A Note on Spatial Dialectics

Abstract

In the notes to the 2015 Venice Biennale, called “All the World’s Futures,” Okwui Enwezor’s make the following observation: “the global landscape lies shattered and in disarray, scarred by violent turmoil, panicked by specters of economic crisis and viral pandemonium, secessionist politics and a humanitarian catastrophe on the high seas, desserts and borderlands, as immigrants, refugees and desperate people seek refuge in seemingly calmer and prosperous lands.” How can the current disquiet—the radical changes from industrial to post-industrial modernity; technological to digital modernity; mass migration to mass mobility, environmental disasters and genocidal conflicts—be grasped and articulated?

This essay examines some critical expressions that could be a response to Enwezor’s poigniant question. To substantiate this statement, I discuss Herbert Marcuse’s 1960 essay “A Note on Dialectic” as well as Henri Lefebvre’s notion of spatial dialectics. Unlike dialectics based on an analysis of historical time and of temporality (Hegel and Marx), spatial dialectics focuses on the contradictions which imply and explain contradictions in historical time without being reducible to them. In other words, the notion of contradiction is not restricted to temporality or historicity but draws attention to contradictions and conflicts in space as well as to contradictions of space, reminiscent of the classical contradictions engendered by history and historical time.

I will elaborate on this point by bringing the discussion back to the visual and performance art—to Tadeusz Kantor’s statements about his use of objects in the 1944 production of The Return of Odysseus and to Abraham Cruzvillegas’ autoconstrucción. Both of these artists, I wish to argue, offer a practice which breaks the syntax of the current new materialist turn and of the processes that aestheticize reality, in order to historicize the performative in the age of globalization along the lines of Marcuse’s dialectics and Lefebvre’s spatial dialectics.

Notes

1 See: http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/exhibition/enwezor/, accessed on 7 July 2015.

2 Ibid.

3 This is especially evident in the social sciences where it is exemplified in a recent interest in the material ontology of culture in geopolitical space, critical or speculative realism, in critical international political economy, globalization and environmentalism, and in calls for new materialist feminism, a new materialist queer theory and new postcolonial study. See, for example, Thrift 2008, Clark 2011 or Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012.

4 In theatre/performance studies, see, for example, a call for papers for the 2014 meeting of ASTR (American Society for Theatre Research) or the work offered in its working groups (on transracial performance; childhood, performance and the post-human; non-human performances; postdramatic theatre; divergent visions of what activism performs; theorizing around the human; post-human sex; ecology and/of/in performance; or technology performs); and Schweitzer and Zerdy 2014, Arons and May 2015 or Zaroulia and Hager 2015.

5 Today, the traces of this debate, translated now into the debate about suffering as identity or about the construction of the victim in print, media, space or on stage, can be found, for example, in Grehan’s Performance, Ethics, and Spectatorship in a Global Age (2009), which draws on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and on his reading of the responsibility for the other to explore ethical questions audience members face as spectators in a media-saturated landscape; or in Lynn Nottage’s play, Ruined (2009), which claims to portray the lives of Central Africans, in particular the lives of four women living in a brothel/war zone in a small mining town in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as accurately as possible.

6 In theatre/performance studies, there is a growing body of work that references Lefebvre’s critique of space. See, for example, Tompkins 2006, 2014, McKinnie 2007 and Hopkins and Solga 2013.

7 Abraham Cruzvillegas, Notes to the installation, Autoconstrucción Suites, printed on the wall, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (23 March–22 September 2013).