(First read at Center for Modern Thought, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, December 04, 2006)

Latin American Literatures and Cultures Colloquium, Department of Spanish and Portuguese,

University of Ohio, Columbus, November 30th, 2007Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott

University of Arkansas, Fayettevillesvillal@uark.edu

The fragmentary demand: neo-avant-garde and nihilism in the Chilean debate on

Visual Arts

I

With the recent publication in 2005, of Art and Politics (Arte y Política), an

international seminar held in Chile in 2004 and focused on the current manifestations

on arts criticism in the so-called Latin American post-dictatorships, new and not very

new intellectual agendas have been reactivated. Particularly those related to the

historical evaluation of artistic movements of the 1970s and 1980s. In this context, one

of the many issues presented at the seminar refers to the critical considerations of

categories such as neo-avant-garde, post-avant-garde, and Escena de Avanzada –

Advanced Scene- that were coined to denote the characteristics of the Chilean

production in the visual field and the criticism associated with it. The main discussion in

the conference, between Nelly Richard and Willy Thayer, paid special attention not only

to the production itself but, principally, to the ways in which criticism conceived and still

does that particular production. It is not surprising then that the very notion of neo-

avant-garde –and the more idiosyncratic Avanzada, were the knots around which an

important part of the debate was articulated. Let us be clear, the categories of neo-

avant-garde and Avanzada, and the exemplary case of CADA (art –action collective),

were categories and examples that attempted, on one hand, a revival of the critical and

emancipatory aspects of the former avant-gardism that appeared in the context of

international Modernism and literary-visual surrealism along with the political

1

connotations of what in Latin America has been called “the other vanguard”. However,

the alternative dimension that these categories were trying to save is the historically

specific situation in which this neo-avant-gardism emerges. The formulation of such

historical and critical labels was done with the explicit intention of differentiating

intellectual and aesthetical oppositional movements under Pinochet’s dictatorship, since

the late 1970s through the 1980s, from the earlier and canonical understanding of the

historical avant-garde, with its correlative exhaustion, as in Peter Bürger’s

interpretation; or death, as in Octavio Paz’ bombastic proclamation1.

If this is so, then there should be something new with art in Chile. However, the

status of such a notion, the “new”, was the blank, in the seminar, of strong criticism as

far as this has been the common and unproblematic appeal of every generation in visual

and literary fields. To put it in other words, the confrontation in the seminar questioned

not only the traditional aspects of avant-gardism but also the overwhelming appealing

to the “new” –novelty and new beginning, as a foundational strategy proper to criticism.

If there were something new with the visual arts in Chile then the problem would be

what is new with the new?

II

In any case, we should understand this debate beyond its natural or disciplinary

inscription; that is to say, what is at stake here is crucial not just for aesthetical or

regional criticism, but, and more important, for the very possibility of re-articulating a

reading of the catastrophic national history. Such alternative reading is needed to

confront the hegemonic version of the recent past that has become official during the

transitional governments in the 1990s. The critical evaluation of visual and art 1 In Chile, the discussion on the Avant-garde exhaustion or potentiality have been formulated in different historical moments, particularly in those of the generations of 1950s –grupo rectángulo-, 1960s –Signo- and the Escena de Avanzada, from 1977 to 1985, approximately. Even if none of those movements attempted a mechanical reception-translation of the international avant-garde, what really matters is the way in which all of them differ in their conceptions of avant-gardism. A panoramic view on the so-called exhaustion of the historical avant-garde is findable in Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984). A contemporary re-evaluation of its critical potential in Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (1996). Somehow, the frame opened by those two books is also the frame traversed by the Chilean debate on visual arts.

2

movements under Pinochet’s regime is a political and intellectual requirement to

articulate a response to the facticity of globalization, which, according to many, would

have started with the military intervention of 1973. However, why visual arts might be

considered important for such a demand? It is not obvious that social sciences have

played a more notorious -if not more decisive- role within the country and in the

international academia? Indeed, what the social sciences and particularly sociology have

done in the dictatorship and post-dictatorship contexts is not only the production of a

reconstructive mechanism to legitimize official versions of the transition to democracy;

they also have offered the correct language, the tone, to narrate history, politics, and

culture at large. Notions such as late modernity and modernization, cultural

heterogeneity and social fragmentation, hybridism and post-political citizenships, pacific

transition and national reconciliation, along with institutional mourning (Retig Report,

Valech Report, and the conversation table on human rights violation under the military

government), forgiveness and forgetting (with impunity), standard historical amnesia

and political anesthesia (the spectacular and media aesthetical politics of today’s world)

are common words and processes in social sciences and political rhetoric of today, in

Chile and beyond. So, why this investment in visual arts? I contend that there is nothing

new in the debate on visual arts; however, it is an exemplary place to deal with issues

that structure critical thinking in the country. As a field, it is one of visibility and

audibility of the intellectual trends in today’s international academia. At the same time,

the very discussion between Nelly Richard and Willy Thayer allows a reactivation,

retrieval, and repetition (Wiederholung) of a thinking on history, more than any sort of

common historical thinking. The Chilean debate on visual arts is a fragmentary demand

for thought, an interrogation directed to the vulgar understanding of temporality,

criticism and politics. It is in this context that Federico Galende’s following quotation

gains its full relevance:

In difference to other Latin American countries, Chile, basically the Chile of post-dictatorship, if we agree in using such a word, it is not the literary field, and less the narrative production, rather the field of visual arts the privileged political

3

space to discuss the transition [to democracy]. Maybe this is due to something very simple as the fact that since the 1980s there are no editors (Chile is a country without editors) and instead there are curators.2

III

The interventions of Nelly Richard and Willy Thayer3 in Art and Politics, present

outlines and telling points about the ways in which our evaluation of the Chilean neo-

vanguard is, at the same time, a positioning on the political field. Curiously enough, both

argue against each other from the viewpoint of critical thinking and both blame each

other of nihilism. Meantime Richard accuses Thayer of a nihilistic attitude that

disregards desires and motivations that moved the Avanzada, conceiving it just as an

effect of the foundational violence of the military intervention of 1973. Thayer responds

to Richard accusing her of a nihilistic attitude of self-assertion that produces a romantic

and foundational historical reconstruction of that particular movement. For Richard,

Thayer negates or represses the political connotations of the 1980s visual arts scene

inasmuch as he is trapped in a philosophical-speculative conception of market as a

trans-historical and insuperable reality. For Thayer, according to Richard’s viewpoint, it

is the eventful condition of the coup d'état of September 11, 1973, the hermeneutical

axis that showed how everything attempted by the neo-avant-garde in the territory of

representation was not only insufficient, but was subordinated to the logic of the

military closure of representation. Such an event was the presentation of the un-

presentable in the national history and as such was the exhaustion of any modernist –

say avant-gardist- understanding of politics, art, and criticism. This is what she calls the

evident conformism feeding Thayer’s position. However, Thayer states:

2 Galende’s text is an unpublished conference given in Duke University, 2003. From now on, all translations into English are my own, at lest the contrary is stated. 3 Arte y Política (2005). Nelly Richard: Lo político y lo crítico en el arte: “¿Quién teme a la neovanguardia?” [The political and the critical in art:” who is afraid of the neo-vanguard?”], 33-46. Willy Thayer: Crítica, nihilismo e interrupción. El porvenir Avanzada después de Márgenes e instituciones [Criticism, Nihilism, and Interruption: the Advanced future after Margins and Institutions], 47-62. Thayer’s title refers to Nelly Richard’s foundational document Margins and Institutions. Art in Chile since 1973, (1986), which is a document that defined the reach and scope of the so-called Escena-de-Avanzada in Chile, and also, configures and founds it as such.

4

The operations of the Avanzada could not be considered under the sign of avant-gardism in terms of the deconstruction of the historical institution of representation, because in 1979, when the Avanzada emerges, not only the distribution and production of art apparatuses, but all institutional forms have been suspended in a series of coups. Six years of coups (1973/9), of shock policies, and military decrees (Vanguardia, Dictadura, Globalización, 251-2.)

For Richard, the Avanzada was an aesthetical and political movement and a category

meant to systematize the heterogeneous manifestations in the field of arts, visuality,

and literatures, through the second period of Pinochet’s dictatorship, between 1977 and

1985: “The Avanzada was not a homogeneous totality. If the Avanzada put together

practices that were supportive with each other because their passion for conceptual

exploration and artistic deconstruction, those practices offered responses frequently

divergent in the form in which they assumed the relationship between art, criticism, and

society” (Lo político y lo crítico en el arte, 43). Avanzada means new approaches in

painting, public performances, social art understood as a break with the institutional

circumscription of the former avant-gardism (50s and 60s), video-testimony, and

photography. But, it also means people as divergent as Raúl Zurita (poet), Diamela Eltit

(writer), Lotty Rosenfeld (visual artist), Richard herself (art and cultural critic) –all of

them grouped in CADA-, along with the photography of Paz Errázuriz, the video-

performance of Carlos Leppe, the serigraphic air-mail of Eugenio Dittborn, the

theoretical elaborations of Ronald Kay, Patricio Marchant and of Pablo Oyarzún, among

many others. We may assert that one of the many contributions of Richard’s critical

undertakings is precisely the coining of such a category, which is the core of her earlier

book, Margins and Institution (1986).

In this sense, more than a socio-historical category, for Richard Avanzada means

a heterogeneous, uneven, and multidimensional set of works, whose common

denominator was their oppositional orientation to the prevailing censorship of the

regime and its monolithic logic of representation (the plot of the coup as the national

salvation and rebirth of the country). It also was in conflict with the classical leftist

understanding of art as an instrument for political liberation. That is to say, the

5

Avanzada was disputing the very role of the so-called (political) vanguardism, criticizing

the general orthodoxy of those who were configuring the political opposition to the

regime.4 Richard affirms the Avanzada was not a simple, a-historical and non-reflexive

recuperation of the classical avant-gardism; on the contrary, it was meant : “1) To

emphasize the precursory character of a –fighting- work with art and about art that,

certainly, was part of the avant-gardist mood of formal experimentation and politization

of aesthetics; 2) to gain distance from the Modernist epic of the avant-garde that was

internationalized by metropolitan histories of art; emphasizing the local specificity of a

risky scene” (Lo político y lo crítico en el arte, 34.) All of this, despite the fact that some

of the artists identified themselves with the resistant spirit of the avant-garde.

Similarly, “the Escena de Avanzada disputed standard politics in the dictatorship

years the ability of conforming a “field” of tensions and problems around the dilemmas

of representation, which was resistant to the instrumental ideological rhetoric of the

content and to the pragmatic operations inherent to the political program.” (Lo político

y lo crítico en el arte, 36). Therefore, the sub-valuation or indifferentiation produced by

Thayer in his nihilistic reading of the coup d'état, as the devastating event that broke

forever the communitarian narrative of the country, plays down the importance of the

Avanzada and its political endeavor. For Richard, Thayer, in a rather nihilistic mood,

identified the whole scene of visual arts with the eventful condition of the military

intervention, and that interpretation leaves him still cast in the spectacular character of

the September 11 bombing of the government palace. If the coup was the

consummation of the avant-garde (as one of Thayer’s titles states) then, the aesthetical

and critical strategies of the Avanzada remained within the historical context opened by

dictatorship, that is to say, those were strategies already capitalized by the neo-liberal

process of globalization. Richard insists:

4 Very clear to this respect is the famous congress in the Alejandro Lipschuz Institute in May 1987, Santiago. Under the title “Hegemony and Visuality”, that congress attempted to organize the semantic field of oppositional cultures and democratic tendencies; however, Richards presented the Avanzada in a rather anti-hegemonic mood questioning the classical humanist reading of the left and its Art of the Resistance. La estratificación de los márgenes (1989).

6

The event of the coup d'état of September 11, 1973 and the emergence of the Escena de Avanzada do not belong to the same series of processes or facts… To force the structural analogy between the coup and the Avanzada, is to dissolve the tension between context (the socio-historical: dictatorship) and text (the aesthetics-cultural: the neo-avant-garde experiment). Between, on one hand, the macro-reference of the historical fact and, on the other hand, the event of the text and the work that translates the fact –vertical, one-dimensional- of the Real (the dictatorship as facticity) to a horizontal game of expressive-symbolic folds, which multidimensionality displaces the transcendental meaning of the “coup” in multiple explosions of critical language (Lo político y lo crítico en el arte, 37-8).

Nonetheless, we should make two observations with respect to this quotation: 1) the

understanding of the coup as an event is not necessarily its reduction to a vulgar

conception of temporality as mere facticity. Actually, Thayer conceives the coup as a

series of events, with different and successive elaborations, in the process of

globalization, in which the very date of September 11, 1973, would appear as its big

bang.5 However, to conceive the coup as an ‘exception’ within Chile’s republican history

is something that official historiography has done insistently since ever. In other words,

the vulgar conception of temporality that identified the event of the military

intervention with the facticity of the interruption of Chile’s republican history, need to

be abandoned. The eventful condition opened by the coup does not end with the

facticity of the coup itself; in fact, Thayer and Richard are both critical readers of the

Chilean exceptionalism or ideological understanding of institutional continuity. Thayer

comments: “The coup makes visible how the continuum of the modern national history,

the more than one hundred years of democratic representational culture supported by

the so-called autonomy of the spheres is, at the same time, the continuum of violence:

that the progress as historical norm is an euphemist version of the violence as the real

historical norm” (Thayer, Crítica, nihilismo e interrupción, 57). This Benjaminean

understanding of official history shows how the State of Exception is actually the rule,

5 If the Chilean case could be thought as one of a revolutionary neo-liberalization, as Thomas Moulian has put it (Chile actual, 1997), then, a socio-economic analysis of such a process is findable in an excellent book by David Harvey: A Brief History of Neoliberalism, (2005).

7

denouncing how the reverse of the so-called democratic exceptionalism is the juridical

exceptionalism that has always prevailed as violence.

2) In Richard’s differentiation between facticity (the coup) and intellectual

elaboration (Avanzada), she opposed an understanding of art based in a relative

autonomy to the sovereign notion of dictatorship that she transfers to Thayer; which is,

precisely, a troublesome argument insofar as autonomy and sovereignty supplement

each other in a perfect fashion according to Thayer’s perspective. If the dictatorship was

a sovereign one –following Agamben’s classification (State of Exception, 2005) so, any

form of political thinking that remains in the territory of sovereignty, without

questioning its nihilistic belonging to the history as violence –be it as a desiring

textuality or, even, as a multiplicity of subjective actions- is part of the same horizon

opened by modern metaphysics. The eventful condition of the coup consists in having

disclosed for us, once again, the complicity between sovereignty as political form and

subjectivism as a nihilistic insistence. The so-called relative autonomy that Richards

opposes to Thayer’s sovereign understanding of the dictatorship rests also upon an

understanding of the dictatorship and its monumental authoritarian culture. Richard

needs to emphasize this authoritarian culture in order to contrast official art and the

Avanzada. Nevertheless, at the same time, Richard remarks the fragmentary character

of the Avanzada to escape from Thayer’s accusation of operating a reconstructive and

legitimizing reading equivalent to the reading of the past performed by sociological

discourses. Finally and paradoxically, she affirms, in contrast to the alleged fragmentary

character of the Avanzada identity, a coherent (if not totalizing) strategy that

differentiates it from classical –pre-dictatorship- avant-gardism and from the leftist

instrumentalism:

Confronted with the breaks in the logic of representation (with the disarticulation of categories and identities) and confronted with the way in which the culture of the left was trying to mask the broken symbols in order to reconfigure a certain image of continuity and historical tradition, the Avanzada works were worried about how to pick up those fragments and residues (the sub-represented, the diminished) that wandered in the margins of the grand and

8

heroic narratives of the resistance and its epic. Meanwhile the art ideologically cast in political parties resorted to humanist-transcendent meta-significations (People, Identity, Memory, etc.), the Avanzada recovered the micro-biographic fragments of shattered imaginaries, in order to undermine in that way, the perfect representations that leftist ideologies were still supporting (Lo político y lo crítico en el arte, 41).

In conclusion, Richard accused Thayer of being nihilist so far as he disregarded the

political and critical elements of a movement that was not only breaking within the

institution of national art, but was also breaking with that very institution. In this sense,

no wonder that Richard recuperates, so insistently, the activities and performances of

CADA6, a collective that emerges in the national situation with a political agenda

oriented to what they called social art:

What Thayer calls ‘the neo-capitalist end of the critique of representation’, is based, precisely, upon an operation that benefits from its refusal of the political. A refusal implicit in the gesture of making equivalent the postmodern diagnostic about the crisis of representation and a post-historical nihilism related to the end of the battles around signification (Lo político y lo crítico en el arte, 45.)

IV

Nelly Richard’s article is a response to two former works of Willy Thayer that he

considers, even if already published, as part of a work in progress.7 Nonetheless, I

should state that my aim is neither to argue against Richard’s crucial work, which, on

the other hand, has been the very condition for many critical endeavors in the visual,

literary, and critical fields (at least, in Chile). Nor do I sympathize in a humanistic fashion

with Thayer’s so-called nihilism [it would be an oxymoron]. What is powerfully called to

my attention is the series of problems that this debate, and specifically, the conceptions

6 In many issues of her fundamental journal, Revista de crítica cultural, Richard and others have addressed the importance of CADA (cf. 18, 22, 28, 29-30). On the other hand, Robert Neustadt, CADA Día: la creación de un arte social, (2001) is an efficient compilation of documents and declarations of CADA and its members. 7 Those works have been re-elaborated and part of them is included in his recently published book El Fragmento Repetido (2006). I have benefited from a long and friendly relationship with both, Richard and Thayer; in this case, I have had access to the manuscript before its publication. See, El golpe como consumación de la vanguardia, (2002). Also, Vanguardia, dictadura, globalización (2003).

9

of nihilism, discloses. Coming back to Thayer, in one of his articles he defines the

Avanzada as follows:

Escena de Avanzada names, before anything else, the textual production of Nelly Richard on visual arts, in Chile, since the late 1970s until 1983, approximately. Her texts, in those years, configure the original accumulation and the latter labeling of that name. To quote them, is to quote the signature of a series of essays that, as a set, configures the hesitant process of elaboration of such a concept, which circulates today among us as a natural category (Vanguardia, Dictadura, Globalización, 250.)

Here, in opposition to Richard, what Thayer identifies with Avanzada is not the

heterogeneous movement that she comments on and defends; Avanzada, instead,

would be for him the very foundational and categorical operation of Richard’s textuality.

This is, however, an argument already presented in the contributions of the Chilean

philosopher Pablo Oyarzún, who as the author of important texts would be one of the

first in addressing this problem. Indeed, in his early text “Art in Chile, from twenty, thirty

years” (1988), Oyarzún already identified the Avanzada with a national wave of

modernization. Avanzada would be, somehow, the equivalent of a later process of

modernization that the visual arts have been experiencing since the 1950s. His main

hypotheses are related to the founding character of the Avanzada, as a foundation of a

“new” understanding of the artistic practice, which is the result of a tense relationship

between the international avant-garde and the local scene of reception. Once the

Avanzada is conceived as a counterpart of the process of modernization, even if within

the art institution, Oyarzún’s second hypothesis gains hermeneutical potentiality: the

way in which Richard elaborates around the Avanzada, her foundational manifesto,

Margins and Institutions, along with being a gifted critical work, is also an inverted

narration familiar to those of the social sciences.8 Even if Oyarzún is very careful

maintaining his reading as a hypothetical one, we might affirm that with those 8 Oyarzún important role in the visual arts debates in Chile, is due to his thoughtful contributions, among which we should mention the texts focused on the history of the national visual arts, “Arte en Chile, de veinte, treinta años” (1988) and, “Crítica, historia. En torno a Márgenes e instituciones de Nelly Richard” (1987). A careful analysis of the Chilean debate requires considering the important and influential book Anaestética del ready-made (2000), which is the edited version of his former dissertation.

10

hypotheses the problem of a reconstructive logic of narration that pervades Richard’s

considerations on visual arts is already set up.

Therefore, Richard’s understanding of the Avanzada is marked by this

reconstructive logic, and thus, the notion of a clear-cut rupture that this movement

claimed in relation to the traditional institution of art is the effect of a foundational-

fiction rhetoric, that shows itself as the counterpart of other reconstructive discursive

logics as those of the transitional sociology. Finally, if the Avanzada requires an

understanding of its specificities, we should not forget how it is articulated through the

process of translation of the international scene, a modernizing translation that is at the

core of this movement.

Thayer, however, (re)orients his criticism to the canonical reading of Richard and

not to the Avanzada as such:

The Political and the Critical in Art [Richard’s text in question] makes possible to perceive that the ‘condemnation of the past and the future’ of the Escena de Avanzada that N. Richard transfers to my texts, actually, constitutes not a condemnation of the practices and works of the Avanzada, rather a reading of the vanguardist-modernizing code with which N. Richard produced the canon and the modernizing profile of such a scene in Margin and Institutions -the only canon that we have, in any case-. A canon, in which she insists today, it seems, in order to protect the Avanzada from other possible readings that go beyond her codification (Crítica, nihilismo e interrupción. El porvenir Avanzada después de Márgenes e instituciones, 53.)

The former accusation of nihilism that Richard employs against Thayer for negating the

political and critical dimensions of the Chilean neo-avant-garde, are now inverted by

Thayer who accuses Richard’s book -Margins and Institution- and her readings on visual

and cultural practices, of being unable to question the deep link between modernization

–as the logic of cultural production- and the reconstructive-foundational mechanism

animating her criticism. What in Oyarzún was in a hypothetical fashion, in Thayer

appears as a diagnosis of Richard limitations. Thayer himself would recognize the

importance of her texts and interventions in general; but what he seems unwilling to

state clearly is his distrustful attitude to the self-proclaimed potentialities of cultural

11

criticism, a practice that characterizes roughly Richard’s intellectual agenda. Is it true

that cultural criticism is equivalent to the international paradigm of cultural studies? Are

the politically engaged texts of Richard a simple and naïve repetition of the modern

emancipatory tendencies of vanguardism? Is the reconstructive-foundational logic of

Margins and Institutions -and The Insubordination of the Signs (1994, 2004)- a neo-

structuralist and romantic version of dissident movements under dictatorship? On the

other hand, is it not obvious that Thayer’s farewell to avant-gardism –even if rescuing

the Avanzada- reminds us of Octavio Paz’ conservative proclamation of the death of the

historical avant-garde? Up to what extent is it possible today to renounce the

heterogeneous configuration of the historical avant-garde, given the geopolitical

complexities in its inception, and reduce any revival of a political avant-gardism to a

nostalgic, if not nihilistic, fashion without being cast in a theoretical indolence? We are

not ready to open such a Pandora’s Box. May be because such an interrogation take us

away from the main problem disclosed by the debate, that of the multiple relation

between criticism, politics, and nihilism.

V

The positions about La Escena de Avanzada, both Richard’s and Thayer’s,

somehow repeat another debate that emerged with the publication of Thayer’s book on

the “Un-modern Crisis of the Modern University9”. Curiously enough, it is a book that

appeared the same year as Bill Readings’ critical account of contemporary academia,

The University in Ruins (1996). There are, of course, many similarities between those

two books that require a deep analysis; however, what is common in both is the

distrustful approach to the field of cultural production. We may say that for Thayer, as

for Readings’ critique of cultural studies, the logic of cultural production that

9 For a whole set of articles related to that debate, see Nepantla, Views from South. A Duke University Journal that in its volume I, issue I (2000), published articles by Thayer and Richard along with a full conversation on the importance of the book regarding the crisis of the modern university. Thayer’s book, La crisis no moderna de la universidad moderna, (1996) is for Richard’s argument equivalent to what Margins and Institutions (1986) is for Thayer’s one.

12

characterizes the international intellectual arena is subordinated, from its very

inception, to the logic of capitalist valuation, insofar as what we call cultural production

is a field diminished by the capitalist contemporary logic of global circulation. Thayer is

not a partisan of end-of-history discourses. His problem is not with the ways in which

cultural heterogeneity and diversity, as matters of fact, are common everywhere; his

problem is related to the way in which cultural fetishism of diversity and

multiculturalism, are symptomatic of a nihilistic strategy of university valuation that

works finally as indifferentiation. Thayer reacts to what we might call, to use an idea of

Alberto Moreiras, a generalized exhaustion of the critical potentialities of cultural

difference. Indeed, an exhaustion of difference due to the all-pervading logic of global

accumulation that implies, basically, the very indifferentiation between what we used to

call intellectual work and manual or even physical labor, between theory and facticity.

Any sort of intellectual reformulation of a critical agenda that disregards the very

condition of indifferentiation, that is to say, the way in which criticism is subordinated to

the standard of valuation, by the international system of production and circulation of

knowledge, is only a complementary effort in the configuration and improvement of a

new “image of the world” (Heidegger10). In this sense, Thayer’s distrust of cultural

production might be thought as a nihilistic strategy, but not in the sense in which

Richard accuses him, since from her viewpoint, what constitutes Thayer’s nihilism would

be his careless consideration on the Avanzada resistance to dictatorship.

For Richard, Thayer is a nihilist insofar as he is trapped in a sort of exaggerated

understanding of the devastating condition of the coup. Unable to read the micro-

politics of desire, minority’s identities, and performative strategies of politization,

Thayer, as a negative theologian, a sort of Hegelian transvestite, subsumes everything

10 This refers to the understanding of modernity as a time-space frame pervaded by the Cartesian logic of subjective rationality (Ratio, Ego cogito), which implies, roughly, the conversion of thinking in knowledge and knowledge in a pragmatic tool to ‘operate’ in the world. The world, by this disposition, has lost its mysteries and has become at-hand, in a state of reserve (bestand) (Heidegger, 1978). In this sense, any effort to represent the current dynamics of our contemporary world in us much as is an attempt within representation –without questioning the inherent relationship between instrumentality and knowledge- is only part of the permanent improvement of such a representation. For Heidegger, modern science has accomplished the conversion of the world into image, but this also means the conversion of ours representations of the world in an un-thoughtful relation to it.

13

under the nihilistic logic of global capitalism. Nevertheless, what we call a nihilistic

strategy in Thayer, nihilation of nihilism, is rather different. Let me summarizes and

make some indications:

a) As stated, part of the debate consists of mutual accusations of nihilism. However,

Richard understands nihilism as a renunciation of politics and culture, insofar as those

are oppositional fields open to the manifestations of drives and desires. Thayer

understands as nihilism the very affirmation of a desire; let’s say culturally or politically,

that is unable to question its inherent mechanism of commodification.

b) Thayer neither considers nihilism as a horizon nor as a philosophical perspective,

instead, as a material a priori, which cannot be overcome or surmounted by any sort of

self-assertion, insofar as such self-assertion (will to power, will to will, Heidegger) is

inherently part of Western nihilism that today is apparent with the global articulation of

capital.

c) Richard identifies oppositional forces at odds with the logic of global capitalism and

she thinks that those forces should be considered as political manifestations of history’s

open condition. From that understanding, Thayer would appear as a philosopher of

history, but at the end of history, in which no force would be capable of resurrecting the

present from its universal closure.

d) But Thayer’s politics –if there is one- would be that of subtraction, that is to say, the

only way to interrupt the all-pervading logic of valuation, say nihilism, would require a

questioning of the modern assertion and investment in identities, sovereignty, and

emancipatory politics. Somehow, Thayer identifies Richard’s anxiety with criticism as a

neo-structuralist version of the modern grand politics (Kant, Hegel), whilst he is pointing

out what he himself calls interruption, désoeuvrement (Blanchot), desistence (Derrida);

which “is” an un-working of those self-assertions and investments in any subjective logic

of the political.

e) Conceptually, the problem has to do with the way in which both understand

devastation, destruction and deconstruction. Meanwhile for Richard the destructive

14

reading of Thayer is more a devastating operation that negates any value to the

Avanzada. For Thayer, the reading of Richard is a romantic foundational-fiction that

reconstructs (and because of that, it is not enough a destructive or deconstructive

alternative) and recuperates, for the transitional present, the politics of the Avanzada

that could be relevant in the 1980s, but not today. In this context, Thayer argues:

The consideration of nihilism as something equivalent to “inactivity”, “loneliness”, “passivity” seems to be a conceptual mistake. This weak and depressed condition of nihilism is related to the idea of Total Mobilization [Ernst Jünger], to values as efficacy, proficiency, administration, confrontation, competition, planetary battles for power, the Cold War and the end of the Cold War that is worse than the Cold War, etc. Notions such as “un-working”, “neutrality”, “subtraction”, I insist, are reserved for a kind of (in)activity that aspires to interrupt nihilism, the activism of the “absolute desire” and things like that. None of this means to defeat nihilism, to progress beyond it, to stop it significantly, nor does it has anything to do with new articulation of the presence (Crítica, nihilismo e interrupción. El porvenir Avanzada después de Márgenes e instituciones, 56.)

f) Nevertheless, still another dimension of this paradoxical mutual accusation of nihilism

must be disclosed. Thayer appeals to an interruption regarding Richard’s reconstructive

emphasis on the Avanzada and its history, but what remains problematic in Thayer’s

position is the status of his understanding of nihilism as a material a priori. If this

material a priori does not work in a deterministic way, then Nelly Richard’s inventions

and emphasis on the Avanzada are to be taken as political attempts to overcome the

closure of experience that the dictatorship meant. Actually, Richard’s reconstructive

analysis of that movement was a contextualized venture still under dictatorship and

Thayer argument questioned more than the analysis itself, its pertinence for a “new”

approach:

I would read the practices and works of the Avanzada against the grain of the canonization that Margins and Institutions [Richard’s book of 1986] made of them; against their capture as a field of formal independence, and even more, against the idea of modernization of visual arts. I would read them, rather, as a constellation of activities or as a pragmatic of the subtraction, of the un-working,

15

désoeuvrement, of interruption: as a pragmatic of the collage, of the Gram or even the allegory, pragmatics that interrupt the undifferentiating homogenization that the noisy cultural plurality of today produces. ((Crítica, nihilismo e interrupción. El porvenir Avanzada después de Márgenes e instituciones, 57.)

Nonetheless, as it is obvious in the quotation, this new reading –the use of the

conditional tense- is still to come and Richard’s account of the Avanzada and the

practices related to it, even if in a secondary way, find in her reading one of the few

places of thoughtful problematization.

g) But, if the understanding of nihilism as a material a priori works in a deterministic

way, then many problems reappears, even against Thayer’s own position. If the logic of

indifferentiation makes impossible to traverse the field of capitalist valuation (de-

valuation) so, why we should take Thayer’s own position as external to this logic? It is

not Thayer’s position one among other image of the world? At the same time, if nihilism

or indifferentiation were the very logic of cultural production and late capitalism, then

would it mean that every critical attempt (including those of Thayer’s and Richard’s)

reproduces the Sisyphus condemnation of uselessness? What happens if we take both

Richard’s and Thayer’s position as fragmentary positions, sort of fictive or fictional

points of departure to break that very logic of homogenization. If we do that, then

Richard’s reconstructive mechanisms are internal to a fiction of the political that is as

worthy as Thayer’s nihilistic version of the field of cultural production. Of course, in

doing that, what I have performed is the very indefferentiation that Thayer denounced,

but, as Thayer himself has put it, today we may need not much a confrontational and

antagonist strategy, rather one of interruption.

We still need to think about the many dimensions of such a debate. However, in

a preliminary conclusion we may assert that in the Chilean debate on visual arts, we

have the lateral discussion on history and its narration; the coup d'état, dictatorship,

and globalization; the way of articulating and re-articulating political thinking, the place

of criticism, and the valuation or devaluation or intellectual work. I think, this is already

an interesting debate, beyond the picturesque reduction of Latin American realities to

16

identity politics, new articulations of presence, and magical realism. To me, the

relationship between nihilism as a material a priori and the political, as a question for

non-subjective articulation of meaning, is already a problematization of the nihilistic

condition of our present, and if that question is possible, it also reserves the time to

think carefully, even if time is what, it seems, we do not have.

To insist in this way of thinking, however, is a rather difficult task, basically

because the moral conceptions that circulate today, blames as a nihilism any critical

attitude of interruption, desistance or reflexive consideration of the emancipatory

urgencies of our time. To give oneself the time –that time of thinking- is the first

condition in order to access thinking without conditions. If not, then nihilism, that is to

say, the moral denunciation of nihilism. In this sense, the dispute between Richard and

Thayer does not require taking sides; it does requires a careful consideration of the

potentialities of a thinking that, maybe for first time in the national intellectual history,

has freed itself from the demands of making sense. Indeed, this debate will not be

interesting for those worried with the reconfiguration of a critical agenda shattered by

the events associated to the Coup and globalization: reconfiguration of the left

strategies around the nation-State, new political rationalities, new emancipatory

subjectivities, and new images of the world. As such, this nihilation of nihilism is a

suspension of the modern dialectic that feeds and absorbs our modern understanding of

the political. As Federico Galende would put it, if there were any political aspect in the

debate on visual arts in Chile, it had to do with the very suspension of intention, that is

to say, with the suspension of the totalizing demand on history. The fragmentary

demand, this is how we call it, “there we are and there we should stay.”

Fayetteville, November 2006-October 2007

17