Beuys, Hardt and Negri: One World ‒ One Consciousness

With the “Social Turn” in art, ideas proposed by Joseph Beuys (1918-1986) gain renewed currency. Today, Beuys’s concept of Social Sculpture may be compared to what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri define as the biopolitical because it produces relationships, networks and subjectivities. One of Beuys’ platforms was democracy, defined by Hardt and Negri as the rule by all based on relationships of equality and freedom. For Hardt and Negri, democracy of the multitude is peace without war. Remarkably, in 2004, they speculated on the rise of a new society based on blurring distinctions between the economic, the political, the social, and the cultural, subjects Beuys lectured on at length. Notably, Beuys abandoned his hermetic performances for direct action of thinking, molding thoughts into actions, and speaking out. Beuys’ metaphor for human society as bees and the hive is re-registered by Hardt and Negri as “the common,” a “swarm” or a united front determined by revolutionary will. Hardt and Negri propose that “the world is in an interregnum with economic wealth and power shifting.” If Beuys can be seen as demarcating the beginning of this interregnum, do events such as The Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street signify what Hardt and Negri predicted more than a decade ago, that, “time is split between a present that is already dead and a future that is already living…”? (Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. 258) Like Beuys before him, Negri suggests that it is art ‒ not reason ‒ that stimulates imagination to realize consciousness of one united world