The Gift in Littoral Art Practice ^[1]                                

by Bruce Barber

continued...

 

 

EXEMPLARY/STRATEGIC ACTION Anarchic/individualistic action	INTERVENTION/ INSTRUMENTAL ACTION collective/collaborative or participatory in form
spontaneous	planned
dynamic/direct/focused action	exhibits less dynamism/ indirect
absence of theory	theory laden/movement toward praxis
induces repression/ con­frontation	integrative, mediative/ interruptive/provocative
cathartic provocative dialectical	non-catharticattempts to lessen provocation/ encourage dialogue usually undialectical
theatrical spectacular	performative non-spectacular
projective	reflective

The table of oppositions above represents the general differences between two types of political action [perform­ance], configured as acts of protest or resistance. Depending upon the circumstances and the type of event, intervention can become an exemplary action, and thus devolve into a form of political posturing, closely implicated in extreme versions of behaviour characterised by violence, anarchic rejection or destructive nihilism.

The meaning of these distinctions becomes patently clear, of course, when we consider the use of the terms direct/strategic action and intervention in either the power vocabularies of the State and special interest (terrorist) groups. Intervention as indirect action is usually precipitous, and as historical events have testified, intervention as a euphemism for neo-colonial incursion can lead to forms of local resistance that will eventually lead to armed struggle and ultimately war. Intervention as (stra­tegic interruption), particularly when it is used by a group attempting to counter or resist the power exhibited by another group, that is in control, is very different from the interventions used by a controlling group attempting to reinforce its control. When employed as political rhetoric by the state, intervention is usually synonymous with incursion, an action that will reproduce/reform, or transform already existing or previously extant power relations. C.I.A. incursions (interven­tions) in Chile in the early seventies, Nicaragua, Bermuda and elsewhere in Central America, as well as more recently Russian intervention in Chechnya and its other republics, attest to the major differences between the two. Interventionist strategies employed by the left attempt to interrupt the passive consumption of the dominant ideologies and contest the hegemony of the state, whereas the interventionist strategies used by the right tend to reproduce them, thus exercising or maintaining their control. ^[17]

Communicative action is very different from direct action or intervention, although it may seem to employ some of the characteristics of both. Jurgen Habermas, who has arguably done more than anyone to theorise various forms of political action within the public sphere, distinguishes between strategic, instrumental and communicative actions. The distinction, he argues, between actions that are oriented toward success and those toward understanding is crucial.

In strategic actions one actor seeks to influence the behaviour of another by means of the threat of sanctions or the prospect of gratification in order to cause the interaction to continue as the first actor desires,

Whereas in a communicative action one actor seeks rationally to motivate another by relying on the illocutionary binding/bonding effect (Bindungseffekt) of the offer contained in the speech act (Habermas, 1990:58).

He distinguishes between openly strategic actions and those that are covertly strategic; the first involves the systematic distortion of an event and unconscious deception on the part of the participants, the second involving various types of conscious deception, is manipulative and therefore inherently propagandistic.

In another passage Habermas asserts that:communicative actions (occur) when social interactions are co-ordinated not through the egocentric calculations of success of every individual but through co-operative achievements of understanding among participants. (Habermas in Thompson and Held 1982:264)* (emphasis added)

He argues that art has an important place as a critical mediating agent in what he terms "the decolonising process"; How art could, or should mediate decolonisation is less clear in his work. If science, philosophy and art are thoroughly institutionalised and therefore subjected to increasing ideological incursion by what he terms "the legitimating practices of the state", how can any one `sphere' - such as art - become the privileged site for communicative action? The question then, he wrote in 1983 
"is how to overcome the isolation of science, morals and art and their respective expert cultures" (1983,90:19), and return them to the public sphere.

Habermas has consistently affirmed that art, along with philosophy, law, politics and economics, are important sites for mediation, communicative rationality and pragmatic action. He is somewhat ambivalent however about the extent to which this can occur in an institution that the forces of an increasingly technocratic and bureaucratic modernity have rendered into increasing autonomy from the life world. As a Kantian, he has remained somewhat resolute in his defence of the separation of pure and practical reason from aesthetic judgement.

In modern societies, the spheres of science, morality, and law have crystalised around these forms of argumentation (instrumental reason). The corresponding cultural systems of action administer problem solving capacities in a way similar to that in which the enterprises of art and literature administer capacities for world disclosure. (Habermas,1987:207).

It is clear from this last statement, which he employed in his extended critique of Derrida's purported collapsing of the genre distinction between literature and philosophy, that while he views art and culture generally as an important locus for theoretical attention, he maintains a boundary between forms of communicative action that can occur within the spheres of political, legal or philosophical discourse, and those that can occur within the domain of art and literature. For Habermas art remains at the level of representation, distanced from the material reality and "spatio-temporal structures" of the life world, and as such, can not be considered as ideal a site as is language - or rather speech - for the deployment of communicative action.

At an early stage in the development of his communication theory, Habermas recognised the inherent problematic of communicative actions that do not offer the possibility of their own (dialectical) transformation. While his system/lifeworld paradigm could adequately describe the instrumental logic behind the progressive development of administrative bureaucratisation and the economic forces driving the conflict(s) between the system and the lifeworld, ^[18] communicative actions, wrongly used, could have, as his intellectual mentor Walter Benjamin himself understood, wholly undesirable consequences.

With his Frankfurt School mentors, Habermas does recognise a important place for art as a critical mediating agent in the decolonising process; however, how art could, or should mediate is less clear. "The issue now", he writes in 1983 
"is how to overcome the isolation of science, morals and art and their respective expert cultures" (1983,90:19), and return them to the pubic sphere. By the early 1980's it seemed as if Habermas was beginning to heed Marx's injunction in his Theses on Feuerbach. And by this time he had fully articulated the restrictions wrought upon life world activities by the hegemony of expert cultures and their rarefied exclusive esoteric languages. However Habermas' own work as a philosopher still remained somewhat distanced from that very life world which he so wished to protect.

I agree, somewhat, with Terry Eagleton's prognosis that as an academic Habermas is "aloofly remote from the sphere of political action" but that his work as an intellectual represents a "political strike for the life-world against administrative rationality." Eagleton however, also generously admits that:
...art itself is for Habermas one crucial place where the jeopardized resources of moral and affective life may be crystalized; and in the critical discussion of such art, a kind of shadowy public sphere may be re-established, and so mediating between the separate Kantian spheres of the cognitive, moral and aesthetic. (Eagelton, 1990:402)

Some will argue that each example of the art of giving discussed at the beginning of this paper can be framed as either liberal altruism, or as leftist tendenzkunst - and perhaps both. Like Marx's criticism of this "wretched offal of socialist literature" The tendenzkunst argument insists that while evidencing the `correct political tendency' the work remains still at the level of representation, merely acting out the forms of cultural politics without providing the important political substance that would engender real change. Armed with the legacy of Marx, Engels, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukacs et. al., many on the left would argue that the artist/intellectual should align him/herself with the appropriate progressive or revolutionary forces within society and their representative social groups and political parties. Like Marx and Engel's critiques of Ferdinand Lasalle, each giving example could be criticised for evidencing the correct political tendency but lacking the correct engagement with its object of concern, which would necessitate an adoption of the appropriate (time honoured), and normative political strategies for social change.

Mealings work, REPOhistory and The Free Food examples insist that giving can be used `strategically' to further a number of identifiable life world and humanitarian goals, as well as provide some critical intervention into the ideological fabric of our culture. The Bloom 98 example attempts to develop "new working relationships between like thinking artists. As Harry Palmer suggests "it is hoped this project will celebrate the adversities, break down the solitary conventions and demonstrate new ways of collaboration."

Claude Levi Strauss argued that "The automatic laws of the cycle of reciprocity are the unconscious principle of the obligation to give, the obligation to return a gift and the obligation to receive" (1987:43) But as Bourdieu demonstrates in his critique of Levi-Strauss's structural logic of the (Maussian) law of reciprocity, in reality "the gift may remain unreciprocated" (98). For Yin and Kantor, and to a lesser extent perhaps, Mealing, the New York, Basingstoke, Birmingham and Halifax artists, this realisation would necessitate that the givers themselves become the first targets of conscientization. But each cultural intervention, exemplary or not, engages "a logic of practice" that encourages an infinite variety of exchanges or gifts, challenges, ripostes, reciprocations, and repressions to occur. These examples of operative art practice have the capacity to creatively engage their public in conscientization and in this sense alone provide service of some social and cultural value. But in accordance with Bourdieu's wry observation on the politics of giving and receiving these examples acknowledge also:
The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise than as laid down by the `mechanical laws' of the `cycle of reciprocity' (and that this) is sufficient to change the whole experience of practice and, by the same token its logic.(99)

In contrast to Mauss and Levi-Strauss' insistence on laws and structure in the cycle of reciprocity, of obligation and exchange, Bourdieu's logic of practice privileges individual agency, in all its unpredictability and contrariness, as the primary component of a generative model of giving (and understanding). Perhaps this logic of practice, like that promoted by Habermas himself "provides an alternative to money and power as a basis for societal integration." (Calhoun 1992:31) And without an acknowledgement of individual agency within communicative action, that is of the potential for contrariety – the act of giving, the gift of food, the gift of labour, the gift of blood, and of life itself, would seem valueless.

Works Cited

Baxandall, Lee, and Stefan Morawski (eds) 
Marx and Engels on Literature and Art St Louis and Milwaukee: Telos Press, 1973
Benjamin, Walter, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings ed. Peter Demetz, trans. E. Jephcott, New York: Schocken, 1986
Blackburn, Lisa and Hartom, John, Empty Bowls Project Pamphlet (self-published) Franklin, Michigan, 1990
Bourdieu, Pierre, The Logic of Practice Standford, California: Standford University Press, 1990
Calhoun, C. (ed) Habermas and the Public Sphere Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992
Eagleton, T. The Ideology of the Aesthetic Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990
Hardin, Garrett. The limits of Altruism: An Ecologist's View of Survival Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977
Habermas, J. "Consciousness raising or redemptive Criticism - the Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin" New German Critique Special Issue on Benjamin No 17, Spring 1979
Habermas, J. Legitimation Crisis Trans. T, McCarthy Boston: Beacon, 1979
Habermas, J. The Theory of Communicative Action Boston: Beacon, 1984
Habermas, J. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve lectures, Trans. Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass., 1989
Habermas, J. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action trans. Christian Lenhardt, Shierry Weber Nicholsen with introduction by Thomas McCarthy, Cambridge Mass, MIT Press, 1990
Hyde, Lewis, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of property New York: Random House, 1983
Mauss, Marcel The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies New York, London: Norton, 1967
Sahlins, Marshall Stone Age Economics Chicago: Adline Publishing Co., 1972
Thompson, J.B and Held , D., (eds) Habermas Critical Debates (including a reply to my critics by Jurgen Habermas) Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1982
Willis, Paul Common Culture Boulder Colorado: Westview Press, 1990