In August I will participate/co-facilitate the NYC conference on ‘fleeing as an act of non-passive political resistance’, organized by volunteers of The Public School.  Fleeing, exodus, withdrawal, invisibility (as opposed to confrontation, protest, insurrection); in the scope of our conference, the genealogy of thought begins with Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, and later Paolo Virno, though of course many people contributed to, lived, this topic avant-la-lettre.  Here is one of the prompt excerpts which we will use as a point of departure for the sessions:

The Italian/French legacy of the exodus, even if it no longer allows dreaming of a completely different outside, is not at all to be understood as harmless, individualist, or escapist-esoteric. “There is nothing more active than a flight!” as Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet wrote in the 1970s, and as Virno repeats almost literally in 2001: “Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of exiting.” What this form of innovation-as-exit involves is a dangerous, positive form of defection, a fleeing that enables one to look for a weapon as one goes. Instead of presupposing relationships of domination as an immovable horizon and yet still fighting against them, this flight changes the conditions under which the presupposition occurs. The exodus transforms the context in which a problem has emerged, instead of treating the problem by deciding between given alternatives. As joke and as innovative action, exodus—the nonpassive, nondialectical, nonindividualist form of defection—opens up a side road, uncharted on political maps, “to modify the very ‘grammar’ which determines the selection of all possible choices.”

From Modifying the Grammar. Paolo Virno’s Works on Virtuosity and Exodus
by Gerald Raunig and translated by Aileen Derieg
[First published in Artforum January 2008]

In mid July it occurred to me that the scope of the discussion needed some articulation, so I wrote an admittedly hastily executed remark about the scope of the ‘fleeing’ we were to be discussing:

July 17

…I’ve been thinking about the scope of fleeing in this context of mainly exodus projects, but your comment with the Virno text seems (please correct me if I’m misreading it) to exclude a profound and probably much more practiced form of fleeing, which IS that of the escapist kind. Think of beach bums, ski bums, permanent expats in Phuket or similar, the homeless, of course suicide; these operate on individualist terms – they are individually made decisions, often, in the mind of the doer, apolitical, and not related to the more formalized exodus projects laid out by some of the other writers here. Yet still, as a whole, in a materialist sense of, say, population migrations, they constitute something political and non passive. They are “life techniques”, as my recent professor Wolfgang Schirmacher might put it.One of the reasons I like Kracauer’s boredom essay is that in a way it doesn’t target any political structure (though some are going to tie that to the ubiquity of media), such as Empire for Tiqqun for example, but to the simple fact that the presymbolic world is interested in us whether we are interested in it or not in the very fact that we are here (perhaps foisted here into this life), and always are aware that we are sensing. The world does to us.

Someone took issue with the casualness with which I seemed to lump together, commensurate matter-of-factly, homelessness and suicide with other individualistic forms of turning away, of which there are more than I can think of if we wish to be expansive in our definition.  I agree, there’s no negligible difference there whatsoever, but here was my defense:

July 22

To preface, I want to upgrade our conception of the implications of an act like ‘moving to Berlin to be an artist’, or ‘going to live in Ibitha’, rather than downplay the seriousness of suicide, or imply that homelessness is usually a happily, freely made choice.

Perhaps I was too hasty in lumping them together without articulation in between, and I would be ready to agree that on the face, suicide and homelessness seem to belong to a different strain of ‘fleeing’, if they can be categorized that way at all. But I do not think they are incommensurable with the other escapes I listed; suicide, as an escape from the harsh realities of the Universe, as well a response to the failings of the human project, is well established territory in philosophy, especially in the tradition of antinatalism (stop having children, effectively species suicide), and misotheism, from Durkheim, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Schirmacher, Hume, Appel, Crawford, and others. Suicide in real life is still widely understood as taboo, as accident, as tragedy (which it is), but I would not shy away from implying that everyone, even the mentally unstable, bring to suicide a personal ethics (not in the sense of what ought I to do, but in the posthumanist sense of what can I do?); is suicide also not somehow a fleeing from the world, a turning inward or otherward? The obvious rebuttal, “but then your dead” is too anthropocentric for my tastes.
Homelessness I would be more willing to agree I erred with. But, for example, I was recently told by a medical anthropologist that 3/4 of the homeless people in the US are gay teenagers; their running away from bad homes, abusive or non-present parents must be brought into a comprehensive discussion of fleeing as non-passive resistance, in this case (in the U.S.) a critique of the indoctrinated Christian notions of the family and home. I also think of the West Coast and Northern span railroad culture of homelessness going back to the Depression but possessing its own developed, autonomous, non-state governed ethics; I am reading William Vollmann’s ‘Riding Toward Everywhere’ on the subject and of how the train riding hobos eventually come to view their space as privileged over that of mere ‘citizens’.

I’ll stop there for now since I need to think about this more, but I’ll also add willful ignorance to my list; e.e. cummings once wrote, kisses are a far better fate than wisdom, and every thinking person knows what he meant.

These remarks just touch the surface and I need to spend a lot of time considering them further, but the sessions should be fruitful in this way.  The first will be on August 4, and the primary text will consist of excerpts from Tiqqun’s Introduction To Civil War, recently published by MIT Press for Semitotext(e).

Some visual associations:

Gigi Scaria

Cosmia von Bonin

The following link leads to a short, sweet and humble autobiographical summary of the life-to-date of Douglas Harper (the earnestness of its form, as an aside, made me want to face-palm at Gregory Ulmer’s “mystory” theory).  Harper is the founder of etymonline.org, writer of several books on Pennsylvania’s Civil War history, and a lover of literature.  He would, I gather from his proclaimed love of the romantic and especially Stendhal’s De l’Amour, forgive the sappiness… (“full of sap,” Late O.E. sæpig, from sæp (see sap (n.1)). Figurative sense of “foolishly sentimental” (1660s)) …when I express that his bio taught me more about how to live, love, fail, and read, than a large fraction of the philosophy I’ve labored through in recent memory.

On that note allow me to capriciously interject with one of Beckett’s finest ruminations:

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again.  Fail again. Fail better. (Westward Ho, 1983)

But back to the point.

Coincidentally or not, the other day’s New York Times Travel section featured a cover story on Madeira, the “Pearl of The Atlantic” and a cynosure of gorgeosity, off the coast of Portugal.  The article’s endnote said that the author, Henry Alford, had recently published “How to Live: A Search for Wisdom From Old People” (well thank you Douglas and Henry!)  Where my scholarly research has taken me, entertaining the idea of fate (posed technically as anthropocentric teleology) is considered a heresy or a naivety, but since I live candidly I will remark that a Portugese pearl of my own (the kind of gal who tells me I need to read Jose Saramago’s Gospel According to Jesus Christ if we’re to be together, and I goddamn will) recently taught me some lessons on life and love, and it’s precisely these coincidences that give us that frisson, the goosebumps, which make the temptation of believing in such naivetes unshakable from our being.

Here is the passage on love from Harper’s bio which inspired me to make that remark:

Kant knew that philosophy thrived when it was deemed trivial by priests and bankers and social reformers and prime ministers. If those people had thought philosophy important, they would have sought to control it or repress it or buy it or pervert it. The quest for truth can only occur in the autonomy known by the scorned and neglected. Yeats knew the same thing about poetry when he wrote “Adam’s Curse.” In a modern, commercial society, unless poets and philosophers are deemed dreamers and fools, no human thought will be free.

He is, I admit, a man’s poet, with all the folly and foolish nobility that implies. Lately I’ve been reading the later Yeats: “The Winding Stair and Other Poems.” I see these poems that I’ve known since I was 18 with fresh poignancy and power. I had read then, but never felt till now, his bitterness at leaving youth just when he’d finally mastered its arts. The powers I feel now: to please a young woman’s heart, to lead her to the well of her sensual self and clear the rushes and clarify the water so that she may drink deeply and long — all these attained powers arrive at the same time I begin to find gray hairs and my hip hurts.

http://www.etymonline.com/columns/bio.htm

Depending on sangria intake, I’ll respond to the following passage in more detail when The World Cup final is over (I’m at Lizzaran on Mercer Street), but it piqued my interest as an opportune causeway into a taboo topic that many art secularists (people whose devotion to art operates as sybaritic secular religion) are unwilling to confront.

via The Creativity Crisis – Newsweek – July 10, 2010 – by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman

Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way.

The single slide Power Point presentation version of the article would point to the discrepancy between the Flynn Effect according to which IQ scores increase on average 10% each generation, and the concurrent decrease in CQ scores (not the Roman Coppola movie), since roughly 1990, scores which, in a word, “quantify creativity” (scoff, gasp!), but actually refer to the ability to creatively engage design questions like, “how can I make this already better?”

My concern relating to the article is the putative default mode of assuming art’s dominion over the positive idea of creativity; its linguistic status (divorced from crescere) and ontological connotations.  I feel that the Art Context as a common substance (Agamben) is an unconscious but highly active as glutton (creatophiliac, catastrophiliac, informavoric) that cannot be attributed to any particular arbiters or institutions, yet as a collective hallucination perpetuated by its antique reputation it is in almost every case righteously presumed to possess, by default, the most direct lineage to “creativity” over the galaxy of other disciplines and human behaviors.  And I think that presumption is a vain fallacy.

Nedko Lucas - Emotions Without Masks

Colleen Asper - Portrait of the Artist as President

LEGO Mindstrom mod by some kids

I’m a 23 year old art writer, though presently the process, even resulting text, of writing to me is perfunctory; I will not go so far as to say not necessary or incidental since what can we do but make marks.  But, in the way Zizek somewhat comically describes his method of extensive rambling note-taking followed by severe editing, eliminating writing in the process, I’m on board with that.  My oft heckled at main area of research has been relational aesthetics, and I’m committed to a prolonged investigation of it’s possibilities and implications (I think it deserves more than the short-shrift people give it).  But if I call it merely a jumping off point, it’s because I’m attempting to keep my eye on the future of art, the popular current blogospheric discourse about which seems to me completely blinkered by market concerns.  There’s still a hell of a lot of ideas out there that deserve sincere focus, and which have zilch to do with this market conversation.  And I’m especially interested in the history and future of exhibition making, both in art and non-art contexts, both in recognizable and yet-to-be-recognized forms. Yes, I’m reading Rethinking Curating, What Makes A Great Exhibition, Obrist’s book, Velthius’s book, etcetera.

BUT…

After my first research semester at the European Graduate School (a brilliant, semi-sadistic, experimental pedagogical interface in the Saastal mountains near Visp, Switzerland, where Avital Ronell is considered the most daring American philosopher, DeLanda the guy to clarify things, and Deleuze/Heidegger/Jean-Luc Nancy the entree at every communal meal, and Schopenhauerian suicide conversations happen daily – although it should be clear that Schopenhauer did not endorse suicide if only for the fact that one would be resigning to the hostility of the universe) I tend these days, perhaps predictably, (cliche?) towards more broadly and obliquely related areas that new art should/must confront.  By new art I choose to toggle off the browser tab containing chronology and historical trajectory, but rather refer to an amorphous body of art practices and involved in a fractured but immediately recognizable conversastion. And if I dare to be precociously/prematurely prescriptive I think more artists and ‘art people’ ought to engage to a greater and more coherent extent  this decade’s developments in continental and non-Western theory, salvageable fringe or radical impulses (a term now vague, sclerotic, bupkis), and especially ‘high science’.  I use CERN’s LHC as a synecdoche for that neat stuff which is problematic since it really takes effort to get past pop quantum physics as cargo cult, even for dedicated artist/theorists (and my own technopositivist faiths).   Although Bruce Sterling recently informed me in a seminar that CERN is basically a 50-year old hodgepodge of existent alongside abandoned projects with temporal shear and obsolete apparatuses held together by duct-tape at every turn, the perfect setting for a future fiction novel on media theory, maybe media punk.

Anyway just some thoughts, but here’s a link to an article I wrote on Triple Candie in NYC, which I was pleased and surprised to see they’ve kept in their press archives. http://www.triplecandie.org/About%20Press%20Calais%20antARTica%20112909.html

Some arguably relevant images I’m currently thinking about:

Christiania, Copenhagen - you are now leaving the EU

NSK

Oda Projesi in Galata - after George Perec's useless space?

Renzo Martens - Enjoy Poverty

Albert Figurt - Notre CAM de Paris

Nathalie Bookchin - Mass Ornament - 2009

Michelle Teran's geolocative project

Alex Fuller and Noah Bernsohn - on a mountain top - 2010

<Pardon me I’m only 23>

“And we inherit that, all at once, as if it were reality…” writes Nietzche in 1881 of the primordial poem which humans created, then proceeded to thoroughly forget they wrote. It seems that Joseph Beuys was somewhat late, then, in his simultaneous proclamation and (as Bill Arning points out) imposition that “Jeder mensch ist ein kunstler,” since perception itself was already the art in question. Perception is always a living-with, the partaking in a common but objectless substance, which Giorgio Agamben, with Aristotle in mind, calls friendship. And when Alan Kaprow observed keenly in 1971 that ‘everything is more interesting than art’ (art in the codified tradition of the mark-maker), it becomes clearer through Nietzche what he meant.

Wolfgang Schirmacher’s portrayal of Nietzche seems to suggest that the most artificial quality of life is its anthropomorphic quality. Artificial life (Schirmacher) is here the epic lie (in the most honest sense) motivated by our will to power, manifested by our emotive capacity with which we map moods and values onto the world, and undersigned later with the forged signature of a Christian God. In the very capriciousness of the story humankind has forged, Schirmacher would have it that the artifice is revealed. For Nietzche it seems that artifical life would show its rangy body nakedly to us after the mask of God has fallen. Schirmacher adds to this that it is the post-technological epoch which is truly chipping away at the patina which conceals our status as Homo Generator (one instance he gives is the post-mortem conflation of Lady Di and Mother Theresa calling natality and mortality into question once again). In the trajectory towards an awareness of Homo generator Schirmacher sets forth, there would have been less autonomy than symptomaticty in Daniel Birnbaum’s titling of the 2009 Venice Biennale, ‘Fare Mondi.’

Regarding the anthropocentricity of artifical life, Nietzche ruminates: “Nothing is beautiful, only the human individual is beautiful,” and one is reminded of Henri Bergson’ theory of humor that: only in the social and the human is there comedy, and that when we see it in the inanimate we are solely making the comparison to ourselves.

“In artifical life, only what my life facilitates to be fulfilled can count as real,” writes Schirmacher. I am not yet clear on Schirmacher’s level of commitment to a materialist world view, but for me one of his most piquant critical twists is that ethics are not ‘what one ought to do’ as traditionally formulated, but the question ‘what am I able I do to make a good life for myself.’ How can I not be reminded of late Wittgenstein’s suggestion that we ask not what something means, but what it is for (it makes me smirk to recall that it was Tiravanija who quoted that line, in interview). Without misreading either philosopher too foolishly, I would like to ask how this notion connects to Spinoza’s concept of free will as merely the knowledge that all our thoughts and actions are the only possible products of those conditions which precede them. I believe Spinoza, in Ethics, made reference to the passage of time as the vessel of the future steadily decanting its liquid into the vessel of the past.

I would also like to inquire into Schirmacher’s assertion that the calculable findings of natural science are instrumental, not artificial, while at the same time they serve as reality substitutes, perhaps heuristics? Does not the progress of science, from Leibniz’ calculus to Darwin’s theory of evolution, Feynman’s quantum electrodynamics, appear to reveal strata of reality without knowledge which calls for unpredictable redefinitions of artificiality in general would be less generative? How do we maintain a stable sense of ethics when the next revelation may negate those ethics?

Finally, regarding Schirmacher’s conception of ethics as self-determined: “Does my life achieve fulfillment? This is the only ethic question,” I agree that freedom is a secondary concern, but I wish to understand what the contingency plan is when two people’s personal ethics must compete over the same resources? If, as Schirmacher quotes from Schopenhauer, society profits from the failure of certain individuals, is Schirmacher’s personally-defined ethics a form of avoiding or shelving the humanistic project of a rescuing into the fold of the less fortunate, as difficult as this may seem.

</pardon me I’m only 23>

Peter Bruegel

Maurice Benayoun - Tunnel Under the Atlantic - 1994

Frances Flora Palmer for Currier + Ives - Across the Continent Westward the Course of Empire Makes its Way - 1868

Anne Collier - New Beginning - 2007

Lara Favaretto

William Wegman - Reading Two Books - 1971

James Croak Chandelier Mistaken for God - 2006

Helmut Smits - A Plastic Plant Acting Like a Real One by Losing Its Leaves