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“Goodbye, cruel world!”

This expression, exclamation, and – usually – resolution, although probably a bit too pithy to be the most common of last words de facto, is the quintessential catchphrase imagined to be uttered, written, or thought by a person whose next action is to commit suicide. Buggs Bunny said it, Pink Floyd sung it, and although by official accounts the last words of Hart Crane, that great poet of failure, were “Goodbye, everybody!”, before he hurdled himself over the banister of the steamship SS Oriza, it is tempting to imagine a second, internal utterance that he might have made to himself before plunging into the Atlantic; “Goodbye, cruel world!”, a drunken vulgarity, sealed with a kiss. It is of absolute relevance that the expression is used in vernacular from time to time before taking a strong drink of liquor. A kind of, “see you later”, and then an escape, ‘down the hatch’ if you will. Which brings us to the question of what, in the precise context we are speaking, suicide is. Self-annihilation, that much is certain, but also an annihilation of the world in question; a spurning, a turning away. It is an appropriate coincidence that in literature, to apostrophize – to address and object or abstraction (often an absent one) with the implication of human qualities, such as understanding – has the Greek origin apostrophe, literally “turning away”.

With modern eyes and heaps of historical evidence, we most commonly understand the figure of speech “Goodbye, cruel world,” and its other approximate formulations, as a signifier for the suicidal, often tragic, and distinctly poetic gesture. Balzac once wrote, after all, that “each suicide is a poem sublime in its melancholy.” And isn’t it just so, when we think of Dido casting herself upon Aeneas’ sword upon a pyre after he betrayed their love. And so on throughout history. Now, there are many reasons to which we attribute the phenomenon of suicide in humans (let us leave non-human animals out of the picture for the moment), and we can even speculate that the “Goodbye, cruel world,” sentiment itself did not awaken necessarily in tandem suicide, but in the mind of an early human, on the cusp of death in the howling prehistoric night, who in a moment of introspection felt some tinge of perplexed resentment toward his unpleasant situation and impending death, so that he might welcome what was to follow. We will come back to this lonely neanderthal who did not exactly kill himself, because what we are after here is not departing utterances of woe in general (after all, suicide in Roman legends like those of Lucretia, Cato, or Portia even in their own time connoted a virtuous glory associated with honor or patriotism), nor the notion of life’s intolerability brought on by external matters, but of the directly apostrophic “J’accuse!” toward this mortal coil and its ills, whether or not there is anybody listening, whether there exists an immanent God, or a deus absconditus, or, from a more modern purview, a cold and indifferent universe consisting only of – as Schopenhauer claimed – will and representation.

Blood, the Builder erupts
From the throats of earth-bound things
And flings burnt fish
Onto the coast of warm sinews from the sea.
And from high bird-nets
From wet azure clods,
It pours casually down
Onto your deadly wound.

So, as the Age wrenches itself out of captivity
So, as a new world begins,
A skein of knotted days
Must be twined within a flute.
This Age is lurching on waves
Of human anguish
And in the grass, a viper breathes
The measure of a golden age.

And buds will still swell,
Green shoots will emerge,
But your vertebrae are shattered,
My beautiful, wretched age!
And with mindless smile
You look back, violent and weak,
Like a once lithe beast,
On your paw prints behind.

(tr. Deborah Marshall & DouglasPenick)

Kittler’s mastery of Technische Medien, and the history of technology, was most evident in the elegance with which he linked up the sweep of technological history: from the birth of human-harnessed electricity (the sparking amber brought back from Rhodes – the Greek word for amber is “elektron”), to Galvani’s discovery – although he was a vitalist – of the relationship between electricity and animation, or life (the bioelectric dead frog), through to the strange Pynchon-esque world of twentieth century warfare (the V-2 rocket, Kittler’s elegiac account of the tragedy of Turing, ).  Kittler lamented the cognitive gap between technicians and human beings being too human – which I unoriginally consider to be, at heart, the currently unresolvable parallax between techne and episteme – and in his analysis of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, observed that the role of the typewriter in the story as a controlled registration device of the medium of (the symbol of) man, renders us all “subjects of machine-based discourse processing gadgets and instruments.” This is in opposition to McLuhan’s notion of technology as an extension of man.  Kittler’s understanding of the continuum of technological autonomy led him to the grammatological conclusion that “there is no more writing,” since the miniaturisation of texts to the level of sub-micrometer sized chips commanding transistors to express differences between voltaic potentials, escapes the bounds of human perception of time and space.  To put it in other words, and in close relation to his famous aphorism “there is no software,” high-level programming languages and user interfaces obscure what at bottom, and at the most privileged access point concealed from users, are local manipulations of electricity.  Furthermore, the content of written media, for Kittler, is the symbolic, which in his reading of Lacan is based in symbols which can be exchanged for other symbols, and do not, as would be supposed, refer to an extra-symbolic real.  However, the radical distinction of technological media is that they ‘produce data that not longer refer to the symbolic world but rather to the material universe, or in other words, to that which cannot be encoded and fixed in writing in the symbolic network.’ (Sybille Kramer)

Many commentators apply a Foucaultian analysis to Kittler’s stance, whereby the power exists in the chip.  Indeed, media are techniques for reading and writing history, manipulating that which passes in irreversible time.  But this does not go far enough: the power, if it can be called that, is in matter itself, manipulated by thrown humans into integrated circuits and burnt silicon, which merely (which is to say magnificently) activate ontically extant possible functions of reality itself: the autoboot and the reset are base ontological functions, which manifest in genes, time, and culture.  Kittler insists on this in the declaration that after Church-Turing, nature itself can be understood as tantamount to a Universal Turing Machine.  In this ontology, data, regardless of human sensory experience, becomes the smallest unit of communication.  Kittler said at least once in interview, “Silicon is nature calculating itself!”  His mortal end leaves rigorously considered traces that can be applied to futuristic resolutions between technology, nature, and data.

Despite the multiple interpretations of the twentieth century which Badiou outlines in his first lesson of the book, it is apparent that the last century was most dominantly inscribed by Crimes of barbarism. The problem which Badiou defines relative to this interpretation, is the surreptitious absolution of barbarism abetted by unthinking. This refusal to think atrocities as they were thought, Badiou claims as a major obstacle towards constructing truths about the past century, and moreover towards deciphering culpability and curtailing such atrocities as were witnessed in the 20th century – Nazi extermination of the European Jews as their paragon – as well as those that are currently being witnessed – untended AIDS in Africa for example.

His argument here is that if we relegate barbarisms to the realm of Evils, which we deny as forms of thought or politics, we subscribe to a feeble theology which does not think, and thereby does not take into account that these supposed Evils were indeed thought through, and carefully at that. Badiou goes on to identify the “real problem” of the past century as being located in the linkages between democracies and that which, after the fact, they delineate as their Other, and to which they are therefore capable of committing ‘wholly innocent’ acts of barbarism. The Other, as with the Africa savagely colonized by Europe, is capable of being thought of as material, and it occurred that the 20th century compounded this in that it had its own obsession with the promise of reconstituting man, mainly through various communist and fascist projects, but in every case with a forgetting of the individual experience of such projects.
At the century’s empirical close, Badiou finds irony in that while these projects are buried in favor of conservation, we finally have the technological and financial means to remake and remap man through genetics. The problem Badiou identifies here is with ”the automatism of things”, something like technological determinism, whereby we finally have the means via genetic manipulation and biomedicine to reconstitute man, yet the problem of Science, grand as it is, is that it has no project; genetics is apolitical, “stupid”. Since we live in an era of the second Reconstitution, which hates thought, for its necessary correlate is the real, which threatens Terror, we will allow profit to dictate the decisions of Science in the twenty-first century, leading only to more unthought atrocities, this time unnameable culprits of the same effective continuation of death, unethicality as in the twentieth, however lacking the umbrella of a defined ideological project.
I tend to agree on the one hand that we live in an era in which taking up ideological projects on a grand modernist register is viewed as almost a literal taboo considering the putative epic failures of modernity and Modernism, however I believe that there is a subtending Project to be unearthed in Science, even Scientism, and this is a desire, such as in biogerontology, and in theories of the coming Singularity, to overcome aging, the loss of memory, and most of all our mortal finitude, death. There is a growing faction that takes up a hybrid of Scientific Reducibility and a Schopenhauerian view of the universe, but places technology squarely as the antidote. We have long been aware of the pharmakos aspect of science, and that, as Bernard Stiegler recounts from Greek mythology, we are bound to techne, which is both our cure and poison, and so whether it will be profit, as Badiou claims, blindly driving our “automatic” arrival at decisions with regard to remodeling man, we in every case oughtto beware of uncritical fanatics of science, who, for instance, are wiling to suppress prospects of putative disaster, such as artificial-intelligence overthrowing humans, in light of the exciting prospects of supercomputing power that could either end sickness or mortality, or formulate a computed moral calculus, etcetera.

Counter to common quotidian analyses, Badiou writes the century as being non-ideological in that it was in constant demand of action Now rather than promising a romantic, characteristically 19th c. Ideal-to-come (which we have crucially never shaken off – a highly consequential reality not for analysis here), from Lenin’s 1902 decree to Situationist activity, so I ask in consideration: have we returned in the “rump century” outcome, to Ideology, this time in Zizek’s sense of ‘unknown knowns’? In other words, has the meaning of ideology changed since Marx and after psychoanalysis to now define unregistered and unconscious, as opposed to explicit, political desires?

Returning to Badiou, he goes on to develop through several lessons a far-reaching, complicated thematic problem: that of the century’s divided interpretation of the meaning of dialectics. In lectures, he has elsewhere defined four interpretations of Aristotle’s laws of negation and I hope to better understand the differing schemata. But while his account here culminates in a stunning overview of the Chinese cultural revolutions of 1965-76, in which dialectics could either stand for radical division expressed as suppression through war, or alternatively as radical synthesis signifying a desire for peace and unity, the action towards which this dilemma is centrally directed are the great wars of the century. We must also note a complex corollary relationship to nihilism in the context of which morality is merely genealogical and we are beyond it. In this context, Badiou introduces the notion that the century announced its law as that of the Two: antagonism. However, this figure of the Two was arguably animated by the desire for the One, nameable as the victorious and therefore the real. In that the century had a passion for the real, which Badiou seems to celebrate reminiscently in its political implications as much as he decries its concomitant atrocities, this antagonism occurred under the paradigm of war, and it was thought by its actors that the wars taking place on its stage were final in their resulting victors, after many centuries in which war promised finality only to be defined by failure.

An expression of this diagnosis was that the first world war was so bloody that in interwar France it was said to have been the end of the end, however it seems in my attempt to grasp Badiou here, that it was simultaneously considered an unjust war in need of closure vis a vis a just and essentially more total war, but here we come across the problematically false belief in the dialectical nature of war. The problem of the justification of war under the logic of its creative potential (such as the Nazi vision of the Thousand Year Reich, or Mao’s dream of permanent class eradication, hence peace) whether by split or fusion, is that, since we, beyond good and evil, could find no basis for meaning, we thought in the century that we must turn to our own fates as actors in historical destiny. A lethal byproduct was the belief in the dialectical resolution of unjust war via just war, which is problematic in that war is un-dialectical in the Hegelian sense, and further does not promise that the newly created order will be better than the old one.

I’ll let my understanding settle here and approach some of the other readings before returning to the twentieth century’s megalithic motors of change, particularly after seeking more clarity on Badiou’s concepts of structure, negation, and the real.

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

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

Aesthetics in Protests

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

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

PANELISTS:

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

DESCRIPTION:

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

QUESTIONS:

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

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

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

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

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

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

My colleague Stephen Wuensch and I have been given the go-ahead to take the reigns of the 2011 semester, a new chapter, of What Is A Metaphor?, one of the BHQFU’s most successful classes.  Details below:

BHQFU @ SILVERSHED

January 18th at 7 PM 119 W 25th St. PH

What’s a Metaphor? with Stephen Wuensch and Paris Ionescu present a night of conversation. Artists Will Stewart, Daniel Galas, David Bernstein and Rose Marcus will present work for discussion. All are welcome. BYOB.

For more information email: whatisametaphor@gmail.com

Silvershed is an artist-run contemporary art project space in Chelsea, working between New York, Los Angeles and Berlin, as a collaboration for exhibitions, publications and events. Silvershed explores social dynamics of increasingly lateral flow of exchange of information, ideas and resources among artists to generate and to connect discussions of contemporary art values, ethics and aesthetics of the 21st century. Started in 2008 by Patrick Meagher, Yunhee Min and Oliver Lanz.

SILVERSHED 119 W 25th St. PH www.thesilvershed.org

Free association illustrations:

candid image of Regine debatty

Alexander de Cadenet - The Thinker - 2008

Bo Bartlett - History Lesson