LEFT WITH TINA: ART, ALIENATION AND ANTI-COMMUNISM

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.