Review Articles / Historical Materialism 20.

3 (2012) 1–8 1

Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory, Gail Day, New York: Columbia University
Press, 2010

Abstract
Gail Day’s Dialectical Passions not only traces the trajectories of leading New Left critics of art and
architecture – T.J. Clark, Manfredo Tafuri, Massimo Cacciari, Craig Owens, Fredric Jameson and
Hal Foster – it also provides a meditation on the problem of negation and the experience of
defeat. This review retraces Day’s arguments, reflecting on her recovery and re-interrogation of
negation and dialectics in postwar art theory. In particular, it aims to critically assess her stress on
the ‘negative thought’ of Tafuri and Cacciari and the possibilities of reactivating a thought of
negativity in the contemporary moment.

Keywords
aesthetics, architecture, negativity, dialectics, theory

Gail Day’s Dialectical Passions is not simply an elegant tracing of the radical trajectories
emerging from theorisations of art and architecture by strands within the New Left, but also
a signifijicant intervention in contemporary left-theory and thought. Key to her work is an
analysis of the problem of recuperation and the persistence and renewal of resistance in
the face of defeat and capitalist triumphalism – a tone now muted, but obviously not
extinguished, by the global fijinancial crisis. This interrogation is vectored through the linked
questions of the dialectic and what Day calls the ‘valences of negative thought in contemporary
art theory’ (p. 3). In a series of subtle and powerful meditations – considering primarily
the work of T.J. Clark, Manfredo Tafuri, Paul De Man, and Fredric Jameson – Day probes the
contours and fates of negativity between a radicalised dialectics and a left-orientated
nihilism.
To declare my own interest and stakes in this problem, I encountered Day’s work as
parallel to, and convergent with, my project to rehabilitate a thinking of negativity within
contemporary Continental theory.1 In the case of Day’s work she treats a very diffferent
‘tradition’ or, in fact, constructs a little-assessed and analysed grouping of thinkers that take
art and architecture as their primary material. What links these thinkers together is not only
a shared experience of the New Left, and political defeat, but also their equivocal engagement
with negation. As Day notes: ‘In cultural and artistic debates, negation’s weight is peculiarly
complex: on the one hand, both highly specifijic and context bound, and, on the other, loose
and plural’ (p. 8). Negation is both bound to what it negates, which has often been the cause
for rejecting it, and yet also destructive of all limits, overflowing any particular context. This
plural form of negation leaves it at risk of disappearing, either into the conditions it claims
to contest or into a mysticism of alterity that has no real purchase.
Of course, negation and negativity have also been the very ‘motor’ of the dialectic. Hence,
always present in any discussion of negation is the legacy of Hegel, usually interpreted
through the ‘anti-Hegelianism’ of French theory, which tends to take Hegel’s thinking of
‘determinate negation’ as a dead dog.2 It is one of the many merits of Day’s work that it
displaces the usual terms of this debate, which has become mired in increasingly strident
dismissals and defences, by re-tracking the tangential trajectories of thinking that has often

1. Noys 2010.
2. For a classic statement, see Derrida 1978.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/1569206X-12341257
2 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 20.3 (2012) 1–8

been seen, or been treated, as marginal. This marginality encompasses not only disciplinary
position – art theory – but also national location – Britain, Italy, and the US. Recapturing
this ‘minor’ tradition, in the positive sense Deleuze and Guattari give this word,3 allows Day
to alter our sense of the left-theoretical landscape that disrupts the accepted commonplaces.
The fact that art history and art theory should prove such a fecund site for this work of
recovery and rehabilitation is not surprising. Day herself notes how the art practice of the
historic avant-gardes and modernism often articulated themselves through the negation of
art, or a negativity that could place art under pressure (p. 6). The probing and radicalising of
such a practice obviously attracted left-theorists, who could draw out a ‘common programme’
of negation between art and politics. This ‘programme’ has been reiterated by Alain Badiou
in his work The Century,4 which probes the ‘passion for the real’ – the passion to instantiate
utopia and disrupt reality – that often ‘fused’ the political and the aesthetic in the short
twentieth century (1917–89). Badiou, along with many others, considers this ‘sequence’
defijinitively closed.5 Day unsettles this consensus, not by a simple return to the verities of
the historic avant-gardes, but rather by probing the theorisation of negativity in art and
architecture as a site with lessons that have not yet been learnt. The very engagement of art
with a practice of negativity requires, as her work demonstrates, far closer attention to the
precise ‘valences’ of negativity that emerged in these theorisations. In particular, the
‘belated’ reflections of art and architecture-theory speak to the tensions of recovery,
reactivation, and reworking that have haunted reflections on the historic avant-gardes
and modernism.
Day’s work begins with the work of T.J. Clark, one-time member of the English section of
the Situationist International, before being expelled by Guy Debord in 1967; founding fijigure
in the contemporary social history of art with his works Image of the People (1973) and
The Absolute Bourgeois (1973); more recently member of the Retort collective, and regular
writer for the London Review of Books. In terms of Clark’s career as a critic and theorist of art,
Day singles out his fraught negotiation with the category of negation and his attempts to
rework the notion of mediation, especially in regards to abstract art and the work of Jackson
Pollock in particular. These two issues converge in Clark’s analysis of Pollock through the
Hegelian fijigure of the ‘unhappy consciousness’ – a key and recurring fijiguration of aporia
and a stalled or unresolved dialectic.
In Clark’s reading, this fijiguration of aporia captures the antinomy of modernism – caught
between the identity of sign and referent and their non-identity – which is, in turn, an
antinomy of bourgeois society displaced into art. Here any ‘dialectic’ of negativity fijinds itself
mired in the impasse of frozen social forms. As Day notes, however, this motif of the unhappy
consciousness comes to mark Clark’s work as well, signalling the limits of his interpretation
and the difffijiculty he has in mediating and ‘unfreezing’ such antinomies. It speaks, in fact, to
the situation of defeat of the Left, which, for Day, ‘spiral[s] . . . into thought’ (p. 63). The
‘unhappy consciousness’ now takes its revenge as a critical category that Clark not only
applies, but which can also be applied to him. It is his work that now testifijies to an impasse,

3. Deleuze and Guattari 1986.

4. Badiou 2007.
5. This is the thesis of Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (Bürger 1984), which is, as Day
notes, absent from her discussion. It would be possible, however, to consider her work an ‘indirect’
response to this thesis.
 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 20.3 (2012) 1–8 3

a failure, and a blocked dialectic. This produces such uncanny efffects as Clark’s melancholic
declaration of Farewell to an Idea – the title of his 1999 work on modernism – before Clark’s
sudden switch back into political activism with Retort, and then his return to melancholy in
his recent assessment of the ‘tragedy’ of the Left.6
Day reconstructs Clark’s work as an attestation to the experience of defeat, but concludes
that his own melancholic thinking of aporia is not, however, to be confused with the
rationalisation of this situation in certain forms of deconstruction. Rather, in Day’s sensitive
analysis, Clark poses to us the historical problem of our inability to cross over from
the stalled negativity of the unhappy consciousness into political practice. This is certainly
an equivocal position, as the shifts of Clark’s own aesthetic and political positions indicate.
Day at once signals the limits of this project and, tentatively, tries to indicate a possible
passage beyond.
It is this impasse that leads to a spiralling back to the work of Manfredo Tafuri and
Massimo Cacciari, in what is the central and key chapter of the book. Tafuri and Cacciari
both worked at the Instituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV), were closely
associated with the Italian Marxist movement of operaismo,7 and returned to work within
the intellectual and political culture of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). If Clark tarries
with a negativity frozen into antinomy, Tafuri and Cacciari stare negativity in the face. In a
detailed historical reconstruction of their work from 1960s to the 1980s, Day contextualises
their provocative anti-dialectical reinterpretation of avant-garde negativity as closely bound
to capitalist practice.
The controversial core of their thought is the argument that avant-garde negation
was not simply antithetical to capitalist value, but belonged to the same movement of
demystifijication. The dialectic of the early avant-garde operated between the twin poles of
Dada’s acts of destruction and De Stijl’s subjection of form to reason. This prefijigured capital’s
dialectic by linking chaos and nullifijication to the necessity of a disenchanted planning: the
‘completed nihilism’ of the avant-garde suggested new institutional operations for capitalism
by disenchanting all signs into manipulable material. Such an argument appears to court
cynicism, in which the avant-garde is merely the avant-garde of capitalism, and so seems to
condemn any embrace of negativity as a validation of capitalism’s power of disenchantment.
In the hands of Tafuri, however, this was not the conclusion to be drawn. It was the facing
of the negative head-on that demanded the refusal of any consolation of reformism that
could repair the damage inflicted by capitalism. The immersion of the avant-garde in the
‘destructive element’ was a sign of engagement as, in a classical Marxist argument, the ‘new’
was only to be achieved through the ‘bad side’. Tafuri’s project of ‘negative thought’ embraced
an anti-Hegelian refusal of ‘synthesis’, and so refused any return to past ‘wholeness’, or the
option of anti-capitalist ‘enclaves’.
Contrary to Clark’s tarrying with aporia, Tafuri and Cacciari aimed to exacerbate and
‘ride’ capitalist negativity. This kind of thinking, which I have elsewhere called
‘accelerationism’,8 here takes the form, as Day puts it, of a ‘willingness to let the very force of
the commodity rip into commodifijication – as if unleashing an autoerotic, self-consuming
energy’ (p. 71). If capitalism disenchants then one more efffort must be made to disenchant

6. This assessment was made in Clark’s lecture ‘A Left with No Future’ (Clark 2011).
7. See Wright 2002.
8. Noys 2010, pp. 5–8.
4 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 20.3 (2012) 1–8

even further, to negate value itself, through a Nietzschean ‘completed nihilism’. It is only by
following the frozen dynamics and contradictions of capitalism that critique can gain
purchase. Yet, this is not simply the endorsement of capitalism as the ‘strait gate’ to
emancipation, as Tafuri and Cacciari stressed the rôle of class struggle as the driving force of
this negativity. Capitalism’s ‘absorption’ of the negative is itself a sign of struggle – a
registering of the resistance of living labour to value. Their aim was, in fact, to separate this
negative force from absorption, to break the capitalist dialectic.
And yet, with the defeat and receding of such struggles in the 1980s and into the 1990s,
such a ‘use’ of the negative might well seem to lose its class edge. If Tafuri and Cacciari were
momentarily in sync with an upsurge of workers’ struggles, the question of how such a
‘negative thought’ might operate in the downturn becomes all the more crucial. This is the
question which haunts Day’s study, and to which I will return in my discussion of her
conclusions.
In fact it is the ‘long 1980s’, as Day puts it, that really haunt her analysis as a whole – a
period which certainly deserves analysis precisely because of its misery. Alberto Toscano,
discussing the work of Antonio Negri, but also Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, remarks:
‘[t]ell me how you survived the 1980s and I’ll tell you who you are’, adding that if such
thinkers attract attention today, ‘it is also because they managed to invent conceptual
confijigurations that permitted them to traverse a period of punishing reaction’.9 In fact, after
the highpoint of the chapter on Tafuri and Cacciari, a certain decline in energy might be
detected in Day’s book precisely because the next two chapters engage more directly with
the 1980s.
The fijirst deals with the ‘allegorical impulse’ and its rediscovery in the 1980s, particularly
by the thinkers associated with the journal October and, in the background, the work of Paul
de Man. In fact, as the rôle of de Man indicates, the turn to allegory is the sign of the
penetration of poststructuralism into critical theorising at this time. Day explores how the
valorisation of allegory qua mediation and mechanism turns on an opposition to modernism
and the symbol (identifijied with plenitude, synthesis and essence) – and also to dialectics.
We are back, again, to the fijigure of the unhappy consciousness, now taken to represent
acceptance of diffference, fragmentation and incompletion (i.e. the postmodern) against the
‘totalising’ and ‘synthesising’ impulses of dialectics. Working to undo this reifijication, via
Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man, Day aims to restore some dialectical fluidity into this
debate.
If the conception of ‘postmodernism’ as anti-dialectics was one reifijication born in the
80s, the fijinal chapter deals with another – the reifijication of capitalism considered as an
increasing tendency to abstraction and the dropping-out of use-value amongst theorists of
art in the 1980s. This ‘dematerialisation thesis’ was particularly the province of Benjamin
Buchloh and Hal Foster, theorists of ‘the school of October’, although Day also considers
the more outlying, and signifijicant, fijigure of Fredric Jameson. With this style of argument the
tendency is to iterate the dominance of exchange-value over use-value as the key dynamic
of capitalism, tracing an increasing colonisation of life and all forms of oppositional politics.
This type of theorising would fijind its terminus in the work of Jean Baudrillard, who
argued that the increasing dominance of exchange-value, fijigured as the rise of ‘simulation’,

9. Toscano 2009, p. 370.

 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 20.3 (2012) 1–8 5

undermined the supposed ‘naturalism’ of use-value subtending Marx’s analysis and so

rendered it obsolete.10
Jacques Rancière, current favourite theorist of the art world, has argued that this kind
of theorisation of the totalitarian dominance of capital produces a ‘left-wing melancholy’.11
His contention is that the harping-on about the dominance of capital actually reinforces the
position of the theorist as savant who can at least ‘see through’ the ideological success of
capitalism, if do nothing more, while the masses remain as poor dupes. He counters this
counsel of despair with his own insistence on the power of art to incarnate a disruption and
redistribution of sites and forms of dominance, so long as it surrenders the security of
critique.12
Day offfers a rejoinder that does not involve abandoning the tenets of Marxism for
invocations of perpetual powers of ‘dissension’ and ‘disruption’, but rather through returning
to Marx’s dialectical analysis of the imbrications of exchange-value and use-value in the
value-form. Refusing the simplifijications of a ‘flattened’ dematerialisation thesis, which
tends to simply tease out, or oppose, a ‘bad’ exchange-value to an increasingly receding
‘good’ use-value, Day also refuses the symmetrical valorisation of the political or artistic as
site of powers or events immune or disruptive to contemporary capitalism. Stressing
capitalism’s ‘combined and uneven development’ does not lead to the political fatalism
identifijied by Rancière, but the necessity to better grasp the dynamics of capital.
This critique is also refijined and directed at Fredric Jameson, whose work tries to hold on
to the possibility of radical change while accepting a narrative of ‘globalised’ capitalism with
postmodernism as its cultural logic.13 Here Day’s analysis is not only directed at Jameson’s
conception of capitalism, but also at the tendency of his analysis to collapse mediations and
instantiate a form of ‘reflection theory’. She scores some amusing points, not least in her
caustic discussion of Jameson’s equation of the architecture of ‘extreme isometric space’
with fijinancial speculation (bubbles = bubbles) (pp. 221–3), and argues that his adoption of
the dematerialisation thesis results in ‘reductive social theory, a simplistic homology, and a
negative pastoral’. (p. 229)
In fact, it might well be possible that Day’s critique could be taken further, especially in
light of Jameson’s claim to a dialectical thinking that would begin from the present
conditions of contemporary capitalism without subjecting them to a moral evaluation.
While Jameson attempts this task, we can detect an oscillation between what Day traces as
his unduly totalising account of capitalism and his insistence on the perpetual possibility of
‘utopian’ disruption.14 The difffijiculty lies precisely in the connection of these two points, as
the fact that any phenomenon contains a utopian moment offfers reassurance but a lack of
precision, or more precisely an abstract hope.

10. Baudrillard 1975.

11. Rancière 2009, p. 33.
12. In fact, the invocation of such ‘disruptions’ by Rancière dates back to his fijirst book,
Althusser’s Lesson, when he wrote ‘The “duty” of workers is no longer to exceed productivity
norms; it is, instead, to invent a new world through their barely perceptible gestures.’ (Rancière
2011, p. 15.) In a declension, this is now the rôle of artists.
13. Jameson 1991.
14. Jameson 2006.
6 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 20.3 (2012) 1–8

This is evident when, in Valences of the Dialectic (2009), Jameson argues that the dialectical
operation involves the reversal of a valence. Taking as his example the US chain-store
Wal-Mart, usually symbol of the worst of contemporary capitalism, he argues we can reverse
its valence in a ‘thought-experiment’ to see its particular structure of distribution as a
utopian prefijiguration of socialism.15 The difffijiculty is that this remains merely a thought-
experiment, an abstract gesture that does not offfer any intervention into actuality, except
via a thinking otherwise. In this way, despite Jameson’s account of capitalism as tendentially
dominant he reconnects to the thought of Rancière, in terms of invoking a possibility of
disruption that persists but only through its detachment from social instantiation. Here, we
might say the ‘tension’ of the dialectic slackens by being over-stretched, and so fails to grasp
the site of possible intervention.
While accepting the broad contours of Day’s critique of the narrative of capitalism as the
dematerialisation of use-value, I do wish to make a critical remark and raise two critical
questions. The remark is that Marx’s own thought is perhaps not as unequivocal as Day
indicates, and so he offfers a certain amount of fuel for this kind of interpretation or
misinterpretation. In terms of critical questions, my fijirst is that while we might accept Day’s
critique we could still ask why do these thinkers believe in this narrative of dematerialisation?
To locate this ‘error’ historically would, obviously, lead us to the analysis of the experience
of defeat and ‘punishing reaction’ (Toscano), as well as the ‘euphoria’ of technological
development and fijinancialisation, during the 1980s and 1990s. Rather than the dismissal in
terms of a lack of fijidelity to Marx, our account would then have to focus more on the
sociogenesis of such an ‘abstract’ view of capitalism.
Our second question would be: can we just dismiss as false the tendency to abstraction?
There is prima facie evidence in capital’s globalisation, increasing commodifijication, and the
crippling of the traditional resources of the workers’ movement (which the French group
Theorié Communiste have analysed as the collapse of ‘programmatism’),16 for a new sense
of the totalitarian ‘dominance’ of capitalism. This was obviously reinforced by the collapse
of many of the existing forms of state socialism starting in 1989. In that sense, for all the
stress on ‘combined and uneven development’, we might suggest that capitalism certainly
forms the global horizon in a far more secure and self-evident fashion than previously.
Obviously such a conclusion does not necessarily have to license the pessimism which
permeates the ‘dematerialisation thesis’, in which all forms of critical opposition – artistic
or political – disappear or are subject to immediate recuperation. Certainly, however, we
could say that this changed conjuncture does need to register this experience and this
‘disappearance’ or mutation of forces of opposition.17
Of course, I would regard Day’s book as actually dedicated to this task. Against the static
reifijications of the ‘long 80s’, with their tendency to embrace either fragmentation or
homogenisation, or both at the same time, thereby generating an oscillation between
pessimism and voluntarism, Day calls for a dialectical recovery and working-through. The
key to the projects she analyses is the struggle to hold on to ‘anticipatory possibility’ (p. 232)
through a torsion of past, missed, historical encounters with emancipation and possible

15. Jameson 2009, pp. 410–34.

16. Theorié Communiste 2008.
17. For an attempt to do this, from within the problematic of ‘communisation’ proposed by
Theorié Communiste, see Endnotes 2010.
 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 20.3 (2012) 1–8 7

emancipatory futures. Resisting the hortatory temptation to conclude on ‘another invocation

of future potential’ (p. 235), Day prefers to analyse the hiatus that emerges between the
potential and the real in the theorisations she has canvassed. While Clark remains mired in
paralysis, as do the narratives of capitalist dominance, it is Tafuri’s embrace of the negative
and rejection of tragic thought that seems to be favoured.
The difffijiculty remains that this anti-tragic politics, which ‘develop[ed] the sense of a
nonabstracted possibility’ (p. 244), depended for its charge on a particular moment of
militancy, or otherwise it would seem to collapse into cynicism or pessimism. While Day
correctly and defijinitively re-establishes this context, it is more difffijicult to see exactly how
this possibility of ‘negative thought’ could be reactivated in the present. The difffijiculty also
remains, noted by Day earlier in her study, that this anti-Hegelian ‘open negativity can be an
emancipatory impulse, [but] it can also signify the drift either into torpor, fatalism,
complacency, nihilistic quiet, that is, as emancipation’s hobbling’ (p. 173). The later career
of Massimo Cacciari is perhaps indicative, in that his confrontation with negativity
increasingly turned in mystical or deconstructive directions, with a concomitant political
accommodation. Therefore, the recovery of a reworked anti-tragic politics of negativity is a
question or problem left posed to us to take up and work for ourselves.
Certainly, Day’s rejection of pessimism and suspicion of the ‘stalled’ and the ‘tragic’
speaks to the contradictions of the present moment. While recognising the necessity to
avoid false consolation, Day wants to reject a tragic tone that simply ratifijies defeat. In this
her work tries to force a path out of the oscillation in left-analysis between unwarranted
pessimism and unwarranted optimism (this latter tone best exemplifijied in the work of
Antonio Negri). Her masterful reposing of the tension between potential and actuality
revitalises dialectical thinking and suggests the necessity to rethink and rework our recent
past as not only the site of an experience of defeat, but also one of maintaining and persisting
in bad times. This is a work which does not offfer easy solutions, but which in this honesty is
far more telling in regards to the tasks which confront us.

Benjamin Noys
University of Chichester
b.noys@chi.ac.uk

References
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Clark, Timothy James 1999, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, New Haven:
Yale University Press.
—— 2011, ‘A Left with No Future’, paper presented at the conference ‘The Luddites, Without
Condescension’, Birkbeck College, The University of London, 6 May 2011, audio recording available
at: <http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2011/05/the-luddites-without-condescension/>.
8 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 20.3 (2012) 1–8

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari 1986 [1975], Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, translated by
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