Contrapuntal Media, Vol. 1

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V1 ART AND REASON SPRING 2018 EDITED BY ARNE DE BOEVER

CONTRA/ PUNTAL/ MEDIA/

CONTRA/ PUNTAL/ MEDIA/

A PAMPHLET SERIES V1 ART AND REASON SPRING 2018 EDITED BY ARNE DE BOEVER

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

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AMANDA BEECH HOW ART OUGHT TO THINK

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JAMES WILTGEN ROLLING TOWARDS X

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ARNE DE BOEVER AESTHETIC EXCEPTIONALISM

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ANDREW CULP FROM THE LINE OF REASON TO THE BLACK ARROW

JANET SARBANES FORMS OF AUTONOMY, AUTONOMY OF FORM

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1 Umberto Eco, The Open Work, Trans.

Anna Concogni, Harvard University Press, 1989.

AMANDA BEECH

HOW ART OUGHT TO THINK

RESUSCITATING THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROJECT

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To situate its critique and, by extension, its value, Art has often proposed itself as a space that eludes or opposes reason. Through this, art’s critique can afford us certain temporal and spatial freedoms from the dominance that reason brings. This type of thinking is most often nonspecific; it is not directed towards any type of thought, or thought in particular, and in this sense, art transcends aesthetic categorization and works in the field of nonrepresentational economies that refuse the casual explanations of Kantian sufficient reason. This critique as an antagonist of reason is evidenced in paradigms of the sublime as well as in poststructuralist deconstructions of meaning across the work of Baudrillard, Lyotard and Derrida. Here we find a proliferation of images in what Eco discussed as ‘the open work,’1 which guarantees a form of adolescent anarchism of the image that reason cannot order, reproduce or comprehend: an immanent critique beats the normativity of reason.

The dominance that critique affords to reason conjures reason within the dogmatisms of a faith in the Enlightenment and its diabolical affects. The view of reason and its stamp in the political can be traced all the way from Colonial power to now, in societies of control, the ordering of minds and bodies, spaces and meaning itself, where we confront what in many senses appears to us as a world that we cannot

2 Ernst Junger’s diagnosis of the labor of reason in his book The Worker, Dominion and Form, (1932) clarifies these errors.

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reconcile with reason but is a product of it. Today, we are well aware that this world borne from reason is a world of complex immaterial labors, elusive markets and ubiquitous forms of power; a world that exacerbates and sustains ruthless hierarchical divisions whose naturalization further aids and abets further abuses of power.

The equivalence between reason, representationalism and overdetermining forms of political power is a narrative that subtends and pervades modern and contemporary philoso-phical critique, but this view is not only shared by the Left.

It is also highlighted by the Right in a popular suspicion of the public intellectual that pervades global media and society, where suspicion towards any demonstration of thinking remains live. Both Left and Right share an opposition to order in this sense; the Left in the name of egalitarianism, and the Right in the name of a politics of individuation, difference and accumulation. Together, these condemnations of reason identify reason as a cultic value that is destined to evil forms of dominance. Reason is a threat to both community and self-hood.

But, from the studio to the essay, it is normatively expected that the work of contemporary art is to make us think. What is this thinking? The answer is that, for contemporary art, the general claim to think must operate without telos, project or aim. It discloses the bottom-line belief that by dint of being constructed, by simply being, art (ironically) represents the opposition to the normativity of reason itself from the side of critique as a mode of a non-representational being as presence.

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To make some first observations, these accounts fail to make a distinction between reason as cult, reason as the base constitution of what it means to be human (as nature), and reason as labor or work.2 These distinctions are key to diagnosing the characterization of reason that has defined a critical culture for some time, where critique as resistance precedes reason. Due to these unproductive demarcations and indistinctions, reason is overdetermined as a fateful inevitability that manifests ruthless hierarchies in the political; it is a patsy for the status quo. These characterizations of reason therefore require re-thinking with reason itself.

Robert Brandom’s work has dealt in detail with what he refers to as the discursive space of reasons. Across many works he writes about how reason demands a public space where we navigate and construct norms. In “the space of reasons” we live in the image, but ask each other to agree on conditions by which to live, and to orientate a future that we take seriously. What reason asks for, and the thing that might scare us the most today, is the offer of potential for agreement that we might then have to act on; i.e. that there is no easy way to communitarian consensus and that voluntaristic free will is a myth. Reason is the act of thinking that justifies itself through producing arguments. It is the space where we make sense of what is given to us, and through this we produce material and conceptual inferences that constitute the basis for life, and therefore it is the space where what is given is contested. Reason then is thinking in context, but it is also the space in which the future is oriented. The logical

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processes of conceptual inference do not call upon empirical grounds that correlate a claim to a thing, but are abductive and demand commitments that lead us to other forms of thought, where premises generate conclusions in future dynamics. Reason then, is the space within which judgements are made and formed, and the discursive space of reasons is where the task of reason is taken, not just to think in public, but to reason better. Here, reason is marked as a political project as opposed to a description of the nature of thinking.

These observations about reason ask us first to think about how art thinks, but also how art has defined this in its history.

Given this historical claim to art’s nature as critique and the self-delimiting factors of this approach, what are alternative and different comprehensions of art’s claim to a critical project now, and can these be made in the name of reason?

With this question I explore the limits of both Art’s claim to criticality as much as its claim against reason. From this I determine an art that is undeterred by the thought of thinking as the work of reason. In this site of a different and possible world of and for Art, I seek to reorganize art’s epistemological project; a place that enables art to direct itself to how it ought to think.

ART AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Art has demonstrated its critical

explication of art as manifest thought in a self-conscious critique of the means of its own production. In the history of Art we have seen art produce pictures

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3 Gustav Courbet’s work “The Desperate Man” 1843-45, lubricates this problem of reason where we apparently swing between this depiction of the artist’s mind, and a “Modernist-scientific rendition” of realist life in such works as “The Artist’s Studio: A Real Allegory” 1855, in his empirical realism of everyday life, to its apparent opposite, the manifest ego of private artistic suffering in the romance of his selfportrait. Obviously, Courbet’s realism is fascinating in this regard as the realist works all aggrandize the artist in some form or other, the joy of self-reference as person.

of “human consciousness” as a point of reflection on the question of what we can and cannot know; what is within and what is beyond our control. Here, explicates a thinking about itself in itself, where the means and ends of consciousness are manifest in aesthetic appearance: The existential primacy of consciousness has been taken by art as an object of artistic inquiry – art about the author for instance.3 This means that Art has attempted to understand what consciousness is by distancing us, our selves, from it as if it were a thing that could be represented but not understood.

It therefore abolishes the very idea that knowledge can be reproduced, or be causally determined, either a priori or a postiori, as in the case of Didactic art. We see this gesture to the irreducible in the Romantic art of the sublime through to Surrealism and psycho-analysis inspired practices that would mine the subconscious. Via these Modernisms, Art has been asserted as an epistemological project, a place to know what knowing is, to question what knowing is, and in doing so to state the condition of what it means to be human. In this category, art claims a form of understanding beyond mechanized power.

Modern antirealist Art shows us a curve in this story, since its work is central to the shift in the task of explicating knowledge as a process and a system subtended by logic.

Here, we encounter an art that focusses on making explicit

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4 See for example Bruce Nauman’s Slow Angle Walk, (Beckett Walk), 1968, and Agnes Martin’s Grids that would allocate no place for the ego and associate this with a unique emancipator gesture within life systems.

the form and mechanism of language that constitutes world.

A structuralist inspired analytical Conceptual art furnishes this example, where we see a turn away from a (Greenbergian) formalism - that would focus on art’s content (or meaning) as form - to an anti-formalism that would make art’s content its process. A Benjaminian aesthetics of inauthenticity and reproducibility dominates this landscape, as well as non-human art as tool-like means of production. Significantly, both Formalism and Conceptualism indulge in explicit conversations with the definition of art as ontology seeking to explore and achieve Art’s relation to freedom, whether this is set as autonomy to come - a linear historiographic becoming towards an essential beginning of art - or in the latter, an impossible extraction from the given of subjective perspectivism; a performance played out in the construction of tautological circles made through the repetition of this knowledge.

Conceptual works such as those by Kossuth, Nauman, Haacke, Martin, Lippard and many others, narrated the paradox of art as an epistemological project. This project of thinking consciousness would re-instate a form of delirious immersion in systems, and that reignited a spectre of unreason at the heart of reason itself.4 In such cases, the desire to know ‘what consciousness is’ is eclipsed by an acknowledgement of a fundamental limitation: that is the impossibility to extract ourselves from our own perspective or state of the situation.

We cannot be free from our own thoughts and, therefore, we can never know absolutely what consciousness is. The mind

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5 This has been described as the “Third Man Problem” by Aristotle, derived from Plato’s Parmenides; discussed in Quine’s account of translation, regressive ontology and his critique of indeterminacy in Word and Object (1960) and Kurt Gödel’s “Second Incompleteness Theorem” in which a system cannot demonstrate its own consistency (1931).

6 See the work of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics that proposed that the mistake of dialectics was to envisage a way through and out of the conditions of nature as given. In response, negative dialectics takes the condition of power as already given; and this notion of power is identified as capital and its culture industry.

constructs the values that it judges.5 Contemporary critical practices defined critique in the late Twentieth Century by demonstrating this knowledge. They articulated the project of knowing as a feedback loop often manifest in an aesthetics of tautological performative gestures. This knowledge of ourselves as trapped within the conditions of our own judgements, unable to escape from our own pathologies, desires, spontaneities and myths, has communicated (in a very Adornian sense6) our tragic condition - that we are constrained to the unreality of our lived experience.

What we see here is how a crisis of knowledge becomes embraced as the highest form of expressing human understanding in and as crisis. Explication forecloses reason in the name of knowledge. It would seem that art cannot live without this regressive and dark epistemology, since this expression of finitude as absolute has characterized our contemporary definition of critique and sustained an art market – a healthy economy of critique.

The fact is remarkable enough that we have to restate it: This expression of knowledge (as a traumatic space of no return and no future) claims to critique dominant power. It is remarkable because it is easy to see how this expression has

AMANDA BEECH — HOW ART OUGHT TO THINK

7 In The Space of Reasons, Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars, Eds. Kevin Scharp, Robert B. Brandom, Cambridge, Mass, 2007, 282-302.

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sustained the myth of the art-market’s good subconscious.

It maps directly onto our comprehension of capitalism as process and figure, and how this fails to interact within this space. It is this critique that defines both the flexibility and banality of a pseudo-conceptualism, embedded more than ever in the nomenclature of a post-conceptual art today.

Through this gluing together of un-freedom and knowledge, art becomes a form of self-mapping via self-reference.

Criticality, or what we might call art’s epistemological project, is defined by the narration of us and our quest to know ‘self’ by producing abstract images of ‘self’ as the inaccessible real. What might have started as a set of questions regarding how systems of knowledge, language and representation work at the level of human use, now slides into forms of self-conscious practice founded upon a recursive formation of art with human identity. And so, we have the three figures conjoined in a theistic nature – art, human, knowledge.

TWO FORMS OF REASON

Wilfrid Sellars in his text “Mental Events”7

makes a distinction between two forms of reason; that of sapience and that of sentience. It is the “recognizing something as something” that forms the basic sentience of all humans. Reflecting on Sellars’s point, we could say that this basic form of reason, where self-reference constructs world and makes life possible, is equivalent to the ultimate critical gesture of Conceptual Art. This is the life of this primitive form of thought as a performative nominalism.

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I refer this to the base notion of a Duchampian claim most synonymous with the Ready-made, that “This is Art”. This nominalism could be understood as art’s sentient nature – a thing that might precede its sapient abilities. A Duchampian conceptualism is ironic in that it makes artistic nominalism its nature through the very process of de-naturalizing art’s claim to represent Art. Here, art’s right to be is brought into the foreground through explicating art as a system - the means of production, structure and mechanism becomes content. Ultimately, however, these forms remain unquestioned because they are highlighted as mere semantics that can never match the ideal of art, but will always be enough to stand in for this in the moment. Whilst conceptual art’s skeptical project de-naturalizes art at the level of the sensible in specific gestures - in that each gesture, each object, each sound is claimed and therefore questioned discretely - this move ultimately naturalizes critique as the generic definition of art, because without a fully articulated ideal, and without a serious commitment to language, then we are left with art as an infinite process. To make an art that explicates the notion that nominalism is the nature of art as the claim of critique is trivial, since in sustaining a critique of sufficient reason art only engages with its necessary condition.

We could say that many artistic practices are not concerned with defining what art is or what art is not anymore – who cares about the art-life argument, or the distinction between reality and appearance? Who cares about claiming the crisis of meaning and bemoaning the loss of project? We have seen

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how a turn to the local has abated these desires, as well as claims to action and experience … but we know that this localism fails to deal with the larger universal problem and desire for meaning that catalyzed this action in the first place.

The idea of challenging forms of dominance, by revealing the truth of the construction of power that subtends it, also seems unviable in the pluralist era of neo-liberal capitalism.

These Marxian inspired conclusions seem to be weaklymade points when the everyday is always already hypercommoditized, when there is no such thing as nature, and when we are always already implicated in any judgment no matter how objectively it is proposed.

As an apparent corollary to the historicization and devolution of these critical methods are practices that involve themselves in research methodologies that are connected to other disciplines. These might be sociological, literary, scientific, and philosophical, or occupy other modes of distributive mechanisms that are less associated with the aesthetics of art-for-art’s sake or an interrogation of art’s politics. These aesthetic signs that indicate the idea that art has taken up another discipline, that it has become something else, might make us think that art had other things to talk about than itself, but this would be wrong. Instead, these practices fulfill the very same ethics of difference and the same dualisms that I have described within the normative critical processes of art’s history. Art is busy pretending it is something else, taking up residencies in science labs, turning abstract data into equally frivolous decorative abstractions. These shifts

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8 This (non) philosophical reading of freedom is totalizing in that ‘critique by nature’ relativizes critical paradigms where each and every critical approach is claimed to have some value by dint of simply offering a perspective in a field where all voices seek to be heard. The impossibility to extricate ourselves from norms therefore engenders the organization of Art as a special humanistic transcendental expression, which ultimately denies the significance of aesthetic gestures that this knowledge expresses in favor of a trivial concept of Art.

to pseudo-function disclose the desire to flee from the conditions of its own ontology of art that is decidedly Kantian – a functional dysfunctionalism. This ontology provides grounds for escape; a weak epistemology subtends a naïve naturalism.

The difference between these trans-Modern, or transdisciplinary contemporary works and works that engage more directly with the question of art is therefore trivial. Both produce an inward spiral - a regressive ontology in either an expansionist ethics of difference or the involuted practice of art’s selfexplication; they rely upon and produce the same world.

ART AS ONTOLOGY MACHINE

Problematically, critical conceptualism

sustains a conservative portrait of culture according to a liberal paradigm that valorizes the figure of a specific humanity recaptured more than ever in theories of the post-Anthropocene – a world where discourses of the post-human tend to remain obsessed with the human condition at the level of identity, and the question of the after us dwells upon the us. Self-conception continues to be the limitation and terminus for art because art is given an absolute character that is set to mirror an ontological definition of a particularly liberal subject; the kind whose freedom is innate, and therefore whose task is to retrieve this freedom, to regain it at all costs from all power in life.8 My point here is that this claim to

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critique against reason is not fit for purpose. Critique stands in Sellarsian terms for the first order of a pathological reason.

These moves underscore art as an ontology machine - a selfgenerating, self-mapping enterprise, inside of which art cites itself as its own problem to be solved. It is at once the problem and the solution, caught in infinitudinal tracks of a non-becoming. These dead ends and repetitions might make us give up on the idea of art as having any epistemological force because the task of scientific knowledge slides into the essentiality of being as appearance. On the one hand, we might say that the fate of epistemology is narcissism, and, on the other hand, we could complain that the irony of any explication of knowledge only mythologizes it as inaccessible and yet representable nature. Therefore, in the context of contemporary art, the gesture to vanquish any claim to a principle of sufficient reason evacuates the means to participate in the space of reason.

It is, therefore, very much worth rethinking what art’s capacity for conceptual inquiry is today, because it is not the identity of art that should act as the focus for our interest in the “yet to be known”. Art’s ultimate task is not to determine what Art is. Art cannot be redeemed by refusing its identity as art, or by going down the old liberationists path of freeing itself from its discipline. A strong epistemological project for art includes the emancipatory gesture from freedom and reason as totality in its various forms. The freedom that is afforded to reason de-stabilizes the very idea of art as a space beyond philosophy and instead instantiates art as a place to manifest thought.

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If we give up on asserting a cause that precedes Art as a means to explain its social function then the very basis for the name Art must be determined otherwise: Art is to invest in the task of making judgements and distinctions between what are correct and incorrect forms of reason, including a healthy skepticism towards this re-thinking of the claims of critique as means to hold reason in check. The implications of this are to understand how rationalism is not equal to a principle of sufficient reason, and the work of explication is not the means to determine an inevitable fate.

Art is to participate in a space that gives and asks for reasons; it is not limited to the explication of how things are so and so … or this and that … This extraction from the empirical and the referential must be supported by the idea of reason for reason in itself.

Art is to take language and thought seriously. To generate a philosophical and linguistic project, it must give up on the idea that it can deliver to us and be for us everything that reason can and cannot communicate. As we have seen, the price of this knowledge has been to lose our grip upon and our claim to future.

As I have described, a suspicion of reason from the Left, and what is often seen in the history of Art, has often

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9 Jean Francois Lyotard’s work on the problem of reason as correlative to dominance can be seen across the books Libidinal Economy (1974), Le Differend (1983) as well as in his work on the Postmodern, where “an art of negation, a perpetual negation ... based on a never-ending critique of representation that should contribute to the preservation of heterogeneity, of optimal dissensus ... [it] does not lead towards a resolution; the confrontation with the unpresentable leads to radical openness” The Idea of the Postmodern: A History Routledge, 1995, 133.

presumed a romantic escape from the strictures of power and dominance. On one side, we see this in the tradition of the sublime that goes so far as Lyotardian poststructuralism, where art offering a form of difference that holds a form of wildness, ambiguity, and ineffability through its complex construction, constructing temporal judgements.9 On the other side we have seen art approach a more analytical project that would narrate the impossibility of both escape and redemption from the inside; this might be recognized in Conceptual Art, for instance, as much as the ironic form of neo-Dadaism in the 1990’s. Here, art becomes a site where its knowledge of self is explicated, ironically when the knowledge of self is claimed as irreducible. We result in a knowledge that ‘knows’ but has no axis to make inferences beyond what it knows. I have also mentioned how this self-narration has been manifest in the discourse of a tragic form of consciousness, where artworks that recognize their limits in the face of the conundrum of reason hinge this very identification on a kind of perverse form of art’s redemptive knowledge.

I have outlined how these naïve approaches to solving the problem of reason, as well as the means by which reason has been defined as a problem, can be seen as naïve and incorrect. In this view, I argue that any desire to free us from

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23 reason slides into the voice of a conservative bourgeois theism. Ultimately, a rejection of reason in the name of freedom from cause is not only impossible but also stultifying.

Cause is essential to building.

EPISTEMOLOGY AGAIN

Our working terms set out in this text,

possible and world, are now key, since the construction of the possible demands extensions to novel and different forms and ideas - but these must be seen as possible. These constructions must come from somewhere, but this place is a world in which we find ourselves alienated.

This fact of alienation should not be a deterrent to the production of modal vocabularies, since totalized knowledge is not the goal. A “possible world” invokes the work of the imagination, but this is not to construct a spontaneous hypothesis of “other places”, for we know that situating the human as the agent ex nihilo – the one who comes from nowhere, without cause or reason to produce the event of change is a dream that merely reproduces the given in the guise of reason.

A different approach is to deal with the condition of the imagination in and as rational processes that extract new forms from the conditions of existence, without over-determining “world as it is”, as a means to think the possible. It is important to recognise also that the imagination in and as rational processes does not necessarily fantasize that we are cause ex nihilo, where we occupy the space of the real, set as

AMANDA BEECH — HOW ART OUGHT TO THINK

A M ANDA BEECH is Dean of Critical Studies and teaches art and critical theory in the School of Critical Studies.

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nothingness and nowhere in order to enact the blast of the full potentiality of a God-like creation before reason takes hold. Our possible world is not set within the fictions of ‘the anything whatsoever,’ for not any world will do. Nor does it appeal to the facticity of contingency in a metaphysical sense, where the real is made tacit in empirical reality. Rather, identifying the conditions of the possible from the field of contingency as idea is the means by which the fact of the possible sustains another drive by reason; to picture the world as it ought to be.

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10 Matteo Pasquinelli, Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas, Meson Press, 2015, pp. 7 & 9-10.

JAMES WILTGEN

ROLLING TOWARDS X

NAVIGATING CURRENTS OF CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT

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What is Reason?

A term, a concept, a provocation with near universal currency yet under tremendous pressure in the wake of geopolitical, technological, historical, and existential changes just for starters, reason produces internal and external dynamics that call for continual upgrading, permanent revision, contested dialogue. Given those injunctions, this essay will address briefly at least three modes of ‘reason’ in the contemporary moment; of course, this will be by no means an exhaustive analysis nor thorough survey, but serve as a means to navigate certain salient precepts in an attempt to create links and connections with art and art practices, historically and in the current juncture.

A TAXONOMY OF THINKING: THREE, PERHAPS MORE, ITERATIONS

In the Introduction of the book Alleys

of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas, Matteo Pasquinelli addresses what he calls the ‘reason of trauma’; countering the “instrumental or technological rationality” of the Frankfurt School he foregrounds “error, trauma, and catastrophe in the design of intelligent machines.”1 0 Excavating the work of the neurolo-

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11 Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution, Stanford University Press, 2010, pp. 4 & 80. See also, the title for the 12th Shanghai Biennale, set to open in Nov. 2018: “Proregress: Art in an Age of Historical Ambivalence”.

gist Kurt Goldstein, Pasquinelli offers a parallel track to “the instrumentalization of reason…(as) the instrumentalization of catastrophe.” Not surprisingly for someone whose clinical research began with WWI soldiers, Goldstein’s conclusions— influenced by German Idealism and Lebensphilosophie—held that trauma and catastrophe constitute the “operative functions of the brain,” or, more forcefully, “(T)he brain is then in a permanent and constitutive state of active trauma,” exceeding in many ways even the concept of neuroplasticity, stressing more the self-organizing processes of the brain in the midst of constitutive catastrophe and trauma. Another vector of this analysis shifts the focus more fully to German Idealism and the work of Kant and especially Hegel, where Rebecca Comay’s provocative investigations posit that, from her perspective of philosophical inquiry, Hegel occupies the position as the “most lucid theorist” of trauma in multiple manifestations: “modal, temporal and above all a historical category.”11 While, of course, the French Revolution becomes the fundamental scene of trauma, the “burning center of his philosophy”—as the “inauguration of political modernity… as inevitable, comprehensible, justifiable, horrible, thrilling, mind-numbingly boring, and infinitely productive,” the scaffolding for the slaughter bench of history if you will— the process goes much deeper, where all of history will be determined “neither as the progressive accumulation of meaning nor as a deterioration from a substantial plenitude.

It presents itself rather as the unconscious or blanked-out transmission of a void.” In the midst of this philosophical thermidor terror must be confronted, but in an almost perversely

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ibid., p. 82 ibid., pp. 4-5, 90. ibid., p. 6; see also Adrian Johnston, “The Voiding of Weak Nature,” The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Vol. 33, #1, “human reason is a reflective power of negativity immanent to being, material nature’s own self-distorting inflection, torsion, curving, or bending,” p. 144. It will be imperative to point out that nature “is pervaded by negativities,” but not to fall into a “mysticism of negativity,” a type of ‘negative theology,” see Johnston, “Reflections of a Rotten Nature: Hegel, Lacan and Material Negativity,” in Filozofski vestnik, Vol. XXXIII, No. 2, 2012, pp. 41 & 44.

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Kantian gesture Comay argues Hegel “poses terror as a question even or especially to itself.”1 2 Descriptively, then, thinking has been presented with an overarching problematic—terror and death—and prescriptively the demand for a fundamental shift from the powerful processes of melancholia to that of a productive and unrelenting process of mourning. Contrary to the more facile readings of the primacy of a universalist project of history and absolute knowledge in Hegel, Comay will define his endeavor, and by extension crucial strands of German Idealism, as approaching history as “transgenerational trauma,” and this “traumatic dissonance” produces a fundamental delay, iterations of Freud’s Nachträglichkeit and Lacan’s après-coup, as “the present is never caught up to itself,” a “brutal opacity…of grinding nonsynchronicity.” From this emerges a different subject, and a reformatted subjectivity, as “(T)error is in this way retroactively integrated as the condition of possibility of the selfwilling will.”1 3 Reason stares the negative in the face, “Spirit returns to work,” thought grapples with the demands of this transition: we remain fully entrenched in this problematic; or, if philosophy makes any claim to universality, it formalizes the necessity of a delay, “together with the inventive strategies with which such a delay itself is invariably disguised, ignored, glamourized, or rationalized.”14 Thus, a blueprint and naviga-

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tional mode for the workings of reason in the midst of dialecticized trauma and transmission.

SELLERSIAN INTERVENTIONS

Grappling with crucial elements of

Kant’s legacy, the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars builds upon and revises a number of key elements from German Idealism, in particular the a priori or transcendental structures of thought, to interrogate the dynamics of cognitive reflection and inquiry. Two axial problematics, fundamental to Sellars, provide the architecture of a crucial instantiation of reason, critical thought, and an assessment of the contours of reality: the myth of the given, and the entanglement of the manifest image and the scientific image. Per the first element, Sellars furthers Kant’s critique of a certain type of a priori, with transcendental structures as the architecture of thinking, shaping the ways in which reality has been conceived—read in particular divine names and the concomitant teleology—in order to produce and construct the terrain for a perpetual questioning of all attempts at foundations, at the ways the tradition inherited from the past will be accepted as too opaque and ‘timeless’ to interrogate. Sellars and those who follow this line of thought will then view a mode of rational agency that, per Kant, insists that reason is the faculty of posing problems, that the Ideas of existence demand of reason a permanent questioning which, depending on the modality of interpretation, has no ultimate solution. In other words, the power and politics of knowing what there is, of how things hang together will

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15 Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Harvard University Press, Second Edition, 1997, p. 76.

16 Johnston, “Reflections of a Rotten Nature,” op. cit., pp. 46-47.

17 Wilfrid Sellars, In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars, Harvard University Press, 2007, eds. Scharp and Brandom, pp. 374-375, 387.

be irreversibly placed in “the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says.”1 5 Subjectivity in this conceptualization entails a type of autonomy, especially from and in conflict with the inherited transcendental structures, an autonomy of ‘self-augmentation,’ but one embedded in both a collective and communist matrix; however, it must be foregrounded here that these processes, and a certain defense of rational agency as “progressive rationalism” stipulates that rational beings ought to have reasons for what they do per obligations, rules, and commitments. Functionally and pragmatically, this project does not unfold in a clear and unequivocal linear process, but via a fraught and complex dialectical movement. The unwinding and reworking of history—in Hegel’s famous phrase as butcher’s block—involves an anguished and bloody way that requires the most resolute courage and vigilance; or perhaps as “Darwin-event,” or the ambling of the amphibians.16 The second axis of this problematic will be generated by the tension between the manifest image and the scientific image, where the former emerges in antiquity, when humans realized themselves as in some sense separate and autonomous from their environment, and ultimately that they existed as species, acquiring the use of language and sapient awareness. The manifest image does not signal a “pre-scientific, uncritical naïve conception” of what there is but a formulation that is “contemporary to the intellectual scene,” and it “is not so much ontological as normative…it indexes the community of rational agents.”1 7 The scientific image comprises the

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18 See Jean-Francois Lyotard’s piercing question “Is it happening?” in The Differend, pp. xv-xvi, p. 193 & p. 206, and Danielle Macbeth, “The Place of Philosophy,” Philosophy East and West, Vol. 67, No. 4, Oct. 2017, where she summarizes that, per Quine, “over the past four centuries the various natural and social sciences have, one "by one, been hived off Western philosophy to become autonomous disciplines…leaving philosophy with nothing with which to concern itself,” p. 969; as should be evident shortly, Macbeth argues forcefully against this position.

synthesis of all the scientific analyses of the human and of reality, or as “postulational theory construction,” and in some ways demands that artistic, philosophical and political agents take science very seriously. Thus, a crucial clash between the images as modes of thought, with the stakes nothing less than whether and in what manner the manifest image ‘survives,’ in what form, and if the so-called “scientia mensura” renders critical thought superfluous, as a mere and fading adjunct to the empirical sciences.1 8 Considerable debate has been occurring along these lines, with one demarcation positing right and left Sellarsian positions, with the former stewards of scientific naturalism, and the latter seeking to maintain a fundamental role for critical thought; while many argue that Sellars provided powerful arguments for scientific naturalism, he also maintained that the scientific image had not yet become fully formed, and that the key project of reason would be to enrich science with the language of reflexive composite organization, with a sense of what the human project ‘ought’ to be, synthesizing methodologically an amalgamation of key elements of both German Idealism and analytic philosophy.

Among those who follow the Sellarsian project in compelling aspects, Reza Negarestani has further elaborated in intricate detail a critique of the transcendental structures of the Kantian approach—physiological, linguistic, sociological,

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19 Reza Negarestani, “The Labor of the Inhuman, Parts 1 & 2,” eflux journal, #52 & #53, Feb. and March 2014.

20 Negarestani, “Three Nightmares of the Inductive Mind,” in Glass Bead Journal, p. 17; in many ways this multimodality of reason will turn on the difference between projectable and non-projectable predicates, on lawlike versus non-lawlike generalizations, for which there is insufficient time to discuss in this present essay.

teleological, etc.—that comprise the terrain of the myth of the given, while mounting an adamant defense of the importance of both the subject as sapient nexus of critical thought, and the necessity of both a “retrospective reassessment and prospective revision” of the contemporary situation, a Janusfaced method employed by philosophically-attuned plebs, or inorganic intellectuals, under the impetus of an ‘enlightened inhumanism.’1 9 All this to, at the very least, resist the increasing power of capitalism in its neoliberal variant, which seeks to destroy any collective or communist sense of organization though a sophisticated generation of what might be called a solipsistic nihilism. A method driven by a resolutely dialectical approach, incremental with regards to the here and now, catastrophic in terms of the future possibilities of change, as well as an incisive critique of Kant’s position on finitude; Negarestani argues for a functionalist sense of the mind, “it is what it does,” the task of reason to engage “with other disciplines,” open systems that are non-monotonic as reason draws upon variants of Humean skepticism and ‘Gödel-susceptibility’ to trigger an “epistemic multimodality (inductive, deductive, and abductive methods, syntactic complexity as well as semantic complexity).”2 0 The full impact of this approach for thought becomes clearer, as “functional evolution is no longer biological or determined by essentialist structures,” coupled with an interactive paradigm of computation which can lead to the instantiation of reason in different substrates, to be reconstructed by different

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21 Negarestani, “Revolution Backwards: Functional Realization and Computational Implementation,” in Pasquinelli, op. cit., chapter 8.

22 Danielle Macbeth, “Natural Truth,” in Sellars and Contemporary Philosophy, Routledge, 2017, eds. Perplyotchik and Barnbaum.

23 Macbeth, “The Place of Philosophy,” op. cit., p. 990.

sets of realizers via “asynchronic processed social-linguistic discursive practices” enmeshed in computational matrices.2 1 Finally, Danielle Macbeth enhances in many ways a Sellarsian approach by arguing that the power of knowing should not be ‘dominated’ by the scientific image, and that while cultural and linguistic relativism must be acknowledged and taken extremely seriously, there exists an overarching impetus for reason to participate in the construction of a type of global community utilizing rational inquiry as a key element, but a reason not generated by any foundational thought other that the dynamics of a self-correcting enterprise and the perpetual questioning of what this global community ‘ought’ to be. While demarcating the role of critical thought/reason as maintaining this posture via a concept she calls “natural truth,” which would be valid for “all rational human beings” as the means by which we “ought” to understand the world, that philosophy’s charge would be to navigate the universalist claims of science—principally mathematics and physics— while arguing for the equal importance of local and perspectival claims; mathematics and science do not pose the questions, per Macbeth’s analysis, of “how and why things ought to be so,” hence the project of philosophy qua reason.2 2 In a follow-up to the issue of natural truths, she argues that in many ways while natural truths remain the goal for her philosophical inquiry, at this point they function in process, as ‘constructive theorization,’ and the only way to make these concepts happen will be for thought to insist that “everything is up for reflective criticism and revision.”2 3

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24 Luciana Parisi, “Instrumental Reason, Algorithmic Capitalism, and the Incomputable,” in Pasquinelli, op. cit., pp. 130-1, 135-6

35 EXPERIMENTAL AXIOMATICS

A third iteration of reason hues closely

to a number of themes already developed in the first two modes, including a robust critique of teleological finality & the finitude of knowledge as well as transcendental structures, and an interrogation of instrumental reason, while adamantly pressing for the construction of a dynamic conceptual architecture of reason that follows a non-linear and dialectical unfolding; however, it augments decidedly the emphasis on trauma, and the primacy of a type of human subject, where subjectivity becomes a much broader, more fluid and ampliative nexus, while foregrounding the rise of computation and algorithmic automation in techno-capitalism. Luciana Parisi has begun an extremely ambitious project to rethink reason from the basic premises of both Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and Turing’s incomputability via Chaitin’s “definition of algorithmic randomness in computational processing” where variation, indeterminacy and contingency become fundamental in elaborating a shift in the logics of reason, away from deduction to more ampliative modes of thought, from the potential incessant iteration of initial conditions to one decidedly exceeding those initial conditions, from a priori conditions to “environmental inputs and a posteriori instructions proposed by the interactive paradigm,” and from formal subsumption, with its static and fixed rules to the logic of real subsumption, producing the possible conditions for what she calls a second nature, or second order of cybernetics.2 4 The role of humans in this process involves, among other tasks, “assisting in the

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25 26

ibid., pp. 5 & 7. ibid. pp. 6-7.

36

27 Parisi, “Automation and Critique,” Reinventing Horizons, 2106/04/27, p. 7, & “Instrumental Reason, Algorithmic Capitalism, and the Incomputable,” op. cit., p. 136, italics in the original.

37

configuration of an automated cognition that cannot be synthesized into a totalizing theory or program,” and as “reason in the age of the algorithm defined as it is in terms of a dynamic logic emerging from the rule-based processing of infinite data expanding beyond its deductive limits.”2 5 How, then, to confront a techno-capitalism whose politics of fixed capital seeks to control the production of finite axioms, and which intimates a teleological finality while effectively enslaving the processes of cognition and the affective via debt and striated forms of power enhancement?

How to challenge the coefficients of a ‘weaponzied reason’ that seeks a regime of perpetual replication of fixed forms, a violent endorsement of the static configurations of global power and privilege?

Parisi argues for the political valence of an “algorithmic automation” driven by an increased volume of incomputable data, involving basically an “infinite patternless” explosion of information which exceeds the programming of fixed capital, having then the potential to produce a different reason and an innovative logic of thinking. What she charts signals both “a fundamental transformation in computational logic,” as well as the nascent development of a “philosophy of computation;” further, “to reveal the limits of reason and deductive logic” as “information expands, extends and exceeds the fixity of capital.2 6 Briefly, this shift involves nothing less that a sweeping rethinking of reason as the a priori dynamics of deductive and conceptual analysis give way to one based upon what Parisi calls “an experimental

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axiomatics,” producing “new axioms, codes and instructions,” that can exceed the strictures of current programming and control, enhancing certain potentialities and tendencies of fixed capital while forcefully blunting others. This augmented reason entails hypothesis generation, experimental solutions, and determinations of the incalculable;” further, the “urgent task” today—certainly not a Whiggish celebration of techno-capitalism nor a naïve enthusiasm for its accomplishments—requires thinking the contours of reason and logic in the age of the algorithm, installing incomputability at the core of thought via the use of different modes of abductive and inductive logic, and the development of a “philosophy of computation and a critical automation theory” capable of engaging the dynamics and demands of a general artificial intelligence, perhaps by way of a neo-reason, or “a new alien mode of thought.”2 7 The above analysis has powerful resonances with art, and Parisi engages in particular with the film Her to underscore several of the analytic points she develops; first and foremost Her asserts rather than an unceasing iteration of initial and a priori conditions, an augmentation in those initial conditions, where Samantha as operating system early on declares “I’m becoming much more than they programmed.” A second engagement Parisi makes with art will be the video work of Ian Cheng, and her analysis contains compelling connections to the film Her; here she uses a Sellarsian matrix to interrogate the dynamics of simulations as they chart an extremely complex interplay of the manifest image and the scientific image. Parisi posits the two images as encompassing the realm JAMES WILTGEN — ROLLING TOWARDS X

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of appearance and the realm of being, with the two images “not opposed but existing in many possible combinations” while both are “global” and of “the same order of complexity.”2 8 The manifest image basically produces cognition and perceptive forms, generating meaning from the material substrates of data, of “the algorithmic operation of composing complexities and decomposing functions,” of the scientific image; the task of reason, of thought resides in abstracting meaning and recoding rules and performativity.

The simulations are “forever changing the ontological and epistemological condition of knowledge,” as they navigate the fundamental “inconsistency between appearance and being,” as the manifest image will be charged with the processes of meaning, “that thought continuously has to abstract, anticipate, deduce, hypothesize.”2 9 Ultimately, then, what emerges will be “a complex general intelligence… now defining new modes of accessing the real:” and the simulations in their manifest images make visible, or better produce a thinking of the laws and working logic that sustain representation, while the scientific image consists of the material substrate(s) of the computation and algorithmic processing.3 0 The relationship between the two images, conveyed by the simulations, reveals the “parallel but incompatible dimensions of computational realty,” and what the algorithmic pattering is and how it appears or is manifest in the world. Reason in this updated and augmented iteration navigates these two images, not as binary configurations but as quasi-infinite combinations that require, and perhaps more demand a highly reflexive reworking of human thought.

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28 Luciana Parisi, “Simulations,” in Ian Cheng: Live Simulations, Spector Books, Evers, Raskin and Jansen, eds., 2015, p. 133.

29 ibid. p. 130.

30 ibid. pp. 130-131; Parisi also asserts that “the real—the world as it is—cannot be directly accessed by sense date, it can nonetheless be thought,” p. 131. See also Ray Brassier, “Nominalism, Naturalism, Materialism Sellars’ Critical Ontology,” in Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and Its Implications, Routledge, eds.

Bashour and Muller, where he argues “thinking cannot touch the real… (but) we can successfully think about the real, p. 104, & that “language is embedded in a nonlinguistic, a-signifying reality” that provides the basis for construction and reconstruction of the world.

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REFERENCES

J A MES WILTGEN is Faculty in the MA Aesthetics and Politics program and teaches Latin American studies, media and cinema, as well as critical theory in the School of Critical Studies.

Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution. Stanford University Press, 2010.

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Danielle Macbeth, “Natural Truth” in Sellars and Contemporary Philosophy.

Routledge, 2017.

Reza Negarestani, “Three Nightmares of the Inductive Mind.” Glass Bead Journal, 2017.

Reza Negarestani, “Revolution Backwards: Functional Realization and Computational Implementation,” in Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas.

Meson Press, 2015.

Luciana Parisi, “Simulations,” in Ian Cheng: Live Simulations. Spector Books, 2015.

Luciana Parisi, “Instrumental Reason, Algorithmic Capitalism, and the Incomputable,” in Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas.

Meson Press, 2015.

Matteo Pasquinelli, Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas.

Meson Press, 2015.

Wilfrid Sellars, In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars. Harvard University Press, 2007.

Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Harvard University Press, 1997.

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41

PUN TAL/

ARNE DE BOEVER

AESTHETIC EXCEPTIONALISM

(ON SAM DURANT’S SCAFFOLD) 31

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31 I want to thank my Spring 2018 Research Assistant Claudia Grigg-Edo for her help uncovering some of the references that are used in this text.

32 I am aware of Dave Beech’s analysis of the “economic exceptionalism” of art but in this text I focus on the connections between aesthetic and political exceptionalisms in particular.

See: Beech, Dave. Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical, and Marxist Economics.

Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.

33 Badiou, Alain. The Century. Trans.

Alberto Toscano. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. 160.

ART ♥ SCHMITT? The topic—or target—of this short little

text is what I propose calling “aesthetic exceptionalism”: the belief that artists or art are somehow “exceptional”. Before anyone gets offended, I want to clarify that my project is not to argue that artists or art are unexceptional, that they are somehow perfectly “normal”.

Everyone knows they aren’t. But still: I would like to trouble the widespread belief in aesthetic exceptionalism just a bit from a political point of view, first by distinguishing between different traditions of thinking the exception, and then by productively considering one recent work of art within the frame that I have set up. My goal, if can put it a little ambitiously, is to develop a critique of what I would call the political reason of art.3 2

“Aesthetic exceptionalism” may sound ugly and difficult, but I’m sure many are familiar with the beliefs—and I choose that word purposefully—that I would associate with this notion.

I am thinking for example of Alain Badiou, who in his book The Century understands the effect of art as “forcing a thinking to declare, in its area of concern, the state of exception”3 3 —and he values this effect positively. Another example: when Steve Corcoran characterizes the connection between aesthetics and politics in Jacques Rancière’s thought, he suggests that in Rancière “art and politics can

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34 Corcoran, Steven. “Editor’s Introduction”. In: Rancière, Jacques.

Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics.

Ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2010. 1.

35 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, Jacques Rancière, Jean-François Lyotard, and Alain Badiou. “Liminaire sur l’ouvrage d’Alain Badiou ‘L’être et l’évènement.”

Le Cahier (Collège Internationale de

be understood, such that their specificity is seen to reside in their contingent suspension of the rules governing normal experience”.3 4 They find each other in the fact that both depend on “an innovative leap from the logic that ordinarily governs human situations”. Art and politics find each other, it seems, in their shared exceptionality.

Where have we heard this language before? In an early response to Badiou’s book Being and Event, Jean-François Lyotard suggested that Badiou’s theory of the subject strangely “mirrors” the twentieth-century German constitutional scholar Carl Schmitt’s theory of the sovereign as he who decides on the state of exception.3 5 If you want to find out who the sovereign is in any given political configuration, Schmitt argues, you need to find out who decides whether a national emergency or security situation counts as “exceptional” and as a consequence justifies the sovereign, extraordinary suspension of the law that Schmitt in such situations recommends.3 6 Sovereign is he who decides on the exception, and then takes extraordinary measures to protect his (or her) people against it. Sovereign is, in a way, he who decides that an exception is an exception. It may sound paradoxical, but if the sovereign is the one who is “made” by the exception, the sovereign is thus also the one who “makes” the exception, who decides that an exception is an exception—while he is supposed to protect us against it. There is thus a kind of complicity between the sovereign and the exception that complicates, I think, the political status of the exception and—vice versa— the politics of sovereignty.

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Philosophie) 8 (1989), 201-25, 227-45, 247-68. Taking their cue from Lyotard, Peter Hallward, Nina Power, and Colin Wright have all considered the similarities and differences between Schmitt and Badiou; the connection between Schmitt and Rancière has received some discussion as well.

Hallward follows Lyotard in noting the resonances between Badiou and Schmitt but very quickly discards the issue: “Badiou Absolutiste?” In: Hallward, Peter. Badiou: A Subject to Truth.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 284-291. That a more careful elaboration may be needed becomes clear in Nina Power’s discussion of these same resonances, which she is more willing to acknowledge while distinguishing between Badiou and Schmitt’s “political aims”: “Towards an Anthropology of Infinitude”.

In: Ashton, Paul, A.J. Bartlett, and Justin Clemens, eds. The Praxis of Alain Badiou. Melbourne: Re-Press, 2006.

309-338. Here 321. It is Colin Wright who has gone the furthest on this count, arguing that—or rather, as he puts it, “believing” that—“the most promising theoretical tool available today for thinking beyond and against the logic of the exception [which he associated with Schmitt] … is Alain Badiou’s philosophy of the event”: “Event or Exception?: Disentangling Badiou from Schmitt, or, Towards a Politics of the Void”. Theory & Event 11:2 (2008): 1-18.

Here 3. The problem, as I see it, is that Wright is rather too good at drawing out the “proximities” between Schmitt and Badiou, which amount to 4 pages of his article—the same length as his discussion of their “differences”.

But in the former section he discusses 5 similarities, whereas the differences really only amount to 1. For the Schmitt and Rancière connection, see: Minkkinen, Panu. “Rancière and Schmitt: Sons of Ares?” In: Lerma López Mónica, and Julen Etxabe, eds. Rancière and Law. New York: Routledge, 2018. 129-148. Minkkinen argues that Rancière is all too quick to dismiss the connections of his work to Schmitt.

36 Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Trans. George Schwab.

Cambridge: MIT Press, 185. 5.

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37 Kahn, Paul. Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. 128.

38 Schmitt, Political Theology, 36.

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It’s the U.S. legal scholar Paul Kahn who has pointed out in a recent book about political theology that Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty links the conception of sovereignty both to God and to the artist.3 7 The tie to God is probably pretty straightforward: Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty famously states that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts”.3 8 Thus, Schmitt argues that the exception—so, a situation in which the normal rule of law is suspended—is a secularized version of the theological notion of the miracle (walking on water, turning water into wine, and so on); the sovereign, in this configuration, is a secularized version of God, or at least of God incarnated into his son Jesus, the Messiah (according to some).

You can even read the separation of power into different branches as a secularized version of the Trinity. That would be a theologico-political reading. This is also why I used the term “belief” to refer to the position of “aesthetic exceptionalism”.

But what about the connection of the sovereign to the artist?

This is maybe less obvious. This is also where, I think, the problematic status of the exception in art comes in. According to Badiou, art does something that is quite similar to what the sovereign does, i.e. it declares a state of exception (in Badiou’s words) whereas the sovereign decides the state of exception (in Schmitt’s words). When Corcoran characterizes the connection between aesthetics and politics in Rancière by focusing on art’s “contingent suspension of the rules governing normal experience”, that language could just as well have been taken from Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty. Particularly striking is

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39 Let me just note complexity of the relation of the political to the aesthetic in Schmitt’s work, and the reception it has received. Neil Levi lays this out brilliantly in an article titled “Carl Schmitt and the Question of the Aesthetic” (Levi, Neil.

“Carl Schmitt and the Question of the Aesthetic”. New German Critique 101 (2007): 27-43). If I am suggesting here that the aesthetic exceptionalisms one finds for example in Badiou and in Rancière—I pluralize the notion of exceptionalism here because there are of course significant differences

Corcoran’s use of the verb “suspend”: that’s the key activity of sovereignty, as Schmitt sees it: suspending the law.

There are differences, of course, when it comes to the goals: in Schmitt, the suspension of the law happens in an attempt to protect it; in Rancière, the suspension happens to accomplish the law’s transformation—which is obviously different from what you find in Schmitt. Given that Schmitt became a Nazi and that Rancière fervently defends democracy, one might want to distinguish here between a fascist and a democratic politics of exception, and in the case of Badiou perhaps also a communist politics of the exception.

To make these distinctions, one would have to ask in what way, to what extent, the politics of art and specifically the exceptionalist “suspension” that art often prides itself on is any different from the exceptionalist politics of Schmittian sovereignty? To put a bit more subversively: in what way might the attachment to an exceptionalist politics of art that “suspends”, in fact be a secret promotional campaign—in what we like to imagine as the critical and progressive sphere of the arts—for the very politics of the state of exception that many who are active in the arts would, politically, claim to be against? And if it is not that, how might the exceptionalism that art prides itself on differ from the one we find in Schmitt?

If art’s politics of exceptionalism is a democratic politics, how is that the case? 3 9

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between these two thinkers—take their echo from Schmitt, it is worth taking into consideration for example Richard Wolin’s criticism of Schmitt, his charge that Schmitt, precisely, “aestheticizes” politics (which, via Benjamin, can lead to the charge of “fascism”). Schmitt does so, Wolin claims, because he focuses on “rupture, discontinuity, and shock, which Wolin claims as ‘aesthetic values’” (Levi, “Carl Schmitt”, 35). The exception is aesthetic; when Schmitt proposes a concept of the political that revolves around the exception, he aestheticizes politics. It is not so much that contemporary theories of the aesthetic take after Schmitt. Rather, there was already an aesthetics at work in Schmitt. As Levi points out (Ibid., 32), not all scholars agree with this: Andrew Norris and Andreas Kalyvas have challenged this reading, pointing out that Schmitt himself wanted to keep the political and the aesthetic separate, and taking him at his word for this.

DEMOCRATIC EXCEPTIONALISMS

There are a few scholars who, in view

of the contemporary political situation and partly as a criticism of a political Left that has been too focused on the withdrawal from power and the horizontal politics of the multitude, have begun to contribute to such a project. Very interestingly, such a project has tended to operate under the banner of “sovereignty”, something that—surely—brings a frown to the faces of most of those in the arts—perhaps especially those who think artists and art are “exceptional”. (Surely, they think, that would mean they are anything but “sovereign”?)

I associate some of this thinking with the work of Chantal Mouffe who, while she does not claim the term sovereignty— the framework she developed with Ernesto Laclau revolves around hegemony and counter-hegemony, of course—, nevertheless takes inspiration from Carl Schmitt to propose what she understands to be a political, Left liberalism that would promote a democratic, agonistic pluralism, a demo-

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40 Mouffe, Chantal. “Introduction: Schmitt’s Challenge”. In: Mouffe, ed.

The Challenge of Carl Schmitt. New York: Verso, 1999. 1-7.

41 Honig, Bonnie. Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

42 Honig, Bonnie. “Three Models of Emergency Politics”. boundary 2 41:2 (2014), 48.

cratic culture of debate that doesn’t presuppose a single, rational and unifying solution needs to be reached (she is arguing against scholars like Rawls or Habermas here). She doesn’t want to be called a Left Schmittian—but she still thinks liberalism needs a dose of Schmitt to become truly democratic (pluralistic, agonistic) again.4 0 Bonnie Honig has in this context explicitly sought to reclaim the notion of sovereignty. She does so by thinking about “exceptionalist politics”4 1 as a possibility not only for sovereign abuse but also for democratic politics. States of exception and emergency situations are the kinds of states and situations in which we appear most visibly vulnerable—in which our usually latent ontological condition of vulnerability becomes undeniably manifest, in the way that having a minor cold or a paper cut can become reminders of the vulnerability of one’s entire bodily system.

But such states or situations are not only the playing ground of Schmittian sovereignty, Honig claims. She proposes instead that we must ask “how democratic theorists and activists might go further to democratize emergency, and to do so not to resist sovereignty but to claim it”.4 2 In other words, Schmittian sovereignty is not the only sovereignty that can become meaningful in a state of exception or emergency situation.

To democratize emergency, she continues, means seeking sovereignty, not just challenging it, and insisting that sovereignty is not just a trait of executive power that must be chastened but

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Honig, “Three Models”, 48.

Honig, Bonnie. Antigone, Interrupted. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

45 Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.

46 Butler, Notes, 155.

43 44

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also potentially a trait of popular power as well, one to be generated and mobilized. Rather than oppose democracy and emergency, then, we might think about democratic opportunities to claim sovereignty even in emergency settings.4 3 Honig has laid out different models for this, deliberative, activist, and legalist. It is through the emergency that “new forms of collective living” can come about. Honig makes these models part of a discourse on “popular sovereignty” and calls it (in her book Antigone, Interrupted) “counter-sovereignty”.4 4 My final example comes from a thinker that Honig engages with on this count, Judith Butler. In her book Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Butler is thinking through assemblies of bodies in the street as part of political protests—and as distinct from political speech, as she repeatedly puts it—, and her focus is on “the people” and the institutions that claim to represent it.4 5 Specifically, she is interested in the notion of “popular sovereignty” and its claim to represent (and enact) the power of the people.

In a chapter titled “‘We the People’”, she makes a claim that reminds one of Mouffe’s work, namely that “no one popular assembly comes to represent the entirety of the people, but each positing of the people through assembly risks or invites a set of conflicts that, in turn, prompt a growing set of doubts about who the people really are”.4 6 This is Mouffe’s issue of hegemony and the exclusions through which it operates— which trigger what Mouffe calls counter-hegemony. There is, Butler suggests, “no assembly” that can truly claim to CONTRAPUNTAL MEDIA — ART AND REASON

47 48

Ibid., 156.

Ibid., 160.

53 represent the people. Instead, there is always this “conflictual process” of constitution that raises the “epistemological” issue of who the people really are.4 7 Mouffe also articulates this as an ontological issue in the sense that for her, the people are never united in the way that deliberative theories of democracy like those of Rawls or Habermas would want them to be. If Butler is also interested in the speech act that constitutes the people, she is more interested in this context in the fact that assemblies already constitute themselves bodily, in the streets, before any words are uttered. So this is really much more the Arendtian position of bodies collectively appearing in space and making politics in this way. “Freedom of assembly” thus becomes, in her view, “a precondition of politics itself”.4 8 It is in this way that we arrive at the notion of “popular sovereignty” as distinct from state sovereignty in Butler’s text. Butler is not a thinker of the multitude. She in fact explicitly presents herself as a thinker of “the people”, and therefore a thinker of democratic sovereignty.

What interests me about these examples is how they criticize art’s association with sovereignty not from sovereignty’s outside, but from within—immanently, so to speak. Exceptionalism—and, by extension, sovereignty—is reclaimed from Schmittian discourses of sovereignty for democratic purposes.

SAM DURANT’S SCAFFOLD

One could see these very issues mobi lized recently in Scaffold, a work by Sam Durant. Durant’s work created controversy: installed in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden of the Walker Art Center, ARNE DE BOEVER — AESTHETIC EXCEPTIONALISM

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the work had been taken down after protests by the Dakota people who had taken offense with the work. Built on a 1:1 scale, the work showed an immense gallows that had been used in the early 19th century to put 38 Dakota men to death in Mankato, Minnesota. It had been, apparently, the largest mass execution in American (U.S.) history. If Durant had rebuilt that massive technology of death here, exposing what Walter Benjamin already called “something rotten” in power, it was obviously not to celebrate that technology, but to criticize it—and that appears to be how the work was received in Europe, where it had already been shown to great acclaim.

Not so in Minneapolis, where the artist’s intention was perhaps not less clear, but where that intention’s actualization through this particular work of art gave cause to offense.

Perhaps even more disturbingly, Durant’s attempt to criticize U.S. sovereign power, defined by the right to take life of let live (as Michel Foucault taught us), was reappropriated by racist groups who showed up on the site of the protests by the Dakota people to defend their heritage through defending the sculpture. It was in view of this, and after careful conversation with representatives of the Dakota people, that Durant ultimately decided with the Walker Art Center to take the sculpture down. Moreover, he signed over the copy-right to the sculpture to the Dakota people, essentially agreeing never to use the sculpture again. For a while, the fate of the sculpture’s materials remained unclear; it was said that the materials would be burnt. Ultimately, because of the role of fire for the Dakota people, it was decided that the materials

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would be buried at an undisclosed location. This act resonates with the execution that Durant’s work evoked, for then the Dakota people had not been allowed to bury their dead.

Some thought Durant was too quick to give in to the Dakota people and should not have accepted what they considered their “censorship”. But Durant himself did not feel that way— he appreciated the Dakota people’s concerns, and acknowledged that installing the work in Minneapolis, and not consulting with the Dakota people for its installation or even its design (which, after all, uncovered a very painful part of their history) was a mistake, a failure of the artist-as-a-whiteman to listen to the concerns of “the other”. Durant, who usually makes provocative, research-based work that engages racial issues in the U.S., had evidently decided to memorialize a painful part of U.S. and indigenous history through a monumental work that he considered an abstract reminder of sovereignty’s power to take life. But he had perhaps not sufficiently considered how his decision to rebuild a gallows at the 1:1 scale also risked to monumentalize that painful part of history—how the work of art risked to become complicit with the very sovereignty it contested. There was a way, in other words, in which Durant somehow assumed an even greater sovereignty for art, as if art would somehow—and in an exceptional way—be able to stand outside of history, in a transcendent realm of abstraction, as art separate from the world. This illusionary conception of art was contested, however, from a perhaps surprising corner: from the site of a third sovereignty, the indigenous sovereignty of the Dakota

ARNE DE BOEVER — AESTHETIC EXCEPTIONALISM

49 Barker, Joanne, ed. Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

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50 See, for example: Honig, Bonnie.

Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair.

New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.

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people, who took offense with Durant’s work and used their indigenous sovereignty as the ground to make that offense explicit. Everything here takes place within the realm of sovereignty. And it yielded, I would argue, a critical sovereignty (as Joanne Barker, editor of a recent book on sovereignty and indigenous gender, sexuality and feminist studies puts it 4 9 ) rather than sovereignty’s outside. That was Scaffold’s critique.

I do not know from what relation to sovereignty Durant was making his work. I know Scaffold was meant to be critical of sovereignty, but I don’t know if Durant had intended with the work a critique in the sense that I have used the term here.

If critique was his goal, then I think rebuilding the scaffold on the 1:1 scale in an attempt to reclaim death-wielding technologies of sovereignty for “other uses” was ill-conceived.

My suspicion is, however, that what Durant intended was not critique, but mere criticism. I’m suspicious about whether he thinks any aspects of sovereignty can be redeemed. The irony is, of course, that with his grand, critical, artistic gesture he seemed to reinstate precisely—presumably against his own intention—the violent power of sovereignty, this time in the form of art. And because it was art, he thought, surely everyone would realize that it was outside of the problematic sovereignty that he sought to contest.

While political sovereignty and sovereignty in the form of art are of course different, this was nevertheless proven to be a naïve assumption. What happened to Durant’s work laid bare

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beyond this obvious difference art’s imbrication in, and even complicity with, sovereignty. It exposes, furthermore, that the idea that art somehow exists autonomously from the problems of sovereignty that Durant wanted to contest is itself a sovereign illusion that repeats the very problems it seeks to contest. Now, what’s interesting about all of this is that this gets exposed not from an intensification of Durant’s intention and this naïve assumption about art. It does not get exposed from an artwork that manages to be separate from sovereignty, as Durant had perhaps assumed about his own work.

Instead, this gets laid bare through another sovereign intervention, critical this time, from the Dakota people, who both contest the sovereignty of art and the U.S. sovereignty from which they have suffered and continue to suffer.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise at this point that indigenous sovereignty is something that both Bonnie Honig and Judith Butler for example are very interested in and write about.5 0 In other words, Durant actually learns something here, in the middle of his perhaps naïve criticism of sovereignty (and unwitting reinforcement of a sovereign theory and practice of art), about how sovereignty can actually be critically useful.

Far from leading to the rejection of sovereignty, then, Scaffold leads one back into it, laying bare sovereignty’s critical and democratic potential, against the fascist instances of sovereign violence that I have mentioned—but also outside of naïve theories of art as separate from the world that risk to perpetuate the very problems of sovereignty that Scaffold sought to attack.

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51 Povinelli, Elizabeth. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

52 See, for example: Barker, Joanne.

“For Whom Sovereignty Matters”.

In: Barker, Joanne, ed. Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. 1-31. 18.

Let me conclude by emphasizing that there is nothing simple about any of this: indeed, to label the actions of the Dakota people as “sovereign” means to inscribe them within a political history of Western power that they may very well want to refuse. It risks perpetuating a logic of internal colonization through Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s celebrated but problematic master/slave-dialectic, in which true self-consciousness is reached through a process of recognition. The anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli has pointed out the “cunning” of such a process when it comes to inscribing the “other” within the master-narrative of the “self”, given that recognition always takes place in the master’s terms (in this case, “sovereignty”)—even if it is ultimately the slave who is the hero of Hegel’s dialectic.5 1 But others have taken a more pragmatic approach when it comes to Indigenous politics and have argued that such recognition is necessary to be politically effective. In addition, to insist on one’s sovereignty and to make claims from that ground means to refuse being labelled a “minority group”.5 2 Durant’s work, situated in the context of these specific debates as well as broader debates about sovereignty today, can help one navigate some of these complexities.

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A R NE DE BOEVER is Director of the MA Aesthetics and Politics program and teaches American Studies as well as critical theory in the School of Critical Studies.

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53 Correspondence on the German Student Movement, trans. Esther Leslie, New Left Review I/233 (JanuaryFebruary 1999),124. Henceforth cited parenthetically.

JANET SARBANES

FORMS OF AUTONOMY, AUTONOMY OF FORM ADORNO, MARCUSE AND THE LIVING THEATRE (EIGHTH LETTER)

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This letter—which is part of a larger project on aesthetic education that, taking its cue from Friedrich Schiller, will consist of several letters—begins with other letters, specifically a correspondence between Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse in the spring and summer of 1969. It was touched off by a series of disruptions to Adorno’s lectures and the workings of the Institute for Social Research by members of the APO, or extraparliamentary opposition, a newly formed coalition of the German student and New Left movements.

At the time of writing, Marcuse was teaching in the Philosophy Department at the University of San Diego, and Adorno at the Institute for Social Research and the University of Frankfurt.

The first such incident occurred when students occupied a room of the Institute and refused to leave. “It was dreadful,” Adorno recounts dolefully. ”We had to call the police, who then arrested all that they found in the room.”5 3 To Adorno’s surprise, Marcuse condemns the Institute’s response: “To put it brutally: if the alternative is the police or left-wing students, then I am with the students” (125). He notes that “there are situations, moments, in which theory is pushed on further by praxis—situations and moments in which theory that is kept separate from praxis becomes untrue to itself” and insists that this one of them (125). While not a revolutionary situation, he concedes, the current state of society “is [still] so terrible,

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so suffocating and demeaning, that rebellion against it forces a biological, physiological reaction: one can bear it no longer, one is suffocating and one has to let some air in” (125).

While agreeing with Marcuse that there can be moments in which theory is pushed on further by practice, Adorno argues that such a situation “neither exists objectively today, nor does the barren and brutal practicism that confronts us here have the slightest thing to do with theory anyhow.” The one point he does take to heart is that a given situation could indeed be “so terrible one would have to attempt to break out of it, even if one recognizes the objective impossibility” (127).

But neither is this that situation, he admonishes Marcuse.

As point of comparison, he observes: “We withstood in our time, you no less than me, a much more dreadful situation— that of the murder of the Jews, without proceeding to praxis; simply because it was blocked for us” (127).

It’s clear that were Adorno to accept Marcuse’s argument – that the current situation is so terrible that something must be done—he would then have to revisit his own response to the situation of the Holocaust, which he deems “much more dreadful.” There’s also an obvious conflict between Marcuse’s more subjective (what he terms almost “biological” or “physiological”) apprehension of the suffocating conditions to which the student movement is responding (capitalism, racism, imperialism, Vietnam), and Adorno’s more objectivist one (that the conditions for revolution have not been achieved, that the German student movement hasn’t even the tiniest prospect of effecting a meaningful social intervention).

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It’s clear that were Adorno to accept Marcuse’s argument – that the current situation is so terrible that something must be done—he would then have to revisit his own response to the situation of the Holocaust, which he deems “much more dreadful.” There’s also an obvious conflict between Marcuse’s more subjective (what he terms almost “biological” or “physiological”) apprehension of the suffocating conditions to which the student movement is responding (capitalism, racism, imperialism, Vietnam), and Adorno’s more objectivist one (that the conditions for revolution have not been achieved, that the German student movement hasn’t even the tiniest prospect of effecting a meaningful social intervention).

As the letters continue, their disagreement moves onto the affective plane, with Adorno accusing Marcuse of deceiving himself as to how terrible he thinks the situation really is.

“I think that clarity about the streak of coldness in one’s self is a matter for self-contemplation. To put it bluntly: I think that you are deluding yourself in being unable to go on without participating in the student stunts, because of what is occurring in Vietnam or Biafra” (127). Marcuse fires back, “in the light of the terrible situation I am unable to discover the ‘cold streak in one’s self’” (129).

The figure of the “cold streak” that Adorno uses here to represent autonomy—specifically the “cold streak in oneself”— suggests that his notions of critical (and, we shall see) artistic autonomy are paradoxically tied to a revolutionary horizon on the one hand and bourgeois notions of personal autonomy on the other. In Negative Dialectics, published just three years

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55 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1981) 362-363 56 “A Conversation with Theodor Adorno,” https://cominsitu.wordpress. com/2015/09/01/a-conversation-withtheodor-w-adorno-spiegel-1969/.

prior to this exchange, he revisits his famous statement that ‘after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems,” saying what he really meant to raise was the question of “whether after Auschwitz you can go on living—especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living.”5 4 This is the context in which he first raises the specter of the cold streak: “His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz” (363).

Tellingly, the next incident of student protest Adorno alludes to in his correspondence with Marcuse is the so-called “breast action” or Busenaktion (since there’s a German word for every situation), which was conceived in April 1969 as a moment of “planned tenderness” towards their professor.

At the start of lecture a student walked up to the board and wrote: “He who only allows dear Adorno to rule will uphold capitalism his entire life,” while three students wearing long leather jackets approached the podium, sprinkled rose and tulip petals over Adorno’s head, and attempted to kiss him on the cheek while exposing their naked breasts to him.55 The Busenaktion was widely condemned as an attempt to embarrass their professor, including by Adorno himself, but we might alternatively consider it a calling-forth of the “cold streak,” i.e. a staging of the possibility Adorno himself raises that rather than preserving the possibility of a utopian future in the midst of the awful present, the autonomy of theory was in that moment acting in service of the preservation of bourgeois subjectivity and its awful past.

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65 Adorno can’t see the student movement as anything other than near-sighted and haphazard—as he says in a famous interview from this period with Der Spiegel, he cannot accept the notion that “if only you change little things here and there, then perhaps everything will be better.” But Marcuse, while conceding that the student movement is not a revolution, nonetheless sees the need for their “new, very unorthodox forms of radical opposition.” Given that bourgeois democracy is sealed off from qualitative change through the parliamentary democratic process itself, he argues, “extra-parliamentary opposition becomes the only form of ‘contestation’; ‘civil disobedience’, direct action” (130). These forms of opposition no longer follow traditional patterns, but they must nonetheless be recognized as “letting the air in.”

It would seem, then, that Adorno’s failures are both affective and aesthetic—he misrecognizes the tenderness of the Busenaktion as a “barren and brutal practicism” (127) and he cannot see the radicality in the new forms of contestation.

In response, Marcuse argues that what is in fact being called for by the students in this moment is not practice in lieu of theory, but a different formulation of the relationship between the two. “It is wrong to cling onto the difference [between theory and practice] in its previous form,” he tells Adorno, “when this has changed in a reality that embraces (or opens up to) theory and practice” (129). To insist upon the old autonomy, he suggests, is to deny “the internal political content, the internal political dynamic” of the old theory—which is why students have come to them in search of concrete political positions to begin with.

JANET SARBANES — FORMS OF AUTONOMY

56 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (University of Minnesota Press: 1996), 41.

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During this period, both Adorno and Marcuse are also reflecting intensely on the relationship between art and praxis— Adorno in his final book, Aesthetic Theory, published posthumously in 1970; Marcuse in the 1969 Essay on Liberation.

Indeed, in the Spiegel interview, Adorno explicitly affirms the autonomy of theory by recasting it as an autonomous art: “In my writings,” he says, “I have never offered a model for any kind of action or for some specific campaign. I am a theoretical human being who views theoretical thinking as lying extraordinarily close to his artistic intentions.”

For Adorno, “art must be and wants to be utopia, and the more utopia is blocked by the real functional order, the more this is true.”5 6 Art, like theory, has an internal political dynamic, insofar as it takes its materials from a real world it fundamentally rejects and seeks to go beyond through the creation of new forms. Art’s utopia, and therefore its forms, must always be out of synch with society as it currently is: “If the utopia of art were fulfilled,” Adorno maintains, “it would be art’s temporal end” (41).

Marcuse understands the function of art vis-à-vis society in similar terms, as a “great refusal” of “all that is.” But in Essay on Liberation, he theorizes the emergence of a “new sensibility” that combines the aesthetic Great Refusal with a political Great Refusal, a break with the established order which he views as foundational to the spread of liberation movements around the globe. Indeed, he raises the possibility that in 1969, “political protest, having assumed a total character, [now] reaches into a dimension which, as aesthetic dimension, has been essentially apolitical.”5 7 Unlike Adorno, he entertains the CONTRAPUNTAL MEDIA — ART AND REASON

57 Herbert Marcuse, Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press 1969) 30.

58 See Bradford Martin’s discussion of “collective creation” in “Politics as Art, Art as Politics: The Freedom Singers, the Living Theatre and Public Performance,” in Long Time Gone: Sixties America Then and Now, ed. Alexander Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 159-188.

notion that art in this moment and situation is actually positioned to shape social reality. With the birth of this new sensibility—we might refer to it as the counterculture—“the radical social content of the aesthetic needs becomes evident as the demand for their most elementary satisfaction is translated into group action on an enlarged scale” (27-28).

If there’s one artistic practice of the late sixties and early seventies that might be said most to embody Marcuse’s new sensibility, it’s that of so-called “living art,” in particular the art of the Living Theatre. Along with Kaprow’s Happenings and the life-as-art performances of Fluxus, the Living Theatre sought to free the energy of the theater from its moribund conventions by jettisoning authorship and the dramatic script in Artaudian fashion and involving the audience in the performance event, transforming the theater from a site of enactment into a site of action.5 8 What’s more, the company lived as an anarcho-communist collective, and invested in autonomous social formations wherever it encountered them.

In 1968, while in residence in Sicily, the Living Theatre created the most ambitious and controversial embodiment of their ideas, a production whose title might be said to have trolled Adorno and Marcuse avant la lettre: Paradise Now. Largely unscripted, Paradise Now consisted of eight performance situations, each of which included a rite and a vision performed

by Living Theatre actors, and an action performed by the audience with the support of the actors. Each performance situation was articulated as a rung in the ascent towards the “beautiful non-violent anarchist revolution.” In addition to inviting audience members to participate in naked “body piles” JANET SARBANES — FORMS OF AUTONOMY

59 “Art as Form of Reality,” in Art and Liberation, Collected Papers of Marcuse (London: Routledge, 2006), 141.

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as part of the rung of “Universal Intercourse,” the production ended by throwing open the doors of the theatre and leading a procession of naked and half-naked people outside, chanting “the theatre is in the street . . . the street belongs to the people . . . free the theatre . . . free the street . . . begin,” which frequently resulted in arrests for indecent exposure.

Interestingly, Adorno and Marcuse were united in their disdain for the living art movement and especially the Living Theatre.

Adorno accused it of left fascism: “It is claimed that the age of art is over: now it is a matter of realizing its truth content, which is facilely equated with art’s social content: The verdict is totalitarian” (Aesthetic Theory, 251). Marcuse was more sympathetic to its aims, which he recognized as also reflecting the new sensibility: “The distance and dissociation of art from reality are denied, refused, and destroyed; if art is still anything at all, it must be real, part and parcel of life - but of a life which is itself the conscious negation of the established way of life, with all its institutions, with its entire material and intellectual culture, its entire immoral morality, its required and its clandestine behaviour, its work and its fun.”5 9 But while Marcuse embraced political protest that reaches into the aesthetic dimension by way of the Great Refusal, he rejected art that reached into the political dimension by unleashing an attack on art’s autonomy: “Compare the ‘classical’ theatre of Brecht with the Living Theatre of today.

We witness not only the political but also, and primarily, the artistic attack on art in all its forms, on art as Form itself” (140). Willing, at least for a time, to envision a different

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relationship between theory and praxis, he was quite convinced the rebellion against form “only succeed[ed] in a loss of artistic quality; illusory destruction, illusory overcoming of alienation” (146). He found the audience participation encouraged by the Living Theatre, for instance, to be “spurious and the result of previous arrangements,” and the vaunted change in consciousness and behavior to be merely part of the play. Most of all, he faulted living art for its naïve belief that it could erase the boundary between art and reality, since “it must retain, no matter how minimally, the Form of Art as different from non-art” (146). The true avantgarde, he suggests, is not “those who try desperately to produce the absence of Form and the union with real life, but rather those who do not recoil from the exigencies of Form, who find the new word, image, and sound which are capable of ‘comprehending’ reality as only Art can comprehend - and negate it” (146).

Though the finale of Paradise Now described above is perhaps the most notorious example of the Living Theater’s attempt to fuse art and life in a revolutionary present, I’d like to consider now a brief film Jonas Mekas made of Street Songs, a piece included in the Living Theatre’s Mysteries and Smaller Pieces—another production created on their European tour. Street Songs is derived from a score by Fluxus poet Jackson Mac Low that asks the performer to recite march slogans of the day in a kind of call and response with the audience. There is a looseness of form to this piece, and at first glance, obvious political content—chants of “Freedom Now” “Stop the War,” “A Bas La Guerre,” etc.—but what you JANET SARBANES — FORMS OF AUTONOMY

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have here is in fact the inverse movement of Paradise Now, where art is turned out of the theater and onto the street.

In this brief ritual, the street is brought into the theater, and marching chants become the meditation mantras of a single cross-legged actor, Julian Beck. Do the chants gain or lose meaning when funneled through a single voice? Is the company/audience mocking or supporting Beck in his utopian aspirations? Is he himself endorsing or satirizing the political sentiments he vocalizes? Is he embracing or critiquing the form of the chant itself? Is he communing with revolutionaries or confronting the audience with its own passivity?

All this to say, the meaning of the piece isn’t over-determined or over-scripted in the way Marcuse describes, for even as it brings street chants into the theater, it changes their form.

Street Songs thus consciously exploits the difference between art and life, but also renders that border more porous. Marcuse accuses the Living Theater of disingenuousness and downright ugliness because it jumps the gun, so to speak, on revolution. But mightn’t this be a failure on his part to recognize emerging affect and form, similar to Adorno’s condemnation of the student movement protests? Though the Living Theater certainly called for life in lieu of art, what it practiced, at least in the years 1964-70, was a different formulation of the relation between the two. To insist on the “old autonomy” in the face of this, as Marcuse arguably did, was to deny the internal political content of the old art—i.e. its utopian relation to society—and to betray the emergence, at least for a time, of a new sensibility that could let a little air into both art and life.

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J A NET SARBANES is Faculty in the MA Aesthetics and Politics program and the MFA Creative Writing Program and teaches cultural studies and critical theory in the School of Critical Studies.

ME DIA/

ANDREW CULP

FROM THE LINE OF REASON TO THE BLACK ARROW

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THE GREEK MIRACLE

The proclaimed ‘birth of reason’ has

occurred many times. Among the most well-rehearsed is the tale of triumph whereby logos replaces mythos. It is said to have occurred when the withdrawal of the gods interrupts the mythological, clearing way for the birth of both politics and philosophy. Comparative mythologist Jean-Pierre Vernant thus says that rational thought has been given “its identity papers” with an official time and place of birth being sixth century BCE in the Greek cities of Asia Minor (“The Formation of Positivist Thought in Archaic Greece,” Myth And Thought Among the Greeks, 371). And as the story goes, the great discovery of the Milesian school of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes was not the naturalist physis of their arche-substances but a sort of rational cosmology whereby human thought thinks itself without valorizing a particular human past.

As quickly as Vernant introduces this idea, he refutes it: the West has no monopoly on reason, its thought is not the only one to thinks and the birth of Greek philosophy does not hail the dawn of the mind (372). Peering behind the supposedly universal form of “Reason,” Jacques Derrida famously claims that metaphysics is nothing but “white mythology” that treats a particular species of mythology – the white Indo-European mythology of logos – as exceptional (“White Mythology,” 11).

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He retraces well-tread ground when considering the precise nature of this exception with the classical division between the human-animal (as zôon logon ekhon) and its others, but suggests the novel argument that this division continues through a whole metaphysical chain connecting discourse, utterance, noun, significance, sense, imitative representation, and resemblance (logos, phonè, semantikè, semainein, onoma, mimesis, homoiosis) (37). No wonder the long history of anxiety and violence metered out to those deemed unable to understand the meaning and truth. The very space between imitation and understanding is where the deconstructive kernel of white mythology can be found – a chasm laid bare

by Butler on the performativity of gender, Bhabha on colonial mockery, Gates on the signifyin(g) monkey. This is all to say: ‘the Greek miracle’ does not mark the birth of the mind but instead “social and mental structures peculiar to the Greek city,” the traces of which still subsist in contemporary rationalism (The Origins of Greek Thought, 130).

Vernant tells a political story of logos that begins with the crisis of sovereignty provoked by decline of the Mycenaen magician-kings and Homeric basileis, and with it, their supernatural cosmology (The Origins of Greek Thought, 51).

He matches the older mythic maintenance of the aristocratic basileus of warriors and priests to the Pythagorean numeric system of homonoia, both a mathematical and musical system that creates harmony out of contraries by placing them in a single accord (“Positivist Thought,” 388). Homonoia thus lends form to the notion of the social order being determined by the division/distribution (nomos) of privilege among CONTRAPUNTAL MEDIA — ART AND REASON

competing groups “that were opposed within the political community, just as the elemental powers were opposed within the cosmos” (388). The subsequent decline of the myth in the seventh century corresponds with the abstraction of nomos into the idea of isonomia as equality before the law for citizens, all seen in the same way (388-389). The rise of reason in this instance is not a miraculous birth, then, but the political opening up of the whole of Greek society to a spiritual world previously reserved for an aristocracy (Origins, 51). Subsequent political reforms in the city express a transformation in technique more broadly, as seen in the introduction of money, a new calendar, and the alphabetic writing system (“Positivist Thought,” 380; 389-397). In this way, one sense of logos is the political means by which a specific relationship between knowledge and technology is forged.

THE MECHANIZED LINE

The time period that interests me today

is a very different era of technical innovation, the age of mechanization. Just as the Ionian Greeks adopted a naturalistic philosophy with mechanistic and instrumentalist interpretations of the cosmos, modern mechanized production embodies a mode of thought. The mechanization of the last two centuries “is the end product of a rationalistic view of the world” says art historian-turned historian of technology Siegfried Giedion in his 1948 book Mechanization Takes Command (31). What is at stake here is not so much a calling into account of any particular rational-

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ism – that of Descartes, Leibniz, or Spinoza. Moreover, I wish to remain critical of rationalism without recourse to Max Weber’s ‘rationalization thesis,’ which is based on a criticism of calculation that relies on expertise, depersonalization, and control (The Limits of Rationality, 29-35). Rather, I am following the line of reason through various layers of society.

The itinerant path of mechanization is a long one. Aristotle’s Mechanica undertakes a practical examination of the lever, the pulley, and the balance in relation to problems of bodies in motion. For thousands of years, the most sophisticated technology were built from the ‘simple machines’ of the screw, the wedge, the wheel, the axle, the lever, and the pulley as powered by water, vacuum, or air pressure (as documented

by Heron of Alexandria; Schiefsky, “Theory and Practice in Heron’s Mechanics”). Even when interest for technical manuals in Italy piqued in the late sixteenth century, technological obsessions remained tied to devotion, fascination, and whimsy including automaton angels and Christs (“muttering, blinking, grimacing on the cross”) as well as a whole menagerie of mechanical fluttering animals, musical theaters, and companies of soldiers (Riskin, “Machines in the Garden,” 18).

In spite of the enduring attention paid to mechanization, is not until the eighteenth century that attempts were ever made to mechanize production.

The first phase of mechanization is an exercise in gesture.

It replaces the versatile motions of the human hand with a mechanical movement (Mechanization, 46-47). The pushing, pulling, and pressing of the hand is substituted by endless

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rotation. The second phase introduces mechanical means for standardization and interchangeability (47-50). Full mechanization thus arrives when human movement is not just substituted but removed, creating full automation’s continuous production where humans on only look on as “watcher and tester” (77). As such, a new spatial-temporal form takes root as the tempo of the machines create an inhuman rhythm (77). Both space and time are dictated by the technical capacities of the machinery rather than its human operator.

The first instance of this appears in Oliver Evans’s automatic flour mill in 1783, but it takes well over a century to reach its apex with meat processing and the automobile assembly line.

Intervening moments includes biscuit manufacturing by the British Navy in 1833, spinning machines and a variety of other inventions from the 1830-50s, and the explosion of mechanization in American starting in the 1860s.

LINE PRODUCTION

There are two ways in which the

rational line collides with mechanization to become line production, which later came to be called the assembly line First, the railroad becomes the factory – elevated rail system of hooks on rollers used in meatprocessing plants then introduced continuous movement into other areas of production. Over the course of his book, Giedion tracks how this form of continuous movement introduced in mass production also extended to agriculture, food, and commodities, as well as furniture (the barber’s chair or sleeping car), and machines used in the home (the vacuum,

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dishwasher, garbage disposal, refrigeration, and the bath).

Second, scientific management elevates rational organization of the line to the general logic of full mechanization. Most accounts of scientific management focus on the practicality of Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose pragmatic focus on identifying “clearly defined laws, rules, and principles” of efficiency lead to a new understanding of time-space (Principles of Scientific Management, 7). Armed with a stopwatch, his “minute study” of gestures to constitute a new principle of efficiency uses the micro in a way that mirrors recent Marginalist Revolution in economics that would establish microeconomics as an independent realm of inquiry (79).

More broadly, Taylor conceives of the factory as a selfcontained organism, which functions as a virtual diagram that could apply to any variety of industries - steel mills, weaponry, concrete construction, ball-bearing production. As such, scientific management established the reign of clock-time.

Often overshadowed is the work of Frank B. and Lilian Gilbreth, who were interested in a different form of efficiency: the economy of motion rather than the economy of time. Critical here is their invention of a ‘motion recorder,’ the Chronocyclegraph, meant to make visible the otherwise indiscernible gestures of experts as they perform their tasks. Their interest in capturing bodies in motion extends the chronophotographic line of sight established by Eadweard Muybridge, Ottomar Anschütz, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Georges Demenÿ, also later taken up by the likes of Harold Edgerton, Man Ray, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Unique to the Gilbreths is their use of photographic abstraction. By attachCONTRAPUNTAL MEDIA — ART AND REASON

ing an electric light to the appendage of someone performing a timed motion, they could then capture movement as photographic traces. Over the course of a long exposure, the body turn into nothing but a blur while a fluid white line remained in focus.

The point of this abstraction of movement was to establish a rational line that would set the pace of repetitive human interaction in complex mechanic processes, such as the repetitive motions that make an automobile. For the Gilbreths, the goal was to create a rational representation of movement that could be used to make worker’s ‘motion minded.’ As part of the making these representations durable, they translated the movement captured in chronocyclographic images into wire models. Yet these studies were not limited to work. The Gilbreth’s looked to fencers, bricklayers, pitchers, surgeons, oyster shuckers all compared to identify “points of similarity between their motions” (Motion Study for the Handicapped, 15).

The Gilbreths demonstrate that behind the discourse of “efficiency” lies a whole metaphysics of rationalism. In fact, discourse has little place here. Faces blur along with the bodies themselves, depicting the situation of speech being severely limited or altogether banned. All that is left is the movement of the line. Though quite far from the geometric methods of Spinoza or Leibniz, there remains something to rationalism’s shared interest in lines that connects the movement of a straight line around a point that creates a circle to the continuous movement of the wheel that defines line production. How are we to understand the social signifi-

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cance of the line? As engineers, what little Taylor or the Gilbreths have to say on the matter is terribly enlightening.

So following Vernant’s lead, perhaps it is best to shift our attention to a different register.

ANOTHER LINE What happens when one follows

rational line to the point where figures fade away, leaving behind traces of the real as movement?

Engineers might hope that the line functions as an index from which they can establish the laws, rules, and principles of proper motion. This is why the Gilbreths constructed their wire models with a grid background – it affords a sense of objectivity. But the Gilbreths also prefigure Bresson’s Pickpocket, which Gilles Deleuze describes as using the hand to make touch “an object of view in itself,” in that it “takes place of the face itself for the purpose of affects” and “becomes the mode of construction of a space which is adequate to the decision of the spirit” (Cinema 2, 12). So in an altogether different sense, it is through the rational line that movement itself becomes an aesthetic figure.

By the 1920s, the rational line leaped across the canvas of abstract art. Already by 1912, Marcel Duchamp had incorporated the chronophotographic tradition of Marey and others into his “Nude Descending Stairs, No. 2.” It combined both the photographic and diagrammatic forms in motion across a space outlined in chronographs, such as those of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. The integration of movement as an abstract line comes into fruition with the work

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of Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, and Paul Klee. The emerge of these artist provide the most interesting moments in Giedion’s book, as he seamlessly transitions from detailed histories of technological transformation to brief discussions of aesthetic revolution. Paul Klee sits beside Frank B. Gilbreth, whereby the former “admits us into the workshop,” and the latter, the factory (Mechanization, 109). Alongside a time-motion study of “Girl Folding a Handkerchief,” a line-study of “The Spiral” (1925), accompanied by some original text, “Motion here is no longer finite; and the question of direction regains new importance,” but Giedion fails to include Klee’s startling conclusion “This direction determines either a gradual liberation from the center through freer and freer motions, or an increasing dependence on an eventually destructive center. This is the question of life and death; and the decision rests with the small arrow” (Mechanization, 111; Pedagogical Notebooks, 53).

For Klee, the line is not just a formal element. Just look to the opening lines of his Pedagogical Sketchbook, which begins with a single line, “an active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal,” taking a “walk for a walk’s sake” (Pedagogical Sketchbook, 16). Editor and translator Sibyl Moholy-Nagy concludes by explaining that the line-in-action works is the beacon that guides Klee (34). She suggests supplementing Klee’s tracing of bone and muscle, the blood stream, waterwheels, watermills, railroad tracks, balances, bullets, and arrows with even more rhythmic experiments in “the vertical extension of bird flight, the horizontal motion of the tides,

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the circular rhythm of tree rings” – examples all at home in the chronophotographic tradition (34). Circle back to Giedion’s conspicuous omission of Klee’s concluding remarks on the spiral. We must ask ourselves: what is it about scientific management that makes it allergic to thinking freedom and destruction, life and death?

FROM THE SPIRAL TO THE FORMATION OF THE BLACK ARROW

French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and

Félix Guattari might be a surprising source for thinking rationalism. To rationalist’s horror, Deleuze rehabilitates both Spinoza and Leibniz by way of materialism. Yet maybe there is common ground to be found in their philosophy of lines, and Paul Klee’s approach to the line in particular. Consider how Deleuze and Guattari echo Klee with discussing “the refrain,” writing that “what is needed in order to ‘render visible’ or harness the Cosmos is a pure and simple line accompanied by the idea of an object, and nothing more: if you multiply the lines and take the whole object, you get nothing but a scramble, and visual sound effects” (A Thousand Plateaus, 344). To this end, a surprising amount of their vocabulary from A Thousand Plateaus overlaps with writing in Klee’s notebooks, published as Volume 1: The Thinking Eye and Volume 2: The Nature of Nature – the concept, lines, points, planes, poles, the earth, rhythm, movement, stratification, territory, the cosmos, creation, the people, bodies, organs, the dividual, the egg, life.

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The relationship between rationalism and the work of Deleuze and Guattari is also plagued by their reputation as irrationalists of a sort. And there are grounds for this interpretation.

Deleuze once remarked in an interview that “all societies” are “perforce rational in their mechanisms, their cogs and wheels, their connecting systems, and even by the place they assign to the irrational,” leading him to summarize his remarks in an aphorism: “the rational is always the rationality of an irrational” (“Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium,” 35-36).

Yet it has been misunderstood as some sort of ballad to the incalculable or an embrace of aberrant (for instance, Brian Massumi’s writing on on the superiority of the analog and David Lapoujade’s project of delirious thought). In contrast, it is my contention that there is something about the line of movement that coincides with both the assembly line and Paul Klee that tells us something about the often-elusive concept the line of flight. What if we were to take the line of flight to be a ‘rational line’? What would it mean for reason to take flight?

The critical rationalism of Deleuze and Guattari would look unlike the traditional humanist critique of the assembly line.

Perhaps Klee’s lines can reverse line production, playing the axiomatic logic of rationalism backwards. There is already a model set of for this on Deleuze and Guattari treat Spinoza as Spinoza treated Descartes – using his method as a starting point only to subvert it. So while Spinoza appears in parts of A Thousand Plateaus as if he was its patron saint, there is a clear adoption of his geometric method in the two nomad-

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ology plateaus to structure their presentation through axioms, propositions, and problems. With close consideration, the fault line is clear: the axiomatics of rationalism is what defines capitalism (something already clear in Anti-Oedipus), whereas the anti-capitalist war machine proceeds by way of problematic lines (461). The image of thought associated with these two models is precisely where issues arise. The irrationalist imagines axiomatics through images of gravity, such as a spinning top, a pendulum, or a perfect circle. Yet the fluid motions depicted by the Gilberth’s is not defined by simplicity but fluidity – movement stuck in a loop, continuous, repetitive. It is here that rationalism offers a way out, but only by reconsidering the rationalist sense of ‘a thought that thinks itself.’ The problematic line of flight that challenges line production is not an irrational line. Nor is it a spiral looking to achieve escape velocity. Rather, one finds a different rational line in Klee’s black arrow, which he says forms “when a given, or adequate, or actual white receives intensified energies from additive, acting, or futural black” (Pedagogical Notebooks, 57). Stripped of his productivist language, Klee provides an image of thought that results from casting a line to the outside. This outside is not a space to occupy but an event that forces thought into crisis. Or as Daniel W. Smith says, thought as thinking difference, thinking “that which is absolutely different from thought but which none the less gives itself to thought,” which is not a thought that thinks existence buts its inverse: “existence forcing itself on thought, forcing itself to be thought, albeit in the form of an intelligible problem or Idea” (“Logic and Existence,” 85). The abstract

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rationalism of the black arrow does little to build new temples of reason. Instead, it propels the movement of something else altogether: the idea of critique.

If that fails, we could worse than than that older discussion of the line of movement in Klee in a document similarly dedicated to unveiling the mechanical workings of an automaton: There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus.

It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm (Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 392).

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REFERENCES

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Aristotle, “Mechanical Problems,” Minor Works, trans. W.S. Hett (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 327-411.

Benjamin, Walter, “On the Concept of History,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and others, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 4: 1938-1940 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003): 389-411.

Brubaker, Roger, The Limits of Rationality: An Essay on the Social and Moral Thought of Max Weber (New York: Routledge, 1984).

Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: The TimeImage, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, “Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium,” in Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977 (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009): 35-52.

Derrida, Jacques, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” trans. F. C. T. Moore , New Literary History 6:1 (1974): 5-74.

Lapoujade, David, Aberrant Movements: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, trans.

Joshua David Jordan (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2017).

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Riskin, Jessica, “Machines in the Garden,” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1:2 (2010): 16-43.

Schiefsky, Mark J, “Theory and practice in Heron’s Mechanics,” in Mechanics and Natural Philosophy before the Scientific Revolution, ed. W. R. Laird and S. Roux (New York: Springer, 2007), 15-49.

Smith, Daniel W., “Logic and Existence: Deleuze on the Conditions of the Real,” in Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012): 72-85.

Taylor, Frederick Winslow, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishing, 1913).

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, “The Formation of Positivist Thought in Archaic Greece,” in Myth And Thought Among the Greeks (New York: Zone Books, 2006).

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).

Gilbreth, Frank B., and Lillian, Motion Study for the Handicapped (London: Routledge, 1920).

Klee, Paul, Pedagogical Sketchbook, trans. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1953).

Klee, Paul, Notebooks Volume 1: The Thinking Eye (London: Lund Humphries Publishers, 1961).

Klee, Paul, Notebooks Volume 2: The Nature of Nature (London: Lund Humphries Publishers, 1973).

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ANDREW CULP — FROM THE LINE OF REASON

A N DREW CULP is Faculty in the MA Aesthetics and Politics program and teaches media and digital studies as well as critical theory in the School of Critical Studies.

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.

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