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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.

Despite the multiple interpretations of the twentieth century which Badiou outlines in his first lesson of the book, it is apparent that the last century was most dominantly inscribed by Crimes of barbarism. The problem which Badiou defines relative to this interpretation, is the surreptitious absolution of barbarism abetted by unthinking. This refusal to think atrocities as they were thought, Badiou claims as a major obstacle towards constructing truths about the past century, and moreover towards deciphering culpability and curtailing such atrocities as were witnessed in the 20th century – Nazi extermination of the European Jews as their paragon – as well as those that are currently being witnessed – untended AIDS in Africa for example.

His argument here is that if we relegate barbarisms to the realm of Evils, which we deny as forms of thought or politics, we subscribe to a feeble theology which does not think, and thereby does not take into account that these supposed Evils were indeed thought through, and carefully at that. Badiou goes on to identify the “real problem” of the past century as being located in the linkages between democracies and that which, after the fact, they delineate as their Other, and to which they are therefore capable of committing ‘wholly innocent’ acts of barbarism. The Other, as with the Africa savagely colonized by Europe, is capable of being thought of as material, and it occurred that the 20th century compounded this in that it had its own obsession with the promise of reconstituting man, mainly through various communist and fascist projects, but in every case with a forgetting of the individual experience of such projects.
At the century’s empirical close, Badiou finds irony in that while these projects are buried in favor of conservation, we finally have the technological and financial means to remake and remap man through genetics. The problem Badiou identifies here is with ”the automatism of things”, something like technological determinism, whereby we finally have the means via genetic manipulation and biomedicine to reconstitute man, yet the problem of Science, grand as it is, is that it has no project; genetics is apolitical, “stupid”. Since we live in an era of the second Reconstitution, which hates thought, for its necessary correlate is the real, which threatens Terror, we will allow profit to dictate the decisions of Science in the twenty-first century, leading only to more unthought atrocities, this time unnameable culprits of the same effective continuation of death, unethicality as in the twentieth, however lacking the umbrella of a defined ideological project.
I tend to agree on the one hand that we live in an era in which taking up ideological projects on a grand modernist register is viewed as almost a literal taboo considering the putative epic failures of modernity and Modernism, however I believe that there is a subtending Project to be unearthed in Science, even Scientism, and this is a desire, such as in biogerontology, and in theories of the coming Singularity, to overcome aging, the loss of memory, and most of all our mortal finitude, death. There is a growing faction that takes up a hybrid of Scientific Reducibility and a Schopenhauerian view of the universe, but places technology squarely as the antidote. We have long been aware of the pharmakos aspect of science, and that, as Bernard Stiegler recounts from Greek mythology, we are bound to techne, which is both our cure and poison, and so whether it will be profit, as Badiou claims, blindly driving our “automatic” arrival at decisions with regard to remodeling man, we in every case oughtto beware of uncritical fanatics of science, who, for instance, are wiling to suppress prospects of putative disaster, such as artificial-intelligence overthrowing humans, in light of the exciting prospects of supercomputing power that could either end sickness or mortality, or formulate a computed moral calculus, etcetera.

Counter to common quotidian analyses, Badiou writes the century as being non-ideological in that it was in constant demand of action Now rather than promising a romantic, characteristically 19th c. Ideal-to-come (which we have crucially never shaken off – a highly consequential reality not for analysis here), from Lenin’s 1902 decree to Situationist activity, so I ask in consideration: have we returned in the “rump century” outcome, to Ideology, this time in Zizek’s sense of ‘unknown knowns’? In other words, has the meaning of ideology changed since Marx and after psychoanalysis to now define unregistered and unconscious, as opposed to explicit, political desires?

Returning to Badiou, he goes on to develop through several lessons a far-reaching, complicated thematic problem: that of the century’s divided interpretation of the meaning of dialectics. In lectures, he has elsewhere defined four interpretations of Aristotle’s laws of negation and I hope to better understand the differing schemata. But while his account here culminates in a stunning overview of the Chinese cultural revolutions of 1965-76, in which dialectics could either stand for radical division expressed as suppression through war, or alternatively as radical synthesis signifying a desire for peace and unity, the action towards which this dilemma is centrally directed are the great wars of the century. We must also note a complex corollary relationship to nihilism in the context of which morality is merely genealogical and we are beyond it. In this context, Badiou introduces the notion that the century announced its law as that of the Two: antagonism. However, this figure of the Two was arguably animated by the desire for the One, nameable as the victorious and therefore the real. In that the century had a passion for the real, which Badiou seems to celebrate reminiscently in its political implications as much as he decries its concomitant atrocities, this antagonism occurred under the paradigm of war, and it was thought by its actors that the wars taking place on its stage were final in their resulting victors, after many centuries in which war promised finality only to be defined by failure.

An expression of this diagnosis was that the first world war was so bloody that in interwar France it was said to have been the end of the end, however it seems in my attempt to grasp Badiou here, that it was simultaneously considered an unjust war in need of closure vis a vis a just and essentially more total war, but here we come across the problematically false belief in the dialectical nature of war. The problem of the justification of war under the logic of its creative potential (such as the Nazi vision of the Thousand Year Reich, or Mao’s dream of permanent class eradication, hence peace) whether by split or fusion, is that, since we, beyond good and evil, could find no basis for meaning, we thought in the century that we must turn to our own fates as actors in historical destiny. A lethal byproduct was the belief in the dialectical resolution of unjust war via just war, which is problematic in that war is un-dialectical in the Hegelian sense, and further does not promise that the newly created order will be better than the old one.

I’ll let my understanding settle here and approach some of the other readings before returning to the twentieth century’s megalithic motors of change, particularly after seeking more clarity on Badiou’s concepts of structure, negation, and the real.

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

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

Rotterdam, 18th of February 2010

Facebook excommunicates WORM because of the Web2.0 Suicide Machine

It is with great sorrow that we announce that Facebook Inc. has decided that WORM, the producer of the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, will be excommunicated from Facebook.

The initiative to build the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine came from Moddr_, WORM’s media lab. By threatening WORM, Facebook is trying to take down the Suicide Machine.

The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine allows users of – among others – Facebook to commit ‘social network suicide’. Facebook threatens WORM with further legal action if WORM doesn’t stop targeting the FaceBook platform via the SuicideMachine. In addition, it has now also demanded that WORM immediately deletes its own Facebook profile (WORM_Rotterdam). According to Facebook and its lawyer, the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine has violated Facebook’s Terms of Service and with that WORM has forfeited it’s right to keep using the platform. WORM does not want to engage in a fight over this matter with Facebook. The idea behind the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine was to be able to ‘unfriend’ in an automated fashion and to make users of social networks aware that they should always be in control of their own data. Facebook won’t allow for this control and is also not willing to enter into this debate. We are pretty much done with that and are left with no other choice than to commit online suicide ourselves. The conditions and attitude of Facebook leave no other option as far as WORM is concerned.

WORM deeply regrets the current situation. The web 2.0 Suicide Machine was never intended to target Facebook as such, but meant as a tool for people who, for whatever reason, are tired of their online life. Facebook wants all access to their service, personal data of their users included, to run via their own ‘connect’ platform. In this way, Facebook can set, interpret and change its own rules as it sees fit…

The excommunication of WORM illustrates that data freedom and net neutrality of users is merely an illusion on many social network sites. Not only is it not allowed for people to unfriend (in an automated manner), but companies also have the power to expel users they do not like. Facebook shows that a user only has the rights that Facebook grants it.

Facebook claims all rights. WORM does not want to continue living in this 2.0 world. Which is why we say goodbye to all our friends. We wish you all the best.

No flowers, no speeches.

moddr_labs,
WORM, Rotterdam
worm.org
moddr.net
www.suicidemachine.org

In 1968, German artist Charlotte Posenske, having become increasingly indifferent about whether her work was identified as art, stopped working as an artist.  Distressed by her belief that art couldn’t have sufficient political impact on social inequalities, she gave up art making to become a sociologist.  She refused to exhibit her work, or visit exhibitions by other artists, until her death in 1985.¹²

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The Austrian art group Gelitin are similarly indifferent about whether their work is identified as art, but the philosophy from which that indifference stems is opposite from Posenske’s: they relish the idea the art doesn’t have to do anything, and believe that expressly political art goes against the uselessness that should characterize it.  As with many artists and art lovers, art is understood doubly here as a free zone for experimentation, and an anarchic counter to capitalism’s expectations of efficiency and function.  Of course, this stance is inherently political in its own way, as art is still operating within capitalism, but you are asked to elide that fact and focus on the direct experience.

Gelitin’s 2007 piece The Dig Cunt was a “durational work as a celebration of the millennium of the female and the anti-phallus”. Beginning every morning for seven days they ritualistically dug a hole on the beach at Coney Island; each evening the hole was filled in. ³

Gelitin has a durational blindfolded sculpture piece going on at Greene Nafatli.  Here’s the press release: http://www.greenenaftaligallery.com/exhibition.php?id=3585&jumpTo=pressRelease

1. http://www.betweenbridges.net/Posenenske.html
2. http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/charlotte_posenenske/
3. http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2007/performance/gelitin.html