Progress as Regress
Critical Reflections on an Open Letter to LA MOCA MEMORY

By Hammam Aldouri

Introduction
Over the course of the last few years, open letters have become a significantly more visible tactic deployed in the interrogation of the social, political and ethical responsibilities of art institutions. Yvonne Rainer’s 2011 letter to Jeffrey Deitch—then director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary of Art—to protest the exploitation of young performers during a Marina Abramovic performance designed for a fund raiser gala at the institution, and Hannah Black’s demand for the destruction of Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till in his coffin at the 2017 Whitney Biennial immediately come to mind as two recent examples.(1)

            This essay takes as its point of departure David Joselit’s editorial introduction in October to the publishing of an open letter to LA MOCA demanding the resignation of Steven Mnuchin from the board of the museum in 2016. Joselit noted that the open letter, published in conjunction with a highly truncated version of Andrea Fraser’s “Trusteeship in the Age of Trump” and Fraser and Eric Golo Stone’s “The Case of Steven Mnuchin,” was an expression of the periodical’s new commitment to “publishing historical and contemporary documents related to cultural activism aimed at creating spaces of progressive resistance to threats of authoritarianism and plutocracy.”(2)

            By publishing the open letter to MOCA in a periodical, October offers readers an opportunity to reconsider the document in greater detail. The consideration of the document set out below begins by suspending the editorial description of its political status. Against Joselit’s direct appeal to “progressive resistance,” I ask: what is the politics at work in the letter? How does it function? Can it be accurately described as “progressive resistance” to a specific political configuration? Through a close reading of three passages from the letter, I will answer these questions by exposing what I take to be the concealed political and theoretical presuppositions at work in it.

            There are three ideological presuppositions in operation, yet dissimulated, within the document: (1) a neo-Hegelian presupposition of the unity of actuality and reason (“the rational is real”), a principle that functions as a telos of political engagement to be defended against any violation; (2) the mystification of real historico-political problems by way of the isolation of political tactics from the mediation of capitalist social form; and (3) the neutralization and reification of the difference of the “other” as subject under attack.

An analysis of these three points will reveal the letter’s secret conception of political action in three respective ways: (1) politics is reduced to a tactical instrument that reminds the state of any transgression it may suffer at the hands of private interests; (2) political action is an isolated tactic that, due to its separation from the forces that render it possible, ideologically miscomprehends real issues; and (3) politics is recomposed as an ethical imperative to protect the other in such a way that it robs the latter of any historical agency or connection with broader socio-political projects of emancipation, those that are structurally defined by the supersession of cultural, racial or sexual differentiation.

1 The Rational is the Real
On December 1, 2016, an open letter was sent to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art demanding that Steven Mnuchin step down from his position as board member due to his role within the administration of the then president-elect Donald Trump. The letter was part of a series of actions—online petitions and leafleting outside the museum—that aimed to mount pressure on MOCA to act according to the demands of the arts community. As we know, the Secretary of the Treasury did resign, thus demonstrating, in some direct sense, the political power of activism in the arena of art and culture.

            My concern here is not with the empirically demonstrable effects of the open letter. What I will attend to is the hidden political and theoretical presuppositions at work in the letter. By “presuppositions” I mean those assumptions that are uncritically taken for granted as conditions upon which theories and practices are based. The first presupposition of the open letter is what I refer to as the neo-Hegelian principle of the unity of actuality and rationality as manifested in the modern state. This assumption is expressed in the opening reflection on the historical particularity of the Trump presidency:

Today, our national arts community is being challenged. Indeed, it is facing a dire threat. President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked the freedom of speech on which artistic expression depends.(3)

      As a threat to the freedom of speech—that sacred human right on which American liberal democracy prides itself—Trump threatens the very existence of art since the latter is politically conditioned on the right to express oneself free of censorship. Reading this opening claim, I am immediately reminded of the political and philosophical development of the young Karl Marx in 1842—that is, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung.(4) I will take a short detour through Marx’s youthful journalist writings and then return to the open letter to LA MOCA.

Marx had a difficult time securing an academic position in Prussia after completing his doctoral studies. This was in large part down to the accession of Friedrich Wilhelm IV to the throne in 1840. Expressing an antipathy for all things Hegelian (Marx’s dissertation was a historical recoding of the problem of post-Hegelian thought by an analysis of the formation of post-Aristotelean thought), the new King effectively mandated the censorship of philosophical journals aligning themselves with the philosophy of Hegel as well as evicting certain Hegelian professors from university posts. In some sense, then, Marx’s turn to journalism was imposed upon him by the state and its censorship of ideas.

With this in mind, it is unsurprising that the first article concerns precisely that issue: state censorship. The basic political problem of “Debates on Freedom of the Press and Publication of the Proceedings of the Assembly of the Estates”—and in some sense, the totality of the writings published in the Rheinische Zeitung—is how to defend the universality of the modern state against its transgression by private property interests of the few.(5) Consequently, Marx essentially adheres to the general principle of the Hegelian concept of the state—namely, that with the modern Prussian state, the opposition of public and private interests of civil society are superseded by a higher order reconciliation, a reconciliation that holds private property relations in tact as a necessary dimension of the spiritual ideality of the state.(6)
           

Following Hegel, Marx was, in 1842, a radical liberal who perceived that the political function of a free press was to remind the subjects of the state that they were part of its political substance. Without a free press, people would no longer recognize themselves in the state; they would thus be converted into “a rabble of private individuals.”(7) More precisely, the press is tasked with forging a connection between the individual and the state at a higher order of intellectual abstraction. Through this link, the free press transforms “material struggles into intellectual struggles and idealizes their crude material form.”(8)
The state censorship of the press openly contradicts the spiritual connection between individual and state, a connection that constitutes the form of modern civil society in its most idealized articulation. It is the goal of a free press to show the state its transgressions—in this instance, when it protects the rights of one constituency at the cost of the alienation of another’s. Marx’s youthful contentions can be mobilized usefully in relation to the political declarations of the open letter to MOCA: Mnuchin must step down as an officer of the board of the art institution since he personifies an administration that, like the Prussian state, openly contradicts the very ideal essence on which political life is formally determined, cultivated and reproduced.
Interestingly, the authors and signatories immediately underscore journalism as the first victim of Trump’s pathological desire to suspend the freedom of speech:

[Trump] has vilified journalism, even encouraging supporters to attack journalists physically. He has ranted against the cast of Hamilton for speaking out from the stage, while remaining silent on neo-Nazis celebrating his election win. He has threatened to jail people who desecrate the American flag, demonstrating either ignorance or disregard of the US Constitution and Supreme Court.(9)     
          
            The “freedom of speech” that conditions artistic expression finds a powerful instantiation in the freedom of the press. The latter is understood, in the context of the letter, as the right of free political expression (thespians “speaking out from the stage,” and athletes “who desecrate the American flag”). Generalized to the level of the freedom of political expression, journalism here is posited as a political tactic that, like Marx’s youthful idealism, reminds the state of its essential status—it is a spiritual totality that does not contravene universal, natural human rights by private interests. In other words, the idealist conception of the state—as the rational made real—is uncritically mapped onto journalism as a political tactic.(10)
            According to the authors and signatories, Trump is a temporary “error” in the substantial unfolding of the ideal modern state. His presidency, we are led to believe, is an irrational glitch in an otherwise rational order. What the authors in 2016, and Marx in 1842, did not underscore is the manner in which the modern state as such—its spiritual ideality—is animated by a constitutive contradiction between its ideality (the reconciliation of public and private interests in state legislation and through state institutions) and its real material existence (the everyday conflicts of private property relations produced by these very relations).

The authors and signatories of the open letter seem to positively affirm the state of American liberal democracy as the historical manifestation of the instatement of reason in everyday life (there is a Fukuyamist character to the political ideology at work in the document). The consequence of this affirmation of the state as the protector of liberal civil society evades the deeper political problem of the structure of the social realities and forces—the content—that render the political form of the modern state possible. This is what Marx began to comprehend in 1843.

2 The Mystification of Reality
If the politics of Marx’s 1842 writings for the Rheinische Zeitung were grounded on the problem of how to redeem the state from its temporary alienation of human rights (freedom of speech) by the impositions of the private sphere (state censorship), then the turn to “true democracy” in his 1843 “Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” consists of a reconfiguration of politics on the basis of its mediation by social life.(11) Politics is no longer an isolated human activity that takes place under the auspices of an idealized state. Rather, the politics of “true democracy” is the total transformation of the forces that produce society in a given order at a specific time—that is, the forces that constitute the private property relations of civil society.(12) It is for this reason the state “disappears” with true democracy.(13)
The socialization of politics in 1843 is premised on a critique of the division of the social sphere from the political one in the modern state, a separation embodied unconsciously by the valorization of journalism as a discrete—or, we can now say, private—political activity. True democracy is the supersession of the immanent contradictions that constitute the modern state understood, now, as the abstract, false unity of private property relations that actually determine the struggles and asymmetries of social life under its conditions. Marx began to have some sense of this when he critically interrogated the basic philosophical presupposition of his 1842 journalism, namely, the neo-Hegelian affirmation of the modern state as unity of actuality and rationality. In other words, with the immanent self-critique of his radical liberalism, Marx started to comprehend politics as a mediated social practice, not an autonomous tactic that forces the state to correct itself by revealing the latter’s infringements.
The authors and signatories of the open letter to MOCA, however, do not take the step toward an immanent critique of the presuppositions of what they uncritically and immediately understand by political action and intervention. This means, above all else, that politics can only be posited as an isolated, private tactic that, and this is crucial, reflects the equally private interests of a particular constituency—thus, only producing and reproducing an illusory sense of the connection of individuals to the state. This restriction of politics to tactics is grave: it results in the representation of real historico-political problems in mystified form.
With the context of the open letter, this mystification of reality operates in two distinctive, yet interrelated, ways: first, by the absence of any identification of the productive and mediating function of the fundamental processes of the capitalist mode of production in its contemporary iteration—generalized monopoly capital—within the context of art institutions; and second, by the misleading historicization of Trump’s presidency as an exceptional rupture within the substance of the unfolding of American liberal democracy—as if the former comprised a mere anomaly in the history of the latter. These two mystifications can be discerned in the following passage from the open letter:

[Trump] has disparaged and denigrated women, immigrants, people of color, and the differently abled, and has shown intolerance of difference of all kinds. He has consistently identified the Other (sic) as threatening, promising mass deportation, faith-based registries, and walls around our country. The policies advocated by Donald Trump and his supporters not only are antithetical to what the Museum of Contemporary Art represents, but also directly threaten cultural producers and the very existence of free expression—which the museum was founded to support and on which the museum itself depends.(14)

            The list of ills that define Trump’s private political pathology—the misogyny, xenophobia, etc.—are, interestingly, a mirror reflection of the positive function of MOCA. As we are told in the letter’s opening declaration, the museum “has presented groundbreaking exhibitions of art that explore and challenge racism, sexism, heterosexism, xenophobia and nationalism.”(15) Accordingly, MOCA can be said to operate identically to an idealized notion of journalism: its political function is to remind the state of its essence, viz. its responsibility of protecting the rights of individuals from coercive private interests. In other words, its political function is grounded on the assumption that politics is a particular tactic caught within an assumed set of determinate social conditions. This reduction of politics to desocialized gesture is reinforced by the absence of any reference to class (and, concomitantly, exploitation, uneven development, formal and real subsumption, expanded reproduction, violent accumulation, etc.) within the chain of pathological signifiers listed in the letter.(16)
Why is it that when it comes to both a positive description of the strength of an art institution and the pathology of Trump, the authors remain silent on the social forces that govern the brutal unevenness of life within a fully globalized context—that is to say, a life comprehensively determined by the extensive and intensive processes of capitalist expansionism and accumulation under the conditions of generalized finance monopoly capital? The forgetting of political economy as a constitutive feature of political life in the disclosure of the crisis of art and culture in a Trump presidency is significant. It offers us insight into the ideological presupposition of the open letter: a mystifying post-ideological de-politicization of the economy.(17)
An upshot of the de-politicization of the economy is the reduction of politics to the level of social antagonism between an abstractly collectivized social subject (one that is usually registered by the pronouns “we/our”) and the singling out of particular individuals (Trump, Mnuchin, etc.). This reduction of politics to a scene of direct conflict of distinct social groups further mystifies the problem of political action under the conditions of the capitalist mode of production. What becomes mystified is the sense in which figures such as Trump or Mnuchin (or the Koch brothers) are themselves governed by a system that is hard to reduce to the level of particular concrete individuals. Marx made note of this systematic determination of individuals in one of his most famous passages from the Communist Manifesto as well as in the concept of Träger (personification) in Capital.(18)
Historical agents governed by the capitalist mode of production are personifications of complex social relations and forces. They are not autonomous individuals who are defined by pre-capitalist ethical codes or systems of thought. Their comportment is capitalist. Although analyses of these dimensions of Marx’s thought far exceed the scope of this essay, they do offer us a challenge to grasping the great difficulty of any future of socio-political action under the conditions of capital: how to re-socialize socio-political movements that de-personalize politics—that is to say, how to recognize the trans-individuating power of capital in both the dominators and the dominated.
Another corollary to the isolation of specific individuals within the realm of politics is its tendency to falsely historicize a particular moment, raising it to the level of an exceptional point in the historical fabric of social life. In the case of the open letter and the accompanying texts by Fraser and Stone, Trump is historicized in such a way. The clearest display of this historical exceptionalism is expressed in the slogan “in the age of Trump,” a catchword that not only constitutes the title of one of Fraser’s text, but one that has circulated profusely in the literature on Trump’s presidency.(19) This historicization of Trump—as constituting nothing less than the opening up of an epoch or era—is problematic in the sense that it extracts Trump from the broader historical processes of American politics under the conditions of generalized monopoly capital. In some sense, the liberal misrecognition of the exceptionalism of Trump contains a theological logic of miraculous revelation: Trump’s presidency was born from nothing and appeared from nowhere or, at least, from outside of the politico-economic processes that mediate American liberal democracy.
Recognizing the function of ideological mystification does not mean, of course, that Trump’s violations of the substance of everyday political discourse, as well as his retrograde policies, do not constitute real political problems, ones that must be faced and challenged. Grasping ideological mystification means that we cannot adequately face those problems if we liberate them from the general processes that render the transgressions and regressions possible. In other words, mystification is not annihilation of reality; it is the representation of reality in estranged form. This sense brings us to the final presupposition of the open letter: the neutralization of the notion of difference.

3 The Neutralization of Difference
            In this section, I leave the continuous reference to Marx and consider the open letter’s sociological presentation of “difference” as “the Other” by way of an analysis of Jacques Derrida’s exposition of the ethical framing of différance as a tertalogical movement that renders both possible and impossible what the French philosopher refers to as “hospitality”—the ethical process of the welcoming of the “monster” that reconfigures the logic of acculturation.
The first thing to note in the identification of difference as other in the open letter is the strange presentation of “other” in its majuscule linguistic form: the other is capitalized, it is presented with a big “O.”(20) English speakers familiar with “French Theory”(21) will immediately register two possible references: Jacques Lacan’s notion of the “big Other” or Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenological description of ethics as openness to the “Other.”(22) Although the latter is not named, it is his conception of ethical subjectivity—albeit in a somewhat diluted form—that the letter is partly referring to. It is diluted because what we have in the letter is another that is not absolutely transcendental, or wholly “otherwise” as Levinas puts it, but is, rather, one represented through a series of given sociological forms: women, the differently abled, immigrants, etc. Trump’s transgressions are apprehended as an inhospitality to recognizable “difference of any kinds,” an inhospitality organized by way of the political category of “intolerance.”
It is ironic that difference is, within the open letter, an index for an immediately socially recognizable victim, an identity that is identical to itself (and open only to intersectional combinations that paradoxically reinforce the ossification of identity by way of a form of sociological bricolage). Within the work of a thinker such as Derrida, who develops a new conception of difference, difference was understood as a dangerous and destabilizing surplus (Derrida spoke often of the “dislocating” force of differentiation).(23) It functioned as an immanent force to any system of conceptualization, reason, or logic, albeit as a constitutively repressed dimension. This means, for Derrida, that systems of identity thinking are always already self-deconstructing—they contain within themselves the very force of their undoing. This self-deconstructing is one way to understand his ethics of hospitality.
In an interview from 1990, Derrida presents the structure of hospitality in terms of an openness to the danger of differentiation, to the force of the other. But what is referred to as other here is a tertalogical element that is always bursting from out of its internment by reason, taxonomy and systematic knowledge that calculates experience cut off from the negativity of the incalculable, the unknowable and that which cannot be systematically appropriated—in short, everything that can be understood in terms of the monster. The sense of the monster, and its concomitant signifiers—the incalculable, the event, the arrivant, the future, etc.—is crystallized in the following tortuous, and somewhat garrulous, passage:

A monster is a species for which we do not yet have a name, which does not mean that the species is abnormal, namely, the composition or hybridization of already known species. Simply, it shows itself [elle se montre]—that is what the monster means—it shows itself in something that is not yet shown[…]But as soon as one perceives a monster in a monster, one begins to domesticate it, one begins, because of the “as such”—it is a monster as monster—to compare it to the norms, to analyze it, consequently to master whatever could be terrifying in this figure of the monster[…]I think that somewhere…I said…that the future is necessarily monstrous: the figure of the future, that is, that which can only be surprising, that for which we are not prepared, you see, is heralded by species of monsters. A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future it would already be a predictable, calculable, and programmable tomorrow. All experience open to the future is prepared or prepares itself to welcome the monstrous arrivant, to welcome it, that is, to accord hospitality to that which is absolutely foreign or strange, but also, one must add, to try to domesticate it, that is, to make it part of the household and have it assume the habits, to make us assume new habits. This is the movement of culture.(24)

According to Derrida, hospitality is preparation for the monster at the level of the process of acculturation. The preparation for the “welcoming” of what is unknown, incalculable, the pure event, is that effort of domestication, of economization, by which what is meant by is that organizational ordering and internalizing the destabilizing element into existing customs.(25) Ironically, the Trump administration as presented in the open letter can be said to grasp something about the dangerous character of difference as other understood in terms of the unknowable monster. Its cultural protectionism is a guard against the immanent acculturation of the monstrosity of differentiation, a process that transforms both the arrivant and the welcoming party that orders its household in preparation. In other words, the domestication of the other means the transformation of the economics of the order in which it became acculturated. Acculturation is not a monolithic, immutable power that swallows up—like the caricatured Hegelian speculative Aufhebung—all negativity. It is alive and mutable; it changes through the capture of the monstrous.
All this to say that the other is not a subject to be protected in anticipation of the transgression of ideologically naturalized liberal ideals (“freedom of expression,” “freedom of worship,” etc.). It is an incalculable violent interruption of the order of socio-historical and cultural life. For Derrida, the other is precisely what the open letter describes Trump as identifying: a threat. There are, however, two important distinctions between Trump’s constant invocation of “the Other as threatening” and Derrida’s phenomenological description of the monster: first, the French philosopher develops a concept of hospitality that opens up the question of how to welcome the threat whereas the American president cultivates a politics of protection from the threat; and second, Derrida’s notion of the monster, the other as event, is transcendental in a consistently Kantian sense—it is that which is the constitutive chiasma, the unknowable “X,” that conditions the possibility and impossibility of economization (domestication by the order of reason through rational appropriation).(26) The “other,” then, is precisely not the personification of “women, immigrants, people of color, and the differently abled,” as the open letter suggests. It is that force—the “X,” the will, the movement of deconstruction, etc.—that cannot be crystallized into particular social identities or forms.
The neutralization of difference-as-other within the letter not only covers over the complexity of the concept of difference within the realm of philosophy, but it, more importantly, hollows the other out of any political and social agency. The other is presented preeminently, and one-dimensionally, as a victim, a subject always under attack or, to push the point slightly, an inevitably traumatized subject.(27) This radical regulation of the other as a sufferer reduces its activity to the capacity to either passively await an evil done to it or can only construct testimonials to its suffering after it has been victimized. An ethical subject, understood by way of the reification of given sociological forms, has, within the institutionalization of certain streams of French philosophy from the 1960s and on, done little more. Ironically, the other cannot become different. It cannot, most importantly, be an active political-historical subject, one that sees itself as part of the transformation of social life at a given juncture.   

Conclusion
            As I have tried to show, the open letter contains within itself three uncritically assumed—thus, wholly ideological—conceptions of political tactics: first, the grounding of politics on a neo-Hegelian idealist conception of the speculative unity of reason and actuality in the historical manifestation of the state of civil society; second, the reduction of journalism to political tactic results in the representation of real historico-political problems—the issues that define the political situation of a given historical moment—in mystified form since what such a conception of politics fails to achieve is the comprehension of the mediating function of the social relations and forces that determine a specific political form; and third, the reification of the other as an essentially depoliticized, non-historical subject—a subject that is destined to suffer and to recall its suffering by testimonies.
Taken together, these three political points operate on the general principle of the absence of any exposition of the socio-historical mediation of the capitalist mode of production within the very mechanisms deployed within the open letter. Consequently, the open letter presents its politics as if it were liberated, at the level of both form and content, from the historical juncture that renders it possible. For precisely this reason, if the document functions as progressive resistance to the authoritarianism and plutocracy of Trump’s presidency, as David Joselit unquestioningly posits in his editorial introduction to the open letter, it does so only by way of the mediation of a regressive acquiescence to the complex processes of historical capitalism. Thus, progress is achieved by regress. Both are intertwined.
This permeation of opposites constitutes the basic dialectical contradiction of documents such as the open letter at given moments within the history of capitalist societies. The corollary of such a dialectical contradiction is unequivocal: the strength of cultural activism, understood by way of the political function of tactics embodied in documents such as the open letter to MOCA, is also its weakness. Without critical reflection on the dialectical interconnection of progress and regress in activism caught under the conditions of capitalist society, one-sided descriptions and analyses of interventions such as the open letter are wholly inadequate.   

Endnotes