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Title: The Palimpsest Author: Hakim Bey Language: en Topics: Friedrich Nietzsche, insurrectionary Source: Retrieved on 17th May 2021 from https://hermetic.com/bey/palimpsest
Nietzsche was so sane it drove him mad – Charles Fourier was so mad he
attained a kind of perfect sanity.
Nietzsche exalted the overhuman as individual (“radical aristocratism”)
– his society of freespirits would indeed consist of a “union of
self-owning ones”. Fourier exalted the Passional Series – for him the
individual failed to exist except in Harmonial Association. Polar
opposites, these views – how is it then that I see them as
complementary, mutually illuminative, and both entirely feasible?
One answer would be “dialectics”. Even more accurately – “taoist
dialectics”, not so much a waltz as a shimmy – subtle, snaky and
fractal. Another answer would be “surrealism” – like a bicycle made out
of hearts and thunderbolts. “Ideology” is NOT an answer – that zombie
jamboree, that triumphalism of spooks on parade. “Theory” cannot be
identified with ideology nor even with ideology-in-process, because
theory has set itself adrift from all categories – because theory is
nothing if not situation(al)ist – because theory has not abandoned
desire to “History”.
So theory drifts like one of Ibn Khaldun’s nomads, while ideology
remains rigid and stays put to build cities and moral imperatives;
theory may be violent, but ideology is cruel. “Civilization” cannot
exist without ideology (the calendar is probably the first ideology)
because civilization emerges from the concretization of abstract
categories rather than from “natural” or “organic” impulses. Thus
paradoxically ideology has no object but itself. Ideology justifies all
and any blood-atonement or cannibalism – it sacrifices the organic
precisely in order to attain the inorganic – the “goal” of History –
which in fact turns out to be ... ideology. Theory by contrast refuses
to abandon desire and thereby attains to genuine objectivity, a movement
outside itself, which is organic and “material” and cognitively opposed
to civilization’s false altruism and alienation. (On this, Fourier and
Nietzsche quite agree.)
Finally however I would propose what I call the palimpsestic theory of
theory.
A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been re-used by writing over the
original writing, often at right angles to it, and sometimes more than
once. Frequently it’s impossible to say which layer was first inscribed;
and in any case any “development” (except in orthography) from layer to
layer would be sheer accident. The connections between layers are not
sequential in time but juxtapositional in space. Letters of layer B
might blot out letters in layer A, or vice versa, or might leave blank
areas with no markings at all, but one cannot say that layer A
“developed” into layer B (we’re not even sure which came first). And yet
the juxtapositions may not be purely “random” or “meaningless”. One
possible connection might lie in the realm of surrealist bibliomancy, or
“synchronicities” (and as the oldtime Cabalists said, the blank spaces
between letters may “mean” more than the letters themselves). Even
“development” can provide a possible model for reading – diachronicities
can be hypothesized, a “history” can be composed for the manuscript,
layers can be dated as in archeological digs. So long as we don’t
worship “development” we can still use it as one possible structure for
our theorizing.
The difference between a manuscript palimpsest and a theory-palimpsest
is that the latter remains unfixed. It can be re-written – re-inscribed
– with each new layer of accretion. And all the layers are transparent,
translucent, except where clusters of inscription block the cabalistic
light – (sort of like a stack of animation gels). All the layers are
“present” on the surface of the palimpsest – but their development
(including dialectical development) has become “invisible” and perhaps
“meaningless”.
It would appear impossible to excuse this palimpsestic theory of theory
from the charge of a subjective and magpie-like appropriationism – a bit
of critique here, a utopian proposal there – but our excuse would have
to consist of the claim that we’re not looking for delicious ironies,
but for bursts of light. If you’re thirsting for PoMo Deconstruction or
smirking hyperconformism, go back to school, get a job – we’ve got other
fish to fry.
Thus we construct an epistemological system – a way of learning and
knowing based on the juxtaposition of theoretical elements rather than
their ideological development; in a sense, an a-historical system. We
also avoid other forms of linearity, such as logical sequence and
logical exclusion. If we admit history into this scheme we can use it as
simply one more form of juxtaposition, without fetishizing it as an
absolute – the same holds true for logic, etc.
This ludic approach to theory should not be confused with “moral
relativism” (the devaluation of values), from which it is rescued by our
“subjective teleology”. That is, we (and not “history”) are searching
for purposes, goals, objects-of-desire (the revaluation of values). The
playful nature of this action arises from the deployment of imagination
(or the “Creative Imagination” as H. Corbin and the sufis call it) – and
also from the visionary discipline of “paranoia criticism” (S. Dali),
the subjective revaluation of aesthetic categories. “The personal is the
political.”
Juxtaposition, superimposition, and complex patterning thus produce a
malleable unity (like the hidden monism of polytheism, rather than the
hidden dualism of monotheism) – paradoxology as epistemic method –
somewhat akin to ‘pataphysics or the “anarcho-dada epistemology” of
Feyerabend (Against Method). “Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!”
Here I’d like to “read into the record” so to speak the entire
theoretico-historic debate about “Art” as a separate category (a museum
of fetishes), and as a source for the reproduction of misery and
alienation by the exclusion of non-“artists” from the pleasure of
creativity (or “attractive labor”, as Fourier called it). I want to
mention the situationist proposal for the “suppression and realization
of Art”, i.e., its revolutionary suppression as a category, and its
realization on the level of “everyday life” (that is to say, of life
rather than the spectacle). This proposal in turn is based on the
assumption that Art finally failed to function as an “avantgarde” (read:
“vanguard”) somewhere around the time the Surrealists entered the
Communist Party – and simultaneously, the gallery/museum “Artworld” of
commodity fetishism – thus embracing spurious ideology and elitism in
one spectacular flop. At this point, the remnants of the avantgarde
began a process of attempted withdrawal from ideology and
commodification (more or less carrying on from Berlin dada) as Lettrism,
Situationism, No-Art, Fluxus, mail art, neoism, etc – in which the
emphasis shifted from vanguardism to a radical decentering of the
creative impulse, away from the galleries and museums and enclaves of
boho privilege – toward the disappearance of “Art” and the re-appearance
of the creative in the social. Of course, museums are now buying up
these “movements” as well, as if to prove that anything (even
“anti-Art”) can be commodified. Each of these post-avantgarde movements
has at some point fallen prey to confusion or temptation and tried to
behave like one of the classic avant-gardes, and each has failed, as
surrealism failed, to liberate the artwork from its role as commodity.
Consequently the Artworld has eaten and interiorized art-theory which
should – if taken seriously – cause it to self-destruct. Galleries
thrive (or at least survive) on a nihilism which can only be contained
by irony, and which would otherwise corrode and melt down the very walls
of the museums. This essay, for example, will be printed in the catalog
of a gallery exhibition, thus perpetrating the irony of calling for the
suppression and realization of art from within the very structure that
perpetuates the alienation of the non-artist and the fetishization of
the artwork. Well, fuck irony. One can only hope that each compromise
will be the last.
Those who fail to see this situation as a malaise will read no further –
theory has enough to do without explaining its own nausea – ad nauseam.
The 20^(th) century fascination with the “primitive” and the “naive”
serves as a measure, first, of the exhaustion of “Art History”; and
second, of the utopian desire for an art which would not be a separate
category but congruent with life. No irony. Art as serious play. Artists
have mimicked the forms of the primitive and naive without realizing
that the whole production of these forms depends on the structural
absence of alienation in the social (as in “tribal art”) or individual
artist. It is this lack of a split, of doubleness, in the art of Africa,
of Java, or the lunatic asylum, that moved such sensitive souls as Klee
to envy.
In a society without “malaise” (at least, in tragic proportions) one
might expect to see that “the artist is not a special kind of person,
but each person is a special kind of artist.” Coomaraswamy was thinking
of Indonesia when he coined this slogan, and I myself was told in Java
that “Everyone must be an artist” – a kind of mystical version of the
suppression-and-realization theory. It’s not precisely “specialization”
(of labor or of cognition) that causes the nausea, by this reading, but
rather separation – fetishization, alienation. As each person is a
special kind of artist, some artists will specialize in the grand
integrative powers of creativity – telling the central stories of the
tribe so to speak – the creation of value and “meaning” – which can be
called the “bardic function”. In certain tribes this function is spread
out among many individuals, but is always associated with a
concentration of mana. In high “barbarian” cultures (such as the Celts)
the function is institutionalized to some degree – the bard is the
“acknowledged legislator” of a society of artists. The Bardic function
focalizes and integrates.
If we sought for a symbolic moment at which the “break” occurred and the
malaise began to set in, we might choose the passage in Plato’s Republic
where poets are banned from Utopia as “liars” – as if the Law itself (as
abstract category) were the only possible integrative function,
excluding the nomadic imagination as opposition, as anti-Truth, as
social chaos. The rational grid is now imposed on the organicity of life
– all good is seen in natura naturata and “being”, while all becoming
(natura naturans) is now associated with “evil”.
In the Renaissance the artist again begins to express “self” at the
expense of the integrative function. This moment marks the opening of
the “Romantic” trajectory, the artist’s disappearance from the Social,
the artwork’s disappearance from life. The artist as promethean ego, the
artwork as “fine” (i.e. useless) – these measure the gap that has opened
between an aesthetic elite, and the masses doomed to sterility and
kitsch. And yet there seems to be something noble and courageous about
this process, which is reflected in the bohemian freedom of the artist,
and also in the artist’s critique of civilization and its cruel dullness
– for the artist will now become the “unacknowledged legislator”, the
prophet without honor – the romantic hero, inspired and doomed by one
and the same divine insight. The artist yearns once again to fulfill the
bardic function, to create aesthetic meaning for and with the tribe. In
anger at being refused this role, the artist spirals out of control into
ever greater alienation – then into open rebellion – and finally into
silence. The romantic trajectory is played out.
The Renaissance also witnesses the first modern attempt to recreate the
integral (“the order of intimacy”) through the combined power of art and
magic – which are in fact seen as naturally related by the deep
structure of both – which is essentially linguistic. The unifying
element is “action-at-a-distance”, and the synthesis of all its
ramifications is the Emblem Book which combines, according to a
hieroglyphic science, the image, the word, and sometimes even music (as
in M. Maier’s Atlanta Fugiens), to bring about “moral” (i.e. spiritual)
changes in the reader AND in the real world. The goal of the Renaissance
Hermeticist/artist was utopian – as in the paradise scenes of
Hieronyomous Bosch or the landscapes of the Hypnerotomachia – and in
this ambition can be seen the desire to reanimate the bardic function,
to give meaning to the experience of the “tribe”, to influence the
consensual reality-paradigm, to change the world by art. Ultimate
romantic project of Gaugin, Rimbaud, Wagner, Artaud, the Surrealists –
the artist as wizard-prophet of revolutionary desire.
For all its failures, and all its sleazy accommodations with the
Artworld of commodity capitalism, this magical tradition is our
heritage, and in some crude way we still “believe” in it. Even to
believe in the “suppression” of art is still to believe that art is
important and effectual, at least by its disappearance. Moreover, the
“freedom” of the artist would seem well worth protecting – and sharing –
if only it were freedom for something and not just freedom from
something. Despite the poverty, loneliness, and feelings of futility,
we’re only out here on the margin by and large because we like it, and
because risk is good for our art. In these matters we are still
Romantics.
Nevertheless we are forced to admit that this magical-revolutionary
project has failed – once too often. Commodity fetishism is a negative
feedback loop – and as for the the hieroglyphic science, it has fallen
into the hands of advertisers, spin-doctors, the “creative managers” of
the post-spectacular “discourse” (or “simulacrum” as Baudrillard calls
it), the real but hidden legislators of our all-too-virtual reality. The
proposal for the suppression and realization of art is the culminating
statement of the romantic-hermetic tradition of opposition, the last
possible “development” in a dialectical progression that leads to our
present impasse or blockage. If we look at “Art History” from this
diachronic perspective we seem to find ourselves in a cul-de-sac, caught
in an impossible paradox whereby the “purpose” of art must be to destroy
art, so that “everyone” may be an artist. For us – as artists – this
constitutes a dead end. What can we do? History has betrayed us.
What happens however if we abandon the diachronic perspective? What if
we superimpose all the “stages of development” in a palimpsest which can
only be read as a synchronicity? What if we treat them as theories, all
visible on a single surface, potentially related not in time but in
space?
Again, we should insist that our palimpsestic survey is not to be
confused with some ironic PoMo vacation cruise through a watery
graveyard of aesthetic categories. We’re looking for values – or for the
imaginal power to create values (by knowing our “true desires”, as the
occultists say), and our search is not cool and detached but passionate
by definition – not frivolous but serious – not sober but playful – for,
to the bards, nothing is as serious as our intoxication with the ludic
act of creativity.
So we take the whole development discussed above and accordion it into a
“manuscript” where every theory is written over every other theory. Like
augurs studying clouds or the eleven kinds of lightning, like wizards
with an obsidian mirror for the scrying of angelic alphabets, we now
study “Art History” as if it had no history, as if all possibilities
were eternally present and infinitely fluid. Seeming contradictions
merely hide occult harmonies, “correspondences” – all and any
juxtapositions may prove fortuitous. “Palimpsestomancy.”
Assuming that the theories we discussed diachronically are now arranged
synchronically upon the page of our palimpsest, let’s try a trial
reading and look for unexpected but revealing coincidences. Fourier’s
theory of attractive labor, for example, could be superimposed on
Hesiod’s cosmology, wherein the first three principles of becoming are
Chaos, Eros, and Earth. Now desire can be seen as the force which draws
the pure spontaneity of Imagination into the forms of Nature, or the
“material bodily principle” – desire as organizing principle of
creativity – desire as the only possible source of the social.
“Action at a distance”, the mainstay of the Hermetic paradigm, was
supposed to be banished from the mechanistic philosophy which prevailed
and conquered science in the 17^(th) century; but it kept sneaking back
into the discourse, first as an “explanation” for gravity
(“attraction”), and now in a hundred places – the four forces in quantum
physics, the influence of the “strange attractor” on disorganized
matter, etc. Although magic failed to “work” for the Renaissance
Hermeticists in the same measurable and predictable way that the
experimental method, for instance, worked for Bacon and Newton,
nevertheless the hieroglyphic science can be revived as an
epistemological tool in our study of certain non-quantifiable (or
ambiguous) phenomena such as language and other semantic codes which –
quite literally – influence us “at a distance”. The Hermeticists
believed in ray-like emanations which could transfer the “moral power”
of an image (its influence boosted by the appropriate colors, smells,
sounds, words, astral fluids, etc.) to human consciousness “at a
distance.” Sight, or reflection, and sound, or inflection, create
polyvalent memes, bits and clusters of “meaning”, in the
observer/listener’s “soul”. By a process of “mutability” wherein
everything symbolizes both itself and its opposite simultaneously, the
hieroglyphic scientist weaves spells in a dark forest of ambiguity which
is precisely the realm of the artist – and in fact alchemists were known
as “artists” of the “spagyric Art”. Just as the alchemist changes the
world (of metals), so does the maker of an Emblembook or a public
monument (such as an obelisk) change the world of cognition and of
“moral” interpretation by the deployment of images and symbols. Leaving
aside the question of “emanations”, we arrive at an occult theory of art
which was passed on (via Blake, for instance) to the Romantics and to
us.
Now, as Italo Calvino points out somewhere, all art is “political” –
invariably and inescapably – since every artwork reflects the artist’s
assumptions about the “proper sort” of cognition, the “proper” relation
of individual consciousness to group consciousness (aesthetic theory),
etc., etc. In a sense all art is Utopian to the extent that it makes a
statement (however vague) about the way things should be. The artist
however may refuse to admit or even become conscious of this “political”
dimension – in which case, certain distortions may occur. Those artists
who have abandoned the hermetic/romantic idea of “moral influence”
frequently reveal their political unconscious to the savvy semiotician
or dialectician. “Pure entertainment” turns out to be freighted with an
ectoplasm of sheer reaction, and “pure art” is frequently even worse. By
contrast, this artistic unconscious can inadvertently reveal what W.
Benjamin called the “Utopian trace” – a sort of Gnostic fragment of
desire embedded in every human production, no matter how reproduced it
may be. Advertising, for example, makes use of the Utopian trace to sell
the image of a reproduction which promises (on the unconscious level) to
change one’s world, to make one’s life better. Of course the commodity
cannot deliver this change – otherwise your desire would be satisfied
and you would stop spending money on cheap imitations of desire.
Tantalus can smell the meat and see the wine, but never taste – he is
the perfect “consumer” therefore, who pays (eternally) for pure image.
In this sense advertising is the most Hermetic of all modern arts.
The Utopian Trace can also be analyzed in another “damned” art-form,
pornography – which acts directly to bring unconsciousness to conscious
cognition in the (measurable!) form of erotic arousal. It is Desire
which draws out (“educates”) this appearance of the utopian trace
(however distorted) and organizes chaos toward action around a vision of
“the way things ought to be”. Masturbation is an epiphenomenon – the
real effect of pornography is to inspire seduction (as in Dante, where
the lovers sin after reading Arthurian romances in the garden together).
Right-wing bigots are correct when they accuse erotic arts of
influencing and even changing the world, and leftish liberals are wrong
when they imply that porn should be allowed because it’s “harmless” –
because it’s “only” art. Pornography is agitprop for the body politic,
and inasmuch as it is “perverse” it agitates and propagandizes for a
revolutionary liberation of desire – which explains exactly why certain
kinds of porn are outlawed and censored in every “democracy” of the
world today. Since most commercial porn is produced on an unconscious
and reactionary level, its proposed “revolution” is ambiguous indeed;
but there’s no theoretical reason why erotica cannot be used according
to the hieroglyphic science for directly utopian ends.
This brings us to the question of a utopian poetics. Nietzsche and
Fourier would have agreed that art is not merely the reflection of
reality but rather a new reality that seeks to impose itself in the
world of thought and action by “occult” means, through “dionysan” powers
and hermetic “correspondences” (hence their shared fascination with
opera as the “complete artwork” and the ideal means of propagating their
“philosophy”). Our “crazy” synthesis of Nietzsche and Fourier will
reveal them both as neighbors of the Renaissance Hermeticists, who also
pursued utopian political programs through action on the level of
aesthetic perception, and through the very pleasure of creativity which
in fact constitutes both the means and the goal of the utopian project.
In Fourier, however, we find the truly divine notion that this aesthetic
realization will manifest as collective action – that society will
re-constitute itself as a work of art. Each individual, with powers now
augmented by Harmonial Association with the appropriate Passional
Series, will become “a special kind of artist”. Having realized their
“true desires”, all their desire becomes productive in a world given
over to veritable orgies of creativity, eroticism, “gastrosophy”, and
aesthetic brilliance. Just as shamanism is “democratized” in certain
tribes where everyone is a visionary, Fourier elevates every member of
the Phalanx to the status of a “great artist”. Naturally some will be
greater (i.e. more passionate) than others, but none will be excluded –
the “utopian minimum” guarantees creative power. Nietzsche speaks of
“the will to Power as Art”; Fourier made it the principle of an
anarchist utopia in which the sole organizing force is desire.
There appear, on the face of our palimpsest, two apparently
contradictory images: – first, that of the artist as “bard”, and as
romantic rebel in a world that has denied the bardic function; and
second, that of the suppression-and-realization-of-art, in which
“artist” disappears as a privileged category in order to reappear (like
Joyce’s “Here Comes Everybody”) in a shamanic democratization of Art.
Would it be possible to intuit – based on our anti-diachronic
palimpsestic theorizing – that this paradox may be merely apparent, a
false dichotomy? Or that, even if it’s a real paradox, we can construct
a paradoxicalism capable of reconciling opposites on a “higher level”
(coincidentia oppositorum)? Or that, like Alice, we can entertain
several (or even six) conflicting contradictory notions “before
breakfast”? Can we “save” ART from the imputation of failure, and the
artist from the stain of elitism and vanguardism, while at the same time
upholding the “revolution of everyday life” and the utopia of desire?
In order to attempt an answer to these question I’d prefer to drop the
problem or “plight” of Art and the artist, and concentrate instead on
the plight of the artwork. After all, what can we say about the
predicament of the artist, who (despite all “tragedy”) is still the only
free spirit in the world of commodities, the only one who knows how to
pay attention, the only one blessed with obsession, and the only
practitioner of attractive labor? [Note: of course I’m defining “artist”
here as anyone freespirited and obsessive and able to pay attention,
whether or not they are involved in “the arts” or belong to the boho
counterculture, etc., etc.] Compared with this good fortune, the real
tragedy seems to involve not the artist but the work of art. The artwork
is alienated as commodity both from the producer and from the consumer.
Either it is removed from “everyday life” as a unique fetish, or else it
is robbed of its “aura” through reproduction. In the economy of
simulacra, the image is cut loose and floats free of all referents –
hence all images can be “recuperated”, even (or especially) the most
“transgressive” or subversive images, as commodities in themselves,
items with price but no value. The gallery is the terminal and the
museum is the terminus of this process of alienation. The museum
represents the final fixation of price and price as the meaning of the
image. Forget the question of “saving” the artist; is it possible to
“save” the work of art?
In order to “justify” and “redeem” the artwork it would be necessary to
remove it from the economy of the commodity. The only other economy
capable of sustaining the artwork would be the “economy of the gift”, of
reciprocity. This concept was sytematized by the anthropologist M. Mauss
in his masterpiece The Gift, and exercised great influence on thinkers
diverse as Bataille and Levi Strauss. It was exemplified in the potlach
ceremonies of the Northwest coastal Amer-indian societies, but it can be
hypothesized as a universal. Before the emergence of “money” and
“contract”, all human society is based on the Gift, and the return of
the Gift. Before the conceptualization of “surplus” and “scarcity” there
prevails an apprehension of the “excessive” generosity of nature and
society, which must be expended (or “expressed” as Nietzsche put it) in
cultural production, aesthetic exchange, or – especially – in the
festival.
In the context of the Gift economy, the festival is the focussing power
of the social – the nexus of exchange – actually a kind of “government”.
As the Gift economy gives way to a money economy however, the festival
begins to take on a “dark” aspect. It becomes the periodic saturnalia or
turning-upside-down of the social order, a permitted burst of excess
which will purge the people of their natural resentment against
alienation and hierarchy, a disorder which paradoxically restores order.
But as the money economy gives way to the commodity economy, the
festival undergoes yet another shift of meaning. By preserving the Gift
within the total matrix of a system which is hostile to the Gift, the
festival in its saturnalian mode has become a genuine focus of
opposition to the economic consensus. This opposition remains largely
unconscious, and the spectacle can recuperate most of its energies
(think of Christmas!) – but the spontaneous festival remains a real
source of utopian energy nevertheless. The “Be-In”, the gathering, and
the Rave, have all appeared to modern authority as dangerous nodes of
total disorder precisely because they attempt to remove the energy of
the Gift from the economy of the commodity. The post-surrealist
post-Situationist art movements that have carried on the project of
suppression-and-realization have all developed festal theories. Jacques
Attali’s Noise, which explores suppression-and- realization in terms of
music (he calls it “the stage of composition”) is based on an analysis
of a painting by Breughel of a festival. Indeed, the festival is an
inescapable component of any theory which offers to restore the Gift to
the center of the creative project.
Is the work of art “saved”? It would be better to ask if the work of art
possesses a soteriological dimension or function. Is the artwork
salvific? Can it redeem me? And how can it do so unless it is liberated
from alienation in a festal economy? Art was born free and everywhere
finds itself in chains – obviously the “revolutionary task” of the
artist consists not so much in making art but in liberating the artwork.
In fact, it appears that if we desire to work for
suppression-and-realization we must (paradoxically?) revive that most
dangerously romantic view of the artist as rebel, as creator-destroyer –
as occultist revolutionary. If creative life (including value-creation)
can be called “freedom”, then the artist is a prophet (vates or
bard/seer) of this freedom – just as Blake believed. By means of the
hieroglyphic science the artist embeds, codes, englobes, educts,
expresses, beckons. The work of art as seduction asks to be superseded
and seduced in turn by the brilliance of each and all – it demands
reciprocity . Not life as ART (which would be an intolerable form of
dandyism) – but art as Life.
In the end, can anything be done about all this within the context of
the gallery, the museum, the economy of the commodity? Is there a way to
avoid or subvert the process of recuperation? Possibly. First, because
the gallery-world has been so devalued (largely because it grows ever
more boring) and hence becomes desperate to try anything. Second,
because the artwork, despite everything, retains a touch of magic.
If we artists are forced (by penury for example) to work within the
gallery-world, we can still ask ourselves how best to “advance the
struggle” and make real spiritual agitprop for the cause of creative
chaos. NOT through ever-more-arcane elitism, obviously. NOT by crude
Socialist Realism and overtly “political” art. NOT by ever-more-morbid
deathkult “transgression” and hip armageddonism. NOT by ironic
hyperconformity.
There may exist many possible strategies for “boring from within” the
Artworld – but I can think of only one that doesn’t involve crude
physical destruction. Simply this: – Every artwork can be made in the
most transparent possible way according to the (ever-unfolding)
principles of utopian poetics and the hieroglyphic science. Each artwork
would be a consciously-devised “seduction machine” or magical engine
meant to awaken true desires, anger at the repression of those desires,
belief in the non-impossibility of those desires. Some artworks would
consist of settings for the realization of desire, others would evoke
and articulate the object/subject of desire, others would shroud
everything in mystery, still others would render themselves completely
translucent. The artwork should shift attention away from itself as the
privileged icon or fetish or desirable thing, and instead focus
attention on liberatory energies. The works of certain “earth-artists”
for example, which transmute landscape (with the simplest and most
painstaking gestures) into utopian settings or erotic dreamscapes; the
works of certain “installation-artists” whose micro-realities concern
memory, desire, play, all the revery-energies of Bachelard’s
“imagination” and his “psychoanalysis of space” – art of this sort can
be shown or documented within the Artworld context, in galleries or
museums, even though its purpose and effect would be to dissolve those
structures and “leak out” into everyday life, where it would leave a
trace of the marvelous, and a thirst for more.
Similar strategies could be evolved for other artforms – printed books,
music, or even the festival as collective creation. In every case I
believe that the most effective work can be done outside the
institutions of aesthetic discourse, and even as attacks on those
institutions. However, we should take advantage of our access to
Artworld and its privileges to use it as a launching pad for an assault
on its own exclusivity, its professionalist elitism, its irrelevance,
its ennui – and its power.
The specific tactics of this insurrectionary strategy remain in the
hands of individual artists and the vertu or power of their creations.
The point is an insane generosity, a donation larger than any
commodity-transaction can recuperate, a free gift over and beyond all
computation. The artwork becomes a virus of excess, an instigation to
utopian desire – a soteriological device. Nothing makes better sense
than the attempts of the ArtWorld to demolish itself. The purpose
however is not to destroy the space of creativity but to open it up –
not to depopulate it but to invite “everyone” inside. We don’t want to
leave; we want (finally) to arrive. To declare the Jubilee.