Abstract
This is a timely and important book written by one of the most accomplished continental philosophers in the U.S. today. It is the second in a trilogy by Evans on philosophical sociology and anthropology that continues to mine his original thesis on the multivoiced body – the idea that society is composed of the massive interplay of voices seeking audibility through all kinds of discursive antagonism and institutions. The remarkable erudition displayed in the first book with that title is once again on display in this second tome. This time the author takes a deep dive into art history and criticism as well as contemporary political theory and delivers an original essay on a political aesthetics for public art. A third volume on cosmopolitanism is in development.
There is a slight shift in nuance from the Multi Voiced Body to Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy I would like to comment on at the onset. In my reading, he refers more often now to society as a dialogic body. He makes no comment on this shift, but it seems to me the emphasis reveals an obvious opening for his theorizing on public art. The multivoiced metaphor continues to refer to the vast clamour of voices seeking audibility in society, and by extension in public art. He reads the later as a way of stretching the fragility of democracy to the brink. It accommodates but also challenges authoritarian oracles through acts of citizenship. In public art, there are spectators imagined by the artists as well as spectators who see the art, as well as critics who imagine both. For the multivoiced body, there are voices directed from the past, present and future. Voices are expressed through a variety of discursive genres including those found in public art. The dialogic addresses itself to an imagined spectator. The utterance itself is in discourse. Scaffolding between what is said and what is sayable is inscribed in what the utterance anticipates in response as heard through its tonality and emotional-volitional orientation. The important point is voices are not only engaged in interplay. In dialogue, they imagine they are answerable to each other. More on this below but keep in mind most often voices/utterances are unique everyday events that anticipate a general response from both an imagined and a real interlocutor.
The nuanced contrast between the multivoiced and the dialogic recalls a similar one between the politics of multiple cultures whose exits, and entrances can be closed off and a transcultural politics where cultures take on meanings from others (even dominant ones) and still become themselves. I will try to lay out what I see as the originality and impressive theoretical scope Evan’s contribution achieves from my sense of where this slight shift leads. I show how he arrives at a series of demanding criteria and defining political virtues that provide an outline for evaluating both an aesthetic and a political democracy. Unfortunately, in such a brief review and given my own limits, my emphasis is more on theory than on his richly detailed analyses of the art works themselves.
The images of the art works contained in the book are meticulously described as ways of demonstrating his argument and presented as philosophical pleasures as well as provoking disturbing political emotions. The opening sentence in the book refers us to the removal of the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee in 2017 from a place of prominence in New Orleans and the very rough demonstration that divided those who supported as well as those who contested the City council decision. Another Robert E. Lee statute erected in 1890 this time in Richmond is scheduled to be removed sometime in 2020, though not without a failed challenge in the Virginia courts. In 2020, there have been 77 and counting more confederate stone statues removed from public view in various cities along with the change of names in dozens of schools and various state institutions. There are still many more cases of these overtly racist monuments that have never been answerable to any truth that could stand up to the measure of reparation antiracists demand. I mention this because while the book examines a variety of public monuments in our time, it is keenly aware of the divisive historical debates over public art since the beginning of the republic. Among the major contemporary works and critical reviews analysed in depth in several chapters are Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection in Union Square and his planned alternative 9/11 monument City of Refuge; Chicago’s Millennium Park and from New York’s national memorial – Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence.
The introduction to public art through the Robert Lee monument has democracy immediately confronting the oracle of White supremacy. This is the books edge. Through the medium of public art, he reveals the fragility of democracy at its worst. Across the book, we are warned of this fragility even at its best. The voice of White supremacy does not seek a response from anyone that refuses to confirm its own identity. The oracle refuses to share an emotional or volitional orientation with the other it has refused to hear or recognize. This is not a new epistemic crisis that assumes we need to strive for a democracy that is about rational deliberation to achieve consensus that guides ‘people’ to rule themselves. On the contrary, it reveals the fragility of consensus as an a prior of democracy. An oracle like White supremacy and its aesthetic regime does not just demand a final word on all others, it violently threatens any other whose sensibility differs from its own inner body. A dialogic body consummates a relation with the other by co-experiencing the other’s inner body from the vantage of an outside perception. The white supremacist is incapable, as Evans put it, of engaging the ‘interplay of voices’. Only the outer body of the other is available. Yet, the oracle is a voice among many. It is in the multivoiced body but not able to enter dialogical society. The conundrum for those who contest its voice is that they cannot avoid hearing it.
How we sustain difference without ourselves becoming an oracle is part of the complex dilemma of diversity in democracy that Evans sets out to undo. He asks how can we ‘exclude the excluders’ without becoming excluders ourselves? The controversy at the heart of the argument is how to dialogue with anyone who does not allow your own final word on yourself? Can unconditional diversity achieve unity rather than submitting to the violence that unity visits on diversity? The answer I deduce from the examples he provides is that in art, there is always the possibility of a loophole, a sideward glance, an immanent transcendence that can overcome the oracle and nurture the fragility of democratic life. It is the shaping of this creative subjectivity and struggles with subjectification where the political aesthetic needs to be situated in terms of acts of citizenship.
Evans quickly proposes two other works early in the book as examples that introduce an opposite political aesthetic in the historical U.S. debates over monuments and public art. One is a blank slate that invites citizens to write their thoughts about George Washington as proposed around 1800 by Congressman John Nicolas. The debate over public art in the United States was already about a political aesthetic for democracy. Do we directly participate in our own governing through the symbol of a stone statute of Washington or through an invitation to perform your own thoughts on Washington? Evans answers that filling the blank tablet is an example of an act of citizenship. Two centuries later Judith Bacas’s Danzas Indigenas provides a postcolonial response to Washington in an installation that provides a bench to sit on under an arch while waiting for a commuter train in Los Angeles. We are invited to enjoy a planter filled with a symbolic reminder of the indigenous and Spanish voices that came long before Washington and that anticipate a response into the future.
There are complex levels involved in the history of oracular or monologic discourse (the magic of the free market, the pure race, American exceptionalism) and how the interplay of voices acts alongside them, against them and never without implicit reference to them. Whether they agree or disagree, approve or disapprove, the clash of utterances means they internalize something of the other. Dialogism, another word for the dilemma of diversity that Evans seeks to undo, means taking on something of the other’s discourse as they are confronted. An interiorized double-voiced discourse emerges whether in agreement or disagreement, subjectification or emancipation, at rest or at play with the ‘ghost of undecidables’. Some voices defend public art for their historical value, others for their heritage and much public art simply celebrates imperial dominance (as in the commercial towers surrounding Arad’s Reflecting Absence in the 9/11 memorial). Evans contrasts these kinds of public art works that tend to service oracles like the confederate statues or that celebrate capital and ethnic nationalism with opposite examples that seek creative breaks from oracles, that add voices and that not only invite the interplay of voices but also provoke them toward democratic values.
Before developing in depth and very illuminating analyses of these and other kinds of works, Evans asks what political theories of democracy can be drawn from to understand the shaping of voices via the medium of public art that can contribute to democracy as acts of citizenship. Do we make sure any hint of justification for inequality in democracy be to the advantage of the least well off as John Rawls proposes in his justice as fairness mantra? Alternatively, is democracy as a regime impossible, as Derrida maintains, because it can only be something greater than it, its ghosts can always remind us of acts of inequality left in its path? Should we look beyond democracy towards Badiou’s truth procedures and communist hypothesis or Ranciere’s focus on dissensus, emancipation and struggles for equality? Among others (Lefort, Foucault, Agamben, etc.), these four are the main theoretical approaches Evans juxtaposes through immanent reading and critique; negating elements of the proposed political ontology from each that cannot help undo the dilemma of diversity and integrating other elements on art that open onto his criteria for assessing public art as events or acts of citizenship. A full chapter on specialists from art history and criticism provides sparkling parallel concepts and debates that situate and strengthen the criteria.
His opening definition of democracy suggests that democracy has always been in trouble. ‘The people’ replace the revolutionary removal of the rule of both the sovereign’s and the divine’s body with a symbolic rule. Following Claude Lefort’s argument, it means that empty space at the centre of power in democracy has never been completely closed or occupied. Contrasting John Rawls and Jacques Derridas’s theories of how to fill democracy’s empty space jolts the reader into what at first glance appear to be two irreconcilable positions. Rawls is an unlikely choice as the first interlocutor to help define the kind of critical theory Evans proposes. Yet, if it is true that the historical poetic of the Americas is itself constituted in a multiplicity of cultural and political voices, that is, a transgrediant mixture of colonial origins and postcolonial hybrids that take-on elements from one another and still become themselves, thinking through the diversity of self-understandings needs to be done with and against some normative theory about what formal democracy should be like in the empty space. Evans takes a bit from Rawls idea of an overlapping consensus between disparate notions of the good as something that can come out of dialogue but distances himself from his basic concept of democracy as a ‘realistic utopia’ that stresses stability over heterogeneity, prematurely closing off the empty space that would allow more voices to emerge.
The collision between advocates of assertive models of democracy like Rawls (or Habermas) shows sharp contrast with Evans model of democracy that takes up the challenge posed by acts of citizenship –- acts that stand-up or break from conventions and claim new voices from lifeworlds left uncared for, unwanted or despised. Any legislative solution for disputes over public art for example would need to be enforced and so they would need to be calculable. Is this an inevitable consequence of the liberal democracy? Has the dispute over confederate statues ever been fair? Can it bring about justice?
If justice is not reducible to another medium, that is, if it is not calculable, it cannot depend on foundations, contracts, laws or brute force. In other words, justice needs to be fair but in practice cannot be reduced and defined as fairness, to temper and link both Rawls’s and Derridas’s definitions of justice. Undoing democracy in Derrida’s sense means probing the ghost of the undecidable, suspending the rules, and coming to the dead end or a priori to leave the deconstruction rather than provide certainties for the force of law (domination for Ranciere) that seek to normalize. Evans, toward his conclusion, raises the need for a dialogic a priori that promotes disclosure rather than closure, gives release from law and its quest for purity and pushes forward new voices over official monologic ones.
Deconstructing democracy points to seeing or doing something collectively in a way that is not yet seen or done. In this sense, democracy is impossible, as Evans says, ‘in the special meaning Derrida gives to that term’. It cannot live up to its promise but it can always be ‘to come’. He draws more from Derrida than Rawls but is troubled – not by the surprising transcendence (the to-come) that helps fill democracy’s empty space while keeping it open – but by his theory of the autoimmunity and the sacrifice of solidarity to unconditional hospitality. To deepen his criteria for defining public art as acts of citizenship and on his concept of society as a dialogic body, he looks to Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere for the most advanced arguments on democracy and critiques of modern art.
Badiou, like Rawls, at first glance seems an unlikely thinker to help resolve ‘the horns of the dilemma’ that diversity poses for democracy. He is often described as the most famous living philosopher who ascribes to eternal truths by radicalizing the Platonic tradition via Marx and Mao. Badiou commits to truth procedures that seek the eternal good in politics, science, art and love, and so allows a familiar way of combating the oracles of bad, evil, deplorable monologues. Ranciere, on the other hand, rejects eternal truths in favour of a subject’s interplay with historical circumstances. This distinguishes his sense of the good as an origin from overlapping consensus and is closer to Derrida’s democracy to come. Ranciere juxtaposes democracy (politics) with domination (the police), sees dissensus and ongoing emancipatory events that challenge the distribution of the sensible not as a route to knowledge but as a permanent agonism related to struggles over real (intelligence), and imaginary (universally presupposed) equality. Evans draws from their mutual rejection of the ethical turn in aesthetics that contradicts representation with practice and argues for a more robust internal political relation with public art.
Badiou’s communist hypothesis argues simply that representative liberal democracy, as we know it, is a not very well disguised oligarchy (for many, this is a point difficult to refute given U.S. politics lately). Stripping liberalism (elections, division of power, rights discourse, private property) and working for a withering away of the state is the ultimate route to rule by the people. The event of politics or art is only achieved through militant decisions and truth procedures that can demonstrate an absolute justice, faith, hope and love (of and in the good). Testing the decision over time requires a militant commitment to truth (Saint Paul and the resurrection is given as an example, as is the revolutionary).
He does not say so, but I suspect Evans accepts much of the communist hypothesis. He clearly rejects Badiou’s broader political ontology that contrasts situations of multiple forms of knowledge and ethics with universal truths and unique ways of being (void). For Evans, ‘the interplay of voices is always challenged by the one true God, the pure race, or other oracles’ (p. 126) and so rejects the idea that some will have the truth and others will not. Ranciere, on the other hand, fails to distinguish the inventive dialogic moment (of exchange) between democracy and domination and between one position of inequality and another in a way that must sacrifice the virtue of solidarity (consummation of difference) to that of fecundity (creation of new voices). He considers Ranciere’s dissensus theory of democracy and politics of emancipation but questions the hard binary between domination and democracy without seeing the one in the other. His version of equality tends towards a levelling force because it risks placing unity above diversity rather than coming from diversity.
The critique Badiou and Ranciere make of modern art and the focus on the act as an event helps Evans confirm his criteria for how public art be an act of citizenship. He posits three overlapping virtues that need to be performed simultaneously: heterogeneity (unfinished difference among voices/utterances), fecundity (creating more unfinished discourse) and solidarity (consummation or unity coming from difference). As an event the act is unique, a rupture from habits and ways of hearing. Ranciere calls this a polemic for presupposed equality and a challenge to the distribution of the sensible. For Evans, the event of the act is ‘an occurrence that exceeds its conditions is singular and interrupts the status quo’ (p. 109). It requires ‘imagining the social body and democracy as the kind of event that affirms simultaneously all three political virtues’ (p. 137).
Evans provides in-depth analysis of his criteria for measuring the political dimensions of public art as acts of citizenship as found in examples from Anish Kappor’s Cloud Gate from Millennium Park and concludes by contrasting Krzysztof Wodiczko’s the City of Refuge with Reflecting Absence. The contrast between the two installations reflects the opening debate over the difference between Washington’s monument and the empty slate proposal discussed in the first chapters. A favoured example of public art that meets the criteria of an act of citizenship is Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection in Union Square. The installation is set against gentrification and city planning that shaped the iconic New York space out of a developer’s worldview. The projections of homeless figures onto the statues of Lafayette, Lincoln and Washington provide playful sideward glances that undo the oracle of capital that centres the recent history of the square. The projection magnifies the homeless, astonishes the public, liberates the homeless from the architecture and contrasts the ‘theatre of the surrounding real estate with the theatre of those who have no shelter’. These works, he argues, break from the formal (passport privileges) and substantive (identity) forms of citizenship, acts that challenge inequality and that come from the creative dimension of the event.
To conclude, the core of this book invites us to expand on the a priori dialogic criteria and the political virtues for assessing how public art can be an act of citizenship. The criteria and virtues open from the concept of understanding society as a multivoiced body where the clamour of voices searching for audibility confront one another whether productively, in difference, or out of solidarity. In the dialogical body, the voices are not only struggling in an upward spiral to be heard, they are also answerable as they step across to each other even when they are deeply divided. The sensibility towards equality in acts of citizenship is not only a type of interplay but also a type of exchange. Oracles like White supremacy that refuse the interplay are in the multivoiced body and so must be heard as required by the dilemma of diversity. It remains unclear how opposing militants hearing the oracle are to respond to each other dialogically. While those who are committed to the interplay of inner and outer-bodied voices must hear those who refuse to engage in interplay, those who are not must not be granted a role in policy. White supremacists do engage in an interplay, it is just that they seek to annihilate rather than anticipate response. As the monologic voice confirms its own identity, it impacts/injures the others it constructs.
Puzzling questions remain: Is an attempt to persuade those captured by or drawn towards the oracles aura to join in the dialogue even possible when there is zero anticipation of response from the other’s identity? What if there is no ability to share an utterance with the other? Alternatively, what happens when we cannot hope to create new interplay so dialogue can transform the racist into an anti-racist? Should we construct the oracle as an adversary rather than an enemy to be annihilated? The answers are complicated. If there is no non-place, no nowhere, to speak from is there no non-racism to speak from? As Evans puts it, we are left with the dilemma of diversity as both a good for society but also as a problem. There can be no last word on society understood either as a multivoiced or as a dialogical body. It is not so much about how to exclude the excluders but how to bring them to hear the other. To make the word audible, it needs to be half yours and half your interlocutors. Acts of citizenship are about flushing out yet more voices not previously heard, hearing them answerably and still granting them a final word on themselves.
Evans concludes that working with his criteria can give answers at least to debates on how public art can become acts of citizenship for a democracy to come. I admire the books depth and courage but also its humility and the admission that others will need to take up the implicit invitation to press against so many vexing questions current events are making increasingly urgent.