In the 1960s and 1970s, politicization meant taking a position, establishing and following a political program, launching armed struggles, putting one’s skills (including art) at the service of the revolution, fighting in the name of the horizon of state socialism, and acting in solidarity with anti-imperialist and decolonization struggles. Artists and militant networks were united by political affiliations, and Palestine, Vietnam, and Chile were symbols of anti-imperialism. This form of politicization evolved into an aesthetic practice of international avant-garde, competition, criticality, counter-hegemony, and postcolonial memorialization and assertion within the politics of representation. Since then, however, such politics has been perceived as a form of violent nationalism, leading to authoritarian states and propagandistic aesthetics. Politics became inseparable from the neoliberalized political economy, as well as from culture.
In the ruin of representation, what used to be “outside” of capitalism, such as marginality, queerness, or race, was symbolically incorporated and stripped of its ability to disrupt and compete. Figures of difference disappeared and were incorporated into “lifestyle” options. The underclass is a blurred horizon, detached from the flows of global capitalism; not being a political figure, the underclass is sometimes subject to site-specific interventions, pacification, improvement, development, and community-building projects. Its emancipatory horizon lies in entrepreneurship. In addition, in the twenty-first century, politics is no longer representative, but what some theorists call “post-politics.” Following Jodi Dean, this means that politics now tends toward a superficial democracy that neutralizes antagonism and denies democratic limits and exclusionary mechanisms. Thus, “post-politics” means the denial of the fundamental divisions that drive politics, as equality has come to mean inclusion, respect, and entitlement. “Postpolitics” means consensus politics, the end of ideology, the neoliberal withering away of the state in some areas and its strengthening in other strategic areas, and the financialization of the economy.
As democracy has become the goal of political action, visibility has become a key feature. This form of politicization assumes that the displacement of signs can contribute to destabilizing or mobilizing people by providing tools for articulation that can contribute to specific political goals. As a result, cultural production has become inseparable from political action. We must also take into account what became apparent during the mobilizations around the world in 2011-13: the huge gap that exists between government (political parties, elections, institutions) and the actual forms in which we are governed, which shape our lives and how we make a living – in accordance with the interests of international trade organizations and corporations. “Que se vayan todos” or “They all have to go” has been a slogan on the streets of Argentina since the early 2000s, even if “they” eventually stay. In Egypt, Tahrir Square took Mubarak’s head, and the Tamarod (uprising) movement took Morsi’s head. Collective self-determination was restored in the streets, and yet the goal of the people was not to organize and take power because, first, the authorities create the fiction that gatherings and protests are enough to change the situation, and second, because politics no longer works as representation.
Whereas traditional forms of power were representative and centered in institutions and individuals, now power is hidden in infrastructure (the highway, the supermarket, software, fiber optics, the data center, corporate energy and water providers) and materialized in the form of spatial arrangements. Post-representational forms of power manifest as the organization, design, and configuration of the world; these forms of power are architectural and impersonal, as opposed to representative and personal. In addition, politics is also post-ideological, meaning that critical attitudes, symbolic gestures, political positions, and everyday life are completely dissociated. This dissociation leads to widespread contradictions: condemning hunger in Africa but drinking coffee at Starbucks; expressing solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza but consuming Israeli goods; protesting against violence but exploiting their own workers; against slavery, but buying clothes made by enslaved people in Southeast Asia; expressing concern about global warming, but buying food from supermarkets; applying for government and corporate funds to create projects that criticize them. Our post-political and post-ideological era is characterized by a sharp discrepancy between political position, political action, and symbolic gesture.
Next, I would like to address the transformations of militarism in the context of the shift from representation to post-politics and post-ideology that has been manifested in politicized art in recent decades. This shift embodies the transition from the ruin of representation to intelligent politics: from internationalism to multiculturalism, anti-globalization, and recent artistic production that, in addition to the task of making the invisible visible, has proposed forms of salvaging reality, self-organization, temporary communities, improved living and working conditions, ideas of new forms of community organization, social therapies, and useful art. One of the questions that needs to be urgently asked concerns the role that contemporary art plays in geopolitics, if we consider the art world as an industry, as a harbinger of neoliberalism, and as a tool for pacification, normalization, and gentrification. Accordingly, can the nation-state still function as a container for globalized struggle? What can the political art and militancy of the 1960s and 1970s contribute to this struggle?