Hannah Forbes Black

Kojin Karatani operates from an enviable crossroads between the arts and social sciences - he has a BA in economics and an MA in English literature, and his books cover the subjects of architecture, philosophy and world history. Though whether anyone in the audience at his talk understood what he was saying is another matter. And not just because some Tate attendees, myself probably included, lack sufficient understanding of the intellectual lodestars Hegel, Kant and Marx to see where Karatani is being radical and where he's toeing a particular line - it's also because his English, while good enough to deliver a prepared paper, wasn't up to scratch during the following Q&A session. A woman kept getting up from her seat to whisper translations. The audience felt bad for him and lapsed into silence, the chair's questions got more and more elaborate and verbally ornate, and the whole thing ground to a mildly embarrassing halt.

A shame, because Karatani's description of the repetitive historical mechanisms that maintain capitalism is provocative and interesting - as one audience member put it, he's offering a historical materialism stripped of its sense of inevitable victory. Haven't read Marx? Never mind - Marx is the kind of thinker, like Freud and Jung, who anyone with an interest in culture will have absorbed almost without realising. Of course some artists deal explicitly with Marx - I'm thinking of the painter Vicky Wright's fantastic recent show at Bloomberg, for example - but we owe to Marx many of the common preoccupations of the art world, such as the handwringing around art as a commodity. If you're still wondering what this lecture series is doing at the Tate, you could always reflect on how great political theorists, just as much as great artists, seduce us into a more intense engagement with the world.

The series Anthropologies of the Present exists because "contemporary art is increasingly part of a network of cultural practices." Increasingly? Maybe not. But any excuse to hear someone clever and dedicated expound on their subject of choice. Karatani's ideas were explicitly offered as a starting point, an inspiration - he himself admitted that his reading of Kant is deliberately tangential.

Without apparent emotion, Karatani confidently predicted that, according to inevitable cycles, we should expect World War Three in about 2048. "Should we all be buying fall-out shelters?" asked the chair, only joking a little bit. Karatani stared blankly back, just as he did when asked about when exactly this cyclical history began. I don't think it was just a language problem. The audience had somehow misunderstood the specific nature of the problem Karatani was describing - this cycle isn't an eternal, immutable historical repetition, but a characteristic of capitalism. Maybe this question - asked both by the chair and an audience member - came up because capitalism makes it hard to imagine anything outside itself.

Karatani closed his talk with a Marxist-Kantian vision of the United Nations as our only means of bringing about international revolution. The chair wondered, not in so many words, where he got off with this big "ethical gesture". But knowing what kind of world we live in should make us more ethical, not less.