Contrapuntal Media, Vol. 2

CONTRA/ PUNTAL/ MEDIA/

V2 CONTRAPUNTAL FUTURES SPRING 2019

EDITED BY ARNE DE BOEVER

CONTRA/ PUNTAL/ MEDIA/

CONTRA/ PUNTAL/ MEDIA/

A PAMPHLET SERIES V2 CONTRAPUNTAL FUTURES SPRING 2019 EDITED BY ARNE DE BOEVER

MA Aesthetics & Politics Program School of Critical Studies California Institute of the Arts

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NORMAN KLEIN WHAT IS CONTRAPUNTAL MEDIA?

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MARISA L. MÉNDEZ-BRADY LIBRARY FUTURES AND WHITENESS IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF SPACE

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STEPHEN WRIGHT DEMOCRATIZING THE MILKY WAY

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ARNE DE BOEVER NEVER MIND THE POLLOCKS?

SARA MAMENI TO FM2030

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EDITOR'S NOTE Manuscript left abandoned on the California Institute of the Arts parking lot, in a stainless steel capsule next to a DeLorean DMC-12 car.

NORMAN KLEIN

WHAT IS CONTRAPUNTAL MEDIA? ARCHIVE NOTES

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Contrapuntal media refers to the invasion by a machine into the production of storytelling. Intrusions of this kind have been launched hundreds of times over the past eight hundred years at least. A machine enters the space where time-based narratives are built—in theater, literature, architecture, cinema, photography. The art direction and the rhythm of these stories are shaken up. Today we associate this invasion with digital software. And it seems as if today’s versions differ considerably from earlier centuries. Something utterly incongruous has been added. At first, when I started research about a year ago, I was less certain of how much they differed. Also, for decades, I have been submerged in many projects where media invasions took place. Now it is June, 2018. The simple archiving of these primary sources, from the fourteenth century to the present, has barely begun. And already, much larger questions have emerged—as I compare the backstories and historical contexts then and now. I am being drawn into economic history, media archaeology, urban anthropology, cultural theory, to better understand what happened at various workshops, studios and theaters, what became of these spaces and production methods that deliver a time-base narrative. Over the past few months, I have decided to slow down my conclusions, for a very sensible reason.

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In my early drafts, I presumed too much—that I intuitively understood contrapuntal media better than I did. I figured that I could center my research inside various story grammars.

But as soon as I discovered arcs within the archive, a problem emerged. For example, let us suppose that the word media were understood as it was in the nineteenth century. That means that the arrival of the railroad by 1840 involved media narratives (travel). Or photolithography changed the layout of newspapers after 1920. Or radio entered the home by 1925.

I assumed that these “industrial” changes (as modernist folklore) came quickly, that the initial chaos did not last long.

This is most certainly not true (or rarely true).

I had been too formal in my approach. The contrapuntal is a much thornier historical concept. Appearances can look more stable than they were. And as any student of musical counterpoint will tell you, this is a highly artisanal, orderly bivalve kind of storytelling, with elegant notation. But its impact is often remembered as something else: that Baroque music was inchoate, more like polyphonic musical arrangements in the fourteenth century than counterpoint after 1560. So, the shock was closer to the wars of the Reformation than the literal point of machinic entry that forced counterpoint to take place. There is a myth of progress involved here.

But what if counterpoint were also a throwback to polyphonic music, into a lattice of tones and narrative tropes, like an atmosphere? Was it a hybrid of church music with street

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music? The trembling realities of sixteenth century Europe were not a Renaissance for many people. It was a miserable transition, bloody. And it ended with even more instability in the seventeenth century. So, when we say “contrapuntal,” history can move sideways very easily. The granular chaos of 1450 might linger for a very long time. Rarely does contrapuntal invasion—in the arts—quickly inspire an orderly transition.

We imagine it in Renaissance music, but that is nostalgia more than fact.

That brings me to a related matter. How is our history today moving sideways? When I started this research, Trump had just been elected. There was still something caricatural about his authoritarian ambitions. Now we are buried in 2018. Too much of our national mood is shifting, not in his favor, but to his advantage. Our media polyphony may be a cultural symptom of this erosion. At the time of my writing, the midterm election season is in full swing; the most important midterm in American history. Our belief in rule of law will be tested. This transition that starts in November could easily absorb decades. I believe in the Progressive angle, being an old New Lefty, but there is something comically perverse in the air, even compared to 2016. For this project, that brings new questions: Could the dissolving impact of media be part of what blindly tips the imbalance? What are the other parts?

Will millions of Americans get used to being lost in the desert?

What if neo-feudalism, as a modality and a political culture,

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becomes the new normal? In case it does, I’d better sort out my research on the “futures” of counterpoint more carefully.

Let me return, then, to the primitive definition with which I started: Contrapuntal Media refers to the moment when a new machine (a tech) enters the physical space where stories are told. This always terrorizes various cultural industries.

And these wounds may not resolve quickly. That leaves us two definitions as one: First of all, the invading tech brings “contrapuntal” shocks to the system. In the second, these shocks are not so bad. They are subdued by newly hybridized forms of storytelling; by fugues and solace. This is an old avant-garde myth. The word contrapuntal means shock bringing dynamic resolution at the same time. That is impossible. Contrapuntal is not about friendly musicians chatting over the fence, echoing parts of each other’s style. More likely, as of June, 2018, contrapuntal implies a chaos (an antilogical “structure”) that will endure, a polyphonia. That is because increasingly, the fabric of our data produces a kind of lattice made up of billions of melodies, in a constant subaltern state of miniaturization. Even in my mousehole of a world, I see ten thousand passwords bent on hacking each other, with me somehow in the middle. Yesterday, my Word program crashed for two hours. I had to anxiously change various passwords, in order (or should I say be allowed) to finish this editing. Talk about preliminary: Contrapuntal is an atmosphere more than a poetics—and a foggy bottom at that.

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Counterpoint, therefore, is a scripted space. Its program is designed to set you at ease, but like all lovable villains, doesn’t especially give a damn. The house may be on fire, but the software offers a comforting fugue, about intelligent dialog. It is often amnesia on fire—very American—a nativist polyphony that dismisses the political order of things. In our era, the angry part of invasion is still fresh. We are barely starting our descent into new modes of granular chaos. And the digital is merely a symptom, Olympian as it may be. In other words, this essay is only the prototype toward a much longer project.

Nevertheless, every history must begin with first principles, however simplified. Admittedly, naming things in that way can lead to evasions. Broad categories tend to be blunt; they smooth over irreconcilable facts. But they also assign boundaries. That is fundamental.

That said, our first governing principle is as follows: Contrapuntal media refers to a phenomenon—a moment of impact.

Only afterward is it a poetics (but how long afterwards?).

That first impact isolates my case. In what year does hard technology (along with its soft geometries, its software and soft power) actually invades a physical space where storytelling is assembled? That becomes an anchor. The most famous example of a contrapuntal space dropping anchor is 1927, when sound invaded silent cinema. The coming of

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1 S.M. Eisenstein, V.I Pudovkin and G.V. Alexandrov, “A Statement,” tr. J. Leyda, p.84 http://academic. csuohio.edu/kneuendorf/c49415/ Eisensteinetlal.pdf. Among the many places where this quote is cited: Expressionist Film, New Perspectives, ed. D. Scheunemann (2006), pp. 244-246.

Here, filmmaker Walter Ruttmann is quoted as taking the reverse position, that sound will add more “inertia” to cinema. But even here, the argument against seems to sponsor precisely what Eisenstein and Pudovkin favored, that (as Ruttmann explains) only through a “juxtaposition of fragments” does cinema perfect its montage.

talkies generated tremendous arguments back and forth, mostly in favor. In many of these, the term “contrapuntal” is featured. I suspect that the word had gained currency in modern literature soon after 1900; and of course, in the music of Debussy, among others. Among the flock of pro-talkie supporters were the philosopher Roman Jakobson, art theorist Erwin Panofsky, film critic Gilbert Seldes (he called talkies “contrapuntal sound”). And most of all, there was Eisenstein and Pudovkin. Their shared Statement of 1929 is often quoted, for example: “Only the contrapuntal use of sound vis-a-vis the visual fragment of montage will open up new possibilities for the development and perfection of montage”. 1 All of these structuralist defenders of the talkies have one point in common. They praise disjunction. They argue that sound should be asynchronous, very much like a Brechtian device. This disjunction added needed gristle, as the world spiraled into chaos. Asynchronic music helped to surface what was unreal in bourgeois narrative. The tinny voices (with buzzes and gaps) might sound awkward—and distancing—but they added more expressive contour and vitality. Contrapuntalism (if I may name it that way) gave an agit-prop ferocity to the economic dramas of the moment.

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17 That moment, at the exact hinge of the Great Depression, and at the rise of Fascism, lent to “contrapuntal media” a political air. It was also very ruthless in some ways. Like a field after an attack of locusts, very little of silent cinema actually survived after sound replaced it. There is a kind of barbarian at the gates quality here; also, a strange ontology. At the moment of impact (1927-30), contrapuntal media looked clumsy. The sound was often wrong, artificial. In time, as always (from movie technicolor to color on TV), engineers fix the glitches. Eventually, the smoother aspect of counterpoint emerges. Meanwhile, the host (silent cinema) is never the same. Often that slicker version is also disastrous; it throws production methods off balance, as in the print industries today.

But the case of the talkie is miraculous. Movie sound in theaters and on movie shoots (invasive as it was—the jungle of wires especially) fit easily within an emerging film grammar, and did so quickly; despite its cost—years of expensive conversions that plagued distributors and studios, nearly bankrupting much of the industry by 1934. And yet, like Singin’ in the Rain, we remember that collapse on a happy note; where progress brings in new blood.

Late twenties theories about sound have also proved durable.

They said that sound in films should be asynchronous. This principle remains basic to film discourse, even in practical everyday terms, in how films are scored. It is a mark of professionalism to have sound editing be contrapuntal. We hope for NORMAN KLEIN — WHAT IS CONTRAPUNTAL MEDIA?

2 Yve-Alain Bois, “Metamorphosis of Axonometry,” Daidalos, Sept. 15, 1981, p.42.

3 Ibid.

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a friendly three act structure here. In Act One, talkie montage (circa 1928-30) was tough, but manageable. That tinny sound had an almost unnatural effect; it surprised audiences at first, but only for a year or two. However, from the start, audiences loved talkies; tinny or not. “Mickey Mouse music” (literally a term at the time) apparently made cinema more powerful, turned Disney, the nobody of silent movies, into an icon within two years.

That still leaves us with a problem in how to define things. How can two opposite meanings fit the same word? Contrapuntal implies a break-in that is violent—the unsettling moment when tons of wires, and clumsy sound booths ensnarl the movie set.

But exactly the same word also implies a soothing collaboration, a stately fugue. Who feels violently assaulted while Bach is being performed?

We can’t return endlessly to the one exception. The coming of talkies ushers in a fugue state almost painlessly. There is something fake about that image anyway. It makes 1927 to 1932 look too choreographed, like a dance number from The Gay Divorcee. That is not true at all.

There is also the architectonic side to this issue. Contrapuntal media tends to collapse time into space. In other words, like the geomancy of animated films by Oskar Fischinger, time is graphed on to an abstract expanse. Within that, counter motifs are in reverb throughout, like a duel. And yet, this jam session

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is very formal, with precise notation, like a choreographed archive. Animated film is especially contrapuntal. The viewer witnesses the hand of the animator as a character the space invading from outside. That self-reflexive quality can be easily dismissed. Contrapuntal forms are often incorrectly described as brilliantly flat, with less depth of field than, say, symphonic music (or character animation and live action special effects).

This is not so. I have spent forty years studying contrapuntal art forms. Their architectonic graphics is not simply about “flat.” They can be axonometric, like Mies Van der Rohe’s work in the twenties. Art historian Yve-Alain Bois, a student of Barthes, devoted much of the eighties to uncovering the rare geometries of axonometrics. The graphics of axonometry, originating in China and adapted in the West, “abolishes the fixed viewpoint of the spectator and creates several possible readings of one and the same image.” 2 It is a kind of peep box architectonics. From the late nineteenth century on, it “invaded” many fields once again, where increasing abstraction was a contrapuntal element in representation. That included “military strategy as well as architecture and painting to descriptive geometry, stereometry, cartography, mechanical drawing.” 3 Of course, its similarities to algorithmic software today is obvious.

Can axanometrics be compared to dueling motifs in music?

The key is multipodes (multilegged robots) as posthuman

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4 During the Baroque eras, mathematics and perspective—tools identified with commercial culture— were often treated in literature, architecture and philosophy as contrapuntal. The time-based narrative rinsed through with perspectival devices was often compared to a labyrinth. From Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, tr. T.Conley (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993; orig. 1988): Leibniz’ use of the “irrational number is the common limit of two convergent series, of which one has no maximum and the other no minimum (17). The irrational number implies the descent of a circular arc on the straight line of rational points, and exposes the latter as a false infinity, a simple undefinite that includes an infinity of lacunae; that is why the continuous is a labyrinth that cannot be represented by a straight line.

The straight line always has to be intermingled with curved lines.”

architecture that plays tricks. That automaton-like machine space is why the contrapuntal, even today, remains Baroque. 4 Labyrinth systems (a feature of the Baroque) are contrapuntal wonders, because they are seasoned with anamorphic tricks, and peopled with clockwork automata. They are loaded with figure/ground ambiguities. That makes absences more obvious, more solid. Handmade puzzle pieces are sharply cut like glass. All this gives the contours of storytelling added presence. It highlights the role of the narrator and the viewer—which is why the masters of twenties film montage, as well as masters of stream-of-consciousness fiction, often referred to contrapuntal effects.

Counterpoint accentuates what is missing. That allows for spectacular crossovers, from art production to linguistics, cultural theory, and narrative. No wonder we are hoping that our contrapuntal third act arrives soon, as it did with the birth of the talkies from 1927 to 1932. We need our contrapuntal media to mutate fast, because they are also smashing parts

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21 of our economy. Fake banking and “fake political tweets” are surely contrapuntal invaders. Hopefully all this does not lead to 1930, to another Great Depression. But swift and charming contrapuntal outcomes, a happy doppler effect, are rare. We should also remember how sound in cinema was exploited by the Nazis and Fascists, that it forever transformed how war was visualized.

We leave the subhead about definitions. Next, as an enhancement, let us briefly study etymologies of the word counterpoint.

They came originally from the medieval French, to mean a song that is stabbed, punctured (as in punctum), or marked over. / Counterpoint has its roots in musical systems since the twelfth century, but was formalized during the Renaissance. Its most carefully studied text, the summa, was published in 1725, Gradus Ad Parnassum (The Steps to Parnassus) by Vatican musicologist and conductor, Johan Joseph Fux. Clearly, Fux’s “steps” observed the rules of counterpoint approved by the Vatican Council, as part of the Counter Reformation launched in 1560. It was important that mass was heard “properly,” in a Popish way. We should never imagine that contrapuntal exists outside the instrumentality of politics. It is not simply about formalisms.

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5 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), pp. 51, 67. Among the many essays on Said’s study of counterpoint (or influenced by these theories): Counterpoints: Edward Said’s Legacy, edited by May Telmissany and Stephanie Tara Schwartz (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010).

Similarly, the term contrapuntal analysis, referring back to Said, is part of communications theory.

Consider this writing by Edward Said: As we look back at the cultural archive, we begin to reread it not univocally but contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts. In the counterpoint of Western classical music, various themes play off one another, with only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is concert and order, an organized interplay that derives from the themes, not from a rigorous melodic or formal principle outside the work. In the same way, I believe, we can read and interpret English novels, for example, whose engagement (usually suppressed for the most part) with the West Indies or India, say, is shaped and perhaps even determined by the specific history of colonization, resistance, and finally native nationalism…

Each text has its own particular genius, as does each geographical region of the world, with its overlapping experiences and interdependent histories of conflict. 5

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6 Pannian Prasad, Edward Said and the Question of Subjectivity, p.52.

7 See Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).

8 Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint, tr. H. de Onis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947; orig. 1940).

As my reference to Said illustrates, the term contrapuntal is featured in literary and postcolonial theory about “counterhegemonic… reading against the grain;” 6 or in histories of Latin–American picaresque fiction. 7 Online is another matter: here the term suggests something else again. Algorithms are contrapuntal because they add granularity and multipolarities to online archives (the data record). The granular is very much about analytics, hardly an obscure apolitical matter, as in the following passage from Fernando Ortiz’ Cuban Counterpoint: To examine the grinding of labor politics and neoliberal restructuring, follow a ‘contrapunteo’ (contrapuntal) analytic. 8 Granular (more like polyphony than counterpoint) suggests an invasion of both privacy and identity through analytics.

That brings us to Cambridge Analytica, and how it operated: The trove of documents shared publicly by the company’s former research director, Christopher Wylie, illustrates that granular personal data on each of us can be used to create precise messages to any individual voter, then delivered to us through the online ecosystem over Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter and other free services. Such tactics have long been standard

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9 Craig Timberg, Tony Romm and Sarah Ellison, “What the Life and Death of Cambridge Analytica Tells Us About Politics—and Ourselves,” Washington Post, May 3.

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10 “Contrapuntal: Transforming Gaza.” A Blog by Marilyn Garson. http://www.ultimathule.blog.

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in commerce—ever noticed how ads for those nice hiking boots keep following you around the Web?—but all these tactics of manipulation are equally available to those working in largely unregulated political realms too.

Politicians hired Cambridge Analytica to use this technology to shape events in many countries across the world. That includes places, like Kenya and Nigeria, where democracy is new and fragile, and places like Britain and the United States, where there is less of an expectation of voter manipulation.

Though there has long been skepticism about whether Cambridge Analytica was as effective as it claimed, experts expect this technology to only improve, especially as artificial intelligence and virtual reality steadily grow more powerful. The era of campaign season “deep fakes”—imagine a convincing but phony clip of a politician doing something appalling—is not far off. 9 Contrapuntal also means outsider points of view, whether the outsiders are foreign capitalists, local kleptocrats, or migrants fleeing war. Globalism invades their everyday on every level.

The story tends to be multimodal, like an ensemble cast. The place is often an invaded and failing nation state. This counterpoint as also an attack of media unreality (as in swindlers) CONTRAPUNTAL MEDIA — CONTRAPUNTAL FUTURES

upon real places. The attack has a touch of espionage about it, with secret hiding places—what admirers of Said have called the “unrepresented space between the fixed extremes,” in speaking of Gaza. 10 Clearly, the internet houses many counter-reformations; and their polyphony has invaded our political narratives. Also, the internet invades our hardscapes.

It even genetically bears witness to what gizmo will enter our body or our iPhone next. It tells us which parasite to swallow.

That media is a parasite needs a few pages of explanation.

Parasites destroy or cure things (in a “friendly” way, for the most part, as naturalists like to remind us). But there is no doubt that digital capitalism is a parasite upon print industries.

Of course, media predations of this kind go back at least six hundred years. We can date the first media parasite, ironically enough, as movable type—in the mid fifteenth century.

And now, we see movable type itself “dying off;” or at least demoted—as part of the end of the Western hegemony. When I say dying off, I mean precisely that, in this case. Rome in the West did not die; it was steadily demoted from the fourth century onward.

Most parasites are friendly bacteria in your stomach. But some parasites are murderous. Occasionally, new media are indeed assassins. Most of the time, they are stomach flora, and do not despoil their rivals down to the root systems. For example, cinema after 1895 did not bankrupt theaters or bookstores (not in the way that digital capitalism has). In fact, popular theater

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and mass publishing incubated the movies at first. Vaudevilles hosted one and two reelers, until cinema found its legs—and its unique mode of editing as a long form—after 1915. Film was not a parasite that eradicates—as the digital has sometimes been; it was more a sedimentary agent; it layered itself upon other media. It added more than it annihilated.

What Marvel supervillain does this invader look like? As a creature, it skis across data networks. It is not evil exactly— means well, but accidentally causes extinctions. These happen because it is more a thing than alive (a Hollywood version of object relations). Like a psychotic Siri, it has ten million answers for every question. On its chest, there is a musical keyboard that blindly launches atomic missiles.

It suffers from a misguided sense of responsibility.

Will this anxious stage last very long (the Marvel sequels to apocalypse)? No wonder we want to get beyond it fast.

As camouflage, such movies could linger for centuries.

Imagine a war criminal in 1650 sponsoring Baroque artists and musicians. Baroque music, so brittle yet serene, served as camouflage for two centuries of endless warfare.

Are we Baroque camouflagers too? In the eighties, I wrote about the contrapuntal merger of late consumerism with the internet. Then, after 2000, a sheer cannibalism attacked literature and the print industries. But let me avoid getting lost in melodrama. In many ways, books will survive, though not dynamically, as they did in earlier (and equally bloody) CONTRAPUNTAL MEDIA — CONTRAPUNTAL FUTURES

centuries. Very few writers will make a living wage anymore, but I never did anyway. Print journalism (newspapers and magazines) has been decimated. Still, any effective utopian must be a well-informed paranoid. Fresh possibilities can only be realized if the dismal facts are understood without fear. That is true about American politics in the age of Trump, and just as true about the shocks to culture industries. We need a long view more than a short temper. That means an historical sense of how to act upon the present crisis.

Our present crisis may take a century to resolve. Our inability to transition is reinforced by a feudalistic condition—a perverse oligarchical tendency that is very sluggish about culture; it enriches the distributors who exploit container ships and the Internet, in order to bypass the artists themselves. / ARCHIVAL NOTES

Contrapuntal can also mean very naked

bricolage; a bit naïve, in its early stages.

We are barely at the middle right now. The United States is literally in a prototype, like this essay. More subaltern realities will take hold, year by year. Our job in the arts is to overcome the stillness that goes with all this; and invent powerful symbolic orders to bring time-based narrative forward.

I am a working through a list of related examples of contrapuntal media. Some are names, others are subjects. In honor of Walter NORMAN KLEIN — WHAT IS CONTRAPUNTAL MEDIA?

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Benjamin, the contrapuntal archivist, I will toss in a section of quotes and aphorisms, to suggest where this montage research is heading: A It is 1840. We are taking our first train

ride. It is visually disconcerting. We crane our necks to make out oblique destinations; to spot the future approaching. Meanwhile, the exhaust smells like rotten food. We notice the wheels shuttling just below us. All at once, we throw up. For years, railroads offered tutorials on how to keep your head (and stomach). The future at forty miles per hour was a shocking convenience. One might call the early railroad a media parasite roaring past five-hundredyear old villages.

I have lectured and written about

special-effects cinema for decades now. If I were to add a section here on how fx Hollywood films reflected this contrapuntal invasion, the most logical choices would involve parallel-worlds cinema, like Brazil, Alien, Terminator, Lethal Weapon, even Blue Velvet, House of Games; and lastly (as the last year of this B

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cycle) Alex Proyas’ Dark City (1998). The contrapuntal aspects of art direction in these eighties films really privileged the viewer as a character; and influenced my early research on scripted spaces. In an early article, back in 1985, I called labeled these story tropes as “the voyeur enters the room.” Add to that the Dark Knight comics, and Neo-Tokyo manga and animé; as well as early games. All this spoke to the slippery effects of early capitalism, with its derivatives and highspeed banking (also known, circa 1986 in the UK, as casino capitalism).

C It is Hollywood in the eighties. Special

effects blockbusters are rapidly feeling the invasion of computer graphics. By 1994, CG will have thoroughly won. I won’t repeat the early list above. This is a subject of great importance, because its art direction is a kind of psychiatric topology about neoliberalism reframing the “story.”

The iconography of this invasion is a folk tale: aliens enter the narrative space—even the brain pan—of humans, who turn into voyeurs painfully visiting themselves. Clearly, after forty years of such films, this predation is global folklore about neoliberal marketing.

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D Music studies are at the heart of this

study—all the terminology, all the allusions, with many more nuances to add. The musical version of this larger story began during the late middle ges—in Western Europe, especially during the late fourteenth century. As in time immemorial, musical performance was generally appreciated as religious. It had been incubated for many centuries inside churches—and was choral; strictly using human voices to sing the prayers. However, other sources were competing, from travelers (jongleurs) to village festivals, like carnival. Then a trend caught on in the fifteenth century. New and old melodies were steadily transcribed to wind and string instruments. At first, the warped inhumanity of brass and wooden instruments replacing the human voice made clerics uneasy. Hearing a lute perform the liturgy seemed fake, perhaps unholy. The precise words of God were getting lost.

E But there was no stopping this prolifera tion, as Europe economically recovered from the Black Death of a century before. Circulation of all kinds increased across the Germanies, France, Spain and Britain; that meant faster circulation of capital, products and information—and

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of course, of melodies. By 1500, the church singer in training had to memorize thousands more songs, not hundreds. This was utterly impossible without the lyrics and melodies being written down. The need for ever more precise notation grew; and with an expanded repertory came ways to generate new forms. Instrumentality was a parasitical shock to a Catholic system that promised to be as eternal as a chorus within the stones of a cathedral.

Steadily, chorales were put aside, remade; even forgotten. Orchestral music took their place. But surely this is not predation, not so ugly (of course, it was). However, it was also sublime; mythic progress. Musical variety across the arts helped to bring about the Renaissance and the Baroque.

F What can musical notation back then

tell us about the impact of the digital today? Music is an operatic history about what happens after media parasites take hold. After 1100, the monophonic tradition—the chorale— evolved into polyphonic forms, especially once musical instruments took over the human voice.

That brought intense variety, musical polyphony by 1500; this polyphony clearly resembles the data explosion that we are experiencing today.

During the sixteenth century, the granularity

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of new sounds also reflected social media. Polyphony was a bricolage that brought street music to the courts. It allowed for vernacular songs to be aestheticized in formal ways—choreographed into Commedia dell’Arte masked theater; or into courtly masque.

Then in Italy, in 1560, reactionary

politics stepped in. The Counter Reformation put its muddy boots on the whole matter. The Vatican Council officially put a stop to polyphonic chaos. One alternative was chosen in its place; to save the liturgy from drowning among the masses. His name was Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, a choir master in Rome.

Contrapuntal alternatives were already catching on anyway. That brings us to a discussion of political media and public taste. One argument: The masses always prefer a playful orderliness (an organized chaos) in music, however many sounds are added. In early orchestral forms that amounted to a kind of duel (or dual), a twin effect known as counterpoint.

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H In the mid-fifteenth century, print—

movable type—was a predator, like the digital today. By 1500, the sale of printed books

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had thoroughly replaced hand-drawn illustrated texts. Some clerical leaders saw this as a theological disaster; mass printing endangered the immutability of the Latin mass itself. Nevertheless, today, from an historical point of view, the loss of illustrated manuscripts is now treated as scholarly throwaways, brilliant pilgrimages, but nothing more; like unicorn tapestries; or devotional pocket-sized shrines carved from ivory—ephemera that once hyperbolized faith. These painfully splendid medieval fashions “had” to be sacrificed in order to realize a larger transformation. Movable type does indeed prove essential to the birth of the Western capitalist hegemony. Print was ideal for “infinite” expansion, for progress as silent reading. Is that a parasitical invasion? There is also the matter of skeumorphs: for a century, printed books copied the look of illustrated manuscripts. Thus, can a parasitical invasion literally crush what it cannibalizes. More likely, predation is a kind of hybridizing.

Somewhere, the two always mutate.

I Now we return to 2018. Can digital culture,

as the replacement for print, deliver the same predatory impacts for good or ill? I would argue that the impact of the computer is already greater than movable type. We can see this strictly

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in business terms. Algorithms have already far surpassed printed matter. Digital capitalism is vastly more integrated—as the soul of banking, politics and intimacy—than print ever was.

But what about the arts and literature? We are talking about time-based media changing; even way reading and memory distortion changing?

Can digital forms deliver new species of novels, streaming video and games equal to literature, painting and architecture over the past six hundred years?

This would be a useful place to talk about

archival storytelling as a contrapuntal form. My two archival novels, Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles (2003) and The Imaginary 20th Century (2014-16) both address contrapuntal forms—as historical crossmediated tales.

J

K Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital

Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

“The unsettling implications of “machine reading” can be construed as pointing toward a posthuman mode of scholarship in which human interpretation takes

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a backseat to algorithmic processes.” Can “digital methods… be… seen as erasing the human.” (Page 30) Hayles diagnoses the contrapuntal affects of digital media. She has noticed “dramatic increases in the use and pacing of media, including the web, television, and films; networked and programmable machines that extend into the environment, including PDAs, cell phones, GPS devices, antechnologies; and the interconnection, data scraping, and accessibility of databases through a wide variety of increasingly powerful desktop machines as well as such ubiquitous technologies such as RFID tags, often coupled autonomously with sensors and actuators. In short, the variety, pervasiveness, and intensity of information streams have brought about major changes in built environments in the United States and comparably developed societies in the last half century.” (Page 98) Hayles calls these “epigenetic transformations in human cognitive capacities.”

(Page 98)

NORMAN KLEIN — WHAT IS CONTRAPUNTAL MEDIA?

11 Margo Singer, “Can a Novel Be a Fugue,” The Paris Review, July 31, 2017.

Her newest novel was published in 2017, Underground Fugue.

36

37

L The Crash of 2008 ushered in a new

stage in the contrapuntal. I have searched through 2008-2009 for sources. One that struck me was a translation of Technical Mentality by Gilbert Simondon (tr. A. de Boever, in Parrhesia Number 7, pp. 28-35). How indeed will the traditions initiated by critical theory be updated to our emergent neo-feudal condition? We return to the machine in contrapuntal media, with this quote from Simondon (page 20):

“The machine is different from the tool in that it is a relay: it has two different entry points, that of energy and that of information. The fabricated product that it yields is the effect of the modulation of this energy through this information, the effect that is practiced on a workable material.

In the case of the tool, which is handheld, the entry of energy and the entry of information are mixed, or at the very least partially superimposed. Of course, one can guide the chisel of the sculptor with one hand, and push it with the other, but it is the same body that harmonizes the two hands, and a single nervous system that appropriates their movement into

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such detail from the material and for the set aim. The potter’s work, which is moved by his feet, is still of the same kind, but it allows one to anticipate the birth of the machine.”

M There are a number of modernists who

write enthusiastically about the contrapuntal, including Adorno. James Joyce dedicated the chapter entitled Sirens, in Ulysses, to his unique understanding of counterpoint. The literature on Sirens reminds me that first of all, Joyce apparently did not understand musical counterpoint all this well (his weak vision made it difficult to read the notes, for example). Indeed, there is a literary praxis that identifies with contrapuntal, especially among modern novelists (like Faulkner, who considered Wild Palms an exercise in counterpoint. This is unique, as are the uses of the word from one area of culture to another; and one area of the world to another.

N Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera is

often identified as contrapuntal, and he himself liked that associative connection. Thus, the lines set up between Kino Eye and film itself—that

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contrast—easily fits into a twenties Soviet discourse on the contrapuntal, and its enduring importance, since the sixties, in how documentary film (and video) is assembled and constructed.

“Joyce knew all along that he could not reproduce the form of a fugue.”

“Dostoyevsky, Gide, Kundera, Nabokov, and Woolf, among others, were all attracted, in various ways, to the challenges of the fugue. For some, like Pound, the fugue evoked a ‘mystery’ or ‘vortex’ of pattern.

To others, it offered a way of creating symmetry and contrast, a formal corollary to the lyricism of their prose. In his 1928 novel, Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley strove to create a sense of harmony and modulation by juxtaposing multiple characters and themes…” 11

O Glenn Gould’s work on counterpoint

deserves a book or a chapter at least.

His radio experiments are especially valuable.

P

Fugue States are a migratory form of story. Novelist Margo Singer writes: “The word fugue comes from the Latin fugo, ‘flight,’ as well as fugere, ‘to flee’ (as do the words fugitive and refugee). “(To a novelist, it suggests) a narrative structured, like a fugue, around ‘successively entering voices’ and a counterpoint of interwoven images and themes...

Originally a form of vocal music, early fugues drew on the canzone, a type of Italian lyric poetry or song…”

Scholars have long debated whether Joyce succeeded, in “The ‘Sirens’ chapter of Ulysses, in exactly replicating ‘a fugue with all the musical notations,’” although Burgess claimed that even

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Q

“By the last decade of Bach’s life, counterpoint had fallen out of favor. Enlightenment critics renounced the complexity and coded symbolism favored by Baroque composers, championing instead a less coolly esoteric, more emotional approach.

By the 1740s, the idea of music as a ‘horizontal’ interweaving of individual voices was giving way to the ‘vertical’ method of composition, focused on a melody

12

Ibid.

40 supported by a harmonic substructure of chords, that’s still the norm today.

But Bach didn’t care about audiencepleasing melodies. Counterpoint, to him, represented more than a compositional technique: it marked the supreme expression of both cosmic order and the ineffable divine.” 12 CONCLUSION My archival notes are a fraction of what

there is, and what I have found. One shift is becoming apparent, even at this stage of the prototype: contrapuntal dualism was also an ancestor of the dialectical in nineteenth century thought. Now, in the interregnum that is 2018, there is a great desire to renarrate this linkage, place countepoint increasingly inside the rise and fall of the modern.

We want to rewind the tape. That means yet another species of the contrapuntal is being invented. As historical memory fades year by year, it will be the nineteenth century in counterpoint that remains. The western hegemony is officially long gone. Only its absences interest us. Luckily, on film, the nineteenth century looks beautiful in color, as well as the Baroque.

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N O RMAN KLEIN teaches media theory in the MA Aesthetics and Politics program at the California Institute of the Arts.

MARISA L. MÉNDEZ-BRADY

LIBRARY FUTURES AND WHITENESS IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF SPACE

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EDITOR'S NOTE This piece was inspired by conversations with librarian colleagues Jennifer Brown (Barnard College), Jennifer A. Ferretti (Maryland College Institute of Art), and Sofia Leung (MIT Libraries) in preparation for an upcoming talk at the 2019 Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) conference entitled “Moving Beyond Race 101: Speculative Futuring for Equity,” as well as with Los Angeles based librarian and creative writer Nisha Mody.

13 As a linguistic note, we will be referring to all library and archive workers as “librarians” from here on out, both for solidarity and brevity.

14 Markus Miessen and Yann Chateigné, eds., The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict, 2016; Terry Cook, “What Is Past Is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,” Archivaria 1, no. 43 (December 2, 1997), http://journals.sfu.ca/archivar/ index.php/archivaria/article/view/12175; Jarrett M. Drake, “I’m Leaving the Archival Profession: It’s Better This Way,” Medium (blog), June 26, 2017, https://medium.com/on-archivy/im-leavingthe-archival-profession-it-s-better-thisway-ed631c6d72fe.

When thinking about the future of libraries and archives, it is helpful to first start with some ideas about how these spaces have been constructed, represented, and idealized. 13 To move forward, we must first (and always) grapple with our past, even in so far as a recent past may help inform the future. What follows is situated within the Euro-centric Western conception of the library specifically, although I would argue these ideas also translate to the Euro-American archive given the robust body of literature that exists around archival spaces. 14 Let us return to this Shakespearean notion of “what is past is prologue” in library spaces and start with this 2013 quote by Neil Gaiman, a long time public supporter of libraries: “Libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that

44

15 Neil Gaiman, “Neil Gaiman: Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming,” The Guardian, October 15, 2013, sec.

Books, https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-futurelibraries-reading-daydreaming.

finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.” 15 Similar rhetoric by thinkers can be found easily across academic and popular writings in the recent and distant past.

T.S Eliot is purported to have said “The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man” and you can find dozens of inspirational library quotes across physical and digital media, to varying degrees of reliability, including the rumored Ray Bradbury quote “Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.” Undercutting these quotes is the issue of access; libraries represent notions of freedom because the reality is that Western societies are unequal. There would be no need to create specialized spaces for accessing information if access were a given.

While these ideals are something librarians and library supporters alike aspire to, with such lofty expectations it is unsurprising that so many libraries do not fulfill their patrons expectations. One only needs to Google “libraries in the 21st century” to find myriad think pieces offering divergent thoughts about the future of library spaces. Looking at these online discussions, it is clear how unrealistic it is to expect so much potential for liberation and freedom from a singular ideological space.

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16 Henri Lefebvre, The production of space (Oxford, OX, UK; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1991).

17 Lefebvre, 40.

45 It is important to note what we mean when we talk about “space.” While thinkers like Foucault and Derrida often refer to epistemological knowledge and cultural spaces, it is helpful to turn to theorist Henri Lefebvre’s writings on the production of space when attempting to bridge the gap between the imagined and the practical space in which individual people interact with material things. He argues that there are multiple dimensions to the production of space: the mental space, the physical space, and the social space. 16 Here, I am primarily concerned with libraries as social spaces. Lefebvre discusses the social realm of space as the interplay between daily routines and networks, the representations of that space, and the users of the space which form a triad between “the perceived, the conceived and the lived.” He further notes that this perceived-conceived-lived triad “loses all force if it is treated as an abstract ‘model.’” 17 In other words, if social constructions of space cannot grasp the concrete everyday reality of lived experiences, then the model is severely limited.

In thinking about social space, I am situating libraries as concrete sites for knowledge and cultural heritage production. At the heart of this is the question, what is the role of the people constructing library spaces? Where does their agency and authority lie? This piece will attempt to situate the librarian at the heart of the aesthetic politics of these spaces, as the entire curation of the space rests on the decisions made

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18 Kathy Rosa and Kelsey Henke, “2017 ALA Demographic Study” (ALA Office of Research and Statistics, January 11, 2017); Brenda Banks, “Special Report: Diversity,” A*CENSUS: Archival Census & Education Needs Survey in the United States | Society of American Archivists (Society of American Archivists, 2005); “Final Report of the ALA Task Force on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion,” June 2016, http://connect.ala.org/files/ TFEDIFinalReport%202016-06-06.pdf.

19 Myrna Morales, Em Claire Knowles, and Chris Bourg, “Diversity, Social Justice, and the Future of Libraries,” Portal: Libraries and the Academy 14, no. 3 (July 10, 2014): 439–51, https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2014.0017.

20 For further information, see the #droptheiword student initiated campaign on Twitter and “Bowker & Star 1999: Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences,” accessed March 22, 2019, https://www.jimdavies.org/summaries/ bowker1999.html.

by individual people. And it is critical to realize those individuals are (and have been) primarily white.

To give a snapshot of the whiteness of librarianship: diversity reports and statistics reveal that in the United States, since the 1990s, 86-90% of archivists and librarians are white despite numerous and sustained efforts to diversify professional ranks. 1 8 There are many ways that overwhelming whiteness impacts the perception, conception, and lived experiences of the library. Let’s take the example of the how the library and archive controlled vocabulary, or subject term, for the Young Lord Party (YLP). YLP was a prominent political organization comprised predominantly of people of color working to address structural and economic disparities plays out in library spaces.

Rather than finding information about YLP under the classification “political organizations”, the YLP is categorized with the subject heading “gangs.” 19 Until this past year, the Library of Congress (LC) subject heading “illegal aliens” (formerly “aliens” from 1910-1980) was the classification given to undocumented

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21 Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, 2017.

22 Shaundra Walker, “Critical Race Theory and the Recruitment, Retention and Promotion of a Librarian of Color: A Counterstory,” in Where Are All the Librarians of Color? The Experiences of People of Color in Academia, ed. Rebecca Hankins and Miguel Juarez (Sacramento: Litwin Books, 2016), 142.

persons, while aliens from another planet obtained the LC classification “extraterrestrial beings.” 20 The issue of whiteness in the formation of space is not new, or unique to librarians. Critiques of whiteness, liberalism, neutrality, and universality are key principles of critical race theory (CRT), and have been since critical legal studies and critical race studies surfaced in academic discourse in the 1970s. These frameworks offer insight into how whiteness is a critical component in the formation of mental, physical, and social spaces. As a social construction, whiteness imbues those of Euro-American or Caucasian peoples and traditions with economic, social, and spatial privileges and benefits. 21 While whiteness is well addressed in many areas of academe, the library occupies a particular place within this discourse because of the explicit racist history of the library profession.

LIS scholar Shaundra Walker notes that “prior to 1926, when a segregated library school at Hampton Institute, a private HBCU, was established, fewer than 70 African Americans had obtained professional library training.” 22 It is particularly important to note how critical the absence of Black and Brown bodies in librarianship is as we think about how knowledge production and cultural heritage spaces become formed.

Black Americans historically did not have access to any library systems across the South because white librarians denied entry for people of color until the late 19th century when the

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23 Cheryl Knott, Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015).

24 Maurice B. Wheeler, Debbie JohnsonHouston, and Heather Boyd, “Timeline in Library Development for African Americans,” American Libraries Magazine, accessed August 17, 2017, https:// americanlibrariesmagazine.org/timelinein-library-development-for-africanamericans.

25 Gina Schlesselman-Tarango, “The Legacy of Lady Bountiful:

scantily funded Carnegie Public Libraries for African Americans began to spring up. 23 It wasn’t until 1961 that the American Library Association included a clause to uphold the rights of an individual to the use of a library should not be denied or abridged because of his race, religion, national origins, or political views. 2 4 Gina Schlesselman-Tarango has written at length about how early Euro-American librarianship is rooted in the Victorian aesthetic of true womanhood, with characteristics of the ideal librarian mapping onto ideas of whiteness, domesticity, and societal standing. Not only were early library schools gendered, but to be admitted to women’s library school in the late 19th and early 20th century meant you had to pass an “evaluation of personality” test that included “breeding and background.” 2 5 The Victorian true woman was white by social definition, as well as physical appearance because breeding in this context is inherently racialized. Schlesselman-Tarango skillfully translates how this historical racism continues to impact the perception, conception, and lived experiences of the library: ...if the ideal library worker...is not simply white, female, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, and middle or upper class, but also subscribes to a specific type of benevolence, what sort of role does she play in regulating the types of people who desire to enter the library workforce today? Does she inform CONTRAPUNTAL MEDIA — CONTRAPUNTAL FUTURES

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White Women in the Library,” Library Trends 64, no. 4 (September 13, 2016): 673–74, https://doi.org/10.1353/ lib.2016.0015.

26 Schlesselman-Tarango, 680–81.

27 Chris Bourg, “Never Neutral: Libraries, Technology, and Inclusion,” Feral Librarian (blog), January 29, 2015, https://chrisbourg.wordpress. com/2015/01/28/never-neutral-librariestechnology-and-inclusion; Sam Winn, “The Hubris of Neutrality in Archives,” On Archivy (blog), April 24, 2017, https://medium.com/on-archivy/thehubris-of-neutrality-in-archives8df6b523fe9f; Jennifer A. Ferretti, “Neutrality Is Hostility: The Impact of (False) Neutrality in Academic Librarianship,” Medium (blog), February 13, 2018, https://medium.com/ librarieswehere/neutrality-is-hostilitythe-impact-of-false-neutrality-inacademic-librarianship-c0755879fb09.

our ideas surrounding what constitutes “fitness for the position”? Does she stunt our ability to imagine a new type of subject or new types of ideologies in LIS, and does she perhaps limit the possibilities of what a librarian or library could be? 26 I would argue that yes, “she” absolutely stunts our ability to imagine the future of what a librarian and a library could be.

To imagine new futures we must acknowledge the physicality of humans interacting within library spaces. 27 The librarian archetype Schlesselman-Tarango describes makes the perceived-conceived-lived triad around libraries so rooted in whiteness that the entire construction of the space is hostile towards otherness. In this light, the continued insistence that libraries should be neutral spaces by both librarians and users is an ideal that must be reckoned with if we are to imagine new futures. Encoded in American Library Association professional documents, in the assumption that “the library” or “the archive” are somehow merely neutral vessels for information exchange, MARISA L. MÉNDEZ-BRADY — LIBRARY FUTURES

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librarians themselves often view “the library” (and “the archive” for that matter) as something outside of themselves, |as intangible aspirational spaces.

Being a visible and petite Latina in library spaces renders it impossible for me to see the library in this light. Colleagues regularly comment on how I look, act, speak; patrons constantly remind me that I do not “fit” within their stereotypical assumptions about librarians both explicit and subtle ways.

My lived experiences in the space are mired with assumptions about my expertise. Patrons have asked me if they could speak to the “real librarian” and at professional librarian conferences I have been consistently assumed to be a student.

And I am not alone. In her piece “Librarians in the 21st Century: It is becoming impossible to remain neutral”, my colleague Stacie Williams writes: I have been constantly reminded that my interactions with patrons are a reflection of my body: my Black, female-presenting body. In ways small and large, I have been reminded that nothing about libraries is neutral. Not the desks or furniture that are sometimes built by incarcerated individuals who can’t protest their labor. Not the buildings, some of which lack physical access for individuals who can’t climb stairs or walk over uneven stones and bricks. Not the collections development theories, not the leadership opportunities, not

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28 Stacie Williams, “Librarians in the 21st Century: It Is Becoming Impossible to Remain Neutral,” Literary Hub (blog), May 4, 2017, http://lithub. com/librarians-in-the-21st-century-itis-becoming-impossible-to-remainneutral.

29 Williams.

the vacation and break schedules, or the computer use policies. Not our co-workers, our funding models, and certainly not the patrons we serve. 28 Narratives like these are easily found across library and archive spaces. While I believe in the ideals of the library, I cannot ignore the realities of how my physical body interacts with the library space. I do not look like a typical librarian, I do not think like a typical librarian, and I am not perceived or conceived of as a typical librarian.

Neutrality as it relates to the dearth of Black and Brown bodies in the library space means that for example, if a peer or patron assumes that I am not able to help them because of the way I am perceived, neutrality suggests I should gracefully accept this lived reality without pushing back. Circling back to Lefebvre, if the spatial model of the library does not include the day to day reality of the lived experiences of librarians of color in the space, then it is not a valid mental or conceptual model. If we want our libraries to evolve and to change, to realize a future that is inclusive and antioppression, we have to challenge the whiteness of a neutrality that “forces [librarians of color] to agree that our personhood is something up for debate.” 29 But, how do librarians and library patrons imagine a future that is inclusive and accounts for the racialized daily realities I have described if our library spaces are so deeply rooted in historical and current conceptions and perceptions of whiteness?

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30 Fobazi Ettarh, “Vocational Awe?,” WTF Is a Radical Librarian, Anyway? (blog), May 30, 2017, https:// fobaziettarh.wordpress.com/2017/05/30/ vocational-awe.

31 Fobazi Ettarh, “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves,” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, January 10, 2018, /2018/vocational-awe.

Librarian scholar Fobazi Ettarh recently coined the term “vocational awe” 3 0 to address the fallacies imbued in historic idealizations of white library spaces head-on. It is crucial to keep in mind that vocational awe is evident in both librarian and patron conceptions of the library as we think about how social space is constructed. Within librarianship, it is best conceptualized as the idea that there is a “calling” to the profession, akin to the vocational call in religious doctrine.

Rooted in the idea that library work is sacred or holy, the result of vocational awe is the conception and perception that library spaces are inherently good, and thus, beyond critique.

It is toxic to the profession, and in the everyday lived experience of librarians in the the space. More expansively, Ettarh explains that vocational awe is evident in: “Cultural representations of libraries as places of freedoms (like freedom of access and intellectual freedom), education, and other democratic values do not elide libraries’ white supremacy culture with its built-in disparity and oppression. In fact, each value on which librarianship prides itself is inequitably distributed amongst society.” 3 1 Reading Ettarh’s words, it becomes clear that this awe around libraries is just as evident in rhetoric of Neil Gaiman as it is in librarian circles, where the idea that the responsibility to uphold democracy and freedom rests solely on our shoulders is commonplace. Most of us choose librarianship because

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Ettarh, 2018.

53 we believe in the ideals of libraries; likely we have internalized a great deal of vocational awe. We want to serve, to work hard for our communities, to connect people to resources in new and radical ways.

The more that our users conceive and perceive of “the library” as some holy defender of freedom and democracy, the more we are likely to try our best to fulfill those expectations in our (often unhealthy) willingness to serve the greater good. It is just as crucial that patrons and library supporters recognize the role they play in perpetuating this awe. It is a shared responsibility for all who value working towards equity in access of information to acknowledge the role of the librarian in shaping these spaces. In Ettarh’s words, “Libraries are just buildings.

It is the people who do the work.” 32 It then follows that it is the people interacting with the library space in everyday ordinary ways who will be able to construct radical new futures and imagine libraries spaces that are truly liberatory. These imagined library futures don’t resemble Eurocentric Western library spaces that reinforce the idea of vocational awe through gothic inspired architecture and church-like religiosity. It is time to speculate entirely new library worlds.

We have to embrace the reality that you cannot eat inspiration for dinner, and libraries are no longer monastic in nature.

Theorist, scholar and artist adrienne marie brown gives us a defined way to speculate in her idea of emergent strategy.

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33 Adrienne M. Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, 2017, 29.

34 Brown, 45.

35 Brown, 140–45.

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55

She describes emergence as “notic[ing] the way small actions and connections create complex systems and patterns that become ecosystems and societies.” 33 Applied to libraries, we can conceptualize this strategy as moving away from grandiose notions of freedom, democracy, and “the library” and towards attentiveness to everyday interactions. We can start thinking about, what are the details of how our behaviors and movements interact with our visions of the space? And, how can we start to imagine changes in these details in order to imagine new futures? brown provides a response to this question in the idea of creating speculative futures, explicitly noting that science fiction writer Octavia Butler is a cornerstone in her thinking about emergent strategy. Just as Butler constructs spaces through vivid details, brown notes “emergent strategies are ways for humans to practice complexity and grow the future through relatively simple interactions.” 3 4 Collaboratively recognizing that “a multitude of realities have, do and will exist” is the first step in dreaming up new worlds.

She emphasizes that “visionary fiction is hard, and realistic, and hopeful. It’s neither utopian nor dystopian, it’s more like life.” What brown calls a “multiverse of possibilities” is in essence, working from the bottom up to affect change. It is practicing social justice through the everyday lived experiences. It is the ability to adapt and to experiment. It is about “birthing new systems through creating conditions that have not existed before.” 35 To speculate about liberatory and

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36 Caitlin M. J. Pollock and Shelley P. Haley, “‘When I Enter’: Black Women and Disruption of the White, Heteronormative Narrative of Librarianship,” in Pushing the Margins: Women of Color and Intersectionality in LIS (Library Juice Press, 2018), 45–46, https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/ handle/1805/17555.

transformative futures for libraries involves changing how we construct the social space. One way to do so is by continually identifying whiteness and pushing back against neutrality and vocational awe in our everyday behaviors. The future of libraries won’t be found by dreaming of a better world, but in the lived reality of our interactions, and in the details of our perceptions and conceptions.

I want to end this piece by turning to another famous literary figure, Audre Lorde. Black feminist theorist, poet, and activist, Lorde was also a librarian. And yet, her major biographies don’t name her as such, despite the fact that she regularly self-identified as librarian in interviews and in her writing.

Even within current conversations in librarianship, Lorde is often viewed as an example of a Black woman leaving the field in response to the profession’s overarching whiteness.

As the chapter chronicling Lorde’s identity as a librarian in the volume Pushing the Margins: Intersectionality in LIS notes, “It is a missed opportunity that many researchers do not connect how Lorde's experience as a librarian affected her work on black feminist thought and theory.” 36 In practicing emergent strategies, what would the future of libraries look like if we made space for Lorde (and others) to exist as a black feminist activist librarian in the perception and conception of the space? How would that change and shape our future destiny? It is thrilling to imagine the multiverse of possibilities that arise from this speculation.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

56

Banks, Brenda. “Special Report: Diversity.” A*CENSUS: Archival Census & Education Needs Survey in the United States | Society of American Archivists.

Society of American Archivists, 2005. https://www2.archivists.org/initiatives/ acensus-archival-census-education-needssurvey-in-the-united-states.

Bourg, Chris. “Never Neutral: Libraries, Technology, and Inclusion.” Feral Librarian (blog), January 29, 2015. https://chrisbourg.wordpress. com/2015/01/28/never-neutral-librariestechnology-and-inclusion.

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Gaiman, Neil. “Neil Gaiman: Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming.” The Guardian, October 15, 2013, sec. Books. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/ oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-librariesreading-daydreaming.

Knott, Cheryl. Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow.

Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015.

Lefebvre, Henri. The production of space. Oxford, OX, UK; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1991.

Brown, Adrienne M. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, 2017.

Miessen, Markus, and Yann Chateigné, eds. The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict, 2016.

Cook, Terry. “What Is Past Is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift.”

Archivaria 1, no. 43 (December 2, 1997). http://journals.sfu.ca/archivar/index. php/archivaria/article/view/12175.

Morales, Myrna, Em Claire Knowles, and Chris Bourg. “Diversity, Social Justice, and the Future of Libraries.” Portal: Libraries and the Academy 14, no. 3 (July 10, 2014): 439–51. https://doi. org/10.1353/pla.2014.0017.

Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic.

Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, 2017.

Pollock, Caitlin M. J., and Shelley P. Haley. “‘When I Enter’: Black Women and Disruption of the White, Heteronormative Narrative of Librarianship.” In Pushing the Margins: Women of Color and Intersectionality in LIS. Library Juice Press, 2018.

Drake, Jarrett M. “I’m Leaving the Archival Profession: It’s Better This Way.” Medium (blog), June 26, 2017. https://medium.com/on-archivy/imleaving-the-archival-profession-it-sbetter-this-way-ed631c6d72fe.

Ettarh, Fobazi. “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves.” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, January 10, 2018. /2018/ vocational-awe.

Ferretti, Jennifer A. “Neutrality Is Hostility: The Impact of (False) Neutrality in Academic Librarianship.”

Medium (blog), February 13, 2018. https://medium.com/librarieswehere/ neutrality-is-hostility-the-impact-offalse-neutrality-in-academiclibrarianship-c0755879fb09.

Rosa, Kathy, and Kelsey Henke. “2017 ALA Demographic Study.” ALA Office of Research and Statistics, January 11, 2017. http://www.ala.org/tools/sites/ ala.org.tools/files/content/Draft%20 of%20Member%20Demographics%20Survey%20 01-11-2017.pdf.

Schlesselman-Tarango, Gina. “The Legacy of Lady Bountiful: White Women in the Library.” Library Trends 64, no. 4 (September 13, 2016): 667–86. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2016.0015.

“Final Report of the ALA Task Force on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion,” June 2016. http://connect.ala.org/files/ TFEDIFinalReport%202016-06-06.pdf.

Walker, Shaundra. “Critical Race Theory and the Recruitment, Retention and Promotion of a Librarian of Color: A Counterstory.” In Where Are All the Librarians of Color? The Experiences of People of Color in Academia, edited

by Rebecca Hankins and Miguel Juarez.

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Sacramento: Litwin Books, 2016.

Wheeler, Maurice B., Debbie JohnsonHouston, and Heather Boyd. “Timeline in Library Development for African Americans.” American Libraries Magazine.

Accessed August 17, 2017. https:// americanlibrariesmagazine.org/timelinein-library-development-for-africanamericans.

Williams, Stacie. “Librarians in the 21st Century: It Is Becoming Impossible to Remain Neutral.” Literary Hub (blog), May 4, 2017. http://lithub.com/ librarians-in-the-21st-century-it-isbecoming-impossible-to-remain-neutral.

Winn, Sam. “The Hubris of Neutrality in Archives.” On Archivy (blog), April 24, 2017. https://medium.com/ on-archivy/the-hubris-of-neutralityin-archives-8df6b523fe9f.

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M A RISA L. MÉ NDEZ-BRADY is a Reference & Instruction Librarian at the California Institute of the Arts as well as the Library Liaison and Selector for the School of Critical Studies.

PUN TAL/

STEPHEN WRIGHT

DEMOCRATIZING THE MILKY WAY

AESTHETICS AND POLITICS OF DEEP SPACE

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EDITOR'S NOTE During the 2016-2017 academic year, Stephen Wright taught a course on “The Politics of Usership” as Visiting Faculty in the MA Aesthetics and Politics program at CalArts.

The course culminated in a field trip to the SpaceX factory on Rocket Road in Hawthorne, California. In preparation of this visit, Paul Tompkins from SpaceX came to give a talk at CalArts about his fascination with space and the SpaceX project at large. The text reproduced here was read by Stephen when he introduced Paul to the audience.

First of all, I would like to say what a privilege it is to be able to have this conversation here tonight with Paul Tompkins, principal engineer of space operations at Space Exploration Technologies. It’s always a bit of an intellectual thrill to discuss “space operations” with Paul and hear him frame what sounds like science fiction as nothing more than an engineering challenge. These kinds of conversations between a top engineer at one of the leading private-sector aerospace companies and the arts community in general, and CalArts in particular, are all too few and far between—and my hope is that our conversation this evening be ongoing and lead to other forms of collaboration.

Before asking Paul to give an overview of where we’re at, today, in terms of deep space travel, and the specific role he plays, I’d like to try and answer why conversations such as these between scientists or engineers and artists or critical theorists are not more commonplace by outlining the two principal reasons—aesthetic and political—that motivated my inviting Paul to join us here tonight.

The reason is not, as one might expect, because scientists and engineers like Paul are too busy launching rockets and preparing to Occupy Mars. Over dinner last week, Paul said that he accepted the invitation to do this four-handed conversation with me because it was at an art school; had it been

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at an engineering school, he would have declined because of his workload. So clearly, responsibility for not initiating collaboration lies, at least in part, on us, members of the critical-theoretical and artistic community. And no less clearly, he feels that there is something potentially very fruitful about mutualizing our very different, even opposing skill sets and outlooks. What that might be from his perspective I’ll leave to him to specify, but I see the fecundity as emerging from a sort of mutualizing of our respective competences and incompetences.

Too much artistic practice—and assumptions about what art is—continues to operate on the reduced scale, “performing” research or whatever rather than ramping up its scale of intervention to the 1:1 scale, enabling it to have traction and use-value in the real. This is probably due to a residual reliance on art’s Kantian inspired aesthetic function, which must be deactivated for other more operative functions to be activated. Of course this is slowly happening, but still on the fringes of mainstream practice. In short, art remains ensconced in the realm of fiction, the enrichment of which has long been art’s central purview.

THE AESTHETIC

This is where art’s encounter with deep space exploration becomes so exciting because in that realm what feels like it must be fiction, defying as it does so many of our earthly certitudes, is actually happening. SpaceX, for example, will have humans on Mars within two decades (before my daughter is of voting age) or go bust trying. The speculative is the operative. At the same time, though, however stunning the achievements of the space-engineering community, it is only what it is. What it is, is extraordinary, but it may lack a certain ontological thickness, or intensity. Simply, if you have your nose to the grindstone—or your eyes riveted to the coding on the screen—which is the condition for making such technological leaps, you overlook the meaning of the operation (Adorno once likened scientific rationality to saying “the operation was a success, but the patient died”). Art, on the other hand, is always about something. It has an “allure”,

What do I mean by that? Art remains

plagued by two deep-set assumptions: on the one hand—and this is art’s romanticist fallacy—, an exceptional overconfidence in its ability to “go it alone”; an unchallenged belief that art has sufficient resources to either engage in only skewed forms of teamwork or to forgo collaboration altogether. At a time when art is laying claim to “research” agendas, this is a vexing legacy that needs to be overcome.

That is all the more challenging, though, because art has become bogged down in a politics of the performative, defining the realm of the purely speculative as the proper domain of artistic and critical enquiry. Performativity is what allowed art to free itself from the regime of representation; but performativity has become a paralyzing addiction.

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a call to a “double take”, and although that need not change the perpetual properties of the action or configuration at all, nothing could be more different. What if we learned that some deep space operation or exploratory mission or other were just that and a proposition of that—that is, an artistic proposition? Nothing would change scientifically, yet nothing could be more different. And that difference—that coefficient of art—would be merely ontological.

Paul shared some of his powerpoint images with me this morning. One of them is entitled: “Masters (and slaves) of low orbit”, and deals with the fact that through initiatives like International Space Station, we have mastered the challenges of low-earth orbit, perhaps to the detriment of other, more ambitious undertakings. In a word, this is what I think about art: it has become locked in low orbit—its low orbit of endless performativity—and needs to recalibrate its trajectory to deeper space.

THE POLITICAL

The other reason this has proven diffi cult for art—and the other reason this conversation needs to happen—is that art is wary not only of the scale of space exploration but the transcendent perspective it more or less implies and entails. A horizon line that we—secular leftist intellectuals—have mistakenly given up on.

We have given up, no doubt erroneously, on any and all forms of transcendence, which we have come to associate, not CONTRAPUNTAL MEDIA — CONTRAPUNTAL FUTURES

without some justification, with the most iniquitous predatory projects (colonialism, exploitation, and so on) at the heart of which transcendence functioned as a kind of metaphysical palliative. But not only have we made transcendence a bad word; worse still, we have replaced it by a form of “pure immanence,” which, having no anchor point in our Western tradition, has ended up playing the role of an inverted transcendence. The pure immanence of possessive individualism, and the system of accumulation that is inseparable from it, have imposed themselves, through the collapse of any horizon, as the abyssal immanence of consumerism.

Which accounts, to some extent, for our despondency, our sense of inadequacy and hopelessness. We have allowed ourselves to be dispossessed of the transcendent horizon we need if we are to undertake anything of consequence; one might even say that we have ourselves scuppered a burden that we felt was just too much to bear. Much of the discourse around space exploration is charged with vocabulary that suggests less a return to institutional religiosity than simply the progressive acknowledgement of our need for a transcendent horizon, and conversely of the extreme powerlessness that comes from yielding any and all transcendent initiative to the adversary. For it can scarcely be denied that the most dynamic sectors of capitalism (those that are the most innovative in terms of their modes of accumulation) have absolutely never lost their millenarianist faith. Capitalism continues to read its destiny in the stars.

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While the global left busies itself with saving the planet and fighting injustice down here on Earth, with neither faith nor hope in its ability to accomplish such tasks on the scale that it itself acknowledges to be necessary, the most powerful decision-makers of global capitalism are aiming at other horizons that nourish their galactic imaginations: Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Jeff Garzik (Bitcoin), Robert Bigelow (Budget), and Elon Musk (SpaceX) all agree with the latter when he regularly proclaims that while humanity was born on Earth it was never destined to die here, asserting his view that it is of some urgency to come up with a “plan-B” as he describes his project to “occupy” the planet Mars by this century’s end with a “colony” of some one million people. As he puts it with his usual panache, he himself hopes to die on Mars, just not on impact… The Left is not unfounded in recognizing such astronomical megalomania as the height of social irresponsibility—and the word “social” hardly cuts it, since we are talking about a sort of extraterrestrial irresponsibility—but condemns itself to despondency when it satisfies itself with merely denouncing the initiative on the basis of its arsenal of Earth-immanent values, which lack any purchase whatsoever on a dream of this order.

In a fundamental sense, why “on Earth” should we allow ourselves to be dispossessed of the Milky Way just as we have allowed ourselves to be dispossessed of other transcendent horizons? What is at stake—or ought to be—is the

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democratization of the Universe; we need, as it were, to Occupy the Galaxy!

The reality is this: in 2014, the United States’ Congress voted the bipartisan Asteroids Act, subsequently signed by President Obama, in order to “promote the right of United States commercial entities to explore and utilize resources from asteroids in outer space… and to transfer or sell such resources.” The objective was to authorize American mining enterprises to exploit the mineral resources (and in particular platinum-group metals and what are known, ironically, as “rare earth”) found on those small and middle-sized celestial bodies known as asteroids. So to whom does space and the celestial bodies found there actually belong? Whereas the 1967 United Nations Outer Space Treaty forbids nations and private organizations from claiming territory on celestial bodies or in interstellar space (let alone colonizing them), the Treaty is more ambivalent as to whether the exploitation of their natural resources would be allowed, and if so, on what terms. Signed by over ninety countries at the height of the space race and two years before the first lunar landing, the Treaty does not forbid usership or occupation of space—indeed providing a legal framework for the usership of space is precisely its aim—, but clearly distinguishes them from its ownership. Nor is the Treaty purely restrictive. It also has a positive requirement for extraterrestrial conduct: “The exploration and use of outer space,” it declares, “shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic

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or scientific development, and shall be the province of all mankind.”

Now that is a decidedly anthropocentric conception of the universe! But the point is well taken, and as a side note was indeed taken up in 1970 by the Argentine delegate to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, who proposed to legally designate outer space and its resources as “the common heritage of mankind.” The glaring anthropocentric bias notwithstanding, from today’s perspective, the proposal was clearly devised to preempt any American or Soviet “space grab,” and give legal grounding to the peaceful international governance of the galactic commons. As space researcher Nick Levine has persuasively argued, “as the space economy grows relative to the terrestrial one, social dividends from a Galactic Wealth Fund could provide the basis for a truly universal basic income.”

Just what are we talking about when we talk about the “space economy”? Deep Space Industries, a leader in the space-mining sector, has estimated the mined value of a single asteroid at some 193 billion dollars… And since outer space doesn’t—or didn’t use to—fall under a regime of ownership but of free usership by “mankind,” or even life-kind as a whole, that should sound like an exciting prospect.

But because the Left considers that space exploration does not fall within its progressive purview, or feels that the whole CONTRAPUNTAL MEDIA — CONTRAPUNTAL FUTURES

notion is just far too extravagant, we find ourselves witnesses to the steady privatization of the Milky Way. Here the risk is astronomical, for the legal frameworks governing the development of deep space will have enormous consequences on how wealth is distributed throughout our galaxy and beyond. Why not advocate for a galactic democracy, where the benefits of the stellar economy are equitably distributed? For now, the Left’s refusal to take up transcendent initiatives of any kind means that we have in effect given up the celestial commons to Capital, which will waste no time in universalizing, literally, in the firmament the same practices of accumulation that have done such damage down here on Earth.

Again, it should be borne in mind that in the 1960s, at the height of the space race and in the run-up to landing on the moon, extraterrestrial politics were not seen as an escapist distraction: in the 1970s, fighting for the celestial commons was one of the pillars of the non-aligned movement and other actors within the global South for a more equitable economic order. If, today, extraterrestrial economic justice sounds like some kind of obsolete futurism, that is partly because we have banished every last trace of transcendent vocabulary from our political lexicon—sublimating it into our horizon of pure immanence where it remains active beneath the surface—, and seem to fear that even if we were to reintroduce it, we would lack the wherewithal to fulfill our hopes and expectations. After all, doesn’t escaping the Earth’s gravitational capture require a level of capitalization which is simply beyond our means?

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Vanquished by this defeatism, we have come to content ourselves with denouncing instead of taking initiatives. It is high time that we extricate ourselves from the terrestrial immanence in which we have become mired, and if indeed it is still necessary that we denounce something, let it be the alien capitalism that has taken over our lifeworlds and subjugated most everything within them! Upon what kind of extraterrestrial and colonial enterprise does capitalism ultimately impose its name? To answer that question, we need to invert the horizon and change scale, asking ourselves a different question: to what community of usership do the galactic commons ultimately lend their name?

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S T EPHEN WRIGHT co-directs and teaches in the program in Documents and Contemporary Art at the European School of Visual Studies in France.

During the 2016-2017 academic year, he was Visiting Faculty in the MA Aesthetics and Politics program.

Since then, the MA has set up an international student exchange with the program in Documents and Contemporary Art enabling one or two students per academic year to spend up to one semester abroad.

SARA MAMENI

TO FM2030

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You have been waiting for the year 2030 to arrive and it is finally here. You attempt to move a muscle. How would it feel for your left index finger to find some motion? You try to send some heat there. Do you feel it? Sensing an isolated movement is difficult. You cannot discern any deliberate shift in your hand. Your arms stretch alongside your torso as they have been for the past 30 years, floating in liquid nitrogen at -196ºC. You have become accustomed to your light weight, to your static suspension. Your feet levitate.

Your fingers sway in cerulean clouds. Your blood and fluids have long been drained but your veins still feel viscous. A concoction of chemicals run through your organs lubricating them with anti-freeze compounds. When you were still sentient you preferred to refer to these chemicals as “cryoprotectants.” You found it comforting to think of the new inhabitants of your body as its protectors against the cold. Cryoprotectants: the blanket within. You liked the idea of anti-freeze running through your veins to keep your cells from the frost. These chemicals have held your organs together since your mortal body died from Pancreatic cancer in the year 2000. Protector chemical compounds have come to replace the nuisance of fluid life, the leaking mess you never chose to call your self. Your philosophy of life had no patience for the confusion between the body

37 F.M Esfandiary, Optimism One: The Emerging Radicalism. (New York: Norton), 1970, 72.

38 Ibid.

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and the self. The body was the site of seepage, of tears, of saliva, of milk, of semen, of urine. The body was discharge.

You did not believe in the body. It was hairy. It became fatigued and did not catch up with the pace of your dreams.

You wanted a synthetic self, one that functioned without error and without excess. You wanted a body that did not age. A body ridded from disease. From hunger. A body free of heat.

Free of want.

The year 2030 held that promise. This is the year your organic body would have turned 100 years old. You believed you could live that long. 100 years at the very least! You urged us all to wish for more. The future was for dreaming. You wanted immortality. Optimism was a force, a moving current that invited you to flow. In 1970 you published Optimism One: The Emerging Radicalism, a polemic against disgruntled nihilism.

“The attainment of immortality is not far away,” you wrote, “probably by the first decade of the 21st century.” 3 7 You supported this claim with facts. “Suspended animation, transference of the brain to durable bodies, genetic restructuring, anti-gravity, anti-aging techniques—these are some of the methods,” you wrote emphatically, “we know today that could help us achieve eternal life.” 38 You believed in what science could do. You wanted it to lift you from the infirmity of the present and into the assurance of a future without pain.

A future without suffering. But you were not a scientist.

Science was too slow. It was too rooted in the thick of life.

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a scientist is wise to the vitality of matter. Scientists know that matter moves in ways that do not anticipate our will. Matter is dynamic. It can resist us. You respected science. But for you science had a purpose beyond its limitations. It had the capacity to lift and move us into an alternate reality. A world outside of this world. You dreamt with science. It augmented the universe. Your science was not a site of humility. It was not a self-reflective testament to human vulnerability. Science was art, imbued with creative potential.

Reading your work requires a willing suspension of our feet a few inches above ground. Your words stretch out a hand asking us to take an unsteady step into a magnetic force that purports to carry us above gravity. You ask us to levitate. To read you is to feel light. It is to give up the weight of the flesh and to disintegrate into the atomic make-up of the atmosphere. This is no easy task. It requires a leap and not all who have jumped were able to ride the crests of the magnetic wave you offered to hold them. Time and again your readers fell with a thud, splattered onto the hard cement beneath their feet. Your editors felt an urgent responsibility to point out the air you floated on. Herman Gollob, the editor in chief of Atheneum publishers mailed back your manuscript with a cover letter that read, “Maybe I am just bogged down in pre-universalist thought patterns” but “as a punctual, earth-bound, dehumanized drone, I couldn’t help wondering where all those Universalist One citizens of nowhere were going to get the money (dare I mention it?) to enjoy their nomadic leisure life. Seriously,” he went on, “it just seems to me SARA MAMENI — TO FM2030

39 F.M Esfandiary, Up-Wingers.

(New York: John Day Co.), 1973, 116.

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that there isn’t enough at the core of Esfandiary’s ideas to support his futuristic visions.” Rummaging through your archives, I found a cacophony of such letters from your readers. A mixture of awe and pragmatism. They all shared your desires: A desire for the abolition of property, a desire to be a Universalist citizen of a world without borders, without genders, without power, without hierarchy, without oppression, without disease. They shared your desires for fluidity when they read you say, “why should I accept this particular body of mine? Why not different bodies different sizes different shapes different colors? Why know only this specific sex? Why not the other sex or an alteration between both sexes or the confusion of the sexes?” 39 They were intrigued when you changed your name from Fereidoun M. Esfandiary to FM2030 to present yourself as a model for a Univeralist future rather than the nationalist and familial past. These were the aspirations of your fans, your editors, your students, your political supporters and your enemies alike. Yet at every turn, they needed the solidity of an aircraft, rather than the havoc of a typhoon, to guide them.

Today, as you float in a thermos tank of liquid nitrogen at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale Arizona, a heavy trail of paperwork you once accumulated rest in the air-conditioned holdings of the New York Public Library.

Newspaper clippings, journal articles, correspondences, pamphlets, minutes from meetings, manuscript drafts, notebooks, audio recordings. All weighing heavy in boxes CONTRAPUNTAL MEDIA — CONTRAPUNTAL FUTURES

waiting to be opened by inquisitive researchers intrigued by your obscure identity as an Iranian futurologist. When I found your name in the library’s catalogue, I was struck by your fantasy to be a person of the future. Like many readers before me, I identified with your buoyancy, with your optimistic outlook on life. Unlike most however, I was not reading your texts and the ephemera in your archives looking for facts. I did not need concrete support for your ideas, a technical blueprint for how to proceed into an immortal future. Instead, I was interested in what guided your optimism. Were you a capitalist technocrat praising technological advancements of your time?

Were you a social activist fighting for the distribution of wealth amongst the poor? Were you a feminist fighting for the abolition of gender hierarchies and patriarchal family structures?

I had these questions because all these positions were concurrently present within the pages of your books, manifestos and mission statements drafted for your classroom instruction and organized groups. I wondered where you stood in relation to these various political positions.

I look through a small notebook that documented your process of conceptualizing your new name: FM2030. First you decided to simplify your name with mere initials FME. But then you crossed out the E that stood for your family name Esfandiary.

You did not need an origin. No heritage. No baggage. You kept FM and tried out a few numbers. FM84? FM500? FM2121? You settled on FM2030. You wrote down a few notes about your choice of 2030: “happy time, an important time, a time that SARA MAMENI — TO FM2030

40 41

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Ibid, 8-9.

Ibid.

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draws me, a switchover time, a goal, a dream.” You liked that 2030 had both even and odd numbers. You liked that it was a 21st century number. You asked yourself in your notebook: “Where are you from?” Then answered “I am from the future.”

You asked yourself, “Are you running away from someone or something? (Are you a fugitive from the law?)” You answered, “Yes, I am running away from obsolescence (I am a fugitive from obsolescence).” I look at your newspaper clippings. You have gathered articles with names that combine numbers and letters: The musical groups U2 and B-52, the Colombian leftist guerrilla group M-19, the serial interface connecting computers to modems RS-232C, new star developments in the Milky Way Bernard 5 and Lynds 1642, The English-speaking robot dev-eloped at UC Berkeley RB5X. You also collected people’s rationale for changing their names. A clipping about a divorced woman who wanted to invent her own name after dropping her husband’s adopted surname. A clipping on Boy George, the lead singer of the music group Culture Club, who sidestepped queries about gender presentation and sexual preference.

Based on these notes, I have imagined a few interpretations for FM. What does FM stand for? Fake Moniker? Future Man? Future Model? Fictional Method? Fantasy Mode? Female Male? Fluid Masculinity? Forced Migration? Forgotten Motherland? False Messiah? Does FM index your unwavering Faith in Modernity? Modernity as a fantasy that never arrives? You may have crossed out your family name, presented yourself as a person with no origins, a man with only a future and CONTRAPUNTAL MEDIA — CONTRAPUNTAL FUTURES

no past, yet you subscribe to age old assimilationist strategies for those who find themselves left out of the promise of Modernity. You were denied Modernity but you are determined to find it. You are Optimism One. You will find Modernity so that you can stand tall before your Iranian countrymen granting them a future more Modern than the one they ever imagined. In your book Up-Wingers published in 1973, you provide us with a clue to the political foundation of your optimism. “The Right-Left establishment is fighting a losing battle” you wrote, “Up is an entirely new framework whose premises and goals transcend the conventional Right and Left.” 40 What you were looking for was a new directionality. Up was uplifting, transcendental and cosmic. Up was the spatial and temporal coordinates of Modernity. Up, you said, was the perspective of astronomers scanning galaxies in search of intelligent life. It was the position of those “working on phytotrons and nuclear food plants which can provide endless quantities of food” and of “bio-engineers striving to conquer death.” 41 Up was also a third way, a path beyond the two dominant— capitalist/communist—positions of the 1970s. Despite your symbolic renouncement of your surname, your heritage, your nationality and your traditions, your search for a third way resonates with the revolutionary spirit of Iranians in the 1970s. Your words echo the slogans chanted by Iranian protestors on the streets, “Na Sharghi, Na Gharbi, Jomhoori Islami!” (No East, No West, Islamic Republic!). You wanted a third way out of the cold war binary and you selected Up, a cosmic awakening.

SARA MAMENI — TO FM2030

42 Quoted in feature on his work

by Wes Thomas and Jeremey Wiesen, “The Case for Optimism”, The Futurist, April 1972, 68-69.

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Yet your path to the heavens could not have been more different than the collective will of the Iranians on the streets who elected a spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, to guid them. Dear FM, are you the Flipped Mirror image of Khomeini, whom you have managed to keep out of your texts, out of your archives? How did you reckon with his presence, with the explosion of his media images, with his impact on the minds and souls of the nation?

Was your silence an absolute refutation of his call for the return of religion in the socio-political life of Iranians? Or is his absence a sign of your inability to fathom the logics of his arrival? You must have watched him on television, as we all did, on the day he landed in Iran, stepping off Air France, after his time in exile in Paris. You must have watched the tail of his long robe catching the wind, his hand raised to salute his followers across the nation. Dear FM, were you a False Messiah believing in Modernity when Iranians had already revolved gazing back at what was lost in Modernity’s wake? Despite your optimism and your aspirational manifestos, your future was out of step with what the masses of Iranians storming the streets were striving for. Your Modernity was the cloak of Western imperialism that Iranian revolutionaries were attempting to shed.

It is puzzling that you chose not to examine the imperial logics of Modernity’s lag within the Third World. Instead, you blamed us for our own sufferings. You placed your faith in the progressive time of Modernity for our deliverance. “People who are brought up with the conviction that they are inherently wicked

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and do not deserve success or happiness are unlikely to rejoice in mankind’s success or allow themselves to be optimistic about human progress,” you wrote emphatically, “to bring glad tidings to such people, to show them for instance that things are going well for mankind, does not elicit pleasure but hostility. Hope, success, happiness, triumph, immortality—these are threatening. The word optimism itself makes them cringe.” 42 The question of why such people thought of themselves as “wicked” and not deserving of “success and happiness” was not the question you wanted to ask. Instead, you wanted us to change our outlook on life. You wanted us to let go of our “hostility” and share in the triumph of mankind. You set yourself as an example—a Future Model—by including yourself within the category of “mankind.” You offered us this anecdote to clarify your point One night in the old town of Bushire, Iran, I sat with several local children on a cliff overlooking the Persian Gulf. “Look out there,” I said.

“That shining star is a satellite. It was sent out recently.” The youngsters looked up and followed the satellite as it slowly glided across the sky. One of them whispered, “Did we send that up there?” “Who do you mean by we?” I asked.

“I mean we—people.” “Yes we sent that out there, we—people. Not the Russians, not the

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43

Esfandiary, Optimism One, 79.

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Americans, but we—humans.” Those youngsters and millions like them around the world are growing up with a more confident view of humankind and its potential. 43 You suggested that a mere inclusion of ourselves within the category of “we—people” was enough to share in the benefits of mankind’s ascent to the stars. You wanted the optimism of a youngster without the demoralizing experience of its repeated suppression over time and over the course of generations.

Perhaps it was your fixed gaze Up and ahead that prevented you from partaking in the political life of your contemporaries.

Perhaps you were more preoccupied with the category of “human” and your rightful place within it than you cared to admit.

Why hold onto the idea of “human”? What was so appealing about humankind that lured you in? Why offer the affairs of humanity as the guiding path for the Iranian youth when much of your texts spoke of the obsolescence of the “human”?

Wasn’t humanity mired in a fleshy, ideological and territorial reality that you wanted to escape? Did you not ask us, in your books and speeches, to let go of our attachments to our human bodies? Did you not embrace a future detached from physical and territorial coordinates? Did you not see a future that did not include humanity in the shape and form we had always known? So why offer the Iranian youth what you had yourself left behind? Why ask them to partake in humanity’s achievements, when the “human” was no longer an operative word?

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You outlined the immanent obsolescence of the human in you 1989 book, Are You A Transhuman? This is not a book preoccupied with the “human” but with how we have already come to surpass it as a viable entity to think with. You envisioned a near future where most bodily functions were assisted and regulated through chemical and technological means. This was a time of cyborgs infused and enhanced with synthetic materials. This was a time of embellishment and bioprotection.

Becoming transhuman was not a reality out of reach. You believed that we had already arrived at a moment when we could test how transhuman we already were. You proposed that we test our participation within a transhuman world by asking ourselves a few simple questions: “Do you have a high-tech body?” “Are you teleconnected to people and services via on-body (portable) telecom?” “Are you androgynous?” “Are you a product of sexual insemination?” “Does your brain contain a pacemaker?” “Are you post-territorial: Free of kinship ties—Ethnicity—Nationality?” “Are your body processes such as moods monitored and regulated?” Every time you answered “yes!” to any of these questions, you were gliding into a future designed for you.

I wonder how you reconciled your contradictory positions on the politics of the “human.” How did you believe that we have embarked onto the age of the “transhuman” while at once encouraging dispossessed Iranian youths to carve a place for themselves within the category of the human? Perhaps your

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use of the term “transhuman” was simply a new way of saying “human.” Perhaps what you were forecasting was a future where to be human was to be the beneficiary of high-tech industries teleconnecting bodies across the globe. Perhaps yours was not a trans-human future at all, but one that expelled non-cyborg bodies outside of humanity itself. Perhaps what you saw was a future in which to be human was a privileged category to attain.

I am left wondering how you imagined one could opt into and out of such a future? Does one simply say “yes!” with enthusiasm and unwavering optimism to share in the benefits of a “transhuman” future?

The year 2030 is almost upon us. You await further developments in genome decoding technologies in order to be reanimated back to life. You await the cure for pancreatic cancer, the cause of the migration of your mortal body from social life into a vat of liquid nitrogen. Where does your soul reside while your body awaits? Does it visit your cells updating them about scientific advancements? Does it remain optimistic as it anticipates your return? I imagine your haunting medical facilities. I imagine your soul entering the mutated tissues of your pancreas and lower abdomen. I imagine it floating through the cells of your body reassuring them that the year 2030 is only 11 years away.

CONTRAPUNTAL MEDIA — CONTRAPUNTAL FUTURES

S A RA MAMENI is Faculty in the MA Aesthetics and Politics program at the California Institute of the Arts where she teaches Art Theory with a focus on the Middle East and theories of race and gender.

ME DIA/

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The text originates in a footnote (note 34, page 234) from my book Finance Fictions: Realism and Psychosis in a Time of Economic Crisis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018).

NEVER MIND THE POLLOCKS?

ART AND FINANCIAL FICTION

EDITOR'S NOTE This is the text of a lecture that I delivered at the Chronus Art Center in Shanghai in the Fall of 2017. The talk was part of the Leonardo Art, Science and Technology Lectures.

It is reproduced here exactly as I delivered it, and without footnotes, footnote references, or bibliography.

Readers interested in the latter can find a much expanded version of the text in: Askin, Ridvan, Frida Beckman, and David Rudrum, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to New Directions in Philosophy and Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (forthcoming).

1 THE ECONOMIC PRESENT

I would like to use this occasion to think

a little more about how in cultural representations of automated, algorithmic trading and artificial intelligence, the work of Jackson Pollock has emerged as an at first sight perhaps unlikely inspiration for the technological innovations that have drastically transformed today’s economies and contemporary human life. For this, it’s useful to start with a quick description of our contemporary economic situation because we need this to understand why Pollock would appear in finance’s cultural representations.

With his general formula of capital, the economic theorist Karl Marx laid bare how capitalism turns money (M) into money that is worth money (M’) through the intermediary of the commodity (C): M-C-M’ is the formula that captures this movement. Today, however, the commodity is no longer central to wealth production. Commodities have been replaced by financial instruments

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like packages of mortgages, or insurance policies, or student loans also—I’m thinking of the so-called Collateralized Debt Obligations for example that, in their toxic form, caused the crash of 2007-2008.

In addition, it’s important to realize that today, the bustling trading floor that many still imagine when the stock market is evoked is drastically outdated—it’s an anachronistic representation of the market. The last human-occupied seat on the New York Stock Exchange was recently sold. Humans are still around on the trading floor, but they are largely there to supervise the trading that digital agents—algorithms—are doing. Such trading often happens very fast (hence, the term high-frequency trading or HFT): in the case of an HFT-caused crash like the 2010 “flash crash”, for example, it happened so fast that neither humans nor computers were able to record the number of trades that took place during the market collapse. Abstract and complex, and fast as hell, this kind of capitalism—financial capitalism or finance—poses a major challenge to representation: in theory, but also in the arts (the literary, visual, and performing arts). Fredric Jameson is one critic who has written insightfully about this and his work has been picked up for example in Jeffrey Kinkle and Alberto Toscano’s Cartographies of the Absolute (which deals with the mappings of finance).

How could art capture not only the baffling complexity of financial reality but also its stark non-humanness?

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How could it render the speed at which today’s financial markets operate? These are important questions for artists who want to engage the digital economy in their work.

For those who thought that Jameson’s book on postmodernism had settled the issue (and who had perhaps regretted that settling it through postmodernism risked to lead too far away from actual finance, from a realism of actual finance), it’s been interesting to see that in literature for example, when it comes to novels about the 2007-2008 financial crisis, “realism” is back; you see novelists making a concerted effort to “explain” finance to their readers in the aftermath of the crash. But what kind of realism is needed here, given our financial situation?

Certainly it is not the aesthetic that the novelist Tom Wolfe, author of the financial novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, advocated way back in 1989: a journalistic, “social” realism that would merely flex its epistemic muscle in the face of the increased abstraction and complexity of the financial world. It seems, rather, that with the reality of markets today—with the reality of digitized trading environments in which non-human agents are acting at speeds that neither humans nor computers can fully record (or, as a consequence, regulate)—we are experiencing an ontological shift that in part gives the finger to old-school realism à la Wolfe—it certainly would need a little bit of Jameson’s postmodernism mixed in. Perhaps the appropriate aesthetic here would be more speculative than postmodern; perhaps ARNE DE BOEVER — NEVER MIND THE POLLOCKS?

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we need a little sci-fi (science fiction) to render today’s realist fi-fi (financial fiction) effective.

I suggest this partly in view of the fact that the imagery that’s often used to describe today’s financial reality is, for lack of a better term, “cosmic”. It’s the imagery of the universe, of the Big Bang and black holes. With its private, non-transparent, and largely unregulated HFT environments called “dark pools”, for example, contemporary finance has arguably entered into the realm of the “dark ideas” of physics (like “dark matter” or “black holes”). In the case of HFT, its association with black holes certainly seems justified even at a superficial level: while HFT is supposed to add liquidity to the market by increasing trading volume overall, it is clear that such an increase in volume merely creates a liquidity effect. The algorithms aren’t interested in the value of actual stocks, they are merely interested in buying and selling at a very high speed in order to profit from minimal differences in price (so-called arbitrage) or from fees that various markets award for buying or selling (fees that can amount to substantial sums if you manage to buy or sell hundreds of thousands of time per day, for many days). This means that when the chips are down, and the market appears to be in distress, HFT liquidity will disappear like snow under the sun—the clearest sign that HFT does not represent a real investment in the market.

In other words, HFT has a kind of vacuum-effect on the market that some have compared to the ways in which, CONTRAPUNTAL MEDIA — CONTRAPUNTAL FUTURES

within the horizon of a black hole, all the information gets sucked toward the extreme gravity of the center; beyond the horizon, nothing gets out.

But there is more: some of the actual HFT science, some of its actual algorithms, were developed by physicists who were working on black holes. For example, Henry Laufer, the former head of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, did his PhD in Astronomy at Princeton and wrote a book about black holes. There is a real confluence between astrophysics and finance that should be considered here. The sociologist Karen Knorr Cetina, who used to work on high energy physics, has done this in her work. I’m also thinking of James Owen Weatherall’s book The Physics of Wall Street.

So that, very quickly, is the particular financial reality that I have in mind when I ask my central question, namely how can art help us think about the technological infrastructures of today’s digitized economies that have rendered finance cosmic?

2 FINANCE IN LITERATURE AND FILM

Sticking with financial novels for a

moment, it’s interesting to consider the kind of art that they feature. I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the walls of the financial novel for example would be adorned with art. In Bret Easton Ellis’ American

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Psycho—which is a classic of the financial fiction genre and has been deemed by some as “the first neoliberal novel”—, one comes across art by Cindy Sherman, Eric Fischl, Julian Schnabel, Frank Stella, George Stubbs (the odd one out, for sure), and most memorably David Onica. But one really just crosses these artists and their works in the novel in passing.

Their paintings are mentioned in the same way that other commodities are. There is no depth to the engagement.

They are merely there as markers of wealth.

I want to argue here, however, that with Pollock’s presence in the finance novel, things are different. Pollock is there to help us understand how today, finance operates.

Let’s consider which art specifically can be found in the financial novel. In American Psycho it is, with the exception of George Stubbs, contemporary art; and of course it would have to be contemporary art that appears in the financial novel as a value-generating instrument par excellence.

Consider simply the collection of the newly opened Broad Museum in Los Angeles, which appears to hold together as an “investment” alone. It includes the usual suspects: Jeff Koons, for example.

One other good example would be the Young British Artist Damien Hirst. Koons and Hirst both appear in Michel Houellebecq’s financial novel The Map and the Territory (not Alan Greenspan’s book about the 2007-2008 financial crisis, which has the same title; Houellebecq’s was published first).

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The Map and the Territory opens with a description of the artist Jed Martin at work on a painting titled “Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market”—a painting that in the same section of the novel he also destroys. When the novel’s opening section ends with the artist “seiz[ing] a palette knife [and] cut[ting] open Damien Hirst’s eye” because he thinks he has been making “a truly shitty painting” [“un tableau de merde”, in the original French; “a shit painting”], the reader can appreciate the destruction of the painting in part because it brings down two icons of the art/value connection, Hirst and Koons.

This scene comes at the beginning of a novel that is obsessively engaged with economics. It traces the career of a contemporary artist who starts out as a photographer, recording objects at the end of the era of industrial production, and experiences the first height of his career when he starts photographing Michelin maps—hence the novel’s title.

Here, with the problematic of the map and the territory, we have a perfectly good reason why art may be prominently present in financial fiction: as a reminder of the challenges that finance’s abstraction and complexity poses to representation—something I already mentioned earlier on. But that question also brings within its scope something else, namely what one could call the issue of a scientific financial realism: the issue of whether the reality of finance, of today’s financial markets, can be truthfully described and understood (and, ultimately, predicted). That issue comes to prominence in the second half of the novel,

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when The Map and the Territory after a gruesome murder (whose victim is none other than the author Michel Houellebecq) abruptly shifts into detective novel mode.

The detective, however, is married to Hélène, an economics professor whose “interest in economics had waned considerably over the years”, as the novel tells us: More and more, the theories that tried to explain economic phenomena, to predict their developments, appeared almost equally inconsistent and random. She was more and more tempted to liken them to pure and simple charlatanism; it was even surprising, she occasionally thought, that they gave a Nobel Prize for economics, as if this discipline could boast of the same methodological seriousness, the same intellectual rigor as chemistry, or physics. And her interest in teaching had also waned considerably.

Economics is not a science. One wonders, by analogy, whether police work is.

Now, the site where this impossibility of detection is found is on the one hand, that of a financial crisis, and, on the other, that of a gruesome murder. But, and here’s where I arrive— finally—at the core of my concerns: it is also the site of art.

While her husband does his utmost to describe a murder and understand a murderer in order to prevent him from striking again, the novel has Hélène doubt those same endeavors on the economic front.

When the painter Jed Martin sees photographs of the site of the murder at the detective’s office, he responds: “It’s funny… it looks like a Pollock, but a Pollock who would have worked almost in monochrome”. When he finds out what the images “represent in reality”, he collapses. Later though, Martin will take his statement back, saying: “You know, it’s just a rather mediocre imitation of a Pollock. There are forms and drips, but the whole thing is arranged mechanically, there’s no force, no vital élan”. It is perhaps this “mechanical” removal from “life” that anticipates that in The Map and the Territory, Houellebecq’s murderer will ultimately be found. Detection is possible. The murder is no Pollock, so it is possible to map it. Realism remains intact after all—but as “mediocre imitation”. Regardless of what the case might be, it’s worth noting that it is around Pollock that these issues get played out in Houellebecq’s novel.

What Hélène is taking on is, in a sense, the expert’s capacity to “detect” the markets. And she is arguing that such detection, such a realism of the market, is impossible.

Again, it is not surprising that there would be a Jackson Pollock in a finance novel. Pollock is one of the few contemporary artists on that dubious list of “most expensive artists”.

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But my point is that there are other, more substantial reasons why Pollock is there.

In Teddy Wayne’s finance novel Kapitoil, it is Jackson Pollock’s paintings, or rather what Pollock has said about his paintings, that inspire the Qatar-born Karim Issar to develop an algorithm that can predict the fluctuations of oil prices. “Then I enter an exhibit on the American Jackson Pollock”, Issar (who is working hard on his English) writes in his journal. “At first I do not enjoy his paintings. They are too chaotic and have no logic and organization like Mondrian’s. … But then I see some quotations by Pollock about his paintings, such as: ‘I don’t use the accident—‘cause I deny the accident’ … And I reevaluate that possibly Pollock’s paintings have more value, because he has a philosophy similar to mine, which is that life is ultimately predictable”. Thus, Issar’s algorithm is born, and it turns out to be wildly successful. It is Pollock, one of the most expensive contemporary artists, who is pre-sented as having contributed to this financial boom. Pollock is here as a maker of wealth rather than as its mere marker.

Compare and contrast Issar’s rather limited association of Pollock with a certain kind of automation, to how Pollock appears in Alex Garland’s recent film Ex Machina, in which a character called Nathan Bateman lets one of his employees in on the Artificial Intelligence called “Ava” that he has created.

One of the scenes in which Bateman is trying to explain the reasoning that lies behind his AI’s brain takes place in what

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the script refers to as “the Pollock room”—the conversation happens in front of a Pollock painting (specifically, Pollock’s painting “No. 5, 1948”—one of the most expensive paintings ever sold). Pollock is crucial to Bateman’s understanding of how AI is “automatic”: Jackson Pollock. The drip painter. He let his mind go blank, and his hand go where it wanted.

Not deliberate, not random. Someplace in between. … What if Pollock had reversed the challenge? Instead of trying to make art without thinking, he said: I can’t paint unless I know exactly why I’m doing it. What would have happened?

His employee replies: “He never would have made a single mark”.

Bateman concludes: “The challenge is not to act automatically. It’s to find an action that’s not automatic” (emphases mine). This is what his AI project is all about. And again, though in a different way than in Kapitoil, it comes from Pollock.

Once again, Pollock is not merely a marker of wealth, and specifically here of a certain kind of intelligence; he also helps make that intelligence. And this kind of intelligence is changing the financial industry today (I am thinking of algorithmic trading in particular).

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So Pollock in Ex Machina and in Kapitoil becomes a site where different understandings of AI are played out.

3 POLLOCK

But why Pollock?

At first sight, the ironies of the turn to Pollock in these contexts appear to be multiple: certainly, it is striking to see a painter whose work is generally associated with the Depression Era, and who from 1935 until 1943 was employed by the United States government (as part of the Works Project Association of the Federal Arts Project), aligned with high finance and extreme wealth in this way—even if Pollock’s “No. 5, 1948” is now one of the most expensive paintings ever sold.

In addition, one should note that even if Pollock himself insisted that his work was “No chaos, damn it!”, it was still about the freedom of human expression—it seems odd to have it be brought in alliance here with AI, which tends to be associated first and foremost with surveillance society, “the black box society”, society of control or the notion of “algorithmic governance”.

And yet, it is the art historian Pamela Lee who has drawn out not in a direct way but by carefully mapping out Pollock’s historical moment, Pollock’s place in the history of contemporary algorithmic culture—the “digital legacy”, as she calls it, of the historical moment of which Pollock was very much a part. In her work on “Think Tank Aesthetics”, Lee puts Pollock’s painting, CONTRAPUNTAL MEDIA — CONTRAPUNTAL FUTURES

which Pollock himself situated entirely within the representational and not the abstract (Pollock rejected the term abstract expressionism, as Lee points out), in dialogue with a Cold War intellectual and military culture. Thus, she lays bare Pollock’s role in what in another chapter of the same book project she calls “the military–aesthetic complex”. Here, Pollock’s nonchaotic painting becomes part of a Cold War obsession with patterning, with the deciphering of abstract form into representation so that, for example, enemy behavior could be predicted.

Lee finds this discourse in anthropology, and notes the government’s interest in it around 1947; Pollock’s painting and the discourse around it, she suggests, need to be read within the same context, with a methodological overlap between all three— anthropology, the military, and art. At stake in a Pollock are the very same issues that fascinate those other fields at the time.

And those issues continue all the way into today’s digital age.

When it comes to patterning for prediction, it seems that Pollock and the New York School of painters with which he was associated would have resisted this—and so there’s a move back towards the abstract when the insistence on representationalism starts operating in the service of predictability—and here is where certain rifts in the military-aesthetic complex open up.

Lee does not consider the realm of finance in which her conclusions could also begin to apply; certainly when it comes to patterning in order to predict, algorithmic approaches to today’s markets can easily be considered within her framework, and Pollock’s shuttling between the representational and the ARNE DE BOEVER — NEVER MIND THE POLLOCKS?

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abstract on this count becomes very meaningful as a position that would resist approaches that claim to render markets predictable through algorithmic patterning.

I would also be tempted to push Lee’s art historical approach further towards the present, to ask how more contemporary artists—with Pollock, we are circa 1947 after all—are addressing these issues. Who are, in other words, the contemporary artists who, after Pollock, can be said to be taking on these issues?

One can think, for example, of Keith Tyson’s “The Art Machine” (1990-2000), which Tyson describes on his website as a “real computational system”. Tyson used it to make art through “a set of algorithms, flowcharts, and computer programs”. Starting from a few variables, and based on an elaborate decision-tree process, Tyson would arrive at an algorithmically generated work of art—a more contemporary, and more literal version, of “automatic art”.

One can find something similar in the realm of curation. The emerging French curator Aude Launay has coined the term “algocurating” to refer, among other things, to a practice of curation that uses an algorithm called “Curatron” (created by the Canadian artist Cameron MacLeod) to select artists and works for an exhibition.

Unsurprisingly, some contemporary artists working on algorithms have turned to finance as a key concern. In a recent issue of the journal 02 which she edits, Launay interviews the

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French artistic research platform RYBN—one of the most important contemporary artistic agents to engage with finance—about “The Great Offshore”, an artistic project about “tax havens”.

RYBN was born on the internet as a group of mostly experimental musicians and sound practitioners who are interested in “software perversion, intrusion, and obfuscation practices”. Adopting what they call, after Brian Holmes, an “extra-disciplinary approach”, RYBN have taken up algorithmic trading and highfrequency trading as a central concern. For one of their projects, “Antidatamining”, they designed algorithms that they let loose to operate on the financial markets, monitoring their activities and performance—they worked with a starting grant of $10,000, which they were given by the French Ministry of Culture.

Like RYBN’s earlier works, “The Great Offshore” deals with the “issues of economics and governance, algorithms and the irrational” and “[uses] analyses of algorithmic black boxes, of the secret and occult practices of finance” among other methods.

Echoing my discussion of Houellebecq’s finance novel, “The Great Offshore” operates in part as a detective project. It is “set up like an investigation, undertaken blind in the thick legal and accounting fog of offshore finance”, as RYBN put it—“an investigation based on significant documentary research, culminating in the collection of eclectic documents… in which we seek out, in paranoid mode, all the clues, signs, repercussions and relations making it possible to reveal and shed light on the structural and fundamental nature of tax evasion practices”.

ARNE DE BOEVER — NEVER MIND THE POLLOCKS?

A R NE DE BOEVER is Director of the MA Aesthetics and Politics program at the California Institute of the Arts, where he teaches aesthetic theory, political thought, and contemporary comparative fiction.

106 Echoing Pollock’s shuttling between the representational and the abstract (and back), they point out that “it is also from the fog itself, from that conditional and constitutive opaqueness, that we try to extricate signs: empty signs, closed signs, negative signs … but also full, positive signs”.

At heart, this is a project of representation that seeks to address the limits of current systems of representation that fail in the face of finance. Ultimately, for them such a project is political since tax evasion marks the limit of what they consider to be neo-liberal politics and economics— it ultimately enables a rational criticism of contemporary market governance. So while there is a sense that RYBN uses finance as a kind of “artistic playground”, as one of their members puts it, the core of this play is critical and political.

There are plenty of other examples, but I with RYBN one can see particularly well how they operate in the shadow of the historical moment that Pamela Lee construes around Pollock’s work, as Pollock’s digital inheritor, so to speak. Building on Lee’s military-aesthetic complex, we find a military-aesthetic-financial (I insist on financial rather than industrial) complex here that, I hope you will agree, is worth considering further.

CONTRAPUNTAL MEDIA — CONTRAPUNTAL FUTURES

Contrapuntal Media (CPM) is a pamphlet series published through the MA Aesthetics and Politics program housed in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. CPM seeks to be an aesthetic medium for provocative, polemical points that incite counterpoints.

CPM features research-in-progress that is presented publicly with minimal editorial intervention or attention to the formalities of scholarly publishing.

V2 CONTRIBUTORS Arne De Boever Norman Klein Sara Mameni Marisa L. MĂŠndez-Brady Stephen Wright

CREATIVE DIRECTOR Stuart Smith

DESIGN Christina Huang

COPY EDITOR Ani Tatintsyan

MA Aesthetics & Politics Program School of Critical Studies California Institute of the Arts

criticalstudies.calarts.edu

V2 CONTRAPUNTAL FUTURES SPRING 2019 EDITED BY ARNE DE BOEVER

MA AESTHETICS AND POLITICS PROGRAM CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS

ARNE DE BOEVER

NORMAN KLEIN

SARA MAMENI

MARISA L. MÉNDEZ-BRADY

STEPHEN WRIGHT

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