Naturaleza jurídico-tributaria de los Derechos arancelarios. arancelarios

In this essay I deal with three complexes that I often discuss in other contexts as well:

questions of the visual arts, of fashion and diagnosis of the present, and of philos-ophy, especially aesthetics and legitimating discourses that play an important role in the visual arts. In the debates surrounding art and politics on the one hand, and art and economy on the other, I feel it is important to adopt a vantage point com-bining the two sets of problems; and to identify in the economic sit uation of artists in general (and visual artists in particular) a hard and material web of reasons and resistances that might explain what is political about contemporary artistic practice in the sense of the politics of its economy, and how that relates to what makes up that artistic practice economically. Specific living and working conditions are one example, a highly specific type of self- exploitation, but also a highly specific new production apparatus that harnesses leisure activity, audience mobilization, and self- realization reflexes as economic resources.

Recently, two motifs have appeared that are already familiar from (or at least preformed in) other discursive fields. Common to both discourses is what the Austrian art journal Springerin has termed antihumanism, while others call it post- humanism. What do they have to do with contemporary art, and why in the world would I want to link them to Marxism?

Bruno Latour’s sociology, which is fairly well- known by now, can be described as a continuation and escalation of constructivist positions. If constructivist theo-ries take aspects of the world that are regarded as nature and disenchant them by showing that they are man- made and hence criticizable and changeable, Latour disenchants the humanist certainty of this distinction itself. He shows that man- made phenomena are partially made or coproduced by things or other nonhuman actors—or actants, as he also calls them—arguing for the abandonment of a subject- oriented, anthropocentric perspective on the construction of the social, which, however, he continues to view as constructed.¹ Unfortunately, in doing so he some-times sacrifices the option of critique, which in earlier forms of constructivism was still a plausible option, since those writers saw the world as partially constructed

This essay is loosely based on a paper given as part of the lecture series “Power of Materials/

Politics of Materiality” at the cx center for interdisciplinary studies, Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. An expanded version appears in a volume based on that lecture series, Macht des Materials – Politik der Materialität, ed. Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2014).

1 See, for example, Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans.

Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

problem, rather, is how to expand the variety of activities, including the activities of knowledge-production, so that women and men may be able to act differently and open up activities to new interests, perspectives, and frameworks hitherto not ade-quately explored or invented. The problem is not how to give women more adequate recognition (who is it that women require recognition from?), more rights, or more of a voice, but how to enable more action, more making and doing, more difference.

That is, the challenge facing feminism today is no longer only how to give women a more equal place within existing social networks and relations but how to enable women to partake in the creation of a future unlike the present.

by discourses like critique. At the same time, he gains a retraction of the somewhat flippant sense, which constructivisms so frequently involve, that the world is at humanity’s disposal.

Unlike Latour, who as a historian of science originally based his reflections on concrete laboratory situations, Quentin Meillassoux argues in strictly philosophical terms and sets great store by doing so. His aim is to eradicate a fundamental flaw of all philosophy since Kant: the distinction between a knowable world for con-sciousness and a world of things in themselves that the philosophical concon-sciousness holds at a distance and whose discussion it denounces as a metaphysical holdover deserving no further attention.² Meillassoux calls this position and all philosophies that share it “correlationism,” because they are only interested in the world in terms of the co- reality of human consciousness, not for its own sake. In this context, my point of departure, particularly with regard to a diagnosis of the present, could not be further removed from the anti- correlationist position. The diagnostician of the present is an even more “extreme” correlationist, because he or she not only posits the relevance of the world for a/the consciousness of every question or problem but its relevance for a decidedly transitory, especially fleeting consciousness of fashion.

It is paradoxical, then, that precisely my conviction that a thing that is in fashion can never lack dignity altogether, that it must always have a certain minimal rele-vance, should move me to engage with a discourse that wishes to banish from the question of truth not only fashion but every other specific, historical, and otherwise relativizing perspective of an interested consciousness as well.

Meillassoux takes modern measuring methods for dating fossils and the technique of radiotelescopy as his starting points. With these, he argues, a sphere becomes accessible in which the consciousness of those for whom the world other-wise exclusively exists was not even present yet. Nevertheless, for this world, which could not yet be differentiated into a world for consciousness and one in itself, accu-rate data can be gathered regarding the earth, the solar system, and distant quasar clusters. Meillassoux refers to objects from this time—former things in themselves, as it were—as “arche- fossils.” It was recently reported that around the year 1200 CE—as we know from the annual rings of very old cedar trees—massive gamma- ray bursts probably caused by the collision of two black holes struck our solar system, including Earth. At the time, however, people were busy with the death of Richard the Lionheart and the formation of guilds or, in the so- called Orient, with the firing of tiles and decorative art forms. They did not have the necessary measuring instru-ments, modern methods of scientific inquiry, or other forms of curiosity that would have tipped them off to the relevance of gamma- ray bursts, so they simply missed the gamma- ray burst entirely. It was one of the things in themselves that completely escaped their consciousness. Today, however, former things in themselves like these

2 See Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude : An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008).

have become measurable and datable; consequently, things in themselves do not absolutely elude measurability and hence cognition in general. Of course, it might be objected that the very design and specificity of measuring instruments are them-selves correlational, but the Meillassoux school treats the arche- fossils and their proven existence less as an epistemological argument against epistemology and for ontology than as an indication of the correlational inconsistency of epistemology and thus as an argument for an ontological reality that, for Meillassoux as for his teacher, Alain Badiou, is accessible through mathematics.

The end point of Meillassoux’s argument is the claim that the laws of nature themselves are not necessary but rather—as was previously only the case for scien-tific hypotheses about nature and the human formulation of its laws—necessarily contingent and that they only apply as long as they apply. Indeed, for Meillassoux the only necessity is the contingency of the laws of nature. He rejects the three Kantian options that Badiou sums up in his preface to Meillassoux’s book After Finitude as dogmatism, skepticism, and critique, instead holding out the prospect of a kind of fundamental critique—although he doesn’t call it that—that embarks on the adventure of cognizing a world in which everything could be otherwise, in which people, for example, could rise from the dead. Meillassoux has been working for years on a project entitled L’inexistence divine, mythologized by his followers, in which he seeks to show that the unprovoked arising of things such as cognition, suffering, or pleasure is a rational concept and that more such outrageous things are therefore likely to arise in the future.

“These are the voyages of the Starship Philosophy. Its mission: to boldly go where no man has gone before …” This, roughly speaking, was my first reaction upon reading a manuscript by Meillassoux and finding out in what circles he is read and admired. I was also reminded of something I said in philosophy class in my junior year of high school, when during a group discussion of Kant, I objected that on LSD the thing in itself could be cognitively accessed. Now, this comparison with my teenage self is unfair, of course. Meillassoux takes great pains to back up his philosophical sensationalism with undeniably brilliant arguments that are naturally speculative—that’s the idea, after all. In the interest of fairness, even a diagnostician of the present should avoid the temptation to categorize Meillassoux’s philosophy purely on the basis of its success and of the intellectual and spiritual needs of the young men who are so excited about it—and not just in keeping with the maxim that one should always make one’s opponent’s case as strong as possible. Assuming he actually turns out to be an opponent: I am not interested in arguing with him on his own terrain—that of metaphysical speculation—nor in joining his all too facile opponents in denouncing him as an escapist and an author of philosophical adventure fiction.

I do wonder, however, why people who come predominantly from the Left should respond with such enthusiasm to a philosophy that seems to reject the central tenet of left- wing thought, the historicity of human societies, as doubly

64 Matter Matter 65

anthropocentrically limited—as a purely human and therefore subjective knowledge of a purely human activity—but which meticulously avoids the elephant in the room:

How does it feel about politics? From time to time, there are isolated answers, for example, that metaphysics, which is after all what this school claims to be practicing, can have nothing to do with politics and that political engagement and metaphys-ical speculation are independent pursuits that must not be conflated. The attempts to translate into political practice the dialogues with political philosophers such as Slavoj Žižek and Badiou that Meillassoux does conduct and has conducted in the past never progress beyond the identification of highly philosophical differences.

Badiou and Žižek, for example, argue (with or against Hegel) for the “contingency of necessity,” whereas Meillassoux believes in the “necessity of contingency.” The art world, which pays close attention to all this, is used to taking its political cues from authors such as Badiou and Žižek, and their numerous comments on current affairs. Presenting themselves as public intellectuals, the two philosophers revel in the opportunity to connect their views on global politics and current events, wom-en’s rights, movies, and the Middle East (views that, in Žižek’s case, are constantly changing, while in Badiou’s case they have been stubbornly the same for millions of years) with their ideas on Hegel and thus to relieve their philosophy of a bit of its abstractness. In Meillassoux’s case, such bridges are impossible: after all, his term for the world in thing- in- itself mode or the beyond of the correlational world is le Grand Dehors (the Great Outdoors). Constructions like this are attractive and pop-ular not just with a philosophy that is in search of a mission beyond administering the conceptual status quo or offering support to aesthetic and cultural- studies proj-ects. It is also appealing to artists who come not from the hegemonic visual arts but from its fringes, where irony is less mandatory and where elegant detachment and jaded theoretical sophistication are on the decline, where grand gestures, pathos, and above all an often nebulous romanticism rise up from dark drones and jagged Black Metal sounds.

Object- oriented philosophies, however, present another side, one based more on Latour. In Graham Harman, object- oriented philosophy has found a mediator between itself and more hard- core Speculative Realism; in Levi Bryant, a canny diplomatic disseminator of the movement who Americanizes it and makes it less dogmatic. Both Harman and Bryant draw their supporters less (or at least not exclu-sively) from philosophical and artistic circles but also, emphatically, from a new, deromanticized but politically radicalized ecological milieu. Evidently, speaking of nonhuman things gives philosophical grounds for rejecting the priority of the human or subjective standpoint because it is contradictory, illogical, or disproportionate (that is, inconsistent with reality), but also finds conflict- based, not to say political grounds, rooted in clashing interests, for straightening out and dusting off ontolo-gies and metaphysics. There are grounds, as it were, in the secondary attributes of things that make it necessary to change the way we think about the primary ones.

Marxism—even beyond The German Ideology—might well have something to say

about the relationship between politics and ontology that cannot simply be reduced to its correlationism. Oversimplifying slightly, one might say that such political grounds are better received and more often cited in the United States, especially among ecological leftists, whereas the adventurous philosophical grounds seem to make an impression on communities in France, Great Britain, and the global art world, which have long been influenced by and excited about Deleuze, in large part because, at least in the imaginations of most readers, it is not so outrageous to go from geological times, which were already a point of departure for Deleuze and Guattari, to the arche- fossils.

At this point, I would like to make another suggestion that may help unite various strands I have broached here, namely, Speculative Realism and Object- Oriented Ontology, the political past of most of the authors, the political agenda of most of the readers, and finally, the role of the visual arts. My jumping- off point is a consideration I have presented elsewhere on the role of labor in the creation of value in the visual arts. Normally, reflections like these are dismissed on the grounds that in the visual arts one is dealing with special objects whose value derives from their singularity. Singularity here is understood in various ways: as pieces that are absolutely rare, meaning, unique; as pieces that are incomparable within a system of value and evaluation; or with reference to the inexplicable judgments of incom-parable (collecting, curating, museum- going) subjects. I have sought to show that all kinds of artworks, including the value assigned to them, its discursive presence, and its function in regimes of attention, can be derived from the highly developed collaboration of highly (formally and informally) qualified and dramatically under-paid individuals—and that their value drops wherever these forms of collaboration are less well developed and engage with each other more sluggishly, less precisely, where there is no nexus of hipsterdom, collectors’ money, intellectuals’ expertise, and “attractiveness technology” at work. Moreover, I have tried to demonstrate that the classical labor theory of value (as corrected by Marx from a value- critical perspective) can be applied to this collaboration. When the time required for educa-tion, including the often necessary hours of informal education in clubs and bars, is incorporated into the calculation of an average socially necessary labor time, a very plausible relationship turns up between production level and quality, labor time, and value, generating ways to speak about exploitation and surplus value in the art market with greater precision.

In the present context, however, what is important about these ideas is a by- product of them. It turns out that one can abstract even further from the Marxian theory of surplus value and its application to the art market and the production of artistic objects and services, that the theory of exploitation it delineates can be framed even more generally for production and being produced per se, for the interaction with matter and material. This can be done by formulating a theory of surplus value like the one I have just described, which reflects the interplay of formal and informal, material and immaterial labor, as a theory of input/objectification and output for

DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN IS MARXISM A CORRELATIONISM?

purposes of exchange.³ Many minds, connections, beautiful physical attributes, fur-nishings and elements of interior design, address list managers, artists’ bodies, art- historical memes, quanta of knowledge, and trays of white wine invisibly contribute in myriad ways to the production not of artworks but of valuable artworks, of objects from which value can be output or extracted. Exchange value. The point of all such abstraction from the theory of surplus value, however, must be that such output is not fair and proportionate: it isn’t the case that all the brain power, the incense and inspiration, the perfumed scent of gallery openings are retrievable when I purchase an artwork. Rather, what is retrievable is an exchange value—whose quantity, however, has something to do with the magnitude of the invested quantum of incense and per-fumes, because that quantum defines an average range within which the price varies.

There are other objectification/output constructions that distort what is invested in ways other than capitalist value creation. Indexical recording media like audiotapes and film actually make it possible to output something that can be rec-ognized as what was invested. To the extent that the input is mediatized, the output resembles it (in ways specific to the medium employed). Mediatization is a different form of disproportionality from value creation. There are others as well, or others are conceivable. What they all have in common is the fact that they take periods of time that a material in the broadest sense has spent together with a processing activity in the broadest sense and transform them into an object that is socially defined by the fact that it can be grasped without any inherent temporality, that it is crystalline and yields a meaning, that it can be exchanged, played, or eaten. The common feature of all these transformations is the fact that they produce disproportionalities, incon-gruities; their transformations are curses, metamorphoses, not phased developments that grow out of one another, like the evolutions that characterize production before it is commercialized, but leaps, as Marx says at one point as well. The appearance of diseases, wear and tear, and symptoms of use are further rewarding examples that could be studied within the framework of this model. In so doing, it would be important to conceptualize the transformation as value- neutral, to grasp the dispro-portionality technically and to evaluate it in specific local instances, in order to avoid

There are other objectification/output constructions that distort what is invested in ways other than capitalist value creation. Indexical recording media like audiotapes and film actually make it possible to output something that can be rec-ognized as what was invested. To the extent that the input is mediatized, the output resembles it (in ways specific to the medium employed). Mediatization is a different form of disproportionality from value creation. There are others as well, or others are conceivable. What they all have in common is the fact that they take periods of time that a material in the broadest sense has spent together with a processing activity in the broadest sense and transform them into an object that is socially defined by the fact that it can be grasped without any inherent temporality, that it is crystalline and yields a meaning, that it can be exchanged, played, or eaten. The common feature of all these transformations is the fact that they produce disproportionalities, incon-gruities; their transformations are curses, metamorphoses, not phased developments that grow out of one another, like the evolutions that characterize production before it is commercialized, but leaps, as Marx says at one point as well. The appearance of diseases, wear and tear, and symptoms of use are further rewarding examples that could be studied within the framework of this model. In so doing, it would be important to conceptualize the transformation as value- neutral, to grasp the dispro-portionality technically and to evaluate it in specific local instances, in order to avoid