Piper, 1992), 202.
11 Provided we are talking about dancing together, that is, dancing in terms of
plurality and communality, rather than a solo performance.
12 Like everything else on this planet, the Toronto lap dance can be found
on YouTube: “G20 Lap Dance / G20 Toronto," 0:42 min., posted by
ConstableBubbles, October 18,2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch
?v=vG8yrLcIRIY.
13 See chapter 6, "On Minimal Politics,” in Oliver Mar chart, Th ink ing Antagonism;
Political Ontology after Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2018), 129-54; and Oliver Marchart, “Democracy and Minimal Politics: The
Political Difference and Its Consequences," South Atlantic Quarterly 110,
no. 4 (Fall 2011): 965-73.
DANCING POLITICS 97
14 This is, by the way, what happened to Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher of
dance if there ever was one, when his mind glided into darkness; it was
reported that his landlady, concerned about Nietzsche turning mad, glanced
through the door in his room where she saw Nietzsche dancing naked.
15 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:

Towards a Radical Democratic Politics {London: Verso, 1985).
16 One may just think of the masculinist militancy of bodies formed into the
choreography of a uniformed black bloc; or, on the other end of the scale,
of the joyous frivolity of bodies choreographed into a partying pink and
silver bloc.
17 Dejan Sretenovic, “The Figuration of Resistance,” in East Side Story, exh. cat
(Belgrade: Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008), 9.
18 Sretenovid, 9.
19 Even though some dancers actually were part of the movement. However,
in this performance they are, first and foremost, dancers, not protesters.
In their role as artists they acted, at best, in solidarity with a political
collective and not as part of that collective.
20 Of course, in the usual sense of the term, East Side Story is a highly political
work. My argument should in no way be understood as criticizing Grubic. It does
not make East Side Story any less critical, but its criticality remains in the art
world and does not speak of "politics" where there are none. My argument in
this text is directed against the current inflation of the qualifier “political,” but
not every work of art has to be political in a precise sense. To be political should
not necessarily make a work better or worse from the perspective of the art
field {provided “good” or ‘h ad ” should be valid criteria at aD, which I doubt),
it only makes it better or worse from the perspective of the political field
(where, correspondingly, its quality as art will be of secondary importance).
21 Public Movement, “The Group of All Groups,” interview by Alhena Eatsof,

Kaleidoscope, Fall 2011, 39.
22 Anyone who has ever tried to organize a protest knows that it is difficult, if
not impossible to predict whether it will work out and people will join in.
Sometimes, you organize a demonstration time and again, and nobody
shows up. But then, suddenly, the conditions change and the same effort
can result in the most massive rally,
23 Public Movement, "Dancing Activists Block Tel Aviv Traffic,” interview by

Benjamin Spier, Jerusalem Post, August 31, 2011, http://www.jpost.com
/V ideoArticles/Video/Artide.aspx?id=236147&R=R55 (site discontinued).
THE STAGE, THE STREET, AND THE INSTITUTION

4.
f Art, Space,
| and the Public
I Sphere(s)
On Public Art. Urbanism,
and Political Theory
“Social space is produced andstructured
by conflicts. Withthis recognition,
ademocratic spatial politics begins.”
—Rosalyn Deutsche1
As we know, a rt in public space can mean at least two things.

There is the traditional definition—art in combination with archi
tecture and artistic urban outfitting, which conceives of public
space as a physical, geographical urban and architectural land
scape. But “public art,” in the sense of more recent forms of art
in the public interest (or so-called social interventionism, commu
nity art, participatory art, etc.), has also evolved into a discrete
category within the canon of available art practices and forms.
However, what this general artistic enthusiasm for social issues

tends to outshine is politics. W hat artistic social work replaces is
political work. And what social interventionist art practices tend
to outshine, it would seem, are political interventionist a rt prac
tices. Politics, wherever it enters the scene at all, is understood by
this social-work art “in the public interest” to mean policy: admin
istration, engineering, and possibly technocratic handling of social
problems. In these terms, public art becomes a privatist version
of public welfare. W hat’s astonishing about this is not only the
appearance of bureaucratic phantasms of administration or admin
istrative reform in art but, above all, a narrowing of the concept
of the public sphere whose banner had once been held high. The
concept of the public sphere has been relegated to the realm of
social affairs, yet the public sphere really only deserves this name
if what it denotes is the political public sphere.

Regarding public art, everything depends on what exactly is im
plied by public sphere, the public, or public space. Is it a space in
which conflicts are resolved or one in which they are managed
and administered? Is it a space of open political agonality, a space
of the battle for meaning, in Stuart Hall’s sense of a “politics of
signification”? Is it a space of reasoned rational and informal de
bate, as Habermas would have it, or a space in which so-called
concrete shortcomings are to be named and remedied in situ? Is
public space one space among many other spaces (e.g., private,
nonpublic, semipublic, local)? Is public space one particular space
at all, or is it rather a generic term for a multiplicity of public
spaces? W hat exactly makes it a political space (as opposed to a
social space)? And what is spatial about public space, and vice
versa, what is public about the public sphere? I am not asking
these questions at the beginning of this chapter with any rhetor
ical aim of finding some kind of approach to the issue; rather,
I would like to try to find a real answer to them here.
To this end, we will have no choice but to depart from the art field
discourse around this topic, which is rather limited in its theoretical
scope, turning toward political theory itself—from which the con
cept of the public sphere derives in the first place—and to recent
discourse on public art. For quite some time, much more than in
Europe, the Anglo-American art discussion has promoted analyses
of public a rt in term s of political theory, for example, through
Claude Lefort’s concept of libertarian democracy, or Ernesto
Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s concept of radical and plural democ
racy. The discussion around art in public space, it would seem, is
becoming increasingly inextricable from theories of democracy
that are not easily passed off as a Habermasian or a social-work
version of the public sphere. So far, the most valid articulation of
public art through the public sphere theories of Lefort, Laclau, and
Mouffe is that of Rosalyn Deutsche. The double question that arises
for us and for Deutsche is: What role does the public sphere play
ART, SPACE, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE(S) 103

for political art practices, and what role can political art practices
play for the public sphere? The initial theory for this chapter and,
it would seem, for Deutsche is that our answer cannot be found by
looking through the lens of art theory and criticism; it is only pos
sible by including political theory. At the same time, this also sug
gests a paradigm shift away from the theoretical disciplines guiding
critical art since the 1970s: Marxist economics and sociology.2
However, before discussing Deutsche’s concrete answer to the

question of the public sphere in term s of democracy theory, our
first step will be to address the more obvious question as to the
concept of public space in urban theory: w here is the space in
public space? Only then will we see where a rt and politics take
place. This seemingly m ore substantial problem has also been
used to analyze political theory, for example, in critical and post
modern urban studies. In order to restrict the subject somewhat,
I would like to take Laclau’s concept of space, also deriving from
the field of political theory, as a basic guideline. Laclau’s under
standing of space has already been assessed by Doreen Massey,
among others, as to its usefulness in term s of critical urbanism
and geography. I will thus begin by looking into the discussion that
evolved from the differing concepts of space developed by urbanism
and political theory, respectively, before returning—after a brief
excursus to critique Michel Foucault’s, Gilles Deleuze’s, and Jurgen
Habermas’s theories of space—to the implications of public art in
terms of politics and democracy theory.
Space vs. Time: Politics as Spatialization
In her article “Politics and Space/Time,” Doreen Massey prefaces

her critique of Laclau by recounting the history of critical geogra
phy:3 In the seventies—during the general rise of social science,
particularly Marxist, approaches—the canonical slogan declared
that space is a social construction. In other words, space was no

longer seen as a preceding substance, or an unchanging terrain
that had always existed and upon which society had been erected,
but rather the specific structure of space was the result of social,
economic, and political processes. Spatial theory underwent the
same constructivist turn that redefined the social sciences as a
whole. In the ’80s, this approach became more radical: not only is
space a social construction, but inversely, the social sphere is also
spatially constructed. And this spatial condition of the social sphere
certainly does have causal effects: that is, the way that society
works is influenced by its spatial structure. The basic difference
between these convictions lies in the fact that in the seventies space
was still seen as a passive mass (i.e., as the result of social con
struction processes), while in the ’80s (and ’90s) space itself as
sumes the role of a social actor.4
Massey criticizes the notion of space as a passive product of social

forces and generally in a state of stasis—a conception, it would
seem, that among other things creeps in when the category
“space” is placed in binaristic comparison to the category “time,”
with time usually being the positive term (as history, change, etc.)
and space the negative.5Although, according to Massey, the dual
ism of spatiality and temporality is very common among theorists,
she accuses Jameson and Laclau above all, despite their differ
ences, of drawing on it (here we will concentrate only on her cri
tique of Laclau). Her analysis is motivated by what she sees as the
depoliticizing effect of their concepts of space. With Laclau, space
itself, she maintains, is depoliticized because he misconstrues it,
in contrast to time, as static: “Laclau’s view of space is that it is the
realm of stasis. There is, in the realm of the spatial, no true tem
porality and thus no possibility of politics.”6 In contradistinction
to this, she feels that radical geographers and urbanists have made
spatiality stronger and more productive as a political category
with the aid of concepts such as center, periphery, and margin,
and their analyses of the “politics of location.”

Thus, the question concerns whether, and how, the concept of same constitutive outside prevents a complete totalization of the
space can be seen as being political in itself. In order to investigate system. Any system, discourse, or structure is thus always tra
whether what appears to be an abstract criticism of Laclau is jus versed by a constitutive ambivalence that Laclau calls “dislocation.”
tified, we cannot avoid giving a brief description of Laclau’s theory He sees a temporal phenomenon in the dislocatory effects that
of space. However, before doing so, it should be noted that it is every structure is subject to, whereas he always sees the structure
certainly rather odd to accuse an (exclusively) political theorist of itself as spatial. The easiest way to understand this is perhaps by
depoliticizing his concepts from the viewpoint of geography; that is, imagining the structure, for example, as a particular topography.
it is strange to accuse a political theory of advocating nonpolitical The very idea of a structure implies some kind of topography (a
concepts. This would rather suggest that certain discipline-specific certain relational arrangement of elements that become “places”
m isunderstandings may have slipped in during the translation through their reciprocal relational determinations), otherwise the
process between urban geography or critical urban studies and structure would, quite simply, not be “structured.” A structure or
political theory. Could it be that Massey does not take the concepts topography is in the extreme (albeit unattainable) case a closed
and theoretical constructions of political philosophy on their own system, where all possible recombinations of its elements and
terms? Could it be that the language game of critical or postmod changes of state can be derived from the internal logic of the sys
ern urbanism—despite all reciprocal inspiration—cannot be trans tem itself.
lated word for word into the language game of political theory,
and vice versa, that something like Laclau’s concept of political On the other hand, the symbolization and systematization (i.e.,
space cannot be completely transposed to urban, social, geograph spatialization) of the structure as compared to its heterogeneous
ical space? And furthermore, that a political theory approach to exterior consists in the almost complete elimination of its tem
the category of space cannot be totally absorbed into the approach poral character (i.e., the dislocations of the structure); hence,
of social science and urban sociology? creating a topography always entails an effort to transfer time
into space (what Laclau calls the “hegemonization of time by
Let us begin by looking at what exactly Laclau understands by space”), to minimize the dislocatory, “destructuring” effects, and
spatiality and temporality. He bases his assumptions on the con to define the flow of meaning. In order to be able to symbolize a
sideration that every system of meaning (i.e., every discourse, temporal sequence of events,8they must be made synchronously
every structure, every identity, and ultimately every space) can present, they m ust be spatialized. This is achieved by means of
only become stabilized by differentiating itself from a constitutive repetition. The mythical figure of the eternal return is—like any
outside.7However, this outside cannot itself be part of the system of myth—spatial in precisely this sense; here, it describes a circle.9
meaning (for then it would not be an outside but part of the inside), But myths of m em ory spatialize the historical event too, for ex
but must be something radically different. Yet for the very reason ample, myths constructed around national historical events and
that it refers to something that it cannot fully bring under control their representation in the form of m onuments. According to
itself, a system of meaning never manages to become fully stable. Laclau, “Any repetition that is governed by a structural law of
On the one hand, what it refers to (by default, the constitutive succession is space”;10 sedimentary social myths and traditions
outside) does permit a certain stabilization; on the other, the very are quite simply the result of repetitive practices that have lost
106 THE STAGE, THE STREET, AND THE INSTITUTION ART, SPACE, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE(S) 107
their contingent origin in the course of their repetition with the
effect that we now perceive them as necessary, naturalized, un
changeable, and eternal. This space—engendered by the liege-
monization of time by space—may be a space of memory, as is
the case with the national monument, in which a certain histor
ical memory has been fixed (only secondarily is it the “physical”
space surrounding the monument).11Laclau, too, concludes from
this that it would be naive to hold on to the notion of space as an
unchallengeable objectivity th a t has always existed. Quite
the contrary, space is the result of an articulatory practice—the
practice of defining meaning. The result of this practice neces
sarily consists in the form of some kind of hierarchized structure
in which the relations between elements, levels, places, and so
on are m ore or less clearly defined (i.e., fixed). In this sense,
Laclau’s position is a structuralist one, because, to him—and this
is w here he falls in with Saussure—m eaning can only evolve
within a relational system of differences. On the other hand, this
“fixation” can never completely succeed. It would be a totalitarian
illusion to believe that one could m aster the totality of a system
of signification, regardless of w hether we call this system dis
course, society, city, or public space. Thus, establishing the flow
of m eaning to form a structured system allows us to forge a
topographical relation between the various elements of the sys
tem. Yet the relation, the articulation and hierarchization, be
tween the various regions and levels of the structure is only the
result of a “contingent and pragmatic construction” and not the
expression of an essential connection. This is precisely due to
the fact that every identity is flooded by a constitutive outside
(i.e., time). In this sense, Laclau’s position is a poststructuralist
one: the relational system can never be completely constituted
or closed.12
To summarize, if space is always subverted by time, then there is

no possibility to tie down or end this contingent and pragmatic

construction of a system of signification once and for all, as this
possibility would only exist if the connection between the elements
were actually essential and preceded articulation. But, of course,
this is not the case; the connection m ust be articulated continu
ously, time m ust be hegemonized constantly through practices
of spatialization, and this w orks by m eans of repetition (i.e.,
sequence). Thus, articulation is a continuous and continuously
failing process that essentially consists in the repetitive connection
of elements. It is precisely by means of articulation, by linking
different elements, that we open up a space.
Articulation, in turn, progresses in a double m ovem ent On the

one hand, hegemonial articulation, if it succeeds, can lead to what
Laclau, and Jameson before him—both referring to Husserl—calls
sedimentation, or the “sedimentary forms of 'objectivity.’”13This
is the field of the ostensibly objective or, as Barthes termed it, the
“naturalized” social sphere, which must be distinguished from the
political field of rearticulation. Following Husserl, sedimentation
is a name for the routinization and forgetting of origins: a process
that tends to occur as soon as a certain articulatory advance has
led to a hegemonial success. In Laclau’s terminology, this move
ment simply describes the “fixation of meaning” in solid topogra
phies that need to be conceptualized as sedimentations of power
and that spatialize the temporal movement of pure dislocation into
a precise “choreography.” Such traditions are the routinized prac
tices, foundation myths, and spaces of m em ory constructed by,
for example, national monuments. Yet inasmuch as these spatial,
“ossified” sediments can be reactivated, there also exists a tem-
poralization of space or, I would suggest, an extension of the field
of the possible. In the words of Laclau, we are confronted with a
m om ent of “reactivation,” with the process of a “defixation of
meaning.” In this case, more and more elements, levels, and places
are perceived as contingent in their relational nature.
ART, SPACE, AND THE PUBLiC SPHERE(S) 109

This puts us in a better position to judge to what extent Massey's
criticism of Laclau’s concept of space is justified. Laclau makes it
quite clear that he is not speaking of space in the figurative sense,
but rather physical space, which is in his understanding only dis
cursively accessible and constructed in the same way as discursive
space: “If physical space is also space, it is because it participates
in this general form of spatiality.”14This is the classical construc
tivist view that Massey would ascribe to the first wave of radical
geography in the 70s. But Massey overlooks the point of Laclau’s
approach by more or less willfully reducing it to traditional struc
turalism. For, just like the second wave of radical geography dis
cerned by Massey, Laclau (in turn favoring discourse theory)
actually bases his assumptions on the inverse theory: that space
is not only constructed discursively, but also that discourse itself,
seen as the partial fixation of a system of signification, is essen
tially spatial (without, however, inferring that space has any causal
effects on time).
Consequently, Laclau’s political theory is not only beyond the

bounds of M assey’s distinction between theory in the 70s and
the ’80s (which could be seen as a distinction between construc
tivism and post-constructivism), but may well be equally beyond
the bounds of the categories of passive and active. Massey’s crit
icism, as mentioned at the beginning, is that Laclau continues the
old metaphysical notion in which space is labeled a passive mass,
a mere product of a construction achievement, for example. Yet for
Laclau the difference between space and time is not a difference
between passivity and activity. Tim e is not the “actor” creating
passive spatial sedim ents (i.e., social deposits); rather, time—
as dislocation—is precisely the category that prevents these sedi
m ents once and for all from becoming firmly established. As
Laclau explicitly attempts to explain, space can hegemonize (i.e.,
“spatialize”) time, but time itself does not hegemonize anything
at all: “While we can speak of the hegemonization of time by space

(through repetition), it m ust be emphasized that the opposite is
not possible: time cannot hegemonize anything, since it is a pure
effect of dislocation.”15
The reason for this is easily apprehended. Although the existence

of a constitutive outside of a system of signification (a space) is the
precondition for a certain systematicity (e.g., topography) to be
come stable; at the same time the constitutive outside (as the source
of dislocation of the system) is the reason why the system will never
be able to close itself to achieve totality. Both a condition allowing
spatialization and, at the same time, a condition thwarting total
spatialization, time is beyond the bounds of categories such as
active and passive. And if time does not simply play the active part,
then inversely, space cannot play the passive part either; thus, the
convenient symmetrical dualism that Massey imputes to Laclau does
not work as such. What effect does this have on Massey's criticism
that Laclau depoliticizes the concept of space? In Massey’s reading
of Laclau, time plays the active role, with space in the passive role.
At the same time, the active role is conjoined to politics, while the
passive role is free of all politics. Inasmuch as Massey imputes this
conviction to Laclau, she can accuse him of seeing space as a
passive, nonpolitical mass in true W estern tradition. This would
be the case if Laclau’s theory were to fit Massey’s portrayal. But
that is not what Laclau writes. Here, Massey is taken in by a cate
gorical mistake that inevitably occurs when categories of political
philosophy are read as categories of social science.
In fact, time is not so much a category of politics as it is a category

of the political. This distinction itself is qualitative and not simply
quantitative, and it is thus generally inaccessible to social scien
tists. Although it is true that Laclau compares politics and space,
he argues that “politics and space are antinomic terms.”16However,
he does so because, to his mind, space, i.e., the social sphere or
“society,” is precisely the final product—by definition unattain

able—of hegemonic efforts of spatialization. Politics is precisely
these hegemonic efforts, namely, practices of spatialization by
means of articulation. Thus we must distinguish between “spatial
ization” as politics, on the one hand, and “space” as a category of
the social sphere, identity, discourse, society, and systems of mean
ing in general, on the other. Indeed, politics (spatialization) can
only exist in the first place because space is impossible in the final
analysis. T he complete constitution of space/system /identity/
society is impossible because these categories refer to a constitu
tive outside that simultaneously is the condition enabling them
and m akes their complete closure and self-identity impossible.
And one of the names for this outside is time.
However, it follows from this that time is definitely not identical to

politics, as Massey implies. As mentioned above, the category of
politics is spatialization. The constitutive outside of space, by con
trast, is that which is heterogeneous to the system—everything
that cannot be explained by the inner logic of the system itself or
has never had any prescribed place in the topography—dislocation,
disturbance, interruption, event. Laclau calls this moment of inter
ruption and reactivation of spatial sediments “the political.”17Thus,
we must distinguish between politics (spatialization) and the politi
cal (the dislocatory collapse of temporality in the emphatic sense).
In his rejoinder to Massey, David Howarth rightly pointed out that
in this Laclau follows Heidegger’s criticism of the metaphysical
notion of time as presence and representation. For Howarth, too,
temporality is the category of the political as pure negativity (antag
onism) that prevents society from achieving its self-identity, while
politics is a practice of spatialization, and thus identification. As
Howarth says, ‘T h e character of temporality is indeterminate and
undecidable: it is a condition for politics, not politics itself. The
political is antagonism and contestation between forces, whereas
politics consists in giving form or embodying the political. In this
respect, politics m ust always have a spatial dimension.”18

So what Massey fails to recognize is what we might call the onto-
ontological difference between space and time, or between the
way Laclau uses these term s and the way Massey uses them. In
his response to Massey, Howarth is absolutely correct in noting
that “Laclau’s usage of the concepts of space and time operates
on the ontological level, rather than at the ontical level of Massey.”19
W hen Laclau speaks of temporality or of the pair tem porality/
spatiality, he is speaking strictly about the conditions of the
(im)possibility of spatialization (politics) and space (society). He is
speaking, if you like, about temporality as the ontology of social
space and of politics. The latter is located at the ontic level that
Massey refers to, for example, when she investigates into a certain
“politics of location.” At the ontic level, time does not exist per se,
but rather only times, that is, spatial-symbolic representations of
temporal processes—for example, history. From the viewpoint of
the social sphere, the ontological level of temporality is manifested
only in the event, only when these temporal processes are abruptly
interrupted and—for example, at the moment of revolution—when
a new “chronology” begins and a new space gains hegemony over
an old one.
By differentiating between a social science (Massey) and a politi

cal philosophy (Laclau) approach, we can thus discern three cate
gories, or rather pairs of categories, which, despite all having
something to do with “spatiality,” m ust not be confused as they
are located on different ontological levels:
a / Time and space. Time is the ontological principle of dis

location of a structure that results from the essential
dependence of the structure on a constitutive outside.
Space, inversely, is the name given to the extreme case
of complete obliteration of temporality, or “dislocation.”
This theoretical extreme case can never occur, however,
as the constitutive outside of the structure will always

leave behind traces and dislocatory turbulence inside. If
we could eliminate this constitutive outside, we would
also eliminate the structuredness of the structure with
i t Thus, the disappearance of temporality would also
entail the disappearance of spatiality. Space itself—a
closed, non-dislocated totality without a constitutive out
side—is consequently never attainable. The term “society”
is generally spatialized in this sense (“everything is so
cial”)—as an indiscernible horizon that knows no outside.
But insofar as space and time can only be analytically
separated as ontological principles and the principle of
space as totality is never attainable without the inclusion
and dislocation of time, society is impossible—impossible
precisely as a closed totality, as space. This is the key
theory of Laclau and Mouffe’s provocative book Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy, society does not exist.20
b / Spaces. If space does not exist in the strict ontological

sense, this is the very reason why spaces may exist at
the ontic level. When Massey speaks of space—and this
is where the misunderstandings arise—she generally
means this level of spaces. But Laclau, too, means spaces
when he speaks of sediments and the unevenness of the
social sphere. The concept of sediments—not indicating
passivity in the slightest—is fully justified in that it only
makes sense in the plural. We will come back to this in
the next section.
c / Spatialization. Spaces, however, are not preexisting, but

must rather be continuously constructed. This process
of spatialization, or sedimentation, is the actual moment
of politics. Laclau calls the logic of politics “hegemony,”
and consequently, spatialization is quite simply the hege-
monization of time by space. As Laclau himself says,

“Any representation of a dislocation involves its special
ization. The way to overcome the temporal, traumatic
and unrepresentable nature of dislocation is to construct
it as a moment in perm anent structural relation with
other moments,” for example, I would argue, as topog
raphy, “in which case the pure temporality of the ‘event’
is eliminated.”21 T his construction, the m ore or less
perm anent connection of various moments to form a
structured whole, is what Laclau term s “articulation.”22
From Space to Spaces and Back: Three Blind Alleys
On the basis of the above discussion, I would like to focus on

three—and, as I see it, unsuitable—strategies for reconceptualizing
public space that I will try to link to the names Foucault, Deleuze,
and Habermas.23Assuming that their theories of space are largely
known, I will not describe them in detail here. My concern is simply
to touch on possible criticisms that would follow from the viewpoint
of political theory, as outlined above. Whereas Foucault consciously
attempts to promote antipublic spheres via a strategy of multiplica
tion, Deleuzians see public urban space as a flood zone of energy
and libidinal flows. Habermas, in turn, hypostatizes a certain con
ception of public space into the public sphere. These three blind
alleys of the multiplication of space (Foucault), the substantialization
of space (Deleuze), and the hypostatization of space (Habermas)
display an even more pronounced depoliticizing effect than Massey
accuses of Laclau. Against the negative background set out in this
section, it will be easier to come closer to a truly political theory of
public space, and thus public art.
Foucault’s 1967 lecture “Of Other Spaces” brought forth a whole

genre of heterotopology studies in the wake of its publication in
the ’80s. The success of this incidental text can probably only be
explained by architects’ and urbanists’ obsessive thirst for theory

imports (and by the inexorable pleasure that architects take in
one-to-one translations of poststructuralist theoretical concepts
into architectural forms such as folds or ovoids).
Foucault presents these “other spaces,” or heterotopias, as privi

leged, forbidden, or sacred places within our society-—places that
mark out a space of transition, crisis, or deviation. Crisis hetero
topias, which he assigns to so-called primitive societies in partic
ular, are privileged, sacred, or forbidden places. Today, they would
be replaced by deviation heterotopias such as holiday homes,
psychiatric clinics, or prisons. Generally speaking, heterotopias
m ust be seen as folds from the outside into the inside, as Deleuze
would say—“bubbles” in a homotopos that Foucault does not de
fine in any further detail. A typical instance of these bubbles is
the last example cited in his lecture: the boat, “a floating piece of
space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed
in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the
sea.” To Foucault, the boat is “the heterotopia par excellence.”
And he draws the somewhat romanticizing conclusion that “in
civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the
place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.”24
As spaces of the outside in the inside, heterotopias are real, exist

ing utopias. And they are above all multiple, so we should really v
speak of many small outsides in the plural. By employing this
pluralization of the category of outside (and its folding into the ;
inside), Foucault does, however, let himself in for a certain incon- i
sistency of his representation, because the heterological science
he evokes is evidently unable to present a criterion for the exact
nat ure of the borderline between outside and inside. If the outside
is real and existing and occurs in many places on the inside, then
how can we speak of an outside? Is the other-in-the-same not im
mediately transformed into precisely this same? Are heterotopias
not merely simple variations or certain modes of homotopias? In

light of the fact that Foucault does not provide us any criteria with
which we could define the borderline between inside and outside,
it rem ains totally unclear who, or what, actually determ ines
whether a given place falls under this category or n o t The very
concept of heterotopia loses all contours. Benjamin Genocchio
poses the same question in the following way: “How is it that
heterotopia are ‘outside’ of or are fundamentally different to other
spaces, but also relate to and exist ‘within’ the general social
space/order that distinguishes their meaning as difference?”25
The only possible answer is that the person differentiating the
places is Foucault himself, Genocchio concludes. The categoriza
tion of heterotopias is apparently an arbitrary act of the author.
Without a criterion to define the borderline between inside and

outside, the criteria for any concrete determination of places as
heterotopias are also weakened. Foucault assigns gardens, ships,
brothels, churches, hotel and motel rooms, museums, cemeteries,
libraries, prisons, asylums, holiday homes, psychiatric clinics,
military facilities, theaters, cinemas, Roman baths, Turkish ham-
mams, and Scandinavian saunas to the category of heterotopia.
And we can add to those, as Genocchio does, markets, sewers,
amusement parks, and shopping malls. So what on earth is not
heterotopical? Are there any other places than other places?
A sympathetic reading could of course see this systematic weak

ness as the real strength of Foucault’s concept. For example, Bernd
Knaller-Vlay and Roland Ritter advance the theory that Foucault’s
almost Borgesian anti-systematology is not a “weak concretization
of a strong idea,” but rather he “creates a systematic inconsistency
with which he protects the fist from being completed. The list of
heterotopias suggests an open-ended series that can be thought
out and continued.”26Thought out and continued, that is all very
well, but according to what criteria? The problem is, if I cannot
give any criteria for the other/outside, then, conversely, I cannot
ART, SPACE, AND THE PUBLIC SPHEREfS) 117

subvert the same/inside either. Foucault’s heterotopias are there
fore neither simple components of the inside nor are they external
to it; rather, they actually coincide with the inside—m uch like
Marc Auge’s non-places. If everything can become a heterotopos,
then ultimately nothing will. Foucault’s fuzzy heterotopology con
sequently proves to be a homotopology.
This argument follows the logic developed in the previous section:

the mere multiplication of other spaces or internal outside spaces
into an unclosable series inversely makes it impossible to define the
borders of the same or interior space in any way. As mentioned
above, the outside must be of a radically different nature than the
inside. If the inside, for example, is a system of differences or differ
entially determined positions, then the outside cannot be a further
difference or position—it would be part of the inside. The constitu
tive outside, which Laclau sees as distinctly nonspatial (time), would
in this case become merely another difference (or many other dif
ferences, that is, heterotopias) of the inside. But then it would cease
to be an outside (and the inside would no longer be an inside). And
it is no longer constitutive, as it has been broken down from an
ontological category (time/space) to an ontic category (spaces).
This thought leads me to the hypothesis that the concept of het

erotopia implicitly seeks to oppose not the ontological category
of the same, or inside, but rather the ontic counterconcept of a
certain rival topos on the inside—namely, public space. In other
words, the most important—indeed the only—thing that the het
erotopias listed by Foucault have in common is the fact that they
seem to not belong to one place, namely, th e bourgeois public.
Foucault drafts a particularist concept of space whose unnamed
but implied opponent is the universalism of public space.
This hypothesis is backed up by the fact that Foucault does not

indicate how, or whether, heterotopias can mediate between one

another—a role traditionally assumed by public space: the mediation
of private spaces. It is not clear what the reciprocal relationship
between heterotopias is or how they relate to each other. So, we
might ask with childlike naivete, must we go through the homotopos
to get from one heterotopos to the other, or are there doors between
heterotopias? And is the public sphere the space that we must tra
verse if we wish to pass from one heterotopos to another?
What seems more probable is that the public sphere is not simply
homotopos that embraces heterotopias, but rather, for the purpose
of Foucault’s argument, it assumes the role of the anti-heterotopia
(and heterotopias assume the role of anti-homotopias). The univer
salis! bourgeois public sphere is quite simply the antithesis to the
particularist heterotopias of crisis and deviation, compared to which
the latter—precisely qua deviation—are tacitly defined.
Thus, heterotopias are the mere reverse, the inversion of an un

defined homotopos that is, however, implicitly manifested as the
public sphere: a homotopos that m ust be presupposed as a uni
versal, mythical authority so as to give meaning to the concept of
the heterotopia. When Foucault, at the only point in the text where
he actually speaks of public space, describes the opposition of
private and public space as the result of a silent sacralization, his
text itself is the best example of the “silence” with which this sacral
ization is still performed in its apparent subversion.
Let us look now at the version of the heterotopia that has been
hailed as the “new public sphere” since the 1990s—the internet.
The idea of the internet as public space or simply as the public
sphere has become commonplace. At first glance, it would even
appear to have formulated and dealt with any criticism of the myth
of the public. However, this internet myth was countered by an
other myth that leaves no room whatsoever for the public sphere.
We are talking about the (post-)Deleuzian myth of the internet as
a rhizomatic space of flows with no center. Here, the pubjic sphere

is overflowed by a spatiality that, as replete with positivity or sub
stance, utterly thwarts any rational discussion or normalization/
spatialization. I call this idea of a space that is too overfilled to be
circumscribed in clear-cut boundaries, and which at the same time
“floods” the space of the public sphere, the space of flows theory.
In a 1995 issue of Architectural Design, Sadie Plant formulated the
space of flows theory of the internet with unequivocal clarity. Cyber
space, she contended, resists all demands for supervision, regu
lation and censorship, for “such zones have always been out of
control.” With this, she drew a parallel to urban space: “Cities,
like cyberspace, are not objects of knowledge to be planned and
designed, but cybernetic assemblages, immensely intricate inter
plays offerees, interests, zones and desires too complex and fluid
for even those who inhabit them to understand.”27 The potential
for this urban resistance is found in the Deleuzian substance as
signed to cities: “Weeds and grasses lift the paving stones.” This
allusion to May 1968 and the Situationist International is not lim
ited to the purportedly subversive potential of cyber flows: “All
spaces, their builders, and inhabitants, functioned as cybernetic
systems in multiple layers of cybernetic space.”28
The euphoric myth of the intrinsic force of flows is usually artic

ulated by the diffusely anarchistic evocation of centerlessness.
The buzzword “rhizome” has been flogged to death for this pur
pose. But promoting a flowing, rhizomatic centerlessness of the
internet/city is also, in a sense, an extremely vapid affair. All anti-
foundationalist theories would today agree that, by definition, no
system of signification has a natural center, and for this reason
alone the internet cannot have a natural center either. But what
exactly does this mean? Again, I would like to link this problem
back to the political theory outlined in the first section. Laclau
makes it clear that merely referencing the decentered nature of a
structure is not the end of the story. What we must understand by
a decentered structure is “not just the absence of a centre but the

practice of decentring through antagonism.”29 In view of the fact
that every system of signification is dislocated, there can be no
singular center. Nevertheless, we must note that “the response to
the dislocation of the structure will be its recomposition around
particular nodal points [centers] of articulation by the various an
tagonistic forces.” The dislocatory, decentered nature of a system
of signification is both the result of the battle of various forces for
the meaning of this system and an appeal to undertake new at
tempts at centering. Laclau concludes that “social dislocation is
therefore coterminous with the construction of power centres.”30
So what does this mean in terms of our problem? If the patchwork

of heterotopias or the rhizome of the internet were to possess a
“natural” and stable center, there would be no dislocation, thus no
problems of meaning. The process of the articulation of meaning
would stand still and we would enter a frozen world in which every
sign is bound to a natural referent and complete transparency ex
ists: a world of total and eternal wealth of meaning. If, on the other
■hand, heterotopias, public spheres, and so on did not have any
centers at all, if meaning were not articulated by the partial con
struction of nodes (by means of spatialization) and no signifier could
maintain a temporary relation to a certain signified, then what we
would see would be a psychotic universe, and again, there would
be no meaning, but rather a world of total and eternal meaningless
ness. In this sense, the Deleuzian flows is extremely psychotic. And
in Deleuzian space there is no room for the public space of politics.
Space is naturalized, vitalized, furnished with natural metaphors,
and it assumes a positivity or substance that obviates any politics,
and thus all articulatory practices of spatialization.
Does the above argum ent lead to a general criticism of plural

models of space? Does a critique of Foucault’s heterotopia model
necessarily entail embracing the public sphere as a homotopos?
This question leads us to the last model of the public sphere,

namely, the public sphere as superspace or metaspace. The idea
of the all-encompassing or standardizing public sphere has often
been ascribed to Jurgen Habermas, which may not be fully justi
fied as Habermas himself speaks of the public sphere in the plural:
it is made up of regional, cultural, literary, scientific, political, or
ganizational, medial, and subcultural “partial public spheres.”31
The problem is not that Habermas does not recognize this plural
ity of partial public spheres, but rather that this plurality is swal
lowed by a positive principle of communicative reason.
According to Habermas, all partial public spheres, being inter-

permeable, refer to one all-embracing, overall public sphere. Regard
less of the plurality admitted at the level of partial public spheres, there
is only one “democratic” or “autonomous” public sphere that does not
coincide with the public spheres of mass culture: the sphere in which
citizens can communicate about the regulation of public affairs. Within
the scope of my analysis so far, the idea of a rational super- or meta
public sphere—that is, the “public sphere” that we are talking about
when we hypostatize the concept of public space into the concept of
public sphere—is amiss. Not that such a public cannot exist; it is
staged wherever people debate in rational and democratic fashion.
We need not even dispute its possibility. (Although practically improb
able, it is at the very least possible as a regulative idea and asymp
totic ideal.) But still it remains a partial public sphere among many, a
public sphere that is not by a long shot ontologically privileged, nor
could it be an overall or, to put it in my words, a meta-public sphere.
Our criticism of the meta-public sphere, then, in no way equates to

Lyotard’s postmodern criticism of metanarratives. The point is not
that all metanarratives, to which I would also count Habermas’s
public sphere narrative, should be rejected because they automat
ically lead to a kind of totalitarianism. The real criticism is that
such narratives cannot assert a m etastatus and are thus at the
same ontological level as all other narratives. This does not in itself

refute the metanarrative itself—-it may well make sense to argue
in favor of the hegemony of a particular narrative—but rather
simply opposes its transcendental status.
I am certainly not coming out against the possibility of communi

cative reason or against the possibility of a democratic public sphere.
Rather, I am opposed to the idea that this public sphere is ontologi
cally privileged over other, pre-rational or pre-, non-, or antidemo
cratic public spaces. To give an extreme example, if we do not wish
to smuggle the idea of communicative reason into the concept of
the public sphere, then there is not even anything to stop us from
speaking of fascist public spheres. Why should the public sphere
of the “one German people” as constructed by Hitler’s radio speeches
not be a public sphere; why should the public facilitated by the
Nazis’ Nuremberg Rally not be a public sphere? Why should only
informal, rational dialogue generate public spheres in the emphatic
sense; is there not equally the public sphere of command, of authori
tarian invocation, of enthusiastically swaying or goose-stepping
masses? Or, to cite some less emotive examples, what makes all
the various partial public spheres—such as the everyday public
spheres of advertising, backstairs gossip, sports events, youth cul
tures, and so on—any less public, less autonomous, or less univer
sal than a public sphere created through rational discussion?
Even if we narrow our concept of the public sphere to political and

democratic public spheres, their plurality rem ains irreducible,
constituted around a collection of equally irreducible political lan
guage games and divergent demands. This brings us back to a
conception of the public sphere that would be compatible with
Laclau’s notion of public space:
A radically democratic society is one in which a plurality »

of public spaces constituted around specific issues and de
mands, and strictly autonomous of each other, instils in its

members a civic sense which is a central ingredient of their
identity as individuals. Despite the plurality of these spaces,
or, rather, as a consequence of it, a diffuse democratic cul
ture is created, which gives the community its specific
identity. Within this community, the liberal institutions—
parliament, elections, divisions of power—are maintained,
but these are one public space, not the public space.32
What Laclau says of the institutional public spheres of democracy

(parliament) can also be said of Habermas's concept of the demo
cratic public sphere: it is not the public sphere. Just as contempo
rary advocates of the freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnun,g33
would like to restrict the democratic public sphere to parliament,
Habermas hypostatizes a certain public space (of rational discus
sion) into the one public sphere.34But isn’t the irreducible plurality
of the public sphere (i.e., the absence of a rational or other super
public sphere, a metaspace) the very precondition that makes
something like democracy possible in the first place? Laclau would
maintain just that: ‘T h e condition for a democratic society is that
these public spaces have to be plural: a democratic society is, of
course, incompatible with the existence of only one public space.”35
This by no means implies that democracy is made up of a m erry

patchwork of public spheres. Rather, democracy means that the
conflict of the question as to which public spheres are tolerated
as politically legitimate and which are repudiated is not automat
ically settled in advance—for example, by taking recourse to a
quasi-transcendental ideal of communicative reason. Democracy
means that no particular public sphere, no individual project of
spatialization may claim this transcendental status for itself. This,
in turn, implies that the public sphere cannot be occupied once
and for all, which is what quite clearly distinguishes an approach
derived from Laclau or Claude Lefort (whom we will speak about
below) from a simple pluralization of the Habermasian public

sphere, as can be found in Nancy Fraser or Seyla Benhabib.36To
recapitulate, we have identified three blind alleys that in a way
illustrate what can go awry with theories of space and the public
sphere and how certain decisions can, from the theoretical outset,
have depoliticizing effects or implications:
The first blind alley was the multiplication of space, or rather the
folding-in of the constitutive outside into the inside. With the aid of
this model of the heterotopos, Foucault aims to draw up a counter
model to the great closed space of society, a countermodel in that
this space always includes something of the outside, of the “other
space” (heterotopos). To say that such spaces are multiple and
plural in no way implies that they constitute an endless, unstruc
tured puzzle or that they are all equal. As illustrated above, by
virtue of the fact that the only applicable criterion of a heterotopos is
its deviation from the homotopos, and that this is ultimately—simi
lar to Habermas's super-public sphere—a phantasm of the theory
that either anarchistically warns us of it (like the Foucauldians)
or upholds it (like the Habermasians), everything can become a
heterotopos, from the sauna to the shopping mall. In the end, even
the parliament is a heterotopos.
The Deleuzian blind alley is the substantialization of space. Here, all

subtly differentiated public spheres—heterotopias, utopias, and ho-
motopias—are brought together. The literary public sphere no lon
ger differs from the party-political, subcultural, or artistic public
sphere; for we are looking not at a logic of delimitable spaces and
possible systems, but rather a rhizomatic, centerless mess. This view
could be countered by the fact that the space of the public sphere is
not a quasi-natural force transforming the city into one big libidinal
jungle of its own accord, for that would imply attributing it with its
internal laws, an inner driving substance of constant becoming and
fading. That would mean remaining in the realm of Deleuzian natu
ral philosophy, if not natural mysticism. Consequently, politics be

comes a distinctly superfluous activity, for it is the quasi-natural
substance of libidinal flows that “lifts the paving stones”—not the
politically organized and articulatory will of political demonstrators.
But a model contrasting with this vitalist hippie and neo-hippie

model is one in which the public sphere is assigned the role of
superbrain.37This is the blind alley of the hypostatization of pub
lic space, where a particular public space—the space of rational,
informal, normative deliberation—becomes the public sphere. Yet
the space of the public sphere is not the bourgeois metaspace of
rational and nonviolent discussion, although it need not even be
disputed that such a space does exist or, if not, in the counter-
factual or regulative sense, should exist somewhere at the ontic
level (although I would tend to doubt both its factual existence
and its counterfactual desirability, for different reasons). Rather,
public space is plural or multiple, and the Habermasian debating
society, if it exists, is one public space among many, a space that
is not in any way ontologically privileged over the others.
None of these three approaches can answer the question of why

the public space is plural but not indefinitely so (i.e., not unstruc
tured); rather, they explain why certain public spheres dominate
other public spheres.38 So none of them can help us explain how
the various public spheres are interrelated. For example, how are
exchange relations supposed to work between these public spheres
if we (1) do not assume there is an overall public sphere that unifies
all others, thus taking charge of exchange (the homotopic space
as a medium between heterotopias), and (2) do not wish to assume
a puzzle of unconnected public spheres, between which no ex
change takes place whatsoever. These problems can only be re
solved by means of a political theory that takes into account the
way in which various projects of spatialization (i.e., the hegemon-
ization of space) are at loggerheads with each other and construct
partial, transitory hegemonies over other spaces.

Public Sphere(s) and Radical Democracy
Rosalyn Deutsche has proffered what is to date probably the most

valid attempt to interconceive art practices and the political cate
gory of public space. Deutsche herself says that one of the most
central aims of her seminal essay “Agoraphobia” is to infiltrate
new theories of “radical and plural democracy” into the discourse
on public art.39In order to answer the question of what makes art
public, we will have to devote our attention to political theory. Of
course, this does not imply demanding a new m aster theory of
art; rather, the questions, problems, and impasses that have long
concerned political philosophers and democracy theorists in de
veloping a concept of the public sphere have always determined
the discussion around public art—even where it has not been
dressed in the explicit vocabulary of political theory. As Deutsche
says, “Although public art discourse has so far paid little direct
attention to these theories, the issues they raise are already pres
ent at the very heart of controversies over aesthetic politics.”40
Speaking of impasses, any progressive theories of the public

sphere in leftist discourse—for example, a theory of “radical and
plural dem ocracy”—have been, and to some extent still are,
obstructed by a Marxist economic determinism that considers any
political concept to be merely symptomatic of the underlying eco
nomic foundations of society. In her attempt to retheorize public
a rt and public space, Deutsche m ust fight on several fronts—
against public art as embellishment, against public art aS a means
of gentrification (as the aesthetic arm of property speculation),
against conservatives who seek to substantialize and restrict the
concept of the public sphere, against the communitarian Left that
sees politics simply as community work, and even against her own
colleagues at October, who continued to argue for the autonomy
of art and artists, and who in some cases even succumbed to fits
of cultural conservatism.411 assume that the criticisms of public art

as a means of gentrification, as an Intrinsic means of distinction in
art, and as an individualist substitute for public welfare, are generally
familiar, so there is no need to go over them again at this point. But
the decisive front on which Deutsche m ust liberate the concept of
the public sphere is against the neo-Marxist Left and its economic
determinism.
Upon closer scrutiny, the latter proves to be the main opponent

of any progressivist articulation of the political public sphere, es
pecially one that involves art and culture. A criticism of the Marxist
paradigm of art and cultural criticism, where it becomes economic-
determinist, m ust go hand in hand with a criticism of the radical
leftist politics that dismisses bourgeois democracy, and thus the
bourgeois public sphere, as “purely formal.” In these determinist
approaches, both politics and culture share the sad fate of being
assigned to the (“purely formal”) superstructure that is supposedly
determined by the economic base. The canonical example of a
theorist operating within this M arxist metanarrative is Fredric
Jameson, for whom the cultural phenomena of postmodernism
are, as we know, merely part of the “cultural logic” of late capital
ism. This view is shared by David Harvey in his influential book
The Condition of Postmodernity, where he argues that the “condi
tion” of postmodernity is, again, the (capitalist) economy. As an
effect of the cultural superstructure, postmodernism is merely a
symptom of the upheavals of the economic base (such as global
ization).42
The very same fate is shared by political actors such as the New
Social Movements. From the neo-Marxist viewpoint, the political
public sphere is part of the bourgeois ideology that obfuscates its
true social (i.e., essentially economic) conditions. Likewise, inter
sectional struggles over issues such as gender, sexual orientation,
race, and so on, and cultural representations in general, are only
scenes of secondary importance; for if, in the final analysis, it is

the economy alone that counts, the only true political actor can
be defined by the category of class, and the only radical political
demands are economic demands. Deutsche opposes this idea by
pleading the case of Laclau and Mouffe against Jameson and Harvey:
“Mouffe and Laclau reverse Harvey’s proposal: socialism, reduced
to hum an size, is integrated within new social practices. Links
between different social struggles must be articulated rather than
presupposed to exist, determined by a fundamental social antag
onism—class struggle.”43 By this logic, socialist class politics is
in no way ontologically privileged over other politics and demands.
Rather, economic demands are presented at the same ontological
level as, for instance, “cultural” demands. And given that class
politics cannot cite any deeper social reality (the economic base),
it cannot claim any automatic leadership over other (e.g., minori-
tarian or identitarian) struggles, but must rather first construct—
that is, articulate—a common chain of equivalence with them in
the field of politics (i.e., the superstructure).
What this articulation creates is, quite simply, a common space

(one space among many). This space has no substantial base that
a priori distributes and determ ines all positions in it (and thus
automatically privileges socialist positions); rather, it is the con
tingent result of an articulatory practice that links up all positions
to form a topography in the first place. This practice is simply
politics; it is, to return to the terminology drawn up in the first
section, a practice of spatialization. As mentioned before, a neces
sary condition for politics and spatialization is, however, that space
does not exist as a closed totality with no constitutive outside (i.e.,
time). As soon as we cease to assign society a fundamental, stan
dardizing base or substance, social cohesion can only ever be the
result of temporary—and ultimately failing—political articulation.
Of course, society as a totality is impossible. But the public sphere
is possible precisely because society is impossible. This is one of
the fundamental propositions of Claude Lefort’s theory of democracy

and Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of radical and plural democracy
taken up by Deutsche when she says, “According to new theories
of radical democracy, public space emerges with the abandonment
of the belief in an absolute basis of social unity.”44 Before discuss
ing Lefort’s exact argumentation concerning the constitution of
the public sphere, let me cite a decisive passage of Deutsche’s
text that might sound familiar:
Democracy and its corollary, public space, are brought into

existence, then, when the idea that the social is founded on
a substantial basis, a positivity, is abandoned. The identity of
society becomes an enigma and is therefore open to contes
tation. But, as Laclau and Mouffe argue, this abandonment
also means that society is “impossible”—which is to say, that
the conception of society as a closed entity is impossible. For
without an underlying positivity, the social field is structured
by relationships among elements that themselves have no
essential identities. Negativity is thus p art of any social
identity, since identity comes into being only through a re
lationship with an “other” and, as a consequence, cannot be
internally complete [...]. Likewise, negativity is part of the
identity of society as a whole; no complete element within
society unifies it and determines its development Laclau and
Mouffe use the term antagonism to designate the relationship
between a social identity and a “constitutive outside” that
blocks its completion. Antagonism affirms and simultane
ously prevents the closure of society, revealing the partiality
and precariousness—the contingency—of every totality. [... ]
It will be the Lefortian contention of this essay that advocates
of public art who want to foster the growth of a democratic
culture must also start from this point.45
If we follow Deutsche, the paradox of public art is not so very differ

ent to the paradox described by political theory. On the one hand,
130 THE STAGE, THE STREET, AND THE INSTITUTION]

society is impossible: every space lacks an essential identity or pos
itivity and depends on a constitutive yet negative outside to exist On
the other hand, a certain socialization is necessary, as a completely
dislocated society (a space without spatiality, as it were, pure time)
Would, of course, be just as preposterous. Politics (spatialization) is
only possible because society has no “base,” or foundation, but must
always fail in an attempt to merge spaces and their constitutive outside
into the space of society. Deutsche’s reference to Lefort is pioneering
in this respect, for it was he who first described the historical emer
gence of this logic—and in it, the emergence of the public sphere.
Everything begins with what Lefort (following Tocqueville) calls

the “democratic revolution.” The historically decisive event for the
emergence of modern democracy—an event that should, however,
be seen as only the symbolic condensation of a development that
had commenced far earlier—was, according to Lefort, not the storm
ing of the Bastille nor the summoning of the Estates General but,
quite simply, the beheading of Louis XVI. From this point on, not
only was the king disembodied, but the place of power in society
was also disembodied. The instance of power, and with it the in
stances of law and knowledge, was henceforth no longer localized
in the “king’s two bodies” (Kantorowicz): the earthly and the
transcendental. The exercise of power—that is, the temporary ap
propriation of the empty space of power—is instead subject to politi
cal rivalry and can no longer cite any transcendental principle.
Without such a founding principle, society is faced with the perma
nent task of re-founding itself again and again. As a result of the
evacuation of the place of power, the democratic dispositive thus
releases a potential of autonomy. For if the place of sacral legitima
tion is vacant, society is referred back to itself in its search for
legitimation. Through this evacuation of the place of power, a new
place is thus separated from the state: civil society becomes the
context for the autonomous self-institution of society. And finally, a
public sphere evolves from this civil society, a space of the political

(conflictual debate) within the nonpolitical (the “private” or economic
parts of civil society that are nevertheless always potentially “pub-
licizable,” meaning they can be made subjects of public debate).46
The secession of an empty place from the state, the separation of

the spheres of power, law and knowledge, the emergence of an
autonomous sphere of civil society and, as a result, a public sphere
in which the legitimatory foundations of society, having lost their
transcendental status, m ust be renegotiated again and again—all
this presupposes the instance of a fundamental division of demo
cratic society, a fundamental conflictual composedness that is
located at the ontological level, not the ontic. Democracy is the
institutionalization of conflict—the debate over the foundations of
society—or else it is not democratic. Institutionalization means
first and foremost the attested legitimacy of public debate about
what is legitimate and what is illegitimate. The public sphere is
not so much a preexisting space in which this debate occurs or to
which it is assigned. On the contrary, the public sphere m ust be
created again and again precisely by means of conflictual debate
about the foundations of society and the scope of rights (albeit on
the absolute foundation of the right to have rights), and the exten
sion of rights to new groups of the population.47
Following Lefort, Laclau, and Mouffe, Rosalyn Deutsche refers

precisely to this necessary construction of the public sphere when
she writes: ‘T h e political sphere is not only a site of discourse; it
is also a discursively constructed site. From the standpoint of a
radical democracy, politics cannot be reduced to something that
happens inside the limits of a public space or political community
that is simply accepted as ‘real.’ Politics, as Chantal Mouffe writes,
is about the constitution of the political community. It is about the v
spatializing operations that produce a space of politics.”48 In other
words, it is political intervention itself that actually creates the
space for politics (the public sphere)—and not the other wav

around. T he logical consequence is that “conflict, division, and
instability, then, do not ruin the democratic public sphere: they
are the conditions of its existence.”49
This form of political spatialization—the opening up of a space

of conflict and debate—originates, it m ust be added, in a consti
tutive division or antagonism (between society and its outside,
between the empty space of power and the state, etc.). The found
ing antagonism is institutionalized in society as a public political
debate that m ust not, in turn, be halted. If it were to be halted,
the empty space of power would be occupied, the separation
betw een power and the state, and the division betw een the
spheres of power, law, and knowledge would be annulled; this
condition of the democratic dispositive, Lefort concludes, is to
talitarianism.50 In totalitarianism, the founding antagonism is
denied, the debate is halted and, as a consequence, the public
sphere implodes. So it is of crucial importance that the conflictual
com posedness of society, politics, and, ultimately, the public
sphere, is not suppressed or obfuscated, as it is in models of
consensus—the consensus model par excellence being, of course,
“Habermas’s ideal of a singular, unified public sphere that transcends
concrete particularities and reaches a rational—noncoercive—
consensus.”51The Habermasian model must be anathema to any
attempt to apply theories of radical and plural democracy to prob
lems of public art. As we have seen, Habermas views the public
sphere as a singular metaspace, and society as a positive object
whose conflictual dimension (and thus its self-difference or non
identity with itself) is to be annulled by m eans of a rationalist
metadiscourse: “Construed as an entity with a positivity of its
own, th is ‘society’—serves as the basis of rational discussions
and as a guarantee that social conflicts can be resolved objec
tively. The failure to acknowledge the spatializations that generate
‘social space’ attests to a desire both to control conflict and to
secure a stable position for the self.”52

In the final analysis, the unification of public space qua rational
ization of conflict comes down to the suppression of this fundamental
social antagonism, to the denial of all distinction between society
and its constitutive outside, that is, ultimately between space and
time. T he (temporal) dislocation of space is seen in Habermas’s
model as som ething to be rem edied rationally. In Laclau and
Mouffe’s model, on the other hand, conflict is precisely what con
stitutes spatiality. To Lefort, Laclau, Mouffe, and Deutsche, some
thing like public space does not emerge where consensus has
been found, but rather where consensus breaks down or is dislo
cated, and where tem porary alliances need to be rearticulated
again and again. On the basis of the terminological distinction
between space as totality and spatialization as political practice,
as previously defined, Habermas’s model would be unambiguously
identifiable as space. As a space of consensus, in the singular, this
version of the public sphere ultimately has no place for divergent
spatializations that do not wish to stand on the basis of “rational”
procedural agreement. But as soon as (rationally unconveyable)
conflictuality is denied, society is set as positive identity. As Deutsche
rightly criticizes, community-art practices commit a similar mis
take when they seek to create “society” through social-consensus
work and thus establish it as a positive identity in the first place.
Thus, the public sphere is not a space of consensus, but rather of

dissensus. Urban public space, we may summarize, is generated;
by conflict and not by a consensus having recourse to rational and
procedural metarules. Deutsche speaks of three incommensura
ble meanings of conflict in and around urban space:
Urban space is the product of conflict. This is so in several,

incommensurable senses. In the first place, the lack of abso
lute social foundation—the “disappearance of the markers
of certainty”—makes conflict an ineradicable feature of all
social space. Second, the unitary image of urban space con-

structed in conservative discourse is itself produced through
division, constituted through the creation of an exterior. The
perception of a coherent space cannot be separated from a
sense of what threatens the space, of what it would like to
exclude. Finally, urban space is produced by specific socio
economic conflicts that should not simply be accepted, either
wholeheartedly or regretfully, as evidence of the inevitability
of conflict but, rather, politicized—opened to contestation as
social and therefore mutable relations of oppression.53
What, then, is the incommensurability of these three meanings of

conflict? In view of the aforesaid, the following interpretation would
seem appropriate: what Deutsche draws our attention to, intentionally
or unintentionally, is the difference between the conditions that make
society (im)possible, and the various attempts to construct society,
if only partially (either as conservative and unifying or as progressive
and reactivating), despite them. The incommensurability she writes
about thus correlates to the onto-ontological difference I outlined
before. At the ontological level, the category of time stands for the
fundamental lack characterizing every space; the ontic level, by con
trast, is distinguished by rival hegemonic efforts of spatialization,
and as a result, by a multitude of (possibly conflicting) spaces. The
final determination of urban space in terms of identity—as with any
other social space—is thus, in the final analysis, impossible due to
the ineradicable ontological conditions; there is no reference to a
constitutive outside, and consequently, a fundamental lack of antag
onism. Inversely, it is precisely this failure to enclose spaces in order
to form space that permits and requires constant efforts of spatial
ization, that is, political practices of articulation.
But does the public sphere, as we have defined it following Lefort,

not have a special relationship—one that may not be completely
reduced to the ontic level of so-called other spaces—to the onto
logical level of space/time? Does so-called public, political space

(without becoming a metaspace) not refer, to a far greater extent,
to the outside of society and to the instance of dislocation than
other social spaces? Not because it emerged historically as a result
of the division of society in the first place (the secession and evac
uation of the place of power, etc.), but because it continues to
perform this division qua conflictual debate again and again, and
is itself constructed again and again through debate in the first
place. Furtherm ore, it would follow from this that the public
sphere emerges wherever debate occurs, and therefore cannot
be restricted to certain places such as parliament; that is to say,
public space itself is not a space at all (nor a space among spaces),
but rather a principle—of reactivation, of the political dislocation
of social sedimentations as a result of the onset of temporality. As
a principle of reactivation (of space by time), the public sphere
indeed belongs to the ontological, rather than the ontic level of
social sediments.
In fact, both Leforfs and Habermas’s concepts of the public sphere

are ontological (or rather, they are both quasi-transcendental).
Above all, this unifies them against social science approaches,
which must always remain on the ontic level. And yet there is an
indelible difference between Lefortian and Habermasian interpre
tations. To clarify matters, let us recall how we defined space and
time at the beginning: time was defined as the ontological principle
of dislocation of a structure that results from the essential depen
dence of the structure on a constitutive outside, whereas space,
inversely, designated the theoretical extreme case of the complete
eradication of temporality and dislocation. This should make it
adequately clear as to what the real difference is between radical-
democratic quasi transcendentalists such as Lefort, Laclau, Mouffe,
and Deutsche on the one hand, and universal-pragmatic quasi tran
scendentalists like Habermas, Fraser, and Benhabib on the other.
It is Habermas’s model of consensus that sees dislocation as a
disturbance or noisome interference in the process of communi

cation and aims to eradicate dislocation and completely spatialize
the public sphere. Ultimately, then, it is a concept of space.
As opposed to Habermas, according to whose theory the public

sphere occupies the category of space (as unified totality), Lefort’s
public sphere is precisely not a space, but rather, in the final analy
sis, belongs to the order of temporality, namely, to the order of
conflict Ultimately, Lefort’s public sphere is not an ontic location
but rather an ontological principle of dislocation. The model of
radical and plural democracy is concerned not with the substantial
consensual standardization of space (i.e., finding consensus), but
rather with its conflictual opening. It is precisely about not occu
pying the empty space of power, that is, the permanent creation
of closed space. From the standpoint of democracy theory, the
public sphere is at once a product and a condition of the possibility
of democracy, because the public sphere stands for the constitutive
division of society and also creates this division qua conflictual,
antagonistic debate again and again. Democracy means that (on
the ontic level) no particular public sphere, not even the public
sphere of rational and noncoercive discussion, may halt this debate
or delegitimize political language games that deviate from the
norm. Lefort’s public sphere is thus also not a metaspace like
Habermas’s public sphere, because time cannot form space. (Time
cannot, as Laclau says, hegemonize anything.) It is nothing but
the principle of the temporalizing opening of space, the guarantor
that the place of the public sphere remains empty. Public art will
be m easured by whether it ultimately decides in favor of space
(the social) or time (the political).

Notes
1 Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: A rt and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 1996), xxiv.
2 The fact that M arxist economic determinism is ingrained in these guiding

disciplines is the real problem. After accepting the basic assumptions of
anti-economic political theory (Lefort, Laclau, and Mouffe), Deutsche must
thus fight on this front against the heirs of economic determinism in critical
urbanism such as David Harvey and Fredric Jameson.
3 Doreen Massey, “Politics and Space/Time,” New Left Review, no. 196
(November-December 1992): 65-84.
■
4 Massey counts the following among this second wave: Edward Soja,
Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory
(London: Verso, 1989); Derek Gregory and John Urry, eds., Social Relations
and Spatial Structures (London: Palgrave, 1985); and her own Spatial
Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production
(London; Routledge, 1984). As illustrated by the programmatic titles of
these works, it is characteristic for these writers to align themselves with
the social sciences rather than with political theory.
5 “With Time are aligned History, Progress, Civilization, Science, Politics and
Reason, portentous things with gravitas and capital letters. With space on the
other hand are aligned the other poles of these concepts: stasis, (‘simple’)
reproduction, nostalgia, emotion, aesthetics, the body.” Massey, 73.
6 Massey, 67.
m m m 7 Specifically, the line of argumentation developed by Laclau is as follows: He

llilS I begins with Saussure's assumption that meaning can only evolve within a system
of differences. The possibility of the existence of a system of difference, however,
■ H H is dependent on the existence of its boundaries—and these boundaries cannot
belong to the side of the system as, in this case, the boundary itself would be
just another difference and consequently not a boundary of differences. Only
PllilialM if we see the outside of the system as a radical outside—and thus the boundary
as an excluding boundary—can we speak of systematicity or meaning in the
first place. As a consequence, the boundaries themselves cannot be signified,
but can only be manifested as an interruption or breakdown of the process of
signification. The radicality of the radical outside (non-meaning) is not only
the condition of possibility for establishing a structure (meaning), it is at the
same time the condition of impossibility of establishing a structure as closed
totality (full meaning). In other words, the function of the excluding boundary
WSm N thus consists in introducing an essential ambivalence into the system of
difference constituted by these boundaries.
8 Strictly speaking, the concept of sequence—if it implies putting diachronous

elements into synchronous order—is in itself a spatial concept
It follows from this that, strictly speaking, there is no dinchronidty. In order to

become representable, the diachronous must be synchronized.
»s»Mia8pwwBi
10 Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution o f Our Time, trans. Jon
Barnes (London: Verso, 1990), 41.
11 We know from memory theory (e,g„ rhetoric), that our memory is best
extended with the aid of spatial constructions, i,e„ memory architectures.
12 Massey’s criticism of Laclau works precisely by constantly reducing him

to a structuralist,
13 Laclau, 35.
14 Laclau, 41-42.
15 Laclau, 42.
16 Laclau, 68.
17 Here, Laclau follows a distinction between politics and the political found in
French discourse since Paul Ricoeur and as recently as Jean-Luc Nancy and
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and in Anglo-American discourse, for example,
in the works of Sheldon Wolin.
18 David Howarth, “Reflections on the Politics of Space and Tune.," Angelaki 1,

no. 1 (1993): 47, Another interesting thing about this quotation is that Howarth,
too, emphasizes a point in his interpretation of Laclau that corresponds to
the second-wave critical geography of the '80s diagnosed by Massey, albeit
in this case in term s of the narrower field of political theory: not only does
space have a political dimension, but also, as Howarth says, every politics
always has a spatial dimension. See also Michael Reid’s response to
Howarth: “The Aims of Radicalism," Angelaki 1, no, 3 (1994): 181-84. On
the discussion between Massey and Laclau, see Malcolm Miles, Art, Space
and the City: Public A rt and Urban Futures (London; Roudedge, 1997).
19 Howarth, 49.
20 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:

Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).
21 Laclau, New Reflections, 72.
22 In the sense used by Stuart Hall or Lawrence Grossberg in cultural studies.
23 T he following portrayals do not intend to give a detailed, in-depth appraisal

of these theories but rather a clarification ex negativo of our own suggestion
of a political theory of space.
24 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, in Other Spaces:
The Affair of the Heterotopia, ed. Roland Ritter and Bernd Knaller-Vlay,
HDA-Dokumente der Architektur 10 (Graz: Haus der Architektur, 1998), 36.
25 Benjamin Genocchio, “Discourse, Discontinuity, Difference: The Question

of ‘Other’ Spaces,” in Postmodern Cities and Spaces, ed. Sophie Watson and
Katherine Gibson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 38.

26 Bernd Knaller-Vlay and Roland Ritter, "Heterotopia,” introduction to Other
Spaces, 16.
27 Sadie Plant, “No Plans,” in "Architects in Cyberspace,” ed. Martin Pearce

and Neil Spiller, special issue, Architectural Design, November/December
1995,36.
28 Plant, 37.
29 Laclau, New Reflections, 40.
30 Laclau, 40, One of the side effects of blindly insisting on the fluid nature of the
network, disregarding equally existing forces of fixation, is that we fail to
recognize the production of new centers in the form of so-called global cities.
Saslda Sassen, for example, insists that we take into consideration that
electronic "free-flowing” financial capital also requires infrastructural fixation
(New York, London, Tokyo, Mumbai, etc,). But she goes one step further,
contending that cyberspace is a new and transterritorial form of centrality: the
network has no center, the network ts the center (or rather, 1 would add, one
of the most clearly articulated centers). See Saskia Sassen, The Global City:
New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
31 See Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:

An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society [1962], trans. Thomas Burger
and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1992).
32 Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), 121.
33 This might be translated into English as the “minimal model of liberal

democracy.”
34 It is often said that Habermas makes the communication model of the university
seminar room into a model of politics. The fact that the agonal moment of
politics is disregarded goes without saying: see, for example, Chantal Mouffe,
The Return of ike Political (London: Verso, 1993). See also the works of
William E. Connolly: e.g., Politics and Ambiguity (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1987); and Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations
of Political Paradox (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
35 Laclau, Emancipation(s), 120.
36 See Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the

Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” and Seyla Benhabib, “Models of
Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jurgen Habermas,”
both in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1992). Despite this superficial multiplication of the public sphere,
the decisive feature of normative, rational deliberation is still preserved for all
public spheres. T he pluralizing "update” thus alters nothing about the fact
itself.
37 Habermas is skeptical about the legacy of the “public sphere as superbrain’’

theory within the philosophy of consciousness tradition, although he does
not always manage to avoid this tradition himself.

38 Note, in both cases in the plural. Not ’why the public sphere dominates other public
spheres, but rather why certain public spheres dominate offer public spheres.
39 Deutsche, Evictions, xxii.
40, Deutsche, xxii,
41 This was exemplified by their defense of Richard Serra's public artwork Tilted
Arc (1981), which was removed from Manhattan’s Federal Plaza in 1989
following a controversial trial.
42 See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultured Logic of Late Capitalism
(London: Verso, 1991); and David Harvey, The Condition o f Postmodernity:
A n Enquiry into the Origins o f Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
Deutsche offers a convincing criticism of Jameson’s and Harvey’s economism
in Evictions; see the chapters “Men in Space” and “BoysTown.”
43 Deutsche, “Boys Town,” in Evictions, 228-29.
44 Deutsche, “Tilted Arc and the Uses of Democracy," in Evictions, 268.
45 Deutsche, “Agoraphobia,” in Evictions, 274.
46 On Lefort’s concept of the public sphere, see, for instance, Claude Lefort,
“Les droits de l’homme et l’Etat-providence,” in Essais $ur le politique:
XLXe-XXe siecles (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986), 33-36.
47 To Lefort, the expansion of rights from white, male landowners only, to include
women, and African Americans following the civil rights movement, and beyond
(contra the ideology-critical suspicion that human rights are “purely formal”)
means a “generative principle” of democracy; it cannot be completed. The
definition of what falls under the category of so-called humans possessing the
right to have rights must continue to be broadened.
48 Deutsche, "Agoraphobia,” in Evictions, 289.
49 Deutsche, 289.
50 Jean-Luc Nancy proposed a perhaps more apt name for this condition, considering
the extent to which the concept of totalitarianism has been ideologized by
Cold War rhetoric; “immanentism.” The advantage of this concept is that it
immediately makes clear that in “totalitarian” conjunctures the constitutive
outside of society is eradicated, or rather denied, and the immanence of the
latter is asserted. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans.
Peter Conner et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
51 Deutsche, 287.
52 Deutsche, 310.
53 Deutsche, 278.

t
lljjg
i
I
':S k
The Curatorial
■
(
\
j
Function
IBi
mm
mm
IBil
\
Organizing the Ex/position
The idea of public art, of art in a public space or in the public in
terest, has thrived over the past two decades. Art has departed its
accustomed place in art institutions and moved into the open. Not
just outdoors in nature, which was accomplished by Land art long
before, or in the exterior spaces of architecture, to furnish facades
or urban space, bu t into the open space of the political public
sphere. This public sphere has more to do with the freedom to act >
politically—or of political action—than with the fresh air of “nature” t
or in the “open air” space of urban traffic. In other words, art prac
tices have emerged for which it is more important to be connected
to political practices than to art institutions themselves, which in
turn, necessarily changes our concept of the public sphere—and of
the institution as well. We are faced with the question of what is ;
public about public art; indeed, what is political about political art?
While thousands of catalogue texts shed light on individual proj
ects from theoretical perspectives, this fundamental question is
only rarely raised and almost never answered adequately. The
situation is almost sadder when it comes to answering the question
(if it is asked at all) of the curator’s role in the production of politi- S
cal art—the roles of “curator” and “artist” often become blurred ;
in this kind of praxis in particular. If we begin not with the empir
ical individual but with the function that is fulfilled by certain ac-
tivities, we may come closer to an answer In this chapter, I would
like above all to raise the question of the curatorial function. And, to
get right to the answer, I will defend the following thesis: the cura
torial function lies in the organization of the public sphere.
That answer is trivial only if we believe that an exhibition or exhi

bition space is already a public sphere simply because it is acces
sible to “the public.” Universal access is, however, only a minimal
criterion, and even that often goes unfulfilled. Our normal use of i;
the term “public sphere” frequently blinds us to its true meaning. |
For example, m ass media are considered public spheres, even
though most of us barely have access to them, apart from letters
144 THE STAGE, THE STREET AND THE INSTITUTION

to the editor and call-in shows. And even exhibiting institutions
rarely fulfill this criterion, unless one understands a space that
anyone can enter by paying a fee to be public (to say nothing of
“invisible” exclusions, qua social distinction, for example). In fact,
the corresponding discourse lacks the sufficient criteria by which
a public sphere, in the true sense, can be described. For accessi
bility alone does not turn a space into a public sphere; it is not the
fact th at one is admitted into a collection or an exhibition after
paying a fee (or even for free). A lot of people can stand around in
a room and stare at the walls without a public sphere resulting
from that alone.
A public sphere is created if and only if a debate breaks out among

those standing around. A debate is not discourse that is “free” of
domination and guided by reason that aims at an ultimate consen
sus, as Habermas describes it; rather, it is a debate that takes place
in the medium of conflict. Only at the m om ent when a conflict
breaks out does a public sphere emerge, with the breakdown of
the consensus that is otherwise always silently presumed. The
essential criterion for a public sphere that can be considered a
true political sphere—and not just a simulation of a public sphere—
is thus conflict, or antagonism.1
If, therefore, the curatorial function consists in the organization of

a public sphere, then we might conclude that it must also include
the organization of conflict or antagonism. But it is precisely here
that we encounter the first problem: antagonism, as we have come
to understand it thus far, cannot be “organized” at all. The antag
onism that ultimately generates a public sphere can break out
anywhere at any time, but it cannot simply be organized. A look at
“politics” proves that. Politics is by no means the best terrain for
conflict; on the contrary, institutionalized politics is generally domi
nated by consensus, mutual agreement, administrative bargaining,
and, when push comes to shove, a mere exhibition fight between
THE CURATORIAL FUNCTION 145

state-functionary elites that represent scarcely distinguishable
parties. Politics consists of well-coordinated, sedimented, institu
tionalized rituals that are not normally shaken by any conflict,
precisely because (pseudo)conflict is itself a fixed and predictable
element of this ritual. And yet, a real conflict, unforeseen by anyone,
can suddenly break ou t Revolutions are the most obvious example,
but the emergence of new political players (like the revolt of 1968,
the social movements of the 70s and ’80s, the anti-globalization
movement, or today’s “yellow vests”) can also provoke conflict. In
reality, therefore, conflict is not a privilege of a single social field
or system (such as politics), meaning it cannot be narrowed down
to one system. Antagonism—as a feature of the political (and not
simply of politics) and hence of the public—can em erge in any
social system or field, even in the field of art, which then becomes
political and “opens up.”
However, it is impossible to “organize” antagonism, as it is pre

cisely antagonism that cuts short every institution (i.e., organi
zation). That leaves us with two possibilities: either we abandon
the thesis that the function of curating consists in organizing the
public, or we cling to it because we nevertheless consider it neces
sary. In that case, however, the first thing one has to recognize is
that the organization of a public sphere is an impossible task.
Consequently, the curatorial function, “curating” in the sense of
organizing or producing a real public sphere in the field of art,
means organizing the impossible. “Curating” in the sense of pro
ducing a real public sphere in the field of a rt means organizing
the impossible. This assertion can be understood in a variety of
ways; one variant is that a truly political sphere cannot be pro
duced in the field of a r t The reason is not simply that antagonism
cannot, on principle, be organized but that it also always oversteps
boundaries between social fields. A conflict that breaks out in the
art world alone will revolve exclusively around artistic questions,
and the resulting public sphere would ultimately be a public

sphere of art—for example, a specialist public sphere of art criti
cism that would move entirely within the parameters of the art
field and would interest no one else. Therefore, it would not even
satisfy the minimal criterion of universal accessibility (which
knows no boundaries between fields).
The other, more optimal variant (which does not, however, preclude
the first variant) would be the following: the impossible element
that is organized by the curatorial function is the political element.
Politics itself, in the sense of a genuine realization of the political,
As.always a praxis that aims at the “impossible” itself—-namely, at
whatever the hegemonic discourse defines in a given situation as
impossible. Curatorial praxis that becomes, or wants to become,
political praxis m ust therefore set itself the same challenges as
political practice. Not in the sense of institutionalized politics but
in the sense of emancipatory counterpolitics, which of course al
ways insists on the necessity of the (supposedly) impossible, that
is, of what has been declared impossible by the hegemonic forma
tion.2 In the construction of this counter, in the construction of a
counterhegemony, lies the true potential for antagonism. In other
words, an antagonism can never be compelled by organization, but
it is possible to construct a counterposition to the dominant position
from which an antagonism can then arise.
To be a little more specific, from the perspective of a political art

praxis, this has consequences not only for our understanding of the
curatorial function but also for the function of exhibitions and art
institutions. But let’s stick to the question of organization for another
moment. From a political perspective, what would correspond pre
cisely to this model for the curator figure or the curatorial function?
One answer can be found in the work of Antonio Gramsci, the
originator of hegemony theory. The figure of the curator in the field
of art corresponds precisely to Gramsci’s figure of the organic in
tellectual, who gives “homogeneity and an awareness” to a hegemonic

function. Gramsci describes this role with reference to the hege
monic rise of the bourgeoisie: ‘T h e capitalist entrepreneur creates
alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political
economy, the organizers of a new culture, of a new legal system,
etc.”3All these organic intellectuals are thus not intellectuals in the
traditional sense—that is, hordes of little Sartres sitting in cafes—
but essentially organizers of hegemony. They organize the hege
mony of the bourgeoisie; they represent the cement in the hege
monic bloc, whereas “traditional intellectuals,” their opposite, in
Gramsci’s terms, have largely lost this function and therefore imag
ine themselves to be free-floating and nonpartisan.4
Not only the maintenance of the hegemonic bloc but also a counter-
hegemonic effort demands the labor of organized intellectuals.
Gramsci, one of the cofounders of the Italian Communist Party,
saw this as the true path for the proletariat to dissolve the bour
geoisie: not by storming the Winter Palace just once, but through
protracted and arduous building up, the organization of a counter
hegemony in everyday life. The point is to develop a “new stratum
of intellectuals.” As Gramsci argues, ‘T h e mode of being of the
new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an
exterior and m omentary mover of feelings and passions, but in
active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, ‘per
manent persuader’ and not just a simple orator.”5Therein we find
what distinguishes this new, organic intellectual from the tradi
tional intellectual, hence the traditional curator. The figure of the
curator as curator is traditional in Gramsci’s sense: it has survived
itself. And that affects not only the empirical social group but also
its true function (Gramsci himself spoke of the “intellectual func
tion”): both the classical idea of curating as taking care (curare)
of the collection and the contem porary idea of the curator-as-
genius (following Harald Szeemann) are “traditional” and not
“organic” activities.

As an organic intellectual, by contrast, the curator’s true standpoint
is in contexts outside of the field of art. They are actively organizing
in social and political contexts beyond the art institution, and they
connect these back to the field of art. In this case, the curatorial
function is essentially collective. Organizing is a collective activity;
one cannot establish a political counter-standpoint, a counter
hegemony, on one’s own—that is the illusion of the traditional
(great/genius) intellectual. However, organization can only be part
of a broader collective political project. Even if the emancipatory
element may be more modest today than in Gramsci’s day, it will
never be a solely individual effort but always a collective one. In
short, an organic intellectual rarely—indeed never—appears alone.
However contradictory to common sense it might initially seem, the
curatorial subject (that is, the subject of the curatorial function) is not
an individual but rather a collective. Curating is a collective activity.
Of course, in the end it is still unclear which master—that is, which

hegemonic formation—organic intellectuals serve. By no means
do they necessarily serve emancipatory politics; the curatorial
function can also serve the hegemonic formation of post-Fordism.
Beatrice von Bismarck notes, drawing on Yann Moulier Boutang,
that today’s curatorial practice is closely related to the tasks of
efficient management. The curatorial tasks of organization and
communication are roughly comparable “to those of book or mu
sic publishers, of content managers or archivists, and hence of
professions that, as ‘increasingly intellectualized abstract work,’
correspond to the definition of immaterial work.”6 In the organi
zational form of material work, the curator, as an organic intellec
tual, becomes a post-Fordist Ich-AG,1 where an individual must
turn herself into her own start-up enterprise. But the “curatorial”
organization of a political public sphere differs fundamentally from
the organization of one’s own economic exploitation. What is the
difference? In a word—and at risk of making a lame pun—it is not
about exploitation but rather exposition.

When organising a political sphere, the curatorial function is not
primarily a function of the economy of the field of art (which is,
in turn, p art of the general economy). A forum in the political
sense should not be confused with a bazaar in the economic sense.
Although the two can overlap in reality, they should be strictly
distinguished in terms of their functions. The political function of
a public sphere is absolutely at cross-purposes with both the in
stitutional function of museums or galleries (as ideological appa
ratuses of the state) and the economic function of the art world
as a marketplace for commodities (so-called works of art) and
services (of creative individuals). In this dilemma, the significance
of the curatorial function, while not directly in the position to
produce a public sphere, can only be realized through the exhi
bition. But not in the traditional understanding of what happens
in a normal exhibition space. An exhibition in the usual sense—
that is, artistic works or actions within the local or institutional
framework of the art field—is never in itself a public sphere. Even
an action in urban space is not in itself public art in the political
sense. For an exhibition to become a public sphere, something
m ust be added: a position.
In “Exhibition or Ex/position?” Jerome Sans seizes on one part

of this political aspect of the exhibition when he distinguishes
semantically between the English term “exhibition” and its French
analogue exposition. According to Sans, exposition alludes more
to positioning and commitment: “An exhibition is a place for de
bate, not just a public display. The French word for it connotes
taking a position, a theoretical position; it is a mutual commitment
on the part of all those participating in it.”8As a practice of “ex/
position” the curatorial function is a form of taking a position, of
consciously taking up a position. Of course, not just any position -
will do, not even a purely theoretical one, as Sans suggests. It must
be an antagonistic position, coupled with political and collective
praxes. From this perspective, the inflationary use of the term

“artistic position” observed recently is almost an improper use
and at the very least a depoliticization of the word “position.” This
is particularly true when “position” is used to describe the work
of artists who most certainly do not take up a position. One doesn’t
simply have a political position; it m ust be taken up. What the art
field understands by “positions,” in contrast, is the difference be
tween particular artists’ names, now ossified into mere labels or
trademarks, and other artists’ names, equally ossified into labels
or trademarks. The logic is differential because the point is to
distinguish something from other positions in the field of art. It
is not equivalential as in antagonistic logic; that is to say, it is not
at all about joining a political chain of equivalence (a coalition, a
collective, a movement or counterhegem onic effort) that con
structs its equivalence only as a construction of an external antag
onism.9 At the moment of antagonism, the competitive struggle
for differential positions disappears and makes room for the soli
darity among all who unite against a common enemy.
The way the term "artistic position” is used in the art field follows
m arket logic, not the logic of politics. Artists’ names are under
stood as labels in the marketplace for art, where the term “posi
tion” is merely a euphemism for this trademark logic. That is what
makes it so disagreeable. No one would ever be so pretentious
as to describe the corporate identities of Wienerwald or Burger
King as “positions”—say, fast-food positions. Political concepts
are used loosely in the field of art, not least because they can be
converted into the cultural capital of radical chic. But political
praxis is not a question of mere self-description—that is, whether
a particular artistic or curatorial praxis calls itself political or acts
as if it were—but one of genuine function. This political function
of art, I have argued, consists in the paradoxical attempt to orga
nize a public space. M ore specifically, it consists in marking a
counterposition as an element of a broader attempt to produce a
counterhegemony.

Only as an ex/position does an exhibition become a public sphere.
As such, it then automatically counteracts the logic of the institu
tion. As an ex/position, an exhibition necessarily has a deinstitu
tionalizing effect, because the true task of institutions consists in
the suppressing or at least domestication of conflicts, which are
supposed to be accommodated by institutionally regulated pro
cesses and procedures. The publicness of antagonism is consid
ered disruptive in relation to the logic of the institution and the
dominant ideology: it interrupts regulated processes, responsibil
ities, and hierarchies. The forms of action that have been de
m anded by the institution under post-Fordist conditions—like
teamwork, creativity, and "participatory management”—are dis
solved and they reaggregate to form new solidarities both inside
and outside the institution. Indeed, every genuine antagonism
breaches the walls of the institution.
Dropping the m etaphors from the world of construction, one

might say, the exhibition (as ex/position) leads to an “opening” of
the insitution. T hat is to say, the ex/position, which is nothing
other than a breach in the walls of the institution, leads into the
open space of the public sphere. As ex/'position it is a positioning
—taking a position. And as ex/position it leads out of the institu
tions of art and the field of art, into political praxis. The curatorial
function, understood as the organization of a public sphere, thus
consists not least in the political opening of the institution of which
it appears to be part.

1 See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:
Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 93-148.
2 It is necessary to add that insisting on a seemingly impossible, counterhegemonic

effort (or a counterpolitics) is not in itself emancipatory, but every emancipatory
effort necessarily attempts the (seemingly) impossible.
3 Antonio Gramsci, “Intellectuals and Education,” trans. Quintin Hoare and

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, in An Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings,
1916-1935, ed. David Forgacs (New York: Schoclcen Books, 1988), 301.
4 Gramsci, 303.
5 Gramsci, 321.
6 Beatrice von Bismarck, “Kuratorisches Handeln: Immaterielle Arbeit

zwischen Kunstund Managementmodellen,” in Norm der Abweichung,
ed. Marion von Osten (Vienna: Springer, 2003), 87.
7 Ich-AG translates literally into "Me, Inc.” It is the informal name for the one-
person corporation subsidized under the 2002 Hartz reforms in Germany,
which offers an alternative to claiming unemployment benefits—Trans.
8 Jbrome Sans, “Exhibition or Ex/position?,” in Words of Wisdom: A Curator's

Vade Mecum on Contemporary Art, ed. Carin Kuoni (New York: Independent
Curators International, 2001), 146.
9 On the logic of antagonism, see Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy, 127-45.

m
The Globalization
of Art and the
“Biennials of
Resistance”
A History of the Biennials
from the Periphery
Biennialization between Glamour and Lure
One important aspect of so-called globalization is a process that could

be described as the decentralization of the W est Its only in the last
decades that Western powers have become aware that the rise of
China and Latin American nations and the growing importance of
the Pacific Rim in relation to the North Atlantic have brought about
a multipolar world order that has substantially relativized the stand
ing of the so-called West. In order to understand this shift of forces,
we have to look at more than just economic indicators. It also needs
to be understood as a struggle for hegemony—that is, a struggle for
consensus and consent—for a specific legitimate yet imaginary car
tography of our world. This symbolic struggle is simultaneously
carried out in local, national, and transnational contexts. Within this
struggle, the art field plays a crucial, and perhaps even a cutting-edge
role—one that remains concealed from view as long as the questions
asked are solely concerned with the economic and not the hege
monic function of the art field. More than any other institution in
the art field, biennials mediate the local, national, and transnational.
In this context, biennials can also be called 'hegemonic machines”
that link the local to the global within the field of symbolic struggles
for legitimation.1
Today, there are over 150 biennials across the globe that fulfill a
wide array of functions.2 Many contribute to marketing cities or
strengthening the tourism industry. They assist in the consolida
tion of cultural infrastructures in metropolises, making them more
attractive locations for businesses located in these places. Smaller
towns or those located on the periphery of larger cities seek to
draw attention to themselves by hosting a biennial. As critic Simon ;
Sheikh puts it, the advantage of the biennial format is that it is
where “the lure of the local meets the glamour of the global.”3
This reference to the biennial as a place of lure and glamour al
ready confirms that it’s not enough to examine biennials through
156 THE STAGE, THE STREET; AND THE INSTITUTION

a purely economic lens. Biennialization not only facilitates the
accumulation of capital, it also aids in constructing local, national,
and continental identities. In reference to this, the biennial format,
as has often been observed, directly links up with that of the
world’s fair, which provided institutional backing for the internal
nation building of the colonial and industrial nations during the
nineteenth century. World’s fairs were colossal hegemonic ma
chines of a globally dominant Western culture.
Within this historical context, the global was conceived of through

a lens of competing national (i.e., colonial) states and therefore
from a perspective firmly rooted in the West. That being said,
even if one considers the world’s fair to be the forerunner of the
biennial format—particularly the first one ever, held in Venice in
1895—the globalization of the biennial format has nonetheless
substantially transform ed i t It is no longer m erely a format in
which form er colonial nations of the West bask in the glamour of
their own artistic production. On the contrary, worldwide bien
nialization has instead contributed to decentralizing the West.
For this reason, biennialization cannot simply be read as an ideo
logical reflex of economic globalization, but also as part of deco
lonial struggles—which certainly did not end with the era of
decolonization (especially in the postwar era) but carried on for
a long time after, as many former colonies continued to strive for
emancipation, even symbolically. We may well be currently wit
nessing the dawn of a new era, where (some of) the tables are
starting to turn, as crisis countries like Portugal and Spain now
find themselves asking for assistance from their former colonies
in Latin America. In the a rt field, the m ost prominent cases of
this are so-called peripheral biennials and the struggles around
the legitimacy and status of non-Western a r t Not without good
reason did Ranjit Hoskote, cocurator of the Gwangju Biennale in
2008, speak of “biennials of resistance,” and demand that a “counter-
Venetian” history of the biennial be told. Such a history would
THE GLOBALIZATION OF ART AND THE “BIENNIALS OF RESISTANCE3 157

also consider the emergence of the Sao Paulo Biennial, Triennale-
India, Havana Biennale, Asia Pacific Triennial, the Gwangju Biennale,
and Johannesburg Biennale:
All of the manifestations of the biennial of resistance that

I have enumerated here articulate what we may term the
emergence of a global South, a network of sites of cultural
production sharing common questions, them es, and, in
deed, a common precariousness. Observe that these plat
form s take their stand on the ground of newly evolving
regionalities—whether mobilized under the sign of Latin
American and Caribbean solidarity, of Afro-Asian unity, of
a post-Cold War position of Asia-Pacific solidarity, or of an
emancipatory politics that has transcended long-standing
antagonisms, as in post-apartheid South Africa.
All these experiments, as well as the biennials of
resistance that continue to extend themselves despite pre
vailing constraints, mark a cumulative counterpoint to the
Venice Biennial as the universal template for the biennial
as form and medium. Their existence demonstrates that
there is a substantial non- and perhaps even counter-Venetian
history of the biennial form that has yet to be narrated.4
This is certainly not the place to outline such a heterodox history

of the biennial, which has yet to be written in any case. And even
if it had been, it would be impossible to tell it in just one singular
article. I will therefore keep to a few aspects that, in my opinion,
are crucial to writing such a history of the biennial.
Anti- and Postcolonial Biennials
A brief genealogy of anti- and postcolonial biennials already illus

trates the magnitude of the contribution biennials have made in
the artistic decentralization of the West. The story begins in 1951
158 THE STAGE, THE STREET, AND THE INSTITUTION |

with the founding of the Sao Paulo Art Biennial, which was still
based on the Venetian model of national pavilions. Although
the first biennials were more focused on retrospectives and Eu
ropean modernity, as time went on, they increasingly included
non-Western nations. For instance, the 1954 edition featured con
tributions from Indonesia, Israel, and Egypt—and, in the years
that followed, from India, Lebanon, the Philippines, Senegal,
Taiwan, and Vietnam, among others. “By participating in the
Biennale [sfr] the young nations confidently presented their ‘own’
culture in a self-assured way, while entering international art his
tory—even if W estern art hardly took note of this.”5With their
newly won independence, many of those nations also utilized the
art field as an institutional platform to demonstrate their sover
eignty. But the Sao Paulo Biennial also lent a postcolonial note to
the Venetian biennial model.
Other biennials and festivals were established in far more radical

ways. A prime example is the First World Festival of Black Arts,
held in Dakar in 1966. Senegalese president and poet Leopold
Sedar Senghor initiated the festival as an institutional flagship of
the negritude movement. Its objective was to provide a platform
for all the facets of African a rt to be presented independently,
thereby reinforcing the self-confidence of the emerging African
nations. Num erous others, including the Alexandria Biennale
(founded in 1955), Triennale-India (1968), Havana Biennial (1983),
Cairo Biennale (1984), and Istanbul Biennial (1987), were situated
somewhere in between these two models—a postcolonial version
of the Venetian model, and an anti-colonial model that instrumen-
talized “non-Western” art traditions in the name of identity politics.
In Africa, the Johannesburg Biennale (of which there were only
two editions, in 1995 and 1997) was established at the end of apart
heid, and in 1992 Dak’Art, the biennial of contemporary African
art, was founded in Dakar.

There are a few interesting points to be made here. It has often ;
been noted that biennials em erge in countries that have yet to i
come to term s with traumatic national events, such as civil wars £
or dictatorships. This is especially true in the case of West Germany’s
documents (1955), founded in the postwar era; the postapartheid
Johannesburg Biennale; or the biennial in Gwangju (1995), the
city w here hundreds of students had been m assacred during
South Korea’s m ilitary dictatorship. Even so, it should not be
forgotten that both Johannesburg and Gwangju, although their
national characteristics may vary, have been inscribed into a net
work of “peripheral” biennials, while Kassel, on the other hand,
is perceived as one of the “centers” of the W estern art world, if
only once every five years. Although these biennials may seem
comparable along one axis of interpretation, they may appear
worlds apart along another axis, which is why Hoskote calls the
biennials in Gwangju and Johannesburg “biennials of resistance”
but not, for instance, documenta. Here, the postcolonial axis is
the m ost relevant for us. Even within this same axis, there are
still differences among the biennials of the periphery.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to seriously refer to some of

the more recently founded biennials as “biennials of resistance,”
even if they do favor local and national artistic production over
that of the West. For instance, in 2006, the Singapore Biennale
was founded during a meeting between the World Bank and the
International M onetary Fund. Although Singapore’s intention
had been to signal openness, a general ban was placed on demon
strations in public places for the duration of the biennial.6 Simi
larly, the recent wave of biennials founded in Gulf states with
authoritarian governments has hardly anything in common with
postcolonial struggles for independence on a national, regional,
or continental level. These regimes utilize the biennial format to
glamorize their image and prepare the tourism industry for the
post-oil era.

Such biennials are generally void of any impetus for resistance.
Instead, the impetus is diverted to foreign countries, since biennials
in Arab countries—such as the Emirati Sharjah Biennial (2005)—
have often been used as a platform for anti-Israel propaganda. It
would be utterly amiss to identify any anti-colonial sentiment within
such projects, because they do nothing more than comply with the
anti-Semitic state doctrine of the theocratic regimes that provide
the financial backing for these biennials.
The Havana Biennial
In principle, it is necessary to differentiate between postcolonial

biennials of resistance and those that, in reality, are no more than
biennials of dominance, corruption, theocracy, or repression7—
even if they are held in the global periphery. The Havana Biennial,
or Bienal de La Habana, is a paradigmatic example: though differ
entiating emancipation from domination is often difficult, it can still
be done, even from within countries with an authoritarian regime.
Although it was Fidel Castro who spontaneously had the idea for
the Havana Biennial, it had been relatively autonomous, in terms
of the curatorial decisions, until the third edition. The programmatic
goal of the Havana Biennial was to present art from the so-called
Third World—that is, from the Global South. This goal was already
realized in the festival’s second edition in 1986; in Gerardo
Mosquera’s words, it was “the first global contemporary art show
ever made: a mammoth, uneven, rather chaotic bunch of more than
fifty exhibitions and events presenting 2,400 works by 690 artists
from 57 countries.”8It was the third exhibition, however, that made
Havana a point of reference in the history of biennials; its place in
the canon is comparable to that of Harald Szeemann’s documenta 5
in 1972, albeit for completely different reasons. During the 1989
Havana Biennial, the orientation toward global art production from
mainly non-Western countries coincided with a number of innova
tive and m omentous curatorial decisions. First and foremost, it
THE GLOBALIZATION OF ART AND THE “BIENNIALS OF RESISTANCE' 161

gave up on presenting artists by countries, and no prizes were :
awarded. The last remnants of the Venetian biennial model were
thereby hilly eradicated. But the most crucial decision, however, j;
was of a different order: the invitation went not only to artists from :
the global periphery, but also to diasporic artists living in the global
center. Head curator Mosquera emphasized the importance of this /
step, as it enabled the concept of the Third World to be expanded, y;
allowing a more complex image of a world shaped by migration to
emerge. This was a clear sign that the Global South had long since
arrived in the North and W est
From this perspective, the 1989 Havana Biennial is markedly

different from the exhibition “Magiciens de la terre,” curated by
Jean-Hubert Martin, which took place that same year at the Centre
Pompidou in Paris, one of the “centers” of the Western art world.
Martin’s exhibition is frequently cited as having launched the “re- y
discovery” of non-Western a rt This was mainly because “Magiciens”
abandoned the colonialist phantasm of primitivism and refrained
from viewing non-Western art exclusively in terms of its reception
within European modernity—which was still very much the case
for the infamous 1984 “Primitivism” exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York. Instead, “Magiciens” chose to level the
playing field with an equal presentation of 50 percent widely known
Western artists and 50 percent largely unknown nonWestern artists.
However, if instead of comparing “Magiciens” with “Primitivism,”
we compare it with the Havana Biennial, the shortcomings of
“Magiciens” become abundantly clear. As Rachel Weiss comments,
unlike “Magiciens de la terre,” the Havana Biennial largely refrained
from presenting traditional objects of art as if they were contempo
rary art: ‘T h e Bienal didn’t try to draw an equivalence between
those objects and the ones made by artists; unlike ‘Magiciens de la
Terre,’it didn’t orchestrate that convergence under the alibi of some
universal creative spirit. It didn’t claim every contributor as a magi
cian, but rather as a citizen, and so the zone it sketched was not

some neutrally shared terrain, but rather a vexed ground as much
comprised of clashing particularities as of cohering accords.”9
Observing the developments in this area, we can see that while

“M agiciens de la te rre ” functioned as a kind of "gateway” for
non-Western a rt to enter into the Western a rt world, it was criti
cized across the board and offered virtually nothing to build upon
in term s of display and curatorial philosophy. Surprisingly, the
concurrent model developed in the periphery turned out to be
more adaptable. One of the reasons is certainly that the Havana
Biennial did not ascribe to the notion that non-Western art had
remained untouched by Western modernity, rendering it compa
rable only in terms of a supposedly universal, spiritual creativity.
Instead, there were early attempts at addressing the “multiple
modernities” emerging in the global periphery.10Within this con
text the Havana Biennial not only set itself apart from the Western
desire for “authentic” a rt but also from the paradigms of anti
colonial projects that also catered to identity-politics-based notions
of indigenous art untouched by the West. Notwithstanding the
critique of W estern dominance, the discussions in Havana de
parted from the notion that it was even possible to draw a clear
line between the West and “the rest.” In this way, the focus within
theory, a rt production, and curating shifted from anti-colonial to
postcolonial strategies. This enabled a critique from within the
frequently nationalist projects of former colonies attempting to
ideologically substantiate their independence.
Under the auspices of this postcolonial critique, even the early

Sao Paulo Biennial, with its orientation toward Western art ideals,
appears less as a perpetuation of colonial relations of dependence
and more a part of a strategic movement to set oneself apart from
nationalistic identity politics in one’s own country. It would be
misleading to read this orientation toward Western art as “merely
mimicked copies and pale imitations [...] of the authentic thing
THE GLOBALIZATION OF ART AND THE “BIENNIALS OF RESISTANCE’ 163

as it is constituted in the W est.” In this light, Okwui Enwezor
suggests:
T he very notion of proximity to the West, as a strategy

enunciated in the dialectical framework of the global rela
tions of power inherent in the development of the discourse
of artistic modernity, is a double-edged sword. This sword
cuts a swath between the revolutionary and emancipatory
portents of the postcolonial critique of m aster narratives
and the nationalist rhetoric of tradition and authenticity.
We can, then, quite clearly state that the periphery does
not simplistically absorb and internalize what it does not
need. Nor does it vitiate its own critical power by becoming
subservient to the rules of the center. In the wake of the
globalization of culture and art, what the postcolonial re
sponse to it has produced is a new kind of space, a dis
course of open contestations that spring not merely from
resistance but are rather built on an ethics of dissent.11
In 2002 Enwezor’s documenta 11 became the first truly postcolonial i

biennial to be held in a Western art center, taking up and working
with this dissident understanding of non-Western art. For Enwezor,
it was not only out of the question to take the position of the neo
colonial discoverer of non-Western art, he also considered the
notion of the “non-Western artist” to be, basically, a contradictio
in adjecto—or, at the very least, a W estern projection.12 Not only
does the Western search for “authentic” art outside the Western
a rt market’s systems of circulation hold the danger of fueling the
notion of the indigenous “other,” it also fails to recognize the
agency of non-Western artists in their active appropriation of West
ern modernity, which renders them less “non-Western” than the
West would like them to be.

The Centrality of the Periphery: A Change in Perspective
If the Havana Biennial model—more so than the curatorial phi

losophy of “Magiciens de la ter re”—has proven to be more fit to
build upon and effective in the long term, would this not imply
that biennial history should be completely reconsidered from the
ground up? I believe it is time for a change in perspective—not
least because it also offers a way out of what I would like to call
the provincialism of the center. Living in the center alone does not
constitute provincialism; it is the province’s unshakable belief in
itself as the center. However, the unshakable belief that one lives
in the center remains provincial even if one actually lives in the
center. Hardly any city in the world is more provincial than New
York. Adrian Pedrosa observed with good reason that putting on
purely “native”—m eaning local or US-centric—exhibitions in
places like MoMA PS1 (the quinquennial “Greater New York”
survey) and the Whitney Museum reinforces the notion that the
world outside New York (or the United States) hasn’t got much
to offer, because the interesting artists all live in Brooklyn anyhow.
And yet, expanding its outlook on the world would be nothing but
beneficial for the New York art scene. In 2012, the New Museum
Triennial appeared as a shimmer of hope; as Pedrosa—somewhat
prematurely—put it, “In a city overcrowded with exhibitions and
overflowing with provincial self-importance, curator Eungie Joo
effectively brought a sliver of the global into the profoundly local
cake. She looked beyond the N orth Atlantic pond and presented
many artists for the first time in the United States. Only five out
of 50 were U.S. natives.”15By presenting many non-Western artists
unknown in the United States, Joo followed in the footsteps of
Enwezor’s documents 11, and curated a “postcolonial” exhibition
at the center. The hope of de-provincializing the center, however,
remained unfulfilled, as the triennial encountered considerable
resentment from the New York art scene. Just as rumors spread
THE GLOBALIZATION OF ART AND THE “BIENNIALS OF RESISTANCE” 165

through, the grapevine in a small town, common opinion was quickly
settled: the 2012 Whitney Biennial (curated by Jay Sanders and
Elisabeth Sussman), which took place at the same time and ex
hibited mostly well-known N orth American artistic positions,
was m uch m ore interesting, and the New M useum Triennial
wasn’t even w orth seeing.14This is a prime example of the pro
vincialism of the center.
The provincial resentment of the center should not however lead

us to falsely conclude that exhibitions with a global focus are passe.
In reality, the opposite is true: they are happening everywhere.
The West just has yet to realize its own decentralization. What this
means for the exhibition and biennial industry is that for some
time now, peripheral biennials have succeeded in presenting them
selves in much more engaging ways and are starting to outshine
their counterparts in the “center.” In this regard, Sabine B. Vogel
observed that the Istanbul Biennial—in term s of professional
accreditations and resonance in international debates—became
for some years the most popular biennial after Venice: ‘T he Istanbul
Biennale has increasingly established itself as a center of global
art that addresses current them es between the poles of politics
and economy.”15The art field’s coordinate system-—just like global
power relations—is starting to shift, to turn. This does not mean
that Venice or Kassel will lose their significance; rather, they will
be seen more clearly as what they really are: an expression of a
specific European provincialism long embedded in a North Atlantic
cultural-defense alliance that became obsolete when the Iron Curtain
fell.16Although the phases of the symbolic, economic, military and
political decentralization of the West may not be taking place simul
taneously, they are still very much entangled in one another.

A Counterhistory
Biennial history needs, therefore, to be rewritten from the periph

ery. Within this history, if the Havana Biennial were a significant
reference, this would be not only because of its curatorial deci
sions. The 1989 edition tried out a concept found in the philoso
phies behind many biennials today: it rid itself of the corset of
being an exhibition in the strict sense. It began incorporating
urban spaces, experimenting with different event formats, and
opening up possibilities for participation.
The third Bienal, like the second one, I insist, was not con
ceived as an exhibition but as an organism consisting of
shows, events, meetings, publications and outreach pro
grammes. It assembled a big main international exhibition,
eleven thematic group shows (three by Cuban artists and
eight by artists from other countries), ten individual exhi
bitions (two by Cuban artists and eight by artists from other
countries), two international conferences and eight inter
national workshops.17
By taking what was once just an exhibition and unraveling it into

an array of various sub-exhibitions, venues, and event formats,
a model was created in Havana that is still distinctive of today’s
biennials. The main focus is not placed on the spectacle as such—
which a biennial certainly also always is—but rather on the inves
tigative and discursive interest in a specific and problematic field.
The 1989 biennial already had a theme—Tradition and Contempo
raneity”—which was reflected in the abovementioned discussions
concerning anti-colonial politics and non-Western modernities. This
self-reflexive mode enabled the project and the possibilities that the
Havana Biennial opened up to become the focus of the debates
.themselves. (Similarly, the 28th Sao Paulo Art Biennial in 2008, curated
by Ivo Mesquita and Ana Paula Cohen, took the biennial format

itself as a them e—meaning the function of biennials within the
global art field—and reexamined it under changed circumstances.)
Hardly any biennial that thinks anything of itself can get away with
refraining from taking on a similar topic or leitmotif, no matter
how loosely conceived. Although Havana was certainly not the
first biennial with thematic contours, its theme was negotiated on
a scale broader than ever before. If, through a Eurocentric lens,
we were to consider Catherine David’s documentaX in 1997, with
its “100 D ays-100 Guests” program, as the biennial that gave
discourse a more substantial place within the program than any
previous biennial, one look at the Havana Biennial reveals another
genealogy entirely. The “discursive tu rn ” that has gripped the
exhibition field for years now,18 may have actually come from
the periphery and not the center. As Rachel Weiss states, ‘T he
integration of a major international Conference into the [Havana]
Biennial’s structure represents a decisive step towards conceiving
of biennials as discursive environments, in which the actual display ;
of artworks is p art of a m uch broader project of research and
knowledge production.”19
This observation is important, because it forces us to rid ourselves,

once and for all, of the notion of primitivism, the idea that art
created outside of Europe is founded on feeling and not intellect.
At any rate, such ridiculous notions can only exist because Euro
pean awareness of intellectual traditions and ways of life in Latin
America, Africa, or Asia has been, and still is, extremely marginal.20
Enwezor’s documenta 11 finally challenged this primitivist notion

in the “center” as well. Enwezor purposefully placed the works of
Hanne Darboven and Bernd and Hilla Becher, and the political-
conceptual a rt of Maria Eichhorn, in a constellation with Latin ;
American political-conceptual art by Luis Camnitzer, Artur Barrio^
and Cildo M eireles, and the w ork of African artists such as %
168 THE STAGE, THE STREET, AND THE INSTITUTION|

Frederic Bruly Bouabre, so as to dismantle the racist cliche that
artists outside Europe are more “emotional,” thereby positioning
Latin American and African art as conceptual art.21With the four
discursive platforms that took place before the actual exhibition
in Kassel, documenta was decentralized even further, and in a
variety of ways. First of all, it shifted the outdated relationship
between art and discourse. Although the greatest amount of the
available resources still went into producing the exhibition itself,
on a symbolic level, it was only one of the five platforms, so, the
discursive formats (workshops and conferences) outnumbered it
by far, on a symbolic level. Thematically, this documenta was de
centralized because the platforms were no longer concerned with
debating the problems of the art field but rather questions such
as democracy, truth, and reconciliation in transition societies (e.g.,
South Africa), the development of African megacities, and Caribbean
creolite and creolization. Spatially, it was decentralized, because
documenta no longer only located in Kassel, as the discursive
platforms took place in Vienna, Berlin, New Delhi, Lagos, and
St. Lucia. This led, if you will, to a de-Kasselization of Kassel. That
Is to say: the province that imagines itself to be the center of the
art world, albeit only once every five years, was decentered.22
The power of definition held by the West, which has imagined

itself as the center of world affairs, is waning; the global history
of the future is being written from what was once considered the
periphery. Looking back, we are slowly beginning to understand
that, even in the past, the so-called periphery anticipated devel
opments that would later be of great significance to the center.
I would not go so far as to say that a causal relation exists between
the influence of the Havanese model and other biennials today;
for instance, Jan Hoet’s visit to the third Havana Biennial left no
obvious traces on documenta IX in 1992. The relations are more
complex. But the Havana Biennial’s early and successful curatorial
practices seem to become more and more appealing with the con-
THE GLOBALIZATION OF ART AND THE “BIENNIALS OF RESISTANCE’ 169

tim ing decentralization of the West: the idea that an exhibition
should prioritize some form of interaction with the city where it
takes place (and not simply descend upon it like a UFO); all of the
current negotiations around “participation”; the renewed interest
in strategies in art education within the context of the “educational
turn,” which was incidentally already anticipated by the third
Havana Biennial and didn’t arrive in the center until the eleventh
and twelfth editions of documenta.23The oh-so-critical, discursive,
and politically savvy West cannot claim a patent on any of this.
The fact that artistic practice and its institutional vessels (such as
biennials) are supposed to reflect their relations to the political
and social context they are em bedded in is, for the m ost part,
widely accepted today, along with the notion that biennials should
neither descend like UFOs nor be capitalized on for regional policy
goodies. This, however, does not mean it is not happening all over
the place. Despite all the critique that can be made in terms of the
political-economic function of biennials and the gentrification of
“biennial art”—including charges that they themselves do not live :
up to their claims of site specificity, as it is often dealt with median- ■
ically or using standardized methods (only to appear again like a
UFO that just descended), or that they are not as political as they
say they are—it should not be forgotten that biennials have deci
sively contributed to our current understanding of artistic practice \:
as an instrument of social and political knowledge production. In
term s of institutions within the art field, the most important steps
have been taken not by the biennials of the West, but by those oU
the periphery. And, though he may be speaking pro domo as a
biennial curator who is in high demand, I agree with Hou Hanru §
when he says: “Biennial culture, I would argue, has become the %
most vital condition for the conception and production of content^
porary a r t Specifically conceived to reflect recent developments 5
in art scenes and contexts, biennials provide freedom for artists
to engage with changing social, political, and cultural realities,

beyond the constraints of traditional museum and gallery exhibi
tion models. Biennials are also opening up new public spaces for
artistic production outside the dominant market.”24
THE GLOBALIZATION OF ART AND THE “BIENNIALS OF RESISTANCE' 171

Notes
1 One could say biennials are a case in point of “giocalization,” This artificial
term was created in order to underscore the fact that the fact that globalization
is not a linear, unidirectional, and self-propelled process; see Roland
Robertson, “Giocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity,”
in Global Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland
Robertson (London: Sage Publications, 1995), 25-44. The local and the
global are intricately entwined, and both the local and the global, in equal
measure, constantly need to he reconstructed.
2 I use "biennial” throughout this essay to refer to such large-scale exhibitions

that recur periodically, not only those happening every two years.
3 Simon Sheikh, “Marks of Distinction, Vectors of Possibility; Questions for

the Biennial,” in ‘T he Art Biennial as a Global Phenomenon,” special issue,
Open: Cahier on A rt and the Public Domain, no. 16 (2009): 73.
4 Ranjit Hoskote, “Biennials of Resistance: Reflections on the Seventh Gwangju

Biennial,” in The Biennial Reader: An Anthology on Large-Scale Exhibitions
of Contemporary Art, ed. Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig
0vsteba (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 312.
5 Sabine B. Vogel, Biennials—A rt on a Global Scale, trans. Camilla R. Nielsen

(Vienna: Springer, 2010), 40.
6 See Vogel, 99-100.
7 This includes all possible variations between liberation and domination.
8 Gerardo Mosquera, ‘T he Third Bienal de La Habana in Its Global and Local

Contexts,” in Making A rt Global (Part 1): The Third Havana Biennial 1989
(London: Afterall Books, 2011), 73.
9 Rachel Weiss, “A Certain Place and a Certain Time: T he T hird Bienal de

La Habana and the Origins of the Global Exhibition,” in Making A rt
Global, 32.
10 “The event has always focused on modern and contemporary art, developing
the notion of a plurality of active modernisms, and giving little room to
traditional or religious aesthetic-symbolic productions, which at the time
were frequently stereotyped as the authentic art created in Third World
countries, while other work was disqualified as an epigonal Westernised
production.” Mosquera, “The Third Bienal,” 77.
11 Okwui Enwezor, “Mega-exhibitions and the Antinomies of a Transnational

Global Form,” Manifesto Journal, no, 2 (Winter 2003/4): 113.
12 This is no coincidence, considering that in reality a significant number of

so-called non-Western artists live in Western metropoles.
13 Adriano Pedrosa, “The Biennial: The Centrality of the Peripheral Biennial,"

The Exhibitionist, no. 6 Qune 2012): 44.

14 This was indeed the case, but not regarding the artistic positions in a strict
sense. The 2012 Whitney Biennial emptied out the entire fourth floor of the
Whitney Museum of American Art to present “time-based arts,” which
included dance. This allowed the “performative turn” and even the
“choreographic turn," which had both been a discernible paid of the fine
arts for a long time, to be put into practice, However, although somewhat
isolated, the m ost interesting performative piece was a production at the
rival exhibition in the New Museum. Salons: Birthright Palestine ? (2012)
by the Israeli group Public Movement consisted of a series of discursive-
performative political “salons" with relatively strict choreographies and
was, in my opinion, the most successful performance piece in recent years
(and, incidentally, also the triennial's m ost expensive production).
15 Vogel, Biennials, 56.
16 I am speaking more precisely of a continental European provincialism, as

documenta has little significance in Great Britain, which also remains seeped
in its own provincialism.
17 Mosquera, “The Third Bienal,” 76.
18 Bruce W. Ferguson and Milena M. Hoegsberg, ‘Talking and Thinking

about Biennials: T he Potential of Discursivity,” in Filipovic et al., Biennial
Reader, 360-76,
19 Weiss, “A Certain Place,” 14.
20 I m ust add that, by now, these traditions have indeed come into contact
with Western intellectual traditions. My concern here is not authenticity
but plain and simple recognition and acknowledgement of specific art and
discourse produced in countries and regions beyond the North Atlantic.
21 See Eriberto Eulisse, ed., Africke, diaspore, ibridi: II concetiualismo come

strategia dell’arte africam contemporanea (Bologna: AEIP Edizioni, 2003).
22 For more on these decentralizations, see Oliver Marchart, Hegemonie im

Kunstfeld: Die documenta-Aussteilungen dX, D ll, 412 und die Politik der
Biennalisierung (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2008).
23 See schnittpunkt, Beatrice Jaschke, and Nora Sternfeld, eds., educational

turn: Handlungsraume der Kunst- und Kulturvermittlung (Vienna: Turia +
Kant, 2012).
24 Hou Hanru, “Reinventing the Social,” The Exhibitionist, no. 6 Gone 2012): 45.
THE GLOBALIZATION OF ART AND THE “ BIENNIALS OF RESISTANCE’ 173

[ Time Loops
A Postscript on Pre-enactments
The genre of artistic reenactment is booming in the art world—
with Jerem y Deller’s Battle ofOrgreave (2001) as the canonical
exemplar. Interestingly, the reenactment has recently experienced
its temporal inversion: the pre-enactment. T he pioneering pre
enactments, however, vary in political inclination and theoretical
outlook. In most cases, for instance, in the performances of the
German artist collectives Interrobang and Hofmann&Lindholm,
the point of pre-enactments is to critically extrapolate from con
temporary developments an image of our social or political future.
This understanding of pre-enactment replicates the popular dra
matization of science-fiction scenarios by live-action role playing,
or LARP, communities. Rather than reviving events of the histor
ical past (such as historical battles), a critical, dystopian view is
cast on our future (a future of privatization or surveillance, for
instance) by artistic pre-enactors. However, a second and, from
our perspective, more interesting use of the concept comes from
the performance collective Public M ovement W hat is supposed
to be pre-enacted artistically, in their understanding of the term,
is a future political event or institution that is yet to be invented—
rather than simply being extrapolated from contemporary events
or institutions. In chapter 3 ,1 described what I consider to be the
canonical exemplar for this nascent genre: Public Movement’s How
Long Is Now?
When Public Movement performers blocked crossroads in 2006,

dancing to the popular tune “Od lo ahavti dai,” the political dimension
of this guerrilla performance remained latent. The critical edge of
the performance—using a circle dance as symbol of communal
gathering, taking on national heritage, etc.—must have been hard
to decipher for the car drivers who literally bumped into this perfor
mance. Yet the situation bore a structural resemblance to political
street protest: traffic was stopped and public order was disturbed
for a few minutes. And it was precisely this structural similarity (to
gether with the habitual availability of the popular “Od lo ahavti dai”
176 TIME LOOPS

choreography) that allowed the guerrilla performance to turn into
a successful protest format in the summer of 2011, when social unrest
broke out in Tel Aviv. From a political perspective the case is of inter
est because the format of these political demonstrations evolved from
a form of artistic activism that was not yet or not quite political—in
other words, it had not made the passage into politics proper. Instead,
the moment of the political was pre-enacted within the field of a rt
Not in a merely mimetic way, as in the case of historical reenactments
(remember Nikolai Evreinov’s restaging of the storming of the Winter
Palace, which was, as I argued in chapter 2, mimetic by definition).
Obviously there is no way in which a future event, whose contours
remain unknown by definition, can be replicated in the present The
moment of the political was pre-enacted by Public Movement because
their latently political performance already displayed structural fea
tures that would later facilitate an easy passage into the political field.
It is easy to see how their approach differs from other theatrical

variants of pre-enactment. T he initial Public Movement perfor
mance was never conceived as a play of post-dramatic theater;
it had nothing to do with theater at all. It was the performance—
or, should we say, pre-formance—of a real political event in the
future, something like a future Battle of Orgreave. Therefore,
I propose to use pre-enactment as a term for the artistic anticipa
tion o f a political event to come. But this political event cannot
simply be extrapolated from well-known contemporary tendencies
(in most cases, not much fantasy is required to develop dystopian
views of our future). Rather, the future event at stake is an intrin
sically conflictual event: the future outbreak of a conflict.
This definition of pre-enactment—as the artistic anticipation of a

political event—leads us back to the difficult problem of how art
can relate to political activism. As I have argued throughout this
book, as long as no antagonism has surfaced, as long as the moment
of the political (in the strict ontological sense of the term) has not
A POSTSCRIPT ON PRE-ENACTMENTS 177

occurred, it is impossible to truly act politically (in the ontic sense
of politics). First, as I have proposed in the introductory chapter,
we have to be touched by an antagonistic force (that is, ontologically
speaking, by the force of antagonism) in order to enact the political.
We have to be agitated in order to agitate. And this only occurs—to
speak Heideggerese once more—if we are “thrown” into a political
(i.e., conflictual) situation. Any other position would amount to a
voluntaristic misunderstanding of the nature of political subjectivity. /
Therefore, as long as a situation is not experienced as antagonistic,
as long as we are not touched by a “real” antagonism, every enact
ment of the political will be of the order of a pre-enactment. With
regard to the actual emergence of the political, it will come too early. ;
It will thus be the anticipation of the political, rather than its direct
enactment. In this sense, a political pre-enactment can occur in
every field of the social, including the art field. Art practices, in an :
entirely experimental way, may therefore pre-enact political ones—
even though they will never be fully identical with political practices
(because they would cease to be art). However, if we wish to in- ;
crease the chances of artistic practice turning into political practice
in the moment of a future conflict, artists would be well advised not v
to imprison themselves within the spontaneous ideology of the a r t ;
field.1And here we have to refine the argument a little. For if art—
at some future point—is supposed to turn into politics, one has to
pre-enact not antagonism (which is, strictly speaking, impossible,
for an ontological category cannot be enacted straightaway) but the %
structural features of political action. This means to act, as it were,
in a political mode even though the moment of the political might
not have occurred y e t But what exactly are these structural features
or conditions of political acting?
In chapter 3 ,1 proposed strategy, collectivity, conflictuality, and

the blockade of streams of circulation by human bodies as defin
ing features of political activism. We have also seen that acting
politically means acting in an organized fashion. These criteria
178 TIME LOOPS

make up, in my view, the nucleus of any activist politics worthy of
the name. They, in a sense, constitute the minimal conditions of
political action.2 For the same reason, these criteria describe, to
different degrees, the potentially political dimension of art prac
tices. Let me once m ore run through these criteria in order to
flesh out the argument. So, first of all, why collectivity? For the
simple reason that in the sphere of the political, I cannot act in
solitude; I will have to “get together” with others in order to act—-
w hat A rendt understands as “acting in c o n c e rt” This can be
achieved in a variety of ways, but in any case, some sort of collec
tivity will result from it; a collectivity that can then be seen as the
actual subject of a particular political act Second, a collective that
is not organized to some degree, that does not find at least some
minimal patterns of organization, isn’t really a collective. In other
contexts, loose networks of people without a common denomina
tor can exist, but in politics people do not join randomly; their
mutual articulation into a collective must be brought about some
how. In other words, it has to be organized. In addition, political
action is never without reason or goals, and these goals can only
be achieved against a plethora of obstacles; for instance, there will
always be institutional obstacles, and there will certainly be rival
attempts to block our efforts to achieve these goals. In order to
circumvent or overcome these obstacles, strategic considerations
are of importance. Therefore, strategy remains an intrinsic part of
political action, as no one acts within a political vacuum. And finally,
since the space of acting is in fact filled with other collectives—that
is, with competing political actors—political action will always be
conflictual. Conflict, make no mistake, is not merely a particular
mode of doing politics; political action is, in and of itself, conflict
ual. W ere it otherwise, we would be able to achieve our goals
through nonpolitical means. In this case, there would be no po
litical adversary, thus no conflict; there would be no obstacle, thus
no strategy required; there would be no collectivity, because we
would be able to achieve our goals individually; hence, there would

be no need to organize. For this reason, antagonism—the onto
logical term for conflict—is not merely one condition among many;
it is the very condition that determines all other criteria of political
action. If it is subtracted from action, we end up with a depoliticized
idea of politics.
From this we can only draw a single conclusion: political aesthet

ics—as an aesthetics of the political—has to be grounded on the
“hauntological” ground, in Derrida’s terms, or “an-archic principle,”
in Reiner Schiirmann’s, of antagonism. Political aesthetics turns
into an aesthetics of antagonism. But not in the sense of an imago-
centric misunderstanding of “aesthetics”; antagonism, as I have
said, is an ontological (hauntological) instance that cannot be de
picted as such, but there are structural features of antagonism that
can be determined. If the minimal conditions of activist politics are,
in fact, ontic instantiations of an ontological ground (antagonism),
then these conditions, from the perspective of conflictual aesthetics,
m ust equally apply to artistic activism to the extent to which the
latter is political. Of course, this is not to advance any claims about
the conditions of art in general; my claim is restricted to political
art practices. Nor do I wish to deny that some of these conditions i;
are easily available for nonpolitical modes of artistic practice. There
is little doubt that there are many examples of (nonpolitical) artistic
practice that are inherently collective, organized, and strategic. But r
as long as conditions such as collectivity, organization, and strategy
are not mediated by antagonism, there is nothing truly political
about such a practice. Artistic positions might well be mediated, for
instance, by competition vis-a-vis other positions. In this case, how
ever, we are talking about marketing strategies between business
competitors within the art field, not about strategies between politi
cal adversaries. For the same reason, artists often tend to organize t
collectives in the form of artist groups, schools, or networks—but
as long as their organization is not mediated by antagonism it will
be hard to think of it as a political collective. So, while artistic prac-|
tice may often resemble political forms of collectivity, organization,
and strategy, the minimal conditions of politics are not met so long
as antagonism has not been encountered.
If it is impossible to force such an encounter into being, what should

we do? One option is simply to wait and see. At some point antag
onism may break out, or it may never break out. This is, to say the
least, a boring option that deprives us of all agency. How can we
forge a path beyond the politically sterile alternative between vol
untarism and passivism? This is precisely where, as I have indicated
above, the concept of pre-enactment comes in. It is, as I keep insist
ing, impossible for us to directly enact the political—rather, we are
enacted by the political. Yet we can pre-enact the political, if only in
weak and prepolitical forms—though there is no guarantee that the
political will ever occur. To do this, we will have to anticipate a form
of action that meets the minimal conditions of politics. Not cogni
tively, of course: we have to anticipate these conditions practically—
that is, in our practices. Artistic pre-enactments of a political event
to come m ust “mimic” neither the event nor the antagonism as
such, but the structural conditions of minimal politics (which include
collectivity, organization, strategy, the bodily blockade of streams
of circulation, and, above all, conflictuality). With a view toward the
political event-to-come, artistic practice in the mode of pre-enactment
has to be collective, organized, strategic, embodied, and conflict
oriented. And if there is no conflict occurring, then you have to look
for trouble. You have to see where the hidden lines of latent conflicts
run, and you have to try to (reactivate them by pre-enacting their
future reenactment. You’ll have to construct a time loop.
Perhaps constructing a time loop is less difficult than it may sound.

The history of contemporary art is full of artistic-political time
loops, and today a new sensitivity seems to have emerged within
the a rt world with regard to similar formats. The topic of “re
hearsal” has become quite fashionable in recent years. In Novem

ber 2014, for instance, a conference was organized at Goldsmiths,
University of London, under the title “Repeat! The Logics of Exercises,
Trainings, Tests and Rehearsals.” As is apparent from the subtitle,
though, different things get mixed up in this debate. A rehearsal,
as a rule, is the repetition of a determinate play or show—which
is the exact opposite of what I have described as the logic of pre
enactments. A pre-enactment—with its open outcome—cannot
be a rehearsal of a determinate event; at best, it can be the re
hearsal of an entirely indeterminate one: the event of the political.
But then “rehearsal” would be a misnomer. It is thus preferable
to think of pre-enactments as training sessions that provide us
with the skills necessary to engage in the real thing, should it
occur. A pre-enactment should not be envisaged as the rehearsal
of a particular choreography that is known in advance. It bears
more resemblance to les exercices, as in the world of classical bal
let: the training of basic m ovem ents at the barre. It is like a
warm-up for some future event with largely unknown contours,
one that may or may not occur.
Let us take as a final example for such time loops between the
artistic and the political: the Happening as invented by Allan
Kaprow around 1958. As an artistic format, this was inspired by
Kaprow’s early experience of Jackson Pollock’s action painting
the American-style Zen Buddhism then in fashion (whose most
famous proponent was John Cage). According to Kaprow’s beau
tifully Zen-ish definition, “Happenings are events that, put simply,
happen.”3In the 1960s, the term evolved into a household concept ;
when the media started to describe any kind of event as a “hap
pening.” W hat is more interesting, however, is that happenings
became an important element of the protest vocabulary of 1968
and after (Remember the story recounted in chapter 2: Jean-Louis
Barrault, the director of the Odeon in 1968, addressing Julian
Beck, who spearheaded the occupation of the theater, with the
w ords “What a wonderful happening, Julian!”) In this sense
182 TIME LOOPS

Kaprow’s Happenings, which were initially located in the art field,
turned out to be pre-enactments of political happenings. Kaprow
him self declined to stage Happenings for a political purpose,
as he thought this would only make them “bad” Happenings—
an indication that he had not managed to free himself from the
spontaneous ideology of the art field.4 Nevertheless, in 1971 he
did speak approvingly of a happening by Abbie Hoffman, head of
the New York yippie protest group Provo:
Abbie Hoffman applied the intermedium of Happenings

(via the Provos) to a philosophical and political goal two or
three summers ago. With a group of friends, he went to
the observation balcony of the New York Stock Exchange.
At a signal he and his friends tossed handfuls of dollar bills
onto the floor below, where trading was at its height. Ac
cording to his report, brokers cheered, diving for the bills;
the ticker tape stopped; the market was probably affected;
and the press reported the arrival of the cops.5
In fight of our theory of pre-enactment, this famous political hap

pening, covered nationwide on television, appears as a perfect
example of political activism modeled upon an artistic format, the
Happening.6Upon closer inspection, however, it turns out that the
time loop may also lead us into the opposite direction, back to the
prehistory of artistic Happenings. Going back in time, we may
discover that Kaprow’s artistic Happening could have been mod
eled, inter alia, upon political happenings in the first place (rather
than political happenings being modeled upon artistic ones). To
see this, we have to revisit Kaprow’s initial source of inspiration:
A rt as Experience, published in 1934 by the American Pragmatist
philosopher John Dewey and read attentively by the young Kaprow.
It was Dewey who had insisted on the aesthetic dimension of
everyday experiences. Kaprow’s idea of experimentally investigat
ing—in form of “happenings” and “activities”—into the aesthetic

qualities of ordinary activities such as, for instance, toothbrushing
or sweeping a stage, was anticipated in Dewey’s book from the
’30s. Experience, for Dewey, was characterized by standing out
from the general flow of consciousness, but there are plenty of
situations in our daily life that have this quality. In A rt as Experience,
Dewey provides us with a list of examples including “eating a meal,
playing a game of chess, carrying on a conversation, writing a
book, or taking part in a political campaign.”7
Surprisingly, it turns out that Dewey’s list of examples ends with a

political happening. Many years later, Kaprow, in his writings, would
repeat exactly the same pattern. A few paragraphs before discussing
Hoffman’s political happening, he predicts that traditional art forms
will be surpassed in the future by “assemblage arts” such as “light
shows, space-age demonstration at world’s fairs, teaching aids, sales
displays, toys, and political campaigns.”8 Later he claims that we
unofficially approximate the sacred rituals of earlier societies “only
in such sports as surfing, motorcycle racing, and sky diving; in
social protests such as sit-ins; and in gambles against the unknown
such as moon landings.”9 In an earlier article he had suggested
affinities between Happenings and other practices such as “parades,
carnivals, games, expeditions, guided tours, orgies, religious cere
monies, and such secular rituals as the elaborate operations of the
Mafia; civil rights demonstrations; national election campaigns;
Thursday nights at the shopping centers of America; the hot-rod,
dragster, and motorcycle scene.”10Admittedly, while in these lists
of examples political happenings only figure as one option among
many, they are given a slightly more prominent position in some
cases, as the final example in a list. But what if we follow Arendt,
who assumed that political acting is not just one among many forms ;
of acting but the supreme instance of acting? Is it imaginable that
acting in the political mode provides us with the template for any
form of acting? And could it be that, by extension, the political event
turns out to be a prototype of the artistic Happening?
184 TIME LOOPS

We may or may not be inclined to answer in the affirmative. Our
answer will largely depend on whether we are prepared to grant
ontological primacy to the political or not. One thing is for sure,
however: artistic pre-enactments, as a format, are not historically
original. They, in turn, have been pre-enacted by political activists
under a telling name: prefiguration. The idea of prefiguration origi
nated in politics, most notably in the civil rights movement of the
1960s, and was further developed by contemporary social move
ments. It is based on the conviction that, in regards to a future
democratic society, there is nothing to wait for. ‘“Prefiguration’ or
‘prefigurative politics/” as Mathijs van de Sande explains, “refers
to a political action, practice, movement, moment or development
in which certain political ideals are experimentally actualised in
the ‘here and now/ rather than hoped to be realised in a distant
future. Thus, in prefigurative practices, the m eans applied are
deemed to embody or ‘mirror’ the ends one strives to realise.”11
In this respect, prefiguration differs significantly from political
strategies that distinguish between means and ends. The Leninist
vanguard party, for instance, was supposed to fight for a future
communist society in which everyone is free and equal, but as an
instrument of political struggle the party was hierarchically struc
tured and tightly organized. In this regard, Leninist politics
adheres to a logic of postponement. T he prefigurative politics
enacted in the assemblies and occupations in 2011, on the other
hand, refutes this idea. T here is nothing to be postponed. If you
wish for a democratic society, your present actions have to pre
figure the democratic structure and procedures of this society.
Therefore, Van de Sande argues, “prefiguration is a particular way
of bridging the temporal distinction between a ‘here and now’ [... ]
and a future alternative society.”12Or, in the words of David Graeber,
one of the most prominent advocates of prefigurative politics: “In
:the early twentieth century it was called ‘building the new society
in the shell of the old/ in the 1980s and 1990s it came to be known
as ‘prefigurative politics/ But when Greek anarchists declare ‘we

are a m essage from the future,’ or American ones claim to be
creating an ‘insurgent civilization,’ these are really just ways of
saying the same thing. We are speaking of that sphere in which
action itself becomes a prophecy.”13
W hen we start to abandon the logic of postponement, political

activism ceases to be a frustrating and often fruitless affair, as it
is often portrayed—mostly by nonactivists. It is not the case, from
a prefigurative point of view, that a truly democratic society cannot
exist in the here and now, and may or may not eventually exist at
some distant point in the future. The future society is brought into
existence in the very moment in which it is pre-enacted. It is already
present in the assemblies on city squares or in other forms of
communal gathering that follow self-established democratic rules.
But it is only present, of course, as long as it is pre-enacted. These
ideas are highly reminiscent of Arendt’s performative notion of
freedom. For Arendt, freedom only exists insofar as people act
together. Freedom, for her, is an action concept. It cannot be manu
factured as a determinate object; it comes and goes in the perfor
mative process of acting together.
There is a second reason why the concepts of prefiguration and

pre-enactment may help us to break with the tragic idea of politi
cal activism as a never-ending sequence of failures, debacles, and
setbacks. The logic of pre-enactment relieves us from the burden
of revolutionary heroism. If your goal is to build a new order on
a world-revolutionary scale, it is quite likely that you will fail. But
if your goal is to prefiguratively enact democratic relations in the
here and now, you are bypassing the logic of scale as much as you
are bypassing the logic of time. I started this book with the ob
servation that events of social protest should not be considered
short-lived temporal outbreaks, but as part of a continuous sub
stream throughout history. We live in a political continuum; it is
less difficult than one may expect to pre-enact something that, on
186 TIME LOOPS

closer inspection, has already occurred and does not stop occur
ring, if only to a minimal degree and in minimal doses. The heroic
view conceives of politics as a grandiose effort, as a form of rare
but “big” politics. Yet politics, in the sense of political activism,
occurs constantly and on any point of the scale—from the maxi
mum to the minimum degree of action.
For this reason, the construction of time loops through prefigu

rative action is a quite mundane, unspectacular affair. In politics,
the laws of linear time are regularly suspended. By acting in the
present we are constantly jumping back and forth in time. In fact,
as phenomenologists have discovered, we do this incessantly in
our daily lives as well. For Husserl, the two experiential modes of
what he calls “retention” and “protention” describe how we hold
on in our minds to a passing event and anticipate how this event
will unfold within the next moments, respectively. Consequently,
the world is never experienced as a disentangled and isolated
instant. Our experience has a temporal imprint that points beyond
the present moment. There is no such thing as the nunc stans—the
“eternal now"’—of the mystics, no pure instant of the present. We
are either lagging behind or jumping the gun.
The time loops of re- and pre-enactments follow a similar logic,

but they are not about mental perceptions, as in Husserl; they
are conditions for collective, organized, strategic activity. In this
latter sense, acting is always both reenacting and pre-enacting.
In other words, to claim that there is no isolated action in the
now means claiming that actions are a confused mix of repeti
tive, ritualistic, conserving, circulating, institutionalizing, and
historicizing practices with anticipating, renewing, revolution
izing, and deinstitutionalizing ones. Through our actions, we
construct loops in time by linking the historical past to a still
unwritten future—which is the same as bending an unwritten
future toward the historical past. T here are only loopholes in

what appears to be linear historical time; therefore, politics, in
the activist mode, is the activity of constructing loops, of twist
ing time—that is, of reactualizing alternative histories by pre
actualizing alternative futures.
Such endeavors to create time loops come without guarantees.

From Allan Kaprow, to whom we now return, we can learn that
“the feedback loop is never exact,” which implies that “something
new comes out in the process—knowledge, well-being, surprise.”14
Future and present do not meet. Politics does not proceed in
perfect circles. The feedback, instigated through our actions,
returns, but it continues beyond the point of origin. K David Graeber
is right that in the sphere of prehgurative politics action “becomes
a prophecy,” then this prophecy is certainly not self-fulfilling. By
constructing the future, we miss the future. The future, in other
words, is made of unintended effects rather than good intentions.
This should not prevent us from making a collective and strategic
effort, but we should be aware of the irrefutable fact that rather
than closing the circle, our actions will always miss the mark
somewhat. Prefigurative activists never move in straight lines
toward a clearly defined goal; they move in staggering, tottering
ways on noncircular lines toward an obfuscated goal. Sometimes
their actions may appear surprisingly creative and effective, some
times clumsy and ridiculously naive—but this, as such, cannot
be held against them. It’s p art of the nature of political acting,
which is closer to slapstick comedy than military discipline be
cause of its ungrounded and open-ended character.15 For this
reason, an aesthetics of conflictual practice may have more to do
with the aesthetics of slapstick, and less with the aesthetics of
high art. Its main object of concern is the street, including banana
peels on the sidewalk, rather than artwork on a gallery wall. Or,
as Kaprow once put it, “Artists of the world, drop out! You have
nothing to lose but your professions!”16
188 TIME LOOPS

Notes
1 As long as they remain dogmatically individualistic; for instance, it is quite

unlikely that their pre-enactment will do more than merely advance their
artistic career.
2 See Oliver M archart, “On Minimal Politics,” in Thinking Antagonism:

Political Ontology after Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2018), 129-54.
3 Allan Kaprow, "Happenings in the New York Scene” (1961), in Essays on the
Blurring o f A rt and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2003), 16. T his notion of Ereignis (the event of enowning) could have
been phrased by Heidegger in exactly the same term s.
4 That Kaprow believed he had crossed the line between a rt and life, which
includes the line between a rt and activism, was, ironically, the very reason
why he never turned into a real activist. Even as he sought to explore the
ideas of “un-art" and of the “un-artist,” he always did so from the perspective
of art and of the artist
5 Kaprow, “The Education of the Un-artist, Part I” (1971), in Essays, 105.
6 For Kaprow, of course, it made “no difference whether what Hoffman did
is called activism, criticism, pranksterism, self-advertisement, or art.”
Kaprow, 105.
7 John Dewey, A rt as Experience (1934), excerpted in A rt and Its Significance:

An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory, ed. Stephen David Ross (Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 1994), 205.
8 Kaprow, “Education of the Un-artist, Part I,” 104.
9 Kaprow, 'T h e Education of the Un-artist, P art II” (1972), in Essays, 114.
10 Kaprow, T h e Happenings Are Dead: Long Live the Happenings!" (1966),

in Essays, 64.
11 Mathijs van de Sande, T h e Prefigurative Politics of Tahrir Square: An

Alternative Perspective on the 2011 Revolutions," Res Publica 19, no. 3
(August 2013): 230.
12 Van de Sande, 230.
13 David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement

(London: Penguin, 2014), 233.
14 Kaprow, “Education of the Un-artist, P art II,” 112.
15 Slapstick accepts and turns the encounter with contingency (the proverbial
banana peel) into a bodily art form, a virtuosic choreography of clumsiness.16
16 Kaprow, “Education of the Un-artist, P a rti,” 109.

Oliver M archart
Public Sphere
Published by Sternberg Press
Managing editor: Zoe Harris

Proofreading: Ames Gerould
Design: Keith Dodds
Cover typeface: Wei Huang
Printing: KOPA, Lithuania
ISBN 978-3-95679-204-5
© 2019 Oliver Marchart, Sternberg Press

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.
Distributed by The MIT Press, Art Data,

and Les presses du reel
Sternberg Press
Caroline Schneider
Karl-Marx-Allee 78
D-10243 Berlin
www.sternberg-press.com
Anewwave of artistic activismhas emerged inrecent
years inresponse to the ever-increasing dominance
of authoritarianneoliberalism. Activist practices in
the art field, however, have been aroundmuchlonger.
As Oliver Marchart claims, there has always been an
activist undercurrent inart. Inthis bookhe traces
trajectories of artistic activismintheater, dance,
performance, andpublic art, andinvestigates the
political potential of urbanism, curating, and“biennials
ofresistance.”What emerges is aconflictual aesthetics
that does not conformwithtraditional approaches to
the fieldandthat activates the political potential of
artistic practice.
Oliver Marchart is apolitical theorist andphilosopher.
Heis currentlyprofessorofpolitical theoryattheUniversity
ofVienna. His books includePost-foundational Political
Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and
Laclau (2007), Thinking Antagonism: Political Ontology after
Laclau (2018), andthe forthcomingPost-foundational
Theories o f Democracy: Reclaim ing Freedom, Equality,
Solidarity.
ISBN 9 7 8 -3 -9 5 6 7 9 2 -0 4 -5
Sternberg Press 9 7 8 3 9 5 6 792045

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Conflictual Aesthetics

Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere

II. The Stage, the Street,

p51 2. Staging the Political

p75 3. Dancing Politics

pl43 5. The Curatorial Function

pl55 6. The Globalization of

pl75 Time Loops

When we hear “1968” we tend to think of street fighting in the

It is not entirely clear, of course, what trace 2011 might leave on

BEING AGITATED—AGITATED BEING 11

From the Spontaneous Ideology of the Art Field

There can be no doubt that as a consequence of 2011 debates on

This trope, paradoxical as it sounds, has become common wisdom

BEING AGITATED— AGITATED BEING 13

It is hardly surprising that dissatisfaction with the antipolitical bias

BEING AGITATED—AGITATED BEING 15

If the Davidian moment repeats itself with every instance of artistic

This political moment is certainly as continuous as the moment of

BEING AGITATED—AGITATED BEING 17

Let us now take a closer look at the structural features of activist

Propaganda, before anything else, is a way of making things po­

An example of an artistic performance may help to illustrate this

BEING AGITATED—AGITATED BEING 19

This will become evident if we compare such fake complexity with

BEING AGITATED—AGITATED BEING 21

We encounter the same phenomenon even when zooming in on

A few months after I painted it, protesters were attacked by

It is at this point that my position on this matter differs to some

BEING AGITATED—AGITATED BEING 23

These differentiations are helpful to avoid confusion; nonetheless,

Fortunately, Mouffe refrains from such a conclusion. She does,

BEING AGITATED—AGITATED BEING 25

I thus agree that it would be unwise for artist-activists to entirely

My suggestion of a conflictual aesthetics shares its starting point

In fact, substantive political change during the m odern

In theory, Mouffe would go along with most of this account but

BEING AGITATED—AGITATED BEING 27

In this sense, I believe that antagonism does have to play a role

There is one more reason why antagonism, rather than agonism,

I outline this logic in chapter 4, where I also discuss its implica­

BEING AGITATED—AGITATED BEING 29

Setting Things Straight:

Let us return to the question of art as propaganda and see how it

A quite different picture emerges when we start appreciating that

It goes without saying that the church was deeply convinced of

BEING AGITATED—AGITATED BEING 31

One of the clearest examples of democratic counterpropaganda

A similar strategy has been used by Liberate Tate, a group founded

Of course, examples abound of artists and/or activists—of which

Their project Rebranding European Muslims, developed for steirischer

BEING AGITATED—AGITATED BEING 33

So far, I have presented these practices as examples of (counter)

Agitational strategies like these, without a doubt, have many prede­

BEING AGITATED—AGITATED BEING 35

How is this to be done? The Russian artist-activist collective Chto

These considerations are substantial enough to lead us to the

Being Agitated—Agitated Being

This triple method of activist art, if we now come to some of its

BEING AGITATED—AGITATED BEING 37

It does not make much difference whether these assumptions are

BEING AGITATED—AGITATED BEING 39

From this we may conclude that being agitated into activism is

Propaganda, before anything else, is a way of making things po

I outline this logic in chapter 4, where I also discuss its implica

Agitational strategies like these, without a doubt, have many prede

5 This “contingency concept’ of the political is rather common among contem

So if in m elodram a inner “dividedness is replaced by a quasi

In the competition for public power that is pragmatic poli