Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

notes to pages 273– 6
70 ‘Patently, art does not have the monopoly on creation, but it takes its
capacity to invent mutant coordinates to extremes: it engenders unprecedented,
unforeseen and unthinkable qualities of being.’ (Félix Guattari,
Chaosmosis: An Ethico- aesthetic Paradigm, Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1995, p. 106.)
71 The fi rst paradigm described by Guattari is the ‘proto- aesthetic paradigm’
of primitive society, in which life and art are integrated under a
transcendent principle. The second moment is the capitalist ‘assemblage’,
in which the components of life are separated and divided but held
together under master signifi ers such as Truth, the Good, Law, the Beautiful,
Capital and so on (see ibid., p. 104). It is informative to compare this
tripartite schema with that proposed by Peter Bürger in Theory of the
Avant- garde (1974) and that of Rancière in The Politics of Aesthetics
(2000).
72 Gary Genosko, ‘The Life and Work of Félix Guattari: From Transversality
to Ecosophy’, in Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, London and
New York: Continuum, 2000, pp. 151 and 155. Transversality has recently
been deployed as a central term in Gerard Raunig’s Art and Revolution:
Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e), 2007. However, Raunig uses this term strictly in the sense
of acentric lines of fl ight that elude fi xed points and co- ordinates, without
any attachment to art as a privileged category. He argues that the fi rst
wave of transversal activist groups appeared in the 1980s, such as ACT
UP (1987), Women’s Action Coalition (1991– 97) and Wohlfahrtsausschüsse
(1992– 93) (pp. 205– 6).
73 See Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary
French Thought, Montreal and Kingston: McGill- Queen’s University
Press, 2007, Chapter 10, ‘Institutional Psychotherapy and the La Borde
Psychiatric Clinic’. See also Guattari, ‘La Borde: A Clinic Unlike Any
Other’, in Chaosophy, New York: Semiotexte, 1995, pp. 187- 208.
74 Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 134. It is thus not unlike the fi rst model (the
proto- aesthetic paradigm) in which art is fused with social praxis, the key
difference being that the ethico- aesthetic paradigm is not organised
around the totemic aura of myth.
75 Ibid., p. 130.
76 Ibid., p. 131.
Conclusion
1 Boris Groys, ‘Comrades of Time’, e- fl ux journal, 11, December 2009,
available at www.e- fl ux.com.
2 Tony Bennett phrases the same problem differently: art history as a bourgeois,
idealist discipline is in permanent confl ict with Marxism as an
anti- bourgeois, materialist revolution in existing disciplines. There is no
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