excerpt from okwui enwezor, "the black box - ground zero or tabula rasa"

7/22/2019 Excerpt From Okwui Enwezor, "The Black Box - Ground Zero or Tabula Rasa"

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Documenta 11 Platform 5: Exhibition

Hatje Cantz Publishers


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Postcoloniality's second lesson is that it exceeds the borders of the former colonized world to,lay claim to the modernized, metropolitan world of empire by making empire's former I"other" visible and present at all times, either through the media or through mediatory, .spectatorial, and carnivalesque relations of language, co mmunication , images, contact, and Iresistance within the everyday. Two decades ago, a number of theorists would have calledthis double move postmodernism's saving grace. But postcoloniality must at all times bedistinguished from postmodernism. While postmodernism was preoccupied with relativizinghistorical transformations and contesting the lapses and prejudices of epistemological grandnarratives, postcoloniality does the obverse, seeking instead to sublate and replace all grandnarratives through new e t h i c a l d ~ m a n d s ~ s o f historical interpretation.

In this regard, it could be said that the history of the avant-garde falls within theepistemological scheme of grand narratives. What, then, is the fate of the avant-garde in thisclimate of incessant assault upon its former conclusions? Seen from this purview, alleconomic, social, cultural, and political questions that emerged in the last half century, andthe vital relations of power that i:lttend their negotiations, have had the distinctive historicalimpact of abolishing all the claims that the former European avant-gardes made forthemselves. \f'f0where is thi s historical termination more visible than in the recent drive by .global capitalism to frame a new optics of spatial and temporal totality that forms the projectof neo-liberali sm after the demise of the crudely managed and regulated Soviet Communistsystem1 To understand what constitutes the avant-garde today, one must begin not in thefield of contemporary art but in the field of c ~ l t u r e aT!sip_Q!itjcs, as well as in the economicfield governing all relations that have come under the overwhelming hegemony of capital. Ifthe avant-gardes of the past (Futurism, Dada , and Surrealism, let's say) anticipated a changingorder, that of today is to make impermanence , and what the Italian philosopher GiorgioAgamben calls aterritoriality,v the principal order of today's uncertainties, instability, and

Agamben, Means Withoul End . Noles on Politics, insecurity. With this order in place, all notions of autonomy which radical art had formerlyBinetti and Cesare Casarino, Minneapolis ,of Minnesota Press, 2000. claimed for itself are abrogated .

Calculating the effects of these uncertainties within the new imperial scheme of"Empire," lVlichael Hardt and Antonio Negri inform us of the features of a new type of glObal \sovereignty which, in its deterritorialized form, is no longer defined by the conservativeborders of the old nation state scheme. If this Empire is materializing, hegemonizing, andattempting to regulate all forms of social relations and cultural exchanges, strong, criticalresponses to this materialization are contemporary art's weakest point. In their thesis, Empireis that domain of actions and activities that have come to replace imperialism; whose scopealso harbors the ambition to rule not just territories, markets, populations, but most fundamentally,soc ial life in its entirety.vl Today's avant-garde is so thoroughly disciplined and domesticated

ae l Hardl and Anlonio Negri , Emp ire, Cambridge, Mass., within the scheme of Empire that a whole different set of regulatory and resistance modelsversity Press, 2000, p. xv. has to be found to counterbalance Empire's attempt at totalization . Hardt and Negri call thisresistance force, opposed to the power of Empire, "the muititude."vil If Empire's counter-modelis to be found in the pressing, anarchic demands of the multitude, to understand whatsustains it historically returns us yet again to the move by postcoloniality to define new modelsof subjectivity. In postcoloniality we are incessantly offered counter-models through whichthe displaced-those placed on the margins of the enjoyment of full global participationfashion new worlds by producing experimental cultures. By experimental cultures I wish to\ define a set of practices whereby cultures evolving out of imperialism and colonialism,slavery and indenture, compose a collage of reality from the fragments of collapsing space.GROUND ZERO OR TABULA RASA: FROM MARGIN TO CENTER

But we ha ve precisely chosen to speak of that kind of tabula rasa which characterizes at theoutset all decolonization. Its unusual importance is that it constitutes, from the very first day,the minimum demands of the colonized. To tell the truth, the proof of success lies in a wholesocial structure being changed from the bottom up. The extraordina ry importance of thischange is that it is willed, called fo r, demanded. The need for thi s change exists in its

Excerpt from Enwezor, Okwui. "The Black Box." In Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition,

Catalogue, 42-55. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002.

(Passage begins below.)

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http:///reader/full/entirety.vlhttp:///reader/full/entirety.vl


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crude state, impetuous and compelling, in the cons ciousness an d in the lives of the men andwomen who are colonized. But the possibility of this change is equally experienced in the form ofa terrifying future in the consciousness of another "species" of men and women: the colonizers.Frantz Fano nVl1i

As in the early years of decolonization and the liberation struggles of the twentieth century,radical Islam has today come to define (for now) the terms of radical politics in the twentyfirst century. Also, following the strategies of the liberation struggles of the last century, theprogram of political Islam today is based on an agonistic struggle with ~ . ~ t e ! n i s r n ; that is,that sphere of global totality that manifests itself through the political, social, economic,cultural, juridical , and spiritual integration achieved via institutions devised and maintainedsolely to perpetuate the influence of European and North American modes of being. Two

_ chief attributes of this integration are to be seen in the constitution of the first and secondphases of modernity: firstly, in the far-reaching effects of the world system of capitalism andthe state form; and secondly, in the perpetual interpretation of what a just society ought tobe, pursued through the secular vision of democracy as the dominant prinCiple of politicalparticipation. The main political rupture of today is properly caught in the resistances.1r.QggJes_being initiated by a host of forces (whether Islamic or secular) in order to preventtheir societies from total integration into these two phases of the Western system.

If we are to have a proper analysis by which to interpret the fundamental rationale forsuch resistance, we must try to understand that processes of integration proper to the idea ofWesternism rest somewhat on what Jurgen Habermas call b o u n d a r y - m a i n t a i n i n g systems,"l x \which are also systems of conceptual appropriation of socio-cultural processes schematizedin his distinction between society and lifeworld . One way of touching on this distinction iscommunicated by a view that sees non-Western societies in evolutionary stages of movement

"7 towards integration: from tribal to modern society; feudal to technological economy;underdeveloped to developed; theocratic and authoritarian to secular democratic systems ofgovernance: In his classic study on the colonial discourse around Africa, V. Y. Mudimbewrites about the colonial system "as a dichotomizing system [with which] a great number ofcurrent paradigmatic oppositions have developed : traditional versus modern; oral versuswritten and printed; agrarian and customary communities versus urban and industrialized;subsistence economies versus highly productive economies."x This evolutionary principle ofintegration returns us to Braudel's notion of "temporalities of long and very long duration,slowly evolving and less slowly evolving situations." In every stage of this evolutionary scheme,

I Western ism's insistence on the total adoption and observation of its norms and conceptsi comes to constitute the only viable idea of social, political, and cultural legitimacy from which

all modern subjectivities are seen to emerge. As I shall argue later, the social and politicalstruggles of today have their roots in the flaws inherent in the two concepts on whichWesternism is based.

Within the field of art, the concepts of the museum and art history rest on a similarunyielding theology that founds the legitimacy of artistic autonomy, canons, and connoisseurshipupon the same interpretive pursl.!lt gf modernity, which would also formulate the historicaland formal understanding of all artistic production for all time. In the specific instance oflarge-scale international exhibitions, Gerardo Mosquera has proposed the view that Westernmodernism's theology of values turns into a moment from which to gauge the asymmetry inthe relationship between those he calls "curating cultures" and those others who are "curatedcuitures ."xi In hindsight, the top-down view of curating contemporary art operates similarlywithin the frame of artistic and canonical integration and totalization that grounds theprinciple of Westernism as such. The horizon of artistic discourses of the last century,regardless of claims made for the affinities between the tribal and modern, is neatlydescribed by the cleavage that defines the separation between Western artistic universalismand tribal object particularities and peculiarities which also define their marginality. Whilestrong revolutionary claims have been made for the avant-garde within Western ism, its visionof modernity remains surprisingly conservative and formal. On the other hand, the political

VIII Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Gro1963, pp. 35-36.

IXJOrgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative ActionLifeworld and System: A Critique of Funclionalist ReasonThomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1987, p. 151.

XV. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosopthe Order of Knowledge, Bloomington and Indianapolis:University Pre ss, 1988, p. 4.

XISee Gerardo Mosquera, "Some Problems in TransculturaCurating," In Global Visions: TowardS a New InternationaVisual Arts , ed. Jean Fisher, London: Ka la Press, 1994, p


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and historical vision of the Western avant-garde has remained narrow. The propagators ofthe avant-garde have done little to constitute a space of self-reflexivity that can understandnew relations of artistic modernity not founded on Westernism. The foregoing makestendentious the claims of radicality often imputed to exhibitions such as Documenta orsimilar manifestations within the exhibitionary complex of artistic practice today. What onesees, then, in Documenta's historical alliance with institutions of modernism is how immediatelyit is caught in a double bind in its attempt to negotiate both its radicality and normativity.

The events of September 11, 2001, in the United States have provided us with ametaphor for articulating what is at stake in the radical politics and experimental cultures oftoday, while opening a space from which culture, qua contemporary art, could theorize anepistemology of non-integrative discourse. The metaphor of September 11 is to be found inthe stark notion of Ground Zero. But what does Ground Zero mean at that moment it isuttered? Where do we now locate the space of Ground Zero? What constitutes its effects onthe nature of radical politics and cultural articulations today? Is Ground Zero the space of thekind of antagonistic politics in which the enemy always appears the same, undifferentiated,making his annihilation all the more justifiable? Or is it to be found in the terrible pile ofmolten steel, soot, broken lives, and scarred, ashen ground of the former World Trade Centerin downtown Manhattan? In Gaza, Ramallah, or Jerusalem? In the ruins of Afghan cities? Oris Ground Zero the founding instant of the reckoning to come with Westernism after colonialism?

Let's begin again It may be said-in the sense of the insecurity, instability, and uncertaintiesit inspires- that the kind of political violence we are experiencing today may well come todefine what we mean when we invoke the notion of Ground Zero. Beyond the symbolicdimension of its funerary representation, the notion of Ground Zero resembles most closelyFanon's powerful evocation of the ground-clearing gesture of tabula rasa, as a beginning inthe ethics and politics of constituting a new order of global society moving beyondcolonialism as a set of dichotomizing oppOSitions, and beyond Western ism as theforce ofmodern integration. No contemporary thinker comes closer than Fanon to articulating withsuch radical accuracy and propinquity the chaos that now proliferates inside the formerdead certainties of the imperial project of colonialism and Westernism. These deadcertainties are still to be found in the discourses that have equally proliferated to describe theradical spatial and temporal violence of the actions of September 11. Some call it the clashof civilizations, others the axis of evil, or the battle between good and evil, between the civilizedand uncivilized world; other.s call it jihad, intifada, liberation, etc. In all the i s t i ( / I a n g u a g ethat mediates this state of affairs, cultural and artistic responses could, however, posit aradical departure from the system of hegemony that fuels the present struggle. In fact, it was

~ the Iranian president, Mohammed Khatami, who called for a dialogue between civilizations.Even if the void in downtown Manhattan constitutes a sort of apocalyptic vision of destruction,we must do well not to see its destruction as an apotheosis and the final chapter in theconfrontation between the West and Islam; or in fact, the West and the rest of the world thatis not doing its share in George Bush the Younger 's war on terrorism. September 11,therefore, far from positing a logical end in the long series of oppositions to Westernism,should perhaps be framed as the instance of the full emergence of the margin to the center.

When Fanon was writing in the 1950s and early 1960s, the Islamic and Arab world inAlgeria had risen up in bloody resistance against the brutal force and terror of Frenchcolonialism. The Algerian war of liberation , along with other decolonization processes acrossthe southern hemisphere from the 1940s onwards, should have taught us a lesson on how toread the history of all future political struggles. Ground Zero as such is not the lacuna indowntown Manhattan out of which the symbolic pillar of blue light that illuminates its emptycenter is the s u _ t ~ r e that will restore it to its past. Ground Zero, as the tabula rasa definingglobal politics and cultural differentiation, points toward that space where the dead certaintiesof colonialism's dichotomizing oppositions, and Western ism's epistemological concepts formanaging and maintaining modernity, have come to a crisis. The emptiness at the center isnot a ground but a founding moment for articulating the demands of the multitude that have


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emerged in the wake of Empire.xlI In the later stage of the Algerian liberation war, Fanonarticulated thi s tension between the multitude and Empire so clearly, a view that completelyprefigures fundamentalist Islam's radical transnational enterprise. In terms of strategy,program, and the direction of their assault on the West, the fundamentalist Islamic challengeto the global order is c learly Fanonian. Let us listen to Fanon , writing towards the end of theFrench/A lgeri an war:

The naked truth of deco lonization evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained kniveswhich emana te from it. For if the last shall be first [my emphasis], this will on ly co me to passafter a murderous and decisive st.ruggle between two protagonists. That affirmed intention toplace the last at the head of things, and to make them climb at a pace (too quickly, some say)the we ll-known steps which characterize an organized society, can only triumph if we use allmeans to turn the scale, including, of course, that of violence.

You do not turn an y society, howeve r primitive it may be, ups id e down with such aprogram if you have not decided from the very beginning, that is to say from the actualformulation of that program, to overcom e all the obs acles that yo u will come across inso doing. The native who decides to put the program into practice, and to become its movingforce, is ready for vi olence at all times. From birth it is clear to him that this narrow world,strewn with prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute vio lence.xlli

Absolute violence seen from Fanon's perspective is not an end in itse lf but a means for theconfrontation to come with th e forces of Western ism, today defined by the hegemony ofindustrial capitalism. In the Islamic world, the Iran ian revolution led by Imam Khomeiniclearly marked the opening of this confrontation. The defeat of the occupying Soviet forcesby a broad coalition of Islamic mujahideen in Afghanistan in 1989 marks another point in thecontinuous Islamic battle with Westernism. Similarly the sanction placed on SalmanIRushdie's novel The Satanic Verses was clearly a contestation of the Western epistemologicalavant-gardism out of which the novel emerged . From the for egoing, it seems quite clear thatthe West had completely underestimated the ferocity of fundamentalist Islam's hostilitytoward Western hegemony. On the other hand, there is also a clear recognition by forceswithin Islam (enlightened an d fundam entalist alike) that the only force capable of challengingthe global political and cultural power of the West is that of Islam as a viable world cu lture .xlvAs such , radi cal Islam must therefore be properly understood as a serious counter-hegemonicopposition, at lea st on the global political sta ge. Because radical Islam has often drawn fromtheories of jihad- which it narrowly interprets from a binary oppositional standpoint ofbelievers and non-believers, infidels and good Muslims- it underwrites, through the deploymentof excessive violence, a view of Islam as belligerent, warmongering, and violent. By objectifyingviolence as a means through which to bring about social and cu ltural transformation inregions where it is a majority cul ture, and by proposing very little innovative political modelfor its in teraction with the rest of global society, radical Islam risks alienating other blocks ofthe disaffected global polity if it does not confront a longstanding perception of it as intolerantof difference and coerci ve and unjust in its juridical procedures. The place of women andreligious minorities, the lack of transparency an d cor ruption in its elite, and the lack ofpolitical rights and participation of a la rge segment of its societies further undermine Islam'sclaim to universalism.

As the battle with the forces of "terrorist" elements continues apace in Afghanistan andelsewhere-as Palestinian s fight Israeli hegemony in the Occupied Territories; as antiglobalization groups battle the police in Genoa, Seattle, Montreal, and other cities in Europeand North America; as protesters in Argentina, Turkey, Nigeria, and all across the developingwor ld engage the pernicious policies of the World Ban k and the International MonetaryFund-there is a view today th at Ground Zero represents the clear ground from which themargin has moved to the center in order to reconceptualize the key ideologicaldifferences of the present global transition.

XIISee Hardt and Negri, Empire .

XIIIFanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 37 .

XIVSee Akbar S. Ahmed, Pos/modernlsm and Islam: PredPromise, London and New York: Rou tledge, 1992. Ahargued the poi nl that with n the "new world order" only tof societies exist, those thai are imploding and those tex ploding. Imp loding societies represent those caughtunderdevelopment, economic helotry, cultural insecurmalaise, polit ical fragmenlation and collapse of the staare marked by crises; while ex ploding cultures are thoof th e industrialized world which he identifies as bubboptimism, and ha ve th e tech no logical achievements wIhem to conlinuously expand economically, cultu rally, aWith such asymmetry in place, th ose societies seen to offer no alternatives to Western global hegemony, andcond emned to be ruled by the West. In the case of Islmakes the case that Islamic modernity is caught in thwhich ideas of both implosion and explosion define thwhal its socieli es are undergoing, but also provides it

. 10 adeq uately respond to Western hegemony.

excerpt from okwui enwezor, "the black box - ground zero or tabula rasa"

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