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

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]

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.

Yet many times over—too many times for comfort—I saw the same thing, a highly recognizable generic ­institutional style whose manifestations are by now extremely familiar. Neo-Structuralist film with overlapping geometric colors, photographs about photographs, projectors screening loops of grainy black-and-white archival footage, abstraction that’s supposed to be referencing other abstraction—it was all there, all straight out of the seventies, all dead in the ­water. It’s work stuck in a cul-de-sac of aesthetic regress, where everyone is deconstructing the same elements.

While it is hard to not look around and to see exactly this problem (a concern that I wholeheartedly agree with) where so much art looks like so much other art without attempting to confront anything other than its own historical conditions, market conditions, and/or engaged in hermetic naval-gazing, Saltz’s take, while evident, does not attempt a very deep examination of the causes of this condition other than to blame art schools, which was why Schor’s follow-up to this problem was interesting, precisely because it attempts to diagnose what is causing the neo-conservatism of so many young artists.

For her, it is a problem of politics, or a lack of political will; this social condition is, of course, a symptom of contemporary capitalism. She compares current social attitudes towards divorce to the conservatism of todays MFAs:

The conservatism emanating from the opprobrium and shame experienced by these affluent young divorcees is also apparent in the MFA generation of artists who have learned all the rules of the art market, are incredibly professional and well-behaved, and would never dream of questioning the status quo of the art market beyond a certain point of academic correctness. And why would they when most of the contemporary critics who these artists follow inevitably preempt any tentative attempts at critique of the obscenities of market by prescriptively concluding that it is naive to imagine one could avoid it. Resistance, one is told every which way, is not just futile, it’s unrealistic, stupid even.

Whence then, does resistance rise? It is hard, at this point in time, growing up as a part of the generation that, as she says, “was formed during the Reagan Bush era when anything resembling true critiques of authority and power have been methodically ridiculed, demonized, or erased, creating a cohort that is surprisingly obedient and conformist, when not imbued with a sense of hopelessness.” It is also true that it is difficult to see the value of the traditional forms of resistance (Marxism, unionization), while you watch the collapsing welfare state crumble before your eyes. After the ascent of globalized capital, the question of whether or not there is an outside anymore appears to be relatively settled, and as such, we must engage the conditions as they exist, not how we wish them to be.

Schor advocates pacifism itself as meaningful form of resistance, in opposition to the Oedipal struggles of war proposed by the modernists whose utopic/dystopic forms still continue to shed their last vestiges of life into ossified remains that we call contemporary art. To speak to her approach, she writes in another article:

As I scan some pages from Mark Kurlansky’s Non-Violence: The History of A Dangerous Idea, so dangerous there is no proactive word for it, only a word defined by the primacy of its opposite, violence, I listen to the music that Dr. King listened to on the car radio as he drove alone to Montgomery, Alabama for his first job interview: Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor: Regnava del silencio,” which, he later wrote, transformed the monotous drive into a radiant experience. On one of the pages I scan for my students, Gandhi is quoted as writing: “Given a just cause, capacity for endless suffering, and avoidance of violence, victory is certain.” “Capacity for endless suffering” is key in my thoughts here, not to focus on the meditative as it sometimes appears in contemporary culture, as a panacea, but on the power of grief when it is expressed as does Mahalia Jackson, heard in this program singing at King’s funeral, “Precious Lord, take my hand,” his favorite song, which he had once requested be sung at his funeral. Every word, every syllable, every sound has meaning, deep meaning. Here is voice, both literal and metaphorical. It was listening to such voices and such “voice” when I grew up that made me believe in the power of art, in the power of language (for the good not only the bad or the stupid), in criticism too and even outrage, but never cynicism.

Not having yet read her recent book of essays, A Decade of Negative Thinking, I don’t wish to over-characterize her approach, but the title alone should clue one into the idea that she is arriving from the perspective of negative dialectic advocated by Adorno and the Frankfurt school, a form of critical Marxism whose learned helplessness to the totalizing force of capital is taught in art schools all across the country. Now, while I do have great respect for these thinkers and their analysis of the conditions of capital, the program that they advocate, of a merely oppositional criticality, akin to that described by Schor in her terms of passive resistance , is a recipe for inaction that pragmatically boils down to what she calls “[not] questioning the status quo of the art market beyond a certain point of academic correctness.” Her desire for the “Capacity towards endless suffering” resonates strongly with what Nick Land describes as “Transcendental Miserablism”:

For the Transcendental Miserablist, ‘Capitalism’ is the suffering of desire turned to ruin, the name for everything that might be wasted in time, an intolerable tantalization whose ultimate nature is unmasked by the Gnostic visionary as loss, decrepitude and death, and in truth, it is not unreasonable that capitalism should become the object of this resentful denigration. Without attachment to anything beyond its own abysmal exuberance, capitalism identifies itself with desire to a degree that cannot imaginably be exceeded, shamelessly soliciting any impulse that might contribute to an increment of economizable drive to its continuously multiplying productive initiatives. Whatever you want, capitalism is the most reliable way to get it, and by absorbing every source of social dynamism, capitalism makes growth, change and even time itself into integral components of its endlessly gathering tide. 1

I, personally, am sick of anxious hand wringing over the invasion of capital into art. It was always the case, only now, art as a commodity par excellence is unmasked. The market is now synonymous with nature for my generation, and to my mind it is not capital that is producing the conditions of anemic art, but rather the dogged insistence upon the negative theology of critique that is restraining the true productive capacity ready to be unleashed. If we must always hold the line for the deferred hope of a Marxist utopia, whose strategy has long since played out, then we are dis-enganging ourselves from the tactical advantages offered by embracing the productive forces of capital. As Land argues, “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.” 2

Thoroughly tactical incursions into capitalism, through the market, may be the best hope we have for any kind of real productive change now. Schor is afraid of this generations “Darwinian positivism”, but active change and not being afraid of the possible destructive capacities inherent in capital, rather than a continual reiteration of a negativity that dare not move for fear of incriminating itself, may signal a new politics of engagement. We have tried peace, and seen it box us into an ever more recursive and humiliating hermeticism. Let us now try war.

1 Land, Nick, “Critique of Transcendental Miserablism”, Fanged Noumena
2 Land, Nick, “Meltdown”, Fanged Noumena

- 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.

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.

Hector Arce-Espasas , Darcy Brennan Poor, Fabio Corredor, Karen Dana, David Finegan, Dawn Frasch, Erica Greenwald, Joshua Johnson, Jaeeun Lee, Ryan McNamara, Nicholas Moenich, Matthew Newton, Steve Rivera, Elisa Soliven, Sharone Vendriger

http://huntermfathesis.org/

Map/Directions

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)

The Frankfurt Kitchen, designed by Margaret (Grete) Schutte-Lihotzky, and the centerpiece of the Counter Space exhibition at MoMA presents an early example of the modernist design paradigm. Interviews with housewives, applied research, and careful attention into the organization of space, along with the materials of industrial production and modular components, gave Schutte-Lihotzky the tools to re-imagine the kitchen as a one-person laboratory. Clean, efficient, and highly functional, the Frankfurt Kitchen appears to be the paragon of rationality, its military crispness evident even in the array of metal storage bins flanking one counter. In this space everything has a place and a use.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, this instrumental logic is mocked by Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, in which she picks up numerous kitchen implements such as a grater or a rolling pin, names them, and then demonstrates their use with a violent gestural force. Traditionally interpreted as a video of womens’ frustration, here Rosler’s video reads like an argument against the authority of design. That is, the design of tools directs our use of them, and that this direction is itself a sort of violence upon the user, who now must submit to the rational organization of the design.

Something is going on with Counter Space; functional architecture is historicized, abuts artworks, and is displayed against an array of beautiful products. Meaning passes from form, function, and history all to be reconfigured again at the next object. There is an odd mixture that blends together to provide a more comprehensive look at the contemporary situation than most exhibitions.

The curators Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor have divided the show into three components, which they mix and match throughout the exhibition space. The New Kitchen, of which aforementioned Frankfurt Kitchen is a part, details the innovations and challenges facing designers post World War I. Visions of Plenty focuses on the array of choice and the aesthetics of designer objects that invaded the kitchen after the rise of American style capitalism. Finally, Kitchen Sink Dramas deals with the social and cultural battles for meaning that arose from the configuration of the modern kitchen and its reinvention of the human.

These three perspectives — roughly focused on history, capital, and culture, respectively — bleed into each other, revealing that the divisions we traditionally erect between different modes of analysis are themselves faulty, and that the objects within our lives often inhabit multiple worlds. Counter Space consistently uses the lens of its theme to continuously explore outward from the personal and mundane to the social and extraordinary.

The exhibition space itself consists of one large room divided by a huge vitrine. At first glance the space feels unfortunately cramped, with its salon style hanging and all-over effect, but then one makes the association with the Natural History Museum’s wall of specimens, and the exhibition becomes a curio of artifacts.Given the strange archeology of the objects presented, it seems almost necessary to intersperse Counter Space with texts. These are often helpful for identifying historical context, and placing the many objects within a timeline, which is wonderful, as the viewer begins to form their own taxonomies.

The vitrine in the center of the space houses any manner of kitchen implements and objects from early modernist design and contemporaneity, and as humble as the common paper bag or as beautiful as Kenneth Brozen’s funky space-age serving bowls. Created in 1960’s, Brozen’s work is clearly situated at the aesthetic end of a design ethos, and is a far contrast to the multi-functional and efficient, but not-unbeautiful Universal Pressure Cooker debuted in the 1939 World’s Fair by Landers, Frary, and Clark.

Baudrillard, in the The System of Objects, examines the application of design in modern consumer products, particularly the automobile :

There was a long period during which American cars were adorned by immense tail fins [...] Tail fins were a sign not a real speed speed but of sublime, measureless speed. They suggested a miraculous automatism, a sort of grace. It was the presence of these fins that in our imagination propelled the car, which, thanks to them, seemed to fly along of its own accord, after the fashion of a higher organism.1

What is fascinating about the application of design in both objects is that they share an ideological teleos towards the utopian promises of technological innovation, but the pressure cooker expresses this through a practical application towards functionality, whereas the serving bowl makes its point through the symbolic expression of its form and surface qualities. As Baudrillard points out in regards to tail fins, it is not actual function that is delivered, but the promise offered by the sign that produces its aura.

Tom Wesselmann’s Still Life #30, a relief/collage, presents all the signs of abundance with its pop depiction of a modern kitchen space filled with food and the latest conveniences. This work is in striking contrast with a 1942 British war poster with a table, bearing a single dish, whose legs are a pitchfork and shovel that become a fork and knife as they pass above the tabletop. It implores the citizenry, who faced food shortages due to the routing of supplies by German U-boats to “Grow your own food”. The message of resourcefulness and economy is one that we would do well to heed today, as the impact of our consumption becomes more and more apparent in our ecology.

A pair of William Eggleston photos from 1972, Memphis and Untitled, of a view into an empty oven and a crammed freezer drawer with all of its pre-prepared foodstuff, reads as an elegiac representation America’s conflicted relationship with its own consumption. Compared with Wesselmann’s cheerfully satiric cornucopia, Eggleston’s pictures reveal the products of our success strangely out of joint; in our grasp but irredeemably remote and alien. As Bruno Latour argues in We Have Never Been Modern, the price extracted for our success is the creation of the third world, with its poverty and exploitation– vital to our way of life, but frozen outside of our techno-utopia.2

Created the same year as Eggleston’s photograph, Spazio Vivo’s compact (Living Space) Mobile kitchen unit presents the mobility and flexibility granted to those who are fortunate enough to live in the first world. This small unit, which folds into a cube, can be rearranged to reveal a surprising amount of functionality and storage space. The emphasis on choice and mobility in the work proposes a newly adaptable lifestyle that is centered around the individual rather than the family unit.

Vivo’s unit presents a liberatory ethic that Vito Acconci, in a lecture at Hunter College, discussed. For him architecture would respond to the actions of whomever was in the space. For example, if you reclined against a wall, the wall would form into a chair for you to sit. Rather than the old architectural of control, in which the architect determined the perspective of the subject, the subject would be in command of their surroundings and capable of configuring it to fit their needs and desires.

The freedom of the kitchen, or freedom from the kitchen, was, of course a major struggle for women, who had historically been relegated to the role of the homemaker. Much design, such as the Frankfurt Kitchen was focused on making the woman’s life easier and more efficient. A Step Saving Kitchen, a 1949 educational video by the US Department of Agriculture, begins by addressing the advantages of modern kitchen to couple, “These plans were developed for people just like you…” and while the man asks the questions, the video only depicts women working in the kitchen, and the presenter repeatedly refers to “housewives” and women as those who will be using the space. The unspoken implication is that it is the man’s responsibility to supply the best space for his wife, and it is the wife’s duty to use that space to serve her family.

Mako Idemitsu explores this historically assumed role, and technologies ability to assuage its inherent limitations. Hideo, It’s Me, MAMA, was based around the intersection of two phenomena in 80s in Japan: a push by marketers in Japan to sell newly introduced video players, and at the same time, a growing social problem with bored housewives, who would have nervous break downs before they could stand to let their growing children leave home. Idemitsu’s film presents a darkly comedic solution to the problem; a housewife places a video cassette of her son eating breakfast into the VCR and begins to place food in front of the television. As the video version of her son eats, she begins to talk to him and ask him questions in a loving voice, but of course, the video cannot respond, since it is only a recording. Technology, while marvelous, cannot makeup for the deficit of a way of life that is inherently unfulfilling.

Today, as we find ourselves surrounded by the wonders of technology, and access to constant, efficient productivity is increasingly inescapable, perhaps it is time to ask what sort of space have we designed for ourselves? The kitchen, and its implements defined the role of those women who inhabited it, and they had to free themselves from its grasp. For Martha Rosler, liberation was possible through the subtle misapplication of the tools provided, a detournement as the Situationists would say. Counter Space offers a valuable picture of how we are capable of defining and revolutionizing the space around us.

Notes

1. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (New York: Verso, 1996), 59.
2. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 9.