FOR A CONCEPT OF THE POLITICAL

      generic political art, may now be a convention in need of critique —
      a disruption outstripped by the world of simulation spun out by
      capital.
         Presentational political art, then, remains problematic. And this
      is so, above all, because such art tends to represent social practices
      as a matter of iconic idea(l)s.³⁰ However general the social practices
      of the industrial worker are, as soon as they are represented as
      universal or even uniform, such representations become ahistorical
      and thus ideological. It is here that the rhetoricity of presentational
      political art is exposed; for when such art seeks most directly to
      engage the real, it most clearly entertains rhetorical figures for it.
      In the west today there can be no simple representation of reality,
      history, politics, society: they can only be constituted textually;
      otherwise one merely reiterates ideological representations of
      them. Generic political art often falls into this fallacy of a true or
      positive image, and from there it is but a short step to an axiological
      mode of political art in which naming and judging becomes one.³¹
      Politics is thus reduced to ethics — to idolatry or iconoclasm — and
      art to ideology pure and simple, not its critique.
         This lapse in art comes of ideology conceived in an idealist
      way — as a fixed corpus of class beliefs (a fiction that renders them
      more real, stable than they otherwise are). Ideology must instead
      be grapsed as Marx in fact saw it: as a matter less "of 'false con-
      sciousness' or of class origins [than of] the structural limits or
      within the social totality."³² Here, then, one might distinguish be-
      tween a "political art" which, locked in a rhetorical code, repro-
      duces ideological representations, and an "art with a politic"
      which, concerned with the structural positioning of thought and
      the material effectivity of practice within the social totality, seeks
      to produce a concept of the political relevant to our present. A
      purchase on this concept is no doubt difficult, provisional — but
      that may well be the test of specificity and the measure of its
      value.

155

NOTES

30. This is not to denigrate the importance of such representation as a means to
      convoke a political group; there is, as Jameson has stressed, a utopian moment
      in all of ideology.
31. See Barthes, "Political Writing," Writing Degree Zero (New York: Hill and
      Wang, 1968).
32. Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist
      (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 17.

© 1985 Hal Foster
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America. First edition published in 1985.
Second printing 1987.
Bay Press
990 Alaska Way
Seattle, WA 98104



Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Foster, Hal
Recodings — art, spectacle, cultural politics.

Includes bibliographic references and index.
1. Postmodernism. 2. Avant-garde (ζsthetics) — History — 20th century.
3. Politics in art. 4. Arts and society — History — 20th century. I. Title.
NX456.5.P66F67       1985       700'.1'03       85-70184
ISBN 0-941920-03-8
ISBN 0-941920-04-6 (pbk.)



Caledonia type set by Walker & Swenson, Port Townsend, Washington