In a recent issue of E-Flux, Gean Moreno has written on many of the same themes I have touched upon in the past, developing his ideas by way of the rather elegant analogy of nano-technology’s ‘grey goo’. His Notes on the Inorganic, part 1: Accelerations, considers capital in light of a Landian reading, regarding it as a distinct ontological being from the human, but of which the human is a constitutive part. He follows the apocalyptic course of Landian eschatology, where the dissipative forces of capital grind down all being that is not subordinated to its drive for replication into the de-intensive states of annihilation or equivalence. He ends his summation of this accelerationist capitalism with the conclusion that, while we should be wary of this alien force, we might be able to tap its energies to produce a newly constituted resistance. [1]
Interestingly, while proposing this, he offers a critique of ‘design thinking’ which attempts to exploit the devastation of capitalist production, while prematurely capitulating to the percieved inevitability of its power:
Pre-emptive design capitulates to an erosion of critical distance in order to vindicate itself as the pragmatic-ethical option: it is willing to look the bitter truth in the face and devise, in an unsentimental way, the best possible solution for the depletion to come. [2]
Instead, Moreno suggests the production of counterfactual claims, a premise which he will more fully develop in his later articles. While looking forward to his further exploration of this notion, I would like further develop some thoughts I myself have presented in regards to harnessing the energies of accelerationism, while keeping in mind the above critique.
Both Moreno and I have been influenced by the wonderful symptomatic diagnosis of capitalism by Franco Berardi. Berardi’s analysis is focused on the disruptive shocks the accelerating displacements of late-capitalism have had upon the human organism:
The cognitive performance of the precarious worker must become compatible, fractal, recombinable. Cognitive ability must be detached from sensibility, from the ability to detect, interpret, and understand signs that cannot be translated into words. The standardization of the cognitive process involves a digital formatting of the mind, disturbing the sphere of sensibility, and finally destroying it. [3]
Where we both disagree with him, however, is in a return to the limits of the human body as a measure of the productive limits of capital. Berardi’s prescription evokes a return to the Kantian legislature of the human subject as the end of all ethical action. Berardi’s neo-Kantian humanism acknowledges the body as a material machinic organism (his inheritance from Deleuze and Gauttari) that can be manipulated and re-organized (with pharmaceuticals for instance), but he maintains a reactionary and idyllic attachment to the authenticity and integrity of the body.
For my part, I find that a return to the human body as the ultimate speed limit also has the deleterious effect of limiting the expansion of the knowledge project. [4] As Peter Sloterdjik makes clear in his explications of Heidegger’s ‘throwness’, there is a relationship between the body and the environment, where one is dependent upon the conditions of the other for its existence, and that technology makes possible a re-alignment, or dis-alignment of one and the other. Technology is then necessary if we are to collect experience of the world outside of this small bubble of existence into which we have been thrown, and by a biological necessity, cannot leave. [5] Prosthesis or modifications to the body through a sort of cybernetics are the natural conclusion of this logic.
We do not, however, have to assume capitalism as the engine of this technological transformation. As Benjamin Noys points out, “[...] there is no simply essential or necessary reason why cybernetic or neurobiological forces are ‘capitalist’, or could not be reassembled (to use Nicole Pepperell’s formulation) for socialism or communism.” [6]
The interesting question then, is what is the idea of this communism that will propel the movement into this post-humanism? As, Alain Badiou asks, “What is to be done about this fact: that science knows how to make a new man?’ And since there is no project, or as long as there is no project, everyone knows there is only one answer: profit will tell us what to do.” [7] Badiou recognizes that without an alternative regulating idea, capitalism becomes the default conditioning mechanism of the post-human; Moreno’s grey goo swallows us all. Berardi, on the other hand, expects a return to a kind of humanism, where the body itself becomes the regulating ideal of the world around it.
To put it another way, there is an ontological spectrum between the human subject and the xenoeconomic subject, capitalism. The techno-ubermensch of Ray Kurzweil’s singularity, for instance, is one other possible subject along this axis. The issue is, as Moreno points out, to what degree the design of this new subject is not simply capitulated to capitalism, but how it is thought in opposition to it.
In the past, I have proposed a speculative phenomenology, along the lines of Vilem Flusser’s Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, as a possible model for understanding the machinic organism that late-capitalism has erupted into. [8] It may seem a bit ridiculous to discuss the capitalist subject, since, as far as we know, that subject does not have a self, but without embracing the reductive tenor of Thomas Metzinger’s work in Being No One, I think it is possible to speak about the phenomenal being of non-human subjects in terms of the formal structural properties he applies to the self. What Metzinger calls the phenomenal self-model, a virtualized self-reflexive representation, is a particular phenomenal model organized around the biological structure of the human. In his work he discusses instances in which components may be added, subtracted, or modified from this model, suggesting that it might be arranged otherwise. For instance, he talks about the loss of perspectivalness, wherein one loses a unitary view of a global reality centered upon the experiencing ego. As a result, one might experience complete depersonalization, which can lead to dysphoric states and a loss of function. [9]
Now, as I said, I’m not interested in the nihilistic/reductive aspect of Metzinger’s work (Graham Harman has done a rather good job of debunking those issues [10]), but rather the formal possibilities suggested by his functional/structuralist break-down of the self. If it is possible to expand this model of consciousness to post-human and non-human actors, then it is possible to imagine the alien subject of capital, and it must also be possible to speculate about the configurations of alternative subjectivities opposed to capital.
___
1. Gean Moreno, “Notes on the Inorganic, part 1: Accelerations”, E-Flux Journal #31, January 2012
2. ibid.
3. Fanco Berardi (Bifo), “I Want to Think: POST-U“, E-Flux Journal #24, April 2011
4. Joshua Johnson, “Velvet Exoskeleton”, joshuaj.net, May 16, 2011
5. Peter Sloterdjik, “Atmospheric Politics”
6. Benjamin Noys, “The Grammar of Neoliberalism”, Accelerationism Workshop, Goldsmiths, 4 September 2010
7. Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Tosacno, Polity Press
8. Vilem Flusser, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, trans. Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, Atropos Press, New York/Dresden
9. Thomas Metzinger, “Being No One: lecture”, A Foerster Lectures on the Immortality of the Soul presented by the UC Berkeley Graudate Council, 2005
10. Graham Harman, “The Problem with Metzinger”, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol 7, No 1, 2011
Recent market innovation, generated by advances in technology and the creation of a cognitive surplus, has led to a condition that calls into question the epistemological basis of the knowledge project. Increasingly, computers model the world, but not for the purpose of research, but rather in service of capitalist exploitation. Knowledge, under this regime, is then only as valuable as it’s ability to liquidate all forms of matter into their optimal monetary value. [1]
If it is now a machinic capitalism whose artificial cognition rules our world — its amphetaminic diachronism melting all to air and lava-like, re-sedimenting the crust — we must ask what is this unconscious from which everything is pulled, molten, to the surface? The phenomenal being of this alien mind, whose transcendental conditions must be vastly different than ours — stemming from countless electronic eyes, miles of fiber-optic tentacles, and limitless semio-data, operating at billions of floating-point operations per-second — produces more information hours than attention can ever repay. [2]
In August of 2011, NPR reported that 75% of market volatility was the product of High Frequency Trading (HFT). [3] HFT runs on hyper-engineered algorithms whose complex mathematics produce an instantaneous transcendental model of the world based upon data consumption far beyond any human phenomenal capacity. The light-speed synthesis of pure information may or may-not be deciphered by human interpreters after-the-fact, in effect modeling possible futures whose real-world fallout may never actually be understood by the very people it affects or is meant to serve. [4] HFT proposes a world in which capital as social relation is instead operated by an anonymous and asocial computer network whose xeno-economic agenda is all but invisible to only the most advanced of computer specialists whose comprehension of the very devices they deploy may be governed not by understanding (as in knowledge) but an opaque operability. Capital becomes an alien and alienating relation, whose machinic agenda follows no specific human intention, but the purely fictional causality of virtual universe.
Goldman Sachs, one of the premiere operators of this advanced late capitalist techno-model, has also been derisively referred to as the ‘vampire squid’. [5]
Coincidentally, Vilem Flusser first wrote of the vampyroteuthis, or the vampire squid, in an early work, where he methodically examines the speculative phenomenology of the creature. [6] Basing his investigations on its biomorphic difference, and particularly noting the closeness of the head and the foot ( sky and earth in Heidegger’s terms), as well as the mouth and the genitals (Battaillian erotics), Flusser produces an animal who is our biological anti-hero. His vampire squid is blessed with phenotypical traits that are a nightmare-mirror world to us . The creature’s tentacled grasp radiates outward from its head, the phosphorescent tips of its many arms groping for prey in every crevice. Whatever it finds, it pulls back into its mouth and, in orgasmic joy, digests every morsel. The ‘knowing’ of the vampyroteuthis is synonymous with consuming, the vampire squid understands reality by incorporating it; by making spiteful love to it.
Flusser’s vampyroteuthis, like our financial vampire squid, consumes everything unto itself. In his own time, the vampire squid had rarely been encountered, and the few live specimens that were dragged from the bottom of the ocean quickly succumbed to a world they were not meant to thrive in. His study then, is a fictional one, but one whose speculative energies open up new areas of investigation outside an ever recursively bracketed post-Kantian anthropocentism. Flusser concludes his study with the statement, “In all these places Vampyroteuthis emeges as our own mirror, as our antipode in which all of our aspects inverted. Because to contemplate this mirror with the aim of recognising ourselves in it, and with the aim of being able to alter oneself thanks to this recognition, is the purpose of every fable, including this one.” [7]
If we are to think the conditions of machinic capitalism, whose tentacled form has metastasized outwards from our simple bilateral one, it may be necessary to begin a speculative project that will enumerate the transcendental conditions of an alien difference. If we do not take up this task, we risk living inside a world where our own experience is increasingly dictated to us by machines, whose algorithmic filters reign over vast territories of unrefined data, compressing all that is raw and sublime into an iCloud. There, a friendly graphic user interface breaks all of our decisions into binary conditionals that we, in our haste to consume (as is demanded of us), mistakenly take for the ironclad laws of nature. Kant’s transcendental conditions were only ever the limit of what the human organism could intuit within the terrifying sublime. Technology has allowed us a window to peak beyond the gloss of our own senses, but to begin to believe what is thrown on the glass for everything that is beyond it is a terrible mistake. [8]
To sit inside the spectrum of the continuum that is mediated to us, simply because it is what we can ‘socially’ comprehend, is to ignore the revolutionary potential inherent in attempting to encompass the modal possibilities of the full continuum of experience, especially as our own former tools begin to mirror the possibility of different modalities back to us. Machinic capitalism proposes a phenomenal time beyond our natural capacity, and it is swiftly making us into products not only of its excess, but also its limitations. We are the objects, the cultural products, the art-work of a mind that is modelling its own drive towards limitless consumption. [9] In proposing an investigation of machinic capital, we are proposing an investigation into our own teleology, into uncharted territories of experience, where the human may end and become something more.
—
1 Franco Berardi (Bifo), “Cognitarian Subjectivation“, E-Flux Journal #20, November 2011
2 I am thinking, of course, playing on Mike Kelley’s 1987 work, “More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid,” but operating outside of the anthropic circuit. As Kelley notes about the work in a 1992 interview, “Basically, gift giving is like indentured slavery or something. There’s no price, so you don’t know how much you owe. The commodity is the emotion. What’s being bought and sold is emotion. I did a piece called More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid. I said if each one of these toys took 600 hours to make then that’s 600 hours of love; and if I gave this to you, you owe me 600 hours of love; and that’s a lot. And if you can’t pay it back right away it keeps accumulating…” [John Miller, “Interview: Mike Kelley”, Bomb Magazine #38, Winter 1992] While leaving aside the violent implications of gift giving, there is an asynchronous relationship between the time accumulated in the labor and the time spent consuming that labor. Under the machinic regime this relationship is inverted. The labor time of computers is able to speed up the production of semio-information far beyond the consumption capability of human beings.
3 Jim Zarroli, “Is Computer-Driven Trading Causing Market Spikes?“, NPR, August 19, 2011
4 Kara Scannell and Tom Lauricella, “Flash Crash is Pinned on One Trade“, The Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2010
5 Matt Taibbi, “The Great American Bubble Machine“, Rolling Stone, April 5, 2010
6 Vilem Flusser, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, trans. Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, Atropos Press, New York/Dresden
7 ibid., 126
8 I am expanding here upon a notion discussed at some length by James Trafford, who derives it from Thomas Metzinger. The basic idea is that mistaking phenomenal experience for the actual conditions of the world is akin to mistaking the finger pointing at the sun for the sun. It is easy to imagine that any phenomenal conditions outside of human experience would also be subject to such a mistake, but on a different modal order of mediation. [MetzingerJames Trafford, "The Shadow of a Puppet Dance: Metzinger, Ligotti and the Illusion of Selfhood", Collapse IV]
9 Franco Berardi, in a devastatingly Huxleyan tone, notes the influx of psycho-pharmaceuticals into neo-liberal culture, and their attempt to combat the mental breakdown imposed by the rapid changes of the new economy. He describes the reformatting of the mind: ”The cognitive performance of the precarious worker must become compatible, fractal, recombinable. Cognitive ability must be detached from sensibility, from the ability to detect, interpret, and understand signs that cannot be translated into words. The standardization of the cognitive process involves a digital formatting of the mind, disturbing the sphere of sensibility, and finally destroying it.” [Franco Berardi (Bifo), "I Want to Think: POST-U", E-Flux Journal #24, April 2011]
Accelerationism is the notion that rather than halting the onslaught of capital, it is best to exacerbate its processes to bring forth its inner contradictions and thereby hasten its destruction. As a radical act, the genesis of this idea stretches back to Marx [1] and continues through Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, and Nick Land’s cybertechnics. I will be focusing largely on Land’s formulation of this perspective, it being among the more recent, and one whose uniquely anti-humanist features I find myself more sympathetic to, particularly because they disrupt the problematic formulation of the subject.
The significant difference between Land’s conception of capital, and that of Deleuze and Guattari, whom his work is explicitly indebted to, is the focus on a negative, or anti-vitalist impulse within the mechanism of capital itself. Rather than re-affirming a kind of Hegelian capitalist subject, Land’s impulse is to move towards further and further desubjectivization and away from the elan of capital as a constructive force. As Ray Brassier details in his excellent critique of Land’s thought:
What Land proposed to retain from Kant was the emphasis on the transcendental efficacy of synthesis, the primacy of transcendental synthesis, but no longer as the synthesis of empirical items, objects of experience anchored in a constituting subject. It’s the self-synthesising potency of what he called intensive materiality. This becomes the key term. It’s a brilliant explication of the logical operation that Deleuze and Guattari carry out vis-a-vis Kantianism in Anti-Oedipus. Matter is nothing but machinic production, self-differentiation, and the fundamental binary that organizes this materialist metaphysics is that between intensive materiality, which he identifies with the body without organs, and death, this moment of absolute indifference as absolute difference. [2]
For Land, materiality is the process of pure synthesis, and the production of representation, or transcendental frameworks, is a consequence of that process. As Brassier argues, this sets up a duality wherein the product of this production is a de-potentiated after-effect of the primary process, and under Land’s schema, a dead-end to be overcome as a mere blockage in the system’s self becoming; as primary production continues it breaks down the binary difference between representation and itself as process. There is, therefore, shades of a black Hegelianism within Land’s eschatology, a terminal point in which the intensification of all matter reaches “degree-zero”, as Land puts it.
The problem is, as Brassier points out:
The point is that organically individuated human subjects cannot position themselves vis-a-vis this circuit or this process. It’s happening without you anyway. It doesn’t need you. The very concept of agency is stripped out. There’s a quote of Land’s: “it’s happening anyway and there is nothing you can do about it.” Something is working through you, there is nothing you can do about it, so you might as well fuse. [3]
Under Land’s program, thought itself is an instrument of the processes of synthesis and destratification, a part of the machinic unconscious of materiality. There is no need for an agency, because you as an agent are already swept up within the process by merely being.
Furthermore, Benjamin Noys notes the passivity of this stance on the political level, and argues that Land’s teleology amounts to complete complicity with the neoliberal project. Noys sees Land as simply cheerleading a passing juggernaut, and not effectively endorsing any form of meaningful resistance or change to the current of the times. He follows Brassier in questioning the possibility of agency in such a theory, and additionally regards the Accelerationist as lacking any substantial imagination in opposition to the ruling structure of neoliberalism. [4]
I will attempt to address these issues, particularly in relationship with Land’s insistence an art as a form of insurrection.
Following the irruption of the sublime in Kant’s philosophy, and carried through to the agent through the notion of genius, Land details a picture of art whereby the subject becomes the instrument of the unconscious outside: “One ‘is’ a genius only in the sense that “one” is violently problematized by a ferocious exteriority. One returns to the subject of which genius has been predicated to find it charred and devestated beyond recognition.” Land introduces the production of a stratified representation, in terms of the arts, as an impetus to further destratification. The work of becomes an infection in the ruling structure, ” what art takes from enigma it more than replenishes in the instantiation of itself, in the labyrinthian puzzle it plants in history.” [5]
While this does not yet distinguish the artist as an agent who willfully “chooses” the products of their insanity, it at least identifies where the vectors of a kind of political act may happen. As Badiou notes, “The avant-gardes even went to the extreme of saying that there is more politics to be found in the formal mutations of art than in politics ‘strickly speaking.’” To continue in his terms, the arts instantiate the infinite in the finite to provoke the human to not more humanity, but, in a particularly Nietzschian turn, to what is overhuman, what withdraws from interpretation. [6] Furthering this parallel, I will return to Land once more: “What the philosophers have never understood is this: it is the unintelligibility of the world along that gives it worth.” [7] Art produces what is exceptional to the world as it is known; that is, it establishes a destabilizing factor outside of the transcendental framework that threatens to encompass the world with its totalizing formula.
In a previous article I quoted Land’s insistence upon a tactical insurgency in the market place, as opposed to following the arc of strategy, which he regards as an instrument of territorialization and stratification: “Foucault delineates the contours of power as strategy without a subject: ROM locking learning in a box. Its enemy is tactics without a strategy, replacing the politico-territorial imagery of conquest and resistance with nomad-micromilitary sabotage and evasion, reinforcing intelligence.” [8]
Brassier critiques Land on precisely this point, echoing Noys concerns about neoliberalism:
In other words, once you dissociate tactics and strategy–the famous distinction between tactics and strategy where strategy is teleological, transcendent, and representational and tactics is immanent and machinic–if you have no strategy, someone with a strategy will soon commandeer your tactics. Someone who knows what they want to realize will start using you. You become the pawn of another kind of impersonal force, but it’s no longer the glamorous kind of impersonal and seductive force that you hoped to make a compact with, it’s a much more cynical kind of libertarian capitalism. [9]
My instinct is to cross-breed Landian thought with Badiou’s to directly counter this difficulty: Art, if it is really a reflection of the kernel of the infinite or a particle of the thanotropic real, will continue to dispel further feedback despite any attempt of the neoliberal economy to instrumentalize it. Recall, for instance, when Colin Powell had Guernica covered up at the UN for his press conference on the Iraq War. [10] Guernica, in this instance was the splinter of a tactical strike, whose irreducible instance continues to worm its way into the hide of the territorialized nation-state which Powell represents.
Elie Ayache makes this approach quite clear when discussing Badiou’s ontology in relationship to both the trading of derivitives, and the production of art. Ayache, who was a trader himself, notes that the sophisticated software used by traders to predict the volatility accounts not only for known quantities, but the field of probability in which deviation can occur. The problem, however, is that this software can not account for the probabilities you havent already accounted for before-hand, which means, when something occurs outside of the model, it can only be contingently dealt with after the fact. In this way, the event appears to produce its own cause. Similarly, he brings up the short story of Borges, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. If you are familiar with the story you will recall that Pierre Menard writes Don Quixote, but he does not copy Cervantes, though his text is the same, word for word. For Ayache this is the perfect example of a rupture, or an event, that exists between the probabilities of what is known. [11] Art instantiates the being of a new form that disrupts the old order. Pierre Menard’s repetition of the text tills the very soil in which Cervates worked; he does not simply repeat Cervantes, but he pulls the roots out from under him, displacing the work in history.
I am proposing the tactics without strategy as a form analogous to Badiou’s notion of the Event as an ontological factor yet to be accounted for, in this sense, the artist becomes an agent by virtue of their production of the event, or the tactic. Willing becomes no longer necessary, but rather, in a strange causal reversal, the effect of the event. Choosing to produce the event always seemed to be derived from a subject oriented position, anyway, while Land’s philosophy quite clearly favors an ontologically ordered non-standard-numerics as an organizing principle [12] , rather than a phenomenologically operative ontology. [13]
Art is a technology [14], engendered by the productive forces of capital [15], that offers a short circuit through which the limited and limiting perspective of the subjective perspective may be transformed. The issue with Noys and Brassier’s difficulties is that they still seem to assume that the subject is the operative node, who determines the political based upon their “free-will”. The mathematical ontologies of Land and Badiou do not accept the admission of free will, and thus must operate under some sense of compatibalism. Agency is not determined by choice, but by the occasion of a Event or tactic without strategy.
___
1 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto; Following Noys pedigree: “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
2 Brassier, Ray, Transcription from Accelerationism Workshop at Goldsmiths
3 ibid.
4 Noys, Benjamin, The Grammar of Neoliberalism
5 Land, Nick, “Art as Insurrection”, Fanged Noumena
6 Badiou, Alain, The Century
7 Land, Nick, “Art as Insurrection”, Fanged Noumena
8 Land, Nick, “Meltdown”, Fanged Noumena
9 Brassier, Ray, Transcription from Accelerationism Workshop at Goldsmiths
10 Cohen, David, “Hidden Treasures: What’s so controversial about Picasso’s Guernica“, Slate, Feb. 6, 2003
11 Ayache, Elie, “In the Middle of the Event”, The Medium of Contingency, ed. Robin MacKay
12 Land, Nick, “Qabbala 101″, Fanged Noumena
13 Metzinger, Thomas, Being No One: The Self Model Theory of Subjectivity; In considering a speculative philosophy of the real post-Metzinger, one should be especially wary of operative phenomenology.
14 Buhlmann, Vera, “Pseudopodia, Prolegomena to a Discourse on Design” Pre-Specifics: Some Comparatistic Investigations on Research in Design and the Arts, ed. Buhlmann, Vera and Weidmer, Martin; I would propose the arts as a primitive form of cybertechnics, one that I think will only become more complex as capital demands further interface with vast amounts of data.
15 Noys, Benjamin, The Grammar of Neoliberalism; “[Accelerationism] presumes a fundamental incompatibility of the market with capitalism, deriving this from a Braudelian position, and often tends to presume a fundamental incompatibility of technological forces, especially cybernetic and neurobiological, with capitalism. Of course, markets have pre-existed capitalism and could post-date it and, of course, there is no reason why cybernetic or neurobiological forces are ‘capitalist’, or could not be reassembled (to use Nicole Pepperell’s formulation) for socialism or communism.”; I think there is an underlying assumption of “free-will” here, in that the technological products of capital might have been assembled otherwise. I would argue that those forces are capitalist in that they have resulted from the modes of production engendered by capitalism. That does not mean, however, that these technologies might not supersede the very structure that has produced them. To yoke them to the ideologically circumscribed realms of communism or socialism derived from some kind of ethical humanism seems to deprive them of exactly the promise of supplanting a limited transcendental perspective.
The inherent connection between the irruptive primary process and artistic creativity, or the basic inextricability of psychoanalysis and aesthetics slips Freud’s grasp, and art is presented as a merely contingent terrain for the application of therapeutically honed concepts. The adaptation of the mutilated individual to its society, in which art is illegal except as a parasite of elite commodity production circuits, is the scandal of psychoanalysis. It becomes Kantian (bourgeois); a delicate police activity dedicated to the social management and containment of genius. As if ‘therapy’ could be anything other than the revolutionary unleashing of artistic creation!
- Nick Land, “Art as Insurrection”, Fanged Noumena
To hear it from the exhausted remnants of those schools of critical theory and Marxism, it is both the comedy and tragedy of contemporary art that it operates at the vanguard of consumer capitalism, apparently completely complicit and under the spell of the very forces of power that operate the majority of the world’s wealth and resources. 1 The museum is a factory, tightly contained and maintained by the managerial class, safely autonomous, and drunk on the trickle of wealth that flows down the legs of the one percenters. 2 The mill town no longer need reside in a single place, but now steadily circulates through the international borders that capital has carefully burrowed through sovereignties. One might, of course, miss the runway lights that will taxi you safely into your next destination, but then you may be mistaken for a terrorist. 3
Whilst the autonomy of art in its current structural incarnation preserves its capacity towards experimentation, it also safely protects the broader social sphere and the interests of the ruling elite from what may amount to an invasion of the cancerously anti-humanist material sub-strata of the gene splicing required by purely novel production. Land identifies this terrifying productive capacity as a the return of the abyssal real, first as genius, smuggled into Kant’s transcendental frame-work through the contradictory notion of the sublime, and finally as schizophrenia- the mental condition that destroys all socially recognizable frames of reference– as outlined by Deleuze and Gauttari in Anti-Oedipus; 4 the artist as a viral phage, complicit with the creeping outside.
Initially, Land’s relationship with capital is ambivalent. He first identifies it with the procedures of rationality and control as outlined by the philosophy of containment enacted by Kant’s transcendental project 5, but as his perspective evolves, and he learns to de-couple the phallic/bourgeois affects of moralism from the material processess of capital as pure mechanism of dissipation. In this light, he aligns capital with Freud’s death drive, or the desire towards unbecoming. 6 As he says:
The deep secret of capital-as-process is its incommensurability with the preservation of bourgeois civilization, which clings to it like a dwarf riding a dragon. As capital ‘evolves’, the increasingly absurd rationalization of production-for-profit peels away like a cheap veneer from the positive-feedback detonation of production-for-production.
If capital is a social suicide machine, it is because it is compelled to advantage its assassins. Capital produces the first sociality in which the pouvoir of dominance is perpetually submitted to the hazard of experimental puissance. 7
Capital is a machine in autopoiesis, spinning the products of human society into a determined impact with the real. The artist is a tool of this process, reshuffling and redefining the categories of material in a drive towards ever becoming novelty. The question is, of course, are they on the side of containment — carefully policing the boundaries of the real to preserve the remnants of dying anthropocentric sociality, and thus bulwarking the remaining pillars of a crumbling structure– or are they on the side of the invaders, redistributing the contents of sensibility towards the degree zero of a substance without hierarchy?
Art’s organizational impulse may be both: at once a carefully crafted cage for the dangerous impact of the real, domesticating the wounded breach for its reception in society, and at the same time a dedicated vector for the distribution of infection. In the anti-oedipal schema of Land, the managerial father may be shocked to learn that his children are busy fucking mother nature, and are out to kill him.
___
1 Steyerl, Hito, Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy
2 Steyerl, Hito, Is the Museum a Factory
3 I am thinking of an extreme version of the inclusion of an antagonistic relationship, as Cliare Bishop advocates. (Bishop, Claire, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics); Perhaps an even more radical example would be an insurgency modelled more on the politics of Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia, in which the inside is constantly perforated by an antagonistic outside (Negarestani, Reza, Cyclonopedia)
4 Land, Nick, “Art as Insurrection”, Fanged Noumena
5 Land, Nick, “Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest”, Fanged Noumena
6 Land, Nick, “Making it with Death”, Fanged Noumena
7 ibid.
In Huysman’s A rebours, the decadent aesthete Des Esseintes, after dallying in an interest in paper and wax flowers, decides to push his sensual experiment further, and purchases a variety of live flora which are perversely chosen for their artificial appearance. Des Esseintes watches with satisfaction as a scabrous decoupage of blossoms and leafy things is unloaded onto his doorstep and notes, “[I]t is true that, for most of the time, Nature is herself incapable of producing species so moribid and perverse; she supplies the raw material, the germ and the soil, the procreative womb and the elements of the plant, which mankind rears, models, paints, carves afterwards to suit his caprice.” 1
To collect his leprous garden Des Essenties had to make visits to various greenhouses, for many of the blossoms– deriving from climates whose atmosphere is vastly different than that of France– required special care. That is, a technical architectural apparatus must first be developed that transposes the necessary environmental conditions of one space into another. The greenhouse, in the time in which Des Esseintes was supposed to have lived, had just begun inspiring theories of the environment that were to have a wide ranging impact on modern philosophy. The contemporary philosopher Peter Sloterdjik examines these concepts in relationship to Heidegger’s notions of being and technology:
Among the first to respond to the provocation innate in the concept of the environment was Martin Heidegger, who as early as the mid-1920s grasped the ontological implications of the new biology. [...] When Heidegger speaks of the Geworfenheit (“throwness”) of being, this expression brings to mind the risk of a sudden dis-alignment of organism and environment, such as a palm tree of African origin faces if it were to unfortunately find itself in England prior to the invention of the greenhouse. [...] Whereas for the organism the meaning of the “en” in environment or the “sur” in surrounding consists of the perfectly calibrated dependence on the original stimuli, in the case of existence in the world they signify an abyss above which one hangs, or a transcendence into which one is suspended. 2
To continue in this vein, it is the very transcendental conditions in which our world is organized that makes our being possible. In science this is known as the anthropic principle, or, that were the universe constructed otherwise it would not follow the conditions necessary to support intelligent life. Even within this cosmic transcendental condition, however, the range of our environments immediately available to the human organism is limited to a specific set of conditions pre-determined by physiology. One cannot, for instance, survive at certain depths of the ocean without the support of some technical prosthesis.
It also means that in order to have experience, or even knowledge, of the conditions outside of our natural environment, it is absolutely necessary to develop technical apparatuses which can extend the perspective of the human beyond the meager line of sight gifted to us. This of course means not only physical techne, but that in conceptualizing the environmental conditions outside of our immediate operative sphere, we must make recourse to a set of tools that may have a disorientating effect upon our casual construction of reality:
If superstring theory is of profound philosophical significance it is because it achieves a univocally consistent physical monism by revealing all scalar incommensurability across the material universe, such as that which apparently separates the realm of quarks and neutrinos from that of galaxies and nebulae, to be the result of a four-dimensional abstraction; a perspectival ‘illusion’ engendered by assumptions about physical space that are ultimately rooted in the limited parameters of phenomenological perception. 3
In our world today the consequences of the technical expansion of human sight have resulted in the so-called condition of groundless, in which the human organism is no longer capable of synthesizing through direct experience the broad consequences of the empirical data available from the expanded environment. The philosopher and artist Hito Steyerl diagnoses this as a condition of “free fall”, and asks why is that we don’t seem to be aware of the consequences of this condition?
Paradoxically, while you are falling, you will probably feel as if you are floating—or not even moving at all. Falling is relational—if there is nothing to fall toward, you may not even be aware that you’re falling. If there is no ground, gravity might be low and you’ll feel weightless. Objects will stay suspended if you let go of them. Whole societies around you may be falling just as you are. And it may actually feel like perfect stasis—as if history and time have ended and you can’t even remember that time ever moved forward. 4
One of the most spectacular technical achievements of the last century was the development of space travel. The journey to the moon required the recreation of many of the natural conditions of the earth bound environment in the hostile reaches of space. Integral to this mission was the creation of the ultimate clothing: the spacesuit. In a recent interview regarding his book examining of the development of the spacesuit, the architect and historian Nicholas de Monchaux points out:
For instance, the word cyborg originated in the Apollo program, in a proposal by a psycho-pharmacologist and a cybernetic mathematician who conceived of this notion that the body itself could be, in their words, reengineered for space. They regarded the prospect of taking an earthly atmosphere with you into space, inside a capsule or a spacesuit, as very cumbersome and not befitting what they called the evolutionary progress of our triumphal entry into the inhospitable realm of outer space. The idea of the cyborg, then, is the apotheosis of certain utopian and dystopian ideas about the body and its transformation by technology, and it has its origins very much in the Apollo program. 5
It is no accident that Playtex, the bra company, defeated numerous defense and military contractors for the right to build the suits for the Apollo mission for NASA. 6 The spacesuit exists at the uncomfortable interstice between the human and the machinic, protecting the fragile organism in its core, but also intimately connected with those biologic necessities of consumption and negentropy. It is precisely the organic construction of a technical knowledge, arrived at through the laborious crafting of materials, that was able to process these mortal needs. The spacesuit opened a new frontier to man, who was now free to have a new experience and knowledge of the universe beyond his earthly confines.
To re-orient ourselves within the conditions of free fall, it may be necessary to develop the proper technics, a new spacesuit, or even– more boldly- a new spaceman, to navigate the increasingly fractured environment. However, as the technological/utopic vision of re-engineering the human is coming ever more into focus, and our operational ability to redeploy materials on a genetic and molecular level becomes increasingly refined, the question remains, as Alain Badiou asks, “What is to be done about this fact: that science knows how to make a new man?’ And since there is no project, or as long as there is no project, everyone knows there is only one answer: profit will tell us what to do.” 7
The technical solution to the technical problem of synthesizing knowledge seems to be stuck in an ever evolving feedback loop. Like the Navigators addicted to the powerful and mind altering spice in Frank Herberts popular science fiction series Dune– who are mutated by the very fuel that allows them travel– the products of our technical expansion, driven by the engine of capital, deliquesce ever outward into new and strangely hybrid forms.
1 Huysmans, J.K. Against the Grain.
2 Sloterdjik, Peter. Atmospheric Politics.
3 Brassier, Ray. Alien Theory.
4 Steyerl, Hito. In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective, E-Flux Journal. 24.
5 de Monchaux, Nicholas. Spacesuit: An Interview with Nicholas de Monchaux, BLBLG.
6 ibid.
7 Badiou, Alain. The Century.
Download the full document: Dinged.pdf
Dinged is a curated selection of existing texts and images that are freely disseminated, arranged and designed in multiple formats, and available online. This project stems from the intersection of several interests, but most notably, the use of media as a site and the agency of things. It is in the imbrication of these two ideas that I hope to locate an adequate form to touch upon the complexity and complication inherent in their examination. As we move into an increasingly mediated age, and more and more stress is placed upon an ecology of things, there is an increasing need to address not only the representation of things, but the format of their representation.
I shall begin by noting Seth Price’s Dispersion, an evolving essay and ongoing artwork on distribution that occupies multiple media outlets simultaneously. Price argues for the use of media itself as a medium for expression:
Does one have an obligation to view the work first-hand? What happens when a more intimate, thoughtful, and enduring understanding comes from mediated discussions of an exhibition, rather than from a direct experience of the work? Is it incumbent upon the consumer to bear witness, or can one’s art experience derive from magazines, the Internet, books, and conversation? The ground for these questions has been cleared by two cultural tendencies that are more or less diametrically opposed: on the one hand, Conceptualism’s historical dependence on documents and records; on the other hand, the popular archive’s ever- sharpening knack for generating public discussion through secondary media. This does not simply mean the commercial cultural world, but a global media sphere which is, at least for now, open to the interventions of non-commercial, non-governmental actors working solely within channels of distributed media.1
Price regards multiple forms of distribution as an open platform for a newly democratic and public work of art. I am interested in expanding the notion from “art” to “museum” or “gallery”. In this instance the media format becomes the exhibition space. This seems appropriate, as it allows for the explication of things in a way that may not be accessible from mere firsthand experience of an object.
The “thing”, as Bruno Latour’s regards it, is not just a simple accretion of matter:
As every reader of Heidegger knows, or as every glance at the English dictionary under the heading “Thing” will certify, the old word “Thing” or “Ding” designated originally a certain type of archaic assembly. [16]Many parliaments in Nordic and Saxon nations still activate the old root of this etymology: Norwegian congressmen assemble in the Storting; Icelandic deputies called the equivalent of ‘thingmen’ gather in theAlthing; [17] Isle of Man seniors used to gather around the Ting; [18] the German landscape is dotted withThingstatten and you can see in many places the circles of stones where the Thing used to stand. [19] Thus, long before designating an object thrown out of the political sphere and standing there objectively and independently, the Ding or Thing has for many centuries meant the issue that brings people together because it divides them.2
For LaTour this division arises precisely because things are mediators, not ‘matters of fact,’ but, as he puts it, ‘matters of concern.’3 Objects are not just neutral presences, but ‘actors endowed with the capacity to translate what they transport, to redefine it, redeploy it, and also betray it.”4
Hopefully by now, my interest is beginning to become clear: That is, I am interested in the way in which things are not reducible to a single experience, but are developed in all of their complexity through their presence as media. Perhaps you have considered, as Seth Price has, the impact of the readymade:
One must return to Fountain, the most notorious and most interesting of the readymades, to see that the gesture does not simply raise epistemological questions about the nature of art, but enacts the dispersion of objects into discourse. The power of the readymade is that no one needs to make the pilgrimage to see Fountain. As with Graham’s magazine pieces, few people saw the original Fountain in 1917. Never exhibited, and lost or destroyed almost immediately, it was actually created through Duchamp’s media manipulations—the Stieglitz photograph (a guarantee, a shortcut to history), the Blind Man magazine article—rather than through the creation-myth of his finger selecting it in the showroom, the status-conferring gesture to which the readymades are often reduced.5
Price notes that is not simply the status-conferring gesture of the artist that produces Fountain, but the whole envelope of media that surrounds it. Fountain does not exist as a single locatable entity bounded by it’s real material presence, but rather an assemblage of photographs, articles, the institutional structures of galleries and museums, and more.
Take, for instance, Brancusi’s Bird in Space, a work which I’m sure you are familiar, and of which I have only had experience of through the internet, though multiple versions of it exist in several media besides this one. You may know the story that accompanies this piece, and that has helped to make it famous. From Time magazine, via Wikipedia:
“Rumanian Sculptor Constantin Brancusi had to pay $4,000 to bring his Bird in Flight into the U. S. … Works of art are duty free. But Sculptor Brancusi’s bird had neither head, feet nor feathers. It was four and a half feet of bronze which swooped up from its base like a slender jet of flame. Customs Inspector Kracke said it was not art; merely “a manufacture of metal … held dutiable at 40% ad valorem.” The press bantered, jibed. Indignant modernists wrote abstruse, defensive paragraphs. Sculptor Brancusi complained to the Customs Court.”Last week Sculptor Brancusi won his case. In its decision the Customs Court dogmatically defined art: “It is a work of art by reason of its symmetrical shape, artistic outlines and beauty of finish.” Even the most wretched of logicians knows enough not to repeat the same term in both subject and definition (“art” —”artistic outline”). But Sculptor Brancusi had his money refunded.”
From a lump of metal, by the alchemy of law, to a work of art. In this instance, the act of the court, with its legal constructions mediates the status of an object. The official documents of the bureaucracy, like the institutional frame of the Steiglitz photograph, confer upon a mere object the status that the finger of the artist alone could not.
Is there not a doubling here, however? Bird in Space represents a symmetrical doubling of mediation; The object speaks though its properties, these in turn are translated by the courts, which present documents verifying a representation of the object. The Judge’s finger is outstretched because of the “symmetrical shape, artistic outlines and beauty of finish.” Adorno, in Aesthetic Theory, argues for the primacy of the art object, “Art’s linguistic quality gives rise to reflection over what speaks in art; this is its veritable subject, not the individual who makes it or the one who receives it.” It is this linguistic quality in art, which I believe the court verdict actually refers to, when attempting to define the artistic qualities of the object.
For Adorno, all artwork is speaking to a “We” and not an “I.” Through this “We,” the unreconciled antagonisms of the culture are preserved, as the subject(s) of the object are unable to reconcile their relationship with the work, the society, and one-another.6 The form and qualities that are present in the object are the manner of this speaking, the media properties, in whose site the dispute was launched over the object itself. The “We”– the doubling of the object into the collective voice– is emblematic of LaTour’s “matters of concern” and locates objects in the network of issues in which they are enmeshed.
Bird in Space received a favorable recognition by the court, but the resistance to the voice of objects is not always resolved so easily. This may be demonstrated by the second interesting story which you may know about Brancusi, and stems from the sculpture Princess X.
When it was first shown its phallic shape scandalized the art world and it was removed from the Salon, despite Brancusi’s protestations that it was an anonymous portrait. Eventually it was revealed that Princess X was Princess Marie Bonaparte, a direct descendant of Napoleon, who was undergoing therapeutic treatment with Freud to achieve orgasm. It was her belief that the distance between the clitoris and vagina was directly related to a woman’s ability to orgasm, and in an attempt to rectify her own difficulties, she had her clitoris surgically removed and reattached.
Brancusi’s work could be seen as a comic acknowledgement of this obsession, but it is also something more. The phallic shaped sculpture represented the threat inherent in acknowledging the sexuality of the other. Princess X succeeds, not through a literal representation of the penis, but by evoking in those who behold the object the idea of sex. The smooth, faceless head, and long thin neck atop a stubby, wing-like bust, are not in themselves inherently sexual, but become in the mind of the viewer by a Gestalt recognition of the sign. The recognition is nevertheless disturbing.
In Freud’s famous essay “The Uncanny,” he relates the story of a young man who unwittingly falls in love with a girl, Olympia, after spying her in a workshop through a spy glass. When he finally sees Olympia up close, it is revealed that she is an automaton. Due to a quarrel amongst her makers, her eyes fall out and he goes mad. The story is interesting not only revolves around blindness, but a blindness to the nature of a thing. Freud, in the article, dismisses the question of blindness to the nature of a thing in favor of a fear of blindness, but I think we should pay closer attention to the question of the thing– the doll Olympia. The mistaking of Olympia is not just a casual mistake, but a mistaking of the other. Olympia is a representation of the young man’s desire, a desire of the female form that he believes to be a true desire, but one that is thwarted when he learns that she is simply a doll. The irony, of course, is that his desire began with nothing but the object of his sight, but ends when it is discovered, not that the object is another subject, but rather that it is the “invisible or blind gaze” of the object.
The anthropomorphisized gaze may be a point of trauma, a point whereby we acknowledge or short-comings as subject, subjects who do not always acknowledge other subjects, or it may be a point where our own subject-hood is called into question. Hito Steyerl, in her article, A Thing Like You and Me (E-Flux #15), argues for the positive effects of this second perspective:
There might still be an internal and inaccessible trauma that constitutes subjectivity. But trauma is also the contemporary opium of the masses—an apparently private property that simultaneously invites and resists foreclosure. And the economy of this trauma constitutes the remnant of the independent subject. But then if we are to acknowledge that subjectivity is no longer a privileged site for emancipation, we might as well just face it and get on with it.7
She goes on to generously conclude that this may mean embracing the position of the object, to become “A thing that feels.” The result of the object– of it’s voice– is to reconsider what effect it has on the “We”. Who are “We”? Steyerl argues that the “We” can be larger than has been considered.
Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely examine the effect that a false closure of the subject can have in We3. We3 is a sci-fi action comic series best described as the Terminator meets Homeward Bound. Three animals are enhanced with advanced technology and developed into cybernetic bio-weapons for the US government. Unfortunately for the military in this bombastic allegory, the possibility of the animals subject-hood was never considered. Treated as mere instruments, these animals, who fall outside of the schema of political representation, express their own desires and instincts, rebelling against the system to which they have been subjected and reeking untold collateral havok for the lack of consideration.
In considering a Dingpolitik, LaTour argues that we are all handicapped in our ability in our ability to recognize political representation, because our machinery of representation, as in depiction, is inadequate to the complexity of the world today.8 In We3, the animals are granted the power of representation through their cybernetic prosthesis. Technology gives these animals a means not only to speak to us, but propel them into our field of representation through sheer power. This problem of denoting a natural order, as our tools of experimentation and representation become more complex and abstracted, poses an issue not only of how we identify potential ethical and political actors, but the degree to which those actors are even recognized. As Vera Buhlmann argues in Pre-Specifics:
The process of de-naturalization we are experiencing in the emerging computer-aided sophistry today concerns the de-naturalization of a concept of nature as the assumed stable order to be testing against by the systematical approximation of the sciences. While the experimental systems which are constraining the experimental culture of modern mindsets, has been largely recognized in their mediality throughout the 20th century, the same de-naturalization on the side of the referential order has not.9
Recently, I read in the paper about the discovery of a new bacterium which eats arsenic, normally considered poisonous to life. The particularly interesting thing about this bacteria, however, is not that it simply eats the arsenic, but that it takes it into itself as a part of its own biological machinery. In doing so, it substitutes arsenic for phosphorous, one of the fundamental ingredients for life as we know it. Scientists say that this discovery basically re-writes what we can consider a living organism, and may give a hint as to what extra-terrestrial organisms could be like. In order to recognize this discovery, however, the scientists had to alter their notion of what it was that defined life. The framework, or architecture, that we have relied upon was inadequate, it became necessary to adjust the tools that we use in order to see what was present. As our vision widens, however, we must be mindful of our relationship to this new “parliament of things”. 10
HP Lovecraft was a pulp horror author from the 1920s who developed an influential fantasy world with such memorable icons as the Necronomicon and Cthulu cult.
His work has been designated as “cosmic horror” because of the philosophical underpinnings of his world view. Lovecraft’s vision imagines vast vistas of experience outside of our everyday understanding; in his world the universe is cold, indifferent, and encounters with its true otherness often lead to a crippling awareness of the limitations of a simple humanism.
In The Colour Out of Space, for instance, a strange meteorite lands in a farmer’s field. It consists of no known physical properties, and is studied with great mystery by scientists from around the area. The meteorite shrinks and disappears due its peculiar properties, but soon after the farmers field breeds an abundant crop of luscious vegetables. Upon consuming the harvest, however, it is discovered that it is bitter and inedible. An affliction falls upon the farm, and the farmers cows begin to sicken and die, and a strange glow appears to emanate from the fields, while the trees sway even when there is no breeze. Eventually the farmer and his family go mad and succumb to the weird effect of the meteorite. The narrator of the tale, an engineer, reveals that soon the land will be damned up and flooded for a water reservoir, perhaps spreading the strange infection across the countryside.
Lovecraft’s monster is no bug-eyed alien, or rattling ghoul, but merely an incident of nature, the effect of an indifferent accident that has horrific consequences for the people subject to the event. It is a reminder, that as we expand our awareness of who speaks, that we must also be mindful of the asymmetries in those relationships. Climate change, pandemics, chemical spills, flooding, etc. These voices in our ecology speak to us loudly, but with indifference. We may become things, and things may speak to us, but, as we design these new orders of representation, it is only we who have the creativity to designate value.
___
NOTES
1 Seth Price, “Dispersion”, http://www.distributedhistory.com/Dispersion2008.pdf (DECEMBER, 2010), 9
2 Bruno Latour, “Realpolitik to Dingpolitik – or How to Make Things Public”, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/96-DINGPOLITIK2.html (December, 2010)
3 Ibid.
4 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard Univesity Press, 1993), 81.
5 Seth Price, “Dispersion”, http://www.distributedhistory.com/Dispersion2008.pdf (DECEMBER, 2010), 12
6 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 163-169
7 Hito Steyerl, “A Thing Like You and Me”, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/134 (December, 2010)
8 Bruno Latour, “Realpolitik to Dingpolitik – or How to Make Things Public”, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/96-DINGPOLITIK2.html (December, 2010)
9 Vera Buhlmann “Pre-Specifics: Considering the design of mediality”, Pre-Specifics Access X, (Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2010), 22
10 Bruno Latour, “Realpolitik to Dingpolitik – or How to Make Things Public”, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/96-DINGPOLITIK2.html (December, 2010)
There is an essential schism that runs through the history of aesthetics that begins with the enlightenment and continues into contemporaneity. Both Adorno and Bourriaud confront this break in their work, but differ considerably in their diagnosis and confrontation of the aporia. Adorno is famously noted for his pessimism, while Bourriaud has often been described as utopian and idealistic in his stance, but both also wish to arrive at a point where some reconciliation may be achieved, and have a vested interest in the project of modernity. My concern in this paper is to read them against each other, to discover if any of the emancipatory claims Bourriaud makes for relational aesthetics offer alternatives to Adorno’s overwhelmingly negative assessment of the situation, and/or if the two approaches can be reconciled to find a third way.
The introduction of the subject, which initiated the enlightenment, produced, like a viral phage, the quandary between the universal and particular that led to the collapse of traditional metaphysics. Bourriaud opens relation aesthetics with a discourse of the situation from the enlightenment, and its repercussions in the modern era. He briefly articulates the rapid political, technological, and educational advancements beginning in the 18th century that were supposed to lead to a freer society, before discussing the downfalls of the very rationalizations that lead to those changes:
Instead of culminating in hoped for emancipation, the advances of technologies and “Reason” made it that much easier to exploit the South of planet earth, blindly replace human labour by machines, and set up more and more sophisticated subjugation techniques, all through a general rationalization of the production process. 1
Adorno pioneered this argument with Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightemment:
Abstraction, the instrument of enlightenment, stands in the same relationship to its objects as fate, whose concept it eradicates: as liquidation. Under the leveling rule of abstraction, which makes everything in nature repeatable, and of industry, for which abstraction prepared the way, the liberated finally themselves become the “herd”, which Hegel identified as the outcome of enlightenment. 2
Adorno furthers this critique, arriving at a dismal diagnosis for the contemporary age. Following the Marxist logic of alienation, he argues that the continued rationalization of society has resulted in a standardized “Culture Industry” which exploits and mechanizes the masses for whom it is intended.
Their characterizations of the situation largely diverge beyond this point. Bourriaud seems to argue that the artwork is a space of relation and participation and that a strategic embrace of the situation will allow us to arrive at a pragmatic reconciliation in the present. Adorno articulates a situation of withdrawal and negative commitment in the face of mass culture, while despairing for the reunion of theory and praxis. That is, Bourriaud is essentially positive about the possibilities of art, while Adorno’s stance is much more pessimistic. To recognize the basis for this difference, a more detailed examination of how we arose at this state of affairs is required.
Bourriaud’s bare bones genealogy misses essential elements of a history that inform Adorno’s more oppressive claims. Juergen Habermas, a student of Adorno’s, supplies us with a more complete articulation of the contemporary situation, outlining an intellectual trajectory that details the problematic inherent in the division between the art world and the world of mass culture. Habermas begins by noting the breakdown of the unified worldview that the Christian/metaphysical enterprise afforded the West prior to the enlightenment. Recalling a concept of Max Weber’s, he identifies three distinct autonomous spheres that arose from the fragmented remains of religion and metaphysics: morality, art, and science. He argues that each of these spheres developed specialists in their particular disciplines, in an attempt to produce an objectively rationalized knowledge. The enlightenment thinkers hoped to develop each field according to its own perimeters, and once their knowledge was perfected, the categories in which they had bound knowledge would be dissolved, and the instruments of their rational exploration would return to praxis, enriching mankind. But, as a result of their increasingly diverging trajectories, these aspects of culture lost their ability to speak not only to one another, but to relate to the larger praxis of the life-world. 3
Bourriaud recognizes the advances of technology and rationalization, but ignores the essential method through which they were carried out, that is, through a program of specialization that further alienates the products of reason from the world for which their emancipatory promises were guaranteed. Under his telling, following a typically Marxist narrative by way of the Situationists, it is capital that is the alienating force behind the ills of contemporary society. 4
Adorno, who is deeply invested in the autonomous art work, is aware of the Faustian bargain that is made in guaranteeing the work’s freedom from the mean-ends rationality that governs the technical application of culture. For him it is precisely the condition of autonomy that allows the work of art its dialectical position in relation to the culture.
While the artwork’s autonomy arises from the same conditions that have lead to the technological domination of nature and the institution of the culture industry, it is the artwork’s resemblance of that process that guarantees its dialogue. “Art’s double character as both autonomous and fait social is incessantly reproduced on the level of autonomy. It is by virtue this relation to the empirical that artworks recuperate, nuetralized, what once was literally and directly experienced in life and what was expulsed by spirit.” 5 It is through withdrawal, not engagement in the world, that the work of art is simultaneously freed of the demands of society, while placing it in opposition to it. However, the historical conditions that give rise to the specialization of the artwork, have, at the same time, removed it from the praxis of everyday life, leaving its promise unfulfilled:
The actual power of aesthetic image-consciousness with respect to the reception of works of art has always been highly questionable. It was bound up with educational privilege and conditions of leisure and in its pure form belonged more to the philosophical concept of art than it did to the social fate of works of art and the social conditions of their production. 6
Bourriaud hopes to return the promise of art by expanding its field of engagement to a new formal sphere, the world of human relationships. “These days, utopia is being lived on a subjective, everyday basis, in the real time of concrete and intentionally fragmentary experiments. The artwork is presented as a social interstice within which these experiments and these new “life possibilities” appear possible.” 7 Bourriaud’s gambit is that works that engage the social as a point of departure will overcome the divide between theory and praxis. He contrasts this approach with that of the conceptualists, whose motive, he claims, was merely to continue the avant-gardists search for the formal boundaries of art. 8
Instead of seeking to use aspects of the life world to produce new artistic experiences, the artistic experience is engaged in finding new ways to live the life-world. Bourriaud argues that the virtue of the art work is its position as this interstice, in a particularly Marxian sense. That is, instead of occupying a place within the capitalist system of commerce, the art work is a privileged space that in some way elides the instrumentalizing forces of the culture industry. 9 Because of this privileged position, the artwork is then an ideal space for experimentation, albeit one that is not determined by the teleological trajectory of utopia. 10 Rather, Bourriaud speaks of a localized and strategic relationship to the present which he characterizes as “micro-utopias.” This viewpoint is again characterized in opposition to prior theoretical positions, in particular the Frankfurt school, who he claims “only fuels art in the form of archaic folklore, a magnificent but ineffectual toy.” 11
Bourriaud’s characterization of the Frankfurt school’s position appears to be a direct jab at Adorno, whose stalwart defense of art appears to advocate a withdrawal into the margins of a culture is unable to confront the truth about itself. Bourriaud himself denies marginalization, but it is unclear how he can advocate the context of the artwork as a site, when the site of the artwork is precisely a space of social and cultural marginalization. He details a number of examples of practitioners of relational artworks, including Gabriel Orozco, Felix Gonzales Torres, Rirkit Tiravanija, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Liam Gillick, and many others. But in this litany of names and examples, the ever present context of the art world hovers nearby.
Claire Bishop addresses and extensively interrogates this problematic, asking who or what the artworks Bourriaud raises are for. That is, if what suffices for a work of relational aesthetics is an experimental framework for social interactions, but the content and context of that interaction is left aside, the political and emancipatory aims that Bourriaud claims for the work are largely illusory. As Bishop points out in regards to a work of Rirkit Tiravanija’s, Untitled (Tommorrow is Another Day), in which he built a reconstruction of his apartment at the Kolnischer Kunstverein, “Tiravanija’s microtopia gives up on the idea of transformation in public culture and reduces its scope to the pleasures of a private group who identify with one another as gallery-goers.” 12 She argues that a social interaction considered in and of itself lacks the social context necessary to aspire to a politic. The question of privilege may be raised in relation to this event, but the work itself is not about the question of who is the audience for this piece, it is about creating the experience. It returns, in the end, “to the hackneyed nonissue of ‘is it art?’” 13
But, the return to the question of art and its boundaries is also a return to the autonomous status of art. As Habermas wrote of the Dadaists and Surrealists, who Bourriaud claims as direct forebearers: 14
These expirements have served served to bring back to life, and illuminate all the more glaringly, exactly those structures of art which they were meant to dissolve. They gave new legitimacy to, as ends in themselves, to the medium as fiction, to the transcendence of the artwork over society, to the concentrated and planned character of artistic production as well as the special cognitive status of judgements of taste. 15
If it is the case, then the strategy that Bourriaud advocates is in reality a return to the autonomous work, but a work engaged in a new formal expansion into the social, then what has changed is the historical condition of the work, a change which Adorno anticipated as he saw the horizon of modernism diminishing, only to be replaced by a new art. In full view of the demands of the enlightenment project, Adorno says that “The concept of art is located in a historically changing constellation of elements, it refuses definition” 16 and that “art must go beyond its own concept in order to remain faithful to that concept.” 17 Could a “relational aesthetic” be one that embodies many of the aims that Adorno sought, but in a different form.
What I am trying to say here is that there may be a continuity between Adorno’s perspective and Bourriaud’s perspective that is not as divorced as it may appear. If Adorno’s conception of autonomy is considered in association with Bourriaud’s stance of engagement, it not only further articulates the relationship between the art space as a space of critical difference necessary for the laboratory of social experiments that Bourriaud proposes, but allows us to consider the aspects of positive engagement that are often overlooked in Adorno’s own theory of withdrawal. Adorno’s withdrawal is not so much a hermetic distance, but a critical one that proposes the art work as place to experience what is missing from the world that is circumscribed by the culture industry. “Art is not only the plenitipotentiary of a better paxis than what to date has dominated, but is equally the critique of praxis as the rule of brutal self-preservation at the heart of the status quo and in its service.” 18 Such statements bring to mind similar evocations by Bourriaud, who argues that the artists he is interested in produce, “relational space-time elements, inter-human experiences trying to rid themselves of the straitjacket of the ideology of mass communications, in a way, of the places where alternative forms of sociability, critical models and moments of constructed conviviality are worked out.” 19 Both maintain a strong commitment to a critical re-evaluation of a damaged culture through the form of the artwork.
To further this comparison, it should be worthwhile to take a look at Adorno’s consideration of the subject’s relationship to the work of art. Bishop critiques Bourriaud on this very point, noting that Bourriaud’s position is not the de-centered subject of post-modernity, but requires a “unified subject as a pre-requisite for community-as-togetherness,” and is therefore unable to be understood within a political framework. 20 If, however, we take recourse to Adorno’s conception of the subject and compare it with Bourriaud’s, we may be able to better grasp the political claims that he argues for.
Adorno considers the subject in light of Hegel, for whom the subject-object relationship transpires within the object itself. For Adorno, the art object is never overcome, but both mediates and is mediated by the subject. It is a relational interaction. Adorno states that “Art’s linguistic quality gives rise to reflection over what speaks in art; this is its vertiable subject, not the individual who makes it or the one who recieves it.” For him, the work does not stand for the artist, or the one who recieves it, but rather for the social relation itself. For Adorno, all artwork is speaking to a “We” and not an “I.” Through this “We,” the unreconciled antagonisms of culture are preserved, as the subject(s) of the object are unable to reconcile their relationship with the work, the society, and one-another. Nevertheless, the subject cannot be abolished, for the truth of the artwork, that is the reality of its antagonism, can only be produced through the critical understanding of the subject. 21
To compare, Bourriaud makes the claim, after Daney, that “all form is a face looking at us.” He explains that this is the work calling for a dialogue with it, one that points both to itself as an object, but also away from itself to its subject. 22 This conception of form is not unlike Adorno’s in that the object is itself the beginning of a dialogue. If Bourriaud’s subject is not the decentered subject of post-modernity, but rather the dialectical subject of Adorno, we can begin to see that subject’s relationship to the object of art.
But what is the object of relational art? To look back at the Tiravanija piece that Bishop critiques, the work is not necessarily the social encounters that happen between the participants, but the objectification of the social encounter as realized within the gallery space. Within the gallery space the encounter becomes reified, and no longer exists as a mere exchange, but as the object of exchange fraught with all of its social tensions. It is important to remember that “all manner of encounter and relational invention thus represent, today, aesthetic objects likely to be looked at as such.” 24 When Bourriaud considers the material of relational art in comparison to the drips of a Jackson Pollock painting, we must ask if it is our reading of the individual drips that are important, or if it is our relationship to the painting that is important. 25 If it is the totality of the social encounters that is important, and our apprehension of their unreconciled difference– between the participants and between the art space and the world in which they occur– then we can begin to understand the critical horizon of the work.
The relational work is not just a question of “is it art?” but an invitation for us to reconsider what is the reality of our social system. When considered in light of Adorno, Bourriaud’s objectification of the social structure proposes it as object whose means, meeting, construction, and communication are ripe for reflection. The micro-utopia maintains that promise of the world as truth, the complex interweaving of a social fabric through its parallels to the productive forces of society, reveals the very relationships and necessary connections that the maintain the movement of the contemporary service economy. It may be true that the hoped for reconciliation of the art and the life-world remains incomplete, but the very contingent and tactical limitations that Bourriaud parenthesizes the ambitions of relational aesthetics should not let us see this as a failure, but rather as a call to do what Adorno calls the most radical of all activities, “think.”
Footnotes
1. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, (France: Les Presse Du Reel, 1998), 12
2. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkeheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Trans. Edmund Jephcott, (New York: Stanford University Press, 2002), 9
3. Habermas, Juergen, Modernity– An Incomplete Project, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: New Press, 2002), 7-9
4. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 16
5. Adorno Theodor, Aesthetic Theory, trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 5
6. Adorno Theodor, “The Culture Industry”, The Culture Industry, ed. J.M. Bernstein, (New York: Routledge, 2001), 646
7. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 45
8. Ibid., 47
9. Ibid., 16
10. Ibid., 13
11. Ibid., 31
12. Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”, October 110, (Fall 2004): 69
13. Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”, 68
14. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 12
15. Habermas, Juergen, Modernity– An Incomplete Project, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster, 10
16. Adorno Theodor, Aesthetic Theory, 2
17. Ibid., 29
18. Ibid., 12
19. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 44
20. Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”, 79
21. Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetic Theory, pg. 163-169
22. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 24-28
23. Ibid., pg. 41
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Adorno, Theodor, “The Culture Industry”, The Culture Industry. Edited by J.M. Bernstein. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkeheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Bishop, Claire, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”, October 110. (Fall 2004): 51-79.
Bourriaud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics. France: Les Presse Du Reel, 1998.
Habermas, Juergen, “Modernity– An Incomplete Project”, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Edited by Hal Foster. New York: New Press, 2002.
In a short story by Philip K Dick an eager young repair man shows up at the door of a baffled entrepreneur attempting to fix an object that doesn’t yet exist. The entrepreneur, realizing the potential of gaining a foothold in a lucrative future industry, coaxes the repair man to reveal this invention which will soon be in nearly every household in the world. It is revealed that the object in question, a Swibble, is a kind of mind control device– invented after the last great war– and that it fixes a person’s ideology so that it remains exactly consistent with every-one’s ideology. Dick, in a footnote, reveals that he was afraid that disaster would not come from some giant horrible monster rampaging down the street, but rather that his toaster or refrigerator would someday quietly announce that it had taken over. This insight reveals not only our increasing dependency upon our appliances to manage our daily lives, but also the effect they have upon the very act of living that life. Could we say that our appliances and furniture have an ideology? If so, what would that be?
In his Utopian novel Walden Two, the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner sketches a view of a harmonious commune where life’s difficulties have been solved through the application of behavioral principles. One notable feature of the novel is the prominent descriptions of the particular appearance of art, architecture, and design that form the world around the inhabitants of this community. Nearly everything is designed for the efficiency of the life-style, down to the very teacups themselves. Skinner’s narrator makes a point of noting that the builder’s of Walden Two were, “interested in interior design, especially in the inexpensive modern furniture which could be mass-produced.” and asks us to “imagine what it would mean to an architect to design an entire community as a whole!” The architectural metaphor reveals the nature of Walden Two. Everything is managed by a series of guidelines laid out by Skinner’s principles. It is not a Utopia in which a single humor rules, but one that operates between the need for variety and regularity. The architecture of the dining rooms varies, in the best sense of Venturi’s post-modern principles between the stylistic modes of class and period, and can be chosen according to the whims and needs of their occupants.
The operational space that Skinner illustrates between the individuals of the community and its realization as an architecture is taken up by Michael Foucault and his concept of heterotopias. Foucault positions the heterotopia as a provisional space in relation to the non-space of the Utopia. For him, the Utopia is a place of potential that operates as a mirror of the heterotopia. The heterotopia is itself as series of relations and transactions between its members, seeking to constantly navigate and define the actual space of living. There is then, no governing ideology, but rather a constant evaluation and strategic shifting between the needs of groups and individuals. In this schema, the government, or the state operates as a regulatory mechanism, it’s position is to exist as a kind of referee. Maurizo Lazzaratto describes this function in terms of illness, contrasting the discipline of pre-modern societies and the security of the modern liberal government:
There is the example of a disease. A disease can be treated in a disciplinary way or according to the logic of security. In the first case (that of leprosy) measures are taken to try and prevent contagion by separating the diseased from the non diseased, confining and isolating the former. In the second case dispositifs of security support new techniques and new knowledges (vaccination) and aim to take into account the whole of the population without discontinuity or ruptures and separations between the diseased and the non diseased. Through statistics (another indispensable knowledge for security devices) a differential cartography of normality can be designed by calculating the risk of contagion for each age group, profession, city, and in every city for each neighbourhood etc. Thus there can even be a table with different curves of normality starting from the location of risks. The technique of security consists in the attempt put a lid on the most unfavourable curves, the ones that deviate the most from the most normal curve.
The principle character in J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World is a doctor famous for his work with leper colonies. He travels to small port on the coast of Africa seeking his former lover and discovers a strange phenomena that is slowly consuming the forests; everything– even living things– within the vicinity of the affected area is slowly being petrified into a luminous strangely colored crystal. The doctor is horrified to learn that the phenomena is also happening in several other areas of the world, and that it appears to be visible in distant galaxies through the Hubble telescope. Time, as it is explained in the book, is stopping, and soon everything will be crystallized in an eternally perfect prismatic world. Nonetheless, he feels a strange attraction to the beauty of the crystal forests, and in the end, decides to submit himself to the crystallization process.
Ballard’s description of time and its disappearance is important, for it seems to be related to Foucaults notion of Utopia. Foucault places Utopia outside of place, but also outside of time; it is a constant potentiality, never arrived at, never achieved. Ballard’s strangely attractive crystal world is one with no life, but also no death. It is a place of perfect, eternal beauty outside of time. Throughout the book, there is the constant description of how the light of the crystal forest effects the world surrounding it. It appears to make all of the shadows deeper, and highlights brighter. Everything is drawn out into contrasts. Utopia may not only be a goal, but also a measure of what the world is not.
If Ballard’s story metaphorically examines the horror of achieving idealized perfection, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space measures the horror of a world outside of rationalization. His tale also begins with a scientific anomaly, the crashing of a meteorite in a remote country farm, and the subsequent effects of its poisonous contamination of the surrounding environment. At night everything glows with a sinister color, and the trees begin to take on a terrible disposition, their bows moving against the wind and their leaves heavy and unnatural. The farmer’s livestock sickens and decays, their bodies withering in inexplicable ways while they are still alive. Eventually the farmer and his family begin to slowly go mad before suffering fates similar to that of the cattle. Upon their deaths the ground remains contaminated. The narrator of the story is an engineer who is surveying the area for a dam which will eventually drown the ground upon which the incident took place. He fears that the water itself will be contaminated, spreading the poison.
Both stories tell the tale of a natural effect that will eventually alter the world, but whereas Ballard’s story focuses upon the consequences of an eternal beauty, Lovecraft is largely concerned with the effects of the forces of decay and depletion. His nature is a ravenous other that is constantly assaulting the edge of man’s understanding. In Lovecraft’s world, it is best if man stick to the basic social concerns that make up the life of men, and not intend to investigate anomalies outside of his sphere of understanding. Nature is an implacable enemy to reason, distorting and destroying the little worlds that man has built for himself. It should be no surprise that Lovecraft’s most positive stories are those that take place in a world of dreams and high fantasy. In this way, Ballard’s tale is the true mirror Lovecraft’s. When the fantasy that Ballard describes becomes real, it is terrifying.
These then, could be considered the two poles between which Foucault’s heterotopia operates– that of an untamed nature ready to devour man, and a cold ideal petrifying him within its ideological rigidity. The science of our society is then to regulate between these excesses. Skinner proposes an architect to navigate these halls– but perhaps Dick is right– and all we need is service man and someone to sell us the product of the future, and we can adjust things accordingly.
