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5 Anarchies of Perception

There are occupations that enjoy universal acclaim, and others that matter more but are barely visible.

Baltasar Gracián

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) offers a different kind of leisure in Two Young Peasant Women (1892). It is a painting of the end of the French peasantry, the fixing of something passing. Not that being a peasant was all that pleasant. It was hard work, but still, shot through with utopian promise.

Valuing peasant life was a way of resisting the disenchantment of the world, but Pissarro’s painting is not an idealization of the image of the peasant as a remnant of the past. It is something more specific. Pissarro paints idleness as a moment within the field of work, as the peasant’s ability to choose the moment to be idle. He found a way of looking at the people without being disciplinary or sentimental. There are certain things Pissarro’s peasant women are not asked to be: figures of sympathy, for one. Clark rightly stresses the rarity of this as an achievement. Unlike Manet’s women, they are indifferent to the gaze.

Pissarro’s way of seeing is, in effect, anarchist. Not in the sense of painting a doctrine, but rather in working, through the act of making art, to a certain understanding of the social world. Anarchism is the theory of a freedom compatible with order. “It is the anarchist temper—vengeful, self-doubting, and serene—out of which Two Young Peasant Women comes.”¹ Pissarro arrived at it through the materiality of painting itself. In this canvas, the singular and universal are no longer in opposition. It’s something Pissarro wrestled with in trying to absorb the influence of Georges Seurat, in whose distinctive paintings all dots are equal, but not the same.

For Pissarro, paintings are a way of thinking, of investigating vision and rendering it thinkable. The danger, as in Seurat, is that “Every act of submission to one’s experience could turn into a system.” But one could struggle against it, by immersion in a practice, of painting or something else, to get at the singular structure of sensation as one experiences it. Art is not an Idea cast into a few signs. It is more a matter of a singular sensation calling objects into being in its own way, with its own “folding of parts into wholes.”² The anarchist critic Félix Fénéon, on Pissarro: “Finally a master of forms, he bathes them forever in a translucent atmosphere, and immortalizes, by means of the benign and flexible hieraticism he has just invented, their exalted interweave.”³

Pissarro matters for Clark because of a need to recover a version of the history of socialism independent of either the social democracy of the Second International (1889–1916) or the Leninism of the Third International (1919–43). The First International (1864–76), for all its squabbles, was one in which anarchism was alive and well. Socialists pay a high price for suppressing their anarchist side, first with the capitulation to militarism of the Second International, and then by the authoritarianism of the Third.⁴ In Pissarro’s time, the anarchists at least resisted militarism, and stood apart from the nascent bureaucratic tendencies of the organized labor movement. For Clark what matters is always the internal difference within revolutionary movements, between a people and its representatives. This was already the case with the sans-culottes and David, the proletarians and Delacroix.

Socialist culture and politics, of which anarchism was then a component, were at the height of their power at the end of the nineteenth century. But socialism “had still to devise a set of forms in which the developing nature of bourgeois society—the cultural order of capitalism as well as the economic and political ones—could be described and resisted. Anarchism possessed some of the elements needed. In closing against anarchism, socialism deprived itself of far more than fire. It deprived itself of an imagination adequate to the horror confronting it, and the worse to come.”⁵

The anarchists were geographers of the peasant condition. Pissarro certainly responded to the anti-urban strand in anarchism, its refusal to be seduced by labor and the machine. It was possible to read The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin together with Marx, to imagine agriculture as another route to praxis. “But at least anarchists knew already in the 1890s that fighting the state meant thinking geographically and biologically.”⁶ They counted among their number Elisée Reclus, veteran of the Paris Commune, acute critic of what was becoming of Marxisant socialism, and the founder of social geography. This is the space toward which Clark’s viewing of Two Young Peasant Women opens.

David’s The Death of Marat is a canvas that contains in embryo the two tendencies in modern representation. The top half points toward art’s recognition of the disenchantment of the sign. In place of its magic, art will turn inward, and succeed by representing its own failure to represent anything else. The bottom half is something else. Here art struggles, and fails, to make a claim to enact a truth that is at once political and aesthetic: Marat’s blood on the traitor’s letter. But is the failure of the bottom half aesthetic or political? Perhaps it is not art that fails in this instance, or not art alone. Perhaps the failure is in calling on art to represent a people in absentia.

One could see Delacroix, Courbet, Manet and Pissarro as attempts to make some kind of painting work in the place of the dead Marat. Delacroix tries to affirm the presence of the people, and fails. What Courbet bequeaths to Manet is the possibility of a realism that finds the gap between appearances and the ruling ideas of their time. What Pissarro offers is the possibility of picturing an actual site in which some other life could be sensed. In their successes and failures is a legacy from which to thieve in the unending struggle of peoples to present themselves to history rather than be represented by the state or the commodity. In short, from the détournement of these formative moments of the nascent spectacle can come resources for a counter-practice to the spectacle in its current form.

Or so, perhaps, was Clark’s proposition in his earlier books, up until The Painting of Modern Life (1985). In his later writing, particularly in Farewell to an Idea (1999), it’s the works that descend from the top half of The Death of Marat that interest him, by Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock. This is where modern art becomes the site of a certain kind of melancholia, the place where the impossibility of the projects launched by the bare half of The Death of Marat is registered. This is an art that becomes enclosed within the spectacle, gesturing crazily to what it can’t picture, what it can’t sense, what it can’t know. Modernism is the spectacle in negative.⁷ But it is still spectacle.

Debord dates the modern spectacle from the 1920s: “the society of the spectacle continues to advance. It moves quickly, for in 1967 it had barely 40 years behind it; though it had used them to the full.”⁸ This periodization is no mystery. The key incidents are the Bolsheviks’ suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion against the Soviet state (1921) and German Social Democrats’ acquiescence to the suppression of the German revolution by the far right (1919). Debord: “The same historical moment, when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in Russia and social democracy fought victoriously for the old world, also marks the definitive inauguration of an order of things that lies at the core of the modern spectacle’s rule: this was the moment when an image of the working class arose in radical opposition to the working class itself.”⁹

What Debord calls the concentrated spectacle has its roots in David and Delacroix; the diffuse spectacle arises out of the contradictory materials Manet and Pissarro explore. The concentrated spectacle merged elements of both. But what separates the spectacle proper from its nascent state is the incorporation, not of an amorphous people, but of the working class, and not as individuals but via the representation of class power. The disintegrating spectacle resembles the nascent state. Organized labor gradually ceases even to be its own image.

Clark’s excavation of the nascent spectacle may well provide resources for thinking about its disintegrating remnants, and what he describes as “a terrible, interminable contest over how best to debauch and eviscerate the last memory—the last trace—of political aspiration.”¹⁰ For Clark, as for Debord, there’s not much to mourn about the collapse of the Soviet Union and its client states, of what Debord called the concentrated spectacle. Debord rather presciently anticipates that its eclipse casts its western counterpart adrift, that it would be lost without its nemesis. The presence of even a false alternative obliged the masters of the diffuse spectacle to think historically. With its victory, the diffuse spectacle integrated into itself the practices of state secrecy of its rival, to the point where it deceived even itself.

Clark opposes a deep attention to the image as a foil to both the absence of historical thought, and—paradoxically—as a challenge to the apparently image-drenched world of the disintegrating spectacle. “Sure, I count myself an enemy of the present regime of the image: not out of some nostalgic logocentricity, but because I see our image machine as flooding the world with words—with words (blurbs, jingles, catchphrases, ten thousand quick tickets to meaning) given just enough visual cladding.”¹¹ Clark himself contributes to the critique of the disintegrating spectacle as one of the members of the group Retort, whose text Afflicted Powers, while by no means Situationist, nevertheless can be read as drawing in part upon Clark’s earlier work.

Retort’s signal date is 2003, when some eight hundred cities hosted anti-war demonstrations. “It was a world-historical moment. Never before had such masses of people assembled, against the wishes of parties and states, to attempt to stop a war before it began.” What appeared is “a digital multitude, an image of refusal,” but set to become just one more image, “another image-moment in a world of mirages.”¹² In 2003 the anti-militarist strain of popular revolt reappeared—and again failed to stop the wars.

Where Clark values Pissarro’s anarchist vision as a small token of a worker’s movement that eschewed a vanguard, Retort extends this critique to the vanguard form of the anti-western jihadists. While it might tempt some on the left to welcome attacks on the empire, Retort is quick to show that the limits and dangers of this kind of vanguard are the same as the Jacobin one and its Leninist inheritors. The fatal flaw hinges on usurping the political and setting oneself up as its armed image.

As for the 9/11 bombers: “They were exponents of the idea (brilliant exponents, but this only reveals the idea’s fundamental heartlessness) that control over the image is now the key to social power.” Spectacular power is vulnerable to a raising of the stakes, to being beaten at its own game. Or so it appears: “But the present madness is singular: the dimension of spectacle has never before interfered so palpably, so insistently, with the business of keeping one’s satrapies in order.”¹³

The colonization of everyday life proceeds apace, an “invasion and sterilizing of so many unoccupied areas of human species-being.” What is somewhat blandly referred to as globalization turns in on itself, “mapping and enclosing the hinterland of the social.”¹⁴ What the disintegrating spectacle leaves in its swirling wake is a world of loosely attached consumer subjects, and a weak form of citizenship which the ramping up of nationalist rhetoric does its best to mask. Weakly attached citizens-consumers still need to heed the call up, from time to time, to make sacrifices to preserve the state. Neither the popular forces nor even the state itself seems to manage any form of historical thought. The state comes to believe its own disinformation.

The Situationist project is often dismissed as if it were a claim to penetrate the veils of false consciousness and reveal the essential truth it masks. What Clark’s dilation on the history of revolution and representation affords is a more subtle view, in no way reducible to such ideology critique. As Clark writes: “supposing we take Debord’s writing as directed not to anathemizing representation in general (as everyone has it) but to proposing certain tests for truth and falsity in representation and, above all, for truth and falsity in representational regimes.”¹⁵

A first test would hinge, as in his examples from David and Delacroix to Courbet, Manet and Pissarro, on the materiality of the encounter. A second test might turn on the social form of the relation within which an image is produced. The dilemma of modernity is the split in the results it achieves in these two tests. The avant-gardes of modern art end up channeled into a preoccupation with the materiality of the encounter, even while modern experience is rife with popular social movements that express desires that escape from the regime of representation and produce other kinds of relation. The spectacle emerges not least as the means of absorbing the expression of both desires back into the representation of the commodity. And yet the very persistence of the spectacle indicates that desire still exceeds it, and on at least these two fronts.

What matters is the remaking of counter-strategies that do not necessarily reveal the real behind the symbolic curtain, but rather attempt to produce a different kind of social practice for expressing the encounter of desire and necessity, outside of power as representation and desire as the commodity form. Clark: “Why should a regime of representation not be built on the principle that images are, or ought to be, transformable (as opposed to exchangeable)—meaning disposable through and through, and yet utterly material and contingent; sharable, imaginable, coming up constantly in their negativity, their non-identity, and for that reason promoted and dismantled at will?”¹⁶ In short, why should détournement not be the practice by which the encounter with the world is discovered and produced?

For Debord, the spectacle emerges out of a key moment, when the Second and Third Internationals come to stand in the place of proletarian power, when the proletariat has to be killed in order to be represented, and represented in order to be killed. Clark extends the historical frame back to the nineteenth century, to show that the spectacle emerges out of not this one but a whole series of encounters between the expression of popular power and the power of representation. From there, perhaps it’s a question of extending forward as well. It is not as if the social democratic and Stalinist forms of usurpation of popular power are the last.

One of the most salient points of departure for critical thought and action in the early twenty-first century may well be the account rendered by former Situationists of the failure of the popular movements of their time. This might at least forestall the curious nostalgia that animates contemporary leftism, which is so often so indiscriminately fascinated by the red decade in France from 1966 to 1976, by the various forms of neo-Maoist philosophy that linger in its wake, and by the Italian Autonomist movement, which arose with a vengeance around 1977 to take up the banner of waning militancy in France.

Situationists and Post-Situationists were consistently hostile to such currents, which might provide a certain useful counterweight to an ahistorical nostalgia for the remnants of such thought. But before turning to the seventies, there is another path that passes from the French Revolution, through its consequences, to the Situationist International and beyond. If Clark restores to view the life of the image and an anarchist vision, then Raoul Vaneigem brings back to our attention the poetry of utopia, and of that moment in modernism for which Clark has so little sympathy: the Surrealists.