Expansiveness, the idea that there is more knowledge to explore and to discover, whether you want to associate that with an image of colonising or not, I'm not sure. I mean, this is the problem with correlationism in a sense, isn't it, is that it interprets in terms of social or historical or linguistic phenomena something which, according to Brassier at
least is completely alien to or prior to those phenomena. Yes, but if you're using language to speak of what is outside of language, that means that we are playing on those things and they cannot be unnegotiated somehow. Yeah, well I think this is part of the question that I was trying to address at the beginning of this session, which is the language with which we describe neutron stars may well belong to the realm of death and may well have nothing in it which we can correlate with the manifest
image. And yet, the practice of philosophy is itself a dramatization. The attempt to understand, to give a place within human knowledge and within the human project to this thought which comes from outside, itself inevitably involves a question of style and a question of tone. So yeah, I agree with you to that extent. The perfect example because it plays on an old great myth which is at the center of the perception of the artist as a genius somehow and the philosopher as a genius. Orpheus that descends to the rhythm of death to take his lover back but he fails because he turns.
it's a very culturally burdened language. Well, in that sense, I mean, the philosopher, the speculative realist philosopher becomes the ambassador, as Morton was talking about, becomes the ambassador between this type of thought which is kind of mute, blind, devoid of imagination, and a cultural world which is unable to communicate with it. In a way, that's the role that the speculative realist philosopher inhabits, whether that's his intention or not. One, do we have to finish precisely?
One, we can go over that. How much do you like? Well, I'll just... Well, I'd just like to finish by showing this piece of work by Amanda, because I think it's an interesting second example of how one can make work, which is informed by these ideas. and Amanda has elaborated and really thought through in some detail I think the way in which the concerns of speculative realism are paralleled by the situation in which artists find themselves and the kind of correlationist orthodoxies that they find themselves in also and Amanda's very
interested in the image and representation and the force of the image and the force of words and rhetoric. And she said that art is in a position of recently of having a fear of making meaning. It doesn't want to make things that mean. And it doesn't want to think about the image and the image as representation to the point at which in relational aesthetics there's a we have a primacy of the relation and this primacy of the relation becomes a kind of correlationist orthodoxy it's discussed that's discussed and that's idealized in art practice
and that becomes an ideal of social engagement or of good political practice precisely in a sense because it refuses to make meaning. It refuses to use image to make meaning. And this fear of making meaning is linked to a fear of being caught in the economic circuits, being caught in this kind of economic machine which makes meanings in order to make money. so they don't want to think about what images mean they don't want to think about the production of meaning through image or the production of meaning through art and representation so there's this dismissal of the production of meaning
but in this dismissal we lose the question of realism and then on the other hand we have practices that work with irony and they have a notion of institutional power and then basically complain about their finitude in the face of it, whether they do so ironically or in some other way. What can art do these days? And demonstrations, endless demonstrations, that it can't really do very much. It can demonstrate ironically how much it can't do. It can demonstrate its own limits and so on, and institutional critique. So there's this idea of this open field of convivial relations, this open interpretive field, or there's this ironic interest in finitude.
and so she said for the what speculative realism allowed her to do was to think to go back to thinking about the production of meaning and the force of images in a different way which isn't remapped onto the conditions of subjectivity and this particular work that i want to show called sanity assassin it follows her interest in the kind of force of image and the force of word, the force of rhetoric and it's based very much on this argument between Adorno and Brassier so the film follows out a pair of characters
and each of the characters is in a kind of theory fiction is living out the philosophical edicts of these two enigmatic theorists. The first is Arnold Rottweiler, who's an exiled European intellectual besieged by capitalist alienation and low culture. So he's a kind of this figure of Adorno as being, Adorno in his exile in L.A., kind of horrified at this cancerous exteriorization, this kind of spatialization and evacuation of internality that we spoke about. And secondly, Artemis Starr, who is a hard-boiled kind of pragmatic theorist of direct engagement.
So he's like a kind of Richard Rorty character. and she draws on the detective fiction she's very interested in Columbo's adventures in L.A. James Elroy and she's also drawing on Adorno's dream diaries from when he was in L.A. which are an incredible kind of parallel to his theoretical work that he was doing in which you see his dreams of kind of seduction by this entertainment machine by the culture and industry kind of crystallize into these incredible images like of female crocodiles that try to seduce him in the basement and so on.
It's really, really interesting, makes really interesting reading. So Sanity Assassin explores how these two subject positions of the kind of besieged internality, the retreat into internality and trying to push away this encroachment of this alien reconfiguration. And this other position of just kind of dealing with it, being out on the street, dealing with everything in this kind of realist, pragmatic way.
So how these diverging notions of nature, of nature as kind of red in tooth and claw and nature as being able to be re-reconciled with human reflexivity or the doomed hope of reconciling nature with history and with the manifest image. These two notions of nature play out in the architecture of L.A. So the history of modern architecture in L.A.,
the socialist dreams of modernist architecture, that is the idea that there's a merging of the interior and the exterior, there's a yearning for nature as an openness and a freedom, There's a perfection of a machine for living which somehow also connects you with nature. All these dreams transplanted into LA eventually necessitate that all these beautiful houses which were built on the basis of these dreams become securitized and privatized. They become private houses which are surrounded by huge security fences. And so they create this other type of space. so in constructing this dream of freedom they also construct this outside
where this other character lives so in living in the modernist dream you also construct this outside and this other nature and this is the landscape of LA the inside and the outside so as we've seen Adorno had argued that the systematic, rational, externalized conceptualization of the world of modernity is this deluded and doom-laden reenactment of the mythical basis of culture. And Brassier reverses the argument, insisting that the cherished internal realm of human spirit is the illusory product of external machinic processes, or an insect's waking dream. So in Beecher's study of this modernist architectural production of subjectivity,
the production of subjectivity and of a notion of nature through architecture sees these diametric modern visions of the real emerging literally in concreto so yeah I think it's just a very interesting way in which one can read this dramatization from a hyper-abstract ontology and philosophical positions through architecture into a politics of subjectivity. So, try to get the audio to work. Oh
When is it from? Sorry? When is it from? From? 2010. Did we finish then on that bombshell? Maybe somebody has another few questions or whatever. But I mean, for me it's a very weird, it's sort of... How can I say this?
this is... of course we can only put images together in a conventional manner. And clearly this is a film. And again, what you can do here is only to sort of hint at what the film tries to do. And it fails to do it and it fails to represent it somehow. It's complicated to look at this without dismissing it as somebody who has just used a FCP in a sort of a random happy attitude. But if I insist then
what I start to see is not the images but what I see is is that which is presently absent somehow. Seems to me that what she's showing is not the images. But it's rather something that falls away when I am trying to comprehend it. They can only comprehend it into an already available set of rules or conventions, right? Being which conventions? I have some, you have others, and some of them are coinciding. I can say that it's a film, I can say that it's an arch film. I can give it lots of identity. Yeah. But it's not there to promote these identities, right?
So, they're not there to tell me a narrative. It's rather there to sort of, what is, without thinking it's Freudian or psychoanalytic, there's a lack that I need to fill in. not a lack in the image, but possibly a lack in how I can identify these images. And then I have to invent something in there. And that puts me on the one side, it could put me out, and say I don't get it. Or it can make me produce or push. Well, there is a narrative. It's not at all repudiating narrative or meaning or representation, as I said. I think that's precisely the point, is that it's not attempting, it's interested in the
production of meaning and not in kind of disrupting it or destroying it. So there is a narrative in kind of disrupting it or destroying it. So there is a narrative in the sense that there's the first section and the second section, and there's the two people speaking from different subject positions and from different sides of the wall, who together create this architecture of the interior and the exterior.
And the interesting thing for me, I think, in terms of philosophy is the explicit acknowledgement that there is a rhetoric involved, but that this rhetoric also has a conceptually interesting component to it. The fact that this kind of forceful rhetoric can be cut up with the James Delroy kind of pragmatism itself has something to say. And the fact that the two... I don't know how you want me to respond.
I mean, it's easy to dismiss anything that comes in any type of frame. But how do you conceive this? Because Adorno, the philosopher of the interior, somehow. somehow. Well, Adorno is the kind of, yeah, besieged in the, enclosed within the library, within the inner sanctum of history, right? Yeah, and I think that, if I got the story right, he wanted to dedicate his aestheticity to Samuel Beckett.
Right. And Beckett read it and thought it was crap. Yeah. It ended up being your dedication, But because Beckett has destroyed language and the possibility of narration. And then Adorno have to come along and reconstruct it. Because Beckett cannot speak. He cannot narrate. Because that would be 15 ligandes. Like just what you described in LA. it would be a thing making of this artwork that can be autonomous because it withdraws into the sublime or the autonomous artwork beyond narration. But Adorno still has to be there somehow to explain it to us that this is what it does.
so I don't know what you think about it but this is an attempt to problem-taste even further like maybe what Morten speaks about also is that on the one hand side there is a silence a very modernistic silence in the narrative of the artwork that we have to fill in ourselves and that is to some extent the creation of the emancipated spectator we don't bring it up to date and that is constructing yet another subjectivity that can be identified and narrowed drawn upon but I don't know, do you see this as a dichotomy or a fight
or between the mute artwork and the blathering philosopher Blathering, I don't know if it's even a word in English, but... Blathering, yeah. Blathering, yeah. I can't answer that. Why is the philosopher blathering? You mean the artwork doesn't need to speak about itself? I mean, I think it must, and I think it does.
But the kind of dichotomy between the two standpoints that I understand that you mean are narrated in this artwork that you just showed us. if there is an interest of bridging that gap, or if there is such a thing as a polar, or polarization, or a dichotomous tension between the two positions. The two positions are not the position of the artist and the philosopher. The two positions are the position of the attempt to preservation of the interiority
against the kind of cancerous excrescence of scientific rationality of this real that encroaches on human interiority. And the pragmatist view, which is just to inhabit that outside without reflection, without reflexivity. And the fact that these two points of view and maybe dichotomous, that they form the architecture of subjectivity. They form the architecture of LA in the same way that they form the architecture of the options available to subjectivity. So there's this horror story of being besieged by scientific rationality, or there's this
other notion of nature, of just complete involvement, pragmatic engagement, but the two can't be thought apart. I mean, in the end, they're both part of the same system. But it's not the artist and the philosopher. I was more benevolent than you understood me, in the sense of watching the film or the art piece. You were more benevolent? Yeah, I mean, I was very happy to have seen it. But what is curious and what is interesting is that when you talk about it before, I somehow expect something that is much more weird or suspicious or strange.
And what I see is somehow a mixture between documentary film, house advertisement from LA and a kind of activist video with too big images somehow. Or this text, the typical typeface of activist video. And there's something in there. No, but that's all deliberate. Yeah, of course. But it's super easy to dismiss it as conventional and rubbish, whatever. So there's something that I can easily dismiss as yet another one. Yeah, yeah. But if I insist, then there is something that comes both in the narration and in the sort of the... It's a kind of horrible, high-definition flatness of the video, of the images from L.A.
There's sort of weird combinations that is easy to see as slightly amateur-esque, but when if I start to look at them, at that moment there is something that it doesn't, it's not in the narration, it's not a narration that I should only follow, but it is something about absences that are present only and giving voice to themselves more in its informants and in meeting when materials connect or how the materials connect somehow. And this is something interesting with other pieces of other stuff that you have shown
me in other circumstances, that this is something that goes through style-wise from time to time sort of the work of the canini is also kind of very nothing special yeah and yeah i find it curious is that how how in this way how artwork that kind of comes from that has relationship to faculty really seems to address an idea of avant-garde or art as progressing society or expanding society as a whatever it could be. The regresses leave issues that have been central to 20th century art making
in a rather different way. From the perspective of perhaps from a perspective that's something like the perspective of a science fiction writer. Like, i.e. from a genre perspective rather than from the institutional, the perspective of a kind of institutional orthodoxy. Which I think is a good thing. Undoubtedly. But I don't know which science fiction writer that we think about. Because I somehow think that it's Certainly not a William Gibson kind of guy. How about? More of a ballard person, definitely. And I don't know exactly which ballard needed.
If it's the one that is kind of early 70s, rather, which is kind of, which is not the crash, which is becomes spectacular, spectacular, nor is it the late one, which is sort of capital critique. Yeah. But somewhere in the middle there, where it's kind of, which is quite British as well. But that depends also if you're speaking about the aesthetics or if you're speaking about the narration, because I think watching this video that you just showed us, it could as well be Gibson or, I mean, the mere apocalyptic community theme is somehow in the center of lots of 20th and 21st century science fiction.
So I was wondering even more that it's not science fiction not in the way of speaking about the extraordinary. So Gibson is sort of, the 90s and the last 10 years of science fiction is very much into to the extraordinary. I wouldn't agree. Out there. That depends also how you read it, I guess. Possibly. For me, science fiction is so much about constructing a normality out of what we haven't yet seen in practiced technology. But then I guess you could also see that as something extraordinary.
from from the now perspective but from the bare perspective it's not new weird that that real is part of it's sort of science fiction in a totally different way now then then then sort of the Gibson that I was and that I am speaking about the terror monster and it's not at all about what is the cyber space and and cyberpunk and kind of these sort of extraordinary characters that that are kind of on a the fruits are kind of missions but it's much more
it's more to do with fantasy in the sense of telling epics or whatever I think what I said to clarify maybe it's not necessary that if we were used to the philosopher explaining what the artist couldn't say like I said this kind of genre also makes the philosopher, fiction writer I mean the advent of resa it makes me realize that the philosophers are actually cyberpunk authors so that's what I meant with I wanted to get rid of the this is obvious probably to all of you maybe I'm a bit slow but the philosopher
in high modernist times has been the ventriloquist of the artist the artist dealing with sublime things that cannot really be articulated on its own terms because that would be spoiling the subversive power of the artwork and now we also bring back the fiction writing we can attribute that to ourselves as thinkers and sort of rid ourselves with the authority of the ventriloquist
Thank you. correlation is. And it's not even about that correlation is there, but it becomes a kind of a ornamentation on, it becomes about delicatess, delicate and excellent. So somebody writes
a book about the way that you say these two words have the same sound of different spelling, and it becomes a totally, totally, kind of a narcissistic writing. So there's something with Reza's book that for me that it's not spectacular. And it's both a real writing of the Loeus-Fraferi-Mille-Plateau sort of conceptually, but it does it in a way which forces me to comprehend or to address I have to address the book in a way that I have no fucking idea I have to reinvent myself so it's not writing a book for the same reason as Darida would write a novel
but it's rather this sort of producing a world to which I must transform my way of understanding to be able to yeah So therefore Marcus used the word hyperstition yesterday, and as far as I can understand it, the idea that it would be to write things that produce a world that is autonomous to ours. Yeah. So that... Well, to write to produce a world that has effects. effects. And if there are a story to which I can correlate my world, that will not have any effect on
my world. If I write a story, if a story is written down that is autonomous from this world, it can but have effects on this one. In respect of, kind of understood as a multitude, sort of a multitude growing as a cancer within the multiplicity. And the multiplicity has to either fully ignore it, sort of cancel it out, or incorporate it in the multiplicity, thus transforming society as it is. And I think that we have experienced quite a hyperstitional moment in the dance and circus University in Stockholm over the two days now without being surprised yet overwhelmed. Which is I think another little thing with Tjennamil Vil, he writes in the text that is
in this book he writes about, he talks about the difference in between surprising and overwhelming. He retells the story about the narrator of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under Water, where this young boy constantly comes back to talking about and talking with people about an absolutely magnificent octopus. and he travels with this boat of Captain Nemo, blah, blah, blah, and all the time describes this animal in minute, minute detail. And towards the end of the book, finally, he comes across it, so it's there.
He looks at it through the window of the boat, and he says that it was not at all surprising, yet completely overwhelming. In a sense of, it was not at all as a ghost, but it's just my grandmother. She's dead for 50 years, but it's always surprising when she comes by. But this octopus was something that could not, he could not inscribe it in his consciousness. Yet it was there. He could not comprehend it, yet it was there. And in this moment, of course, he has to, either he dies or he has to completely shift subjectivity. Yeah, yeah. And I think not to compare you with Mabil or with Schultz-Bern, I think we have had a moment of over-the-press over these two days.