Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory, Columbia University Press, New York, 2011. 320 pp., £34.50 hb., 978 0 231 14938 9. Luke White Dialectical Passions is a book about art and architectural theory in the wake of the New Left. It locates itself in the context of a turning tide in thinking – a movement away from the orthodoxies of what Day terms ‘the long 1980s’, which tended to an apolitical relativism (or at best to a politics of identity). The discourses surrounding contemporary art, in contrast, are becoming increasingly politicized, and the nature of this politics returning to issues such as the subject, history or totality that, for a while, tended to be dismissed as too metaphysical and even dangerously authoritarian. Taking such issues seriously again, Day proposes, places us in a Marxian–Hegelian tradition in which the dialectic is central. In this regard, Dialectical Passions is a challenge to recent narratives of the history of postwar art theory. To problematize these, Day focuses on a thread of dialectical thought that runs back in time, through the 1980s (if in submerged form), to join with longer histories of radical discourse on culture. In particular, Day’s investigation concerns the fate of notions and practices of negation during a period when such a concept was marginalized. To reconnect with a tradition of dialectical negation, she suggests, offers a key resource for an art theory wanting to engage with the radicalizing artistic and intellectual currents of today. However, as Day astutely presents it, the politics of negation are certainly not monolithic or unproblematic, and the book sets out to explore the different ‘valences’ that negative thought has taken on. No-saying lies at the heart of socio-political refusal, but the negative is also the root of a melancholic ‘Left-oriented nihilism’. That the book explores recent art theory as suspended between these poles seems indicative of the current state of radical thought; it also, however, marks Day’s admirable scepticism towards the false comfort of easy answers, even (or especially) when these seem to hold out hope. To pursue this end, the first half of the book contrasts T.J. Clark and Manfredo Tafuri, two writers with sustained but very different interests in notions of the negative, and who both exemplify the rigorous scepticism which Day champions. Day argues that Clark’s conception of modernist ‘practices of negation’ is at the core of his reinterpretation of Greenberg’s narrative of the purification of medium. For her, the politics of Clark’s account of modernism thus hinge on the relation he proposes between the formal negations of art and socio-political negation. He proposes that modern art’s formal agitation does have a certain ‘seriousness’ in its recognition that it has implications for the institutions and languages in which power is lodged. However, for Clark, the refusal by a modernist artist such as Jackson Pollock of the established figurative and metaphorical modes through which an audience can determine artistic meaning is ultimately a symptom of the wider deadlock of a contradictory bourgeois society and culture, one that cannot be resolved artistically. This reading of the central stakes of Clark’s understanding of modernism explains much about the melancholic tones of his Farewell to an Idea, though Day closes the chapter noting the more militant character of the Retort book, Afflicted Powers, Clark co-authored just a year later. Doing this, she poses us the challenge of gathering our ‘afflicted powers’ to transmute Clark’s critical insights into a culture and criticism that moves beyond the impasse he seems to share with the artists he diagnoses. It is Tafuri, then, who emerges as opening a view onto practices that might create a passage beyond the present. At its most obvious, Tafuri’s account of the avant-garde seems (famously) somewhat pessimistic, proposing that it is precisely in its rebellion that vanguardist culture most replicates the negative and chaotic energies of capital (or, in Tafuri’s term, the ‘Metropolis’). Day, however, placing Tafuri’s account back in the context of the debates of operaism, finds in it a far less nihilistic programme. She notes his counterintuitively positive evaluation of the seemingly more co-opted post-avant-garde architecture and design that began to eschew rebellion against metropolitan conditions in order to work … Continue reading Radical, like in the eighties