Key Principle
Guattari's principle of double finality provides Bishop's culminating evaluative criterion: each work must "[Firstly] insert itself into a social network which will either appropriate or reject it, and [secondly] celebrate, once again, the Universe of art as such, precisely because it is always in danger of collapsing" (p. 273). Without both, participatory projects become edu-tainment or collapse into mere social work.
Why This Matters
The ethical turn (Ch. 1) created a critical impasse: participatory art was evaluated only by social criteria. Double finality resolves this by demanding simultaneous success in both art and social fields. It preserves art's autonomy while insisting on social engagement -- not as sacrifice of one for the other, but as productive tension.
Argumentative Sequence
- The educational turn (2000s): Artists appropriate lectures, seminars, libraries, schools as form. Governing tension: "art is given to be seen by others, while education has no image" (p. 241).
- Freire's critical pedagogy: Teachers as co-producers through non-authoritarian collaboration. "Dialogue does not exist in a political vacuum. It is not a 'free space' where you say what you want" (p. 266). Authority is retained without authoritarianism.
- Ranciere's equality of intelligence: Equality as "method or working principle, rather than a goal: equality is continually verified by being put into practice" (p. 266).
- Schiller's limitation: Art as waystation to moral improvement subordinates the aesthetic to the ethical -- the error Bishop wants to surpass (p. 272).
- Guattari's transversality: Leaves art as a category intact but insists on "its constant flight into and across other disciplines" (p. 278). "Militant, social, undisciplined creativity" -- movement rather than fixed point (p. 273).
Good Examples
- Hirschhorn's Monuments (Spinoza, Deleuze, Bataille, Gramsci): Public projects in housing estates juxtaposing philosophy with everyday life. "Presence and Production" replaces "participation" because participation = consumption (p. 264). Montage of "co-existing incompatibilities" (p. 265).
- Bruguera's Arte de Conducta (Havana, 2003-2009): Art school as artwork, training students in "behaviour art" -- performance art with political content.
- La Borde psychiatric clinic (est. 1953): Doctors, nurses, and patients exchanged roles via the grille (rotating task grid). Philibert's documentary: viewers cannot distinguish patients from staff (p. 273).
- Althamer's Einstein Class (2005): Worked with a class of "problem children" over months, producing artworks and a trip to Brussels -- idiosyncratic pedagogy drawn from his own teachers (p. 267).
Counterpoints
- Education has no spectators: The most effective pedagogy is a closed process, yet art must communicate beyond participants. Resolution requires secondary modes -- video, exhibition, lecture, publication (p. 272).
- Academic capitalism: The educational turn partly responds to neoliberalisation of universities, but artists operate "from a position of amateur enthusiast rather than informed expert" (p. 265).
- Barthes's insight: "The famous 'teaching relation' is not the relation of teacher to taught, but the relation of those taught to each other" (p. 272).
Key Quotes
"How do you bring a classroom to life as if it were a work of art?" -- Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis (1993), p. 273
"Pedagogic art projects foreground and crystallise one of the most central problems of all artistic practice in the social field: they require us to examine our assumptions about both fields of operation" -- Claire Bishop, p. 274
Rules of Thumb
- Apply double finality as evaluation: does the work succeed in BOTH social and art fields?
- If it only succeeds socially, it risks being edu-tainment; if only artistically, it risks elitist irrelevance
- Authority without authoritarianism: the best participatory projects provide "programme and content" rather than utopian spaces of undirected collaboration (p. 267)
- Transversality means constant flight across disciplines, not dissolution of disciplinary boundaries
Related References
- The Ethical Turn and Its Discontents - The impasse that double finality resolves
- Core Framework: Participation, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Spectatorship - The broader theoretical architecture
- Quality vs. Equality: The Persistent Dilemma - The historical version of this tension
- Rules of Thumb: Philosophical Heuristics for Participatory Art - Heuristic #2 derives from double finality