by Gilles Deleuze

The body is the Figure, or rather the material of the Figure. The material of the Figure must not be confused with the spatializing material structure, which is positioned in opposition to it. The body is the Figure, not the structure. Conversely, the Figure, being a body, is not the face, and does not even have a face. It does have a head, because the head is an integral part of the body. It can even be reduced to the head. As a portraitist, Bacon is a painter of heads, not faces, and there is a great difference between the two. For the face is a structured, spatial organization that conceals the head, whereas the head is dependent upon the body, even if it is the point of the body, its culmination. It is not that the head lacks spirit; but it is a spirit in bodily form, a corporeal and vital breath, an animal spirit. It is the animal spirit of man: a pig-spirit, a buffalo-spirit, a dog-spirit, a bat-spirit .... Bacon thus pursues a very peculiar project as a portrait painter: to dismantle the face, to rediscover the head or make it emerge from beneath the face. 

​The deformations which the body undergoes are also the animal traits of the head. This has nothing to do with a correspondence between animal forms and facial forms. In fact, the face lost its form by being subjected to the techniques of rubbing and brushing that disorganize it and make a head emerge in its place. And the marks or traits of animality are not animal forms, but rather the spirits that haunt the wiped off parts, that pull at the head, individualizing and qualifying the head without a face. Bacon's techniques of local scrubbing and asignifying traits take on a particular meaning here. Sometimes the human head is replaced by an animal; but it is not the animal as a form, but rather the animal as a trait - for example, the quivering trait of a bird spiraling over the scrubbed area, while the simulacra of portrait-faces on either side of it act as "attendants" (as in the 1976 Triptych). Sometimes an animal, for example a real dog, is treated as the shadow of its master  or conversely, the man's shadow itself assumes an autonomous and indeterminate animal existence. The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering. In place of formal correspondences, what Bacon's painting constitutes is a zone of indiscernibility or undecidability between man and animal. Man becomes animal, but not without the animal becoming spirit at the same time, the spirit of man, the physical spirit of man presented in the mirror as Eumenides or Fate. It is never a combination of forms, but rather the common fact: the common fact of man and animal. Bacon pushes this to the point where even his most isolated Figure is ​already a coupled Figure; man is coupled with his animal in a latent bullfight.

This objective zone of indiscernibility is the entire body, but the body insofar as it is flesh or meat. Of course, the body has bones as well, but bones are only its spatial structure. A distinction is often made between flesh and bone, and even between things related to them. The body is revealed only when it ceases to be supported by the bones, when the flesh ceases to cover the bones, when the two exist for each other, but each on its own terms: the bone as the material structure of the body, the flesh as the bodily material of the Figure. Bacon admires the young woman in Degas's After the Bath [101], whose suspended spinal column seems to protrude from her flesh, making it seem much more vulnerable and lithe, acrobatic.2 In a completely different context, Bacon has painted such a spinal column on a Figure doubled over in contortions (Three Figures and a Portrait, 1975 [78]). This pictorial tension between flesh and bone is something that must be achieved. And what achieves this tension in the painting is, precisely, meat, through the splendor of its colors. Meat is the state of the body in which flesh and bone confront each other locally rather than being composed structurally. The same is true of the mouth and the teeth, which are little bones. In meat, the flesh seems to descend from the bones, while the bones rise up from the flesh. This is a feature of Bacon that distinguishes him from Rembrandt and Soutine. If there is an "interpretation" of the body in Bacon, it lies in his taste for painting prone Figures, whose raised arm or thigh is equivalent to a bone, so that the drowsy flesh seems to descend from it. Thus, we find the two sleeping twins flanked by animal-spirit attendants in the central panel of the 1968 triptych; but also the series of the sleeping man with raised arms, the sleeping woman with vertical legs, and the sleeper or addict with the hypodermic syringe. Well beyond the apparent sadism, the bones are like a trapeze apparatus (the carcass) upon which the flesh is the acrobat. The athleticism of the body is naturally prolonged in this acrobatics of the flesh. We can see here the importance of the fall [chute] in Bacon's work. Already in the crucifixions, what interests Bacon is the descent, and the inverted head that reveals the flesh. In the crucifixions of 1962 and 1965, we can see the flesh literally descending from the bones, framed by an armchair-cross and a bone-lined ring. For both Bacon and Kafka, the spinal column is nothing but a sword beneath the skin, slipped into the body of an innocent sleeper by an executioner. Sometimes a bone will even be added only as an afterthought in a random spurt of paint.

Pity the meat! Meat is undoubtedly the chief object of Bacon's pity, his only object of pity, his Anglo-Irish pity. On this point he is like Soutine, with his immense pity for the Jew. Meat is not dead flesh; it retains all the sufferings and assumes all the colors of living flesh. It manifests such convulsive pain and vulnerability, but also such delightful invention, color, and acrobatics. Bacon does not say, "Pity the beasts," but rather that every man who suffers is a piece of meat. Meat is the common zone of man and the beast, their zone of indiscernibility; it is a "fact," a state where the painter identifies with the objects of his horror and his compassion. The painter is certainly a ​butcher, but he goes to the butcher's shop as if it were a church, with the meat as the crucified victim (the Painting of 1946 [3]). Bacon is a religious painter only in butcher's shops. 

Near the end of the eighteenth century, the novelist K. P. Moritz described a person with "strange feelings": an extreme sense of isolation, an insignificance almost equal to nothingness; the horror of sacrifice he feels when he witnesses the execution of four men, "exterminated and torn to pieces," and when he sees the remains of these men "thrown on the wheel" or over the balustrade; his certainty that in some strange way this event concerns all of us, that this discarded meat is we ourselves, and that the spectator is already in the spectacle, a "mass of ambulating flesh"; hence his living idea that even animals are part of humanity, that we are all criminals, we are all cattle; and then, his fascination with the wounded animal, 

a calf, the head, the eyes, the snout, the nostrils ... and sometimes he lost himself in such sustained contemplation of the beast that he really believed he experienced, for an instant, the type of existence of such a being ... in short, the question if he, among men, was a dog or another animal had already occupied his thoughts since childhood.

​Moritz's passages are magnificent. This is not an arrangement of man and beast, nor a resemblance; it is a deep identity, a zone of indiscernibility more profound than any sentimental identification: the man who suffers is a beast, the beast that suffers is a man. This is the reality of becoming. What revolutionary person - in art, politics, religion, or elsewhere - has not felt that extreme moment when he or she was nothing but a beast, and became responsible not for the calves that died, but before the calves that died? 

​But can one say the same thing, exactly the same thing, about meat and the head, namely, that they are the zone of objective indecision between man and animal? Can one say objectively that the head is meat (just as meat is spirit)? Of all the parts of the body, is not the head the part that is closest to the bone? Look again at El Greco or Soutine. Yet Bacon does not seem to think of the head in this manner. The bone belongs to the face, not to the head. According to Bacon, there is no death's-head. The head is deboned rather than bony, yet it is not at all soft, but firm. The head is of the flesh, and the mask itself is not a death mask, it is a block of firm flesh that has been separated from the bone: hence the studies for a portrait of William Blake [20, 21]. Bacon's own head is a piece of flesh haunted by a very beautiful gaze emanating from eyes without sockets. And he pays tribute to Rembrandt for having known how to paint a final self-portrait as one such block of flesh without eye sockets.6 Throughout Bacon's work, the relationship between the head and meat runs through a scale of intensity that renders it increasingly intimate. First, the meat (flesh on one side, bone on the other) is positioned on the edge of the ring or the balustrade where the Figure-head is seated [3]; but it is also the dense, fleshly rain that surrounds the head and dismantles its face beneath the umbrella [65]. The scream that comes out of the Pope's mouth and the pity that comes out of his eyes have meat as their object [27]. Later, the meat is given a head, through which it takes flight and descends from the cross, as in the two preceding crucifixions . Later still, Bacon's series of heads will assert their identity with meat, among the most beautiful of which are those painted in the colors of meat, red and blue [26]. Finally, the meat is itself the head, the head becomes the nonlocalized power of the meat, as in the 1950 Fragment of a Crucifixion , where the meat howls under the gaze of a dog-spirit perched on top of the cross. Bacon dislikes this painting because of the simplicity of its rather obvious method: it had been enough to hollow out a mouth from solid meat. Still, it is important to understand the affinity of the mouth, and the interior of the mouth, with meat, and to reach the point where the open mouth becomes nothing more than the section of a severed artery, or even a jacket sleeve that is equivalent to an artery, as in the bloodied pillow in the Sweeney Agonistes triptych. The mouth then acquires this power of nonlocalization that turns all meat into a head without a face. It is no longer a particular organ, but the hole through which the entire body escapes, and from which the flesh descends (here the method of free, involuntary marks will be necessary). This is what Bacon calls the Scream, in the immense pity that the meat evokes.

excerpt from the book: Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation by GILLES DELEUZE 

To sufer with or to sympathize with? That is a question that concerns both ethics and aesthetics, as was clearly intuited by Gericault, the man who made his famous 'portraits of the insane' at La Salperriere Hospital in Paris over the winter of 1822 at the invitation of one Dr Georget, founder of 'social psychiatry'. Gericault's portraits were meant to serve as classificatory sets for the alienist's students and assistants. 

Driven by a passion for immediacy, Gericault sought to seize the moment whether of madness or death live. Like the emergent press, he was especially keen on human interest stories such as the wreck of the Medusa, that TITANIC of the painting world ... 

The art of painting at the time was already busy trying to outdo mere REPRESENTATION by offering the very presence of the event, as instantaneous photography would do, followed by the PHOTOFINISH and the first cinematographic newsreels of the Lumiere brothers and, ultimately, the LIVE COVERAGE offered by CNN. 

INTERACTIVITY was actually born in the nine teenth century with the telegraph, certainly, but also and especially with clinical electricity, which involved planting electrodes on the faces of the human guinea pigs used in such 'medical art' as practised by Dr Duchenne de Boulogne. The recent Duchenne exhibition at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, aimed no less than to 'rehabilitate' Duchenne's work, though this La Salpetriere Hospital photographer was no mare than an 'expressionist of the passions' for whom his p atients' faces were only ever laboratory material that enabledhim to practise 'live anatomy'. 

Already in the eighteenth century just prior to the French Revolution, this confusion of cold-bloodedness with a mode of perception that allowed the doctor or surgeon to diagnose illness due to the ability to repress emotion pity had contaminated the artistic representations of 'naturalistic' painters and engravers. Jacques Agoty, for instance, as a painter and anatomist on the trail of ' the invisible truth of bodies', wavered between an engraver's burin and an autopsy scalpel in his work.

But the truly decisive s tep had to wait until much more recently, till 1998, with ' The World of Bodies' exhibition at the the Mannheim Museum of Technology and Work (Landesmuseum fur Technik und Arbeit) , where close to 800,000 visitors rushed to contemplate 200 human corpses presented by Gunther von Hagens.  

The German anatomist actually has invented a process for preserving the dead and, in particular, for sculpting them, by plastination, thereby taking things a lot further than the mere embalming of mummies. Standing tall like statues of antiquity, the flayed cadavers either brandished their skins like trophies of some kind or showed off their innards in imitation of Salvador Dali's Venus de Milo with drawers.

As sole explanation, Dr von Hagens resorted to the modern buzzword : 'It's about breaking the last remaining taboos', he says ... A kind of slide occurs as a result of this Mannheim terrorist manifesto, j ust as it does with the exhibition 'Sensation' in London and New York: it will not be long before we are forced to acknowledge that the German Expressionists who called for murder were not the only avant-garde artists. By the same token so were people like Ilse Koch, the blonde romantic who, in 1939, settled in a gloomy valley near Weimar where Goethe once liked to walk and where, more to the point, he dreamed up his MEPHISTOPHELES that spirit that denies all. The place was Buchenwald.  

​The woman they would call ' the Bitch Dog of Buchenwald' actually enjoyed aesthetic aspirations pretty similar to those of the good Dr von Hagens, for she had certain de tainees sporting tattoos skinned so that she could turn their skins into various objects of art brut, as well as lampshades. 

'The painter brings his body with him first and foremost', wrote Paul Valery. In the course of the 1960s and 1970s, the painters of the Wiener Aktionismus, or Viennese Actionism, would follow this dictum to the letter, using their own bodies as the 'support surface' of their art. 

Hermann Nitsch's Orgies Mysteries Theatre 'masses' , in which he sacrificed animals in a bloody and bawdy ritual, were followed by what no doubt takes the cake as the most extreme case of AUTO-DA-FE by any artist. The story goes that Rudolf Schwarzkogler actually died after a bout of castration he inflicted on himself during one of his performance pieces that took place without a single viewer in the huis clos between the artist and a video camera. 

This is TERMINAL ART that no longer ​requires anything more than the showdown between a tortured body and an automatic camera to be accomplished. 

​At the close of the twentieth century, with Stelarc, the Australian adept at 'body art', the visual arts Schopenhauer wrote were 'the suspension of the pain of living' would turn into a headlong rush towards pain and death for individuals who have gradually developed the unconsidered habit of leaving their bodies not so much ' to science' as to some sort of clinical voyeurism harking back to the heyday of a certain Dr Josef Mengele who performed experiments we all know abou t, AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU for a time becoming the biggest genetic laboratory in the world. 

​'Immediacy is a fraud', Father Dietrich Bonhoffer declared before d isappearing in the camp at Flossenburg in 1945 ... Well, art is every bit as much of a fraud as amnesiac immediacy. 

If 'everything is ruled by lightning', as Heraclitus suggested, the PHOTO-FINISH imposes the instantaneity of its violence on all the various 'artistic representations' and modern art, like war ​BLITZKRIEG is no more than a kind of exhibitionism that imposes its own terrorist voyeurism: that of death, live. 

By way of illustrating the path the impiety of art has taken in the twentieth century, let's look at two types of funerary imagery back to back, though these are separated by almost 2,000 years. The first are the famous PORTRAITS OF THE FAYOUM in Upper Egypt; the second, the PHOTOFINISHES of the Tuol Sleng Memorial in Phnom Penh, where the Angkar the government of ' Democratic Kampuchea' had thousands of innocents put to death in cold blood, women and children first ... carefully photographing them beforehand. 

In Egypt at the dawn of Western history, people forced themselves to drag the deceased out of anonymity and into the public eye as an image in order to identify the essential being. In Cambodia at the going down of a pitiless century, the photographic identity of the detainee was filed before they were put to death. 

In the twinkling of an eye we have, on the one hand, the birth of the portrait in all its humility, its discretion. On the other, systematic use of the freeze frame as a death sentence revealing THE LOOK OF DEATH.  

Two versions of an 'art' that French artist, Christian Boltanski, has tried to pull off according to his own lights in order to fend off forgetting, negation: this aesthetic of disappearance that, alas, simply provides a cover for those who still, even now, reject the impiety of art. 

It is better to be an object of desire than pity, they say . .. Once the province of advertising, this adage surely now belongs to the realm of art, the desire to consume yielding to the desire to rape or kill. If this really is the case, the academicism of horror will have triumphed, the profane art of modernity bowing down before the sacred art of conformism, its primacy, a conformism that always spawns ordinary everyday fascism. 

How can we fail to see that the mask of modernism has been concealing the most classic academicism: that of an endlessly reproduced standardization of opinion, the duplication of 'bad feelings' identically reproducing the duplication of the 'good feelings' of the official art of yore? 

How can we ultimately fail to twig that the apparent impiety of contemporary art is only ever the inverted image of sacred art, the reversal of the creator's initial question: why is there something instead of nothing? 

Finally, just like the mass media, which no longer peddle anything other than obscenity and fear to satisfy the ratings, contemporary nihilism exposes the drama of an aesthetic of disappearance that no longer involves the domain of representation exclusively (political, artistic, and so on) but our whole vision of the world: visions of every kind of excess, starting with advertising outrages that ensure the succes de scandale without which the conditioning of appearances would immediately stop being effective .  

And speaking of disappearance and decline, note the underhand way the naif painters have been bundled away: without wanting to wheel out yet again the 'Douanier' Rousseau, whose masterwork, War, inspired Picasso's Guernica, think of painters like Vivin or Bauchant.

Why the Freudian lapse? This discreet elimination of painters who never laid claim to any art savant, whether atademic or avant-garde? Do we really believe that this trend of art's towards ingenuity suddenly stopped in its tracks, decidedly too pitiful like that ingenu libertin, Raoul Dufy? 

It will not be long before the drawings of kindergarten children are banned, replaced by digital calligraphic exercises.

Meanwhile, let's get back to art's fraudulent immediacy, to the PRESENTATION of works that supposedly come across as obvious to all and sundry without requiring the intercession of any form of reflection. Here's Marshall McLuhan, that bucolic prosateur of the 'global village' : 'lf we really want to know what's going on in the present, we should first ask the artists; they know a lot more than scientists and technocrats since they live in the absolute present. ' 

Here we find the same line of thought as Rene Gimpel's only, deformed by the Canadian sociologist's media-haunted ideology . What is this ABSOLUTE PRESENT (that 'absolute' is surely tautological!) if not the resurgence of a classicism that already laid claim to the eternal present of art, even going so far as to freeze it in geometric standards (witness the Golden Mean) bearing no relationship to the relative and ephemeral nature of analogical perception of events. Impressionism would try to free us from these standards, on the threshold of industrial modernity. 

Contrary to appearances, REAL TIME this 'present' that imposes itself on everyone in the speeding-up of daily reality is, in fact, only ever the repetition of the splendid academic isolation of bygone days. A mass media academicism that seeks to freeze all originality and all poetics in the inertia of immediacy. 

'Inertia is a raw form of despair', Saint-Exupery claimed, at the end of his life. This goes some way to explaining the relentless desire not to save phenomena, as in the past, but to shed them, to spirit them away behind the artifice of the manipulation of signs and signals by a digital technology that has now sunk its teeth into the whole array of artistic disciplines, from the taking of photographs to the capturing of sounds. Things have reached such a pitch that a pitiful musician par excellence like Bob Dylan can bemoan the fact that 

All the music you hear these days is just electricity! You can't hear the singer breathing anymore behind this electronic wall. You can't hear a heart beating anymore. Go to any bar and listen to a blues group and you'll be touched, moved. Then listen to the same group on a CD and you'll wonder where the sound you heard in the bar disappeared to. 

The demise of the relative and analogical character of photographic shots and sound samples in favour of the absolute, digital character of the computer, following the synthesizer, is thus also the loss of the poetics of the ephemeral. For one brief moment Impressionism in painting and in music was able to retrieve the flavour of the ephemeral before the nihilism of contemporary technology wiped it out once and for all. 

'We live in a world traversed by a limitless destructive force', reckoned Jonathan Mann, the man in charge of the World Health Organization's fight against AIDS, before he disappeared, a victim of the crash of Swissair Flight 111 .

Impossible indeed to imagine the art of the twentieth century without weighing the threat of which it is a prime example. A quiet yet visible, even blinding, threat. ls In the wake of the counter culture, aren't we now at the dawning of a culture and an art that are counter-nature? 

That, in any case, was the question that seemed to be being posed by a conference held at the Institut Heinrich Heine in Paris in the winter of 1999. The title of the conference was: 'The Elimination of Nature as a Theme in Contemporary Art'

As far as contemporary science and biology go, doubt is no longer an option, for genetics is on the way to becoming an art, a transgenic art, a culture of the embryo to purely performative ends, just as the eugenicists of the beginning of the twentieth century hoped. When Nietzsche decided that 'moral judgements, like all religious judgements, belong to ignorance', he flung the door to the laboratories of terror wide open. 

To demonstrate or to 'monstrate', that is the question: whether to practise some kind of aesthetic ​or ethic demonstration or to practise the cleansing of all 'nature', all 'culture', through the technically oriented efficiency of a mere 'monstration', a show, a blatant presentation of horror.  

​The expressionism of a MONSTER, born of the labour of a science deliberately deprived of a conscience ... As though, thanks to the progress of genetics, teratology had suddenly become the SUMMUM of BIOLOGY and the oddball the new form of genius only, not a literary or artistic genius anymore, but a GENETIC GENIUS. 

The world is sick, a lot sicker than people realise. That's what we must first acknowledge so that we can take pity on it. We shouldn't condemn this world so much as feel sorry for it. The world needs pity. Only pity has a chance of cobbling its pride. 

So wrote George Bernanos in 1939 . . . Sixty years on, the world is sicker still, but scientist propaganda is infinitely more effective and anaesthesia has the territory covered. As for pride, pride has gotten completely out of hand, thanks to globalization; and pity has now bitten the dust just as piety once succumbed in the century of philo-folly a la Nietzsche. 

They say the purpose of ethics is to slow down the rate at which things happen. Confronted by the general speeding-up of phenomena in our hypermodern world, this curbing by conscience seems pretty feeble. 

We are familiar with extreme sports, in which the champion risks death striving for some pointless performance 'going for it'. Now we find the man of science, adept in extreme sciences, running the supreme risk of denaturing the living being having already shattered his living environment.

Thanks to the decryption of the map of the human genome, geneticists are now using cloning in the quest for the chimera, the hybridization of man and animal. How can we fail to see that these 'scientific extremists', far from merely threatening the unicity of the human race by trafficking embryos, are also taking their axe to the whole philosophical and physiological panoply that previously gave the term SCIENCE its very meaning? In so doing, they threaten science itself with disappearance.

Extreme arts, such transgenic practices, aim at nothing less than to embark BIOLOGY on the road to a kind of 'expressionism' whereby teratology will no longer be content just to study malformations, but will resolutely set off in quest of their chimeric reproduction. 

As in ancient myths, science, thus enfeebled, will ​once more become the 'theatre of phantasmatic appearances' of chimera of all kinds. And so the engendering of monsters will endeavour to contribute to the malevolent power of the demi-urge, with its ability to go beyond the physiology of the being. Which is only in keeping with what was already being produced by the German Expressionism denounced by Rene Gimpel. But also, first and foremost, by the horror of the laboratories of the extermination camps.

It is no longer enough now to oppose negationism of the Shoah; we also need to categorically reject negationism of art by rejecting this 'art brut' that secretly constitutes engineering of the living, thanks to the gradual decryption of DNA; this 'eugenics' that no longer speaks its name yet is gearing up all the same to reproduce the abominiltion of desolation, not just by putting innocent. victims to death anymore but by bringing the new HOMUNCULUS to life.

In 1 997, a member of the French National Ethics Committee, Axel Kahn, wrote of cloning: 'It is no longer a matter of tests on a man but of actual tests for a man. That a life so created is now genetically programmed to suffer abnormally this constitutes absolute horror.

How can we fail to see here the catastrophic continuation of Nazi experimentation, experimentation destined as a priority for the pilots of the Luftwaffe and the soldiers of the Wehrmacht, those supermen engaged body and soul in a total war?

In Hitler's time, Professor Eugen Fischer, founder and director of the 'Institute of Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics (lEG) , declared that animal experiments still dominated research only because we have very limited means of obtaning human material. Fischer went on to say that, 'When we have done with research on rabbits, which remains the main type of research for the moment, we will move on to human embryos'. With the abundant stock of human embryos at the end of the twentieth century this is, alas, a done deal ... 

But stay tuned to what the German geneticist went on to say in 1940 . 'Research on twins constitutes the specific method for studying human genetics. '  Two years later, Adolf Hitler made Eugen Fischer an honorary member of the 'Scientific Senate' of the Wehrmacht; he was succeeded as head of the IEG by Professor Otmar von Verschuer, a specialist in twins ... 

From that moment, AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU became a research laboratory undoubtedly unique in the world, the laboratory of the ' Institute of Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics' . The name of Professor Verschuer's assistant was Josef Mengele. You know the rest. 

As recently as 1998, the British medical weekly The Lancet condemned the initiatives of the European Union and the United States in trying to introduce a total ban on the practice of human cloning. A year later, the editors were still arguing that 'the creation of human beings' had become 'inevitable', regardless. The editors of the London publication wrote that: 

The medical community will one day have to address the care of and respect for people created by cloning techniques. That discussion had better begin now, before the newspaper headlines roll over the individuality of the first person born this way.

They went on to stress that, all in all, ' there is no difference between an identical twin and a clone (delayed identical twin) ' . 

It is not too hard to imagine the consequences of this confusion between PROCREATION and CREATION, of the demiurgic pretensions of a eugenics that no longer has any limits. Now that medically assisted procreation of the embryo has led to genetically programmed creation of the double, the gap ​between HUMAN and TRANS HUMAN has been closed j ust as those old New Age disciples had hoped; and the celebrated British review The Lancet can arrogate to itself the exorbitant right to remove the term INHUMAN from our vocabulary! 

Sir Francis Galton, the unredeemed eugenicist, is back in the land of his cousin Darwin: freedom of aesthetic expression now knows no bounds. Not only is everything from now on 'possible'. It is 'inevitable' ! 

Thanks to the genetic bomb, the science of biology has become a major art only, an EXTREME ART. 

This helps make sense of the title of that Heinrich Heine I nstitute conference, 'The Elimination of Nature as a Theme in Contemporary Art' . It also makes sense of the recent innovation not only of a COUNTER CULTURE, opposed to the culture of the bourgeoisie, but also of an art that is frankly COUNTER-NATURE, peddling as it does a eugenics that has finally triumphed over all prejudice absolutely, in spite of the numberless horrors of the waning century. 

Having broken the taboos of suffocating bourgeois culture, we are now supposed to break the being, the unicity of humankind, through the impending explosion of a genetic bomb that will be to biology what the atomic bomb was to physics.  

You don't make literature out of warm and fuzzy feelings, they say. And they are probably right. But how far do we go in the opposite direction? As far as SNUFF LITERATURE, in which the conformism of abjection innovates an academicism of horror, an official art of macabre entertainment? In the United States, to take one example, the torturing of the human body by sharp instruments seems to have become the preferred image of advertising, according to the Wall Street Journal of 4 May 2000. 

Hit over the head by such media bludgeoning, the art lover is surely already the victim of what psychiatrists call impaired judgement. Which is the first step in an accelerated process of derealization, contemporary art accepting the escalation in extremism and therefore in insignificance, with significance going the way of the 'heroic' nature of old-fashioned official art, and obscenity now exceeding all bounds with SNUFF MOVIES and death, live ... 

Let's turn now to contemporary theatre and dance, in particular the work of choreographer, Meg Stuart. Since the early 1 990s, Stuart has been taking her stage performance to the limit. In Disfigured Study of 1991, the dancer's skin looked like it was straining to contain a body in the process of dislocating itself in a brutal vision of automatic self-mutilation. Devastated bodies seemed like so many panicky signs of a live spectacle in which 'the catastrophic intensity condenses a terrifying serenity at the edge of the abyss' as you could read in the press apropos Stuart's most recent work, Appetite, conceived with the installation artist, Ann Hamilton.  

In work like this, everything is dance, dance involving ' bodies without hands, twisted legs, wavering identity expressing who knows what selfhatred'. After the SNUFF VIDEO, we now have the SNUFF DANCE, the dance of death of the slaughterhouses of modernity. 

Whether Adorno likes it or not, the spectacle of abjection remains the same, after as before Auschwitz . But it has become politically incorrect to say so. All in the name of freedom of expression, a freedom contemporary with the terrorist politics Joseph Goebbels described as 'the art of making possible what seemed impossible'.

But let's dispel any doubts we might still have. Despite the current negationism, freedom of expression has at least one limit: the call to murder and torture. Remember the media of hate in the ex-Yugoslavia of Slobodan Milosovic? Remember the 'Thousand Hills Radio' of the Great Lakes region of Africa calling Rwandans to inter-ethnic genocide? Confronted by such 'expressionist' events, surely we can see what comes next, looming over us as it is: an officially terrorist art preaching suicide and selfmutilation thereby extending the current infatuation with scarring and piercing. Or else random slaughter, the coming of a THANATOPHILIA that would revive the now fo rgotten fascist slogan: VIVA LA MUERTA! 

At this point we might note the project of the multinational Monsanto designed to genetically programme crop sterilization and designated by the telling name, 'TERMINATOR'. Are we still talking biotechnology here? Aren't we really talking about a form of necro-technology aimed at ensuring one firm's monopoly? 

Thanatophilia, ,necro-technology and one day soon, teratology . :. Is this genetic trance still a science, some new alchemy, or is it an extreme art? 

For confirmation we need loqk no further than the Harvard Medical School where Malcolm Logan and Clifford Tabin recently created a mutation that says a lot about the fundamentally expressionist nature of gene tic engineering. 

After locating a gene that seemed to play a decisive role in the formation of a chicken's hindlimbs, Logan and Tabin took the radical step of introducing the gene into the genome of a virus which they then injected into the developing wings of a chicken embryo to test the function of the gene.

​Some weeks later, this TERATOLOGICAL breakthrough made headlines.  

The chicken's wings have undergone major transformations and now look like legs, with the wing twisted into a position suitable for walking and the fingers pivoting to facilitate pressure on the ground. The placement of the muscles is radically different, too, better adapted to the specific functions of walking.

But this monster is not yet perfect, however, for its Kafkaesque metamorphosis is incomplete ... The 'four-legged chicken' is in fact an experimental failure worthy of featuring in the bestiary of a Jerome Bosch! After the 'Doctor Strangeloves' of the atomic bomb, voila 'Frankenstein', no less: the monster has become the chimerical horizon of the study of malformations. And it won't be long before human guinea pigs are used instead of animals in future experiments. 

​Let's hear it from those trying to denounce this drift of genetic expressionism, from the inside: 

The dazzle of success is goading biologists implacably on, each obstacle overcome leading them to take up the next challenge a challenge even greater, even more insane? We should note that if this challenge is not met, the consequences will not be felt by the biologists alone but also by this improbable and uncertain child whose birth they will have enabled in spite of everything. 

​So writes Axel Kahn apropos 'medically assisted procreation'. Kahn concludes, 'Everything in the history of human enterprise would indicate that this headlong rush into the future will one day end in cat-astrophies in botched attempts at human beings.

How can we fail here to denounce yet another facet of negationism: that of the deliberate overlooking of the famous NUREMBURG CODE, set down in 1 947 in the wake of the horrors the Nazi doctors perpetrated? 'The Nuremburg Code established the conditions under which tests on human beings could be conducted; it is a fundamental text for modern medical ethics', as Axel Kahn rightly reminds us ... There is not a hint of respect for any of this in the contemporary trials: 'When will the Nuremburg Code be applied to medically assisted procreation ... to the attempts at creating a human being?' asks Kahn, as a geneticist and member of the ​French National Ethics Committee, by way of conclusion. 

Ethics or aesthetics? That is indeed the question at the dawn of the millenni um. If freedom of SCIENTIFIC expression now actually has no more limits than freedom of ARTISTIC expression, where will inhumanity end in future? 

After all the great periods of art, after the great schools such as the classical and the baroque, after contemporary expressionism, are we not now heading for that great transgenic art in which every pharmacy, every laboratory will launch its own 'lifestyles', its own transhuman fashions? A chimerical explosion worthy of featuring in some future Salon of New Realities if not in a Museum of Eugenic Art.  

As one critic recently put it: 'Artists have their bit to say about the laws of nature at this fin de siecle. ' What is urgently required is 'to difine a new relationship between species, one that is not conceived in the loaded terms of bestiality'.

It is not entirely irrelevant to point out here that if 'extreme sports' came before 'extreme sciences' , there is a good reason for this, one that has to do with the cult of performance, of art for art's sake, the breaking of records of every imaginable kind. 

When it comes to the ingestion of certain ​substances by top-level sportspeople, a number of trainers are already asking about limits. 'We are at the beginnings of biological reprogramming yet we don't know how far we are not going to be able to go.' Beyond the drug tests and medical monitoring that champions are already subject to, the general lack of guidelines opens the way to gene tic manipulation and cellular enhancement as well as doping on a molecular level. According to Gerard Dine, head of the 'Mobile Biological Unit' launched by the French Minister of Youth and Sport: 

Sportspeople are managed by an entourage who are under more and more pressure from the media and their financial backers. If the current debate isn't settled pretty .. swiftly, a person will only have to ask in order to be programmed to win.  

'The assembly-line champion is already on the drawing board. Soon we will even be able to intervene with precision on energy levels and mechanical, muscular and neurological elements' , one expert claims. After all, the German Democratic Republic did it in the 1 970s using synthetic hormones, but these left a trace. Thanks to genomics, you can now enter the human system in the same way as you break into a computer bank without leaving any trace at all. 

'The lack of guidelines requires us urgently to define an ethical boundary that would make clear what comes under therapy and what is out of bounds' . 

If we do not put in place some sort of code that would extend what was covered by the Nuremburg Code in the area of experimentation on top-level sports people, the Olympic Games of the year 2020 or 2030, say, will be mere games of the transgenic circus in which the magicians of the human genome will hold up for our applause the exploits of the stadium gods of a triumphant super-humanity. 

Ethical boundary, aesthetic boundary of sport as of art. Without limits, there is no value; without value, there is no esteem, no respect and especially no pity: death to the referee! You know how it goes ... 

Already, more or less everywhere you turn, you hear the words that precede that fatal habituation to the banalization of excess. For certain philosophers the body is already no more than a phenomenon of memory, the remnants of an archaic body; and the human being, a mere biped, fragile of flesh and so slow to grow up and defend itself that the species should not have survived ...

To make up for this lack, this 'native infirmity' as they call it, echoing a phrase used by Leroi-Gourhan: man invented tools, prostheses and a whole technological corpus without which he would ​not have survived ... But this is a restrospective vision incapable of coming to terms with the outrageousness of the time that is approaching. Ghicault, Picasso and Dali, Galton and Mengele ... Who comes next? 

Where will it end, this impie ty of art, of the arts and crafts of this 'transfiguration' that not only fulfils the dreams of the German Expressionists but also those of the Futurists, those 'hate-makers' whose destructiveness Hans Magnus Enzensberger has dissected. 

Remember Mayakovsky's war cry, that blast of poetic premonition: ' Let your axes dance on the bald skulls of the well-heeled egoists and grocers. Kill! Kill! Kill! One good thing: their skulls will make perfect ashtrays. 

Ashtrays, lampshades, quotidian objects and prostheses of a life where the banality of evil, its ordinariness, is far more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, as Hannah Arendt noted while observing the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. 

Under the reign of Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea, the hopes of the poet of the October Revolution were satisfied yet again, though it was with spades, not axes, that the self-mutilation of a social body of nearly two million Cambodians was perpetrated. 'The murderers did not use firearms. ​The silence, they knew, added further to the climate of terror'. 

The silence of the lambs still required the silence of the executioners. The silence of an untroubled conscience, such as that enjoyed by a so-called 'political science' now disowned by former 'revolutionary' Leng-Sary who today declares, apparently by way of excuse, 'The world has changed. I no longer believe in the class struggle. The period from 1975 to 1979 was a failure. We went from utopia to barbarity. '

Meanwhile, Tuol Sleng has become a museum a genocide museum. The sinister Camp-S2 1 (Security Office 21), where the gaolers were teenagers, offers visitors a tour of the gallery of photographic portraits of its multitudinous victims. Here, contrary to the German extermination camps, the bodies have disappeared, but the faces remain ... 

This pitiless century, the twentieth.
    Albert Camus   

This evening we are not going to talk about piety or impiety but about pity, the pitiful or pitiless nature of 'contemporary art'. So we will not be talking about profane art versus sacred art but we may well tackle the profanation of forms and bodies over the course of the twentieth century. For these days when people get down to debate the relevance or awfulness of contemporary art, they generally forget to ask one vital question: Contemporary art, sure, but contemporary with what?

In an unpublished interview with Francois Rouan, Jacqueline Lichtenstein recently recounted her experience: 

When I visited the Museum at AUSCHWITZ, I stood in front of the display cases. What I saw there were images from contemporary art and I found that absolutely terrifying. Looking at the exhibits of suitcases, prosthetics, children's toys, I didn't feel frightened. I didn't collapse. I wasn't completely overcome the way I had been walking around the camp. No. In the Museum, I suddenly had the impression I was in a museum if contemporary art. I took the train back, telling myself that they had won! They had won since they'd produced forms of perception that are all of a piece with the mode of destruction they made their own.

What we will be asking this evening will thus take up where Jacqueline Lichtenstein left off: did the Nazi terror lose the war but, in the end, win the peace? This peace based on ' the balance of terror' not only between East and West but also between the forms and figures of an aesthetics of disappearance that would come to characterize the whole fin de siecle.

'To humanize oneself is to universalize oneself from within', they say. Hasn't the universality of the extermination of bodies as well as of the environment, from AUSCHWITZ to CHERNOBYL, succeeded in dehumanizing us from without by shattering our ethic and aesthetic bearings, our very perception of our surroundings? 

At the dawn of industrial modernity, Baudelaire declared, 'I am the wound and the knife.' How can we fail to see that, in the wake of the hecatomb of the Great War, when Braque and Otto Dix found themselves on opposite sides of the trenches in the mud of the Somme, modern art for its part forgot about the wound and concentrated on the knife the bayonet with the likes of Oskar Kokoschka, 'the scalpel-wielding artist' , before moving on through the German Expressionism of Der Sturm to the Viennese Actionism of Rudolf Schwarzkogler and his cohorts in the 1960s ... 

ART MAUDIT or Artist Maudit? What can you say, meanwhile, about the likes of Richard Hiilsenbeck, one of the founding fathers of Dada, who told a Berlin audience in 1918, at a conference on the new trends in art, 'We were for the war. Dada today is still for war. Life should hurt. There is not enough cruelly! The rest is history. Twenty years later the 'Theatre of Cruelty' would not be the one defined by Antonin Artaud but by Kafka, that prophet of doom of the metamorphosis engineered by the camps, the smashing to smithereens of humanism. 

The slogan of the First Futurist Manifesto of 1909 'War is the world's only hygiene' led directly, though ​thirty years later this time, to the shower block of Auschwitz-Birkenau. And Breton's 'Surrealism' , following hot on the heels of Dada, emerged fully armed from the fireworks of the Great War where common reality was suddenly transfigured by the magic of explosives and poison gases at Ypres and Verdun. 

After that, what is left of Adorno's pompous pronouncement about the impossibiliry if writing a poem after AUSCHWITZ? Not much at the end of the day, for everything, or almost everything, kicked off at the turn of a pitiless and endlessly catastrophic century from the TITANIC in 1912 to CHERNOBYL in 1986, via the crimes against humanity of HIROSHIMA and NAGASAKI, where one of the paintings in van Gogh's 'Starry Night' series went up in the nuclear blast. 

Perhaps at this juncture it is worth remembering Paul Celan, the German poet who committed suicide in Paris in 1970, the same year that painter Mark Rothko did in New York . .. But why stop there in art's death roll, featuring as it does a constant suicide rate from the self-destruction of Vincent van Gogh, ' the man with the missing ear'? 

You would think the drive to extinguish the suffocating culture of the bourgeoisie consisted specifically in exterminating oneself into the bargain the dubious bargain of the art market thus giving ideas, for want of cultural ideals, to the great exterminators of the twentieth century! 

Remember what Friedrich Nietzsche advised: 'Simplify your life: die!' This extremist simplification in which 'ornament is a crime', has stayed with us throughout the history of the twentieth century, from the pointlessly repeated assault on the peaks of the Chemin des Dames in 191 7 to the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s. 

Avant-garde artists, like many political agitators, propagandists and demagogues, have long understood what TERRORISM would soon popularize: if you want a place in 'revolutionary history' there is nothing easier than provoking a riot, an assault on propriety, in the guise of art. 

Short of committing a real crime by killing innocent passers-by with a bomb, the pitiless contemporary author of the twentieth century attacks symbols, the very meaning of a 'pitiful' art he assimilates to 'academicism'. Take Guy Debord, the French Situationist, as an example. In 1 952, speaking about his Film Without Images, which mounted a defence of the Marquis de Sade, Debord claimed he wanted to kill the cinema 'because it was easier than killing a passer-by'.

A year later, in 1953, the SITUATIONISTS would not hesitate to extend this attack by trashing Charlie Chaplin, pitiful actor par excellence, vilifying him as a sentimental fraud, mastermind of misery, even a proto-fascist!

All this verbal delirium seems so oblivious of its own century and yet condescends to preach to the rest of the world in the name of freedom of artistic expression, even during a historical period that oversaw the setting up of the balance of terror along with the opening of the laboratories of a science that was gearing up to programme the end of the world notably with the invention, in 1951, of thermonuclear weapons. It corresponds equally to the autodissolution of the avant-gardes, the end of the grand illusion of a modernite savante. You would think it was not so much impressionism that laid the foundations for the latter as the nihilism of the calamitous intelligentsia of nineteenth-century Russia, with men like Netcha'iev decreeing that one had to 'forge full steam ahead into the mire' ... And he was not talking about Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed (The Great Western Railway), the painting that paved the way for Monet's Impressionism. 

Inseparable from the suicidal state of representative democracies, the art of the twentieth century has never ceased dangerously anticipating or at least ​saluting from afar the abomination of the desolation of modern times with their cardboard cut-out dictator that keeps popping up, whether it be Hitler or the 'Futurist', Mussolini, Stalin or Mao Zedong.

And so the emblematic figure emerges not so much of Marcel Duchamp as Charlie Chaplin or Bonnard, pitiful painter par excellence, as was Claude Monet, that miracle-worker of a Rising Sun, which is not quite the same as the one rising over the laboratories of LOS ALAMOS.

The new German painting, naturally, represents current sensibility in Germany and it really frightens me. The Ancients invented and represented the world of witches, but the world of Hate is a modern invention, the invention of Germany, spread out over the canvas. The demons of gothic pictures are child's play when it comes to the human, or, rather, inhuman, heads of a humanity bent on destruction. Furious, murderous, demoniacal heads not in the style of the old masters but in completely modern manner: scientific, choking with poison gas. They would like to carve the Germans of tomorrow out of fresh meat ... 

So wrote the great art dealer, Rene Gimpel, in his diary of 1925. Gimpel was to disappear in the NEUENGAMME camp twenty years later on New Year's Day, 1945 ... Thoroughly convinced of the lethal character of the works of Oskar Kokoschka, Emil Nolde or the sculptor, Lehmbruck, Gimpel goes on to tell us that there never has been any such thing as old-master art or modern or contemporary art, but that the 'old master' shaped us, whereas the 'contemporary' artist shapes the perception of the next generation, to the point where no one is 'ahead of their time for they are their time, each and every day'. 

How can we not subscribe to this statement of the bleeding obvious if we compare the fifteenth-century PIETA OF AVIGNON with the sixteenth-century lssenheim Altarpiece of Matthis Grunewald both pitiful works the 'expressionism' of the German master of the polyptych illustrating the atrocity of the battles and epidetnics of his time in the manner of Jerome Bosch? 

Today we could apply this observation about lack of anticipation to 'issues' such as the 'contaminated blood affair' in France and the (alleged ) nonculpability of the politicians in charge at the time ...

Without harking back to Jacques Callot or even Francisco de Goya and ' the miseries of war' of the Napoleonic era, we might remember what Picasso said when a German interrogated him in 1937 about his masterwork, GUERNICA: "That's your doing, not mine!"

If so-called old-master art remained demonstrative right up until the nineteenth century with Impressionism, the art of the twentieth century became 'monstrative' in the sense that it is contemporary with the shattering effect of mass societies, subj ect as they are to the conditioning of opinion and MASS MEDIA propaganda and this, with the same mounting extremism evident in terrorism or total war.  

At the end of the millennium, what abstraction once tried to pull off is in fact being accomplished before our very eyes: the end of REPRESENTATIVE art and the substitution of a counter-culture, of a PRESENTATIVE art. A situation that reinforces the dreadful decline of representative democracy in favour of a democracy based on the rule of opinion, in anticipation of the imminent arrival of virtual democracy, some kind of 'direct democracy' or, more precisely, a presentative multimedia democracy based on automatic polling. 

In the end, 'modern art' was able to glean what communications and telecommunications tools now accomplish on a daily basis: the mise en abyme of the body, of the figure, with the major attendant risk of systematic hyperviolence and a boom in pornographic high-frequency that has nothing to do with sexuality: We must put out the excess rather than the fire, as Heraclitus warned. 

Today, with excess heaped on excess, desensitization to the shock of images and the meaninglessness of words has shattered the world stage . PITILESS, contemporary art is no longer improper. But it shows all the impropriety of profaners and torturers, all the arrogance of the executioner.

The intelligence of REPRESENTATION then gives way to the stunned mullet effect of a 'presence' that is not only weird, as in the days of Surrealism, but insulting to the mind. The whole process, moreover, implies that the 'image' suffices to give art its meaning and significance. At one extreme the artist, like the journalist, is redundant in the face-off between performer and viewer. 

'Such a conception of information leads to a disturbing fascination with images filmed live, with scenes of violence and gruesome human interest stories', Ignacio Ramonet writes on the impact of television on the print media. 'This demand encourages the supply of fake documents, sundry reconstructions and conjuring tricks.

But surely we could say the same today of art when it comes down to it. Take the example of the NEW NEUROTIC REALISM of adman and collector, Charles Saatchi, as revealed in the London (and New York) exhibition, 'Sensation' , with i ts fusion/confusion of the TABLOID and ​some sort of would-be avant-garde art. Yet the conformism of abjection is never more than a habit the twentieth century has enjoyed spreading round the globe. 

Here, the brutality is no longer so much aimed at warning as at destroying, paving the way for the actual torturing of the viewer, the listener, which will not be long coming thanks to that cybernetic artefact: the interactive feed-back if virtual reality. 

If the contemporary author is redundant see Picasso on Guernica and if the suicide rate has only kept accelerating in cultural circles to the point where it will soon be necessary to set up a WALL OF THE FEDERATED COMMUNE OF SUICIDES in museums (to match the wall of the federated communards of the Paris Commune in Pere Lachaise cemetery), then make no mistake: the art lover's days are numbered! 

This is how Rothko put it: 'I studied the figure. Only reluctantly did I realize it didn't correspond to my needs. Using human representation, for me, meant mutilating it'. Shot of all moral or emotional compromise, the painter seeks to move 'towards the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, between the idea and the onlooker'.

This is the radiographic triumph of transparence, the way radiation of the real in architecture today goes hand in glove with the extermination of all intermediaries, of all that still resists revelation, pure and simple.

But this sudden OVEREXPOSURE of the work, as of those who look upon it, is accompanied by a violence that is not only 'symbolic', as before, but practical, since it affects the very intentionality of the painter: 'To those who find my paintings serene, I'd like to say that I have trapped the most absolute violence in every square centimetre of their surface', Mark Rothko confesses before proving the point by turning this repressed fury against himself on a certain day in February, 1970. 

Thirty years on, how can we fail to feel the concentration of accumulated hate in every square metre of the 'uncivil cities' of this fin de siecle? Go one night and check out the basements or underground parking lots of suburban council estates, all that the clandestine RAVE PAR TIES and BACKROOM brothels are only ever the tourist trappings of, so to speak! 

After having 'only reluctantly' abandoned the figure on the pretext of not mutilating it, the American painter then chose to end this life himself as well by exercising the most nihilistic of freedoms of expression: that of SELF-DESTRUCTION. 

If God died in the nineteenth century, according ​to Nietzsche, what is the bet that the victim of the twentieth century will not turn out to be the creator, the author, this heresy of the historical materialism of the cen tury of machines? 

But before we bid the Artist farewell, we should not forget for a moment that the words PITY and PIETY are consubstantial something the members of the Holy Inquisition obviously overlooked ... Let's not repeat their crimes, let's not become negationists of art. 

​by Paul Virilio

'Remaining silent, now there's a lesson for you! What more immediate notion of duration?' , Paul Valery noted in 1938, shortly before the tragedy of the camps, the silence of the lambs ... ​

To speak or to remain silent: are they to sonority what to show or to hide are to visibility? What prosecution of meaning is thus hidden behind the prosecution of sound? Has remaining silent now become a discreet form of assent, of connivance, in the age of the sonorization of images and all audiovisual icons? Have vocal machines' powers of enunciation gone as far as the denunciation of silence, of a silence that has turned into MUTISM? ​

To better understand such a heretical point of view about the programmed demise of the VOICES OF SILENCE, think of the perverse implications of the colouration of films originally shot in BLACK AND WHITE, to cite one example, or the use of monochromatic film in photographing accidents, oil spills. The lack of colour in a film segment or snapshot is seen as the tell-tale sign of a DEFECT, a handicap, the loss of colour of the rising tide under the eflects of maritime pollution ...  ​

Whereas in the past, engraving enriched a painting's hues with its velvety blacks and the a rainbow array of its grays, BLACK and WHITE are now no more than traces of a degradation, some premature ruin. ​

Just like a yellowed photograph of the deceased mounted on their tomb, the MONOCHROMATIC segment merely signals the obscurantism of a bygone era, the dwindling of a heroic age in which the VISION MACHINE had yet to reveal the PANCHROMATIC riches of Technicolor ... gaudy, brash AGFACOLORI over-privileging hot colours to the detriment of cold. But surely we can say the same thing about the sonorization of what were once silent films. ​

Nowadays everything that remains silent is deemed to consent, to accept without a word of protest the background noise of audio-visual immoderation that is, of the 'optically correct'. But what happens as a result to the SILENCE OF THE VISIBLE under the reign of the AUDIO-VISIBLE epitomized by television, wildly overrated as television is? How can we apply the lesson of Paul Valery's aphorism in considering the question, not of the silence of art so dear to Andre Malraux, but of the DEAFNESS of the contemporary arts in the age of the multimedia? ​

Silence no longer has a voice. It LOST ITS VOICE half a century ago. But this mutism has now come to a head ... The voices of silence have been silenced; what is now regarded as obscene is not so much the image as the sound or, rather, the lack of sound. ​

What happens to the WORLD OF SILENCE once the first SON ET LUMIERE productions are staged, again under the aegis of Malraux, invading as they do the monumental spaces of the Mediterranean? The 'son et lumiere' phenomenon has been followed most recently by the craze in museums as venues for live shows, though you would be hardpressed to beat the calamitous NIGHT OF THE MILLENNIUM, when the mists of the Nile Valley suddenly broke up a Jean-Michel Jarre concert. After the deafening felt of Beuy's London installation, PLIGHT, they managed to bring SMOG to the foot of the pyramids. ​

​'I don't want to avoid telling a story, but I want very, very much to do the thing Valery said to give the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance.' These words of Francis Bacon's, taken from David Sylvester's interviews with the artist and quoted as a lead-in fbr the 'Modern Starts' exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, 1999, beautifully sum up the current dilemma: the less you represent, the more you push the simulacrum of REPRESENTATION!

​But what is this 'situation' concealing if not the contraction if time? Of this real time that effaces all duration, exclusively promoting instead the present, the directness of the immediacy of ZERO TIME ... a contraction of the LIVE and of LIFE, which we see once more at work in the recent appeal of live shows, which are to dance and choreography what the video installation already was to Fernand Leger's Mechanical Ballet. 

All in all, the invention of the CINEMATOGRAPH has radically altered the experience of exposure time, the whole regime of temporality of the visual arts. In the nineteenth century, the aesthetics of CINEMATIC disappearance promptly supplanted the multimillennial aesthetics of the appearance of the STATIC. ​

Curiously, it is in the era of the Great Depression that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1 929 that  ​SILENCE WAS PUT ON TRIAL in Europe as in the United States. From that moment, WHOEVER SAYS NOTH ING IS DEEMED TO CONSENT. No silence can express disapproval or resistance but only consent. The silence of the image is not only ANIMATED by the motorization of film segments; it is also ENLISTED in the general acquiescence in a TOTAL ART the seventh art which, they would then claim, contained all the rest. ​

During the great economic crisis which, in Europe, would end in Nazi TOTALITARIANISM, silence was already no more than a form of abstention. The trend everywhere was towards the simultaneous synchronization of image and sound. Whence the major political role played at the time by cinematic NEWSREELS, notably those produced by Fox-Movietone in the United States and by UFA in Germany, which perfectly prefigured televisual prime time. ​

Those days are long gone. No one is waiting any more for the REVOLUTION, only for the ACCIDENT, the breakdown, that will reduce this unbearable chatter to silence. ​

In olden days a pianist used to punctuate segments of old burlesque movies; now the reality of s cenes of everyday life needs to be subtitled in similar vein, the AUDIO-VISUAL aiming to put paid to the silence of vision in its entirety. ​

All you have to do is dump your mobile phone and grab your infra-red helmet. Then you are ready to go wandering around those museums where the sound-track amply makes up for the image track of the picture-rail. ​

Victim of the prosecution of silence, contemporary art long ago made a bid for divergence in other words, to practise a CONCEPTUAL DIVERSION before opting for convergence. ​

Surely that is the only way we can interpret the Cubists' newspaper collages or the later, post- 1918, collages and photomontages of Raoul Hausmann, say, or his Berlin Dadaist confrere, John Heartfield, not to mention the French Dadaists and Surrealists, among others. ​

In a decidedly fin de siecle world, where the automobile questions its driver about the functioning of the handbrake or whether the seatbelt is buckled, where the refrigerator is gearing itself up to place the order at the supermarket, where your computer greets you of a morning with a hearty 'hello', surely we have to ask ourselves whether the silence of art can be sustained for much longer. ​

This goes even for the mobile phone craze that is part and parcel of the same thing, since it is now necessary to impose silence in restaurants and places ​of worship or concert halls. One day, following the example of the campaign to combat nicotine addiction, it may well be necessary to put up signs of the 'Silence Hospital' variety at the entrance to museums and exhibition halls to get all those 'communication machines' to shut up and put an end to the all too numerous cultural exercises in SOUND and LIGHT. ​

Machine for seeing, machine for hearing, once upon a time; machine for thinking very shortly with the boom in all things digital and the programmed abandonment of the analogue. How will the silence if the infinite spaces of art subsist, this silence that seems to terrify the makers of motors of any kind, from the logical inference motor of the computer to the research engine of the network of networks? All these questions that today remain unanswered make ENIGMAS of contemporary ethics and aesthetics.  ​

With architecture, alas, the jig is already up. Architectonics has become an audio-visual art, the only question now being whether it will shortly go on to become a VIRTUAL ART. For sculpture, ever since Jean Tinguely and his 'Bachelor Machines', this has been merely a risk to be run. As for painting and the graphic arts, from the moment VIDEO ART hit the scene with the notion of the installation, it has been impossible to mention  ​CONCEPTUAL ART without picking up the background noise of the mass media behind the words and objects of the art market. ​

Having digested the critical impact of Marcel Duchamp's retinal art, let's hear what French critic, Patrick Vauday, had to say a little more recently:  ​

At those words, you could be forgiven for fearing that the waxing twenty-first century were about to reproduce the first years of the twentieth, albeit unwittingly! ​

Under the guise of 'new technologies', surely what is really at work here is the actual CLONING, over and over, of some SUPER-, no, HYPERABSTRACTION that will be to virtual reality what HYPER-REALISM was to the photographic shot. This is happening at a time when someone like Kouichirou Eto, for instance, is gearing up to launch SOUND CREATURES on the Internet along with his own meta-musical ambient music! ​

What this means is a style of painting not only without figures but also without images, a music of the spheres without sound, presenting the symptoms of a blinding that would be the exact counterpart to the silence of the lambs. Speaking of the painter Turner, certain nineteenth-century aesthetes such as Hazlitt denounced the advent of 'pictures of nothing, and very like'. You can bet that soon, thanks to digital technology, electro-acoustic music will generate new forms of visual art. Electro-optic computer graphics will similarly erase the demarcation lines between the different art forms. ​

Once again, we will speak of a TOTAL ART one no longer indebted to the cinematograph, that art which supposedly contained all the rest. Thanks to electronics, we will invent a GLOBAL ART, a 'single art' , like the thinking that subtends the new information and communications technologies. ​

To take an example, think of the influence of  Wagner on Kandinsky in 1910, when the very first ABSTRACT canvases emerged; or think of the influence of Kurt Schwitters whose Ursonate was composed of oral sounds ... Then, of course, there is the influence of JAZZ on works like the 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' of New York based Mondrian, an artist who would not have a telephone in the house during the years 1 940 to 1 942 . Unlike MoholyNagy, who was already making TELE-PAINTINGS twenty years earlier using the crank phone to issue instructions at a distance to a sign painter ... and inventing pictorial INTERACTIVITY in the process. ​

All this interaction between SOUND, LIGHT and IMAGE, far from creating a 'new art' or a new reality to borrow the name of the 1950 Paris salon dedicated to French painter Herbin's geometric abstraction only destroys the nature of art, promoting instead its communication. ​

Last autumn, the BBC began broadcasting recordings of murmurs and conversation noises destined for the offices at the big end of town where employees complain about the reigning deathly silence. ​

'We're trying to get a background of ambient sound', explains a spokesman for the British station. 'These offices are so quiet that the slightest noise, such as the phone ringing, disturbs people's concentration which, of course, can lead to stuff-ups. ​

Following the muzak that is piped through shops and supermarkets, let's hear it for AMBIENT MURMURING, the voice of the voiceless! After the promotion of domestic consumerism via the euphoria of radiophony, it is now production that finds itself beefed up with a sound backdrop designed to improve office life ... ​

Similarly, over at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the post-renovation reopening exhibition, which was called 'Le Temps vite' or ' Time, Fast' was underscored by a sound piece composed by Heiner Goebbels. ​

On the eve of the new millennium, the aesthetics of disappearance was completed by the aesthetics of absence. From that moment, whoever says nothing consents to cede their 'right to remain silent' , their freedom to listen, to a noise-making process that simulates oral expression or conversation. ​

Today, when the AUDIO-VISIBLE of the mass media reigns, beamed out twenty-four hours a day seven days a week, what remains of that effect of immediacy of visual representation? Media presentation dominates everywhere you turn.  ​

Struck 'deaf and 'dumb' over the course of the waning century, the visual arts have taken a battering, not only from the animated image, but especially from the TALKIES.  ​

​Remember, too, what the poet said when he insisted on the fact that so-called SILENT cinema was only ever DEAF, the first cinema-goers of the darkened movie halls being less aware of the actors' lack of words than of their own deafness. The early devotee of the seventh art of cinematography translated the silence of the movies into their own imaginary handicap, their personal limitation in seeing without hearing what the characters up on the screen were saying to each other. ​

Yet has anyone ever experienced this feeling of infirmity looking at a painting representing singers or angelic musicians? Hardly! So why did the aesthetics of the animated image suddenly disable the viewer of silent films, rendering strangely deaf a person hitherto not deaf in the slightest? ​

'Looking is not the same as experiencing' , Isabelle Adjani reckons and she would know when it comes to looks. Adjani here goes one further than Kafka, who expressed his specific anxiety to his friend, Gustav Janouch, some time in the years between 1910 and 1912 : ​

What can you say about the 'talkies' and about the sound-track that puts the finishing touches on the effect of mastery of the image track, except that they are a lot more harmful than people realize? Must we wheel in radiophony and telephony yet again to explain 'the accident of the visible' ' that goes by the name of the AUDIO-VISUAL?  ​

​Bear in mind Demeny's bit of chronophotography in which a man mouths 'je t'aime' to a camera that only records the movement of his lips. We've all seen the smile of the Mona Lisa; here you can see the smile of Etienne-Jules Marey's pretty niece as a prelude to hearing speech enunciated in front of a microphone. ​

The contemporary cnsls in the plastic arts actually started here, with the enunciation if the image of the TALKIES and the concomitant denunciation of our deafness. You do not lend speech to walls or screens with impunity not without also attacking the fresco and mural art and, ultimately, the whole panoply of the parietal aesthetics of architecture every bit as much as painting.
​
After the eye, mobilized by the whipping past of film sequences denounced by Kafka, it is the turn of the ear, traumatized suddenly by imaginary deafness. Victim of the war in which the unfolding of time is speeded-up, the field of perception suddenly becomes a real battlefield, with its barked commands and its shrieks of terror; whence the quest for the SCREAM as for FEAR conducted by the German Expressionists throughout the traumatic years of the 1920s and 1930s when the disqualification of the silence of paintings would usher in the impending tyranny of mass communications tools. 

This bestowing of speech upon images, upon the whirling rush of film, meant unwittingly triggering a phenomenon of panic in which the audio-visual would gradually lead to this silence of the lambs whereby the art lover becomes the victim of sound, a hostage of the sonorization of the visible. In his 1910 tract Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto, Marinetti, ​after all, declared, 'Our sensations must not be whispered; we will make them sing and shout upon our canvases in deafening and triumphant fanfares.'  ​

'To command, you must first of all speak to the eyes', Napoleon Bonaparte decreed. 'The cinema means putting your eyes into uniform' , Kafka confirmed . Between these two complementary assertions, oral culture has slowly evaporated. The art of speaking has bowed out before the ' talking' cinema and the oratorical power of the political tribune has been defeated by media culture. From now on, what speaks is the image any image, from billboard images to images at home on the box. ​

Wherever TELEPRESENCE has taken over from PRESENCE, whether physical or graphic, silence spreads, endlessly deepening.  ​

​Having been wired for sound at the end of the 1920s in 1927, to be precise, with the film The Jazz Singer the cinematograph has not only pulled blinkers over viewers' eyes or iron shutters, as Kafka would say. It has also, according to Abel Gance, stymied looking before going on to render the visual arts hoarse and then swiftly dumb. ​

By indirectly promoting the rise of TOTALITARIANISM, Democratic Germany's 'silent prosecution' promptly authorized every kind of negationism. Bear in mind the confession of the German priest, Father Niemoller: 'When they arrested the gypsies, I said nothing. When they arrested the homosexuals, I said nothing. When they deported the Jews, I said nothing. But when they arrested me, the others said nothing.' Early warning signs of the pitiless nature of MODERN TIMES as portrayed by Charlie Chaplin, the visual arts of that historical period never ceased TORTURING FORMS before making them disappear in abstraction. Similarly others would not cease TORTURING BODIES afterwards to the tune of the screams of the tortured prior to their asphyxiation inside the gas chambers.  ​

On that note, let's hear the testimony of Valeska Gert, the actress who starred in German filmmaker G. W. Pabst's 1 925 'street' film, Joyless Street: ​

A still figure coming to life, silhouettes, shadows flapping about: the camera obscura had already been there, done that with the invention of visual perspective. But an animated image, one that talks, calls out to you ... This was the birth of a sonorous audio-visual perspective that far outdid what instrumental music had already done for the history of oral culture. Suddenly Plato's cave became the Sybil's lair and there was not a thing the visual arts could do about this sudden irruption of the AUDIO-VISIBLE. ​

When Al Jolson, the white singer who mimicked the movements of a black singer, launched his celebrated 'Hello Mammy' in the first talking film, in 1927, he was answering the unarticulated scream of Edvard Munch. In 1 883, two years before the Lumiere brothers invented cinema, Munch had tried to puff up the painted image with a sort of SOUND RELIEF, which was until that moment the sole province of music and its attendant notations. ​

Similarly, around 1910, newly hatched abstraction would typify the bid for mental sonorization in the pictorial realm. Here's the way Kandinsky put it: 'The clearer the abstract element of form, the purer, the more elementary, the sound.'  ​

While theatre and dance those arts involving immediate presence still demand prolonged ​attention, we sum up the visual arts immediately, or as good as. The very recent development of REALTIME computer imagery only ever accentuates this effect of iconic stupefaction. ​

Whence contemporary art's shrillness in its bid to be heard without delay that is, without necessitating attention, without requiring the onlooker's prolonged reflection and instead going for the conditioned reflex, for a reactionary and simultaneous activity.
And strangely, as British art historian, Norbert Lynton, notes: ​

To thus vociferously denounce OMERTA, this law of the silence of art, and promote instead some socalled 'freeing up of speech' , was to trigger a system of informing that George Orwell would later portray to perfection. NEWSPEAK, the language Orwell invented in his novel, Nineteen-Eighty-Four, beautifully exemplifies not only the linguistic cliches of the emergent totalitarianisms, but also the crimes and misdemeanours of the audio-visual language of the MASS MEDIA and, in particular, those of this denunciatory telesurveillance we see being installed all over the world. ​

​While psychoanalytical culture managed to bring artists up to speed with tales from the FREUDIAN DIVAN, twentieth-century political culture would embark on the rocky road of trying to control the silent majorities. TO MAKE SOMEONE TALK would suddenly become a major requirement with the advent of the poll and television ratings systems. ​

​Despite Magritte and a handful of others, commercial imagery verbal art, visual art would wreak the havoc we are all too familiar with yet which has for some reason provoked less of an outcry than that wreaked by 'Socialist Realism', the official art of the defunct Soviet Union ... The comic strip iconography of the likes of Roy Lichtenstein taking on the noisy sound effects of the Futurist machines, Mimmo Rotella apeing systematic billposting, etc. Why go on?​

excerpt from the book: Art and Fear by PAUL VIRILIO ​

There are two problems here that certain people confuse in order to construct the phantom of a historical reality that would solely be made up of ‘fictions’. The first problem concerns the relationship between history and historicity, that is to say the relationship of the historical agent to the speaking being. The second problem concerns the idea of fiction and the relationship between fictional rationality and the modes of explanation used for historical and social reality, the relationship between the logic of fiction and the logic of facts. 

It is preferable to begin with the second problem, the ‘actuality’ of fiction analysed by the text you refer to.15 This actuality itself raises a twofold question: the general question of fiction’s rationality, i.e. the distinction between fiction and falsity, and the question of the distinction - or the indistinction - between the modes of intelligibility specific to the construction of stories and the modes of intelligibility used for understanding historical phenomena. Let’s start from the beginning. The specificity of the representative regime of the arts is characterized by the separation between the idea of fiction and that of lies. It is this regime that confers autonomy on the arts’ various forms in relationship to the economy of communal occupations and the countereconomy of simulacra specific to the ethical regime of images. This is what is essentially at stake in Aristotle’s Poetics, which safeguards the forms of poetic mimesis from the Platonic suspicion concerning what images consist of and their end or purpose. The Poetics declares that the images consist of and their end or purpose. The Poetics declares that the arrangement of a poem’s actions is not equivalent to the fabrication of a simulacrum. It is a play of knowledge that is carried out in a determined space-time. To pretend is not to put forth illusions but, to elaborate intelligible structures. Poetry owes no explanation for the ‘truth’ of what it says because, in its very principle, it is not made up of images or statements, but fictions, that is to say arrangements between actions. The other consequence that Aristotle derives from this is the superiority of poetry, which confers a causal logic on the arrangement of events, over history, condemned to presenting events according to their empirical disorder. In other words - and this is obviously something that historians do not like to examine too closely - the clear division between reality and fiction makes a rational logic of history impossible as well as a science of history.

The aesthetic revolution rearranges the rules of the game by making two things interdependent: the blurring of the borders between the logic of facts and the logic of fictions and the new mode of rationality that characterizes the science of history. By declaring that the principle of poetry is not to be found in fiction but in a certain arrangement of the signs of language, the Romantic Age blurred the dividing line that isolated art from the jurisdiction of statements or images, as well as the dividing line that separated the [57] logic of facts from the logic of stories. It is not the case, as is sometimes said, that it consecrated the ‘autotelism’ of language, separated from reality. It is the exact opposite. The Romantic Age actually plunged language into the materiality of the traits by which the historical and social world becomes visible to itself, be it in the form of the silent language of things or the coded language of images. Circulation within this landscape of signs defines, moreover, the new fictionality, the new way of telling stories, which is first of all a way of assigning meaning to the ‘empirical’ world of lowly actions and commonplace objects. Fictional arrangement is no longer identified with the Aristotelian causal sequence of actions ‘according to necessity and plausibility’. It is an arrangement of signs. However, this literary arrangement of signs is by no means the solitary self-referentiality of language. It is the identification of modes of fictional construction with means of deciphering the signs inscribed in the general aspect of a place, a group, a wall, an article of clothing, ​a face. It is the association between, on the one hand, accelerations or decelerations of language, its shuffling of images or sudden changes of tone, all its differences of potential between the insignificant and the overly significant or overly meaningful, and on the other hand, the modalities of a trip through the landscape of significant traits deposited in the topography of spaces, the physiology of social circles, the silent expression of bodies. The ‘fictionality’ specific to the aesthetic age is consequently distributed between two poles: the potential of meaning inherent in everything silent and the proliferation of modes of speech and levels of meaning. 

The aesthetic sovereignty of literature does not therefore amount to the reign of fiction. On the contrary, it is a regime in which the logic of descriptive and narrative arrangements in fiction becomes fundamentally indistinct from the arrangements used in the description and interpretation of the phenomena of the social and historical world. When Balzac places his reader before the entwined hieroglyphics on the tottering and heteroclite façade of the house in At the Sign of the Cat and Racket, or has his reader enter an antique dealers shop, with the hero of The Magic Skin, where jumbled up together are objects both profane and sacred, uncivilized and cultured, antique and modern, that each sum up a world, when he makes Cuvier the true poet reconstructing a world from a fossil, he establishes a regime of equivalence between the signs of the new novel and those of the description or [59] interpretation of the phenomena of a civilization. He forges this new rationality of the obvious and the obscure that goes against the grand Aristotelian arrangements and that would become the new rationality for the history of material life (which stands in opposition to the histories of great names and events). 

The Aristotelian dividing line between two ‘stories’ or ‘histories’ - poets’ stories and the history of historians - is thereby revoked, the dividing line that not only separated reality and fiction but also empirical succession and constructed necessity. Aristotle established the superiority of poetry, recounting ‘what could happen’ according to the necessity or plausibility of the poetic arrangement of actions, over history, conceived of as the empirical succession of events, of ‘what happened’. The aesthetic revolution drastically disrupts things: testimony and fiction come under the same regime of meaning. On the one hand, the ‘empirical’ bears the marks of the true in the form of traces and imprints. ‘What happened’ thus comes directly under a regime of truth, a regime that demonstrates the necessity behind what happened. On the other hand, ‘what could happen’ no longer has the autonomous and linear form  of the arrangement of actions. The poetic ‘story’ or ‘history’ henceforth links the realism that shows us the poetic traces inscribed directly in reality with the artificialism that assembles complex machines of understanding. 

This connection was transferred from literature to the new art of narrative, film, which brought to its highest potential the double resource of the silent imprint that speaks and the montage that calculates the values of truth and the potential for producing meaning. Documentary film, film devoted to the ‘real’, is in this sense capable of greater fictional invention than ‘fiction’ film, readily devoted to a certain stereotype of actions and characters. Chris Marker’s Le Tombeau d A’ lexandre (The Last Bolshevik), the object of the article you refer to, fictionalizes the history of Russia from the time of the czars to the postcommunist period through the destiny of a film-maker, Alexander Medvedkin. Marker does not make him into a fictional character; he does not tell fabricated stories about the USSR. He plays off of the combination of different types of traces (interviews, significant faces, archival documents, extracts from documentary and fictional films, etc.) in order to suggest possibilities for thinking [61] this story or history. The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought. This proposition should be distinguished from any discourse - positive or negative - according to which everything is ‘narrative’, with alternations between ‘grand’ narratives and ‘minor’ narratives. The notion of ‘narrative’ locks us into oppositions between the real and artifice where both the positivists and the deconstructionists are lost. It is not a matter of claiming that everything is fiction. It is a matter of stating that the fiction of the aesthetic age defined models for connecting the presentation of facts and forms of intelligibility that blurred the border between the logic of facts and the logic of fiction. Moreover, these models were taken up by historians and analysts of social reality. Writing history and writing stories come under the same regime of truth. This has nothing whatsoever to do with a thesis on the reality or unreality of things. On the contrary, it is clear that a model for the fabrication of stories is linked to a certain idea of history as common destiny, with an idea of those who make history’, and that this interpenetration of the logic of facts and the logic of stories is specific to an age when anyone and everyone is considered to be participating in the task of ‘making’ history. Thus, it is not a matter of claiming that [62] ‘History’ is only made up of stories that we tell ourselves, but simply that the ‘logic of stories’ and the ability to act as historical agents go together. Politics and art, like forms of knowledge, construct ‘fictions’, that is to say material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done. 

It is here that we encounter the other question that you asked, which concerns the relationship between literarity and historicity. Political statements and literary locutions produce effects in reality. They define models of speech or action but also regimes of sensible intensity. They draft maps of the visible, trajectories between the visible and the sayable, relationships between modes of being, modes of saying, and modes of doing and making. They define variations of sensible intensities, perceptions, and the abilities of bodies.18 They thereby take hold of unspecified groups of people, they widen gaps, open up space for deviations, modify the speeds, the trajectories, and the ways in which groups of people adhere to a condition, react to situations, recognize their images. They reconfigure the map of the sensible by interfering with the functionality of gestures and rhythms adapted to the natural cycles of production, reproduction, and submission. Man is a political animal because he is a literary animal who lets himself be diverted from his ‘natural’ purpose by the power of words. This literarity is at once the condition and the effect of the circulation of‘actual’ literary locutions. However, these locutions take hold of bodies and divert them from their end or purpose insofar as they are not bodies in the sense of organisms, but quasi-bodies, blocks of speech circulating without a legitimate father to accompany them toward their authorized addressee. Therefore, they do not produce collective bodies. Instead, they introduce lines of fracture and disincorporation into imaginary collective bodies. This has always been, as is well known, the phobia of those in power and the theoreticians of good government, worried that the circulation of writing would produce ‘disorder in the established ​system of classification. It was also, in the nineteenth century, the phobia of‘actual5 writers who wrote in order to denounce the literarity that overflows the institution of literature and leads its products astray. It is true that the circulation of these quasi-bodies causes modifications in the sensory perception of what is common to the community, in the relationship [64] between what is common to language and the sensible distribution of spaces and occupations. They form, in this way, uncertain communities that contribute to the formation of enunciative collectives that call into question the distribution of roles, territories, and languages. In short, they contribute to the formation of political subjects that challenge the given distribution of the sensible. A political collective is not, in actual fact, an organism or a communal body. The channels for political subjectivization are not those of imaginary identification but those of ‘literary’ disincorporation.

I am not sure that the notion of utopia takes this into account. It is a word whose definitional capabilities have been completely devoured by its connotative properties. Sometimes it refers to the mad delusions that lead to totalitarian catastrophe; sometimes it refers, conversely, to the infinite expansion of the field of possibility that resists all forms of totalizing closure. From the point of view that concerns us here, i.e. the point of view of the reconfigurations of the shared sensible order, the word utopia harbours two contradictory meanings. Utopia is, in one respect, the unacceptable, a no-place, the extreme point of a polemical reconfiguration of the sensible, which breaks down the categories that define what is considered to be obvious. However, it is also the configuration of a proper place, a non-polemical distribution of the sensible universe where what one sees, what one says, and what one makes or does are rigorously adapted to one another. Utopias and forms of utopian socialism functioned based on this ambiguity. On the one hand, they dismissed the obvious sensible facts in which the normality of domination is rooted. On the other hand, they proposed a state of affairs where the idea of the community would have its adequate forms of incorporation, a state of affairs that would therefore abolish the dispute concerning the relations of words to things that makes up the heart of politics. In The Nights of Labor, I analysed from this perspective the complex encounter between workers and the engineers of utopia. What the Saint-Simonian engineers proposed was a new, real body for the community where the water and rail routes marked out on the ground would take the place of paper dreams and the illusions of speech. The workers, for their part, did not set practice in contrast with utopia; they conferred upon the latter the characteristic of being ‘unreal’, of being a montage of words and images appropriate for reconfiguring the territory of the visible, the thinkable, and the possible. The ‘fictions’ of art and politics are therefore heterotopias rather than utopias. 

excerpt from the book: The Politics of Aesthetics(The Distribution of the Sensible), by JACQUES RANCIÈRE ​

by JACQUES RANCIÈRE 

The first possible meaning of the notion of a ‘factory of the sensible’ is the formation of a shared sensible world, a common habitat, by the weaving together of a plurality of human activities. However, the idea of a ‘distribution of the sensible’ implies something more. A ‘common’ world is never simply an ethos, a shared abode, that results from the sedimentation of a certain number of intertwined acts. It is always a polemical distribution of modes of being and ‘occupations’ in a space of possibilities. It is from this perspective that it is possible to raise the question of the relationship between the ‘ordinariness’ of work and artistic ‘exceptionality’. Here again referencing Plato can help lay down the terms of the problem. In the third book of the Republic, the mimetician is no longer condemned simply for the falsity and the pernicious nature of the images he presents, but he is condemned in accordance with a principle of division of labour that was already used to exclude artisans from any shared political space: the mimetician is, by definition, a double being. He does two things at once, whereas the principle of a well-organized community is that each person only does the one thing that they were destined to do by their ‘nature’. In one sense, this statement says everything: the idea of work is not initially the idea of a determined activity, a process of material transformation. It is the idea of a distribution of the sensible: an impossibility of doing ‘something else’ based on an ‘absence of time’. This ‘impossibility’ is part of the incorporated conception of the community. It establishes work as the necessary relegation of the worker to the private space-time of his occupation, his exclusion from participation in what is common ​to the community. The mimetician brings confusion to [68] this distribution: he is a man of duplication, a worker who does two things at once. Perhaps the correlate to this principle is the most important thing: the mimetician provides a public stage for the ‘private’ principle of work. He sets up a stage for what is common to the community with what should determine the confinement of each person to his or her place. It is this redistribution of the sensible that constitutes his noxiousness, even more than the danger of simulacra weakening souls. Hence, artistic practice is not the outside of work but its displaced form of visibility. The democratic distribution of the sensible makes the worker into a double being. It removes the artisan from ‘his’ place, the domestic space of work, and gives him ‘time’ to occupy the space of public discussions and take on the identity of a deliberative citizen. The mimetic act of splitting in two, which is at work in theatrical space, consecrates this duality and makes it visible. The exclusion of the mimetician, from the Platonic point of view, goes hand in hand with the formation of a community where work is in ‘its’ place.

​The principle of fiction that governs the representative regime of art is a way of stabilizing the artistic exception, of assigning it to a  techne, which means two things: the art of imitations is a technique and not a lie. It ceases to be [69] a simulacrum, but at the same time it ceases to be the displaced visibility of work, as a distribution of the sensible. The imitator is no longer the double being against whom it is necessary to posit the city where each person only does a single thing. The art of imitations is able to inscribe its specific hierarchies and exclusions in the major distribution of the liberal arts and the mechanical arts.

The aesthetic regime of the arts disrupts this apportionment of spaces. It does not simply call into question mimetic division - i.e. the mimetic act of splitting in two - in favour of an immanence of thought in sensible matter. It also calls into question the neutralized status of technë, the idea of technique as the imposition of a form of thought on inert matter. That is to say that it brings to light, once again, the distribution of occupations that upholds the apportionment of domains of activity. This theoretical and political operation is at the heart of Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Behind the Kantian definition of aesthetic judgement as a judgement without concepts - without the submission of the intuitive given to conceptual ​determination -, Schiller indicates the political distribution that is the matter at stake: the division between those who act and those who are acted upon, between the cultivated classes [70] that have access to a totalization of lived experience and the uncivilized classes immersed in the parcelling out of work and of sensory experience. Schillers ‘aesthetic’ state, by suspending the opposition between active understanding and passive sensibility, aims at breaking down - with an idea of art - an idea of society based on the opposition between those who think and decide and those who are doomed to material tasks.

In the nineteenth century, this suspension of work’s negative value became the assertion of its positive value as the very form of the shared effectivity of thought and community. This mutation occurred via the transformation of the suspension inherent in the aesthetic state’ into the positive assertion of the aesthetic will. Romanticism declared that the becoming-sensible of all thought and the becoming-thought of all sensible materiality was the very goal of the activity of thought in general. In this way, art once again became a symbol of work. It anticipates the end - the elimination of oppositions - that work is not yet in a position to attain by and for itself. However, it does this insofar as it is a production, the identification of a process of material execution with a community’s self-presentation of its meaning. Production asserts itself [71] as the principle behind a new distribution of the sensible insofar as it unites, in one and the same concept, terms that are traditionally opposed: the activity of manufacturing and visibility. Manufacturing meant inhabiting the private and lowly space-time of labour for sustenance. Producing unites the act of manufacturing with the act of bringing to light, the act of defining a new relationship between making and seeing. Art anticipates work because it carries out its principle: the transformation of sensible matter into the community’s self-presentation. The texts written by the young Marx that confer upon work the status of the generic essence of mankind were only possible on the basis of German Idealism’s aesthetic programme, i.e. art as the transformation of thought into the sensory experience of the community. It is this initial programme, moreover, that laid the foundation for the thought and practice of the avant-gardes’ in the 1920s: abolish art as a separate activity, put it back to work, that is to ​say, give it back to life and its activity of working out its own proper meaning.

I do not mean by this that the modern valorization of work is only the result of the new way for thinking about art. On the one hand, the aesthetic mode of thought is much more than a way of thinking about art. It is an idea of thought, linked to an idea of the distribution [72] of the sensible. On the other hand, it is also necessary to think about the way in which artists’ art found itself defined on the basis of a twofold promotion of work: the economic promotion of work as the name for the fundamental human activity, but also the struggles of the proletariat to bring labour out of the night surrounding it, out of its exclusion from shared visibility and speech. It is necessary to abandon the lazy and absurd schema that contrasts the aesthetic cult of art for art’s sake with the rising power of industrial labour. Art can show signs of being an exclusive activity insofar as it is work. Better informed than the demystifiers of the twentieth century, the critics in Flaubert’s time indicated what links the cult of the sentence to the valorization of work, said to be wordless: the Flaubertian aesthete is a pebble breaker. At the time of the Russian Revolution, art and production would be identified because they came under one and the same principle concerning the redistribution of the sensible, they came under one and the same virtue of action that opens up a form of visibility at the same time as it manufactures objects. The cult of art presupposes a revalorization of the abilities attached to the very idea of work. However, this idea is less the discovery of the essence of human activity than a recomposition of the landscape of the visible, a recomposition of the [73] relationship between doing, making, being, seeing, and saying. Whatever might be the specific type of economic circuits they lie within, artistic practices are not exceptions’ to other practices. They represent and reconfigure the distribution of these activities.

excerpt from the book: The Politics of Aesthetics(The Distribution of the Sensible), by JACQUES RANCIÈRE 

​​The Network Ensemble was born out of a pun.

​The legendary Roland TR 808, an analog drum machine who allowed a new kind of freedom to music producers in the 80s (just play Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force), provided the pun: we were going to build TR 802.11.

​​A physical device was ready by summer. Built into a flight-case to be easily carried, the machine was taken around London to explore the WiFi network territory. When shut, 2 ports accessible on the outside let the user tune into the network with an antenna and hear its raw sounds with headphones. When open, a set of peripherals (stored in the bottom half of the flight-case) can be connected to 6 ports built into an operational panel (located on the other half), letting the user perform the network space.

​​Building on the software developed for the early TR 802.11 virtual experiments, we developed NE.app, a software tool for the capture and analysis of network data. Sitting at the hearth of the operational panel, NE.app collects as much WiFi packets from the local networks as it can. Upon receipt it categorises them according to their intent and transforms them into an electrical pulse, which is transmitted to the ports on the operational panel. Each port corresponds to a slice of the network: structure, gatekeeping, communications, data, broken and unknown.

​​The peripherals sonify these network slices. When plugged into the ports, they translate the electrical pulse into a digital sound, a mechanical tap, and so on… The peripherals are various in shape, scope and configuration: an antenna, a set of speakers, a series of solenoids, to name a few. Together, they form an autonomous orchestra which plays the network data live onto its physical surroundings, allowing serendipitous and distorted soundscapes to be uncovered by a user, whether performing or exploring. It is this horizontal relationship between machine and human that we dubbed “Network Ensemble”.

​A third machine, the NE3, was built in 2017. NE3 is a compact board which uses a stripped down version of the NE.app employed in previous Network Ensemble experiments to receive packets on all networks local to it and convert their content into sound as directly as possible. A single knob on the top-side of the board allows control of the speed at which the network data is transformed, ranging from high speeds, staying true to the intense nature of the WiFi, to low speeds, making it possible to identify patterns in the noise or investigate the sonic character of a particular slice of the network. Two jack ports allow for the connection of audio equipment for sonic manipulation and performance. As a base, the NE3 has a surface transducer which turns nearly any surface into a speaker.

​​Originally conceived as a drum machine to amplify the activity of network landscapes, the Network Ensemble is now a free-form and ever-changing set of tools and experiences for sonically uncovering the hidden operational layer at the very core of the network. Since 2015, we heve performed as part of the ensemble, under this moniker, in a number of locations across three countries. We have also used the machinery to study wireless networks, exploring physical and network territories, creating audiovisual work from our findings.

​Some of this sound and video work is released for the first time through Selected Network Studies.

Perhaps first I should clear up a misunderstanding concerning the notion of mechanical arts’. The connection I established was between a scientific paradigm and an aesthetic paradigm. Benjamin’s thesis presupposes something different, which seems questionable to me: the deduction of the aesthetic and political properties of a form of art from its technical properties. Mechanical arts, qua mechanical arts, would result in a change of artistic paradigm and a new relationship between art and its subject matter. This proposition refers back to one of modernism’s main theses: the difference between the arts is linked to the difference between their technological conditions or their specific medium or material. This assimilation can be understood either in the simple modernist mode, or in accordance with modernatist hyperbole. The persistent success of Benjamin’s theses on art in the age of mechanical reproduction is, moreover, undoubtedly due to the crossing-over they allow for between the categories of Marxist materialist explanation and those of Heideggerian ontology, which ascribe the age of modernity to the unfurling of the essence of technology. This link between the aesthetic and the onto-technological has, in fact, been subjected to the general fate of modernist categories. In Benjamin, Duchamp, or Rodchenko’s time, it coexisted with the faith in the capabilities of electricity and machines, iron, glass, and concrete. With the so-called ‘postmodern’ reversal, it has kept pace with the return to the icon, which presents the veil of Veronica as the essence of painting, film, or photography.

It is thus necessary, in my opinion, to take things the other way around. In order for the mechanical arts to be able to confer visibility on the masses, or rather on anonymous individuals, they first need to be recognized as arts. That is to say that they first need to be, put into practice and recognized as something other than techniques of reproduction or transmission. It is thus the same principle that confers visibility on absolutely anyone and allows for photography and film to become arts. We can even reverse the formula: it is because the anonymous became the subject matter of art that the act of recording such a subject matter can be an art. The fact that what is anonymous is not only susceptible to becoming the subject matter of art but also conveys a specific beauty is an exclusive characteristic of the aesthetic regime of the arts. Not only did the aesthetic regime begin well before the arts of mechanical reproduction, but it is actually this regime that made them possible by its new way of thinking art and its subject matter.

The aesthetic regime of the arts was initially the breakdown of the system of representation, that is to say of a system where the dignity of the subject matter dictated the dignity of genres of representation (tragedy for the nobles, comedy for the people of meagre means; historical painting versus genre painting; etc.). Along with genres, the system of representation defined the situations and forms of expression that were appropriate for' the lowliness or loftiness of the subject matter. The aesthetic regime [49] of the arts dismantled this correlation between subject matter and mode of representation. This revolution first took place in literature: an epoch and a society were deciphered through the features, clothes, or gestures of an ordinary individual (Balzac); the sewer revealed a civilization (Hugo); the daughter of a farmer and the daughter of a banker were caught in the equal force of style as an ‘absolute manner of seeing things’ (Flaubert). All of these forms of cancellation or reversal of the opposition between high and low not only antedate the powers of mechanical reproduction, they made it possible for this reproduction to be more than mechanical reproduction. In order for a technological mode of action and production, i.e. a way of doing and making, to be qualified as falling within the domain of art - be it a certain use of words or of a camera - it is first necessary for its subject matter to be defined as such. Photography was not established as an art on the grounds of its technological nature. The discourse on the originality of photography as an ‘indexical’ art is very recent, and it is less a part of the history of photography than of the history of the postmodern reversal touched upon above.11 Furthermore, photography did not become an art by imitating the mannerisms of art. Benjamin accurately demonstrated this regarding David Octavius Hill: it is with the little anonymous fishwife from New Haven, not with his grand pictorial compositions, that he brought photography into the world of art. Likewise, it is not the ethereal subject matter and soft focus of pictorialism that secured the status of photographic art, it is rather the appropriation of the commonplace: the emigrants in Stieglitz’s The Steerage, the frontal portraits by Paul Strand or Walker Evans. On the one hand, the technological revolution comes after the aesthetic revolution. On the other hand, however, the aesthetic revolution is first of all the honour acquired by the commonplace, which is pictorial and literary before being photographic or cinematic. 

We should add that the honour conferred on the commonplace is part of the science of literature before being part of the science of history. Film and photography did not determine the subject matter and modes of focalization of new history’. On the contrary, the new science of history and the arts of mechanical reproduction are inscribed in the same logic of aesthetic revolution. This programme is literary before being scientific: it shifts the focus from great names and events to the life of the anonymous; it finds symptoms of an epoch, a society, or a civilization in the minute details of ordinary life; it explains the surface by subterranean layers; and it reconstructs worlds from their vestiges. This does not simply mean that the science of history has a literary prehistory. Literature itself was constituted as a kind of symptomatology of society, and it set this symptomatology in contrast with the clamour and imagination of the public stage. In his preface to Cromwell, Hugo called for a literature based on the story of the customs of everyday life that would be opposed to the story of events practised by historians. In War and Peace, Tolstoy contrasted the documents of literature, taken from narratives and testimonial accounts of the action of innumerable anonymous actors, with the documents of historians, taken from the archives - and from the imagination - of those who believe to have been in charge of battles and to have made history. Scholarly history took over this opposition when it contrasted the history of the lifestyles of the masses and the cycles of material life based on reading and interpreting mute witnesses’ with the former, history of princes, battles, and treaties based on courts’ chronicles and diplomatic reports. The appearance of the masses on the scene of history or in new’ images is not to be confused with the link between the age of the masses and the age of science and technology. It is first and foremost rooted in the aesthetic logic of a mode of visibility that, on the one hand, revokes the representative tradition’s scales of grandeur and, on the other hand, revokes the oratorical model of speech in favour of the interpretation of signs on the body of people, things, and civilizations.

This is what scholarly history inherited. However, its intention was to separate the condition of its new object (the life of the anonymous) from its literary origin and from the politics of literature in which it is inscribed. What it cast aside - which was reappropriated by film and photography - was the logic revealed by the tradition of the novel (from Balzac to Proust and Surrealism) and the reflection on the true that Marx, Freud, Benjamin, and the tradition of ‘critical thought’ inherited: the ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the true. And the ordinary becomes a trace of the true if it is torn from its obviousness in order to become a hieroglyph, a mythological or phantasmagoric figure. This phantasmagoric dimension of the true, which belongs to the aesthetic regime of the arts, played an essential role in the formation of the critical paradigm of the human and social sciences. The Marxist theory of fetishism is the most striking testimony to this fact: commodities must be torn out of their trivial appearances, made into phantasmagoric objects in order to be interpreted as the expression of society’s contradictions. Scholarly history tried to separate out various features within the aesthetico-political configuration that gave it its object. It flattened this phantasmagoria of the true into the positivist sociological concepts of mentality/expression and belief/ignorance.