Left with TINA: Alienation and Anti-Communism

Research output: Contribution to conferenceOther

Abstract / Description of output

We – and this ‘we’ must be imagined as the broadest possible – live in the midst of a protracted ‘anti’ culture. A number of movements and struggles take as the crux of their politics and ‘anti’ stance, the most visible perhaps among them figured and configured as ‘anti-capitalism’; contemporary struggles on the left often self-identify as anti-capitalist. We can also encounter various strands of post-May 68 struggles articulated as antithetical to capitalism, or at least critical of various aspects of its lived reality – including trajectories of feminism, decolonial struggles, strands of the LGBTQ movement, student movements, environmental movements, anti-debt movements, movements such as Occupy or the Indignados. The art field as such has been a fertile ground for voicing this ‘anti’ stance; as has literature, where, the bible of the chemical or idle, alienated generation, shunning (low-paid, boring) wage labour must today be re-read as an omen, and in light of the advent of the generation of the precarious.
My aim in this paper is to problematise the ideological space (and time) of this ‘anti’ stance by linking it to capitalism’s most successful ideological campaign, itself headed by another ‘anti’: anti-communism. The starting point is that Margaret Thatcher’s beloved vision, TINA, dating back to the emergence of so called liberalism, permeates, visibly or not, the broader culture of ‘anti’ generated under the hegemony of anti-communism, which is not of course limited to the former East but informs the politics of the contemporary left everywhere, locked as it is in a logic and politics of opposition rather than proposition. The question why capital’s liberal ideologues put so much effort today in crafting anti-communism as part of anti-totalitarianism is telling, and what I want to consider is how an alienated subject is constructed not in the absence of struggle but through its very political process in so far as the latter cannot overcome the ideology of anti-communism. In this context, it will be further argued, it is unsurprising that fascism, a politics of proposition that plays its ‘anti’ card, and specifically the anti-status-quo card, merely as strategy, has gained traction in the social imaginary. But this, to state the obvious, is hardly a problem for capitalism, while it offers the left the focus of yet another ‘anti’.
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished - 5 Oct 2018
EventANTARKTIKA: A Conference on Alienation - Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria
Duration: 4 Oct 20186 Oct 2018
http://kunsthallewien.at/#/en/events/antarctica-symposium-alienation

Conference

ConferenceANTARKTIKA
Country/TerritoryAustria
CityVienna
Period4/10/186/10/18
Internet address

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • Accelerationism
  • art institution
  • alienation
  • anticommunism
  • contemporary art
  • Generation X
  • fascism

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