Whose Passions? On T. J. Clark’s Those Passions: On Art and Politics

James Ensor, Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888).

Perhaps because I have spent a good part of my life engaged (in some way or another) in the complicated legacies of the Situationist International, writing a review of the former situationist T. J. Clark’s recent book, Those Passions—a lushly illustrated collection of essays, nearly four hundred pages wrapped in a spectacular cover—seems like a particularly daunting task. At least if by “review” we mean something like a “formal assessment” or “critical appraisal.” Clark is hard to write about—easy to dismiss or denounce, easy to idolize, hard to read without overreacting. It seems especially hard not to overreact to the fact that when Clark looks at art and its history, he seemingly only finds versions of himself staring back: Those Passions is a book largely about the white male and his “self-portrait.”

In Clark’s tripartite structuring of Those Passions, the prospect of multiple “Modernities” hinges on a single unbroken line of great “Moderns”—from David, Delacroix, and Ensor to Matisse, Picasso, Lowry, Pollock, and Richter—and their so-called “Precursors”: Bosch, Rembrandt, Velásquez. Far be it for Clark to latch on to “decolonization” as an empty metaphor for expanding the traditional, and surely problematic, Western canon of Art history with a capital A.

It seems, then, that any limits I can hope to discern in Those Passions will inevitably also be my limits, any critique a form of self-critique. This seems like a good starting point. Or perhaps it is a farewell. For Clark, too, the idea of “art” is a demonic object. A categorical antinomy at the heart of bourgeois society, art must constantly engage, as Clark notes, in “a series of self-risks, self-parodies, agit-props, suicides, aggrandizements, long goodbyes. It has to wreck the category in order to preserve it.”

For Clark, to write about “art” means to write with and against the problematic canon of Western art history, tracing the rise and fall of bourgeois society through “what happens in paint.” The question, for Clark and for us, is how to mourn art’s passing without falling into the temptation of reactionary nostalgia for the mode of production that sustained its possibility.

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Where to begin? As the subtitle makes clear, Those Passions is a book about “art and politics.” Clark’s overarching interest is not how art and politics may intersect, overlap, or exchange places but how to conceptualize their conjunction. Art-and-politics, as Clark sometimes has it. In more than one sense, then, Those Passions is inseparable from its MAGA moment of appearance. What Trump makes abundantly clear—and what Clark seems to suggest in what we might call the “postscript” to Those Passions, recently published in the London Review of Books1—is not simply that art has been swallowed up by spectacular politics and spit back out as memes, but that the distinction between art and politics was always-already tenuous. Modernism, and the history of the twentieth-century avant-gardes, rested on a fragile political-economic equilibrium. A historical parenthesis comes to a close, and the future lies in ruins.

What is ultimately at stake for Clark, who is fully aware that “some readers may be shaking their heads at its wild Hegelian scope,” is the idea of art itself and the ways in which images structure and mediate our collective experience of capitalist modernity in its imminent downfall. In Clark’s analysis, the “mad sublimity” of our current image-world speaks to its “ending,” the exacerbation of an underlying crisis that may or may not reach back to the origins of modern art. Wherever that may be. For Clark, it’s usually Bruegel. In this book, it’s David. Peu importe.

For Clark, the main point is that art is conspicuously coterminous with capitalist modernity and that any spiraling image excess we may witness—think Trump’s Gaza AI slop—maps onto its cycles of accumulation. But how do we get from the commodity-form to the image-form: What are the social conditions—and visual forms of mediation—that allow a grotesque mediocrity like Trump to play a hero’s part in the great American drama of civilization?

Trump’s Gaza video is a truly horrifying example of “the spectacle” in overdrive. A kitsch genocidal phantasy that sits uneasily with any existing left analysis of culture. To call it “ideology” would be an insult to the term. And there is clearly something in excess of “consumer society” at work here, an infernal feedback loop of desire, violence, terror, passion, and sheer American idiocy. Here, Clark rightly insists that to understand a society in which images have come to rule supreme—taking on an uncanny air of psychotic autonomy—there is no better guide than Debord (a constant presence in all of Clark’s writing) and his analysis of the “society of the spectacle.” This is where we start.

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In Clark’s reading, however, the link between capital accumulation and the rule of images is often simply assumed. To my mind, Clark’s Weberian spin on “the spectacle” obscures more than it clarifies. Clark speaks of a “mutation” in the structure of the spectacle but is not very helpful in tying this transformation to actual historical circumstances. For all the astonishing level of detail he makes out in paintings—Clark remarks of one of Bosch’s panels, called Ascent to Heaven, that one could “write a book about the angel’s profile, and the effect of our understanding of that touch of red to its lower lip,” and if anyone could write that book it would surely be Clark—there is little effort to spell out the political-economic coordinates of the society of the spectacle in its current form, or to grapple seriously with the vexed question of periodization, which has been so central to the best communist thought of the twenty-first century: from Théorie Communiste to Endnotes, Chuang, and the Brooklyn Rail, among others. So much in Clark remains between the lines, and some of it (if there at all) doesn’t even make it that far.

How, then, would anyone reading his essays in Those Passions on Rembrandt or Richter suspect that his entire argument in the book hinges on revolutionary subjectivity and its (impossible) representation? Or that almost every word—the word “representation” chief among them, with its “Leninist aftertaste”—carries an ultraleft payload, like so many mines waiting to explode in the minds of Clark’s readers?

To me it is partly unfathomable that the perhaps most revered art historian of our times (who can afford these fancy coffee table books anyway?) casually throws in this newly added “conclusion” to the undying essay “Why Art Can’t Kill the Situationist International,” coauthored with Donald Nicholson-Smith and originally published in 1997 in October:

It seems, alas, entirely realistic to look to a future in which wave after wave of violent upheaval overtakes a capitalism in collapse. The task of politics in such a situation will be, not for the first time, to recognize—to take part in, to lay hold of, to inhabit but not to represent—the new forms of revolutionary community as they struggle free from the inheritance of the past century.

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“To inhabit but not to represent.” I think this is key to understanding Clark’s work, his oeuvre if I may. Though highly revered, Clark remains somewhat of a jester within the established Marxist left. In the book’s introduction, Clark recalls how “a dying stalwart of left thought, the New Left Review” once related that they “had made a bad mistake in giving houseroom to a piece by a ‘joker.’“ Clark adds that he is reconciled with that name and encourages his readers to “take a look, in the book, at Bosch’s jester on the tree branch or the expression of Velázquez’s Aesop, or Ensor’s conspirators, or the situationists’ strip cartoons. Jokers all.”

There is much shadowboxing going on with the left in Those Passions. And whatever else the book may be—a contribution to art history and its unraveling—it inevitably doubles as an autobiography, a final settling of accounts.

It is hardly coincidental that the essay “The Hand that Mocked Them,” in which Clark recalls his visit to Debord’s apartment “on the rue Saint-Jacques where The Society of the Spectacle got written,” opens with a quote from Rousseau’s memoir: “It was necessary to say with what eye, if I was someone else, I would see a man like myself.”

“If I was someone else” is Clark inviting himself, and the reader, into Debord’s “miniscule apartment, through which friends and comrades continually passed.” Or, better, an invitation to imagine the process of reading and writing as a social act where the meaning of words participates in the general improvement of language towards a “literary communism” where one author’s phrase or expression is embraced by another, and false ideas are replaced with the right ideas.

The “situationist” moorings of T. J. Clark’s writing on art and politics must, for obvious reasons, be conveniently ignored or pushed to the fringes. Either because it would pull commentators back from the belief that the avant-garde project was essentially an “artistic” deviation from the pure politics of modernist form, or because arguing with it would bring them face to face with the limits of their own analysis: “limits” here meaning the loss of historical continuity in (and the rupture with) the radical tradition, the failure to reconnect Marxism with its most vital undercurrents. In this respect, we need jokers like Clark more than ever.

Yet, I will perhaps never understand some aspects of Clark’s political thought. The essay “For a Left with no Future,” for instance (but also the essay on the 2011 London Riots, which is the former’s mirror image), represents to me the least compelling aspects of Clark’s thought. My disagreement with Clark, however, differs from the one Susan Watkins presents in her NLR riposte to the No Future essay, in which she takes Clark to task for believing that utopianism has no place in left political thought, that the avant-garde project was therefore fundamentally misguided and offers no guidelines for contemporary left politics.

On the contrary. Clark’s reservations about utopianism, as I understand it from his work on Bruegel (oddly not included in this volume), are not simply grounded in a refusal to write recipes for the cookshops of the future, and certainly not in a rejection of the role of the imagination in political thought: Why would someone spend a lifetime meticulously analyzing the material history of the human imagination—how desires and passions are mediated and shaped by imaginings; painted, pixelized, congealed, nationalized, in short given social form—only to dismiss it as politically irrelevant?

Instead, coming to terms with the world as it is—a recurring motif in Clark—means disabusing oneself of any “vanguard” pretensions, rooting out the all-too-human desire to want to direct and orchestrate the revolutionary passions by means of art-as-politics. Clark’s anti-utopianism, for lack of a better term, is an injunction against the left’s continued fascination with the Leninist vanguard idea more than a disavowal of any previously held avant-garde commitments.

Where I disagree with Clark, then, is not with his supposed anti-utopianism or his failure to “imagine” the world otherwise. Clark’s principal error lies in his inability, or unwillingness, to think the world beyond the infinite loop of its increasingly deranged self-representations. To understand the 2011 London riots, or the “era of riots” that followed in its wake, as a theatrical staging of one’s alienation—rioters reveling in a kind of disaffected late-capitalist nihilism but unable to move, like deer caught in the headlights of an approaching car—is to profoundly mischaracterize these events, which will surely only multiply in the years to come.

While Clark has a keen eye for the continued relevance of the concept of “the spectacle” for describing the late-fascist overdrive in US politics, there is little interest in simply shattering the lens through which we have become accustomed to seeing the world. “We,” of course, includes myself. Whose passions are those passions?

If Those Passions doubles as a kind of autobiography, it is perhaps closer to a “collective autobiography,” like that of Annie Ernaux’s Les Années, where the “I”—as noted by Tobi Haslett in a recent essay that positions Ernaux as the “mirror-image” of Debord—gradually dissolves, “each face a vanished self.”2

Isn’t self-abolition—of the white working class and its representations—the end point of left politics? Wasn’t this the lesson Debord drew from the Watts riots? In 1965, when Debord penned his essay in defense of the rioters, he staged the drama as one in which a new world-historical character boldly enters the scene and scrambles the coordinates of the (white) script for the Revolution.

For all its own problems and limitations, Debord’s analysis shines a light on the path towards the “horizon of abolition”—rather than simply mourning the revolutionary failures of the past. Clark’s missed encounter with the “black dimension” of radical thought since the 1960s seemingly prevents him from drawing the conclusion—the ultimate lesson—of the twentieth-century avant-garde project: not simply, as Debord had it, that the realization of art is its abolition but also that the “abolition of art” implies the withering of its central Subject, and its self-portrait.