modes of functioning, and system of dependencies’.46 The construction of an artist-function named ‘The Atlas Group’ is in many ways a precise application of the terms of this analysis to the production of artistic authority. Its primary characteristic is its dissemblance of a documentary practice.
This dissemblance is dependent upon, first, its creative use of anonymity, within pseudonymity, via the ‘Group’ form (pseudonymity, one might say, is a condition of historical fictionalization); and second, the exploitation of the documentary, simultaneously, as indexical mark and pure cultural form. More deeply, it relies for its productive ambiguity upon a general ambiguity in the relationship between historical and fictional narratives, through which it achieves both its philosophical and political force. On the one hand, this ambiguity is constitutive of a practice that uses fictional historical narratives for critical ends; on the other hand, a rigorous internal demarcation between the indexical and purely formal (that is, fictional) use of documents is marked by systematically aberrant chronologies and narrative contradictions – a procedure that is at times applied to the narration of the formation of The Atlas Group itself, variously specified as 1999, 1977 and 1986–99 (1999 was the actual year). It is through the relation between the anonymous collectivity of the fiction of the Group itself and the national specificity of its fictions (‘Lebanon’) that the ‘contemporary’, global, transnational character and political meaning of its practice are constructed.
Artist collectives (fictional and actual) are fashionable once again. For over a decade now, they have been proliferating like wildfire through the international art community, whether in purportedly singular form (‘Claire Fontaine’) or explicitly collective guise (Raqs Media Collective). And there is now a revisionist historiography of such collectives’ recent past.47 There are a variety of reasons for this, mostly to do with the attempts to refashion the modes of effectivity of the relations between politics and art. My thesis is that artistic collectivism has a new function here tied to its fictionalization, at the moment of global transnationalism. The recent spate of collectives (fictional or otherwise) are its generally unconscious manifestation.
The collectivization of the fictionalization of the artist-function works, once again, at two levels: the collectivity of the Group, and the collectivization of authority inherent in the (in this case fictionalized) documentary form – at its limit, the material ‘collectivity’ of indexicality itself, the signifying power of nature. The link is anonymity. It is through the combination of anonymity and reference inherent in the pseudonym ‘The Atlas Group’, with its global connotations, that its fictive collectivity comes to figure the speculative collectivity of the globally transnational itself.
I claimed earlier that currently it is only capital that immanently projects the utopian horizon of global social interconnectedness, in the ultimately dystopian form of the market: only capital manifests a subject-structure at the level of the global. Yet capitalist sociality (the grounding of societies in relations of exchange) is essentially abstract; it is a matter of form, rather than ‘collectivity’. Collectivity is produced by the interconnectedness of practices, but the universal interconnectedness and dependencies that capital produces exhibit the structure of a subject (the unity of an activity) only objectively, in their product, separated from individual subjects and particular collectivities of labour, in the self-development of the value-form. Historically, of course, nationalism (the cultural fiction of nations) has filled this lacuna. Nations (‘imagined communities’) have been the privileged social subjects of competing capitals. But the subject-structure of capital no longer corresponds to the territorially discrete entities of nation-states, and other societies outside the nexus of global capital are being drawn inexorably into it. In this respect, the immanent collectivity of capitalism remains, and will always remain, structurally, ‘to come’; hence the abstract and wholly formal character of its recent anticipation as ‘multitude’.
The fictional collectivity of The Atlas Group and its narrative ‘characters’ is a stand-in for the missing political collectivity of the globally transnational, which is both posited and negated by capital itself. As such, it corresponds, at a structural level, to the work of such ‘authors’ as Luther Blissett and Wu Ming in the field of literature.48 Politically, one might say, such work represents, by virtue of its effective relations to the philosophical history of capital, the continuation of the intellectual tradition of Marxist internationalism by new transnational artistic means. The Atlas Group could be construed as the artistic representative of a kind of ‘First Transnational’.
But what then of the specifically national focus of the Group’s work, its exclusively Lebanese fiction? The transnational is not the non-national, but it changes the status of the national, which was in any case famously only ever an ‘imagined community’. Here, the fictionalization of ‘Lebanon’ – through the fictionalization of the evidence of its existence – effects an emblematic fictionalization of the national itself. Furthermore, this fictionalization of the national acts as the de-nationalizing condition of its transnationalization; a transnationalization that is effected via the socio-spatial structure of the artwork/artworld. This is not transnationalism as the abstract other of the nation, but transnationalization as the mediation of the form of the nation-state with its abstractly global other. On the horizon of this movement, we can glimpse something of the radical-democratic aspect of Foucault’s projection of a possible replacement of the conventional author-function (tied to relations of ownership) by some form of anonymity. It evokes the rhetorical question that closes Foucault’s essay: ‘What difference does it make who is speaking?’49
In US art writing of the mid-1960s – at the moment of the emergence of what would become ‘contemporary art’ from the standpoint of its immanently artistic periodization – it mattered very much who was speaking. Whether it was the formalist critic (Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried) or the self-proclaimed conceptual artist (Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth), the authority of the discourse rested heavily on the construction of the author-function. The struggle over art’s relationship to aesthetic was a struggle over the institutional authorization of ‘the beholder’, conducted by a new generation of artist-critics, constructing a new kind of author-function, who refused to offer up objects deemed appropriate to the beholder’s gaze.1 This campaign against a certain ‘aesthetic’ institution of spectatorship was at once anti-institutional and the bearer of an alternative institutionalization, following the temporal logic of artistic avant-gardes established at least a century before.2 It so fundamentally transformed the field of practices institutionally recognized as ‘art’, it will be argued here, as to constitute a change in art’s ‘ontology’ or very mode of being. The new, postconceptual artistic ontology that was established – ‘beyond aesthetic’ – came to define the field to which the phrase ‘contemporary art’ most appropriately refers, in its deepest critical sense. The historical ontology of contemporary art, it is argued here, is thus most directly grasped in the proposition: ‘Contemporary art is postconceptual art’.3
Before I expound this proposition, though, we need to consider the modern concept of art more generally, in its difference from Kant’s concept of ‘aesthetic art’, with which it is still frequently conflated, since this conflation (grounded in a confusion about autonomy) continues to generate confusion about the ontological status of aesthetic aspects of contemporary art. To do this, we need to return to the relationship between Kant’s thought and that of Jena Romanticism, to clarify the difference established there between ‘aesthetic’ and ‘metaphysical’ conceptions of art. This is the topic of the first section. Next, these terms are returned to the present, in the presentation of early Romantic philosophy of art as the conceptual ground for contemporary art criticism, by virtue of contemporary art’s primary historical and metaphysical determination as postconceptual art. The proposition ‘contemporary art is postconceptual art’, through which this situation is grasped, it is argued, has a philosophical status similar to what Hegel called a ‘speculative proposition’ – or at least, a speculative proposition reinterpreted romantically. Finally, the