I am beginning to work through Alain Badiou’s The Century, and while in its late chapters he returns to some of the broadly predicative concepts that demand deep knowledge of the whole body of work going back to the 1980s, there are some very interesting and more accessible early problems established in this powerful and emotionally challenging piece of work, which I have produced some notes about, below.  If I have anything drastically wrong, please feel free to correct me, or to inveigh against my open-source essaying (the project here, as well as to comment on Badiou, is really to trace my development as an amateur theorist so that there is a transparent place of reference that might inspire others’ trust in their own individual developments):

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.

<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

The following is the final paragraph of Frederic Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic (2009), re-blogged  from K-Punk.

… We may argue that Utopia is no longer in time just as with the end of voyages of discovery and the exploration of the globe it disappeared from geographical space as such. Utopia as the absolute negation of the fully realized Absolute which our own system has attained cannot now be imagined as lying ahead of us in historical time as an evolutionary or even revolutionary possibility. Indeed, it cannot be imagined at all; and one needs the languages and figurations of physics – the conception of closed worlds and a multiplicity of unconnected yet simultaneous universes – in order to convey what might be the ontology of this now so seemingly empty and abstract idea. Yet it is not to be grasped in this logic of religious transcendence either, as some other world after or before this one, or beyond it. It would be best, perhaps, to think of an alternate world – better to say the alternate world, our alternate world – as one contiguous with ours but without any connection or access to it. Then, from time to time, like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces, are still possible.

I have been reading this book to try and get a grasp on how Utopia, philosophically out-of-commission in favor of versions of realism and the microtopian¹, is envisioned today, from the specialized realm of philosophical discourse, to popular culture, to the role it plays in the extra-institutional beliefs of regular people.  Jameson argues that Utopia is not only no longer a potential somewhere on Earth, like James Hilton’s Shangri-La, but actually has no possibility as a place in time either.  Utopia is, after all avenues of theorization have been explored, a mystical concept, belonging to one’s dreams, outside the universe (though not in the religious sense of transcending our universe); a kind of parallel thread that ghosts our own.  My 22-year-old’s analogy is that it is, for Jameson, like when you play a time-trial in a racing videogame (Project Gotham, whatever) and get to see the “best time” car doing a ghost run around the circuit.  As brilliant as Jameson’s description is, I fear that when he mentions “the language and figurations of physics” as the required mode of conception for understanding Utopia, he does what seems to have become rather common in contemporary philosophy, which is to vaguely invoke theoretical physics, astronomy, and cosmology, as more lofty fields (which maybe they are).  But, as Stephen Hawking among others have told us, science became wildly complicated in the twentieth century, and the result is that most if not all philosophers (not to mention artists!) have had a very difficult time keeping up, making their invocations flimsy and cargo-cultish.  Surmounting the challenges that extreme complexity in each and every field present to generalist writing and thought will be of importance to the development of human knowledge this century.  Still, Jameson is pointing to a cross-pollination between the philosophic, the mystic, and the rigorously scientific, to great effect.

Here are a few art associations:

LIZ GLYNN – 24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project

ANTON VIDOKLE – Night School

BRUCE NAUMAN

CCA SAN FRANCISCO M.A. STUDENTS – Secret of the Ninth Planet

DAVID BOWEN – Growth Rendering Device

RICHARD FEYNMAN’S SECTION AT THE CALTECH BOOKSTORE

FINNBOGI PETURSSON – Tides

SLIM AARONS RELAXING

GABRIEL OROZCO – Horses Running Endlessly

GIANNI MOTTI – Preemptive Act

1. http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/reality_check/ [↩]

Daniel Birnbaum put Semiotext(e), Sylvere Lotringer’s perennially relevant publishing company, as number 10 in his list of the Best of 2009, in Artforum.  This year, Semiotext(e) picked up The Coming Insurrection, by The Invisible Committee, originally published in French by La Fabrique in 2007.  Notably, this book has been recommended (in an antiphrastical sense) by Glenn Beck because its “dangerous”.  This is, in my mind, a landmark moment.  Not because this book is actually dangerous, although it might be, but because for the first time in a long time French philosophy appears explicitly on mainstream American television!

(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?

Nothing seems to be more common in our present situation than a millenarianist feeling of closure.  Whether celebratory (what I will call manic) or melancholic one hears endless diagnoses of death; death of ideologies (Lyotard); or industrial society (Bell); of the real (Baudrillard); of authorship (Barthes); of man (Foucault); of history (Kojeve) and, of course, of modernism (all of us when we use the word postmodern).  Yet what does all of this mean?  From what point of view are these affirmations of death being proclaimed?  Should all of these voices be characterized as the voice of mystagogy, bearing the tone that Kant stigmatized in About a Recently Raised Pretentiously Noble Tone in Philosophy (1796)?  Derrida writes:

“Then each time we intractably ask ourselves where they want to come to, and to what ends, those who declare the end of this or that, of man or the subject, of consciousness, of history, of the West or of literature, and according to the latest news of progress itself, the idea of which has never been in such bad health to the right and the left?  What effect do these people, gentile prophets or eloquent visionaries, want to produce?  In view of what immediate or adjourned benefit?  What do they do, what do we do in saying this?  To seduce or subjugate whom, intimidate or make come whom?”¹

UPDATE:  I had posted this passage because I have observed certain artists, when their practice is teleologically challenged by critics or theorists, sometimes defend themselves with questions similar to those Derrida poses here: namely, “what are you trying to do, sink the boat? what for?”  To me, an artist like Julian Schnabel is a caricature of one who would use this particular defensive strategy, one which I’m afraid can stultify critical discussion.  I haven’t developed this thought, clearly.  At any rate, two articles in the New York Times this morning, on the occassion of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, seem relevant:

20 Years of Collapse – Slavoj Zizek

Life After The End of History – Ross Douthat

Also relevant:

False Positives – Art Lies

The End – n + 1

De Appel’s Final Curatorial Project, 2008/2009 “Weak Signals, Wild Cards”

1. Yves Alain-Bois, from “Painting: The Task of Mourning” [↩]

They’re not performance artists!  I write this in response to Richard Lacayo’s Time.com entry “Sacha Baron Cohen: Performance Artist”, in which he compares Michael Jackson’s life, and Baron Cohen’s work (of which I’m a big fan), with Anthony Gormley’s One & Other piece for which Brits can apply to stand atop a fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square and do stuff.  Sure these things are commensurable, but one of the practical realities of the art economy (as opposed to the philosophical notion that anything can mean anything so long as one person experiences it that way) — an economy of display, circulation, and discourse — is that in order for anything to be art, two conditions are required: self-proclamation, and assimilation.  Self-proclamation means that the author must view, understand, and proclaim the work as art.  Assimilation means that the work must be assimilable, which is to say visible and legible as art, to the arbiters of the art economy.  Without this legibility, there can be no discourse, and so no collective recognition or acceptance of the work as art can emerge.  The social Web complicates this notion of assimilation a bit because anyone can produce a node of discourse, and claim that, say, Roger Federer is an artist (like I do ALL the time), or that Barack Obama is an artist, and technically it is accessible to art world arbiters (as in not entirely isolated as a diary locked in a drawer in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico would be), but these nodes are generally ineffectual and do not enter the stream of contemporary art discourse.  I am reminded of the an essay by Bill Arning in What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art, in which he reflects on Joseph Beuys’ proclamation “Jeder Mensch ist ein Kunstler” (roughly: every man is an artist), adding: yeah, but only one guy gets to be the person that says that…

The context of art is a privileged context, where one is situated in a historical lineage of art.  It’s also a privileged context in that one receives a certain respect along with people’s time and intellectual energy.  To annex ‘Michael Jackson’s life’ into the history of performance art simply because it was theatrical, witnessed by a wide public, and spectacular (in the Debordian sense), is only wordplay because his life did not have artistic intent inline with that which is understood as performance art.  Furthermore, it did not have a planned durational bracket, as even the work of Tehching Hsieh, who shrunk his own life into his art, always did.  The difficulty of assimilating Hsieh’s life-as-work into the 1980′s art discourse meant he wouldn’t be widely recognized until the surge of interest in performance and Asian art in the mid-nineties, and demonstrates in order for something to ‘be art’ it must first be socially reified by a few thousand art-people worldwide.  Unless a good number of those people care, it ain’t art in the sense Lacayo is talking about.  The general non-contemporary-art-following public doesn’t know about this system, and it’s irresponsible to tell them with short-shrift in 200 words that Michael Jackson’s life is performance art when there are ten thousand self-acknowledging performance artists dying, figuratively, to be accepted into that system.

Got the idea to write this post from Art Fag City.