Some Present Thoughts...

Reading Deleuze's texts has been quite a personal experience to me (as opposed to solely intellectual or academic). Therefore, such are my present thoughts. Both a wonderful and disturbing experience. Besides the fact that I have been encountering many of my own and long cherished thoughts and ideas now expressed through mostly different metaphors and thus enhanced and deautomatized in my own perception, the disturbing has been the realization that some of those very ideas had started ossifying inside of myself without my fully being aware of that. Therefore, to me, these texts have not only been inspiring but also animating. Along such a journey, to read Bourriaud's text was an annoying astray that turned into a fortunate touchstone for the hitherto developed or awakened thoughts, finally into a peculiar affirmation of them.

Being an art critic (and I suppose, an art historian, as well), therefore aware of the importance of the change, shift and novelty, Bourriaud naturally aspires to bring some of these himself. What in my view his text actually offers is a manifestation of an impotent and more importantly, destructive sort of both art practice and social thought.

His "democratic" art suggested through this cheesy and ridiculous notion of "giving everybody a chance" to the point of disgust, is what I see as a manifestation of the highest level of arrogance, which is itself nothing but an embodiment of a deepest although the most perfidious kind of racism, or fascism (to use this so dear contrasting word to all these democracy promoters). This racism is utterly unaware of itself for it never questions itself as such. It however, leaks through personal attitudes, notions and actions. What is an artist to give everybody a chance?! Is he a god? The one who gives and takes away? Or is he the omniscient? My point here is neither to affirm nor to deny the artist as a divine creature, but to focus on Bourriaud's axiomatic maintenance of the artist as such. This is important because this notion "naturally" becomes applied to the admirers and those who understand and appreciate these artists and their work. Consequently, we have a consecrated group that gives a chance to everybody who thinks the way they do.

And chance for what? To justify your own thoughts, beliefs, ways of leading your life? To soothe your pains, dilemmas or fears? Or to hear that you are ok, I am ok and everything will be just fine – we'll have a democratic dialogue. Although I haven't read Bishop's article yet, from what I've heard about it, I believe we'd agree that a democratic society is not the cohabitation of bunch of zombies producing "a specific sociability" while "harmoniously" exchanging frozen smiles, whereas any potential wondering face whose muscles might be moving toward an expression that would suggest a criticism of any kind is treated as intolerance. The two-clocks-put-next-to-each-other endlessly and pointlessly (but democratically!) striking their seconds, to me is a marvelous plastic example of the utterly vulgarized notion of democracy – a society where any genuine (re)questioning is a taboo, where contractions are anesthetized, shifts in dynamics banished and differences …well, this is the Houdini level of illusion! Differences, today, have been existing and are cherished only within the "communication" – the one Deleuze is talking about.

Opposed to this Bourriaud's ever-giving art is the "authoritarian" art of all those obsessed megalomaniacs who used to fight and sweat while persisting in the process of conceiving and creating their "private symbolic spaces". I must say that I am very mistrustful about this "invisible glue" that Bourriaud's artists are using… Maybe because I usually miss to see parts and layers that can be glued at first place. The importance of the process that precedes a finished piece of art is not in the effort itself – an artistic value certainly has nothing to do with the amount of effort that is put into creating a piece. The basic problem that most of such pieces have in common is that they are single-layered. They tend to remain on the level of a more or less (and less than more) witty, interesting or lucid idea (in the sense of a "lucky" thought, pun and the like), which they then hurry on to present to the rest of the world. But there was no journey along which "witty ideas" become questioned and re-questioned, where personal feelings and experiences become exceeded, thus preventing an artist to make a piece that is nothing but an "imagination and projection of his own ego". Again, it is not about the amount of time, tools, materials or money invested and spent, it is about a multiplicity of layers existing within a piece. For, this multiplicity is what allows me to enter a piece, forget my former self and become another, and another, and another… It is the single-layered pieces that are inevitably authoritarian, or better – totalitarian, for they always offer one – a self-sufficient, flat one. Consequently, they disable me entering them unless I agree (with whatever is the content of the layer). And if I agree, I can rejoice in the recognition of my own self. Thus undisturbed, I go home, back to my harmonious democratic life.

This is why such pieces, besides their very questionable artistic value, have some seriously problematic political implications. Even more so, for the fact that the artists themselves usually designate their works as socially engaged, political and so on. This again brings me to the one of the biggest scams of our contemporary society – the notion of democracy that safely keeps under control any unanticipated movements behind the two-clocks mask, under the pretext of a banal and vulgar, yet deeply indoctrinated understanding of harmony and tolerance as static and limb states of mind. The Middle Ages had their rich subculture that emphasized the body sometimes to the extreme, thus creating a contra balance to the dominant Christian culture. Former totalitarian systems had their underground formations that in their own ways kept persisting in subverting them. But they had iron boundaries to deal with – when they hit against them, their bodies were bleeding. Our boundaries are elastic, made of silicone. Not only that they are indiscernible, but also smooth and soothing – when you hit, you get anesthetized.

… Maybe it is not about hitting anymore – about attacking and aggression, but about acknowledging and creation. Deleuze says: Good destruction requires love. I am sure he did not have in mind some kind of post-modern flower children (of which above discussed artists actually remind me). So what does it mean? To me, it is a very deep, multi-layered and difficult thought. The one I used to find only in texts of some Eastern artists, thinkers, healers. One of the ways I interpret it: to be able to create is to forget. But, forgetting here is not rejecting, starting off as some kind of a tabula rasa (which we never are), but rather allowing oneself to be deeply involved with the world, to look and see, to observe and learn, to accept it in a way of acknowledging it, thus to know it and, to use Deleuze's thoughts, to see what is missing in the existing in order to extract something that still belongs to it, though you also turn it against it. By having accepted your past, you liberate yourself from dependence upon it – you forget, and enable yourself for the future. Like one of the layers in Nietzsche's aphorism suggests:

· Was I ill? Have I recovered?

Has my doctor been discovered?

How have I forgotten all?

· Now I know you have recovered.

Healthy is who can't recall. (Gay Science)

And then, you create.

Vladana

Snow Day Lectures (II): Nietzsche and the Over-man

As some of you already know, Nietzsche is considered an influence not only on “post-structural” philosophers, like Foucault and Deleuze, but also on the movement that came to be known as “existentialism” that precedes post-structuralism by a couple of decades. (The most recognized face of existentialism at the time was, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre.) Deleuze, for his part, would argue that existentialism does not live up to the challenge of Nietzsche’s thought, since it presumes a transcendent subject with a power to choose this or that action. In other words, existentialism remains a philosophy of transcendence. Indeed both existentialism and phenomenology can be understood as the latest developments in a legacy that begins when Descartes utters the formula cogito ergo sum. As Todd May notes, in his explication of Deleuze’s philosophy, “It is not simply a question of how we human beings might go about creating our lives, of what we might decide to make ourselves into” (2005, 23). This is Sartre's question. It is still insufficient or inadequate because it prioritizes being over becoming, identity over difference. It presupposes that there is an identity, a self, who chooses their existence. Deleuze rejects the emphasis placed in Sartre on agency, on self, and, more importantly, the emphasis placed on the human. “Deleuze,” May writes, “tries to pry us away from humanism by focusing on a difference that need not be human difference and a one that need not be a person.” Humanism is to be understood here as a form of anthropomorphism. Humanism commits the "error of believing that the proper perspective for understanding the world is centered on the viewpoint of the human subject" (2005, 24).

Humanism places man at the center of the universe, since man is its principle or exclusive concern. Deleuze places his emphasis on life; on the becoming of the entities that populate our world. These entities are not pre-determined; nor is their future known once and for all. To stop at the human would be to presume that the goal of life were the creation of man. (Which, of course, is what Christian theology says.) It would be a mistake to argue (and some have done so) that this “anti-humanism” is an expression of contempt for mankind. How could this be so since mankind is part of world? At the same time, we cannot fall into the trap of thinking too highly of ourselves. Since everything is becoming – everything is in process – so too is man. Man is becoming, in and with the world. This, Deleuze will claim, is what Nietzsche means when he coins the term übermensch (the “over-man” or “super-man”). We are in the process of overcoming ourselves, and there is no certainty that our evolution will not take us elsewhere, even beyond man. At least, man as it is known today.

As Deleuze says to his interviewer, in “On Nietzsche and the Image of Thought,” the goal of contemporary philosophy is to attempt to rethink the questions of existence without the constraints of either God or Man – which is to say, without the constraints of transcendent being. And the value of Nietzsche is that he “was trying to uncover something that was neither God nor Human…” which he called Dionysos or the over-man (2004, 139).

***

What does it mean though to say that there is no identity or self who chooses this or that existence? And how might this be squared, for example, with the thought-experiment known as the Eternal Return? (Does not the Eternal Return seem to presuppose choice?) This is where Nietzsche gets tricky. Consider here his concept of Will-to-Power, which he views as the “noblest” of values. Will-to-Power is misunderstood if we imagine an individual who exerts his or her will on another entity or thing. For Nietzsche, there is no separation between a will and what is willed. They are one and the same. There is no pre-constituted subject who wills this or that act. No, the act (what is willed) and the subject (who wills) are constituted at the same time. (The error of separating out one from the other is precisely what we find in Descartes: Descartes assumes that a thought, the act of thinking, requires a subject who performs this action. Nietzsche would deny this hierarchy or priority: the subject doesn’t precede thought but is constituted in the act of thinking.)

Put more simply, we can say that the subject is immanent to its expression. The challenge then is not to fall back on a notion of substance or install an agency at the origin of an activity or an expression of Will-to-Power. The use of terms like “object” or “thing” or “entity” is an example of how language misleads us into seeing solids (autonomous, pre-constituted beings) when there are only fluidities, only relations. The artist’s relation to their artwork is a good demonstration of this: the challenge from a Nietzschean perspective is not to be misled into seeing the artwork as an expression of the artist’s will. There is not an entity we call an “artist” who decides to will a painting into existence. Rather, the activity of painting itself is the expression of a will to power that produces both the painting and painter at the same time: the painter as such emerges through the activity of painting, and not once and for all, not through the painting of this or that painting, but over the course of years or decades and in conjunction with a body of work. What then is the difference between an artist and an oeuvre? There is none in terms of Will-to-Power: they are an expression of the same force, the same will. The artist accumulates an oeuvre and, in the process, a self.

S I-G

Preface to Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals" (A Reading)

A scene from Arnaud Desplechin's Un Conte de Noël (A Christmas Tale, 2008), in which the family patriarch reads a passage from Nietzsche to his perpetually unhappy/unsatisfied daughter (the reading begins at 1.26). The citation is completely unexpected and all the more wonderful for being so, and there is a lovely coda that follows: Henri, the black sheep member of the family, sitting on a swing, his back to the camera, saying these words (but to whom?): "You don't know me. I'm not like that."

For those who might like to compare, here is an English translation of the first two paragraphs from Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (1887): "We don't know ourselves, we knowledgeable people – we are personally ignorant about ourselves. And there's good reason for that. We've never tried to find out who we are. How could it ever happen that one day we'd discover our own selves? With justice it's been said that 'Where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also.' Our treasure lies where the beehives of our knowledge stand. We are always busy with our knowledge, as if we were born winged creatures – collectors of intellectual honey. In our hearts we are basically concerned with one thing, to 'bring something home.' As far as the rest of life is concerned, what people call 'experience' – which of us is serious enough for that? Who has enough time? In these matters, I fear, we've been 'missing the point.'

Our hearts have not even been engaged – nor, for that matter, have our ears! We've been much more like someone divinely distracted and self-absorbed into whose ear the clock has just pealed the twelve strokes of noon with all its force and who all at once wakes up and asks himself 'What exactly did that clock strike?' – so we rub ourselves behind the ears afterwards and ask, totally surprised and embarrassed, 'What have we really just experienced?' And more: 'Who are we really?' Then, as I've mentioned, we count – after the fact – all the twelve trembling strokes of the clock of our experience, our lives, our being – alas! in the process we keep losing the count. So we remain necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we have to keep ourselves confused. For us this law holds for all eternity: 'Each man is furthest from himself.' Where we ourselves are concerned, we are not 'knowledgeable people.'"

It's a marvelous scene. It's a marvelous text.

S I-G