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The Misadventures of Critical Thinking

I gave to this talk the title: ”The misadventures of critical thinking”. This title requires some

preliminary explanations, especially in the framework of a lecture in Critical Theory. I am

certainly not the first person who suggests that there is something wrong to-day with the

tradition of critical thinking. Many contemporary authors have declared that its time was over.

According to them, there would not be anything left for criticism, since criticism implies the

denunciation of a bright appearance concealing a dark and solid reality, but there would be no

more any solid reality left to oppose to the appearance and no darkness to oppose to the

triumph of affluent society. Such was the melancholic assertion of the late Jean Baudrillard,

that we can find reasserted to-day in a more aggressive way by thinkers like Peter Sloterdijk. I

am not willing to lend my voice to that tune . Instead I would like to restage the case and

suggest that the concepts and procedures that defined the “critical tradition” have not vanished

at all, that they still work, be it in the very discourse of those who make fun of it. Those

concepts and procedures are still at work, but in a way that implies an entire reversal of their

supposed ends and orientations. It is only by taking into account the persistence of this

framework and the reversal of its meaning and function that we can hope to engage in a true

“critique of the critique”.

So I will focus on some contemporary manifestations in the fields of art, theory and

politics that reveal a significant shift in the procedures of presentation and demonstration

which defined the tradition of critical thought .I will borrow my starting point from the art

world by focusing on the evolution of an artistic procedure that was for a long time

emblematic of critical or political art, the procedure of collage. I don’t understand it as a

technical device but as an aesthetic procedure which consists in playing on the clash of

heterogeneous, if not contradictory elements, the model which was the well-known meeting

of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissection board. That aesthetics was implemented

in the times of dadaïsm and surrealism, as a means of exploding the “reality” of bourgeois

everyday life and disclosing the deeper reality that it repressed, the reality of dream, desire

and the unconscious. Then it was taken up by Marxist artists, notably under the form of

photomontage, as a means of showing the realities of violence and exploitation which

underpinned the false appearances of peaceful democracy. Among the artists who used it in

that way , Martha Rosler made at the end of the 60’ and the beginning of the 70’s her well-

know series “Bringing war home” by pasting images of the atrocities in Vietnam on images

of American petty-bourgeois interiors. For instance in this collage called Amputee , or in this

other one called “balloons” that organized a clash between the balloons situated near the door

which probably belong to the children of an apparently wealthy family and the bullets that

stroke the dead Vietnamese child carried by his mourning father. The image worked as a

twofold demonstration of causality. The young cripple or the dead child were the truth hidden

by the cosy interior, they were the reality of imperialist violence that allowed for happy

American family life. This revelation of the secret beyond the door was emblematized by

another image in the series, showing a woman opening the curtain on the reality of the

imperialist war. But the other way around, happy American family life was staged as the

cause of the indifference towards the violence of imperialism. The two images had to be

connected in order to produce the connection of two effects: an awareness of the system that

tied together American domestic happiness and imperialist violence, and a feeling of guilt, of

shameful complicity in this system. On the one hand the image said : this is the hidden reality

that you cannot see; you have to be aware of it and behave according to that knowledge. But

there is no evidence that the awareness of a situation bring about the determination to change

it. This is the reason why the image told something more. It said: this is the obvious reality

that you don’t want to see because you know that you are responsible for it. In that way, the

political effect expected from the critical dispositif was a combination of knowledge of the

hidden reality and guilt about the denied reality.

Let us look now at some works of an artist who, in the same way, deals with the

contemporary forms of relation between violence and consumption. Let us look at the

installations made by the German-born and New-York based artist Josephine Meckseper.

Those installations consist in little show cases in which she systematically puts together

things that don’t go together: for instance in this installation called “Selling out” a display of

fashion items and a book on a British group of urban guerilleros who precisely wanted to

bring war against imperialism in our streets and homes; here a communist poster next to a

mannequin for feminine lingerie; or here the well-known slogan of May 68 in France “ Ne

travaillez jamais” “Never work” on bottles of perfume. The structure of the collage is the

same as that of Martha Rosler’s series. The artist puts together things which apparently don’t

go together. But by doing so she wants to show us that those things actually go together, that

they are part of the same process. Now, in the case of Martha Rosler, the collage opened up

on the demonstration of the incompatibility of two worlds : The image of the dead child could

not go with the image of the cosy interior without exploding it. On the contrary, Meckseper’s

collage is predicated on the homogeneity of the elements: the forms of political radicalism

and even the action of the urban guerilleros are staged as a phenomenon of “youth fashion” .

It is no more the conflict which is the truth of the commodity but the commoditisation which

is the truth of the conflict. This reversal could be epitomized by an image , that unfortunately I

could not get. The same artist Josephine Meckseper made several series of photographs of

protests either in Germany or in the United States and notably of the marches against the war

in Afghanistan and in Iraq. One of these photographs shows us protesters holding banners in

the background. As for the foreground it shows an overfilled garbage-can , the content of

which falls to the ground. Once more we are presented with the connection between

imperialist war abroad and domestic consumption. The anti-war protest brings war home, in

its way, but it brings it in a space where it is “at home”, in a space of struggle that is itself a

territory of consumption. Presumably, the cans and packages that overfill the bin have been

thrown there by the protesters. So “bringing war home” does not mean anymore: “being

aware of the remote reality of imperialist war in the heart of American happiness”. It means

the contrary: being aware that the “war” is present here only as a motto on a banner in the

middle of a reality which is the reality of American consumption . And the protest itself

appears to belong to an homogeneous process of consumption of commodities and images

.The marchers protest against the terrorism of the war on terror waged by the empire of

consumption that throws its shells on Mid-eastern towns. Those shells are a response to the

terror of the attack of the towers; that attack itself had been displayed as the spectacle of the

collapse of the empire of consumption and spectacle. As for the protesters, they have

consumed the images of the collapse of the towers and the images of the strikes in Iraq; and

what they offer on the streets is a spectacle too. Ultimately terrorism and consumption, protest

and spectacle are boiled down to the same process, a process governed by the law of the

commodity which is the law of equivalence.

At first sight we might draw the conclusion that the logic of the critical dispositif has

been entirely self-cancelled: there is no hidden reality to unveil, no feeling of guilt to arouse.

But if it were so, why keep a dispositif that has no more relevance? This is why I assume that

the dispositif itself still works. There may be no hidden reality behind the curtain. But the

logic of the critical model can perfectly do without it. It is enough that there be something that

we cannot see or don’t want to see. And the very absence of another reality can become the

thing that we are unable or unwilling to see. As the commentators warn us , Meckseper’s

images both “ mirror the nihilist horror of middle class lifestyle “ and “ examine the

phenomenon of radicalism as youth fashion”. So her images say: this is the way our world is

and this is the way in which we try to ignore that our forms of protest contribute to this world

of consumerism and spectacle. The mechanism of the critical procedure has not been

cancelled. Instead it has been overturned. The collision of the heterogeneous series of images

is still given a power of pointing out an ignored reality which also means a denied complicity.

It is still a matter of making what is “ignored” known. And it is still a matter of targeting the

point where the two forms of ignorance – the incapacity to understand and the desire to

ignore- are brought back to the same excess, the same overflow of commodities and images .

The power of the critical dispositif predicated on a basic assumption: we act improperly

because we don’t see properly. This is why the critical thinker or the critical artist has to stop

the images, to produce “one image more” that confronts two different images in order to

reveal the logic of their connection . In the old fashion, illustrated by Rosler’s collage , the

confrontation brought about the perception of the reality of the empire of the commodities

behind the display of the images .In the new fashion, illustrated by Mecksepers’s one , there

is no reality behind. The display of images is the same thing as the structure of a reality where

everything is displayed in the way of the commodities. But it is still a question of producing

the clash of images which stops and congeals the overflow of images in order to show us that

even the denunciation of the images in the name of the reality is in tune with the flow of

images into which the law of the commodity has entirely turned our “real” world. Needless

to say, this clash of images appears to belong itself to the same process. The installation

which takes on the form of a shop window in order to demonstrate the equivalence between

the display of commodities and the forms of anti-capitalist protest makes no bones about

presenting itself as a luxury commodity .

So there is a dialectic inherent in the denunciation of the critical paradigm> It declares

that it has become obsolete. But the form of the denunciation reproduces its mechanism. It

simply turns the ignorance of reality or denial of misery into the ignorance of the fact that

reality and misery have disappeared. It turns the desire to ignore what makes us guilty into the

desire to ignore that there is no reason to be guilty. Such is the argument pursued by Peter

Sloterdijk throughout his book entitled Foams . What defines modernity, according to him , is

the joint vanishing of poverty and reality. He describes the process of modernity , in its more

general feature, as a process of “anti-gravitation”. “Anti-gravitation” first refers to the

technical inventions that allow men to conquer space and fly in the air. But, in a more general

way, it refers to the way in which life would have lost much of its “gravity” – which means

both its weight of poverty, pain or toughness and its weight of reality. According to him, we

experience exactly the contrary of what the Marxist schema set up: instead of projecting into

an ideal sky the inverted reality of their earthly misery, our contemporaries would project

into an illusory solid reality the inverted image of that process of escape. As he puts it : they

would “re-translate the luxury that holds power in the language of misery”. So there would

be a total discrepancy between the effectiveness of the “lightened” world and the old

discourse of poverty and victimism that still takes the floor . Our “affluent society” would be

definitely released from what he calls “the definitions of reality formulated by the ontology of

poverty” and yet we would still hang on to those formulas, we would still phrase the lack of

misery and the lack of gravity in the language of misery and gravity.

Such an analysis sounds as an appeal to get free from the forms and contents of the

critical tradition. And yet it is not difficult to perceive that the denunciation is still enclosed

in the circle of that tradition . Once more we are told that there is a structure of illusion which

is the result of the ignorance of- and resistance to - a global process of development of the

productive forces. This global process is represented as a process of de-materialisation of

wealth, which brings about a loss of weight of the old beliefs and ideals. We easily recognize

in those assertions the indestructible logic of the Communist Manifesto . It is no coincidence

that the so-called post-modern turn had to borrow from it its motto “All that is solid melts into

the air”. We are told that everything becomes fluid, liquid, gaseous, etc. And the ideologists

of course are said to ignore or deny that “fluidification “of everything as they still believe in

the reality of reality, poverty and wars.

Ironic as they purport to be, those statements are still in keeping with the premises of

the “critical” tradition. They are still in keeping with the presupposition of a global process

which produces a mechanism of ideological inversion that turns reality into illusion or illusion

into reality, poverty into wealth or wealth into poverty, etc. They still denounce an “ignorance

“of the global process which entails both a lack of knowledge and a will to deny. And they

still point out a feeling of guilt at the core of the denial. So the criticism of the critical

tradition still puts into plays its categories and procedures. The only difference is the

following: the critical procedures were supposed to be means of arousing awareness and

energies for a process of emancipation. Now either they are disconnected from that horizon of

emancipation. Or they are overturned. They become tools against any process or even any

dream of emancipation- a mechanism that could be emblematized by this work of Charles

Ray called “Revolution Counter-Revolution “ because the mechanism of the merry-go-round

is disjointed from that of the horses so that they go into opposite directions.

This is , in my view, the true lesson of the fable of the protesters and the

garbage-can . This is ultimately the “little difference” separating Martha Rosler’ collages from

Josephine Meckseper’s collages. After all, in the 1960’s Jean-Luc Godard already made fun

Ranciere - The Misadventures of Critical Theory.pdf

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