Left with TINA: Art, Alienation and Anti-Communism

Abstract

The article traces the haunting of the contemporary art field by a post-1989 cultural and political imaginary captured in Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991). This was a formative literary work for its anti-work stance but also the narrativisation of withdrawal in awe of processes of acceleration that saw production principles translating into “dazed and confused” lifestyles. The preference of Gen-Xers for “microcosms”, where withdrawal encountered low-fi collectivism, became more prevalent in subsequent decades and aligned with a democracy realised, and idealised, as the politics of “anti” (including anti-fascism) – exemplified in the art field in its association with an ethical left. Constant and glorified antagonisms join the liberal art field to the social field, forever re-scripting ‘anti’ as TINA – the principle that “there is no alternative”. TINA, it is argued, is assuming specific figurations within the largely left-inclined art terrain where commoning practices remain cut off from the propositional politics of communism while, both within and beyond the art field, technophilia is legitimised left and right as a substitute for the desire for communism. The main theses of the article are that: (a) such developments are intertwined with a political process of struggle that delivers alienation as their main outcome – that is, alienation from an imagined endpoint of the struggle and (b) that such alienation cannot be considered separately from the hegemony of acceleration in light of the traumatic withdrawal from, and of, communism and capitalism’s continuous re-working of prefigurative anti-communism.