WHY ONLY ART CAN SAVE US Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency
SANTIAGO ZABALA
INTRODUCTION Yet from where does the emergency of the future of philosophy come? Must not philosophy itself—in the act of beginning—first awaken this emergency? Such emergency stands on this side of misery and grief, which always roam merely in some corner of established beings and of their “truth.” —Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event)
Si nce Martin Heidegger said that “only a God can still save us” in a legendary interview with Der Spiegel, many have interpreted the word “God” too literally.1 They have ignored that to Heidegger “God” was simply another realm where Being takes place, as he had explained thirty years earlier in “The Origin of the Work of Art.”2 In that famous essay he indicates not only how art embodies an ontological struggle between the self-concealing earth and the illuminating world but also that the event of truth can happen in different acts, such as the “essential sacrifice,” “founding a state,” or a “work of art.”3 Only Reiner Schürmann and Gianni Vattimo have managed to overcome the literal interpretation and suggest that “only Proteus” or “communism” can save us,4 but few have focused on “art” as a realm of salvation—even though Heidegger listed it among Being’s events.5 It should not come as a surprise that Heidegger wrote this important essay right after his political adventure of 1933 as rector of the University of Freiburg, in other words, after the failure and error implied by this political involvement,6 which inevitably caused him so many academic, public, and psychological difficulties, as the recent publication of his Black Notebooks (once again) confirmed.7 1
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It seems as if art could offer a possibility of salvation not only from the ontic world but also from the metaphysical implications of Heidegger’s idea, given the different events of truth he lists.8 Nonetheless, if Heidegger and his followers have been searching for salvation (or a decent decadence) in different events, it is not because they were searching for the one correct answer but rather because they have seen that no answer today could be framed within metaphysics, that is, where “Beings have been replaced by beings,”9 where “everything is held to be calculable,”10 and where the “only emergency is the lack of a sense of emergency.”11 We have reached a point, according to Heidegger, where human beings themselves, like the organized superman, seem to dominate everything and are dispropriated of the last possibility of their essence: they can never recognize in the extreme blindness that the human forgetfulness of being, a forgetfulness brought to maturity along with the abandonment of beings by being, leaves human beings without a sense of emergency insofar as it compels them to think that the ordering of beings and the instituting of order would bring about the substantive fullness of beings, whereas indeed what is assured everywhere is only the endlessly self-expanding emptiness of devastation. The dispropriation of beings, which takes from them the truth of beyng, allows humanity, ensnared in such beings, to fall into a lack of a sense of emergency.12
In the current condition of accomplished realism, where the culmination of Being’s replacement by beings (or the replacement of existence by objects), that is, in the technological organization of the world, existence has been jettisoned not only topologically but also aesthetically.13 “The lack of a sense of emergency,” Heidegger explained, “is greatest where self-certainty has become unsurpassable, where everything is held to be calculable, and especially where it has been decided, with no previous questioning, who we are and what we are supposed to do.”14 In such a world, where we are constantly under surveillance and where even the future is becoming predictable through online data mining,15 the problem is not only the emergencies we confront but the ones we are missing. Recent publicly remarked emergencies, such as the refugee crisis in Europe, ISIS terrorist attacks, and Edward Snowden’s revelations of U.S. National Security Agency surveillance, served to preserve the 2
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status quo. The refugee crisis and terrorist attacks are consequences of decades of Western military constraints in the Middle East, and Snowden’s revelations have served only to show how constrained and framed we are and continue to be. These events mark the absence of emergency, which does not mean they are not emergencies but rather that they are framed within our globalized system. They emerge as a consequence of this frame, which is the greatest emergency. To distinguish Heidegger’s “absence of emergency” (“Notlosigkeit”) from the popular “state of emergency” (“Ausnahmezustand”) of Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, and Giorgio Agamben, one must remember that the latter is a consequence of the former. Even though the terms have often been translated as “lack” or “state” of “emergency” and “exception,” Heidegger’s term does not refer to the “sovereign who decides on the exceptional case” but rather to “Being’s abandonment,” which also includes the decision of the sovereign.16 If a sovereign can decide upon or declare a state of exception or emergency in an epoch where Being has already been abandoned, then the epoch’s metaphysical condition is its greatest emergency, and this condition explains the rise of the term “emergency” in the public discourse. The fact that a number of intellectuals have embraced the rhetoric of exception, crisis, and emergency that is deployed by governments (the state of “exception,” the burkini “crisis,” or the transgender bathroom “emergency”)17 is an indication, as Janet Roitman pointed out, that this idea has become “a blind spot for the production of knowledge about what constitutes historical significance and about what constitutes social or historical meaning.”18 Although these “blind spots” entail “unremitting and often implicit judgment about latencies, or errors and failings that must be eradicated and, evidently hopefully, overcome,”19 they still conceal the greatest emergency. As we will see, if artists can “thrust” and “rescue” us into the greatest emergencies, it’s because they have retreated from what “constitutes social or historical meaning” or, as Heidegger says, “cultural politics.” The greatest emergency, then, concerns more than aspects of law, politics, and society, which belong to the ontic realm of knowledge. It also involves senses and feelings, that is, “existence,” which, Heidegger says, is never an “object” but instead is “Being—it is there only insofar as in each case a living ‘is’ it.”20 Herbert Marcuse summarizes Heidegger’s existentialist concerns over the rationalization of the world when he points out how the “total 3
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subordination of reason to metaphysical reality . . . would inevitably prepare the way for a ‘racist ideology.’ ”21 Although this racist ideology was already evident at the beginning of the twentieth century, demonstrated by the revolt of the humanistic spirit against the imposition of social rationalization in the artistic avant-garde and in theological and philosophical existentialism, “during the past century such forms of ‘humanistic’ resistance have appeared ever weaker and more partial.”22 This absence of revolutionary spirit is evident now in a number of young philosophers who once again “turn toward objects,” who seek to submit thought to “reality”: Quentin Meillassoux demands a return to “the Great Outdoors” (“le Grand Dehors”),23 which in his thought is constituted of supposedly independent objects; Graham Harman believes in a “reality never exhausted by any relation to it by humans or other entities.”24 This primacy of things over human relations has also given birth to a “speculative” or “realist aesthetics” that understands artworks as independent “not only from their social and political surroundings, their physical settings or their commercial exchange value, but from any other object whatsoever.”25 In sum, together with Markus Gabriel and others,26 they call for a “reality” independent of human beings, even though, as Slavoj Žižek recalls, “there is no ‘neutral’ reality within which gaps occur, within which frames isolate domains of appearances. Every field of ‘reality’ (every ‘world’) is always-already enframed, seen through an invisible frame.”27 Although these “new” philosophers justify their theoretical beliefs in different ways, such as the demonstration—despite Thomas Kuhn—of the supposed stability of a scientific (in particular, physical) understanding of the world, their work is part of a global call to order and to orderly behavior.28 All this is not very different, as Arthur C. Danto recalls, from “what in France was called after World War I rappel à l’ordre—a call to order—in which avant-garde artists were enjoined to put aside their experiments and represent the world in ways reassuring to those whose worlds had been torn apart by war.”29 This order, in the twenty-first century, contrary to what we might expect at first, does not simply refer to a reality that must be respected or imposed but also to the absence of events and emergencies, an absence that seems to constitute the condition of our globalized world. Although the media—traditional, online, and social—are full of “events” and “emergencies,” the dominant impression of citizens in industrialized countries, whether at their centers or 4
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in their postcolonial slums, is that nothing new happens: reality is fixed, stable, and secured. As we can see, the absence of emergency is a consequence of politics, finance, and culture having been framed within previously established realist parameters. These parameters are meant to rescue us from emergencies, from whatever emerges as different. It should come as no surprise that “to emerge” (which comes from Latin “e-,” “out of, from, according to,” and “mergere,” “to dip, plunge, immerse”) suggests openness, undecidedness, and multiple potentialities. But whoever does not submit to the ongoing absence of emergency is defined as mistaken or, worse, on the wrong side of reality—maybe even the wrong side of the border. Anything that is not framed within the dominant paradigms— political (democracy), financial (neoliberalism), and military (NATO)— not only is repressed but also constitutes an emergency as it strives to change these established paradigms. The agents that seek to disrupt the framing powers are the weak, the remnants of Being, that is, every person and idea forced to the margins of this frame and that inevitably strives for change or, better, for an alteration of the imposed representations of reality. This alteration is necessary not only politically and ethically but also aesthetically. An aesthetic force is needed to shake us out of our tendency to ignore the “social paradoxes” generated by the political, financial, and technological frames that contain us; the “urban discharge” of slums and plastic and electronic wastes; the “environmental calls” caused by global warming, ocean pollution, and deforestation; and the “historical accounts” of invisible, ignored, and denied events. These aesthetic forces, like Žižek’s four powerful antagonisms,30 will disrupt not only capitalism’s indefinite reproduction but also realism’s metaphysical impositions. Art, like other “events of truth,”31 does not operate within this metaphysical frame but rather at its margins and as a response to the lack of a sense of emergency. This does not mean that artists and galleries are now literally located in the slums, but they present works that disclose what remains of Being: paradoxes, discharges, calls, and accounts. If, as we will see, there are a number of artists whose works demand our intervention rather than simple aesthetic contemplation, it’s not because they lack classically artistic sensibility but rather because the lack of a sense of emergency in framed democracies demands a new artistic shock. Just as impressionism was a response to industrialization and 5
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Dada to the First World War, contemporary art of emergency responds to the “lack of a sense of emergency” that we are all framed within. Without ignoring the eighteenth-century split between “fine arts” (poetry, sculpture, music) and “crafts” (popular songs, embroidery, shoemaking) brilliantly exposed by Larry Shiner in The Invention of Art,32 my ontological account of art strives to overcome this division in order to focus on concerned disclosures. My goal is not to define art in the light of changes in the visual arts but rather to interpret these changes through the lack of a sense of emergency, the “racist ideology” I have already mentioned. The aim of this book, then, is not simply to criticize previous aesthetic theories or propose a new one; rather, I wish to point out the aesthetic emergency, in all senses of the word. Chapter 1, “The Emergency of Aesthetics,” will outline how Being’s events are concealed, and chapter 3, “Emergency Aesthetics,” will outline a philosophical stance capable of interpreting the ontological essence of contemporary art, in other words, its existential disclosures. As we can see, art’s ontological nature does not belong to aesthetics but rather to the remains of Being, that is, to everything that is not framed within metaphysics. This is probably why Heidegger, in Contributions to Philosophy (a text written after his political misadventure), pointed out how the question of the origin of the work of art is not intent on an eternally valid determination of the essence of the work of art, a determination that could also serve as a guideline for the historiological survey and explanation of the history of art. Instead, the question stands in the most intrinsic connection to the task of overcoming aesthetics, i.e., overcoming a particular conception of beings—as objects of representation. The overcoming of aesthetics again results necessarily from the historical confrontation with metaphysics as such. . . . Within the horizon of this knowledge, art loses its relation to culture; art manifests itself here only as an event of be-ing.33
As long as we do not overcome these representations, we will continue to experience the “absence of art,”34 the state of beings framed within the metaphysical organization of the lack of a sense of emergency. This is why, according to Heidegger, to overcome this emergency it’s not enough simply to leave aside “what is objectively representable”; rather, “something 6
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extraordinary, unimaginable, thrust[s] [us] into this emergency.”35 This is the “Emergency Through Art” presented in chapter 2 and that I will refer to throughout the book. My postmetaphysical aesthetics does not aim simply to overcome representations of reality but rather to disclose and interpret the forgotten and annihilated existential appeal of Being.36 Although this occurred several times throughout the history of art (Pablo Picasso’s Guernica is the paradigmatic example here: painted as a response to Spanish Nationalist forces’ bombing of a town in Basque country, it was used not only to inform the public but also as a symbol of all the ignored victims of war),37 since the fall of the Berlin wall, when globalization began to frame our lives politically, financially, and militarily, the call to this aesthetics has drastically increased among artists. Art often works better than commercial media or historical reconstructions as a way to express and bear emergencies. A work of art, such as a song or a photograph, is not that different from other objects in the world. The difference is not one of kind but rather of degree, intensity, and depth. This is evident in our everyday encounters. Media photographs can be truthful, but rarely as powerfully as a photographic work of art. Thus, Hans-Georg Gadamer believes that the term “aesthetic object” is a completely useless concept. “When a work of art truly takes hold of us, it is not an object that stands opposite us which we look at in the hope of seeing through it to an intended conceptual meaning. Just the reverse. The works is an ‘Ereignis’— an event that ‘appropriates us’ into itself. It shocks us, it overturns us, and sets up a world of its own, into which we are drawn, as it were.”38 Nonetheless, now that aesthetics has overcome metaphysics, that is, objectivist-representational forms (which also limited art’s creations), it can focus on the existential claims of art, which such distinguished thinkers as Arthur C. Danto, Jacques Rancière, and Gianni Vattimo have already begun to respond to through their “transfigurations of common places,” “dissensus from the sensible,” and “claims to truth” aesthetic theories.39 These responses are attempts to enact the demands not only of art but also of politics.40 These contemporary thinkers have moved beyond aesthetic representationalism and formalism both because of their postmetaphysical philosophical positions and because they are affected by art’s current ontological appeal. The truth of art no longer rests in representations of reality but rather in an existential project of transformation. The end of art proclaimed by Hegel and Danto 7
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was never a matter of art simply becoming conceptual, that is, “philosophical,” but instead its becoming existential.41 The radical changes brought about in the advent of global society mean that the artist today must respond to a wider public than in the past, one that is concerned with the same global emergencies that affect the artist. This is why Danto believes that art today is not for connoisseurs of collectors alone. Nor is it only for the people who share the artist’s culture or nationality. The globalization of the art world means that art addresses us in our humanity, as men and women who seek in art for meanings that neither of art’s peers—philosophy and religion—in what Hegel spoke of as the realm of Absolute Spirit, are able to provide.42
After the eras of “imitation” and “ideology,” when artists were often commissioned for their work, we have now entered the era of the “lack of a sense of emergency”; now artists, along with their audience, are called to intervene for the sake of humanity. But how does the encounter with the work of art take place today? It is no longer a question of the pleasure obtained by the identification of beauty and luminosity (the predominant aesthetic tradition up to Plotinus), the harmonious synthesis between sensibility and understanding (as Kant suggested), or even any more recent aesthetic system but rather, as Vattimo proposes, “an active interpretation and practical intervention.”43 In sum, it’s no longer possible to claim that the encounter with a work of art can be explained on the basis of optical, sociological, or even psychological models: this would ignore an ontological appeal to intervene expressed in contemporary art. As Danto brilliantly explains in his last book, What Art Is (2013), even though much “contemporary art is hardly aesthetic at all, it has in its stead the power of meaning and the possibility of truth, and depends upon the interpretation that brings these into play.”44 This different aesthetic relation with the work of art began taking shape in 1917, when Marcel Duchamp revealed his Fountain and pointed out how any “readymade” could become a work of art if placed within the walls of a museum, which forced the public to question the work and enter into dialogue with it.45 But there are now more radical examples of art determined to save us, such as the work of Tom Waits, Steven Soderbergh, Dmitry Lipkin, and Colette Burson. When one listens to Waits’s 8
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“The Road to Peace” or views Soderbergh’s Traffic or Lipkin and Burson’s Hung,46 it is difficult to remain simply aesthetically satisfied because they involve us at an existential level. But this is not because they simply narrate the truth of ongoing events (the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the drug trail between Mexico and the United States, and middle-class desperation in Detroit) in a more objectivist way than we are accustomed to. Rather, they demand that we take a stance in a process of transformation that is vital for our future. As Danto and Rancière would say, if there are “transfigurations” (in music, films, and TV series) of our “commonplaces” (conflict, violence, and economic recession) in these three works, they emerge not only from the creative energy in the composition but also because these commonplaces have become too common and we feel the need to “dissent” from them. In sum, if we have become so accustomed to these commonplaces that we take them for granted, then art, as Heidegger said, is “something” that “thrust[s] us into” emergencies, that is, saves us from discrimination, forgetfulness, and annihilation. Rather than points of arrival for consumers’ identification, contemplation, and realization of beauty, works of art are points of departure to change the world, a world that needs new interpretations instead of better descriptions.47 While some might consider emergency aesthetics excessively political, it is difficult to ignore contemporary art’s interest in our salvation, which one could also consider a late response to Walter Benjamin’s call to politicize art in the perspective of a communist revolution, one that is finally taking shape in some regions of the world.48 “The main goal of aesthetics today,” Michael Kelly rightly points out, “is to explain how the transformation of demands on art to demands by art is already a reality in some contemporary art.”49 These “demands by art” are particularly significant for my objectives because they will help aesthetics overcome not only its metaphysical nature but also our own, where the “will to get out,” as Heidegger noticed, “is lacking.”50 This will is lacking because of our condition within framed democracies and also because of our exaggerated confidence in metaphysics, which continues to condition aesthetics. This is why to formulate an aesthetic judgment today does not consist in recognizing the beautiful qualities of a work of art but rather in revealing, interpreting, and, most of all, emphasizing the fact that the work strives to belong to a community that has been discharged by history. This is probably why Heidegger’s most 9
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distinguished disciple, Gadamer, was so concerned to emphasize how art, like science, also manifests truth claims. The only difference between them is their requirements. Science will remain satisfied with measurable truths (information regarding the state of things), but art demands we enter into conversation with the work, that is, intervene existentially.51 It should not come as a surprise that Gadamer founded upon these arguments what today goes under the name of hermeneutics, a philosophical stance focused upon the interpretative nature of human beings.52 Although juridical and biblical hermeneutics (the interpretation of laws and the scriptures) played a significant role throughout the history of hermeneutics, Gadamer, in Truth and Method, decided to emphasize its aesthetic nature. While many believe this was to contrast the ongoing “neutralization” in the developments of Kantianism, Gadamer was probably also following Heidegger’s political disillusionment, searching in art for the possibility of salvation. After all, Gadamer’s aesthetic experience was modeled on the notion of dialogue, which does not aim for a passive exchange of different interpretations of a work of art but rather to effect change, to save us from what we are. But how does hermeneutics, which had constantly been accused of relativism (for stressing the interpretative nature of truth) and aestheticism defend itself, given that its theoretical architect founded the discipline on these arguments? As Gadamer explained: “Hermeneutic philosophy, as I envision it, does not understand itself as an ‘absolute’ position but as a path of experiencing. Its modesty consists in the fact that for it there is no higher principle than this: holding oneself open to the conversation.”53 However, hermeneutics is anything but an aestheticizing approach, because my whole argument begins precisely with art and not with aesthetics. There I would rather speak of the transcendence that goes beyond everything one encounters in the experience of life. Take for instance, ingratitude, the lack of thankfulness. This is something King Lear teaches us. This is also what Aristotle meant when he found poetry to be more philosophical than history. The writing of history deals with things as they have really happened; poetry in contrast shows how they will always happen.54
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As we can see, hermeneutics strives for dialogue or, in Richard Rorty’s words, to pursue “the conversation of humankind”55 in order to allow events of Being (such as God, communism, or art) to “teach” and “address us in our humanity.” If Gadamer, with other hermeneutic philosophers, was concerned with art, it is because it points out the emergency of aesthetics as well as our own. Even though this emergency has only recently begun to be explicitly addressed,56 it is difficult to imagine this was not among Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s concerns when they explored art’s demands. Art discloses the remains of Being, the emergency at the margins of framed democracies. It exposes Being’s ontological condition (weak, discarded, and forgotten) for those who are politically prepared to interpret it. In sum, like art, hermeneutics does not seek compromises but interpretations, reactions, and, most of all, interventions. This is how the title of this book ought to be interpreted: only art can save us given the emergency of aesthetics, that is, the political “neutralization” or “lack of a sense of emergency” that we find ourselves in. Perhaps this political impasse is what moved Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said to create the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra (in which young Israeli and Arab musicians perform Beethoven, Mozart, and other classics), which asks the public not just to enjoy but also to intervene hermeneutically. If Barenboim was so pleased when a man, after one of his concerts in Gaza City, told him, “We feel like the world has forgotten us. We receive aid supplies, and we’re grateful for that. But the fact that you have come here with your orchestra gives us the feeling that we are human beings,” it’s because art, unlike politics, is “willing to do everything” for the sake of salvation.57
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praise for Why Only Art Can Save Us “Santiago Zabala’s extraordinary book strikes at the very heart of our spiritual predicament. From austerity politics to security measures, everything is legitimized with the axiom that we live in a state of emergency. The first task of the critique of ideology today is thus to dispel this myth of emergency—something that Zabala does brilliantly, combining theoretical stringency with immense readability.” SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK , author of Less Than Nothing and Absolute Recoil “Why is the absence of emergency the greatest emergency? This question is at the heart of Zabala’s new book, which develops further his ‘ontology of remnants,’ i.e., what remains of Being in the twenty-first century. Art, like communism, is not an aesthetic or political subject matter for Zabala but rather an ontological event where Being emerges as remnants. This is why instead of aesthetic contemplation he calls for existential interventions meant to change the world. The art world, as well as the philosophical community, will benefit from Zabala’s best book so far.” GIANNI VATTIMO , author of Art’s Claim to Truth and Of Reality “Why Only Art Can Save Us is a crucial publication for anyone concerned about the future and necessity of art in the twenty-first century. Its main claim is that the possibility of art lies in its aesthetics of emergency. Although we live in a time of social, political, and environmental emergencies, Zabala makes the convincing case that we tend to repress the emergencies we live in. The aesthetics of emergency discloses the concealment of emergency as the essential emergency, helping us to recover the sense of emergency. This aesthetics proposes a major shift in our understanding of art, which is less about representation than existence.” CHRISTINE ROSS , author of The Past Is the Present; It’s the Future Too: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art, and The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression “Zabala’s new book is a timely and provocative exploration of art in the age of emergency. Today, the real emergency we face is not so much the populist emergencies of media spectacles that confront us ad nauseum day in and day out; rather, it is the emergency that arises from concealing the destruction and oppression that neoliberal democracy, militarism, and global capitalism inflict. It is here where art can save us. Why Only Art Can Save Us is a major contribution to political philosophy and the philosophy of art.” ADRIAN PARR , author of Birth of a New Earth and The Wrath of Capital
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