Author: Respondents

It is assumed that “thinking globally” is a moral imperative within the humanities. Is it? Among other things, it presumes a neutral space from which to expand one’s geographic purview, as though curators and scholars could stand outside the global game of profit and recognition. In this issue of The Tank, art historians and critics respond to sociologist Larissa Buchholz’s analysis of the global contemporary art field. Do globalizing initiatives really serve artists outside the Global North? Or do they refract neoliberal logics of concentrating capital and expanding markets? Has the global turn transformed our evaluative norms? Or has the very concept of “the global” become just another currency for meting out prestige?

The central argument we make in the book, contrary to the received wisdom on the left, is that the rise of capitalist finance in the current period cannot be understood as a cause or symptom of the decline of the “real” industrial economy. Nor can it be considered as “separate” from production. Rather, finance is and has been utterly integral to the dynamism, flexibility, and strength of capital. Moreover, we show that it is precisely as a result of the role of finance that capitalist development has not led to increasing monopolistic stagnation but has increased the competitiveness of capital by facilitating its growing mobility across space and among economic sectors. Capitalist financialization has thus served to intensify the competitive discipline on all investments to maximize monetary returns.

Abbas sees this musical Brecht as offering a fuller means of accessing the nature of fascism, an account that necessarily draws together “war, capital, and colony,” but also “patriarchy,” “supremacism” and the “colonializing … discourse of the expert,” what she also calls “knowledge systems of colonial and capitalist modernity.” Abbas warns the reader against the urge to “separate” these terms as these “systems are contained within each other,” so that for Abbas, addressing one is addressing the others. This is, I argue, a classically “inaccurate” picture of capitalism.

In the encounter with another, seeing is always already reading. Expression, here, appears another name for the allegoresis of the soul as it unfolds into visibility—that is, legibility—by way of the body, with all the opportunities for misreading that inevitably follow. Yet there is no other, notionally more direct way for it to show itself. Warnock approaches Hantaï’s paintings as fields of expression in roughly this sense: places where thought becomes visible, where Hantaï works out ideas that necessarily take just this form.

Complexity enchants ANT, new materialism, posthumanism, media studies, affect theory, and the literary undertakings of postcritique, new descriptivism, and “weak theory.” Its prophets claim as virtue that reality is immanent to itself, that no individual element of a complex web can be said to activate “a more fundamental reality” than any other. There is therefore a propulsive purpose accorded to critics: count up the everything, trace out the complexities, caress nuance, feel the vibe, what is connected to what. When everything is complicated and criticism calls itself to the tasks of phenomenological witnessing and empiricist tabulating, the vocation of criticism to make a cut in the swath of experience, to shift registers to a different order of knowing, is abandoned.