Recently Published Book Spotlight: Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy

Fred Evans has authored three single-authored books, each on a different topic: Psychology and Nihilism: A Genealogical Critique of the Computational Model of Mind; The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity; and Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy: An Essay in Political Aesthetics. He is currently a professor of philosophy at Duquesne University.

What is your work about?

A book that I wrote years ago developed a genealogical critique of cognitive psychology’s computational model of mind.  A later book concerned society, communication, and democracy in “the age of diversity”; it clarified and built upon some of the ideas in the book previous to it. In particular, it proposed viewing society as a “multivoiced body,” a creative interplay among voices that also resists “oracles,” that is, nihilistic tendencies in societies. My new book, the one I’m discussing here for the blog, Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy: An Essay in Political Aesthetics, uses the political ontology of voices and oracles to address the problems public art faces in a democratic society. These problems derive in part from democracy’s intrinsic questioning of what it is or should be. Although this openness invites creative explorations of what democracy can be, and is thus a promising aspect of democracy, it also renders democracy fragile, allowing it surreptitiously or inadvertently to incorporate racist, plutocratic, or other forces that corrupt it.

In response to this paradoxical nature of democracy, I develop a criterion for assessing when public artworks either reinforce or resist the nihilistic forces that plague this form of polity—that is, when such works do or don’t qualify as “acts of citizenship” in a democracy. The criterion proposes both political and aesthetic guidelines, the latter concerning the creative tension between the aesthetic and political dimensions of given works (see #4 and #5 below for details on this and the other points I introduce in this section, #1). To ensure that the criterion doesn’t betray the democracy it supports, I show how it shares the openness of democracy, acting as a lure for always further articulations of itself and thus adopting the form that contemporary philosophers call an “event.”

The construction of this criterion involves extended critical discussion of key theorists of democracy (both “continental” and “analytic” thinkers), art critics and art historians, as well as artists.  I have selected them on the basis of their importance in their fields but also for their relevance to the specific task of fashioning the public art criterion.  Although I discuss an ample number of public artworks for carrying out this undertaking, including topical Confederate and diversity oriented monuments, I devote a chapter to Millennium Park, whose conviviality celebrates life, and another to New York’s 9/11 memorial, whose commemorative task addresses death and mourning.  The critical discussion of these two multifaceted memorials allows me to refine the public art criterion and test its mettle for the burden I am assigning it.

Much is at stake in this endeavor. Many governments that profess democracy today nonetheless adopt rhetoric and policies promoting bigotry, authoritarianism, and thuggery. They thereby revive social–political tendencies that have historically threatened democracy from within as well as from without. Moreover, the vast amount of wealth that is passing into the hands of a decreasingly smaller group—the “one percent”—progressively turns freedom and equality, the two bulwarks of democracy, into a mirage. All the more reason to explore how public art can enlist its aesthetic and political power to resist these destructive tendencies as well as to reveal new possibilities for a democratic way of life.

What directions would you like to take your work in the future?

Pretty much all my work, books or articles, develop the idea of the political ontology of voices and the political ethics and political aesthetics I derive from it. This development involves placing it in agonistic dialogue with thinkers on the topics that interest me as well as with thinkers who themselves make substantive use of the notion of “voice.” More generally, I apply the ontology to the areas that interest me, such as psychology, as in my Psychology and Nihilism book (I earned an MA in psychology plus a year of PhD work before returning to philosophy), democracy, as in The Multivoiced Body book, and public art, as in my Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy.  In the case of the psychology book, I was able to take advantage of the MA and year of PhD work I did in psychology and vent my discontent with the computational or computer models of mind in cognitive psychology; the book on democracy allowed me to show how the notion of voices could provide an ontological basis for the simultaneous affirmation of the three political virtues I think are at the core of democracy, that is, solidarity (identity), heterogeneity (diversity and difference), and fecundity (the emergence of new voices through the creative interplay among the others); and the book on public art permitted me to see how art could combine with politics to make for a strong defense of democracy and resistance to fascism and predatory capitalism.

The other direction or “application” of this ontology – the one “in the future” – I want to take concerns cosmopolitanism.  This work will be the most important for me because it involves what was probably the most important event in my personal life apart from my relation with my life partner, the art historian Barbara McCloskey.  That event was the five years I spent in Laos working under the auspices of International Voluntary Services.  That commitment consisted in learning Lao, living with Lao people, and working to help them achieve some of their objectives and values.  The most fulfilling part of that work was my last three years there, collaborating with a Lao counterpart to develop a social worker position at the Lao National Orthopedic Center in Vientiane, Laos.  I view cosmopolitanism as the political ethics of world togetherness.  I think the voice ontology can provide a strong basis for addressing the two axes of my experience in Laos:  an appreciation of ethnic, cultural, and other kinds of difference (the enrichment of oneself and the world that can come from exposure to this diversity) plus a strong desire to resist capital, racism, and the other nefarious forces that cost three million Indochinese lives (in Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia) and fifty thousand U.S. lives.  Updating this experience for the world of today, which includes addressing global climate change and desperate migration as well as the new developments related to the two axes just mentioned, will constitute a grand challenge for my ontology and for my desire to repay a debt owed but also a celebration of a time past which still has a current meaning for me.  In particular, how can someone from the Global North speak to others from the Global South – or all marginalized groups – without ending up speaking only to himself or herself and a society that has dominated the globe for so long?

Why did you feel the need to write this work (the Public Art book)?

In my The Multivoiced Body, I had found that an effective and poignant way to start the book was through the video-opera work of the internationally recognized couple, Reich and Korat, especially their piece, The Cave.  The piece is an interplay of music, language, and video around the theme of the biblical cave at Hebron and its contemporary meaning for the lives of Palestinians, Israelis, and American tourists.  For me, It captured the creative interplay of voices and the simultaneous affirmation of solidarity, heterogeneity, and fecundity mentioned above.  So did Jose Salamanca’s novel The Cave, and both it and that of Steve Reich and Beryl Korat contrast perfectly the Plato’s more autocratic view of the cave.  In short, the two artworks inspired their philosophical interpretation and the elaboration of the multivoiced body idea and its relation to democracy.  It encouraged me to think of the more specifically relation b/w art and politics, especially democracy, and about how artworks could further help me unfold the idea of society as a multivoiced body.

But I was also encouraged in this endeavor by my partner Barbara McCloskey, some of her colleagues who are leaders in the field (Kirk Savage and Terry Smith), and Memorial Mania by the art historian Erika Doss.  Their work convinced me of how important public art was in shaping our view of democracy, and also how the best of it embodied my idea of society as a multivoiced body.  Furthermore, the two great art installations, Millennium Park and the New York National 9/11 Memorial and Museum also provoked me to think about art:  the former, life, the latter, death and mourning.  Just as important, I was intrigued by how the three ideas – democracy, citizenship, and public art – are interrelated: in thinking about the one I had to think about the other two.  I also saw how some public art in the U.S., particularly Confederate monuments, unwittingly advances undemocratic ideas.  All these factors produced the need in me to write on art and the political.

What topics do you discuss in the work, and why do you discuss them?

I’ve already mentioned the topics of democracy, public art, and acts of citizenship as well as the three political virtues of solidarity, heterogeneity, and fecundity.

I’ve already mentioned the topics of democracy, public art, and acts of citizenship as well as the three political virtues of solidarity, heterogeneity, and fecundity.  I also think what I’ve already said makes it clear why I discuss them.

In turn, the topic of my theory of society as a multivoiced body (MVB) threatened by oracles is important because it clarifies the meaning of these other terms (democracy and the others above) and provides an ontological foundation for the valorization I and many others give those terms.  In particular, the notion of voices involves the discourse they express, the subject (human or otherwise) who enunciate them in practice, and that each voice is intrinsically either a response or an address to the other voices.  On a horizontal or spatial (or logical axis), each voice is diacritically related to the others (each is what it is through its differences from the others).  But this horizontal axis is always already converted into a vertical or temporal axis.  On this axis, each voice is part of an ongoing dialogic interplay with the others.  I further argue that

a) The horizontal axis and its diacritical structure implies that each voice is part of the identity of the rest and their other at the same time. Ontologically, this validates or affirms solidarity (each is part of the identity of the rest) and heterogeneity (each is the other of the rest).  The affirmation of any one voice is the affirmation of them all and their difference.

b) The vertical or temporal axis means that the interplay among the voices

1) simultaneously holds together and keeps these voices separate, forming the dynamic “body” we call society and the latter’s political nature.

2) The dialogic interplay among the voices produces new voices, which transforms all the others because of their diacritical relation, and thus society is the same body but as always different.  Ontologically, this validates or affirms the third political virtue, fecundity.

c) The ethical expression of this multivoiced body is captured by the ancient Greek notion of “parrhesia”: courageous speaking to and hearing of the other voices (parrhesiastic democracy).  This is ultimately founded on our “amor fati” of the MVB.

d) This ethico-political ontology (the political just is all about which voices get heard and which don’t) solves two possible objections to it: the paradoxical idea of excluding the excluders, and the charge that MVB itself is a nihilistic oracle.

e) Oracles are the one true god, the pure race, or any other voice raised to the level of a non-revisable discourse that threatens to terminate the creative interplay among the others and parrhesiastic democracy.

The other important topic concerns the criterion for judging whether particular public artworks qualify as “acts of citizenship” in a democracy.  The criterion that I arrive at in Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy has a political and an aesthetic part:[i]

a) The political part of the criterion contains two types of acts of citizenship:

1) The first type involves innovative affirmations and creative nuances of democracy and its three political virtues;

2) The second type consists of acts that resist spectacle, capital, American exceptionalism, white supremacy, and other nihilistic oracles.

a. Public artworks that qualify as acts of citizenship can involve either of these two types of acts.

b. But if they directly affirm democracy, they indirectly resist the oracles that are undermining it.

c. The same claim is inversely true of the second type of acts: if they directly perform or express resistance to oracles, they also indirectly affirm democracy.

b) The aesthetic part of the criterion declares that the aesthetic and political dimension of a work of public art must sustain a creative tension and neither one cancel out the other (this is a more inclusive version of Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic regime of art):

1) A public artwork can qualify as an act of citizenship only if its aesthetic dimension sustains or reinforces its political dimension, which can occur in two ways:

a. The artwork must resist the oracle of spectacle, that is, its aesthetic dimension must not distract or otherwise detract from its political content.

b. The artwork must have an aesthetic forcefulness that precludes the political content from canceling out the contribution of the aesthetic dimension to the artwork, from reducing art to political philosophy.

2) The aesthetic forcefulness has to help constitute the artwork as a “quasi-voice” that can interrupt the predetermined or stereotypical ways the artwork might be received by those encountering it.

a. These interruptions are necessary for allowing public art to introduce novelty in its aesthetic form as well as in its content.

b. The aesthetic part of the criterion, then, requires that the aesthetic and the political dimensions work together to augment the presence of the public artwork, neither one reducing the role of the other.

Which of your insights or conclusions do you find most exciting?

First, let me summarize the four main elements of the book:  a) the interrelationship between democracy, public art, and acts of citizenship (all three would be different if were talking about an authoritarian society, for example, Nazi Germany and its iconic art and architecture); b) the complex criterion for judging public artworks as acts citizenship in a democracy; and c) the foundation that the idea of society as an MVB provides for the other two,  a) and b).

The insights or conclusions concerning the above items that I find most exciting are:

a) That all three end up adhering to the three political virtues of solidarity, heterogeneity, and fecundity.

b) The comprehensiveness and effectiveness of the public art criterion I arrive at.

c) The criterion’s detailed application to the specific oracles (capital, racism, American exceptionalism, and spectacle) related to the public artworks I examined: Confederate monuments, Baca’s Danzas Indigenas, Wodiczko’s The Homeless Projection,  Arad’s New York’s 9/11 memorial (Reflecting Absence), Wodiczko’s response to it (City of Refuge, and a number of other examples of public art.

But there are two other ideas related to them that make the whole of my political aesthetics work:

a) Event: The criterion share’s the social body’s (MVB’s) status of being an “event” rather than a substance.  I use Derrida’s idea of the future as always and only “to come” as a means of ensuring that there can be no final version of MVB or our public art criterion (or any other concept) – that all concepts are “indecidable.”  However, I do not think of time as an independent actor; rather, I locate its thrust and openness, its futurity, in the ongoing interplay among the subjects enunciating the discourses of the voices that they are (though only “elliptically”); it’s the status of each voice as always being a response or an address to other voices that unceasingly calls for another response that ensures the existence of a space that always points beyond itself to another exchange ad infinitum in principle (closer to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of relation b/w time and social subjectivity or Deleuze and Guattari’s between time and “assemblages” or “multiplicities”).   This means that the criterion, like the social body of which it is a part, is always a lure for other articulations of what it is and functions as a virtual interruption to any discourse that would mistakenly assume itself to be the final interpretation of what MVB and the criterion are.  The “always and only to come” status of the future, ala Derrida, makes it so.

b) Dialogic a priori: But doesn’t the notion of event then lead to a lethal relativism? I hold that it is neither absolutist nor relativist with respect to truth (Nathan’s question about truth).  Derrida’s temporality of “to come” is valid but formalist.  It is a formal or logical notion of time but not the historical time within which we live.  Historical time differs from the formal variety in that it requires decisions based on the past and the present and, in a special way, to the future.  With respect to the past and the present, the dialogical a priori requires that the best definition of a concept, for example, of democratic society such as MVB or our public art criterion, is the one that seems most compelling among the current competitors, that is, the participants in the global dialogue, at any given time; with respect to the future, it also has to be one that we think would remain the best for as far as we can see into the future.  When we do find such a concept or characterization of MVB and/or the public art criterion, then it is dialogically a priori and not relativistic; but it is also not absolutist: it is indecidable as to its truth in formal time.  Both formal and historical time are real, they exist, but historical time is the one pertinent to the decisions we live by.  Formal time and the indecidability it implies simply reminds us that “as far as we can see or imagine into the future on present concrete matters” is not commensurable with time that goes beyond that limit.  Our amor fati – our embracing of the most general characteristics of our existence – implies that we live in the historical rather than in the formal time except as the latter plays the role just outlined.  Nonetheless, the thought of this incommensurability may curb our tendency unnecessarily to kill in the name of our decisions in historical time.  Yet, because the decision is the best with which we can live and necessary for the latter, we can act on it albeit with the proper hesitation.

c) Parrhesia: the political ethics back up by the MVB framework is the parrhesia, the courageous speech and hearing, I mentioned above, and its linkage with what I dubbed “parrhesiastic democracy.”  Foucault’s work on this is very important, as is George Yancy’s application of it.

You can ask Fred Evans questions about his work in the comments section below. Comments must conform to our community guidelines and comment policy.

*

The purpose of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is to disseminate information about new scholarship to the field, explore the motivations for authors’ projects, and discuss the potential implications of the books. Our goal is to cover research from a broad array of philosophical areas and perspectives, reflecting the variety of work being done by APA members. If you have a suggestion for the series, please contact us here.