Page 95 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 95
counter-identification and politics of art
structuralism and post-structuralism, the term entered the theoretical dis-
course and it determined also the field of aesthetics, which was visible also
in Bourdieu‘s contribution. Madan Sarup refers to Michel Pecheux‘s theo-
retical advance on the bases of Althusser‘s theory of ideology:
He has added to Althusser‘s account by sketching three mecha-
nisms through which subjects may be constructed: identification,
counter-identification and disidentification. Identification is the
mode of ‘good subjects’, those who ‘ freely consent’ to the image held
out to them, while ‘bad subjects’, troublemakers, refuse it. Coun-
ter-identification is the mode of the troublemaker who turns back
those meanings lived by the good subjects who are only stating the
obvious. The main features of counter-discourses are that they are
held in a kind of symmetry, which consists in resisting only with-
in and on the terrain of the prevailing ideologies, which they would
challenge. (Sarup, 1996: p. 74).
In a field, such as it is described in these sentences, and in which a con-
struction of a subject through identification takes place, there is plenty of
space for different stratagems of artistic intervention. Due to the historical
and political circumstances a “strategy” of counter-identification was most
visible and artistically effective at the time of modernism, which broadly
coincides with the Benjamin‘s age of mechanical reproduction.
Making Statements
The positioning of art in view of Bourdieu‘s reading, which moves the no-
tion of the transcendental into the field of an articulate aesthetic discourse,
based on a reflexive sociology, should be perceived in an inversion of the
relationship between social reality and art in view of the autonomy of art.
My hypotheses that the positioning of science – meant in the general sense
of rational reflexive savoir – in a rapport to art gives way to a positioning of
art in the order of politics in the social space, is incorporated in the activ-
ity of artistic production, which works on its singular intervention in the
symbolic universe. The element of transcendence, which enters into a fabric
of meanings (or destruction of all meaning, representation, etc.) of a par-
ticular work of art, is an effect of subjectivity or the creator, as Nietzsche
and Agamben would say. Subjectivity, or its (re)production to be exact, is
operated through mechanisms of identification. The differentiation is, of
course, just a negative identification, which is especially important in ar-
93
structuralism and post-structuralism, the term entered the theoretical dis-
course and it determined also the field of aesthetics, which was visible also
in Bourdieu‘s contribution. Madan Sarup refers to Michel Pecheux‘s theo-
retical advance on the bases of Althusser‘s theory of ideology:
He has added to Althusser‘s account by sketching three mecha-
nisms through which subjects may be constructed: identification,
counter-identification and disidentification. Identification is the
mode of ‘good subjects’, those who ‘ freely consent’ to the image held
out to them, while ‘bad subjects’, troublemakers, refuse it. Coun-
ter-identification is the mode of the troublemaker who turns back
those meanings lived by the good subjects who are only stating the
obvious. The main features of counter-discourses are that they are
held in a kind of symmetry, which consists in resisting only with-
in and on the terrain of the prevailing ideologies, which they would
challenge. (Sarup, 1996: p. 74).
In a field, such as it is described in these sentences, and in which a con-
struction of a subject through identification takes place, there is plenty of
space for different stratagems of artistic intervention. Due to the historical
and political circumstances a “strategy” of counter-identification was most
visible and artistically effective at the time of modernism, which broadly
coincides with the Benjamin‘s age of mechanical reproduction.
Making Statements
The positioning of art in view of Bourdieu‘s reading, which moves the no-
tion of the transcendental into the field of an articulate aesthetic discourse,
based on a reflexive sociology, should be perceived in an inversion of the
relationship between social reality and art in view of the autonomy of art.
My hypotheses that the positioning of science – meant in the general sense
of rational reflexive savoir – in a rapport to art gives way to a positioning of
art in the order of politics in the social space, is incorporated in the activ-
ity of artistic production, which works on its singular intervention in the
symbolic universe. The element of transcendence, which enters into a fabric
of meanings (or destruction of all meaning, representation, etc.) of a par-
ticular work of art, is an effect of subjectivity or the creator, as Nietzsche
and Agamben would say. Subjectivity, or its (re)production to be exact, is
operated through mechanisms of identification. The differentiation is, of
course, just a negative identification, which is especially important in ar-
93
