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.

Vilem Flusser’s concept of bidirectional, dialogic media, seems to be yet one more testimony to the swelling desire, rooted rhizomatically across many miles of artistic thought, towards the possibility of enhanced intersubjective political subjects, in the same vain as all of Bourriaud’s precedents laid out in his own work.

The question arises, all these strands laid side by side, whether a new art, or an art that would of course weave strategies new and old, can possibly enhance said relationships in earnest and outside what Flusser would call the wooly blanket of familiar scenes. Can this intersubjectivity, a relational heightenedness ready to take on the challenges of a daunting new set of decades before us, exist and thrive in the un-familiar, alienated spaces of future conflicts? – 6.12.11

Aesthetics in Protests

Wed., Mar. 23rd, 6:30-8pm

The New School
Lang Auditorium
55 E 13th st.
2nd floor

PANELISTS:

Mark Herbst, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest
member from W.A.G.E.
Beka Economopoulos from Not An Alternative
Chris Mansour, Platypus

DESCRIPTION:

This panel will focus on the aesthetic tropes that activists use to express political dissent. Theatrical gestures such as street art (e.g., glamdalism), dance parties (e.g., Funk the War), or costumes have found their way into protest tactics. Simultaneously, many contemporary artists create ‘activist’ or ‘social’ art by pulling off media pranks against the government or corporations (e.g., Yes Men), reenact past protests (e.g., Mark Tribe or Sharon Hayes) and other forms of public performances. What are the historical roots that contribute to the use of current aesthetic interventions in political protests? In what ways do they expand or limit the possibilities for protests to transform the social order? How does experimenting with aesthetic and artistic sensibilities influence our political consciousness and practice? Political thinkers and art-activists will address these questions in order to make sense of the various forms of protest today.

QUESTIONS:

1) Contemporary “political” artistic practice aims to raise political consciousness for progressive or left politics. How does — and how can — the use of aesthetic, theatrical and narrative elements heighten political possibilities and consciousness?

2) Over the last fifteen years, the ‘star’ of theatrical protest tactics has risen high in both leftist politics and the contemporary art world.  Bored with the staid march-and-rally routine, activists seek to diversify the form of protest politics: Funk the War, Bash Back, Billionaires for Bush, Claire Fontaine, etc. Such tactics aim to allow the “message” of progressive politics to reach a broader audienceand counter the ‘right wing noise machine.’  Despite this increase in creative ingenuity, the social situation has worsened over the past half a century, and one might even see this creativity as a symptom of worsening conditions (e.g., the deflation of the anti-war protests–which began as some of the largest protests in 20th century history). Given the Left’s greater inability to change reality and gain popular support, how is the creative aesthetic approach towards activism bound up in this failure? What must be rethought in light of these dimming prospects?

3) “How might you articulate the difference between ‘aestheticizing politics’ and ‘politicizing aesthetics’?  How might the difference matter for the understanding of contemporary politico-aesthetic practice.”

4) What role ought considerations of value and aesthetics play in our evaluation of politically minded contemporary art?

___

If you need additional information, or have any questions, please contact Chris Mansour at chris.d.mansour@gmail.com

The Platypus Affiliated Society organizes reading groups, public fora, research, and journalism focused on problems and tasks inherited from the “Old” (1920s-30s), “New” (1960s-70s) and post-political (1980s-90s) Left, for the possibilities of emancipatory politics today.

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

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

http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/

What: Site a specific film performance
When: Sunday 1.24.10
Where: 16Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: 8:00 pm
Who: Free and open to all
This sunday will be the third in a four-part series investigating the role of abstract and affective processes in a contemporary revolutionary politics, featuring performance and experimental film and video. The evening, as did our last two events, mixes lecture elements with screenings in order to recontextualize select works from the experimental film and video canon, and set them to work for an idiosyncratic, political activism.

Continuing our investigation of linkages between politics and abstraction, tonight will examine the critical category of narcissism.

Using Harari’s text on the late Lacan, and Krauss’ seminal essay from the first October on Video – The Aesthetics of Narcissism as touchstones, this sunday we will investigate the complex interaction between “narcissism” and the political. In previous evenings abstraction has been considered according to Bataille’s categories of the informe (formlessness) and the sacred, and Agamben’s analysis of The Open, with the political necessity of keeping open the spaces exemplified (and intensified) by the abstract Image as a primary theme. Here narcissism (the mirror) figures as a kind of short-circuit, which tonight’s performance-based videos evocatively display. Performance/improvisation – as a strategy of conceptual liberation, as a tool for creating radical intuitive (abstract) spaces, versus a kind of “mimetic narcissism” – as a product of radical devolution. The work of surrealist Jacques Vache (and the fourth dimension of (h)umour) and Duchampian irony will be utilized. Krauss’ essay will be considered but creatively reconfigured in order to take video performance out of its historicized context and set it to work for political activity.

Works to be included tonight (Jonas’s hypnotic meditation on self-reflexivity and alter-ego Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy, Trecartin’s synaptic, digitally manipulated psychedelia What’s the Love Making Babies For?, Charles M. Jones’ classic short Duck Amuck, and Joe Gibbons’ acerbic take on emergence Sabotaging Spring, among others) will be employed to develop the theme.

In order to refigure video performance strategies to their purely abstract/structural dimension, performance works tonight will be interposed with the work of
Japanese filmmaker Takashi Ito.

___________________________________________________
2. Films to be screened

Joan Jonas Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy 15 min.
Takashi Ito Venus 8 min.
Chris Burden Big Wrench 16 min.
Takashi Ito Box 4 min.
Leslie Thornton She Had He So He Do He To Her 5 min.
Takashi Ito Ghost 6 min.
Ryan Trecartin What’s the Love Making Babies For? 20 min.
Charles M. Jones Duck Amuck 7 min.
Takashi Ito Drill 5 min.
Tony Oursler Selected Early Work [excerpt] 10 min.
Takashi Ito Spacy 10 min.
Joe Gibbons Sabotaging Spring 15 min.

(Note: that is actually technically untrue if we count Matthieu Laurette’s holding up of a sign reading ‘Ranciere Is So Cool’ in the crowd at The Today Show, last month)

Coming from America, where the idea of radical provocateur for many ends at Michael Moore, I found The Coming Insurrection to be truly startling.  The prose is more angry, alienated, and calls for more direct action than anything published mainstream recently in the US, to my knowledge (except maybe Joel Kovel’s recent books).  The language and tone share much with the tradition of what has been called “the violent left”, in the tradition of late Marxism, to Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, the terroristic implications of the Situationists, the key texts of 1968, to the writings of the RAF.  For The Invisible Committee, society is but “a vague aggregate of social millieus … there is no longer any language for common experience”  For them, “the present offers no way out.”

What is potentially “dangerous”, about The Coming Insurrection is the following: its authors are “predominantly graduate students from middle-class backgrounds, from 22 to 34 years old” (this range actually refers to The Tarnac Nine, a group of political activists led by Julien Coupat, the book’s alleged co-author).  Coupat went to the prestigious egare de l’ESSEC business school, and later wrote a dissertation on Guy Debord.  The potential danger, in my mind, comes in that much of today’s Western youth grew up in an atmosphere of intellectual relativism, of acknowledged relative value systems, and that this relativism is actually beginning to backfire in the form of a fetishization of radicalism.  This youth, seduced by terrorism as what Dieter Roelstraete calls a historical genre, is educated and deeply empathetic, but they carry one major naivete: they have only seen war on television.  They never saw the surreal wasteland that was Europe after World War II, or witnessed the dekulakization of Stalinist USSR.  They have, however, seen Godard’s La Chinoise. They find the Baader-Meinhoff and Action Directe, among other things, adventurous. This is something that separates them from the more experienced thinkers of a generation prior.  Radicalism, for a globally networked portion of today’s youth, is cargo cult.  That, if anything, is what makes this book potentially dangerous.

Don’t get me started on twenty-something activist artists from Brooklyn.  Bunch of puppy dogs.

I have read critiques that the philosophical logic behind The Coming Insurrection is B-grade.  I can’t speak to that, but I do see in it a central act of legerdemain committed: that is to lead readers to believe that the radical left is everywhere, on every street, akin to the repressed members of Palahniuk’s Fight Club (Palahniuk also frequently takes cues from a Marxist tradition of social satire).  The Invisible Committee writes that the European riots of 2005 occurred not just in the banlieues by an alienated, primarily North African male youth, but all over:

The flames of November 2005 still flicker in everyone’s minds. Those first joyous fires were the baptism of a decade full of promise. The media fable of “banlieue vs. the Republic” may work, but what it gains in effectiveness it loses in truth. Fires were lit in the city centers, but this news was methodically suppressed. Whole streets in Barcelona burned in solidarity, but no one knew about it apart from the people living there. And it’s not even true that the country has stopped burning.

This book has other flaws that, in my little experience, I can see.  For one thing, it all but ignores major techno-economic paradigm shifts, like the open source, gift economy that pervades the web  (There is a fantastic newsletter on the very topic of digital labor and the “erotics of playbor”, over at the iDC, and another at thenextlayer.org).

Second, they have this peculiarly French way of honing in on singular artifacts of a wildly complex society and hinging their entire indictment around that… for the Situationists it was the dishwasher, for The Invisible Committee it’s anti-depressants.

I’ll stop there because I’m experiencing a wave of self-doubt.  Anybody up for ping-pong?

“In Denmark, it’s legal to make copies of commercial videos for backup or other private purposes. It’s also illegal to break the DRM that restricts copying of DVDs. Deciding to find out which law mattered, Henrik Anderson reported himself for 100 violations of the DRM-breaking law (he ripped his DVD collection to his computer) and demanded that the Danish anti-piracy Antipiratgruppen do something about it. They promised him a response, then didn’t respond. So now he’s reporting himself to the police. He wants a trial, so that the legality of the DRM-breaking law can be tested in court.”

http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-group-refuses-bait-drm-breaker-goes-to-the-police-091201/

I have also been reading Creative Time’s A Guide to Democracy in America, kind of spuriously named after Alexis de Tocqueville’s excellent book of observations from 1835.  I usually like Nato Thompson, but I did not like this book, or its design.  Anyway, the reading and some hyperlinks brought me to Theo Watson, former fellow at Eyebeam Atelier, and thus to Graffiti Research Lab.  On their blog they discussed a documentary about their practice, and referred jokingly to it having been put on the Department of Homeland Security’s “No Fly List.”  I wikipedia No Fly List and learn about the contention surrounding it.

Graffiti Research Lab renames Verizon, "NSA" (2008)

Nato Thompson, austellungmacher and sometimes editor

Example:

• Walter F. Murphy, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton, reported that the following exchange took place at Newark on 1 March 2007, where he was denied a boarding pass “because I [Professor Murphy] was on the Terrorist Watch list.” The airline employee asked, “Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that.” “I explained,” said professor Murphy, “that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution.” To which the airline employee responded, “That’ll do it.” ((Naomi Wolf, The Guardian, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/24/usa.comment))

Then, Bruce Schneier, cryptographer and security guru, wrote the following in an article for The Atlantic, as a simple way for people to defeat the No Fly List.  I don’t understand how this works, if it still does, and am wondering if anyone can help explain…

Use a stolen credit card to buy a ticket under a fake name. Print a fake boarding pass with your real name on it and go to the airport. You give your real ID, and the fake boarding pass with your real name on it, to security. They’re checking the documents against each other. They’re not checking your name against the no-fly list—that was done on the airline’s computers. Once you’re through security, you rip up the fake boarding pass, and use the real boarding pass that has the name from the stolen credit card. Then you board the plane, because they’re not checking your name against your ID at boarding.²

Some quick art associations:

Benjamin Edwards

Charles Gute (2003)

Kevin Mitnick's business card

Mark Bradford - Los Moscos

Martin Creed - Work No. 227 (2001)

Brody Condon - Velvet Strike (2002)

Theo Watson + Graffiti Research Lab

Ethan Ham - Email Erosion (2006)

Yann Serandour

Tobias Putrih + MOS - Maximum Brick Overhang

Eva and Franco Mattes - United We Stand (2005)

1. Dieter Roelstraete, Art In and Out of The Age of Terror, Afterall 17, Spring 2008 – http://afterall.org/journal/issue.17/art_age_terror
2. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/airport-security/2