Public (E-Journal, York University)

Holmes, Brian

The Affectivist Manifesto
Artistic Critique in the Twenty-First Century
Brian Holmes
Brial1 Holl11es 75
In the twentieth century, art was judged with respect to the existing state of the medium.
What mattered was the kind of rupture it made, the unexpected formal elements it brought
into play, the way it displaced the conventions of the genre or the tradition. The prize at the
end of the evaluative process was a different sense of what art could be, a new realm of
possibility for the aesthetic. Today all that has changed, definitively.
The backdrop against which art now stands out is a particular state of society. What an
installation, a performance, a concept or a mediated image can do is to mark out a possible
or real shift with respect to the laws, the customs, the measures, the mores, the technical and
organizational devices that define how we must behave and how we may relate to each
other at a given time and in a given place. What we look for in art is a different way to live,
a fresh chance at coexistence.
How does that chance come to be? Expression unleashes affect, and affect is what touches.
Presence, gesture and speech transform the quality of contact between people, they create
both breaks and junctions; and the expressive techniques of art are able to multiply those
immediate changes along a thousand pathways of the mind and the senses. An artistic event
does not need an objective judge.You know it has happened when you can bring something
else into existence in its wake. Artistic activism is affectivism, it opens up expanding
territories. These territories are occupied by the sharing of a double difference: a split from
the private self in which each person was formerly enclosed, and from the social order
which imposed that particular type of privacy or privation.
When a territory ofpossibility emerges it changes the social map, like a landslide, a flood
or a volcano does in nature. The easiest way for society to protect its existing form is simple
denial, pretending the change never happened: and that actually works in the landscape of
mentalities. An affective territory disappears if it isn't elaborated, constructed, modulated,
differentiated, prolonged by new breakthroughs and conjunctions. There is no use defending
such territories, and even believing in them is only the barest beginning. What they urgently
need is to be developed, with forms, rhythms, inventions, discourses, practices, styles,
technologies-in short, with cultural codes. An emergent territory is only as good as the
codes that sustain it. Every social movement, every shift in the geography of the heart and
revolution in the balance of the senses needs its aesthetics, its grammar, its science and its
legalisms. Which means that every new territory needs artists, technicians, intellectuals,
universities. But the problem is, the expert bodies that already exist are fortresses defending
themselves against other fortresses.
Activism has to confront real obstacles: war, poverty, class and racial oppression, creeping
fascism, venomous neo-liberalism. But what we face is not so much soldiers with guns as
cognitive capital: the knowledge society, an excruciatingly complex order.The striking thing
from the affective point of view is the zombie-like character of this society, its fallback to
automatic pilot, its cybernetic governance. Neo-liberal society is densely regulated, heavily
overcoded. Since the control systems are all made by disciplines with strictly calibrated
access to other disciplines, the origin of any struggle in the fields of knowledge has to be
extradisciplinary. It starts outside the hierarchy of disciplines and moves through them
transversally, gaining style, content, competence and discursive force along the way.
Extradisciplinary critique is the process whereby affectively charged ideas-or conceptual
76 New Communities
arts-become essential to social change. But it's vital to maintain the link between the
infinitely communicable idea and the singularly embodied performance.
World society is the theater of affectivist art, the stage on which it appears and the circuit
in which it produces transformations. But how can we define this society in existential
terms? First, it is clear that world society now exists, with globe-spanning communications,
transport networks, benchmarked educational systems, standardized technologies, franchised
consumption facilities, global finance, commercial law and media fashion. That layer of
experience is extensive, but it is thin; it can only claim part of the lifeworld. To engage with
affectivist art, to critique it and recreate it, you have to know not only where new territories
of sensibility emerge-in which locale, in which historical geography-but also at which
scale. Existence in world society is experienced, or becomes aesthetic, as an interplay ofscales.
In addition to the global, there is a regional or continental scale, based on the aggregation
of populations into economic blocs.You can see it clearly in Europe, but also in North and
South America, in the Middle East and in the East Asian network. Make no mistake, there
are already affects at this scale, and social movements, and new ways of using both gesture
and language, with much more to come in the future. Then there is the national scale,
seemingly familiar, the scale with the richest sets of institutions and the deepest historical
legacies, where the theaters of mass representation are overwhelmingly established and sunk
into fantasmatic inertia. But the national scale in the twenty-first century is also in a febrile
state of continuous red alert, hotwired to excess and sometimes even capable of resonating
with the radically new. Mter this comes the territorial scale, long considered the most
human: the scale of daily mobilities, the city, the rural landscape, which are the archetypal
dimensions of sensibility. This is the abode of popular expression, of the traditional plastic
arts, of public space and of nature as a presence coequal with humanity: the scale where
subjectivity first expands to meet the unknown.
And so finally we reach the scale of intimacy, of skin, of shared heartbeats and feelings,
the scale that goes from families and lovers to people together on a street corner, in a sauna,
a living room or a cafe. It would seem that intimacy is irretrievably weighted down in our
time, burdened with data and surveillance and seduction, crushed with the determining
influence of all the other scales. But intimacy is still an unpredictable force, a space of
gestation and therefore a wellspring of gesture, the biological spring from which affect
drinks. Only we can traverse all the scales, becoming other along the way. From the lovers'
bed to the wild embrace of the crowd to the alien touch of networks, it may be that intimacy
and its artistic expressions are what will astonish the twenty-first century.
Brian Holl11es 77


English

The Affectivist Manifesto.  Artistic Critique in the Twenty-First Century

Critchley, Simon

Mystical Anarchism

Möntmann, Nina

Introduction
Nina 111.ontmann
Introduction 9
The present popularity of "community" as a topic in art and theory goes hand in hand with
the big changes currently taking place in how community is envisioned and experienced.
For several years the work of many artists and theoreticians has been increasingly orienting
itself on questions around forms of living together, in the private as well as the collective
social sphere. Epoch-making changes are occurring in recent histories after 1989, such as
the idea of a new Europe with its (geo)political changes and globalized work and relationship
structures which create new closenesses and possibilities for working together, but which at
the same time corroborate or extend old power structures in underhanded ways. These new
experiences raise many questions that the essays collected here approach from different
points of view. This reader endeavours to bring together and discuss the relevant discourses
in the broader art context.
Some of the essays in the reader are papers from two conferences I organized around the
topic of communities: Nikos Papastergiadis and Brian Holmes participated in the symposium
"New Communities" at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, 1 and Maria Lind, Simon
Critchley, Luis Jacob, Jon Davies, Emily Roysdon, and Saara Liinamaa gave the papers
published here at the symposium "We, Ourselves and Us" at The Power Plant in Toronto.2
We have also been fortunate in acquiring additional contributions by Carlos Basualdo,
Reinaldo Laddaga, and Raqs Media Collective.
I wish to sincerely thank Gregory Burke, Director of The Power Plant, Toronto, and
Helena Reckitt, Senior Curator of Programs, for inviting me to curate the exhibition "lfWe
Can't Get It Together: Artists rethinking the (mal)function of communities" at The Power
Plant. Collaborating with them and their fantastic team was an exceptionally enriching
experience. The exhibition is documented here alongside the essays. I would like to thank
the Managing Editor of Public Ciaire Christie and collective member Janine Marchessault,
for their splendid cooperation on this publication, and Saara Liinamaa, Public's editor for this
collection, for her vigilant editing of the texts. My thanks also go to the publication's most
capable designers, Torsten Jahnke (for the cover design) and Claire Christie.
1 The symposium took place on November 7,2008. It was organized in collaboration with the Royal
University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm and part of a seminar and workshop with students over
two semesters.
2 January 23 and 24,2009.


Introduction

Jacob, Luis

Communities Between Culture-by-Mouth and Culture-by-Media

Contributors
SHAINA ANAND is an artist, filmmaker, and new media practitioner. Born in Mumbai, she travelled
to the US to pursue an MFA in Film and Media Arts at Temple University. Anand explores the ideas
of localized media distribution in relation to notions of access and participation. Her work has been
included in the exhibitions "Broadcast Yourself" at Cornerhouse, Manchester (2008), and the "Asia
Triennial" in Manchester (2008). She lives in Mumbai.
EGLE BUDVYTYTE was born in 1981 in Lithuania. At the root of her video art practice is an interest
in the construction and negotiation of private and public spaces. Her work has been included in
exhibitions such as "Transmedial 08: CONSPIRE..." at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin
(2008), "The Joy is Not Mentioned" at the Contemporary Art Center Vilnius in Lithuania (2007), and
"Whenever It Starts It is the Right Time: Strategies for a discontinuous future" at Frankfurter Kunstverein
(2007). Budvytyte received her MFA at the Piet Zwart Institute in 2006. She lives in Rotterdam.
CARLOS BASUALDO is the Curator of Contemporary Art at The Philadelphia Museum ofArt. He
was a co-commissioner, with Michael R. Taylor, for the US Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale
(2009), where they presented an exhibition with Bruce Nauman. Basualdo was one of the curators of
Documenta11 in 2002 and one of the curators of the 50th Venice Biennale. Previously, he was Chief
Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts. Basualdo has written extensively for scholarly
journals and art publications, including Ariforum, ArtNews, The Art Newspaper and Flash Art, among others.
SIMON CRITCHLEY is Chair and Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in
New York and is also currently a part-time Professor ofPhilosophy at the University ofTilburg in The
Netherlands. He works in continental philosophy, history of philosophy, literature, ethics, and politics.
Recent works include On Heidegger's Being and Time (Routledge, 2008), The Book of Dead Philosophers
(Granta Books, 2008), Infinitely Demanding (Verso, 2007), and Things Merely Are (Routledge, 2005).
KA]SA DAHLBERG was born in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1973. In 2003 Dahlberg graduated from the
Malmo Art Academy and is currently participating in the Whitney Independent Study Program in
New York. Through video, text and sound the artist explores the relationship between constructed
narratives and film, questioning notions of cOlmnunity, history, nationalisms, and political representation.
Dahlberg's work has been exhibited internationally including at the "1st Athens Biennial" (2007),
"Prague Biennial 3" (2007), "Momentum Nordic Biennial for Contemporary Art" in Moss (2006),
"Sala Rekalde" in Bilbao (2006), and "Swedish Hearts" at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2004).
In 2007, Stockholm's Index gallery presented Dahlberg's solo exhibition "A Room of One's Own/A
Thousand Libraries" and related artist's book. Dahlberg lives in Malmo and New York.
]ON DAVIES is a writer and curator based in Toronto. His writing has appeared in C Magazine,
Canadian Art, GLQ, Cinema Scope and Xtrat, as well as in books on filmmaker Todd Haynes and on
artists Daniel Barrow, Candice Breitz and Luis Jacob. He has curated numerous screenings for the
artists' film and video exhibitor Pleasure Dome, and for various galleries and festivals in Toronto and
internationally. He most recently curated the travelling retrospective "People Like Us: The Gossip of
Colin Campbell" for Oakville Galleries, Ontario, and wrote a book on Paul Morrissey's 1970 film
Trash (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009). He is currently the Assistant Curator ofPublic Programs atThe Power
Plant, Toronto.
159
HADLEY+MAXWELL are a multi-media Vancouver-based artist duo, working collaboratively to
examine the nature of representation, and looking at issues of the historical construction of taste. Born
in 1973 and 1966 respectively, the two have collaborated and exhibited their work across Canada and
internationally since 1998. Hadley+Maxwell often extend their collaborations to involve individuals
and communities. In 2005 they received the prestigious VIVA award, an annual prize of $10,000
awarded to two mid-career artists who show great creative potential and a strong dedication to their
practice. They are represented by Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto, and their work has been
shown at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2007) and the Contemporary Art Gallery inVancouver (2006).
BRIAN HOLMES is a cultural critic, based in Paris and Chicago, working with artistic and political
practices, moving restlessly around the world. He holds a doctorate in Romance Languages from the
University of California at Berkeley, and is the author of Hieroglyphs rf the Future: Art and Politics in a
Networked Era (WH\V, 2002) and Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering
(Autonomedia, 2008).
LUIS JACOB is an artist and writer based in Toronto. Recent exhibitions include: "7 Pictures of
Nothing Repeated Four Times, in Gratitude," at Stadtisches Museum Abteiberg (Monchengladbach,
Germany); "The Order ofThings," Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (Antwerp, Belgium);
"Martian Museum of Terrestial Art," Barbican Art Gallery (London, UK); "Luis Jacob: Habitat,"
Kunstverein in Hamburg (Hamburg, Germany); and Documenta12 (Kassel, Germany). Opening in March
2010, he will participate in the exhibition "Haunted: Contemporary PhotographyIVideo/Performance,"
at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NewYork). Jacob is represented by Birch Libralato,Toronto.
HASSAN KHAN is an artist, composer and writer who works with image, sound, text, space and
situation. His work is inspired by the city of Cairo and has been presented internationally in exhibitions
such as "Transmediale 08: CONSPIRE ..... at Haus der Kulturen derWelt in Berlin (2008), the "1st
Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art" (2007), the Biennale of Sydney (2006) and "Summer
Screen" at Spacex in Exeter (2008). Recent solo exhibitions include "KOMPRESSOR" at Gasworks
in London (2006) and "Hassan Kahn" at the Baltic Art Center in Visby (2006). Khan lives in Cairo.
REINALDO LADDAGA (Rosario, Argentina, 1963) is a writer and critic. He teaches in the
Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. His last books are Esthetics of
Emergency. The formation of a culture of the arts (Adriana Hidalgo, 2006), Reality Shows (Beatriz Viterbo,
2007), and Three secret lives. John D. Rockefeller, Wait Disney, Osama bin Laden (Adriana Hidalgo, 2008).
SAARA LIINAMAA's research addresses contemporary art as an experimental platform for urban
research. She is a member of Public Access, the editorial collective that produces the artlculture/ideas
journal Public, and a researcher for the Visible City Project + Archive (York University), a project
devoted to the study of art practices and networks in different cities. She is currently teaching
part-time at Acadia University, WolfVille, Nova Scotia.
MARIA LIND is Director of the Graduate Program, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. She
has worked as Director of Iaspis, Stockholin (2005-2007), Kunstverein Munchen (2002-2004), and
Moderna Museet, Stockholin (1997-2001). She has contributed widely to magazines, catalogues and
other publications. She is the co-editor of Curating with Light Luggage and Collected Newsletter (Revolver
Archiv fUr aktuelle Kunst, 2004), Taking the Matter into Common Hands: Collaborative Practices in
Contemporary Art (Blackdog Publishing, 2007), as well as the report European Cultural Policies 2015 (Iaspis
160 New Communities
and eipcp, 2005) and The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art (Sternberg
Press, 2008). She is the 2009 recipient of the WaIter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement.
NINA MONTMANN is a curator and writer. She is Professor and Head of Department ofArt Theory
and the History ofIdeas at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm. In 2009 she curated
"The Jerusalem Show:Jerusalem Syndrome" (with Jack Persekian), and was curator at NIFCA (The
Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art) in Helsinki (2003-2006). Recent publications include: Rana
Dasgupta, Nina Montmann, Avi Pitchon (eds.) Manifesta 7, Companion Reader (Silvana Editoriale,
2008); Nina Montmann (ed.) Art and its Institutions (Black Dog Publishing, 2006). She frequently
writes for ArtfonJm, Le l\!Ionde Diplomatique and Frieze, and has published essays on Martha RosIer's if
you lived here.. in ejlux journal (2009), on "Redefinitions of Citizenship and Belonging in a
Contested Society of Immigration" for the publication Be(com)ing Dutch (Van Abbemuseum, 2009),
and on national identity in Israel and Palestine in the reader Liminal Spaces (2009).
NIKOS PAPASTERGIADIS is Professor at the School of Culture and Communication at the University
of Melbourne. His current research focuses on the investigation of the historical transformation of
contemporary art and cultural institutions by digital technology. His publications include l\!lodernity as
Exile: The Stranger in John Berger's Writing (Manchester University Press, 1993), Dialogues in the Diaspora:
Essays and Conversations on Cultural Identity (Rivers Oram Press, 1998), The Turbulence of Migration:
Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity (Polity Press/Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2000), Metaphor
and Tension: On Collaboration and its Discontent (Artspace, 2004) Spatial Aesthetics: Art Place and the
Everyday (Rivers Oram Press, 2006).
RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE was formed in 1992 by independent media practitioners Jeebesh
Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Based in Delhi, India, the collective has been
variously described as artists, media practitioners, curators, researchers, editors and catalysts of cultural
processes. Their work, which has been exhibited widely in major international spaces and events,
locates them at the intersections of contemporary art, historical enquiry, philosophical speculation,
research and theory, often taking the form of installations, online and oflline media objects, performances
and encounters. They were co-curators, in 2008, of the Manifesta 7 Biennale.
EMILY ROYSDON is a New York and Stockholm based interdisciplinary artist and writer. Her work is
invested in language, memory, collectivity and the processes of history and she uses video, photography,
text, and performance to that aim. She is editor and co-founder of the queer feminist journal and artist
collective, LTTR. Roysdon's work has been shown at Participant, Inc. (New York); Generali
Foundation (Vienna); New Museum (New York); The Power Plant (Toronto); and Studio Voltaire
(London). Her writings have been published in numerous books and magazines, including Cabinet
Magazine, the Journal ofAesthetics and Protest, and Women & Performance: aJournal of Feminist Theory.
HAEGUE YANG was born in Seoul in 1971. She attended the Seoul National University and the
Stadelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Yang's practice is rooted in exploring the possibility of
a community made up of individuals who do not identifY with any community. Yang has exhibited
internationally including shows such as "Whose History" at Hamburger Kunstverein in Germany
(2008), "Life on Mars" at the 2008 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh and the 2007 Prague
Biennale. Yang's solo exhibitions include "Asymmetric Equality" at REDCAT in Los Angeles (2008),
"Remote Room" at Gallery Barbara Wien in Berlin (2007), and "Les Indepliables" at Gallery Collet
Park, Paris (2006).Yang lives and works in Berlin and Seoul.


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The Affectivist Manifesto. Artistic Critique in the Twenty-First Century

Mystical Anarchism

Introduction

Communities Between Culture-by-Mouth and Culture-by-Media

Contributors

New Communities

Experiemental Communities

Aesthetic Challenges for Cognition in the Public Sphere

War Porn

An Amorous Example: From Virgil to Berlioz

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