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“Goodbye, cruel world!”

This expression, exclamation, and – usually – resolution, although probably a bit too pithy to be the most common of last words de facto, is the quintessential catchphrase imagined to be uttered, written, or thought by a person whose next action is to commit suicide. Buggs Bunny said it, Pink Floyd sung it, and although by official accounts the last words of Hart Crane, that great poet of failure, were “Goodbye, everybody!”, before he hurdled himself over the banister of the steamship SS Oriza, it is tempting to imagine a second, internal utterance that he might have made to himself before plunging into the Atlantic; “Goodbye, cruel world!”, a drunken vulgarity, sealed with a kiss. It is of absolute relevance that the expression is used in vernacular from time to time before taking a strong drink of liquor. A kind of, “see you later”, and then an escape, ‘down the hatch’ if you will. Which brings us to the question of what, in the precise context we are speaking, suicide is. Self-annihilation, that much is certain, but also an annihilation of the world in question; a spurning, a turning away. It is an appropriate coincidence that in literature, to apostrophize – to address and object or abstraction (often an absent one) with the implication of human qualities, such as understanding – has the Greek origin apostrophe, literally “turning away”.

With modern eyes and heaps of historical evidence, we most commonly understand the figure of speech “Goodbye, cruel world,” and its other approximate formulations, as a signifier for the suicidal, often tragic, and distinctly poetic gesture. Balzac once wrote, after all, that “each suicide is a poem sublime in its melancholy.” And isn’t it just so, when we think of Dido casting herself upon Aeneas’ sword upon a pyre after he betrayed their love. And so on throughout history. Now, there are many reasons to which we attribute the phenomenon of suicide in humans (let us leave non-human animals out of the picture for the moment), and we can even speculate that the “Goodbye, cruel world,” sentiment itself did not awaken necessarily in tandem suicide, but in the mind of an early human, on the cusp of death in the howling prehistoric night, who in a moment of introspection felt some tinge of perplexed resentment toward his unpleasant situation and impending death, so that he might welcome what was to follow. We will come back to this lonely neanderthal who did not exactly kill himself, because what we are after here is not departing utterances of woe in general (after all, suicide in Roman legends like those of Lucretia, Cato, or Portia even in their own time connoted a virtuous glory associated with honor or patriotism), nor the notion of life’s intolerability brought on by external matters, but of the directly apostrophic “J’accuse!” toward this mortal coil and its ills, whether or not there is anybody listening, whether there exists an immanent God, or a deus absconditus, or, from a more modern purview, a cold and indifferent universe consisting only of – as Schopenhauer claimed – will and representation.

Kittler’s mastery of Technische Medien, and the history of technology, was most evident in the elegance with which he linked up the sweep of technological history: from the birth of human-harnessed electricity (the sparking amber brought back from Rhodes – the Greek word for amber is “elektron”), to Galvani’s discovery – although he was a vitalist – of the relationship between electricity and animation, or life (the bioelectric dead frog), through to the strange Pynchon-esque world of twentieth century warfare (the V-2 rocket, Kittler’s elegiac account of the tragedy of Turing, ).  Kittler lamented the cognitive gap between technicians and human beings being too human – which I unoriginally consider to be, at heart, the currently unresolvable parallax between techne and episteme – and in his analysis of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, observed that the role of the typewriter in the story as a controlled registration device of the medium of (the symbol of) man, renders us all “subjects of machine-based discourse processing gadgets and instruments.” This is in opposition to McLuhan’s notion of technology as an extension of man.  Kittler’s understanding of the continuum of technological autonomy led him to the grammatological conclusion that “there is no more writing,” since the miniaturisation of texts to the level of sub-micrometer sized chips commanding transistors to express differences between voltaic potentials, escapes the bounds of human perception of time and space.  To put it in other words, and in close relation to his famous aphorism “there is no software,” high-level programming languages and user interfaces obscure what at bottom, and at the most privileged access point concealed from users, are local manipulations of electricity.  Furthermore, the content of written media, for Kittler, is the symbolic, which in his reading of Lacan is based in symbols which can be exchanged for other symbols, and do not, as would be supposed, refer to an extra-symbolic real.  However, the radical distinction of technological media is that they ‘produce data that not longer refer to the symbolic world but rather to the material universe, or in other words, to that which cannot be encoded and fixed in writing in the symbolic network.’ (Sybille Kramer)

Many commentators apply a Foucaultian analysis to Kittler’s stance, whereby the power exists in the chip.  Indeed, media are techniques for reading and writing history, manipulating that which passes in irreversible time.  But this does not go far enough: the power, if it can be called that, is in matter itself, manipulated by thrown humans into integrated circuits and burnt silicon, which merely (which is to say magnificently) activate ontically extant possible functions of reality itself: the autoboot and the reset are base ontological functions, which manifest in genes, time, and culture.  Kittler insists on this in the declaration that after Church-Turing, nature itself can be understood as tantamount to a Universal Turing Machine.  In this ontology, data, regardless of human sensory experience, becomes the smallest unit of communication.  Kittler said at least once in interview, “Silicon is nature calculating itself!”  His mortal end leaves rigorously considered traces that can be applied to futuristic resolutions between technology, nature, and data.

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

“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

I’m not up on the legal or ethical nuances of the now mature debate about copyright/left, piracy, etc, but I think I know two things: I want to see the continuation excellent thought to be written and published and that requires money one way or another; and I think it’s right that my favorite authors, and even the ones I don’t like, get paid so that they can live.  But I also believe that the impulse towards piracy will not go away; the virtually irreversible way the Internet has been designed and then emergently developed, makes piracy, even ultimately ethical piracy, too easy too resist for mortals, perhaps especially when we say “oh, it’s just Foucault, Lacan, Althusser, they’re dead, they won’t mind!”  As it also clear, there are many living (and much less famous than the aforementioned) authors, breathing normal modern people who drive cars and have mortgages, on aaaarg, who, whether they are for or against, are not getting paid where they could (I didn’t say should) be getting paid.  One inchoate suggestion to mitigate comes to mind: the open-source software techie community has been leading the way for many years towards a highly permissive, tip jar model (definitely influenced by communist thought, though they call it common sense)… again, this usually operates under the threshold at which individuals become consumers in a knowledge economy, and points on a parabola, but is something like this model an option for philosophy with a niche audience? Should every writer, tenured or not, make a website with a little donation button; I bet many would be pleasantly surprised if they did.  This is sort of reducible to the argument I hear a lot regarding copyright; make it really easy for us to pay you, to which I’ll add: also pay you whenever we spontaneously feel generous or have some dosh in our pockets to. That’s to a degree the reality we’re working with.

But onto my more theoretical suggestion: I knew from critic Claire Bishop (via Artforum then via Academic Search Premier via Bard College wifi), to read up on Mouffe and Laclau (via aaaarg) who wrote at some length about an agonistic model of democracy.  This is one of the notions on which good relational aesthetics, of which I am a supporter even when I often cringe or get hypercritical about it, seems to be consistently grounded in… Things will probably never be perfect — until we are all uploaded to harddrives and allowed the Vanilla Sky life we all deserve, where we can meet our long lost lovers afresh, again and again, each balmy Jamaican evening or whatever your hetero/homo fantasy, forever, now, never bored, no existential void at the middle of things –  especially in this concatenous, multiplicitous, fragmented present in which we vascillate between advanced civility and brilliance, hopeless endless catastrophic barbarism, and not metaphysically knowing which way up is, what morality is, whether objective reality exists, whether we’re better off than our million year old early hominoid ancestors, whether it’s wrong to eat animals, whether men are all created equally, what historical actors can be legitimately considered in a materalist ontological framework, etcetera, but we can TRY GOD DAMMIT, we can strive (god meant in the secular sense of hetero ego love narratives of course).  We can create microtopias!  Out of recyclable, upcycleable materials.  We can read Bruce Sterling, E.O. Wilson, Stewart Brand, be kind when we can, and start free, ad hoc pedagogical interfaces.  I think the same can be said for the situation with publishing; war is peace in a sense it has been argued if provocatively, so I say let’s keep the agonistic relationship going… there’s more writing out there with more eyeballs getting to it, with more initiatives being orchestrated as a result, than ever before (even if this is partially a function of population increase) and somehow it’s working, agonistically.  There will be casualties!  Frivolous lawsuits against deceased Oklahomans, legitimate lawsuits against brat hipsters who know they’re pushing their luck and milking the radical political associations of p2p spuriously, authors struggling financially who could be struggling less or even well-off, career changes, but there will be more eyes on the prize: truth.  Publishers are going to invent more built-in self-destruct mechanisms, hackers are going to continue cracking DRM.  Non-activists will mostly keep reaping the benefits of using their ex-girlfriends’ Netflix accounts.

The goal is thinking and writing and acting our way out of the catastrophic car-wreck of history, out of technological determinsm (which the self-awarely agonistic model puts a wrench in), and of the fundamentally hostile conditions of the universe (disclosure: I’m a misotheistic agnostic currently, there have been many of us).  Even allowing for singularity and permanent virtual reality vacations, we eventually we need to be getting off this rock in large numbers within the next several hundred years (‘the eventual choice of ours is spaceflight or extinction’ to paraphrase Carl Sagan) and/or, probably both, majorly downsize world population.  Or we give up on the human project and turn to antinatalism, nihilism, a very very very grave form of Lewboski-ism.  I am suggesting the much less drastic but seemingly irrational plan of action that we actually draw out, protract the checkers-like, Tom and Jerry-esque, war over intellectual property, and more provocatively that we occasionally switch sides (we all feel like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man sometimes anyway), batting for the Lessigs, the slashdotters, the Estonian hackers, the spam-kings, and the Mark Taylors and even RIAA on ocassion; it’s a kind of dither that will confuse the hell out of them, and in the process we’ll get to keep our precious content, our precious celebrities and lionized heroes, and not pay that much for it unless we’re hardcore fans, patrons.  We’ll also continue to deal with invasions of privacy, mainstream media and news that panders to what I believe is honestly a mostly imaginary audience of dimwits, stupid ads, and occasional wrongful imprisonment: the secular sacrificing of a life; but you know what, 250,000 people died in Haiti a couple of months ago, and that was the universe’s fault; our ethical perplexedness is not completely unwarranted.

some related images:

Danny Snelson - Endless Nameless

anniversary letter from Richard to Patricia Nixon

Adrain Piper - Everything

Aeolipile - created by Hero of Alexandria, 1st century A.D.

Analytical Engine - unbuilt proto-computer 1829, replica, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace

Yann Arthus-Bertrand - 6 Billion Others Project

Benjamin Edwards

Ben Fry

Daniel Bozhkov - Training in Assertive Hospitality - 2002

cellular automata

Dylan Stone - Lifesize Watercolor - 2005

Christian Phillip Muller - Passe Immediat

Yes to All - Sylvia Fleury - 2007

from Brucennial - on the cover of Bookforum

David von Schlegell (they look like laptops)

Erwin Wurm

Helmut Smits - Unseen Work - 2008

Jan Hoeft - Hallo herr lewitt

Matthew Barney for JCrew

e-toy corporation - Mission Eternity

Jochem Hendricks - Tax

Well, while it may not provide the wealth of information about where we have been, whenever I look at the weathered granite runeforms of Tim Hawkinson’s Bear (2005), I picture it also as a potent testament.  I suppose it is more precise to say that I feel this way about the ruin form of the teddybear, to the idea of a monument to the desire for tenderness that must be at the root of so much human drama, and which to me would fit right beside the ancient Hindu excavations that scatter Hampi, India.

Tim Hawksinon, Bear, 2005

Hampi, India

In view of this, selfportrait will launch a new project, beginning next week, that aims to respond to the often overlooked experiential nuances of the contemporary art exhibition.

Recommended Reading:

The Triangulation of Value – Nav Haq – Afterall 23

Politics of Installation – Boris Groys – e-flux 2

David Carrier on Art Power

Reception History, from U. Toronto

Doug Wada - Untitled (Bags, Winter) - 2008 - oil on linen, from Look Again at Marlborough Chelsea

For at least two decades prior, perhaps since the 1984 interview “Game with Vestiges”, Baudrillard had been declaring that every possible artistic form and function had been exhausted, so that what we were left with was a game of rehashing and recombination.  In 1994, long after his theories on the Simulacra had been appropriated by the American art scene and he had been hailed as a visual arts guru, he published The Transparency of Evil, in which he extended his exhaustion argument to the claim that since art had infiltrated every sphere of existence, the ideals of the avant-garde had been realized, a state of “transaesthetics” had come to be, and by virtue of these conditions, art itself as something separate had disappeared.

This argument was further sharpened and pointed toward those who populated the field of interests called the art world in the essay The Conspiracy of Art (1996), which famously stands as the culmination of Baudrillard’s betrayal (or simply rejection, depending on how one views it) of the art world.  Here, Baudrillard talks of how “art” as a designation is held up by the collusive efforts of those who stand to profit from it, including the most earnest artists.  Though Baudrillard’s radical critique on art largely got him ostracized from the art world, and though he was not able to recognize the richness and variety of new frontiers contemporary art has produced since the early 1990s (perhaps because the old can never really cope with the new, and because of the perceived frivolity of the Now), the weight of his claims — which nearly sink the boat — are still slowly, reluctantly, existentially being integrated into the mainstream understanding of contemporary art.¹

What I wanted to do in view of this is begin an image series in which works of art — conceptual, performance, installation, political, new media, participatory, research oriented — are paired, contrasted, and appraised against similar objects and events that emerge from unadorned reality as what Baudrillard might have called “strange attractors”.  Each week we will invite someone to contribute a new pair.

Tehching Hsieh - Cage Piece (1978-79(

V.S.

Stefania Follini, who was involved in a 1989 experiment on circadian rhythms, and voluntarily isolated herself in an underground room fifty feet down a cave in Carlsbad, New Mexico, away from all outside indications of night and day, for 166 days.

Maurizio Montalbini, the sociologist who initiated the project with Follini, lasted in isolation for 366 days in 1993, thinking it had only been 219.

1. http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/2008_Kellner_Baudrillard%20and%20the%20Art%20Conspiracy.pdf

revanchist: (Date – 1926) one who advocates a policy of revanche, a usually political policy designed to recover lost territory or status

tannoy: Tannoy Ltd is an English manufacturer of loudspeakers and public-address (PA) systems. The company was founded as Tulsemere Manufacturing Company in London in 1926. The name Tannoy is a syllabic abbreviation of tantalum alloy, which was the material used in a type of electrolytic rectifier developed by the company. The brand had been trademarked by 10 March 1932, on which date the Tulsemere Manufacturing Company was formally registered as Guy R. Fountain Limited.

portacabin:

Now and again you come across the word ‘Portakabin’ in a variety of different, but wrong, spellings. And regularly we are asked questions about this. As the only experts on this topic we would like to clarify the origin of the name and how it should be used correctly.  Portakabin is not an ordinary word but, in fact, a trade mark. Donald Shepherd, the founder of the company Portakabin, had the idea of a stand-alone, relocatable building way back in the Forties. He thought of a fitting name for his business – Portakabin, which he registered as a trade mark. Since that day, only buildings produced by Portakabin can be called a Portakabin building.

As a pioneer in the development of relocatable and modular accommodation and as an international market leader in the industry, sometimes people use our company name wrongly. We always work hard to prevent this.

In short – Portakabin is a protected, exclusive trade mark that can only be used to describe the products of the company Portakabin.

Other mispellings we came across:

portacabin, portacabins, portakabins, porta cabins, porta cabin, portocabin, portocabins, portkabin, porta kabin, porto cabins,potakabin, potacabins, port a cabin, port a cabins, potacabin, porta kabins, portokabin, porto cabin²

secateurs: Chiefly Brit a small pair of shears for pruning, having a pair of pivoted handles, sprung so that they are normally open, and usually a single cutting blade that closes against a flat surface

antiphrasis: The use of a word or phrase in a sense contrary to its normal meaning for ironic or humorous effect, as in a mere babe of 40 years.

cater-corner: (Date – 1838) in a diagonal or oblique position

1. Sources include: Artforum, Frieze, e-flux, Afterall, Artlies, October, OEI, Artvehicle, cms.mit.edu, edge.org, The Next Layer, Mute Mag, aaaarg.org, NeMe, IDC
2. http://www.portakabin.co.uk/news/newstwo/

I responded to a thread on Jerry Saltz’s facebook wall about artists who use lecture as form.  The prompt was that Karen Archey had written a neat, focused article for Map Magazine on the subject, tracing pedagogy as practice from Joseph Beuys’ 1965 performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, which uses lecture in a heavily performative manner, through to contemporary artists like Anton Vidokle, and Bruce High Quality Foundation, who use lecture in a far more literally educational manner.

Everyone in the conversation rattled off some more artists whose work connects to this practice: Warhol’s impostors, Eric Duyckaerts, Cory Arcangel’s jokes, Mark Leckey, Walid Raad, Marcel Broodthaers’ Interview With A Cat…

I sometimes wonder, when we draw fun and interesting connections between artists and eras, whether we pollute or saturate discourse, particularly for future generations of people reading art writing.  Is there something distorting about starting a conversation about ‘lecture as form’ and ending with an exhaustive list of every artist who has used interview, public speech, seminar, or participatory conversation, as a strategy in their work?

Maybe Boris Groys can answer that one.

I added Mark Tribe because of Port Huron Project (2006-2008), in which notable protest speeches of the New Left from the Vietnam War era were reenacted in a literal “re-speaking”¹ of history.  Harun Farocki’s 1968/69 film NICHT Ioschbares Feuer is a chasteningly serious agitprop treatise on Napalm B, and the abuses of the distribution of labor that facilitate its production.  The film was closely remade in English and in color by Jill Godsmilow (What Farocki Taught Us, 1998), provoking viewers never exposed to the film, which was originally distributed only in Germany, to reassess the radical potential of documentary film.  I added Critical Art Ensemble because the dissemination of material focusing on under-represented connections between art, technology, and political activism, is their central activity as a collective.

screenshot of NICHT Ioschbares Feuer

Re-enactment of Cesar Chavez’speech at Exposition Park, Los Angeles, May 2, 1971

I also add…

Jacob Riis

Simon Critchley (International Necronautical Society)

Neue Slowenische Kunst

The Yes Men

proto-mu

Liam Gillick

Annika Eriksson

superflex

Peter Greenaway

1. Julia Bryan-Wilson, Artforum, January 2008