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Title: Beaubourg: Future Cancer? Author: Jacques Camatte Date: 1997 Language: en Topics: Beaubourg, art, France Notes: Jacques Camatte, “Beaubourg et le cancer du futur,” mars 1977; “Beaubourg: Future Cancer?,” *Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed*, Fall/Winter 1997–1998, pp. 52–55
Whether as a trick, a diversion, or core-work within a well-established
project, the Beaubourg Cultural Center occupies a point where a number
of phenomena converge. Its existence is significative of the
transformation of the community of capital. All that cannot be
considered here. I will restrict myself to pointing out some fundamental
parallels between art and capital. [1]
Art developed at the moment when human beings were separated from their
community. There was no art in the long prehistory preceding that event.
The term isolates the materialization of a cognitive means for people to
represent their world, from which they weren’t separated. It was part of
a nonabstracted knowledge, that is, not presented solely through
abstraction, as occurred later. It was what Leroi-Gourhan called a
drifting knowledge: [2] a radiant, multidimensional thought in sympathy
with its surroundings, since the break hadn’t yet occurred. So, in
contemporary terms, this art was simultaneously language, science,
magic, ritual, etc. At the same time it was part of a whole that it
recognized and to which it gave signification.
After the break art was to become the means for recreating the old
community, the “Lost Totality.” With the loss of immediate coherence,
art was the mediation reestablishing communication. This search for the
lost community is clear in Greek theater, opera, cinema, and the
attempts to realize total art (even in happenings), even if it no longer
appears in such terms to those doing them. It’s not just art as the sum
of the artistic actions trying to reaffirm a whole, it’s each particular
art that rushes into this endeavor. It’s as if each wanted to reorder
the whole and reform it from itself, involving a reconstitution from a
certain viewpoint and understanding; for linearization began as soon as
the “radiant phenomenon” was destroyed, because of the break and the
autonomization of the parts constituting the original whole. Attempts at
reconstitution failed to stop this, since they began from a separated
part. It’s impossible to catapult oneself straight into another
community. But it’s the only starting point for rediscovering radiant
thought.
Nostalgia for lost community is most obvious at times of appearance of
art derived from opposition between two moments in human history in a
well-determined area. Examples are the oppositions between matriarchy
and patriarchy [3] in Greek tragedy, and feudalism and nascent bourgeois
society returning to the old models (Renaissance). A common
characteristic is that it’s the defeated parts that produced art (such
as provincials or American southerners), as if art is all the more
glorious when attached to something irredeemably lost. So for some art
would be a consolation for the defeated, ignoring its affirmation not of
the defeat but of creation or maintenance of a possibility, a refusal of
the diktat of realism and the reality principle.
Secularization happens at the same time. Loss of the sacred leads art to
take nature as its model. In reaction it is equally the place of its
conservation. The heresies have survived through art.
At the time of capital’s formal domination over society, art could
remain outside it and accomplish its anti-bourgeois function. As it
happened, it was anticapitalist, for the bourgeoisie historically needed
art to impose itself on the world, as it was a class that exalted it.
This opposition continued until the attempt by the Dada movement to link
up with the revolution then occurring in Germany. This simultaneously
admitted that no separated activity could reorganize a totality or be a
starting point for another community. Nonetheless artists at that time
showed more insight than revolutionaries, [4] because their proclamation
of the death of art was linked to their perception of the end of a
world, the old bourgeois society, because of the passage from formal to
real domination of capital, which occurred over several years (notably
1914–45). At the turn of the century, painters had already anticipated
capital’s development in breaking all reference to nature and in
discovering that everything is possible.
The Futurists were the first to entirely and methodically reject the
hegemony of cultural stereotypes. Once the social barriers were
abolished, the masses – for whom the quantitative appeared as the new
twentieth-century determinant – would have to organize the world
differently. The new dynamism and its collective nature made it
transgress the old social categories and imposed an active
transformative logic already foreseen by Marx. So the world no longer
appears as inevitability but as a collection of possibilities. In the
euphoria of this new freedom, experienced in several areas of
contemporary intellectual life, classes and noble subjects vanished from
the collection of social relations. (One of the things passing through
this breach was totalitarian practice.)
Now, “Everything is possible” is capital’s fundamental characteristic.
It’s essentially revolutionary because it destroys obstacles impeding
development and eliminates taboos and congealed mimesis: all are put
back into question and into movement. (Taboos that cannot be lifted are
exteriorized and consumed in representation, for example, the incest
taboo and psychoanalysis.) If capital (under its modern as well as
antiquated forms) thus became definite by taking over the immediate
production process, this was due to the confluence between the movements
of exchange value’s autonomization and peoples’ expropriation. It could
successfully pass to its real domination over society only at another
moment, because of confluence between its nature and the deep desires of
people separated from their community and stripped of divine and natural
referents. In accomplishing this even the implied consequences could be
forgotten: desire becoming all the grander and imperious the more people
are desubstantialized and alienated.
The restricted man or woman, separated from everything, wishes to
reconstitute everything from potentialities, beginning the opening of
the field of applied science. For a time, the referent could still be
the individual human being, until capital’s anthropomorphosis, when it
realized its real domination over society and established itself as
representation (and therefore as referent). This reconstitutes the
splintered person, who is ever more enslaved. So what Eliade said
relates only to the initial moment:
“The nihilism of the early revolutionaries and nihilists represent
attitudes already surpassed in modern Art. No great artist of our times
believes in the degeneracy and imminent disappearance of his/her art.
From this point of view, their attitude resembles that of the
“primitives”: they have contributed to the destruction of their world
and their artistic universe – in order to create another one.” [5]
Not only has the natural referent been destroyed and another world
created, but the very forms coming from the previous great destructive
movement have themselves been destroyed (especially in Picasso). [6]
This again resembles capital’s movement, which is impeded by
substantialization and must avoid becoming fixed. Eliade continues in an
equally illuminating way:
“It’s significant that the destruction of artistic language coincided
with the development of psychoanalysis. Depth Psychology brought renewal
of interest in origins, an interest characteristic of people in archaic
society. A close study of the process of re-evaluation of the myth of
the end of the world in modern Art would be interesting. It would be
found that artists, far from being the neurotics they are often called,
are, on the contrary, psychologically more sane than many modern people.
[7] They’ve understood that a true beginning can come only after a true
end. And artists were the first moderns to apply themselves to
destroying their world, [8] to recreate an artistic universe in which
people could simultaneously live, observe and dream.” [9]
The world created since the 1920s is actually one in which people have
decreasing importance and significance, because psychoanalysis has
deprived them of these qualities: the various qualities of the psyche
have been exteriorized and transformed into representations. [10] The
artistic universe created is metaphorically that of capital. Such is
Beaubourg: the idealized and ideal factory, industrial revelation and
capital, presenting itself as art. The subject becomes art itself,
completely realizing it, going beyond its reconciliation with life.
Beaubourg reabsorbs the dimension of art as nostalgia for the past,
since it is a museum, a place for hoarding (the old form of behavior of
exchange value become capital). Since exhibitions of contemporary
painting are held in it, [11] it’s also the place where credit is
obtained. As Cailloix [12] justly remarked, credit invades art:
“When execution is replaced by credit, by a blank check, Art finds
itself reduced to derisory size and, at the extreme, disappears. It
disappears by becoming almost the opposite idea.”
This is evident since, to the extent that there remain no concrete
representations and referents through which people could come together
again, it’s clear that the important thing will be the individual’s
credit, whether accorded spontaneously or through the influence of
advertising (something becomÂing important in art). [13] Now, credit is
the means of appraisal and behavior in the material community of
capital, which is partly instituted through generalization of credit.
With inflation this becomes capital’s confidence in itself. The same
process rules over the whole human environment. People disconnected from
their old relationships, referents, and sentiments can only reconstruct
their “unity” and social relationships through external mechanisms such
as advertising, criticism, etc. (It’s no longer possible to speak of
community, since it’s that of capital in every case).
Progressive abstraction is bound to the loss of the general referent
(general equivalent). This implies that there’s not just abstraction but
also its autonomization. So it becomes practically synonymous with the
arbitrary: “The arbitrary here is basically the absence of all
justification” (Cailloix), a kind of gratuitous act (so Gide’s theory
isn’t without historical significance). Paradoxically, the gratuitous is
real for others only through appearance of the credit bestowed by
justified significance or significant justification. Obviously this has
a clear relationship to the saturation of the art market at the end of
the last century, which meant that new openings had to be found. The
picture could be decomposed even to the extent that unprepared canvas
would be put forward as the artwork, a work with multiple possibilities.
But that is but an effect of the phenomenon, since it too would have to
lead to the demand for the end of art.
That death arrived. Nevertheless, art still exists. It no longer has
anything to do with what was previously understood by the term. And
those wanting to revive Dada’s project can only carry out a “murder of
the dead.” [14] Capital’s art is knowledge of capital. It’s a way to
achieve knowledge of the new world it has created, in which the sacred,
nature, men and women exist only behind death masks.
As Cailloix emphasized, the ridiculous often accompanies the arbitrary.
It cannot fully realize itself or else the capitalization of the
pictures produced would cease, putting an end to hoardÂing and ruining
many people, and also breaking down many museographical institutions.
The ridiculous corresponds to the disappeared and ephemeral, things
affected by present-day capitalism. Here the same forms are again found:
capital too cannot really eliminate hoarding, gold, and the past and
create itself, so to speak, ex nihilo. Basically it can only escape the
past by running away from it: inflation.
Here we encounter capital’s essential “project”: it must dominate the
future or else its power would be put back into question and its
domination wouldn’t be real. This is already present in the concept of
capital, but can only be achieved at a given moment in its “life.” [15]
Consequently, there can no longer be a specific anticipation and
abstraction of the heart of a totality (a perceived abstraction) by
which to perceive the distinctive and significant parts. Initially the
future is produced; there is as much imagination as possible; reality
and image are fused. [16] The imposed image invades everything, to the
extent that it isn’t yet produced with its reality. In effect, capital
needed its own image to be able to implant itself within the
socioeconomic whole and to dominate it. It then had to annex all images
and, to confirm its domination, eradicate their presuppositions and
replace them with its own.
So the factory becomes indispensable – art has to be produced from art
and artists in a manner amenable to capital. For what matters is to
touch the mass of human beings (otherwise there would be no realization
of art) [17] who still haven’t internalized capital’s lifestyle, who are
still more or less bound to certain rhythms, practices, superstitions,
etc., and who (even if they have taken up the vertigo of capital’s
rhythm of life) don’t necessarily utilize its image, and therefore live
a contradiction or jarring, and are constantly exposed to “future
shock.”
Everything must be understood through capital’s image. Such is
Beaubourg’s function: a carcinoma, a neoplasm that must divert the
aesthetic flux into domination of the future. It will create roles to
that end. This carcinoma will overrun everything and secrete its
metastases everywhere. No individual encountering Beaubourg will remain
unaltered: his/her image will be reoriented, reordered, or completely
transformed (all the more when taken in the totality) through exposure
to living in anticipation.
Beaubourg is the future cancer. It organizes the destruction of art
extolled by Dada and, to the extent that culture is presented as nature,
deprives human beings of any possibility of escape. This is all the more
true because of the need for nature powerfully affirmed since 1968: it
has to be diverted toward a wholly formed, dominated, and programmed
nature, magically capturing all revolt. [18]
Beaubourg’s role isn’t annihilation of all revolt (at least not
immediately), since, as has been said, one of art’s sources rises from
the clash between two historical moments. The integration-realization of
art by capital implies its integration of revolt. It will be absorbed.
Better: revolt will be declared insignificant and a more total rebellion
proposed to the individual, drowning him/her in revolutionary
possibilities because there are no reference points and he/she is
disowned. Revolt can no longer begin from the individual and his/her
released possibilities; the being can no longer give structure to
his/her revolt, for enjoyment is always the basic model: always promised
but never attained, because it’s always deferred....
So even if painters, musicians, and poets arrived at an intuition of
elements of the human community, they could do so only to the extent
that they accepted work at a center like Beaubourg. It provides the
possibility to reinvigorate the image of capital, which swamps
everything, even if this is to pervert it, since it is the great
“embezzler” (detourneur).
Capital’s future lies in the complete uprooting of all kinds of people,
so that they’re completely liberated and can be moved in any direction
whatsoever, to do whatever they’re told to do. It will amount to human
life without human beings, just as cancer (the high point of alienation)
is life excluding the life of the being in which it developed. But
simultaneously it is the ultimate vital reaction of a body afflicted
with a bizarre life, as much on the nutritional as the affective or
intellectual plane, for cancer is caused by no microbe, virus, or
pathogenic agent. It’s caused by the wandering of humanity and is the
typical human sickness under the domination of capital, which is also a
product of the great wandering. No therapeutic like reformism or
revolution can cure the human species, only the abandonment of the crazy
dynamic it’s been following.
I’m well aware that many people consider that I’m making capital into an
entity, a mysterious being outside human beings, while I’m simply
showing that it realizes a human project (domination over nature),
through the process of anthropomorphosis. They also deny that my
description of development is correct and recall what Eliade said
concerning the creation of an artistic universe: that people could
change a movement; that they could divert what is now moving toward
destruction, reification, etc... They don’t actually recognize that
sooner or later they will be reduced to saying “I didn’t want that” like
those intellectuals who initially supported fascism. It’s unfortunate
that, if truth is an unveiling, for many it happens only
retrospectively. Nevertheless, even this retrospect already displays
many facets that all indicate a single reality. Even the blindest must
recognize that it’s necessary to abandon this world which is so
congenial to the future cancer, the inevitable promise of abominable
events.
(March, 1977)
[1] For example, it would clearly be necessary to study Beaubourg’s
importance with regard to the organization of space and urbanization
(i.e., the mineralization of organic nature). Nor am I considering
similar phenomena already under way in other countries, especially the
U.S.A.
[2] See Le Geste et La Parole (1964). No particular passage is cited
since the entire book must be not only read but studied.
[3] These terms are used for simplification and to avoid long
theoretical digressions on the nature of the human groupings in the
Greece of Aeschylus and Euripides.
[4] This statement should be tempered by consideration of the Anarchist
movement at the turn of the century, which, in its terrorist and
negationist tendencies, declared the wish to speed up this end, avoid
decomposition, drag the masses from the listlessness induced by
democracy, and build afresh.
[5] See Aspects du Mythe (1962, pp. 93–94).
[6] See Cailloix’s “Picasso the Liquidator” {Le Monde, 28/11/75} and the
ensuing polemics.
[7] Nevertheless, can’t they be said to be more sensitive to human
pathology, in the sense that they’ve had a more shocking glimpse of the
result of the wandering?
[8] Eliade was far ahead in reporting a discovery announced by Attali in
“Noise”: that music anticipates social development. And what goes for
music goes for all the arts. That’s a commonplace. Its interest is that
Attali makes himself the recuperator of its “noise” and poses as
mediator of capital. What’s he actually telling us?
“A new theory of power and a new politics are needed. Both require the
elaboration of a politics of noise and, more subtly, an explosion in the
capacity to create order starting from each individual’s noise, beyond
the channeling of pleasure into the norm.”
For him, it’s a matter of listening – as is the case for the current
ecological demands – in order to recuperate the various “noises” to
ensure the survival of theory, power, and politics. It’s worrying that,
to allow scientific comparison, he still wants to reduce us... to
noises!
[9] It shouldn’t be forgotten that Western art accomplished this
destruction-creation by plundering so-called “primitive” peoples:
American Indians and Africans. This is another aspect of capital’s
“rejuvenation” which I described in Invariance Vol. 2 No. 6 in “Working
Theses on Communist Revolution.”
[10] Let us add that the mediation of pedagogy and ethology means that
the world of childhood and early moments in the life of our species are
also affected. In particular, with regard to childhood, it has allowed
the creation of an industry of playthings and products “specific” to
children, who were excluded from their life and creation. The moment
when “Homo Ludens” (Huizinga) is discovered is that when humans are
increasingly robbed of play.
[11] By simultaneously incorporating museum and experimental center,
Beaubourg realizes one of Toffler’s projects: the establishment of past
communities to allow those unable to follow power’s rhythm to get their
bearings, and future communities for those living only through
anticipation (see Future Shock).
The incorporation of a Center of Contemporary Architecture plagiarizes
Voyer’s “Institute of Contemporary Prehistory.” Briefly, the presence of
experimental centers indicates a wish to fuse science and art. More
precisely, what is seen here reinforces an already distinct
philosophical tendency: the loss of autonomy. Art and philosophy follow
in science’s wake in order to produce something. They become
commentaries on science, hermeneutics.
[12] See “Picasso the Liquidator,” an article to which I will return
later.
[13] Later it will be necessary to investigate fashion and advertising,
considering them as forms for creating and representing the world of
capital.
[14] The title of an article by Bordiga, in which he showed that capital
can only regenerate itself by destroying all dead, accumulated labor
which impedes its process of valorization- capitalization.
[15] See Invariance. Vol. 2 No. 6: “Here is the fear, jump here.”
[16] One thus goes beyond abstract art, the moment of intuition of the
basic elements of the community of capital, which had hardly yet
appeared. This can now be represented in its totality, so realism is
possible. This shows the extent to which Socialist Realism is bound to
an ideological perspective and not to a social movement. The Soviet
leaders don’t realize to what extent abstract art (as well as other
recent Western art) represents a reality. Their fear of this kind of art
is actually a fear of the subversive in capital, that “Everything is
possible,” which could be easily diverted in a society in which the
capitalist mode of production has great difficulty implanting itself. So
the Soviets are condemned to understand only the despotism of capital,
without ever “enjoying” its revolutionary liberating aspect. This
explains the pro-Western views of elements in the present-day USSR
“intelligentsia.”
Leroi-Gourhan’s statement concerning figuration, very clear in the USSR,
is also vital. I’m drawing attention to it, and will eventually return
to it, since it concerns the specificity of the whole human phenomenon,
and the biological madness afflicting humanity in particular:
“The crisis of Figuration is the corollary of the mastery of
machinism.... It’s particularly striking to observe that, in societies
excluding Science and Work from the metaphysical plane, the greatest
efforts are made to save figuralism.... In fact it seems that an
equilibrium as constant as that co-coordinating the roles of figuration
and technique cannot be destroyed without putting the very sense of the
human adventure into question.”
A simple remark: as I suggested above, capital could very well
reintroduce figuralism. But, again, it’s no longer art as human referent
(nor has it been so for some time) but the art of capital.
[17] On this subject, I can but raise a matter of great theoretical and
historical breadth: that of the continual degradation, the
reification-extraneization linked with the massification-democratization
taking place down the millennia. Progress is often justified by saying
that it gave something formerly restricted to a limited circle of
individuals to ever-increasing numbers of people. In saying this, what
is forgotten is the complementary process of loss of the sacred, nature,
and humanity (e.g., in the sense of an art of life in society such as
that in the eighteenth century) leading to desubstantialization of human
beings and their reduction to transient, insignificant beings. It’s the
undeniable existence of this process that explains the pregnancy of the
aristocratic critique and a certain form of art, as well as the Nazi
lucubrations.
Let us also add that the hope that “the masses would have to organize
the world differently” was largely disappointed, and that this draws us
to the question of the proletariat’s historic mission and the illusion
that this class could divert the development of productive forces in a
human way. These masses haven’t been able to organize: capital did it
instead and organized them at the same time. So the solution no longer
lies in elites or masses!
[18] Capital must provoke and reinvent revolt, therefore organize it,
and perfectly realize the spectacle as described by the Situationist
International. The separation between actors and spectators tends to
disappear, because the spectacle must be worked by all human beings set
in motion by some “master illusionists” (Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la
Parole), mediators of capital.