Art Biennials between La Revolution urbaine and Les Revolutions du capitalisme

While La Revolution urbaine refers to the book by Lefebvre (1970), Les Revolutions du capitalisme is the title of Lazzarato's (2004) work. Lefebvre assesses the historical process through which cities came to dominate space around them. Capital cities are just one form in which the asymmetry of the relations between city as a point of economic, political, social and cultural accumulation and the processes that while corresponding to these forms of accumulation take place over expanses of space. Before global cities were proclaimed centres of command and control, each city that has succeeded in establishing itself on geographical maps had to impose the structure of relations that would create an island of intensity across time and space. For Lefebvre, cities feed on the countryside while rejecting it through the construction of their urban identity. Whether the supply chains becoming stretched across global distances makes the rise of urban difference any less enigmatic from the perspective of repetition of the status quo ex ante or not, cities have always been part of a more rational social, political, economic and cultural order. Even though these claims can be taken for justification strategies that serve the purposes of domination, as Lefebvre holds, the urban surplus and excess across processes of accumulation may provide a foundation for cities theorization over and above the structures of exchange into which they become embedded.

Lazzarato's Revolutions takes precisely this aspect of excess and surplus to point to the essence of the revolutions of capitalism taken to mean the turning points in the logics that govern the processes of economic, political, social and cultural accumulation. Essentially these are cultural events that have a revolutionary significance not only for the narratives that subsequently describe their consequences but also for the actual processes of accumulation themselves. I am loath to describe these events virtual, as being caught between being real and abstract, since the transitions between these two qualities are instant and radical. As their consequence, one group of causes and effects experiences a transition from real to abstract and another in the opposite direction. Lazzrato suggests that the alterations in the forms of collective thought, feeling and action break out with the force of revolutions that belong much more to the changes in what spheres of intellectual, emotional and practical possibilities become actualised than to a pre-existing logic of their development as such. From this point of view, capitalism becomes a ride through the geography of unexpected possibilities that become added to individual and collective experience only once they are realised.

This connection between capitalism and revolutions, however, is properly understood in the context of rapid changes in the structures that govern the possibilities of accumulation as abstract means of their creation. Capitalism steps forward as an abstract process that is defined much more by the theorisation of excess than by the theorisation of lack. Each realised form that capitalism takes rationalises away the circumstances of its emergence in terms that point to the functions that its fulfils as a lack oriented activity. As such this historical activity is dependent on the existence of lack that it satisfies. But a new form of capitalist accumulation, or any form of capitalism whatsoever, is unpredictable for exactly the reason that it needs novel logics, possibilities and terms that go into the process of its transition from abstract to real in the first place. The term of virtual while correctly pointing to the theoretical gap between the real and the abstract appears to assimilate itself to the existing logics, possibilities and terms, which may defeat the possibility of transition from the abstract to the real as a subject of theorisation in the first place. In other words the gap between repetition and difference may be more unbridgeable that the term of virtual suggests.

This is where Perniola's notion of transit may stand in better stead than the theorisation of virtual. Rather than pulling the abstract and the real apart, transit describes their immediate contact. In other words, it is at the points of contact between the real and the abstract that urban revolutions of intensity, excess and surplus occur. This is why, art biennials connect between the two works by Lefebvre and Lazzarato through Perniola's works on art and desire that come closer to theoretical ethnography than to philosophical reportage. A philosophy of capitalism would try to bridge the repetition of philosophical discourse with the difference of economic accumulation. A more cogent approach might be the concentration on the points of transit between the two. Spaces of art appear to be just such points. Neither fully abstract, nor exhaustively real, artworks belong to the realm of excess, surplus and intensity in ways that make them both capitalist and anti-capitalist at the same time, as Perniola reminds us vis-a-vis the provocations of Warhol. Modern art has defined itself via the exploration of the possibilities of aesthetic expression that were unavailable heretofore. Modern capitalism charts a homologous path. However, it is art biennials that are the points of contact that as urban spaces of global culture bring processes of cultural, economic, social and political accumulation into immediate and highly charged contact.