Stavrakakis, Yannis. “Challenges of Re-politicisation: Mouffe’s Agonism and Artistic Practices.” Third Text, Vol. 26, Issue 5, September, 2012, 551–565
Check out Mouffe’s take on agonism/art
Indeed, are we really conscious of the ease with which the post-democratic malaise is accepted and legitimised, of the ease with which people accommodate themselves to power strctures and resist change?.”
Why are people so willing and often enthusiastic – or at least relieved – to submit themselves to conditions of subordination, to the forces of hierarchical order? What had already emerged with Etienne de la Boétie as the troubling question of voluntary servitude, and through Stanley Milgram’s experiment as an elementary psycho-social structure of obedience to power, is today further reinforced through the transformations in the ways in which the social bond is regulated and obedience secured.
And it is not a problem of false consciousness or education. It is a problem of desire.
No, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.
In his preface to the Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault locates this problematic at the centre of their explorations. In his view, the strategic adversary of Deleuze and Guattari is the fascist tendencies implicit in all of us, informing our judgement and behaviour: ‘the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us’.
Foucault was right when he observed that power does not only denote coercion and repression: power relations are tolerated and even desired, because they produce identity, give meaning, procure pleasure. In a similar vein, Jacques Lacan indicated the crucial role of enjoyment ( jouissance) in securing obedience – in Lacan the super-ego command is ‘Enjoy!’. Indeed, in late capitalist societies, it is the command to enjoy — through consumption — that increasingly constitutes the ethical foundation of the social bond
Hence it is utopian to think that persuasive critique and a (local) de-legitimisation of hegemonic discourses alone can threaten their smooth reproduction. Very often we ourselves function as the worst enemies of our freedom, of another more enabling structuration of our desire.
to thematise and highlight our personal implication in the reproduction of power structures and of the inability of conscious knowledge to effect a shift in this relation.
What is called for, in other words, is a restrained re-politicisation able to function at both the cognitive and affective levels in order to make us assume responsibility for our multiple accommodation to power structures.
Can contemporary art function as an agent of such a re-politicisation?
The first step in any subjective – or collective – change is to assume responsibility for our direct and indirect, conscious and unconscious, cognitive and affective implication in our symptom: to put it in Lacan’s terms, we need to identify with our symptom, to thematise our own attachment to what secures our servitude.
In this way we can also avoid the fetishisation and demonisation of the enemy figure as an alien intruder destabilising our supposed harmony, characteristic of ‘speculative leftism’; Kentridge’s use of his own image in the depiction of Eckstein offers a useful mechanism sublimating violent antagonism into democratic agonism: true change always requires an ambiguous struggle against our own selves and no easy solution is available here, no purity can ever be achieved.