D.I. Cunningham

Floating on the Same Plane: Metropolis, Money and the Culture of Abstraction

This article argues that the emergence of a trans-disciplinary discourse of ‘visual culture’ must be understood as, above all, a constitutively urban phenomenon. More specifically, it is in the historically new form of the capitalist metropolis, as described most famously by Simmel, that the ‘hyper-stimulus’ of modern visual culture has its social and spatial conditions. Paradoxically, however, it is as a result of this that visual culture studies is also intrinsically ‘haunted’ by a certain spectre of the invisible: one rooted in those forms of ‘real abstraction’ which Marx identifies with the commodity and the money form. Considering, initially, the canonical urban visual forms of the collage and the spectacle, these are each read in a certain relation to Simmel’s account of metropolitan life and of the money form, and, through this, to what the author claims are those forms of social and spatial abstraction that must be understood to animate them. Finally, the article returns to the entanglement of the visible and invisible entailed by this, and concludes by making some tentative suggestions about something like a paradoxical urban ‘aesthetic’ of abstraction on such a basis.

Spacing abstraction: capitalism, law and the metropolis

In considering contemporary accounts of the interrelations of economic, legal and urban forms of social relations in the emergence of a global capitalist modernity, this paper argues that politico-juridical imaginaries of new forms of transnational universality have tended to be limited by virtue of both an anachronistic recourse to spatial models of the polis and a failure to confront the ineliminability of abstraction to any idea of global social interconnectivity. In such terms, it argues, Lefebvre’s famous call for a ‘right to the city’ needs to be reinscribed as a properly modern right to the metropolis; one that would allow us to conceive of the possibility of new kinds of relation between individual and collective subjectivity and the development of abstract social forms.

Marx, architecture and modernity

This paper reviews some current manifestations of Marxist thought within and around architectural discourse, building on papers presented at a symposium held at the University of Westminster in May, 2004.

Unnoticed apocalypse: The science fiction politics of urban crisis

The slogan ‘capitalism is crisis’ is one that has recently circulated swiftly around the global Occupy movement. From Schumpeter to Marx himself, the notion that the economic cycles instituted by capitalism require periodic crises as a condition of renewed capital accumulation is a commonplace. However, in a number of recent texts, this conception of crisis as constituting the very form of urban capitalist development itself has taken on a more explicitly apocalyptic tone, exemplified by the Invisible Committees influential 2007 book The Coming Insurrection, and its account of what it calls simply ‘the metropolis’. ‘It is useless to wait’, write the texts anonymous authors, ‘for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement.… The catastrophe is not coming, it is here.’ In considering such an apocalyptic tone, this paper thus situates and interrogates the text in terms both of its vision of the metropolis as a terrain of total urbanization and its effective spatialization of the present as itself a kind of ‘unnoticed’ apocalypse: the catastrophe which is already here. It does so by approaching this not only apropos its place within contemporary debates surrounding leftist politics and crisis theory but also via its imaginative intersection with certain post-1960s science fiction apocalyptic motifs. What, the paper asks, does it mean to think apocalypse as the ongoing condition of the urban present itself, as well as the opening up of political and cultural opportunity for some speculative exit from its supposedly endless terrain?

Logics of generalization: Derrida, grammatology and transdisciplinarity

This article seeks to explore some issues regarding the different modes of generality at stake in the formation of transdisciplinary concepts within the production of ‘theory’ in the humanities and social sciences. Focused around Jacques Derrida’s seminal account of ‘writing’ in his 1967 book Of Grammatology, the article outlines what it defines as a logic of generalization at stake in Derrida’s elaborations of a quasi-transcendental ‘inscription in general’. Starting out from the questions thereby raised about the relationship between such forms of generality and those historically ascribed to philosophy, the article concludes by contrasting Derrida’s generalized writing with more recent returns to ‘metaphysics’ in the work of Bruno Latour and others. Against the immediately ‘ontological’ orientation of much recent ‘new materialist’ or ‘object-oriented’ thought, the article argues for the necessity of ‘different levels of writing in general’ through a continual folding back of absolute generalization into historically specific disciplinary crossings and exchanges; something suggested by but never really developed in Derrida’s own work.

Returns of the Modern: Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘Altermodern’, in Nicolas Bourriaud (ed.) Altermodern: Tate Triennial (London: Tate, 2009). Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘Altermodern Manifesto’, online at Tate website: http://www. tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/manifesto.shtm ‘Global Modernities’, Altermodern: Tate Triennial Symposium, Tate Britain, London, Saturday 14 March 2009

As the term ‘postmodern’ disappears into the distance – not before time for many of us, but rather more alarmingly for others – it leaves in its wake some tricky questions. As a periodizing device, the naïve simplicity of the ‘post’ itself was always likely to store up a few problems. One can’t keep adding ‘post’ to the front of things before a certain absurdity and desperation quickly sets in. ‘Post-postmodern’, ‘post-post-postmodern’, anybody? So, ‘postmodernism is dead’, begins Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘Altermodern Manifesto’, accompanying his curation of the fourth Tate Triennial (3 February to 26 April 2009). Yet, for those who once took it to be the very cultural logic of the contemporary, this leaves a rather bald choice. Either disavow any serious claim it might ever have had upon our attention – in order, belatedly, ‘to admit that modernity is inescapable and to desist from speculations about [its] end’, as Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar has put it – or produce some further terminological novelty that would assert that there once was such a thing as postmodernity but that now it is no more. To borrow an analogy from my friend Tim Bewes, this is the difference between declaring something to be as dead as a doornail and as dead as a dodo. Both may be dead, but the doornail was never actually ‘alive’ in the first place.

A TIME FOR DISSONANCE AND NOISE

In a talk first given to a Norwegian conference on contemporary art and the function of critique, published in Angelaki 4.3 (1999), Simon Critchley argues that music “is no simple lapse back into the pre-discursive ... [I]t rather produces an endless effort of evaluation, cognition and judgement ... Musical experience is both preand post-reflective” (“Sounding Desire” 129). Critchley’s guide here is Adorno, as he acknowledges early on in the piece, although given that his central subject is the black “trip hop” artist Tricky, this might well be considered ironic. (If Adorno had not had the good fortune to die when he did, such music would no doubt have finished him off.) Nonetheless, as Critchley rightly asserts, whatever Adorno’s own “inexcusable ignorance and elitism,” as regards forms like jazz, if one is to avoid “collapsing into some sort of vapid postmodernist inversion of the high into the low,” then it is Adorno’s claims for the “critical and emancipatory function of art” that still provide the best starting point for any “evaluation, cognition and judgement” of contemporary musical forms and practices (123). Explicitly connecting Adorno’s “elevation of certain forms ... of aesthetic production” with Clement Greenberg’s theorisation of “aesthetic modernism” in painting, Critchley asserts a need to move beyond “the now strangely démodé conflict between modernism and postmodernism” (123). While I certainly have no wish to re-activate such debates – stale as they are – it will be my contention in what follows that it is, in fact, precisely Adorno’s philosophical conception of modernism, actually quite different from that articulated by Greenberg, which remains of the utmost importance for critical reflection on contemporary art and music, including so-called “mass art.” However, it will also be my argument that the condition of this “importance” must be a theoretical disentangling of Adorno’s general (abstract) conception of modernism – as something like an immanent dynamic logic of artistic production or a structure of temporal experience – from the particular objective forms of “aesthetic production” with which he came (more or less exclusively) to associate it in his postwar writings. What is at stake, in general, in such a disentanglement is, for reasons that will hopefully become obvious, best traced through david cunningham

Renouncing the Single Image: Photography and the realism of abstraction

This essay addresses the issue of the relationship between abstraction and realism that it argues is at stake in the rejection of any primacy accorded to the single image, in favour of a sequencing of photographs according to certain, often novelistic and epic ideas of narrative form. Setting out from the opening text of Allan Sekula’s Fish Story, the article explores the competing tendencies towards what Georg Lukács termed “narration” and “description” as these are traced throughout Sekula’s project (in part through a comparison with the contrasting works of Andreas Gursky. The essay concludes by suggesting the ways in which it is the irreducible actuality of abstraction within the concrete everydayness of capitalism’s social world that means that all photographic “realism” is intrinsically “haunted” by a certain spectre of that “self-moving substance in the “shape of money”, as Marx calls it, or of the abstract form of capital itself.

Introduction: Photography and abstraction

Holmes’ assessment of a future in which the image supersedes the object is often cited, and with good reason, since he manages to catch in this brief sketch the violent emancipation of the photographic image from the now redundant world of things. The image, though, is not free for long since the act of taking the picture does not liberate at all but ensnares the image in a new visual economy. Nature will soon be stripped of its fruit, Holmes predicts, since “[m]en will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth”. While matter is “fixed and dear”, form is “cheap and transportable”; the asset-stripping of things by the camera allows for the acquisition and accumulation of these abstracted forms that “will have to be classified and arranged in vast libraries”. A “comprehensive system of exchanges” will be necessary, Holmes continues, “so that there may grow up something like a universal currency of these bank-notes, or promises to pay in solid substance, which the sun has engraved for the great Bank of Nature”. The imperial gusto with which Holmes imagines the world being flayed of value is only equalled by the efficiency with which that value is inventoried and put to work in a system of exchange. What is then, from one perspective, an apparently irreducible photographic attentiveness to particularity, to the capturing indexically of this singular moment, this thing, this person, this place, appears from another as a dividing up of the world itself into a series of abstract grid-like units, phantasmatically projecting some allencompassing and flattened “global” space of universality. It is this economy of photographic vision that relates it also to those forms of abstraction inherent to the fetish-like character of commodities, which are “both particular, sensual objects ... and values, moments of an abstractly homogenous substance that is mathematically divisible and measurable (for example, in terms of time and money)” (Postone 175;

The Death of a Project

conference Platform 4: Four African Cities: Freetown, Johannesburg, Lagos, and Kinshasa (March 2002). 9. The entire documenta 12 S-guide can be downloaded [http://www.documenta12.de/audio. html?&L=1] 10. Buergel’s essay first appeared in the excellent exhibition catalogue (2005) 50 Jahre/Years documenta 1955–2005: Archiv in Motion (Buergel, 2007[2005]). 11. Be[com]ing Dutch, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (12 November 2007). [http://becomingdutch.com/events/ ?s=0,9,5.] 12. The title of Robert Storr’s Venice Biennale, Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind, also proposed a link between mind and body, but placed much less emphasis on the pedagogic.