Further notes on Western Individualism and Asian Collectivism

 

Continuing from post below,  I was thinking that there is nothing that makes it necessarily true that kpatalism is individualistic - in reality the individual is constantly giving things up for the collective. Just because your relationship to others is mediated through the money relation doesn't mean that you are less connected to others.

The dogma is that it is socialism and collectivist systems deny rights to individuals for the advantage of the collective. However isn't this just as much true within market relations? This is where the 80s neo-liberal dogma that "greed is good" comes from; that is, that in being greedier you are actually being more productive and creating more value and therefore actually giving more to society as a collective whole. In this sense the person who is motivated by money and does whatever is highly paying is actually, according to this view, most influenced by the collective (aggregated) will of others, and less motivated by their own immediate desires.

Also one is always effected by the collective in so many infinite ways that the idea of the individual is a huge abstraction; so the American individualism doesn't reduce their inter-reliance on each other at all, it just means that one has less empathy etc when one passes a homeless person because they are constructed as completely in control of their own respective destiny.

In this context liberalism's stress on the individual is an ideological one, it is one that emphasises individual choices at the micro level, but in fact you have less and less choice to act in ways that are "inefficient", and you have less option to disengage from the logic of market exchange relations. The individualism you are actually provided with is just the cultural allowance to ignore the plight of others in proximity to you, so it is just a shorthand that conditions everyday cultural practices.

So firstly, could one say that Western individualism might be taken to mean a cultural preference for acting through market relations as opposed to directly, informally or through the state (so a disentangling of individualism as a concept from market liberalism). For example, Asian collective values means that people preference looking after their elderly relatives directly as opposed to the West that would either do this through the welfare state or through private healthcare or paying for nursing homes etc.

Secondly, could we then say that the individualism against the state is the individualism against the market, not the individualism in favour of the market?  Thus the individual vs collective (state, market, family) dynamic exists prior to the system of mediation between the two terms. Further, that individualism against the market actually requires more than one individual to operate (eg informal economy) so the collectivism of relational projects is actually a type of expanding of individual liberties? (Freedom through others vs freedom from others).

Thirdly, in constructing this as a cultural question, it is I guess about how a society represents its   mediations between individual and collective to itself. So if in fact American individualism represents a preference for market relations, and Asian collectivism a preference for state driven mediations, on what basis do we ethically say that individualism (of Ai Wei Wei or relational practice) is more emancipatory than collectivism? Or does the emancipatory potential lie in just running counter to power, its concentration, and all the problems that creates?

Paul O'Connor

You should get in touch with this guy. I like his new paper.

Talking about food

In order to account for the obviously glib inanity of this post, let me start by stressing its especially purposive nature; that is, as you are well aware I cannot stand conversations about food, but in order to avoid completely alienating myself from many people I care about I have decided to try and find a way to make these conversations bearable.  My solution? To pretend they are talking about art.

Now bare with me here. Let's take a few co-ordinates:

•        The spectrum that consists of Rirkrit's version of relationality on one pole and the riposte in Documenta.
  
•       Bin's Korean art critic who talked about all art exclusively in descriptives of shit.
  

Perhaps the co-ordinates traaced by this debate didn't go far enough, and this comparison is under theorised. So why could using this vocabulary be useful?

• 1.     It allows us to account for the fact that aesthetic experience is conditioned not only by sense but by contextual framing. Example: A date eaten on a hot day at a desert market is much tastier than one eaten at a city supermarket. (Relationality 1)
  
• 2.     It allows us to account for the fact that aesthetic experience is conditioned not only by sense but by symbolic content. Example: A date eaten by a migrant who has not eaten these dates since the day they left their homeland is even better. (Relationality 2)
  
• 3.     It allows us to refer to the ideological/critical/theoretical substance of a work as a type of nutritional content. Example: A date may be sweet in terms of its aesthetic, but it is richer than wiz fizz. A date tagine is even better.
  
• 4.     It allows us to talk about process in a way that might be useful in a cooked-baked-fried structuralist type of way; particularly with respect to semiotic techniques. Example: A tagine is a stew in which signs are melted together, but if you are just drying dates and packaging them, well you aren't doing much.
  
• 5.     It mirrors the fact that a work is not reducible to an explanation or concept of the work. That is, because there is no replacement for having to chew something for one's self, there is a process of eating and digestion that can be talked about. In this context some didactic work could be called pre digested, or over-determined.
  
• 6.     It offers a metaphor in which form is reduced to a position I would argue is more appropriate. For example, I like the way you presented that meal in the form of Bernard Black towers with turrets, but nevertheless, I especially liked it because instead of using spoons I had to eat the meal using mini trebuchets.  
  

Ok. I really do understand how stupid this is, but, next time I am stuck in some decadent brunch conversation I will be thinking about what art work they might be talking about and reverse engineering it in my mind. 

Praxis (personal mythologies 3)

In response I would begin by distinguishing between praxis (as an abstract concept) and praxis (as a particular set of strategies and techniques that would constitute a particular artists practice, or life).

Praxis as concept - Well I guess to begin with I was talking about praxis in the abstract. So with particular opposition to theory, praxis in the sense that only in action (changing material circumstances for instance, which includes the symbolic field), can one produce certain thoughts, theoretical leaps, experiences etc etc because only in making constitutive leaps does one change the conditions of one's own thought and action. I mean this is super standard stuff, but still an explanation of why a simple process of actualizing theory is necessarily a failure. And this concept is over theorised in a million different terms for "rupture". For me the critical component is the way it includes an aspect of non-agency, you are always acting in the name of the subjectivity to come. (There is an analogue here with credit money actually, in the way that the growth generated by today's debts will compound – but I'll save my ideas on why an artist is a type of currency for another post.)

Contemporaneity - I'm not sure what you mean by "calling oneself contemporary" – does this mean relevant and not outdated? In the sense of the creation of other worlds I would describe unreadability and dense lifestyle as particular techniques rather then necessary conditions.

Techniques – Perhaps we can set up a model as follows, where the strategy of Menard's Quixote can be opposed to Bourriourds "remixing of signs", and therefore be labelled "pre-production". Alongside this we may note that the position of "production" itself corresponds quite directly to Fordist production, hence to modernism, at least within the West. My question then is can we equate this strategy as being pre-industrial, in the sense it is concerned with the production of social relations above the production of the commodity? Or rather is pre-modern something else, and this is rather a type of fourth term (see 2^nd schematic).

Pre-production	Production	Post-production
Rearticulation of existing forms: Think for example of religious rituals, strictly formalist and unchanging, but meaning is clarified and changed over time.	Producing of forms: Best example is the constructivists who think that new meaning can be created with new form	Remixing of forms
Traditional (?)	Modernism	Post-modernism
Pre-industrial (?)	Fordist	Post-fordist
Reorganisation of signified	Production of signifier	Reorganisation of signifiers
Collective subject: Social totality (?)	Individualist subject: Rise of interiority the novel	Decentered subject: Language, culture, big other speaks through the individual

Alternative schematic:

The above model is fairly teleological and Western, although actually its ordering is focussed on the process of meaning production. However if you want something more generalised perhaps one could try to devise something along these lines:

Production of Signifier	Reorganisation of Signifier
Production of Signified	Reorganisation of Signified

Overall, I think we have both been in agreement for some time about the technique of disembowelling and refilling existing forms a la the Quixote. Although I have to say that I am not entirely able to articulate from first principles why I would necessarily preference this technique. In a sense all these techniques form a totality and I am not entirely convinced yet, well at least from first principles, that the preferencing of one is not just a trend My feeling is that in the wash up all these techniques might be more ideologically neutral than they now seem.

Perhaps one always has to be sensitive to specific conditions, and in the end having something to say and to say it with regard to the specificity of its annunciation might be more important. But as you've eluded to, its probably to do with the fact that preproduction is a technique relatively better at resisting the dissimulation of meaning posed by capital, or at least in the current conditions.

Non-West – I am overwhelmingly in agreement with you about resisting the fetishising of collectivity / relationality as an end in itself, and also note its particular appeal to an American and Western sensibilities. Having said this I do have doubts that traditional collective structures, even outside the West, have not been challenged by the process of capitalist industrialisation and I would expect that even in China there is probably more of an individualist streak than previously – is this the case?

Because on the one hand I agree that these things are extremely cultural, but also there is an element in which I can't help but be materialist and think that the way a society produces things is fairly determinative of culture. In this context, Bishop's Russians were resisting collectivity not only on the political level but on the material one as well. So in Ai Wei Wei's revolutionary individualism, (its true that his work always stresses the individual, such as the 1001 in fairytale, or the handmade seeds) it is maybe also crucial to think about how he is also critical of both the commodification and the destroying of China's collective heritage through modernisation (eg all the pots).

On Borges – if you wanted to take it one step further, then the best romanticisation is to consider The Theologians, from which one might say that you are rewriting it as Quixote and I am rewriting it as Panza.

It is interesting that you mention the garden of forking paths, because something that is appearing to me overlooked in Borges is the deep ambivalence put forth in his continual reference to the infinite, in the sense that he is always the thinker of the totality, that "one path is as good as another", that in the long run all books and non-books will be written side by side. There is a poverty of meaning in this idea, which is to say that the coincidence of Borges and Kafka might be in lacking the particularity brought about by desire, and hence their mutual interest in the Quixote, (this too for another post).

Faber 2014

A Response to the Old Debate on Personal Mythologies

I am interested in the mention you make of the avant-garde coming out of historical materialism. Where does this reading come from? Presumably, the idea is that the historical Modernist avant-garde is understood as a critical response to the internal contradictions of the Industrialized 19^th century coming into conflict with the old artisanal, labour intensive traditional arts.  In parallel to this, Modernism as a critique or response to mechanization and societies transformed by the rhythm of the assembly line is interesting, not just from a historical lens through which to read those movements but for reading contemporary art as the only extant space for a critique of global capitalism as suggested by Gillick.

I argue for a particular approach to artistic practice and questions of 'contemporaneity' which can be seen as an analogue for being 'new' or 'original' (as an aside, I realize that I don't pay too much attention to contemporary mainstream graphic design, media or visual culture, because I find it so 'readable' and that I am looking for images which are 'unreadable' that I am unable to assimilate into any specific visual gestalt. This is rare and perhaps impossible, that, as in your comment about historicizing, after Borges, history is but a list of a couple of broken metaphors and perhaps it is the case that, substituting and shifting the meanings behind very common images is the real aim [thus taking an office job unpaid in the name of radical critique when your entire raison d'etre for entering alternative models of production was to avoid the tyranny of the office job itself or, to be a trained and certified lawyer who chooses not to work and step into something which could easily have been got without the hassle of a law degree] thus, praxis for me is to be understood as, rather than a simple process of actualizing theory should be more properly read as living for the sake and right to call oneself contemporary. In other words, I think it is only possible to insert new 'unreadable' images into the history of art by orchestrating a lifestyle which is so dense and radically opposed to that which one was trained to live, that everything you do is intrinsically the document of another world.

 

One ferry ride later…

 

Thinking about this further, I can think of no better model for my own understanding of artistic practice than Menard's Quixote. So, if images are indeed exhausted, or universal history is a collection of a few metaphors then, the problem for the visual artist becomes one of production.  How to produce new images, how to reconfigure existing images to produce new effects or how to rearrange, substitute or reconfigure the subjectivities and histories which those images are cyphers for. I figure that perhaps praxis is about, in a semiotic sense, attacking the signified rather than signifier. That one goes through the same, or a completely different experience to produce the same image, and though formally identical, the latter is, if not superior-then enriched by the praxis, hence why Menard operates as a way for understanding this process. And again, why playing the song, or showing the image at the start of the film, then at the end, with the experience in between which shifts or charges it with meaning, is such a fruitful strategy.

So in these terms, are we to understand social practice as the reification or institutionalization of this strategy? Perhaps, now that all images have been exhausted it becomes a matter of engaging in a systematic project of focusing on the experiences which produced those images and imagines the individual as collectively constituted which is another way of saying that experience is necessarily outside of the body and collective rather than, subjectively constituted as Western Romanticism and Neo-Liberalism would have it.

 

Another way to travel is down the Garden of Forking Path's, or to regard the Asiatic experience in the context of this configuration we have devised. One must acknowledge that, in the act of maneuvering a collectively constituted individual you are conceiving of it as an oppositional, retaliatory act against a Western consensus which privileges the individual and subjective experience. So, how does one account for Asian culture where the collective is the primary unit of social organization, where turning inward is the revolutionary act. This was properly encountered by the Russians (Kabakov et al) and artists in the Soviet Block as well as late 1980's Beijing Apartment Artists, where the only way to resist the authoritarian will to impose collectivity upon the individual left the artist to withdraw into radical, contemplative subjectivity as the only private space not occupied by the state. This has been thoroughly documented by Bishop in the European context but, I believe has yet to be acknowledged as an issue in the contemporary Asian art scene. All this is a way of saying, perhaps what the world needs most is self-mythologizing, individualist Asian artists to impose a alternative, normative cultural subjectivity upon the art world and the world in general like Ai Wei Wei (and myself, ha!)

Africa-Mars question

Africa Mars as a paradigm for innovation.

I've been a fan of Rao's blog for a while now.  Interesting how he draws together several points of reference that we share, especially given his non-arts viewpoint approaches questions through organisational theory, cognitive modelling, technological innovation, use of metaphor in decision based contexts etc.