Flux without a subject

A note on the twilight of vanguardism

Over the past couple months I’ve failed to write a few things that I’ve meant to write, for reasons that aren’t hard to fathom (students and their teachers tend to be busy in late summer / early fall). I hope I can get to these projects soon. In the meantime, I thought I’d collate some thoughts about Fluxus on the occasion of Colby Chamberlain’s new book, which looks to be important. I don’t have a copy of it yet, but I’d like to pick it up soon and I’ve just read a review.

What I find interesting is that Chamberlain apparently solidifies a tendency in recent scholarship to interpret the (exceedingly labile) Fluxus movement, or network, as an aesthetic of administration, specifically as a mimesis of midcentury business culture. This is true of Mari Dumett’s earlier volume on Fluxus “corporate imaginations.” It’s also, I think, more tenuously so of Natilee Harren’s important work on Fluxus (inter)medial forms such as the event score. Although she doesn’t pursue the point, the shift that Harren describes from medium specificity to various temporal protocols (as also seen in Allan Kaprow’s contemporaneous Happenings and, needless to say, John Cage) parallels organizational developments of the sort that Pamela Lee has zeroed in on: cybernetics, think tanks, game theory, etc.

This is by now something of an orthodoxy, and the story it tells is that of a new spirit of capitalism. The radical challenge to the status of the art object that emerged circa 1960 turns out to have been a prelude to the real subsumption of previously uncolonized zones of practice and experience to the accumulation of capital, somewhat as the immediately preceding historical task of Abstract Expressionism had been to dredge the unconscious itself into representation and, therefore, marketability (to condense a more tangled argument that T.J. Clark once made).¹

The curious thing is that a second object of mimesis has dropped out of the picture. If one reads texts by the Fluxus Svengali George Maciunas—things that have been published as well as the archival materials scattered across a few collections at the Getty Research Institute, which I’ve done, incidentally—it’s clear that he modeled what he was up to on the Leninist party form. Hence the strident verbiage: “Fuse the cadres of cultural, social & political revolutionaries into united front & action,” “Communists Must Give Revolutionary Leadership in Culture,” and all that. It’s always been difficult to tell how much of this was meant for shock value, how much was quasi-camp meant to play up Maciunas’s Eastern European origins (he was Lithuanian), and how much was serious. In any case, art historians have little to say about it.

As I see it, there are two main reasons for this neglect. The first is that Fluxus’s pretensions to the dignity of a communist vanguard are rather laughable. A comparison between Maciunas (or Henry Flynt) and Guy Debord makes the point immediately; a few years later, Ben Morea and Black Mask / Up Against the Wall Motherfucker would do it better in any case.

The second and, I submit, more important reason is that we have collectively lost the ability to imagine political formalization as anything other than a threshold to horrendous office work—perhaps rightly so. I should give credit where credit’s due; historians certainly recognize that Maciunas’s subordination of the individual artist to a collective identity was linked to a fragmentary reception of Soviet Productivism, especially the LEF group. But the party, as such, is not really a factor in this discourse. This raises more interesting questions than that of Maciunas’s sincerity (or his character: frankly, he seems to have been a huge asshole, and without Debord’s good reasons for it). That Leninist bureaucracy is only a hair’s breadth removed from its capitalist equivalent is a basic article of Situationist critique, as of the left communist and anarchist strands that pre- and postdate it. Yet it’s striking that this isn’t the mode in which Fluxus has been theorized. Rather, it simply hasn’t been theorized as a party form at all.

But why not? Fluxus was above all else a leaky mode of control. Maciunas tried to keep a tight lid on it with excommunications and tirades as petty as any in the leftist canon. Fluxus nonetheless functioned most usefully as an adaptable brand that constellated an incoherent bundle of activities. The organizational media that Chamberlain and his forebears isolate all have close parallels in the culture of the historical left, especially its propaganda wings: the newsletter, the manifesto, the plan, the fundraising circular. It might be, then, that the futility of Maciunas’s dictatorial efforts indexes the fading of the party form as much as it does a transition to neoliberalism.

Further, and more provocatively, it may be that the decay of bureaucratic socialism was just as fertile mulch for capitalism’s new spirit as was the rise of a libertarian New Left. And by now we have no other way to interpret it. Formalization as such, that is, reads by default as capitalist planning: we see a card file and we think business, not tractors on the Volga. The absurdity of what passes for “industrial policy” debate in the contemporary moment is a good illustration. In a similar vein, it now seems (to me, anyway) useful to read the Italian Operaist discourse of the “plan of capital” as a transitional phenomenon proper to a stage when the subsumption of futurity itself to capitalist rationality was still a more unfamiliar idea. From the same milieu, Manfredo Tafuri’s extraordinarily bleak analysis of the function of architectural utopianism for capitalist development remains as reliable a guide as any. Planification is an emergent quality of advanced capitalism which it’s able, often, to appropriate wholesale from social planning in its embryonic Leninist condition.

What exactly was Fluxus, then, as arguably the representative formation of the neo-avant-garde? Surely, yes, a prototype for postindustrial business, as the new scholars suggest. But it was also a late variant of the Leninist mode of accumulation—a mode in which the self-perpetuating rationality of the vanguard party bleeds into the self-reproducing rationality of the capitalist firm. Hence the ambiguity of Maciunas’s dictatorial collectivism, and by extension of present-day interpretations of it, which cannot help but annex one unfreedom to another. The posthumous bureaucratization of Fluxus is accordingly the signature of an absent subject, namely, the identical subject-object of history for which the Leninist party was meant to be a placeholder or, in practice, a substitute. This is a predicament that has broad effects, none of which are very well remedied either by nostalgia or partisanship for indeterminate negation (as I’ve tried to point out before; as it happens, related issues were a leitmotif in Italian Operaismo, too, and account for what at first glance seems like bizarre ping-ponging between proletarian spontaneity and the “autonomy of the political”). The occlusion of the party form as the real specter haunting Fluxus thus reverberates in the shape of current art history; it could be shown, I think, that similar effects are at work in other subfields, such as the dismaying collapse of serious work on the early Soviet avant-garde over the past two decades. In a non-metaphorical sense, we don’t know what we’re studying, or rather mourning. Whose funeral is this, anyway?

1. Specifically in the chapter on Jackson Pollock (“The Unhappy Consciousness”) in Farewell to an Idea.