Published in ILLUMInations: 54th International Art Exhibition: The Venice
Biennale Catalogue, editors Bice Curiger and Giovanni Carmine, Venice,
Marsilio Editori, 2011, pp. 100-111.
Rainbows and Rationalism
The Fate of the Terrestrial Manifesto of Art
Reza Negarestani
[T]he disenchantment of the world understood as a consequence of the process whereby
the Enlightenment shattered the ‘great chain of being’ and defaced the ‘book of the world’
is a necessary consequence of the coruscating potency of reason, and hence an
invigorating vector of intellectual discovery, rather than a calamitous diminishment.1
I. Launch your patron into space and watch your world flip.
Aggravated by war, transmuted by capitalism, modulated by liberalism and mustered by
globalism, the twenty‐first‐century art world – that nebulous site for the conflux of artists,
artworks, curatorial processes, spectators, institutions, markets, raw materials, labor … – is
determined by its complicated relationship, its complicity, with the Earth as its first and foremost
patron. Even the lucrative promiscuity of contemporary art with its political, economic and
cultural patrons takes place under the auspices of this unique monogamous relationship.
Presiding over the marriage is a certain ineradicable conception of terrestriality which constitutes
the horizon of all activities on the planet: Terrestriality is grasped as a continuum of neighboring
regions or complex manifolds whose tensions and syntheses fabricate what we know as the earth.
As a continuum, this terrestrial horizon has at once local and global expressions. Whilst local
expressions of the terrestrial continuum suggest various forms of tensions (transformative,
antagonistic, accelerative, inhibitive, etc.) between regional sites, the global expression articulates
the synthetic and universal aspect of the continuum that connects and opens the regional to the
global. Whilst the regional has its different orders of magnitude – cerebral, individual, social,
geopolitical, and even geological regions – the global horizon of terrestriality that marks the
ultimate boundaries of such tensions and their syntheses is figured by the body of the Earth. The
art world partakes in terrestrial syntheses that traverse this globalized body; at the same time its
scope and activities are also determined by tensions between terrestrial regions spanning the
entire telluric continuum, from basic inorganic regions of the earth to biological, cultural, socio‐
1
Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (London: Palgrave, 2007), p. xi.
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political and economic regions. Its artistic, curatorial, cultural and commercial perspectives shift
according to regional‐global tensions and their corresponding syntheses (relations between
regional perspectives and the global outside or the open). The more radical these terrestrial
tensions in terms of their syntheses, the broader the scope of the art world, the more enlightened
and the more deepened its perspectives. But as we shall see, this path of illumination does not
follow the lead of planetary myopias or models of lighting rooted in a strict monogamy with the
Earth and a restricted conception of terrestriality.
The Earth’s global continuum is constituted of infinitesimally fuzzy gradients of regional tensions
which are purely synthetic: neuropsychological tensions between the individual and its outside
that highlight the de‐privatized site of thinking; social tensions that paste the already‐synthetic
public individual into the social fabric as a site where individual actions and thoughts have no
longer exclusive expressions; economic tensions that meticulously glue the geochemical tensions
of the inorganic earth to the permeable economies of the organism, society and territory through
widespread production, circulation and consumption of minerals, chemical compounds and fuels;
(post‐)industrial dialectics between the attentive triad man‐labor‐technology and the inattentive
and cosmically indifferent body of the Earth from whose bowels culture and civilization are
traumatically conceived; and lastly, modern nations, which dominantly concentrate all the
aforementioned regional tensions within their trans‐territorial horizons. The earth’s patronage for
today’s art is too unfaithful, its business too shady, its source of funds too untraceable, for the
artist not to shed some light on her dependent relationship with it. Likewise, the contemporary
art world is unthinkable without a model of enlightenment capable of illuminating its regional
sites – its artists, works, nations – as gradations of a profound terrestrial continuum. But such a
feat of enlightenment – understood both as a widening of artistic scope and a overdue probe into
the subterrain of the art world – first requires the unbinding of a truly universalist conception of
the earth in which the regional‐global continuum has no ground, center or discrete regional
authority, for it is driven by the open. Within the universalist conception of terrestriality, the
relationships between regions of the continuum (whether cerebral, social or national) are
unrestricted, and ultimately, the patronage of the earth for art is no longer a matter of
guardianship or provision but one of delivering art, its visions and problems, without any
chaperoning prejudice, to the abyssal depths of the universal continuum.
Accordingly, the universalist and speculative widening of terrestrial syntheses opens a transfinite
scope for the artist by illuminating the world of art and its nations as non‐discrete yet focalized
gradients of the geocosmic continuum, the unbound universal gradient in which one can no
longer isolate or capitalize on any region (of thought, the Earth or the Universe) whatsoever. Since
regions of the geocosmic continuum are all synthetically interconnected and in complicity with
the global expression of the continuum, artistic and philosophical products of the brain are no
longer irreproachable: Like any other product, they do not have any fundamentally discrete
presence within the reality of the continuum, because they are continually determined,
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transformed, and renegotiated by the tensions and syntheses between economic, cultural,
biological and even inorganic regional gradients of the global continuum. Consequently, the so‐
called inner sanctuaries of the senses, emotions and intellect – the sites of artistic creativity –
must be regarded as regions nested within the precarious mines of Africa, South America and
Asia, gradationally inseparable from the micro‐nation of factories and illegal workshops, the
amorphous rendezvous points of low wages, chemical fumes and human trafficking systems. In
the same vein, the artistic haven of intuition is a part of the neurochemical plasticity of the
cerebral individuum or the nervous system that has never been (and should never be) withdrawn
from everyday explosions and insurgencies in the streets of the earth or the contingently and
indifferently distributed cosmic inorganic materials that simultaneously shape, feed and
traumatize it. Within the telluric continuum, streets, mines, militarized trenches, the brain and
the so‐called home are cavernously dug within each other in a manner that is topologically and
categorically contingent and counterintuitive. Respectively, the Earth with its undeservedly
privileged status and glorified solar patron – the Sun – is already expropriated in the name of the
universal public, a Universe in which neither reason nor materiality have a private life of their own
or a particular ideal necessity. For this reason, the speculative widening of the art world across
the geocosmic continuum, not as a discrete self‐centered world but as a synthetic regional
gradient of the universal continuum, marks the wedding of universal enlightenment and the
artistic vision. At the same time, it is an all‐out universalist war (rather than a war of nations)
against all leftover and mutated strains of planetary myopia – those cosmetically enhanced
variants of the Ptolemaic tradition, capitalism, liberalism and fundamentalism.
II. To ground control, we hardly see any earth up here.
The restricted conception of terrestriality always recognizes the Earth as a discrete entity that has
the final word (or more accurately, world) in everything. This axiomatic world on which all
thoughts, visions and modes of living must be grounded is not necessarily synonymous with the
planet Earth. For it can be one’s nation, the interiority of the self, the purported integrity of
lineage, the sanctum of artistic intuitions, the site of the intellect or any horizon whose edges fold
over onto themselves to form a self‐centered sphere, an axiomatic resource of its own verity.
Those who are weary of this enveloped world are told to unburden themselves by declaring the
Earth as the private property of the Divine, or more constructively, to build a new Earth out of the
resources at hand, that is to say, from the axiomatically veritable and discrete Earths of this
world: Their individual selves, nations, ancestral lineages, private intuitions and so on. In this
world, openness of scope is always circumscribed; syntheses between regions are modally
restricted, real alternatives are diminishing insofar as syntheses progressively happen on the basis
of capacity and affordability of regions and the fact that each region can now isolate its own
veritable earth as the ground of its synthesis (i.e. openness) toward the outside. The earth of
illusory alternatives and restricted syntheses is an earth endemically susceptible to the scourge of
fundamentalism, which insists on expanding the Divine’s franchise to every corner of the Earth
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and its regions. It is equally dazzled by the mirage of global openness generated by liberalism’s
confusion between real alternatives brought about by the universal continuum and affordable
options based on regional capacities and economical imperatives. But above all, the world of the
discrete earth is the venue of capitalism’s global circuitry, switching from one territory to another,
from one limit to the next, from the earth of one region to a newer Earth.
Capitalism does not advocate isolated regions per se; indeed, it champions a global continuum of
the earth – but one whose frontiers can safely and reliably be determined at any time. What
capitalism supports is synthesis between isolated regions and discrete earths so as to
simultaneously conform to capacities – that is, affordable confines – of cerebral, social and
national regions of the Earth, and appear as the ultimate emancipatory force: ‘Our business is to
incorporate all secluded regions into a wholesome Earth’. In order to carry on its planetary trades,
capitalism must prevent the Earth from dissipating out of its manifest global horizon, its discrete
self‐centered sphere. In short, capitalism must demarcate and determine the boundaries of the
universal continuum, for only in a bound continuum can regions be discretely identified,
syntheses or methods of openness restricted, and regional capitalization undertaken. Within such
a restricted ambit, the transition from the regional to the global does not bespeak of the reality of
the universal continuum. It simply denotes a unified concept of the self‐centred Earth – the
ground control of the artist that prevents her from sighting the universalist picture of her art
world which, like the Earth, is not the world but an increasingly blurred gradient of the unbound
continuum, in infinitesimal complicities with other regional spheres.
The possibility of widening artistic scope by wresting an unbound universal continuum from the
current sponsors of planetary myopia rests upon a synthetic transfiguration of the artist: The
artist becomes a new participant in the speculative project of enlightenment, alongside science
and philosophy. Synthetic illumination begins with modern science’s headlong dive into the
chasm: Modern science embraces only one necessity, the necessity of an unbound universal
continuum absolutely free from the necessity of its particular elements no matter who or what
they are. It only acknowledges a reason that does not emanate from the ocular subject to the
world, but follows the impersonal course of a generic light. In short, modern science impersonally
heralds a boundless universal continuum and in doing so, it contributes to the abolition of
privatized, isolationist regions of the world in the name of a public abyss. Disenthralled by the
abyssal universe introduced by modern science, philosophy systematically synthesizes all
universally expropriated regions of the open into one gradient. Accordingly, it approximates the
scope of the universal synthesis for thought as a unified gradient synthesized by alternative and
unrestricted modes of openness drawn between regions by the universal line of synthesis or
generic light of the open – between the fields of culture, politics, economy, geology, mathematics,
etc. The highlighting function of synthetic illumination reaches its greatest intensity when art
begins to color the gradients uncovered by modern science and synthetically approximated by
philosophy. The artist’s chromatic illumination of the universal continuum not according to the
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will of regions (earthly sponsors, intellectual guardians, and emotionally sanctioned muses) but
according to the will of the open – this is the only sweepingly revolutionary, realistic (by any
measure or in any sense) and responsible artistic engagement for bringing out the reality of
regions / nations – Color the rainbows of the unbound universe and bringing their regions into
focus as its spectra. Far from restricting the course of light to its own region or becoming the
stellar source of it, artistic illuminations should make regions – not only the regions of the art
world but also of thoughts, streets and nations – chromatically stand out without any self‐
imposed distortion or myopia, but in their real, contingent and unrestricted relationships with the
universal chasm. This is why even the complex portrayal of the artist as a multifaceted refractor
who bends regional beams of light through various processes of artistic production so as to
converge them upon her work does not satisfactorily present the synthetic figure of the artist as
the one who works through and within the generic light of the universe. In this latter figure, the
artist brings out the continuity of all nations with the unbound continuum of the abyss, and
thereby chromatically highlights all unrestricted syntheses and complicities between regions –
between her world, the subterranean workings of mines, the art world, factories, the world of her
patron, insurgencies in the streets, low wages, capitalism, fundamentalism, liberalism, oil, water,
Dubais and Venices ancient and future.2
III. Back to coloring rainbows and making infinite bows.
[A]ll dualities disappear, a continuum is looked for, and the cultural web is understood as a complex
topological space where all sorts of breaks/sutures of continuity give rise to the most interesting
artistic, philosophical and scientific expressions of the epoch.3
Coloring rainbows is no frivolous task; it is not a matter of glorified whimsicality but of utmost
rationality. The synthetic transfiguration of the artist as the tinter of universal continuum calls,
first of all, for a distinction between the center‐sanctifying halos of the glory and the floating
universal bridges of the rainbow. Glories are produced by light reflected back toward its source by
a cloud of uniformly‐sized droplets in such a way that the observer’s shadow (‘Brocken spectre’)
appears at the center of the chromatic halo of the glory. But the rationalist light of the universal
continuum is destitute of any singular illuminating source. Even stars are merely glorified regions;
for the earths they monopolize, they are transient obstacles to universal illumination, or precisely
speaking, sources of planetary obsessions. The light of universal continuum and its unbound
synthesis is neither diurnal nor nocturnal, for it is shackled neither to stellar luminance nor to
planetary dusk. It is a vague and generalized light radically indifferent to day and night; one that,
2
The synthetic reintegration of the artist indicates, more than ever, the exigency of arts organizations –
such as the UK’s Urbanomic – that embrace unforeseeable syntheses between philosophers and artists
within vistas opened up by scientists, at the same time probing both territorial and intellectual regions for
individual and collective entities whose heterogeneities create new topologies of tension and synthesis.
3
Fernando Zalamea, “Peirce and Latin American Razonabilidad: Forerunners of Transmodernity,” in
European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, Vol. 1, (2009), p. 120.
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as Tintoretto depicts, breaks and enters of its own accord from asymmetrical cracks it opens in
the horizon, or lights it contingently improvises from regional resources – for instance, an oil lamp
that outshines the saints. But free even from the divinological source of Tintoretto’s lighting, the
synthetic light of the universal continuum relinquishes all privileges and privations by
transplanting the universal into the regional and inciting modally unrestricted syntheses which
drive (treiben) the region toward the open. Within the open continuum, the divinological infinity,
like any other order of infinity, finds a regional and contingently posited status and for this
reason, like any other regional register, it is exteriorized by the positive force of openness – its
necessity is revoked by universal contingency. Unlike glories, which are circularly formed by the
reflection of light back toward its source, the generalized light of the open is alien to any source of
light that reason could be traced back to. It pervades any obstruction against syntheses of the
universal light and deflects the centrality of shadows of regional subjects (observers, thinkers,
tinters, creators) to the universal continuum and its gradients. Therefore, the synthetic light of the
open does not allow universal rings to radially expand around the shadow of the regional subject.
Rainbows glorify neither the subject nor any region of the universe. As the generic light of the
universal continuum traverses regional horizons – each a droplet or a crystallized particle open to
light – it enters them. Upon entering a regional horizon, the light refracts, bringing into the
equation the internal conditions of the region. Once the light reaches the end of the horizon (the
back of the droplet), it reflects back. As the light departs the regional droplet, it changes direction
once again, indicating a departure from the regional conditions (the composition of the droplet)
into the open, and accordingly, the continuation of this synthetic illumination for other regions.
This freedom of departure to the open – the way out – illuminated in the regional sphere by the
light of the universal synthesis, chromatically reveals the unbound continuity of the regional
enclosure with the open, setting highlighted paths for a universal revolution: that is, the
possibility of unrestricted syntheses between regional horizons of the universe, reason as an anti‐
glory and the rational opportunity of recognizing the open as a non‐glorious continuum that is
free of the centrality of its regions.
The regional sphere and synthetic illumination
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As sites of universal revolutions, rainbows become the polychromatic – that is to say, spectrally
and panoramically highlighted – open embraces of the universal synthesis between all regions of
the world. For this reason, it is important that the artist does not treat rainbows gloriously. Not
only does the wave of universal synthesis break and enter on its own, it also follows the specific
conditions set by each region or nation of the universe. What is important in pursuing rainbows is
that the open reflects onto its universal continuum through its regional spheres in more than one
way. In other words, openness is not only the expression of boundlessness but also the expression
of modal freedom – that the universal synthesis toward the open takes place in the regional
horizon in more than one way. Therefore, the regions of the world can be opened onto each
other in modes untrammeled by any regional necessity, national restriction or methodological
prejudice. The generic light of the universal synthesis is reflected in the regional sphere not once
or twice, but infinitely; and in being so reflected, it creates rainbows of higher orders, rainbows
with infinite bows. Rainbows created by second and third reflections of light in a single droplet
(viz. rainbows with two and three bows) are rare in nature, as the light begins to grow dimmer
and lose its intensity and becomes invisible to the observer. However, it is said that French
physicist Félix Billet (1808‐1882) observed a rainbow of the nineteenth order with overlapping
and separate bows, bows with different angular sizes and eccentric imbrications fanning out in all
directions. Following Billet, who called this illuminated twirling blossom of continua the rose (rose
des arcs‐en‐ciel), the modally unbound reflection of the universal light within each and every
regional horizon creates hyper‐roses.
Hyper‐roses are the asymptotic expressions of both the boundless universal continuum and the
freedom of its line of synthesis, its light. They grow in silent indifference to regional myopias or, as
historian Carl Benjamin Boyer noted regarding three‐arced rainbows, they grow where no one
looks for them or sees. The artist enlightened by the synthetic light of the open, for this reason, is
the hunter of roses even before being the chromatic highlighter of universal rainbows. Moved by
an unanchored earth, committed to the path of anti‐glories and devoted to the garden of hyper‐
roses, the universalist artist knows that the generic light of the open and its line of synthesis can
be neither intensified nor separated from its universal backdrop. Such attempts to intensify the
generic universal light or separate it are preludes to glorification. But then how is it possible to
hunt hyper‐roses and color their sprawling syntheses as the expression of an unbound and free
universe if the artist cannot see the synthetic bows that grow around her? Here Tintoretto’s
technique for creating intense and condensed lights which do not grow dim in regional spheres
should be adopted as a rational model of paramount importance. Drawing upon a theory of light
derived more from general chemistry (medieval theories of ratio, concoction and quantity of
qualities) and the turbulent late‐scholastic theology than a theory of optics, Tintoretto attained an
intense synthetic illumination through an emphasis on the closure of the regional background and
the elements of the scene. Only when shadows of regional elements are painted darker, when
regional perspectives become extremely focused, when the ratio of regional closure to universal
openness increases, is the generic light of the open accentuated, so that it can begin to irrigate
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hyper‐roses. In order to see the hyper‐roses of the generic light, it is imperative to adopt a
terminally focused vision with regard to regions of the universe, and to realize the true expression
of the regional (whether it is the reality of an artwork or nations) as a closure that should be both
integrally and differentially highlighted. It is the just proportion of closure with regard to the
outside that brings out and intensifies the will of the open and its unbound syntheses.
The more integral the artist’s regional subjectivity, the more intense the light of universal
synthesis through the regional enclosure, and the higher order the rainbow that highlights the
paths of that region to the open … the rose twists forth.
A glory
A rainbow
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