The Game of the Real: Art and the Knowledge Project

A DOCUMENT OF THE AESTHETICS AND POLITICS LECTURE SERIES

THE GAME OF THE REAL ART AND THE KNOWLEDGE PROJECT

CALARTS SCHOOL OF CRITICAL STUDIES

EDITED BY AMANDA BEECH AND NATALIE BUSCH | VOL. 1 SPRING 2021

THE GAME OF THE REAL ART AND THE KNOWLEDGE PROJECT

CALARTS SCHOOL OF CRITICAL STUDIES

Contents Introduction Amanda Beech

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Session I. Anna Longo Tristan Garcia

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Responses and Questions Responses Ryan Mangione-Smith Hannah Plotke

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Questions Natalie Busch Lydia Horne

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Session II. Chiara Bottici Boris Ondreička

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Responses and Questions Responses Kulov Nikki Gamboa Moham Wang

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Questions Lydia Horne Kristofor Giordano

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Session III. Mer Maggie Roberts Nandita Biswas Mellamphy

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Responses Andrew Moses C Bain

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Questions Kristofor Giordano Natalie Busch

Keywords

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THE GAME OF THE REAL: ART AND THE KNOWLEDGE PROJECT Our attempts to know, explain and grip objective reality objectively or—the task of knowing things as they really are rather than as they appear to be—has revolutionized our understanding of ‘a world out there’. But, at the same time, what we have learnt has also revolutionized our self-perception, transforming conceptions of ourselves as self-determining beings to be increasingly contingent, alienated and dispossessed. These forms of knowledge have produced the irony that the world is a human oriented and human-made fiction, yet one that we have no capacity to control and they have outlined the tragic recognition (now fully advanced in forms of public acceptance and extreme tolerance of inequality) that capitalist ideology is our fate and any decision that aims beyond it is futile; and that we are the dust particles of interplanetary indeterminacy and we should be one with nature. These as well as other alienation stories backgrounded by science and materialism are but a few of these narratives of human knowing. They remind us how knowledge of the structure of our reality bars us from the unknowable, and the idea of knowing is often the project of knowing our limits. Often, problematically, the project of knowing self – determining what the human is in forms of self-reflexive knowledge only knows semantic nihilism; a world of circularities, traps and dead ends.

Whilst art has often been seen to produce experiences beyond our cognitive grasp occupying a space between transcendental and dogmatic realism, it is true that its critical identity shares similar pathologies of self-reflexive knowledge that has unproductively secularized art from the political. The idea

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that art is the space wherein knowledge is re-thought is troubled by its own critical traditions.

By exploring the relations between art and philosophy, we can ask: How do systems of “non-knowledge” such as technology, non-human intelligencies as well as libidinal economies including art, that have been claimed to intersect with the objective world but not know anything about it, shed light upon this problem, if at all? On the other hand, if knowing that something is the case is not a means to transcend that case, then is the idea of art’s self-explication in any formation also a deadend street?

What, if any, is the role of art in a constructive project such that art might demand and enable us to re-orientate the very idea of what knowing is, what thinking is and what reality is?

In a context where there is no straightforward way of explaining and understanding what anything is, does and means, we can think about the possibilities for a paradigm shift in what constitutes knowledge, thinking and reason. The serious games we can play in systems where things are yet to be known, allow us to ask if a “game of the real” allows us to reconfigure both our means and our ends, to revise the rules that rule us. Indeed, in a world dominated by affect-based populism, is the question of knowledge credible, warranted or achievable today in politics and culture; dare we mention “progress”?

In the following pages we document the talks presented by 6 speakers over one semester at the Aesthetics and Politics Lecture Series, Spring, 2021. The series is part of a core class for our MA Aesthetics and Politics Graduate students in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts, where our visitors lead seminars with students as well as present talks and discussion topics. This series is part of a long term program that has been consistently supported and normally held at the West Hollywood Public Library. This year it was held remotely, streamed live and archived on our youtube channel. I would like to thank West Hollywood for supporting this series and for investing in the production of public conversations around these important themes.

The format for this series consisted of three sets of talks each featuring two speakers. These included Anna Longo and

INTRODUCTION

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Tristan Garcia, Chiara Bottici and Boris Ondreika and Mer Maggie Roberts and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy. What is important to mention is that some of our speakers had not met before, and were asked to come together to present their work in many ways to test out the possible connections, conjunctures and tensions between their disciplines (art, philosophy, theory, curation and more) and their positions. In many ways then, whilst this series was “curated” it was not planned in terms of what we understood to be a line of specific inquiry nor any sense that this line, if we saw it, would lead somewhere.

Instead we worked with a hunch and followed our noses just a little…

In our first event Anna Longo spoke to the problem of capital and how the game-like system of our contemporary economy stands as the vector by which our future is organized.

Longo’s work brought up questions of how and if the understanding can de-naturalize a system that insinuates itself as nature, a systematic ontology of forces that accommodates and thrives on deviance and subversion and which, problematically for Longo, denies justice. Tristan Garcia also discussed social organization via the question of representation, looking at the scene of the exhibition in what we might call the hyper expanded field, for it is something that is constructed as much by animals as by humans. His work brought up questions of how exhibitions instantiate the presence of what is not correlated to our knowledge or perception: the object and our role in engineering these encounters. Garcia’s presentation posed the question of how the exhibition is not just an ontological description of life at work, but is held as politically necessary for a quality of life. Overall, in both presentations, questions of nature, organization and power underscored the intense relation between subjectivity and objectivity, and how our understanding of them bears out in the social as decision, value and meaning.

Our second event concentrated on the politics of negation, in both the art form and anarchism. Chiara Bottici performed a manifesto for Anarcha-feminism, an urgent call to mobilize in solidarity against all dominance in the name of specific oppressions. The scene for this work is her “Imaginal Feminisms”, a space that following Spinoza by-passes the Modernist

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trajectories of subject and object dualisms and instead proposes the aesthetics of the counter Spectacle, a work of representation against inequality. Boris Onderika also offered a performance in the presentation of a new work that responded to our theme. Here, the question of the operations of the artwork were addressed, the aesthetics of knowledge, and the space of its undoing in the form of constructive and disaggregating diagrammatics. In both, the question of the dynamic between matter and what matters, and the production of thought and meaning in a trans-individual and post-human ecology was foregrounded.

Across the whole series we have tried to stress the complex relation between how the understanding supplies itself with what we take to be reality in itself and how mediations manifest what we take to be the case, in various and diverse languages that span the artistic, the political and the scientific.

In a world beyond the assurances of a classical metaphysics, we might find ourselves making specific anchorages for our rational and imaginary capacities via securing temporal, pragmatic and unverified grounds; a kind of pragmatism that may still be haunted by the spectre of the indeterminate and crisis ridden character of not only the future as a political project, but the transient aspect of the address from which we think it.

But other investigations focus on this disjunction at the heart of knowledge. Nandita Biswas Mellamphy’s work is a case in point. Her work on larval warfare raises specific questions regarding the distinction between our capacity to act in the world and our means to understand it. In Larval Warfare the state of all affairs is perpetual antagonism embroiled within all life via the complex and insidious nature of the hyper technological. Who gets to win this game, who sets the rules and how we discern ourselves and each other therefore instantiates new questions regarding knowledge in formats of conspiracy and peripheral tactical obligations. This vista of newly apprehended networks that define human and non-human intelligences manifests in Mer Maggie Roberts’ artworks developed as part of the collective 0rphan Drift. In the context of art that conducts research regarding what it is to perform intelligence, we are given an aesthetics without telos, levered through the condition of the Octopus. In this, art and science take on a new

INTRODUCTION

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AMANDA BEECH DEAN SCHOOL OF CRITICAL STUDIES

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interdisciplinarity, a project with its own problem, that catalyzes political and philosophical hypothesizing regarding the languages that are excluded from human knowledge and those that can extend it. In these scenes, we can ask more profound and difficult questions regarding how and if such extensions of knowing recursively transform the standards and rules that govern the conditions of knowledge in itself. A striving for knowledge thus enters the scene of various disjunctions in knowledge; do we exit such frames and what do we find within them?

Discussion and reflection are a key part of any lecture series and for each session we have included interventions and discussion from our students who participated in this class.

Together, these dialogues, presentations and discussions leave open a set of provocations and establish some unanswered questions, ready for future dialogue. These extensions invite us to work further towards understanding the contradictions, problems and paradoxes that persist when we start to talk about orders of power, and theories of knowing; how thought and world articulate compatibilities in complex involutions and processes, producing who we think we are.

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THE EVOLUTION OF CONVENTIONS AND THE CONVENTIONALITY OF EVOLUTION ANNA LONGO I would like to start by addressing an apparent paradox. On the one hand, today we have very sophisticated algorithmic predictive systems that analyze impressive quantities of data. On the other hand, we are exposed to increasing uncertainty about the future; although we rely on constantly updated forecasts, it is more and more difficult to make plans.

This leads to two opposite perceptions: on the one hand, the idea that beliefs are manipulated and behaviors controlled, and on the other hand, the idea that hypotheses which are reasonable today won’t be valid for making decisions tomorrow.

I am going to show that these opposite feelings of uncertainty and control can be explained as effects of the game theoretic notion of knowledge, which supports the productive evolution of the laws of the market in the age of information economy.

Since time is short for developing a full argument, I am going to introduce the issue through fiction, specifically the short story “The Lottery in Babylon,” written by G.L. Borges.

The narrator tells the story of the progressive and monstrous development of a common lottery in the mythical city of Babylon. Since people had lost interest in the banal initial lottery, the company organizing it decided to include in the list of lucky numbers a couple of unlucky draws requiring the payment of a fee. The introduction of this little risk turned out to be attractive and the company running the lottery started to make good profits again.

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To protect the interests of the winners, whose prizes were awarded with the money coming from the fees, insolvent losers started to be legally pursued and they had two options: pay the due or spend some days in jail. Of course, in order to spoil the lottery, most of the losers chose to go to prison. So, after a while, the company decided to substitute the list of fines with tickets forcing periods of jail; for the first time a non-pecuniary outcome appeared in the lottery, making it more exciting.

Meanwhile, people were protesting because only wealthy Babylonians could afford the lottery tickets and the poor were excluded from the thrilling experience. So the company decided to make the game free for anybody and to substitute pecuniary rewards with the hazardous distribution of events affecting people’s life: one could be physically punished, one could be nominated as president of a company, another one could be sent on a trip or locked in a cave.

However, to manage this transformation, the company was forced to assume all public power and it became secret. Finally, the lottery was made compulsory and the town of Babylon was turned into nothing but an infinite game of chance.

At the end of the story, the narrator explains that Babylonians accepted chance as a natural and necessary condition and they forgot about the lottery and about the secret company determining the hazard they regularly encountered in life.

It is interesting to note that, at some point in the fiction, the narrator observes that Babylonians were not speculative people, so they did not try to develop a theory of gaming and they passively accepted, with terror and hope, the unpredictable unfolding of their destiny. Our story starts exactly at the point when a Babylonian had a brilliant idea: if chance is real, why not bet on it?

The game entered a new phase in the 20th Century, when Babylonian scientists realized that the laws of classic mechanics were not suitable for predicting the plurality of possible states that can follow from the same conditions. They started to apply probability calculus to quantify the chances of observing different possible experimental outcomes, exactly as natural phenomena were determined by stochastic devices like dice, roulettes or coins. So, it comes with no surprise that, as

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Henry Poincare noted, “in a multitude of circumstances the physicist is often in the same position as the gambler who reckons up his chances.”

Scientists accepted the challenge by trying to guess what kind of random device was responsible for the aleatory series of observed experimental results, exactly like it was a matter of determining what kind of dice Nature was throwing by observing the largest possible number of results in order to calculate the probability distribution of future outcomes. Accordingly, the idea was that the probability distribution of future events could be calculated by observing past frequencies so as to elaborate on winning betting strategies.

However, it soon became evident that it was not possible to prove the existence of real random variables as if nature was actually throwing dice, tossing coins or spinning roulettes. In the same way as there is no ground to assess that all the ravens are black after having observed a large number of black samples, so it is not certain that new observations won’t contradict past frequencies and expected probability distributions.

Moreover, there are events—for instance earthquakes, volcanic eruptions but also wars, famines, etc.—for which it is reasonable to consider possible future occurrences even though they did not happen frequently enough in the past to calculate their future likelihood in an objective way.

On the one hand, the prediction of such rare events is extremely important and, on the other hand, they challenge the belief in the stability of probabilistic laws; rare catastrophic events, in fact, modify the situation in such a way that a totally new set of events becomes possible, while what one used to observe does not happen anymore.

Among these rare events, we can consider, for instance, the evolution of the lottery in Borges’ story; any further step of it brought about conditions that couldn’t be anticipated. When the lottery was based only on pecuniary rewards, one could calculate the probability of winning by knowing the proportion of lucky and unlucky tickets in the urn. But one couldn’t calculate the risk of buying a ticket for prison since this option was enabled by the unpredictable decision of modifying the content of the urn.

Nevertheless, it would be inaccurate to claim that the

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company’s decisions to modify the rules of the lottery couldn’t have been anticipated by relying on a different kind of information, for example, rumours or just by thinking of the possible reactions of the company to customers’ discontent. The belief that the rules of the lottery were about to be changed could have been reasonably supported, and it was actually possible to start believing in a new probabilistic forecast.

The game entered a new phase thanks to the subjective interpretation of probability and the rediscovery of Bayes’ method for calculating the degree of beliefs that predictive hypotheses deserve with respect to the available–but always incomplete–information supporting them. From this standpoint, not only past frequencies but any kind of information can support a prediction, and a prediction is subjectively more or less probable with respect to the quantity and the quality of gathered information. Within this framework, the subjective degree of belief in a hypothesis is measured by the decisions that one is willing to make by relying on it; for example, how many tickets to buy with respect to the hypothesis that a certain kind of prizes are available.

Thanks to Bayesian probability theory, Babylonians learnt to bet not only on supposed real random variables, but they started betting on the likelihood of different probabilistic predictions as they were evaluating the reasons to believe that nature was playing with a regular fair dice rather than with a biased one. To go back to the example of the lottery, it is like the Babylonians started to bet not only on the possible events by calculating their chances as if the composition of the urn was known, but they started betting on hypotheses about the possible compositions of the urn.

Accordingly, to hold a belief about the likelihood of a predictive hypothesis means to engage with a specific strategy, or a set of decisions whose consequences are the best with respect to the expected state of the world. Different beliefs about the probability of a future specific event—for example, the next ticket drawn from the urn—entail different decisions and the observation of others’ bets reveals their beliefs. First, this led to the opportunity of embracing the beliefs of the players whose decisions were more successful so that players started to converge toward similar predictions and decisions. But soon

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they realized that they could enter a further stage of the game by enabling bets about the decisions of anybody else by trying to guess their beliefs by observing behaviors.

Hence, decisions started to be made by anticipating reciprocal strategies in such a way as to select the best responses to any others’ expected decisions. As a consequence, the lottery became a multi-agent competition where probability measures the likelihood of the expectation about players’ future moves, and where decisions are determined by the available information about players’ beliefs.

Bayesian Babylonians soon realized that they could get higher profits by privately investing in the research of information about the others’ behaviours in order to guess their beliefs and anticipate their decisions. Since more informed player’s decisions are unpredictable for the less informed, the latter’s bets are far less rewarding than the former’s.

They also realized that, since information is the key to making efficient decisions, it could be privately produced and sold as a good; the investment in the acquisition of more sophisticated forecasts would be compensated by the possibility of playing more profitable strategies. Moreover, they realized that the release of information was a good way of manipulating beliefs in such a way to produce behaviours that can be predicted by the more informed manipulators to their own advantage.

When information is costly and unequally distributed—rather than being free and public—the chances of making the best decisions with respect to the others’ expected strategies are reserved for the agents who have the means of actually exploiting data resources, predictive technologies and media in their own interest. While updating their beliefs on misleading information, naïve agents make decisions that fulfill the expectations of those who manipulated their beliefs, rather than their own expectations.

The lottery became a competition where more informed species of players have more chances to replicate their incomes.

Within this ever evolving competition, fitness depends upon the capacity for developing innovative deviant strategies based on the private exploitation of costly information and expensive technologies for data mining and algorithmic predictions.

Taking into account the infinite correlations discoverable in

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growing data sets, forecasts about the future states of the multi-agent game are continuously produced, updated and constantly contradicted by new ones. These predictive hypotheses are more or less believable experts’ forecasts that suggest strategies for making decisions in order to get some specific good or to avoid undesirable possible future situations. However, predictive hypotheses are also forecasts that are privately sold and bought to enable the more informed to bet on the effects of the less informed agent’s unilaterally anticipated beliefs and behaviours.

In this latest form of the universal game, the plurality of available predictive hypotheses are like tickets to participate in different lotteries that do not provide the same chances of getting large rewards. While the most expensive belief tickets allow those who can afford them to make decisions that are more fortunate, free tickets are offered to produce behaviours to the advantage of somebody else. The world has become a rapidly evolving game of chance where one has to bet on the probability of buying the tickets for the good lottery. Nevertheless, not everybody has the information which is needed to make efficient choices.

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NEITHER GESTURE NOR WORK OF ART: EXHIBITION AS DISPOSING FOR APPEARANCE TRISTAN GARCIA What Is Revealed and What Is Exhibited Perhaps there are cultures of revelation and cultures of exhibition, or rather: perhaps one part of any culture rests on revelation, another part on exhibition. Let us take “revelation” as the sudden appearance to a subject of an idea or a reality, of a simple presence.1 This appearance of an object (of linguistic content, like a divine commandment, of a prophetic image, or even a pure and present sensation) is given as immediate, without the slightest intermediary, as natural and spontaneous.

By contrast, by “exhibition”—for the time being in its broadest sense—we may understand any lasting, constructed, publicized appearance of an idea (a mathematical theorem), a presence (the remains of a dead animal), or a representation (a drawing on a wall). What is exhibited does also appear, but in contrast to a revelation, the exhibit is given as having been prepared, organized, and deliberately made available to appear to us. The operation therefore presupposes a set of arrangements that both bring us closer to the thing that appears and distances it from us. We are led toward it by artifices (a constraining path, a play of light, a dramatic staging) and made distrustful of its appearance due to the very fact of these artifices (we have been manipulated, everything was arranged to make us see what we saw).

That which is exhibited triumphs over what is revealed in its total honesty about the means, but it loses in intensity regarding its purpose: what is exhibited is more credible than what is revealed, but one believes in it less strongly.

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Everything that a religious, mystical, or aesthetic revelation claims to make appear intuitively, spontaneously, and immediately to a person’s consciousness (which might be the name of God, a vision of the absolute, just as well as amorous feelings, the naked beauty of a moment, the pure presence of things, the general order of the real), an exhibition claims to deliver to perception and to intellection by subjects who are disposed to receive this rationalized appearance, by an ensemble of means that do not hide themselves, but do not appear directly to the spectator: plinths, frames, showcases, picture rails, lighting, etc.

Exhibition is easy to conceive, through all the historic transformations in sites and modes of exhibition, from the Wunderkammer as analogic space2 to the White Cube as generic space,3 as a sort of transcendental concept of the

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Exhibit to Organize Appearance If we recognize the two principal paths of appearance in cultures (revelation and exhibition), then hypothetically the path of exhibition designates everything that allows subjects to make things appear to themselves. These things may be abstract, as in a mathematical demonstration, i.e., an ensemble of procedures enabling the organized appearance of a truth; or they may be concrete, and this is what interests us here. What figures here is the regulated appearance, in a limited space and time, sometimes ritualized, of presences (mineral, vegetable, bodies, artefacts) or representations (images, texts, sounds), staged in a way to be perceived, seen, read, heard, and sometimes touched by spectators.

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But we should take seriously the possibility of exhibiting as a possibility of living things in general, and of the human species in particular, as it works endlessly with revelation and against it. Without exhibition, revelations—too rare, brief, individual, and powerful but dubious—could never make a society; in order to reveal (in the religious, artistic, or scientific order), it is always necessary to resolve eventually to exhibit, which means accepting having to construct the possibility of a collective appearance to the eyes of others.

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To Exhibit Is Not to Show It is perhaps as a negative, by carefully separating the two related concepts, that “exhibition” may be better defined. In fact, we should distinguish the action of exhibiting from the act of representing or showing.

Many anthropologies of gesture, which often go back to the work of Etienne Bonnot de Condillac 4 and Jean-Jacques Rousseau,5 have insisted on the immediacy of the gesture as opposed to the articulation of speech. At the interface between nature and culture, a gesture appears as the most spontaneous expression of a conscious and intentional living being, which projects itself toward something, which designates it with the hand, the chin, a simple exclamation, which tries to make present something other than itself, and also to make present to someone else a detail of the environment, a part of the landscape, an animal in movement, the source of a sound, a subject of concern, a predator, or, inversely, a prey.

Without reproducing this work on gesture conceived as an immediate expression, which has been largely criticized,6 here we shall content ourselves with defining gesture as the effort of making itself present and of rendering present something that is already present. A gesture in effect presupposes playing on the dual sense of “presence”: on the one hand, objective presence, the presence of something (the tree that I see from afar), and on the other the subjective presence, the presence to something (perception, a consciousness that is directed—and directs the attention of another—to the tree). Objective presence is discrete: either the tree is there or it is not there; subjective presence is continuous and intensive: a subjectivity is capable of making itself more or less present to something, for its attention may always increase or decrease.

Returning to the problem that concerns us, if we accept this characterization of the gesture as a double presence, we already perceive what obliges us to distinguish showing from exhibiting: in exhibiting a cairn (a pile of stones), a cut-up animal carcass, raked bones, or any other object left as testimony.

I claim in effect to show something that will survive my gesture.

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appearance of things that are organized socially—but it is hard to actually define it.

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To Exhibit Is Not to Represent It is tempting to make of the exhibition a kind of representation: like any image, what is exhibited in effect designates something, whereas the person who wanted to designate that thing is no longer there to point a finger, even presuming that the representation ever had a model in the real world—the painting outlives the model and the painter, the exhibition also exists in the absence of the person who conceived it. But nevertheless, should we identify the exhibition of images with an image like any other, or make of the exhibition of signs a signification like any other?7 In that case, we would commit a confusion of orders and make a mistake symmetric with the preceding one (assimilation of gesture and exhibition).

Whereas a representation such as a fixed image, whether it be pictorial or photographic, makes something present absent (matter, of in this case a spatial dimension, since it transforms three dimensions into quasi bi-dimensionality), in order to present something that is absent (a landscape, a face, a silhouette, perhaps an abstract form, even an ideality),8 an exhibition always presents to us only what was already there. To exhibit— like to show—is to render present to one who is present: natural samples, artefacts, bodies, movements, layouts, and perhaps

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Mysteriously, I do something so that the thing will be shown by itself again, after I have gone.

Therefore, though I must absolutely be present to be able to show, I may and I must (in time) become absent to be able to exhibit.

So, exhibiting in its most fundamental anthropological sense consists of producing a gesture that implies the effacement of the one who shows. Quite evidently, such a maneuver presupposes that at first there must have been someone to show, but also that this someone is no longer there to do so: what was previously shown now shows itself. So, what is exhibited is not what was shown, but what shows itself, because that will have been carefully conceived and called to the attention of an audience, in such a way that it no longer has to be shown to be able to appear. This is what separates the exhibition from the gesture, and seems to relate it to representation.

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Not to Show or to Represent, but to Make Available for Appearance Let me summarize as follows: showing (a gesture) is an oriented relation between a present subject and a present object; representation (of an image, a text, music) is an oriented relation between a present object (colors and forms, phonemes or signs, frequencies or rhythms) and an absent object (a figure, a silhouette, a real or imaginary scene that is described, a feeling that is evoked). And between the two, what we call “exhibition” is the oriented relation between a subject ready to absent itself (the one who arranges things) and a present object (the things arranged). Schematically:

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images, etc. Of course, one may exhibit representations—which is what ordinarily occurs in an art museum or gallery—but the confusion would consist of imagining, by a sort of meta-artistic illusion, that one was representing representations, that one was making a work of art out of artworks. But no: the exhibition delivers works in their full materiality, in their stubborn presence, bodies as well as images, sometimes texts and ideas.

Better still: the exhibition renders presence to representations that flee into ideality, that evade what is there in order to point toward what is not there. To exhibit, from this point of view, leads back to the first presence of objects that are trying to make absent something from their hic et nunc. What the artist does, what someone who exhibits his work must somehow do— more or less delicately—is to undo this, in order to better let it appear.

For this reason, the exhibition, even in the service of representations, also works against them by showing them, because it never designates anything that is not concretely there, in a given space and time.

And this is what distances the exhibition from the concept of representation—and brings it closer to the concept of gesture.

To show present subject==presents==> present object To exhibit

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From “representation” that is the foundation of any art, the exhibition retains the possibility of dealing with absence in relation to the gesture, which always presupposes an entire and shared presence of subjectivity and objectivity. But from “gesture,” in contrast with representation, the exhibition retains the necessary presence of the presented object: an exhibited image is therefore not the image of an image, the representation of a representation, but the presentation of this representation, which is quite different.

The apparently paradoxical consequence of this is that an exhibition lets the presented object, in the absence of the presenting subject, present itself.

This is what defines in our sense any exhibition, from the first arrangements realized by birds or primates that gathered trifles or branches, objects of vivid color or sparkling fragments,9 and arranged them so that they would be seen in the absence of those who arranged them. One who exhibits, whether non-human or human, prepares his own disappearance and tries to give what he exhibits the power by itself to be exhibited to sight, to the attention of those who come by. This seems to me an impulse quite different from representation, which instead tries to point toward what is not there, just like the gesture, which presupposes the presence of the one who performs it.

Thus, as soon as a living being starts to exhibit anything at all, he prepares for his own disappearance from the eyes of others; he effaces his existence and starts to dispose to action that which he wanted to show, so that it appears to us as if it were spontaneous.

How can we dispose something to appear? This is the key to the comprehension of any form of exhibition whatever, from the first cabinets of curiosities to art museums, from anatomical theaters to the museums of natural science, from dioramas to zoos, from salons to the contemporary white cube. To dispose

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To represent present object ==presents==> absent object

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Logical Disposition First there is what we could call the logical disposition, which affects the logical characteristic of the object, either by canceling its singularity in favor of its genericity, or by canceling its genericity in favor of its singularity. What does this strange operation signify? By accepting that any object is both a singularity (this block of quartz, singularly cut in space and time) and a genericity (a quartz, a quality shared with all the other blocks of quartz), the logical disposition of an exhibition consists of isolating one or the other of these characteristics, by arranging a material and symbolic environment that will force our perception to no longer see this thing, for example this block of quartz, either as pure singularity or as pure genericity: the thing, both unique and common, finds itself split in its being in order to be exhibited. In the former case, we obtain an operation of aestheticization, which is the foundation of the exhibition of art, since the thing is now considered only as an incomparable individuality, which is only what it is, irreplaceable and drawing its value (aesthetic and market) from an operation of ultra-singularization as well as being purified of its generic character: no urinal could replace the one chosen by Duchamp. The principle of the Duchampian operation (and of the readymade in general)10 rests on the idea of the election of one object, which amounts to choosing and to presenting something (apparently banal) as strictly singular.

This operation is well known and has been analyzed by Nelson Goodman.11 But it has been rarely noticed that there exists an inverse and symmetric operation by which exhibiting also permits purifying an object of its whole singularity in order to present it as nothing but a specimen:12 the lion in the cage

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anything whatever to appear, it must be enabled to no longer have to be shown, to be able to show itself. Thus, it becomes necessary to arrange the environment, the space and time around it, such that the object receives certain qualities that were reserved to the subjectivity that is doing the showing.

An exhibition thus relies on the partial transfer (never total) of aptitudes of subjectivity to objectivity, by the disposition of objects. To understand this better, let us take three examples of such dispositions.

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Spatial Disposition More concretely, what we will call “perivision” and penetration have since the first exhibitionary apparatuses (rationalized by the cabinets of curiosities) enabled disposing a viewing subject either to enter into a thing, or else move around it. Opened up, as in theaters of anatomy,13 the thing (in this case a dead organism) is manipulated in a way that its interior becomes as accessible to perception as its exterior. To open the thing, and to authorize a penetrative vision, is to dispose an object to show itself by refusing it any privacy. Similarly, to dispose it in a space that permits free circulation all around it, from above and below, is to deliver it to a peripheric perception that cancels the curse of a limited perception that is condemned to a single point of view,14 to better deploy in space all the facets of the thing.

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thus ceases being this lion and becomes a lion. We might assert that this operation, by which an inanimate object or an organism is stripped of its singularity and appears only in its genericity, lies at the foundation of scientific exhibition, where the specimen is the principal personage. Everything appears systematically as the representative of a genre, of a species, of a class, and is replaceable by another.

The logical disposition of the thing thus enables two symmetrical and inverse operations, either of singularization (and aesthetization), or of generification (and epistemization) of that which appears to us. The exhibitionary apparatus transfers the gesture, which requires seeing this thing as either pure individuality or on the contrary as a simple specimen (by showing it, I simultaneously indicate how it should be seen), onto the object itself: Is it named? By a proper name (which singularizes it) or by a common name (which makes it generic)? Does it appear as representative of its class? Does it have an author? Is it replaceable? Is it compared to others? Is it arranged in a narrative sequence of other specimens, or isolated? Is it signed?

Thus, the object finds itself disposed logically—by constraints of classification, nomination, and staging—to present itself as singularity or as specimen, hence, to be primarily destined either to our aesthetic sentiment, or to our knowledge; but this still-abstract disposition is nothing without a spatial disposition of the thing.

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Temporal Disposition Everything that exists should be able to be considered as an event, something that happens. Even a block of mineral of stable appearance is in fact a moment in a slow process by which a stone subject to erosion does not stop imperceptibly changing. This is even more evident in a living organism that transforms itself and end up dying, whose flesh becomes corrupt and decomposes.

Therefore, to exhibit the inert or the living thing, in the grip of processes of incessant change, perceptible or imperceptible, one has to dispose it to become an object, meaning an entity that is identifiable and re-identifiable over time. By exhibiting something that is becoming, then, one fixes it, either by techniques (embalming, stuffing, covering it with lacquer or varnish), or by arranging it in an environment that immobilizes the thing, renders it identical to itself, visit after visit. Inside a glass showcase, ever since the cabinets, labelled and classified, the thing is identified and presented in such a way as to appear to remain the same from day to day, from year to year.

Museums—a commonplace idea noted by Proust or Valéry15— tend to eternalize things artificially. They tear them from their becoming in order to make them remain identical with themselves.

But modern exhibitionary apparatuses also enable the inverse operation: grasping immobility to give it the appearance

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“Perivision” and penetration are no doubt the simplest operations of arrangement of perceptual space that enable the subject of a gesture to no longer have to show something of a thing, since the dead angles of that thing (as well as its interiority) are disposed in advance to possible perception. Thus opened, spread out, flattened, deprived of shadowy zones, the inanimate or living thing no longer has to be shown: it appears to reveal itself to the gaze as split open, naked, and entire.

In this sense, any historic form of exhibition could be reinterpreted as a spatial apparatus that predisposes things for their being perceived, which releases some apparently forbidden or blocked perspective of the thing, as if this thing now gave us access to itself from all points of view, but also from the aspect of its becoming and of its eternity, of its movement and of its immobility.

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of movement, and sometimes of life. After the phenakisticope and other devices of optical illusion, the cinematograph became the most powerful technique for exhibiting fixed images that appeared to move. But there existed and still exist other techniques, through dramatic lighting, staging from life through dioramas, use of rotating plinths, artificial animation of inert images and objects, etc. What at first glance is presented as an object can always be transformed, by exhibition arrangements and devices, into the appearance of an event. And the procedures that seek, at least since the historical avant-gardes and Dada in particular, to revive the dead cultural things, are trying as in a theater of the living dead to reanimate objects put to death by their cultural exhibition, by claiming to create irrecoverable events, something incredible that arises, that seems to take place here and now.

On the one hand, the exhibition transforms living events into inert objects; on the other hand, it regularly claims to reanimate these inert objects as simulacra of living events.

In both cases, the act of exhibiting consists in an “as if” that disposes our perception to consider events as if they were objects, and objects as if they were events. How? By governing time. To exhibit is also to impose another temporality on something, and to require it to be merely an object or an event, whereas it was naturally both one and the other. To exhibit is to fix something, to immobilize it and let it appear identical from one moment to another, or on the contrary, to seize a stable entity and make it spring up with the illusion of movement.

Paradoxically, doing this means requiring something to act on the perception we have of it. What changes becomes imperceptible as such, and presents itself to us under the appearance of immobility and eternity; what remains becomes imperceptible as such and presents itself to us under the appearance of movement and duration.

A such, the museum constantly produces the transmutation of the becoming and of the living into a simulacrum of eternity, then of this simulacrum of eternity of cultural objects produces the impression of life and movement, and so on.

This is the key to any disposition for exhibition: it is not only a matter of showing the inert as if it moved, and the mobile as if it were static, but of constructing an environment where the

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Transfer of Dispositions Consequently, at the heart of an exhibition, a partial transfer between subjectivity and objectivity is at play.

In order for the subject of the gesture—the person who is showing something—to be able to be effaced, such that what is shown survives it, this subject has to lend some of its qualities to that object. What we are calling an exhibitionary apparatus (dispositif)—what is most concrete and has to be considered epoch after epoch (architecture, arrangement of interior space, cutting up time, social rules, what is forbidden, management of the circulation of bodies, temperature, light, the visibility of things)—is essentially the transfer of certain capacities of perception from objects themselves to objects as perceived.

Rather than penetrate into the matter of things, we cause matter to present itself as penetrable: we dispose it to penetration by the gaze. Rather than make an object turn, we make it visible from all possible points of view: we transform it into a kaleidoscope of itself. Now things seem to present themselves to any perception. They seem to offer themselves to us because they preempt the operations to which we would need to subject them to penetrate them, to circumscribe and discover them.

They uncover themselves in advance—or rather, they are disposed to do so.

A historic form of exhibition is nothing other than an ensemble of these dispositions that preempt and prepare our perception, by attributing them to the things perceived, to the natural objects or to the works of art that are offered to our gaze.

What is a museum? It is an ensemble of social, spatial, temporal, logical and ontological dispositions (selection of the

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very being of things-in-time may appear as the contrary of what this being it is, such as to give the impression that it itself is acting, that it is the thing itself that acts, because it has become like a subject. As spectators, we then get the feeling that the work in the museum is offering itself to us, that it has spontaneously torn itself from time in order to give itself as immobile, identical, and eternal in our sight, or by contrast that the image in movement moves and is animated by itself.

This is what disposer (to dispose) ultimately means: to act in such a way that what we do to things, the things appear to do spontaneously.

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audience, paid entry or not, how visits and the flow of visitors are regulated, monumental architecture and ornamentation, the distance to respect in relation to the works presented, the ban on touching them, their elevation, their frontality, the space between works, standing or seated spectators, educational tours, the possibility of virtual visits on-line, etc.)16 which dispossess spectating subjects of part of their activity in order to render the objects of their contemplation active. And—it is believed—the works act in proportion to the renunciation of action on the part of those who contemplate them, since, as with any transfer, there are two directions.

If subjectivity lends certain of its qualities to exhibited objects, then in return the objects lend certain of their attributes to subjects. In an exhibition, if the things shown appear to us to become active and give themselves, to show themselves, to offer themselves to our gaze, this is because as spectating subjects we lose at least part of our capacity to act, finding ourselves partially disposed as objects. Our movement, our gestures, our attitudes are commanded by the situation of these objects. There is no exhibition without a constraining apparatus that affects the bodies of those who come to see, that disciplines them, and sometimes forces them to be still when they want to move, to advance when they want to stop, to step back when they want to press forward, to not touch when they extend their hands. On the bodies of spectators, this has the effect of receptivity and passivity, and more generally of objectification.

In Le corps nerveux des spectateurs, Mireille Berton has shown by studying the links between psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and the beginnings of cinema, how early cinema—e.g., nickelodeon films that were viewed standing up and without any placement of spectators—became a domesticated cinema.17 With growing fear of a technique that was presumed to excite bodily nerves, in particular feminine ones, likely to produce crises of hysteria due to the exposure of free bodies to luminous movement, spectators were made to sit down, and so armchairs were added. This was not merely an operation to provide them with more comfort; it was a profound transformation in the medium of exhibiting films, which acted on the organisms of spectators, rendering them more passive and, it was thought,

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Spontaneous Illusion As part of the modern invention of museums and their democratization, and corresponding to the creation of apparatuses for exhibiting images in movement, as well as to the classification of natural entities within gigantic collections made visible to the public, the transfer performed by exhibition became rationalized. And the spectator’s sentiment of passivity, his alienation at being dispossessed of his potential for action as it was withdrawn from agents and transferred to the things themselves, has fatally grown.

Within the history of the forms of exhibition a counter-history has developed, that of an organized rebellion against the transfer of subjective activity to objects and against the disciplining of bodies by ever-stricter arrangements of exhibition sites.

The transfer performed in an exhibition has led to a sort of revolt: the modernist project to overthrow this transfer, to give back the qualities of subjectivity to subjects and those of objectivity to objects. We find traces of this project in the history of avant-gardes, for example the Russian constructivist exhibitions,18 and Surrealist interventions, then in the post-war Actions,19 the challenge to the stage and staging, and regularly since then, every time a modernist project arises with the old desire to retransform the exhibition into a gesture. We will call this desire an impulse for the spontaneous: opposed to the artifices of any exhibition arrangement (social rites, conventions, what is not allowed, spatial arrangement, frontality, limited and regulated duration), the spontaneous impulse aims to

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more peaceful, which would favor narration and contemplation over visual shock and muscular and nervous reactions to images. In order for cinema images to act more fully on spectators, one had to diminish the potential action of these spectators.

It has always been this way with an exhibitionary apparatus, which in order to permit things to be shown, hence, to act on us without somebody having to activate them, must correspondingly diminish our potential for action, discipline the body, transform attitudes, and transfer what was withdrawn from us to the objects, to the exhibited images.

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Artistic Illusion The opposite of the spontaneous illusion is what we will call the artistic illusion: the exhibition becomes a work of art. In this case, in order to solve the conflict arising from transfer by the exhibitionary apparatus between the object that is shown and the receptive (even passive) spectator, the exhibition pretends to sublimate itself and become a representation, a work of art in itself, most often a meta-work, a representation of representation. Here we may think particularly of Harald Szeemann’s “Questioning Reality – Pictorial Worlds Today” at Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972. Contemporary curatorial studies have regularly encouraged this conception of the exhibition-as-artwork,20 by confusing exhibiting and representing: what is exhibited, which is always present, is distanced and becomes as if absent.

The act of exhibiting then consists of denying the presence of works and treating them as an ensemble of signs, indices, like words or phrases of a grand proposition, such that the exhibition treats representations, images, paintings, sculptures, bodies, fittings, and installations, as new material for a representation of a superior order, of which the curator becomes the mastermind. Upon works of a first order is

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reestablish the sovereignty of the gesture that has been effaced by exhibition. It wants to return to the spectating subject its activity, no longer submit it to the object that is shown, but enable it once again to perceive actively what is shown to it by another subject (the artist).

But in that case, the essential conceptual distinction between the fact of showing and that of exhibiting is cancelled: the more it is actively shown, the less it is exhibited. This is the plight of the participative and the organized recourse to spontaneity. As long as this wants to also appear as an exhibition, it becomes mendacious: a gesture is not an exhibition. Either the exhibition is undone (allowing a gesture to arise that cancels it, since it subsists merely as long as a subject stays here and now to accomplish this); or else the exhibition is maintained, and then it cannot pretend to the spontaneity of the gesture: it fails, for it still and always depends on the apparatuses of mediation and ritualization that sustain it across space and time beyond the gesture.

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Exhibiting as a Constructed Revelation How can the simple possibility of exhibiting be maintained, without tipping into the spontaneous illusion of the gesture-exhibition, or the artistic illusion of the exhibition-as-artwork?

This is the whole problem with contemporary exhibitionary apparatuses, which are constantly confronted with one or the other of these temptations. Artists who fear seeing their works freeze the moment they are exhibited are tempted to transfigure the exhibition into a gesture, while the curators who exhibit these works are tempted to become artists in their manner, to transform the exhibition into representation.

But to maintain the exhibition as such, no doubt we should tirelessly come back to the third possibility: a living faculty, particularly human, of showing without showing, of representing without representing. How? By reasserting first, that the exhibition is not immediate, hence that it is constructed and that it will never be able to espouse the idealized spontaneity of a gesture; and then, that the exhibition works with effective presences and that it never materializes something that is

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superimposed a work of the second order, a critical work, which by exhibiting represents and signifies in its turn.

Thus, the tension of the exhibition transfer (thanks to which the object is shown) is resolved, since the object now shows something other than itself, carries a meaning, directed by the curator and destined for the spectators who, in front of such an exhibition, find themselves as if faced with a painting of paintings, or a text of texts.

But then the exhibition has become a work that both reduces exhibited works to being only works of the first order, of which it is the work of the second order, and cancels itself as an exhibition and becomes art21—but does it have the means to do this? Only on condition of no longer presenting itself as an exhibition.

In both cases, what is lost is the very meaning—which derives from a living and anthropologically fundamental impulsion—of an exhibition as distinct from gestures and representations; there is no third possibility, there is no longer an exhibition. This has become an enterprise of spontaneity—or, on the contrary, a meta-artistic production.

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absent, as do images, texts, systems of signs. Above all, someone who exhibits should render perceptible the apparatus by which he makes something appear to us, all the while preparing his own effacement from the scene. Because he makes available for appearance one or several objects, one or several events, parts of nature, artefacts, works of art, bodies, or movements, but without pretending that they show themselves spontaneously, he should never occult the social apparatus of circulation, of staging, of vision, that he is using—and without making this apparatus the new central object of exhibition. To make an exhibition an experience, it is a matter of being aware of the mediations by which something appears to us, yet without our perceiving these mediations first of all, such that they remain the means and not the ends.

Ultimately, this means that these dispositions always have to be at the service of the upsurging of an idea, of a presence, of a representation. For if an exhibition is reduced to the staging of its staging (mise en scène), it loses its object, which is to enable an appearance for us, the spectators.

This is the ultimate meaning of the act of exhibiting: to authorize that all things worthy of interest appear and become perceptible to us, in order to forge our aesthesis and our knowledge.

In addition, a proper exhibition, an exhibition that preserves the possibility of this original faculty rationalized by modernity, which divided it between the exhibition of art and the scientific exhibition, between the aesthetic and the epistemic, between the staging of the irreplaceable singularity of things and the staging of specimens, will always be an exhibition that artificially disposes toward revelation.

The goal of an exhibition is the upsurging of something, but through an apparatus, hence without pretending to immediacy, spontaneity, or naturality: a good exhibition is a conceived and constructed revelation.

Perhaps this is a distant ideal that nevertheless orients those forms of exhibition that cannot be reduced either to gestures or to works of art, which are of another genre, which in any case traverse the history of cabinets, of galleries, of museums, residing in the mind of all those who seek to produce materially a gesture beyond the subjective and spontaneous

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gesture, in order to show the parts of nature, human works of art, mélanges, inert objects, bodies living or dead, or actions, in order to offer them to our perception. Exhibiting them means revealing them, though this is not a miracle but the patient result of the construction of sites and moments where one can make as if everything shows itself.

Translated from the French by Susan Emanuel.

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1 I t is difficult to find in social sciences an accurate definition of revelation. While Emile Durkheim or Max Weber minimized its role in the analysis of religious practice, William James nonetheless paid particular attention to revelation, being interested in the nature of such “immediate experiences”: religious ideas “presuppose immediate experiences as their subject matter,” in William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Modern Library 102), 128.

2 See Robert Felfe, “Collections and the Surface of the Image: Pictorial Strategies in Early-Modern Wunderkammern,” in Helmar Schramm et al. (eds.), Collection, Laboratory, Theater. Scenes of Knowledge in the 17th Century (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005), 229: “From this point of view, the historical phenomenon of Wunderkammern is thoroughly heterogenous. What perhaps unites this type of collection, however, is a common theoretical and conceptual background. The most encompassing epistemological frame and therefore a possible matrix for these collections, is the analogical relationship between microand macrocosm.”

3 See in this volume, Jeremy Lecomte “Blank Space: About the White Cube and the Generic Condition of Contemporary Art.” 4 See “Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge” in Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Philosophical Writings of Etienne Bonnot, Abbé de Condillac, Vol. 2, trans. Franklin Philip (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1987), 35: “Their mutual company allowed them to associate the perception of each passion of which they were the natural signs of expression. They accompanied these cries with some movement, some gestures or some action, the expression of which was even more sensitive. For example, the one who was suffering, because he was deprived of an object that he needed, did not limit himself to uttering cries: he tried to obtain it, he shook his head, his arms and all the other parts of his body. His companion, moved by this spectacle, fixed his eyes on the same object.”

5 See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, trans. John T. Scott (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2000), 290 – 291: “Although the language of gesture and that of the voice are equally natural, nonetheless the former is easier and depends less on conventions: for more objects strike our eyes than our ears, and shapes are more varied than sounds; they are also more expressive and say more in less time.”

6 Jacques Derrida remarks that in such an anthropology of gesture as immediate presence, everything that culturally supplements this

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Endnotes

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gesture seems an estrangement from the primordial presence: “The presence, which is always natural, […] ought to be sufficient in itself.”

In De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), 209.

7 See Jean Davallon and Emilie Flon, “Le média exposition,” Culture et Musées, 2013, Web. https://journals.openedition.org/culturemusees/695: “Any mise en exposition, since it accomplishes a choice, a sample, an assemblage, an availability and a composition of objects in a place, consequently effects a spatial, sensory, perceptual, and conceptual putting-into-context, that produces—no offense—meaning.

Yet it is precisely this production of meaning that makes the exhibition a device for communication.” (Our translation.) To make it a device of communication is to forget that the act of exhibition is not at first image, representation, or signification (even if it may become so), but putting into presence: to exhibit means to deal first with presence—which may be the presence of signs—and not meaning.

8 “To re-present is first of all to absent. All representation—visual, sonic, or even tactile—presupposes the work of absenting the present matter: an image is a three-dimensional object reduced to the state of a quasi-surface, of which the depth has been reduced to almost nothing, and one side of which has been transformed into the verso.”

Tristan Garcia, “In defense of representation” in Walead Beshty, Maja Hoffmann, and Tom Eccles (eds.), Picture Industry: A Provisional History of the Technical Image, 1844-2018 (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2016), 760.

9 See the example of the satin bowerbird, who places on the threshold of its nest flowers and objects of vivid colors.

10 Since Marcel Duchamp refused to define the readymade, it was up to André Breton to come up with the first definition: “A usual object promoted to the dignity of an art object by the artist’s simple choice,” in his Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme (Paris: José Corti, 1938), 55.

11 “As long as it is on the road,” explains Goodman, “the stone is not usually a work of art, but it can become one when it is given to be seen in an art museum. In the museum, it exemplifies certain of its properties—for example, the properties of form, color, texture.”

Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Hackett, 1978), 66–67.

12 Pierre Brunel summarizes the criticism of the concept of specimen in the framework of scientific exhibitions, before defending the use of it: “What is this reality that museum objects aim to represent? If we confine ourselves […] to traditional museums of natural history, their classic task—until recent decades—was to show the reality of species. The samples of this reality that their limited resources allowed them to exhibit or make available to researchers were called specimens. In the Dictionnaire Robert, this term (which goes back to 1662), was initially defined as follows: ‘A single individual that gives an idea of the species to which it belongs; a unity or part of an ensemble that gives an idea of the whole.’ Simmons does not like this word because of its ‘Aristotelian or typological connotations’ and because it ‘denotes a representative part of a whole.’ This objection signifies simply that the specimen is not a good sample because it may badly represent the real species. […] Any scientist will admit that a specimen chosen as a ‘type’ by the ancient naturalists was often little representative of its species, but it could be. And whether it was representative or not, it gave an ‘idea’ of the group of individuals decked out with a scientific species name. The word ‘specimen’

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is thus perfectly valid to refer to a sample consisting of a single individual.” Le Naturaliste canadien, vol. 129 (1) 2005: 11. Our translation.

13 See Helmar Schramm, “Kunstkammer – Laboratory – Theater in the ‘Theatrum Europaeum’: On the Transformation of Performative Space in the 17th Century,” in Helmar Schramm et al. Collection, Laboratory, Theater, 28: “The penetration into the inner space of the human body, in the course of permanent repetition, also gradually tended towards a consistent systematization.”

14 About this concept of Husserl’s, Paul Ricœur specifies in a note to his translation of Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie, (p.

132): “We have translated Abschattung by ‘sketch,’ which roughly renders the idea of a fragmentary and gradual revelation of the thing.” By multiplying in advance the available sketches of the thing, “perivision” constructs and accelerates this revelation.

15 But Proust and Valéry understood this in a very different sense, which Adorno commented on in “Valéry Proust Museum,” Prisms (Studies in Contemporary German Thought) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 173 ff: Valéry regretted that the museum should be like a mausoleum; Proust saw it as the condition for a revelation of the work in its singularity and its eternity.

16 About the social effects of the museological apparatus, see Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, L’Amour de l’art (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1968). In English, Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public, trans. Dominique Schnapper (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997).

17 Synthesizing the theses of Miriam Hansen and Mariagrazia Fanchi, Mireille Berton writes: “Also, during the first years of the exploitation of the cinematograph, there was a shift, a non-linear and non-organized transition, from a bodily spectator (pathological and ‘feminine’) to an intellective spectator (cognitive and ‘masculine’). At first barely defined, the ‘spectator’ entity gradually became abstract, fruit of work on address and on anticipation on the part of the object-film and its production. Thus, we slid from a primitive spectator (turbulent, carnal, dispersed) to a ‘classic’ spectator (rationalized, docile, psychologized) or, in other words: after conceiving a spectator above all as a body (a neurophysiological, neuropathological subject), the cinema on the way to institutionalization would bet on a psychological spectator.” Le corps nerveux des spectators (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 2015), 34. Our translation.

18 “The equilibrium which one seeks to attain in the gallery must be elementary and capable of change. It must acknowledge and work with existing conditions, social, spatial, political. The light, in which the effect of color originates, should be controlled. […] Just as the best acoustics are created for the concert-hall, so must the best conditions be created for the show-room, so that all the works may achieve the same degree of activity.” El Lissitzky, “Exhibitions Rooms” in El Lissitzky: Life-Letters-Texts (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), 366.

19 The gesture of Viennese Actionism was clearly directed against the distancing in the exhibition of the representation: “representation is repression.” Olivier Jahrhaus explains how it is opposed to auto presentation (of the body by the body), which returns to the immediate gesture of the specific body, against the “bourgeois” drift of a cultural exhibition that becomes representation, and then a

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representation of a representation… and evaporates into an ideal absence. See Olivier Jahrhaus, Die Aktion des Wiener Aktionismus.

Subversion der Kultur und Dispositionierung des Bewußtseins (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2001).

20 Here is an example: “Many artistic practices have reconceived the relation between the work and the exhibition, especially by working on the latter as a medium or a dispositif. What results is a multiplication of ways of managing or appropriating museum space, by the exploration of new formats or new modalities, but also by a reactivation of the most classic museographic arrangements (dioramas or period rooms, among others) or doing a reprise of historic exhibitions in with faithful or revisited reconstitutions. Liberated from simple showing (monstration), the exhibition has become a work of art in itself.” Sylvette Babin, “L’exposition mise en œuvre” in esse arts + opinions, no. 84, 2015: 2. Our translation.

21 The curator and theoretician Rossen Ventzislavov has recently declared: “My thesis is simply that curating should be understood as a fine art,” in “Idle Arts: Reconsidering the Curator,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2014: 83. It seems to me that this thesis, the source of a debate with Sue Spaid, is intrinsically false: since his point of view is conventionalist (who is called an “artist”?), everything depends on the historic conditions and on what/who is recognized or not as occupying a social function of artist at a given moment. But then one misses the logic of articulation between these concepts: if the curator becomes an artist, then they can no longer claim to be a curator. If the exhibition becomes an artwork (a form of representation), then it is no longer an exhibition. One cannot win on all levels unless you render these concepts inconsistent.

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A RESPONSE TO TRISTAN GARCIA’S “NEITHER GESTURE NOR WORK OF ART” RYAN MANGIONE-SMITH In “Neither Gesture nor Work of Art,” Tristan Garcia argues that exhibition should be understood as an essential aspect of culture. More particularly, he contends that exhibition is irreducible to the related cultural phenomenon of revelation.

Revelation, on the one hand, implies a raw, immediate appearance of reality in front of the subject, unburdened by objective mediation. Exhibition, on the other hand, is necessarily mediated through the exhibitor’s purposeful selection of the context in which an artwork appears. Garcia’s most notable intervention is the contention that exhibition produces a partially objective experience on the part of the audience. In positing exhibition as a mediated form of appearance, and thus incommensurable with revelation, Garcia refutes postmodern theory’s tendency to reduce all appearance to a state of relative subjective experience.

Exhibition, Garcia argues, performs a unique operation. The interplay between subject and object that preconditions exhibition distinguishes it from the related operations of showing and representing. To show is to have a present subject display a present object, while to represent is to have a present object, such as a painting, display an absent object, such as a tree or piece of fruit. Exhibition, however, relies upon an absent (or soon to be absent) subject displaying a present object. While the exhibitor, for instance, cannot be indefinitely available to show the viewer a piece of art, they can selectively determine the precise context within which the piece is displayed. In this way, they impart a distinct subjectivity upon the displayed object, circumscribing it with a particular mode of appearance and jettisoning the possibility of alternative appearance.

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Exhibition, therefore, allows subjective presentation to exist in the absence of the presenting subject. By preserving the subjective inclinations of the exhibitor, and thus allowing the exhibitor to be absent from the moment of viewing itself, exhibition allows the exhibitor’s subjectivity to “appear” within the displayed object.

Garcia describes this preservation of absent subjectivity as a process of disposition. Through the particular manipulation of the logic, space, and time within which an object is displayed, the exhibitor’s subjectivity is partially transmitted into the object. This disposition, in turn, triggers a reverse transmission of objectivity onto the audience. In Garcia’s words, “In an exhibition, if the things shown appear to us to become active and give themselves, to show themselves, to offer themselves to our gaze, this is because as spectating subjects we lose at least part of our capacity to act, finding ourselves partially disposed as objects. Our movement, our gestures, our attitudes are commanded by the situation of these objects.” Beyond individual viewers’ dispositions, tastes, and knowledges, there can be said to be a semi-consistent experience of the work, in so far as the displayed object’s appearance is predetermined through its exhibition. Importantly, Garcia does not address how this unifying experience relates to the content of the work itself. For instance, if one-hundred spectators were to view the same Francis Bacon painting in a museum, they would not necessarily arrive at a unanimous interpretation of what the work means.

Rather, exhibition ensures that all one-hundred spectators would have experienced the same painting in the same way, regardless of the potentially different conclusions they arrive at concerning the painting’s meaning or cultural significance.

Against the claim that exhibition is an artform or immediate experience on the level of revelation itself, Garcia demonstrates the necessity of objective constraint in preparing an artwork for appearance. Exhibition, he argues, cannot be immediate, in so far as it is always mediated. The subject viewing a piece of art has a level of autonomy in terms of what conclusions they arrive at concerning the content of the work itself. That said, their interpretive agency is prelimited by the objective constraints imposed by the exhibition. One can appreciate a Francis Bacon painting from a contemplative distance, for

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instance, and, from this vantage point, interpret its meaning whichever way one likes. One cannot, however, bring the painting home, drink a few bottles of red wine, and proceed to tear it to shreds, however much Bacon might have appreciated such a gesture. Rather than attempting to recuperate some false trace of revelatory immediacy in the act of exhibition, Garcia pushes for a sense of exhibition that would render the constraints preconditioning appearance visible, making clear the apparatuses through which subjectivity and objectivity are partially exchanged.

In response to post-modernism’s derision of objectivity as merely an ideological justification of the status quo, Garcia poses the following question: is it possible to live in a world absent of objective mediation? If not, are all notions of objective mediation as tyrannical as post-modernism makes them out to be? In posing this question, Garcia is echoing an Althusserian concept of ideology, which contends that all social orders require ideological mediation in order to function.

Without certain accepted ideas about how art can, or should, be exhibited, there would be no space for subjective interpretation in the first place. Viewers would not be able to progress to the level of interpreting their experience of an artwork, for they would be too caught up asking whether they should touch or look at a painting, why this strange piece of canvas has been framed and put in this strange building, and so on. Garcia resolves post-modernism’s suspicion of objectivity as merely an ideological ruse of power by positing exhibition, in its highest form, as a constructed revelation. He accepts that some level of objective fixity is inevitable, and thus argues that the best resolution one can strive for is to make visible the apparatuses through which reality is being objectively mediated. In his words, “The goal of an exhibition is the upsurging of something, but through an apparatus, hence without pretending to immediacy, spontaneity, or naturality: a good exhibition is a conceived and constructed revelation.” If objectivity is an unavoidable condition of experiencing art, the noblest goal of exhibition is to make the presence of objectivity as transparent, or as untyrannical, as possible.

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39 A RESPONSE TO ROBERT SUGDEN’S “SPONTANEOUS ORDER” HANNAH PLOTKE Spontaneous Conventions In “Spontaneous Order,” a text published in The Journal of Economic Perspectives in 1989, economist Robert Sugden addresses his theory on the structures and catalysts that impact the evolution of customs, norms, and conventions. He takes an antithetical position to traditional game theorists, describing the overly rational, linear and deductive motivations claimed to drive most choice given to individuals between multiples in the life game as overly narrow and failing to account for human dynamics sufficiently.

Sugden argues that spontaneity is a causal factor which is underestimated (and perhaps undervalued) and provides new possibilities for choice and invention, rather than the purely rational or efficient evolutionary processes of elimination through deductive reasoning and inherent moral beliefs guiding human advancement. He is engaging in a critique and conversation with traditional game theorists in this area. But Sugden is arguing for a view of behavioral economics and value which reads not as utilitarian or mechanical, but as ecological and mystical. Conventions can be defined as patterns of behavior that are self-perpetuating, in that they can replicate themselves.

Sugden offers a way of understanding human behavior and the evolution of social structures. He posits the existence of replication itself as that which creates a convention’s value; replication and endurance are the sole function and purpose of the convention’s nature, rather than inherent value being signified through rational evolution. Patterns and norms are actually caused through spontaneity, deviance, random chaos, risk, irrational choice and arbitrary assignment of value, as well as

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social and psychological factors like desire for approval by others, drive to meet expectations, resentment at the failure of others to behave in the same manner, and social inclusion/ exclusion.

The contemporary art market is just one instance of property value that could fall under the category of spontaneous order, especially if viewed as a neo-liberal, unregulated space.

Through the indexical approach of the author’s key points, concepts like deviancy, impulse, mutation in behavior pattern, and dynamics of acquiescence/control are freed from their common rhetorical themes, untethered from morality and value judgement, and operate simply as potential options/solutions within a game.

The text’s primary focus is on how conventions are created and maintained and why some evolve into norms, approached through behavioral economics and in conversation with traditional game theory. In outlining his argument for an alternate theory to the predominant, rationalist game theory concept, Sudgen takes aim at the failures in a reductive theory. He describes the logical failures of the theory, which is moralistic, oversimplified, and generally assumes that humans given options will default to logic, collective interest and deductive reasoning to choose a next move. This neglects to acknowledge the lack of power, comprehension, mastery, and power of influence we actually have within the inconceivably complex, powerful ecosystem we are temporary actors in. The multiplicity that spontaneous order explores dismantles our western delusions of mastery and sovereignty, undermining totalitarian control regimes. Although this potentially replaces them with western ideals of individual mastery and destiny.

Sugden, alternatively, emphasizes the possible implications in these theories, which go beyond economic spaces.

Spontaneity, disorder, imaginative and libidinal drives, deviations, risk, and experiment are potential factors for movement; eventually mutation and/or replication can create new rules, previously incomprehensible options, and shifts in our cosmic fabric. But if an instance of disorder can produce new conventions then is it ultimately a kind of disorder at all, and does it know that it is itself ordering and systematizing? The distinction between order and disorder is difficult to pull apart, and

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the question of whether the distinction is necessary is important.

The ability for a behavior to easily replicate and remain (particularly here with regard to the establishment of property value) is what creates the custom and value and purpose.

Meaning and higher purpose are not inherent simply because the action is established, ritual is enacted or worth has been assigned. Through social adherence to maintaining patterns, customs can become self-perpetuating and nonsensical, or emptied of content, standing in for meaning or significance that has lost its referents. The reenactment of custom itself can generate its social value and stand in for purpose, even though its inception may have itself been a perversion, or a spontaneous, random malfunction. Sugden argues that norms have not all evolved for a purpose, through trial and error, for the betterment of humanity, or for efficiency.

A product of Sugden’s emphasis on scholarly impartiality in method is that it enables the opening of space to explore a big playground of human perversion, delinquency, and absurdity in expansive ways. Perhaps this is what the structure of game theory provides: the room to strategically and methodically investigate human possibility for creation and destruction equally. He touches on the evolution of deviance (deviant play), why it does not become customary or normal if the only requisite is replication itself, ultimately emphasizing the intense drive of human’s need for acceptance, and on the other end, the drive to temper the unpredictability of others, where forms of punishment/retribution can be performed.

“Spontaneous order” is a description of human nature, describing developments that occur through playing the game of existence we all participate in, using alternate rules and causal factors; a kind of chaotic cosmos. The concept was earlier explored by economist and theorist Friedrich Hayek, who Sugden references as an influence. Spontaneous order is an antithesis to hierarchical, top down social/economic structures.

It seems to be more rhizomatic in order, relying on multiplicities, different types of stimuli, feedback, diversity of responses and dispersions of activity.

While the text’s argument—that meaninglessness, randomness and nothingness may be the aimless armature for

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existence—could be viewed as daunting and vertigo-inducing with the lack of control, linearity, and order; I interpret it as potential. The position argued for here is one that describes endless creations and configurations. New rules, concepts, knowledge systems, plays of form, civil and social structures and politics that are not conceivable are in process (becoming), in perpetual formation and entropy—creating new “rules” from discoveries earned out of random error, glitches, mutations, and order/disorder; shifting our entire game.

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43 QUESTIONS NATALIE BUSCH / TRISTAN GARCIA In “Neither Gesture nor Work of Art,” Tristan Garcia argues that exhibition consists of an absent—or soon to be absent—subject presenting a present object. This process results in the disposition of the subject’s subjectivity onto the object. This disposition thus leads to the objectification of the immobile audience, which passively receives the exhibited object. Garcia points to an example described in Le corps nerveux des spectateurs (2015) by Mireille Berton: early cinema was viewed standing up until armchairs were eventually installed. This increased the objectivity, receptivity, and passivity of the spectator. Or in Garcia’s words, “In order for cinema images to act more fully on spectators, one had to diminish the potential action of these spectators.” Garcia argues that this diminishing prevents the spectator from acting; the spectator becomes an immobile object, rather than an active subject. Garcia proposes that those who exhibit must make the apparatus of exhibition visible while preparing for their own absence.

But can the spectator’s passivity be challenged—not by the exhibitor making apparatuses visible—but by the spectator’s own active and critical examination of those apparatuses? In other words, can the apparatuses of exhibition be made visible through the use of media literacy tools? This could consist of spectators learning to identify and question and critique the apparatuses of exhibition, especially those which have been effectively obscured. If spectators were also encouraged to actively make their own exhibitions or their own media, would this challenge the spectator’s passivity? Or would this simply result in a disposition of that same objectivity onto a new spectator?

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Although Sugden is skeptical of some of the principles of game theory, he uses it as a medium to exercise his conviction that individuals are inherently irrational. According to Sugden, people continue to follow conventions because rationality has no enforcing principle. This notion endures even when said convention is not efficient. Sugden suggests that prominence, the coordination of behavior without communication, perpetuates conventions by encouraging the individual to rely on common experiences to make decisions. Those conventions with the most accessible analogous situations spread most easily.

Conventions are also bolstered by generic groupthink mentality: humans crave approval from others and are biologically fitted to live in groups. Sugden explains that individuals perceive there are repercussions for deviating from the norm—we uphold conventions with the expectation that others will do the same.

It is actually advantageous for individuals to follow conventions as they are reluctant to disobey them out of fear of being shunned or isolated.

Thus, game theory is predicated on the belief that all players are motivated to win. How do we understand players who do not want to win—are they simply external to the spontaneous order? “Winning” is also a subjective term. How do we account for players whose concept of winning deviates from the norm?

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IMAGINAL FEMINISM CHIARA BOTTICI We live in a global society of the spectacle, and that spectacle is menocratic.1 Maybe patriarchy is declining, maybe men are no longer the single head of the family, but they are still the “first sex.”2 The attack on patriarchy has had its effects. The invention of plastic contraceptive and hormonal treatment separating sex from reproduction, along with the emergence of the multiple wages household system, multiplying the “breadwinners” within each household, have deeply changed the traditional patriarchal family. And yet, after the frontal attacks to the family, launched by feminisms of different sorts, now, even within the LGBTQ+ communities, and thanks to the legalization of same-sex marriage, the family seems to be back.

However, what came back is clearly not the same thing that went away.

This is the reason we, imaginal feminists, propose moving from the category of patriarchy to that of “menocracy.” The latter signals that, even in those contexts where there are no more patriarchs, cis-gendered men are still the first sex. Whereas “patriarchy” literally means the rule (arche) of the male head of the family, that of “menocracy” points to the power (cratos) that men exercise in general. Menocracy can thrive even where patriarchy is declining. Women are still oppressed all over the world, and all over themselves. In a time when the world has become a global village, when information and capital and viruses travel instantly worldwide, we cannot pretend we did not know, and so we know. What do we know? We know that women are politically, economically, socially and sexually oppressed. No matter which sources of oppression one will focus on, race, class, gender, empire—women are always at the bottom. And men, on top.

There are many tools by which men exercise their privilege, but a useful, although temporary, list includes the following:

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The Sovereign State is an instrument of the Sovereign Sex Men are the sovereign sex because, like sovereign states, they

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Women gendercide The menocratic society of the spectacle tells us that there is a war going on globally and that war is waged against women.

Why are there more men than women on the planet, despite the fact that women tend to live longer? Where are all the missing girls? The “missing girls” are not counted in the hundreds, or thousands, but in the millions. As of today, there are somewhere between 126 to 160 millions of girls missing from the global population as a consequence of sex-selective abortion, infanticide, gender violence, and inequalities of care. But violence against women bodies does not stop after birth: one in every three women know it, and she knows it because she has experienced it herself—in the form of physical or sexual violence, or, very often, a combination of both. Homes, as we learned during the Covid pandemic, are not safe for women and for other gender minorities: as the lockdown goes on, gender violence goes up.

Against women gendercide and all forms of violence against them, we imaginal feminist call for feminism to become anarchafeminism: the liberation of women is the liberation of all!

Either all women and all genders will be free, or none of us will be free.

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death, the state, capital, and the imaginal. Death because women are the object of a worldwide gendercide, the state because the sovereign state is an instrument of the sovereign sex, capital because its economics exploits women more than men, and the imaginal because the global menocratic imaginary constantly produces and reproduces images that are detrimental and oppressive for women. That is why feminists should fight the evil with a little bit of the same evil, the spectacle with another spectacle, in sum, that is why feminists should become imaginal feminists. We invite you all to navigate the global menocratic spectacle we are immersed in, eat it, digest it and spit it out in an unrecognizable form.

Here are a few steps.

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do not have to recognize any (sex) superior to themselves. The world is currently divided into states, meaning there is not a single piece of land where we can escape. So we are forced to live under state rule which, in turns, also means we are forced to live under men’s rule: across 149 states assessed (some did not even agree to show their numbers) women head of states were a meager 11%. Thus, it is largely men who ultimately decide what is legal and what is illegal, who/how and when taxes have to be paid, who/how and when employment is to be given, marriages made, property inherited, healthcare assured, kindergartens built, and abortion legalized -- or not. Given that we live under men’s rule, are we surprised to hear that, globally, women are paid on average 63% of what men get3?

No, we are not surprised.

Does this mean that we should fight to have a woman president?

No, this means we should fight to have no president at all.

We should not entertain any illusion: there cannot be a feminist state because feminism means liberation of all women and the state is the tool whereby a minority of people rules over the vast majority of them. But feminism cannot mean the liberation of just a few women. We have another name for that: it is called elitism. As chinese anarchafeminist He Zhen, put it more than a century ago: “When a few women in power dominate the majority of powerless women, unequal class differentiation is brought into existence. If the majority of women do not want to be controlled by men, why would they want to be controlled by a minority of women?”4 Instead of competing with men for power, women should strive for overthrowing men’s rule, and anarchafeminism is the best tool to do so because it is the best antidote against the possibility of feminism becoming simply elitism or, even worse, white privilege.

In an epoch when the election of a single woman as president is often presented as liberation for all women, when people can turn “feminism” into a fashion brand, the fundamental message of anarchafeminists of the past is more urgent than ever: “Feminism does not mean female corporate power or a woman president: it means no corporate power and no president.”5 Against the violence perpetrated by sovereign states in order to maintain the sovereign sex in its privilege, we

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Capital sins If we liberate ourselves from the intellectual yoke of state boundaries and take the entire globe as our framework, the first striking datum emerging is that people have not always been doing gender, and, moreover, even if they did it, they did it on very different terms. It is only with the emergence of a worldwide capitalist system that the rigid gender binary dividing bodies into masculine men and feminine women became so hegemonic worldwide. This does not mean that sexual difference did not exist before global capitalism, nor that capitalism invented patriarchy from scratch. It simply means that capitalism reoccupied previous forms of patriarchy, eradicated matriarchy where it existed, thereby giving menocracy a new strength and a new formidable impetus. Capitalism needs “women,” because it needs the assumption that women are not “working” when they wash their husband’s and children’s socks and make their meals: it needs them to believe that they are just being good wives and good mothers. If a capitalist had to pay wages for all the cleaning, cooking, feeding, caring, baby-sitting and child-raising labor that “good wives” and “good mothers” do for free, then there would be no capitalism because there would be a limit to the limitless expansion of profit that defines capitalism as an economy.

But along with the extraction of free unwaged labor from women, capitalism also needs to extract free natural resources from the environment and create mechanisms to regulate the flux of labor. This is the reason why, from the very beginning, capitalism has gone hand in hand with colonialism, land occupations, and ecological catastrophes. As a system devoted to the endless accumulation of profit, capitalism relies on boundaries to regulate the movement of labor force and the extraction of natural resources, but it also relies on racism to make sure that some bodies are more exploitable than others.

This is where intersectionality is most evident, because being a woman of color means being exploitable in a way that cannot simply be explained by the quality of being a woman plus being a person of color, and being an indigenous woman, whose

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anarchafeminists call for the liberation of all. Not one less!

Either all, or none of us will be free.

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Another woman is possible.

At this point one can ask: why insist on feminism and not just call this anarchism? If the purpose is to dismantle all types of hierarchies, should we not also get rid of the gender binary, which opposes “women” to “men,” and thus imprisons us in a cis-gendered and heteronormative matrix?

By drawing insights from an ontology of the transindividual, we respond that bodies in general, and women’s bodies in particular, must not be considered as individuals, as objects given once and for all, but rather as processes. Women’s bodies, like all bodies, are bodies in plural because they are processes constituted by mechanisms of affects and associations that occur at the inter-, the infra- and the supra-individual level. Our bodies come into being through an inter-individual encounter; they are shaped by supra-individual forces, such as their geographical locations; and they are made up by infra-individual bodies such as the molecules we breathe, the hormones we englobe, or the images we ingurgitate every day. A ‘woman” comes into being not just through “inter”-actions, but also through “intra”-actions.

Properly speaking we are not, and never have been, individuals: we are, literally, transindividual processes, accidental sites of a process of becoming that takes place at different levels. We are relations, not substances. Processes, not things.

Only if we consider skin boundaries as the ultimate boundaries, can we classify bodies as males and females, but if we look beyond those boundaries and consider the totality of the cells

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environment has been destroyed and waters poisoned, means being exploited to such a degree that no monthly check can ever pay back. Something very peculiar happens in those intersections of capital’s sins, and that is where “the coloniality of gender”6 thrives.

Against this systematic intertwinement among capitalist exploitation, racial classification of bodies, and gender oppression, against this boundary drawing that separates women from other genders in order to make them more exploitable, while destroying the environment we live in, we anarchafeminists call for the liberation of all women. Not one less! Either all, or none of us will be free.

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Ecofemimism as queer ecology Every being is endowed with the capacity to affect and to be affected, and that is how they strive to persist in their being.

The notion of “affecting” is indeed central to a transindividual philosophy. Within this framework, “ecology” is nothing but co-affectivity, whereas “ecological thinking” is the thinking of co-affectivity as co-origination. This move prevent us from collapsing ecology into an all-encompassing-organicism, where the whole determines its parts: co-affectivity is co-origination without an arche’. “Anarcha-feminist” is “e-co-affectivity”8, understood as the capacity to affect and of being affected by every single being, without implying any hierarchical organizing of such an infinite web of affecting.

The notion of affect is thus central to a “politics of renaturalization”9, where nature is brought back to the center of philosophico-political thinking, but not as Nature with a capital letter, which is capitalized at the very moment that is idealized, and thus sadistically made exploitable. This is the nature that leads to xeno-feminism. An anarchafeminist approach to ecology is one without Nature10 in that alienated form, but through nature, in its meaning of the unique infinite substance. An ontology of transindividuality enables us to both retain and distinguish between different individualities, while according none of them any type of ontological superiority: stones, not

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comprising human bodies, we find out that 95% of them escape that dichotomy: most of the living matter is actually queer.7 If, and only if, we adopt this transindividual perspective, can we speak about “womanhood” outside of the modern/colonial gender system, and thus use that very term in order to include all types of women: feminine women, masculine women, transwomen, female women, male women, lesbian women, bisexual women, intersex women, ciswomen, asexual women, queer women, and so on and so forth. All the way up to ways of being woman that have not yet been invented because another woman is not just possible: it has also, always, already begun.

Against the violence perpetrated in the name of gender binarism, homo-phobia and trans-phobia, we anarchafeminists call for the liberation of all women. Not one less! Either all, or none of us will be free.

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only cats or any other candidate for our “animal chauvinism”11, are to some extent animate. Along with hierarchies, all rigid boundaries between “man” and “woman”, “human” and “animal”, “animals” and “plants”, “life” and “non-life” are also being questioned. A transindividual ecology is indeed a form of ecology where industrial waste ceases to be outside of nature, and becomes itself a living organism, where the molecules we inhale or englobe become literally constitutive of our being, whether they are alive or not -- in sum, it becomes a form of queer ecology.

Many authors have noticed some affinities between ecology and queer theory, with some even stating that “fully and properly, ecology is queer theory and queer theory is ecology”.12 Both queer theory and ecology have a vocation towards questioning established hierarchies, classifications and the rigid boundaries between the inside and the outside. But to question boundaries does not mean to eliminate distinctions, nor to give up individualities: it simply means conceiving them as transindividualities. A transindividual philosophy frames queer ecology as one that examines boundaries and topples hierarchies, while maintaining distinctions. The reason for this is easy to see: if ecological thinking means that boundaries are abolished at “practically any level”, and that we are thereby invited to “becoming open, radically open—open forever, without the possibility of closing again”, as Tim Morton argued13, then not only do we end up in a night where all cows equally look grey, but also open the door for the idea that anything is therefore up for grabs by anybody. This is not only a caricature of a queer theory, but also a theoretico-political dangerous move that justifies violence against queer bodies. To question boundaries does not mean to state that one is “open forever”.

Although Morton’ understanding of queer ecology problematically brings it to a terrain where most queer theorists may actually be uncomfortable, it still points to a possible tension within queer theory itself: how to rethink the questioning of boundaries without ending up in a blind mesh where everything is available for grabbing? The notion of transindividuality can be very useful here, precisely to point out that emphasizing the inter-, supra-, and even infra-dependence of every being does not mean abandoning individualities and distinctions. It means

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Technologies of the self But the imaginal apparatus that sustains the global menocracy has infiltrated even the very process of becoming woman.

Women bodies are everywhere the object of a process of disciplining whose very purpose is not simply to govern bodies but to instill in us the idea that our bodies need to be governed.

Images and rituals of health, beauty, and care change a lot from one context to another, but they are everywhere one of the most powerful sites for the exercise of menocratic technologies of the self. This is how docile subjects are created: not (only) through the imposition of rules from the outside, but through the voluntary and, at times, even joyful participation to one’s own submission.

Imaginal fashion—Since the 19th century, that is the time of the emergence of factories and compulsory military service, European men have undergone their “great masculine renunciation”14: they gave up all the colors, laces, and fusses, to wear the sober color two-piece suit that is worn today by any important business men, from Nairobi to Shanghai. This has certainly increased men’s attire functionality as well as their solemnity, particularly when the jacket opens up to reveal that “imponderable” adornment hanging down in the middle of the chest and called a “tie”. By renouncing all other adornments, except the tie, men made it clear that they did not need any of them, precisely because they are already so important by themselves,

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conceiving every individuality as trans-individuality, as the result of a process of affecting and being affected that takes place at multiple levels, as one that individualizes, so to speak, in single concrete formations in different spaces and times. It is social ontology that enables us to perceive what happens beyond the threshold of somebody else’s skin, but also one that does not invite us to violate that threshold if uninvited.

Against the violence perpetrated in the name of that contradiction in terms called “green capitalism”, against that menocratic hierarchy man>woman> animal>plant>inanimate matter, we anarchafeminists state that all matter is to some extent animate, so there cannot be a liberation of women without a liberation of the planet. Not one less! Either all, or none of us will be free.

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whereas women, who constantly need to prop themselves up, are consequently invited to carry all the burden of colors, laces, and fusses. It is women, who constantly have to “make-up” —“make up” for what? What are we missing?

Women carry most of the burden of care, in all senses of the term—from childcare to bodycare, all the way up to healthcare.

Women bodies and sexualities are indeed medicalized and pathologized to a degree inconceivable in the case of men. Why are women supposed to visit a gynecologist once a year, while most men can lead an entire life without ever having seen an urologist? Why do women sexual organs need so much more “check-ups” than men’s? Are we assuming that something must have gone wrong just because… they are women?

And why are women sexual organs mainly spoken of in terms of the vagina, which, as the Latin etymology reminds us, only means the scabbard? The Christian God created the world by giving names, and, since then, name-giving has remained the sovereign act par excellence. Who and why naming all that variegated space just a mere “container for the sword”? Where have the clitoris, the vulva, the pubis, the uterus, and the labia gone? All into the “Vagina”. The whole is reduced to the part: the part that is supposed to give pleasure to the penis.

This is not just a form of terminological reductionism: precisely because female genitalia are named as incomplete the way they are, precisely because women are supposed to carry the “make-up”, women more compliantly undergo constant rituals of adjustment that may vary enormously across space and time, but are relentless in their disciplining effect. For instance, whereas men rarely undergo complete body depilation, women are increasingly expected to have all hair stripped from their bodies in order to be clean, desirable, and sexy. But why do we need to have hairless, pre-pubescent vulvas in order to be acceptable?

If it is true that hair appears on the body when we reach puberty, what is this imaginal order of pre-pubescent vulvas asking us? That we never reach puberty? That we remain “little girls” forever? Can we greet everybody and politely walk away from this menocratic society of the spectacle?

Probably not that quickly. From traditional foot binding to modern high heels wearing, the control of women feet is yet another tool for disciplining our bodies. Whether prevented

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Endnotes 1 Parts of this text have previously been published on Public Seminar, as part of an invitation to collective manifesto writing called “Anarchafeminist manifesto 1.0”. For those interested in collaborating, please visit https://publicseminar.org/2020/05/ anarchafeminist-manifesto-1-0/.

2 In this sense, “man” works like the Italian term “uomo” and the French “homme”. We borrow the term “second sex” from Simon de Beauvoir’s influential The Second Sex, which insists on this peculiar position of men, who can be both one single sex and the unsexed humanity more in general: “The relation of the two sexes is not that of two electrical poles: the man represents both the positive and the neuter…” (Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 2011), 5. In comparison to the cis-gendered males, all other sexes and genders are “second” because none of them can aspire to be both one specific position and the neutral term.

3 The data are from the Global Gender Gap report published on 16 December 2019 by the World Economic Forum. (https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-gender-gap-report-2020; http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2020.pdf).

4 He Zhen, “Women liberation”, in Anarchism. A documentary history of libertarian ideas, Vol 1, edited by Robert Graham, Black Rose Book, 2005, pp.341.

5 Peggy Kornegger, “Anarchism: The Feminist Connection,” in Quiet

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In sum, we imaginal feminists call for all women to be able to walk—free.

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from their natural growth, because small feet were said to be particularly attractive, or seduced into walking over painful high hills, because by walking on pointy little penises we are said to be particularly dressed-UP, women feet never seem to be in their right measure. Why can men be masculine when wearing perfectly comfortable shoes, while women have to be in pain in order to be truly feminine? How have we come to accept this systematic association of the feminine with pain and suffering?

Against menocratic technologies of the self, we anarchafeminists call for a global liberation of women -- literally head to toes. We pledge to fight: state fascism and plantar fasciitis, rape and osteoarthritis, phallocracy and metatarsalgia, sexual harassment and bunions, brain wash and pump bump, unpaid housework and hammer toes, denial of abortion rights and bone spurs, gender pay gap and ankle sprains, feminicide and foranimal stenosis, gender mutilation and stress fractures, lower back pain, and cramps and spasms….

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Rumors, (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012), 25.

6 Maria Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development, London Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016.

7 Myra Hird, M. 2004, “Naturally queer”, in Feminist Theory, Vol 5 issue, 1, pp. 85-88 8 We borrow the expression from Marjolein Oele, E-Co-affectivity.

Exploring the Pathos at Life’s Material Interfaces, Suny 2020. Notice however that Marjolein Oele mainly focuses on interfaces between living being such as skin and placenta.

9 This insight comes from Hasana’s Sharp, who emphasized the centrality of this notion in Spinoza’s philosophy (Sharp, H. 2011, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization, Chicago, Chicago University Press).

10 On the notion of an “ecology without nature” see Tim Morton, The Ecological Thought, 2010, Harvard University Press, pp.3-4. Morton is obviously considering only a certain type of nature, that is the alienate nature.

11 I take this term from Emanuele Coccia La Vie des plants, pp.16.

Coccia refers to earlier usages by W. Marshall Darley and J.L. Arbor.

12 Page 281 of Morton, T. (2010) ‘Queer ecology’, PMLA, 125(2), pp.

273-282.

13 This is the expression used as “opening moves” in Timothy Morton’s Ecological thought, Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 8.

14 John Carl Flügel, “The great masculine renunciation” from The Psychology of Cloths (1930); reprinted in Purdy, ed. The Rise of Fashion. A Reader (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2004), pp. 102-108

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ANTIKOZMICK MATERRIALISM BORIS ONDREIČKA ANTIKOZMICK MATERRIALISM is a poetic meditation around urgency of reconfiguration of culture. ANTIKOZMICK MATERRIALISM sees the devastation of Earth by humans as a result of wrong code (doxa and mythos) of culture.

ANTIKOZMICK MATERRIALISM proposes a study of language as possible way of return to primordiality of culture to reconfigure it.

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TZIM-TZUM OR THE END OF EN(LIGHT-EN)MENT A RESPONSE TO BORIS ONDREIČKA’S ACTUALLY, THE LIVING IS NOT LIVING

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At the end of 2018, the Bergen Assembly, a triennial contemporary art event in Norway, announced its next installment of projects entitled Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead. Through a core group of ten artists, curators, writers and activists, this edition of the triennial would explore life through a re-examination and a re-definition of humanity’s connection to (and alliances with) “those who are no longer or do not yet exist within the living political present.”1 By paying attention to what Jacques Derrida calls the “not presently living,” i.e. phantoms or specters, as “important allies in the process of emancipation and in the struggle for justice,” (ibid.) the press release for Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead ultimately calls for the rejection of prevalent global necropolitics2—the latter ranging from the deadly rejection of the disempowered to the destruction of the planet. In other words, the Bergen Assembly advocates for the “return of these dead, [but] for the sake of life.” (ibid.1) Slovak artist, author and curator Boris Ondreička, one of the additional contributors to this edition of the Bergen Assembly, responds to its thesis with a visual and textural proposal entitled Actually, the Living Is Not Living—a kind of “negation,” or an inverse reading, of the aforementioned press release. In a carefully constructed feast of words, symbols, new and re-imagined theories, terminologies and theologies, he attempts not only to re-claim, but dig deeper into a space of darkness and nihilism, embracing and re-constructing the binaries of life and death, light and dark, chaos and order, human and non-human, subject and object, past and future.

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After re-stating the main points of the assembly’s press release, Ondreička begins his own exploration of the triennial’s thesis in a narrative constructed as an eight-section outline rather than continuous prose, using video frames in a forty-minute presentation format. The temporal and the aesthetic is of utmost importance to this work. Statements and re-hyphenated words fade in and out, strategically presenting and re-presenting the artist’s ideas. Seemingly random visual symbols and quotations also appear then disappear, sometimes giving insight, although not necessarily clarity, thus inviting the viewer to delve deeper, think harder and construct meaning even from the “missing” prose in the space between video frames.

The only element that stays constant is a vertically-stacked row of what looks like the letter “z” turned sideways or flipped or grouped together with copies of itself, constructing a mysterious totem pole in the middle of the screen. This visually commanding structure divides each frame into another binary, left and right, while uniting textural meanings as an unlikely alphabet that spells “zum” when static, but parts of it sometimes turn into “sun,” or “un,” or “soma” and “koma,” depending on Ondreička’s narrative at specific temporal points in the work.

White type here is prevalent, while color minimal—a touch of yellow for sun/light, red for fire/hell quietly, and only sporadically, penetrate the solid black video frames.

Presented in complete silence, as though mirroring the black void of the video frames as yet another strategic aesthetic element that allows the viewer to claim that empty audio space for further exploration through one’s mind, Actually, the Living Is Not Living initially invokes the “doomsday argument” or what Ondreička also calls “negative ecology.” This is a familiar theory, supported by most astrophysicists, in which a billion years from now (or simply now) our Sun would become 10% hotter, thus making our planet inhabitable. As the Sun is ultimately no longer needed, while we are (or will be in a billion years) technologically advanced enough to support life without it, this artist calls for humanity to embrace this inevitability and dive deep under the planet’s crust, by the primordial volcanic vents in the motherly “womb” of the Earth, in search of a new (or an old) place of habitat. It would be a place where René Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” would be inverted to “I am, therefore I

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think,” as materiality is re-claimed and primitive evolutionary instincts in humanity are triggered.

While temporality is linear (and necessarily so) within the aesthetics of this work, it is completely dismissed in the storytelling, with all events seemingly happening simultaneously, which allows for the conflation of religious and theoretical references. Since this dark space of return to the abyss (or to “abyssal negativity”) has long been referred to (or “re-dis-interpreted”) as Hell, Ondreička goes even further, ultimately rejecting Enlightenment. As he states, the latter “…is out of any questions. Endarkening is the answer.” Here, he invokes the support of the Lurianic Kabbalah concept of “tzim-tzum,” in which God begins the process of creation by dimming or “contracting” his own ultimate light in order to create a space in which the spiritual and physical world can exist. This new space of “darkness is the Universe itself,” which, as being contingent on light, cannot exist autonomously. Thus, according to Ondreička, Satan also cannot exist as a master of that space, but perhaps only as a mere servant and as a construction of God’s conscience and “moral remorse.”

This “brutal” good (or God, the light itself), Ondreička continues, is what establishes the “imperative of happiness” which actually “de-activates” critical thinking and access to “reality,” trapping humanity in a kind of “incubator-prison,” suppressing its intellectual evolution through perpetually tyrannical systems such as capitalism. It is even more urgent for this artist that humanity escapes the light, this whiteness—a place of idealism and a desensitized state of dictated happiness, and goes back to black—the darkness, the materiality of the real, and the actual space of truth. Ondreička empowers those “expelled, depatriated or deported,” who seek “ideas instead of ideologies,” and who accuse and “struggle against God,” seeking a place without any master, by initiating them as “Whitened Undeath Doomsters.”

These concepts of a “dissent” from light/enlightenment through a “descent” into dark/ materiality, which Ondreička lays out in the first two sections of Actually, the Living Is Not Living (0 and 1), contain the basic premise of his argument in this artwork/proposal. For the next several sections, he explores various issues of late (and post-late) capitalism, such

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as digital (and pharmaceutical) consumerism, corporate data mining (and surveillance), automation (and artificial intelligence), labor (and slavery), citizenship (and immigration), among others. For some, he calls out the support of pagan traditions, occultism, medievalism, Black Metal Theory and even Martin Luther. For most, however, Ondreička relies on his main thesis and on his methodology of impassioned statements, newly invented symbols, hyper-hyphenated words, and conflated religious and critical theories.

There are no answers in this work, but that’s not Ondreička’s intent—he is a seeker, and thus takes us on his journey of exploration of ideas. One of the last video frames simply states “WE don’t know,” followed by the Greek letter Omega, and finally by a tiny dot, each element strategically positioned in the middle of its individual frame. Perhaps that tiny dot is the end, but perhaps also the singularity and origin of the Big Bang, or the beginning. What happens next? Does this artwork/proposal run backwards, first through Omega, which also symbolizes an all-inclusive God’s desire for the world’s beginning (or the end), then through the void of “WE don’t know,” and so on… to the explosion of light and darkness, chaos and order of the material universe?

The only answer this artist has for us is actually a call to “lower [our] expectations—deep depression is the only access to ‘reality.’” Thus, rather than create a space of possibility which exists beyond light (or in between light and dark), Ondreička focuses on the space under, reclaiming darkness as the original, primordial space of existence. In a sense, humanity makes a full circle back to its origins and ultimately to its non-existence.

Ironically, however, as a poetic artwork and a didactic proposal, Actually, the Living Is Not Living can only exist in that beyond or in-between space, one of possibilities, but also of no expectations. And maybe the only way to experience this work is through that very space. But perhaps Ondreička’s journey into the extreme of darkness, and our ride along with him, ultimately also makes those aforementioned binaries less extreme—transformed now into life and non-life, light and un-light, chaos and re-order, human and post-human, subject and subjected, past and post-past.

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1 B ergen Assembly; “Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead” press release; e-flux, December 10, 2018.

2 Defined as social and political power and its sovereignty over (or relationship of control to) life and death, as well as what Cameroonian philosopher and political scientist Achille Mbembe would call, “the subjugation of life to the power of death” in a book entitled Necropolitics, translated from French and published in the U.S. by Duke University Press in 2019.

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71 A RESPONSE TO CHIARA BOTTICI’S “ANARCHAFEMINISM: TOWARDS AN ONTOLOGY OF THE TRANSINDIVIDUAL” NIKKI GAMBOA Chiara Bottici’s piece “Anarchafeminism: Towards an ontology of the transindividual” brings to light the often missed feminist tradition that anarchy, as a political philosophy and social movement practice, must approach in order to effectively resist all forms of oppression and domination. This anarchafeminism focuses on patriarchy, sexism, gendered violence and women’s experience. The two concepts—anarchy and feminism—find marriage in that the commitment to destroying patriarchy is naturally linked to destroying capitalism, as patriarchy and male domination are intrinsic to capital and labor forces.

Gendered divisions of labor are a method for exploitation as well as class, cultural, and racial divides. These cleavages further the hegemony of both heteropatriarchy and the nationstate. The practices of either philosophy finds a synthesis in opposing patriarchy and the state. Bottici prioritizes a multifaceted and global approach to anarchism by intertwining it with feminist traditions, creating a method for both practices that avoids the pitfalls of either: exclusion that furthers oppression.

Issues of sexual/gender domination directly link feminism and anarchism, although these extend within these very philosophies and practices to generate internal marginalizations. Examples of this, to name a few, include white feminism/ privilege and trans-exclusionary radical feminists. These subsets of feminism employ tenets of capitalism in invigorating the powerful, upper-class cis-hetero women committed to emancipating women of the same class. Bottici pulls from Chinese anarchafeminist He Zhen in identifying these as elite women that prioritize “competing with men for power” rather than “overthrowing men’s rule.” These tactics incorporate fake

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measures for progression that function to distract or appease rather than effect change .

Bottici’s use of examples and thinkers beyond the global north is of particular relevance to her larger point, as a purely Western focus on these concepts would be counterproductive to challenging the domination with which she is engaging. She requires a universality in her approach to anarchafeminism in order to effectively challenge state-domination. This is a striking feature of the reading that engages with transborder public discourse. By moving beyond geopolitical territories and state boundaries, the framework for anarchafeminism is able to avoid ethnocentricism and Bottici is able to reinforce the true feminist theory of inclusion.

The context for anarchafeminism as a global imperative rather than linked to so-called nations introduces notions of anarcha-Indigenism and critiques of colonialism. A further development of these overlaps could potentially strengthen Bottici’s manifesto for anarchafeminism. Heteropatriarchy’s explicit relationship to the nation-state has abused Indigenous communities and instilled hierarchies that were not (always) historically present. Bottici contextualizes the historic role of gender diversity as a core logic of Indigenous feminism when she references third-gender categories, and briefly touches on the notion of a “coloniality of gender” in the erasure of these categories from native cultures in favor of Western binaries of gender. I propose that a wider analysis of anarcha-Indigenism would further anarchafeminism’s radical potential. While Indigenous movements are commonly linked to communism, the destruction of the nation-state and it’s symptoms, namely patriarchy, is anarchist in nature. The project of colonialism is what defines geopolitical territories and constructs borders, making colonial critique a natural fit for Bottici’s argument.

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73 A RESPONSE TO CHIARA BOTTICI’S “BODIES IN PLURAL: TOWARDS AN ANARCHA-FEMINIST MANIFESTO” MOHAM WANG Chiara Bottici’s article, “Bodies in plural: Towards an anarcha-feminist manifesto,” is a compelling statement surrounding the concept of anarcha-feminism. As encapsulated by the abstract, this article effectively points out the usefulness and limits of intersectionality, especially its potential relationship and conflicts with anarchism and feminism, and later, obviously, anarcha-feminism. With the discussion of intersectionality, the author argues for the necessity of a new political program.

Through the Spinozist ontology of the transindividual, this program could be better conceptualized and realized as plural and the specific “mode” of women unified.

Stylistically, the article demonstrates an impressive ability to explain profound and sometimes novel concepts with a rhythmic strategy. The author often switches between relatable examples as diagnosis (and digestible language) and necessary elaboration to dwell for solutions. Specifically, in the first section of the article, the author introduces a New York City subway poster targeting disabled communities. Through a rare (more often in visual studies and art history) progression of visual analysis, moving from one location to another and one image to another, the poster is stripped bare of most visual distractions. Within a context saturated with bodies and history of oppression, the nature of intersectionality with exceptions emerge from the image and her robust analysis. Although the intersectional strategy has been popularly useful for a general diagnosis, female oppression has its particularities. These aspects should not be buried within a “panacea” prescription of intersectionality.

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manifesto, the author moves beyond the diagnosis to a positive proposal in the following section. With a detailed survey of the past empirical works that engaged with the plural forms of female oppression, the author points out the two limits of this pluralist perspective: first, the list of factors could be infinitely growing, thus rendering it both complete and incomplete. It is complete because a specific structure is required but incomplete because the “complete” list necessarily implies a priority order of some factors over others. This argument is insightful and applicable to most intersectional disciplines, including those related to studying female oppression. Based on this twofold nature of the “list,” the author continues to clarify the danger of intersectional propensity to generalize the specific problems of women’s conditions and reduce most problems to other factors. Without reexaminations of the distinct position of feminism, this tendency might fall into the trap of the oppressions most feminists aspire to subvert. To respond to this potential dilemma, the author puts forward an anarcha-feminist manifesto and suggests a position that is both anarchist and feminist.

In a critical effort to support this position, the author introduces a crucial theoretical resource, Spinoza’s concept of individuality as transindividuality. Through this Spinozist lens, the author contributes to the modern tradition of anarcha-feminism by pointing to the bodies’ ontology. For Spinoza, either nothing exists, or an absolute infinite being also exists. With this relational model, the author conceptualizes a new politics of the bodies. Based on Spinoza’s association with “materialism” and his idea about for every being to persist in its being, the body and the mind are just two of the infinite attributes and results of a constant process of individualization with no division from each other. To add to this argument, the author further distances herself from the two extremes of a Spinozist philosophy of imagination as either an individual’s faculty or collective social memory. By contrast, she prefers to seek a third space, which is “imaginal,” neither “imaginary” nor “imagination,” to avoid the western metaphysical dualist approach to the problem and to pursue the transindividual sense of bodies as a theoretical basis for her manifesto.

The fourth section is an application of this transindividual politics to feminism. To guarantee an individual’s continuity

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through time and space, the author argues for viewing an individual as a narrative, a whole dynamic storytelling process to form and to be formed. In the specific discussion of anarcha-feminism, the woman becomes a story with processes and potentialities. However, this story has to remain open to explore different ways to womanhood while questioning the hegemonic sterilization of the narrative. In response, artistic practices provide the space of counter-spectacles for an imaginal discourse to happen and keep happening to challenge and invigorate women and bodies’ understanding. The author draws from the example of Barbata’s artwork and the tragic story of Julia Pastrana as a homeopathic method to turn the patriarchal spectacle against itself. Again, a meticulous visual analysis followed by a surgical identification of potential problems in viewing the spectacle demonstrates the conflicting attitudes concerning womanhood’s plurality and how it speaks with the difficult openness to various positions, including the audience, the exhibitor, and the exhibition.

In conclusion, the author revisits the history of convergence between feminism and anarchism and summarizes the anarcha-feminist approach with a stronger and clearer tone, being a liberating strategy considering all forms of liberation. To quote from the author, anarcha-feminism “cannot mean women sovereign rulers or women successful capitalists: it means no sovereignty and no capitalism.”

In retrospect, the article is a sharp critique of the previous popular forms of feminism and the over-generalizing intersectionality approach. It is undoubtedly an adventurous move to marry anarchism and feminism if such a marriage could exist and persist. The artwork’s analysis in the fourth chapter and the introduction of the poster speaks well to support an imaginal space to remain a challenge against the hegemonic narrative. If an individual can read as a narrative in process, this narrative will hopefully be told and translated by more than one voice. Myriad voices will form a complex network as a dynamic mechanism and precisely the pluralist body to think and talk differently regarding critical issues such as feminism.

Other questions also emerge from anarcha-feminism: how can we as individuals remain a stance of individual critique while encouraging women’s transindividual politics? How will

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our critique not lapse into the trap of the essentialist dualism but another of spiritual theology if the ubiquitous substance processes us? In reality, there also remain uncertainties about the practical realization of transindividuality in political operations. To reframe it historically, ancient China was well-known for promoting a Taoist bodily philosophy which might have arrived close enough to the author’s non-binary concept of transindividuality. However, women’s oppression in China was a persistent issue throughout Chinese history, even today. Maybe eastern philosophy could be further examined to contribute to the anarcha-feminist discourse, and there should be no division between the east and the west. The prospect remains in the world in the making, inasmuch as different ways of being not just women, but humans are constantly being disclosed to us if we are open to them.

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77 QUESTIONS LYDIA HORNE / CHIARA BOTTICI As Bottici acknowledges, intersectionality has undeniably paved the way for an expansion of identity politics, in the way that postcolonial feminists have had to reckon with their white biases regarding the narrow scope of voices represented in their work. However, intersectionality cannot be all-encompassing. Bottici identifies the limits of this framework, explaining that suggesting any “list” of identities is implicitly subjective. Furthermore, relying on intersectionality, according to Bottici, reduces the “specificity of women’s oppression.”

Instead, Bottici offers anarcha-feminism as a comprehensive approach to examine systems of oppression. The anarcha-feminist manifesto overlaps with many of the goals presented by intersectionality but asserts that liberation of all beings is contingent upon, first, the liberation of women. Bottici describes, “It means defending a position that is both feminist and anarchist at the same time.”

How does Bottici defend her prioritization of a feminist agenda when she critiques intersectionality for “privileging some factors over others?”

QUESTIONS KRISTOFOR GIORDANO / BORIS ONDREIČKA In Boris Ondreička’s retrofuturist-influenced deconstruction of the languages, images, materiality of Western ethos he seems to suggest a “return” to a pre-democractic state of “becoming”— chaos—in order to undermine or replace any preservation-oriented—cosmetic—response to the problem. His “diagnosis” takes the form of a lyrical and systematic destabilization of these dominant symbols and lexicons. While his approach is decidedly iconoclastic, he embraces the aesthetics of BMT (Black-Metal-Theory) and NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst). The inability to imagine anything outside the dominant principles of division, categorization, naming, value, morality, exchange— except through a total and radical collapse—speaks to how “real” and embedded these sociopolitical/theological frameworks are. While I agree that an attempt to salvage any portion of the current (evidently failing) democratic system perpetuates the problem, I also question how any attempt to “return” to a pre-logos state is possible outside a fictional return-to-innocence that is nostalgic at best and destructive at worst. More importantly, in appropriating the aesthetics of fascism and destruction (in order to presumably dismantle their “constructed,” therefore fragile nature) I question how separable the container is from the embedded content. In other words, in instrumentalizing the aesthetics of dominance, how does one avoid “becoming what they pretend to be?”

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NAVIGATING THE PLURIVERSE: FICTIONING, SCIENCE AND INTERSPECIES COMMUNICATION MAGGIE ROBERTS The ‘Pluriverse’ is a multiplicity of different co-existing lifeworlds. We are, in Deleuze & Guattari’s terms, assemblages, and Western thinking has prioritised specific perspectives within these assemblages to increasingly disastrous effect. We must become open to the intensive life that surrounds and constitutes us, and be changed in the process. Our perspective, and therefore what being human means, will be changed. I know there is much work to be done, and the odds often seem insurmountable, but I have some hope. The Game of the Real project asks: ‘What, if any, is the role of art in a constructive project such that art might demand and enable us to re-orientate the very idea of what knowing is, what thinking is and what reality is?’

Central to the collaborative artist 0rphan Drift, which I co-founded in London in 1994, is the exploration of permeable thresholds between the concrete and the virtual; of invisible currents and currencies that become effective frequencies in our habitats and fantasies; futurity impacting on the present and conversations between human and machinic processes—all these have been part of a continuing attempt to expand what it means to be human. Our approach has involved imagining into speculative worlds, shamanic technologies and techno-human evolution. Linearity, control, representation, single point perspective, fixed figure ground relations are some of the things we

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have dismantled in order to produce sensations of fluidity, uncertainty and multi-dimensional possibility, set against the human centrism that defines the Western Enlightenment worldview.

During the 90’s, Simon Reynolds wrote of our early video work in his essay ‘Seeing the Beat: Retinal Intensities in Electronic Music Videos’: ‘0rphan Drift represents dissolving, ego-melting, boundary-hemorrhaging femininity. They consciously articulate their work as an attempt to close the gap between the visual, the tactile and the aural. There’s all these abstract, abject-looking pulses and filaments and oozings of colour-texture combined with abstract patterns. The overall effect simulates a sort of retinal trembling, as though vision itself was wavering. The eye is restored to its materiality as a jelly-like orb, a muscle capable of being stressed or strained, as opposed to a disincarnate, invulnerable perceptual apparatus. The aim of 0rphan Drift’s work is the liberation of texture from its environment, of energy-flux from contoured form.’

We called this ‘machine vision’ and this has informed our aesthetic for over 20 years. We have courted glitch, accident, iteration, and deliberate misuse of first analogue, then digital, then coding visual technologies as forms of generative disturbance. From these experiments we cultivate presences that become an agent in or character for a specific work. A form of collaboration with machines, where art practice makes space for the unknown and places imagination at its core, producing visions of possible embodiment, perception and proprioception and increasingly, of porous relations between the synthetic and organic. This kind of relationship is built into working with digital imaging softwares – although I may have an idea of the sort of effect certain decisions will have on an image – the result is always a collaboration with the software, and involves recognizing and amplifying an unexpected outcome that has the potential to manifest a particular idea.

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‘Octopus Skin and Terrain Patterns’, 2020-21. 0rphan Drift ISCRI art team. Blender 3D work by Maggie Roberts and Megan Bagshaw, chromatophore pattern simulation coded by Duncan Paterson.

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In Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, she talks about speculative investigations that become propositions that become paradigm shifts.

The next video, If AI were Cephalopod (2019), is one of our AI/octopus Fictioning explorations. Quoting Clark Buckner in the exhibition catalogue: ‘It postulates an AI coded by the somatic tendencies of the octopus, conceiving consciousness as, not only more artificial, more technologically distorted and dispersed than previously understood, but also, as more rooted in the body and the sensuousness of the flesh’. We constructed a narrative that assembled the 4 videos in a repeating colour sequence using a ‘mood’ diagram we developed after researching the unique colour language that octopuses use to communicate and respond to their environment.

Two overlapping projections achieve a disorientating disruption of planes in space, whilst two flat screens further interrupt

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Leaping forwards 23 years to 2018, Miasma was inspired by failed water hyacinth terraform experiments. A synthetic environment gradually transforms a decaying urban hinterland, orchestrated by an androgenous swamp demon. Waste becomes elemental and provokes change in the environment, traversing virtual thresholds.

I worked with digital imaging and coding experts to explore the aesthetic, technical and theoretical possibilities of Lidar Scanning, Google Deep Dream Code and Datamoshing. The chimeric monsters generated by Deep Dream iteration became agents of decay and the Datamosh glitching phenomena, of dissolution and liquefaction. Lidar is used to portray moving from real landscape into virtual dimensions. Particular locations were both filmed and scanned, so that the Lidar - as well as Deep Dream and Datamoshed versions - could be layered on the real to suggest the breakdown and transformation of matter.

The inherent dimensional fabric of Lidar-captured data presents the viewer with the uncanny experience of travelling into what’s called the ‘backface’ of an animation, its inner surface.

‘Inside’ the turning landscape or object, we look through a virtual skin that is not ours.

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the sense of scale and surface. The videos are deliberately generated from mostly similar source material so that iteration happens at different scales, in different textures and opacities.

There are subtle tempo differences, bleeds between organic and synthetic, filmed, Lidar and Blender generated images.

Lidar is used to suggest the infinitely complex information processing of the environment by a nonhuman entity, whether octopus or AI. Lidar also portrays the imagined shapes of an AI becoming Cephalopod, partly point cloud, partly wire frame and partly sculptural, with a luminous synthetic skin. Deliberately awkward animations mimic the filmed octopuses, portraying a different kind of alive.

The uncertainty of figure, ground, planes, frames and image relationships in the work is an attempt to give the viewer an embodied and perceptual experience that is fluid, unfixed and morphing. The work presents a lot of questions about the formation of the notion of intelligence - where does the model of intelligence come from for the development of AI - and what are the implications of those choices. It ultimately suggests we do not know what we are doing in creating these systems... so some of the on screen texts suggest threat or catastrophe whilst others are more about unknowing, or advancing embodiment or sensuality as worthy aspects of intelligence.

Reviewing Other Minds: The Evolution of Intelligent Life by Peter Godfrey-Smith, Amia Srinivasan writes: “In evolutionary terms, octopuses are the closest we can come to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens. Such otherness holds up a mirror to teach us about the limits of our own understanding and embodiment. The majority of the octopus’s neurons exist outside its brain - the arms can taste and smell, and exhibit short-term memory. The octopus is, phenomenologically speaking, in a hybrid situation: its arms are partly self, and partly other, which is why it is being called an ‘embodied cognition.’”

And in Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, A Treatise, Vilem Flusser writes: “Their world is constituted as a dynamic conglomerate.

And the impressions are of plasticity of form and sensation.” He talks of cephalopod ‘volatile immanence’ and legendary camouflaging techniques that enable the sender to become invisible to its receiver. He terms the information age an octopoid revolution.

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‘Polarised Light Vision’, 2020-21. 0rphan Drift ISCRI art team.

Underwater filming, Maggie Roberts, Blender 3D work by Maggie Roberts and Megan Bagshaw, LIDAR scan animation

by Jason Stapleton.

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Donna Haraway talks about how much detail matters in stories, and what detail is focused on. We have researched octopus cognition and behaviour extensively, and I learnt to free dive and work with an interspecies communicator, in order to imagine the worldview of an octopus for my Becoming Octopus Meditations, part of iMT Gallery’s 2020 This Is A Not-Me online Covid lockdown exhibition. This work developed a formula for merging distinct political, ecological, philosophical, scientific and aesthetic agendas into a seamless fiction. The voices fold between octopus, AI and occasionally human perspectives.

The first of the 8 sessions begins: “You float in viscous silky liquid, dappled by light rays stretched and polarized into a kaleidoscope of synthetic colours.

Turning slowly, mesmerized by being in a horizonless world.

Turning slowly, becoming the textures and frequencies of the coral you are resonating with. Merged, intimate, indistinguishable to the visual sense, resonating through touch, taste and smell. The ocean moves through you. She’s there, although you won’t see her, being as the rock, and your depleted imagination keeps her unseen, barely possible. What needs shifting is the relation of human perception to its difference.” Each session immerses the meditator in aspects of octopus consciousness – it’s spatial awareness, biology, seeing skin, polarized light vision, camouflage understood as becoming other, it’s curiosity, pain, interaction with humans, and finally fusing with an AI. Scientific research informed my imagining, providing tools for interpreting some of the interspecies communication downloads. These came as a series of initially disconcerting visualisations and physical sensations which made me think about How we know things. Here the body receives information that is then interpreted by the mind. It is the first site of intelligent response and this we need to develop in order to reengage with the pluriverse.

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www.orphandriftarchive.com/if-ai/becoming-octopus-meditations/

As well as Lidar, this project used Blender software to develop experiments in patterning, texture and colour communication fields and in conveying 8 (armed) simultaneous viewpoints.

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ISCRI is our most ambitious collaboration to date - working with cutting edge Machine Learning Research and Development team, Etic Lab, based in Wales, and partnered by the Serpentine Gallery’s R&D platform, the Creative AI Lab in London.

We see ISCRI as an open experiment in interspecies communication. It is an attempt to flip the assumed science experiment relationship i.e. we will not be in control.

The collaboration itself is an experiment – an interdisciplinary enquiry between established multimedia and computational artists, Machine Learning technologists, cultural theorists, an interspecies communicator, a sociologist and scientists. In development for over 2 years now, ISCRI proposes training an AI that gathers data from sensors placed in an ocean Mesocosm housing a Common Octopus. Inspired by their famed curiosity, we hope that it responds to ‘art made for an octopus’ inserted into its underwater environment. These responses will be registered by the sensors (measuring for example, colour change, light, movement, water pressure). The AI system will evolve through the latest Unsupervised Learning models, ensuring that it has not learnt primarily from a human agenda, but from a fellow distributed consciousness (an octopus) operating in an uncertain and fluid environment (water).

Ranu Mukherjee of 0rphan Drift conceives of the Mesocosm environment and its art, octopus and AI triangulation, as a single complex artwork.

NAVIGATING THE PLURIVERSE

Such imaging is made possible by VFX innovations in animation softwares. Together with visual coding, they are key to manifesting experimental, part synthetic nonhuman worlds.

Digital animation, as media historian Deborah Levitt says in Animatic Apparatus, “is a tool for developing perceptual and aesthetic languages that no longer privilege the human, and move away from the recognizable towards the unknown. It is expansive and questions subjectivity, gender, reality, materiality.

Animation can model new ways to negotiate the in-between of worlds, open up possible bodies, spaces, temporalities. It produces mythical dimensions, it is viscerally intimate and neuro speculative. What we don’t know is a generative space.”

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‘Interactive Objects and Pattern Animations’, 2020-21. 0rphan Drift ISCRI art team. Blender 3D work by Maggie Roberts and Megan Bagshaw, Unity tentacle simulation by George Simms.

MAGGIE ROBERTS

NAVIGATING THE PLURIVERSE

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The artworks ‘made for an octopus’ will respond to its distributed intelligence that does not prioritise vision-led perception (in the way a human does) but interprets the world more through 360 degree touch, shifting light and dark, water pressure and chemotactile information. The video content will be modified by the AI as it develops, which should in turn mediate the octopus responses and feed these back into the AI’s learning patterns. This process will, over time, produce visual material that both articulates and responds to an octopus in its liquid environment, and will not, we assume, reproduce a humancentric aesthetic. We hope that the AI might communicate with the octopus in ways we cannot recognize.

By offering streams of pattern, colour and shape that we can attach less humancentric meaning to, and responding to any octopus interest by producing variations on the content it engages with, we may learn to think differently. We will have to become sensitive to abstract inconclusive forms of interaction.

Deborah Levitt states: “The focus here is on the set of cultural assumptions and epistemologies that frame and structure the modes of experience and forms of life generated at the intersection of materialities of communication and perception…it is precisely here that we find new forms of life and modes of vitality emerging’.

In Blender, physics are applied to objects to simulate gravity.

A key moment for me was applying cloth physics to the ‘wrong’ thing - a rock for one of the meditations. I’ve not looked back.

Creating layers of environment that float off each other, pixellate suddenly or become octopoid, twisting so you are under it as seabed becomes a skin.

These experiments are infused with the shapes and colours captured in underwater filming sessions – here working with BBC cameraman, James Loudon – to evolve viewpoints that simulate octopus movement, perspective and tactile navigation.

There are skin patterns coded by Duncan Paterson using Turing’s reaction diffusion system, and a touch sensitive 9-brained simulation.

We have the potential to develop some self organizing digital entities that the octopus can interact with, created by George Simms using Houdini and Unity softwares.

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I’m working with Megan Bagshaw in Blender, to build a MimicSkin Reef that will play with our assumptions of figure ground stability, what is alive, and what is felt by an octopus moving across a reef environment.

Being asked recently, “What exactly am I looking at here?” gave me hope that we are making some progress.

‘FULL-SPECTRUM’ OPS: THE EMERGENCE OF LARVAL WARFARE NANDITA BISWAS MELLAMPHY A kind of warfare is emerging that is not designed to be visible and spectacular but rather imperceptible and obscure.

More and more, warfare is conducted but we are unable to see it – not because it is invisible or because we are short-sighted (although both those things may be true); but because it is meant to be something we can’t readily identify.

This is a mode of warfare without war; it is latent and capable of exploiting the thresholds between presence and absence, appearance and disappearance, clarity and opacity.

Today warfare is conducted not only in the contexts of military battlespaces, martial personnel, armed force and weapons;

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95 — increasingly, warfare is creeping into the domain of everyday social interactions.

This is not the same as conventional warfare which is based on military dominance and elite command-driven armed intervention.

This style of warfare mimics peacetime behaviours.

The ability to be vague

becomes advantageous.

cannot be identified and measured by its martial characteristics alone.

Warfare comes to encroach upon civilian arenas and to seep into civil society.

Civilians are deployed as agents, targets and weapons.

When warfare becomes ordinary, commonplace, and routine, the boundaries between ‘war’ and ‘peace’ become theoretically and empirically blurry and the thresholds between warfare & socio-technical mediation become ambiguous and open to exploitation.

It becomes possible to conduct warfare without declaring war, circumventing the legal standards of acknowledged warfare. In addition to the concepts of standard defensive operations and non-standard offensive operations,

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This kind of warfare

NANDITA BISWAS MELLAMPHY

and to exploit vagueness

a third construct of warfare is emerging that could be called larval.

Larval warfare is strategically imperceptible, obscure, and ambiguous.

Because it is emergent, larval warfare bypasses mechanisms and processes set up to regulate warfare.

Techniques and technologies used to wage non-standard warfare have altered the strategic importance of unconventional and emergent battlespaces.

While the stretching of thresholds

It has also led to the emergence of another unacknowledged practice of warfare that is yet-undefined.

In larval warfare,

and divisions between the categories of ‘military’ and ‘civilian’ are made irrelevant.

When warfare becomes larval,

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friction and use of force are absent,

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has led to the rise of non-standard operations,

it can surreptitiously creep, seep, and sweep into the very micro-processes of everyday-life to become normalized.

Larval warfare ‘blends in’ with the ordinary and can mimic, exploit and weaponize ordinary behaviours to

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97 gain advantage over opponents.

Instead of using force against opponents, action is transformed into techniques that are not evidently coercive or disciplinary.

Anti-expertise is emphasized and distraction is deployed as a way of subverting opponents.

— This is a construct of warfare in which

armed conflict, or the use of force; nor is it synonymous with unconventional fighting like drone strikes, guerilla tactics, or urban warfare.

Rather than behaving as dominating or domineering, larval warfare encroaches-upon ordinary life, making use of the appearance of ordinariness, cunningly entangling itself in civilian networks, and incrementally merging with the very media of informational/communicational exchange to exploit socio-technical vulnerabilities from within.

Hostile motivations and belligerence remain couched in civilian, aesthetic, ludic and communicative techniques designed to appear ordinary.

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This style of warfare is not based on the behaviours usually associated with conventional fighting,

NANDITA BISWAS MELLAMPHY

the rationales and zones of non-combat are re-conceptualized as obscure, latent and predatory non-battlezones.

Digital cultural techniques like clicking, surfing, tagging and poking, and technological regimes like online gaming and social media become fertile ground for the use of warfare techniques like covert surveillance, tracking and targeting to influence civilian domains and social relations.

Larval operations mask their character, motives and weapons, having a spectral quality that bleeds into various environments; encroaching imperceptibly and undetectably.

The etymology of the word is highly interesting in this regard.

Larva is the Latin word for ‘mask’, referring to the biological sense in which immature-insects ‘mask’ their adult forms.

But there is an even older usage of the term referring to ‘ghosts or specters’— that which is shrouded

that which falls outside the spectrum of standard perceptions), deriving from the Old French mascurer: ‘to blacken or darken’,

Consistent with its meandering etymology,

larval warfare does not behave like war at all;

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and curiously related to the English word ‘mesh’.

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(especially in the sense of

rather its operations are enmeshed with ordinary behaviours, rendering its actions incognito.

Its rationale is ambiguous and ambivalent, making use of appearances, façades and personas, but very hard to pin down.

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99 Larval warfare, unlike standard and non-standard forms of warfare, is not definable and thus not acknowledged as ‘warfare’ (requiring no declarations of war, no delimitations of battlespace, and no regulation by policy).

Warfare objectives can be operationalized without friction under the radar of normal, unnoticeable, and benign everyday activities. Online and offline environments become battlespaces for the conduct of larval operations that seek to shape tendencies, influence networks, and manipulate balances of power.

through technical ordering and the prioritization of technological rationales. The synchronization of the techniques of warfare with those of digital culture enacts a ‘mission creep’ in which the objectives of warfare quietly seep into everyday practices.

Information micro-tracking & mass-collecting, metadata and traffic analyses, and micro-surveillance techniques gratuitously proliferate in the guises of gift-culture.

War-machines are hyper-camouflaged ‘trojan horses’ and become part of the arsenal of a fuller-spectrum of warfare.

The concept of larval warfare widens the established spectrum of warfare beyond conventional defensive and unconventional offensive modes.

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Warfare permeates civilian societies and cultures

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Larval operations include propaganda and psychological operations as well as socio-technical operations like framing, nudging, click-baiting, and other techniques of manipulation.

Larval warfare uses techniques like astroturfing to distract, amplify insecurities, and create dead-zones that quietly re-engineer sub-local & geo-political balances of power. Hypermediated surveillance enmeshes with everyday life, and conflict is ever-camouflaged as routine socio-technical activity.

In the future, warfare will look less and less like the conventional portrait of big battles with dueling state-militaries using high-intensity weaponry and maximum force. — This is not because in the future global conflicts will disappear to be replaced by peace, but because warfare will not appear in the same forms or behave in standard and conventionally identifiable ways.

Warfare will no longer be held in check by policy and politics, and nation states will no longer be considered the only or most important actors

Larval warfare entails conducting

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Nations will come to consider their own domestic populations to be equal or greater threats to national security than foreign enemies. Top-down, state-centric designs of power will no longer lay claim to supremacy; instead, information contests will arise as civilians and other information actors will compete with states to gain influence over social networks and the shaping of public opinion.

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in the business of warfare.

disguised and subversive campaigns against opponents; in this aspect, it exploits the ambiguities between persuasion and manipulation. The medium of communication becomes an important weapon of larval warfare because it not only conducts and transmits influential messages to target populations, but also because it comes to shape people’s perceptions, comprehensions, opinions and decision-making.

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101 Larval warfare involves the exploitation of networks through algorithmic/automatic/predictive tactics to covertly introduce propaganda effects into platforms.

Groups like Islamic State, for example, have used a blend of social media trend-setting techniques and propaganda to advance their hostile objectives, to challenge the internationalcommunity and mainstream-media, and to grow their membership base. Moreover, states like Russia and China are following suit in their use of online and social-media weapons of warfare. Russia, for instance, has recently announced the creation of “information-warfare troops.”

And China is strategically using digital ‘astroturfing’,

as if they were the real views of ordinary people, to distract and redirect public attention away from events with collective action potential.

It’s not simply that social media have become used as tools of warfare, but more-so that military practice has struggled to keep up with the quixotic transformations and disruptive effects of emergent battlespaces. Part of the challenge lies in finding appropriate frameworks for its conceptualization. In political sciences as well as propaganda and security studies, the catch-all term ‘information warfare’ largely refers to the strategic use of information and disinformation to achieve political and military goals, and is associated with campaigns sponsored by state actors.

Such state-centric approaches

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invented social media comments

NANDITA BISWAS MELLAMPHY

the surreptitious posting of

seek to explain information-warfare in terms of top-down, strategic models of power.

Standard conceptions of information-warfare share assumptions that state agents are the main actors ‘weaponizing’ information. State-centric assumptions (whether pro-state or anti-state) tend to emphasize ‘information dominance’ in which state elites use disinformation in strategic ways to manipulate and control civilians who are predominantly seen as passive and/or victims of state actions. Likewise, in state-centric perspectives, social-media are seen primarily in terms of state-controlled flows of information and ordinary citizens are viewed as ‘users’ and ‘consumers.’

State-centrism, however, does not really capture the ways in which citizens are taking active roles in curating disinformation.

This is not to say that citizens are not subject to state-controlled and pro-government discourses; but they can

generate their own content as well.

the socio-technical media of communication and by the mediatized tendencies of societies dependent on information and communication technologies.

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In sum, warfare will be transformed by

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curate information and

Rather than being an extraordinary and highly visible military instrument of last-resort for nation-states, Warfare will be embedded within the fabric of ordinary, everyday life, to be waged by social-groups, civilians, and networks, in addition to nation-states and governments.

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103 As communication and information-networking becomes routine, and as societies orient their social practices towards the formation of media ecologies, perpetual mediation will lead to the conflation of military and civilian jurisdictions, expert knowledge and popular culture, as well as the dissolution of the boundaries between war and peace.

These thresholds of ambiguity can be exploited, becoming imperceptibly weaponized, where the overlapping of friend and enemy renders the distinctions between ‘war’ and ‘peace’

cannot be overlooked or underestimated: peacetime activities, civil society and civilians have become part of the battlespace.

Masking identities and masquerading as ordinary citizens becomes a highly effective way of waging warfare without friction or detection.

Larval warfare advances by masking itself in a fog of peace, which is why it can proceed without any need for ‘states of exception’. Merging commerce, governance, and surveillance, larval warfare exploits the forces of peace for its hostile, predatory, and covert tactics. ***

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The significance of the turn to non-military operations

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more porous, and open to insurgence.

A RESPONSE TO NANDITA BISWAS MELLAMPHY’S “‘FULL-SPECTRUM’ OPS: THE EMERGENCE OF LARVAL WARFARE” ANDREW MOSES What are the conditions under which art and larval warfare can be distinguished? My tools are speculation and play; since art resists definition. For the purposes of this experiment, suppose that art bears a close relation to anxiety. If Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan agree about anything on the subject of anxiety, they concur that anxiety is a mood which opens being to the indeterminateness of death. For Lacan, anxiety is larval; and it takes place in the domain of the possibility of warfare. In his Seminar X on Anxiety, Lacan provides a metaphor about anxiety, which is as much gender trouble as anything else; wherein anxiety is like wearing a mask, unknown in design to oneself, in front of a giant praying mantis. One doesn’t know how the giant praying mantis will respond. Lacan situates anxiety as a function of opacity. It isn’t surprising, then, that the escalation of larval warfare that Mellamphy describes is congruent with a rise in anxiety, among the same populaces. The anarchist group, Plan C, argues that anxiety is the dominant affect of capitalism today.

Besides the mask metaphor, Lacan proposes that anxiety is the sensation of the desire of the Other. The desire of the Other is the condition of the possibility of my desire. So, if art is anxious, art is concerned with the sensation of the condition of the possibility of my desire. In what sense is the anxiety of larval war different than the (hypothesized) anxiety of art? Upon what basis can a modality of anxieties be elaborated?

If art is anxious in the Lacanian sense—insofar as it, or the artist, doesn’t know what its mask signifies in relation to the desire of the other—larval warfare causes anxiety insofar as it conducts war on the basis of a politics of masks which it does

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A RESPONSE TO NANDITA BISWAS MELLAMPHY

know. In other words, the perpetrator of larval warfare manipulates the other on the basis of a larval politics, which they utilize after statistical analysis. The spectator or victim of larval warfare becomes anxious out of suspicion. While art is motivated by anxiety, insofar as it doesn’t know how its mask relates to the desire of the other. The larval warrior’s will to power is the will to possess an exhaustive knowledge of larval affect, which is an obsession with predictive accuracy: affect theory and social control.

A RESPONSE TO MER MAGGIE ROBERTS’ “NAVIGATING THE PLURIVERSE: FICTIONING, SCIENCE AND INTERSPECIES COMMUNICATION” C. BAIN The opposite of an octopus might be a hospital. The opposite of a decentralized field of sensation, colors coming through the skin, though a field of consciousness, is a hospital, the rigid and precise perceptual habits, strategic occlusions, distinctly human and distinctly artificial. The sudden violence of becoming a patient, of having autonomy defined in order to have it removed. When i worked in the hospital i had a key to the glass room in the middle. The Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program. Blue cleaning fluid, beige linoleum floors.

The smells, chemicals, neglect. Accumulations of antagonism and disregard so severe it becomes an injury; so severe it changes the mechanism, the institution, the organism itself.

One form of human madness also comes from organizing information; “referential”; hyperconnection of facts; the television speaking to you. i left the city in September and i haven’t been anywhere, really. i’ve been in quarantine conditions, and i’ve been in school on the internet, my eyes radiating into a small luminous screen that radiates back at me. i barely notice the world.

An egret died. Underneath the retractable bridge that i cross every day, a white egret, dead, stuck to a bunch of brush coming up from the middle of the river. My phone’s machine eye clicking open. On her side like a bas relief, neck thrown back.

Therapod death pose, common among long-necked dinosaur fossils, dorsiflexion of the head and tail. i think because the bird is dead, she will disappear— removed by an authority?

Subsumed into the landscape? – but no. She’s there for weeks.

For the first month she looks more or less the same.

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The river rises. At first, only her head is underwater, the feathers of her neck clumping together to reveal the darkening skin underneath. i think about how [_____] put me on the bed, on my back, my head hung off of the edge so he could fuck my throat upside down, which really reduces the dexterity and agency of the mouth. Which makes one feel like there is a camera even when there’s not. The water came over the bird’s head, her neck pushed around by the wavelets. I took her picture every day. Her body fell onto its back, wings coming slightly open, like she was holding something invisible.

Once the water took her, she was harder to see. The airfilled shafts in her wings floated up, pulled the feathers to the surface like an M, an angel absent the human part in the middle. After the rain, hidden in sticks, rushes, bits of Styrofoam, a mostly empty bottle of ranch dressing. Her waterstroked wing turning green through a gap in floating trash.

Looking for the dead bird made me feel purposeful. It’s made up but whatever. Like an artwork or a government is made up. A belief in space and time and objects as they are integrated by the human perceptual system is made up. The glass room with people coming in and out, and the reasons the people have to be there, and the reasons other people can control who stays and who leaves. Ornithomancy, the reading of birds as divination. The fortune tellers were called augurers, the process was to “take the auspices,” auspices translating roughly into birds. You can fortune-tell in entrails too. Much like psychiatry, or paranoia, a very human practice, that kind of info-assemblage. To remain with anything for long enough that it reveals itself to you will reveal that it is dead; that you are also dead; that the information is something you made up, imposed onto the world.

The first time i took her picture, i’ll admit, was because she looked “beautiful.” The last time i took her picture the water ebbed, pulled her into the silt. Folding, peeling back, the inside and outside indiscernible, the surface excreting, flowing like a ripped edge of fabric with threads pulling loose, only her whole body was the rip, the edge, the water infiltrating her completely.

There were no more feathers; the stipplings along the surface looked like fins. Small bubbles of fat or some other fluid burst and gleamed on the river’s surface. I knew i couldn’t get it in a

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photograph. Moment to moment, giving herself up. i took her picture, finally, despite feeling like it was, in a sense, private.

And i sent it to Kristofor, who said “it looks like one of mer maggie’s renderings.” Which is very true.

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109 QUESTIONS KRISTOFOR GIORDANO / NANDITA BISWAS MELLAMPHY The use of found imagery, repetitive movie sequences (Brazil, A Scanner Darkly, The Matrix, Possessor, etc...), elecatro-industrial music, and the authoritative — affected — narration in Nandita Biswas Mellamphy’s Larval Warfare video seem to operate as a kind of visual-auditory currency for her analysis of surveillance, deception, dominance, and control practices that are “masked” beneath the surface of everyday life. Such aesthetic queues have become the trademark of alt-right media content, which similarly invoke a “legible” repertoire of images, soundbytes, and digital effects in order to — paradoxically — drive home the message that appearances obfuscate “the truth.”

While I’m fairly confident that Biswas Mellamphy’s examination of the latent and spectral character of warfare’s latest “normative” operations is not politically “right-wing,” I also do not register a glimmer of irony with her deployment of this aesthetic. If her intention is ironic, I wonder: How are these “manipulative aesthetics” functioning at the service of her unmasking of “soft” coercion? Or, is her intention to make the line between conspiracy theory and academic theory indistinguishable, to effectively “amplify insecurities” further? Who does she imagine to be the “appropriate” audience? If she doesn’t feel it is necessary to delimit the audience of this work, would she feel at all concerned or responsible if (for example) an InfoWars audience “engaged” with her video in a way that was not intended?

QUESTIONS NATALIE BUSCH / MAGGIE ROBERTS In Navigating the Pluriverse: Fictioning, Science and Interspecies Communication, Maggie Roberts describes her work with collaborative artist 0rphan Drift and how those projects interrogate a central question of the Game of the Real: how can art contribute to the reimagining of what it means to think and know reality?

Roberts’ argues that humans must decenter themselves in “The Pluriverse,” which she defines as “the multiplicity of different co-existing lifeworlds.” With Miasma in 2018, Roberts collaborated with coding experts to use Lidar Scanning, Google Deep Dream Code and Datamoshing to explore their aesthetic and theoretical potential. In If AI were Cephalopod (2019), again using Lidar, the video is generated by an AI informed by the sensory system of octopi. Then in 2020, Roberts learned to free dive and worked with an interspecies communicator, an endeavor which culminated in Becoming Octopus Meditations, a project which uses visual effects technology, scientific research, and fiction to explore how we come to know what we know, and to question western thought’s prioritization of the human.

Roberts’ projects all use software, artificial intelligence, and digital technologies in order to expand what it means to be human, rather than to erode it. When so much of technology is harnessed for the ends of capitalism (to generate profit for the few, to exploit the many, and to degrade the environment), Roberts’ methods present a radical alternative. Who else is engaging in this kind of work—a reclamation of technology as a democratizing tool—and what more needs to be done?

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111 KEYWORDS FROM “GAME OF THE REAL” KRISTOFOR GIORDANO Telos

Animation

Conatus

Agency

“Nature”

Matter

Rationality

Disposition

Perivision

Revelation

Penetration

Presence

Singularity

Absence

Generality

Opacity

Verity

Invisibility

Interiority

Hermeneutics

Subject

Interzone

Object

Things causing things causing things causing things causing things

Destabilization Fiction Normalization Normative dimension Spontaneity Property Neoliberalism Decapitated Satan Being what you pretend to be Unknowability

Domination Mutations Tremble The Enlightenment Project The Modern Horror Project

GAME OF THE REAL ART AND THE KNOWLEDGE PROJECT When there is no straightforward way of explaining and understanding what anything is, does, and means, can we think about the possibilities for a paradigm shift in what constitutes knowledge, thinking, and reason? The serious games we can play in systems where things are yet to be known allow us to ask if a “game of the real” allows us to reconfigure both our means and our ends, to revise the rules that rule us. Indeed, in a world dominated by affectbased populism, is the question of knowledge credible, warranted, or achievable today in politics and culture; dare we mention “progress”?

This collection of essays and responses documents the Aesthetics And Politics Lecture Series which was sponsored by the West Hollywood Public Library.

Each semester a new theme is developed with a series of invited speakers to tackle contemporary issues across art, politics, and society.

CONTRIBUTORS: C BAIN AMANDA BEECH CHIARA BOTTICI NATALIE BUSCH NIKKI GAMBOA TRISTAN GARCIA KRISTOFOR GIORDANO LYDIA HORNE KULOV ANNA LONGO RYAN MANGIONE-SMITH NANDITA BISWAS MELLAMPHY ANDREW MOSES BORIS ONDREIČKA HANNAH PLOTKE MER MAGGIE ROBERTS MOHAM WANG

A DOCUMENT OF THE AESTHETICS AND POLITICS LECTURE SERIES

CALARTS

MA AESTHETICS AND POLITICS CALARTS SCHOOL OF CRITICAL STUDIES