The artwork’s community

ABSTRACT

The paper explores the inherent political dimension of art, theorized as the artwork’s community: the community structurally constitutive of the work of art as a phenomenon. I distinguish between two major paradigms of the artwork’s community: the Kantian and the Heideggerian. The Kantian is a transcendental aesthetic community, evoked in aesthetic judgment, which thus claims the possibility of emancipated political existence. The Heideggerian, in contrast, is an actual community, sharing the understanding of reality inaugurated by the truth-disclosing event of art. I further distinguish between two possible interpretations of the Heideggerian artwork’s community. The orthodox interpretation conceives of it in terms of Volk, which renders it largely irrelevant for the art of our age. I suggest a new interpretation of the Heideggerian artwork’s community, which keeping with the historical actuality as its essential treat, reduces its scale to the type of community defined by Hakim Bey as temporary autonomous zone (TAZ). I undertake a comparative analysis of two contemporary artistic phenomena, which seem to be informed by an interpretation of the artwork’s community in terms of the latter paradigm: the participatory practices of contemporary art (also known as relational art) and the psytrance dance movement. I show that while psytrance indeed embodies the Heideggerian artwork’s community in its TAZ-version, participatory art operates within the Kantian paradigm, while taking TAZ as the privileged medium of its aesthetic operation.

KEYWORDS:

• Art and community
• aesthetics and politics
• relational aesthetics
• participatory art
• psytrance
• Kant
• Heidegger
• Hakim Bey

Introduction

In this paper, I explore the inherent political dimension of art, theorized as the artwork’s community: the community structurally constitutive of the work of art as a phenomenon. This analysis is part of the phenomenological investigation of our idea of art: the complex multidimensional framework of intelligibility, which enables us to experience anything whatsoever as art. This idea is commonly constitutive for our involvements with an enormously diverse and heterogeneous domain of products of our culture, as well as those of historical past or culturally remote present. The main presupposition of my argument is that the artwork’s community is one of the constitutive “always-already” dimensions of this idea. It is analytically true that there is a necessary communal dimension to the work of art at least inasmuch as the plurality of subjective positions, implied in the artist/spectator distinction, belongs to its grammar. Aiming, however, at a stronger notion of the communal, my presupposition should be understood as rephrasing Jacques Rancière’s observation that in our culture “certain ‘politics’ is consubstantial with the very definition of the specificity of art” (2009, 30). The artwork’s community as a fundamental structure of art captures the fact that for us any plausible answer as to why art matters necessarily involves a notion of an emancipated mode of being-together.

The starting point of my argument is the distinction between two principal versions of such an answer, from which two major paradigms of the artwork’s community follow. I will associate these accounts with the names of Kant and Heidegger, focusing my presentation in Sections 2–3 not so much on the reconstruction of these philosophers’ original positions, but rather on the form that their grounding insights take—or may take—in contemporary thinking of art. Contrasted as the aesthetic and the truth-disclosing conceptions of art, the Kantian and the Heideggerian accounts yield the transcendental and the actual paradigms of the artwork’s community. While for many the two conceptions stand as excluding alternatives, one of the framing theses of my argument is that thinking of them as an irreducible duality, inherent to our idea of art, proves to be more philosophically productive. In Sections 4–5 I pursue a further specification of the actual artwork’s community, contrasting Volk and TAZ (temporary autonomous zone) as two quantitative paradigms of its interpretation. The last and the greatest part of the article (Sections 6–8) is concerned with a comparative analysis of two contemporary artistic phenomena, which seem to be informed by an interpretation of the artwork’s community in terms of the latter paradigm: the participatory practices of contemporary art and the psytrance dance movement. My aim is to show that allowing to think these phenomena together—something that, as far as I know, was never done before—the conceptual model developed in this article contributes equally to an adequate philosophical understanding of each and to a more detailed grasp of what we today mean by art.

The Kantian conception of the artwork’s community

The political dimension of Kant’s aesthetic doctrine—at least as it was commonly inherited by a diverse set of contemporary philosophies of art, on which I will base my construal—is announced in the following doubly phrased point of the Analytic of the Beautiful: in making an aesthetic judgment one believes to be speaking in a “universal voice” or acts upon the idea of sensus communis (2000: 101, 122–124). As much as it demands universal agreement on the basis of personal feeling of pleasure or displeasure, the judgment of taste claims the possibility of the natural dimension of human experience to have public significance and play a legislative role in the social practice (Bernstein 2006, 6–9, 82). This possibility, we may say, is the utopian political promise inherent to the unity of nature and freedom, staked in Kantian aesthetics. In this sense, to use Eli Friedlander’s expression, aesthetic judgment points “at the horizon of an ideal community of taste” (2015, 41). It is crucial to emphasize that the community of taste, evoked in appreciation and practice of art, is not an actual community in any political sense, but rather a transcendental dimension of humankind as a whole—analogous in this regard to the kingdom of ends (2015). Hence, in Thierry de Duve’s wording, the “transcendental aesthetic community,” implied in the universality of the aesthetic judgment’s address, is essentially one as humanity itself (2019, 76, 86).

The aesthetic community so construed stems from Kant’s analysis of the reflecting aesthetic judgment, which, as all know, was for Kant primarily exercised with regard to beauty in nature. Positing it, however, as a paradigm of the artwork’s community is in line with the univocal agreement among the thinkers quoted here—or, indeed, most major appropriations of Kant’s aesthetics since Hegel—that it is art which is the primary domain of aesthetic claiming. Without going into the variety of accounts as to why this is so, I adopt the interpretation—strongly argued by Jay M. Bernstein and congenial to Rancière’s and Friedlander’s positions—according to which the aesthetic priority of art is by no means opposed to, but rather premised on a particular idea of nature: namely, the idea of “nature seen as if art” (or the purposiveness of nature), defining for Kant the a priori principle of the reflecting judgment. Art, on this view, is the cultural practice of maintaining the transcendental claim for the possibility of experiencing nature as a non-subjective source of shared human meaning. Art does so by active and systematic negation of determinate conceptuality preconditioning the aesthetic encounter (Bernstein 2006, 6–9, 62–63). The emancipatory stakes of the artwork’s community, evoked in the aesthetic claim, belong with what Bernstein calls its “material motive” (2006, 199). Or as Rancière explains, it is the suspension of “the power of form over matter, of intelligence over sensibility” which defines art as “a sensorium different of that of domination” (2009, 30–31).

Such negation of conceptuality, however, should not be understood as its total abolition in aesthetic experience, but rather as the suspension of its determinate mode in reflective free play. Reflection will be a key notion in this construal of the artwork’s community at different levels, specifically—as we shall see—in its deployment in contemporary art. At one level, the reflecting judgment reflects upon its conditions and hence the artwork’s community (i.e. the idea of sensus communis upon which the judgment is made) is part of the transcendental content reflected upon. At another level, however, we shall discover continuity between the political dimension, intrinsic to aesthetic reflection as such, and the aesthetic reflection of the political content of particular works, which can be modeled on Kant’s account of aesthetic ideas. At least for some works, the emancipatory promise and “the reflective access to ideas of practical reason,” definitive of the aesthetic domain, is gained through the articulation of specific utopian visions and political agendas (De Duve 2019, 99). Aesthetic reflection so understood is closely related to the notion of possibility that commonly defines the modality of whatever “we may hope for” on the transcendental basis of the aesthetic claim, and the notion, popular in the discourse of contemporary art, of the work’s exploring, modeling, or elaborating certain “political possibilities.” At the same time, as we must underline once again, this account is by no means confined to explicit artistic thematization of politics (or nature, for that matter). Remaining first and foremost an analysis of aesthetic judgment as such, it covers an exceptionally vast phenomenal domain. Each and every time we comport to art in the mode of appraisal—judging it as beautiful, artistically good, not-trivial, etc.—the artwork’s community as described above is at work.

The Heideggerian conception of the artwork’s community

The Heideggerian conception of the artwork’s community relocates the political dimension of art from claiming a possibility to making it real. It is not the promise of a community but its actual establishment, which Heidegger’s vision ascribes to the work of art. For Heidegger, the work of art is not first and foremost a site of aesthetic experience, but rather the locus of a truth-disclosing event: the artwork’s, it is claimed, inaugurates a new “understanding of beings”—that is, a reality new in its most fundamental parameters—and so creates a historical community of those sharing it. In “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935–36) Heidegger famously exemplifies this notion with the vision of a Greek temple, “opening up the world” of the Greek polis. In the truth-disclosing event of the temple, as these passages show, the ontological and the political operations of art coincide: when all things “first enter their distinctive shapes and thus come to appearance as what they are,” “the people first returns to itself for the completion of its vocation.” (Heidegger 2002, 21–22).

The Heideggerian point I wish to flesh out is structural-ontological and to be fully recognized as such must be for a moment abstracted from the suggestive setting of Heidegger’s example. The artwork’s community—that is, the community which pertains to the temple as a work of art—is an actual historical community, established in the inaugurating event. It is not the Greek past and not the particular type of political formation which is the crux of Heidegger’s model, but rather the claim that an artwork’s necessarily establishes a community: the community-forming operation is part of the very truth-disclosing essence of art. The fundamental distinction between the Kantian and the Heideggerian conceptions of artwork’s community amounts to the difference between claiming a possibility and generating an actuality as the essential operation of art.

Although it is this formal distinction that will play the primary role in our analysis, a word should be said about the possible continuity between the political promise of Kantian aesthetic reflection and the community actually produced in the Heideggerian artistic event. This continuity is manifest in Heidegger’s account of earth—the artwork’s second essential feature and the striving counterpart of world in the dynamic unity of unconcealment—which ties the community-forming world-opening of the artwork’s with the coming to explicit appearance of material nature as phusis: the non-subjective, inexhaustible and secluded source of disclosure (2002, 21). If indeed this notion—as I am not the first to suggest (Schalow 1992, 335–336)—is compatible with “nature seen as if art” of the third Critique, then the difference between the Kantian and the Heideggerian conceptions on the possibility-actuality axis may be phrased as follows. While the transcendental aesthetic community evoked in Kantian aesthetic judgment is by the same token an evocation of the unity of nature and freedom as a possible source of shared human meaning, the actual community established in Heidegger’s event of art is a community sharing a common attunement to this source and—at least in this sense—a non-alienated community.

The Volk-interpretation of the Heideggerian artwork’s community

I wish now to consider two possible interpretations of the Heideggerian artwork’s community, distinguished with regard to the scale on which the political entity generated by the work of art is to be understood. The orthodox reading of Heidegger’s model, taking the temple passages quite literally and being faithful to some other Heidegger’s texts of the 1930s, follows Heidegger in interpreting the artwork’s community in terms of people—a political entity of at least such magnitude and cultural unity as we may attribute to the Greek polis (or, indeed, “the Greeks”) (Young 2000; Dreyfus 2005). Heidegger’s usual term for the phenomenon is Volk—a word problematically implicated in the Nazi discourse, but which in Heidegger, as it has been convincingly argued by James Phillips (2005), cannot be easily reduced to an ethnic or even linguistic present-at-hand entity. Whatever is the case, what is important for our argument is the grand political scale of the artwork’s community, implied in this notion and inherited by the contemporary proponents of the orthodox reading as the belief that “nothing less than the reception of the artwork’s by a culture (‘people’)” is meant in Heidegger’s conception (Young 2000, 7). But is there today a political entity of such magnitude, for which any artwork whatsoever plays the role Heidegger has ascribed to the temple in the Greek polis? Could we seriously account for anything that matters to us in art in terms of “coming to itself” or “being put to decision” of our national being? For the contemporary advocates of the orthodox interpretation, the answer to the questions posed above is clearly negative, and hence they conclude that Heidegger’s truth-disclosing paradigm of art is inapplicable—and only critically (rather than descriptively) relevant—to artistic practices of our time (Young 2000, 1; Dreyfus 2005, 407). The community-forming “great art” of the temple is—as Hegel has famously argued—“a thing of the past”; what we have in our age is precisely the merely aesthetic art, which can do no more than to claim the possibility of its return or, better yet, the transcendental necessity of what made it possible in the first place. In other words, the Volk-interpretation of the Heideggerian artwork’s community indirectly establishes the Kantian paradigm as exclusively defining art as we know it.

The TAZ-interpretation of the Heideggerian artwork’s community

Taking the historical actuality of the Heideggerian conception as its definitive ontological feature, I wish to propose an alternative to its Volk-interpretation, which would reduce the political scale of the actual artwork’s community to the possible minimum. As a paradigm of such interpretation, I adopt Hakim Bey’s notion of temporary autonomous zone (TAZ), which the anarchist thinker uses precisely to signify the model of emancipated community radically opposed to the national or state model. Bey does not explicitly define TAZ and explains it instead by the means of a suggestive series of not entirely commensurable examples. Among the instances of TAZ are pirate hideout islands, nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers, pride parades, the Rainbow Gatherings, Saturnalia, and generally a party or a festival: “Harlem rent parties of the twenties, nightclubs, banquets, old-time libertarian picnics” (Bey 1985, 32–47). On the basis of these examples, TAZ may be explicated as follows. It is a zone—in the sense that its unity is physical and concrete, unlike the metaphysical unity of the state, which belongs, according to Bey, to the order of simulation (1985, 38). It is autonomous—in the sense that it is a realm of meaningfulness, operating according to its own laws and values, rather than those preconditioning it or determining the social reality outside its enclave. This is what makes it compatible with Heidegger’s world. The definition of TAZ as temporary captures the brevity of its emergence and dispersal, opposing it thus specifically to the “historical duration” that Heidegger thought the state provides to Volk (Heidegger 2009, 136). At the same time, since Heidegger believed the historically enduring worlds themselves to be transient (2000, 20), taking TAZ as the paradigm of the artwork’s community is not unfaithful to the essential thrust of Heidegger’s conception, but rather radicalizes it to the extreme.

It is important to remain clear about the precise relation of TAZ to art. Not all TAZs are created by works of art: a band of gatherers or a libertarian picnic must not be. Yet, following a Heideggerian intuition that the essence of art as a “condition of life” is belied by its reduction to commodity in the contemporary artworld, Bey poses TAZ as the necessary communal paradigm of art living up to its essence. “TAZ,” Bey argues, “is the only possible ‘time’ and ‘place’ for art to happen … for the sheer pleasure of play and as an actual contribution to the forces which allow the TAZ to cohere and manifest” (1985, 48). Note the conjunction of the Heideggerian “actual contribution” with the Kantian “pleasure of play” in this quote, for as we shall immediately see, TAZ-communality not only allows for the contemporary relevance of the Heideggerian paradigm, but also becomes central to the aesthetic paradigm in its contemporary existence.

In what follows we shall consider two contemporary artistic domains, which appear to be constituted by the TAZ-interpretation of the artwork’s community as the medium of their realization and the conceptual focus of their self-understanding. Participatory art and psytrance have both come to prominence in the last decade of the twentieth century and could be regarded as two culturally remote manifestations of what is sometimes called the post-1989 emancipatory wave. It is worthy to note that this also makes them contemporaneous with most post-Heideggerian thinkers discussed above: Bernstein, Bey, de Duve, Dreyfus, Rancière. This inclines me to consider these phenomena not as examples of the idea we were able to construe following these philosophers, but as its objective historical determinations.

Participatory practices of contemporary art

Our first concern is with the series of artistic practices in the field of contemporary art (in the narrow institutional sense), termed “relational art” by Nicolas Bourriaud in Relational Aesthetics (2002) and theoretically reframed by Clair Bishop as “participatory art” in Artificial Hells (2012). From the perspective of our investigation, these non-coinciding concepts refer to ontologically and sociologically continuous domain, and I will treat the two accounts as complementary descriptions of the phenomenon. I will use “relational art” and “participatory art” interchangeably as abbreviations of “participatory practices of contemporary art.” To this loosely defined domain commonly belong such diverse practices as interactive installations involving the spectator in the material existence of the work (Felix Gonzales-Torres), transformation of exhibition spaces into venues of participatory non-artistic activities (Rirkrit Tiravanija), and different modes of collaboration with non-artistic audiences, ranging from historical reconstructions (Jeremy Deller) and educational projects (Tania Bruguera) to Santiago Sierra’s disturbing “delegated performances” (in which usually underprivileged are hired to perform or endure some humiliating actions).

The common denominator of this heterogeneous list may be doubly defined as the shift from product to process in the conception of the work, and the repositioning of what was previously known as “spectator” as “co-producer or participant” (Bishop 2012, 2). Bourriaud’s account of the communitarian stakes of the phenomenon so outlined seems to place it within the purview of the Heideggerian artwork’s community: “the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real” (Bourriaud 2002, 13). Since the being-together determined by direct participation in the work, which is at the focus of participatory art, is local and concrete, it also appears that it is conceived here in terms very close to Bey’s TAZ. To examine to what extent and in what manner participatory art embodies the TAZ-interpretation of the Heideggerian artwork’s community, we shall consider this notion under two interrelated aspects, which we shall call the immanent TAZ and the extended TAZ of the work.

The immanent TAZ defines the immediate actuality of relational work, which consists of the local micro-community it configures. In relational art, Bourriaud claims, the work’s very “substrate is formed by inter-subjectivity” (2002, 15). So, for example, in Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled (Free) (1992), in which the artist converted 303 Gallery in New York into a kitchen serving Thai curry for free, the actuality of the piece coincides with the social situations of its viewers-participants eating, talking, and making acquaintances. Or take Thomas Hirschhorn’s The Bijlmer-Spinoza Festival (2009), in which, for a period of 1 month, a large installation environment was hosting a daily program of workshops and activities for the residents of the Amsterdam suburb Bijlmer. As Bishop’s analysis of the piece shows, “the point” of the work—or, indeed, what Bourriaud would call its “substrate”—lies not in the material construction involving a gigantic sculpture of a book (Spinoza’s Ethics) and not in the content of the play the participants were staging in the evenings, but in “everyone’s continual production and collective presence” (Bishop 2012, 264).

The establishment of TAZ as an essential medium of art is the great contribution of Relational Aesthetics. But as the very title of the book suggests, a closer look at Bourriaud’s argument reveals its much more profound intimacy with the Kantian rather than the Heideggerian conception of the artwork’s political operation. In Bourriaud’s account, the relational, TAZ-forming sociability of art is premised on the historical convention of the exhibition, constitutive of contemporary art inside and outside the white cube. It is the very essence of “contemporary art exhibition” to create “free areas, and time spans whose rhythm contrasts with those structuring everyday life” (Bourriaud 2002, 16). As if to answer Bey’s Heideggerian dismissal of the “artworld” for its aesthetic objectification of art, Bourriaud claims that art’s resistance to the alienation of the capitalist society of the spectacle relies on its being a culturally defined social “interstice” that “… fits more or less harmoniously and openly into the overall system, but suggests other … possibilities than those in effect within this system” (2002, 16). But this, to wit, is precisely the place of aesthetics in the Kantian division of domains, where art is “exiled” from the rationally dominated social sphere of theory and morality, but from where it is allowed to protest the alienation this division engenders (Bernstein 1992, 5). It is hence no surprise that the emancipatory stakes of relational art throughout Bourriaud’s book are defined within the traditional aesthetic modality of the possible: the relational artwork experiments and models, suggests and reflects, rather than inaugurates and establishes, as it does in the Heideggerian paradigm. Finally, the possibilities it so offers are accessed by the means of judgment. The relational work, as Bourriaud says clearly enough, “must be judged on the basis of aesthetic criteria, in other words, by analyzing the coherence of its form, and then the symbolic value of the ‘world’ it suggests to us, and of the image of human relations reflected by it” (2002, 17–18). Put in converted commas, a “world” is suggested, rather than opened-up, in relational art as accounted in Bourriaud. In this account, the immanent TAZ of the work figures not as a version of the actual artwork’s community of the Heideggerian conception, but as a privileged medium—and in this sense, an ontological elaboration—of the Kantian aesthetic model.

The extended TAZ, which comes to the fore in Bishop’s account of participatory art, concerns the placement of the immanent TAZ of the work within a larger social configuration—or a lifeworld—beyond its immediate existence. After all, the crux of the political actuality, claimed in the Heideggerian model, lies not in the internal constitution of the temple but its productive position within the polis. Bey points at the same dimension from the existential perspective, saying that “these moments of intensity [i.e.TAZ-events] give shape and meaning to the entirety of a life” (Bey 1985, 37). The extended TAZ of the work may be thus defined very broadly as the political ordinary generated or transformed by the immanent TAZ of the work. So, for example, this aspect would shift our attention from the communal experience of the Bijlmer-Spinoza Festival to the educational or otherwise transformative impact that it has had on the life of the Bijlmer residents. Such an impact is explicitly elaborated in an increasingly dominant group of participatory practices, which involve—or, indeed, are entirely focused on—directly positive communal contributions. Of this category would be Tenantspin (2000-) an internet-based TV station opened for a community of elders by the Danish collective Superflex, “the major achievement” of which, according to its curator, consists in forging a “stronger sense of community in the building” (Bishop 2012, 16). It would be this kind of participatory work—transcending the boundaries of the exhibition space and procuring an extended TAZ within the social tissue of the ordinary—that may appear as embodying the Heideggerian paradigm of the artwork’s community.

Yet—and this is a major problem Bishop’s theoretical project aims to address—the political actuality of the Heideggerian conception appears to be bought for such projects by the loss, or indeed the explicit denial, of their artistic specificity. The “doing-good” projects—as Bishop aptly terms these works—tend to be judged in ethical-political, rather than aesthetic terms. Bishop quotes the critic Reinaldo Laddaga to pronounce an exemplary statement of this approach apropos Lisa Roberts’ What’s the Time in Vyborg? (2000–): “the criteria of its success … could not be described as artistic,” for the objective of this work lies not in “aesthetic or intellectual experience” but rather in “the creation of a temporary community engaged in the process of solving a series of practical problems” (Bishop 2012, 18–19). Bishop’s disbelief in such alleged dissolution of art in the political stems from the poignant observation that the perceived social achievements of such works are never compared with properly social or political undertakings: “the point of comparison and reference for participatory projects always returns to contemporary art“ (2012, 19). Bishop’s understandable worry is that in a misguided pursuit of political actuality, art in this idiom loses the peculiar political force which belongs to it as “an autonomous regime of experience that is not reducible to logic, reason or morality” (2012, 18).

Borrowing Rancière’s concept of metapolitics so as to designate the reflective political dimension, intrinsic to the very aesthetic autonomy of art, Bishop emphasizes that it does not stand in direct relation to any positive social outcomes (2012, 279). Rather, the metapolitical generates a “dissensus about what is sayable and thinkable in the world” (Bishop 2012, 36), operating thus in the domain of possibility and reflection. Hence, much like in Bourriaud’s account, what is at stake in the best participatory works is “experiences that enlarge our capacity to imagine the world and our relations anew” (Bishop 2012, 284). But as Bishop herself acknowledges, so construed metapolitics does not specifically pertain to participatory art, but to the “aesthetic regime” as such. The relational form (immanent TAZ) as much as a communal contribution (extended TAZ) is neither sufficient nor necessary for the metapolitical achievement of a piece.

At the same time, it is important for Bishop to claim a specific relation between the explicit, thematized TAZ-features and the artistic value of those participatory works she finds successful. For as much as the denial of the essentially artistic framework of Bijlmer-Spinoza Festival seems wrong, so does the conclusion that its TAZ-communality should have no part in our overall evaluation of its achievement. An adequate approach to such works, Bishop argues, must hence exercise “double judgments,” considering them in two conjoint yet heteronomous dimensions simultaneously: as art and as communal deed (viz. educational project) (2012, 249). The ambiguous unity of the two, for Bishop, stems from the internal constitution of art in aesthetic regime, captured by Rancière as its “founding paradox”: “art is art insofar as it is also non-art, or is something other than art” (Rancière 2009, 36; Bishop 2012, 27). Hence, the best of participatory works, according to Bishop, are characterized by “negotiation of the social”—that is, an elaboration of this ambiguity itself (2012, 40). What this means in terms of our analysis is that the central role of TAZ-communality in participatory art is accounted in Bishop, as much as in Bourriaud, as a specification of the Kantian aesthetic model: the metapolitical reflection of possibilities in these works articulates its own ambiguous tension with political actuality as its constitutive “other.” So construed, the artwork’s community of participatory art still stands in sharp contrast to the Heideggerian model, in which the community-forming operation belongs to the very identity, rather than constitutive otherness of art.

Psytrance

The second artistic phenomenon we are about to consider is the psytrance dance movement. In my presentation of the phenomenon—marginal, not to say inexistent, for philosophical aesthetics—I rely on the invaluable book by the sociologist Graham St. John The Global Tribe (2012), which provides not only a comprehensive account of the genesis and the contemporary state of psytrance, but also a profound analysis of what may be taken as its claim to truth. Evolving from the hippie movements of the 1960s and the 1970s and taking its distinctive form in the 1980s in Goa, psyculture turned towards the end of the 1990s to a transnational movement, the central practice of which is ecstatic dancing to electronic music mixed by DJs in open-air festive events (St. John 2012, 3–5). Psytrance is a phenomenon much more monolith than participatory art. Despite the diversity of styles, the following stable form persists: people are gathering in outdoor, sometimes remote natural locations, in groups varying from several dozens to several thousands of people, so as to camp, for a period ranging usually from 12 h to a week, in the close vicinity of the dancefloor, where trance music is being continuously played. In this case too, we shall consider the possible determination of the phenomenon in terms of the Heideggerian artwork’s community in its TAZ-version under the aspects of the immanent TAZ and the extended TAZ, which we have distinguished in our analysis of relational art.

With regard to the first dimension, what seems to be clear is that the trance-rave is an exemplary participatory practice. If there is an artistic phenomenon that—to use Bishop’s wording—forges “a collective, co-authoring, participatory social body” (Bishop 2012, 275), it is certainly the “activated dancefloor” of the trance party. “Here,” St. John writes, “the dancer is an artist, and thus a performer, via an organic ecology of gestures responsive to the assemblage of sound and visual art, and other dancers … with such responses rippling across the dance floor like waves of energy” (2012, 180). The raison-d’être of the dancefloor so described, as it is commonly attested by psy-practitioners, is a unique epiphanous experience of “enchanted sociality”: an “intimate, extraordinary and transgressive co-presence with other [participants]—including, notably, strangers” (St. John 2012, 28). St. John refers to the communal space so radically heterotopic to the ordinary sociality of the late capitalist society, as “interzone,” “interstice” (Marx’s term also used by Bourriaud) or, indeed, TAZ—a concept explicitly and widely used in psyculture (2012, 157).

To acquire an adequate concept of the psytrance-TAZ, an emphasis should be put on the party or the festival as its particular relational form. Accounting for the intimate relation between festivity and the very notion of TAZ, Bey quotes Stephen Pearl Andrews, who “offered, as an image of anarchist society, the dinner party, in which all structure of authority dissolves in conviviality and celebration” (1985, 39). This remark may be helpful in attuning us to the communitarian aims of such projects as Hirschhorn’s Festival or the food works of Tiravanija (who is not the only artist of the participatory tradition preoccupied with situations of food consumption). For the mode of festivity definitive of the trance party, however, it is Heidegger, who—surprisingly or not—reappears as the most insightful source.

In his reading of Hölderlin’s poem “Remembrance” in an eponymous 1943 essay, Heidegger (2000) poses festival as the common ontological core of the holiday—the cessation of the everyday activities in a celebration, and of “poetizing”—a later Heidegger’s term for the essence of art. The festival shares with “The Origin’s” artwork the structure of the world-inaugurating event (Ereignis), defining the moment of its highest actuality, out of which “the ordinary duration” of the everyday follows (Heidegger 2000, 128–129). But here too—and indeed, even more empathically than with “The Origin’s” earth—the world-opening involves a manifestation of own self-secluding ground. It is in this sense that the celebration “transposes us beyond ourselves into a rarely experienced realm, out of which our essence is determined” (Heidegger 2000, 126). The revelation of the transcendent source of the everyday is thought by Heidegger in semi-religious terms: “the festive character of the festival has its determinate ground in the holy” (2000, 128). It is, I believe, from within this Heideggerian framework that we should hear Goa Gil, one of the establishing figures of psytrance, exclaim “The party is Holy!” (St. John 2012, 85) or the Argentinean DJ Nicolás Di Bernardo refer to his art as a “holy work” (St. John 2012, 110).

The discourse of transcendence, as St. John’s book convincingly shows, is fundamental to the self-understanding of psyculture, frequently accounting for the enchanted sociality of the dancefloor in terms of religious experience (2012, 17). According to the research quoted in St. John, above 75% of the interviewed psy practitioners identify themselves as spiritual or on a spiritual path (2012, 8–9). Yet, despite the influence of the Hindu and Buddhist religions, as well as such New Age prophets as Castaneda or Osho, neither of these teachings has a grounding or unifying status for the spirituality of psyculture (St. John 2012, 185, 229). As St. John explains, whatever are the discourses to which psy-practitioners adhere, they do so “to make sense of their own phenomenal connection with the sacred made available in the socio-aesthetic of the dance floor” (2012, 116). This is to say, in accordance with Heidegger’s program, art—rather than religion—is the primary domain, where the holy is manifested. “The extraordinary” in the end of the day—or, to be more precise, in modernity—“opens itself up and opens up the open only in poetizing” (Heidegger 2000, 126). As another founding father of psytrance Ray Castle puts it, “dance parties have transmuted the role that organized religion once had to lift us onto the sacramental and supramental plane” (St. John 2012, 75)

This is a convenient point to shift our attention to the extended TAZ of the trance-festival, which at least for a certain percent of its participants for at least a certain time-span, determines the structuring practices of a lifeform and the set of shared values informing them. The “religious-like ecstasy” of the dance floor, as Castle says in the same interview, “permeate[s] thru into all aspects of our life” (St. John 2012, 75), or as St. John generalizes the point: “dance floors are … epicentres of sacrality, they are midpoints of a culture possessing concentric rings of conviviality” (2012, 164). In Heideggerian terms, so described is precisely the determining relation of the festival to the order of the everyday. But while for Heidegger, as a psy-raver would be disappointed to discover in the continuation of the quoted essay, the world constituted by the festival is of the “German humanity” (Heidegger 2000, 171), the TAZ-event of the trance festival generates a transnational community St. John terms the “global tribe.”

The word “tribe” stands here for the immediate TAZ-sociality of the festival, actual only in the “intense moments in the calendar,” as this community’s primary mode of being (St. John 2012, 304). The word “global” stands for the transnational character of this community, the belonging to which—unlike the linguistic predetermination of Heidegger’s Germans—is constituted exclusively by a committed relation to the evental moments of this kind. Although there are distinct local psytrance scenes (such as the Israeli and the Australian ones discussed at length in St. John’s book), journeying into foreign locations so as to mingle with other travelers and expats is part to the defining ritual of the tribe: for the artwork’s community operative in psy, heterotopia substitutes fatherland as much as TAZ substitutes Volk.

Yet, the global tribe possesses a unity of a culture, whose multinational agents share—to use just a couple of St. John’s apt wordings—a “bohemian ethos” and a “festal lifestyle” (2012, 157, 309). Among its most persisting features are habitual drug-use, sexual permissiveness, a taste for eccentric looks (viz. tattooing), alongside the already mentioned “spirituality” and ecological awareness. The latter is an increasingly dominant ideology in the psytrance world—standing, according to St. John’s illuminating analysis, in an identity-forming dialectical tension to its orgiastic “here-and-now” ideology (2012, 308–322). From the perspective of our study, however, it is rather the common ground of these opposites that should be emphasized. Both the ecstatic experience of the dancefloor (“being one with our fellow being and our Mother Earth” [St. John 2012, 191]) and the ideal of sustained living are informed by a normative discourse of non-subjectivistic, non-dominating relation to nature, “affirming the organic place of individuals in, and not outside, or above, the natural world” (St. John 2012, 172). It is as if the unity of nature and freedom, hoped for in Kant’s aesthetic claiming and implied in Heidegger’s positioning of phusis as the primordial ground of the community-forming event, is explicitly affirmed as the understanding of beings shared by an actual artwork’s community.

Isn’t it as close to Heidegger’s conception of art as one may want to get?

Conclusions: co-thinking participatory art and psytrance

Participatory art and psytrance are two artistic phenomena that have much in common: for both the political dimension of their art-being plays a primary role, and in both it is focused on the type of community captured by Bey’s notion of TAZ. Yet they differ with regard to their fundamental constitution. The conceptual framework we have introduced—building upon the paradigmatic distinction between the Kantian and the Heideggerian accounts of the artwork’s community—enables to render this difference in the following way. The trance party is an exemplary Heideggerian artistic practice, a full-bodied existence of the actual artwork’s community in its TAZ-version. The participatory practices of contemporary art, in contrast, operate within the paradigm of the transcendental artwork’s community, while taking an artistically generated TAZ as their privileged medium. The first conclusion is of a greater philosophical importance, since it is generally assumed—in both the Heideggerian and the Kantian camps—that the aesthetic paradigm exclusively defines the art of our time. If, however, as our analysis shows, the Heideggerian paradigm—although not on the social scale Heidegger has thought of and not in the cultural domain philosophical aesthetics usually looks at—thrives in our historical present, then a phenomenologically adequate account of art must be able to co-articulate the two paradigms, and specifically the two practices embodying them, in their mutual theoretical relevance.

I wish to conclude with several considerations towards this dialectical task, departing from what may appear—especially to a biased Heideggerian—as a necessary conclusion of the comparison we have drawn. It is hard to avoid the impression that the communitarian sensitivities cultivated in relational art render psytrance as a more successful artistic practice. Hardly any of the works discussed by Bourriaud or Bishop creates a micro-community as convivial and intense as the activated dancefloor or has a compatible impact on the common style of lives lived. To explain why the challenge so put to participatory art does not deem it to essential inferiority, it is not enough to point once again at the metapolitical, rather than the community-forming, operation which defines it as an art of the aesthetic paradigm. What must be added is a certain explanation as to why the community-forming art of psytrance isn’t at the same time capable of the metapolitical operation, as it intuitively seems to be the case. This, however, by no means implies that there are no lessons that participatory art—or contemporary art in general—has to learn from the comparison to psytrance. Quite to the contrary, a central motivation of this article was to establish a theoretical framework that will make the avoidance of these lessons no longer possible. My last aim, hence, will be to suggest what those lessons might be: how the challenge posed by the communitarian potency of trance and, more broadly, the demand to acknowledge the contemporaneity of the truth-disclosing paradigm of art may influence the self-understanding of the aesthetic art itself.

Differentiating the two paradigms as belonging within the provenance of the same idea should be clear with regard to the dialectic of the aesthetic and truth-disclosing moments within each of them. We have already suggested that the Heideggerian conception is to a certain extent implied in the Kantian one, as much as it consists in the actuality of what the latter claims possible. At the same time, the irreducible aesthetic element must be also fleshed out within the Heideggerian paradigm. We should not be surprised to discover a developed normative discourse of quality and aesthetic appraisal operative within psyculture (viz. “ongoing debates around genre and musical canon,” attested in St. John (2012, 97)), as much as Heidegger would never deny that a discourse of style, craft—and, indeed, of beauty—is involved in the construction and preservation of the temple. Heidegger explicitly argued that beauty essentially belongs to the truth-disclosing operation of art, remaining though at the ontologically subordinate level (Heidegger 2002, 52). While in participatory art, as we have seen, the artistically generated community is put to reflection, in the trance party, we may say, aesthetic reflection—as much as it is implied in enjoyment and appraisal of music—is put to the service of the community-forming operation of art.

But this would be also to admit that trance is not committed to art as an autonomously constituted regime of experience, and, accordingly, despite the colloquial use of the term “art” among its practitioners, the essential operation of psytrance is not premised on conceiving it as art. Although aesthetic experience is involved, the community-forming impact of the trance party is not mediated by the judgment thereof as good art, but rather on its success as a party. In contrast, the transcendentally sanctioned task of metapolitical reflection—that is, the political raison-d’être of aesthetic art—necessarily involves the reflection of the idea of art itself, “knowing what art is” to use Hegel’s phrase. Accordingly, the political project of relational art for Bourriaud is “a line of thinking about the fate of artistic activity” (2002, 44). Such meta-artistic reflection, definitive of participatory art and apparently missing in trance, is closely related to the intrinsic historical dimension of art in aesthetic regime. The primary vehicle of metapolitics, the aesthetic judgment—as it was extensively argued by different strains of modernism—is necessarily situated with regard to the succession of previous answers as to what art is. It is, indeed, part of the meaningfulness of relational works that they are “taking up the legacy of the 20th century avant-gardes” (Bourriaud 2002, 45) and are accounted for in terms of contemporary art as the present of this legacy. Such reflective inheritance is also what, apparently, defines the realm of “advanced art” to which Bishop takes the works of her concern to belong (2012, 12). If being “advanced” in this sense is a necessary condition for fulfilling the metapolitical task of aesthetic claiming, the intuition that psytrance is inadequate in this regard appears to be explained. While indeed being “an historical product of radical reflexive modernity” (St. John 2012, 231)—sharing thus with aesthetics the vocation of resistance to the ontological conditions of modern alienation—psytrance is not part to the history of aesthetic modernism.

To suggest how the realization of a common historical ground with an art beyond the aesthetic paradigm may impact this paradigm itself, we shall make one last step in our comparative analysis. We have heard Rancière and Bishop say that in aesthetic regime “art is art insofar as it is also non-art, or is something other than art.” It is notable that the non-aesthetic art of psytrance shares the idiom of this founding paradox, while interpreting the heteronomous constitution rather differently. For Bishop as for Rancière (as well as for de Duve and Bernstein), the “other than art” is identified with the political. In psytrance, although the communal is also at stake—indeed, as we have seen, at the very heart of its experience—the “something other” with relation to which it is constituted is of the religious order: the manifestation and communal experience of the holy. It is the very religious, rather than just the community-forming character of Heidegger’s temple, which we may want to underline once we take it as the paradigm of the Dance-temple—the main stage of the emblematic Boom festival. In contrast, when Bourriaud emphasizes the secular character of relational art, “focused upon the sphere of inter-human relations,” rather than on the “relations between Humankind and deity” (2002, 28), he is being representative of the generally profane register in which the turning of art to the political is thought in the aesthetic camp.

Such secular outlook, however, is not uncontested within the history of advanced art, which—from Wassily Kandinsky to Anna Mendieta and from Paul Tillich to Suzy Gablik—was more than once defined with regard to the experience of transcendence normally associated with the religious domain. It is particularly notable that Gablik, prophetically announcing in her Reenchantment of Art (1991) the emergence of “participatory aesthetics,” “in which art will begin redefining itself in terms of social relatedness” (9, 27), envisions it as coextensive with art’s reclaiming the “lost sense of oneness with nature” and the possibility of “meeting the gods in the magic circle” (43, 45). Co-thinking participatory art and psytrance, as suggested in this article, supports the need to revisit this road not taken. The TAZ-forming efficiency of religiously oriented psytrance may press the politically oriented aesthetic art into acknowledging its own more primordial accountability to the holy. It may be recognized as an important step in this direction, when such a secular aesthetician as de Duve admits in his most recent work that in its essential aesthetic operation art “opens the door to an experience that, depending on your disposition, you may or may not want to call mystical” (De Duve 2019, 203–204). My contention is that thinking aesthetic experience in keeping with the experience of trance motivates the disposition conducive to such an account. It remains to be thought through what form the emancipatory aspirations of contemporary art may take, if it acknowledges that the metapolitical reflection of aesthetic claiming is committed at least to the possibility of the holy, as much as the community-forming power of the temple—or the trance-party—depends on its direct experience.

Acknowledgments

This research was made possible by the generous post-doctoral fellowship of the Minerva Stiftung. I wish also to thank Georg Bertram, Jonathan Soen, Jakub Stejksal, and Amir Yaretzky who have commented on the article at different stages of its development.

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This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Pioter Shmugliakov

Pioter Shmugliakov is a Minerva postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of Freie Universität Berlin. His research is concerned with the Heideggerian methodology in criticism of art and film, the work of Stanley Cavell, and philosophy of love. Shmugliakov is also the author of two published books of poetry in Russian and Hebrew under the pen name Petia Ptah.