Eric Alliez

Capitalism and Schizophrenia and

Consensus: Of the Relational Aesthetic'
I will give just a quick sketch of my argument by choosing to
(Translators note)
ignore the artists, theirworks, the art administration and Translation of Alliez, E.
their places of exhibition (starting with the "site of contem- Capitalisme et schizophrenie
U et consensus: De I' esthetique
porary creation at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, until recently relationnelle. This transla-
codirected by Nicolas Bourriaud and Jerome Sans) and focus tion is ofthe first draft of
an ongoing discussion, the
instead on an order of discourse that has become strangely fi rst version of the article
familiar to us: the relational aesthetic (which accounts for the has recently been published
U
in Plato, (September-
"symptomal quality of my reading). So familiar that the art December 2006).6,74-79.
Plato is a Turkish art journal
of the nineties, which this discourse brings into focus by published in Istambul. All
U
asserting the "misunderstandings surrounding it are due to footnotes belong to the
u original text unless other-
the" shortcomings of theoretical discourse which fails to wise noted. Many thanks
recognise the rupture with the critical art of the sixties, that to Grant Thompson for bring-
ing this text to my attention,
this art itself could only be the audiovisual archive of this to Stephen Zepke for his
engaged commentary on relational form which supposedly negotiations and to Eric
Alliez for his many helpful
animates a new division of the art world into revisited modern revisions of my translation.
and truly contemporary. Reading over this equally descrip-
(Y)
tive and prescriptive discourse when it affirms that "anyhow,
the liveliest factor that is played out on the chessboard of
art has to do with interactive, user-friendly and relational
concepts (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 8) 2
U 2
I say between the descriptive
The argument in Nicolas Bourriaud's book-manifesto and prescriptive because
we should note from the very
on the art of the nineties, that contemporary art would not start, without needing to
know how to engage in current relations "to society, to return to it later, that this
relational form-function
history, to culture" without this rupture, possesses a double entails the selection of artists
and paradoxical characteristic: It cannot in fact conform to su pposed to represent this
tendency (the "liveliest") by
the "relational" perspective of an aesthetic characterised by reducing exemplary artworks
categories of consensus-to restore the lost sense of commu- to their single structure as
"open works", "opened"
nity by repairing social divisions, patiently weaving a "rela- by the participation-pars
pro toto, according to Hans
tional fabric", returning spaces of conviviality, searching for
Ulrich Obrist-ofthe public.
forms of sustainable development and consumption, low Reading Nicolas Bourriaud's
further arguments, it seems
energies able to infiltrate the cracks within existing images, that RirkritTiravanija, who
etc. - other than by discharging the force of the most innova- opens the series of art exam-
ples in Relational Aesthetics
tive theoretical and artistic practices of the sixties and and who features prominently
seventies into modest forms, in the "modest connections" in the chapter on "Art of the
'990s" (in the first section,
of a micropolitics of intersubjectivity. Under the title of entitled Participation and
a new mental ecology of "linkage" [Fr. reliance] (according transitivity) is the most
paradigmatic figure of
to Michel Maffesoli's term, who has long anticipated "relational art". This should
not stop us from remarking
this process of rupture with the "revolutionarism" of the

--- - - - - - - _ .. _-----_ ....... _-

1960s 3 ) used in the re-invention of everyday life Ca theme that even Tiravanija's instal-
lations and even more certain
"bricolaged" by Michel de Certeau in his The Practice of other works by artists men-
Everyday Life according to the principle of "user" diversion tioned by this curator-critic
(Felix Gonzales-Torres,
[Fr. detournement] of consumer society4). Aesthetics there- Santiago Sierra, Gabriel
fore becomes an education in [De. bi/dung] postmodern life- Orozco, Patrice Hybert, or
Philippe Parreno, for exam-
"learning to inhabit the world in a better way" - according to pie) can be far more complex
a sequence that ends by simultaneously conter-effectuating and problematising in terms
of the modes of sociality
the policies of the becoming-life of art and the becoming- they imply. This is in order
art of life and whose dialogical structure ("the inter-human to stress, in case it wasn't
already clear, that (1) we
commerce") would signify the ethical verification of a refuse to inscribe the art of
the 1990s, as such, under
presupposed community of sense differentially supplying the monotonous rubric of
the "everyday micro-utopias". Ethical in the desire for a relational aesthetics; (2) a
good criterion for the evalua-
"social transparency" considered as part and parcel of a tion of works could be their
"democratic concern" for immediacy and proximitYl making excess vis-a-vis repeated
calls to "modesty" and
this a demand for a "formal communism" [sic] that proposes "conviviality" ... It is on
to promote "lived time" as an "new artistic continent"5 the basis of such a criterion
that one could prefer Daniel
that above all hides the reality-as Jacques Ranciere (2004) Spoerri's Eat art or Antoni
has put it very well-of "its capacity to recode and to invert Miralda's Food culture
museum to Rirkrit Tiravanija's
forms of thought and attitudes that in the past strived for cu Iinary aesthetic.
radical artistic or political changes" (p.l72). In the age of In his response to Claire
Bishop's article (2004,
communication and capitalism of services where "marketing Autumn) Antagonism and
has preserved the idea of a certain relationship between relational aesthetics,
October, 110, Liam Gillick
the concept and the event" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 10) to become is not afraid to write,
a laboratory for the "control societies" means: Schizophrenia "Relational Aesthetics was
the result of informal argu-
and Consensus. This parodic reversal of Capitalism and ment and disagreement
Schizophrenia from an earlier time could account for the among Bourriaud and some
of the artists referred to in
obstinate recuperation of Deleuze and Guattari that takes his text.. .. The book does
contain major contradictions
place through the relational aesthetic: it participates in fact and serious problems of
in a rear-view mirror effect that makes the aesthetic rehuman- incompatibility with regard
to the artists repeatedly
isation of postmodernity dependant on the spectacular listed together as exemplars
dematerialization and re-symbolisation of art as the continu- of certain tendencies"
(Gillick, L. (2006, Winter)
ation of the "transversalist" political experience of the Contingent factors: A
protest years. In the same way the rupture announced at the response to Claire Bishop's
Antagonism and relational
start is now being reformulated as the need to reconstitute aesthetics, October, 115,96.)
Make of this what you will.
the "links between the 1960s and 70s and our own time"
3
(Bourriaud,2005,pp.12-13). This monstrositYl that one could call See the interview with
Michel Maffesoli in the
historico-transcendantal representedby a micropolitics of
1
catalogue of the Bienniale
intersubjectivity enunciates this short-circuit when it returns de Lyon 2005 that Nicolas
Bourriaud & Jerome Sans
to an intersubjective practice of the communicational act had commissioned.
that "artistically" revisits the micropolitical that had in fact 4
cf. de Certeau, M. (1984).
undermined the foundations for this in advance by opposing The practice of everyday life,
the molecular revolution to the "recentering of economic (S. Rendall, Trans.) Berkeley
(CA): University
activities on the production of subjectivity" (Guattari, ,.',1995, p. 122). of California Press.
It is truly schizophrenic when the relational aesthetic tries
to credit its surfing on the new universes of communication 5
cf. Bourriaud, B. (2005).
with a function of alternative democratization. Far from Experience de la duree
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liberating "the inter-human exchange from its economic (histoire d'une exposition),
u Lyon: Biennale de Lyon.
reification "in the cracks of existing social forms (as the rela- Bourriaud, B. (2003).
tional aesthetic claims- but without ever losing sight of the Postproduction, Dijon,
France: Les Presses du
trajectory from the gallery to the museum-laboratories of reel. Bourriaud, B. (2003).
the new economy of art and the accelerated return by a succes- Formes de vie: Le art
moderne et le invention
sion of Bienniales JTriennales J Documentas Manifestas ... )
J de soi, Paris: Denoel.
it instead promotes new criteria of merchandization and
participatory management of life by means of these exhibi -
tion devices that showcase the intensive extension of the
"culture of interactivityu (The relation here is actually
transaction). The art administrators are overjoyed because
they gain at the best possible price the social function of
"proximityU indicative of the postmodern democratization
of art breaking away from avant-gardist and "revolutionaryU
dangerousness in the transformation of forms into forces
(to liberate the forces of life from the forms that imprison
them to create Jyes the new-which we are told is "no longer
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a criterion but rather the surpassed characteristic of the
avant-gardes). The critics (who are here the same) are over-
joyed because they recover within intersubjectivity a "theory
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of form for which form is "the representative [Fr. deJegue]

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of desire in the image providing a horizon of sense for the
image "by pointing to a desired world Jwhich the beholder
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thus becomes capable of discussing J and based on which his ''-:;
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own desire can rebound (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 23). (Objection: Has i-'
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not form always been the relegation of desire in the image

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who makes the pictures will be projected quite consensually Bonne have called La
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the processes of artistic constitution for which the ready produces a true alternative
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made would then be the posthistoric truth. The biggest of desire in the form of U
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hurdle: Judgement then becomes the glossary of a practice the image. u

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To this Duchamp ready made of the social "infrathin thisJ
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human J all too human DuchampJ customised Little Democracy

recycled in the "transactional" reading of the new aesthetic
paradigm developed by Guattari (the political ontology of
desire inevitably redirected towards a "policy of forms U7 ) 7
In the last part of his book
one is tempted to oppose the hard truth of a constructivism (The relational aesthetic
pp. 86-1 04) Nicolas
of the signifierthat the Contemporary has forced into the Bourriaud appropriates
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field of the artistic Modernity. This "strategic radicalisation "the new aesthetic
paradigm" of Felix Guattari
of Duchamp in effect reduces Form-Art to language games (the title of the penultimate
about art, and furthermore reduces that to the iteration chapter of Chaosmosis).
The subsection "Felix
of signifiers that cut the subject up in order to turn the plas- Guattari and art" is includ-
ticity of language against the so-called plastic arts (cosa ed in the section entitled
Towards a policyofforms.
mentale, grey matter, art is what makes language realize its
unknowing). In this way Duchamp signifies the abolition of
all making-sign of the world by cutting up the expression and
the construction and then taking hold of the literal meaning
(Phallus, Art comes down to the same thing from Fountain
to Objet-Dard, from The Bride to The Given). The cutting(-out)
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of Painting by the "invisible colour of the title/words, which
is thus negotiated in accordance with a logic of the event
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reduces art to the Bachelor Machine of a "floating signifier
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whose "expressions can now only symbolize the "tautology
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in act of the construction "without any resonance in the
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physical world ex-posing its final Reality in the form of its
:

image fetichized as an object (given the absence of sensible

donation in the in-aesthetic state, art outside art is what
realizes its image-signifier). This is Duchamp/s unique posi-
tion in contemporary thought: translating the impossibility
of Romanticism into the nihilistic irony that takes over the
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"presentation of the unpresentable traditionally reserved
forthe aesthetic: not the Invisible of/in the Image, and no
longer the Intersubjectivity of/in Form, but the image-signi-
fier of/out of art as the in-aesthetic foundation of postmo-
dernity that one de-monstrates for the first time as such
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(in the guise of the Possible, "the hypophysic of the letter
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"unmasked of any aesthetic ).
It is this anti-aesthetic which will have determined
the level of intervention of a conceptual art which is at the
same time" exclusive U and "inclusive u , in its "informative u
endeavour to neutralise the aesthetic plane of composition,
"so that everything takes on a value of sensation reproduc-
ible to infinityU (this is the primary information of a materialist
function initially articulated as Language Art after Analytical
Philosophy); as well as the radicality of the alternatives
required to let the machination of being that has been named
Post/modern (with the bar expressing the phenomenon in
terms of forces) pass through logics of sensation likely to
disorganize or affect its course with their capacity for inventing
mutant subjective coordinates in which experimentation
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implicates explicates and complicates in a determinant

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fashion the physical as well as social "environment" (what Guattari,

1995 calls "the discovery of a negentropy at the heart of the banality of the environment" p. 181).
Weak thought [It. Pensiero debolel reprocessing this move-
ment of double meaning/easing [Fr. double entente/detente]
of strained relations in the zero-sum game of cultural protocols J

the Relational Aesthetic is a mark of the postproduction of this

moment where "the only events are exhibitions and the only J

concepts are products that can be sold" (Deleuze &Guattari, 1994, p. 10)-
for the user-consumer of forms who has renounced any attack
on cultural capital in order to adapt it to their desires J

in complete conviviality.

(In the text: Artists today practice postproduction

as a neutral operation a zero-sum game whereas the
J J

Situationists had the goal of corrupting the value of the

work being diverted in other words of attacking cultural
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capital. Production writes Michel de Certeau is a capital

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with which consumers can realize a set of operations that

make them the tenants of culture. Bourriaud, 2003, p. 33)

Translated by Tim Adams

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References ..c
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BOURRIAUD, N. (2002). The relational aesthetic, (S. Pleasance, F. Woods & M. Copeland, Trans.) (j)
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Dijon, France: Les Presses du reel.
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BOU RRIAU D, N. (2003). Postproduction, Dijon, France: Les Presses du reel. o
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BOU RRIAU D, N. (2005). Experience de la duree (histoire d'une exposition} Lyon, France: (j)
~
Biennale de Lyon, Paris-Musees. (j)
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DELEUZE, G. & GUATTARI, F. (1994). What is philosophy? (H. Tomlinson & G. Burchill, Trans.) 4-

London: Verso.
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GUATT ARI, F. (1995). Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm, (P. Bains, & J. Pefanis, Trans.) C
(j)
Bloomington: Indiana University. l/)
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RAN Cl ERE, J. (2004). Malaise dans le esthetique, Paris: Galilee. U
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