(The following is a guest essay by Keith Tilford, author of the weblog Metastable Equilibrium. It is very long but, like everything on Long Sunday, hardly bored, or boring. Update: Part II is now here.)
Michael Blum, still from "Wandering Marxwards", 1999
What follows definitely took some liberties with a reading of Tronti. I used “The Strategy of The Refusal” more as a point of departure than anything else, as I wanted to focus generally on the notion of refusal – on its creative/inventive capacities - and attempt to make visible some of the relationships between art practices since the 1960’s and the trajectory of operaismo and autonomia along with the theoretical works that have come out of Italy. So perhaps in the spirit of Zizek’s book on Deleuze that he didn’t write, this can be my post on Tronti that I didn’t write. The post is divided into four parts, the first two will be here at LS, but because of excessive length I’ll be posting the last two parts over at my blog if the reader is interested (one is a more in depth consideration of the work of artist Francis Alys, and the other on “anorectic subjectivities” which acts as a kind of conclusion). This is really part of a wider research interest of mine, but I am very pleased that this symposium took place since it gave me the chance to return to some of those interest. Call this a draft, then. Many of the themes taken up in the second part of this post are also adressed in Howard Slater's essay "The Spoiled Ideals of Lost Situations", which is meant to accompany a reading of the book Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, where most of the artist's writings I've used can be found. Two artists that I have not been able to squeeze into this, but would highly recommend that anyone interested with what’s being said here check out are Thomas Hirschhorn (see here) and especially Santiago Sierra (a little about him here). Also, I should point out that while the word “practice” appears throughout, many artists today (including myself) really don’t like this word. I’ll skip giving reasons for the moment. Perhaps Ranciere’s “ways of doing and making within the aesthetic regime of the arts” would have been better, though long-winded – and out of laziness I have not yet modified any of that. However, the word does appear in inverted commas at several points, which I’m sure Matt will appreciate.
I. Double-Headed Histories
"Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults into a terrain of particles each containing its own void." – Robert Smithson
"The clear division between reality and fiction makes a rational logic of history impossible as well as a science of history." – Jacques Ranciere
With nearly forty years separating us from the first publication of Tronti’s essay “The Strategy of The Refusal”, a document showing that the struggle against work was actually essential to the development of capital, what to make of it now, in light so many radical, and at times even invisible or largely unnoticed mutations in the constitution of contemporary capitalism? Perhaps some possible answers can be recognized in Tronti’s formulation that ‘against the old forms of struggle and resistance’ should be installed new forms of political organization and refusal. It seems apparent then, that to think refusal today should invest in the same formulation – this time polemically positioned against Tronti. Why? Because from within the paradigm of “The Strategy of Refusal” is a rigorous division of class – and one that seems to run the risk of merely satisfying a dialectic and binary representational machinism; the categories of ‘worker’ and ‘party’ seem to end up installing themselves within the very representations that the workers would have intended to overthrow, a move which became thwarted by their own becoming-major. So perhaps some solutions to envisioning contemporary forms of refusal might begin along the lines suggested by Deleuze and Guattari: to think minority instead of class. To say this does not mean denying that there are classes, or that there is a ruling class; only that refusal, resistance – what composes and calls for them - are not reducible to the antagonisms of a class division. As the Italian Futurist FT Marinetti once said, “language is the motherload of all culture”, and it is without doubt impossible to follow the consequences of Tronti’s initial formulations without encountering and taking into much consideration all the nominations which have entered and continue to circulate through the “post-Fordist” lexicon as a result of the ‘failures’ of the Italian operaismo: social subjectivity, social chain, multitude, social factory, the general intellect, generic will, compositionism, immaterial or cognitive labour…
In coincidence with the workers movement as a particular history of struggles and theoretical works lay another long history of artistic practices and revolutions that could be said to have aimed at constructing solidarities with such resistances and refusals. If the artists and workers caught up in these histories shared a common enemy it was certainly ‘capital’ – though such an enemy will always express itself in different forms relative to a given situation or milieu. In Italy it was the factory; with artists, the museum, institution, or gallery. In both instances there was a resistance toward the system’s control that manifested itself in the engaged and active search for an outside set against received modes of subjectivity and the “conjugations of the axiomatic” (D & G); a search that concerned itself with the invention of new forms of life and work aimed at the embetterment of society as a whole. This other history, with loose ties to the attitudes of such localized movements as the Bauhaus in Germany and the Russian Constructivists (or for that matter more diffuse movements such as Dada), initiated new inquiries into modes of aesthetic production conceived through a kind of ‘anti-aesthetic’ which intersected with the ambitions of the Italian workers and autonomia during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Such coincidence figures into the attempts made by artists during this period to resist both the sedentary space of an elitist institution and the commodity form of the artwork in what came to known as Conceptual Art.
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