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Eric AlliezCapitalism and Schizophrenia andConsensus: Of the Relational Aesthetic'I will give just a quick sketch of my argument by choosing toignore the artists, theirworks, the art administration andtheir places of exhibition (starting with the "site of contemporary creation U at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, until recentlycodirected by Nicolas Bourriaud and Jerome Sans) and focusinstead on an order of discourse that has become strangelyfamiliar to us: the relational aesthetic (which accounts for the"symptomal U quality of my reading). So familiar that the artof the nineties, which this discourse brings into focus byasserting the "misunderstandingsU surrounding it are due tothe"shortcomings of theoretical discourse u which fails torecognise the rupture with the critical art of the sixties, thatthis art itself could only be the audiovisual archive of thisengaged commentary on relational form which supposedlyanimates a new division of the art world into revisited modernand truly contemporary. Reading over this equally descriptive and prescriptive discourse when it affirms that "anyhow,the liveliest factor that is played out on the chessboard ofart has to do with interactive, user-friendly and relational

U 2concepts (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 8) The argument in Nicolas Bourriaud's book-manifesto

on the art of the nineties, that contemporary art would notknow how to engage in current relations "to society, tohistory, to culture" without this rupture, possesses a doubleand paradoxical characteristic: It cannot in fact conform tothe "relational" perspective of an aesthetic characterised bycategories of consensus-to restore the lost sense of community by repairing social divisions, patiently weaving a "relational fabric", returning spaces of conviviality, searching forforms of sustainable development and consumption, lowenergies able to infiltrate the cracks within existing images,etc. - other than by discharging the force of the most innovative theoretical and artistic practices of the sixties andseventies into modest forms, in the "modest connections"of a micropolitics of intersubjectivity. Under the title ofa new mental ecology of "linkage" [Fr. reliance] (accordingto Michel Maffesoli's term, who has long anticipatedthis process of rupture with the "revolutionarism" of the

(Translators note)Translation of Alliez, E.Capitalisme et schizophrenieet consensus: De I'esthetiquerelationnelle. This translation is ofthe first draft ofan ongoing discussion, th efi rs t version of th e articlehas recently been publishedin Plato, (SeptemberDecember 2006).6,74-79.Plato is a Turkish ar t journalpublished in Istambul. Allfootnotes belong to theoriginal text unless otherwise noted. Many thanksto Grant Thompson for bring-ing this text to my attention,to Stephen Zepke for hisnegotiations and to EricAlliez for his many helpfulrevisions of my translation.

2Isay between th e descriptiveand prescriptive becausewe should note from th e verystart, without needing toreturn to it later, that thisrelational form-functionentails th e selection of artistssu pposed to represent thistendency (the "liveliest") byreducing exemplary artworksto their single structure as"open works", "opened"by th e participation-parspro toto, according to HansUlrich Obrist-ofthe public.Reading Nicolas Bourriaud'sfurther arguments, it seemsthat RirkritTiravanija, whoopens th e series of ar t exam-ples in Relational Aestheticsand who features prominentlyin th e chapter on "Art of th e'990s" (in th e first section,entitled Participation andtransitivity) is th e mostparadigmatic figure of"relational art". This shouldnot stop us from remarking

(Y)

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1960s3) used in the re-invention ofeveryday life Ca theme"bricolaged" by Michel de Certeau in his The Practice ofEveryday Life according to the principle of "user" diversion[Fr. detournement] of consumer society4). Aesthetics therefore becomes an education in [De. bi/dung] postmodern l ife"learning to inhabit the world in a better way"- according toa sequence that ends by simultaneously conter-effectuatingthe policies of the becoming-life of art and the becomingart of life and whose dialogical structure ("the inter-humancommerce") would signify the ethical verification of apresupposed community of sense differentially supplyingthe "everyday micro-utopias". Ethical in the desire for a"social transparency" considered as part and parcel of a"democratic concern" for immediacy and proximitYl makingthis a demand for a "formal communism" [sic] that proposesto promote "lived time" as an "new artistic continent"5that above all hides the reality-as Jacques Ranciere (2004)has put it very well-of "its capacity to recode and to invertforms of thought and attitudes that in the past strived forradical artistic or political changes" (p.l72). In the age ofcommunication and capitalism of services where "marketinghas preserved the idea of a certain relationship betweenthe concept and the event" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 10) to becomea laboratory for the "control societies" means: Schizophreniaand Consensus. This parodic reversal of Capitalism andSchizophrenia from an earlier time could account for theobstinate recuperation of Deleuze and Guattari that takesplace through the relational aesthetic: it participates in factin a rear-viewmirror effect that makes the aesthetic rehumanisation of postmodernity dependant on the spectaculardematerialization and re-symbolisation of art as the continuation of the "transversalist" political experience of theprotest years. In the same way the rupture announced at thestart is now being reformulated as the need to reconstitutethe "links between the 1960s and 70s and our own time"(Bourriaud,2005,pp.12-13). This monstrositYl that one could callhistorico-transcendantal 1 representedby a micropolitics ofintersubjectivity enunciates this short-circuit when it returnsto an intersubjective practice of the communicational actthat "artistically" revisits the micropolitical that had in factundermined the foundations for this in advance by opposingthe molecular revolution to the "recentering of economicactivities on the production of subjectivity" (Guattari, 1995, p. 122).,.',It is truly schizophrenic when the relational aesthetic tries

that even Tiravanija's installations and even more certainother works by artists mentioned by this curator-critic(Felix Gonzales-Torres,Sant iago Sierra, GabrielOrozco, Patrice Hybert, orPhilippe Parreno, for exampie) can be far more complexand problematising in termsof the modes of socialitythey imply. This is in orderto stress, in case it wasn'talready clear, that (1) werefuse to inscribe the art ofthe 1990s, as such, underthe monotonous rubric ofrelational aesthetics ; (2) agood criterion for the evaluation of works could be theirexcess vis-a-vis repeatedcalls to "modesty" and"conviviality" ... It is onthe basis of such a criterionthat one could prefer DanielSpoerri's Eat art or AntoniMiralda's Food culturemuseum to Rirkrit Tiravanija'scu I nary aesthetic .In his response to ClaireBishop's article (2004,Autumn) Antagonism andrelational aesthetics,October, 110, Liam Gillickis not afraid to write,"Relational Aesthetics wasthe result of informal argument and disagreementamong Bourriaud and someof th e artists referred to inhis text.. . The book doescontain major contradictionsand serious problems ofincompatibility with regardto the artists repeatedlylisted together as exemplarsof certain tendencies"(Gillick, L. (2006, Winter)Contingent factors: Aresponse to Claire Bishop'sAntagonism and relationalaesthetics, October, 115,96.)Make of this what you will.

3See the interview withMichel Maffesoli in thecatalogue of th e Biennialede Lyon 2005 that NicolasBourriaud & Jerome Sanshad commissioned.

4cf. de Certeau, M. (1984).The practice of everyday life,(S. Rendall, Trans.) Berkeley(CA): Universityof California Press.

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to credit its surfing on the new universes of communicationwith a function of alternative democratization. Far fromliberating "the inter-human exchangeUfrom its economicreification "in the cracks of existing social formsu (as the relational aesthetic claims- but without ever losing sight of thetrajectory from the gallery to the museum-laboratories ofthe new economy of art and the accelerated return by a succession of BiennialesJTriennalesJDocumentasJ Manifestas .. )it instead promotes new criteria of merchandization andparticipatory management of life by means of these exhibi tion devices that showcase the intensive extension of the"culture of interactivityu (The relation here is actuallytransaction). The art administrators are overjoyed becausethey gain at the best possible price the social function of"proximityU indicative of the postmodern democratizationof art breaking away from avant-gardist and "revolutionaryUdangerousness in the transformation of forms into forces(to liberate the forces of life from the forms that imprisonthem to createJyes J the new-which we are told is "no longera criterionu but rather the surpassed characteristic of theavant-gardes). The critics (who are here the same) are overjoyed because they recover within intersubjectivity a "theoryof formu for which form is "the representative [Fr. deJegue]of desire in the imageUproviding a horizon of sense for theimage "by pointing to a desired worldJwhich the beholderthus becomes capable of discussingJand based on which hisown desire can reboundu (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 23). (Objection: Hasnot form always been the relegation of desire in the imagethat addresses the participating spectator of the representation?6) So that Duchamp's proposition that i t is the viewerwho makes the pictures will be projected quite consensuallyby these brokers of desire onto the performative origin ofthe processes of artistic constitution for which the readymade would then be the posthistoric truth. The biggesthurdle: Judgement then becomes the glossary of a practicethat can no longer distinguish between the use value of artand a personalized tourist circuit for the use of the tenantsofculture: "Sensation depends on the simple r opinion' of aspectator who determines whether or not to r materialize'the sensationJ hat is to saYJ decides whether or not it is art

U(Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 198). I

To this Duchamp ready made of the social "infrathinuJ thishumanJall too human DuchampJ customised Little Democracyrecycled in the "transactional" reading of the new aesthetic

5cf. Bourriaud, B. (2005).Experience de la duree(histoire d'une exposition),Lyon: Biennale de Lyon.Bourriaud, B. (2003).Postproduction, Dijon,France: Les Presses dureel. Bourriaud, B. (2003).Formes de vie: Le artmoderne et le inventionde soi, Paris: Denoel.

6What I and Jean-ClaudeBonne have called LaPensee-Matisse (Paris:Edition du Passage, 2005)produces a true alternativeto this representativeof desire in the form ofthe image.

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