The images exhibited by our museums and galleries today can, in fact, be classified into three major categories. First, of all, there ís what might be called the naked image: the image that does not constitute art, because what it shows us excludes the prestige of dissemblance and the rhetoric of exegeses. Thus, a recent exhibition entitled Mémoires des camps devoted one of its sections to photographs taken during the discovery of the Nazi camps. The photographs were often signed by famous names - Lee Miller, Margaret Bourke - White, and so on - but the idea that brought them together was the trace of history, of testimony to a reality that is generally accepted not to tolerate any other form of presentation. Different from the naked image is what I shall call the ostensive image. This image likewise asserts its power as that of sheer presence, without signification. But it claims it in the name of art. It posits this presence as the peculiarity of art faced with the media circulation of imagery, but also with the powers of meaning that alter this presence: the discourses that present and comment on it, the institutions that display it, the forms of knowledge that historicize it. This position can be encapsulated in the title of an exhibition recently organized at the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts by Thierry de Duve to exhibit 'one hundred years of contemporary art': Voice. The affect of the that was is here apparently referred to the identity without resídue of a presence of which 'contemporaneity' ís the very essence. The obtuse presence that interrupts histories and discourses becomes the luminous power of a face-to-face: facings, as the organizer puts it, obviously contrasting this notion with Clement Greenberg's flatness. But the very contrast conveys the meaning of the operation. Presence opens out into the presentation of presence. Facing the spectator, the obtuse power of the image as being-there-without-reason becomes the radiance of a face, conceived on the model of the icon, as the gaze of divine transcendence. The works of the artist's painters, sculptors, video-makers, installers - are ísolated in their sheer haecceity. But this haecceity immediately splíts in two. The works are so many icons attesting to a singular mode of material presence, removed from the other ways in which ideas and íntentions organíze the data of sense experience. 'Me voici'. 'Nous voici" 'Vous voici' - the three rubrics of the exhibition make them witness to an original co-presence of people and things, of things between themselves, and of people between themselves. And Duchamp's tireless urinal once again does service, via the pedestal on which Stieglitz photographed it. It becomes a display of presence making it possible to identify the dissemblances of art with the interactions of hyper-resemblance. The device of the installation can also be transformed into a theatre of memory and make the artist a collector, archivist or window-dresser, placing before the visitor's eyes not so much a critical clash of heterogeneous elements as a set of testimonies about a shared history and world. Thus the exhibition Voilà aimed to recap a century and illustrate the very nation of a century, by bringing together, inter alia, Hans-Peter Feldmann's photographs of ane hundred people aged 0-100, Christian Boltanski's installation of telephone subscribers, Alighiero and Boetti's 720 Letters fr0m Afghanistan, or the Martins' room devoted by Bertrand Lavier to exhíbíting 50 canvases linked only by the family name of their authors. Contrasting with the ostensive image is what I shall call the metaphorical image. Its power as art can be summarized in the exact opposite of Voici: the Voilà that recently gave its time to an exhibition at the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, sub-titled 'te monde dans la tête'. This title and sub-title involve an idea of the relations between art and image that much more broadly inspires a number of contemporary exhibitions. According to this logic, it is impossíble to delimit a specific sphere of presence isolating artistic operations and products from forms of circulation of social and commercial imagery and from operations interpreting this imagery. The images of art possess no peculiar nature of their own that separates them in stable fashion from the negotiation of resemblances and the discursiveness of symptoms. The labor of art thus involves playing on the ambiguity of resemblances and the instability of dissemblances, bringing about a local reorganízation, a singular rearrangement of circulating images. In a sense, the construction of such devices assigns art the tab that once fell to the 'critique of images'. Only this critique, left to the artists themselves, is no longer framed by an autonomous history of forms or a history of deeds changing the world. Thus art is led to query the radicalism of its powers, to devote its operations to more modest tasks. It aims to play with the forms and products of imagery, rather than carry out their demystification. The thís oscillation between two attitudes was evident in a recent exhibition, presented in Minneapolis under the title 'Let's entertain' and in Paris as Au·delà du spectacle. The American title invited visitors both to play the game of an art freed from the criticai seriousness and to mark a critical distance from the leisure industry. For its part, the French title played on the theorization of the game as the active opposite of the passive spectacle in the texts of Guy Debord. Spectators thus found themselves called upon to accord Charles Ray's merry-go-round or Maurizio Catalan's giant table football set their metaphorical value and to take a semi-distance from the game through the media images, disco sounds or commercial mangas reprocessed by other artists. The unifying principle behind these strategies clearly seems to be to bring about, on a material that is not specific to art and often indistinguishable from a collection of utilitarian objects or a projection of forms of imagery, a double metamorphosis, corresponding to the dual nature of the aesthetic image: the image as cipher of history and the image as interruption. On the one hand, it involves transforming the targeted, intelligent productions of imagery into opaque, stupid images, interrupting the media flow. On the other, it involves reviving dulled utilitarian objects or the indifferent images of media circulation, so as to create the power of the traces of a shared history contained in them. Installation art thus brings into play the metaphorical, unstable nature of images. The latter circulate between the world of art and the world of imagery. They are interrupted, fragmented, reconstituted by a poetics of the witticism that seeks to establish new differences of potentiality between these unstable elements. Naked image, ostensive image, metaphorical image: three forms of 'images', three ways of coupling or uncoupling the power of showing and the power of signifying, the attestation of presence and the testimony of history; three ways, too, of sealing or refusing the relationship between art and image. Yet it is remarkable that none of these three forms thus defined can function within the confines of its own logic. Each of them encounters a point of undecidability in its functioning that compels it to borrow something from the others. This is already true of the image that seems best able, and most obliged, to guard against it - the 'naked' image intent solely on witnessing. For witnessing always aims beyond what it presents. Images of the camps testify not only to the tortured bodies they do show us, but also to what they do not show: the disappeared bodies, obviously, but above all the very process of annihilation. The shots of the reporters from 1945 thus need to be viewed in two different ways. The first perceives the violence inflicted by invisible human beings on other human beings, whose suffering and exhaustion confront us and suspend any aesthetic appreciation. The second perceives not violence and suffering, but a process of de-humanízation, the disappearance of the boundaries between the human, animal and mineral. Now, this second view is itself the product of an aesthetic education, of a certain idea of the image. A photograph by Georges Rodger, displayed at the Mémoires des camps exhibitions, shows us the back of a corpse whose head we cannot see, carried by an SS prisoner whose bowed head shields his face from Our eyes. This horrendous assemblage of two truncated bodies presents us with an exemplary image of the common dehumanization of victim and executioner. But it does 80 only because we see it with eyes that have already contemplated Rembrandt's skinned OX and all the forms of representation which have equated the power of art with obliteration of the boundaries between the human and the inhuman, the living and the dead, the animal and the mineral, all alike merged in the density of the sentence or the thickness of the pictorial paste. The same dialectic characterizes metaphorical images. These ímages, it is true, are based on a postulate of indiscernibility. They simply set out to displace the representations of imagery, by changing their medium, by locating them in a ditTerent mechanism of vision, by punctuating or recounting them differently. But the question then arises: what exactly is produced as a difference attesting to the specific work of artistic images on the forms of social imagery? This was the question behind the dísenchanted thoughts of Serge Daney's last texts: have not all the forms of critique, have not all the forms of critique, pIay, and irony that claim to disrupt the ordinary circulatíon of images been annexed by that circulation? Modern cinema and criticism claímed to interrupt the flow of media and advertising images by suspending the connections between narration and meaning. The freeze-frame that closes Truffaut's Quatre cent coups was emblematic of this suspension. But the brand thus stamped on the image ultimately serves the cause of the brand image. The procedures of cutting and humor have themselves become the stock-in-trade of advertising, the means by which it generates bath adoration of its icons and the positive attitude towards them created by the very possibility organizing it. No doubt the argument is not decisive. By definition, what is undecidable can be interpreted in two ways. But it is then necessary discreetly to draw on the resources of the opposite logic. For the ambiguous montage to elicit the freedom of the critical or ladies gaze, the encounter must be organized in accordance with the logic of the ostensive face-to-face, representing advertising images, disco sounds, or television sequences in the space of the museum, isolated behind a curtain in small dark booths that give them the aura of the work damming the flood of communication. Even so, the effect is never guaranteed, because it is often necessary to place a small card on the door of the booth making it clear to viewers that, in the space they are about to enter, they will lead knew how to see and to put the flood of media messages that usually captivates them at a distance. Such exorbitant power attributed to the properties of the device itself corresponds to a rather simplistic view of the poor morons of the society of the spectacle, bathing contentedly in a flood of media images. The interruptions, derivations, and reorganizations that alter the circulation of images less pretentiously have no sanctuary. They occur anywhere and at any time. But it is doubtless the metamorphoses of the ostensive image that best express the contemporary dialectic of images. For here it proves decidedly difficult to furnish the appropriate criteria for discerning the proclaimed face-to-face, for making presence present. Most of the works put on the pedestal of Voici can not in any way be distinguished from those that contribute to the documentary displays of Voila. Portraits of stars by Andy Warhol, documents from the mythical sectíon of the Aigles du Musée by Marcel Broodthaers, an installation by Joseph Beuys of a batch of commodities from the ex-GDR, Christian Boltanksi's family album, Raymond Hains's stripped posters, or Pistoletto's mirrors - these scarcely seem conducive to extolling the undiluted presence of Voici. Here too it is then necessary to draw on the opposite logic. The supplement of exegetical discourse proves necessary in order to transform a ready-made by Duchamp into a mystical display or a sleek parallelepiped by Donald Judd into a mirror of intersecting relations. Pop images, neo-realist décollages, monochrome paintings, or minimalist sculptures must be placed under the common authority af a primal scene, occupied by the putative father of pictorial modernity: Manet. But the father ofmodem painting must himself be placed under the authority of the Word made flesh. His modernism and that of bis descendants are indeed defined by Thierry de Duve on the basis of a painting from his 'Spanish' period - Christ mort Soutenu par les anges - inspired by a canvas of Ribalta 's. Unlike his madel, Manet's dead Christ has bis eyes open and is facing the spectator. He is thus an allegory for the task of substitution assigned painting by the 'death of God'. The dead Christ comes back to life in the pure immanence of pictorial presence.8 This pure presence is not that of art, but instead of the redeeming Image. The ostensive image celebrated by the Voici exhibition is the flesh of material presence raised, in its very immediacy, to the rank of absolute Idea. On this basis, ready-mades and Pop images in sequence, minimalist sculptures or fictional museums, are construed in advance in the tradition of icons and the religious economy of the Resurrection. But the demonstration is obviously double edged. The Word is only made flesh through a narrative. An additional operation is always required to transform the products of artistic operations and meaning into witnesses of the original Other. The art of Voice must the based on what it refused. It needs to be presented discursively to transform a 'copy', or a complex relationship between the new and the old, into an absolute origin. Without a doubt, Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma affords the most exemplary demonstration of this dialectic. The filmmaker places his imaginary Museum of cinema under the sign of the Image that is to come at the Resurrection. Ris words counter-pose to the deathly power of the Text the living force of the Image conceived as a cloth of Veronica on which the original face of things is imprinted. To Alfred Hitchcock's obsolete stories they oppose the pure pictorial presence represented by the bottles of Pommard in Notorious, the windmill',. sails in Foreign Correspondent, the bag in Marnie, or the glass of milk in Suspicion. I have shown elsewhere how these puree icons had themselves to be removed by the artífice of montage, diverted from their arrangement by Hitchcock, so as to be reintegrated into a pure kingdom of images by the fusing power of video superimposition. The visual production of íconic pure presence, claimed by the filmmaker's discourse, is itself only possible by virtue of the work of its opposite: the Schlegelian poetics of the witticism that invents between fragments of films, news strips, photos, reproductions of paintings and other things all the combinations, distances or approximations capable of eliciting new forms and meanings. This assumes the existence of a boundless Shop/Library/Museum where all films, texts, photographs and paíntings coexist; and where they can ala be broken up into elements each of which is endowed with a triple power: the power of singularity (the punctum) of the obtuse image; the educational value (the studium) of the document bearing the trace of a history; and the combinatory capacity of the sign, open to being combined with any element from a different sequence to compose new sentence-images ad infinitum. The discourse that would salute 'images' as lost shades, fleetingly summoned from the depths of Hell, therefore seems to stand up only at the price of contradicting itself, transforming itself into an enormous poem establishing unbounded communication between arts and mediums, artworks and illustrations of the world, the silence of images and their eloquence. Behind the appearance of contradiction, we must take a Closer Look at the interaction of these exchanges. Jacques Rancière/The Future of the Image/Part 1: The Future af the Image/ 'NAKED IMAGE', 'OSTENSIVE IMAGE', 'METAPHORICAL IMAGE' edit in Grammarly by Dejan Stojkovski
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by Gilles Deleuze
Painting transmutes this cerebral pessimism into nervous optimism. Painting is hysteria, or converts hysteria, because it makes presence immediately visible
- Gilles Deleuze
This ground, this rhythmic unity of the senses, can be discovered only by going beyond the organism. The phenomenological hypothesis is perhaps insufficient because it merely invokes the lived body. But the lived body is still a paltry thing in comparison with a more profound and almost unlivable Power [Puissance]. We can seek the unity of rhythm only at the point where rhythm itself plunges into chaos, into the night, at the point where the differences of level are perpetually and violently mixed.
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Beyond the organism, but also at the limit of the lived body, there lies what Artaud discovered and named: the body without organs. "The body is the body / it stands alone / it has no need of organs / the body is never an organism / organisms are the enemies of bodies." The body without organs is opposed less to organs than to that organization of organs we call an organism. It is an intense and intensive body. It is traversed by a wave that traces levels or thresholds in the body according to the variations of its amplitude. Thus the body does not have organs, but thresholds or levels. Sensation is not qualitative and qualified, but has only an intensive reality, which no longer determines with itself representative elements, but allotropic variations. Sensation is vibration. We know that the egg reveals just this state of the body "before" organic representation: axes and vectors, gradients, zones, cinematic movements, and dynamic tendencies, in relation to which forms are contingent or accessory. "No mouth. No tongue. No teeth. No larynx. No esophagus. No belly. No anus." It is a whole nonorganic life, for the organism is not life, it is what imprisons life. The body is completely living, and yet nonorganic. Likewise sensation, when it acquires a body through the organism, takes on an excessive and spasmodic appearance, exceeding the bounds of organic activity. It is immediately conveyed in the flesh through the nervous wave or vital emotion. Bacon and Artaud meet on many points: the Figure is the body without organs (dismantle the organism in favor of the body, the face in favor of the head); the body without organs is flesh and nerve; a wave flows through it and traces levels upon it; a sensation is produced when the wave encounters the forces acting on the body, an "affective athleticism," a scream-breath. When sensation is linked to the body in this way, it ceases to be representative and becomes real; and cruelty will be linked less and less to the representation of something horrible, and will become nothing other than the action offerees upon the body, or sensation (the opposite of the sensational). As opposed to a miserabiliste painter who paints parts of organs, Bacon has not ceased to paint bodies without organs, the intensive fact of the body. The scrubbed and brushed parts of the canvas are, in Bacon, parts of a neutralized organism, restored to their state of zones or levels: "the human visage has not yet found its face ...."
A powerful nonorganic life: this is how Worringer defined Gothic art, "the northern Gothic line." It is opposed in principle to the organic representation of classical art. Classical art can be figurative, insofar as it refers to something represented, but it can also be abstract, when it extricates a geometric form from the representation. But the pictorial line in Gothic painting is completely different, as is its geometry and figure. First of all, this line is decorative; it lies at the surface, but it is a material decoration that does not outline a form. It is a geometry no longer in the service of the essential and eternal, but a geometry in the service of "problems" or "accidents," ablation, adjunction, projection, intersection. It is thus a line that never ceases to change direction, that is broken, split, diverted, turned in on itself, coiled up, or even extended beyond its natural limits, dying away in a "disordered convulsion": there are free marks that extend or arrest the line, acting beneath or beyond representation. It is thus a geometry or a decoration that has become vital and profound, on the condition that it is no longer organic: it elevates mechanical forces to sensible intuition, it works through violent movements. If it encounters the animal, if it becomes animalized, it is not by outlining a form, but on the contrary by imposing, through its clarity and nonorganic precision, a zone where forms become indiscernible. It also attests to a high spirituality, since what leads it to seek the elementary forces beyond the organic is a spiritual will. But this spirituality is a spirituality of the body; the spirit is the body itself, the body without organs (The first Figure of Bacon would be that of a Gothic decorator).
Life provides many ambiguous approaches to the body without organs (alcohol, drugs, schizophrenia, sadomasochism, and so on). But can the living reality of this body be named "hysteria," and if so, in what sense? A wave with a variable amplitude flows through the body without organs; it traces zones and levels on this body according to the variations of its amplitude. When the wave encounters external forces at a particular level, a sensation appears. An organ will be determined by this encounter, but it is a provisional organ that endures only as long as the passage of the wave and the action of the force, and which will be displaced in order to be posited elsewhere. "No organ is constant as regards either function or position . .. sex organs sprout anywhere .. . rectums open, defecate and close .. . the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments." In fact, the body without organs does not lack organs, it simply lacks the organism, that is, this particular organization of organs. The body without organs is thus defined by an indeterminate organ, whereas the organism is defined by determinate organs: "Instead of a mouth and an anus to get out of order why not have one all-purpose hole to eat and eliminate? We could seal up nose and mouth, fill in the stomach, make an air hole direct into the lungs where it should have been in the first place." But what does it mean to speak of a polyvalent orifice or an indeterminate organ? Are not a mouth and an anus very distinct, and is not a passage of time needed to get from one to the other? Even in the meat, is not there a very distinct mouth, recognizable through its teeth, which cannot be confused with other organs? This is what must be understood: the wave flows through the body; at a certain level, an organ will be determined depending on the force it encounters; and this organ will change if the force itself changes, or if it moves to another level. In short, the body without organs is not defined by the absence of organs, nor is it defined solely by the existence of an indeterminate organ; it is finally defined by the temporary and provisional presence of determinate organs. This is one way of introducing time into the painting, and there is a great force of time in Bacon, time itself is being painted. The variation of texture and color on a body, a head, or a back (as in Three Studies of the Male Back of 1970 [63]) is actually a temporal variation regulated down to the tenth of a second. Hence the chromatic treatment of the body, which is very different from the treatment of the fields of color: the chronochromatism of the body is opposed to the monochromatism of the flat fields. To put time inside the Figure - this is the force of bodies in Bacon: the large male back as variation.
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We can see from this how every sensation implies a difference of level (of order, of domain), and moves from one level to another. Even the phenomenological unity did not give an account of it. But the body without organs does give an account of it, if we look at the complete series: without organs - to the indeterminate polyvalent organ - to temporary and transitory organs. What is a mouth at one level becomes an anus at another level, or at the same level under the action of different forces. Now this complete series constitutes the hysterical reality of the body. If we look at the "picture" of hysteria that was formed in the nineteenth century, in psychiatry and elsewhere, we find a number of features that have continually animated Bacon's bodies. First of all, there are the famous spastics and paralytics, the hyperesthetics or anesthetics, associated or alternating, sometimes fixed and sometimes migrant, depending on the passage of the nervous wave and the zones it invests or withdraws from. Then there are the phenomena of precipitation and anticipation or, on the contrary, of delay (hysteresis), of the afterward, which depend on the accelerations and delays of the wave's oscillations. Next, there is the transitory character of the organ's determination, which depends on the forces that are exerted upon it. Next, there is the direct action of these forces on the nervous system, as if the hysteric were a sleepwalker, a somnambulist in the waking state, a "Vigilambulist." Finally, there is a very peculiar feeling that arises from within the body, precisely because the body is felt under the body, the transitory organs are felt under the organization of the fixed organs. Furthermore, this body without organs and these transitory organs are themselves seen, in phenomena known as internal or external "autoscopia": it is no longer my head, but I feel myself inside a head, I see and I see myself inside a head; or else I do not see myself in the mirror, but I feel myself in the body that I see, and I see myself in this naked body when I am dressed ... and so forth. Is there a psychosis in the world that might include this hysterical condition? "A kind of incomprehensible stopping place in the spirit, right in the middle of everything . . ."
Beckett's Characters and Bacon's Figures share a common setting, the same Ireland: the round area, the isolator, the Depopulator; the series of spastics and paralytics inside the round area; the stroll of the Vigilambulator; the presence of the attendant, who still feels, sees, and speaks; the way the body escapes from itself; that is, the way it escapes from the organism .... It escapes from itself through the open mouth, through the anus or the stomach, or through the throat, or through the circle of the washbasin, or through the point of the umbrella. The presence of a body without organs under the organism, the presence of transitory organs under organic representation. A clothed Figure of Bacon's is seen nude in the mirror or on the canvas (Two Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, 1968 [50]). The spastics and the hyperesthetics are often indicated by wiped or scrubbed zones [71], and the anesthetics and paralytics, by missing zones (as in the very detailed 1972 triptych [70]). Above all, we will see that Bacon's whole "style" takes place in a beforehand and an afterward: what takes place before the painting has even begun, but also what takes place afterward, a hysteresis that will break off the work each time, interrupt its figurative course, and yet give it back afterward ....
Presence, presence ... this is the first word that comes to mind in front of one of Bacon's paintings. Could this presence be hysterical? The hysteric is at the same time someone who imposes his or her presence, but also someone for whom things and beings are present, too present, and who attributes to every thing and communicates to every being this excessive presence. There is therefore little difference between the hysteric, the "hystericized," and the "hystericizor." Bacon explains rather testily that the hysterical smile he painted on the 1953 portrait [11], on the human head of 1953 [13], and on the 1955 Pope [19] came from a "model" who was "very neurotic and almost hysterical." But in fact it is the whole painting that is hystericized. Bacon himself hystericizes when, beforehand, he abandons himself completely to the image, abandons his entire head to the camera of a photobooth, or rather, sees himself in a head that belongs to the camera, that has disappeared into the camera. What is this hysterical smile? Where is the abomination or abjection of this smile? Presence or insistence. Interminable presence. The insistence of the smile beyond the face and beneath the face. The insistence of a scream that survives the mouth, the insistence of a body that survives the organism, the insistence of transitory organs that survive the qualified organs. And in this excessive presence, the identity of an already-there and an always-delayed. Everywhere there is a presence acting directly on the nervous system, which makes representation, whether in place or at a distance, impossible. Sartre meant nothing less when he called himself a hysteric, and spoke of Flaubert's hysteria.
What kind of hysteria are we speaking of here? Is it the hysteria of Bacon himself, or of the painter, or of the painting itself, or of painting in general? It is true that there are numerous dangers in constructing a clinical aesthetic (which nonetheless has the advantage of not being a psychoanalysis). And why refer specifically to painting, when we could invoke so many writers or even musicians (Schumann and the contraction of the finger, the audition of the voice...)? What we are suggesting, in effect, is that there is a special relation between painting and hysteria. It is very simple. Painting directly attempts to release the presences beneath representation, beyond representation. The color system itself is a system of direct action on the nervous system. This is not a hysteria of the painter, but a hysteria of painting. With painting, hysteria becomes art. Or rather, with the painter, hysteria becomes painting. What the hysteric is incapable of doing - a little art - is accomplished in painting. It must also be said that the painter is not hysterical, in the sense of a negation in negative theology. Abjection becomes splendor, the horror of life becomes a very pure and very intense life. "Life is frightening," said Cezanne, but in this cry he had already given voice to all the joys of line and color. Painting transmutes this cerebral pessimism into nervous optimism. Painting is hysteria, or converts hysteria, because it makes presence immediately visible. It invests the eye through color and line. But it does not treat the eye as a fixed organ. It liberates lines and colors from their representative function, but at the same time it also liberates the eye from its adherence to the organism, from its character as a fixed and qualified organ: the eye becomes virtually the polyvalent indeterminate organ that sees the body without organs (the Figure) as a pure presence. Painting gives us eyes all over: in the ear, in the stomach, in the lungs (the painting breathes ...). This is the double definition of painting: subjectively, it invests the eye, which ceases to be organic in order to become a polyvalent and transitory organ; objectively, it brings before us the reality of a body, of lines and colors freed from organic representation. And each is produced by the other: the pure presence of the body becomes visible at the same time that the eye becomes the destined organ of this presence.
Painting has two ways of avoiding this fundamental hysteria: either by conserving the figurative coordinates of organic representation, even if that means using them in very subtle ways or making these liberated presences or unorganized bodies pass beneath or between these coordinates; or else by turning toward abstract form, and inventing a properly pictorial cerebrality ("reviving" painting in this direction). Velasquez was undoubtedly the wisest of the classical painters, possessing an immense wisdom: he created his extraordinary audacities by holding firmly to the coordinates of representation, by assuming completely the role of a documentarian... What is Bacon's relation to Velasquez, and why does he claim him as his master? Why, when he speaks of his versions of the portrait of Pope Innocent X, does he express his doubt and discontent? In a way, Bacon has hystericized all the elements of Velasquez's painting. We cannot simply compare the two portraits of Innocent X, that of Velasquez and that of Bacon, who transforms it into the screaming Pope. We must compare Velasquez's portrait with all of Bacon's paintings. In Velasquez, the armchair already delineates the prison of the parallelepiped; the heavy curtain in back is already tending to move up front, and the mantelet has aspects of a side of beef; an unreadable yet clear parchment is in the hand, and the attentive, fixed eye of the Pope already sees something invisible looming up [112]. But all of this is strangely restrained; it is something that is going to happen, but has not yet acquired the ineluctable, irrepressible presence of Bacon's newspapers, the almost animal-like armchairs, the curtain up front, the brute meat, and the screaming mouth. Should these presences have been let loose? asks Bacon. Were not things better, infinitely better, in Velasquez? In refusing both the figurative path and the abstract path, was it necessary to display this relationship between hysteria and painting in full view? While our eye is enchanted with the two Innocent Xs, Bacon questions himself.
But in the end, why should all this be peculiar to painting? Can we speak of a hysterical essence of painting, under the rubric of a purely aesthetic clinic, independent of any psychiatry and psychoanalysis? Why could not music also extricate pure presences, but through an ear that has become the polyvalent organ for sonorous bodies? And why not poetry or theater, when it is those of Artaud or Beckett? This problem concerning the essence of each art, and possibly their clinical essence, is less difficult than it seems to be. Certainly music traverses our bodies in profound ways, putting an ear in the stomach, in the lungs, and so on. It knows all about waves and nervousness. But it involves our body, and bodies in general, in another element. It strips bodies of their inertia, of the materiality of their presence: it disembodies bodies. We can thus speak with exactitude of a sonorous body, and even of a bodily combat in music — for example, in a motif - but as Proust said, it is an immaterial and disembodied combat "in which there subsists not one scrap of inert matter refractory to the mind." In a sense, music begins where painting ends, and this is what is meant when one speaks of the superiority of music. It is lodged on lines of flight that pass through bodies, but which find their consistency elsewhere, whereas painting is lodged farther up, where the body escapes from itself. But in escaping, the body discovers the materiality of which it is composed, the pure presence of which it is made, and which it would not discover otherwise. Painting, in short, discovers the material reality of bodies with its line—color systems and its polyvalent organ, the eye. "Our eye," said Gauguin, "insatiable and in heat." The adventure of painting is that it is the eye alone that can attend to material existence or material presence even that of an apple. When music sets up its sonorous system and its polyvalent organ, the ear, it addresses itself to something very different than the material reality of bodies. It gives a disembodied and dematerialized body to the most spiritual of entities: "The beats of the timpani in the Requiem are sharp, majestic, and divine, and they can only announce to our surprised ears the coming of a being who, to use Stendahl's words, surely has relations with another world."14 This is why music does not have hysteria as its clinical essence, but is confronted more and more with a galloping schizophrenia. To hystericize music we would have to reintroduce colors, passing through a rudimentary or refined system of correspondence between sounds and colors.
GILLES DELEUZE: Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation/ Hysteria
My title might lead readers to anticipate some new odyssey of the image, taking us from the Aurorean glory of Lascaux's paintíngs to the contemporary twilight of a reality devoured by media images and an art doomed to monitors and synthetic images. But my intention is different. By examíning how a certain idea of fate and a certain idea of the image are tied up in the apocalyptic discourses of today's cultural climate, I would like to pose the following question: are we in fact referring to a simple, univocal reality? Does not the term "image" contain several functions whose problematic alignment precisely constítutes the labour of art? On this basis it will perhaps be possible to reflect on what artistic images are, and contemporary changes in their status, more soundly. Let us start at the beginning. What is being spoken about, and what precisely are we being told, when it is said that there is no longer any reality, but only images? Or, conversely, that there are no more images but only a reality incessantly representing itself to itseIf? These two discourses seem to be opposed. Yet we know that they are forever being converted into one another in the name of a rudímentary argument: if there is now nothing but ímages, there is nothing other than the image. And if there is nothing other than the image, the very notion of the image becomes devoid of content. Several contemporary authors thus contrast the lmage, which refers to an Other, and the Visual, which refers to nothing but itself. This simple line of argument already prompts a question. That the Same is the opposite of the Other is readily intelligible. Understanding what this Other is its less straightforward. In the first place, by what signs is its presence or absence to be recognized? What allows us to say that the Other is there in one visible form on a screen but not in another? That it is present, for example, in a shot from Au hasard Balthazar and not in an episode of Questions pour un champion? The response most frequently given by detractors of the 'visual' is this: the television image has no Other by virtue of its very nature. In effect, it has its light in itself, while the cinematic image derives it from an external source. This is summarized by Régis Debray in a book called Vie et mort de I'image: "The image here has its light ín-built. It reveals ítself. With its source in itself, ít becomes in our eyes its own cause. Spinozist definition of God or substance." The tautology posited here as the essence of the Visual is manifestly nothing but the tautology of the díscourse itself. The latter simply tell us that the Same is same and the Other other. Through the rhetorical play of telescoped, independent propositions, it passes itself off as more than a tautology by identifying the general properties of universals with the characteristics of a technical device. But the technical properties of the cathode tube are one thing and the aesthetic properties of the images we see on the screen are another. The screen precisely lends itself to accommodating the results both of Questions pour un champion and of Bresson's camera. It is therefore cIear that it is these results which are inherently different. The nature of the amusement television offers us, and af the affects it produces in us, is independent of the fact that the Iight derives from the apparatus. And the intrinsic nature of Bresson's images remaíns unchanged, whether we see the reels projected in a cinema, or through a cassette or disc on our television screen, or a vídeo projection. The Same is not on One side, while the Other is 0n the other. The set with in-built light and the camera of Questions pour un champíon place us before a feat of memory and presence of mind that is in itself foreign to them. On the other hand, the film of the film theatre or the cassette of Au hasard Ballhazar viewed 0f our screen show us images that refer to nothing else, which are themselves the performance. THE ALTERITY OF IMAGESThese images refer to nothing else. This does not mean, as is frequently saíd, that they are intransitive. It means that alterity enters into the very composition of the images, but also that such alterity attaches to something other than the material properties of the cinematíc medium. The images of Au hasard Balthazar are not primarily manifestations of the properties of a certain technicaI medium, but operations: relations between a whole and parts; between a visibility and a power of sígnífication and affect associated with it; between expectations and what happens to meet them. Let us look at the beginning of the film, The play of 'images' has already begun when the screen is still dark, with the crystalline notes of a Schubert sonata. It continues, while the credits flash by against a background conjuring up a rocky wall, a wall of dry-stone or boíled cardboard, when brayíng has replaced the sonata. Then the sonata resumes, overlaíd next by a noise of small bells which carries on into the first shot of the film: a little donkey's head sucking at its mother's teat in close-up. A very whíte hand then descends along the dark neck of the little donkey, while the camera ascends in the opposite direction to show the líttle girl whose hand this ís, her brother and her father. A dialogue accompanies this action ('We must have it' - 'Give it to us' 'Children, that's impossible'), without us ever seeing the mouth that utters these words. The children address their father with their backs to us; theír bodies obscure his face while he answers them. A dissolve then introduces a shot that shows us the opposite of these words: from behind, in a wide-angled shot, the father and the children come back down leading the donkey. Another dissolve carries us over into the donkey's baptism - another close-up that allows us to see nothing but the head of the animal, the arm of the boy who pours the water, and the chest of the little girl who holds a candle. In these credits and three shots we have a whole regime of 'imaginess' that is, a regime of relations between elements and between functions. lt is first and foremost the opposition between the neutrality of the black or gray screen and the sound. The melody that pursues its direct course in clearly separated notes, and the braying whích interrupts it, already convey the tension of the story to come. Thís contrast is taken up by the visual contrast between a white hand on an anímal's black coat and by the separation between voices and faces. In turn, the latter is extended by the link between a verbal decision and its visual contradiction, between the technical procedure of the dissolve, which intensifies the continuity, and the counter-effect that it shows us. Bresson's 'images' are not a donkey, two children and an adult. Nor are they simply the technique of close-ups and the camera movements or dissolves that enlarge them. They are operations that couple and uncouple the visible and its signification or speech and its effect, which create and frustrate expectations. These operations do not derive from the properties of the cinematic medium. They even presuppose a systematic distance from its ordinary employment. A 'normal' director would give us some sign, however light, of the father's change of mind. And he would use a wider angle for the baptism scene, have the camera ascends or introduce an addítional shot in order to show us the expression on the children's faces during the ceremony. ShalI we say that Bresson 's fragmentation vouchsafes us, rather the narrative sequence of those who align cinema with the theater or the novel, the pure images peculiar to this art? But the camera's fixing on the hand' that pours the water and the hand that holds the candles is no more peculiar to cinema than the fixíng of Doctor Bovary's gaze on Mademoiselle Emma's nails, or of Madame Bovary's gaze on those of the notary's clerk, is peculiar to literature. And the fragmentation does not símply break the narrative sequence. It performs a double operation with respect to it. By separatíng the hands from the facial expression, it reduces the action to its essence: a baptism consists in words and hands pouring water over a head. By compressing the action into a sequence of perceptions and movements, add short-circuiting any explanation of the reasons, Bresson's cinema does not realize a peculiar essence of the cinema. It forms part of the novelistic tradítion begun by Flaubert: an ambivalence in which the same procedures create and retract meaning, ensure and undo the link between perceptions, actions and affects. The wordless immediacy of the vísible doubtless radicalizes its effect. but this radicalism itself works through the operatíon of the power which separates cinema from the plastíc arts and makes it approximate to literature: the power of anticipating an effect the better to displace or contradict it. The image is never a simple reality. Cinematic images are prímarily operations, relations between the sayable and the visible, ways of playíng wíth the before and the after, cause and effect. These operations involve different image-functions, different meanings of the word 'image'. Two cinematic shots or sequences of shots can thus pertain to a very different 'imaginess'. Conversely, one cinematic shot can pertain to the same type of imaginess as a novelistic sentence or a painting. That is why Eisensteín could look to Zola ar Dickens, as to Greco or Piranesi, for models of cinematic montage; and why Godard can compose a eulogy to cinema using Elie Faure's sentences 0f Rembrandt's painting. The image in films is thus not opposed to televisíon broadcasting as alterity is to identity. Television broadcasting likewise has its Other: the effective performance of the set. And cinema also reproduces a constructed performance in front of a camera. It is simply that when we speak of Bresson's images we are not referring to the relationship between what has happened elsewhere and what is happening before our eyes, but to operations that make up the artistic nature of what we are seeing. 'Image' therefore refers to two different things. There is the simple relationship that produces the likeness of an original: not necessarily its faithful copy, but simply what suffices to stand in for it. And there is the interplay of operations that produces what we call art: or precisely an alteration of resemblance. This alteration can take a myriad of forms. It might be the visibility given to brush-strokes that are superfluous when it comes to revealing who is represented by the portrait; an elongation of bodies that expresses their motion at the expense of their proportions; a turn of language that accentuates the expression of a feeling or renders the perception of an idea more complex; a word or a shot in place of the ones that seemed bound to follow; and so on and so forth. This is the sense in which art ís made up of images, regardless of whether it is figurative, of whether we recognize the form of identifiable characters and spectacles in it. The images of art are operations that produce a discrepancy, a dissemblance. Words describe what the eye might see or express what it wiII never see; they delíberately clarify or obscure an idea. Visible forms yield a meaning to be construed or subtract it. A camera movement anticipates one spectacle and discloses a different one. A pianist attacks a musical phrase 'behind' a dark screen. Ali these relations define images. This means two things. In the first place, the images of art are, as such, dissemblances. Secondly, the image is not exclusive to the visible. There is visibility that does not amount to an image; there are ímages which consist wholly in words. But the commonest regime of the image is one that presents a relationship between the sayable and the visible, a relationshíp whích play on both the analogy and the dissemblance between them. This relationship by no means requires the two terms to be materially present. The visible can be arranged in meaníngful tropes; words deploy a visibility that can be blinding. It might seem superfluous to recall such simple things. But if it is necessary to do so, it is because these simple things are forever being blurred, because the identitarian alterity of resemblance has always interfered with the operation of the relations constitutive of artistic images. To resemble was long taken to be the peculiarity of art, while an infinite number of spectacles and forms of imitation were proscribed from it. In our day, not to resembIe is taken for the imperative of art, while photographs, videos and displays of objects similar to everyday ones have taken the place of abstract canvases in galleries and museums. But this formal imperative of non-resemblance is itself caught up in a singular dialectic. For there is growing disquiet: does not resemblíng involve renouncíng the vísible? Or does it involve subjecting its concrete richness to operations and artífices whose matrix resides in language? A counter-move then emerges: what is contrasted with resemblance is not the operativeness of art, but material presence, the spirit made flesh, the absolutely other which is also absolutely the same. 'The Image will come at the Resurrection" says Godard: the Image - that is, the 'original image' of Christian theology, the Son who is not 'similar' to the Father but partakes of his nature. We no longer kill each other for the iota that separates this image from the other. But we continue to regard it as a promise of flesh, capable of dispelling the simulacra of resemblance, the artifices of art, and the tyranny of the letter. IMAGE, RESEMBLANCE, HYPER-RESEMBLANCEIn short, the image is not merely double; ít is triple. The artistic image separates its operations from the technique that produces resemblances. But it does so in order to discover a different resemblance en route a resemblance that defines the relation of a being to its provenance and destination, one that rejects the mirror in favour of the immediate relationship between progenitor and engendered: direct vision, glorious body of the community, or stamp of the thing itself. Let us call it hyper-resemblance. Hyper-resemblance is the original resemblance, the resemblance that does not provide the replíca of a reality but attests directly to the elsewhere whence it derives. This hyper-resemblance is the alterity our contemporaries demand from images ar whose dísappearance. together with the image, they deplore. To tell the truth, however, it never disappears. It never stops slipping its own activity ínto the very gap that separates the operations of art from the techniques of reproduction, concealing its rationale in that of art or in the properties of machines of reproduction, even if it means sometimes appearing in the foreground as the ultimate ratíonale of both. It is what emerges in the contemporary stress on distinguishíng the genuine image from its simulacrum on the basis of the precise mode of its material reproduction. Pure form is then no longer counter-posed to bad image. Opposed to both is the imprint of the body which light registers inadvertently, without referring it either to the calculations of painters or the language games of signification. Faced with the image causa suí of the television idol, the canvas or screen is made into a vehicle on which the image of the god made flesh, or of thíngs at their birth, is impressed. And photography, formerly accused of opposing íts mechanical, soulless simulacra to the coloured flesh of painting, sees its image ínverted. Compared wíth pictorial artifices, it is now perceived as the very emanation of a body, as a skin detached from its surface, positively replacing the appearances of resemblance and defeating the efforts of the discourse that would have ít express a meaning. The imprint of the thing, the naked identity of its alterity in place of its imitation, the wordless, senseless materiality of the visíble instead of the figures of discourse - this is what is demanded by the contemporary celebration of the image or its nostalgic evocation: an immanent transcendence, a glorious essence of the image guaranteed by the very mode of its material production. Doubtless no one has expressed this view better than the Barthes or Camera Lucida, a work that ironically has become the bible of those who wish to think about photographic art, whereas it aims to show that photography is not an art. Against the dispersive muItiplicity of the operatíons of art and games of signification, Barthes wants to assert the immediate alterity of the image - that ís, in the strict sense, the alterity of the One. He wants to establish a direct relationship between the indexical nature of the photographic image and the material way it affects us: the punctum, the immediate pathetic effect that he contrasts with the studium, or the information transmitted by the photograph and the meanings it receives. The studium makes the photograph a material to be decoded and explained. The punctum immediately strikes us with the affective power of the that was: that i.e. the entity which was unquestionably in front of the aperture of the camera obscura, whose body has emitted radiation, captured and registered by the black chamber, which affects us here and now through the 'carnal medium' of light 'like the delayed rays of a star'. It is unlikely that the author of Mythologies believed in the para-scientific phantasmagoria which makers photagraphy a direct emanation of the body displayed. It is more plausible that this myth served to expiate the sin of the former mythologist: the sin of having wished to strip the visible world of its glories, of having transformed its spectacles and pleasures into a great web of symptoms and a seedy exchange of signs. The semiologist repents having spent much of his life saying: Look out! What you are taking for visible self-evidence is in fact an encoded message whereby a society ar authority legitimates itself by naturalizing itself, by rooting itself in the obviousness of the visible. He bends the stick in the other direction by valorizing, under the title of punctum, the utter self-evidence of the photograph, consigning the decoding of messages to the platitude of the studium. But the semiologist who read the encoded message of images and the theoretician of the punctum of the wordless image base themselves on the same principIe: a principle of reversible equivalence between the silence of images and what they say. The former demonstrated that the image was in fact a vehicle for a silent discourse which he endeavoured to translate into sentences. The latter tells us that the image speaks to us precisely when it is silent, when it no longer transmits any message to us. Both conceive the image as speech which holds its tongue. The former made its sílence speak; the latter makes this silence the abolition of all chatter. But both play on the same inter-convertibility between two potentialities of the image: the image as raw, material presence and the image as discourse encoding a history. Jacques Rancière/The Future of the Image/Part 1: The Future of the Image A round area often delimits the place where the person that is to say, the Figure is seated, lying down, doubled over, or in some other position. This round or oval area takes up more or less space: it can extend beyond the edges of the painting [64, 37] or occupy the center of a triptych [60, 61]. It is often duplicated, or even replaced, by the roundness of the chair on which the person is seated, or by the oval of the bed on which the person is lying. It can be dispersed in the small disks that surround a part of the person's body, or in the gyratory spirals that encircle the bodies. Even the two peasants in Two Men Working in a Field [66] form a Figure only in relation to an awkward plot of land, tightly confined within the oval of a pot. In short, the painting is composed like a circus ring, a kind of amphitheater as "place." It is a very simple technique that consists in isolating the Figure. There are other techniques of isolation: putting the Figure inside a cube, or rather, inside a parallelepiped of glass or ice [6, 55]; sticking it onto a rail or a stretch-out bar, as if on the magnetic arc of an infinite circle [62]; or combining all these means - the round area, the cube, and the bar - as in Bacon's strangely flared and curved armchairs [38]. These are all "places" [lieux]. In any case, Bacon does not hide the fact that these techniques are rather rudimentary, despite the subtlety of their combinations. The important point is that they do not consign the Figure to immobility but, on the contrary, render sensible a kind of progression, an exploration of the Figure within the place, or upon itself. It is an operative field. The relation of the Figure to its isolating place defines a "fact": "the fact is ...," "what takes place is ...." Thus isolated, the Figure becomes an Image, an Icon. Not only is the painting an isolated reality, and not only does the triptych have three isolated panels (which above all must not be united in a single frame), but the Figure itself is isolated in the painting by the round area or the parallelepiped. Why? Bacon often explains that it is to avoid the figurative, illustrative, and narrative character the Figure would necessarily have if it were not isolated. Painting has neither a model to represent nor a story to narrate. It thus has two possible ways of escaping the figurative: toward pure form, through abstraction; or toward the purely figural, through extraction or isolation. If the painter keeps to the Figure, if he or she opts for the second path, it will be to oppose the "figural" to the figurative. Isolating the Figure will be the primary requirement. The figurative (representation) implies the relationship of an image to an object that it is supposed to illustrate; but it also implies the relationship of an image to other images in a composite whole which assigns a specific object to each of them. Narration is the correlate of illustration. A story always slips into, or tends to slip into, the space between two figures in order to animate the illustrated whole.2 Isolation is thus the simplest means, necessary though not sufficient, to break with representation, to disrupt narration, to escape illustration, to liberate the Figure: to stick to the fact. Clearly the problem is more complicated than this. Is there not another type of relationship between Figures, one that would not be narrative, and from which no figuration would follow? Diverse Figures that would spring from the same fact, that would belong to one and the same unique fact rather than telling a story or referring to different objects in a figurative whole? Nonnarrative relationships between Figures, and nonillustrative relationships between the Figures and the fact? Coupled Figures have always been a part of Bacon's work, but they do not tell a story [60, 61, 66]. Moreover, there is a relationship of great intensity between the separate panels of a triptych, although this relationship has nothing narrative about it [55, 62, 38]. With modesty, Bacon acknowledges that classical painting often succeeded in drawing this other type of relationship between Figures, and that this is still the task of the painting of the future: Of course, so many of the greatest paintings have been done with a number of figures on a canvas, and of course every painter longs to do that .... But the story that is already being told between one figure and another begins to cancel out the possibilities of what can be done with the paint on its own. And this is a very great difficulty. But at any moment somebody will come along and be able to put a number of figures on a canvas." What is this other type of relationship, a relationship between coupled or distinct Figures? Let us call these new relationships matters of fact, 4 as opposed to intelligible relations (of objects or ideas). Even if we acknowledge that, to a large degree, Bacon had already conquered this domain, he did so under more complex aspects than those we have yet considered. We are still at the simple aspect of isolation. A Figure is isolated within a ring, upon a chair, bed, or sofa, inside a circle or parallelepiped. It occupies only a part of the painting. What then fills the rest of the painting? A certain number of possibilities are already annulled, or without interest, for Bacon. What fills the rest of the painting will be neither a landscape as the correlate of the Figure, nor a ground from which the form will emerge, nor a formless chiaroscuro, a thickness of color on which shadows would play, a texture on which variation would play. Yet we are moving ahead too quickly. For there are indeed, in Bacon's early works, landscape-Figures like the Van Gogh of 1957 [23]; there are extremely shaded textures, as in Figure in a Landscape (1945) [2] and Figure Study I (1945-6) [4]; there are thicknesses and densities like those of Head II (1949) [5]; and above all, there is that alleged period of ten years which, according to Sylvester, was dominated by the somber, the dark, and the tonal, before Bacon returned to the "clear and precise."5 But destiny can sometimes pass through detours that seem to contradict it. For Bacon's landscapes are a preparation for what will later appear as a set of short "involuntary free marks" lining the canvas, asignifying traits^ that are devoid of any illustrative or narrative function: hence the importance of grass, and the irremediably grassy character of these landscapes (Landscape, 1952 [8]; Study of a Figure in a Landscape, 1952 [9]; Study of a Baboon, 1953 [14]; Two Figures in the Grass, 1954 [17]). As for the textures, the thick, the dark, and the blurry, they are already preparing for the great technique of local scrubbing [nettoyage local] with a rag, handbroom, or brush, in which the thickness is spread out over a nonfigurative zone. Clearly these two techniques of local scrubbing and asignifying traits belong to an original system which is neither that of the landscape, nor that of the formless or the ground (although, by virtue of their autonomy, they are apt to "make" a landscape or to "make" a ground, or even to "make" darkness). In fact, the rest of the painting is systematically occupied by large fields [aplats] of bright, uniform, and motionless color. Thin and hard, these fields have a structuring and spatializing function. They are not beneath, behind, or beyond the Figure, but are strictly to the side of it, or rather, all around it, and are thus grasped in a close view, a tactile or "haptic" view, just as the Figure itself is. At this stage, when one moves from the Figure to the fields of color, there is no relation of depth or distance, no incertitude of light and shadow. Even the shadows and the blacks are not dark ("I tried to make the shadows as present as the Figure"). If the fields function as a background, they do so by virtue of their strict correlation with the Figures. It is the correlation of two sectors on a single plane, equally close. This correlation, this connection, is itself provided by the place, by the ring or round area, which is the common limit of the two, their contour. This is what Bacon says in a very important statement to which we will frequently recur. He distinguishes three fundamental elements in his painting, which are the material structure, the round contour, and the raised image. If we think in sculptural terms, we would have to say: the armature; the pedestal, which would be mobile; and the Figure, which would move along the armature together with the pedestal. If we had to illustrate them (and to a certain degree this is necessary, as in the Man with Dog of 1953 [15]), we would say: a sidewalk, some pools, and the people who emerge from the pools on the way to their "daily round." We will see later what the various elements of this system have to do with Egyptian art, Byzantine art, and so forth. But what concerns us here is this absolute proximity, this co-precision, of the field that functions as a ground, and the Figure that functions as a form, on a single plane that is viewed at close range. It is this system, this coexistence of two immediately adjacent sectors, which encloses space, which constitutes an absolutely closed and revolving space, much more so than if one had proceeded with the somber, the dark, or the indistinct. This is why there is indeed a certain blurriness in Bacon; there are even two kinds of blurriness, but they both belong to this highly precise system. In the first case, the blur is obtained not by indistinctness, but on the contrary by the operation that "consists in destroying clarity by clarity,"9 as in the man with the pig's head in the Self-Portrait of 1973 [72], or the treatment of crumpled newspapers: as Leiris says, their typographic characters are clearly drawn, and it is their very mechanical precision that stands opposed to their legibility.10 In the other case, the blur is obtained by the techniques of free marks or scrubbing, both of which are also among the precise elements of the system. (We will see that there is yet a third case.) excerpt from the book: Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation/Chapter 1: The Round area, The Ring by GILLES DELEUZE Interview with Catherine David CD: Your work explores the world of today, a world where telecommunications technology tends to abolish space and time. In this context of worldspace, you advance the idea of a general delocalization. How would you define a delocalized art? PV: It’s clear that one of the great philosophical and political questions of the day is deconstruction, and deconstruction in a broad sense, not only that of Derrida. Myself, I would say that art may have anticipated this debate over deconstruction, long before architecture and long before the philosophical situation as it stands today. I would like to recall that the word delocalization has the same root as the Latin verb dislocate, to dislocate; the two words have the same source. The question is then to what extent art can be dislocated, delocalized? And that leads to the question of virtual reality. We have gone from spatial dislocation – in abstractionism as well as cubism – to the temporal dislocation that is now under way. This means virtualization in its very essence: the virtualization of actions as they occur and not just simply of what was, to recall Barthes’s idea. This is not the virtualization of photography, of reproduction or of film; it’s no longer only in a time lag, but in real time. I would also say that relative speed has been the speed of art in general. All art has been a relative speeding-up, not only dance and music, but also painting. What is coming into play today is no longer relative velocity, but absolute velocity. We’re running up against the time barrier. Virtuality is the electromagnetic speed that brings us to the limit of acceleration. It’s a barrier in the sense of ‘no crossing’. This is the whole question of live transmission, global time, near-instantaneous intercommunication. Is the time barrier not also a barrier for art? Doesn’t art have to deal with this contingency, when it comes up short against the barrier of real time? CD: How has art reached such a barrier? In what forms and under what conditions? PV: In order to see what has happened between the inscription of art and its delocalization, we need to look back in time. Art was initially inscribed in bodies and in materials. With cave paintings and tattoos, art was traced in matter. The art of the inscription is what it was, in a material fixity. That was art’s localization. Art and its localization were inseparable in the body of the marked man or in the body of the cave, and then later in frescoes, mosaics, etc. Thus there was a grounded localization of art since its origins; and then, in the course of time, delocalization began, with the easel painting that stepped free of the cave and the skin to become a displaceable, nomadic object. This was still just a relative delocalization, that is to say, not yet a loss of place, but a possibility of movement. Painting, for example, was still inscribed in the reliquary, the illustrated book, the canvas. The Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry were delocalized in the sense that they could be taken away by the feudal lord, but they were still localized in the book. The delocalization we’re dealing with today is nowhere. Art can be nowhere, it only exists in the emission and reception of a signal, only in feedback. The art of the virtual age is an art of feedback. And I’m not yet even talking about the Internet. So, moving from its initial inscription in a place, in a cave, pyramid, or castle, via museums, galleries, and travelling collections, and then through photographic reproduction – where the trip is of another nature – and the CD-Rom, which is still a material support, the art of today with its interactive techniques has now reached the level of instantaneous exchange between actor and spectator, the final delocalization. Modern decomposition – divisionism, pointillism, cubism and abstractionism, which were all decompositions of figures – manifests another type of delocalization; these artistic movements are no longer to be read in human or animal figures, but in broken figures. This process of decomposition culminates in the fractal image and in computer graphics. We go from modern decomposition to fractalization, the digital image, and finally to absolute virtualization, that is to say, the emission reception of images which are totally instrumental. That’s a brief summary of the process which has led to the dislocation or delocalization of art today. Now, to understand what’s at stake here, I’d like to briefly evoke what I call cybersexuality, the climax of virtualization, which is now being pushed, by the Japanese in particular, toward the separation of bodies, the most absolute divorce there is. You can make long-distance love from thousands of miles away, by means of sensors that transmit impulses. I never laugh about cybersexuality, I really don’t find it funny … Now, if even sex becomes virtual, what will happen to art? Cybersexuality is the example of total dislocation or delocalization: there is no longer any specific place, just the emission and reception of sensations. It’s clear that art will suffer the consequences. It seems to me now that land art was the last great figure of an art of inscription, before the total delocalization of art in virtual reality. It was inscribed on the scale of the earth, the largest territory possible. Is it the beginning of a possible reterritorialization of art, or is it the very last sign, the swan song of art’s inscription on the terrain before its final disappearance into the virtual reality of instantaneous exchange? CD: Let’s pause for a moment over land art. It seems to me that it’s one aspect of what was called the ‘dematerialization of art’ in the late sixties. The work took place in complex spaces – here and elsewhere – which Robert Smithson, but also Marcel Broodthaers, articulated in their exhibition structures. It was a way of expressing the fact that aesthetic experience takes shape in material and mental spaces which go beyond the singular object. On the other hand, if you take a quick scan of the art scene today, what’s interesting is to see that all these artistic moments or phases are still present. You still have painting, sculpture, installations, cinema, and so-called ‘Internet works’. So there’s quite a broad range … PV: Hasn’t that always been the case? In the nineteenth century, impressionism coexisted with art pompier, with the very worst of art. What interests me is the leading edge … CD: There’s just this one difference, that right now the most significant research is no longer necessarily connected to places of display, or to the traditional places for the experience of art. Could that be the problem today? PV: That’s exactly why land art is such an important phase. Contrary to other transient forms, land art lasts long enough to exist. Inscription came before exhibition: even if a man exhibited his tattoos, the tattooing was initially done to mark a body. In the same way, if you believe Leroi-Gourhan and other anthropologists, the cave is first of all a place of mystery and initiation. I’m wondering, then, if art didn’t regress from the exhibition, the installation on a wall or in a gallery, to the inscriptions of land art, only finally to disappear, no longer inscribed anywhere but in the instantaneous exchange of sensations offered by virtual reality. What we have today would be a sidereal aesthetics, an aesthetics of disappearance, and no longer one of appearance. Can we hang on to the Raft of the Medusa represented by land art, like a kind of life-saver that would carry us toward a reinscription and reinstallation of art in the here and now, the hic et nunc that I insist on? Or is this life-saver the sign of a sinking ship, and will the victory fall to virtual reality as reciprocal electrocution, the instantaneousness of an art that leaves no trace? CD: The works of land art which have best resisted are precisely those which were able to articulate different places and/or times: Smithson with Spiral Jetty and The Monuments of Passaic, or Walter de Maria with Lightning Field. In that last work, the lightning field is integrated by the artist. The work was conceived for a non-urban space, wild, magnetic, and so on, a place you can decide to go to … The access and the effect are deferred, mediated, controlled by the artist himself, particularly through a very rigorous use of photography, which in this case can in no way appear as a convenience or a concession. PV: I’d like to remark that with Lightning Field it’s also a case of electrocution! I feel like comparing this lightning field to the work of Stelarc, who is another man of electrocution. Body art doesn’t interest me in the least, but Stelarc interests me. He is a lightning field; he is already the support of an electrocution, of a terrifying feedback, like the earth is for Walter de Maria. He returns to the body, a body that is being absorbed, destroyed by foreign cells. He wants to become a non-body, a posthuman body, a ‘beyond-body’, to borrow the theme of an issue of Kunst-forum in which I participated. You had a territorial body for land art, an animal body, male or female, for body art. There is a correlation between the lightning field with its electromagnetic activity and Stelarc’s attempt to be the lightning field himself, through all his electric hook-ups. CD: Don’t you get the impression that it’s a direct, almost archaic return to the body, a certain way of playing with living flesh, if I daresay … I’m wondering if he isn’t replaying some of the actionists’ strategies, or the strategy of Chris Burden when he had himself shot in the arm. These have never been precisely resituated in their context, the post-1945 context. PV: Stelarc predates the attempt to replace man by machine, he is the contemporary of a crucifixion of the human body by technology. He is a prerobotic man, the apostle of the machine that will come after him. In a certain way he is the end of his art. He wants to be the Saint John of the body’s Apocalypse, the Saint John of Patmos who prophesies the Apocalypse. That’s why I liken him to Antonin Artaud. Like Kafka, Artaud was a contemporary of the concentration camps. Stelarc is the contemporary of the terrifying things that are happening right now in Yugoslavia and elsewhere, which are not much discussed in art and which we should discuss. I’m still scandalized by a Venice Biennial that takes place a few cable’s lengths from a civil war in Europe, and by the penury of references to that war in Venice. That war cuts right through us, and a man like Stelarc illustrates the fact that man has become useless, that the machine is replacing him. He plays out this loss of his own body; it’s his Baroque side. He actually brags about letting his body be replaced by the machine. [Outside, echoes of a demonstration by strikers and students.] The people marching in Paris while we do this interview are people cast into the street by mass unemployment, because electronic automation and hyperproductivity replace man. Man as a producer, a soldier, a parent, a procreator, is outmoded. But to return to Walter de Maria, those lightning fields were ‘contemporary’ with the atom bomb and the flash of Los Alamos. They aren’t ordinary flashes of lightning. They come after the flashes of the bomb that exploded not far away … CD: Your interpretation is quite different from the traditional readings of Walter de Maria, which have locked him away between minimal and land art, or criticized the megalomaniacal, even authoritarian aspects of his work [B. Buchloh]. But I’d like to return to your regret over the lack of political involvement or strong testimony in contemporary art, apropos of Venice and Yugoslavia for example. Doesn’t the fading or disappearance of what could be called the critical art of the seventies have to do with the growing domination of communications, with everything involving advertising, with television, or in short, with the forces that tend toward consensus and homogeneousness? PV: Communication has been taken captive by the media system and the advertising system. The movement of advertising practices is interesting, because it has gone increasingly toward the sidereal and the subliminal, where there is nothing to be seen. Only imperceptible, unconscious sensations, but very effective ones. The art market is an advertising market, and not only in the economic sense. It is clear that the critical function – and the function of art criticism – has in fact disappeared in the commercialization of signs. So when I refer to Artaud, for example, it is because Artaud was an art critic, he wasn’t simply an artist: he criticized his time with his art. Like Kafka, he was a kind of prophet of artistic calamity, and at the same time, a prophet of political calamity. Through his confinement and his Judaism, Kafka anticipates the camps – and they’ll all die there, even Milena, in Dachau. In his own way, Stelarc ‘prophesies’ through the very violence of his tribulation, through the dangerous pressure of technology on his body. Of course that’s not a political commitment like Picasso’s during the Cold War, with his doves and so on … Nor does it have anything to do with Sartre’s engagement. So when I see Walter de Maria’s lightning field, I can’t help but think of Electromagnetic Impulses, EMP. I’m what’s called a ‘defensive intellectual’, in the sense that I’m familiar with military affairs, and with generals! The time of Lightning Field – 1977 – corresponds to the period of tension between the power blocs. A debate was raised over the EMP effect, that is, the electromagnetic discharge provoked by nuclear explosions in the upper atmosphere: before attacking the other side, a bomb would be set off in the upper atmosphere to knock out all the communication systems, all the intercommunication between the chiefs of staff. In fact, this was why the Americans launched the Internet, which at the time was called Arpanet. In the event of atomic war it was supposed to function after EMP, allowing for communication despite the destruction of other networks. It’s a matter of armouring the communication devices against this electromagnetic effect that blows all the fuses. Now we’re really in the theme of the flash! And lo and behold, an artist, who may not know a thing about it, stages EMP. His field is more than just lightning flashes, it’s a kind of atom bomb! The delocalization I’m talking about proceeds from electromagnetism. The problems of proximity, of localization if you wish, have always been linked to energies. The first proximity was linked to animal energy, it meant walking or going on horseback. The animal is the energetic element of the past and it’s no accident if people painted them in caves. Later the relations of proximity and localization are linked to mechanics, it’s the railway, the automobile, we’re still living in this one. But since the seventies we have entered an effect of electromagnetic proximity, through impulses, always that famous feedback between an emitter and a receiver. Therefore I have the strong impression that this question of dislocation and delocalization in art is also linked to the energy that replaces the mechanical energy of Léger’s Ballet mécanique, and of the experiments in concrete music which had such a formative influence on us. Because you need energy to delocalize, to lose your place. CD: One also gets the feeling that excepting the minority of artists who are already working in virtual reality, the most visible, most spectacular development is the parasitic absorption of art by the aesthetics of communication, or better, of design, cultural, social, or political design. Energy isn’t really my specialty … But if you take a quick look around the scene, doesn’t it seem that the artistic postures or positions that can still hold their own are those that can mark distances, or as Godard would say, can still change speeds? PV: That’s exactly what’s threatened … CD: Such works aren’t caught up in events, in things, they avoid idiosyncrasy. PV: Isn’t dislocation precisely a resistance to this dissolution of art? Take the example of architecture: it too is threatened with dissolution by the new technologies. The various avenues of research into glass and steel are signs of a possible dissolution of the materiality of architecture. When architecture is threatened with dissolution, that is, with ‘anything goes’, what’s brought into play is a kind of deconstruction: people invent forms that dislocate the geometrical orthodoxy of architectural space, of simple architectural figures. This is what you have with Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and Eisenmann. Faced with the threat of a dissolution of art, could a form of dislocation be an attempt at resistance? CD: How would you identify the artists of dislocation on the contemporary scene? PV: They would be people working precisely with the fact that art no longer takes place, that it has become pure energy. Lots of artists have anticipated the loss of place, the non-place of art, they anticipate it in an energeticism that can include the most shocking of images, or the most rapid of images on the feedback level. Is this attempt at energeticism one of the last ways of standing up against dissolution? Like someone who feels his strength failing him and puts all his force into his last punch, precisely because he knows it’s his last. I see that in dance, in theatre, in video, in all the arts I still enjoy. I’m repelled by the plastic arts now, there’s nothing left, for me it’s over … CD: Great news! PV: There’s dance, there’s theatre, and video installations in the broad sense. Theatre, for example, is playing with video. It no longer plays with film as it once tried to, with little success. I’ll take the example of a very successful play by Heiner Müller which wasn’t much talked about, Bildbeschreibungen, which appeared shortly after my book Logistics of Perception: War and Cinema [1984/1989], and which was influenced by it, as Heiner Müller readily admits. I have great admiration for Heiner Müller. Here is a theatre that really plays with the deferred time of video: you have a video receiver that functions as a rear-view mirror, letting the spectator see something other than what’s to be seen on the stage. There’s a direct vision of bodies on the stage, plus the retroactive time of video that plays something else. That’s an experiment in the area of theatre; we could find many more. Let’s take another example from dance. I like William Forsythe very much. The effort demanded from Forsythe’s dancers goes all the way to the breaking-point. It’s a performance of the body. Forsythe is on the edge of dislocating his dancers. As for video installations, they are dematerializing. The coherence and structure of Michael Snow’s La Région centrale – an absolute masterpiece in my opinion, as Deleuze also said so well – made it the film of the here and now: you plant an object in the ground, make it turn, and on that basis you show a world. That was absolute localization. When you see installations now, they are dislocating themselves, delocalizing. They are efforts to break through, to lose place, to be nowhere. To be dislocated, delocalized – and the people out demonstrating in the streets don’t realize this clearly enough – means being nowhere, not going somewhere else. In France people speak about delocalizing corporations and administrations. But being delocalized doesn’t mean going to the suburbs or the provinces, it means no longer being anywhere! This year IBM delocalized its head office to go nowhere, next year IBM won’t have any head office, the first delocalized corporation … I’m mixing levels, of course, and I’m doing it on purpose. I’m not an art critic, I’m a critic of new technologies. So it seems to me, through these examples of dance and theatre, that in order to resist the dissolution of art, not to say the end of art and its total disappearance, people are risking the challenge of dislocation, of delocalization, of a transfer into energy. An art that would be nothing other than energetic. CD: You haven’t mentioned cinema at all. PV: For me, cinema is over. For years I haven’t been able to put up with cinema, first of all because I can no longer put up with the ritual of the movies. Cinema should have changed its theatres. It exists by virtue of a space called the movie theatre, and the movie theatre should be constantly revolutionized, like art. But obviously it’s more expensive to make new movie theatres every two years than to make new films every two years … Serge Daney and I often spoke of this: we need Godards of the movie theatre, otherwise Godard himself will disappear. Cinema takes place, it has its dark room, its camera obscura, and it needs to make that place evolve. Today the camera obscura is virtual space, it’s the video-helmet, there’s no more dark room. That’s another delocalization … CD: Aren’t the plastic arts somewhat like cinema in that they fundamentally need a place, even if it’s only temporary? PV: That brings us back to the same problem, the problem of the body. You no longer make a phone call from your home, in a place, but you phone out in the street, the telephone is on you, it’s portable, cellular. Are we heading toward a cellular art, just as we have cellular telephones? A portable art, on you or even in you? CD: How do you interpret the attitude of certain young artists today who claim to work on and in the social? PV: Lucy Orta, for example, has done work along those lines. Work on the body, on clothes, on the portable. Her clothes are not for fashion but for survival, they are apocalyptic clothes in a certain way. She makes clothes for several people, five people who put on the same outfit: kinds of diving suits, places of junctural proximity … She does it because there are more and more people out in the street. In fact she began at the Salvation Army where her first exhibitions took place. Her art is a kind of alarm signal: the symptomatic clothing of a drama, the drama of survival in the city under normal conditions. CD: Would that be a critical contemporary art? PV: Yes, in the sense of Kafka or Artaud. In the fundamental sense, not in the sense of political commitment. I’d like to return to the last hold-outs against delocalization and dislocation. Since art has already left its spaces and begun floating through the worlds of advertising and the media, the last thing that resists is the body. Whatever artists like Stelarc may think, whatever dancers and theatre people may think, they are artists of habeas corpus, they bring their bodies. And yet they are on the front lines, the possibility of going beyond the body is posited through them. The dramatic thing in theatre, dance and body art in the sense we were just talking about, is that they prefigure a limit. They ask the question ‘How far?’ That’s also an ethical question in the context of genetic engineering, in the problems of traffic in human beings as improvable raw materials, the body considered as raw material, the body of ‘hominiculture’, as some scientists say. That’s why I’m in love with bodies. I think that alongside ‘SOS save our souls’ we should invent an ‘SOS save our bodies from electromagnetic electrocution’. Everybody ought to reread the great book of Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Future Eve, the source for the Maria of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the electric woman. The book prefigures the overcoming of the body by wave bodies, bodies of emission and reception, and therefore cybersexuality, but also cybersociality and cyberculture in general … CD: How would you explain the paradoxical co-existence, among the youngest artists, of a certain kind of work on the body and a fascination for the Internet at the same time? PV: It’s very tempting to become an angel, but there’s a thin line between being an angel and not being at all. Many young artists are tempted by dematerialization, it’s the angel’s leap. They don’t want to die, they want to be dead, that is, to be deprived in a certain way of the bother of having a body, the bother of feeling tired, of being disturbed by the people around them. And telecommunicating is a way of zapping your communicatees, of privileging the farthest over your neighbour. ‘Love the farthest as yourself’, said Nietzsche: that means being able to zap him. On the contrary, loving your neighbour is more difficult, because there’s no zapping; you have to deal directly with your neighbour, he smells bad or is demanding … There’s a kind of myth of becoming an angel which is tempting. When you’re older, you know that you will very soon be an angel … CD: If everything shifts, if even for a short time, you can no longer inscribe the meaning of it all, then what can you do? PV: You shock the other, you electrocute him, you put him out of action. Terrorism isn’t just a political phenomenon, it’s also an artistic phenomenon. It exists in advertising, in the media, the reality show, the pornographic media. The last thing to do is to give the other a punch in the face to wake him up. It’s the image of that blind, deaf, and dumb kid in the 1950s who was totally isolated from the world and who was knocked out of his isolation by a slap. The shock gave him his speech back. You can see that in the suburbs right now, speech is replaced by violence. The punch is the beginning of communication: a punch brings you back into proximity when words are lacking. Art is at that point right now. The terrorist temptation of art has already settled in everywhere. But the exhibition Fémininmasculin should have been done as a punch in the 1950s, or in the Victorian age, today’s it’s just marketing. Despite Auschwitz, it’s true, everything has been done. One should never forget Adorno’s idea, ‘Can poetry still be written after Auschwitz?’ After the end of abstract art, after all those people who were still people of culture, we have stuttered the horror revealed by Auschwitz and Hiroshima. CD: And yet there was cinema, Rossellini … PV: It’s true, at the same time there was Rossellini, Rome Open City, all that extraordinary documentary work … CD: In this context, what is the model for an exhibition? PV: You have to fight for the here and now. Being here is now one of the great philosophical questions, but its also one of the great artistic questions. Telesexuality is the disappearance of being, it’s a phenomenon of the diversion of the human species: making love with an angel, with the future Eve. The question of the here and now is an absolute question in all fields. It is absolute in democracy, in mores, in sociality. In the same way, you have to ask the question of the presence of art. Is there a telepresence of art and to what point can art be telepresent without disappearing? CD: This is the problem of the exhibition that must create or recreate a place for itself, even temporarily … PV: The installation interests me because it poses the problem of place and non-place. Let’s take three examples in architecture: first, the non-place of the vestibule in the bourgeois home, a semi-public, semi-private space. The people entering are in a quasi-virtual space, because they enter without being greeted; that’s the case for the postman, for example. The second place is the telephone booth, which is also a semi-private, semipublic space, there’s no more body, there’s only the voice, and even that … And the third, which has just been brought into operation, is the virtual portal, what I refer to as the calling chamber. A room entered by the clone of your visitor, his spectre. Inside your data suit you see the clone, it sees you, you shake its hand, you smell its perfume. The only thing you can’t do with it is drink a glass of Bordeaux, tele-tasting is not possible, not yet! This example is the final delocalization, the meeting of spectres, of angels, the dislocation of the real encounter with the other. Art participates in this situation. The here and now is equally put into question. CD: The ultimate interest of an exhibition is to offer an alternative to the meeting of clones. You take the trouble to go, you travel to see things you would never see elsewhere, or at least not under the same conditions. PV: What has actually happened to the real presence of art? Here’s another image, Michel de Certeau gave me this one. When Galileo’s telescope was invented, the Jesuits of the time raised a theological question: do we attend mass if we watch it through a telescope? Today when Bill Gates calls up all the paintings of the Louvre onto the screens lining the walls of his bunker-architecture, he sets off the process of the telepresence of art. The question of reproduction has been asked with photography. Barthes said it all on that subject. It’s a movement toward the spectralization of art, toward cloning! Even the non-place evolves and progresses toward the immaterial. The non-place in the sense of Marc Augé, airports, telephone booths, freeway interchanges, is none the less a constructed non-place. While the telephone booth is still quite present, the modular structure heralds the spectre. The statue of the commander is all of us. So, is there a phantom of art? CD: The great contemporary artists, like Smithson, Broodthaers, and Dan Graham, have worked intensively with exhibition structures. With Broodthaers, for example, the work is conceived as an exhibition and the exhibition as a work. We’re still far from telepresence. PV: But they’re threatened with dislocation! Let’s take video, a medium that still had some materiality. Even if video was an art of the non-place, it still had an inscription, a materiality that virtual reality and computer graphics no longer have. So I come back to my question: what has happened to the presence of art? It’s a philosophical question which is practically without an answer, and at the same time, it’s the question being posed concretely right now. CD: Nonetheless, it seems to me that there are two realities: possibility and actuality. I have the feeling that telesexuality, for example, is not widely available … In the same way, only a minority of artists are working in virtual reality. PV: Of course, but it’s a tension. What’s interesting is not the fact that it exists, but that it’s being actively sought. The Gulf War was already a war by telecommand, long-distance. Now they’re working on cyberwar, with insect-size sensors. Instead of reconnaissance aircraft or drones, you send out tiny sound-and-image sensors that survey space like bees. And at the same time, it’s true, the war in Yugoslavia exists. CD: In the same way that art still assumes a material presence. PV: For how long? CD: An exhibition like Documenta tries to work in the here and now.1 Therefore we have to enquire into the way of presenting works that still propose a real experience, an aesthetic, cognitive, sensible, even ethical experience. PV: What should be shown is everything that fundamentally resists, not in a conservative way but a provocative way. I’m not a curator of ancient forms of art, I say that conservation becomes a provocative phenomenon. The conservation of the here and now, of presence and localization, is a provocative phenomenon. The Fauves of today are those who are working on the presence of art. CD: That means inventing exhibition structures. It would be foolish and dangerous to try to outdo television. Some people consistently cite television as a possible model of exhibition. On the contrary, I believe it’s urgent to set up barriers to zapping. PV: Anyway, television is out of date. It’s already in a state of breakdown! Multimedia will be the death of television, its absorption into virtual reality. Cinema is dead, as I already said, but cinema is what makes television resist. If there were no more cinema, television would be long gone. The two cadavers hold each other upright. I say that from within a love of cinema which I once had and can have no longer … In a period of occupation you don’t speak of resistance, said Serge Daney. The occupation is by the media. We are occupied by teletechnologies and we must be part of the resistance. Today there are the collaborators and the resistance. Me, I’m in the resistance. What we’re actually doing here, with lots of questions, is exploring the dark spot of art today. That’s resistance. It’s not conservative resistance, but liberating resistance. CD: How can an exhibition – which is more and more a place of cultural consumption ‘without qualities’ – be a space of resistance? PV: At the time when François Burckardt was at the Pompidou Centre, after Lyotard’s exhibition Les Immatériaux, Lyotard and I received two commissions. Les Immatériaux was one of the great exhibitions, a failure and a stroke of genius all at once, a successful failure, a contradiction. He got a commission on resistance, all forms of resistance, electric, social, military, etc. And I got a commission on acceleration. Two contradictory exhibitions, obviously. Everything I’m talking about happens within an acceleration that emancipates us from places, from the body, from ourselves, from others, and finally from democracy … CD: Can strategies be invented to resist acceleration, to maintain the distances, depths and heterogeneous elements that still exist in aesthetic production – strategies other than desperate attempts at restoration, like the one we saw in Venice this summer? PV: Initially, at the time when the Pompidou Centre was still being planned, what was envisioned was to present not only exhibitions but also art in the making, studios and labs, a zoo of working artists. It’s clear that it didn’t come out that way, but that aspect was at the basis of Beaubourg. A place where creation would be exhibited while taking place, not a depot of works but a research centre. The Frisco exploratorium has the same kind of dimension in a certain way; you have the work of the day, the work is presented as a trajectory and not as an object. You’re offered whatever has just arrived, like in a railway station. In this idea of Beaubourg, art was in the trajectory of art and not only in its arrival. But that wasn’t really a new idea, the romantic painters of the nineteenth century had artistic duels at their openings, they finished the canvas in front of the visitors. When Turner added the steam to the locomotive emerging from the fog and figured speed for the first time in a painting, he was anticipating art as a trajectory by trying to finish the painting in front of people. Something was played out there which continues in the idea of Beaubourg. Not consuming the finished product, but being at the level of the act, of the theatricalization of the act. It’s the idea of an art that wouldn’t be deferred but would exist in real time, live. Behind this temptation, something is being declared about the time of art, I don’t know what. It’s the same interest in improvisation, in jazz, an interest in art being made. CD: Nonetheless I have the impression that behind this desire for real time there are other, less admissible preoccupations, the search for the spectacular, the exhibitionism of the medium … Everything is art, all the time, everybody is an artist – absolute relativism! PV: It’s true that if everyone is an artist there’s no more art, and that’s what’s happening. That’s the reason why I say that for me, the plastic arts are finished, it’s over, alles fertig. I’m not joking! CD: You’re saying that to someone in charge of a major exhibition! … PV: … which is called ‘alles fertig’, it’s all over? No, let’s get serious again! The presence of art, and therefore its localization, is threatened. And yet that’s exactly where the solution to the threat lies, in the question of the temporality of art today. We have attained the limit of velocity, the capacity for ubiquity, for instantaneousness and immediacy. The fact of having reached the wall of the speed of light makes us the contemporaries of ubiquity. Art is in the phase of globalization. I don’t have the answer, but it is in this question that the answer lies, and it’s up to the artists to answer. Some video artists have done it, Gary Hill, Michael Snow, Bill Viola; theatre does it, choreographers do it, plastic artists don’t do it enough. CD: But what’s happening in theatre, contrary to the plastic arts, is of the order of representation, and representation implies distance. An aesthetics with no step back is just advertising. How would you discuss this question of distance? PV: It’s the problem of the interval. The interval of space, of time, and the third interval, according to physicists, the interval of light, the zero sign. This third interval is what brings ubiquity into play. It’s what allows you to be the contemporary of an event on the other side of the world. CD: Without an interval you’re in ‘the same’, you cannot be a witness. To be a witness is to have seen, from not far away. Can art still bear witness? I don’t want to subscribe to all the sociological recipes that are being served up just now. But the dimension of witnessing is important. PV: We always come back to the dark spot of the presence of art today … The possibility of a disappearance of art was evoked in the nineteenth century by Rodin, Cézanne and many others, who thought at that time that art could disappear. They weren’t pretending. Nor did they say it was apocalyptic. Art can disappear. In a certain way Auschwitz was a disappearance of art, an event so far outside history that it is a kind of proof that the worst can happen. I am of the generation that can envisage the disappearance of art. All the questions that we’re asking here turn around this possible disappearance. As long as people censor the possible disappearance of art there will be no art. To think about the here and now, the temporality and presence of art, is to oppose its disappearance, to refuse being a collaborator. Now, art plays with this possible disappearance, finds it amusing, because it doesn’t take it seriously. Lots of artists are already profiting from the death of art, they’re not like Artaud who announced the possibility of the end, they’re already in the after-death and they’re profiting. They’re inheriting from the cadaver. I think our time is as unheard-of as the period before the Renaissance. Before the incredible explosion of the Renaissance there was the tragedy. Today we’re entering the tragedy. A world is coming to an end. Careful – it’s not the end of the world, I can’t stand all the apocalyptic ravings people indulge in today. But I’m sure it’s the end of a world. Once you recognize this situation – and what a daunting situation it is, to topple over into an unheard-of and ungraspable world – then you also have to recognize that it’s fantastically exciting! Translated by Brian Holmes © 1996 Kassel: Cantz Verlag and Paul Virilio. Interview with Catherine David. documenta documents 1, 1996. © 1996 translation by Brian Holmes. VIRILIO LIVE: Selected Interviews/ © Selection and editorial matter, John Armitage 2001/SAGE Publications London. Thousand Oaks, New Delhi
by Jean Baudrillard The adventure of modern art is over. Contemporary art is contemporary only with itself. It no longer knows any transcendence either towards past or future; its only reality is that of its operation in real time and its confusion with that reality. Nothing now distinguishes it from the technical, promotional, media, digital operation. There is no transcendence, no divergence anymore, nothing of another scene merely a specular play with the contemporary world as it takes place. It is in this that contemporary art is worthless: between it and the world, there is a zero-sum equation. Quite apart from that shameful complicity in which creators and consumers commune wordlessly in the examination of strange, inexplicable objects that refer only to their selves and to the idea of art, the true conspiracy lies in this; complicity that art forges with itself, its collusion with the real, through which it becomes complicit in that Integral Reality, by which it is now merely the image-feedback. There is no longer any differential of art. There is only the integral calculus of reality. Art is now merely an idea prostituted in its realization. Modernity was the golden age of a deconstruction of reality into its simple elements, of a detailed analytics, first of impressionism, then of abstraction, experimentally open to all the aspects of perception, of sensibility, of the structure of the object and the dismemberment of forms. The paradox of abstraction is that, by 'liberating' the object from the constraints of the figural to yield it up to the pure play of form, it shackled it to an idea of a hidden structure, of an objectivity more rigorous and radical than that of resemblance. It sought to set aside the mask of resemblance and of the figure in order to accede to the analytic truth of the object. Under the banner of abstraction, we moved paradoxically towards more reality, towards an unveiling of the 'elementary structures' of objectality, that is to say, towards something more real than the real. Conversely, under the banner of a general aestheticization, art invaded the whole field of reality. The end of this history saw the banality of art merge with the banality of the real world - Duchamp's act, with its automatic transference of the object, being the inaugural (and ironic) gesture in this process. The transference of all reality into aesthetics, which has become one of the dimensions of generalized exchange ... All this under the banner of a simultaneous liberation of art and the real world. This 'liberation' has in fact consisted in indexing the two to each other - a chiasmus lethal to both. The transference of art, become a useless function, into a reality that is now integral, since it has absorbed everything that denied, exceeded or transfigured it. The impossible exchange of this Integral Reality for anything else whatever. Given this, it can only exchange itself for itself or, in other words, repeat itself ad infinitum. What could miraculously reassure us today about the essence of art? Art is quite simply what is at issue in the world of art, in that desperately self-obsessed artistic community. The 'creative' act doubles up on itself and is now nothing more than a sign of its own operation - the painter's true subject is no longer what he paints but the very fact that he paints. He paints the fact that he paints. At least in that way the idea of art remains intact. This is merely one of the sides of the conspiracy. The other side is that of the spectator who, for want of understanding anything whatever most of the time, consumes his own culture at one remove. He literally consumus the fact that he understands nothing and that there is no necessity in all this except the imperative of culture, of being a part of the integrated circuit of culture. But culture is itself merely an epiphenomenon of global circulation. The idea of art has become rarefied and minimal, leading ultimately to conceptual art, where it ends in the non-exhibition of non-works in non-galleries - the apotheosis of art as non-event. As a corollary, the consumer circulates in all this in order to experience his non-enjoyment of the works . At the extreme point of a conceptual, minimalis logic, art ought quite simply to fade away. At that point, it would doubtless become what it is: a false problem, and every aesthetic theory would be a false solution. And yet it is the case that there is all the more need to speak about it because there is nothing to say. The movement of the democratization of art has paradoxically merely strengthened the privileged status of the idea of art, culminating in this banal tautology of 'art is art', it being possible for everything to find its place in this circular definition . As Marshall McLuhan has it, 'We have now become aware of the possibility of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art'. The revolutionary idea of contemporary art was that any object, any detail or fragment of the material world, could exert the same strange attraction and pose the same insoluble questions as were reserved in the past for a few rare aristocratic forms known as works of art. That is where true democracy lay: not in the accession of everyone to aesthetic enjoyment, but in the transaesthetic advent of a world in which every object would, without distinction, have its fifteen minutes of fame (particularly objects without distinction). All objects are equivalent, everything is a work of genius. With, as a corollary, the transformation of art and of the work itself into an object, without illusion or transcendence, a purely conceptual acting-out, generative of deconstructed objects which deconstruct us in their turn. No longer any face, any gaze, any human countenance or body in all this - organs without bodies, flows, molecules, the fractal . The relation to the 'artwork' is of the order of contamination, of contagion: you hook up to it, absorb or immerse yourself in it, exactly as in flows and networks. Metonymic sequence, chain reaction. No longer any real object in all this: in the ready-made it is no longer the object that's there, but the idea of the object, and we no longer find pleasure here in art, but in the idea of art. We are wholly in ideology. And, ultimately, the twofold curse of modern and contemporary art is summed up in the 'ready-made': the curse of an immersion in the real and banality, and that of a conceptual absorption in the idea of art. ' ... that absurd sculpture by Picasso, with its stalks are leaves of metal; neither wings , nor victory, just a testimony; a vestige - the idea, nothing more , of a work of art. Very silmilar to the other ideas and vestiges that inspire our existence - not apples, but the idea, the reconstruction by the pomologist of what apples used to be - not ice-cream, but the idea, the memory of something delicious, made from substitutes, from starch , glucose and other chemicals - not sex, but the idea or evocation of sex - the same with love, belief, thought and the rest . . . ' Art, in its form, signifies nothing. It is merely a sign pointing towards absence. But what becomes of this perspective of emptiness and absence in a contemporary universe that is already totally emptied of its meaning and reality? Art can now only align itself with the general insignificance and indifference. It no longer has any privileged status. It no longer has any other final destination than this fluid universe of communication , the networks and interaction. Transmitter and receiver merging in the same loop: all transmitters, all receivers. Each subject interacting with itself, doomed to express itself without any longer having time to listen to the other. The net and the networks clearly increase this possibility of transmitting for oneself in a closed circuit, everyone going at it with their virtual performances and contributing to the general asphyxia. This is why, where art is concerned, the most interesting thing would be to infiltrate the spongiform encephalon of the modern spectator, For this is where the mystery lies today: in the brain of the receiver, at the nerve centre of this servility before 'works of art'. What is the secret of it? In the complicity between the mortification 'creative artists' inflict on objects and themselves, and the mortification consumers inflict on themselves and their mental faculties. Tolerance for the worst of things has clearly increased considerably as a function of this general state of complicity. Interface and performance - these are the two current leitmotifs. In performance, all the forms of expression merge - the plastic arts, photography, video, installation, the interactive screen. This vertical and horizontal, aesthetic and commercial diversification is henceforth part of the work, the original core of which cannot be located. A non-event like The Matrix illustrates this perfectly: this is the very archetype of the global installation, of the total global fact: not just the film, which is, in a way, the alibi, but the spin-offs, the simultaneous projection at all points of the globe and the millions of spectators themselves who are inextricably part of it. We are all, from a global, interactive point of view, the actors in this total global fact. Photography has the self same problem when we undertake to multi-mediatize it by adding to it all the resources of montage, collage, the digital and CGI, etc. This opening-up to the infinite, this deregulation, is, literally, the death of photography by its elevation to the stage of performance. In this universal mix, each register loses its specificity just as each individual loses his sovereignty in interaction and the networks - just as the real and the image, art and reality lose their respective energy by ceasing to be differential poles. Since the nineteenth century, it has been art's claim: that it is useless . It has prided itself on this (which was not the case in classical art, where, in a world that was not yet either real or objective, the question of usefulness did not even arise). Extending this principle, it is enough to elevate any object to uselessness to turn it into a work of art. This is precisely what the 'ready-made' does, when it simply withdraws an object from its function, without changing it in any way, and thereby turns it into a gallery piece. It is enough to; turn the real itself into a useless function to make it an art object, prey to the devouring aesthetic of banality. Similarly, old objects, being obsolete and hence useless, automatically acquire an aesthetic aura. Their being distant from us in time is the equivalent of Duchamp's artistic act; they too become 'ready-mades', nostalgic vestiges resuscitated in our museum universe. We might extrapolate this aesthetic transfiguration to the whole of material production. As soon as it reaches a threshold where it is no longer exchanged in terms of social wealth, it becomes something like a giant surrealist object, in the grip of a devouring aesthetic, and everywhere takes its place in a kind of virtual museum. And so we have the modification, like a 'ready-made', of the whole technical environment in the form of an industrial wasteland. The logic of uselessness could not but lead contemporary art to a predilection for waste, which is itself useless by definition. Through waste, the figuration of waste, the obsession with waste, art fiercely proclaims its uselessness. It demonstrates its non-use-value, its non-exchange-value at the same time as selling itself very dear. There is a misconception here. Uselessness has no value in itself. It is a secondary symptom and, by sacrificing its aims to this negative quality, art goes completely off track, into a gratuitousness that is itself useless. It is the same scenario, more or less, as that of nullity, of the claim to non-meaning, insignificance and banality, which attests to a redoubled aesthetic pretension. Anti-art strives, in all its forms, to escape the aesthetic dimension. But since the 'ready-made' has annexed banality itself, all that is finished. The innocence of non-meaning, of the non-figurative, of abjection and dissidence, is finished. All these things, which contemporary art would like to be, or return to, merely reinforce the inexorably aesthetic character of this anti-art. Art has always denied itself. But once it did so through excess, thrilling to the play of its disappearance . Today it denies itself by default - worse, it denies its own death. It immerses itself in reality, instead of being the agent of the symbolic murder of that same reality, instead of being the magical operator of its disappearance. And the paradox is that the closer it gets to this phenomenal confusion, this nullity as art, the greater credit and value it is accorded, to the extent that, to paraphrase Canetti, we have reached a point where nothing is beautiful or ugly anymore; we passed that point without realizing it and, since we cannot get back to that blind spot, we can only persevere in the current destruction of art. Lastly, what purpose does this useless function serve? From what, by its very uselessness, does it deliver us? Like politicians, who deliver us from the wearisome responsibility of power, contemporary art, by its incoherent artifice, delivers us from the ascendancy of meaning by providing us with the spectacle of nonsense. This explains its proliferation: independently of any aesthetic value, it is assured of prospering by dint of its very insignificance and emptiness. Just as the politician endures in the absence of any representativeness or credibility. So art and the art market flourish precisely in proportion to their decay: they are the modern charnel-houses of culture and the simulacrum. It is absurd, then, to say that contemporary art is worthless and that there 's no point to it since that is its vital function: to illustrate our uselessness and absurdity. Or, more accurately, to make that decay its stock in trade, while exorcising it as spectacle. If, as some have proposed, the function of art was to make life more interesting than art, then we have to give up that illusion. One gets the impression that a large part of current art participates in an enterprise of deterrence, a work of mourning for the image and the imaginary, a mostly failed work of aesthetic mourning that leads to a general melancholia of the artistic sphere, which seems to survive its own demise by recycling its history and its relics. But neither art nor aesthetics is alone in being doomed to this melancholy destiny of living not beyond their means, but beyond their ends. Baudrillard, Jean/The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact First published in France, 2004 by Editions Galilee © Galilee, 2004, Le Pacte de lucidite ou l'intlelligence du Mal Introduction and English translation © Chris Turner 2005 English Edition by Berg by Jon Longhi William S. Burroughs’s experiments with novel literary and media forms have a self-conscious relationship to Dada and Surrealism. Few artists or writers active after the Surrealists’ heyday of the 1940s did so much to champion their cause and to reaffirm the fertility of the Dadaists’ explorations into the nature of the work of art and its producer. Many of Burroughs’s innovative working techniques originated in Dada parlor games; his cut-ups and dream journals employ devices first pioneered by the Surrealists decades earlier; and his interest in the unconscious and the irrational basis of human nature closely parallels the outlook of key Surrealist figures. This excursus examines some of the intellectual and aesthetic similarities between Burroughs’s work and that of his Dadaist and Surrealist predecessors, with particular reference to the roles of automatism and dreaming in artistic technique. The common conceptual origin of both Burroughs’s ‘routines’ of the 1940s and 1950s—the spontaneous comedy monologues delivered as impromptu performances that gave rise to the revelatory and hallucinatory prose of Naked Lunch—and the free-form immediacy that characterized Dada is that of ‘automatic writing’. Automatic writing, a technique in which text is produced ‘spontaneously’, was introduced into public consciousness at the beginning of the twentieth century by, among others, W. B. Yeats and the psychic Helen Smith (Jochum 1993). The Dadaists’ adaptation of the method involved three elements: ‘the psychological concept of the liberation of psychic inhibitions, the mathematical one of the coincidences of chance verbal encounters, and the hermetic one of the oracular function of the medium-poet’ (Balakian 1971:61). All three of these themes are echoed in Burroughs’s reflections that ‘[t]he writer is simply someone who tunes in to certain cosmic currents. He’s sort of a transcriber, an explorer, a map maker’ (Ziegesar 1986:162), and in his 1957 letter to Allen Ginsberg, in which he remarks that ‘[t]he only way I can write narrative is to get right outside my body and experience it. This can be exhausting and at times dangerous. One cannot be sure of redemption’ (LWB 375). The technique of automatic writing was pioneered by the Dadaists in the ‘Cabaret Voltaire’ performances in the refugee-flooded no-man’s land of 1916 Zurich. These performances involved spontaneous poems that, like Burroughs’s routines, invoked the elements of unconscious creation. Tristan Tzara’s Zurich Chronicle—itself a stream-of-consciousness diary of the first days of the Dada movement—describes the free-form spontaneous poems improvised nightly by the Cabaret (Huelsenbeck 1920). Such poems, read ‘in various languages, rhythms, intonations, by several people at once’ (1920:112), evolved into more elaborate innovations: ‘Innovations came pouring in: Tzara invented the static poem, a kind of optical poem that one looks at as at a forest; for my part, I initiated the dynamic poem, recited with primitive movements, as never seen before’ (1920:112). Tzara always remained committed to the element of mathematical chance, however: ‘choice played no part: the refusal of the conscious self was the essential thing’ (Brandon 1999:100). Even four years after the invention of the cut-ups, during the 1919 Dada Parisian debut—a poetry reading organized by Andre Breton’s magazine, Litterature—Tzara’s method of writing was still the same: ‘Tzara appeared, blinking in the lights. He proceeded to cut up an article by Leon Dauder, dropped the pieces into a hat, and read out the resulting “poem”. In the wings on either side Breton and Aragon rang bells as he spoke, drowning out the words’ (Brandon 1999:138–9). Quite early on, however, two opposite dynamics developed in response to Tzara’s technique. Hans Arp interrupted the element of mathematical chance by discarding the poems he didn’t deem ‘successful’; from here it was a short step to Breton’s impatience and rejection of this core element of Dadaism. As Phillipe Soupault later commented, it was always in Breton’s nature to ‘draw conclusions’ (Brandon 1999:148). Two other key figures, Kurt Schwitters and Hugo Ball, however, went in a different direction, going beyond creating clusters of random words to reducing the poems to collections of sound-concoctions of rhythmic grunts, squeals and cries. Ball’s ‘intention was to free vowels from syntax and meaning, creating nuances and triggering memories’ (Huelsenbeck 1920:61), while Schwitters adopted Raoul Hausmann’s ‘optophonetics’, a technique for denoting atomized individual phonemes (which culminated in the 1932 composition ‘Die Sonata in Urlauten’, a 40-minute sound poem set in traditional sonata form [Nice 1988]). While Burroughs often attributes the invention of the cut-up technique to Brion Gysin in September of 1959 at the Beat Hotel in Paris (see, for example, Miles 2000:194), there is no doubt that he was aware of Tzara’s techniques earlier than this (see, for example, BF 63). It is also possible that he was aware of Schwitters’s later experiments with collage and montage (a technique Schwitters dubbed Merz); certainly Burroughs’s visual works in Ports of Entry bear many similarities to Schwitters’s collages and canvases. As the connection between Burroughs’s techniques and those of Dada may be understood in terms of automatic writing, his adaptation of Surrealist principles can be traced to a shared interest in the nature of the ‘unconscious’. The literary paths that Breton chose to travel following his disillusionment with Dada were strongly directed by his immersion in Sigmund Freud’s researches. Breton described Surrealism as ‘a systematic exploration of the unconscious’, and as existing ‘firmly in the realm of the non-rational, to be achieved by any number of routes—physical fatigue, drugs, extreme hunger, dreams, mental illness—all inducing similar hallucinatory phenomena’ (cited by Brandon 1999:215). Burroughs’s literary experiments were also closely linked to a view of human nature that, like psychoanalytic theory, emphasized instinct and the biological, non-rational basis of culture and consciousness. Burroughs experimented intensely with the manipulation and alteration of consciousness through the use of drugs, but he also viewed travel, sex, art, and machines of various types as portals to the unconscious. The convergence between Burroughs, the Surrealists and psychoanalysis is nowhere more striking, however, than in their shared attitudes towards dreams. Both Burroughs and the Surrealists give the sleeping life an almost equal relevance to the waking world. As Burroughs wrote to Allen Ginsberg in 1958: Of course life is literally a dream, or rather the projection of a dream. That is why political action fails, just as attempts to coerce neurosis with so-called will-power always fail. But the whole existing system can be dreamed away if we get enough people dreaming on the Gysin level. There is nothing can stop the power of a real dream. (LWB 398) Burroughs also used his dreams ‘professionally’: ‘I get perhaps half my sets and characters from dreams. Occasionally I find a book or paper in a dream and read a whole chapter or short story … Wake up, make a few notes, sit down at the typewriter the next day, and copy from a dream book’ (AM 97). Burroughs was a restless sleeper and often woke many times a night, at which instances he recorded his dreams in a notebook kept next to the bed. A selection of these writings was published as My Education: A Book Of Dreams (1995). Surrealist painters such as Salvador Dali and Max Ernst considered their paintings to be essentially recorded dreams. Major Dali works such as The Great Masturbator (1929) and The Lugubrious Game (1929) owe the majority of their images to Dali’s sleeping world (Descharnes and Neret 2001:139). In 1922, immediately following his break with Tzara, Breton initiated the ‘séance project’ (see Nadeau 1944:80–2). Breton was the lead ‘scientist’ and Robert Desnos his favorite patient. Desnos had narcoleptic tendencies and was capable of frequent catnaps in public. During these ‘sleep fits’, as the Surrealists called them, Desnos would scrawl down spontaneous poems. Breton was entranced by the results of these experiments and for months the Surrealists embarked on a series of séances, where groups of Surrealists would study sleeping subjects and prod them to write down or speak messages as a means of accessing their unconscious. The experiments produced only words at first, but the Surrealists rapidly began to externalize images as well. These experiments in the visualization of dreams reached their highest point in Dali and Luis Bunuel’s cinematic masterpiece Un Chien Andalou (1928). According to Bunuel: One morning we told each other our dreams and I decided that they might be the basis for the film we wanted to make. […] Dali said, ‘Last night I dreamed that my hands were swarming with ants.’ I said, ‘And I dreamed that I cut someone’s eye in half.’ […] We wrote the screenplay in six days. Our minds worked so identically that there was no argument at all. The way we wrote was to take the first thoughts that came into our heads, rejecting all those that seemed tainted by culture or upbringing. They had to be images that surprised us, and that both of us accepted without question. That’s all. (cited by Brandon 1999:317–18) To cut through the ‘taint of culture and upbringing’ was a shared ambition of Burroughs and the Surrealists. Indeed, Dali argued that ‘I categorically refused to consider the Surrealists as just another literary and artistic group. I believed they were capable of liberating man from the tyranny of the “practical, rational world” ’ (1955:22). The ‘logic of disintegration’ that may be said to inhabit both Dada and Surrealism as well as Burroughs’s work is not, of course, to be understood simply in terms of production, but also as reflection: their experiments in fragmentation anticipate—and helped to create the appetite for—the jumbled and confused circus of the nightly media, a spectacle that would not look out of place in the Cabaret Voltaire itself. However, while the Dadaists and Surrealists were marking the decline of Old World hierarchies, giving much of their work a playful and even celebratory dimension, Burroughs was in a position to observe the consequences of the appropriation of their techniques by the rapidly emerging hegemony of the culture industry. Burroughs’s vision, while it retains the humor and antinomianism of Dadaism and, to a lesser extent, Surrealism, has the nightmare quality of derangement, a reflection of an incoherent media landscape of constantly changing images, desires, and needs that the Surrealists and Dadaists could have only dreamed of. REFERENCESBalakian, A. (1971) Andre Breton, Magus of Surrealism (New York: Oxford University Press). Brandon, R. (1999) Surreal Lives (New York: Grove). Dali, S. (1955) Diary of a Genius, Howard, R. trans. (London: Creation, 1994). Descharnes, R., and Neret, G. (2001) Dali: The Paintings (Hamburgh: Benedik Taschen Verlag). Huelsenbeck, R. (1920) Dada Almanac, Green, M. trans. (London: Atlas Press, 1993). Jochum, K. P. S. (1993) ‘Yeats’s Vision Papers and the Problem of Automatic Writing: A Review Essay’, English Literature in Transition (1880–1920) (36)3, pp. 323–36. Miles, B. (2000) The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1968–1963 (New York: Grove Press). Nadeau, M. (1944) The History of Surrealism, Howard, R. trans. (New York: MacMillan, 1965). Nice, J. ed. (1988) Futurism And Dada Reviewed [Brussels, Belgium: Sub Rosa Records]. Ziegesar, P. Von (1986) ‘Mapping the Cosmic Currents: An Interview with William Burroughs’, IN Hibbard, A. ed., Conversations with William S. Burroughs (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), pp. 160–70. Retaking the Universe (William S.Burroughs in the Age of Globalization) Part1: Theoretical Depositions/Excursus: Burroughs, Dada and Surrealism /Edited by Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh First published 2004 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA www.plutobooks.com Gilles Deleuze Conversation with Didier Eribon Le Nouvel Observateur,August 23, 1986 You've already written a lot about Foucault's work. Why this book, two years after his death? It marks an inner need of mine, my admiration for him, how I was moved by his death, by that unfinished work. Yes,earlier I'd done articles on particular points (utterances, power). But here I'm trying to find the logic of this thought, which I see as one of the greatest of modern philosophies. A thought's logic isn't a stable rational system. Foucault, unlike the linguists, thought that even language was a highly unstable system. A thought's logic is like a wind blowing us on, a series of gusts and jolts. You think you've got to port, but then find yourself thrown back out onto the open sea, as Leibniz put it. That's particularly true in Foucault's case. His thought's constantly developing new dimensions that are never contained in what came before. So what is it that drives him to launch off in some direction, to trace out some-always unexpected-path? Any great thinker goes through crises; they set the rhythm of his thought. You consider him above all a philosopher, while many people place the emphasis on his historical researches. History's certainly part of his method. But Foucault never became a historian. Foucault's a philosopher who invents a completely different relation to history than what you find in philosophers of history. History, according to Foucault, circumscribes us and sets limits, it doesn't determine what we are, but what we're in the process of differing from; it doesn't fix our identity, but disperses it into our essential otherness. That's why Foucault deals with recent short historical series (from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). And even when, in his last books, he deals with a long-term series, down from the Greeks and Christians, it's in order to find in what way we're not Greeks, not Christians, but becoming something else. History, in short, is what separates us from ourselves and what we have to go through and beyond in order to think what we are. As Paul Veyne says, our actuality's something distinct from both time and eternity. Foucault is the most "actual" of contemporary philosophers, the one who's most radically broken away from the nineteenth century (which is why he's able to think the twentieth century). Actuality is what interests Foucault, though it's what Nietzsche called the inactual or the untimely; it's what is in actu, philosophy as the act of thinking. Is this what leads you to say that what's basicfor Foucault is the question: What is it to think? Yes, thinking-as a perilous act, he says.It's definitely Foucault, along with Heidegger but in a quite different way,who's most profoundly transformed the image of thought. And this image has various levels, corresponding to the successive layers or areas of Foucault's philosophy. Thinking is in the first place seeing and talking, but only once the eye goes beyond things to "visibilities," and language goes beyond words or sentences to utterances. That's thought as archive. And then thinking's a capacity, a capacity to set forces in play, once one understands that the play of forces doesn't just come down to violence but is to do with acting upon actions, with acts, like "inciting, inducing, preventing, facilitating or obstructing, extending or restricting, making more or less likely. . . "That's thought as strategy. Finally, in the last books, there's the discovery of thought as a "process of subjectification": it's stupid to see this as a return to the subject; it's to do with establishing waysof existing or, as Nietzsche put it, inventing new possibilities oflife. Existing not as a subject but as a work of art-and this last phase presents thought as artistry. The key thing, obviously, is to show how one's forced to pass from one of these determinations to the next: the transitions aren't there ready and waiting, they correspond to the paths Foucault traces out, and the areas he reaches that weren't there before he reached them, and the jolts he himself precipitates as well as experiences. Let's take these areas in order. What's the "archive"? You say that for Foucault the archive is "audiovisual"? Archaeology, genealogy, is also a geology. Archaeology doesn't have to dig into the past, there's an archaeology of the present-in a way it's always working in the present. Archaeology is to do with archives, and an archive has two aspects, it's audio-visual. A language lesson and an object lesson. It's not a matter of words and things (the title of Foucault's book5 is meant ironically). We have to take things and find visibilities in them. And what is visible at a given period corresponds to its system of lighting and the scintillations, mirrorings, flashes produced by the contact oflight and things. We have to break open words or sentences, too, and find what's uttered in them. And what can be uttered at a given period corresponds to its system oflanguage and the inherent variations it's constantly undergoing, jumping from one homogeneous scheme to another (language is always unstable). Foucault's key historical principle is that any historical formation saysall it can say and sees all it can see. Take madness in the seventeenth century, for instance: in what light can it be seen, and in what utterances can it be talked of? And take us today: what are we able to say today, what are we able to see? For most philosophers, their philosophy's like a personality they haven't chosen, a third person. What struck people who met Foucault were his eyes, his voice, and an erect bearing that went with them. Flashes, scintillations, utterances wresting themselves from his words-even Foucault's laugh was an utterance. And if there's a dislocation between seeing and saying, if there's a gap between them, an irreducible distance, it only means you can't solve the problem of knowledge (or rather, of "knowledges") by invoking a correspondence or conformity of terms. You have to look elsewhere for what links and weaves them together. It's as though the archive's riven by a great fault dividing visible form on one side from the form of what can be uttered ... other, each irreducible to the other. And the thread that knits them together and runs between them lies outside these forms, in another dimension. Aren't there some similarities to Maurice Blanchot here, an influence even? Foucault always acknowledged a debt to Blanchot. This, perhaps, in three respects. First of all, "talking isn't seeing. . . ," a difference that means that by saying what one can't see, one's taking language to its ultimate limit, raising it to the power of the unspeakable. Then there's the primacy of the third person, the "he" or neuter, the impersonal "one," relative to the first two persons-there's the refusal of any linguistic personology. Lastly, there's the theme of the Outside: the relation, and indeed "nonrelation," to an Outside that's further from us than any external world, and thereby closer than any inner world. And it doesn't diminish the importance of these links to emphasize how Foucault takes the themes and develops them independently of Blanchot: the dislocation between seeing and talking, most fully developed in the book on Raymond Roussel and the piece on Magritte, leads him to a new determination of the visible and the utterable; the "one speaks" organizes his theory of utterance; the interplay of near and far along the line Outside, as a life-and-death experiment, leads to specifically Foucaldian acts of thought, to folding and unfolding (which take him a long way from Heidegger too), and eventually becomes the basis of the process of subjectification. After the archive or the analysis of knowledge, Foucault discovers power, and then subjectivity. What's the relation between knowledge and power, and between power and subjectivity? Power's precisely the nonformal element running between or beneath different forms of knowledge. That's why one talks about a microphysics of power. It's force, and the play of forces, not form. And the way Foucault conceives the play of forces, developing Nietzsche's approach, is one of the most important aspects of his thought. It's a different dimension from that of knowledge, although power and knowledge form concretely indivisible composites. But the fundamental question iswhy Foucault needs yet another dimension, why he goes on to discover subjectification as distinct from both knowledge and power. And people say: Foucault's going back to the subject, rediscovering the notion of subject that he'd alwaysrejected. It's not that at all. His thought underwent a crisis in all sorts of ways, but it was a creative crisis, not a recantation. What Foucault felt more and more, after the first volume of The History of Sexuality, was that he wasgetting locked in power relations. And it was all very well to invoke points of resistance as "counterparts" of foci of power, but where was such resistance to come from? Foucault wonders how he can cross the line, go beyond the play of forces in its turn. Or are we condemned to conversing with Power, irrespective of whether we're wielding it or being subjected to it? He confronts the question in one of his most violent texts, one of the funniest too, on "infamous men." And it takes him a long time to come up with an answer. Crossing the line offorce, going beyond power, involves as it were bending force, making it impinge on itself rather than on other forces: a "fold," in Foucault's terms, force playing on itself. It's a question of "doubling" the play of forces, of a self-relations that allows us to resist, to elude power, to turn life or death against power. This, according to Foucault, is something the Greeks invented. It's no longer a matter of determinate forms, as with knowledge, or of constraining rules, as with power: it's a matter of optional rules that make existence a work of art, rules at once ethical and aesthetic that constitute waysof existing or styles of life (including even suicide). It's what Nietzsche discovered as the will to power operating artistically, inventing new "possibilities oflife." One should, for all sorts of reasons, avoid all talk of a return to the subject, because these processes of subjectification vary enormously from one period to another and operate through very disparate rules. What increases their variability is that power's always taking over any new process and subordinating it to the play of forces, although it can always then recover by inventing new ways of existing, and this can go on indefinitely. So there's no return to the Greeks, either. A process of subjectification, that is, the production of a way of existing, can't be equated with a subject, unless we divest the subject of any interiority and even any identity. Subjectification isn't even anything to do with a "person": it's a specific or collective individuation relating to an event (a time of day, a river, a wind, a life. . . ). It's a mode of intensity, not a personal subject. It's a specific dimension without which we can't go beyond knowledge or resist power. Foucault goes on to analyze Greek and Christian ways of existing, how they enter into forms of knowledge, how they make compromises with power. But they are themselves different in nature from knowledge and power. For example, the Church as pastoral power was constantly trying to take control of Christian ways of existing, but these were constantly bringing into question the power of the Church, even before the Reformation. And Foucault, true to his method, isn't basically interested in returning to the Greeks, but in us today :what are our ways of existing, our possibilities oflife or our processes of subjectification; are there waysfor us to constitute ourselves as a "self," and (as Nietzsche would put it) sufficiently "artistic" ways, beyond knowledge and power? And are we up to it, because in a way it's a matter oflife and death? Foucault had earlier developed the theme of the death of man, which caused such a stir. Is it compatible with the idea of creative human existence? The "death of man" is even worse than all the fuss about the subject; misinterpretations of Foucault's thought really thrived on it. But misinterpretations are never innocent, they're mixtures of stupidity and malevolence; people would rather find contradictions in a thinker than understand him. So they wonder how Foucault could get involved in political struggles when he didn't believe in man and therefore in human rights. . . The death of man is in fact a very simple and precise theme, which Foucault takes over from Nietzsche but develops in a very original way. It's a question of form and forces. Forces are alwaysinteracting with other forces. Given human forces (like having an understanding, a will . . . ), what other forces do they come into play with, and what's the resulting "composite" form? In The Orderof Things, Foucault shows that man, in the classic period, isn't thought of as man, but "in the image" of God, precisely because his forces enter into combination with infinitary forces. It's in the nineteenth century, rather, that human forces confront purely finitary forces-life, production, language-in such a way that the resulting composite is a form of Man. And, just as this form wasn't there previously, there's no reason it should survive once human forces come into play with new forces: the new composite will be a new kind of form, neither God nor man. Nineteenth-century man, for example, confronts life and combines with it as the force of carbon. But what happens when human forces combine with those of silicon, and what new forms begin to appear? Foucault has two models here, Nietzsche and Rimbaud, and adds his own brilliant analysis to theirs: What new relations do we have with life, with language? What new struggles with Power? When he comes to consider modes of subjectification, it's a way of pursuing the same problem. In what you call "ways of existing" and Foucault called "styles of life" there is, as you've pointed out, an aesthetics of life: life as a work of art. But there's an ethics too! Yes, establishing ways of existing or styles of life isn't just an aesthetic matter, it's what Foucault called ethics, as opposed to morality. The difference is that morality presents us with a set of constraining rules of a special sort, ones that judge actions and intentions by considering them in relation to transcendent values (this is good, that's bad . .. ); ethics is a set of optional rules that assess what we do, what we say, in relation to the ways of existing involved. We say this, do that: what wayof existing does it involve? There are things one can only do or saythrough mean-spiritedness, a life based on hatred, or bitterness toward life. Sometimes it takesjust one gesture or word. It's the styles of life involved in everything that make us this or that. You get this already in Spinoza's idea of "modes." And is it not present in Foucault's philosophy from the outset: What are we "capable" of seeing, and saying (in the sense of uttering)? But if there's a whole ethics in this, there's an aesthetics too. Style, in a great writer, is alwaysa style of life too, not anything at all personal, but inventing a possibility of life, a way of existing. It's strange how people sometimes say that philosophers have no style, or that they write badly. It can only be because they don't read them. In France alone, Descartes, Malebranche, Maine de Biran, Bergson, even Auguste Comte in his Balzacian aspect, are stylists. And Foucault also belongs to this tradition, he's a great stylist. Concepts take on with him a rhythmic quality, or, as in the strange dialogues with himself with which he closes some of his books, a contrapuntal one. His syntax accumulates the mirrorings and scintillations of the visible but also twists like a whip, folding up and unfolding, or cracking to the rhythm of its utterances. And then, in his last books, the style tends toward a kind of calm, seeking an ever more austere, an ever purer line. . . Interview with Mladen Dolar Mladen Dolar is a co-founder of the Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis, together with Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič and Rastko Močnik. Conny Habbel met the Slovenian philosopher in June 2009 in Ljubljana. WgK: Is there an artwork that had a lasting effect on you? Dolar: The work of Samuel Beckett – if I have to single out just one. It is both the importance it had for me and for the particular historic moment of the end of the twentieth century. I think he is the one who went the furthest in a certain way. There are various reasons for this, and one of them has to do with an enormous will to reduction. What Beckett did was to create an infinitely shrinkable world. There is never little enough. You can always take away more. Take the The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. In the Beginning there is some sort of plot and some sort of characters. Then in the second novel you have just Malone, who is dying alone in his room and who is inventing stories as he is waiting for death. The space has shrunk, there is no more travel. And then you have the third novel, where you don’t even have this. You don’t even have a space, you don’t even have a character, you just have a voice. A voice which just rambles on and continues, and it doesn’t matter what it says in the end. It’s just the sheer thrust of perseverance, of persistence, which carries the whole thing. So just persist. You have to go on. And you know how this ends, it ends in the most beautiful way: “I must go on, I can’t go on, I will go on“. I think this is an incredible point, I don’t think literature has ever gone this far this radically. This is so completely reduced to a bare minimum, what Beckett has called ‘the unnullable least’. And extremely powerful. WgK: So what is art actually? Dolar: I think to make art is to make a break. And to make a cut. This would be the simplest way of answering your question. But there are different ways of answering. One of them would go to Freud’s theory, which looks at art through the spyglass of sublimation. I think what Freud conceives as drive, ‘der Trieb’, actually has to do with the transition between something natural and a creation of a separate space, and that everything he describes as the specificity of culture actually has to do with the structure of the drive. The drive is like thwarting of a natural hang, it gets thwarted towards a different sort of end. This is like a supposed initial natural need, but which in the process of its satisfaction actually gets thwarted. It produces something else than merely the satisfaction of a natural need. If you look at the way Freud describes culture in Unbehagen in der Kultur, he defines culture with a list of features. The first on the list would be the question of tools. We’re getting more and more tools in order to be the masters of nature, so that we can do all the magic things, we can look at far away distances through the telescope, we can see the invisible in the microscope, we can talk through distance with the telephone, we can do absolutely magical things. And Freud uses the wonderful word, he says: “Der Mensch ist ein Prothesengott“. So he’s a god with prostheses. You just need some prostheses to be a god. So you have these extensions of the body. And what actually the drive to master nature produces at the same time – something more than the simple mastering of nature – it produces prostheses, a sort of ‘in between space’, a space which elongates your body, prolongs your body into the world. The eerie space between the inner and the outer is libidinally invested. And, to cut it short, this is also the area where culture comes in. WgK: Do you have any idea of what good art is? Which art do you regard as good? Dolar: Well, this is not a subjective question. There is a strong tendency to reduce art to the question of taste. And the question of taste is kind of dangerous because it always goes down to the question of narcissism. There is something profoundly narcissistic in the judgement of preference. ‘I prefer this, I am a connoisseur, I prefer the late Beethoven quartets against symphonies.’ The difference which means difference as such and which means that you are distinguished and that you can distinguish yourself from the common lot of people by being the man of refined taste, to see all these differences that the others don’t see. I have this conception of art, which is that art has to do with universality and infinity. It introduces something into the continuity of being, into the continuity of our survival. A break. Which is a universal break. A break to universality. It can speak universally. What is important in art is not a question whether it is an expression of a certain individual or whether it is an expression of a certain ethnic group or nation or of a certain age. I think that the break is such that it makes the universal out of particularities. But the problem is how to do this with the subjective means at your disposal, within the nation to which you belong, or language, or culture, within a particular type of civilization, within this historic moment – which are all very finite and singular things. How to produce universality and infinity out of this? And this I think is the moment of art. This is not a production of spirit, this is a material production of the break. I like very much this saying, which is on t-shirts like: “Art is a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it“. You have to get your hands dirty. This is a very material thing. You produce the idea with the material, with the matter. Art has always worked with the sensual. If one tries to get immediately to universality or the infinity of a beyond, an idea, the sublime or whatever – this is, I think, a big mistake. You cannot do this. You just have to produce it the hard way. But it depends on being able to produce a break. And this sets the standard by which it can be judged. I don’t think it can be judged on the basis of taste, it’s not just a question of whether I like it or not. It has the power to produce universality. It creates a potential virtual audience which goes far beyond this audience here. And I think the awareness that it goes beyond this, beyond my particular taste and reaction, is what makes good art. WgK: Is art a benefit for society? Why does there have to be someone who does this dirty job? Dolar: Well, I think that in the question with which I started, the question of drawing a line, making a cut in the continuity of our animal or social being, of our finite being, that this is what defines humanity. I’m not saying that art is the only way to do this. I think thought is something which does this also, it breaks with the conditions of its own production. This is the practice of philosophy. I think philosophy, similarly, but also very differently, makes a conceptual break in the continuity of particular received ways of thinking. We have the definition of man as homo sapiens, the thinking animal, but the trouble is that thought is very rare. It’s not that men think all the time, it happens very rarely. There are very few occasions when thought happens and when it does, it seriously changes the very parameters of the ways we conceive the world, ourselves, whatever. There’s a handful of thinkers. This is a strange thing in the history of philosophy, there’s only a handful of thinkers with which we have to deal continually. But I don’t think – this is important – that thought is some sort of prerogative of philosophy, that philosophers are very special because they have this specialisation in thought. I don’t think that at all. I think thought can happen anywhere. In silence and… WgK: Does it also happen in art? Dolar: Oh yes. It does most definitely. It has a different way and the question of art working with the sensual, with sensuous material means is very important, this is a materialised thought. It’s the thought which works within the matter and shapes the matter. It is attached to matter, and matter thinks in art. This is very important, the materiality of thought. I think thought actually happens in a number of areas of human endeavour. And art is one of the most reflected. WgK: Which are the others? Dolar: Do you know the work of Alain Badiou? He has made a list of four truth procedures, four areas where truth emerges. These are: Science, and above all the completely constructed science like mathematics. It doesn’t refer to anything in the world, it just creates its own entities, pure entities. Then: Poetry and art as such. Then politics. Politics not of opinions but politics of truth. There’s an opposition between the two. Democracy basically is a democracy of opinions. Anybody is free to hold any kind of opinion and then you count the votes. This is not a politics of truth. There is a sort of truth at stake in politics which has to do with justice and equality, it has to do with an idea. And then there is the question of love, which is the emergence of a truth event. A subjective truth event. Badiou lists the four areas as the areas in which this break happens. I am not sure that this list is the best, exhaustive or conclusive. Maybe this list is too neat in some way. I think things are messier in life. In many everyday situations, even trivial ones, there may be a sudden and unexpected break, people show an inventive creativity and do something very unexpected, and actually change the parameters of the situation and their own lives and the lives of others. I would leave this field open. WgK: I just had this spontaneous thought if humour might be one of those areas too? Dolar: Well, you have an old suggestion which goes back to Aristotle, that the man is a laughing animal. You have various proposals for the definitions of man, one is the thinking animal, another one is the tool-making animal, which goes back to Benjamin Franklin. Marx takes this up that one can define the man through the tool which conditions his capacity for work. And then you have Aristotle’s suggestion: Man is a laughing animal. The only animal that can laugh – laugh at what? To laugh, precisely, at being able to produce a certain break. The break in meaning, in the very parameters of making sense. One way of describing this could be where I started – to make a break, to make a cut – which is also to make a break in meaning in order to produce sense, if I may use this Deleuzian opposition between meaning and sense. And sense is the sort of unexpected thing which emerges. In order to produce this you have to cut down the usual expectation of meaning. The very horizon of meaning in which you move, in which you live your life. And this is the capacity of art. As far as humour is concerned, I would just point out that there’s a question of humour and there’s a question of ‘Witz’. Freud has written a book on ‘Witz’ and a different paper on humour and he says that those things are absolutely not to be confused. Additionally there’s a question of comedy and there’s a question of irony. So we have four different things which are not the same. We may laugh as a result, but there is laughter and laughter. Laughter itself does not have to be subversive. It can also be very conservative. WgK: Who becomes an artist? What is it that makes people become artists? Dolar: I don’t think there’s a rule. There is the capacity, well, the break-making capacity. The way that we relate to ourselves is always conditioned by a break, there is a question of redoubling. Culture is always a question of redoubling: it redoubles the ‘normal’ life. It reflects it into something else, but redoubling is always already there. WgK: But still there are some people who don’t become artists or intellectuals. Dolar: No, no, of course. I think the capacity is there, and it is a capacity which defines humanity and subjectivity. And… how the hell do you become an artist? What particular things have to come together? I think what makes the greatness of art is precisely its singularity. Which means that if you could establish this rule art would stop being art. WgK: But couldn’t it be that there is some reason why people start to make art? Robert Pfaller once suggested that artists might have some traumatic experience that they – all their lives – try to handle by making art. Dolar: Don’t we all have to handle some sort of traumatic experience? It’s very hard to say. I mean, the question has been asked many times, so you have art schools which precisely can teach you everything except what is essential. WgK: Yeah, but art school starts at a moment where you already decided to go to art school. Who is likely to go to art school? So there are two aspects of this question. The one is: How do you become a good artist? The other question – which actually interests me – is: Why does someone want to become an artist? No matter if good or bad, if successful or not: What makes a person take up this way? Dolar: If you want to become an artist, what do you want to become? If I take some of the greatest musicians of all times, like Bach and Mozart or Haydn. You can see what? Who was Haydn? He was hired by the Esterhazy family as a craftsman. I mean, did he want to become an artist? I don’t think he ever thought of himself in that way actually. He was a paid craftsman. And if you look at Mozart, he was all the time trying to get hired by some court or something. If you look at Bach, he was employed by the St. Thomas church in Leipzig to produce a piece of music for mass every week. It was not a question of genius or inspiration. You were hired. Because this was another craft and I don’t think anybody would look at themselves this way today. If you want to become an artist you don’t want to become a craftsman. You see yourself as a person with a special vocation, which goes beyond all usual vocations. This is due to the romantic model of art and then to the modernist conceptions. WgK: Let’s stick to today’s understanding of art: Do you think artists are narcissistic? Dolar: The question of art and narcissism… I would say that on the one hand it’s profoundly narcissistic. It’s usually linked with a project of profound narcissism of self-expression and the precious treasure I have in me and want to disclose to the world.. But I don’t think that this is what makes art. As I said before: Art is not expression. It’s not an expression of yourself. People may want to do it to express themselves, but what makes the break and what makes the universal appeal, the claim of art, is not a question of whether they express themselves well or not. It’s just not the question by which art is ever judged. So on the one hand I’m sure that the motivation for doing this is in most cases narcissistic. WgK: Did I understand you right when you say art is not an expression – could you say art is one of the ‘Prothesen’? Dolar: Yes. Oh yes. WgK: I really like this picture. Dolar: The ‘Prothesengott’? Yes. But, well, Freud uses this in the context of technology and tool-making. WgK: I have the feeling that it’s very good, maybe not only for tools. Dolar: Yes. It’s a good thing. It’s not just a question of tool. A tool is never a tool. It’s a libidinally invested extension of the body. WgK: So you could also say art is a libidinal extension of yourself. Of the body. Dolar: Well, it has something to do with the libidinal extension. The way Freud introduces the notion of prosthesis, it has more to do with technology than with art. But I think it’s nevertheless a useful metaphor also to think about art. WgK: Could you also call it objet a? Art as an extension towards objet a? Dolar: Well, yes. I didn’t want to use the heavily technical Lacanian language for this. I mean this could be described in another language, but what Lacan calls objet a is precisely the object of transition between the interior and exterior, which doesn’t quite fall either into interior or the external world out there; the objective world. I mean it’s neither subjective nor objective. In this sense it’s always in this zone of indeterminacy, in the zone which opens in between. And which is the zone of ‘Prothesen’ if you want, I mean, the Prothesen always fill the zone: you put something between subjects and objects. You extend your body into the world, and at the same time the world extends into you. Still, what Lacan calls the object a doesn’t coincide with any existing object, it has no substance of its own, while art produces existing objects whose task is to evoke this impossible object. To evoke the impossible. WgK: Would you agree that artists and philosophers share similarities in the realities they live in? Dolar: Yes. I think there’s a lot of common ground. The tools with which they work are different, but I think they work on a common ground and that they can’t be neatly delineated. One way of differentiation – which I particularly dislike – is to say that artists have the passions and the feelings and they work with this and philosophers have the reason and understanding and they work with this. I don’t think this opposition is worth anything. It never works this way. I think that any human activity has both: indiscriminately passion and reason inscribed into it. If you look at the history of philosophy – look at Plato, look at Spinoza, look at Augustine, look at Hegel, Marx, Kant, Wittgenstein – there is always a huge passion. This is terrible passion you have in this. They are all passion-driven. To describe this as works of mere intellect is completely misguided. This is the erroneous common conception of philosophy, rationality and concepts. If it doesn’t involve passionate attachment and passionate involvement, then it’s not philosophy. There is very, very serious passion at work in this. And at the opposite end I think there is very, very precise thinking involved in art. If it’s not, it’s just not good art. WgK: We were talking about passion and reason – do you think artists or philosophers can have a family? Do you think it can be organised to do such an ambitious or passionate work and to have love for people? Dolar: On the general level I don’t see why it should be exclusive. But this is not a question which concerns only art. I think it’s a question which concerns any sort of passionate attachment to your profession. I mean it could be a lawyer, a politician, a scientist, a teacher, all kinds of things. It can be sport, it can be all kinds of things and it does produce problems, very practical problems, how the hell you then deal with your family, with your love, with your private life. I suppose it very much depends on what kind of person you are. There are people who would somehow erase everything else and there are people who would always find ways, no matter how. They can work twenty hours a day but they will nevertheless find a way to have a private life. WgK: And what can you tell me about passion? Where does it come from and what can you do to prevent its disappearance? Dolar: To prevent its disappearance? WgK: Can anything be done? Dolar: Have you ever read Ovid? Remedia Amoris, the remedies against love. The question that he asks is the opposite. Not how to keep the passion going but how to prevent it happening. You can see this through thousand years of antiquity: It’s not the problem how to keep your passion alive. It’s the problem of detachment. “Remedia Amoris“ are rather humorous. Ovid’s advice is: don’t go for it. Keep your mind aloof, otherwise you go crazy. Passion is folly. This is a bad thing for you. It would completely ruin your life. So you have a history of passions. This is a stage of antiquity and then you have a certain stage of Christianity which again is very differentiated in itself. I mean the passion is the passion of Christ. So the passion worth having is the passion in this other sense. There is a passion worth having and which is this suffering you must undergo in order to be worthy of redemption. The ultimate passion to sacrifice all other passions. This gives the word passion a very different meaning. It comes from ‘patior’, ‘passus’, which means suffering. Like ‘Leidenschaft’ comes from ‘leiden’. If I put it in this very reduced, simplistic way, the question of passion which drives you, the question of passionate love is a question of romantic love, a certain conception of romantic love which we deal with. It emerged only in the 19th century. WgK: It’s a very interesting point that you made about the difference between trying to get rid of it or trying to keep it alive. You said before philosophy is always passionate, driven, so in this way it’s actually necessary to keep it. I didn’t only mean passion in private life, also as an activating thing like in your work. Dolar: Yes, there has to be a passion which drives this. There’s an interesting passage in Helvetius. Helvetius was a philosopher of the French Enlightenment and he has written this book De l’esprit in 1759 – the book was actually burnt at that time and banned. He has a passage there which I always found terribly funny, he says: “Why are passionate people more intelligent than others?” He completely overturns this common view that you either have intelligence – and then you can control your passions – or if you let the passions have the upper hand, then you lose your head. He puts these two together and he says: People never use their intelligence unless they are driven by a serious passion. It’s only the passionate people who are intelligent. Otherwise they are lazy. Come on, why use your head? You can always get along somehow. So it’s only the passion which actually drives you to use your reason. And this is just a funny way of putting it that you can’t see the two as being on opposed sides. WgK: Do you have an influence on it, can you do something to keep it or to feed it? Dolar: I think passion is what drives you, drives you towards something. But it’s not that passion as such is enough. It’s not that it just drives you and you let yourself be driven. It actually demands a hell of a lot if you want to pursue this passion! It demands that you put something, everything at stake. To risk the usual ways of your life, the ‘bequemes Leben’, if you are lucky enough to have a comfortable social position. There is the spontaneous hang to pursue your social survival within a certain slot, the script for your career is waiting for you. And this is where the question of break comes in. The passion is what makes a break. But the break, it demands a hell of a lot of ‘Anstrengung’ and you have to put things at risk. Sometimes drastically at risk. You risk everything for the question of passion, to pursue your passion. What Freud names ‘Todestrieb’ (death drive) in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) is not some striving towards death, but too much of life. There’s too much life, more than you can bear. So this is the excessive moment which derails the usual course of things and in order to pursue this it takes a lot of courage and persistence, perseverance. I think most people give up at a certain point. There are many ways of giving up, also as an artist. One way of giving up is to somehow be content with your role or to… ‘übereinstimmen’. So that you consent to being that role. And this is a socially assigned role which can bring glory and awards. If it started with a break, then the big danger is that the break starts functioning as the institution of the break. The break itself gets institutionalised and highly valued. WgK: It has a place then. Dolar: Yes, it has a place then. Freud has this wonderful phrase “people ruined by their own success“. And I think that in art many people are ruined by their own success. Precisely by succeeding in what they wanted to do and then they fit into this. They have made an institution of themselves and somehow started to believe that they are this. You have this wonderful phrase in Lacan: who is a madman? It’s not just an ordinary person who thinks that he’s a king. The definition of a madman is a king who thinks that he’s a king. And you have this madness among artists who believe that they are artists. This is psychosis, in a certain sense, if you really think that you are what you are. You really think that you are an artist. This is the end of art, I think. WgK: You were saying that one has to be courageous to proceed with passionate work. I have the feeling that there is another big thing, besides from missing courage, which might be a cushion for passion: The desire for containment, for feeling secure. I don’t know the best translation, I mean ‘Geborgenheit’. Dolar: Geborgenheit? WgK: Yeah. You know Geborgenheit? Feeling secure. Dolar: Security, yes. Sicherheit. WgK: A warm feeling. Dolar: Feeling at home. Is there a good way to feel at home? I don’t know. I think there’s always an ideological trap in this. What you mostly feel at home with is always ideology because it offers a sort of security. I mean security in the sense of providing a certain status within which you can dwell. And also security of meaning, which means that it provides you with some answers as to ‘What does it all mean?’ ‘We live in parliamentary democracy, we’re a free society, in the aera of progress and prosperity’, etc. I mean the words which fulfil a certain horizon of meaning which situates you within a certain social moment and social structure, within a certain type of social relations. And this is always ideology, ideology is what makes this run. And I think that the break that we are talking about – the break with meaning or the break with the continuity of things – it could be described as a break with ideology. Art and ideology are at the opposite ends. Art always makes a break, a cut into the ideological continuity of what you most feel at home with. And what you feel at home with is entrusted upon you. But this is not to say that art is immune to ideology, it can easily be made into ideology. WgK: At that point when you feel content. Dolar: Yes. When you feel content in your role. One could make a certain opposition between art and culture. I think culture is a sort of domestication of art. You establish canonical artworks which you are taught at school. And it’s a question of what comes into the canon and is it a good thing to have a canon or how to include or exclude works. Of course you always have a canon. There’s no escaping this, but at the same time you have to understand that culture is always a domestification of what is dangerous or excessive in art. It domesticates things by giving them a sort of proper place and value. You can say: ‘Well, Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist of all time.’ I mean it’s quite true, but it’s also a very forced statement to domesticate Shakespeare’s work. You glorify it instead of dealing with it. WgK: It ends their quality of being a break by giving them a place. Dolar: Yeah. You reinscribe them into a continuity of a tradition, of a cultural identity. WgK: I have the feeling it’s a regressive desire. Dolar: For home? WgK: Yeah. Isn’t it? Dolar: Yes. Ultimately yes. I think that being at home means being in the ideology and being in the meaning and having some sort of meaning secured. And I think that creating a home as a way of being with yourself – or being with another person – is precisely to try to deal with the unhomely element of it. To keep the unhomely element of it alive. What Freud called das Unheimliche, litterally the unhomely, but with the utter ambiguity where it can be given the comic twist. I think that love is keeping the non-homely element alive. It’s not to finally ‘go home’ with someone, but actually to keep this thing in the air. Keep this thing in the air. And comedy is precisely – to keep the ball in the air. Keep the ball in the air, I mean constantly. WgK: So then I can come to my last question: How can one become happy in life? Dolar (laughing): It beats me! WgK: So this is why I kept it till the end. Is there a good strategy? Dolar: Ah, god knows! But I am an atheist. |
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December 2017
art and aesthetics in art |