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Lecture
No we can’t: consensual sovereignty and contemporary art
Cornelius Cardew, celebrated avantgarde composer turned co-founder of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), gave up on what he began to recognize as ʻbourgeoisʼ post-serialist abstraction and turned instead to the production of popular and lyrical songwriting, performing at rallies and demonstrations on the back of lorries with a group of equally committed musicians. The author of Stockhausen Serves Imperialism (1974) leaves contemporary accountants of his life and work in a quandary: how to recognize the opus of a man whose most important gesture, made explicitly through his work, was to give up?
Of course Cardew did not give up as such. He attempted to drop out of one circuit of production (that understood and valorized by systems of artistic production), and enter another in which the intensities of formal and conceptual acting are replaced by the destination of political agency. But his story presents a problem for contemporary cultural industries, built on a fantasy of repeatedly positivised production within the public realm. We are always encouraged to make something in
the space allotted to us – a composition, an exhibition, a book, a work, an event – when sometimes the most apposite mode of action might be to stop and walk away.
Whilst in the political realm the decision not to act is recognised as a forceful procedure in which absence, refusal and withdrawal are understood as strategies of protest, contemporary art would seem to operate in obedience with a sovereignty of consensus, meaning a supremacy of sensuous participation, whereby the opportunity to act is always taken up, no matter how illogical, counter-intuitive or dubious the consequences. This consensus sovereignty forms the basis of contemporary exhibition-making in which doing, as opposed to not doing, is fetishised on both a commercial and ethical basis, running parallel to current democratic politics, also based on consensus, in which cultural production can only be recognised through its ameliorative, socialising capacity. The perceived necessity to make and fill the spaces and times available for and in the name of art has in its recent idioms been carried out diversely, forcefully, yet the desire to stop grows stronger, exacerbated by the recognition that not all types of acting, showing, telling - collectivising - are necessary, useful or important.
Jacques Rancière has said that ‘[t]he folly of the times is the wish to use consensus to cure the diseases of consensus’ and here we might recognise the mode through which consensus politics is formed, especially but not only in the cultural world. Composition, as Cardew realised, is carried out in all its forms through the impulse – encouraged, funded, commissioned or otherwise – to fill the spaces and times laid bare by politics. Cardew got tantalisingly close to a complete
giving up, an action foreclosed in his instance by the desire to still see in the public playing of music some political affirmation. Perhaps we all do this – get close to giving up then swerve back into production, caught in the consistent reinventions of capital, unable to stop entirely. The filling of these times and spaces by art in the name of public need suggests that we have lost the
capacity to distinguish between that which is generally actioned and that through which inaction may otherwise occur, between space-filling and making space.
Andrea Phillips
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