Sketch 5: Arts and entertainment — Balkania as a spectacle?
"In general one can say that bourgeois, or established, politics serves to fundamentally make social contradictions invisible or to make them appear as if they could be treated as pure management problems. This does not only apply to contradictions which are immediate consequences of the capitalist nature of the bourgeois society, but also in similar ways to the consequences of the patriarchal relations of violence. (…) The constituting element of leftist politics is a materialist analysis of society. The criticism of political economy is central in leftist analyses of societal relations. The question of the economic structure of a society is one of the necessary starting points (though not the only one) for addressing the societal contradictions and struggling for social change. (…) A social movement that would set out to chase away the capitalist wolves’ society is not in view. (…) In this situation there are two possible areas of leftist practice, below the level of ‘the’ revolution that seems unreachable. On the one hand there is the possibility, on the symbolic level, to point out societal contradictions and make those visible, i.e., intervene in the conflict around the representation of social relations. On the other, there are attempts on the material side to keep the consequences of these contradictions at least halfway bearable in the everyday life of people." (autonome a.f.r.i.k.a.-gruppe, "Symbolische versus ‘richtige’ Politik? — Zur unmöglichen Suche nach der richtigen Politik in der falschen" / "Symbolic vs. ‘true’ politics? — On the impossible search for the true politics in the wrong one", com.une.farce, pilot issue, http://www.copyriot.com/unefarce/no0/symbol.htm")
How can we intervene in the field of art so that we do make a difference on the level of people’s lives? The autonome a.f.r.i.k.a.-gruppe identifies a possibility for symbolic intervention in pointing out societal contradictions and making visible what bourgeois, or mainstream, politics goes to great ends to make invisible. In "The Future State of Balkania", the approach has rather been to design an imaginary future, or imaginary futures, trying to escape the grip of "history". I see two problems in this. Firstly, as various "histories", meaning mystifications by the ruling elite, are not discussed and deconstructed explicitly, those "histories" come in through the back door, less consciously introduced in an effort to parody them in individual subprojects of "The Future State of Balkania". Secondly, the parodies tend to be designed to be entertaining. However, entertainment, or the spectacle, as described by Guy Debord in "Society of the Spectacle", is one of the chief means of unifying, i.e., of levelling differences and dissimulating social conflicts. To the extent that our productions are meant to entertain, they bear the danger of mystifying more than they demystify, and quite literally contributing to the stabilization of the system they parody, the system they had the intention of undermining. It therefore seems to me that it is unlikely for any art production that does not actively seek to destabilize its own entertainment value to have any influence towards social change and destabilizing of systems of power.
This is not to say that it is easy, materially, for an artist to take such a radical approach. If I work as an artist, I am dependent on grants provided quite often by sources that are supportive of the hegemonic symbolic politics. In the feudal power system the king’s fool was an institution. The fool could go quite far in criticizing the king as long as he was witty and entertaining, and was even expected to be critical. But if he had started to deconstruct and delegitimize the king’s position, he would have lost his head at once. Similarly, artists in a capitalist "society of the spectacle" are expected to be critical, to bring up questions of social relevance, and entertain. If an artist steps over the line and starts deconstructing and delegitimizing the powers that be, s/he might not lose her or his head, but likely her or his funders.
This, of course, is part of a more general problem of all activists, who are all entangled into a net of dependencies and cannot avoid supporting systems of power and control without even wanting to. There is no complete escape from this, no clean hands, but only the search for ways to destabilize one’s own privileges and one’s own unintentional participation in affirming exclusion and control mechanisms.