Francesco Matarrese
Greenberg and Tronti: Being Really Outside?

1. Struggling against Themselves

There are two short works that date back to the late 1960s that should be reread and approached today. The extreme encounter that I would like to address as an artist is that between Clement Greenberg, the most famous American art critic, and Mario Tronti, the most radical Italian political philosopher.

I thus put two works together on my table: “Recentness of Sculpture” by Greenberg, from the 1967 American Sculpture of the Sixties catalog (with its original silver cover), and “Lotta contro il lavoro!” by Mario Tronti, from his famous book Operai e capitale, published in Turin in 1966.1 I believe that this encounter at a distance is one of the highest points that can be conceived today in terms of a discussion about art and politics. Both are animated by the same concern: not being able to think about the inconceivable adequately. For Tronti the defeat of the workers, for Greenberg design, middlebrow culture: poison for art. Today, Greenberg’s dissatisfaction appears like a ghost within the smoldering ruins of his modernism. Just as the intransigent “criticism of the present state of things” is what remains outdated in the fortunate topicality of Operai e capitale. They present themselves as two real legacies, two positions about the modern that pose us questions, due to an unprecedented emergency. Never had there been such an organic totality as this, says Tronti. The modern has by now been entirely occupied by capitalism. No empire or church ever reached this level. A world that has become one is not free. In the 1960s, Manfredo Tafuri, a discerning reader of Tronti, started one of the most important oppositions to modernism from this radical “criticism of ideology.”

Shortly after “Recentness” came out, the authoritative American art critic Michael Fried promptly noted, in a memorable essay in Artforum, “Art and Objecthood,” that Greenberg had spoken of a “condition of non-art”; Fried added that an explicitly hostile phase in art had begun: “a war.”2 Today, all this seems almost like a prophecy. I believe that the debate opened by Greenberg about the condition of non-art is the abyssal field that was opened wide after the defeat of the hopes of the avant-garde. In this place there is only conflict, an endless war. All this seems announced in advance by the two texts.

The short work by Greenberg denounced the scandalous “presence” of a type of “far-out” art of the avant-garde, seemingly anti-conventional, irregular, different, yet only paying lip service to these values. The works of this type of art when put to the test were seen to be painfully subdued by middlebrow culture, “in good safe taste.” To this he opposed the vision of a high absolute, unitary, “integrally abstract” art, at war with the meaningless forms of art of the society of the spectacle. Tronti claims that the irruption of the worker-subject in the twentieth century is due to the great experience of the culture of crisis. He claims that the war was against the whole present state of things. The “refusal” of capitalist labor had to be absolute. The task of the working class was, by then, that of “fighting against itself.” To the insolubility of the crisis, the suffocating lack of identity and unity, the response was an impossible thought. Does a unity exist outside unity? Can an all be contrasted with an all, a unity with another unity? Can you really be outside?

One should remember that the matter of “unity” was debated in the sixties in the U.S. between Greenberg, Fried, and two Minimalist artists of such caliber as Donald Judd and Robert Morris. In this period, Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” was also decisive. Fried felt Greenberg’s criticism of the “presence” of Minimalist works, which were too dangerously projected toward the outside, was important. That is, presence inevitably broke the unity of form to which the efforts of some important Abstract Expressionist artists were directed. But the “objects” of Judd (that is, non-subjects) were, not by chance, thought of as literally present in an outside. The task of eliminating the traditional illusionistic separation between depth and plane was entrusted to their external presence. Robert Morris also joined the debate, inserting labor into a gestaltic space and sustaining it in order to provide “resistance to perceptual separation”3 and keep “the entire situation”4 under control. Greenberg totally disagreed with this way to the outside; he defended profound, radical, and rigorous autonomy inside art to the last. This was the only thing that could guarantee unity to a work. All the protagonists of this debate had the same hope: of being able to close the crisis of forms from which the avant-garde had departed. The divergence in the solutions, however, made the debate hostile. Process art, which came after Minimalism, bravely took it upon itself to highlight the will to power that was behind the whole modernist project. Yet it was not enough: the crisis of forms was not overcome.

Let us now move elsewhere, where it is possible to splice the threads of the debate again and retake our path. In the same years in which the adventure of late modernism was under way in the U.S., Mario Tronti was leading one of the most original theoretical and politically influential undertakings of the end of the twentieth century in Italy: workerism. I believe that his contribution is pertinent to and decisive for our debate too. In Operai e capitale, he had elaborated a Copernican “point of view” (as it was called at the time), according to which the time had come in the political struggle to abandon the idea of contrasting an all to an all, a unity to another unity, a universal interest to another universal interest. Even recently, while discussing again the pages of this book of his, he confirmed that “the knowledge that the all proposes is always false and ideological. It always leads to a false appearance. The only true and realistic knowledge is that which a part can make of the totality.”5 Tronti advances the idea of an absolute partiality, of a partial absolute truth, not of a truth that is valid for everything, but of a truth that is valid for a part, a piece, of the world. It is a strategic repositioning of the traditional concept of the absolute. The question of unity, in this context of partiality, is proposed outside any will to power. This is because it is an “absolutely” different difference. It is an absolutely different separate unity. It is the so-called Italian thought of difference, as Toni Negri recently highlighted in La differenza italiana, placing it next to Italian feminism of difference and particularly to Luisa Muraro.6

Nevertheless, what makes Tronti’s intervention really unusual in this debate is that, in my eyes, the partiality he thought of at the time, that of the Italian mass worker (“the rude pagan race”), was in explicit continuity with the mass worker in the U.S. Tronti stressed more than once that what had happened in the U.S. in the 1930s (the political context from which Greenberg started) had later happened in Italy in the sixties. But while Tronti formed the vertiginous idea of an absolute partiality, of an absolute outside, from worker radicalization of the sixties, Greenberg, from the U.S. of the thirties, formed the idea of a rigorous autonomy, of a legitimacy only within the work of art. In short, Greenberg did not concede a partial absolute or one that was apart or separate, just as Minimalist artists had never succeeded in conceiving an absolute partiality.

In Greenberg, the theme of unity, of the absolute, was a worry that we can already find in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” where he expounds the idea that the avant-garde had reached its high level of abstract art thanks to being really “in search of the absolute.”7 Thus, in “Recentness,” at a distance of many years, with great intellectual independence, he not only reasserts this position but radicalizes it, referring to an “integrally abstract” art. Of course, his concept of the absolute was weakened by the lack of deconstructive will. Yet to make up for this limit, at least partly, and make his position even more important, he reached heights of critical intransigence. Naturally, one cannot deny that in those years he sustained an art that was not in accord with the big questions he himself raised. The question, the request for the anti-conventional, was, however, real and authentic. This might explain why the anti-modernists, even though they effectively demonstrated the groundlessness of Greenberg’s answer and most of his theoretical construction, have still not even made a dent in the pertinence of his dissatisfaction with the state of art, as I believe Rosalind Krauss has tried to explain on several occasions. Was it right to ask for an absolute use of the anti-conventional or, as Greenberg called it,...