Mark Fisher
Practical Eliminativism: Getting Out of
the Face, Again
I want to talk about the problems around the concept of experience.
But I’ll start with an accelerationist genealogy, starting off with the
position that many of us were oriented around in the 90s, which was
Nick Land, Landianism. This was a kind of hyper-Deleuzianism, a dark
Deleuzianism, but one which was still organised around the problem of
experience, I think, in Nick’s theory. You can trace that back to Bataille,
the kind of impossible quest to experience not only the maximally
intense, but beyond that, the quest to experience from a position where
experience itself is not possible; i.e. death, death itself as the limit.
I think one of the crucial moves of the last few years was to move
against experience, actually. Rather than pursue this kind of quest for
an impossible experience, instead to point out the contrast between the
cognitive and what can be experienced. So, as it were, death—not just
individual death, but hyper-death, and not just the unexperienceable,
but the evaporation of the very possibility of experience, via extinction
or whatever—becomes contrasted to experience as such. You can’t
experience extinction, and so we no longer worry about that….
Instead, extinction becomes a speculative and cognitive challenge.
I think this was a crucial move, but it has serious consequences for
this question of the aesthetic. Put simply, how can one have the
aesthetic without experience, at all? If the aesthetic must involve some
kind of experience, how can we think about what experience is without
relapsing into familiar theories? On the face of it, the ‘speculative turn’
has little to offer aesthetics. In some ways, the emphasis on mindindependent reality, whether in its OOO-phenomenological mode or in
Ray [Brassier]’s anti-phenomenological form, can be construed as an
anti-aestheticist move, in the sense that it is a decisive rejection of
deconstruction’s literary poetics of indeterminacy as well as the
Deleuzian ontology of affects and intensities.
One decisive move it makes—which separates it from the
accelerationist antihumanism of Nick Land—is the rejection of what
Ray, in ‘Genre is Obsolete’, calls the ‘myth of experience’. We can
understand this in terms of the impasses of affect theory, actually.
Affect theory was quickly taken up in various discourses around the art
world. And part of the reason why Ray’s work was important is that it
really called out the way in which affect theory is used as an alibi for all
kinds of anti-propositional, anti-argumentative, anti-rational, anti-lucid
kinds of discourses. It became a kind of theoretical aestheticism, which
became really boring. The hymning of sensation, affect, etc., became
really tedious. So for me it’s an issue: if we want the aesthetic, we
must have experience in some sense; but what do we mean by
experience, now?
1
I think in some ways this rehearses the old dispute between Hume
and Kant, with Deleuzian affect theory as a form of return to Hume,
and the idea that you can have sensations that do not require a subject
as their guarantor. But what I want to suggest is some sort of return to
a Kantianism. Not to Kantian aesthetics, nor to his metaphysics and
epistemology actually, but to the crucial difference between experience
and conditions of experience.
As Ray was asking earlier, what is the value of the alienating power
of the arts in modernism? It’s an experience that makes one question
one’s own experience. And one way of putting that would be, then, that
it is an experience which confronts one with the conditions of
experience. And beyond Kant is the move from Transcendental
Idealism into Transcendental Materialism, where plasticity goes all the
way down, where the conditions of experience themselves become
subject to transformation, etc.….
The constitution of our subjectivity in everyday life is the product of
various forms of engineering and manipulation; the reality in which we
are invited to live is constructed by PR and corporations, is a form of
libidinal informational engineering. So I think this mandates a kind of
counter-engineering practice that must be undertaken. To follow on
from Robin’s point at the end of the previous discussion, we’ve seen
massive behavioural mutations of the human population in the last
decade. But they’re turning towards banal ends, such as Facebook,
smartphones, etc. What you’re seeing are behavioural tics that have
passed through a population, i.e. looking at a screen, digital twitch, etc.
These behaviours were not in place ten to fifteen years ago; it was
impossible for them to be in place. Now they are ubiquitous.
The practical question, and it’s a schizoanalytic one, is whether that is
only possible on the basis of faciality. You’ve got a kind of
deterritorializing mutation here where, although the behaviours are quite
banal, they are nevertheless radical in terms of the addictions and
compulsions that are involved. Obviously people don’t undertake them
on the grounds that they are participating in this kind of mutational
vector. They undertake them on the grounds of folk psychology. The
brain and fingers can become this kind of libidinal assemblage only
because the mind is distracted by this pull of folk psychology. Folk
psychology is a practical kind of cultural proposition in which we live,
and I think one of the deep sadnesses, one of the miseries of the
twenty-first century, is the return of folk psychology and the depletion
of the resources of the depersonalization that culture once offered.
Much contemporary art has reached an extraordinarily decadent
pass, where a typical work is radically denuded of aesthetic texture. A
fear of content seems to have a tyrannical hold, motivating ’works’
which consist of banal discursive pre- (and post-) texts attached to
super-banal objects which, at worst, trigger neither thought nor
sensation (to expect either is, apparently, to be a vulgarian) and, at
best, indirectly invoke some mildly diverting process which led to their
construction. The justification for this kind of production seems to be a
worst-of-all-worlds mixture of post-conceptual cognitivism without
concepts (which makes aesthetic texture passé) and the postDeleuzian celebration of infinite creativity (which outlaws any negativity
by imposing a mandatory affirmatory imperative—don’t complain!).
Yet, while contemporary art seems especially played out, it is not as
if the other cultural zones which had in recent years superseded visual
art as the leading edge of cultural experimentalism are immune from
the processes of inertia which have reduced contemporary art to an
anxious vacuum. There have been no significant transformations in
electronic music for about a decade, and the best we have come to
expect is minor incremental shifts and sophisticated pastiche rather
than any new sounds and/or sensations.
Meanwhile, mainstream culture has become increasingly reduced to
folk psychological interiority. Whether it’s reality tv or social networks,
people have been captured/captivated by their own reflections. It’s all
done with mirrors. The various attacks on the subject in theory have
done nothing to resist the super-personalization of contemporary
culture. Identitarianism rules. Queer theory might reign in the academy,
but it has done nothing to halt the depressing return of gender
normativity in popular culture and everyday life. Elements of ‘leftist’
politics not only collude in, but actively organise this rampant
identitarianism, corralling groups into ’communities’ defined according to
the categories of power: a Foucauldian dystopia.
So instead of this thing about dancing and games, that Robin talked
about, instead of that, increasingly cultural time is taken up with forms
which, at the psychological level, mirror people back to themselves in
the most banal possible kind of manifest image. The question now is
whether a certain kind of defacialization can be recovered—whether a
practical, not merely theoretical, eliminativist project can be resumed,
and whether we can start getting out of our faces again.
1. R. Brassier, ‘Genre is Obsolete’, in Multitudes 28 (Spring 2007).