Discussion
SIMON O’SULLIVAN: I’ve got a question for Robin, but I think it might be
going to Mark as well. Robin, one of the things that strikes me, and it’s
a bit like what I was saying to Tom, is that one can have the
‘aestheme’, but it’s kind of an evacuation of the human, and yet,
whether it’s a story by Ballard or a Smithson, it’s all human. And so that
seems to be a real issue, that while aesthemes evacuate the human
from these things, yet the human comes in as the person reading the
fiction or the person who wrote it.
If I remember rightly, Friday is a story where Robinson goes through
this series of rituals and practices and performances, as you know with
the goats in the trees, and he buries himself in the island, doesn’t he?
He does all these various practices in order to save the island. And it
strikes me that there’s something really interesting about that practice
that’s not a million miles away from what you were saying, Mark, in
terms of schizoanalysis and counter-engineering. That it’s not so much
a practice in the sense of an art practice that’s ‘about’ something,
about depicting something; it’s a series of practices or rituals or
performances that allow transformations to take place.
There are two questions here really: one is about aesthemes and the
way the human comes back in; but the broader question is whether
bringing art and speculative realism together is more interesting if we
think of it in terms of practices that themselves allow one to become
different, to step ‘outside’, etc.
ROBIN MACKAY: Of course art is made by humans for other humans to
experience. The notion of the aestheme doesn’t at all try to evacuate
the human; that’s why I think it’s interesting. If we take an aestheme,
cuteness would be one, the sublime would be one. What are they?
They’re relations between certain material objects and certain ideas,
and the traditional way in which we think of them is to understand the
idea as belonging to a transcendental subject and the aesthetic
qualities somehow to exist in a purified form elsewhere, beyond the
particular object in which they are presented. What’s interesting for me
in what I would call the ‘sideways causality’ at work in Ferenczi is that
the relation itself does not constitute the aestheme; the aestheme can
be said to exist independently of it. So it’s not really a case of
evacuating the human, but it’s a case of conceptualising the aestheme
in a different way, in which one’s investment in it shifts and the subject
is actually transformed. And this is particularly interesting in relation to
the sublime, because as people have always noticed, it’s really difficult
to write about the sublime, a sublime painting, say, without writing in a
sublime way. It’s difficult not to propagate it, one is indeed ‘prone’—and
this propagation is indeed a question of ritual. And I think this kind of
blocking procedure is a genuinely interesting way in which to break
from this epidemic dimension of art in a new way, by presenting these
things in a ‘desufficient’ form. Presenting them in this different way,
rather than separating ourselves from them or trying to leap outside of
or beyond them—not to try and jump outside again, but to take a
perspective in which we are already outside the circle.
MARK FISHER: This is the crucial issue for me, this question of leaping
outside; this came up this morning as well, leaping too quickly over the
subject, over the human, etc. We can see the CCRU, early Land etc.,
as being haunted by this problem, I think. It is as if the argument is: If
the real isn’t human in some sense, then everything about being a
human is total illusion. Okay, that might be true, but then so what?
Things would carry on anyway. I think there was a kind of struggle as
to what kind of practice would link the two; and I think it ended up in a
kind of self-hatred, because it couldn’t be writing, that wasn’t good
enough, that was just a relation of transcendence and not what will
actually take us out of being a human…. But if we see writing as a
practice, which of course it is, things look different.
At the same time, what is called lived experience is a product of
ideology, which is fundamentally ritualistic—it is not first of all ideas, but
behaviours. Which is just to say that I think the way out of this bind is to
do what they say in pedagogical practice and to start where people
are, as it were. That we are here now, but whatever it is that
constitutes the ‘for us’ is mutable, is subject to change.
So, I think the link then between the philosophical project of
eliminativism and actual cultural practice, I think that’s the key. It might
well be true that, as Metzinger says, there’s no self, but selves persist,
as ritualised performances, and this has a clear aesthetic dimension.
So maybe here the role of the aesthetic would be much stronger than
that of theory. And maybe the role of the aesthetic is to culturally
propagate things, so as to interrupt the ritualistic reiteration of a
subjectivity which may well be pure simulation, but nevertheless is
highly effective.
RM : The most amusing thing about the ‘performative’ aspect of Laruelle,
and the reason why his writings really annoy people is that they are
nonplussed by the fact that he says he’s doing non-philosophy, but then
how come his writing isn’t like some kind of crazy beat poetry, how
come it still looks like, and uses, philosophy? That’s what really annoys
people: that he’s continuing to practice and do something and yet he’s
claiming this kind of indifference. Similarly, in conversations I’ve had
with people about Pamela’s work, some people find it just impossible
to engage with and I believe it has to do also with this kind of blocking,
this refusal to mirror. And yet obviously it’s in art galleries, and it’s in
the institution, and it is artwork. So yes, it’s more interesting to actually
practice rather than get obsessed about this immanentization question;
but to think seriously about how to practice otherwise.
AMANDA BEECH:
Because we know that this rhetoric of escape, this
desire to escape the paradigm that we know is art, is very much a kind
of standard politics of resistance that requires a relation to what is
resisted. You know, its negation produces a relation. But Robin, what
you’re describing is I think something like a non-relational resistance of
some kind, and I find that compelling.
But then I think also, what kind of relations are being formed and
grasped here? If we’re not thinking about a relation with what is being
resisted, what are we producing in terms of new forms? Is it
reengaging its own history, the history of art for example? If so, what is
being affirmed in those connections and the interpretations that are
going on in a practice? What is being grasped as a relation, and why?
That leads me to pick up on your question of future and past, Ray.
This question about the future is really important here, because what is
it we are grasping in the non-relation? I am a little anxious that, if we
can’t perfect a non-relational resistance, we might end up with some
reinvention of autonomy for art and a remystification of the aporia of
the aesthetic and those kinds of dynamics.
So this question of islands is interesting in its resistant form, but it
also promises something like shamanistic autonomy for the image and
that worries me, because that would be to suppose a discrete territory
without purpose, if you like. But this seems to me to be the primary
mode in which art aids and abets capital and produces it, and that’s the
art that we love as capitalists. So while on the one hand it’s claimed as
being deeply politicised because of its separateness if you like, its
resistant form, that, as we also know, is the very form around which
we pivot our relations in terms of capitalist accumulation. So I guess
those two figures that I’m identifying here seem to be close but very
different in many ways as well.
PETER WOLFENDALE: I thought I’d try and pick up on what Mark was
saying about art after experience. I get what you meant with the
relationship between Hume and Kant, and how this figures a lot of stuff.
And I thought it’d be interesting just to pick up what seems to be one of
Kant’s crucial insights: the fact that for him the experience of beauty
and the experience of the sublime, these things that are subjectively
universal, they’re cognitive, fundamentally cognitive in a way that, say,
having a nice meal, that’s like ‘mmm, tasty’, just isn’t. So that’s the
difference between aesthetic judgements of taste and aesthetic
judgements of the beautiful and the sublime. And I think this can lead
you into an interesting open space for getting past phenomenological
conceptions of art. If we start having this more complicated
understanding of social cognition, then we have to start talking about
cognitive systems, sociocognitive systems like collective agents and
other kinds of mechanisms which simply have no phenomenology. In
what sense does a group form themselves as a collective agent that
has an artistic experience? Well, if there’s cognition, there’s some
sense in which there might be some sort of artistic relationship; but it
couldn’t possibly be described in any phenomenological terms.
MF: I think my problem here is that it’s still like rushing too quickly out of
the human. You have to pass through the phenomenological in a certain
way in order to attain the cognitive response. I don’t mean you have to
stay at the phenomenological, of course, and I think that there are
ways of getting beyond that. One is the extent to which the cognitive is
always implicated in the phenomenological anyway, which is already
there in Kant; and secondly, what cognitive judgements do particular
phenomenological manifestations mandate or call up? But this is much
more than the idea that you can just rule out the phenomenological
entirely or that we can just leap over it to a purely cognitive account of
art or whatever; that seems to me just going nowhere really.
RAY BRASSIER: I totally agree. Kant transforms the account of experience
into one of cognitive experience—it becomes experience as a cognitive
accomplishment, because experiences can be structured through
judgement and through conceptual synthesis. So I think the point at
which they manifest, some phenomenal level, some stratum of
phenomenal experience, is indispensable. It’s possible to embrace it as
a post-Kantian conception of phenomenology, which is that phenomenal
experiences are conceptually mediated and propositionally structured in
some complicated sense, as opposed to a more problematic sense of
the term, which would say that the world has this predetermined
categorical structure. So I completely agree. I mean, you can’t get
beyond the empirical; the manifest is indispensable. But the point is a
dialectic between the phenomenal and the noumenal such that the
possibilities of experience, of perceptual experience, are enlarged
through conceptual, through cognitive revolution; so aesthetic
experience in that sense is something that is an enlargement, an
expansion of the horizon of perception. Aesthetic experience in that
sense is indispensable and illuminable because it is perceiving things
that transcend any merely sensible synthesis. So I’m just reiterating
this point—this is why you cannot leap over the manifest image.
MF:
Isn’t that the danger of wanting to go beyond Kant, into
transcendental materialism?
RB:
The boundary between the phenomenal and the noumenal is
constantly renegotiated. And the point is that there are no phenomena
without noumena, and the noumenon is the reality of the phenomenon.
It’s something that is embedded in the structure of the phenomenon.
So, in other words, phenomena are real. This is Kant’s point; they’re
not illusions. Phenomena, shadows, are real. But to understand how
phenomenal experiences are dimensional projections of a higherdimensional reality is a cognitive task. And then the point about the
cognitive is that you can enlarge it: we perceive things that were
imperceptible several centuries ago.
MF: Isn’t that then Kant instead of phenomenology? Schematically, we
can divide this post-Kantian account of phenomena from these
dominant neo-Humean models of phenomenology and also much of
Deleuze, where you’ve got this idea of autonomous sensation. But we
can perhaps see the whole schizoanalytic project as much more to do
with the former, as a reengagement with Kant over the question of
conditions of experience, which are now seen as mutable rather than
fixed. But the idea of sensation, accessible without conditions of
experience of any kind, isn’t that a kind of Humean temptation in
Deleuze’s work?
RB: I think it’s also a legacy of Bergson. Bergson is the real culprit,
Phenomenology in the early Husserl and Heidegger is about the
inapparent within appearances. It’s not just describing what things
seem like, or what they could feel like. But the problematic claim of
Bergson is that there is this dimension of absolute individual
experience, there’s this absolute dimension you can intuit. There’s a
point where thinking and feeling fuse, and what you find in Bergson is
the idea of recovering this sub-representational, sub-conceptual
stratum of experience, which is always individual.
This is tied to an attack on the sociality of human perceptual
experience. The gregarious self is a merely superficial crust hiding this
deeper, more profound individual. Whereas Kant’s point is that what
makes you a subject of experience is the fact that when you have an
experience, you’re having an experience that could be had by any
human. This is the difference between Erfahrung and Erlebnis in
German philosophy; Erfahrung is cognitive experience which is
necessarily social and collective; Erlebnis is lived experience which is
supposedly private and intersubjectively effable. And that’s
problematic, since it’s that model of experience as Erlebnis that has
become potentially capitalist idealogy, the idea that what you feel and
what you directly experience is this inalienable fulcrum for everything
else.
RM : Very schematically: art has always dealt with images of the real,
and at one time maybe there was a belief that there were ‘good’ and
‘bad’ images of the real, and now we’re in this position where it seems
(as Amanda was saying) that we worry that there are only ‘bad’
images, since representation itself is somehow inherently ideologically
tainted; and yet we still have to go through them. This is the variously
tragic, ironic, or self-satisfied predicament. But why does that
peculiarly moral judgement have such a hold? I wonder whether we
could instead talk about images as being models of the real, or fictions;
fictions in the sense in which Laruelle uses the term, Or lowdimensional projections, as Ray was saying. To think about this in
terms of models and what they do, what they allow us to do in the real
world, is to learn a lesson in Copernicanism. ‘We cannot escape
mediation through a form of images, but images are evil’—This is just a
form of narcissism, whether you’re bemoaning it or whether you’re
celebrating it as a correlationist.
MF: But haven’t you just evacuated aesthetics there, in the sense of
what is specifically aesthetic? You could have models that have no
aesthetics whatsoever. That would be my problem.
RM : That would be intellectual intuition, surely?
MF:
Yes, but the point is that given that you’re thinning down the
aesthetic content by doing that.
ALEX WILLIAMS: Why would you necessarily want to do that to models?
Thin down the aesthetic content? I don’t know why you’d want to.
Because that aesthetic content may be vital in enabling you to gain
traction.
RM : Yes, surely it’s the compelling nature of the aesthetic content that
makes a model effective, as well as its purchase on the real or, if you
prefer, its capacity to further abstraction and therefore action. It comes
back again to the notion of cunning, and methods. And that’s all about
being in the middle of models and their powers, and not having an
absolute viewpoint; it’s about, very literally, putting yourself in another’s
place, not sentimentally but through prosthetic use of ‘aesthetic
technologies’; and thus refusing to accept that you’re trapped forever in
one reality, one set of rituals, along with their attendant abstractions.
AW: I was thinking about what Amanda was talking about, this question
of relations and the potential political content of aesthetic forms. So,
there’s this idea that says that resistance is bad because it ends up
regenerating the thing you’re trying to get away from; on the other hand
we get this sort of subtractive or non-relation which you were pointing
towards, Robin, to some extent, with Laruelle. I think that Amanda also
raised this idea of the realist engagement with a future, and this is
something that I think might provide another kind of way out of this
nightmare whereby all left politics get turned into a politics of
resistance, which, as Ray was saying, is basically a reactionary politics
of fear, with a reactionary imagination. And maybe to move outside of
this situation where we’re obsessed with this thing we can’t get away
from, where the best we can do is to create a vacuole that is effective
temporarily, to reengage the future and therefore generate something
on that basis—this would be a speculative aesthetics. With Landian
accelerationism there is certainly a suggestion that it is through
aesthetics and through aesthetic representations and experiences,
through thinking from the standpoint of this future, that you can
generate that future.
MF:
But the problem with that was that the future had already
happened, so all you could do was get on board with it or not; and that
produced a kind of self-hating impotence, actually: It doesn’t matter,
Kapital, the Terminator, has already happened and we’re just this sad
relic waiting around for termination, cheerleading along, and the
Terminator will show no more mercy to us than those who decide to sit
around campfires, hymning the natural beauty of the earth or whatever.
But what’s hinted at sometimes in those texts is that the future will only
happen if it’s made to happen now, so that gives you a positive
immanence rather than an impotent negative transcendence.
I just want to come back to the broader themes that have come up
today, this relationship between purposiveness and non-purposiveness,
etc. I think what also relates to this is that the Landian ideology of that
moment did fit with neoliberalism in that it was the idea that control and
organisation are inherently oppressive. Whereas I think with Alex and
Nick’s accelerationism, there can be a role for management and control
where, rather than inhibiting a certain kind of acceleration, it can
intensify it, raising this question of aims and ends. And I think also the
important point about the supererogatory is that there can only be a
supererogatory excess when you do have a determined aim. If you
don’t have any aim or lure, then you don’t get any excess. And I think
this points to a crisis of ‘experimentalTM’ culture, which has no real
experiment in it because there’s no concept of success or failure.
There’s no real aim, the form is negatively defined in relation to the
non-experimental. There’s nothing taking place in these experiments;
you’re not finding anything out.
That’s one thing that’s come out for me really strongly today, is that
dialectic between aim and a purpose and purposiveness of a certain
kind. Genuine experimental practice would have specific determinate
aims, that’s how you open up things into an unknown.