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Art in the Age of Biopolitics
defined by the aspiration of today’s art to become life itself, not merely to
depict life or to offer it art products.
Traditionally, art was divided into pure, contemplative, “fine” art and
applied art—that is, design. The former was concerned not with reality but
with images of reality. Applied art built and composed the things of reality
themselves. In this respect, art resembles science, which can also be divided
into a theoretical and an applied version. The difference between fine art and
theoretical science, however, is that science has wanted to make the images
of reality that it creates as transparent as possible, in order to judge reality
itself on the basis of these images, whereas art, taking another path, has taken
as its theme its own materiality and lack of clarity, the obscurity and, therefore,
autonomy of images and the resulting inability of these images adequately
to reproduce reality. Artistic images—from the “fantastic,” the
“unrealistic,” by way of the Surrealistic and on up to the abstract—are
intended to thematize the gap between art and reality. And even media that
are usually thought of as reproducing reality faithfully—such as photography
and film—are also used in the context of art in a way that seeks to undermine
any faith in reproduction’s ability to be faithful to reality. “Pure” art thus
established itself on the level of the signifier. That to which the signifier
refers—reality, meaning, the signified—has, by contrast, traditionally been
interpreted as belonging to life and thus as removed from the sphere in which
art is valid. Nor can it be said of applied art, however, that it concerns itself
with life. Even if our environment is largely shaped by applied arts such as
architecture, urban planning, product design, advertising, and fashion, it is
still left to life to find the best way to deal with all these designed products.
Life itself as pure activity, as pure duration, is thus fundamentally inaccessible
to the traditional arts, which remain oriented toward products or results in
one form or another.
In our age of biopolitics, however, the situation is changing, for the
principal concern of this kind of politics is the lifespan itself. Biopolitics is
often confused with scientific and technical strategies of genetic manipulation
that, at least potentially, aim at reforming the individual living body. These
strategies themselves, however, are still a matter of design—albeit that of a
living organism. The real achievement of biopolitical technologies lies more
in the shaping of the lifespan itself—in the shaping of life as a pure activity
that occurs in time. From begetting and lifelong medical care by way of the
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