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Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art Against Democracy Anthony Gardner, Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art Against Democracy, MIT Press, 2015, 352pp, £24.95, 978 02620285 3 0.
At the Democracy Unrealised conference held in Berlin as part of Documenta 11 in 2001, the late Stuart Hall remarked of democracy that it had become a term 'so proliferated, so loaded down with ideological freight, so indeterminate ... that it is virtually useless'. It is ironic then that the truth of Hall's diagnosis - the very opacity of the term - would make it so efficacious for the hawkish regime of George W Bush in the years following the attacks on the World Trade Center. After the already frail narrative of WMDs collapsed, 'democracy' and that equally diaphanous word 'freedom' became the terms used to justify militarily implemented regime change within a sovereign nation in the Middle East. We are now living with the bloody and catastrophic consequences. In Iraq and Libya, as thumbs are inked and ballots cast amid the horrors of a holy war, never has 'democracy' seemed so little worth the cost and its syllables rung so hollow.
In the West, democracy has come to seem a term emptied of promise for other reasons, but primary among them is motivational deficit. Anthony Gardner in his impressive new book Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art Against Democracy shows how 'democracy' emerged in the years following the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union as a universalising term around...