On the Repoliticisation of Art through Contamination

Abstract

It is inherently necessary for the capitalist machine to have new productions and expressions of creativity, which means that new forms of art, as well as new forms of life, have to be constantly produced. This is as well acknowledge by the psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik, a professor at the Catholic University of São Paulo, where she directs the Centre for Research on Subjectivity. Rolnik emphasizes that the intention of this need to continuously produce new forms of art and life is to give all these structures (theory, criticism, and official institutions) subjective consistency, while other artistic and cultural productions are swept off the stage along with entire deactivated sectors of the economy. To put it another way, what contemporary theory, criticism, and official institutions all happily share is creativity, but it is a creativity without resistance. This wellspring of free inventive power has been discovered by contemporary capitalism as a virgin resource, an untapped vein of value to be exploited. To describe this process of giving fresh blood to the (cannibalistic and vampire) capitalist system while deactivating entire sectors of troubled artistic, cultural, and social strategies, Rolnik introduces the formulation kidnapped inventions; these are innovations that have been kidnapped by various kinds of systems, theories, criticism, institutions, and