kagablog

Unless writing music proceeds from knowing that you don’t know anything, it adopts an opinionated register as it tends to fall back on whatever is available in the ideas-closet. Writing music is a matter of tone more than content, and tone can only ever be unpredictable, haphazard, immediate en probing (backwards and forwards). The moment writing music is about content, it becomes writing on something else. So I don’t know if I agree with what Boulez is saying (transposed to writing music). Once music becomes part of history, it is severed from experience anyway. The issue of memory is an issue of curatorship, not performance. And language and music in the present can only ever be engaged in guess work and fore-play - but then it can’t be driven by theory, which immediately consumates the relationship.

stephanus muller

The world is now dominated not by governments but by images. International media corporations are phantom states shadowing the world, with real political power everywhere more distant and invisible. In another key scene in the film “Guy Debord, son art et son temps” a group of African immigrant girls are reading Zola’s ‘Au bonheur des dames’ with a white middle-class teacher in the Parisian suburbs. When they are asked what century they are living in, they reply in all seriousness that they do not know. This scene has no metaphorical importance, but stands as a literal representation of the fact that, like all of us in the society of the spectacle, the girls are condemned to a perpetual present which they cannot understand or alter.

andrew hussey
the game of war: the life and death of guy debord

Cécile Guilbert, now one of the most important young novelists and essayists in France, was eighteen, bored and wandering around her native Paris on a sweltering day in June 1981, when on a whim she entered the dim, empty cinema on the rue Cujas, which resembled more a porno cinema than any of the glitzy corporate picture houses of the great boulevards. Inspired, moved and disturbed by what she had seen (a programme of 4 films by Guy Debord) she hurried to look for a copy of the almost unfindable Society of the Spectacle, whose arguments struck her with the force of revelation. ‘Debord for me was an adventure and a great discovery,’ she says. ‘Everywhere you read that France was changing and that democracy would solve all our problems, but in the film ‘In girium imus nocte et consumimur igni’ Debord was telling us, in his grave and melancholy way, that the war was not yet finished, that it could not yet be finished whilst the spectacle was transforming life into non-life. I did not know then much about Hegel or )Marx’s) The German Ideology, but I knew that what Debord was saying was true because I could see it all around: the spectacle of politics, the illusion of democratic power. I left the cinema feeling as if I had seen something transgressive, like a porno film or a novel by Georges Bataille, but most of all I knew what I had just seen was not cinema but something else.’

andrew hussey
the game of war: the life and death of guy debord

Aufhebung is the term used by Hegel to describe the dialectical transition in which a lower stage is both annulled and preserved in a higher one and which is commonly translated as ’sublation’. Debord quoted Hegel on the dialectic as the envoi to the book “The Real Split in the Internationale, public circular of the Situationist International”: ‘One party proves itself to be victorious by breaking up into two parties; for in doing so it shows that it contains within itself the principle it is attacking, and thus had rid itself of the one-sidedness in which it previously appeared… So that the schism that arises in one of the parties and seems to be a misfortune, demonstrates rather that party’s good fortune.’

The game of absolute negation played by the Situationst International under Debord’s direction, he was asserting here, had always been entirely faithful to this principle, which meant not that to destroy was to create but that destruction was in itself an absolute value.

Andrew Hussey
The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord

Debord began to use the word ’spectacle’ with increasing frequency around the middle part of 1963. The term had been first used in print in L’Internationale situationniste 3 in 1959, in an article probably penned by Guy Debord, which gave rare approval to Alain Resnais’ film Hiroshima mon amour. This film, scripted by Marguerite Duras, had caused a stir on its release when its unconventional treatment of a Franco-Japanese love story had led to its being dropped as France’s official entry at that year’s Cannes Festival, apparently on the grounds that it was too uncommercial, too literary and too political for American tastes. The film’s visual content was uncompromising. The famous opening shots of the film present a montage of images of Hiroshima and the wounded, fragmented bodies of its inhabitants, intercut with images of a couple making love. These are accompanied by Emannuelle Riva’s elliptical, stilted commentary. There is an essential separation between voice and image which marks out the film’s theme of memory and dislocation.

It was precisely this aspect of the film which pleased Debord, who saw this deliberate disassociation of text and image as being in line with the various Situationist strategies that sought to ‘reduce the cinema to nothing’. This technique, he wrote, marked a leap forward in the development of the ‘cinematographic spectacle of the world’ towards ‘free cinema’, a cinema which, like the ‘free jazz’ currently espoused by Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, sought to extend the limits of the art to breaking point. ‘It is likely that than’, Debord wrote, ‘the freedom of the cinema will be superseded, forgotten, in the development of a world where the spectacle will no longer be dominant. The fundamental feature of the modern spectacle is the representation of its own ruin.’

The term ’spectacle’ was here used for the first time not only to denote visual representations of the world which denied or distorted its reality, but also an ideology which shaped that representation. The phrase, as it was now being used by Debord, came from Nietzsche. In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy in the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche had argued that the origins of all modern forms of thought lay in the realization that life could not be truly represented in art.

This separation between art and life, for Nietzsche, had a political dimension. More specifically, it was traditionally argued by contemporary commentators that the ‘chorus’ in Greek tragedy represented the mood and will of the people. This, argued Nietzsche, was patently untrue, indeed an impossibility in a community which had not yet begun to conceive of political relations in terms of democracy or equality. The chorus were then passive spectators of a process in which they could neither participate nor act upon. ‘What kind of artistic genre,’ wrote Nietzsche, prefiguring Situationist positions on art, ‘could possibly be extracted from the concept of the “spectator”, and find its true form in the “spectator as such”? The spectator without the spectacle is an absurd notion. We fear that the birth of tragedy is to be explained neither by any high esteem for the moral authenticity of the masses nor by any concept of the spectator without a spectacle: and we consider the problem too deep to be even troubled by such superficial considerations.’

The realization of this separation, according to Nietzsche, was the moment which heralded the arrival of ‘the second spectator’ who was no longer passive or controlled by events. This ’second spectator’ was also in this sense what Nietzsche called ‘the theoretical man’, the artist who was able to announce a break with the past and imagine the future. Towards the end of his life Nietzsche also began to use the term ’spectacle’ to denote the lack of real meaning in the passing events of modern life. ‘A riot or a newspaper in a big city are both deep down no more than “spectacle”, an absence of authenticity,’ Nietzsche wrote in a fragment from 1880, prefiguring early definitions of what the Situationists termed ‘the modern spectacle’.

Andrew Hussey
The Game of War: The life and death of Guy Debord
2001

if I sometimes write anything political, it is by necessity focused on the terror of normality which totally dominates all the channels which are supposed to contain free communication. The stagnation is absolute.

traditional class struggles led by the working class and communist parties have become obsolete and we have to extract subversive energy directly from the flows of capital. Now it isn’t just work-time that is being used, but life-time. The entire ‘bio’. This ambivalence is inherent to post-Fordism in which life and work have become indistinguishable. It results from the principle of equivalence enforced by capital in which everything becomes commutable, reversible, exchangeable. It is this general exchangeability that has gradually abolished all differences and boundaries, and imposed an uneasy sense of indetermination throughout society. Sex, the last remaining codification of morality and culture, is the quintessential example.

…

Much later, when the flood of destruction, pollution, and falsification had conquered the whole surface of the planet, as well as pouring down nearly to its very depths, I could return to the ruins that remain of Paris, since by then nothing better was left elsewhere. No exile is possible in a unified world.

Panegyric 1

The Gypsies rightly contend that one is never obliged to speak the truth except in one’s own language; in the enemy’s language the lie must reign.

panegyric 1

3rd International Deleuze Studies Conference
Amsterdam 12-14 July 2010

ASCA/CfH
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis
Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University

The third annual International Deleuze Studies Conference will explore how the three creative domains of thought - art, science and philosophy - connect, continue and create together.

Jung-Yeon Min, Chute Vers Mille Soleils, 2008, courtesy Galerie Kashya Hildebrand

The conference intends to bring together academics, urban planners and architects, sociologists, economists and politicians, neuroscientists, physiologists and psychologists, and artists, filmmakers and media-producers, who are interested in exploring a philosophy of relations in open and complex systems.

Deleuze Camp 4

Preceding the conference, students can participate in a summer school: Deleuze Camp 4 “Mille Gilles”. The camp will take place from 5-9 July 2010 in Amsterdam. Places are limited.

click here for the website

Born in Paris, Sylvère Lotringer studied at the Sorbonne before he moved to New York in the early 1970s, and founded the journal Semiotext(e). In 1975 he organized the ‘Schizo-Culture’ conference at Columbia University, New York, at which Michel Foucault and Félix Guattari addressed an audience of thousands, and in 1978 ‘The Nova Convention’, a three-day homage to William S. Burroughs. Lotringer was responsible for introducing the work of Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Paul Virilio and others to America through the publication of the small, desirable Foreign Agents book series. He is Professor Emeritus at Columbia University and continues to work for the publishing house Semiotext(e) alongside his co-editors, Chris Kraus and Hedi El Kholti.

NINA POWER Recently you were at London’s Kingston University to talk about the avant-garde. What do you understand by this term?

SYLVERE LOTRINGER I was happily surprised that we can still talk about the avant-garde in art. We are now inhabiting another time-space. Everything is happening too fast and in too many places at the same time for any group or movement to make any such claim. The conference that I attended was trying to extract from this Modernist concept some elements that could still apply among more socially creative political groups and movements, especially at this time when the capitalist system seems to be faltering. The idea of the Italian Autonomia movement – which I documented in an issue of Semiotext(e) in 1980 and republished recently – was that we could reinvent politics, and create something more fluid and non-institutionalized. We are now republishing The German Issue, first released in 1982, as part of the same attempt to bring out the communal part, the creative social impulse that was left behind as we entered the strange anomie that we are experiencing today, in which shallow individualism, cynicism and rapacity thrive in a complete vacuum.

NP One of the most important media for the Autonomia was radio. The obvious contemporary comparison is the Internet; it offers the possibility of putting out material quickly, and of constructing para- or non-academic discussions, as you did with Semiotext(e) at a time when French theory was still mostly untranslated. Perhaps there is less room for the kind of fetish items that the early Semiotext(e) books became. Now there are blogs, online books, and so on. How do you feel about this development?

SL It certainly offers an enormous range of possibilities that didn’t exist before, but increased dissemination and accessibility doesn’t replace hard theory. Actually the introduction of the electronic media in the late 1970s marked the end of French theory in France. Philosophers of this great generation were replaced by publicists, like Bernard-Henri Lévy. Theory is not synonymous with blogging, nor is multi-tasking with thinking. The books that we publish are a long-time intellectual commitment on their authors’ part and we have hardly scratched the surface. We are interested in everything that helps us diagnose the future, where we are going, what can be done, and that is far from clear at this point. We are presently moving from a humanistic space to a more global and ecological horizon. So we need an ever wider range of theories, not less, and the re-introduction of Italian social thinkers as well as Peter Sloterdijk’s amazing philosophical extrapolations are part of this project. Radio certainly had its time, but it is no less interesting for that. Actually it has been experiencing a revival. Technological advance isn’t everything. The Autonomists’ radios were not just radio, they were part of a total – not a global – environment, and they could mobilize the population whenever the police tried to raid them. These were political groups embedded in a local community, they knew who they were talking to. Can these communities be extended on a wider scale? Not in the same way. The Internet seemed to be the answer at the time it was introduced, but it has quickly become a new form of mental pollution. The CIA, apparently, is now working on a ‘gated’ equivalent that will keep hackers and other rogue idealists off-limits. The Internet certainly allows for a direct connection between people, but it still depends on long-time memory and a central organ. It assigns individuals a place that pre-exists them and abstracts them from their own environment. This is just the opposite of the idea of ‘general intelligence’ that Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno have extracted from Marx, which implies social creativity and public cooperation. Like other recent technological inventions, the Internet runs the risk of reproducing itself at the expense of the very sociability it was supposed to provide. It expands our world and reduces it to nothing, enforcing a culture of non-stop communication that is taking its toll on human temporality and its capacity to connect to the outside.

I call capitalism ‘the system’ because it doesn’t have a face, let alone a ‘human face’ you can challenge.

Ernst Jünger was the first to invoke, in the 1930s, the ‘total mobilization’ of populations in times of peace as in times of war. He was careful to point out that it didn’t mean sending people to the battlefields, but making sure of their readiness for mobilization. We all seem to be engaged at this point in a war of movement whose purpose and outcome mostly exceeds our control or understanding. And this war, unlike any other before, is being waged by humanity against itself. Fittingly, the Internet was conceived by ARPANET for the US military in 1962 before being released to the general public. Its original purpose, let’s not forget, was to preserve the capacity for massive retaliation from below in case of a nuclear explosion. This doomsday scenario involved the destruction of 20 million Russians in major cities, and there is no question that it would have been activated given the chance. Paradoxically, the same concept was invented separately by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari with their ‘rhizome’ in 1975, and the disproportion between the means involved tells a lot about the power of theory. The rhizome doesn’t foster separation or passivity, which was the major Situationist diagnosis of the society of the spectacle. It is not a given, but invented along the way and you constantly have to look for roots that could burgeon into untimely events. It fitted perfectly what was happening with Autonomia and Guattari at the time; but when you look at the extension of the concept of rhizomatization alongside Foucault, then this fluidity can also reinforce power and control. We’re in a society where nothing is simply what it is. All the more reason to try and drive a wedge, in concrete situations, between active and reactive forces.

NP In The Conspiracy of Art, the book you collaborated on with Jean Baudrillard in 2005, you talk about the devil’s pact between art and markets, and how it’s no longer possible to separate them.

SL It hardly was a prediction by then, only a clinical assessment. Marcel Proust said that much of Swann’s love after it reached a certain stage: it was no longer operable. This is the kind of relation that art has entered with the art market, and you would have to look at art from the point of view of the system, not from an art lover’s, if you wanted to understand what has happened to it. The situation of art has become ‘systemic’ in the sense that the concept is being used in the present financial crisis. What it means is that the problem keeps feeding upon itself and nothing proves it can really be solved. So we had better ask the market itself what it thinks about art. That’s why I found the discussion about ‘Art and Money’ that was held last year in New York so fascinating. It was a triumphalist event, like the press conference of the US generals in Saddam Hussein’s palace – and it was staged just a few months before the castle of cards abruptly collapsed. Every participant in the discussion, including the many artists in the audience, seemed to rejoice at the thought, expressed by Jeffrey Deitch, the New York art dealer, that avant-garde movements could be replaced by the ‘top ten list’ of contemporary artists. ‘We’ve gone from art market to art industry’, Deitch asserted, going on to say that the art world had become ‘an extraordinary platform for cross-marketing’. As Christian Marazzi reminded us recently, the typical sequence of financial cycles is a phase of impetus, then collective infatuation and overtrading, followed by fear and disorder. This was financial infatuation at its very best. Amy Cappellazzo, co-head of contemporary art at Christie’s, estimated that art fairs and auctions were the places where ‘the art is happening in real-time’ and anticipated confidently that ‘the market will have shake-ups’, but that ‘the very high end will have the smallest amount of correction.’ They were not boasting. They were celebrating the fact that, from the point of view of the market machine, art has become like everything else, and that differences don’t make any difference any more. Art has ceased to be special, it has become an industry like any other. And it is true that the ongoing crisis has been affecting the art world just like any other corporation or industry, although it seems to have suffered a bit less. No auction-house that I know of has gone bankrupt. There may be something special about art after all: it is the minion of capital. This was exactly what Baudrillard had in mind when he accused the art world of ‘insider trading’, and he chose his words carefully. Art is still claiming a special privilege, and behaving as if it had one. But that was pure arrogance on its part, and Baudrillard deflated it roundly in the best Situationist tradition by asserting that art was null – meaning that it had no more ‘distinctive’ qualities. That was a deliberate provocation, and part of his strategy, which consists of pushing the system to the limit until it collapses. And he was right in that respect: withdraw this sense of privilege, and art would be just like anything else. Nietzsche always urged us to shake down what is unsteady. What is crumbling down is a certain idea of art.

What I like about theory is that it spares us disasters. We don’t need to see the worst to understand it.

NP One of the central figures to emerge in the art world in recent years is the freelance curator. Do you see any link between a curator, who is basically pure connectivity and networking, and the theories of immaterial labour that Semiotext(e) has published? Marazzi, Virno, and others have tried to theorize changes in the nature of work, trying to get back to ideas of human capacity, almost a return to a kind of naturalism, or, in Virno’s case, a kind of critical naturalism.

SL Virno is clearing the ground, collapsing naturality and immateriality – biology and techno-intelligence – in order to bring out a capacity for innovation that capitalism fosters and could eventually be used against it. His approach is in line with the strategy devised by French post-1968 theorists after they realized that traditional class struggles led by the working class and communist parties had become obsolete and that they had to extract subversive energy directly from the flows of capital. Marx anticipated that the ‘general intellect’ liberated by the system of machines could replace political action, the way Italian autonomists created immaterial barricades in Bologna by tampering with traffic lights. Political action then becomes pure performativity without any product. But that kind of communicative virtuosity can also be tapped by the system. The freer the curators, the more work-time they will have to devote to their projects. They contribute in their own way to the extermination of use-value, which was mostly an alibi for exchange-value to start with. Now it isn’t just work-time that is being used, but life-time. The entire ‘bio’. This ambivalence is inherent to post-Fordism in which life and work have become indistinguishable. It results from the principle of equivalence enforced by capital in which everything becomes commutable, reversible, exchangeable. It is this general exchangeability that has gradually abolished all differences and boundaries, and imposed an uneasy sense of indetermination throughout society. Sex, the last remaining codification of morality and culture, is the quintessential example. It has been so saturated from all sides that there is nothing much that one can do with it at this point. The only place left is greed. Virno would agree with Baruch Spinoza that there is nothing worse than ubiquity, the endless oscillation between invention and negativity. Ambivalence is a prey to fear and anxiety, emotions that separate us from our strength and prevent us from discovering what our body is capable of. It is precisely that kind of indetermination that ‘general intelligence’ claims to eradicate by breaking into the productive process through communication, abstraction and linguistic cooperation. Whether these can hold against the exchangeability and ubiquity of capital, and how they could be mobilized against capitalism, remains to be seen. It is, in any case, a bold proposition meant to regain the initiative.

NP Do you think that art has become indeterminate as well?

SL Absolutely. This has little to do with individual works – whether good or bad – only with the dizzying change of scale, the massive production, circulation and consumption of art world-wide. The art market has expanded exponentially and has been losing its shape to achieve monstrous proportions. It is occupying all the space, wildly metastasizing in every possible direction. It is so bloated at the core that it doesn’t seem able anymore to digest all the data. It is on its way to surpass its function. The early 1980s orchestrated the return to painting, and gave the art market a chance to fasten its hold. But it didn’t stop there and it didn’t take long before art started outgrowing its own boundaries, opening itself up to the exchangeability of capital. First it absorbed photography, until then considered unworthy; then it moved to architecture, fashion, and design. Along the way, it has integrated ‘outsider art’, abolishing its own internal limit, and put together ubiquitous ‘installations’ liable to be pitched anywhere and provide a fast pedigree for ‘rogue nations’. Today it is difficult to imagine anything that could be excluded from art. Its field has expanded exponentially to include the entire society. Along the way, it has grabbed anything that could be used for its own purpose, recycling garbage, forging communities, investigating political issues and perfumes, tampering with biology etc., simultaneously appearing and disappearing with an ambiguous promiscuity. Art has finally fulfilled the program of Dada with a vengeance, embedding art into life. The only thing left for art to do is ‘auto-dissolve’. Most avant-gardes promised too much and never delivered. Their manifestos of ‘auto-dissolution’, on the contrary, revealed them at their most radical and paroxysmal moment. This moment has come to contemporary art, and it may even spare itself the trouble of publicizing its own exit. Forget art then. Unless it is capable of bringing us up to the next paradigmatic shift, as Andy Warhol once did, forgetting about its own name and past history. Artists themselves may have been showing the way by venturing so far astray from home. All it would take is to cut off the umbilical cord that still ties art to the market, or rather turn it into a rich rhizome. Some art groups are already working at it. Autonomists used to say, ‘The margins at the centre’. We haven’t yet given art a chance to grow autonomously.

NP There’s an interesting link here with your essay ‘Doing Theory’ included in the collection French Theory in America (2001) where you say that one of your initial reasons for setting up Semiotext(e) was about not becoming a medium for the art world, because of everything that’s tied up with it, money and so on.

SL The art world is so seductive, especially when you’re stuck in academia…

NP Right, but then obviously Semiotext(e) and Baudrillard, in particular, went on to have a very complicated relationship with both artists and the art world. By not being a playground for art or art theory you somehow end up with more of a role in the art world.

SL It is a role, if any, that the art world has mostly created for itself since I didn’t give it much of a hand. It didn’t take me long to realize that it was best keeping some distance. The art world is a black hole, but one had better not occupy it, just step aside and let others fall in. That’s what I’ve been trying to do: to reverse the seduction and dodge the position that has been carved out for you. Baudrillard did the same, quite brilliantly I must say. At the height of his fame, in 1987, after his lecture at the Whitney Museum, he refused to acknowledge his own misguided disciples. It was all the more easy for him that he didn’t know what the scene then was and didn’t realize what was really at stake. He told me later on that had he known, he would have been a bit more cautious. But he had no compunction blasting the art world again in 1996 with ‘The Conspiracy of Art’, the small pamphlet published in Libération, that seemed totally uncalled for, and created an uproar world-wide. If you want to be a free thinker, you can’t let your mind be clogged up by half-truths.

Semiotext(e) started with nothing, and mostly managed to stay clear from the art machine. On the other hand, it has always been a pleasure for me to deal with artists in any capacity, and we had a few groups of them work with us along the way. I can be more relaxed about the university, because the stakes are much smaller, and nobody forces you to take them seriously. Staying with one foot on either side has always been my favourite position. It gives you some more room to play. But as time passed, the university and the art world got a bit too close together for me. They started speaking the same lingo, sharing the same critics and students. I would have preferred to keep them separate, but it was part of the same blind thrust to abolish boundaries that you can now find everywhere. Now they are debating if there should be a doctorate in art. I say, why not? If you teach students to make art, why not make it a doctorate? At least they would get something for their money. The American university is now embarking wildly on new imperial ventures, farming out summer schools in Europe, disseminating its own academic model throughout the world, as our troops enforce ‘democracy’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. Everything ends up becoming business, even war, and I don’t see why academia shouldn’t have a go at it. At least the stakes are clear. Art is still too murky for me, and I prefer watching Deitch strut about the stage like Ubu the King. It remind us of what art becomes when it covets the system.

NP This idea of the system has been a constant theme in your work. In the French Theory in America essay, you say that the dominant ways of conceptualizing history and the subject were inadequate to the ‘violence and terrorism’ of capitalism, and that you have to be aware of assimilation; it’s not simply about redefining the borders of art, artist, the gallery.

SL You’re right, I don’t like assimilation. It is not by chance that we published a book called Hatred of Capitalism (2001), quoting artist Jack Smith’s rant against capitalism’s ‘insane waste’. Hatred is a volatile affect, but it is still a way of acknowledging someone’s existence. I call capitalism ‘the system’ because it doesn’t have a face, let alone a ‘human face’. You can’t challenge it to come out in plain view.

NP Perhaps the economic crises will focus things.

SL Yes, but at what cost? The financial meltdown suddenly made things appear that we wouldn’t have had a chance to witness otherwise. From one day to the next you could see businesses close, entire industries collapse, crowds on the dole. And nothing had happened. No towers had collapsed, no trace of any violence. Suddenly Circuit City, the huge electronics store on Sunset Boulevard, was emptied, as if it had been snuffed out by a plutonium bomb. The parking lot was deserted, the entire compound surrounded by barbed wire. A secret war was unfolding; not in far away places but under our very eyes. It was happening in the heart of one of the great cities of the West.

It requires quite a mental jump to equate the immateriality of sub-prime speculation – signs spinning on signs – and the huge devastation that it dealt on the entire planet in just a matter of hours. This is the violence of capitalism. And the worst is still to come, in this or other ways, ecological disasters on the scale of continents yet as abstract in our minds as this crisis in liquidity was, all caused by the terrorism of greed and neglect. So it did help remind me that, for all the freedom it promises, capitalism is on its way to destroy everything that made life worth living on this planet, art included. Capitalism isn’t just something that is happening outside, it is also polluting people’s minds. What I like about theory is that it spares us disasters. We don’t need to see the worst to understand what it is about. It gives us a handle on the way contemporary society operates, and what place we occupy in it, where it is going and how we could possibly affect it. It is one of the ways we have been able to survive for so long in the interstices of the ‘system’, and make something out of it.

1 See: Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism, Semiotext(e),
Los Angeles, 2009
2 Art and Money’, discussion organized by Artforum at the New School, New York in April 14, 2008
3 See my Overexposed: Perverting Perversions, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2007
4 René Loureau, Manifestes d’auto-dissolution des avant-gardes, Galilee, Paris, 1980
5 Sande Cohen and Sylvère Lotringer, eds., French Theory in America, Routledge, New York/London, 2001

Nina Power is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University, UK and author of the forthcoming book One-Dimensional Woman (Zero Books).

this interview first published on frieze.com

To give good advice is to disdain the faculty of erring that God gave to others. Not only that, we should be glad that other people don’t act like us. It makes sense only to ask for advice from others, so that we can be sure - by doing just the opposite - that we are totally ourselves, in complete disagreement with all Otherness.

fernando pessoa
the book of disquiet

Our personalities should be inscrutable, even to ourselves. That’s why we should always dream, making sure that we’re included in our dreams so that we won’t be able to have opinions about ourselves.

And we should especially protect our personality against being invaded by others. All outside interest in us is a flagrant disrespect. What saves the banal greeting ‘How are you?’ from being an inexcusable vulgarity is the fact that it’s usually completely empty and insincere.

fernando pessoa
the book of disquiet

…

Some die as soon as they die, while others live on for a time in the memory of those who knew and loved them; others survive in the memory of the nation that bore them; still others enter into the memory of the civilization they were part of; and some very few are able to span the contrary tendencies of differing civilization. But all of us are surrounded by the abyss of time, in which we will ultimately vanish; the hunger of the abyss will swallow us all….

Durability is just a wish, and eternity an illusion.

Death is what we are and what we live. We are born dead, we deadly exist, and we are already dead when we enter Death.

Whatever lives, lives because it changes; it changes because it passes; and, because it passes, it dies. Whatever lives is constantly transforming into something else - it continually denies itself, it perpetually evades life.

Life is thus an interval, a link, a relation, but a relation between what has passed and what will pass, a dead interval between Death and Death.

…

fernando pessoa
the book of disquiet

…

Every thought is debased when expressed in words, which transform the thought into the property of others, making it understandable to anyone who can understand it.

…

fernando pessoa
the book of disquiet

…

The best way to start dreaming is through books. Novels are especially helpful for the beginner. The first step is to learn to give in completely to your reading, to live totally with the characters of a novel. You’ll know you’re making progress when your own family and its troubles seem insipid and loathsome by comparison. It’s best to avoid reading literary novels, which tend to divert our attention to the formal structure.

I’m not ashamed to admit that this is how I started. Strangely enough, detective novels are what I instinctively read. I was never able to read romantic novels in any sustained way, but this is for personal reasons, I being romantically disinclined even in my dreams. Let each man cultivate his particular inclination. Let us never forget that to dream is to explore ourselves. Sensual souls, for their reading matter, should choose the opposite of what I read.

When the dreamer experiences physical sensation - when a novel about combat, flights and battles leaves his body really exhausted and his legs worn out - then he has passed beyond the first stage of dreaming. In the case of the sensual soul, he should be able - without any masturbation except in his mind - to experience an ejaculation at the appropriate moment during the novel.

Next, the dreamer should try to transfer all of this to the mental plane. The dreamed ejaculation (which I choose as the most violent and striking example) should be felt without actually happening. The fatigue will be greater, but the pleasure will be incomparably more intense.

…

The second stage is to construct novels for your own enjoyment. This should be attempted only once dreaming has become perfectly mentalized, as described above. Otherwise, the effort to set a novel in motion will hinder the smooth mentalization of pleasure.

Third stage: Once our imagination has been trained, it will fashion dreams all by itself whenever we want.

At this point there’s hardly even any mental fatigue. The dissolution of personality is total. We are mere ashes endowed with a soul but no form - not even that of water, which adopts the shape of the vessel that holds it.

With this thoroughly established, complete and autonomous plays can unfold in us line by line. We may no longer have the energy to write them, but that won’t be necessary. We’ll be able to create secondhand; we can imagine one poet writing in us in one way, while another poet will write in a different way. I, having refined this skill to a considerable dgree, can write in countlessly different ways, all of them original.

The highest stage of dreaming is when, having created a picture with various figures whose lives we live all at the same time, we are jointly and interactively all of those souls. This leads to an incredible degree of depersonalization and the reduction of our spirit to ashes, and it is hard, I admit, not to feel a general weariness throughout one’s entire being. But what triumph!

This is the only final asceticism. It’s an asceticism without faith, and without any god.

God am I.

fernando pessoa
the book of disquiet

One notes that in primitive societies, where the exploitation of man by man is still fairly weak, the products of human activity not only flow in great quantities to rich men because of the protection or social leadership services these men supposedly provide, but also because of the spectacular collective expenditures for which they must pay. In so-called civilized societies, the fundamental obligation of wealth disappeared only in a fairly recent period […] Everything that was generous, orgiastic, and excessive has disappeared; the themes of rivalry upon which individual activity still depends develop in obscurity, and are as shameful as belching. The representatives of the bourgeoisie have adopted an effaced manner; wealth is now displayed behind closed doors, in accordance with depressing and boring conventions […] Such trickery has become the principle reason for living, working, and suffering for those who lack the courage to condemn this moldy society to revolutionary destruction […] As the class that possesses the wealth — having received with wealth the obligation of functional expenditure — the modern bourgeoisie is characterized by the refusal in principle of this obligation. It has distinguished itself from the aristocracy through the fact that it has consented only to spend for itself, and within itself — in other words, by hiding its expenditures as much as possible from the other classes […] In opposition, the people’s consciousness is reduced to maintaining profoundly the principle of expenditure by representing bourgeois existence as the shame of man and as a sinister cancellation […] As for the masters and exploiters, whose function is to create the contemptuous forms that exclude human nature — causing this nature to exist at the limits of the earth, in other words in mud — a simple law of reciprocity requires that they be condemned to fear, to the great night when their beautiful phrases will be drowned out by death screams in riots.

georges bataille
1933

At times the unity of Batailles thought is astonishing. When reading one seemingly unrelated part of his work, other aspects suddenly appear and are clarified. In the pages on Sovereignty (3rd part of The Accursed Share) the generality of his philosophical approach to phenomena becomes more visible as profound and delightful simply ideas that have a tremendous force of explanation.

In embarking upon the general notion of sovereignty, Bataille immediately disembarks from any question of approach from the point of view of political theory. Rather than a matter of international relations, sovereignty refers to the properties of the inner relation of man to the objects of his desire. In dispelling a purely functionalist view of man’s social life, Bataille argues that the desire for the sacred and the marvellous is as much essential to man as his desire for bread. Capitalism for instance displaces mans desires, the worker must work to eat and eat to work, or science in its disinterestednes postpones the moment in the service of an anticipated result. For Bataille both represent the loss of sovereignty, which is regained when, say, the worker surrenders himself to a drink of wine; i.e. to his desire. Sovereignty lies in this immediacy where the process of thought and calculation is suspended. Sovereignty is sort of the savouring of the marvellous abandonment to objects of desire and crucially beyond any calculation of their utility.

“What is sovereign in fact is to enjoy the present time without having anything else in view but this present time” (p.199)

In a piece entitled Nonknowledge (The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge p. 198) a different definition of sovereignty appears. It does so in a strange context where Bataille is discussing the relationship between death and thought. For Bataille thought, especially deep and rigorous thought is the product of an exhaustion and suffering in life. He describes a moment of awakening in bed with having the sensation of drifting with the bed’s inertia. This sensation of having ‘hold of nothing’ is one of those experiences that we tend to dismiss within the daylight hours and their routine. But noting our fascination for their absurdity Bataille remarks:

“I want to specify what I mean by sovereignty. It is the absence of sin, but this is still ambiguous. This reciprocally defines sin as lacking the attitude of the sovereign.

But sovereignty is nonetheless….sin.

No, it’s the power to sin, without having the feeling of a missing purpose, or it is this lack that has become a purpose.”

After an example in the context of friendship, he continues:

“We continuously move further away, in the examination of thought, from the decisive moment (of resolution) when thought fails, not as an awkward gesture, but, on the contrary, as a conclusion, which cannot be surpassed; because thought gauged the awkwardness involved in the act of accepting the exercise: it’s a servility! Common men were right to despise those who stoop to thought; those who believed they could escape the truth of this contempt through an effective superiority, which they allowed themselves to the degree that humanity as a whole is engaged in the exercise of thought: but this superiority cannot be reduced to greater or lesser excellence in a servile occupation. But established excellence shows that, so long as the final search for man and thought is sovereignty, resolved thought reveals the servility of all thought: this operation by which, exhausted, thought is itself the annihilation of thought. Even this phrase is uttered in order to establish the silence that is its own suppression. It is the meaning, or better, the absence of meaning …” (p. 199)

Thus the sovereign moment is for Bataille also an instance of ‘unknowing’. (there are important links here to the role of the marvellous in Surrealism to explore).

Where in these passages of the Accursed Share Bataille states quite explicitly his idea of the unknowing, he demonstrates something of the uniqueness of his own thought. He does not deny knowledge, rather he understands it as a practice that is generated out of discourse. But because of this it takes place through duration, knowledge being the whole process rather than its final result. Hence knowledge can never be part of the moment, precisely because whether painful or joyous (they share the same form for Bataille see p201), the miraculous moment over-rides any reflexive or anticipating kind of thought.

“Consciousness of the moment is not truly such, is not sovereign, except in unknowing. Only be cancelling, or at least neutralizing, every operation of knowledge within ourselves are we in the moment, without fleeing it. This is possible in the grip of strong emotions that shut off, interrupt or override the flow of thought” (p.203)

This is of course just the start of the story. For Bataille knowing and doing are intimately connected with the impossible and with death. Thoughts auto-dissolve into nothing and become sovereign when they cease to be.

this article first appeared here

481

I went into the barbershop as usual, with the pleasant sensation of entering a familiar place, easily and naturally. New things are distressing to my sensibility; I’m at ease only in places where I’ve already been.

After I’d sat down in the chair, I happened to ask the young barber, occupied in fastening a clean, cool cloth around my neck, about his older colleague from the chair to the right, a spry fellow who had been sick. I didn’t ask this because I felt obliged to ask something; it was the p lace and my memory that sparked the question. ‘He passed away yesterday,’ flatly answered the barber’s voice behind me. The whole of my irrational good mood abruptly died, like the eternally missing barber from the adjacent chair. A chill swept over all my thoughts. I said nothing.

Nostalgia! I even feel it for people and things that were nothing to me, because time’s fleeing is for me an anguish, and life’s mystery is a torture. Faces I habitually see on my habitual streets - if I stop seeing them I become sad. And they were nothing to me, except perhaps the symbol of all life.

The nondescript old man with dirty gaiters who often crossed my path at nine-thirty in the morning… The crippled seller of lottery tickets who would pester me in vain… The round and ruddy old man smoking a cigar at the door of the tobacco shop… The pale tobacco shop owner… What has happened to them all, who because I regularly saw them were a part of my life? Tomorrow I too will vanish from the Rua da Prata, the Rus dos Douradores, the Rus dos Fanqueiros. Tomorrow I too - I this soul that feels and thinks, this universe I am for myself - yes, tomorrow I too will be the one who no longer walks these streets, whom others will vaguely evoke with a ‘What’s become of him?’. And everything I’ve done, everything I’ve felt and everything I’ve lived will amount to merely one less passer-by on the everyday streets of some city or other.

476

It will seem to many that my diary, written just for me, is too artificial. But it’s only natural for me to be artificial. How else can I amuse myself except by carefully recording these mental notes? Though I’m not very careful about how I record them. In fact I jot them down in no particular order and with no special care. The refined language of my prose is the language in which I naturally think.

For me the outer world is an inner reality. I feel this not in some metaphysical way but with the senses normally used to grasp reality.

Yesterday’s frivolity is a nostalgia that gnaws at my life today.

466

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face - there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.

Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

458

…

Bells or a large clock strike what, without counting, I know must be eight o’clock. I awaken from myself because of the banality of measured time, that cloister which society imposes on time’s continuity, a border to contain the abstract, a boundary around the unknown. I see that the mist which has completely quit the sky (except for the quasi-blue that still lingers in the blueness) has indeed penetrated into my soul, and has likewise penetrated to the depths of things where they have contact with my soul. I’ve lost the vision of what I was seeing. My eyes see, but I am blind. I’ve begun to perceive things with the banality of knowledge. What I see is no longer Reality, it’s just Life.

… Yes, the life to which I also belong, and which also belongs to me, and no longer Reality, which belongs only to God or to itself, which contains neither mystery nor truth, and which - since it is real or pretends to be real - exists somewhere invariably, free from having to be temporal or eternal, an absolute imge, the external equivalent to the idea of a soul.

I turn and walk slowly, though faster than I think, to the door that will lead me back up to my rented room. But I don’t enter; I hesitate; I keep going. Praca da Figueira, gaping with variously coloured wares and filling up with customers, blocks the horizon from my view. I advance slowly, lifelessly, and my vision is no longer mine, it’s no longer anything; it’s merely the vision of a human animal that inexorably inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality, and all the other illusions that form the civilization in which I feel and perceive.

Where are the living?

fernando pessoa
the book of disquiet