Giorgio Agamben's The Man Without Content, Mini-Review

Here's a small review of Agamben's The Man Without Content, which I thoroughly enjoyed - as a read - but was ultimately kind of disappointed by. I need to mention - right after I finished reading the Agamben book, I started Hito Steyerl's Duty Free Art, and the contrast, which I won't really go into, is stark beyond measure. Steyerl really gets into issues of art's production and transmission, the so-called 'material conditions' that everyone likes to bang-on about, and it just reads so much closer to the grain of what art is today, than anything in Agamben's book. Reading Agamben in Steyerl's light, Agamben comes off as story-telling, a just-so story told through rarefied categories whose purchase on the world is... questionable at best. This comes off as super critical, but I should emphasize that I really liked Agamben's book! What I want is a Steyerl and an Agamben, together. Until then... here's the review:

Art, we have been told, belongs to the realm of the aesthetic. To study art is to study the aesthetic, the one simply being the name of the field of the other. But what if this was not always the case? What if there was an aetheticization of art, a long, drawn out process, in which art, once belonging to nature itself, found itself drawn into a sphere all of its own, separated and autonomous, but rendered impotent as a result? Such is the story of art told here, in which art, fallen and cast out from the Garden in which it once grew, now attests to nothing less than a pervasive and consuming nihilism that has everywhere taken root. If this sounds dramatic it’s because… well, I suppose it is. But the strength of Agamben is the way in which he tells this story, woven with a coherence and a confidence that makes this book read like a detective novel, forcefully written.

For among the elementary datum that Agamben here isolates is the now established division of labour - rigid and inviolable - between artist and spectator. Artist: creature of genius, active demiurge, creator of works and endowed with full - albeit isolated - freedom to do as they will. Spectator: creature of taste, disinterested and passive, adjudicator of judgement: is this work refined or vulgar? But this split too is new, writes Agamben, citing - among other things - the praise heaped upon not only Michelangelo, but Pope Julius II, who, as patron of Michelangelo’s immortal frescos in the Sistine Chapel, was himself credited with this ‘gift to humanity’. In fact it is Hegel whom Agamben credits with first recognizing the change by which artist and spectator become split, having written in his Lectures on Aesthetics of the newly inculcated 'indifference' of the artist to his material, making him nothing other than - 'the man without content'.

Much of Agamben's book then is following just this trail opened by Hegel, tracking its consequences all its way into the contemporary era (well, kind of, as we'll see). Further symptomatic of this isolation of art from life is the emptying out of any positive definition of art itself: defined more and more by its distinction from 'non-art', at its limit, art becomes nothing but whatever non-art is not. Proffered here are both Dada and Pop-Art as the culmination of exactly this process, with Duchamp's 'readymades' (toilet bowl as art), attesting to becoming-art of non-art, and Warhol's serialized paintings of soup doing the same from the opposite end: the becoming non-art of art (art as industrialized product). Thus it is that this 'emptying out' of the artist from any content, along with the degradation of art into something completely indistinguishable, is nothing less than a process of - Hegel's term - "a self-annihilating nothing".

All of this is, admittedly, a very persuasive story. And in fact, The Man Without Content tells it from two angles, with the second-half of the book approaching the question in strictly metaphysical terms, with Agamben casting the whole process as the eclipse of 'poiesis' (roughly: "coming into being") for 'praxis' (roughly: "action"). This in turn being used as a springboard to critique a range of philosophical positions, from Nietzsche, to Schelling, to Marx, each of whom are pilloried for being conceptually complicit in this nihilating process (Heidegger's shadow, especially his critique of the 'will' as a ultimate expression of metaphysics, hangs incredibly heavy here, although Agamben only barely gives him a credit in the footnotes). It's all very sophisticated, all very learned.

But one really has to wonder how Agamben managed to write any of this without once mentioning the commodity status of art. Like, even if Agamben has the symptomology right - the artist as atomized maître, the spectator as passive consumer, art as indistinguishable from technical product, all novel phenomena in the history of humankind - can this really be put down to do some epochal movement defined solely in Aristotelian terms? Is the real issue the eclipse of poiesis? Do we really need to just pay more attention to the 'authentic temporal dimension' that Heidegger once theorized in his On Time and Being? Can we really discuss the aestheticization of art without at the same time discussing its universal privatization for markets? Or else the general conditions of artistic production and circulation? Can any discussion of the 'destiny of art' proceed without doing so? For as much as can be recognized in Agamben's subtle - too subtle - portrait of art here, I remain unconvinced.