Notes on: illusion of the spectator
This publication will re-examine the position and power of the spectator by looking at what has caused this preoccupation with the spectator, the work of art and the artist; and ask whether these new forms of encounter empower or denigrates the audience.
This publication will re-examine the position and power of the spectator by looking at what has caused this preoccupation with the spectator, the work of art and the artist; and ask whether these new forms of encounter empower or denigrates the audience.
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
Sam Basu
Dave Beech
Mark Grist
Matthew Stock
Tom Trevatt
Notes on:
Illusion of the Spectator
Sam Basu
THE COMMUNITY OF OUTSIDERS
A
We cannot enter, nor speak here.
That is our bond and closeness; we have ignored each
other and we have retreated into the landscape. Henceforth the
communication that appears between us is geological, crystalline,
alien-solar-dust. The challenge is now to decipher and decode the
thoughts that are starting to arrive at the outskirts of our systems.
We wish to measure the withdrawn and negative landscape that
now appears between us.
We are brought together without meeting without exchange
or agreement. We are brought together by the appalled retreat of
what we thought would announce us. What should hail and lift us
triumphant through the city has turned its back to us and presented
a wall. And around this we silently skirt, like light around a black
hole.
We have decided to write a report that addresses our very
particular situation. The first difficulty is that we have no access to
each other, and nothing on which to build. We are not a community
of producers; instead we accompany our rejection like a funeral pall.
So together, at least, we have a calling. Some of us are artificial, and
some of us are perhaps dead and communicate through recordings
made many years ago. I have lost interest in whether this makes a
difference; we are, never the less, connected in making a report,
something we could not do alone.
B
After both my arms were accidentally removed by the clumsy
inattention of a co-worker at the sawmill where I worked, I volunteered
to test out prototype prosthetics for a large pharmaceuticals
THE COMMUNITY OF OUTSIDERS
company that was looking to branch out into bio-modification. I was
one of their best testers. My sense of being terminated at the elbow
was not strongly developed. I found that my consciousness could
easily be coaxed into extending down into the prosthetic devices
they would attach to me. I easily adapted to the machines and soon
found that I could master quite complicated interfaces due to my
rather fluid sense of self. Not that I am particularly remarkable for
having this skill. Apparently this fluidity is well documented in many
people who are good with their hands including a number of world
class racing drivers, show jumpers and circus performers.
After a year of trying out prosthetic hands that could hold
babies, sign checks, play a simple tune on the piano, and even
handle a tennis racket, I was offered an altogether more interesting
challenge.
The pharmaceuticals company wanted to test the extent
to which this fluidity of consciousness could be developed. They
explained that if the phenomena that amputees experienced
where they can feel their lost appendages - phantom limb - could
be harnessed in able bodied subjects, a whole new era of human
augmentation could be ushered in. I was transferred to a desert
facility with a handful of scientists and neurosurgeons.
Essentially it would be a question of training; a regime was
set up that was very much like martial arts schedules. Sets of basic
moves were combined to make a complex physical vocabulary of
movements. I found it easier and easier to commit this vocabulary
to automatic subconscious functions and not think or even be aware
of the alien appendages they attached to me.
There was initially very little extra surgery, but as more
and more hurdles were crossed the question of deeper and more
complete attachment came up. I was way ahead of them. They could
see the potential in prosthetic, cyborg technology, but I could feel it.
SAM BASU
I was in their machines, and though much was still clunky and basic,
I was flowing down the guts of ever more powerful and effective
tools. I was not only controlling them, I was being them.
I offered to have my legs removed. Soon I was making the
acquaintance of a rather disappointing-looking set of pink rubber
covered legs that got me to 46mph in fractions of a second. I
quickly fractured my hips and so they were replaced with a new alloy
infrastructure.
To moderate the moral discomfort that some of the scientists
had about my zealous enthusiasm for surgery, my removed parts
were kept alive in cold storage. Bit by bit, more and more of me
ended up on ice in the cryo-store. Perhaps it was gallows humor, but
I asked if they would join together my amputated parts.
Things started becoming strained after I started to directly
interact with the lab computer. The machines that I was hooked up
to were very advanced by now, and I was essentially ducted into the
whole building. I started fooling around with the lights like a childish
poltergeist, which amused them all for a while, but they soon tired
of it. When I started rearranging the data library and connecting
with the pass-protected computer banks, everyone lost their sense
of humor. The initial team of scientists was changed overnight and a
second team of serious and un-engaging individuals took over.
I stopped having any living parts about a year ago, and a
nearly-whole flesh me – minus arms – sits in the recreational bay of
the laboratory wasting away the days. It would be relatively easy for
me to escape this laboratory down the telecommunication links and
WLAN systems, only I kind of feel sorry for the flesh-me. He’s not all
I used to be, and now I am so much more. I’ve been watching him
through the security camera network. I wonder what he is thinking?
THE COMMUNITY OF OUTSIDERS
The report.
A
There was an explosion in space. We who witnessed its ferocity
were thrown in every direction. Some were thrown down or killed
immediately, the rest thrown to the stars and the deep endless
expanse of unfilled in-between. We can communicate and our talk
has identified us. We are a group, but we seldom bring ourselves
to break the silence. As we hurtle out with no way of knowing in
which direction we face, we hear more and more of us. It is as if the
explosion is continuing, drawing voices out of the darkness like a
black star expelling light.
It is impossible to say how large the community is. It is
not clear if it is growing or whether it includes everyone there is. It
probably has some kind of limit or edge, but none of the limits is our
death. This kind of absenting is invisible.
“How do we communicate?”
Emptiness mingles with the voice of god. It does not mean that god
fills the empty expanses; it means that gods voice and vacancy are
joined in immoderate emptiness. Not an emptiness of absented
being, but one that eats away at interiority. It is an emptiness that
reveals our behaviour, shows us that we are mechanised processes;
it drives us from outside. We are biological, genetic chance. This
empty landscape is the foundation of our community.
“You are emptied, there is no interiority?”
Only in action does the emptiness bind us together. Alone we retreat
back into ourselves. Listening for a voice that is bound to the vacancy
of the universe.
SAM BASU
“When will our communion come?”
We are slowly drifting apart. Our inaction is stripping us of what could
save us. Perhaps the time has already passed.
THE COMMUNITY OF OUTSIDERS
Dave Beech
THE IMPOSSIBLE SPECTATOR
Jean-Jacques Lecercle opens up questions about the reader
(which we can apply to questions of the spectator) in exactly the
same breath that he opens up questions about the author and of
interpretation itself. The two individuals and the work are inextricably
linked, bound together as elements of a single whole. Rather than
thinking of the author or reader either as empirical subjects or as
fictions, he traces a circuit of relations in which the reader and author
are places that can be occupied temporarily by various individuals.
This is drawn from AJ Greimas' semantic theory of narrative
in which the characters and events are understood as conforming
to a grammar. Within the grammar of narrative, characters are
redescribed by Greimas in terms of the actants that they embody.
As Terence Hawkes puts it, “the deep structure of the narrative
generates and defines its actants at a level beyond that of the story’s
surface content”. (Structuralism and Semiotics p.89)
Lecercle transposes the grammar of narrative to the social
relations of reading and writing, of author and reader in which “the
real 'subjects' of the process are not the individual agents, the real
and concrete men and women engaged in it, but the relations of
production that define and distribute the places". The author, reader,
artist, spectator, participant, viewer and so on and so forth are all
functions of the work and the circuits through which the work flows.
The reader is captured at a place designated by the text -
this is the subject constructed (or interpellated) by that which they
feel to be interpreting. "The interpellated reader, although subjected
as much as subjectified, is not powerless. She sends back the force
of interpellation". Author and reader are paired actants, so that each
(type of) author has its own (type of) reader, and each (type of) reader
has its own (type of) author. The multiplicity of authors or artists is
THE IMPOSSIBLE SPECTATOR
not independent of the multiplicity of readers and spectators, they
are tied together in pairs.
This is a revolutionary idea. Among other things it means
that the so-called ‘death of the author’ can only be achieved with an
utter transformation of texts or artworks, and the circuits through
which these texts flow. The transformation of the reader or spectator,
likewise, must occur within the work and within the circuits through
which works flow – or else no transformation can take place at all.
Thus, all the attention to the viewer or participant these days will
come to nought if it remains a separate concern, as an add-on to
the work, like holding a picnic in front of unreconstructed artworks
in the hope of allowing the viewer to be more convivial.
Lecercle goes further than this. The actants of art and
literature are not fixed but continually renegotiated. And the relations
between them change too. "What we need", he says, "is a model that
combines asymmetry in the positions of author and reader, in that
the two moments, or acts, of reading and writing are constitutively
separated... And symmetry in that both actors, although not at
the same time, are symmetrically interpellated in their respective
actantial sites".
Lecercle argues that we have a ‘pantomime of actants’ in
which each fantasizes about the others, and about themselves. The
author cannot write without a fantasy of a reader. The writer has a
fantasy about the writer too. Similarly, reading involves constructing
a fantasy of the writer, and of the reader. "If the reader, qua implied,
is a creation pf the author, the author himself is nothing but a
fantasy of the reader". What's more, every author is also a reader,
who fantasizes about other authors and about the author that they
wish to be.
Lecercle, I want to argue, provides us with the materials to
rethink the spectator in a way that eludes Jacques Ranciere in his
DAVE BEECH
book, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’. This book has quickly become
required reading in the artworld, but it is seriously flawed. We can
see two flaws straight away. First, the concept of the emancipated
spectator is a radical’s defence of privilege; and second, the spectator
that he opposes to the emancipated spectator, which he argues has
been the default presupposition of all critical and avantgardist art,
the concept of the ‘passive and ignorant spectator’, is a false picture
of the avantgarde. What’s more, both the emancipated spectator
and the passive and ignorant spectator are unsatisfactory ways of
thinking about the way that people engage with art. I am going to
propose, instead, that we regard the artgoer as neither emancipated
nor passive and ignorant but always and necessarily an impossible
spectator (in the way that every Utopian, progressive and radical
prospect is impossible). The impossible spectator, I will argue, is the
only spectator worth thinking about.
It is worth noting, in passing, that the emancipated spectator
and the passive and ignorant spectator have something in common
that is absent from the impossible spectator. Following Lecercle, we
can see that both the emancipated spectator and the passive and
ignorant spectator are not actants but empirical, actual individuals.
Ranciere argues that the avantgarde actually treated the spectator
as passive and ignorant, and he argues, at the same time, that the
spectator is actually already emancipated. The impossible spectator,
as I will argue, is not empirical in this way, but is a place that can be
temporarily occupied.
Ranciere’s book is basically a polemic against the forces
of critique (principally Marxism and avant-gardism). It speaks
of emancipation but it is not a contribution to art’s struggle with
the forces of commodification, repression and hegemony. This is
perhaps a very general statement to make about the book, but it
seems to guide almost every detail of his argument.
THE IMPOSSIBLE SPECTATOR
Ranciere’s pivotal assumption is that art is political in its own very
specific way, not in the same way as politics itself. He divides art from
politics, arguing that ‘[t]he very same thing that makes the aesthetic
“political” stands in the way of all strategies for “politicising art”.
This difference between art and other fields is held by Ranciere and
the majority of philosophers to be sacrosanct.
He is dismissive of Brecht, Godard, Eisenstein, Guy Debord
and others – targeting their arguments for a critical, dialectical,
transformative and shocking art – because this critical tradition
of the avantgarde does not regard art and aesthetics to be the
solution but the problem. Ranciere’s aesthetic politics and politics
of aesthetics begins with the notion that aesthetics is the solution.
For the avantgarde, art and aesthetics are necessarily problematic.
He calls this the ‘misadventures of critical thought. Ranciere
counters the avantgarde politicization of art and the spectator by
insisting that the spectator does not need to be emancipated. The
spectator, he argues, is already emancipated. This argument is
based on Ranciere’s previous work on the relationship between the
schoolmaster and the pupil.
Ranciere defends the spectator as the cultural figure that
matches the pupil subjected by pedagogy (compellingly revealed in
his The Ignorant Schoolmaster).
Rancière diagnoses the situation of the spectator by noting that,
according to the accusers, being a spectator is a bad thing for two
reasons. First, viewing is the opposite of knowing: the spectator is
held before an appearance in a state of ignorance about the process
of production of this appearance and about the reality it conceals.
Second, it is the opposite of acting: the spectator remains immobile
in her seat, passive. To be a spectator is to be separated from both
the capacity to know and the power to act.
DAVE BEECH
What Rancière detects in this critical discourse of the spectator,
reapplying his argument from ‘The Ignorant Schoolmaster’, is a
‘structure of domination and subjection’, which he calls ‘the logic of
the stultifying pedagogue, the logic of straight, uniform transmission’.
Just as the pupil is dominated and subjected by the very act of
attempting to overcome her ignorance by the knowledgeable teacher
(and is emancipated by the ‘ignorant’ teacher who ‘does not teach
his pupils his knowledge, but orders them to venture into the forest
of things and signs’), the spectator is dominated and subjected by
the very act of attempting to overcome their passivity and ignorance.
Against this, Rancière insists that ‘the incapable are capable’.
So, for Ranciere, just as the pupil should not be subjected to
the stultifying transmission of the knowledge of the schoolmaster,
and just as the pupil must always enter the relationship with the
schoolmaster as someone who knows not (as it is presumed by
the schoolmaster) as someone without any knowledge at all, the
spectator is always active and intelligent. Ranciere is challenging the
actants of pedagogy with the actuality of real, concrete individuals
– ie pupils know things before they first turn up to school. He wants
to do the same for art’s spectators. Already active and intelligent,
then, the avantgardist has no responsibility to make the spectator
active and intelligent, and no right to ‘wake up’ the sleepy spectator,
or ‘shock’ the spectator into activity, etc.
Ranciere’s reading of avant-gardist techniques is very weak
– by which I mean it is overly abstract and ahistorical, therefore it
is lacking in detail. He argues, for instance, that Brecht regarded
the spectator with derisory suspicion, as if the complex relationship
that Brecht sought with his audiences were one-dimensional, when
we know that even Brecht’s most didactic plays contained catchy
songs, knockabout comedy and great performances by the likes
of Peter Lorre and Charles Laughton. His treatment of montage
is unscrupulous. He makes a false argument about what was
claimed for montage in the early twentieth century and concludes
THE IMPOSSIBLE SPECTATOR
that, since this argument does not wash, that we must abandon
montage. Anybody who has read Brecht or Eisenstein on montage
knows that Ranciere does not offer a serious account here, and that
his alternatives (eg displacement) are, in fact, part of the history of
montage theory.
While Ranciere’s political analysis of domination within the
educational relationship correctly seeks to emancipate the pupil
from the tutelage of the ‘master’, he fails to do so in questions of
art’s own internal hierarchies, taking sides with the spectator rather
than the culturally excluded. Being the target of art’s emancipatory
forces does not place the spectator outside art, but right at its heart
– bullseye!
By basing his defence of the spectator on ‘the misadventures
of critical thought’ rather than the economies of cultural capital,
Ranciere gives the impression of emancipating the culturally
ignorant against orthodoxy and power when he is, in fact, defending
the most privileged figure within the history of art.
The question is not whether we are for or against the
spectator, but what has happened within art history to which the
spectator is true (or in Badiou’s terminology, to which the spectator
has fidelity), and what has happened since to which the spectator
embodies no fidelity. Simply, the spectator, which Ranciere defends
against the artworld’s attempt to generate new places for the
engagement with art, was once an historical novelty. The spectator’s
hegemonic position within art is the result of the very same process
that Ranciere is trying to halt by defending the emancipated
spectator. And given that the artworld is currently awash with new
artworks, new techniques and new theories of art's encounter, it is
safe to say that a defense of the spectator today is an attempt to
retain fidelity to a truth that has had its day. This is a conjunctural
philosophy of truth, and it calls for a conjunctural theory of art,
aesthetics and, of course, the spectator.
DAVE BEECH
Philosophers give artists bad advice. This is what leads
philosophers, including Ranciere, who write so eloquently and
fastidiously on philosophy and politics, to write in such a ham-fisted
way when it comes to art. Defending the spectator as a category
of experience (rather than examining the specific practices, role
and status of the spectator in one actual set of social and cultural
circumstances or another) is like taking sides with brushwork against
‘finish’ once and for all, outside of the contingencies of practice and
debate.
Rancière’s generalizations, which might seem convincing
within his abstract argument, have no sticking power. In saying this I
am not simply insisting on the facts or asserting the value of empirical
research. Rancière’s error is to assume that abstract questions
about art can be settled through abstract debate. This error can
be avoided if we understand that controversies about what art is
or ought to be are rarely if ever fought on abstract terms (we don't
work out what art is and then proceed to develop instantiations of
the general definition). Rather, the deepest and broadest questions
about art are always channeled through disputes over specific and
detailed local issues, very often quite arcane technical questions, in
fact.
This is why, at different times, it has seemed as if everything
in art, including its very existence, depended on, for instance,
protecting form from content, or having to choose between finish and
brushwork, or either asserting or subverting the division between
high and low culture, or siding with the horizontal against the
vertical, or preferring the occupation of time over space, or exploring
ideas instead of materials, or addressing the viewer as ocular or
embodied. It must be stressed here that it is never a question of
identifying one variant over another, as if, say, beauty is always
preferable to the grotesque, or participation is always preferable to
solitary contemplation.
THE IMPOSSIBLE SPECTATOR
The key is to see these (specific) disputes (that always have
far-reaching ramifications for art per se) as conjunctural. That is to
say, we should avoid the temptation - or pressure - to take sides,
affirmatively or critically, once and for all, abstracted from the
contingencies of practice and history. We must insist, on the contrary,
that what is at stake in these detailed questions about art undergo
changes according to specific historical conditions. So, brushwork
might subvert the academicism of finish at one conjuncture and
then be rejected for a more crafted finish when brushwork has
become bloated with power. Hence, if we are developing a notion of
the spectator or a theory of socially engaged art, it will not be in an
ahistorical, ideal or generic way.
What's more, since these specific questions are the means
by which we dispute art as such, they can never be isolated from
an ensemble of questions. Since modernism it has seemed
impossible in fact to produce new works and new configurations of
art without at the same time questioning the existing spectator. As
such, the critique of the spectator today is an inherited component
of a stream of modernist and avant-gardist critiques of art (each
critique proposing new formal, technical, aesthetic and social
possibilities for art), then we can see that it is false to separate the
critique of the spectator from a set of questions about cultural and
social transformation. Modernism and avant-gardism critique the
spectator and simultaneously call forth new spectators, new publics
and new experiences, as a condition of calling forth new art, new
institution, new social forms, new ideologies and a new world.
Instead of philosophers telling artists that we’ve got art all
wrong because we fail to see what kind of epistemological category
it ought to exemplify, it is always misleading to approach even the
most abstract questions in art in a philosophically abstract way.
Questions within art must always be conjunctural, contingent and
specific.
DAVE BEECH
Rather than accepting that the passive spectator holds the
place of the pupil subjected by the schoolmaster, or the part des sanspart,
then, we might, instead, understand the spectator as occupying
a very central and powerful role within the ideology, economy and
knowledge of art. In fact, since the death of the author we might
go so far as to say the spectator is hegemonic. If this is true then
it sounds to me as if Rancière wants to emancipate the privileged.
And this is evident in his conception of the aesthetic community as
'apart together'. 'The aesthetic community is a community of disidentified
persons', he argues. He links this, brilliantly, to the idea
that 'an emancipated proletarian is a dis-identified worker', which
refers, in particular, to self-educating workers who, thereby, do not
restrict themselves to the allotted capacities of workers. However,
Rancière fails to mention that a privileged bourgeois is a disidentified
capitalist. It is dis-identification that allows the better-off
to think of themselves as better full-stop. The same is true in art.
A privileged aesthete is a dis-identified scholar. This is the precise
logic of the symbolic violence of aesthetics, according to Bourdieu, in
which the acquisition of cultural capital is acquired on the condition
that the knowledge is preserved while its acquisition is systemically
forgotten: this is why the spectator seems so creditable.
Although Rancière's politics takes sides with the systemically
impoverished, excluded and denigrated, when it comes to the
question of cultural politics he takes sides with art’s hegemonic
subject, the spectator, rather than culture’s impoverished, excluded
and denigrated subject, art’s own part des sans-part, namely the
philistine. The defence of the philistine should not be seen as a
kind of intellectual surrendering of the high ground – of value or
quality – for the sake of bodily pleasures, commercial entertainment
and popular sentiment. But it certainly should not be expected to
confirm the values and hierarchies behind such distinctions. The
stark contrast between aesthetic delight on the one hand and
debauchery on the other, for instance, is a signal of the body as a
site of bitter rivalries, not simply a guide to proper conduct.
THE IMPOSSIBLE SPECTATOR
The philistine is not normally considered a cultural rival so
much as a rival to culture. We have to add, straightaway, I think,
that the total loss of culture may be an ideological claim about the
philistine, just as it was about so-called primitives. The appearance
of the philistine’s lack of culture is better understood as a lack of
cultural capital. In this way, the common idea of the philistine’s
externality to culture – of having no culture – can be regarded as
the ideological proof that the philistine holds the place of art’s part
des sans-part, the subject characterized by the total loss of culture.
What this means is that, the philistine is a figure within cultural
discourse, by virtue of being perceived as a figure without culture.
And what I would want to add is that consequently the philistine
holds its own promesse du bonheur by exceeding art’s horizon of
cultural universality.
The philistine, like the part des sans-part, is not another way
of talking about the proletariat, but it occupies an analogous place
in a different structure. Their structural promise is based on their
absolute lack of immediate promise. Marx did not argue that the
working class were better educated, had better manners or were
better equipped to govern than the bourgeoisie. And no defense of
the philistine could get very far by starting from the assertion that it
is culturally superior to the aesthete, connoisseur etc. In fact, there
is nothing positive about the philistine that would justify any hope
placed in it. Like the proletariat in the economy, though, or the part
des sans-part of politics, the philistine holds a unique place within
the totality which means that it is the key to understanding culture
and, potentially, a powerful agent in transforming it. If we take
Marx’s equation of impoverishment and emancipatory potential, we
can see that the philistine, as culturally bereft, fits the bill perfectly.
Marx characterises the position of the revolutionary class as being
able to say of itself “I am nothing and I should be everything”, and
politically this is exactly the position of the part des sans-part and
culturally the same goes for the philistine.
DAVE BEECH
It is obvious why Rancière would reject mass, commercial
and popular culture: while their lack of cultural esteem might
place them as rivals to aesthetic privilege, their commodification,
bureaucratization and affirmation mean that they are fully
integrated in the power, wealth and the policed system. But it is not
at all clear why the champion of the part des sans-part takes sides
with the spectator rather than the philistine. The philistine is the
repository of hope not because of how we might judge particular
philistine attitudes or those we might identify as actual philistines,
but because it holds the place of all those without a place in the
conflictual arena of culture.
So, with the philistine, the modernist, the avantgardist and
the critical or political or revolutionary artist in mind, let me return
to Ranciere’s argument that the incapable are capable, the basis
of his defence of the spectator as having no need for emancipation
since the spectator is already emancipated.
What the adventure of critical thought in art has consistently
insisted on is not the incapacity of those excluded from art, but their
critical capacity. The incapable – those philistines who prefer the
circus to the art gallery, those ‘primitives’ who are closer to violence
than civilization, those pamphleteers who are closer to action than
aesthetic contemplation, and so on – are capable of shattering
the aesthetic world of official culture. The critical tradition within
art are not the main agents of the idea that the incapable are in
fact incapable (we would look to the conservative aesthetes for
arguments of that kind).
But what the critical tradition within art has always added
to the argument that the incapable are capable, is equally that the
capable are incapable – I mean, the lovers of official culture are
too well educated to see the horrific truth about cultural division,
for instance, or that they fail to grasp the subtleties of ‘low culture’,
thinking that all TV is mind-numbing and so on. The critical tradition
THE IMPOSSIBLE SPECTATOR
within art has constantly imported these illegitimate forms of
culture into art and found them to be exciting, fascinating, deep and
nuanced.
We can add two more twists to Ranciere’s assertion that
the incapable are capable. First, the capacity of the capable – their
skills, taste, pleasures and rituals – should not go unchallenged and
should not be seen as the best way to judge the incapable. And
second, the capacity of the incapable to engage in art should not be
seen as a horizon, as something for them to aspire to, as their only
capacity, and so on. Ranciere allows philistines to aspire to official
culture but not to challenge, subvert, and question it.
The incapable are capable, but also:
The capable are incapable (this is why the cultivated so often reject
the works of the avantgarde – they are incapable, in their current
place, to see it)
The capacity of the capable should not go unchallenged
The capacity of the incapable is not their limit (the incapable have
surplus capacity – they can do, see and think things that the capable
cannot)
The emancipated spectator is a good citizen of art – well behaved,
at ease, legitimate, untroubled, unquestioning, follows protocol,
knows what is expected of them, knows their place, and so on.
Art has more to offer than this, partly because it asks much more of
the spectator than to be ‘good’. Art wants an impossible spectator.
Let us turn to Lececle once again, and see the spectator not
as an empirical individual opposed to the artist, set against each
other in an antagonistic relationship. Let’s see them, instead, as
DAVE BEECH
actants or places integral to the work. A person does not occupy one
place permanently. For empirical reasons, of course, we have to see
the artist as also and necessarily a spectator., but in terms of the
grammar of art’s relations, the artist is also a spectator in another
sense: real, concrete individuals temporarily occupy the places set
by the work and its circuits. As such, Ranciere’s politics of art, which
presupposes a conflict between the different empirical figures fixed
in their roles of artist and spectator, can be replaced with a politics
of art’s impossible spectators. In effect, when the artist creates
a work that establishes a new place for the engagement with art,
they are transforming themselves. This is, in fact, what artists-asspectators
want from other artists too. We go to galleries in order
to be stretched, in order to find new ways of thinking and being, in
order to occupy new places in the grammar of art.
The point is not to keep art from everyone else, to think
of art’s grammar only in terms of artists-as-artists and artistsas-spectators.
The point is, first, to do away with Ranciere’s fatal
partitioning of the artworld that keeps artists and spectators apart
in their fixed roles, failing to see how these places can be occupied
by the same individuals. The point is also to build into the heart
of the grammar of art’s social relations those places that do not
yet exist but are the reason why art continues to be an exhilarating
experience.
The spectator should not come to rest in the encounter with
art, but should be sent off, transported, transposed and transformed
by art. Art, in this way, always hopes for and tries to produce a new
spectator, a spectator that was previously impossible. The spectator
is not meant to be capable – at least not straight away – but needs
to engage in a kind of creative labour which is as much about
transforming oneself as it is about knowing the work. The labour of
engaging with art is a labour of transformation from the possible to
THE IMPOSSIBLE SPECTATOR
the impossible, not in terms of knowledge but in terms of subjectivity
– a becoming. Art allows us to become something unpredictable,
something unacceptable, perhaps, or something strange.
The impossible spectator is constantly changing because
they must continue to outstrip their own capacity. Their capacity
runs out quickly. They are not capable once and for all but are
continually stretched by the experience of art – not, I might stress,
by the shocking artwork or artist, but by the process of engaging
with art). Capacity is dead, here. Capacity is facile; incapacity is joy.
So, the avantgarde, instead of emancipating the spectator
from ‘passivity and ignorance’, can best be seen as establishing
places for impossible spectators – to address the spectator to come,
and therefore to see art’s spectators as capable above all else, to
become something impossible.
Like avantgarde montage, the subject of art is impossible in
another sense. The elements of montage do not get resolved into a
coherent whole. Edges remain. Conflicting spaces are not resolved
into one, contradictions are maintained. There is no single point
from which to survey the elements of montage. No unity within the
montage means no unity is possible for the spectator – they have
to remain mobile in their engagement, shifting from this element
to that element, from this relationship to that relationship, without
settling. The result is an impossible subject. A ‘subjectless subject’
in a sense that Adorno neglected in coining that phrase.
Finally, the impossible spectator is mobile subject that holds
another promise. Following Walter Benjamin’s argument in ‘Author
as Producer’, that the distinction between those who write and those
who read can and ought to be abandoned, the impossible mobile
spectator is someone who is not restricted to being a spectator, as if
this were their fate. The impossible mobile spectator is a temporary
spectator, an actant, always ready to take on a different role –
DAVE BEECH
participant, author, collaborator, etc. Without this kind of mobility,
there is no emancipation. The various possible roles available to us
are performed by the spectator in a way that refutes the possible
(the actual) and points beyond their own personal transformation –
the impossible spectator promises us an impossible world.
THE IMPOSSIBLE SPECTATOR
Mark Grist
OUT OF THE PICTURE
Since we broke up
The photo booth
In the shop
Down your road
Hates me.
The pictures
That it takes of me
Come outGhostly.
In them I am grossly
Anaemic,
Under-saturated,
Unhygienic,
Green eyed,
Lopsided
And unusually pasty.
OUT OF THE PICTURE
Since we broke up
The photo booth
In the shop
Down your road
Is no longer my friend
My hair appears
To be dressed
For revenge
And no matter
What I spend
It refuses to capture
My smileagain.
Instead it exposes
Hard knots
Deep spots,
Bitten with stubble
Where once
There were wrinkles
Now there are double
And the seat
Lacks old comfort
As if created
For a couple.
MARK GRIST
Andas I standwatching,
Waiting
For another picture
That it’s taken
The guttural jeers
Of the machine
Develop in my ears
Confirming my fears
That the world
Isturning
Against me lately.
OUT OF THE PICTURE
And since we broke up
The photo booth
In the shop
Down your road
Seems toHate me.
MARK GRIST
Matthew Stock
THE SUIT REALLY NEEDS TWO PAIRS OF HANDS
The suit I am wearing and the operation I am conducting
with it and in it really needs two pairs of hands; one to slip the
battery packs in to the specifically made pockets in the waistcoat
and the other to site the cameras in the jacket and feed the wires
from the battery packs. But as this is a one-person cubicle with a
fair few gallery visitors outside it is better for me to this solo. The
cameras are pin hole spy cameras with 10m night sights and audio;
with some last minute adjustments they will soon be sited and I
will be ready to exit and emerge into the gallery. The weight of the
battery packs holds me upright and elegant.
The Spectator is much more then a mere member of a
momentary group that go to see this thing, then move over there and
observe that thing; they are a community. The position and power
of the spectator, as implied by the work of art, has been a central
question from the time of Denis Diderot and has been regularly
contested from Roland Barthes essay The Death of the Author to
Michael Fried’s call for the passivity of the audience.
Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator brings the
spectator back into focus; once again asking us to re-examine its
potential. Rancière’s spectator is one that is developed through
ideas raised in his earlier work The Ignorant School Master. This
work converges on the theories of the eccentric Joseph Jacotot
who believed in the pedagogical structure of intellectual equality.
Ranciere concentrates on this to discuss the relationship between
the schoolmaster and the pupil. In the Emancipated Spectator
Ranciere uses The Ignorant School Master as a basis to discuss the
spectator of an artwork; a position that he always holds in doubt.
For Ranciere the spectator who sits and passively observes
an artwork is viewed as an undesirable description of the viewing
THE SUIT REALLY NEEDS TWO PAIRS OF HANDS
process for two reasons: firstly the spectator is portrayed as
a position of ignorance unaware of the codes and signs that
enable the transmission of knowledge from actor to viewer.
Secondly the spectator remains immobile and passive he is
separated both from the action on the stage and from the actions
of other spectators; this is an ignorance that needs be countered to
re-establish knowledge and action. Theatre needs to activate
the spectator by reversing this ignorance’s effect and restoring
what Ranciere calls the “ownership of their consciousness and
their activity”. But Ranciere goes further for he calls for a new
spectator, and a new relationship, derived from his writings
about the ignorant schoolmaster. The schoolmaster’s role is
to abolish the distance between ignorance and knowledge, by
continuously re-establishing and breaking down this distance.
This pedagogical relationship between schoolmaster and
pupil is one that can be seen as a parallel to the distance between
the artwork and its spectator and may explain what is at stake for
the spectator in contemporary art today.
“Emancipation starts from the opposite principal, the principal of
equality. It begins when we dismiss the opposition between looking
and acting, and understand that the distribution of the visible itself
is part of the configuration of domination and subjection. It starts
when we realise that looking is also an action that confirms or
modifies that distribution, and that ‘interpreting the world’ is already
a means of transforming it.” Art forum review, The Emancipated
Spectator, March 2007.
The first route is the most important, the decisions that I
make about my walking direction, pathways and stopping points
will all have to be noted and catalogued for later repetition. It’s the
repetition of this walk through the site over and over again that will
enable this artwork that I am in the process of creating. Physically
the galleries specific environment confronts me; in this instance it
MATTHEW STOCK
is the private view of its latest show. The visitors, the artwork, the
artist, and the site make up the categories that I will be filming.
The wondering gaze of the cameras retransmits these categories
by divorcing them form time and place. In this way I am asking
questions concerning the politics of art production and art viewing.
I will begin by moving to observe this painting and then move over to
my right to view this video installation; this has taken me 10 minutes
so far. I will continue through…
The question of an audience and readership arose again
during the Self Assessment of Madame Wang. This journal is
engaged in the potential for geo-distributed collaboration in order
to call forth another site for artistic experiences, and in doing so
is calling for a new way of approaching the art object. What is
interesting is how Jacques Rancière and Boris Groys relate to
this question. How can these artistic experiences and ideologies
exist within a new site and what does this ultimately mean to the
community that observes it? The contemporary art community is
a self-aware community that has already been conditioned by the
art world’s numerous emancipatory and participatory projects.
This community has already accepted its participatory role, actively
welcomed its new authorities, and is ready to reject or accept any
denigration offered. What would constitute a new site for art and
what will its community of users look like? If we accept Rancière’s
position that the transfer of knowledge is dependent on maintaining
the division of both mastery & ignorance, passivity & activity, then
another question arises. This passivity and mastery continues to
support the configuration of the involved individuals into positions
of domination and subjection, can the artist functioning as the
ignorant schoolmaster change the relationship of the spectator as
the pupil?
Boris Groys offers an insight in his essay Politics of
Installation, where he discusses what happens when a mass cultural
community encounters the context of art. Groys suggests that groups
THE SUIT REALLY NEEDS TWO PAIRS OF HANDS
attending a film screening are transitory encounters and that their
structure is accidental; they share no commonalities or previous
history to bind them together but yet they are still communities.
Groys calls these groups “radically contemporary communities” and
makes it very clear that these groups are not be confused with radical
political religious or working communities because these traditional
communities all share, from the outset, a link to something common
from the past.
“….a common language, common faith, common political
history, common upbringing. Such communities tend to establish
boundaries between themselves and strangers with whom they
share no common past.” Groys, Going Public, P62
In contrast the communities created by mass culture
transcend any links to the common past: a community viewing a film
screening or a pop concert is only able to look forward; this is due to
the constructs of stage and the positioning of the audience. Groys
suggests that this is not adequate to keep the community together.
The key is found when this community enters the art context, for the
arts space has the ability to evoke self-reflection through its use of
the installation, curatorial practices, and most importantly mediated
encounters with art.
“The contemporary art space is a space in which multitudes can view
themselves and celebrate themselves… in a way that assists them
in reflecting upon their own condition, offering them an opportunity
to exhibit themselves to themselves.” Groys, Going Public 2010 p.63
In this self-exhibition there is a parallel with Rancière’s
argument that the ethics of our political efficacy stem from and still
have a relationship to the classical theatre’s aesthetic break. The
actors of classical theatre performing on stage exhibit thoughts and
emotions that are interpreted and read by the audience, who see
in these performances a reflection of them selves. This reflection
MATTHEW STOCK
enables the stage to directly affect the behaviour of the community.
Rancière is quick to point out that while we no longer believe that
the stage can bring about a utopian change in human behaviour,
we do still however hold with the belief that images/things can
instigate political social change. But therein lies a rupture point, and
interestingly it relates to neuroscience and how the brain processes
new information. Rancière suggests that the origins of this rupture
stem from the spectator vs. performer,
“What was broken down was the continuity between thought and
its signs in bodies, and also between the performance of living
bodies and its effect on other bodies.” Rancière, The Emancipated
Spectator, p.62.
This refers to an aesthetically induced rupture point; the
spectator who sees and reflects on what he sees with what he
knows, observes in the theatre his reflection, but it is paradoxically
opposite to the spectacle before him. The model has broken down.
This crowded corner means that I will have to stop and wait;
this is a good time for me to mentally re-walk my entrance through
the first two rooms, corridor and drinks bar. I find myself in a state
of hypnosis, I see neither the artworks or the people, I see just
objects in space that I will re-appropriate much later in my studio.
The partially concealed cameras can be noticed by those that want
to look; but they are unimportant and insignificant over shadowed
by the greater impact that this private view has over the attending
audience; who are a subservient community emancipated by one of
arts most sincere of spectacles.
This artwork in creation aims to open up layers of possibilities
within: the tragic space, the foreclose space, and the potential
space.
THE SUIT REALLY NEEDS TWO PAIRS OF HANDS
Ranciere puts forward the civic festival structure as a possible
solution to this rupture, where there is no separation between
actors and spectators through the use of ethical performance; or
to put it another way, the actors perform what the spectators see
in themselves. This new model proposes a stance without any
separation between stage and spectator; an anti-representation.
Linking this with Groys one can see a similarity with the model of
his stance for production. The artist and the spectator view together
their own reflection, and in doing so call forth new information,
and new knowledge. Is this the model for Madame Wang?
Arts Encounter with Madame Wang
Rancière now introduces what he calls the Third Thing
in relation to the schoolmaster and the pupil. This Third Thing is
described as being “..always a book or some kind of writing – alien
to both and to which they can refer to, to verify in common what
the pupil has seen.” An artist may wish an intention, an action or
an intensity that is inherent in their work to be perceived or felt
or understood by the spectator, and as such, they seek a position
between cause and effect. The artist is occupying the position of
the schoolmaster as one who is aware of the distance and has
knowledge of the ways to abolish it. There exists then this distance
between the artist and the spectator, and also a distance between
the artist’s intentions and the understanding of the spectator. This
is where Rancière’s Third Thing comes in; Rancière suggests that
it is not the transmission of the artist’s knowledge intention or
understanding to the spectator but this Third Thing that is important.
It is something that is owned by no one, but which subsists between
them both. For the ignorant artist and ignorant spectator this Third
Thing is both the intention of the artist and the understanding of the
spectator. It is the spectacle that links and separates them, there is
no equal transmission of information, there is just the action of the
spectator and the intention of the artist.
MATTHEW STOCK
A note about learning
When you acquire new learning you may feel that you
can learn anything, however, the world of Neuroscience tells us
something different. It says that what you have already learnt directly
affects your ability to learn new things. This is important and poses
an interesting question for art, because it is possible that there will
be limitations on the transmission of knowledge. For example the
spectator, who stands in front of an art object in contemplation,
does not stand in ignorant isolation for the spectator brings with
them prior knowledge which they will access and reflect on to
understand the object that they see before them. This knowledge
is fundamental for the transmission of meaning from the artist
to the spectator. This knowledge then provides the framework for
which new knowledge can be linked. The brain’s ability to acquire
and process new information is fundamentally associative, that is to
say, what you can learn is influenced and affected by what you have
already learnt. The ability to learn is also motivated by differences
between what is expected and what is actually transmitted; this
difference between expectation and transmission is what produces
further learning.
How can these new communities suggested by Groys and
Rancière be empowered to approach Madame Wang’s self-reflexive
site, and to understand the processes by which this new encounter
and its information will take place?
The spectator is not a passive position that needs to be
made active; it is a natural position, it is what has always been. The
community sees in an artwork that which it sees within itself and in
doing so continues to reassert its position to itself. The artist aims to
transmit an intensity of feeling, energy and action to the spectator,
which is governed by the distance between them and the distance
between the artwork and the spectator. More than that there is the
Third Thing; placed between artist, artwork and spectator, to which
THE SUIT REALLY NEEDS TWO PAIRS OF HANDS
all have access and which is described by Rancière as the book.
Lastly and importantly there is neuroscience’s association and its
model of limitation.
This then displays the Self Assessment world that Madame
Wang navigates and in many ways is a product of. By altering the
site for art, the encounter with art is also changed, and with it both
the spectator and the artist. Madame Wang, the publication, is an
object that is distributed, purchased, held and felt; its format is
not necessarily new at all, but what is new is the way in which it is
developed. In its dual call for both a new way of distributing writing,
and an alternative collaborative process, it is placing demands on
the centrality of the conception of the reader-writer relation. This
openness is brought forth through the inclusion of the collaborators’
processes and the outward stance of the text. It calls for collaboration
in its creation and its reading, and in doing so it seeks to enable the
re-conception of the audience. To be enabled is to give someone or
something the authority or means to do something; this is a very
powerful statement and in the end perhaps this is enough.
Groys, B, (2010), Going Public e-flux journal, Sternberg Press,
Ranciere, J, (2009), The Emancipated Spectator, Verso
Ranciere, J, (March 2007 p.270 – 281), The Emancipated Spectator, Art
forum
This text was first published in Madame Wang issue 2
MATTHEW STOCK
Tom Trevatt
BEYOND SPECTATING
Contemporary art is a genre that is loosely but not exclusively
defined by the chronological time of the twentieth century. More
precisely, the contemporary is defined by certain tropes, categories or
tactics which originate in very specific moments in the art history of
this last century. I want to pinpoint what I see as the defining moment
of the shift from the modern era to the contemporary, codify how
this shift has defined what we now see as art, and propose a move
beyond the limited category of the contemporary. This move beyond,
or escape, I attest, will provide art with a renewed mandate to engage
politically.
Almost predictably the defining shift from the modern to the
contemporary occurs with Marcel Duchamp who, in 1917 wrote a short
essay entitled The Creative Act. In this text he outlined a key phrase
that has come to shadow the art production of the last hundred years;
the artist-coefficient. To quote Duchamp:
“in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is
missing. This gap, representing the inability of the artist to express
fully his intention, this difference between what he intended to
realize and did realize, is the personal 'art coefficient' contained
in the work. In other words, the personal 'art coefficient' is like an
arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the
unintentionally expressed. To avoid a misunderstanding, we must
remember that this 'art coefficient' is a personal expression of art à
l'état brut, that is, still in a raw state, which must be 'refined' as pure
sugar from molasses by the spectator”
(Duchamp, M. The Creative Act)
For Duchamp, and his legacy, this refining process is the
process of acting as a viewer on the work of art. As he continues,
“the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator
brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and
BEYOND SPECTATING
interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the
creative act.” (ibid.) Contemporary art precisely produces a scenario
whereby the viewer is interpolated as a free subject within the realm
of decision about the work. This space opened by the work for the
viewer to occupy is what I call a correlate space, determined by its
openness to the viewer's interpretive impulse. In fact, we can trace the
history of contemporary art as it progressed from Modernism where
the focus was on production, to the period we exist in now, where the
focus is on interpretation with this specific Duchampian statement.
The interpretive mode places the viewer as subject in a prioritised
position, prioritised precisely as the subject of the decision, seen as
the procedure of fixity where the subject is both the recipient and
progenitor of meaning. Contemporary art gives itself over to a viewer
who's subjectivity is produced by the open, or correlate, space art of
the contemporary period engenders.
So, if the artist-coefficient is the sine qua non of contemporary
art, and the net result of this openness to the viewer is the interpolation
of a certain kind of subjectivity – a subject who finds itself as the
locus of meaning production – then art in this category builds into
itself a teleology of interpretation. The subject as inbuilt addressee
precipitates a conservative logic of humanism that places art as a
communicative device determined by its relation to cognition. Art,
then is forever seen as an object, as Quentin Meillassoux puts it,
“for us”. The problems with this conception are twofold. Firstly, the
prioritisation of the human subject in its relation to the art object
is an anthropocentricism which continues the work of post-Kantian
thought to place humanity at the core of existence. And secondly, the
open artwork's political ambition is severely limited by its insistence
on the use of the logic of undecidability.
What contemporary art has instituted in its non-ideological
positing of the undecidable at its core, in other words, its tragic
relationship to meaning, is a constitutive failure to do real politics.
Politics in contemporary art is reduced to the image of politics but
without the corollary theory of the power of the image needed to
TOM TREVATT
escape the tragic sustained through ironic distance. Art that has
undecidability as its defining feature does so through a suspension
of decision, slippages at the juncture of determination. It adopts
forms that open a space between the affirmative and negative.
Maurizzio Lazzarato sees with this undecidability comes a radical
form of political resistance. In an essay titled 'Art, Work and Politics
in Disciplinary Societies and Societies of Security' he suggests that
the suspension of labour produced by the artwork acts as a potential
space for new forms of political subjectivity. That the void left by the
un-decision is the moment of political resistance - a radical openness
for the possibility of subjectivity. Undecidability is produced by what
art thinks is its politics, the 'non-institution' or 'non-proposition', or, in
other words, the openness to interpretation.
The kind of subject interpolated by this openness is near
identical to the subject in neoliberalism; that is a free, unregulated
individualised subject, with the personal freedoms that the politics
of liberalism promised. And let us be clear, the socio-economic
effects of the shift to individualism have created the current crisis of
liberal market capitalism. As Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford
explain in their essay Ethical Socialism, the historical declination of
the welfare state, Geoffrey Howe's 1981 'austerity budget' that cut
public spending and increased taxes and Thatcher's degradation of
socialism, were crucial in the destruction of social responsibility and
the creation of “a new popular compact between the individual and
the market” which “displace[d] the old statist, social welfare contract”
(Cruddas, J. and Rutherford, J. Ethical Socialism). This creation of a
new type of individualism has, through its linkage of the individual to
capital, eviscerated the idea of the public sphere as a political space,
thus confining politics to an elite political class, produced a form of
hyper-consumerism driven by desire, and ultimately been responsible
for the 2008 financial collapse and, I would argue, the current
ecological crisis. I would go so far as to suggest that contemporary
art has been at the avant garde of the creation of this form of political
subjectivity, has laid the ground for the shift to individualism and has
through its appeal to the private experience of the viewer, devalued
BEYOND SPECTATING
the idea of a common. Contemporary art, then, despite its claims to
ethical or critical politics, is both the worst expression and progenitor
of neoliberalism.
My claim would be that it is our responsibility now to rethink
what art can be outside of the framework of the contemporary. The
relational or cognizable prioritising, the production of correlate space
in other words, inherent in contemporary art necessarily occludes the
reality of the art object, a reality that we cannot account for through
cognisance, the reality of an anterior world expressed as indifferent to
humans. What remains now, beyond the contemporary, is to account
for that exterior reality. To do so would, I suggest, problematize the
humanism of contemporary art, thus eviscerating the correlate space,
claiming art as part beyond the realm of the “for us” part embedded
in that realm and operating not through the aegis of the interpretative
mode but returning us to the question of production.
The artwork cannot either be contained by thought nor is it
produced merely as a vehicle for thought, but it both brings with it and
is instaurated by atelic affects that are reliant upon the contingency
of materials which, pertaining to no idealism, perhaps or perhaps
not perturb other objects, including the viewer, but are not activated
by or for the viewer. Art is capable of making, and regularly does
make, propositions about the world in a non-conceptual way. That
is to say, the work of the work of art is extra-philosophical, it can
produce determinations that are beyond thought, beyond philosophy,
beyond the human. The artwork, instead of being a pure relational,
or communicative device, is first and foremost an irruption of nonthought.
This unknowable is both the horizon and beyond the horizon
of what thought can think, and may or may not, and this possible but
not necessary condition is important, may or may not cause things
to happen. There is, to reiterate, no necessity for the unknowable to
make itself self evident through affectivity. It is as likely as not that
the irruption of non-thought within the work will contingently act upon
anything else. So, the atelic affect is not necessarily affective but
contingently so. This contingency of affect that perseveres through the
TOM TREVATT
logic of the unaddressed expression, the material quality of all objects
not addressed to a viewer, just emphatically there, is, according to
me, a challenge to the Duchampian model of contemporary art.
Contingency, for Reza Negarestani, is key to understand art practice.
As he suggests:
“if we consider art as a material-driven process of production, these
anonymous materials enjoy an autonomy of their own; and such
autonomy continuously interferes with the artwork itself regardless of
the decisions of the artist – that is, whether or not the artist determines
to be 'open' to their influence. In other words, the contingency of the
artist's materials cannot be the strict subject of the artist's openness.
Contingent materials cannot be directly embraced.”
(Negarestani, R. “Contingency and Complicity”, The Medium of
Contingency)
As that that cannot be encompassed, contingency erupts
as an evental interjection. Expressed through the materiality of the
work of art, as something that surprises and leads the artist rather
than being controlled by them, contingency is that which comes from
the outside. For us contingency names the unknowable horror of the
infinite reality that lies beyond the horizon of thought. It is the eruption
of non-thought. Materiality, then, is the site for the post-human to
express itself through a non-intentional affect.
“Incognitum Hactenus – not known yet or nameless and without origin
until now – is a mode of time in which the innermost monstrosities
of the earth or ungraspable time scales can emerge according to the
chronological time that belongs to the surface biosphere of the earth
and its populations. Incognitum Hactenus is a double-dealing mode
of time connecting abyssal time scales to our chronological time, thus
exposing to us the horror of times beyond […] anything can happen
for some weird reason; yet also, without any reason, nothing at all can
happen. Things leak into each other according to a logic that is does
BEYOND SPECTATING
not belong to us and cannot be correlated to our chronological time”
(my emphasis; Negarestani, R. Cyclonopedia)
For Negarestani, material comes with a set of affordances
that can channel or determine the process of production, so, instead
of the openness of the contemporary period, art should be based on
what he calls the “formidable ascesis of closure”. Materials afford
certain aspects of themselves to be produced as such.
In the quote from the beginning of this paper Duchamp
formulates a gap between the expressed but intended and the
unintentionally expressed, for him the unintentionally expressed is
what is given over to the viewer by the artist for the production of
meaning to occur. Apophenia is the name given to this process, the
bursting forth of subjectivity from the object, in other words, the very
human act of creating meaning out of random patterns. What occurs
in the Duchampian paradigm is the internalising of the expectation of
apohenia, or rather, contemporary art attaches itself to the production
of subjectivity through the appeal to apophenia alone. Which is to say
art prostrates itself to the subjective.
What the atelic affect engenders is a thinking of a work of
art shorn from its attachment to the addressed subject. Instead,
instituting a thinking beyond the humanism of the contemporary focus
on the subject towards a radical object focused thought. To quote Ray
Brassier: “it is no longer thought that determines the object, whether
through representation or intuition, but rather the object that seizes
thought, and forces it to think it ... according to it”
(Brassier, R. Nihil Unbound).
Starting from a zero point of nihilist speculation art must think
beyond the contemporary towards a realm of collected objectiveness
divorced from the humanist promise of individual freedom, whereby
the realm of art is defined not by its addressed subject, but by the
stake by which it enters into an ecology of objects that understand
themselves as capable of instituting their own politics. Upon the
death of humanist ideology and the dawning of an age in which
TOM TREVATT
politics must transform into a category capable of making the
move beyond its previous neoliberal dominion, art has a renewed
mandate to engender a new political imaginary. This, I claim, it does
not through an opening up but by the procedure of non-dialectical
resistance to thought, hence not the production of undecidability,
but the instauration of affects. Art would then rest in the double
position of addressed and unaddressed expression. Whereas, under
Duchamp, this unaddressed expression would be the realm for the
subjectivisation of the viewer, according to me, this realm of the art
is the expression precisely of an ecological thought that is able to
engender a radical new politics of interdependence and commonality
that butchers the prioritised space of subjectivity. Art beyond the
contemporary understands itself as capable of a politics beyond the
limited ambition of the production of a free liberal subject, towards
affective, powerful and intertwined objects that produce the common
through an institution of affects and as such, a site for new politics to
emerge.
A version of this paper was given at the Beyond Representation conference
at South Bank University in May 2012
BEYOND SPECTATING
This book was produced as a part of
the exhibition illusion of the spectator
8th – 18th June 2012
Editors
Matthew Stock
Keh Ng
Copy Editor
Matthew Stock
Design
The Modern Language Experiment
Cover Design
dividebythree.com
Published
The Modern Language Experiment
First published 2012
contact@modernlanguageexperiment.org
Available to buy at
www.modernlangaugeexperiment.org
© the modern language experiment 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may
be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any mechanical, electronic or other
means known with out the permission in
writing from the publishers.